Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

That if she is a wife and mother, a woman should not stray.

One influential critic wrote that Tolstoy’s new novel “arouses disgust in everyone,” because instead of genuine love he depicts “naked and purely animal sensuality”; the critic saw nothing but “unfettered lust” in the relations between Anna and her lover, Vronsky.

The most scathing (unprinted but popular) remark came from the idol of the progressives, the satirical writer Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, who called it “a novel about improving the life of genitalia.” He added in a letter to a friend, “I find it vile and immoral. And the conservative party is using it and gloating. Can you imagine turning Tolstoy’s bovine novel into some kind of political banner?”¹²

These angry words about Tolstoy’s novel being used as a political banner for the conservatives explain the liberal outrage over Anna Karenina. As contemporaries recalled, Alexander II “hated learned women,” seeing them as both potential and actual revolutionaries.¹³ His high officials were in complete agreement on this. The liberal press and public opinion pushed for women’s access to higher education. The wary government did not give in.

In 1873 a special commission, which included the minister of public education, the minister of internal affairs, and also the chief of gendarmes, sent Alexander II a report on women’s education and the “women’s issue,” which the commission felt was being used by enemies of autocracy to push through demands of “a utopian, almost revolutionary character: to make a woman’s rights equal to that of men, to allow her to participate in politics, and even give the right to free love, which destroys the family and turns extreme licentiousness into a principle.”¹⁴

For the authors of the report and Alexander II, who approved it, women’s radicalism in both sex and politics was equally frightening and repulsive. A noted conservative journalist, Prince Vladimir Meshchersky (a known homosexual in St. Petersburg) maintained that female students were “the most fanatical, and one must truthfully say, the ugliest maidens, shorn, in blue spectacles and men’s jackets,”¹⁵ for whom education was just a smokescreen for sexual and political anarchy.

That is why the conservative camp hailed Anna Karenina, a love story in high circles, in which the heroine, seeking sexual independence, is punished by society and consequently throws herself under a train.

Reading Anna Karenina, explained a right-wing critic, “you are freed from mediocrity and filth, you stop breathing the fetid air of taverns, hospitals, and prisons, where most of contemporary belles-lettres are gasping.” At last one could enjoy fine descriptions of the life of aristocratic salons, ladies’ boudoirs, fashionable restaurants, and the races.

The left fumed over why Tolstoy did not write about the simple folk or, for example, students: “What a shame that Tolstoy has no ideals! … He cares more about a she-buffalo than an advanced woman.” The ultra-conservative poet Fet reported those liberal opinions to Tolstoy in a letter and added a response to them: “Because a she-buffalo is perfection in its species, while your advanced woman is God knows what.”¹⁶

Tolstoy chose the epigraph to Anna Karenina from the Bible: “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.” The full quote is this: “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith The Lord.” A lively polemic over the epigraph began immediately, and it continues to this day. Is the unfaithful Anna a criminal and God punishes her justly? Or is she innocent, and it is not the business of people to judge her?

In other words, does Tolstoy have sympathy for Anna, or did the “rubbishy old man” (as protofeminist Anna Akhmatova angrily called him) truly believe, as Akhmatova maintained, that “if a woman leaves her rightful husband and joins another man, she inevitably becomes a prostitute”?¹⁷

Tolstoy avoided a straightforward comment on the novel. “If I wanted to summarize what I wanted to express in the novel, then I would have to write exactly the same novel that I have written, from the beginning.”

We can assume that the epigraph from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans was chosen by Tolstoy after reading Schopenhauer’s philosophical treatise The World as Will and Representation, where this passage is interpreted. At the same time, Tolstoy was responding to the misogynistic pamphlet by Alexandre Dumas fils, “L’homme—femme,” which posed the question: What should be done with an unfaithful woman—forgive her, throw her out, kill her?

The highly moral Dumas strongly suggested killing unfaithful wives, but Tolstoy, generally very sympathetic to antifeminist ideas (“Women’s only purpose is to give birth and bring up children”), in this case was arguably mercifully inclined to leave the act of punishment to God.

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