Tolstoy

Dumas’s own life, meanwhile, or rather that of his wife, provides interesting commentary on the themes of Anna Karenina, for he was married to Nadezhda Naryshkina, a Russian aristocrat who had committed adultery and borne an illegitimate child. Naryshkina had also been involved in an infamous murder case in Moscow in 1850 which shocked and thrilled Russian polite society, Tolstoy included. She was a captivating woman who had been married at a young age to Alexander Naryshkin, a scion of one of Russia’s most distinguished aristocratic families. After bearing him a daughter, she resumed her career as one of the grandes dames of Moscow high society, and was renowned for arriving last at soirées, preferably no earlier than midnight. Tolstoy, who was her contemporary, was also living in Moscow at this time, and he described her as ‘très à la mode’ in a letter to Aunt Toinette. In 1850, when she was twenty-five, she began an affair with a Vronsky type – a handsome, wealthy aristocrat called Alexander Sukhovo-kobylin, who was a talented dramatist and had the reputation of being a Don Juan. Naryshkina then became caught up and later implicated in the murder of his French mistress, a crime for which Sukhovo-kobylin was (probably wrongly) arrested and imprisoned, along with two serfs who were convicted and sent to Siberia. Pregnant with her lover’s child, the flame-haired femme fatale hastily decamped with her daughter to Paris, where she immediately made a name for herself in the city’s top salons. It was in Paris that she met Dumas, the illegitimate son of Dumas père, who had come to fame after the publication of his 1848 novel La Dame aux camélias, inspired by his relationship with a celebrated Parisian courtesan (and later turned into Verdi’s opera La Traviata). Naryshkina’s husband refused to give her a divorce, also threatening to take their daughter away from her, and she was able to marry Dumas only after Naryshkin’s death in 1864.

Tolstoy wrote to tell Toinette about the scandalous murder case which was a subject of Moscow gossip for many years,²¹ and he may well also have heard about Naryshkina’s high-profile relationship with Dumas during his later visits to Paris. Dumas’s reflections on marriage in L’Homme-femme were clearly the product of his experience as husband to Nadezhda Naryshkina, with whom he had two daughters, and they struck a chord with Tolstoy. It was Aunt Toinette, however, who had perhaps the greatest influence on Tolstoy’s views about adultery. In his memoirs, in which he writes about her at length, Tolstoy records telling her late one night about an acquaintance of his, whose wife had been unfaithful and absconded. When he expressed the view that his friend was probably glad to be shot of his wife, he describes how Toinette at once assumed a serious expression and urged instead forgiveness and compassion.²² This is the precisely the sentiment Tolstoy voices through his unsung heroine Dolly in Anna Karenina. When karenin tells Dolly about his predicament at the end of Oblonsky’s dinner party in Part Four of the novel, she pleads with him not to bring shame and disrepute on his wife by divorcing her, as it would destroy her. Toinette’s general view, that one should hate the crime, but not the person, was essentially Tolstoy’s, and holds the key to why Anna karenina is one of the most compelling and complex literary characters ever created.