Anna Karenina's Children's Novel

Just as we are intrigued by discovering new details about the people we love, I was intrigued, reading Anna Karenina the dozenth time, to have it sink in, finally, that Anna has written a children's novel. Having returned to Moscow with Vronsky after a year or so abroad, for the last three months Anna has been shunned by her old friends. We read that her brother Stiva Oblonsky has spent the evening dining and drinking with his brother-in-law Konstantin Levin, who has never met Anna before. The usually shy and wary Levin is tipsy enough that he cannot resist Stiva's argument that this suffering, lonely woman needs company. Levin learns from Stiva that she is not occupied so much by her and her lover Vronsky's baby girl as by writing:

"She's writing a book for children and doesn't tell anybody about it, but she read it to me, and I gave the manuscript to Vorkuev . . . you know, that publisher . . . a writer himself, it seems. He's a good judge, and he says it's a remarkable thing." ¹ [Tolstoy's ellipses.]

Of course I always knew that detail, that Anna, idle, unhappy, and bored, writes, yet I had never given it a second thought. Could it be her novel is "remarkable," as Stiva thinks? The publisher Vorkuev concurs, and yet from the evidence of his continual flattery we may guess that he is as smitten with her as most of us would be and that his critical opinion carries no weight. Vorkuev is visiting her when Stiva and Levin arrive; a moment before he meets her, Levin is dazzled by the portrait of Anna (the one painted in Italy by a real artist, not by Vronsky), and, having met her, says, "I've never seen a better portrait." Vorkuev chips in an easy compliment, "And isn't it a remarkable likeness?"

Anna takes Levin as a challenge; he is, after all, the husband of Kitty, Anna's young, innocent former admirer from whom she won Vronsky's love. Anna acknowledges, and puts him at ease about, their complicated relationship, and sweeps him off his feet. Then, because of another fawning compliment of Vorkuev, she explains to Levin her involvement in a "village school":

". . . I went several times. They're very nice, but I couldn't get caught up in it. Energy, you say. Energy is based on love. And love can't be drawn from just anywhere, it can't be ordered. . . ."

She shares Tolstoy's (and Levin's) ideas about education--that it depends on a human relationship and can't be prescribed. Levin, Tolstoy's ghost (lacking only his creator's genius), replies:

"I understand that perfectly. . . . One cannot put one's heart into a school or generally into institutions of that sort, and that is precisely why these philanthropic institutions always produce such meagre results."

Part 7, Chapter X, turns out to be especially interesting, because we see Tolstoy's alter-ego converging upon Anna Karenina, who is, by now, the author's deeper and truer connection. (Anna is art; Levin, function.) Levin and Anna volley some conversation, and then, after she offers her guest some tea, "She rose and picked up a morocco-bound book."

More than any other writer Tolstoy creates for us the illusion that these characters are real, continuous with life, that everyone in his fiction lives even when they're not on the page (just as Homer's lists of the dead and heroic in The Iliad suggest each man's own private Iliad), and I'm at least for the moment also persuaded that Tolstoy's objects exist, including this leather-bound book and thus the novel contained therein, which, however, Tolstoy never attempted imagining. Too much else is going on in this convergence of the two characters in whom he has bound up so much of his own experience and so much of his artistry, a meeting that results in the most explicit revelation of Tolstoy's own long, complicated attitude to his heroine:

As he followed the interesting conversation, Levin admired her all the while--her beauty, her intelligence, her education, and with that her simplicity and deep feeling. He listened, talked, and all the while thought about her, about her inner life, trying to guess her feelings. And he who had formerly judged her so severely, now, by some strange train of thought, justified her and at the same time pitied her, and feared that Vronsky did not fully understand her.

The arrogance! The arrogance of love at first sight! But we, looking on and sympathetic, certainly feel that it's true. Vronsky, for all his determined decency, does not seem to understand Anna as well as Levin and we readers now do.

But to return, to retreat a page, to her children's novel, and the moment when she picks it up, and we see Vorkuev trying to score points:

"Give it to me, Anna Arkadyevna," said Vorkuev, pointing to the book. "It's well worth it."

"Oh, no, it's all so unfinished."

"I told him," Stepan Arkadyich said to his sister, pointing to Levin.

"You shouldn't have. My writing is like those little [woven] baskets made in prisons that Liza Mertsalov used to sell me. . . . those unfortunates produced miracles of patience."

Patience is what Anna is determined to have now, in her own "prison." She, another "unfortunate," must occupy herself, and so she takes up the intricacies of weaving a novel. I suspect I would act as slavishly as Vorkuev, who says, to whatever it is she has written (only he and Stiva know), "It's well worth it."

When Anna goes to a have a private word with her brother, Vorkuev tells Levin--though the fascinated Levin, watching Anna, is scarcely listening--"about the merits of the children's novel Anna Arkadyevna had written."

We cannot pick up that volume and appreciate its "merits," but wouldn't Anna Karenina's children's novel be "well worth it"? Wouldn't we love to know what is in Anna's deliberate imagination? We have faith that whatever the book says it would show us something of her mind and feelings. We would be aware that while she sees herself as hopelessly trapped, this is a children's novel, so she cannot be writing the story of a married woman who falls in love with a dashing army captain and leaves her husband.

Then, what is Anna's book about? Tolstoy gives no hint, he hasn't invented it, and yet he has given us so much of Anna that we can do some guessing of our own. We know she's bored, we know she has taken up the English family that was abandoned by Vronsky's drunken horse trainer, and we know she reads English and is fluent in French. We have seen her muse over a faux Trollope novel on the train while she rides away from Vronsky, way back when she fell in love with him. Though we have been with her ever since she met Vronsky for the first time, we don't know much about her background or life before him. We know she has affection for her older brother Stiva, and that they--like Tolstoy--were orphans. We can guess that Vronsky, selfish and carefree as he is, loves her even more than she loves him. We know that she misses her son Seryozha more than she misses anything else, and that it is her son more than anything else that makes her miserable about her situation with Vronsky. Her daughter means little to her, to her own and Vronsky's surprise and disappointment. (After all, as she has said above about the "energy" required for teaching, love "can't be ordered.")

No flash comes to me when I try to imagine her novel, but when I think of Seryozha, about ten years old, besieged by tutors, unloved by his father, desperately missed by his mother, I can believe she would write a book that would pique the interest of her son, perhaps the story of a boy who misses his mother and goes out into the world to find her--or of someone who, through cruel circumstances, is separated from a beloved child. The novel need not be terribly imaginative, and it is likely to be derived from her reading and unlikely to be art, but she would imagine a real child, her darling boy, and perhaps she could relieve her own suffering by her interest in that abandoned, lonely character's life and imagination.

In any case whatever she dramatizes, whatever details she invents to depict any children's story, the situations and details must be at a remove, so as not to be about herself, a topic she won't discuss socially and would not, in any case, see as entertaining or enlightening to children. There is no reason the book should be bad (she's intelligent, sensitive, educated), but it is unnecessary that it be good. What is important, Tolstoy tells us, is that she has diverted herself by drafting a children's novel. But she is not a writer, and its possible publication seems of little moment to her. (There is no doubt Vorkuev would publish it at the slightest encouragement from her.)

"Every artistic word, whether it belongs to Goethe or to Fedka," wrote Tolstoy in one of his essays on education (Fedka was a peasant boy in the school he once ran on his estate), "differs from the inartistic in that it evokes an endless mass of thoughts, images, and explanations." What "artistic words" in Anna's novel would evoke in her son these thoughts, images, and explanations? If we can speculate that her primary goal was to indulge in imagining the emotional life of her dear boy, isn't it possible that her strong feelings would blossom at least occasionally into "artistic words"? Can we imagine Seryozha reading the novel? Maybe he wouldn't be allowed by his father or tutor to read it in manuscript--as coming from his mother. But perhaps published by Vorkuev's legitimate publishing house, authored by an anonymous Madame K, it makes its way to him as a gift from his uncle or as a surprise from a bribed or sympathetic servant or tutor.

The boy, mildly curious, begins to read and though the plot and setting are not similar to his own, he sees his own character in the boy or recognizes the mother. Perhaps it's her disguised, anonymous voice he recognizes, her phrasing, her eye for particular details. He has searched among strangers for his mother, and maybe in this book he finds her.

It could be that Anna's lack of spirit or energy for teaching has to do with not having Seryozha as a "student." She can no more feign love for her daughter than she can for her husband. But if she could have Seryozha in her life again, there would be no feigning: her love and her energy would pour forth. Tolstoy, whose own mother died when he was almost two, elsewhere suggests that the most important education is that at one's mother's knee. This is not to say that parents are the best schoolteachers of their own children, but perhaps the absence of a parent is the most regrettsed teacher. And Tolstoy is really not talking about the teaching and learning of the rudiments; he means the moral teaching and the loving guidance of a parent. That's what he feels he missed; and that's what Anna Karenina misses giving to her son. Maybe it's in her children's novel.