Tolstoy (44 page)

Masha was understandably hesitant about going through with divorce. It was extremely rare in Russia, and the risk of social disgrace was very real. In 1857, the year in which divorce first became possible in an English court of civil law, the sanctity of marriage as a religious institution in Russia was upheld by the publication of the third edition of the Imperial Law Code. A divorce in Russia could only be obtained through the Church, which viewed marriage as a holy sacrament which could not be dissolved,
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and accorded illegitimate children no legal rights. Article 103 of Chapter 1 in Volume One of the Law Code specifically forbade married couples from living apart, except in cases of exile to Siberia, while articles 106 and 108 upheld male authority within wedlock:

A husband shall love his wife as his own body and live with her in harmony; he shall respect and protect her, forgive her shortcomings, and ease her infirmities. He shall provide his wife nourishment and support to the best of his ability ... A wife shall obey her husband as the head of the family, abide with him in love, respect and unlimited obedience and render him every satisfaction and affection as the mistress of the house...
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Female subjugation was not exclusive to Russia, of course, but the state had a vested interest in supporting patriarchal structures, as it equated domestic stability with political stability. Tolstoy could have picked no better way of portraying the disintegration of late imperial Russian society than to decide to write a novel with the theme of the 'family'.

Over the course of the nineteenth century the Orthodox Church had made marital separation more rather than less difficult. Petitions for divorce had to be made to the diocesan authorities, and entailed an expensive, bureaucratic and lengthy process, with nine separate stages. Adultery, furthermore, could only be proved with the testimony of witnesses, as Alexey Alexandrovich discovers to his horror when he goes to consult the 'famous St Petersburg lawyer' in Part Four of
Anna Karenina.
It is thus hardly surprising so few petitions were made—seventy-one in the whole of Russia in i860, and only seven made on the grounds of adultery.
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But with the Great Reforms, urban growth and the expansion of education came new attitudes towards marriage, and pressure to simplify and update divorce, so it was a constant topic of discussion in the ecclesiastical press in the second half of the nineteenth century.
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A committee set up by reformers in 1870 proposed transferring divorce proceedings to the civil courts, thus saving the ecclesiastical authorities from having to investigate such matters, 'which are full of descriptions of suggestive and disgusting scenes, in which the whole stench of depravity is often collected'.
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In May 1873, just when Tolstoy was starting
Anna Karenina,
the Holy Synod overwhelmingly rejected this proposal, as it did a proposal to introduce civil marriage (which had already been introduced elsewhere in Europe) on the grounds that it was 'legalised fornication'. Nevertheless, the number of divorces rose steadily, from 795 in 1866 to 947 in 1875.
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Both Sonya's elder sister Liza (the clever one Tolstoy had shrunk from marrying) and their brother Alexander obtained divorces during this period.
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Tolstoy's research on behalf of his sister served him well when dealing with the topic of divorce in
Anna Karenina,
as did the experience of witnessing divorce proceedings close at hand. In 1868 his old friend Dmitry Dyakov's sister Maria Alexeyevna divorced the stuffy, Karenin-like Sergey Sukhotin, having created a scandal by abandoning him and their young children for another man, with whom she had an illegitimate child.
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In the event, his sister Masha did not need to go through with the divorce from her husband, as the weak-willed and impoverished viscount returned to Sweden to marry someone with better financial prospects, leaving Masha mired in debt. His family had been reluctant to see him marry a woman with four children who would also soon bear the stigma of divorce, and had persuaded him to leave her. Masha returned to Russia and Valerian Petrovich died the following year, but she remained deeply unhappy in her personal life, having left her daughter Elena behind in Switzerland. As she wrote in the desperate letter to her brother in 1876 in which she likened herself to Anna Karenina, she knew of no single woman from their background with the 'courage' to admit to the existence of an illegitimate child.
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Tolstoy himself certainly contemplated divorce too on occasion, but his increasingly troubled marriage was stable and conventional when compared to the marriages of his relatives and friends. His brother Dmitry spent his last years living with a former prostitute (as Nikolay does in
Anna Karenina),
and his brother Sergey was married to a gypsy. While Tolstoy was trying to rescue Masha in 1864, and write
War and Peace,
he suddenly found himself also having to deal with the romantic crisis Sergey had become embroiled in. The previous summer, after his fourteen-year relationship with Maria Shishkina, the gypsy singer from Tula whom he had 'bought out' from her choir, Sergey had suddenly fallen madly in love with Sonya's vivacious sister Tanya (with whom Tolstoy himself was also slightly enamoured, if the truth be told). Sergey proposed to Tanya, but quite apart from the fact that he was twenty years older (Tanya was a very young seventeen), he already had three children with Maria Shishkina and was expecting a fourth. In the end, his conscience got the better of him. It broke his heart to see Maria praying on her knees in front of an icon in floods of tears, and meekly submitting to fate.
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In June 1865, a month after his daughter Vera was born, he broke off the engagement.
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Both Tanya and Sergey married in 1867. Tolstoy was opposed to Tanya marrying her cousin Alexander Kuzminsky, as he thought she would be a good wife for his old friend Dmitry Dyakov, who had just been widowed. There was something distinctly curmudgeonly about the distaste he expressed ten years later when Dyakov (then fifty-five) married his daughter Masha's former governess Sofya Robertovna, who was thirty-two.
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After all, 'Sofesh', as she was affectionately known, was the same age as his own wife, and two years older than Tanya.
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After Sergey finally married Maria they moved to his Pirogovo estate. They were to have a total of eleven children, of whom four survived, but their marriage was not happy. Maria felt painfully aware of their different social backgrounds, and was shy and retiring in the company of her brother's family. Tolstoy always showed Maria Mikhailovna the greatest of respect, and repeatedly invited her to accompany Sergey to Yasnaya Polyana, but she was reluctant to come, even when Sonya had the idea of asking her to become godmother to their son Andrey, born in December 1877.

If Tolstoy had essentially stopped keeping a diary while he was writing
Anna Karenina,
it was partly because he was able to give voice to matters that concerned him on the pages of his novel. Through the relationship of Levin and Kitty he had wanted to chart a 'third way' between the European-style marriage favoured by Anna, notable for the small number of children, and the 'traditional' peasant-style marriage of Dolly, who raises a large number of children despite being from the same noble background as Anna. Over the course of the novel Tolstoy had woven many thinly disguised autobiographical details into the story of Levin's courtship and marriage of Kitty (the communication via letters written in chalk, the oversight of leaving out a clean shirt for Levin to wear to the wedding and so forth), but in the second half of Part Six, he began to voice through Dolly one particular immediate concern: his horror of contraception.

After the death of Varvara in November 1875, Sonya's health had remained precarious, and in January 1877 she made her first visit to St Petersburg to spend a week with her mother (whom she had not seen for three years) and consult the famous Dr Botkin, court physician to the Tsar. She also met Alexandrine for the first time, who immediately wrote to tell Tolstoy how much she liked his wife. She told him that she had found 'Sophie' sincere, intelligent, warm and straightforward, and had taken to her at once. It was Alexandrine who also conveyed a euphemistic message from Dr Botkin about Sonya's 'health' which resulted in her becoming pregnant again in a matter of weeks.
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Since the death of Varvara, Sonya had so dreaded having another child that she had done everything in her powers to avoid becoming pregnant, including considering contraception, and it had clearly had an impact on the marriage. It was just at this time that Tolstoy wrote the chapter in
Anna Karenina
in which Dolly reacts with extreme shock to Anna's revelation that she has been using contraception. For Dolly, and for Tolstoy, contraception was immoral.

While Sonya was in Petersburg, Tolstoy got on with finishing
Anna Karenina,
turning to Trollope for light relief. He was reading
The Prime Minister,
the penultimate of the six Palliser novels, and recommended it highly to his brother Sergey.
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Anna Karenina
reflects Tolstoy's engagement with the French novel of adultery, but also his enthusiasm for English fiction, which he highly revered—he once stated quite baldly that English books were the best, and that he always found something fresh and new in them.
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The English novel Anna reads on the train at the beginning of
Anna Karenina
may well have been by Trollope, since it mentions Members of Parliament, fox-hunting and peers.
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Trollope had decided early on that his spirited heroine Lady Glencora would eventually grow to love her upright, dry, statesman husband Plantagenet, who is altogether more benign than his Russian counterpart Karenin. And without the burden of a didactic tradition to weigh him down, opting for a happy ending was unproblematic for a writer devoted to his full-time job at the Post Office. Trollope was mercifully immune to the kind of self-doubt which increasingly bedevilled Tolstoy as he struggled to finish
Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy finally finished
Anna Karenina
in 1877. Russian readers had certainly been patient. They had, after all, begun reading it two years earlier, and they were probably as disconcerted as Tolstoy's editor was when the instalments had suddenly stopped in April 1875, a third of the way into the novel, and again in 1876. Katkov had even felt obliged to publish a notice explaining that the hiatus was not due to the journal's editors but to 'circumstances preventing the author from completing his novel', whose publication, they hoped, would now continue 'without interruption'. Tolstoy's readers remained enthusiastic, however. One young acquaintance of Tolstoy later recalled that he and his fellow students waited with bated breath for each new issue of the
Russian Messenger,
and then immediately 'devoured' every page whenever there was an instalment of
Anna Karenina
.
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But Tolstoy was fairly nonplussed when Strakhov wrote from Petersburg in May 1877 to tell him that the most recent reviews were hailing him to be a writer as great as Shakespeare, and that even Dostoyevsky was waving his arms about and calling Tolstoy a 'god of art'.
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Dostoyevsky, however, would shortly change his tune when he came to read the novel's final chapters, in which Tolstoy threw down the gauntlet to Pan-Slavists like himself.

Anna Karenina
was nothing if not topical, and Tolstoy's slow progress enabled him to reflect in its pages not just the most recent debates about agriculture, but also the latest political developments as they unfolded in Russia. Here Tolstoy was in new territory, but his increasing indifference to purely artistic questions made him fearless about voicing unpopular opinions and set him on a collision course with the Russian establishment. The April 1877 issue of the
Russian Messenger
contained the last chapters of Part Seven, which end with Anna's death, and they were greeted with wide acclaim. This issue should have also contained the novel's epilogue (as Part Eight was originally called), but Tolstoy had once again fallen out with his editor, and he was still awaiting a third set of revised proofs in mid-May.
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The sticking point was politics, and specifically the 'unpatriotic' opinions expressed in the novel about the Russian volunteer movement in aid of the Serbs, who since the end of June 1876 had been at war with the Ottoman Empire. This is the movement which Vronsky joins at the end of
Anna Karenina:
we see him getting on a train at the Smolensky station in Moscow as he sets off on a journey from which we know he will never return.

The Serbo-Turkish War was just one aspect of the 'Eastern Question' which reared its head once again in the 1870s, this time driven by the Balkan nations' desire for liberation from centuries of Ottoman rule. Pan-Slavists saw the conflict as a golden opportunity to further their goal of uniting all the Slavic nations, ideally under Russia's sovereignty. The fact that Pan-Slavism had its roots in Russia's diplomatic isolation and humiliating defeat in the Crimean War was not lost on Tolstoy, whose experience fighting in that campaign had turned him into a committed pacifist. He found this new war greatly troubling. He had no wish to be caught up in contemporary politics, but his concern over the events unfolding in the Balkans caused him to put aside his disdain for the press temporarily and follow the war's progress. Foreseeing Russia's ineluctable involvement in the Serbo-Turkish War, he had actually gone to Moscow to find out more about it in November 1876. He was there when Alexander II gave a speech from the Kremlin in which he gave the Turks an ultimatum, and could not have avoided the patriotic crowds lining the streets and shouting, 'War! War!' along with the customary 'Hurrah!'
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What really made Tolstoy's blood boil was the part he believed was played by the press and the 'Slavic Committee' in whipping up enthusiasm for war, and in the last pages of
Anna Karenina
he began to speak out.