All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (34 page)

When Stepan says to him: ‘Suppose you’re married, you love your wife, but you become infatuated with another woman…’, he responds that he doesn’t understand, just as ‘I don’t understand how I could pass by a bakery, as full as I am now, and steal a sweet roll.’ Stepan, decidedly a man with the makings of a modern consumer, counters that the sweet roll may be so fragrant you can’t help yourself, even if it is a theft and engenders lamentable consequences. Not a man driven by passing desires, Levin advises him simply not to steal sweet rolls. But, remembering his own past sins in this area–before he formed a pure and overarching love, a love that leads to higher areas of the soul, for Dolly’s sister, the delectable Kitty–he blurts out that he simply hasn’t the answer to these problems of love.

Stepan will go on chasing ‘sweet rolls’, whatever his wifely ration of daily bread. And Levin will continue to agonize. There are, Tolstoy shows, simply differences of character. These play themselves out in the arena of love. There are also fundamental incompatibilities between desire, morality (here, the social institution of monogamy) and indeed the very desire for morality. These produce the conflicts with which humans struggle. The charming, philandering adulterer may, like a sensuous child, be forgiven by a kind and caring, one might say maternal, wife; whereas the stern, austere, more reflective character will experience his own straying from his high ideals as a sin and flagellate himself for it, though this may not always stop the straying. Nor will his guilt necessarily make him any kinder to his wife. It would be a little, if one dares to leap from fiction to political life, like comparing an Alan Clark with a Gladstone, or a Clinton with a Lincoln.

When Levin, after much delay and soul-searching, does get his idealized Kitty, the way of marriage is never smooth, for all that.

Tolstoy’s own marriage to Sophia Andreevna Bers, sixteen years his junior, as the radiant and pure Kitty is Levin’s, may have begun with intense passion. She served as his loyal secretary, reading and copying his major books, managing his financial affairs and bearing him thirteen children. But Tolstoy, again like Levin, torn by the struggle between his idealist hopes and the reality of his debauched past–what Nabokov has called his ‘sensual temperament and his supersensitive conscience’–was rather less than tactful when it came to Sophia’s own sensitivities: for one thing, he felt duty-bound to show his innocent eighteen-year-old bride the diary of his lusts on their wedding night. Revelation and self-confession trumped care for the other.

After reading the first part of
Anna Karenina
, Sophia is recorded as having said to Tolstoy that Levin was him, minus the talent; and that he was an impossible man! Over the long years of a tempestuous marriage, in which five of their thirteen children died before their tenth birthday, Tolstoy and Sophia see-sawed from love (and lust) to hate and back again. At the last, he seemed to prefer his acolytes to his family, abandoning Sophia to die amongst them. Wild with rage and jealousy, she had several times attempted suicide.

In imagining Anna, his adulteress, Tolstoy had initially wanted to judge her as morally reprobate. Her punishment for her sin was a predetermined suicide. But in the final version of the novel, based like
Madame Bovary
on an incident from life, Anna gains in psychological depth so that her destiny is less moral punishment than a matter of desperate choice. She becomes a person we feel we have known more intimately than our intimates. Viewed from inside and out, speaking what she does not intend to say, prey to unconscious forces beyond her control, derailed and tormented by a love she can neither abandon nor enjoy, cast out by society, separated from her son, Anna’s journey towards her fate takes on the grandeur of tragedy. Amongst the destinies of the other ‘unhappy families’ interwoven with hers, her own emerges as particularly pitiable. By telling us that Anna was handed over in marriage by her aunt to a man twenty years older than her, by making that man the rigid, righteous, bullying and unappetizing Karenin, Tolstoy has us wanting Anna to sin, to
live
, whatever the social and spiritual consequences. And if Count Vronsky, her lover, as Nabokov judged, is ‘a blunt fellow with a mediocre mind’, with none of Anna’s brilliance and depth, he has charm and energy on his side.

Then, too, Tolstoy’s art is such that he leaves no doubt that neither of his lovers is in command of their actions. They are propelled by the electric charge of a blind passion which from the first seems to have death as its inexorable shadow. No sooner have they met on the train that brings Anna and Vronsky’s mother from Petersburg to Moscow than a watchman is found dead on the tracks: ‘a bad omen’, Anna murmurs with trembling lips. During the ten months of Vronksy’s wooing, sheer physical attraction, a sexual imperative, sways far more than any inconsequential words that are spoken. The two are driven towards each other by a force that frightens by its sheer quantum of desire. Anna in love glows with the ‘terrible glow of a fire on a dark night’ and when at last she succumbs, it is as if the man she has desired and who now has every power over her is also her murderer. The ‘sole person in her life’, her great love, Vronsky is also her doom. On his account Anna will be ostracized from all else–her husband, her son, society as a whole, and indeed from herself, for she can never stop judging her own actions.

Anna’s attachment to Vronsky bursts beyond the bounds of an acceptable ‘secret’ liaison between a young officer and a married woman. Unlike her peers, unlike Vronsky’s mother who has tallied up lovers in her youth, Anna’s love cannot be managed. She lives it in perpetual anguish, tossed between desire and hapless guilt, between a passion that gives meaning to her life and conventions that mark her out as depraved and guilty. She doesn’t want to and can’t give the love up, yet she can’t live it happily. Unable to dissimulate, she can’t play by the rules of the worldly game. She simply feels too much. ‘Love,’ as Horace Walpole observed, ‘is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.’

Nor can Tolstoy allow Anna’s to be a redemptive passion, the kind he gives to Levin and the innocent Kitty. It is just too sexual. The carnal is always in play: Vronsky’s white teeth, Anna’s beauty and quick hands, the dark hair curling above her white neck. In a metaphoric signal of the doom that is to be unleashed by the dark forces of ungovernable passion, Tolstoy has Vronsky accidentally break the back of his equally subjugated mare in a long-awaited race played out before all Petersburg. Anna, already pregnant, is similarly broken. In her distress at Vronsky and the mare’s fate, she blurts out the fact of her affair to Karenin.

First Karenin, the ‘administrative machine’, feels jealousy; then he sees Anna as depraved. He considers a duel, but is too cowardly; finally he reflects on divorce or separation, both of which would bring social shame and the terrible side-effect of setting Anna free to follow her passion. Karenin reasons that Anna should pay and be unhappy, while he, who is not guilty, should not be unhappy. So he determines to punish her by keeping their marriage intact, at least in appearance, and by allowing her to repent–all under the aegis of his magnanimity. This is a man whose desires are all to do with reputation and morality.

‘He’s right… he’s always right. He’s a Christian, he’s magnanimous!… the mean, vile man!’ Anna bursts out when she hears his decision. Karenin is ‘mean’ and ‘vile’ because under the cloak of rectitude he is, as he has been through their eight years of marriage, stifling everything that is alive in her. Yet she, too, is entangled in his ‘lies and deceits’, since Karenin knows that she cannot willingly abandon their son and live as a ‘criminal’.

Hardly a tract promoting easier divorce, the book teases out the torments that attend the unravelling of any marriage, its impact on the new ‘adulterous’ attachment as well as on the family left behind.

Trapped between her love for her son and her love for Vronsky, aware of the plight of her son in having to judge between the competing parental narratives, Anna begins to question her love for Vronsky. In that generalizing of paranoia which so often attends love’s moments of greatest permeability, she no longer altogether trusts Vronsky or her love; she finds herself constantly having to readjust her image of him, to re-illusion it. She grows jealous, which has the effect of making Vronsky increasingly indifferent. His bond to Anna grows into a prison. He is more fully enmeshed than he has appetite for in a liaison which has put paid to his ambitions together with his income from his disapproving mother. When his love was stronger, he reflects, ‘he might have torn that love from his heart… but now, when he felt no love for her, he knew that his bond with her could not be broken’.

The birth of Anna and Vronsky’s daughter and the puerperal fever which follows it unleash a new stage in this adulterous passion. In her delirium and on the cusp of death, Anna asks for Karenin’s forgiveness. He gives it: the feeling and expression of compassion bring him a joy he has never known. But for Vronsky, Karenin’s forgiveness engenders humiliation. Abased, Anna lost to him, his life is emptied out, meaningless. He tries to shoot himself.

But neither he nor Anna die. This is only the first step in the elaboration of their grand passion.

As she convalesces, Anna experiences her existence with the newly lofty and doubly repulsive Karenin as a death-in-life. In that constant counterpointing of family stories that Tolstoy so expertly dovetails, it is Anna’s brother, Stepan, who now miraculously engineers Karenin’s release of her to Vronsky, just as she had so well orchestrated his reconciliation with his wife Dolly. Anna and Vronsky leave for their coupled life together, for happiness, just as Levin embarks on his rapturous married life with Kitty. But the fate of the two couples will be very different.

After travelling through Italy with their baby girl, though separated from Anna’s beloved son Seryozha, Vronsky and Anna set up house in a small town. The brief honeymoon over, Anna is faced by a new anxiety. Vronsky is so dear to her, makes her so happy both in himself and in his attentiveness to her, that she is plagued by an anxiety that he will stop loving her, that he will become aware of just how much he has given up for her–his military post, his ambition, his vocation for statesmanship, his whole life–worthless as she now is in comparison to her earlier social status. And indeed Vronsky, though he knows his wishes have come true, also recognizes that their realization has given him ‘only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected’. The freedom to love has robbed him of both his other freedoms and his desires. The pleasures of society, of meaningful work, are gone and, ‘as a hungry animal seizes upon every object it comes across, hoping to find food in it, so Vronsky quite unconsciously seized now upon politics, now upon new books, now upon painting’. Both he and Anna, left with only each other, suffer from too much freedom. Boredom, and then worse, sets in.

Meanwhile Karenin, the abandoned, friendless husband, suffers such a deep sense of humiliation that he can barely carry on with work or daily life. The intervention of Countess Lydia Ivanovna, one of the new Petersburg spiritual enthusiasts, shows him that his lofty magnanimity towards Vronsky and Anna, which so shames him, was God working through him. He has no reason to feel dishonoured. Karenin, though he thinks this rapturous faith silly, turns to it and its proponent to reorder his life. Part of that reordering is to tell Seryozha that his mother is dead.

Back in Petersburg, Anna is tormented by the need to see her son. Her baby daughter cannot make up for the child that is lost to her. Since permission to visit Seryozha is refused, she steals in to her old home for a heart-breaking encounter and must too soon steal away. That night, in an agitated state and against Vronsky’s wishes, she dons her finery to flaunt herself at the Opera, before all Petersburg. Shunned and insulted, she challenges Vronsky to give her the love for which she has forfeited everything: her son, her relations, her social place. Though he is dutiful and makes the gestures, he is no longer capable of it. The forces set in train by passion and adultery will soon drive her to her death.

A brief respite far from society, in their country home, sees Vronsky revive amidst projects that absorb him. He remodels his old house, builds a hospital for the locals. Anna takes an informed and active interest. Yet it is as if they are both playing at their coupled roles without quite inhabiting them. Vronsky suffers from the fact that his daughter, and any future children, will not legally be his, but Karenin’s. He also suffers from Anna’s jealousy of his ‘male independence’–the political and social activity that takes him away from her. Her anxious love, in its need for constant expressions of worship, collides with his need for freedom. A dark struggle for power ensues.

Simone de Beauvoir’s scathing analysis of ‘the woman in love’ and the grand passion which begins in generosity and ends in exigence para llels the process of Anna’s and Vronsky’s love. At first the woman in love, de Beauvoir writes, ‘takes delight in gratifying her lover’s desire to the full; later on… she applies herself to awakening this desire so that she may have it to gratify. If she does not succeed in this enterprise, she feels so humiliated and useless that her lover will feign ardours he does not feel. In making herself a slave she has found the surest means of enchaining him.’ The love that began as a gift becomes an insatiable tyranny, as master and slave grow enmeshed, each taking on opposing roles in turn.

‘Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,/’Tis woman’s whole existence,’ Byron wrote–apparently with Madame de Staël in mind. In her social isolation, the words take on especial weight for Anna. She narrows her eyes so as not to allow too much reality in. She cannot bear Vronsky’s absences. Nor at first can she bring herself to write to Karenin to demand the divorce he promised: it would mean giving up her son utterly. She cannot have both Vronsky and Seryozha. The two loves are irreconcilable. Torn between them, she takes more and more morphine to dull the pain. When she does finally ask for the divorce, Karenin refuses it.