How the Russians Read the French: Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy

4. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

4 Tolstoy, Anna Karenina What is a Frenchwoman going to talk to the children about? Nasty, stupid things; in her affected way she’ll infect them with her vulgar, corrupt, ridiculous and imbecile code of manners, and her distorted notions about society, about religion. . . . The Frenchwoman will introduce a new and vile French element. FyodorDostoevsky,lettertoVarvaraMikhailovnaDostoevskaya-Ivanova,1868 Rousseau and the Gospels have been the two great and beneficent influences of my life. Lev Tolstoy, letter to Bernard Bouvier, 1905 The richness and ambiguity of Anna Karenina arises from the conflict between its sympathy with both the adulteress and the family. In his novel, Tolstoy at once empathizes with Anna and reaffirms the biblical understanding of adultery as sinful, while including a vision of family that could prevent it. Tolstoy’s antidote to the decadence he found in the French novel of adultery is made up of the ideals of Rousseau and the eternal authority of the Gospels; he needed them to answer the question that increasingly tormented him as he was writing Anna Karenina—the meaning of life and how to live. Tolstoy sets this conflict into dialogue against the background of a variety of literary, philosophical, and sacred texts; he builds his response by recasting the most minute details of each work in such a way that the novel both forgives Anna and enshrines the holy ideal of the family. Since Les Liaisons Dangeureuses first appeared, adultery has been a particularly French theme. To portray an adulteress, Tolstoy, who followed French prose closely throughout his life, drew from Rousseau as well as from French works published during the twenty years preceding 152 his writing Anna Karenina. Tolstoy’s novel of adultery in the European style became a “philosophico-moral” one as he set the relationship among Karenin, Anna, and Vronsky into dialogue with the ideas of a range of French novels.1 Tolstoy’s counterexample to the adulterous triangle , the story of the successful marriage of Kitty and Levin, explicitly contradicts these French models and uses the Gospels to suggest the mysteries of the sacrament of marriage. The novel of adultery was a widespread genre in European literature of the nineteenth century, sharing many features: adulteresses go mad or, more often, die—by disease, in childbirth, or by murder—while adulterous men perish on the battlefield, in a train crash, in exile, and a child often serves as a source of grace.2 The problem of a woman’s role in marriage becomes a paradigm for the problems created by interrelating patterns, with marriage as mediator attempting to harmonize the natural, the familial, the social, the religious, and the transcendental realms.3 As Tony Tanner puts it in Adultery and the Novel, “The tension between [Old Testament] law and [New Testament] sympathy . . . holds the great bourgeois novel together.”4 While marriage brings harmony in a mythologized society such as those depicted by Shakespeare, in nineteenth-century Western European society marriage is the mythology that the novel of adultery demythologizes. The generic commonalities , however, are insufficient to explain Tolstoy’s highly specific response to particular representatives of the genre. Of the many literary sources for Anna Karenina, Tolstoy used French material as a baseline against which to consider adultery; he builds the relationship among Karenin, Anna, and Vronsky in dialogue with Rousseau, Dumas, Zola, and Flaubert. Most of the French subtexts for Anna Karenina address the problem of the adulteress from the point of view of the betrayed husband. Only Flaubert’s Madame Bovary conveys the adulteress’s experience predominantly from her point of view, which contributes to making it the most important of the novel’s subtexts. Each work relates to particular aspects of adultery in Anna Karenina: Rousseau’s Emile and Sophie, or Les Solitaires considers the moral questions faced by the husband when the wife is in all other respects an honorable woman. Dumas’ two works on adultery presuppose a dishonorable wife: his essay Man-Woman (L’Hommefemme ) stimulated Tolstoy’s thinking about the “woman question”; his polemical play Claude’s Wife (La Femme de Claude) provides scenes of unhappy married life. Zola’s Thérèse Raquin and Madeleine Férat contribute a few structural and stylistic elements. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, a Tolstoy, Anna Karenina 153 deeper, more artistic work than these five, considers causes of adultery and ultimately the meaning of life from the woman’s point of view. In all...