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Stricken by Infection: Art and Adultery in Anna Karenina and Kreutzer Sonata

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

David Herman
David Herman*
Affiliation:
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Virginia
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Extract

Resentment proceeds from powerlessness, said Rousseau. How true! A man is spiteful when he wants to do what is not in his power–he encounters obstacles and grows resentful. (57:136)

Lev Tolstoi had originally intended to open Anna Karenina with a scene in Princess Betsy’s salon, later moved to part 2 of the novel, in which the work’s central themes are all touched on in the conversation of the gathered guests. This introductory discussion primarily concerns illicit liaisons, but alongside the talk of adultery, one guest states, “The theme is everything. Once one has a theme, it is easy to embroider on it” (121). These words obliquely acknowledge a debt to one of the novel’s sources, Aleksandr Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights,” a story about improvisation in which that art is conceived not merely as the instantaneous or impromptu invention we usually think of, but even more importantly as the appropriation of someone else’s topic. Anna Karenina, and some of Tolstoi’s later works as well, make important borrowings from Pushkin’s story about borrowing, employing both themes from “Egyptian Nights” and therefore the methods of the Italian improvisor in it.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , Spring 1997 , pp. 15 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1997

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References

Passages from Tolstoi’s diaries, notebooks, and letters are my translations of the text in the Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 90 vols. (Moscow, 1928–58); references are by volume and page numbers. The editions of the other major works cited in the text are: Tolstoy, L. N., Anna Karenina,trans. Aylmer, Maude, ed. George, Gibian(New York, 1970)Google Scholar; Tolstoy, L. N., What Is Art?trans. Almyer, Maude [sic](Indianapolis, 1960)Google Scholar; Tolstoy, L. N., “Kreutzer Sonata,”in Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy,trans. Louise, and Aylmer, Maude(New York, 1967)Google Scholar. When the Maudes’ translation of Kreutzer Sonataclearly does not correspond to the text in the Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, the translation is also mine; these cases are marked by the reference to volume and page.

1 When this original opening scene was moved back to the second part of the novel, it was replaced with a new beginning, which, though altered in characters, setting, and action, is likewise constructed around the question of improvisation, as we shall see below.

2 See, for example, the improvisor’s reference to “the close connection between one’s own inspiration and an alien, external will.” Pushkin, A. S., “Egyptian Nights,”in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii,2d ed., 10vols. (Moscow, 1957–58), 6:381Google Scholar. Charskii’s hidden “commentaries” on improvising—the topics he suggests for the Italian’s performances— are clearly fascinated with the connection to alien minds and indifferent to questions of speed.

3 Though laboriously drafted, both Anna Kareninaand Kreutzer Sonatahave improvisational origins too complex to explore in depth here. On the literally inspiring role of “Egyptian Nights” for Anna Karenina, see David, Sloane, “Pushkin’s Legacy in Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy Studies Journal 4(1991): 2–7 Google Scholar; Boris, Eikhenbaum, Tolstoi in the Seventies,trans. Albert, Kaspin(Ann Arbor, 1982), 127–29Google Scholar; and Gudzii, N. K., “Istoriia pisaniia i pechataniia ‘Anny Kareninoi,'”in Tolstoi, L. N., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 20:577–78Google Scholar. For a discussion of the next step, Tolstoi’s adaptation of Anna Kareninainto Kreutzer Sonata, see Mark, Aldanov, Zagadka Tolstogo, Brown University SlavicReprint Series (1923; reprint, Providence, 1969), 39–56.Google ScholarThis strategy of improvisation and self-improvisation is even more prominently—and problematically—represented in Kreutzer Sonata’stitle, which dates to a performance of the Beethoven sonata at Tolstoi’s home. After the performance, Tolstoi very enthusiastically (!) suggested that he and two other artists present (a painter and an actor) create improvisations on the work, each in his own art form. Opul’skaia, L. D., Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi: Materialy k biografiis 1886 po 1892 god(Moscow, 1979), 117–21Google Scholar.

4 A word needs to be said about the sparse scholarly literature on Kreutzer Sonata, especially striking in view of the voluminous and impassioned reaction to it at its publication. Something about the work seems to have inspired both its Russian and western commentators to one of two extreme postures vis-à-vis the text: that it is selfevident and needs no exegesis, or that it is self-contradictory and difficult to make sense of. Typically, the views expressed on chastity are said to be presented so unsubtly as to be beyond explication, while the rhetorical strategy of placing them in the mouth of a preachy and unrepentant murderer is held to be unfathomable. The result is that the work has been deemed at once unnecessary and impossible to explicate. As an illustration, Gustafson, Bayley, Wasiolek, Greenwood, and Christian in their roughly 1,500 collective pages on Tolstoi as a whole devote only a combined 16 pages to the story: Richard, Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger(Princeton, 1986)Google Scholar; John, Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel(New York, 1966)Google Scholar; Edward, Wasiolek, Tolstoy’s Major Fiction(Chicago, 1978)Google Scholar; Greenwood, E. B., Tolstoy: The Comprehensive Vision(London, 1975)Google Scholar; Christian, R. F., Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction(Cambridge, Eng., 1969)Google Scholar. Meanwhile, the best-known Russian surveys of Tolstoi’s work usually concentrate on his three major novels and omit Kreutzer Sonataaltogether. Substantial treatments of the work are given only by Ulf Peter, Møller, Postlude to the Kreutzer Sonata: Tolstoj and the Debate on Sexual Morality in Russian Literature in the 1890’s,trans. John, Kendal(Leiden, 1988)Google Scholar; Marie, Sémon, Les Femmes dans Vaeuvre de Leon Tolstoi: Romans et nouvelles(Paris, 1984)Google Scholar; Coetzee, J. M., “Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky,” Comparative Literature 37(1985): 193–232 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Charles, Isenberg, Telling Silence: Russian Frame Narratives of Renunciation(Evanston, 1993)Google Scholar. The latter three precede me in underscoring the central, unresolved paradox of a work of art that seems to abhor art, or what Isenberg calls the “erotics of narrative” (82), though Rischin and Kopper also note in passing the “equivocation of art” and language (43) and Pozdnyshev’s “fictionmaking“ (171), respectively. Ruth Rischin, “Allegro Tumultiwsissimamente:Beethoven in Tolstoy’s Fiction,” and John Kopper, “Tolstoy and the Narrative of Sex: A Reading of ‘Father Sergius,’ ‘The Devil,’ and ‘The Kreutzer Sonata,'” both in Hugh, McLean, ed., In the Shade of the Giant: Essays on Tolstoy(Berkeley, 1989)Google Scholar.

5 For more on the linkage between art and love in “Egyptian Nights,” see my “A Requiem for Aristocratic Art: Pushkin’s ‘Egyptian Nights,'” Russian Review55 (1996): 661–80, esp. 673–77.

6 On some of the ways in which literature invades and exposes privacy, see David, Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy(Chicago, 1988)Google Scholar, and John, Bender, “Impersonal Violence: The Penetrating Gaze and the Field of Narration in Caleb Williams,”in Stephen, Melvilleand Bill, Readings, eds., Vision and Textuality(Basingstoke, Eng., 1995), 256–81Google Scholar.

7 Quoted in Turner, C.J. G., A Karenina Companion(Waterloo, Can., 1993), 49 Google Scholar.

8 Isenberg notes that Pozdnyshev finds in Trukhachevskii “a virtual double“ (Telling Silence, 91).

9 Sigmund, Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,'”in On Creativity and the Unconscious(New York, 1958), 122–61Google Scholar.

10 L. N. Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, ed. George Gibian (New York, 1966), 223. It should be noted that the second set of benchmarks What Is Art?proposes for the evaluation of artwork, those weighing religious worth, do nothing to remedy this crucial ambiguity, for Tolstoi again formulates his ideal as “the loving union of man with man [Uubovnoe edinenie liudei]”(150), a definition good for many purposes, but not for fighting adultery. It is tempting to conclude that Tolstoi is assuming some generally accepted Christian moral standards must also be met by good art, but then Tolstoi is the exceptional Christian thinker who regularly asks us to reject accepted moral standards and go along with him as he constructs a radically new, often unpredictable, set of ethical concepts.

11 Note that, as we might expect, Tolstoi’s definition of art works equally well as a theory of love. For love too is an emotion which is shared, which overcomes our isolation, unites us with another, and merges viewpoints, and which, to be real, must be genuinely felt (sincerity), conveyed so that the other knows (clarity), and stamped with the lover’s own unique personality (individuality, or what Tolstoi calls osobennost'[30:149]). Distinctions between a theory of art and one of love, if there are any, are limited to secondary requirements, such as that art be passed on “consciously, by means of certain external signs” (What Is Art?50).

12 Sloane and Gary Saul Morson interpret the novel’s strategy differently than I will, as a demonstration that art and life are not the same and should not be confused. Thus the imaginary adultery of art and “real” adultery—this is, of course, precisely the distinction Tolstoi will void in Kreutzer Sonata—would be clearly differentiable no matter how much they resembled one another. Morson argues that Anna dooms herself by reading her life as an artistic structure with symbolic and foreboding moments; Sloane sees error when a character allows the desire to live vicariously to supplant the ability to live really (11). However, both authors admit that there are residual problems with any work of art that means to warn us against art. Gary Saul Morson, “Anna’s Karenina’s Omens,” in Elizabeth Cheresh, Allenand Gary Saul, Morson, eds., Freedom and Responsibility in Russian Literature: Essays in Honor of Robert Louis Jackson(Evanston, 1995), 134–52Google Scholar.

13 In addition to Stiva, the Italian is the prototype for Mikhailov, who will be discussed shortly, and also the medium Landau, another foreigner who speaks with borrowed voices in public performances.

14 The quotation from Fet, not readily apparent, is discussed in Babaev, E. G., Ocherki estetiki i tvorchestva L. N. Tolstogo(Moscow, 1981), 171–77Google Scholar. By replacing the conversation in Princess Betsy’s salon with Stiva’s dream, Tolstoi retained the theme of improvisation as a key marker at the entry to his text.

15 Ronald, LeBlanc, “Levin Visits Anna: The Iconography of Harlotry,” Tolstoy Studies Journal 3(1990): 1–20 Google Scholar.

16 Amy, Mandelker, Framing “Anna Karenina“: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel(Columbus, 1993), 108–21Google Scholar.

17 Dolly’s reaction to Anna when she visits Vronskii’s country estate can be read as an expression of caring, but in fact she discovers “that she was so far away from Anna that there were questions on which they could never meet, and about which it was best not to talk” (579). With that gesture, Dolly has given up the possibility of any authentic dialogue with Anna. Within minutes, Dolly “could not make herself think about [Anna]” (581) and has resolved to get away from the estate and her once close friend as soon as possible.

18 Note the curious parallel to Resurrection, part 2, chapter 13 ( Tolstoy, L. N., Resurrection,trans. Louise, Maude[New York, 1899], 285 Google Scholar), where Maslova, now a prostitute, rejects Nekhliudov’s solicitousness and concern and vows not to let Nekhliudov “make use of her spiritually as he had done physically.” This is the same peculiar condemnation of compassion for a fallen woman as genuinely evil and shameful, though in a different context and now from the vantage point of the woman.

19 Why Levin’s self-centered concluding resolutions outweigh the (few) suggestions that he may be growing more tolerant and loving is discussed more fully in my “Allowable Passions in Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy Studies Journal(forthcoming).

20 Quoted in Sémon, Les Femmes dans I'oeuvre de Leon Tolstoï, 375.

21 Though there is not room to address the issue fully, even What Is Art?, which does exemplify good art, continues to be fascinated with “Egyptian Nights” and the symbolic system it had built around sympathetic artists in contrast with a viciously unsympathetic Cleopatra. The tract declares of Christian art, for example, “The ideal is no longer the greatness of Pharaoh” (148), but proceeds to cite as its example of true religious narrative that of Joseph, another Egyptian tale where the greatness of Pharaoh plays a key role and in whose retelling Tolstoi lingers longest over Potiphar’s adulterous advances to Joseph (154).

22 Note that Tolstoi’s ideas about music do not necessarily grow less extreme with time; a decade after What Is Art?Tolstoi notes in his diary, “In music you do it yourself” (meaning the listener believes the sounds he hears are his own creation; 57:237).

23 On the drafts, see Gudzii, N. K., “Kreitserova sonata,”in Tolstoi, L. N., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 27:561-624Google Scholar, and Zhdanov, V. A., Ot “Anny Kareninoi” k “Voskreseniiu“(Moscow, 1967), 155–84Google Scholar.

24 Møller, Postlude to the Kreutzer Sonata, 27.

25 One might object, though ultimately it would not undermine my main argument, that even if all art is adulterous, at least all love surely need not be so, for there is the possibility of love pledged to a single person, as art generally cannot be. Yet it is precisely this vision of two hearts wedded to one another till death do them part that is the most unexpected target in Kreutzer Sonata. The novella’s withering skepticism declares even the sacrament of marriage merely public adultery, and while it does not explicitly rule out the existence of spiritual love, it conspicuously refuses to offer so much as a single example of it.

26 Tolstoi’s comment in What Is Art?is interesting in this light: “The Jews could use Egyptian art—the fundamental ideals were one and the same” (148).

27 The connection between resentment and Judaism is made just as Tolstoi is beginning the work on Kreutzer Sonataby Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals(1887). Note also Silbajoris’s observation, “There is a strange sense of frustration in the story,“ and Jackson’s description of Pozdnyshev as “deliberately spiteful, full of mingled selfpity and hatred.” Rimvydas Silbajoris, Tolstoy’s Aesthetics and His Art(Columbus, Ohio, 1991), 150; Jackson, Robert L., “Tolstoj’s Kreutzer Sonataand Dostoevskij’s Notes from the Underground,” in Victor, Terras, ed., American Contributions to the Eighth International Congress ofSlavists(Columbus, Ohio, 1978), 287 Google Scholar.

28 We might note in the psychology of the good Christian a curious analogue for the troublesome adulterous impulse; his desire never slaked because he pursues unattainable ideals, the good Christian strives ever onward, filled with more and more desire. This recalls the unbounded and unstoppable amorous energy that defined adultery. We again stray into territory where restless and ceaseless desire—the essence of adultery—doubles as the soul of virtue.

29 Morson, in a brief passing comment, gives one of the most insightful readings of Kreutzer Sonata, observing, “Tolstoy wants us to reject Tolstoy as Tolstoy rejected Tolstoy. It follows that we can understand fictions like The Kreutzer Sonatabest if we treat them as anti-fictions. The Kreutzer Sonatais a brilliantly contrived aesthetic masterpiece that teaches us to despise such contrivance and mastery—and that is its duplicitous strategy.” Gary Saul, Morson, “Reader as Voyeur,”in Harold, Bloom, ed., Leo Tolstoy,Modern Critical Views (New York, 1986), 189 Google Scholar. Although it is resonantly modern, I find Morson’s reading overly optimistic, for the simple reason that it is hard to imagine what Kreutzer Sonata “teaches us” if it is a work of art that warns against art. Tolstoi means us to see that Jews and women do not achieve the liberation they seek by practicing their mutually destructive strategy. Less a clever and self-delighted stratagem to undermine art than an expression of its author’s frustration, Kreutzer Sonataderives from Tolstoi’s realization that he could not solve the long-simmering dilemma of art and adultery that he obviously abhorred. Tolstoi admits as much when he writes, “There was something vile in Kreutzer Sonata. I find it horribly repugnant, any recollection of it. There was something evil in the motives governing me in the writing of it, such malice it caused” (87:53). “Malice” here renders zloba, which shares the root of the verb translated in the epigraph as “to be spiteful” and “to be resentful.“

30 Tony, Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression(Baltimore, 1979), 18–24 Google Scholar.

31 This phrase is missing in the English translation, perhaps because of the singularly unresolved status of the story’s many drafts (discussed in Gudzii, “Kreitserova sonata“).

32 For more on Tolstoi’s attitude toward dialogue, in the Bakhtinian sense of the subtler forms of reckoning with the viewpoint of the other, see Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy, 3–52, 176–90. Gustafson’s discussion is relevant though it mentions neither Bakhtin nor dialogue.

33 On the dialogic nature of Beethoven’s work, see Owen, Jander, “The ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata as Dialogue,” Early Music 16(February 1988): 34–49 Google Scholar.

34 Cf. Isenberg, Telling Silence, 89. Note that What Is Art?follows the same structural principle. Tolstoi begins with the necessary obeisance to dialogue, running through every significant aesthetic theory in western history from Plato to modern times merely in order to earn the right to dispense with them all and to speak monologically, addressing his reader in what Morson calls absolute language, suited to the communication of incontrovertible truths.

35 Note that art and love are again in parallel. This merely confirms the linkage that Tolstoi wants so passionately to escape.

36 I have used Maude’s translation here, but emended “We all” to “You all” in accordance with the Polnoe sobranie sochinenii.

37 Christian finds Pozdnyshev’s views “irritating and manifestly unjust” (Tolstoy, 233). Wasiolek perceives a tendency “to bludgeon the reader” (Tolstoy’s Major Fiction, 162). Isenberg observes that the text “repels” (89) and is self-contradictory even by its own standards (Telling Silence, 92). Miller notes that Pozdnyshev’s tale “is constructed so as to seem shocking” (Postlude to the Kreutzer Sonata, 25). To my mind, Sémon is the most perceptive, considering the reader to be “flogged, bruised, shocked. Instead of ‘infection,’ an aggression to which one cannot be indifferent,” which prevents “the indispensable identification with the hero” (Les Femmes dans I'muvre de Leon Tolstoï, 397

38 In his diary, Tolstoi upbraids himself for appealing too much to the reader: “I'm taking trouble writing Kreutzer Sonatafrom vanity; I don't want to appear before the public not entirely polished, not articulate, in bad form even. And that’s terrible. If there’s anything valuable and necessary to people, people will extract it from something bad. A perfectly finished story won't make my arguments more convincing“ (50:129–0).

39 As Linkov notes, the “Afterword” was a rare exception to Tolstoi’s normal practice of refusing to respond to public criticism and calls for clarification. Linkov, V. la., Mir i chelovek v tvorchestve L. Tolstogo i I. Bunina(Moscow, 1989), 84 Google Scholar.