Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

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Reading Anna Karenina, explained a right-wing critic, “you are freed from mediocrity and filth, you stop breathing the fetid air of taverns, hospitals, and prisons, where most of contemporary belles- lettres are gasping.” At last one could enjoy fine descriptions of the life of aristocratic salons, ladies’ boudoirs, fashionable restaurants, and the races.

The left fumed over why Tolstoy did not write about the simple folk or, for example, students: “What a shame that Tolstoy has no ideals! … He cares more about a she-buffalo than an advanced woman.” The ultra-conservative poet Fet reported those liberal opinions to Tolstoy in a letter and added a response to them: “Because a she-buffalo is perfection in its species, while your advanced woman is God knows what.”¹⁶

Tolstoy chose the epigraph to Anna Karenina from the Bible: “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.” The full quote is this: “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith The Lord.” A lively polemic over the epigraph began immediately, and it continues to this day. Is the unfaithful Anna a criminal and God punishes her justly? Or is she innocent, and it is not the business of people to judge her?

In other words, does Tolstoy have sympathy for Anna, or did the “rubbishy old man” (as protofeminist Anna Akhmatova angrily called him) truly believe, as Akhmatova maintained, that “if a woman leaves her rightful husband and joins another man, she inevitably becomes a prostitute”?¹⁷

Tolstoy avoided a straightforward comment on the novel. “If I wanted to summarize what I wanted to express in the novel, then I would have to write exactly the same novel that I have written, from the beginning.”

We can assume that the epigraph from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans was chosen by Tolstoy after reading Schopenhauer’s philosophical treatise The World as Will and Representation, where this passage is interpreted. At the same time, Tolstoy was responding to the misogynistic pamphlet by Alexandre Dumas fils, “L’homme—femme,” which posed the question: What should be done with an unfaithful woman—forgive her, throw her out, kill her?

The highly moral Dumas strongly suggested killing unfaithful wives, but Tolstoy, generally very sympathetic to antifeminist ideas (“Women’s only purpose is to give birth and bring up children”), in this case was arguably mercifully inclined to leave the act of punishment to God.

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Tolstoy’s views obviously evolved over time: in his most sensational work on relations between the sexes, The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), the hero kills his wife, whom he suspects of having an affair with the violinist with whom she plays Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, “a terrible thing,” and the court finds him not guilty.

In his feverish monologue, the protagonist explains his crime by the fact that women have acquired “a terrible power over people” in modern society: “Women, like empresses, hold 90 percent of the human race in slavery and hard labor. And all because they have been humiliated, deprived of equal rights with men. And so they get their revenge by acting on our sensuality, ensnaring us in their nets.”

According to Tolstoy, that shameful and immoral “slavery of sensuality” can be avoided only by total abstinence. Akhmatova commented on the late Tolstoy’s idee fixe skeptically: the old writer, settled in his famous estate, Yasnaya Polyana, stopped lusting after the village girls and therefore decided to forbid the rest of the world to have sex too.¹⁸

In this case Akhmatova was wrong, if only because Tolstoy was still in his fifties when he wrote The Kreutzer Sonata and he had no problems with his sexual drive, judging by his diaries. The philosophy of the story is, of course, more complex, expressing the quasi-Buddhist idea that “if passions are destroyed including the last, most powerful one—physical love, then the prophecy will come to pass, people will be united into one, the goal of humanity will be reached, and there will be no reason for it to live.”

The diaries also suggest that while one of the impulses for writing the story was, in fact, autobiographical, it was rather opposite to the reason Akhmatova attributed to Tolstoy.

Tolstoy had been waging a fierce psychological war with his wife, Sophia, a strong woman who tried to hold on to her position in the family vis-a-vis the dictator and tyrant her husband was.

When they married in 1862, he was thirty-four and she was eighteen, and in the subsequent thirty years of marriage, she bore him thirteen children; as one of their sons calculated, she was pregnant for almost ten years and breast-fed children for more than thirteen years, and also “managed to run the complex household of a large family and copied War and Peace and Anna Karenina and other works by hand eight, ten, and sometimes twenty times each.”¹⁹

Sophia resisted her husband’s intentions to turn her into a mere machine for producing and feeding children (with additional functions as housekeeper, secretary, clerk, and literary agent). There were endless arguments and quarrels, accompanied by Sophia’s hysterics and nervous collapses. Time and again, Tolstoy would angrily write in his diary that the break with his wife was “complete.” Things never reached divorce, even though each threatened to leave, and Sophia often mentioned suicide, a terrible sin for a Christian.

Tolstoy, the more powerful figure, always won. But there was one sphere—sex—where Sophia could get her revenge. In his youth, Tolstoy caroused and debauched, as did everyone in his milieu. Toward the end of his life, he admitted to Maxim Gorky, “I was an insatiable … ‘—’ using a salty word at the end.”²⁰

Gorky insisted (and he knew!) that even with Tolstoy’s “passionate nature,” his wife “was his only woman for almost a half century.”²¹ It should be added that Sophia, according to contemporaries, was not only energetic and light on her feet, but amazingly youthful. When Tolstoy was writing The Kreutzer Sonata, she was in her early forties, but “there wasn’t a single wrinkle on her smooth, rosy white face,”²² as one of her daughters wrote.

Sophia did not use powder or any makeup and bore her imposing, full figure with grace and quiet confidence. In conversations, she liked to stress her youthfulness—and Tolstoy’s age. She continued to arouse her husband and, well aware of it, turned sex into a weapon (both wrote about this in their diaries).

In one typical entry, Tolstoy described bitterly that he had asked his wife to join him that night but she “with cold anger and the desire to hurt me, refused.” Tolstoy was infuriated that Sophia was turning conjugal sex “into a lure and a toy.” The Kreutzer Sonata (like other works of the period on the humiliating power of lust and sex—The Devil and Father Sergius) was his revenge and exorcism.

The story became a major public event: in Russia (as in the West) questions of sex were discussed avidly and turned into a battlefield between conservatives and liberals.

The Kreutzer Sonata was translated into the main European languages and became perhaps the most popular work by Tolstoy in the West. In Russia, where it was blocked by the censors, the novella was distributed in thousands of handwritten copies, and it was read aloud and debated passionately. “It sometimes