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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
When he wasn't shaking his finger at the reader about God or the Slavic question, Tolstoy was a brilliant and effortlessly confident dramatist, creating scene after magnificent scene in that attractively declarative 19th century style, in which infinitely detailed and subtle evocation of the tiniest gesture or glance (the envy of any contemporary novelist) is seamlessly interwoven with plain-spoken exposition of hard psychological truths. The book is full of heart-stopping set pieces: Vronsky riding his race horse to death as Anna watches; Levin mowing hay all day with the peasants on his estate, and then staying up all night on a haystack to ponder his life; Levin and Kitty caring for Levin's consumptive brother in his final days. My favorite, though, is a little episode about two minor characters, Kitty's spinsterish friend Varenka and Levin's scholarly half-brother Sergei Ivanovich, whom everyone, including Varenka and Sergei Ivanovich, thinks would make a perfect match. But in a heartbreaking and bitterly honest scene set in the woods on Levin's estate, they come to the brink of passion but no further:
To be the wife of a man like [Sergei Ivanovich]... seemed to her the height of happiness. Besides, she was almost certain she was in love with him. And now it was to be decided. She was frightened. Frightened that he would speak, and that he would not.He had to declare himself now or never; Sergei Ivanovich felt it, too. Everything in Varenka's gaze, colour, lowered eyes, showed painful expectation. Sergei Ivanovich saw it and pitied her. He felt that to say nothing now would be to insult her. In his mind he quickly repeated his arguments in favor of his decision. He also repeated to himself the words in which he wished to express his proposal; but instead of those words, by some unexpected consideration that occurred to him, he suddenly asked:
"And what is the difference between a white boletus and a birch boletus?"
"Varenka's lips trembled as she answered:
"There's hardly any difference in the caps, but in the feet."And as soon as these words were spoken, both he and she understood that the matter was ended ...
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is fucking brilliant. Tolstoy was never the fastidious stylist that, say, Flaubert was, and the prose here, at least in translation, is plain-spoken to the point of gracelessness. But the psychological insight is so acute and subtle -- Varenka is "almost certain" she loves him; Sergei Ivanovich is more afraid of hurting her feelings than winning her heart -- and Tolstoy's attitude is so calmly honest and compassionate, that it's not like you're reading this harrowing and humiliating moment, but you're living it. Sergei Ivanovich (or Varenka, for that matter), c'est moi.
The greatest set piece, though, is the climactic one, the sequence leading up to Anna's famous suicide under the wheels of a freight train. For five breathless chapters, as Anna convinces herself, erroneously, that Vronsky loves someone new and careens about Moscow looking for him, Tolstoy inhabits her feverish consciousness nearly as deeply as Virginia Woolf inhabits Mrs. Dalloway's, or (perhaps more apropos) as Joyce inhabits that more carefree adulteress, Molly Bloom. With the same sturdy prose, we look through Anna's eyes as the streets of Moscow pass her carriage window and she imposes her frenzy on everything she sees. A fat man raises his hat to her, thinking he knows her, then realizes his mistake:
'He thought he knew me. And he knows me as little as anyone else in the world knows me. I don't know myself. I know my appetites, as the French say. Those two want that dirty ice cream. That they know for certain,' she thought, looking at two boys who had stopped an ice-cream man, who was taking the barrel down from his head and wiping his sweaty face with the end of a towel. We all want something sweet, tasty. If not candy, then dirty ice cream. And Kitty's the same: if not Vronsky, then Levin. And she envies me. And hates me. We all hate each other. I Kitty, Kitty me. That's the truth.'
No she said no I won't No -- it's a sequence, in fact, that blows apart any facile dichotomy between the loose bagginess of the 19th century novel and the intense inner focus of the modernists, reminding this reader, anyway, that the history of the novel is organic, an evolution, not a hierarchy.
