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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
It's a critical commonplace by now that Tolstoy the philosopher manqui was at odds with Tolstoy the peerless artist, and that "Anna Karenina" represents a tug of war between the brilliantly dramatized scenes of domestic life and warfare, and Tolstoy's passionate, if tendentious working out of his own spiritual dilemma through the character of Levin. Of course, I'm being a little glib, it's more complicated than that. At the heart of every great novel is a mystery, or, if you prefer, a contradiction. At the heart of "Ulysses" is the paradox that Joyce fled Dublin, never to return, and then spent his whole life reconstructing the place brick by brick in his imagination. There are a number of mysteries at the heart of "Anna Karenina," but perhaps the greatest one lies in the heart of its author.
You don't need to know a thing about Tolstoy's biography to understand that he was a profoundly sensual man who at the same time yearned to reject the material world and be spiritually pure; this struggle is indelibly etched on every page of "Anna Karenina." Perhaps no one understood this struggle better than Vladimir Nabokov, not just because he was a great novelist himself, but because he was also a Russian. "What one would like to do," Nabokov writes in "Lectures on Russian Literature," "would be to kick the glorified soapbox from under [Tolstoy's] sandalled feet and then lock him up in a stone house on a desert island with gallons of ink and reams of paper -- far away from the things, ethical and pedagogical, that diverted his attention from observing the way the dark hair curled above Anna's white neck." But in the same passage, Nabokov allows that "the thing cannot be done: Tolstoy is homogeneous, is one," and the "truth which he was ponderously groping for or magically finding just around the corner, was always the same truth -- the truth was he and this he was an art."
If I wanted to be criminally glib here, I could boil this down to the workshop truism that it's all about the process, dude. But I don't think that's what Nabokov meant, and it's certainly not what Tolstoy's life and work meant. As this middle-aged novelist (and I'm the same age as Tolstoy was when he published "Anna Karenina") struggles up off the couch and takes off his aggravating reading glasses and returns to work on his own novel, he's faced with the fact that the author of the greatest novel on the greatest conundrum in human experience -- flesh vs. spirit, profane vs. sacred, whatever -- finally decided that writing novels was downright sinful and immoral. For what it's worth, Jim the philosopher manqui (and I have the useless B.A. to prove it) thinks Tolstoy was wrong about that, and that what Nabokov is really saying is, don't listen to what Tolstoy said about art, look at what he did, at the magnificent art he created. For that matter, I don't have to look any further than my agent, who, with the towering example of "Anna Karenina" before him, turned around and wrote a first-rate thriller ("The Icon," by Neil Olson. Check it out).
At the climax of "Anna Karenina," Anna's final moment is represented as the extinguishing of a candle, "by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil," and one last time it flares up, "brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been in darkness, sputtered, grew dim, and went out for ever." Any reader who finishes that passage and isn't weeping doesn't have a heart. And any writer, no matter what his age or her ambition, who finishes that passage and isn't inspired to at least reach for that level of grace and subtlety and truth -- who isn't inspired, in other words, to keep Anna's flame, and "Anna Karenina's," burning a little longer -- well, that writer hasn't been paying attention.
This story has been corrected since it was originally published.
