Transnational Tolstoy: Between the West and the World 9781472544131, 9781441153265

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Acknowledgments Completion of this book was greatly facilitated by the support of several institutions and granting agencies. I am especially grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a research fellowship from January 2012 to January 2013, which allowed me to bring together my previous work on this subject, fill in several gaps in the body of the book, and write the introduction and conclusion. I should also acknowledge the Semester Study Leave that was granted for Autumn 2011, by my home institution, George Mason University. In 2006 to 2007 an earlier grant from the NEH, which supported myself and four colleagues in developing a world literature curriculum for general education students, also provided essential background and perspective. I wish to thank Deborah Kaplan and Robert Matz, my department chairs during this period, for their support of these research programs. Over the years I have accumulated many intellectual and personal debts to colleagues, for which I am grateful. William Mills Todd III and Edith Clowes have been most generous with their support of this project, dating back in Bill’s case to an arrangement to teach courses on the Russian novel when we were assistant professors at Stanford, and in Edie’s case to a seminar we organized on “Slavic Identities” at a conference of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature. Several other colleagues helped to launch different segments of this project, long before I realized that they could enter into a book on the reorientation of Tolstoy’s transnational interests from Western to world literature. Vladimir Alexandrov suggested that I contribute a short article on Vladimir Nabokov and Tolstoy for the reader’s companion he was editing on Nabokov, Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris asked me to participate in a panel on magical realism that eventually led to their book on that movement, and my George Mason colleagues Coilín Owens and Roger Lathbury persuaded me to write the introduction to the edition of Hadji Murad which Roger published with Orchises Press. I should also thank Ronald Bogue for inviting me to give the plenary talk at the 2006 meeting of the Southern Comparative Literature Association (now the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts), which pushed me to develop the thesis on worldliness and world literature that now appears in Chapter 4. I am grateful as well to Ileana Orlich for inviting me to reflect on Tolstoy and world literature for her panel at the inaugural meeting of

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x Acknowledgments the World Literature Association in Beijing in July 2011. Chandra Mohan, the executive secretary of the Comparative Literature Association of India, invited me to take part in two conferences sponsored by his organization in February and March 2012, which gave me useful insights into Tolstoy and India. Finally, and perhaps idiosyncratically, let me pay tribute to the criticism and theory component of the doctoral orals at Yale’s Department of Comparative Literature. For a subtopic on Russian formalism, one of the books I chose to read was Boris Eikhenbaum’s three-volume book Tolstoy, which awakened in me the ambition to sometime write a book on that author myself, a goal that has finally been realized. I should acknowledge as well the support and encouragement I have received over the years from Abdulla al-Dabbagh, Lucia Boldrini, Julian Connolly, Marcel Cornis-Pope, David Damrosch, Dorothy Figueira, Jonathan Hart, Margaret Higonnet, the late Masako Hirai, Herbert Lindenberger, Elaine Martin, Burton Pike, Leona Toker, and Mary Ann Frese Witt. Needless to say, none of the people acknowledged here is responsible for any problems with this book’s approach or with its details. Earlier versions of several chapters or parts of chapters have previously appeared in print. Much of Chapter 1 was published as “Doubting the West: Negotiations with Eurocentrism in Dostoevsky’s The Gambler and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina” in Old Margins and New Centers: The European Literary Heritage in an Age of Globalization/Anciennes Marges et Nouveaux Centres: L’héritage littéraire européen dans une ère de globalisation, (eds) Marc Maufort and Caroline de Wagter (Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 97–110. Small portions of Chapter 6 appeared in “Nabokov and Tolstoy,” in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, (ed.). Vladimir Alexandrov (New York: Garland, 1994), pp. 518–28. A somewhat different version of Chapter 7, under the title “National Solidarity, Toxic Nationalism, European Inner Edges: Stendhal and Tolstoy in Malraux’s Les Noyers de l’Altenburg and Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo,” was published in the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 37.4 (2011): 318–37. The first half of Chapter 8 is an extensively revised version of “Magical Realism, Compensatory Vision, and Felt History: Classical Realism Transformed in The White Hotel,” published in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Zamora and Wendy Faris (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 267–83. An earlier version of Chapter 9, with the title “‘Show Me the Zulu Tolstoy’: A Russian Classic Between ‘First’ and ‘Third’ Worlds,” appeared in a Forum on Slavic Identities, edited by Edith Clowes and John Foster, in the Slavic and East European Journal 45.2 (Summer 2002): 260–74. Sections 2 through 6 of Chapter 12 originally appeared as “Islamic Jihad in Tolstoy’s Khadzhi Murad: Ethnic Rivalries, Local Customs, Levels of Struggle,” in From Ritual

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to Romance and Beyond: Essays in Comparative Literature and Comparative Religion, edited by Manfred Schmeling and Hans-Joachim Backe (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2011), pp. 23–33.

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A note on citations and abbreviations Works by Tolstoy and also by Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Goethe, Stendhal, and Proust exist in several and even many different translations. Citations from their writings will use the editions listed below, will be keyed to the accompanying abbreviations, and will be given in parentheses immediately after the passage quoted. As a convenience, due to the differing pagination of the many translations, citations will also provide the unit, chapter, and/ or section of a cited passage as a second form of identification following the page reference in the translations listed below. For the sake of consistency, all citations from Tolstoy’s works use the recent translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky whenever possible. With Russian names, I use the more familiar anglicized forms such as Moscow or Nicholas or Kitty. The main exception is with the male protagonist in Anna Karenina, which I render as “Lyovin,” in accord both with its pronunciation in Russian and its derivation from Tolstoy’s first name, which is “Lyov.” In line with this book’s emphasis on transnationality, I have also chosen to use the Italian “Fabrizio” in place of Stendhal’s use of the French “Fabrice” for the young hero of The Charterhouse of Parma. Similarly, I have used an English transliteration of the Turkic “Murad” for the name of the hero of Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad, instead of the Russianized spelling of “Murat.” Texts written originally in Russian, French, German, and Italian were used in the research for this book, but mention of these languages will occur only when directly relevant to the discussion. All other references to literary works and to scholarship will be annotated in the Note section at the end of the book. AK

Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Viking Penguin, 2001.

CP

Stendhal (Henri Beyle). The Charterhouse of Parma, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Modern Library, 2000.

EA

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Elective Affinities, trans. and Intro. David Constantine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

G

Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Gambler. The Double and The Gambler, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, intro. Richard Pevear. New York: Everyman’s Library, 2005, pp. 171–329.

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A note on citations and abbreviations

xiv HM

Leo Tolstoy. Hadji Murat, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, intro. Richard Pevear. New York: Vintage, 2012.

L

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The Leopard, trans. Archibald Colquhoun. New York: Pantheon, 1983.

LRL

Vladimir Nabokov. Lectures on Russian Literature, (ed.) with intro. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.

SE

Gustave Flaubert. Sentimental Education, trans. Robert Baldick. New York: Penguin, 1978.

WIA

Leo Tolstoy. What is Art?, trans. Aylmer Maude, (ed.), intro., and notes by W. Gareth Jones. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2007.

WP

Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace, intro. Richard Pevear, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Viking Classics, 2008.

WT

André Malraux. The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, trans. A. W. Fielding, Foreword by Conor Cruise O’Brien. Chicago: University of Chicago Pressa, 1992.

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Introduction Transnational Tolstoy and the new comparatism

Over the past two decades, transnationality has become a watchword and key concept in promoting new, cross-cultural perspectives on literature, especially with fiction and the novel. Whereas before, heeding the constraints set by language differences, cultural traditions, and patriotic sentiment, critics and scholars focused on literatures in their national settings, now appreciation has deepened for all the ways in which literary works enter into cultural transactions that take place across borders. After all, we can regularly observe how other, often more widely popular art-forms like film and music, not to speak of the new media, have international and even global impacts of this kind. Doesn’t a similar process take place with well-known writers and works, despite literature’s current standing as an older, more localized, and “bounded” medium? Indeed, even in the nineteenth century, at a time when literature and literary study were becoming more exclusively national and even nationalistic in orientation, scholars in the newly formed field of comparative literature were asking questions of this kind. Given the situation back then, however, the comparative attitude was quite weak and limited. It lacked the broad support that national approaches received at a time when print culture and literacy were felt to be vital to the nation-state; and, having originated in Europe, this older comparatism focused on the literatures of neighboring countries, not on writing and verbal expression worldwide. As a result, its term of choice became the “international,” which in that era of European dominance meant a preference for studying exchanges among the national literatures of this one region. Indeed, in actual practice, comparative scholarship then and well into the twentieth century often simply dealt with the “major” literatures written in French, English, and German, with the addition of the Greek and Latin classics and of the Bible from the deeper past. A typical, and for the time an enlightened and well-meaning expression of this internationalism would be Matthew Arnold’s efforts to overcome English insularity. Arguing for a broader, more intellectually inquisitive European awareness (which for Arnold, before the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 to 1871, meant maintaining an interest in French and German developments alike), he defined it “as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes,

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one great confederation … whose members have … a knowledge of Greek, Roman and Eastern antiquity, and of one another.”1 The reference to a “confederation,” which betrays an assumption that each of the constituent national units had a distinctive identity, is the telling indicator of Arnold’s internationalist approach. Transnationality, by contrast, shifts attention to the larger, culturally more varied world we inhabit today, with its many new nations, its greater awareness of cultural regions outside Europe, and its heightened communication across borders—in short, a world that is at once postcolonial and globalizing, and often multilingual as well. In The Challenge of Comparative Literature, an advanced overview of the field by Claudio Guillén, this Spanish-American comparatist had already begun to move in this direction. His book, based on lectures given in Spain and China, both of which were nations in which cross-cultural inquiry had faced serious obstacles, pointedly rejected the international approach. For a scholarship that seeks to do full justice to literature’s more-than-national cultural richness, Guillén affirmed, “the point of departure is not to be found in national literatures, nor in the interrelationships between them.”2 Instead, the basic impetus should come from a “yearning” to surpass the national literary perspective; and, with Cervantes as his example, he contended that “it is rare that the horizon of a great writer is only national in scope.”3 For Guillén in the mid-1980s, however, at a relatively early stage in his field’s shifting orientation, the preferred term is “supranationality,” a word with loftier and more serenely cosmopolitan implications than transnationality. Since then the trans-national has come decisively to the fore.4 If “inter” assumed orderly, almost diplomatic processes of give-and-take among welldefined units, “trans” posits a more active, less regulated, even unpredictably creative surge of forces across borders that no longer seem as firmly established. Facing this larger, more diversified sense of our world, a new comparatism has come into existence. Its initiatives, which, taken together, have helped to transform comparative literary study, provide the basis for this book’s inquiry into Tolstoy’s career as a novelist, as seen in transnational terms. The explicit concern with transnationality grew out of the ferment occasioned by literary theory, the so-called “theory years” that were associated with comparative literature as a field from the 1960s until at least the late 1980s. Yet theory, for all the excitement generated by its intellectual power and sophistication, remained largely European in orientation. Indeed, it could (quite ironically, given its aura of novelty) be seen as a continuation, a full century later, of the Arnoldian concern with deepening one’s understanding of French and German literary and intellectual developments. This

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blind spot became glaringly apparent in the later work of figures like Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, who had first come to attention by engaging with leading theorists like Foucault and Derrida. Then, however, in books like Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993) or in Spivak’s translations of stories by the Bengali author Mahasweta Devi, beginning with In Other Worlds (1987) and continuing with Imaginary Maps (1995), they went on to urge a more searching attention to literature outside Europe, mainly by taking a post­colonial approach. A second, less widely credited impetus for this transnational turn (and one that had interested Guillén) was East-West studies, which had been exploring linkages, parallels, and differences between East Asian and European literatures even before the ascendancy of literary theory. Yet another catalyst was translation studies, which has deepened interest in the variety, complexity, and significance of transactions between different languages and their cultures. One important early application of these insights to comparative study came with Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystems theory, which drew attention to the new meanings that texts from one culture could gain upon entering a second culture’s field of force.5 In this kind of reconfigurative process, the “trans-” prefix could acquire a new, more precise role in comparative studies, as was made clear more recently by the polemical title of Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006). As a key side effect, translation studies eased the requirement that comparative scholarship should deal exclusively with texts read in the original. Without some freedom to read more widely, while keeping a comparatist’s multilingual awareness of the difficulties that come with translated texts, transnationality in the broader sense of openness to the world as a whole that was promoted by Said, Spivak, and East-West studies would have been impossible. More recently, and at times in alliance with courses or anthologies that venture beyond the Western canon, the revival of interest in Goethe’s scattered comments on world literature has brought home even more directly the value of studying the transnational dimensions of authors like Tolstoy. Drawing on translation studies, David Damrosch has stressed how the reputation of such writers depends upon the twists and turns of communication across borders. As a result, important new meanings that might have been overlooked or even dismissed in a national setting can become available, despite the obvious limitations of not paying as much attention to the original language and to the writer’s immediate cultural context. Damrosch resolves this difficulty by contending that the metaphor of nationally “centered” accounts of a work’s meaning needs to be supplemented by thinking of its full impact in terms of an ellipse. This addition of a second focal point allows for transnational readings that, while based on the

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same text, can legitimately differ in some respects from those generated in the domestic setting. “World literature,” Damrosch contends, “is an elliptical refraction of national literatures.”6 The French scholar Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (2004), in turn, has shown how much our notion of what counts as world literature, in the sense of world-renowned classics, depends upon the authority of specific centers for transnational validation. However, even as she emphasizes Paris’s role in identifying such masterpieces from the Renaissance up to the period immediately after World War II, she also allows for the subsequent rise of new centers in the world literary system as well as for crystallizations of achievement at the margins. As examples of the latter, she instances Kafka’s Prague and the Ireland of Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett, but her point applies equally well to the transnational reach of Tolstoy’s Russia—a topic not addressed in her much-discussed book. Also germane to this line of inquiry is Franco Moretti’s research on the novel as a genre, especially the perspective opened up by the final unit in the “History, Geography, and Culture” volume in his ambitious edited collection, The Novel.7 This unit indicates that the novel may now be in the process of creating the first literature that belongs to the entire world. To be sure, the richly detailed accounts, in both this book and Moretti’s other writings, of the genre’s European origins and of its spread outward from that center may be understood to show a continuing attachment to the Europe-based internationalism of the old comparatism. However, in a striking unit on “The Semantic Field of ‘Narrative,’” The Novel provides accounts of distinctive narrative traditions that have flourished elsewhere, for example, in East Asia, the Arab world, or (of special interest in studying Tolstoy) Russia.8 Given the often hidden and surprising power of such traditions, they could end up exerting an influence on world fiction as it continues to develop, thus allowing for more complicated cross-cultural transformations in the future than Moretti’s mainly European model of the past. Not surprisingly, the transnational turn described above has given rise to controversy. Its obvious differences from national literary study need little comment, except to note that research in many national fields has increasingly shown interest in forms of cross-cultural exchange that are themselves transnational and interlingual.9 However, within comparative literature itself there has been vigorous debate over what a new transnational comparatism might owe to or learn from the field’s former experience with European literary relations. Do translation and postcolonial studies or the revival of world literature, which have done so much to promote the transnational turn, in fact have major residual connections with comparative literature as once practiced? One polemical extreme in this discussion would be Susan

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Bassnett’s position over a decade ago, that comparative literature was dead and had been superseded by translation studies.10 Edward Said showed greater willingness to acknowledge continuities, for, despite his enormous impact on postcolonial studies, he repeatedly expressed strong interest in a landmark of the old comparatism, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis.11 Said was careful, however, to distinguish between the limitations of Auerbach’s regional subject-matter and the value of his method, which displayed an openness to historical and cultural variety that in other contexts could be taken much further. As might be expected, Moretti is an even stronger admirer of Auerbach; while Spivak shows a scrupulous awareness for cultural complexity when she couples her work in reaching out beyond Europe with candid reminders that as a scholar she is herself basically a Europeanist. From another angle, the references to “International” and to “European” in a recent study of East Central European literature sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association may seem to endorse the older paradigm. In the hands of Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, however, this collaborative project has become a model of transnational scholarship, since it spotlights the shifting borders, cultural upheavals, and hidden commonalities of a region in which nationalism could be just as problematic as in the Spanish and Chinese cases addressed by Guillén.12 Confronted with these and other positions in a swirling, many-sided debate, we can make sense of the differences if we posit that the “comparative” in comparative literature stands for an overarching, continually evolving interest in what cross-cultural transfers and exchanges can add to literary study. To compare, therefore, would mean to accept the challenge of studying works, careers, genres, or literatures from settings that differ from each other in significant linguistic, historical, and/or social ways. From this vantage point we can see that postcoloniality, world literature, and translation studies each name a distinct stage in the growth, over the past two decades, of the transnational attitude within comparative study. The European empires that reached their zenith around 1900 have now devolved into a wide variety of successor states, the world of recorded writing extends over even more space and far deeper back into time than those empires did, and a heightened awareness of and respect for translation sharpens insight into the differences and commonalities among all these literatures and cultures. Comparative literature as a whole also includes other major interests, such as literary theory and poetics, intermediality and the other arts, and interdisciplinary studies. But these topics deal in varied ways with literature’s distinctiveness as a medium, whether in its own right, in relation to other artistic and disciplinary languages, or within the mediascape overall. For the new comparatism, however, transnationality betokens a widened

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contextual vision, one that aspires to a worldwide perspective on literature that traverses borders of language, culture, and nation. To some extent this ambition was latent in the older field’s international, generally European phase. Now, thanks to postcolonial and translation studies and later to the renewed interest in world literature, transnationality has acquired a sharper, more clearly defined profile in widening the geocultural scope of literary study. This book will pursue the implications of this broader vision, using a series of case studies to show how the transnational turn can enrich our appreciation of Tolstoy’s achievement as a writer. Tolstoy is a widely admired novelist whose work draws meaningfully on the European literary realm invoked by Arnold, who eventually achieved lasting recognition in Casanova’s “world republic of letters,” but who then anticipated the wider horizons of postcolonial studies and the world literature movement. Though barely mentioned in a recent anthology of readings about the term,13 he also developed an idea of world literature that rivals Goethe’s. To grasp these developments in the detail they deserve, Transnational Tolstoy: Between the West and the World presents an interlocking set of cross-cultural case studies. They range from nineteenth-century Germany, France, and Italy with the aim of evoking and casting new light on Tolstoy’s connection to the Western literature of his time; then move to the poorly studied affinities and connections that his major works have with the rise of modernist fiction and the crisis of World War II; and finally turn to episodes that illustrate his role in the growth of a worldwide literary outlook during the twentieth century and on into the new millennium. True to its transnational theme, the book will highlight the two works from the first half of Tolstoy’s career that have consistently had the most resonance among readers outside Russia: War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878), two of the world’s most compelling novels. To give due credit to the second half of the author’s long career, Transnational Tolstoy will also pay special attention to Hadji Murad,14 a shorter work found among Tolstoy’s papers after his death in 1910 and published in 1912. It shares the earlier novels’ historical sweep and subtle interplay among a large cast of characters while it even exceeds them in social breadth; despite praise from readers as varied as Wittgenstein and Harold Bloom, it deserves to be better known.15 Along with bringing Tolstoy’s narrative gifts to bear on a Muslim protagonist, it represents his most sustained attempt at going beyond the Western orientation of his two great novels and writing a work of world literature on his own terms. He had discussed this shift in goals at about the time he started this late novel in his treatise What is Art? (1898). Several shorter works from Tolstoy’s later career

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also cast light on his ideas for world literature and for how to put them into practice, most notably “Prisoner of the Caucasus” (1872), “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (1886), and “Master and Man” (1895). This view of the author’s career does not mean to discount the large body of insightful Tolstoy scholarship, nor to suggest a total absence of crosscultural treatments in this previous work, but transnational perspectives have been scattered and underrepresented. By linking War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Hadji Murad to key moments in Western and then in world literature, when Tolstoy responded to some key predecessors, when later figures with varied interests looked back to him, and as his own goals for fiction underwent a major change, this book aims to help right the balance in Tolstoy research even as it hopes to show, more generally, what a transnational approach can add to literary study. Part One on Tolstoy and the nineteenth-century novel has a double purpose. Chapters 1 and 4 examine issues of the West and the world that arose during the first half of Tolstoy’s career, while Chapters 2 and 3 reassess and extend into new territory the nature of his connections with Stendhal and Flaubert. These are the two outstanding French novelists of that century with whom Tolstoy is most often compared, at a time when France set the standard for transnational fiction. Chapter 1 raises the issue of Occidentalism, a term that refers to critiques and negative stereotypes about the West from writers and thinkers outside the West.16 This is a tradition where the nineteenth-century debates in Russia between Slavophils and Westernizers about their country’s cultural identity can be placed, when these groups of intellectuals reflected on their widespread sense of not fully belonging to the West, despite Russia’s role as a European great power. This chapter’s approach is literary, meaning that it singles out the responses to Western Europe that appear in fiction written by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the wake of Russia’s Westernizing reforms in the 1860s. Attention focuses on visits to cosmopolitan German spas as symptomatic of the present, and to Italy as one of the West’s cultural wellsprings that take place in Anna Karenina and in Dostoevsky’s short novel The Gambler (1866). The many-sided play of attitudes shown in the Russian characters on their first direct exposure to the West is richer in its variety and probes deeper than the sweeping Occidentalist formulas that often marked Russian reactions to Europe at a time of ready-made distinctions. On the whole, Tolstoy’s horror of stereotypes contrasts with Dostoevsky’s coarser, but admittedly vivid approach, though both authors face up to Russian literature’s complex status vis-à-vis the West. Chapter 4 complements this chapter by aligning the complex, plotand-character-driven intimations of world literature in Goethe’s Elective

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Affinities (1809), decades before he coined the term Weltliteratur around 1830, with similar hints in Anna Karenina that to some degree involve a direct dialogue with Goethe. Both novels grope toward a larger sense of “world” that is at odds with the mere worldliness of the novel of manners, the subgenre with which each book has an affinity. The chapter then turns to Proust, who continues this debate in a turn-of-the-last-century setting of hypertrophied worldliness. But he does so with less self-consciousness about the need for global horizons, given an undercurrent of French (or, more precisely, Parisian) self-confidence about literary centrality. In all three novels, however, the allure of worldliness (but not of world literature) fades before a tragic awareness of human mortality. Chapters 2 and 3 take the inherited sense of Tolstoy’s important French connections into new territory, beyond the much-mentioned links between War and Peace and the early Waterloo chapters in Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) or between Anna Karenina as a novel of adultery and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856). The revenge plot that dominates the mainly Italian setting of The Charterhouse links up with Tolstoy’s elaboration of Anna’s “Vengeance is mine” epigraph from the Bible. At stake are both the nature of Franco–Russian cultural relations and the way in which these psychological novelists anatomize the power of retaliatory impulses as they meet resistance from the moral/religious heritage. Stendhal’s heroine Gina and Tolstoy’s Anna start as contrasting counterparts, with The Charterhouse presenting revenge as a vivifying feature of Italian culture, while Anna’s epigraph proclaims that God, not human beings, “will repay” when retribution is called for. By the end, however, in a reversal that shows how relentlessly novelistic writing can test an author’s original plans, Stendhal gives a nod to religious penance while, maintaining the counterpoint between the writers, vengeful motives keep much of their power in Tolstoy. Sentimental Education (1869), Flaubert’s second great novel about contemporary French society, has an equally illuminating relation to War and Peace. Though the two novels ostensibly address different historical periods, they were written almost side-by-side in the 1860s. The key role of Napoleonic anniversaries in both novels acts as a lens in their investigations into the meaning of history’s great leaders and great turning points. Flaubert’s novel leads up to Napoleon III’s coup d’état of December 2, 1852, while the first, independently published volume of Tolstoy’s novel, which grew out of its author excavating the past ever more deeply as prelude to the Russian present, looks back beyond victory in 1812 to defeat at Austerlitz in 1805, exactly one year after the first Napoleon’s coronation on December 2, 1804. Though it is ironic that Tolstoy and Flaubert each admired recent

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novels in their counterpart’s literature that the native novelist detested (Hugo’s Les Misérables for Flaubert and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons for Tolstoy), the Napoleonic anniversaries in both novels fail to inspire lofty commemorations of past glories. Rather, they spark reflection on the dark underside of victory and on the futility of Napoleonic visions of history. Part Two, on ways in which Tolstoy’s presence in twentieth-century Western fiction exceeds the official Soviet view of his importance, deals with his ties to literary realism, often stressing links back to Flaubert and/or Stendhal. For much of the last century Tolstoy was viewed as an old-fashioned novelist out of step with recent innovations. This view was encouraged by Soviet policy that classified him as a “critical realist” but also by some British appreciations of his works.17 But the situation was in fact more complicated, as the case studies in Part Two will show. The first two chapters feature neglected options that align Tolstoy with the more modern tendencies in fiction. Chapter 5, on two still influential British translations of Anna Karenina from early in the twentieth century, reconsiders the contrast between “realist” and “modernist” modes of fiction that has been used to classify this novel. In the British target culture this was the time when the modern movement from Conrad to Joyce was emerging and when these terms had not yet gained their taken-for-granted rigidity in our current literary vocabulary. Meanwhile, in the Russian source culture, Tolstoy had completed Anna several decades before What is Art?, the book in which he vigorously critiqued both realism and early modernism as it then existed on the Continent. As a result, the usage of these keywords first in Tolstoy’s Russian and then in the translators’ English displays a surprising but enlightening fluidity, especially given the prominence of “realism versus modernism” as a catch-phrase in Cold War cultural debates. Chapter 6 deepens this interrogation of Tolstoy’s purported realism by highlighting the kinship between his vigorous descriptions and the key modernist trend known as imagism. This is Vladimir Nabokov’s dissenting view on Tolstoy, which was formed on the basis of his own transnational exposure to and involvement in early twentieth-century literature. After Nabokov had moved around Western Europe before coming to the United States, writing in Russian and then briefly in French before shifting to English, he argued for Tolstoy’s relevance (in close conjunction with Flaubert) to innovative Western fiction that put a premium on vividly concrete sense impressions over abstractions and “ideas” of many kinds. The next two chapters revisit an issue integral to Tolstoy’s reputation as a literary realist, the overlap between his novels and the allied aims of historical writing, but take it into new territory. Chapter 7 treats two novels that, even as they focus on key turning points for earlier generations of Western

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Europeans, which occurred either in the 1860s or in the period leading up to World War I, look ahead to the crisis of nationalism in the period of fascism and World War II. To put the contemporary situation in perspective, both Giuseppe di Lampedusa in The Leopard (1958) and André Malraux in The Walnut Trees of Altenburg (1943) hark back to visions of national solidarity in The Charterhouse of Parma and War and Peace. As a result, both of these twentieth-century novels, which stand somewhat apart from the mainstream of modern fiction, emphasize Tolstoy’s historical relevance in an emphatically transnational sense, doing so at the very time that War and Peace had intense patriotic meaning for the homeland, given parallels between Napoleon’s nineteenth-century invasion and Hitler’s contemporary one. Chapter 8 goes on to consider how historical pressures can make themselves felt in works of fiction not in the form of a full-fledged narrative, but as visceral sensations experienced on the body and acquiring broader implications when correlated with material elsewhere in the text. Building on some suggestive remarks by Erich Auerbach, it examines the motif of “felt history” in Stendhal, Flaubert, and Tolstoy, as well as in Thomas Mann. The chapter then shows how this practice of linking historical tensions to telling bodily sensations re-emerges in a more mystical or paranormal key with the advent of magical realism in the later twentieth century. This shift becomes especially striking in D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), which looks back at the crises of the 1930s and 1940s that were treated in Chapter 7. But a similar new twist on the motif takes place in now-famous novels from the periphery of the Western literary system as perceived around 1950, like Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). Despite their ties to earlier configurations of this motif, Tolstoy and Thomas Mann after him also have affinities with this later development. The widened literary horizons associated with the magical realists antici­pate Part Three’s case studies on Tolstoy and world literature, with special emphasis on Hadji Murad. Enlarging on the dawning interests in world literature broached in Chapter 4, Part Three begins by reviewing a critical debate that misconstrued the significance as Tolstoy’s transnationalism shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Chapter 10 then loops back to the 1890s to examine Tolstoy’s own thinking about world literature, both as outlined in What is Art? and as carried out in some of his fiction after Anna Karenina. Chapter 11 follows by discussing some responses to Tolstoy in fiction from India and Egypt between the 1920s and the 1950s. Chapter 12 considers Hadji Murad in greater detail, focusing on Tolstoy’s treatment of cultural difference in this short novel, which must be considered his most self-conscious and substantial work of world literature.

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Allowing for Tolstoy’s relevance outside the West, Chapter 9 suggests, casts new light on a North American debate about culture in the 1990s. Originating in an ambiguous catch-phrase coined by Saul Bellow, the “Zulu Tolstoy” controversy assumed that his words were a symptom of Western cultural chauvinism. To the degree that the critique included Tolstoy, however, it revealed deep-seated confusion about where his writings might belong in the post-Soviet, transnational world that was just beginning to emerge. To emphasize Tolstoy’s classic status within a Western canon of “great books,” while neglecting potential links to postcolonial or third world situations, pointed up an ironic myopia among critics who were arguing for more cultural diversity. It also showed an ignorance of Tolstoy’s works that suggested he had not been read attentively enough, at least with regard to his implications for world literature. Chapter 10 looks back a century to examine the extent to which Tolstoy wrote Hadji Murad with a world audience in mind. In What Is Art?, the treatise he finished around the time he started the novel, Tolstoy introduced his ideas about “universal” or “worldwide” literature. What do these ideas mean as a theory of this topic, and to what degree does the short novel fulfill his vision? The relationship between theory and practice in Tolstoy is a complicated one, all the more so because What Is Art? repudiates almost all his fiction including the great novels in favor of “Prisoner of the Caucasus.” This short story from the early 1870s differs from Hadji Murad in ways that bring out major tensions in Tolstoy’s program. Chapter 10 also weighs this short novel’s claims to represent or typify the author’s career alongside two major rivals, the long stories “Master and Man” and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” the latter of which often appears in recent world literature anthologies. Chapter 11, which probes Tolstoyan moments in Premchand (the pseudonym of Dhanpat Rai, from India) and Naguib Mahfouz (from Egypt), provides a case study of Tolstoy’s impact outside the West. Both authors read Tolstoy in English translation; but because the works that interested them were so very different, one drew on the later career, while the other honored War and Peace. Since neither writer addressed world audiences with the ease of the magical realists, they only became well known abroad after major delays. An emerging postcolonial perspective on imperial history, a strong interest in peasant life, and Gandhi’s ties to Tolstoy stand out in Premchand’s “The Chess Players” (1924) and “The Shroud” (1936). These two stories engage in an illuminating dialogue with Hadji Murad as the representative work in Tolstoy’s later career, though Premchand probably knew just his short stories of this period. A reminiscence of Prince Andrey lying wounded at Austerlitz, in a scene near the end of Mafouz’s Palace Walk (1956) where British troops fire on an anti-colonial demonstration, illustrates a

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very different response to Tolstoy. As well as honoring War and Peace as a model for Mahfouz’s family-based historical novel, this homage may also acknowledge the parallels in the deeper past between Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and his earlier campaign in Egypt. Chapter 12 deepens the earlier discussions of Hadji Murad by reading this novel, set on a conventional border between Europe and Asia, in light of its depiction of someone from a culture other than Tolstoy’s own. The Muslim protagonist displays wavering commitments in a conflict that would now be perceived as an Islamic jihad in opposition to a Russian territorial expansion. In this proto-colonialist setting, the hero’s situation often—but not always—evokes recent events in the Middle East. With his typical richness of characterization, Tolstoy complicates the hero’s religious motivation by showing the survival of pre-Islamic traditions, the role of personal and ethnic rivalries, and the conflict between spiritual aspirations and the pressures of a long, brutal war. Reversing the priorities of War and Peace, romance and marriage only play a secondary role, though in this area as well the work takes pains to dispel cultural stereotypes. At the same time, because Hadji Murad also reflects the late Tolstoy’s moral and religious attitudes, its objective surface opens up to reveal authorial partialities that both undermine and energize the narrative. As a result, beyond the obvious value it assigns to specificity and complexity, Hadji Murad avoids easy answers to the issue of what world literature might contribute to crosscultural understanding. Like Tolstoy’s other fiction, however, it does raise searching questions. Written after the celebrations of the centennial of the author’s death in 1910, Transnational Tolstoy aims to enlarge still further the array of perspectives that we can take on his writings. Even as it brings new insights to bear on the nature and significance of his career, this book aims to illustrate the benefits of comparative literature’s will to cross-cultural inquiry and to make a contribution to the world literature movement. Tolstoy, it should be clear, is a pivotal figure in both areas. After writing fiction with a strong but not an unconditional orientation toward Western Europe, one that has affinities with the older, internationalist model of comparative study, he then sought to replace it with a broader, worldwide outlook that both anticipates and challenges the global horizons of today. At our current transnational moment, with cultural flows that occur not just within but across geocultural regions, the evolution of Tolstoy’s career between the West and the world offers much to ponder about the emergence and evolving character of this wider literary space.

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Culture shock in Europe Occidentalism in Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky’s The Gambler

1 Issues of the West, and of how Western Europe and North America are perceived and criticized today by the rest of the world, bear a strong resemblance to a major cultural debate in Tolstoy’s Russia. By the 1840s, before he had even made his literary debut, two positions that were known as those of the Westernizers and the Slavophils had coalesced among the literati and intelligentsia. The first group held that Russia could only maintain its rightful place among the civilized nations of the world by imitating the achievements of Western Europe, while the other upheld the value of distinctive Russian traditions that would be threatened by such wholesale copying. Each attitude reflected a basic fact about Russian history. On the one hand, the nation had been isolated from the West and left to its own devices throughout the Middle Ages and, more consequentially, during the Renaissance. But around 1700, spurred by Peter the Great, it began to welcome contact with Western Europe with the goal of emulating its successes, especially in the military sphere, but also, later and more hesitantly, in intellectual life and literature. The analogies with postcolonial debates over whether to hold onto or to revive indigenous African, Asian, or Caribbean traditions versus assimilating or appropriating the culture of the European colonial power are clear. When this defense of indigenous cultures is accompanied by harsh, even one-sided criticism of the West, the result is sometimes known as “Occidentalism,” a term that brings out the analogies between such anti-Western attitudes and the negative images and stereotypes about the East that Edward Said has so famously analyzed in Orientalism. The political and economic power relations between the parties differ greatly in the two situations, but the underlying issue of distorted cross-cultural perceptions is the same. Within this situation of transnational tension between global regions, it will be instructive to examine the nature of Tolstoy’s response to the West

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by comparing the fictionalized accounts of Russians visiting Europe that appear in Anna Karenina with a parallel situation in Dostoevsky, his leading rival during the Russian novel’s golden age from 1855 to 1880. With Tolstoy the most thought-provoking passages come in Part Two of his novel, when the youthful Kitty Shcherbatsky goes to Germany to recover her health, and in Part Five, where the title character Anna travels to Italy with her lover Vronsky.1 With Dostoevsky the telling text is his short novel The Gambler (1866), which is set entirely in Europe; it was the companion volume to Crime and Punishment in a ruinous two-book publishing contract that was a desperate gamble in its own right on Dostoevsky’s part. These works merit special attention because they depict Russian characters in the process of dealing directly with Western Europe, usually for the first time. Indeed, because travel to the West had been difficult for Tolstoy and especially Dostoevsky in their early manhood,2 this element of direct experience has particular importance. The dearth of immediate face-to-face contact helps explain why, as with so much cross-cultural exchange in general, Russian images both positive and negative of the West could easily become overly abstract or ideological. There are also good methodological reasons for giving precedence to fictional accounts of Russian characters on visits to Western Europe. Though neither Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky fully identified with the Slavophils or the Westernizers, their discursive statements on these issues of cultural orientation can run the risk of producing sweeping over-generalizations, in the manner of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West or of Samuel Huntington’s much criticized “conflict of civilizations” thesis. Indeed, even their fiction, when it treats these issues in a domestic setting, can oversimplify. For example, the student Raskolnikov’s “theory” of historical greatness in Crime and Punishment jumps rapidly from Newtonian physics to Napoleon’s military genius before it culminates in Raskolnikov’s plot to murder the old pawnbroker with an axe.3 This rapid series of intellectual short-circuits brings home in a striking manner the dangers of theoretical abstraction, as Dostoevsky intended. However, since the narrative also encourages readers to identify this habit of mind with the West—Raskolnikov is living in Petersburg, the capital city that Peter the Great had founded as Russia’s window on Europe, while Newton and Napoleon typify the science and politics of modern Europe—Dostoevsky has insinuated a grand generalization of just the kind his novel seeks to condemn. With Tolstoy, as Isaiah Berlin has memorably argued, a fox-like capacity to give memorable expression to eloquent specifics undercuts his hedgehog urge to propose grand generalizations.4 Even within Anna Karenina, however, this inborn resistance to ideological simplifications coexists with at least a tinge of

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Occidentalism. Thus the belated spread of railroads in Russia, which are linked in the heroine’s nightmares with a peasant babbling weirdly in French, lurks in the novel’s background as an ominous novelty from abroad (e.g. AK 361, 765; IV.3, VII.31). Anna’s attraction to her future lover Vronsky deepens when she meets him on a railroad platform while traveling back to Petersburg (AK 102–3; I.30), and much later she will throw herself beneath the wheels of another train (AK 768; VII.31). In these domestic contexts, Western influences have turned baleful in the imaginations of both writers, taking shape as the indiscriminate blow of an axe or the crushing momentum of a railroad car. Fictional visits, therefore, can impose a useful reality check on the writers’ images of other cultures. Yet at first glance these directly experienced “facts on the ground,” as they appear in Anna Karenina and The Gambler, may seem to produce badly skewed representations of the West. For the purposes of comparison, of course, it is certainly convenient that both visits begin in German spas, but these sites where the need for health cures and the sobering sight of serious illnesses clash with the leisured ways of nineteenthcentury polite society and (in Dostoevsky) with a chance to gamble could be criticized as mere enclaves lacking true typicality. For Russian travelers at the time, of course, a German setting of some sort made sense, given how often they had to travel through their neighbor to the West, even if headed elsewhere. However, though the dozen years between Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoy’s novels witnessed major changes in Germany, that history receives scant attention.5 This may be because the two authors’ works mainly reflect their trips in the early 1860s before Bismarck made his mark on European politics, between July 1860 and April 1861 in Tolstoy’s case and for ten weeks in Summer 1862 with Dostoevsky.6 For Russians, the riveting events in those years would have occurred at home, namely the great reforms promulgated by Tsar Alexander II in 1861, which included the abolition of serfdom, the introduction of a modern legal system, and the encouragement of local government elections. Because these changes sought to bring Russia closer to European norms, they gave even sharper profile to debates about Russia’s relationship with the West and to the question of Occidentalist attitudes. In a wider sense, however, the international clientele that flocked to the German spas did make them suitable microcosms for Europe, in the manner of the Swiss sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain] 60 years later.7 This point is particularly true for Dostoevsky, whose cast of non-Russians includes French, English, and Polish characters as well as Germans. A similarly cosmopolitan mix may be discerned in Tolstoy, but his novel emphasizes the Russian travelers and expatriates who came to the spas, a type that also plays a major role in Dostoevsky. In any

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case, the spas are not the only European setting in these works. The Gambler opens with the young Russian narrator’s vivid account of his attempt to obtain a visa to Rome and ends with his brief, hectic foray into the Parisian demi-monde. When Anna travels to Italy in a later episode from Tolstoy’s novel, attention shifts to a different group of Russians who dabble in the visual arts. If Dostoevsky’s pleasure-seeking Paris continues a downward spiral that started at the spa, Tolstoy’s Italy develops a major new perspective on Russia’s cultural relations with the West. At an existential level, beyond any direct engagement with Occidentalism, neither Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky brings out the life/death tensions at the spas with the same force as Mann later would. As the symbolic site for this in-between status, where thoughtless distraction clashes with the unavoidable spectacle of human mortality, the Swiss sanatorium is epitomized by a phrase repeatedly linked with the novel’s hero—humanity as a “Sorgenkind des Lebens” or “problem child of life.”8 Instead of Mann’s comprehensiveness, each Russian author focuses on one of the opposing visions: health crises in Tolstoy and frenzied gambling in Dostoevsky. Who can forget the artist Petrov in Anna Karenina, so desperately ill from tuberculosis that he can barely stand, yet nonetheless so eager to hide his weakness from the attractive young Kitty that when he staggers while conversing with her he contrives to wobble again to make the movement seem intentional (AK 230; II.34)? His counterpart in The Gambler would be the imperious Russian grandmother who is confined to a wheelchair and has been rumored to be near death, yet remains certain that she will win at roulette if she keeps wagering on zero—and in the end that is all she has left. At the basis of these vivid images, of course, lie Tolstoy’s memories of witnessing his brother’s failing health when he visited him at a German spa and Dostoevsky’s compulsive gambling sprees on his trips to Europe. On a more subliminal level, though, the sharp contrasts to be observed at the spas do seem to have registered with the authors. Gambling in Dostoevsky escalates to the level of a serious illness when the narrator confesses to being transfixed by the thrill of risking everything at roulette: “truly, there’s something peculiar in the feeling when, alone, in a foreign land … and not knowing what you’re going to eat that day, you stake your last gulden, your very, very last!” (G 329, XVII). Kitty, the main character in Tolstoy’s German chapters, finds that even though she is not suited to be a sister-of-mercy, as she had begun to hope during her sojourn at the spa, her experience with ministering to the needs of people sicker than herself has tempered her naïve identification with the social elite: “she was not so carefree and light-hearted as before, but she was at peace” (236; II.35). With her own health restored, she can return to Russia a more serious and

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mature young woman, ready, much later, to support her husband at his dying brother’s bedside. Though not developed as fully or explicitly as in Mann, life and death do intertwine in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, either in a frenzied surge of vitality that undermines one’s very survival, or in a wisdom born of suffering and compassion that is able to affirm mortal existence, even in an end-of-life crisis. Left unstated, however, as a possible implication of these culminating moments, is the Occidentalist question, which surfaces in Mann, of whether Western culture has itself lost the capacity for such lifeand-death insights.

2 The Gambler is more obviously critical of the West than the corresponding scenes in Anna Karenina. Snobbery and especially corruption flourish among an array of cartoon-like characters: an impossibly haughty German Baron and Baroness; a French speculator and con artist and an upwardly mobile Parisian courtesan, both with noble titles that are probably bogus; and several egregiously treacherous Poles (an obsession of Dostoevsky’s messianic Slavophilia). To top things off, a semi-senile Russian general falls in love with the courtesan and, despite having been cashiered for embezzlement, passes himself off as a fabulously wealthy big shot. Gambling enters the story as the metaphor for an intoxication with easy money, for an obsession with the status and feelings of power that money brings, and for the threat to Russians, especially ones with the youthful narrator’s unruly passions, of impulsively embracing this way of life. In a sharp, melodramatic contrast to these misguided souls, the novel’s Englishman is a businessman who, though burdened by his shyness, is a benevolent outsider in a Dickensian style. The novel’s most striking and culturally suggestive scenes, however, involve two scandals provoked by the young narrator Alexei Ivanovich, who is a tutor in the disgraced general’s household. In one, he loses patience when he meets with a delay in getting a visa to Rome, still ruled at that time by the Pope. In his account (it is never entirely clear that the event really took place), when he learns that the cleric charged with validating this document has made him wait while the cleric socialized in a back room, he threatens to burst in and “spit into the Monsignore’s coffee.” To a horrified aide, the narrator explains his behavior by screaming in French: “je suis hérétique et barbare” [“I am a heretic and a barbarian,” G 177, I]. In a later scene, to win a bet with Polina, a young woman in the general’s family whom he wishes to impress, he walks up to the Baron and Baroness and, though only

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a tutor who lacks a formal introduction to these aristocrats, announces, “J’ai l’honneur d’être votre esclave” [“I have the honor to be your slave”]. When the husband, stunned, replies, “sind Sie rasend” [“are you mad”], the narrator drawls “Jawohl” in a tone that offensively mimics the Berlin accent he had overheard when he passed through that city upon entering Europe several weeks earlier (G 210–11, VI). On one level the verbal violence of these scenes vents the young man’s feelings of insecurity during a first trip abroad, especially once he has met hostility due to Russia’s recent suppression of the Polish uprising of 1863. The narrator both acknowledges this blame and seeks to fend it off by identifying, far too vehemently, with negative Western attitudes toward Russia. Indeed, many of his words may simply repeat scurrilous epithets from the journalism of the day, given that he had been reading a French newspaper just before his outburst at the Papal embassy. In the content of what he says, he repeats the epithets; but in his strident tone he seeks to refute them by violating the proprieties. Thus, by proclaiming himself a “heretic and barbarian” to an authority figure from Rome, he combines a Catholic rejection of Russian Orthodoxy as heretical with a dismissive term that the Roman Empire may have used for Scythian hordes on its northeastern frontier. Yet, even as these words launch a vivid critique of the narrator’s threat to spit in a prelate’s coffee, the scandalousness of his threat displays his scorn for such labels as well as an underlying conviction that he is worth more than the negative stereotypes. With the German aristocrats, when Alexei Ivanovich replaces the conventional “serviteur” (“servant”) of well-bred speech with “esclave,” he undermines a polite gesture by hyperbolizing an already hyperbolic turn of phrase.9 The greeting has many implications, since on one level it displaces onto these strangers the narrator’s seemingly extreme, even masochistic devotion to Polina, the young woman with whom he made the bet; while on another it implies that as a Russian he must slavishly want to imitate all things Western. More subtly, as a continuation of the earlier scene’s ironic identification with Western stereotypes, these words fuse a liberal accusation against Russian absolutism—that it turns Russians into slaves—with a reminder from a more distant past that the words for slave and Slav share an etymology in several Western languages.10 In a further irony, even as the narrator shouts out these “civilized” Western accusations against Russians, he reveals his own expertise about the West. After all, he knows how to speak both French and German, and is able to be so spectacularly rude only because he knows the rules for good manners. Thus, if Crime and Punishment had implied that Western values could prompt Russian students to concoct murderous theories and if the German spa in The Gambler could represent an Occidentalist microcosm of the

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West’s snobbery, corruption, and pretense, the narrator conjures up a more intricate cultural confrontation with his scandalous tirades. Placed between Russia and the West, this young man vociferates against a culture he has only recently been able to experience at first hand, while at the same time he reveals his own considerable mastery of its mores and languages. As the novel continues, however, and he falls ever deeper under the spell of gambling, this discrepancy between his combative attitude and his actual identity shrivels. At moments, to be sure, the very energy of Alexei Ivanovich’s gambling mania or the rapidity in the final chapters with which he loses interest in the pleasures of Paris can seem to be hopeful signs. In that case, his claims to be heretical and barbaric could be understood, in loosely Slavophil terms, as symptoms of Russian freshness and energy when faced with Western shortcomings. On balance, however, even though in typical Dostoevsky fashion the novel ends on a razor’s edge between decisive change and irremediable inertia, the impression remains that The Gambler has relied on the power of a negative example. Thus, after Alexei Ivanovich achieves his greatest triumph at roulette, Polina, whom he believes he loves, realizes that he has turned into the same money-obsessed wretch as the conniving Frenchman who has betrayed her. Throwing his winnings in his face, she flees his room (G 301, XV). The West has conquered him, abominably. In the wake of the great reforms in the early 1860s, The Gambler raises Occidentalist doubts about Russia’s further Westernization. Unlikely as a German spa may be as a site for testing this view, the deeper motives that rise to the surface of money, status seeking, and ultimately thirst for power support this verdict. These are the motives that guide the characters’ relations with each other and, especially, mark the narrator’s mood after his overwhelming success as a gambler: “My only sensation was of some terrible pleasure—luck, victory, power—I don’t know how to express it” (G 297, XIV). Even more problematic, however, had been the mysterious psychological state that Alexei Ivanovich had briefly glimpsed a little earlier upon placing his last bet. His egotistical delight at attracting attention in the casino has abruptly veered off in a new direction, becoming a feeling of utter submission to the spinning roulette wheel: suddenly, indeed without any challenge to my vanity, I was overcome by a terrible thirst for risk. Maybe, having gone through so many sensations, the soul was not sated but only exacerbated by them, and demanded more sensations, ever stronger and stronger, to the point of utter exhaustion. (G 296, XIV)

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Beyond the spa’s other enticements lies a new, addiction-like slavery that presages the narrator’s lethargy and inertia as the novel ends. Wherever the West might be headed on its own—and except for Mr. Astley, the benevolent Englishman, the goal doesn’t look promising—Alexei Ivanovich’s fate raises doubts about the West’s impact on outsiders. What might the future hold if this young Russian’s exasperated urge to belong to this culture with which he is already quite familiar can escalate so rapidly into a frenzied abandonment of his distinctive character, leaving him in the end with nothing?

3 Tolstoy’s German spa, unlike Dostoevsky’s, seems to lack a casino. It is mainly a place where the formalities of proper etiquette clash with the harsh realities of disability and serious illness. Upon their arrival, the Shcherbatsky family, who have come abroad to restore Kitty’s health after Vronsky deserted her in favor of Anna, fits easily into an international aristocratic society that “crystallizes” (AK 214; II.30), in Tolstoy’s metaphor, around a German princess. The words “Furst” and “Fürstin” (“prince” and “princess”) ring with authority as the episode opens, but there is no apparent need to mention money, in contrast to its all-consuming role in The Gambler. However, status anxiety remains an issue, and in this regard Anna Karenina’s princely counterparts to Dostoevsky’s German Baron and Baroness soon give way to Madame Stahl, a Russian expatriate and invalid who, like the grandmother in The Gambler, is confined to a wheelchair. Her German-sounding name, which was not unusual in Russia as a result of Catherine the Great’s reliance on her fellow countrymen to staff the imperial bureaucracy,11 comes from an estranged husband. But though she may be a native Russian, Madame Stahl has lived abroad for years, where she has cultivated a reputation for piety and good works and—far from parading as a heretic—has welcomed both Catholic and Protestant spiritual advisers. Connected as well to high society in Petersburg, Madame Stahl is thus doubly Westernized in terms of this novel’s cultural coordinates: Russia’s capital appears as a hotbed of pretentious worldliness copied from abroad, not of alienated students like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov. Kitty’s mother, with a Europeanized susceptibility to rank that had led her to prefer the aristocratic and vaguely Anglophile Vronsky as her daughter’s suitor, is initially miffed by her inability to enter this woman’s society. The coveted introduction eventually does arrive, but in an unconventional way. Soon after her arrival at the spa, Kitty has become eager to befriend Varenka, a youngish commoner who had been substituted at birth

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for Madame Stahl’s stillborn baby and was orphaned soon after. Varenka is now her adopted daughter, while also serving as an unpaid companion and nurse. Whenever possible, she does charity work among sick and needy people at the spa; and this selflessness attracts Kitty, whose misfortune in love has caused her to distrust the ways of high society. When her mother, after hesitating, allows Kitty’s admiration for Varenka’s kindness to outweigh the young woman’s questionable social status, her condescension is rewarded. The daughter’s freedom from social constraints has had the ironic result of at last giving the mother her coveted access to Madame Stahl. In a typically Tolstoyan manner, sincerity has created an openness of manner that smoothes over the sharp facets of social crystallization. Further nuances in this transnational comedy of manners emerge from the portrayal of Kitty’s father, who unlike his wife tilts away from Europe in favor of what the novel describes as Russian good nature. However, Anna Karenina avoids the melodramatic contrasts of The Gambler, so that in this case, although Tolstoyan generalizations often seem problematic alongside the specifics of narrative situations, the narrative can comment provocatively on the husband’s and wife’s differing ways of overreacting to the West. In the contrast between their responses, a psychology of cultural insecurity that seems muted compared to Dostoevsky also hints at an imbalance in Slavophils and Westernizers alike. The wife, we have seen, exaggerates by trying to conform to the norms of European good society, but Tolstoy adds that despite her efforts she could not avoid remaining “a typical Russian lady” (AK 227; II.34). Meanwhile, the husband prefers to stress his distinctive Russianness, but he does so at the expense of what he in fact shares with Europeans. This suppressed connection with the West surfaces quite pointedly when he meets with Madame Stahl. He chooses to address her—a fellow Russian, no less—“extremely courteously and pleasantly, in that excellent French which so few speak nowadays” (AK 231; II.34).12 Usually, though, Kitty’s father resists the spa’s proprieties, but he does so with a contagious good humor that is poles apart from Alexei Ivanovich’s aggressive outbursts. As a result, when he impulsively arranges an outdoor luncheon at his lodgings, his German landlord and even the servants can join in happily despite the inconvenience. In addition, since the local shopkeepers do not know that in Russia the father’s title of “prince” does not indicate the same high rank as in Germany, the father delights in poking fun at the pretentious titles with which they greet him. A recollection of this jovial scene, which a sick German doctor witnesses with envy (G 232; II.35), may lie behind the vignettes of sociable Russians in Mann’s Death in Venice.13 This part of the novel culminates with the father disabusing Kitty of her admiration for Madame Stahl’s piety. She welcomes her illness, the father

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explains, because reclining in a wheelchair wrapped in blankets hides her unattractive legs (AK 231; II.34). Her religion he has already dismissed by connecting it to a Russian fad for Pietism (AK 229; II.34). The alluring truth Kitty thought she saw in Madame Stahl’s religiosity dissolves with this revelation of its name and history; so does the “heavenly light” of her eyes, once it is shown to coexist with a vain woman’s desire to conceal her legs. Even without her father’s comments, Kitty had noticed inconsistencies in Madame Stahl’s behavior with Varenka, who is sometimes treated more like a scolded servant than a cherished daughter. The spirituality of this expatriate has boiled down to a form of social one-upmanship enhanced by access to foreign models: the West as nothing more than a source of empty prestige. At the same time, though, Kitty’s friendship for Varenka acts to qualify this satirical image of Westernized pretense. Perhaps due to her undefined social status, Varenka’s practice of pious values, like the ones merely affirmed by Madame Stahl, seems genuine. Kitty reflects admiringly: “What gives her this strength to disregard everything, to be so calmly independent?” (AK 221; II.32). Varenka’s self-possession is all the more striking because she has lived in the West for most of her adult life. She is clearly even more Europeanized than Dostoevsky’s narrator, and is even more dependent on a capricious and unworthy employer cum guardian. Thus, even as the debunking portrait of Madame Stahl raises Occidentalist doubts about Western models, Tolstoy’s horror of stereotypes—which is at the heart of Viktor Shklovsky’s influential concept of ostranenie or “making it strange” as a key to Tolstoy’s artistry14—leads to a pointed counter-example. Later in the novel, when Varenka’s prospective engagement with Koznyshev fails to “take,” she will reappear as a less positive character, with overtones of biological rather than cultural sterility. But here she illustrates Tolstoy’s resistance to the grandiose posturings of Occidentalism. Much later in Anna Karenina, Italy surfaces as an actual destination for Russian travelers, in contrast to its merely potential role in The Gambler, in the narrator’s fracas over obtaining a visa to Rome. Italy is where Anna and Vronsky decide to escape once their clandestine affair becomes an open relationship following Anna’s near death from childbed fever. Quickly bored with sightseeing—an inexplicable pleasure of the English, the narrator comments (AK 465; V.8)—they settle down in an anonymous north Italian town, and Vronsky tries his hand at painting. These chapters focus on the couple’s visit to the studio of Mikhailov, a Russian artist who eventually paints Anna’s portrait. In contrast to the spa episode, which criticism of Anna often neglects even though it prepares for the key chapters on the death of the hero Lyovin’s brother, this portrait, along with the other Mikhailov paintings

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evoked in the text, amounts to a series of miniaturized equivalents in the visual arts that mirror Tolstoy’s aims in the novel (ekphrastic mises-en-abyme in the technical language of literary criticism). The rich array of interpretive options that result from comparing these paintings to the work in which they appear yields many insights into Tolstoy’s goals and assumptions. In light of this chapter’s cross-cultural purposes, the key issue centers on what is implied by Tolstoy’s choice of a painter as his alter ego in this novel, given that Mikhailov’s portrait of the heroine could itself be called “Anna Karenina.” At first glance this conceit may be understood to acknowledge Tolstoy’s own debt to Western traditions of novel writing. This Russian painter who has settled in Italy to learn from that country’s visual arts corresponds to the Russian writer who by this point had read and appreciated many Western novels. But there are key distinctions. For one thing, painting is accessible to illiterates, and in the years before writing Anna Karenina Tolstoy had been occupied with teaching illiterate peasants to read. So though Mikhailov works somewhat unwillingly in a very different environment of urban exhibition halls, commissioned portraits, and wealthy patrons, his art can become available to onlookers in a more direct way than printed words. Moreover, given the importance of icons in Orthodox Christianity, the visual arts in a broad sense may be understood to be native to Russia, unlike the alienated situation of literature when Tolstoy started writing, late in Nicholas I’s repressive reign.15 Indeed, in a longer historical vista such as those which underlie Alexei Ivanovich’s outbursts, this episode acknowledges, however fleetingly, that Italian art can be seen as the efflorescence of a cultural heritage in which Russia once had a part and with which it still has a connection. Thus Vronsky in these chapters can develop a surprising interest in the Italian middle ages, to the point where we are told he “even began wearing his hat and a wrap thrown over his shoulder in a medieval fashion” (AK 466; V.9). In acting this way Vronsky is imitating what he must have seen in Italian paintings from a period when some of this art was indebted to Byzantine mosaics. This situation chimes with the thesis advanced in this Italian episode by Golenishchev, a former schoolmate of Vronsky’s with whom the couple have been socializing. This expatriate art historian and culture critic argues that Russia needs to think of itself as an heir to Byzantium (AK 462; V.7). Although this point may be understood in a variety of ways,16 this brief convergence between Golenishchev and Vronsky brings up a thought-provoking affinity between the cultural histories of Russia and the West, however vague that affinity might be, given Vronsky’s inability to sustain his interests in either Italy or painting. In contrast to Alexei Ivanovich’s identification with Russia’s differences with

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both Catholicism and the Roman Empire, these allusions to medieval Italy and Byzantium hint at the underlying commonality between Russian icons and the evolution of Western painting via their shared source in Eastern Christianity. With this evocation of an alternative history, the aggrieved Occidentalist sense of cultural imposition, exclusivity, or supremacy on the part of Western Europe that characterizes both the Madame Stahl episode and The Gambler recedes. Instead, there is a glimmering awareness of cultural exchanges resulting in more nuanced interactions and evolutions, ones that avoid rigid prioritizing of one side over the other. Chapter 4 will address other, more explicit expressions of this attitude in Anna Karenina. Moreover, Mikhailov’s role—as a painterly alter ego for the author in whom a more widely accessible visual culture replaces novelistic literacy— points toward Tolstoy’s later development. I have in mind his rejection of Anna Karenina some two decades later in What is Art?, because he felt that the novel was too narrowly concerned with a specific class-based milieu instead of working toward more universal forms of narrative (WIA 243–6; XVI). By this point the doubts about the West that surface during the Shcherbatskys’ visit to Germany, qualified though they may be by Tolstoy’s resistance to stereotypes and to establishing sharp dichotomies between cultural regions, had evolved past the Slavophil-Westernizer debates. Perhaps encouraged by Russia’s location at one margin of Western culture, the novelist had begun to look out at the world as a whole rather than continuing to debate the nature and consequences of Russia’s cultural subservience to Western Europe. In this new role Tolstoy anticipated the globalism of today. Ironically, however, as Chapter 9 will consider in greater detail, some recent critics of the Western canon and Eurocentrism have dismissed Tolstoy’s literary work as basically European in orientation. Witness the North American controversy that erupted in the 1990s in response to Saul Bellow’s sloganistic challenge: “Show me the Zulu Tolstoy.” At the time, this phrase was interpreted to betray Western cultural chauvinism, in a scenario that oddly raised Tolstoy to the status of the ultimate Eurocentric classic, whose supreme mastery reveals the literary nullity of the entire non-Western world. But as discussion here has shown, it would have made more sense to recognize a certain affinity between the Zulus and both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, given their shared location in societies at one edge or another of the West’s expanding influence. Their experiences differed, to be sure, in both their basic nature and when they occurred. Still, it would be a strange error if, in the cultural reshuffling that is occurring in our globalizing age, the result would be to remarginalize these once marginalized Russian classics by aligning them, a century and a half later, so seamlessly with the West.

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4 The long tradition of comparing Tolstoy with Dostoevsky has relied on a wide variety of literary and intellectual criteria, and has come to many conclusions. This chapter does not claim to add to this tradition, if only because neither The Gambler nor the European episodes in Anna Karenina fully represents its author’s best work. However, both Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s commitment to fiction writing did alert them to the complex interplay both between attitudes of sympathy and distance and between general assertions and particular details in fully realized narratives. As a result of this complexity, neither of their works—and especially Tolstoy’s—can come down hard, in the manner of thesis-driven fiction or direct exposition, on either side in the Slavophil-Westernizer debates of their time. But even as Anna Karenina and The Gambler assess Russia’s relationship with the West through the lens of concretely imagined fictions, they do illustrate a major distinction in people’s responses to wide cultural differences on a transnational scale. Vladimir Nabokov, in the first period of his career when he was a Russian novelist who was much closer to the West than either of his great predecessors, has identified the basic issue, albeit in a manner hostile to Dostoevsky. In his novel Despair (1932), which also features Russians in Germany, but at a time when they arrived there after the Russian revolution as exiles rather than as travelers or expatriates, the narrator describes Dostoevsky as “our national expert in soul ague and the aberrations of human self respect.”17 These insecurities of “soul ague,” which can range in scope from a sense of defensiveness about one’s national identity to an overwhelming feeling of self-consciousness, will often heighten or exaggerate the felt significance of cultural differences. As we have seen, Tolstoy does recognize the force of such insecurities and registers their Occidentalist results, but he minimizes their impact by making allowances for the varied and often contradictory responses of individuals with their different attitudes and experiences. As Isaiah Berlin has noted, Tolstoy (often in spite of himself) had the gift of seeing many different things in their uniqueness much more clearly than one big thing in its generalizing force. The richly nuanced but emotionally more distanced perspective on cultural difference produced by this outlook is one that The Gambler, with its agitated first-person narrator, necessarily neglects. In some cross-cultural encounters, as Dostoevsky brings home to readers with almost delirious force, neither a Nabokov’s self-assured aloofness nor, despite its undoubted merit, a Tolstoyan ability to enter wholeheartedly into variety and multiplicity will succeed in overcoming the vivid projections of an aggravated self-consciousness. After the Great Reforms of the early 1860s,

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at a key turning point in Russia’s history of cross-cultural encounters with the West, the pressures of that encounter have surfaced with special force in these fictions of direct transnational contact. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, taken together, have illuminated both the psychological upheaval that can attend such face-to-face experiences and the nature of countervailing efforts to reach sympathetic understanding.

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“Vengeance is mine” Stendhal’s Italy and Anna Karenina

1 Despite the tensions in mid-nineteenth-century Russia’s transactions with the West, as discussed in Chapter 1, Tolstoy’s own fiction shows clear interests in or affinities with Western writing. There has already been a great deal of research into the extent and nature of these connections. In the case of English fiction, discussions have ranged from Laurence Sterne; through Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope; and on to George Eliot,1 and from elsewhere in the West have included figures like Goethe (about whom more in Chapter 4) and Harriet Beecher Stowe. But in a full transnational perspective it has been Tolstoy’s linkages with nineteenth-century French fiction, especially with Stendhal and Flaubert, that have the most significance. There are broad historical reasons for this connection, centering on Russia’s role in bringing down Napoleon and then, after Russia became the “policeman of Europe” following Waterloo, its importance in maintaining the Restoration status quo, up until the Revolutions of 1848. There are also cultural factors, such as the prevalence of Franco–Russian bilingualism among upper-class Russians when Tolstoy was growing up, as seen in the conversation Kitty’s father holds with Madame Stahl (see p. 23). Equally relevant is the international primacy of French fiction throughout the nineteenth century, as signaled in Auerbach’s Mimesis, which with good reason contends that French novelists from Stendhal through Balzac to Flaubert “played the most important part in the rise and development of modern realism”.2 Even during the second half of Tolstoy’s career, after he underwent a major shift in his literary views, he was still capable of writing a thoughtful appreciation of Guy de Maupassant, who was perhaps Flaubert’s closest follower.3 Later in this book, when attention turns to the twentieth century, we shall see a continuing tendency for the transnational Tolstoy to be associated with Stendhal and/or Flaubert.

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To focus on Stendhal in this chapter, it has been a commonplace since Eikhenbaum’s The Young Tolstoy to hold that Fabrizio del Dongo’s youthful misadventures at Waterloo in La Chartreuse de Parme [The Charterhouse of Parma] look ahead to War and Peace, especially to Pierre’s role as a naïve eyewitness to the Battle of Borodino. Thus Eikhenbaum cites Tolstoy’s remark, decades after he wrote this novel, that “all that I know about war I first of all learned from Stendhal”.4 Of course, there is a major shift in how the two novelists handle this motif, since Pierre loses all of his original enthusiasm for Napoleon, while Fabrizio never fully gives up his hero-worship for the man he sees as Italy’s liberator. In a similar spirit, Ernest Hemingway’s 1942 anthology of war writings brings out the parallel between Tolstoy and Stendhal as supreme novelists of war.5 But he chose to emphasize the connection between Fabrizio at Waterloo and an earlier battle sequence in War and Peace, the one leading up to the Russian defeat at Austerlitz. Since these parallels, put forward in turn by a masterful scholar and by the intuitions of a well-known fiction writer, are so widely accepted even now, there is no need to revisit Stendhal’s considerable impact on War and Peace in this chapter. However, since the Waterloo chapters only act as a prelude to the remaining 400 pages of Stendhal’s novel, the intriguing question remains: What might Tolstoy have found to be equally compelling in this main, Italycentered portion of the book, which he continued to admire when he reread it in 1887? After all, as the title’s specification of Parma indicates, most of Stendhal’s novel takes place amidst the stifling social life and petty political intrigues in this absolutist Principality, which serves as a microcosm of the political order in Restoration Europe, which was indebted, ultimately, to Russia’s victory over Napoleon. This vision of a tiny Italian statelet as the epitome of abusive absolutist power, living under the shadow of its imposing citadel for political prisoners, may easily have contributed to the coldly distanced treatments of Petersburg in Tolstoy’s fiction, where the Russian capital serves as the wellspring of authority for a much vaster yet equally suffocating polity. Even if influence cannot be settled beyond all doubt, Stendhal’s vivid portrayal of the oppressiveness of Restoration Italy must have sparked a shock of recognition in Tolstoy, whose initial conception for War and Peace hinged on a political exile’s return from Siberia, following the death of Nicholas I.6 Building on this connection, this chapter will consider one notable affinity between the post-Waterloo main portion of La Chartreuse and Tolstoy’s second great novel, Anna Karenina. This is the interest taken by both novelists, with their gifts for searching psychological analysis, in the place and development of vengeful feelings in the stultifying environments

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of Parma and Petersburg. On this basis, Anna Karenina enters into a pointed dialogue with La Chartreuse, one that centers on the two pairs of leading characters who inhabit these capitals: Fabrizio’s aunt Gina in Parma, who as the Duchess Sanseverina moves to that city and enters into a power struggle with its Prince, and Anna and her husband Alexei Alexandrovich, the unhappy Karenin couple in Petersburg. In this psychological perspective focused on revenge, the two novels relate to each other as contrasting counterparts. La Chartreuse begins by presenting Gina’s long quest for revenge as an enlivening feature of Italian culture, while in sharp contrast Tolstoy opens his novel by proclaiming that it is God, rather than people, who “will repay” when retribution is called for. By the end of the novels, however, a reversal in perspective has taken place which shows in the case of these two writers how relentlessly a psychological novelist’s urge to uncover buried motives can test and even overturn his original aims. In the end Stendhal must give some credit to a need for religious penance while, as the counterpoint between the writers continues, vengeful motives turn out to keep much of their power in Tolstoy.

2 La Chartreuse is an explicitly, even defiantly transnational novel, for its French author makes it clear that he prefers to write about Italy—especially northern Italy—more than about France. When he died several years after dictating the novel in a mere eight weeks, he would even leave orders that his gravestone in one of Paris’s main cemeteries should proclaim this allegiance. Instead of his pseudonym of Stendhal, it should give not his true name of Henri Beyle, but the Italian-sounding “Arrigo Beyle,” to which he added “Milanese” to show which city he really preferred. The question of a typically Italian delight in revenge first comes to the reader’s attention in the novel’s tongue-in-cheek foreword, when the author recalls his pleasure at hearing the Duchess’s story, supposedly during a lively evening of talk in Padua. Only later does he offer an apology for her actions, which he fears, anticipating responses to the first of the Duchess’s two acts of revenge, may give him “the reputation of an assassin” among moralists (CP xiv). Chapter 1 goes on to advance two explanations for this revenge ethic, going back in the deeper past to Milan’s subjugation to Spanish rule, whose “arrogant, suspicious, taciturn” spirit caused Italians to fixate on “avenging the slightest insult” (CP 8). Then, more recently, came the lethal animosities generated by the sudden swings back and forth between revolution and counter-revolution that began with Napoleon’s first Italian campaign in 1796

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and culminated with the cross-currents of his exile to Elba, the Hundred Days, Waterloo, and the Restoration. Almost a decade later, when Gina resolves to avenge herself on the Prince of Parma, these historical insights give way to a more ambitious psychological analysis. Stressing the “immoral delight Italians experience in taking revenge,” Stendhal notes the resurgence in Gina of “a sort of gaiety” once she takes control of the situation by deciding on retribution: “she felt her strength; each step her mind had taken [in planning revenge] gave her a certain happiness” (CP 365; XXI). Given that Stendhal found some inspiration for Gina’s character in a chronicle of vendettas in Renaissance Italy,7 at a time prior to the dominance of either the Spaniards or the French, his turn away from such historical contingencies makes sense. The Italian character, when naturally itself—he would have readers think—exults in revenge. We shall need to return later to the reservations implied in this analysis by “sort of ” and “a certain,” which reflect a hesitancy in the French original, “une sorte de gaieté” and “du bonheur.”8 As essential background to Gina’s plot to have the Prince poisoned, we should recall her failure in an earlier attempt at revenge. At the time of political payback between Napoleon’s exile to Elba and his attempted return to power during the Hundred Days, her first husband, a Bonaparte loyalist, was killed in a supposed duel by men partial to Milan’s Austrian rulers. Lacking “that absurd courage known as resignation” (CP 21; II), but, unable to prod a male friend to retaliate, Gina was left unappeased. She would find a redress of sorts in her nephew Fabrizio’s enthusiasm for Napoleon’s doomed return, which took place shortly thereafter; though he may have been acting naïvely, at least he did do something. This attachment is tested much later, after Gina has moved to Parma, when Fabrizio himself is arrested after he is attacked by the traveling actor Giletti and happens to kill the man. The situation, which clearly involved self-defense, is far less suspicious than the circumstances of her first husband’s death. But it evokes in Gina the misplaced but revealing reaction that, rather than getting mixed up in this affair, Fabrizio would have done better to avenge her loss almost a decade earlier (CP 205; XII). The elevation of this act of self-defense into an accusation of murder, though engineered by Parma’s chief law officer, has its roots in the jealousy of Ernesto IV, the Prince of Parma. In her new role as Duchess Sanseverina, Gina has become the star of his court, bringing liveliness and spontaneity to the stiflingly conventional gatherings of the local elite. Her success leads the Prince to feel that he must reassert absolute authority by taming her independent spirit; her love for her nephew means that arranging for the murder charge will give him a hold over her. This time, however, Gina is

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determined to act on her own. In the minute-by-minute account given in Chapter XIV that makes for one of the novel’s most dramatic scenes, she confronts the Prince and, relying on the power of her presence and personality while assuming that as a man of honor he can be counted upon to keep his word, she extracts a written promise to nullify the charges against Fabrizio. It is here, when she threatens to abandon Parma and to let boredom reign once more in the social life at court if the Prince fails to comply, that his motives crystallize: “I am losing her forever; pleasure and revenge, everything is vanishing” (CP 240; XIV). Even as he relishes the joie de vivre that Gina has provoked, the Prince’s autocratic need to assert supreme power awakens an opposing urge to retaliate. This speech shows that true pleasure for him lies in an Italian’s characteristic desire for revenge, one that has here become separated from any genuine feelings of delight. Retaliation comes quickly, since on the very next day the Prince abrogates his written promise by backdating Fabrizio’s arrest warrant (CP 248; XIV), thereby giving the document an artificial temporal priority that fits with the retrograde spirit of restoration politics. As a result, when Fabrizio returns from exile to Parma, he is immediately imprisoned; and the Prince tightens the screws on Gina by regularly having rumors spread of her nephew’s upcoming execution. Here students of Russian literature may recall Dostoevsky’s experience of mock execution, which was arranged by Tsar Nicholas I a full decade after publication of Stendhal’s novel. Rescuing her nephew will become Gina’s main goal for the next few months, but once that feat is accomplished by having him clamber down the walls of the towering citadel, she turns to revenge with the above-mentioned feelings of delight in her resurgent feelings of strength. Gina’s emotions on deciding that the Prince must die are so very intense that they suggest not just love for her nephew, but also pent-up frustration at not having succeeded in avenging her first husband’s murder. Thus, when she orders her servant Ludovico to flood the streets of Parma with water from a reservoir hidden in the walls of her residence, ostensibly to show her scorn for townspeople eager to witness Fabrizio’s execution, but in fact to send a signal to conspirators to start plotting the Prince’s death, she repeatedly cries out against Fabrizio’s unjust treatment. At the same time, though, her servant can fear that Gina is going mad when he notices how she was “staring fixedly at the bare wall six paces in front of her, and it must be confessed that her gaze was horrible” (CP 383; XXII). The reservoir that is to be opened, which readers are told is a relic of civic conflict in the middle ages, here acquires psychological force, as it evokes both the civil war mood at the time of her first husband’s murder and the accumulation of affect in Gina due to her

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inability to get satisfaction then, affect that now floods out, to Ludovico’s alarm. Given the narrator’s ironic jabs at morality earlier in the novel, his comment here on Gina’s decision to have the Prince poisoned may seem insincere: “the Duchess permitted herself an action not only dreadful in the eyes of morality but also fatal to her peace of mind for the rest of her life” (CP 379; XXII). To what extent is Stendhal still able to take a tongue-incheek attitude toward Gina’s deeds? At a telling moment later in the novel, her lover and future husband Count Mosca will mention his reluctance to use his power as Parma’s Minister of Interior to have people put to death. He has learned caution from an incident during his service with Napoleon: “sometimes, at dusk, I still think of those two spies I had shot a little too lightheartedly in Spain” (CP 427; XXIV). Not only does Gina’s distress that the Count “should suffer from such dark thoughts” (CP 428; XXIV) imply similar sentiments in her; but this vignette of guerrilla warfare in Spain, which looks ahead to similar events treated more fully in War and Peace, probes Napoleon’s legacy more searchingly than Stendhal’s breezily positive treatment of his impact on Italy throughout La Chartreuse. The text now acknowledges the bur­dens of conscience already suggested in the comment about Gina’s “peace of mind,” but it pointedly avoids what for Stendhal was the separate and more problematic issue of morality, whose “eyes” in the cited passage imply surveillance by others, not the self-scrutiny of “dark thoughts.” This key distinction between personal and public values aside, it soon turns out that Gina’s revenge on the Prince has failed simply as an effort to bring back the intimacy she once enjoyed with Fabrizio. While in prison, she learns, Fabrizio has fallen in love with the jailer’s daughter Clélia, bringing Gina’s special relationship with her nephew to an end. This outcome highlights the ironic parallel between Gina’s motives in private life and Restoration Europe’s back-to-the-past politics. Ultimately, happiness eludes her, whether in Fabrizio’s lively companionship or her own inner tranquility. La Chartreuse thus makes good on the limits implied by Gina’s “sort of gaiety” or her “certain” happiness at the time she decided on revenge. These reservations stand out all the more forcefully when set beside the undiluted “gaiety and sweetness of temper” that shone forth in her character when Gina entered the novel as a young teenager (CP 6; I). As if to test this outcome and emphasize its consequences, La Chartreuse includes a second, equally vain effort at revenge on Gina’s part, one that appears all the more quixotic because it takes place after the Prince’s death. To put this episode in perspective, we need to allow for the sudden acceleration of Stendhal’s novel toward the end, a change in tempo that also

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marks his other great novel, Le Rouge et le Noir [The Red and the Black (1830)]. In this case, though, the new rapidity of movement may also have come from his publisher’s demand for a shorter two-volume work instead of the three-volume one which Stendhal intended. As a result, Gina’s second, more startling act of revenge is drastically foreshortened in the telling, to the point where its importance can be overlooked. To be sure, Stendhal did find an ingenious way to compensate for the need to write a shorter novel. By adding an episode that describes Italian commedia dell’arte, in which actors improvise from a sketchy scenario instead of following a script, he encourages readers to feel their way into his own more rapidly paced narrative by entering into a similar co-creative relationship with the novelist. Gina’s second act of revenge takes place after it turns out that Fabrizio has fallen so deeply in love with the jailer’s daughter that when the opportunity arises he chooses to return to the Citadel of Parma and to undergo imprisonment a second time to be near her. But in doing so he exposes himself to possible retribution from several authority figures who feel dishonored by his escape. To save him once again, Gina must promise to sleep with the new Prince, Ernesto V, a naïve and loutish young man who has fallen in love with her during the commedia dell’arte performances in which she has been acting with him. No sooner has Fabrizio been set free than she regrets this promise; yet even so, when the time comes, she keeps her word. For readers ready to improvise under Stendhal’s direction, the unspoken point is clear: Gina has honored her promise in order to defy the young man’s father one more time. Since she flees Parma immediately after the assignation and takes up residence across the border in Lombardy, never to return, it is clear that she could easily have reneged on the promise, as the old Prince had done with her. Readers may also sense how harshly this acquiescence to an uncouth young man clashes with Gina’s feelings for Fabrizio, as a surrogate son or as something more, the lost happiness of her youth perhaps. Gina can gloss over this incident quite lightly when she says, “Do not ask me to be cheerful for the next month”; but when she adds, “I shall not see Fabrizio again” (CP 468; XXVII), she reveals how much violence this last act of revenge has done to her spirit. Though she quickly marries her devoted lover Mosca, she is not destined to know true satisfaction, given the catastrophe that overtakes Fabrizio when his son and Clélia herself both die, and he soon follows, after withdrawing in penance to the charterhouse named in Stendhal’s title. In ironically resonant words, where “appearances” marks the inadequacies of Gina’s present and “adored” her regrets for the past, the novel’s next-to-last sentence states that despite “all the appearances of happiness,” Gina will live “only a very short time after Fabrizio, whom she adored” (CP 495; XXVIII).

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In a novel that closes with the English motto, “to the happy few,” this muted outcome to the story of a woman who, as the novel began, was so “vivacious and frank” (CP 6; I) already amounts to penance of a kind, as well as to a radical qualification of Stendhal’s musings about Italian delight in revenge. Literal penance, as set forth by a title that evokes the rigors of the Carthusian order, is reserved for Fabrizio, though mention of Parma’s charterhouse only takes place on the novel’s final page. Given the order’s strict vow of silence, this disproportion may be appropriate—in a charterhouse there simply cannot be anything more to say—but in assessing Gina the situation ultimately remains open. To use Stendhal’s English motto as the standard, if “few” undercuts her choices in life, especially in her campaign of getting vengeance on the Prince, “happy” does not rule out the vivacity and impulsive freedom of Gina’s personality, even if those qualities have awakened jealousy and vengeful inclinations in others.

3 Vengeance in Anna Karenina, despite the prominence of this word in Tolstoy’s biblical epigraph (and also in the title of this chapter), does not act alone throughout the novel but in concert with forgiveness. This countervailing word is crucial if the unhappy families in the novel’s famous first sentence are to gain some degree of happiness, responding in the process to the challenge posed by the “happy few” motto that ends La Chartreuse. The interplay between vengeance and forgiveness in Tolstoy, which in Russian relies on the verbs “mstit’” and “prostit’” and the related nouns and modifiers, makes good sense on several levels. If vengeance belongs to the Lord, as the epigraph’s original context makes explicit (Tolstoy omits “saith the Lord,” which in the Bible specifies the source of this utterance9), then forgiveness is surely needed to temper divine wrath. But a merciful spirit will also be required among human beings as they deal with each other, both to mitigate vengeful impulses in others and to counter one’s own urges to retaliate. Early scenes in Tolstoy’s novel, which do not center on murderous political passions as is the case in Stendhal, but on sexual/marital crises, emphasize this point. Dolly’s discovery of her husband Stiva’s adultery causes her to desire “to punish, to shame him, to take revenge on him for at least a small part of the hurt he had done her” (AK 10; I.4). Correspondingly, Stiva’s sister Anna, when she arrives in Moscow to mend this rift, urges Dolly to forgive, asserting of herself, and the rest of the novel will test her ability to remain true to these words to their limit and beyond: “I would forgive, and forgive in such a way as if it hadn’t happened, hadn’t happened at all” AK 70; I.19). Meanwhile, in

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the novel’s second main plot, the male lead Konstantin Lyovin, who is Anna’s counterpart, follows a similar propitiating course when, in conversation with Stiva, he takes back some harsh words about “fallen creatures” (AK 41; I.11). With his own sexual history in mind, this thirty-something bachelor thinks of the forgiveness that he hopes to receive from his future wife, resolved as he is to tell her of his past behavior. Left unsettled in this abrupt shift from the strictures of social morality to a thoughtful probing of personal conscience is whether Lyovin will be able to forgive himself. The issues raised in these opening scenes receive a richly complex development as the novel continues, based on a tightly interwoven set of characters and situations that comment on each other in manifold ways. Two such strands stand out given our discussion of Stendhal: the tension to be observed in Anna’s husband between impulses to retaliate and feelings of forgiveness, and the duality that makes Anna both a victim and an agent of revenge. Midway through Anna Karenina, in a scene that provides one of the novel’s emotional high points, Karenin unexpectedly shows his capacity to forgive Anna, despite the bitterness that has marked their deepening estrangement due to her affair. This occurs when it seems that she is dying after giving birth to the child fathered by Vronsky. Up until this point, Karenin has been portrayed as a man who takes religion seriously, yet there is a striking difference between what happens at this peak moment and the nature of Tolstoy’s epigraph. As the text explains, “He was not thinking that the Christian law which he had wanted to follow all his life prescribed that he forgive and love his enemies; but the joyful feeling of love and forgiveness of his enemies filled his soul” (AK 413; IV.17). At this moment of crisis, when he renounces the vengeful feelings he had revealed a few pages earlier to Dolly (AK 394–5; IV.12) and thus actually aligns his behavior with the spirit of the epigraph, Karenin has not explicitly heeded its words or those of any other religious document. As a result, this moment may suggest either that his faith has now reached so deep that the practice of forgiveness has become second nature for him or, more likely in a broader psychological sense, that life itself, through the urgency of this apparent deathbed meeting, has released a deeper, more spontaneous potential for forgiveness in Karenin. In that case, the narrative has shown how the epigraph has come to earth in the lives of this specific unhappy family, where it functions less as an injunction to renounce vengeful feelings (it belongs to the Lord, not to the people) than as a demonstration of the surprising strength forgiveness can have in human nature. As readers learn, Karenin will soon slide back from this peak moment, a possibility that was already implicit in the ironic circumstances of his earlier

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conversation with Dolly about adultery. When she affirms, “I forgave, and you must forgive!” (AK 394; IV.12), she has overstated the extent to which she has changed toward Stiva. Her attitude at this point amounts less to real forgiveness than to a resigned indifference toward his infidelities that is punctuated with occasional jabs of sarcasm. In Karenin’s case, however, the upsurge in his impulses to forgive becomes eroded in an insidiously contorted way. Anna’s harsh suspicion that his peak moment at her bedside was in essence an underhanded expression of vengeful feelings is a problem with her perceptions. As she herself can admit on one occasion, “I hate him for his magnanimity” (AK 427; IV.21). Almost immediately, however, Karenin begins to sense a “another force, crude and equally powerful” in people close to him that is at odds with their professed admiration for his conduct with Anna, as seen, for example, in the “restrained, spiteful, and mocking smile” that accompanies Betsy Tverskaya’s praise (AK 419, 423; IV.19). As this outside pressure affects him more and more, Karenin starts to rely on Lydia Ivanovna for a kind of support that, in view of his high position in Russian bureaucracy, could be described as delegated vengeance. With a deviousness that her enthusiastic nature may keep hidden even from her, she intervenes to prevent Karenin’s access of generous feeling from having any meaningful effect. Her success in causing Anna pain by delaying a reunion with her son parallels, in this more ordinary, domestic setting, the Prince of Parma’s strategy for getting back at Gina by spreading rumors of Fabrizio’s impending execution. Even more insidious is the role of the medium Landau, who is eventually called upon to resolve Karenin’s future relations with Anna. Does the trance in which he orders Anna’s brother to leave the room, thus frustrating Stiva’s mission to end the lengthy impasse in advancing the couple’s divorce, simply turn on blind chance? Or has Landau sensed his patrons’ secret desires to injure Anna and conducted the séance with this aim in view? At the end of the novel, Vronsky’s mother mentions that Karenin has taken responsibility for raising Vronsky’s and Anna’s child (AK 778; VIII.4). Tolstoy thus leaves readers poised between two contrasting views of his motivation. It is possible, following Anna’s tragic suicide, that Karenin has found the way back to his elevated mood at the time of her illness when he found comfort in ensuring the child was well cared for, and may even have saved its life (AK 419; IV.19). But if Vronsky’s mother can be believed, it is also possible that Karenin relishes having prevented the real father from getting custody of the child. One may also wonder, given his cold formality in overseeing the education of his and Anna’s son (AK 524–6; V.27), what this other child’s long-term prospects might be in Karenin’s care. The interplay between vengeance and forgiveness in this character, which had

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tilted toward a triumph of unacknowledged vengeful feelings at the time of the séance, has ended in an ambiguous equilibrium. This corresponding interplay in Anna is even more complex. As the novel moves forward, she comes to resemble Lyovin in her inability to forgive herself, as shown most forcefully once she recovers from her illness and abruptly departs for northern Italy to live with Vronsky. In this Stendhalian setting, amid the euphoria of a return to health and the chance to live more openly with her lover, this seeming escape from her previous dilemmas reveals a crucial drawback. In a stern parallel to the qualification implied by Gina’s “sort of gaiety,” Anna feels “unpardonably happy” (AK 463; V.8). She can experience no pardon or forgiveness for finding such great happiness? When scrutinized, the superlative satisfaction conveyed by this phrase turns out to be hollow, both because Anna has a guilty conscience like Gina and also, unlike her, because she fears and expects retribution from outside. This “outside” refers to the social elite among whom she lives in Petersburg and on whom she depends, though not to the extent of her socialite friend Betsy Tversaya, the enabler of her liaison with Vronsky. Anna’s expectation of facing painful social pressures had surfaced earlier in the novel, after her visible agitation at witnessing Vronsky’s accident in the steeplechase had led to a confrontation with her husband. The next morning she starts to have the fateful feeling of “everything beginning to go double in her soul” (AK 288; III.15), which in spite of emerging first as an inner, psychological state, went on to include the certainty of receiving harsh treatment from both her husband and her circle. In a telling gesture, as she sits distracted at her dressing-table, she feels a sharp pain on both sides of her head and, looking at her reflection in the mirror, realizes “that she was clutching the hair on her temples and squeezing them with both hands” (AK 288; III.15). To escape this feeling of inner division, Anna rushes out onto the terrace. Looking around her, she senses a harsh pitilessness in her surroundings, which, ironically, seem unusually fresh, clean, and clearly focused, but utterly frigid: “She stopped and looked at the tops of the aspens swaying in the wind, their washed leaves glistening brightly in the cold sun, and she understood that they would not forgive, that everything and everyone would be merciless to her now, like this sky, like this greenery” (AK 290; III.15). Later in the novel, when Anna has returned to Petersburg after her Italian interlude, the premonition registered in this stark image comes to pass, first when Lydia Ivanovna refuses to let her visit her son, then at the opera when she brings public humiliation upon herself. There is, in short, a reciprocity in Tolstoy’s handling of the double-standard theme: society is hypocritical when it singles Anna out for ostracism, since it has no right to exact retribution. But Anna has invited this response, as a result of

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an inner doubleness that cancels the openness to forgiveness that she urged on Dolly. As her state of mind worsens, Anna attempts to strike back on her own initiative, especially against Vronsky. In him, as the only person from high society with whom she can still associate, she senses a residue of that society’s coldness. Here we should note that Vronsky’s cool manner and his passion for horse-racing and for being a country gentleman are vaguely Anglophile. This is a trait to which Anna once responded: returning to Petersburg in Part One, she switched easily from reading an English novel to a deeper intimacy with Vronsky on the blizzard-swept station platform. But in their final quarrel, when all she perceives in him is this coldness, it sharpens her desire for vengeance. Key to her decision to punish him with her suicide remains an acute sense that forgiveness is impossible; even when she merely imagines his cruel speeches, she “could not forgive him for them, as if he had actually said them to her” (AK 751; VII.26). After Vronsky leaves her for the last time, his ability to feel compassion masked by an aristocratic, Anglophile calm, she reaches a decision, “feeling a vague wrath surge up in her, and a need for revenge” (AK 761; VII.29). Even as Anna waits to throw herself beneath the train, this dark mood persists: “I’ll punish him and be rid of everybody and of myself!” (AK 768; VII.31). In the devastating simplicity of this sentence, her desire for vengeance on Vronsky has become all-encompassing, exploding outward into a social world that now reaches out to people in general, whose hostile pressures she feels pointed at herself. At the same time it pours inward into her psyche, which has invited that pressure and is raging in torment against it. One final set of ironies remains, however. At the last minute, perhaps because Anna crosses herself as she used to before entering the water to swim, a dormant sentiment of needing to ask for forgiveness awakens, even as the train’s overwhelming force bears down on her. Just as Ivan Ilyich’s dark sack turns inside out at the last minute, here too Tolstoy cannot imagine leaving his character utterly isolated, this time within her vengeful feelings. Yet Vronsky will know nothing of this reversal of sentiment. For him all that remains is the searing spectacle of her face in death, which to his eyes failed to reveal the complexity of this final moment. The bitterness of their last meeting overshadows what he might have seen that was “pitiful on the lips,” so that all he can recall is her “cruelly vengeful” expression (AK 780, 781; VIII.5). In effect, then, the momentary release that Tolstoy imagines for Anna at the end is available only to his readers, not to the people in her world, where the desire for retribution continues to hold sway. Here the harsh verdict of Vronsky’s mother, who like Betsy Tverskaya is a

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typical member of that world, creates a jarring dissonance. Anna “ended as such a woman should have ended” (AK 778; VIII.4), she affirms in pitiless self-righteousness. If Lyovin’s philosophic half-brother Koznyshev responds to this condemnation by invoking the epigraph’s basic meaning when he comments, “It’s not for us to judge” (AK 778; VIII.4), his observation at this point gives the impression of being just a bookish allusion, in contrast to Karenin’s earlier, more heartfelt reaction to Anna’s possible death. Lacking the power of conviction, Koznyshev fails to moderate the mother’s final words, which call on forgiveness only to reveal the greater strength of vengeful feelings: “God forgive me, but I can’t help hating her memory” (AK 778; VIII.4). In this final mention of Anna, the forces of retribution, far from giving way before an irresistible upsurge of forgiveness, have overwhelmed their merciful counterpart.

4 Within Tolstoy’s novel as a whole, the Karenin story showing the corrosive power of revenge is balanced by the Lyovin story about forgiveness that manages to prevail. Thus, at the very time when Karenin learns that Anna may be dying, Lyovin is able to overcome his pain at being rejected by Kitty and proposes to her again. Crucial to their reconciliation is the parlor game of secrétaire, in which the players exchange messages using only the first letters of their words as clues. Kitty’s last, decisive message expresses the wish “that you could forgive and forget what happened” (“t,y,c,f,a,f,w,h” [AK 398; IV.13]), which responds, within the human world of the novel, to the call for vengeance in the biblical epigraph by appealing to the countervailing emotion. This scene reproduces Tolstoy’s own proposal to his wife; yet here again we can discern a dialogue with Stendhal. During Fabrizio’s first imprisonment in the Citadel of Parma, Gina used coded light signals to send him messages, letter-by-letter; and in a similar spirit Fabrizio opened the lines of communication with Clélia by holding up large letters made from materials in his cell. Just as the vengeful, reactive force embodied in the Prince’s Restoration prison failed to control the free spirits of Stendhal’s three main characters, so, in the more ordinary, domestic world of Tolstoy’s novel, Kitty and Lyovin have escaped entrapment in recriminations stemming from failures in their past. Indeed, their attunement is so close that no letterby-letter spelling out of meaning is required; in Tolstoy’s revisioning of the scenes of intimate communication in Parma’s prison, just the first letters have sufficed to bring the couple’s self-imposed isolation to an end in a mutual recognition of forgiveness.

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Priscilla Meyer’s discussion of Franco–Russian literary relations in How the Russians Read the French casts further light on how Anna Karenina relates to Stendhal’s Italy. In analyzing the revisionary polemics between Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Crime and Punishment, and Anna Karenina and an array of French subtexts, she stresses influence rather than dialogue. But her thesis that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy part company with morally question­able French models on religious and spiritual grounds does put Stendhal’s and Tolstoy’s treatment of vengeance in broader cultural perspective.10 Though Meyer does not consider Stendhal, the discussion in this chapter of his initial relationship with Tolstoy does fit her pattern. French free-thinking individual­ism as found in Gina as a Renaissance-style heroine resolved on revenge confronts Russian spiritual depth in what amounts to “vengeance is the Lord’s; let people forgive” in Tolstoy’s contextualization of the biblical epigraph. Yet beyond this initial difference, both novels end by conceding some validity to the other’s position. Thus La Chartreuse shows Fabrizio ending his life in a monastery and Gina feeling only “a sort” of happiness, while Anna Karenina presents vengefulness as a primal force in human nature and a malady among the social elite. Stendhal, of course, could have known nothing about Tolstoy’s fiction, but if Tolstoy did learn from Stendhal’s ability to question assumptions and to transcend them in the course of working out a long-pondered fictional design, his treatment of vengeance in Anna Karenina does bear witness to a certain level of influence. More important, though, is the insight that this chapter has given into these novels as finely wrought intellectual instruments. As shown, neither author’s portrayal of vengeful feeling proceeds as an unfolding discursive argument, but relies instead on an inter­play of dramatic situations, evolving characters, and choices of language. This sustained process of novelistic thought ends by taking both writers in unexpected direc­tions as they labor to rearrange and combine values and traditions from different areas of experience. The prominence of this fictive form of inquiry in both La Chartreuse and Anna Karenina adds an intellectual seriousness to their power as psychological narratives and helps explain why they can remain so compelling, well over a century after they were written.

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Discordant histories / Napoleonic anniversaries War and Peace and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education

1 The patriotic Cinco de Mayo or Fifth of May celebration, which enjoys greater popularity in the United States among people of Mexican heritage than it does in Mexico, happens (by an odd coincidence) to mark a Napoleonic anniversary of just the kind that this chapter will discuss in Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale. On May 5, 1862, a French army on its way to occupy Mexico City at a time when the United States, which would otherwise have called on the Monroe Doctrine, was distracted by the Civil War, met defeat outside the city of Puebla. Despite the temporary setback, this foreign adventure of Napoleon III’s would soon help in setting up a Hapsburg monarchy in Mexico, which lasted until 1867 when supporters of the Mexican Republic captured Maximilian I and had him executed. By a jarring irony, this May 5 defeat of the French army happened to be the 41st anniversary of the first Napoleon’s death on Saint Helena in 1821. Similar situations, in which current events are overshadowed by anniversaries from the past and at the same time give rise to unexpected consequences, take place at key points in Tolstoy’s and Flaubert’s novels, both of which offer rich portrayals of their characters’ private lives against the backdrop of history in the making. In this process, a date that had special meaning for the first Napoleon and that later connected the uncle with his nephew Napoleon III clash harshly with received ideas of Bonapartist glory. In contrast to the utopian hopes of time reborn that led to the establishment of a new Republican Calendar after the French Revolution, in Tolstoy the Year One and in Flaubert the Year Forty-Seven of Napoleonic time produce several sharp discordances. The result is a number of enlightening

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comparisons, to be explored in this chapter, between War and Peace and L’Éducation sentimentale as novels of the 1860s. Both Flaubert and Tolstoy had risen to literary prominence in the 1850s in contexts that had involved meaningful contact between their callings as authors and the France of Napoleon III. In 1857 Flaubert won an important victory in the Second Empire’s lawcourts when, unlike Baudelaire who fled to Belgium when faced with a similar situation, he contested the charges of immorality that had been brought against Madame Bovary. His stand enhanced the success of his first novel and, over the longer term, helped promote freedom of literary expression. Meanwhile, the appearance in 1855 and 1856 of the pieces later collected in the Sevastopol Sketches brought Tolstoy to public attention in Russia as a compelling writer about the Crimean War. The France of Napoleon III had been one member of the coalition that attacked Russia in this war, which revived memories of the first Napoleon’s grandiose invasion four decades earlier but revealed a significant decline in Russia’s standing as a European great power. During the following decade, and especially from 1863 onward, the two novelists built on these earlier encounters with the persistent power of Napoleon’s image. Working simultaneously on War and Peace and L’Éducation sentimentale, but with no knowledge of the other’s project, Tolstoy and Flaubert both wrote novels that give a decisive historical role to an anniversary of Napoleon’s coronation as Emperor of the French. The first of these special dates set the stage for the disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812, while the second led to the overthrow of France’s Second Republic, and with it an abrupt end to the political ideals that marked the 1840s. Unlike Tolstoy’s dialogue with Stendhal, therefore, which could have involved direct influence by way of his warm admiration for La Chartreuse, the dialogue with Flaubert to be considered in this chapter depends on the novelists’ shared participation in a historical and literary context that is broadly Western. In both novels the anniversary in question dates back to December 2, 1804, when Napoleon I famously had himself declared Emperor. During the ceremony, instead of allowing the Pope to follow tradition by placing the crown on his head, Napoleon unexpectedly put it there himself as a sign that he had won authority by his own merit. Exactly one year later, on December 2, 1805, he won what is arguably his greatest victory, when he defeated the combined Russian and Austrian armies at Austerlitz (now in the Czech Republic), in the battle that brings the first three books of War and Peace to a close. These three books, which in addition to the military events in 1805 cover the family lives of the Rostovs, the Bolkonskys, and Pierre, the illegitimate son of Count Bezukhov, appeared as a separate volume in

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1865 under the title The Year 1805. Near the end of Book Three, one of this novel’s male leads, Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, falls seriously wounded at Austerlitz and, in a well-known set piece, looks up from the battlefield and marvels at the immeasurable loftiness of the sky. Later that day, after the battle has been lost, a group of retreating soldiers follow Dolokhov, a secondary character in the novel, and take off across a frozen pond in an attempt to flee the continuing French bombardment. This panicked effort to escape only magnifies the disaster, as the ice gives way and a large number of soldiers drown in the freezing water. In witnessing this triumph on the first anniversary of Napoleon’s elevation to emperor, readers of Tolstoy’s novel see it from the viewpoint of an opponent that would recover from this defeat to win an equally famous and even more shattering victory seven years later. This reversal of fortune would occupy much of the last half of War and Peace when Tolstoy published the novel in its entirety several years later. In another anniversary 46 years after Austerlitz, on December 2, 1851, Louis Napoleon would launch the coup d’état that ended his tenure as the elected president of France’s Second Republic, revived his uncle’s title of emperor, and made him Napoleon III. The last paragraphs in the main action in L’Éducation sentimentale cover this event, which comes immediately before two chapters that occur long afterwards and function as a double epilogue. For Flaubert’s protagonist Frédéric Moreau, the coup reaches its startling climax when he witnesses his friend Dussardier, an idealistic defender of the Republic, being killed by Sénecal, a former companion who is now a policeman under orders from the new ruler. The next chapter begins after an ellipsis of sixteen years, initiated by the famous two-word sentence “Il voyagea” (“He traveled”), whose blank generality signifies Frédéric’s disillusioned withdrawal from the turbulence that had marked French society and politics as well as his own young manhood during the 1840s. Comparisons of Tolstoy with Flaubert have usually ignored the striking parallels between the two novelists’ careers in the 1860s. Instead, attention has been lavished on Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, considered either as novels of adultery, as classics of nineteenth-century realism, or as contrasting models for the craft of fiction.1 Barring some remarks by Georg Lukács on the extent to which Flaubert’s deep sense of disillusionment carries over to Tolstoy, except in those places where War and Peace revives a sense of epic grandeur,2 the parallels and differences between that novel and L’Éducation sentimentale have remained understudied. Yet simply as ambitious literary achievements, which feature the added interest of a major historical theme, these novels rival and may even surpass the two that have fascinated comparatists but deal more exclusively with private life. Thus War and Peace as well as Anna Karenina have been widely accepted as

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outstanding works of world fiction; while Flaubert, unlike most of his critics, was convinced that L’Éducation sentimentale outranked Madame Bovary as a novel about modern France. Obviously the two novelists’ historical ambitions go further and deeper than launching critiques of one or the other Napoleon. Still, their books do attain a measure of closure in the scenes that focus on the December 2 anniversaries, which as a result promise to furnish a convenient lens on works that, if treated in more detail, would require a lengthier discussion.

2 Comparison can begin with a striking, even jarring paradox that, in the questions it raises about temporal sequence, plays off of the very idea of a Napoleonic anniversary. As the marker of an ideal historical model, such an anniversary encourages a sense of time that moves forward in regular chronological order up to the present day. At the same time, as a commemorative gesture that seeks to honor an inevitably receding past, it also suggests a sense of time as re-created in people’s memories, one that loops back against the chronological flow. Flaubert expresses this paradox in a sharper, more arresting manner than Tolstoy, as befits his awareness of the limits to strict chronology in fiction. However, a similar zigzag complexity is also apparent in Tolstoy’s creative process as he wrote and rewrote the drafts for War and Peace, initially departing from a more contemporary perspective than he used in the finished novel. At first glance it seems natural to identify Tolstoy with clear, unambiguous historical and narrative beginnings. Year One of Napoleon’s imperial rule coincides with the first grand movement in War and Peace, in which the Russian defeat abroad serves as the prelude to the nation’s overwhelming victory on the home front seven years later. Flaubert, in sharp contrast, seems to focus on endings: the Napoleonic Year Forty-Seven brings a second brash seizure of power by a nephew who has imitated the uncle. The event irrupts into the novel without further comment, in effect suggesting a conclusion to meaningful history itself even as it brings the main action of L’Éducation sentimentale to an end. Yet the novel’s famous last words, the very last ones of all to appear in the second of the two epilogue chapters, undercut this distinction. It is here that Frédéric and his long-time friend Deslauriers recall the past and agree that the best time in their lives occurred in 1837, three full years before the novel begins, as announced with ostentatious precision, on September 15, 1840. In a temporal back-and-forth that complicates the forward-moving chronology of both history and much

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nineteenth-century fiction, the end of this novel turns out to come before the beginning. This twist in timing corresponds, of course, to memory’s power to reverse chronology, a point underscored by the fact that in this passage the characters have literally been engaged in reminiscing. But it also overlaps with the logic of anniversaries and the act of circling back in time to commemorate a supposed high point in the past. In L’Éducation sentimentale, that logic brings with it a subversive historical message, in which various personal experiences involving “sentiment” correspond to larger political trends. Thus Frédéric’s frustrating courtship of Madame Arnoux has mirrored the country’s increasing frustration with the Orléanist regime that had ruled France since 1830 and that culminates in the Revolution of 1848, which itself finds an equivalent in his sudden decision to make Rosanette his mistress. From this perspective, the conversation between Frédéric and Deslauriers might be decoded as follows: without the “better days” of the first Napoleon’s early successes, at an even longer time before this novel began than the incident remembered by the two friends, how could there ever have been a third Napoleon to bring its story to an end? Conversely, if we look back from the 1860s when Tolstoy was working on War and Peace, the author’s earlier writings on the Crimean War make it clear, not just in objective historical terms but in the sub­ject­ive perspective of his unfolding career, that Russia’s victory over the first Napoleon had faded badly over time. For though the Crimean War was not a catastrophe on the order of the 1812 invasion, it did still lead to major changes in Russia, with the Great Reforms and most notably the emancipation of the serfs that were instituted shortly before Tolstoy began his novel in earnest. To put the point in another way that draws on Kathryn Feuer’s insights into how War and Peace got written,3 Tolstoy realized when he began work on his novel that Russian history after the Crimean War made it impossible simply to focus on the triumph in 1812. To tell that story he had to start by going back to defeat in 1805. Thus his decision about how to narrate the first Napoleon’s invasion was conditioned by the third Napoleon’s recent participation in the more modest Crimean venture. Without this last act in a Napoleonic saga that was brought to mind, long after the final pages of War and Peace, by Russia’s quasi-defeat in the Crimean War, would Tolstoy have needed to write a first act about the nation’s full-scale defeat at Austerlitz? Thus, in Flaubert’s case, the Napoleonic anniversary that comes at the end of the main action of L’Éducation sentimentale depends upon a beginning before the novel began—a first Napoleon before the third. Paralleling this historical paradox is an equivalent paradox in the lives of the two main characters, whose best time in life was similarly elided by a narrative that only began at a later date. Correspondingly, with Tolstoy, the Napoleonic

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anniversary that occurs at the end of the first phase of his novel (initially published separately, it should be recalled, as The Year 1805) depends upon an ending after the novel has ended—a third Napoleon after the first. This twist in the historical chronology also had its parallel in the life of one of Tolstoy’s characters, since the earliest drafts for War and Peace focus on a figure similar to Pierre Bezukhov. After having lived through Napoleon’s invasion, this man was exiled to Siberia for joining in a revolt against the government (the Decembrist Uprising of 1825), and was only able to come back to European Russia after the end of the Crimean War. As Tolstoy explored this character’s situation in the early drafts, he found himself pushing this initial Rip Van Winkle-style juxtaposition between the 1812 invasion and the Crimean War further back into the past, so that eventually Austerlitz replaced Crimea. Though readers today cannot be expected to notice any lingering traces of this shift in emphasis, when the novel first appeared at least one contemporary Russian critic of considerable originality (Konstantin Leontiev) did accuse Tolstoy of writing about the present in War and Peace more than about the past.4

3 To turn now to the anniversary scenes themselves, in their foreground appear several characters who, though they vary widely in their significance for the narrative, are portrayed in ways that also produce discordant effects. The way in which these characters are handled no doubt affects most readers more directly than these paradoxes of sequencing, paradoxes that, despite their greater obviousness in Flaubert, also take place in Tolstoy. First, and in greater detail, there is the initial sharp contrast between the two leading characters who witness the events of the day: Tolstoy’s heroic Prince Andrey and Flaubert’s anti-hero Frédéric. This apparent contrast does not rule out some important underlying parallels between the two men. Then, more incidentally, there are the secondary characters who gain a brief, baleful centrality in the anniversary scenes: Tolstoy’s Dolokhov and Flaubert’s Sénécal. Also relevant here are the novelists’ differing approaches to the issue of whether their respective Napoleons should make brief, cameo appearances of the kind novels usually employ when dealing with actual historical figures. On the surface Prince Andrey may be thought to be everything that Frédéric is not: a man of intelligence and ability with a genuine desire to serve his country, with an admirable impatience about the comfortable and not very demanding routines of his privileged social class, and with a force

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of character that, when obstacles arise, allows him to recover a sense of direction. When compared with the all-too-frequent revelations of Frédéric’s entanglement in unheroic cross-purposes, Andrey might credibly figure as the potential hero. After all, once the Russian troops waver and begin to panic when the French army emerges unexpectedly out of the fog at Austerlitz, he is the one who seizes a banner and runs forward in an attempt to turn the tide. But then he is shot, and the day is irretrievably lost. Frédéric, in sharp contrast, has stood idly by the day before the Bonapartist coup, afflicted by “fatigue … deathly torpor, and a sense of disintegration” (SE 407; III.5), while his aristocratic mistress, Madame Dambreuse, comments with studied malice on an auction of items that once belonged to Madame Arnoux. This is the woman whom Frédéric has loved for a decade in every conceivable form of unrequited passion. To add to his (and the reader’s) frustration and sense of squandered feelings, his other mistress, the highclass prostitute Rosanette, also happens to come by, only to provoke “a smile of unspeakable insolence” from Madame Dambreuse. Up until this point, Tolstoy’s and Flaubert’s treatment of these two men as they face their respective anniversaries would seem to correspond to Marx’s well-known squib about the two Napoleons: that if history repeats itself, it does so “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”5 Yet there is more to these scenes, so that Andrey in battle against the uncle cannot be viewed as simply a valiant officer fulfilling his duty despite a suddenly tragic turn in events, while Frédéric in the lull before the nephew’s coup is not just a man about town who is laughably, even shamefully incapable of real action. For one thing, even as Andrey rushes forward, Tolstoy has suggested the immaturity of his response, since when he calls out “Forward, lads,” the narrator adds “in a childishly shrill voice” (WP 280; III.16). Then Tolstoy vividly reveals another dimension to life besides the heroic charge. Just before Andrey was shot, he was looking at the absurd tug-of-war between a Russian and a French soldier over possession of a swab used to tamp down the powder in a cannon. His field of vision was exclusively horizontal. But once he falls, the vista shifts to a vertical one; and as Andrey looks upward and sees nothing “krome neba, vysokogo neba,” “except the sky—the lofty sky” (WP 281; III.16), his mood shifts. He now has feelings of quiet, peace, and solemnity, with an overtone of religious sentiment, since the Russian word “nebo” can also signify “heaven.” In addition, his very aim of trying to turn the tide of battle was a Napoleonic fantasy, an attempt to meet his own Toulon (WP 162; II.12), that being the place where Napoleon had first distinguished himself as a young officer. Conversely, though Frédéric has demonstrated his inability to act on many, many occasions, the scene at the auction turns out not to be one

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of them. Repelled by Madame Dambreuse’s cattiness, he tries to persuade her not to buy a casket belonging to Madame Arnoux that holds sentimental meanings for himself. When she persists, he refuses to join her in her carriage, thus breaking in a decisive way with what would have been a socially and financially advantageous marriage. For a moment he is flooded with joy at asserting his independence, and though he soon falls back into an all-too-typical “feeling of infinite weariness,” he does hold to the insight that courting Madame Dambreuse had been “a somewhat ignoble speculation” (SE 409; III.6). Thus, on the eve of December 2, Frédéric has managed to show some backbone. Any attempt to draw a sharp contrast between these two characters, either in Marx’s spirit or that of E. M. Forster’s praise for epic spaciousness in Tolstoy as distinguished from the intense disenchantment that Auerbach identified in Flaubert’s realism,6 needs to be qualified. The history neither of the novel as a genre nor of the French or Russian societies portrayed in these novels is that schematic. The discordant effect in this case depends upon the novelists’ avoidance of typecast clarity in portraying their leading characters, with the aim instead of revealing psychological variability and complexity. In addition, as young men at the fringe of their society’s elites, Andrey and Frédéric are well-positioned to witness historical developments that take place outside those elites. Andrey’s father is a fiercely independent retired general who left court during the reign of Paul II. Since censorship in Russia limited what could be written about the royal family, the implication is either that the father had arbitrarily fallen from favor under that erratic ruler or he had refused to join the plot that led to Paul’s assassination and the ascension of the current Tsar. There is no better illustration of both his independent spirit and his isolation from power than the way in which he reacts to the news that a high-placed courtier will visit his estate. It is midwinter, but although the serfs have cleared the approach for the visitor’s carriage, the father orders them to shovel the snow back onto the road (WP 215–16; III.3). Thus, despite his title of prince, which in any case was a common one in Russia, Andrey is in fact at odds with the inner circles of autocratic power. Though he is not quite the “superfluous man” of other Russian novels in this period, the potential for discord in Andrey’s social position emerges in his own feelings of estrangement from “proper” social circles at the capital, and of coldness toward his wife who fits in so comfortably with those circles. George Orwell, in considering his own socially discordant position, once identified himself as a member of the “lower-upper-middle class.”7 Neither Andrey nor Frédéric ventures nearly as far down in society as Orwell, who, as a result of his complex status, felt born to write books like Down and Out in Paris and London. Still, Andrey’s place in what might be called the “slightly

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lowered upper class” does correlate with his readiness to connect with people from other spheres, seen just before Austerlitz when he decides to transfer off the staff into the regular army. Earlier in The Year 1805 he had vigorously defended the lower class artillery officer Tushin, who had shown his mettle by handling himself with notable calm and effectiveness just before Austerlitz, during Bagration’s rearguard defense of the retreating Russian army (WP 199; II.21). In Flaubert’s novel, Frédéric’s social experience is more fluid, since it fluctuates among at least three phases, focused on the upper middle class during his prosperous periods, sinking toward the middle class when in reduced circumstances, and even verging on the upper class through his mother’s tenuous links with the aristocracy. These ups and downs are reflected in the breadth of Frédéric’s contacts, to such an extent that Pierre Bourdieu has praised L’Éducation sentimentale for portraying so much of French society—from the aristocracy to the upper levels of the working class, along with the alternative worlds of artists and the demi-monde.8 However, though Flaubert’s Paris of the 1840s had more social variety than Tolstoy’s Russia of 1805, and though Andrey’s position in society is firmer than Frédéric’s, both characters do occupy situations of social liminality. This liminality serves to widen the historical scope of their novels. Within the flux brought by the two Napoleons, it allows Tolstoy to register, through Andrey, an incipient national solidarity that would emerge more fully during the first Napoleon’s invasion in 1812. This issue had become even more urgent when he began writing just after the liberation of the serfs, which was in turn a delayed consequence of the Crimean War that had been supported by the other Napoleon. Similarly, Frédéric’s social liminality allows Flaubert to track the sociopolitical fluctuations of a French polity that in the course of his novel wobbles from kingdom to republic to empire, and between more and less open visions of citizenship. As a final, notably striking dissonance, we should note the problematic status of fatherhood for Andrey and Frédéric, a topic that chimes with the obliquity of the Napoleonic lineage from uncle the first to nephew the third. Andrey, it is clear, is desper­ately unhappy in his marriage to a good-natured but utterly conventional society woman, Lise, the “little princess.” Thus, for him, leaving home for war in 1805 represents not just a mission to prove himself but also a chance to escape his unsatisfactory family life, all the while managing to ignore the fact that his wife is pregnant. Her anxieties for the future will be realized when she dies in childbirth, and Tolstoy leaves the reader—and her husband—with the image of her slightly raised upper lip, in life a leitmotif for her empty character but in death a pathetic reproach for his neglect. Though Tolstoy abandoned his initial plan to have Andrey die at Austerlitz (The Year 1805 as a stand-alone section of the novel may leave the

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impression that he has indeed perished) and even lets him fall in love with his heroine Natasha Rostov, in the end the marriage never takes place due to a certain lack of resolve on Andrey’s part. For fear of displeasing his father, he decides to wait a year before marrying, not thinking of the effect this prudent delay might have on the impetuous Natasha. Andrey will finally die when he is wounded again in 1812. In the novel’s First Epilogue, which is set in 1820, he is at most a ghostly presence. This is where the narrative part of War and Peace ends with two happy couples and with the last words going to Andrey’s son, who is now a teenager. In his situation as an orphan, he makes a forward-looking but perhaps meaningless pledge to try to live up to an idealized image of Andrey: “Father! Father! Yes, I’ll do something that even he would be pleased with” (WP 1178; Epilogue I.16). Only in a metafictional sense, if readers transfer these words from the character to the author, who was himself an orphan, and apply them to the novel they have just finished, can these words convey an unequivocal sense of fulfillment. In Flaubert, however, it is the child who dies rather than the mother, leaving Frédéric without even Andrey’s tenuous paternal link to the future. Ambivalent about the son he has fathered with Rosanette, Frédéric soon believes that “it would have been better for him not to be born” (SE 382; III.4). Later, when the infant is dying, the whitish spots “like patches of mildew” (SE 395; III.4) that spread over his body are not just pathetic in the manner of Lise’s upper lip, but add a chilling sense of active decay. The novel’s last words, “That was the happiest time we ever had,” summon up the pet memory that Frédéric shares with Deslauriers. As they recall being refused entry to a brothel as adolescents, their mood of nostalgic innocence combines with a sardonic sense of futility to rule out even the vague prospect of a meaningful future. Inheritance, with its reassuring but often arbitrary implications of historical continuity and stability, has become problematic for both authors; it is perhaps even felt to be impossible. If this impossibility seems more explicit in Flaubert, it should be noted that by ending War and Peace in 1820, Tolstoy left unanswered the question of what might happen to his characters in 1825. This was the year of the Decembrist revolt, a subject that was on his mind during his first plans for the novel and one that continued to interest him later in his career. Would the ultimate fates that Tolstoy had in mind for Pierre and Natasha have been dispossession and exile in Siberia, in the spirit of his initial drafts, and not the closing scene of family happiness that has disappointed some of War and Peace’s readers?

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4 Sharpening the discordances associated with Andrey and Frédéric are two secondary characters closely linked to the Napoleonic anniversaries: Tolstoy’s Dolokhov and Flaubert’s Sénécal. The former enters War and Peace as an infantry officer lacking wealth or social connections but with a lot of prestige among a rowdy group of young men. After dueling with Pierre Bezukhov as a result of sleeping with his wife, winning large sums at gambling from Nicholas Rostov, and planning an attempted abduction of Natasha, he exits the novel as the take-no-prisoners leader of a partisan band that harries the French in 1812. At Austerlitz he was the first soldier to dash out onto the frozen pond in an attempt to escape the relentless cannonade that continues long after the battle has been lost. He manages to cross to safety on the other side himself, but he sparks a stampede in which many others drown in the icy water (WP 289–90; III.18). This scene of mass panic is Tolstoy’s crowning image of defeat, and Dolokhov’s daredevil gamble confirms his dangerous, even nihilistic egotism—which stands in sharp contrast to Andrey’s earlier attempt to rally the troops. As a supremely discordant moment, this scene of desperation and chaos goes beyond picturing Russian defeat to belie the myth of Napoleonic glory: to continue the slaughter of a panicked enemy reveals a dark underside to one of his most celebrated victories. The scene also portends the magnitude of Napoleon’s own defeat seven years later. For just as Dolokhov, who as a Russian is unfamiliar with the relative mildness of December weather at Austerlitz, may have expected the ice to be more solidly frozen than it actually is, so Napoleon’s army will dissolve into a meager remnant after having to face a Russian winter far crueler than anticipated. As War and Peace eventually shows, no artillery fire will be required in 1812 to hasten the work of cold, hunger, fear, and exhaustion. In L’Éducation sentimentale, Sénécal is a lean, ascetic, doctrinaire figure who is variously a math instructor, a foreman in a factory, a socialist ideologue, and a political conspirator. To Frédéric’s and the reader’s astonishment, he reappears as a policeman on December 2. It is none other than Sénécal who, when the idealistic workman Dussardier shouts “Long live the Republic” and refuses to give way before the new regime’s show of force, threatens him with his saber and then kills him (SE 411; III.5). Critics have often identified Sénécal with the outlook and tactics of the Bolsheviks, but to stay with the incident’s implications at the time it was written, it is enough to note that this fratricidal scene undermines the populist and patriotic rhetoric of the Napoleonic restoration from its outset. Authority has trumped democracy in a harshly discordant event that leaves Frédéric as witness “béant,” or open-mouthed. He is unable to find anything to say, just

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like Flaubert in the elliptical emptiness of “He traveled” that comes immediately after. This silence, it should be added, extends to Napoleon’s name, which Flaubert never mentions in connection with the coup. Perhaps it was unnecessary, given that the Second Empire was still standing when L’Éducation sentimentale was published, and for Flaubert the silence may have given a sardonic political overtone to his famous goal of writing a book about “nothing.” But the silence, whatever its discordant potential, may also have been diplomatic. When Flaubert started planning this novel, the success of his previous novel Salammbô had resulted in an invitation to the salon of the Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, the Emperor’s cousin. This tie to the imperial court continued, and Flaubert would eventually read the whole of L’Éducation sentimentale in five sessions to the Princess and her guests. In such a gathering, silence may have been the only option. In any case, whatever Flaubert’s motives for the ellipsis, it was eventually filled by one of this novel’s foremost admirers. I refer to Émile Zola, and to the twenty naturalist novels in the Rougon-Macquart series, which thoroughly documented the scandals and abuses of the Second Empire, though from the relative safety of the Third Republic and by taking an approach to fiction that did not live up to Flaubert’s stylistic ideal of tightly woven concision. Tolstoy, however, does bring the first Napoleon into War and Peace. When the Emperor tours the battlefield after the victory, he spots Andrey lying there and praises his bravery, but he then gives orders to continue the bombardment that is spreading panic and mayhem among the Russians. To Andrey the winning general’s words sound like the “zhuzhzhanie mukha,” “the buzzing of a fly,” an image that could serve as a subliminal reminder of what someone would certainly hear among the bodies on a battlefield had it been summer rather than early December (WP 293; III.19). The man himself seems like “a small, insignificant man” beside the “lofty, infinite sky” that has entranced Andrey. Andrey will survive, but his hero-worship of the French emperor has perished; and in his half-conscious musings about “malen’kij Napoleon” (little Napoleon), we may hear an echo of Victor Hugo’s notorious denunciation of the nephew as Napoleon le Petit, Napoleon the Little.9 If so, this would be a telling trace of the novel’s point of departure in the period following the Crimean War. But Tolstoy’s explicit target here is the celebrated uncle and the legend of imperial grandeur. This polemic would deepen when The Year 1805 morphed into War and Peace, as Andrey’s dramatized moment of new insight feeds into the longer and often-criticized expository passages that as the novel continues set forth at ever greater length Tolstoy’s quarrel with “great man” theories of history in general and with Napoleon in particular.

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Tolstoy’s possible reworking of Hugo’s polemic against Napoleon the Little to include the uncle takes us back to 1862, to the time just before he and Flaubert started to write their novels. This happened to be the same year that Hugo’s long multi-plot historical novel Les Misérables came out in France (and was so eagerly awaited that its appearance prompted a publishing delay for Flaubert’s Salammbô). It was also the year that Turgenev’s more concise and much-discussed Fathers and Sons appeared in Russia. The result, for both Flaubert and Tolstoy, was a striking dissonance in the relations among these leading French and Russian writers that, if nothing else, shows the extent to which a transnational literary space had begun to arise between the two countries. Thus Flaubert, though he was usually an admirer of Hugo, soon arrived at the judgment that Les Misérables was a “threadbare” novel, even as he realized that he could not criticize the book in public due to Hugo’s heroic stature as an enemy of the Napoleonic coup and an exile from the Second Empire.10 In this same period Tolstoy was telling a friend that he had ended his personal relations with Turgenev and could not share the Russian public’s lively interest in Fathers and Sons.11 It is unclear whether or not Flaubert’s detestation of Hugo’s novel and Tolstoy’s angry repudiation of Turgenev helped fuel their subsequent labors on L’Éducation sentimentale and War and Peace. But it is one of the ironies of literary history that Turgenev would soon become a lifelong friend of Flaubert’s, while Tolstoy would hail Hugo’s “powerful” novel, whose epic amplitude may certainly have given some encouragement to his vision for War and Peace.12 But let us not be fooled by this dissonant criss-cross in Franco–Russian literary relations. Not only does Tolstoy share something of Flaubert’s interest in grappling with temporal paradoxes, in reaching below a merely elitist vision of history, and in questioning the very possibility of meaningful continuities, but the two novelists both resist drawing the easy distinctions between hero and anti-hero, sublime epic and realistic novel, or tragedy and farce that might be applied to their works as ways to distinguish between them. Above all, they realize that, far from calling forth a commemoration of past glories, Napoleonic anniversaries should spark serious reflection on the dark underside of victory, on the disturbing kind of person who sometimes emerges in a crisis, and on the falsity of the Bonapartist vision of historical grandeur and inspired leadership.

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4

Worldliness to world literature Tolstoy between Goethe and Proust

1 Thanks to the Jane Austen boom of the past few decades, many more readers have gained some familiarity with the novel of manners as a literary subgenre, perhaps through films as much as through Austen’s books themselves. This kind of novel, by depicting worldly behavior in a society’s upper ranks, seeks to criticize that sector’s shortcomings even as it reaffirms its basic stability and values. This point has often been made, never with more authority than by Lionel Trilling in the essay “Man­ners, Morals, and the Novel,” which took Mansfield Park as its example.1 Before closing with Proust, this chapter will consider scenes in Anna Karenina and Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1808; Elective Affinities in English) that overlap with Austen’s novel,2 but which also venture beyond the social worlds typical of the novel of manners by anticipating their authors’ interests in world literature. Scenes showing a relatively early shift in Tolstoy’s orientation away from the West alone and toward wider horizons correlate with similar situations in Goethe, who started to talk about Weltliteratur [world literature] around the time of Tolstoy’s birth in 1828. The scenes in question deal with conflicts over the naïvely worldly behavior of two young members of polite society, one a Russian man, the other a German woman. To their surprise and dismay, these would-be sophisticates come up short when they meet characters who are strikingly unworldly. In Anna, Konstantin Lyovin must struggle with his unruly feelings toward a house guest, the socialite Vasenka Veslovsky, who has flirted in the fashionable French fashion with his wife. Lyovin will violate acceptable standards when he orders his guest to leave his house before he even has a chance to unpack. The parallel in Elective Affinities comes when Luciane (the brilliant daughter of Charlotte, one of four main characters) arrives for a visit and snubs Charlotte’s niece and ward, the socially less adept Ottilie. Even so, Ottilie attracts the scene’s most perceptive characters, and

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these chapters end with thought-provoking excerpts from her diary. Readers who know the crisis over home theatricals in Mansfield Park, with the worldly Crawford couple, a risqué German play favored by the even more worldly Mr. Yates, the poor relative and ward Fanny Price’s discomfort at these goings-on, and Sir Thomas Bertram’s decision to call off the play on his return from the Caribbean, will see analogies with both Tolstoy and Goethe. Although the Crawfords are more sophisticated than either Veslovsky or Luciane, the lavish plans for home entertainment and Fanny’s presence as a poor relative and ward chime with Goethe, while the play’s erotic suggestiveness and the enraged host connect with Tolstoy. Despite both novels’ favorable treatment of what their social elites would see as unworldly behavior, each episode ends up oriented toward the world in a broader sense. But now “world” no longer connotes a deferential view upward, toward the top of a nation’s social pyramid, but an inquiring view outward, toward other world cultures. This more global sense of “world” looks ahead, in Tolstoy, to his idea of “universal literature,” discussed in What is Art? (1898). With Goethe, the broader geocultural perspective anticipates his comments on world literature in the conversations recorded by his secretary Eckermann. As a result, the Veslovsky and Luciane episodes also raise an interesting issue about the relation between fiction and ideas. An intuition first surfaces among the expressive resources of novelistic prose— in what might be called an imaginative grasp of an idea—only then, after several decades, to emerge full-blown in Tolstoy’s treatise and Eckermann’s transcription of Goethe’s suggestive comments.

2 For leverage on this topic, let us begin with the links between Anna Karenina and Goethe, which are more explicit than with either Stendhal or Flaubert. In general, although Tolstoy’s view of Goethe turned quite negative following the religious crisis he experienced after completing Anna in 1878, in old age both men had similar roles in world culture. As much-admired sages, they were besieged by visitors from elsewhere even as authorities at home held them in some disfavor. This situation clearly encouraged reflections on literary transnationalism—that is, on writings that transcend boundaries of nation and language while reaching out toward a wider world. Moreover, despite negative judgments later, the younger Tolstoy admired Goethe. He strongly praised the first part of Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther; and, since he claimed to have read Goethe’s collected works three times, he must also have known Elective Affinities.3

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Traces of his admiration for Werther, especially for its main character, appear in Anna, which like Goethe’s internationally famous first novel was inspired by a suicide that fascinated the author. Early on in Vronsky’s affair with Anna, his mother welcomed the boost that this worldly liaison would give her son in high society at Petersburg, the Russian capital. Once the affair turns more serious, however, she deplores its resemblance to a “desperate Werther-like passion” (AK 174; II.18). In context this allusion strikes a stunningly false note, since its easy cosmopolitan tone overlooks the gulf between her son’s indifference to Anna’s married state and Werther’s painful paralysis after Lotte’s marriage to Albert. The real point of comparing Vronsky to Werther—for someone reading over the mother’s shoulder—is to sense the potential for a passion so desperate it might lead to suicide. Vronsky’s mother cannot envision this option, even though Vronsky will survive a botched suicide in the climactic scenes midway through Anna Karenina. By the novel’s end, however, it will be Anna who manifests extreme “Werther-like passion.” The mother’s appeal to Goethe reveals the utter inadequacy of her namedropping familiarity with Werther: the painful specifics of misery in love as merely a social faux pas. Here she differs from her author, whose tragic sense arguably outweighs Goethe’s. If Anna is the true Werther, the incipient stream-of-consciousness style with which Tolstoy describes her plunge beneath the train has great emotional intensity. The narrative point of view puts readers right with Anna during her desperate final hours. This approach contrasts with Goethe, who worried that his account might be too vivid and as a result records Werther’s last weeks from a distanced third-person perspective. Tolstoy’s immediacy is a hallmark of his realism about death, but it also shows a refusal to observe the conventions of polite society. To Ibsen’s Judge Brack, who protested Hedda Gabler’s suicide with “People don’t do such things,”4 this novel’s iconoclastic, unworldly, but empathic response is, “Yes they do, and literature should face such events head-on.” Its one named chapter, about the passing of Lyovin’s tubercular brother, bears the forthright title “Death” (AK 499; V.20). Veslovsky’s expulsion from Lyovin’s estate (AK 566–605; VI.6–15) is accompanied by another misguided reference to Goethe, this time to Faust. The episode opens when Stiva Oblonsky (Lyovin’s friend and, following Lyovin’s marriage, his brother-in-law) comes to visit with Veslovsky, a distant member of their wives’ family. This young man may be the Vaska who turned up in Betsy Tverskaya’s worldly salon (AK 298; III.18). He will reappear in the next episode (AK VI.17, 22) as a tennis-playing guest at Vronsky’s estate, whose fashionable tone and showy innovations contrast so sharply with Lyovin’s down-to-earth home. Veslovsky comes across as an

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oblivious creature of high society, habituated to what Lyovin calls a “holiday outlook on life.” With his fat thighs and irrepressible flirtatiousness, he is an innocuous youthful version of Anatole Kuragin in War and Peace, the dissolute young aristocrat who botches his courtship of Princess Mary, tries to abduct Natasha, and loses a leg at the Battle of Borodino. Faust surfaces near the end of the episode, during an overnight hunting trip. The men are bedding down in a hay barn when they hear peasant women singing; and Veslovsky, a singer himself, finds the promise of something “jolly” attractive (the Russian here is “veselo,” in a telling echo of his name). He leaves, engages in animated conversation with the women, then returns for the others. In an easy Franco-German glide, Veslovsky enthuses over one woman: “Charmante! A perfect Gretchen” (AK 590; VI.11). Stiva, shown to be a womanizer from the start of the novel, responds with gusto. But Lyovin, who has a history with peasant women but is now resolved to remain true to his marriage, pretends to be asleep. Veslovsky, like Vronsky’s mother, has alluded to Goethe to show his familiarity with Western culture, but his knowledge is even more inadequate. Thus, even as he praises the peasant’s voice and glamorizes her lower rank by associating her with Goethe’s commoner (who lived in town rather than being a peasant), Veslovsky has glossed over the moral ambiguities and tragic burden of Gretchen’s story. When Faust met her, he had become an aristocrat with the equivocal aid of Mephistopheles; but if Veslovsky’s social advantages replicate this difference in status, he senses no moral issues. Even more tellingly, his vapid “charmante” to signal sexual attraction overlooks the unwed pregnancy, the abandonment by her lover, the ostracism, and the madness, infanticide, and execution that await Gretchen because of Faust. With his characteristic carefree joyousness, Veslovsky had probably noticed an actress’s beauty and excellent voice but not her tragic role in the Gounod opera based on Goethe.5 Once again, worldliness boils down to a vague familiarity with scraps of Western culture. How these aristocrats understand Goethe mirrors the reaction to Russia by the globe-trotting Prince whom Vronsky took around Petersburg earlier in Anna. Eager for “national amusements,” this man expects to sample “trotting races, pancakes, bear-hunting, troikas, gypsies, and Russian sprees with smashing of crockery.” But even this attitude, reminiscent of a bad historical movie, yields to a still more simplified worldliness. Not at all Russian, it features “French actresses, a ballet girl, and white-seal champagne” in a Frenchified set of “Russian amusements” that would also include Veslovsky’s “charmante Gretchen.”

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3 In Anna Karenina’s Russia this loosely cosmopolitan worldliness applies to Petersburg more than to Moscow. It is associated above all with the capital city’s “high society,” which, Tolstoy wickedly adds, “clung to the court with one hand lest it should sink into the demi-monde,” a one-liner that resonates with Odette’s seven-volume ascent in Proust from adolescent prostitution to the best Parisian salons. Tolstoy distinguishes this “high-society” group, with its leisure-class interests in fashion, entertainment, and gossip, from two others, one of bureaucrats jockeying for position, the other of pious aristocrats who claim to be “the con­science of Petersburg Society.” He dramatizes the falsity of all three groups, but the duplicities of the fashionable set are the most egregious. In the Veslovsky episode these traits rise to new, almost delusional, yet also ludicrous heights, as the young man glides serenely through an array of misadventures—mismanaging Lyovin’s horses, being careless with a rifle, scaring off game, eating food intended for others. It is, however, his free-and-easy attitude toward young women that best illustrates his worldliness. By the same token, Lyovin’s discomfort with his guest reinforces the reader’s sense of this awkward hero’s unworldliness. Lyovin finally loses patience with Veslovsky after the hunting trip, when his wife Kitty is treated to a second dose of the young man’s flirtatiousness. Later, Lyovin moodily enters Veslovsky’s bedroom and tries to start the sort of polite conversation expected of a host, only to have his body language betray him. He starts fiddling nervously with a piece of wood which then snaps in his increasingly agitated hands. The gesture is meaningful since, even as it reveals Lyovin’s turmoil at having witnessed Veslovsky re-enact Vronsky’s earlier success in courting Kitty, it expresses this committed husband’s growing intimacy with his wife. Up until now she has been the one who expressed emotion in this way, most memorably when she broke her friend Varenka’s parasol during a heated discussion of vocation at the German spa (AK 234–6; II.25). Lyovin soon orders Veslovsky to leave, then sends the astonished socialite off to the station in an old cart, seated on a pile of hay. This final detail may be symbolic pay-back for Vasenka’s failure to bed down at the hay barn; while, more generally, the prosaic, unworldly realities of country life have triumphed over the savoir-faire of the capital. When Alexandra, Tolstoy’s beloved relative and a lady-in-waiting at the Russian court, wrote to the author to protest that “Veslovsky should not have been sent packing,” Tolstoy would spring to Lyovin’s defense.6 The Veslovsky episode shows Tolstoy’s skill in fashioning a carefully patterned novel-of-manners narrative. But it gains further significance

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at a quasi-autobiographical level, given that Tolstoy himself had expelled unwanted guests from his estate.7 Here Veslovsky’s visit stands out for its effectiveness in making use of simple, everyday situations to reveal unruly emotions. But what are these emotions? From a worldly viewpoint Lyovin’s insecurity at this young man’s attentiveness to his young wife might be shrugged off as an older husband’s stereotypical jealousy, and Oblonsky mentions this possible motive. But what really matters is the power of a primary attachment, specifically the orphaned Lyovin’s fear of lacking any family at all. Thus the novel has told us of his attraction to the Shcherbatskys as a family group before he fell in love with any of its members. Indeed, the playfully childlike fantasy in which he likens Kitty and her two older sisters to the three bears in the fairy-tale hides an interlingual pun that by way of English honors Tolstoy’s wife, whose maiden name was Behrs.8 Similarly, but more directly, Lyovin’s name has incorporated Tolstoy’s own first name of Lyov. These markers align Lyovin’s almost panicked moments of abandonment during this episode with Tolstoy’s own status as an orphan. Veslovsky has not only flirted with Lyovin’s wife, but in doing so during her first pregnancy has seemed to threaten family along with marriage. Equally telling is the incident where—with an effrontery verging on someone in a Dostoevsky novel—he polishes off all of Lyovin’s food. Though Lyovin later laughs at having missed his dinner, when he came back famished from a day in the woods he was so upset that he nearly dissolved into tears. Tolstoy has momentarily brought his readers into the world of Oliver Twist. In thus affirming the power of primary attachments through Lyovin’s lingering sense of orphanhood, the Veslovsky episode has bridged a major affective gap in Anna Karenina. This sixth part of the novel might otherwise have lacked narrative momentum after the emotionally charged scenes in Part Five that dealt with the death of Lyovin’s tubercular brother and Anna’s all-too-hasty reunion with her son. Similar intensities will arise in Part Seven, with the birth of Lyovin’s and Kitty’s child and Anna’s painful descent into suicide. Alongside the depths in human experience that Lyovin can feel as “holes in this ordinary life” (AK 713; VII.14), worldliness has hovered, carelessly and unfeelingly, on the surface. Eventually Lyovin will begin to grapple with another, more searching sense of world culture than a superficial familiarity with the mores of Western Europe’s social elite.

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4 In Elective Affinities, Luciane’s homecoming might seem even more digressive than Veslovsky’s visit. Consider the self-conscious way in which the novel moves into the second part of Goethe’s two-part novel. Between Part One, which focuses on the gradual but irrepressible shuffling of emotional ties among two men and women on a country estate, and the second half of Part Two, which reveals the consequences, there is a lengthy interlude. Part Two accordingly begins with the comment that the two men’s decision to depart from the estate will allow the story to turn to “some second or third and until then scarcely noticed person” (EA 117; II.1). At first meaning the estate architect, this aside applies, by Chapter Five, to Luciane and even to Ottilie herself, who despite being one of the two lead women had been much less conspicuous in Part One. Moreover, of the six chapters that end with excerpts from Ottilie’s diary, Chapter Five gives the longest and most striking selection of her thoughts. When Hillis Miller states that these excerpts sound “far less like the diary of a young girl than like the sober maxims of the aging Goethe,” he recognizes the interest they inspire.9 But he does not allow for the possibility that they reveal an otherwise unnoticed promise of Ottilie’s intellect, rather than authorial inconsistency. Thus, if one role for the Veslovsky episode within Anna was to link emotionally more powerful scenes, the Luciane episode uncovers new depths in Ottilie. Even before this chapter, Luciane has clearly viewed Ottilie as a rival. In an early scene we learn that the two young women were classmates at boarding-school, and though Luciane excels in accomplishments that promise worldly success while her cousin has struggled, Luciane could not resist taunting Ottilie. On examination day she even felt the need to dance up to her, wave her prizes in her face, and cry out, “You will always be last” (EA 38; I.5). Given this situation, Charlotte has decided that Ottilie should leave school; and once she comes to live on the estate she reveals talents in music, gardening, and household management, but lacks all interest in worldly brilliance. Ottilie’s mysterious appeal has not yet become obvious; but by Part Two, Chapter Five, when Luciane arrives with a troop of friends and admirers, Ottilie’s pre-eminence becomes unmistakable. Their rivalry now shifts to a realm that borders on art. At first, hoping to inspire a poet to write verses in her honor, Luciane sets several of his poems to music and sings them, only to find that he paid so little attention that he didn’t even recognize his own words. Instead, he has written a poem for a favorite melody of Ottilie’s. Then, at the suggestion of a Count who, as a more worldly elder, corresponds to Stiva Oblonsky vis-à-vis Veslovsky, she decides to stage a series of

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tableaux vivants, in which she and her guests will portray figures in famous paintings. The preparations are extravagant, and Luciane excludes Ottilie while ensuring that she gets to star. Yet her true motive, which is to impress the architect, backfires. For once Luciane has left, he arranges a tableau of the Nativity Scene; and, taken with Ottilie, he casts her as the Virgin Mary! How do we account for Ottilie’s capacity to outdo her more accomplished, gregarious, and worldly cousin in winning the attention, however overdone, of artist figures? Certainly a romantic yearning for the inexpressibly mysterious contributes, and at this level Ottilie recalls the haunting figure of Mignon in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. But her ability to inspire poet and architect also has an intellectual component, as shown in her diary entries which come after the narrative part of Chapter Five. These entries stand out for their aphoristic brevity, which suggests that Ottilie is indeed capable of the slower but more profound style of learning that the assistant at her school had seen in her, in contrast to Luciane’s quick but superficial mastery of knowledge. The excerpts begin with reflections on manners and worldliness, noting the limitations of the latter—“There is nothing that cannot be imposed upon society, except what matters” (EA 150; II.5). They also point to a deeper ethical meaning for manners, in terms that anticipate Trilling on manners and morals in Austen: “There is no outward sign of politeness that does not have a basis deep in morality” (EA 151; II.5). Then, when Ottilie goes on to state that “There is a politeness of the heart, akin to love” (EA 151; II.5), she gestures toward social behavior that transcends worldliness entirely. Her point becomes clearer given the polysemy of Goethe’s German word for “politeness,” which is “Höflichkeit.” The association with “Hof ” that connects this word with courtly life—an equivalent effect in English would be “courtesy”—ironically recalls Luciane’s role as “queen” of her group, as well as the fact that she heads to some small German court by the end of Chapter Five. Hers is a superficial, merely worldly form of politeness, one that does not involve the heart. To be sure, Ottilie’s awareness of this “politeness of the heart” is ambiguous, even fateful, since even as it points up a human warmth that helps account for why her unassuming presence strikes some people as so alluring while it ignites Luciane’s spite, it also accords with her deepening passion for Charlotte’s husband Eduard. This passion will ultimately prove disastrous. Near the end of her diary entries, Ottilie turns from manners to art and in so doing lays out a different vision of what “the world” might mean. Thus, when she asserts, with startling authority, that “There is no surer way of evading the world than through art, and no surer way of attaching oneself to it” (EA 152; II.5), her first use of “world” evokes the mere worldliness of polite society. But her second, pronomial reference shifts to the broader

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aspirations of great artists, ones who in seeking to reach beyond the hereand-now could be considered transnational. These broader aspirations were suggested in an earlier aphorism, which stated that “Even the greatest men are connected to the times they live in by some weakness” (EA 152; II.5). It implies, through the back door as it were, that it is in their greatness that these figures transcend their time and, by the same token, their specific place in the world, thereby becoming transnational. To support this interpretation, we should recall that Ottilie has just witnessed Luciane’s self-promoting exploitation of artworks in the tableaux vivants. Yet dubious as this involvement with paintings as a social pastime may be, it has enlarged Ottilie’s cultural horizons by acquainting her with Flemish, Dutch, and French painters whose subjects range from everyday realistic topics to those drawing on classical antiquity and the Bible (EA 147–9; II.5). Luciane has travestied the art of other nations much as Veslovsky travestied Faust; but Ottilie has started to reflect on this art from elsewhere—unlike Lyovin, who simply refused to listen to the songs of a “charmante Gretchen.” In short, despite its fragmentary state, her diary expresses an intuitive groping toward a wider outlook that is humanly and geoculturally worth more than the worldliness of her provincial society. Today, these aphorisms of Ottilie’s would seem to look ahead—as an analogous groping for broader cultural horizons, here in the visual arts—to Goethe’s equally fragmentary and elusive ideas on world literature several decades later. To be sure, Ottilie’s exposure to great artists from the recent past yields a different vision of world literature than the one often ascribed to Goethe. Though the art in question is limited to Western Europe, Ottilie’s reflections point toward a “world masterpieces” model for Weltliteratur, in contrast to recent discussions of Goethe’s ideas. With the arrival in the 1820s of what John Pizer has described as the “improved communication infrastructures, increased translation activity, and a political atmosphere in which nationalist sentiments had been temporarily exhausted,”10 Goethe highlighted cross-cultural intellectual exchange over intrinsic artistic excellence. For him, in fact, “literature” may not have had its current meaning of belleslettres, sub­divided into poetry, drama, and fiction, but instead the earlier, less specialized meaning of “lettered learning,” with room for science, philosophy, and history as well as the arts.11 This wider view accords with the disciplinary breadth of Goethe’s own interests; and rather than monumental achievements from the past, suggested by the idea of masterpiece, it emphasizes contemporary forms of discourse and an emerging global outlook.

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5 In the corresponding episode in Tolstoy, Lyovin’s dismissal of his breezily Europeanized guest looks ahead two decades to What is Art? This book’s wholesale critique of most recent Western high culture, apart from a few figures like Schiller, Dickens, or Maupassant, amounts in its own right to a summary ejection. Even as Tolstoy passes judgment on Baudelaire, Wagner, and much of what is now known as symbolism and early modernism, he also consigns almost all of his own work, including Anna Karenina itself, “to the category of bad art.”12 By portraying the social world of the Russian aristocracy in such specificity, he feels, he leaves himself open to the very critique that he levies against current fiction, that its “abundance of detail makes the stories difficult of comprehension to all who do not live within reach of the conditions described by the author.” As an alternative to this surfeit of particularity, which reveals the vast gulf between educated Russians and the recently liberated peasantry, and which in turn parallels the problems in resolving differences among national and linguistic groups, Tolstoy proposes “universal art.”13 This formula points up the paradox of a would-be man of the world like Veslovsky. His is a casual, class-bound worldliness without serious access to a deeper, more broadly human world of primary attachments and shared ordinary experience. These are things that, despite Tolstoy’s rejection of his own work in What is Art?, many readers have found expressed so compellingly in Anna, in situations like Anna’s failed reunion with her son or Lyovin’s conflicted feelings at his brother’s deathbed. For Tolstoy’s treatise on art, however, “universal” humanity is best found in situations marked by less turmoil, those involving what he calls “simple feelings of common life.” It is only in a second, higher type of good art, which he calls “religious art” or, more specifically, “Christian art,” that he allows for the more complex, even tragic feelings in Anna, such as “indignation and horror at the violation of love” (WIA 178; XVI). Two points with special relevance stand out in these formulations. The first is Tolstoy’s word for “universal,” which is “vsemirnij,” a word that, if its lexical elements are taken literally, might better be translated as “worldwide.” This choice has the virtue of aligning Tolstoy more closely with ideas of world literature, although “mir” in Russian can also have implications relating to “peace” or “community.” The second involves Tolstoy’s two-tiered scheme for literary excellence, which subordinates “worldwide” art to a religious art which he often identifies with Christianity. The result is a vision of world literature that is both less secular and less elitist than Goethe’s. However, there is the issue of how rigorously Tolstoy maintains the distinction between these forms of literary excellence. In the preceding chapter in What

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is Art?, he had proposed equally sharp divisions among individuality, clarity, and sincerity of feeling as sources for art’s power with audiences, which he called its “infectiousness.” Yet ultimately, all three criteria boil down to sincerity. Does something similar occur with his distinction between universal-worldwide and Christian-religious literature? A provisional answer comes in the final, eighth part of Anna, which serves as an epilogue. Coming immediately after Anna’s suicide, it opens with news about a Serbian and Montenegrin revolt against Turkish rule, then follows Vronsky and a trainload of volunteers traveling to assist their fellow Slavs. In Lyovin’s case, doubts about the Turkish war fuse with a personal quest for meaning throughout the entire novel. By now this post-Darwinian agnostic and student of Schopenhauer has come to recognize the importance of religion; yet at the same time, as he wonders whether the Russian Orthodox version of Christianity is enough, he begins to glimpse a broader, transnational, and even worldwide attitude. At first, with Turkey in mind along with Schopenhauer’s interest in India, he begins to think more broadly of religion, stressing moral issues: “then why was this revelation limited to the Christian Church alone? What relation to the beliefs of the Buddhists, the Mohammedans, who also confess and do good, have to that revelation?” (AK 814; VIII.18). “Mohammedan” here draws a false analogy with Christianity, showing limits to Lyovin’s intercultural knowledge; yet his aspirations for a broader, worldwide outlook are obvious. Later, near the novel’s end, he goes further, “Well, but the Jews, the Mohammedans, the Confucians, the Buddhists—what are they?” (AK 815; VIII.19) His intuitions now move both inward and outward, from Muslims nearby in the Ottoman Empire to Russia itself with Jews and Muslims as well, while in the other direction he diversifies Asia by adding China’s Confucians to the Buddhists. At this point Lyovin’s speculations break off; but the close link Tolstoy sees between the religious and the worldwide is clear. The two categories are at this point a distinction without a difference—which is not to say that Tolstoy, with his strong sense of particularity, really wishes to dissolve worldwide variety into universal uniformity. He may think this goal, but he could never realize it imaginatively, either in addressing religion or in writing fiction. As a result, the unworldliness that informed his hero’s spiritual quest has resulted in a wider, implicitly transnational outlook that seeks to come to terms with the world’s cultures in their complicated variety.

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6 Turning to Proust for more perspective on worldliness and world literature, we no longer have a direct link such as the one connecting Anna with Goethe. But, as Veslovsky’s “charmante Gretchen” shows, a Frenchified vision of worldliness frames his view of Faust. And what chronicler, analyst, and judge of French worldliness could surpass, or even equal Proust?14 Most notable are passages in the first four volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time] on the illness and death of the narrator’s grandmother and his own delayed grief. Though short compared to the novel’s elaborate social scenes, these episodes have struck many readers with their emotional power and truth. They culminate in Sodom and Gomorrah, Part II, in which, unusually for Proust, the last section of Chapter I has a title. That title is “The Intermittencies of the Heart” (SG 204),15 and the importance of the episodes involving the grandmother becomes clear once we learn that this was Proust’s working title for an early, three-volume version of the Recherche.16 Beginning with the initial “Combray” section, the grandmother Bathilde has been associated with unworldliness. Though not as eccentric as her sisters, who are famous for their overly subtle compliments, she is still the butt of jokes from his great-aunt, the enforcer of a rigid code of bourgeois behavior. Her veiled cruelty is secretly but ineffectually detested by the narrator as a boy (SW 14), though the grandmother is not hurt as seriously as he imagines. In her sensibility a romantic cult of nature far outweighs these social pressures: she loves fresh air to the point of walking in the rain, oblivious to muddied clothes (SW 12–13). Detesting formal gardens, she detaches plants from their stakes to give them a more “natural” look (SW 16). Her love of art, motivated by her desire for unworldly pleasure “elsewhere than in the satisfactions of comfort and of vanity,” (SW 53), can go to similar lengths. This unworldliness coexists with the unconditional love of a primary attachment, since the grandmother is deeply involved in the narrator’s upbringing. Indeed, she worries far more about his health and future than about social slights; and, as a second mother figure in the Recherche, she equals the narrator’s mother in importance. Yet, in typically Proustian fashion, appearances are deceiving. In a telling detail early on in the novel, the grandmother comes home exhausted from a long walk to buy books for her grandson’s birthday (SW 53). At the time her fatigue seems to show her devotion, but readers later realize that it had to be an early symptom of her last illness. In a Proustian analogue to Lyovin’s experiences with his dying brother, life-and-death issues have abruptly entered the story, but here they

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underlie an expression of parental-style love absent for Tolstoy’s orphaned hero. In the Recherche’s next volume, it is the grandmother rather than the mother who, to steady the adolescent narrator’s uncertain health, accompanies him to the seaside resort of Balbec. They have adjoining rooms, and he arranges to knock on the wall in case of emergencies or if he needs reassurance in getting used to the new room. Despite her protective role, however, the narrator is ashamed of his grandmother, who does not fit in at the Grand Hotel, which literalizes the “life as holiday” attitude Lyovin sensed in Veslovsky. Not just adolescent discomfort, this embarrassment is a symptom of the narrator’s emerging fascination with worldliness. Later, in long swathes of the Recherche, in what amounts to a vast expansion of Tolstoy’s comment on the three circles in Petersburg high society, this obsession will lead him from one Parisian salon to another, vainly questing for the pinnacle of exclusivity. The narrator fails to realize that even as his grandmother watches over his malady, she is struggling to hide her own. Here a photography incident is crucial. His grandmother wears a fancy, broad-brimmed hat for the picture, and surprises the narrator—who projects his own worldliness onto her—with her apparent vanity: “I even wondered whether I had not been mistaken in my grandmother, whether I did not put her on too lofty a pedestal” (WBG 500). He does not object openly, but does add “a few sarcastic and wounding words … with the result that, if I was obliged to see my grandmother’s magnificent hat, I succeeded at least in driving from her face that joyful expression which ought to have made me happy” (WBG 501). Only much later, in Volume four, does the truth come out. As the family’s maid Françoise explains after the grandmother’s death, while the narrator looks at the photograph, “that day the Marquis took her picture, she was very poorly, she had been taken bad twice. … And then she says to me, she says, ‘If anything happened to me, he ought to have a picture of me to keep …’ in the end she got herself up so cleverly in the big pulled-down hat that it didn’t show at all” (SG 237–8). Not worldly vanity, then, but care for her grandson’s anticipated grief had been foremost in his grandmother’s mind. These tensions between the allure of worldliness and deeper currents like parental love and the finality of death, as they mingle in the narrator’s relations with his unworldly grandmother, come to a head in two scenes from the third and fourth volumes. In the first, the grandmother’s illness has progressed to where, house-bound, she no longer enjoys the open air. Obeying a doctor’s mistaken orders, however, she does go with the narrator to a park on the Champs-Elysées. No sooner do they arrive than she has her first major attack of uremia, the same disease that caused the death of

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Proust’s mother; to recompose herself, she enters a public rest-room. The attendant, long familiar to the narrator, was believed by Françoise to have once been a marquise (WBG 88); however fantastic in fact, this supposition does fit the affectation with which this woman praises her clientele. On leaving the rest-room the grandmother can hardly speak, but, from having heard the attendant, drives the point home: “Could anything have been more typical of the Guermantes, or the Verdurins and their little clan?” (GW 423). In aping these exclusive salons, the wash-room marquise undercuts worldliness even more savagely than Tolstoy did in yoking monde and demi-monde or in imagining Veslovsky’s ignominious hay ride. Satire of worldly affectation in a French style evidently bites deepest when it comes from a cultural insider. However, whereas Proust stresses the lack of fellow feeling, the hypocrisy, and the plain nastiness of snobbery, Tolstoy chose to emphasize Veslovsky’s utter conventionality and leisure-class thoughtlessness, with sexual exploitation hovering near the surface of Vasenka’s inane “charmante Gretchen.” The narrator, in his own thoughtlessness, had lost patience with his grandmother’s delay in the rest-room, but once he realizes the gravity of her attack he rises to the occasion. On meeting a doctor known to his family, he musters quick, appropriate aid. In the process, however, the doctor’s hesitation gives him a new insight into snobbish self-importance. Though the man is befittingly sensitive and serious, he also shows a worldly, even frivolous concern for the decorations he will wear at an impending function (GW 430–2). The second episode, the aforementioned “Intermittencies of the Heart,” explores a much stronger vacillation of this kind in the narrator himself. Returning to Balbec he is given his old room; as soon as he enters he recalls, with poignant vividness, his grandmother knocking on the wall to communicate with him. “Upheaval of my entire being” (SG 210), he states in a terse phrase that clashes with the usually slow unfolding of his sentences. Unlike the banging and rapping of a spiritualist séance, which promise a posthumous presence (during Swann’s deepest access of emotion on hearing the Vinteuil sonata in the first volume, someone had foolishly remarked that she hadn’t heard “anything to beat it … since the table-turning!” [SW 501]), this moment of total silence assaults the narrator with a feeling of deathly absence. It is a very different Proustian total recall, not—like the famous madeleine incident—a joyful recovery of the past but a first true realization of loss. Oppressed by this abrupt reminder of his grandmother’s death, the narrator postpones his plans for an active social life, to suffer what amounts to a delayed mourning. At least temporarily, he has transcended narrow worldliness.

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The more mature narrator, as he looks back at his grief, sees his previous lack of feeling to be “barrenness of spirit” (SG 210), the error “of an ungrateful, selfish, cruel young man” (SG 211). Here Proust’s verdict on the narrator is harsher than Tolstoy’s on the merely episodic Veslovsky, whose selfishness is foolish and immature (though potentially corrupting and dissolute) but not actively cruel. “Intermittencies of the Heart” will end, unfortunately, with the narrator dismissing his grief and fatefully deciding to renew relations with Albertine, which begins a love affair that leads to distractions greater than his pursuit of worldliness. Still, this time of painful insight, though intermittent for him, has shown the supreme value of the heartfelt truths embodied in his grandmother, truths that will remain her enduring gift to him.

7 Goethe and Proust offer complementary perspectives on the Veslovsky episode, both by putting its response to the West into sharper focus and by connecting Anna Karenina to their own novels of manners. The Tolstoy character’s thoughtless mention of Gretchen highlights the novel’s forceful satire of superficial cosmopolitanism; this worldliness makes no serious effort to grasp the world in its human fullness. Looking past these faults to the links with Elective Affinities brings out the mystery of Ottilie’s unworldliness. As Lyovin’s female counterpart, she can appear like a fruitful alternative to her all-too-worldly environment; but she is thwarted by having so little room to maneuver. She cannot throw anyone off Eduard and Charlotte’s estate; and when she renounces the world by turning against herself (she starves to death), she may have yielded to a morbid tendency. Yet this intertextual link also underlines Tolstoy’s sensitivity to the intensely tragic currents in Goethe that Veslovsky overlooked and Goethe himself kept at some distance. The Recherche reinforces the lesson of Vronsky’s globe-trotting Prince: Tolstoy does not target French worldliness per se but an ersatz Russian variant that, with a nod to Barthes, could be called “Russo-Frenchiness.”17 Proust’s portrayal of the French original, in coming from a disillusioned insider, is more nuanced and penetrating. The “intermittencies” of his narrator, in waffling from family feeling and heart-breaking loss to worldly ambition (and later, possessive love), probe the attractions and failures of worldliness more deeply than the Veslovsky episode. Even when we turn to the corresponding conflict within Anna as a whole, the ambivalences of Proust’s narrator or his alter ego Charles Swann toward high society along with a growing sense of their wasted potential make a stronger impression than Vronsky’s and

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especially Anna’s dependence on worldly acceptance. Tolstoy’s characters never fully see how much this ingrained dependence channels their lives even as it haunts and distresses them. In drawing this conclusion, however, let us not forget the Veslovsky episode’s placement within Anna, among vivid scenes of birth and death, and of attachments both formed and broken. These scenes, in their force and directness, express the unworldly bedrock of existence with as much conviction as Proust’s more elaborate novel. In still broader perspective, this chapter has pointed up crucial ambiguities both in the novel of manners and in its tacit appeal to “worldliness” or to “the world” as benchmarks. Against the assumption that the “unworldly” should have a largely negative or even a ridiculous role in this subgenre, Goethe’s and Proust’s portrayals of Ottilie and Luciane and of the narrator and his grandmother, no less than Tolstoy’s depictions of Lyovin and Veslovsky, imply quite the opposite. It is true, as James Kincaid has contended with Trollope in mind, that such novels are “most interestingly seen as an attack on the novel of manners.”18 The implications of “world” turn out to be just as complex. Goethe and Tolstoy do concur with one key meaning the late Edward Said gave to “worldliness,”19 as a willingness to open oneself to the world’s many cultures. In their attacks on limited worldliness, both of these novels do suggest, however elliptically, the possibility for more inclusive, even global visions of world culture. This vision found fuller expression later on, in their expository calls for “world literature” or “good universal art.” For Proust, some such sense of the world at large may have come with Parisian cultural life and with writing in French, given the transnational prestige of that city and language in Casanova’s “world republic of letters.” But inclusivity for him tended less to envision wider geocultural horizons than to look out beyond a blinkered present. It led, in the Recherche’s final words, to greater depth “dans le Temps” [in time]. In none of these authors, however, does “worldly” mean what Said often saw in the word, namely a firmly secular opposition to overly idealistic, rigidly schematic, or blindly fanatical tendencies.20 On such occasions Said evidently meant contrasts between “this worldly” and “otherworldly” orientations, but in Goethe and Proust as well as in Tolstoy no such principled avoidance of otherworldly motifs exists. Think of Gretchen’s redemption at the end of Faust I, of Ottilie’s role as Mary in a Nativity Scene, or of the religious aura surrounding artistic creation and reception in Proust. It is hardly necessary to mention Lyovin’s spiritual journey in Anna, or the darkening shadows of Tolstoy’s impending religious crisis. “World” at these points still has the older, pejorative sense of John Bunyan’s “Mr. Worldly Wiseman” or Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us,” even as the novelists also envision new transnational “worlds” for literature.

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Still, their novels do not emphasize otherworldly alternatives, but focus on limits to current worldly standards. In contrast to Bunyan or Wordsworth, there is no clear, outside judgment given from the start, as a framework for what follows. Even Tolstoy’s biblical epigraph, the apparently obvious exception, stands in isolation, without the authority of “saith the Lord” or an explanation of how to apply “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.”21 As a result, characters confront the vicissitudes of life on their own, in Ottilie’s struggle with Eduard’s irrepressible desire for marriage, in the Proustian narrator’s emotional upheaval on recalling his grandmother’s knocks on the wall, or in Lyovin’s explosion of anger at Veslovsky. Only after a complex series of events saturated with experiential detail do these characters break with worldly norms. Ottilie rejects the all-too-sensible advice to accept a healing marriage, the narrator learns to grieve in the face of an impending holiday, and Lyovin tells a supposedly well-bred guest to pack up and go. In the end, unworldliness for these novels remains anchored in this world. Rather than otherworldliness, it promotes the idea of a world literature expressive of a fuller, even tragic sense of life beneath and beyond a worldly veneer.

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“Realism of the new school” as “modern fiction” Anna Karenina in English, 1900 to 1920

1 As -isms, “realism” and “modernism” have been widely used to label two distinct, even sharply contrasting ways of understanding literature, especially fiction. Thus they can signal the nature of the transition from the nineteenth- to the twentieth-century novel, or the opposition between “engaged” and “experimental” writing. Both terms are very broad and can be hard to define because, at different times and places, they have figured so often in heated debates about where literature should be heading. Witness the many avant-garde manifestos agitating for a “modernist” spirit or the Soviet Union’s stubborn promotion of “socialist realism.” More recently, the question has arisen of their applicability to world fiction, given their origin as Western trends. Yet derivative terms like “magical realism” or “post­modernism” have often been used to characterize the goals of fiction worldwide, suggesting the persistence of these benchmarks, however vague and shifting they may be. There have been many reasons for considering Anna Karenina to be a masterpiece of literary realism, even for singling it out as the outstanding example of this period or tendency in Western culture. Within the AngloRussian orbit of this chapter, one prominent reason, perhaps the decisive one, would be the Soviet Union’s official classification of Tolstoy as a “critical realist.” Another, more localized one would be the invocation of his name in the 1950s and 1960s in British dissents from modernist fiction.1 Still another would be the consensus among leading critics regarding his exemplary role in nineteenth-century fiction, which ranges (with contrasting valuations) from Henry James, who attacked Tolstoy for serving “execrably, pestilentially” as a model to conventionally realistic novelists after 1900, to Lukács, who placed Tolstoy at the pinnacle of Russian public-spirited realism.2

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Later in the twentieth century, opinions ran a gamut from the minimalist persona in a Donald Barthelme story, who scampers anxiously through an overwhelming “Tolstoy Museum,” to Harold Bloom, for whom Tolstoy epitomized the “democratic age” in an evolving Western canon.3 This chapter will examine the cross-cultural exchanges associated with two translations of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina into English from about a century ago. Both the Constance Garnett translation from 1901 and the Aylmer and Louise Maude one from 1918, which are still well respected and widely used, appeared before the contrast between realistic and modernist fiction had been firmly set. As it happens, they bracket the period in the English target culture when fiction started to question “realism” and began to experiment with “modernism,” a transition famously dated by Virginia Woolf to have happened in 1910. In the Russian source culture, meanwhile, Tolstoy had published Anna Karenina in 1878, two decades before bringing out his treatise What is Art? (1898), in which he launched stinging critiques of both realism and early modernism as they existed at the time, mainly in France and Germany. At least three decades would pass before the Soviet Union started to pigeon-hole Tolstoy as a “critical realist,” so that until then the contrast between the terms was also unsettled in the Russian context. In short, by studying the cultural vocabulary that was used to characterize Anna Karenina in the decades before Cold War literary polemics had a chance to influence the very categories of perception, this chapter will emphasize how Tolstoy was received in a transnational context outside the official Soviet canon. This is a topic that the next three chapters will also pursue in separate case studies involving twentieth-century literature. However, even as this inquiry proposes to question realism’s full applicability to Anna Karenina, it does not reject such historical-typological terms out of hand. The arguments that such terms falsify the richness of great literature, betray the uniqueness of genius, or are indefinite or unstable by their very nature have rightly shown that neither realism nor modernism should be accepted uncritically as givens. However, both terms can serve as useful benchmarks or pointers with which to survey historical developments, especially since they did play a major role in debates. To appreciate the value of the historical-typological approach in providing broad overviews, we need only recall such nuanced studies of our cultural vocabulary as Claudio Guillén’s Literature as System, Matei Calinescu’s Five Faces of Modernity, or Raymond Williams’s Keywords.4 In their spirit, this chapter will consider the semantic fields that surrounded realism and modernism, first in the British context in which the two translations of Anna Karenina first appeared, then in Tolstoy’s Russian text itself and in its handling by the translators. In situations where the sharp contrast between realism and modernism had not yet

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crystallized, what cues about these terms emerge from relevant passages, situations, and characters in Anna Karenina, and how were these cues interpreted at a time when British fiction was shifting from one of these modes of fiction to the other? By a “semantic field,” I mean a group of related words that over time coalesce to describe an emerging cultural situation. Such a field takes shape when people with influence in a given field succeed in promoting a new outlook through a mutually reinforcing set of advantages like favorable institutional settings, frequent informal contacts, and suitable venues for publication that allow them to exchange opinions, form ideas, and develop a vocabulary about a cultural topic. This process can be quite open, as in the spirited talk that occurs in Tolstoy’s novel; somewhat hesitant in British literary circles, given the constraints of tradition or public opinion; and downright prescriptive in the case of Soviet cultural policy. A further complication in this particular case would be the foreign origins of both realism and modernism as cultural terms, which led to some resistance in their use among Russian and English opinion makers alike. Overall, therefore, both with literary Londoners between 1900 and 1920 and in Russia over a longer period from 1880 to 1950, the fortune of these terms was tied to a major shift in attitudes and concepts that was in the process of crystallizing. At the outset, however, no one possessed our current language for this shift, including the sense of a sharp opposition between realism and modernism. This linguistic uncertainty and fluidity means that analysis cannot stop with specific uses of “realism” and “modernism.” Instead, allowances must be made for a wider range of words, beginning with closely related though more general terms like “reality,” “modernity,” and their derivatives. But the semantic field also includes more remote terms that anticipate or substitute for words in the “real” and “modern” families, such as “truth” or “actuality,” which can replace “real”; “innovative” or “new” which are synonyms for “modern”; or “life,” which can belong to either family depending on whether it was used to mean the “really real” or “restless vitality.” This larger group of words, which for the participants could reflect anything from a prolonged search for just the right term to a stimulating variety of proposals before the advent of a bland and overly broad stereotype, comprises the semantic field associated with the emerging contrast between realistic and modernist fiction.

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2 Before Constance Garnett and the Maudes, Anna Karenina had already started reaching the English-speaking world. Just before Matthew Arnold’s death in 1888, he had introduced Anna to British readers after reading the novel in a French translation.5 However, in an unusual situation at a time when Britain was the normal intermediary for literature translated into English, a now forgotten American version had already drawn notice in 1886. As a result Tolstoy won the praise of editor and novelist William Dean Howells, a major proponent of realistic fiction at the time.6 The Garnett and the Maude translations would follow as the first ones to appear in England. Indeed, though several new versions of Anna have appeared since World War II, these two have stayed in print and remain influential. Constance Garnett is the better known translator because (as Rachel May comments in her book on Russian fiction in English translation7) her versions of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov as well as of Tolstoy made her for decades the dominant English voice for classic nineteenth-century Russian fiction. The Maudes translated only Tolstoy; but Louise Maude was born in Russia and lived there for many years, while her husband not only lived there as an adult but got to know Tolstoy quite well during the later decades of his life. At first the Maudes concentrated on Tolstoy’s later writings, including several that met with censorship in Russia. Tolstoy himself had asked Aylmer Maude to do the English version of What is Art?, and Maude later produced the first uncensored edition of the posthumous short novel Hadji Murad (see Chapter 10), both of which were vital to Tolstoy’s interests in world literature. The first English version of the late novel Resurrection (1897) was the work of Louise Maude, and the couple also translated Tolstoy’s later short fiction, such as “Prisoner of the Caucasus” and “How Much Land Does a Man Need.” Before World War I, therefore, the Maudes were the voice of the late Tolstoy, while Garnett had established herself as the voice of his earlier career. Only in the 1920s and 1930s, when the couple collaborated on a collected edition of Tolstoy’s works for Oxford, did the Maudes produce versions of the novels already translated by Garnett. This project accounts for their undertaking a second translation of Anna, which, as revised by George Gibian, would become the basis for the widely used Norton Critical Edition of that novel. Aylmer Maude also went on to write what is still a well-regarded two-volume biography of Tolstoy.8 The Garnett and Maude translations are of special interest because their appearance coincides so closely with two milestones in the emergence of a modernist sensibility in British fiction. Thus Garnett was the wife of the

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influential editor Edward Garnett who, while she translated Anna around the turn of the twentieth century, was giving Joseph Conrad advice on Heart of Darkness. Before this short novel’s more recent notoriety in postcolonial studies, it was considered a prime exemplar of a fresh new approach to fiction, so that T. S. Eliot could see it as the breakthrough work of the modern movement.9 His poem “The Hollow Men” even features an epigraph from this work of Conrad’s, “Mistah Kurtz, he dead.” Similarly, the Maudes’ version of Anna appeared only months before Virginia Woolf ’s review “Modern Novels” came out in The Times Literary Supplement. This manifesto-like attack on contemporary best-sellers such as Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells now circulates as a landmark statement on the modern movement, with the title “Modern Fiction.”10 The review begins with a guarded appraisal of James Joyce’s Ulysses, based on early chapters that had recently appeared in The Little Review; but it concludes with strong praise for Russian fiction. Although Chekhov rather than Tolstoy is the Russian author discussed, it should be recalled that Chekhov’s career began under the strong influence of Anna, that the story Woolf discusses (“Gusev”) is quite Tolstoyan in tone, and that at that time her husband Leonard Woolf was helping to translate Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy.11 Since realism and modernism started out as foreign terms for the English as well as for the Russians (to be discussed later), their use in both cultures a century or more ago anticipates an issue that now faces world literature studies—to what extent can this cultural vocabulary be transferred to a global setting? For the English, realism had come from France, where it had figured in literary controversies since around 1850, and more recently, having mutated into naturalism, had led to what Tennyson would call the “troughs of Zolaism.” Modernism had a more varied genealogy that included Baudelaire’s art criticism, German reflections on “Die Moderne,” and religious modernism in the Roman Catholic Church.12 Woolf ’s shift in tactics in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” another manifesto-like essay on the same topic as “Modern Fiction,” reveals a certain degree of resistance to these terms. By contrasting “Edwardian” with “Georgian” novelists, she now chooses to describe the ongoing shift in fiction by invoking dynastichistorical terms that are specifically English. The close alignment between the Garnett and Maude translations and key moments in the rise of modern British fiction raises two key points that counteract received ideas about Tolstoy as a canonical realist. Far from contrasting sharply with each other, the real and the modern were once closely related, even interchangeable in meaning; and it is Tolstoy who is a leading example of this intermixture. Edward Garnett’s appreciation of Tolstoy in 1901, the same year that his wife’s translation of Anna was

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being published, could hardly be more explicit: “The realism of the great Russian’s novels is … more in line with the modern tendency and outlook than … other schools of Continental literature.”13 Here an already formulaic “realism” is considered to be integral to a “modern tendency and outlook” that has not yet hardened into an -ism, and the “great Russian” Tolstoy is the supreme example of this symbiosis. In addition, the phrase “schools of Continental literature” suggests a recognition on Garnett’s part that there is a certain foreignness in both the “real” and “modern” families of words. Woolf, almost two decades later, approaches the two terms more circuitously, yet in the end deploys them in a similar way. Thus at first, despite the emphasis on “Modern Novels” in her title, she dismisses “modern” as a term better suited to machines than art (283); and she seems to heave a resigned sigh at needing to speak “as critics are prone to do, of reality” (285). Still, when she criticizes Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells, she prefers to call them “materialists,” a maneuver which ensures that both terms in the realismmodernism semantic field stay on her side of the polemic. Thus she can say, in criticizing the materialists, that “life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off ” (285). Thus, too, she contrasts the all-toofamiliar “this” of materialist writers with the more significant “that” which marks the “tendency of the moderns” (287–8). After this ambivalent, perhaps even grudging, acceptance of the semantic field, Woolf turns to Chekhov, her prime exponent of modern fiction, whom she appears to rank above even James Joyce’s Ulysses, discussed earlier in the essay. “No one but a modern,” she affirms, “no one but a Russian” could have written a story like “Gusev” (288). Although, as she continues, the “reality” family of words is not directly mentioned, we sense its presence in the one phrase she quotes from the story. The Russian soldier Gusev is buried at sea in a sailcloth bundle, which gives his body the look of “a carrot or a radish” (288). This poignant yet utterly ordinary image of disregarded death suggests why Woolf has construed reality in a way that makes truth, spirit, and life but not materialism its synonyms. At the same time, without wanting to diminish Chekhov’s power as a writer, readers of Tolstoy will recall a similar image uniting strong feelings with the simplest of impressions. This comes from an even more famous story written four years before “Gusev”: Ivan Ilyich being relentlessly shoved into the dark, claustrophobic sack of death. Or, for a parallel from Anna Karenina eight years earlier, there is the tubercular cough of Lyovin’s visiting brother, sleeping with him in the same room, and with this abrupt reminder of mortality throwing Lyovin’s plans for the future into turmoil. Thus, though Tolstoy remains unmentioned in this passage—elsewhere, though, she does call him “the greatest of all novelists”14—the blunt Chekhovian image that she quotes is clearly Tolstoyan

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in force. Yet along with the ability to dispense with narrative conventions like plot or romantic love-interest that she mentions as typically modern in her review, this everyday reality of carrots, radishes, sacks, and coughs together with the visceral associations that they generate as images—as distinguished from the materialism of up-to-date machinery—marks the very modernity that Woolf ascribes to the Russians. As with Edward Garnett, therefore, but with a deepening of tension in the linguistic waters, the real and the modern have come together in Woolf ’s presentation of Russian fiction, as personified by Chekhov but with Tolstoy as a major precursor in the background.

3 Woolf ’s famous review reveals complexities in the semantic field that was emerging in literary London during the formative period for AngloAmerican modernism. Less explicitly but still to a noticeable extent, a similar semantic field was already making itself felt in Russia when Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina. What forms does the opposition between realism and modernism take in this novel, and how do Garnett and the Maudes respond to the modernist option and to the assumptions embedded in it? But first we need to review the places of “realizm” and “modernizm” in the Russian language. Both terms must initially have seemed even more foreign to Russians than to their counterparts in English. As a result, almost eighty years after Anna Karenina, each one earned entries in the Lyokhin/Petrov Dictionary of Foreign Words, with results that can be followed in Table 5.1. Beyond identifying them as imports, however, this dictionary’s heavily Stalinized 1955 edition treats the two terms as opposites. Realism by this later date gives the impression of having been fully assimilated into the Soviet cultural vocabulary, due to the heavy promotion of “socialist realism” since the 1930s. The term is also unequivocally positive, since, as the dictionary puts it, “the greatest geniuses of literature and art were realists.” The related entry on “real’nost’,” or “reality,” suggests that the equivalent homegrown term would be “dejstvitel’nost’,” an elaboration on the common noun “dejstvie” or “act.” Modernism, by contrast, seems irreducibly alien. The dictionary provides a cross-reference to “modern,” an entry that (due perhaps to a sense of its extreme foreignness or even to strictures on what might be said about a controversial word after decades of polemics) hastens in turn to provide a gloss right away, in the word-derivation part of the entry. “Modern,” we are told, is an equivalent for “noveishij” (the superlative form of the adjective for “new”) or “sovremennyj” (a Russian calque on the Latin and then the

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Western word “contemporary”). There exists a parallel to the first of these synonyms in English usage, since Pound’s “Make it new” is still a modernist slogan.15 But the second is quite distinct in its implications, given Stephen Spender’s contrast, in The Struggle of the Modern, between the startling innovations of the truly modern writers and the works of those more conventional figures he proposes to call “contemporaries.” The latter turn out to be none other than Woolf ’s three materialists, Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells, with Shaw added for good measure.16 In Russian, however, it is “modern,” rather than “contemporary,” that has pejorative overtones, given its definition as a “reactionary, decadent current in bourgeois art.” Thus, though Russian does have terms that are directly related to “real” and “modern,” they ended up being more sharply polarized than was the case in English at the time of Garnett and the Maudes. More usefully (and objectively), the dictionary gives native equivalents for these terms, with words like “dejstvitel’nost’,” “noveishij,” and “sovremennyj”—or, roughly speaking, words that might be rendered into English as “actuality,” “newest” or “really new,” and “contemporary.” Of course, Anna Karenina is concerned with far more than cultural labels. Still, in a novel that startles most fiction readers with the wide range of issues it addresses, this topic does come up. Thus the hero Lyovin’s half-brother, Koznyshev, is described as a writer active in “the philosophical-historical realm” (AK 247; III.3); and in this spirit, when Anna closes with the possibility of greater military conflict in the Balkans, then largely under Ottoman rule, he proclaims how “the liberated forty millions of the Slavic world, together with Russia, were to start a new epoch in history” (AK 813; VIII.18). The historical-typological category proposed here is pan-Slavic rather than more broadly cross-cultural or transnational; and Lyovin’s own feelings about his half-brother’s ideas are shown to be mixed. Lyovin’s attitude led to Tolstoy’s difficulty in getting this final installment of the novel published, when Mikhail Katkov, editor of The Russian Messenger which was serializing Anna, raised objections. Nonetheless, issues of historical transition and periodization have clearly entered the novel as a topic of direct reflection. Along the same historical-typological lines, but in a spirit more open to the West, Anna shows the extent to which “realism” had entered the Russian cultural lexicon by the 1870s. In the scene often read as commentary on Tolstoy’s art that was discussed from another angle in Chapter 1, Anna and her lover Vronsky visit the Russian painter Mikhailov. Their guide, the art historian Golenishchev, categorizes the artist’s style in terms of the “realism of the New School” (AK 467; V.9),17 where his language balancing the “real” and the “innovative” closely anticipates Edward Garnett’s tribute to Tolstoy a quarter of a century later in Britain. In fact, despite Lyovin’s expressed

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dislike for technical words from non-Russian sources (AK 350; III.32), he too will refer to realism in another key scene, the one where he and Anna meet face-to-face for the only time in the novel. Lyovin has just had a chance to see Mikhailov’s painting, which is hung in Anna’s reception room, then starts a lively conversation with Anna by remarking that current French art “attributed special merit to a return to realism” (AK 698; VII.10).18 This knowing comment about Western culture at first deepens the intimacy between the novel’s two most important characters, but soon thereafter Kitty’s jealousy leads Lyovin to regret having even visited Anna. If the sympathy ignited by this art talk has momentarily united the two halves of the novel’s double plot, the good feeling which Anna and Lyovin have for each other turns out to have been fleeting. As opposed to “realizm,” “dejstvitel’nost’” and other words that share this root, along with an equally “Russian” adjective like “nastoiashchii” (which can translate into English as “real”) appear quite often in Anna. They sometimes do so in contexts that put some distance between Tolstoy and any formulaic or purely documentary notions of realism. In general, the novel follows a “lost illusions” model of realistic writing, which shows how a character’s expectations or imaginings dissolve after having experiences that reveal how different the reality actually is. Thus Anna, after her return from Moscow at the start of the novel, can have “a feeling akin to disappointment” on reuniting with her son, because she finds that “she had imagined him better than he was in reality” [v dejstvitel’nosti] (AK 107; I.32). But in Lyovin’s meeting with Anna, this kind of realism acquires a more modern, metafictional twist. When he actually sees Anna after viewing her portrait, he notices that “She was less dazzling in reality [v dejstvitel’nosti] but in the living woman there was some new attractiveness that was not in the portrait” (AK 697; VII.9). Here again this portrait that may itself be called “Anna Karenina” invites being seen as a metaphor for the novel. The shift in Lyovin’s perceptions on seeing Anna herself suggests that reality in its own right surpasses its representation within Anna Karenina just as Anna’s personal presence has outdone the portrait of her that has just been associated with realism. This fuller sense of reality occurs not because Anna possesses exceptional glamor (which has been conveyed by the portrait despite its realism) but by her actual presence during an ordinary social call. Here French “realism” conflicts directly with Russian “dejstvitel’nost’.” By analogy even the richness of reality in the novel, which Tolstoy communicates so vividly, must also simplify the greater richness and complexity of reality itself. This represented reality must also allow for the limits of human perception. These limits become manifest especially at moments of birth

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Table 5.1  Modernism and realism in Russian usage From the Lyokhin and Petrov Slovar’ Instrannykh Slov (Dictionary of Foreign Words, 1955 Edition) Modernizm [ French, “modernism” ]—1) the same as “modern”; 2) Catholic M.—one of the reactionary currents of contemporary religiousidealistic philosophy, advocating a renewal of Catholic dogma in the spirit of the newest (novejshikh) inventions of bourgeois philosophy in the epoch of imperialism. Modern [< French “modern” novejshij, sovremennyj ]—reactionary, decadent current in bourgeois art (mainly in architecture and the applied arts) at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. Realizm [< Medieval Latin “realis” veshchestvennyj (substantiality) >—1) tendency in literature and art, with the task of giving the fullest, truest picture of reality (dejstvitel’nost’); r. demands the imitation of typical characters in typical situations. The greatest geniuses of literature and art were realists. Mainly characteristic of the leading art and literature of the past is “critical realism,” that is, a deeply truthful reflection of life, uncovering the irresolvable contradictions of the bourgeois-landowner class; “socialist realism”—the new, higher stage in the historical development of realism, based on an assertion of the socialist social system,—the basic method of Soviet artistic literature, visual art, literary and art criticism; socialist realism demands of the artist a true, historically concrete portrayal of reality (dejstvitel’nost’) in its revolutionary development. Also, the truth and historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality must be combined with the task of furthering the communist education of the workers. Real’nyj [