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Tolstoy and the English Novel: A Note on Middlemarch and Anna Karenina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Edwina Jannie Blumberg
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In the famous train ride scene of Anna Karenina, Anna reads “an English novel” and imagines herself the heroine—caring for a sick man, making speeches in Parliament, and riding to hounds (1:29). That she is reading about other people distresses her, because she wants to do all these things herself. She envisions herself joining “the hero of the novel [who] was about to attain the English notion of happiness—a baronetcy and an estate.” The English novel traditionally conveys a sense of orderliness, propriety, and happiness in marriage and home, and if we judge from appearances, Anna's daydreams of English happiness find fulfillment at Vozdvizhenskoe. There is a deliberate accumulation of things English on Vronsky's estate, as if these outward trappings might assure stability and well-being. When first we see Anna on the estate she is riding a “kob” (both the horse and the word are borrowed from the English). Vronsky has a racing stable and stud farm, and keeps an English trainer and jockey in his employ; his horses are clipped short in the English fashion. The nursery furnishings are all imported from England, including the head nurse.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , September 1971 , pp. 561 - 569
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1971

References

1. The edition of Anna Karenina used is Tolstoy, L. N., Sobranie sochinenii v dvadtsati tomakh, vols. 8 and 9 (Moscow, 1963)Google Scholar. References are to part and chapter.

2. Cecil, Lord David in Early Victorian Novelists (London, 1948), p. 288 Google Scholar, has written of the English novel prior to George Eliot, “The English novel in its first period consisted of a number of characters and incidents knit together by an intrigue centering around a young ‘attractive’ hero and heroine and rounded off with their happy marriage.“

3. Tolstoy's library, letters, and late writings, however, reveal his considerable interest in the novels of Eliot, George. An often-cited letter, Tolstoy's famous book list (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Leningrad and Moscow, 1928-58], 66: 67–68 Google Scholar), indicates that the novels of George Eliot were of greatest significance to him between the ages of thirty-five and fifty (1863-78). Tolstoy's library at Iasnaia Poliana supports this remark (PSS, 54: 423). Among Tolstoy's collection are Adam Bede (1859), Felix Holt the Radical (1867), Romola (1863), Mill on the Floss (1860), and Middlemarch (1872-74). The first three of these novels contain marginal comments by Tolstoy. All but Middlemarch are in English, a part of the Collection of British Authors series by the prominent Leipzig publisher, C. B. von Tauchnitz. Middlemarch, a Berlin edition, is probably in German, (The only Berlin edition of Middlemarch which at all correlates with the dates given by PSS is a German translation by E. Lehmann dated 1872-73.) Quite possibly Tolstoy was also familiar with Eliot in Russian translation, since her novels were held in high regard in Russia at this time and were translated almost as soon as they appeared in England. Adam Bede, for example, appeared in both Russkii vestnik and Otechestvennye sapiski in 1859, Mill on the Floss in Ot. sap. in 1860, and Middlemarch in Ot. sap. in January-June 1872, January-April 1873, and June-August 1873. During the mid-1880s Tolstoy reread George Eliot; letters of the period indicate his interest in having her novels translated (PSS, 83: 477, 64: 29, 85: 189). Subsequently the publishing house Posrednik was formed to pursue Tolstoy's interest in printing simplified, inexpensive editions of the classics. George Eliot was among the authors published, and Tolstoy's niece, Vera Sergeevna, translated for Posrednik Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner. During the last ten years of Tolstoy's life his interest in Eliot was again manifested in print. In Krug chtemia and similar compendia he included a number of quotations from her work—all of an abstract, didactic character (PSS, 41: 49, 162, 491).

4. Such a confusion considerably weakens the argument of W. Gareth Jones's study, “George Eliot's Adam Bede and Tolstoy's Conception of Anna Karenina,” Modern Language Review, 61, no. 2 (July 1966), pp. 473-81. In an otherwise interesting paper Mr. Jones concludes, primarily on the basis of similarities in hair style and facial gesture, that “the prototype for Anna Karenina is Hetty Sorrel.” The conclusion is wholly insupportable considering the evidence offered. An examination of hair styles, facial gestures, and attire in Adam Bede, Middlemarch, and Anna Karenina shows a high correlation between simplicity and modesty of demeanor and hair style with virtuous women, while elaborate or especially appealing attire and coiffures are associated with attractive, sensual, coquettish women. What is operative is simply the use of hair and appearance as an archetypal symbol of womanliness and sexuality or the lack of it. In defense of Mr. Jones's association of Hetty Sorrel and Anna Karenina, perhaps the similarities in the climactic delirious journeys experienced by Hetty and Anna just before their attempted and actual suicides might provide evidence of Tolstoy's borrowing from Hetty to Anna.

5. The novels do overlap in several broad thematic areas—the treatment of agricultural and political reforms, political elections, the social etiquette and obligations of the landowning class, and the changing status of women in society. To these areas of shared experience in the novel must be added the fashionableness of things English in Russia at the time—horse racing, yachting, the English clubs, English hired help, and English inventions. All of these phenomena find expression in Anna Karenina. In Middlemarch and Anna Karenina, then, there is a record of the process of political and social evolution— which in itself provides a source for much that is common in the novels.

6. I have discussed this in my unpublished M.A. essay (Columbia University, 1968), “The Ideal Woman in Tolstoy,” pp. 47-50.

7. The edition of Middlemarch used is Novels of George Eliot, vols. 5-7 (New York, 1878). References are to chapters.

8. Walter, Allen, George Eliot (New York, 1964), p. 1964 Google Scholar