In his History of Russian Literature, D.S. Mirsky credits Tolstoy's marriage, in 1862, a couple of years before he undertook the composition of War and Peace, with the sudden transformation of his female characters into complex, full-bodied beings. "There can be no doubt," writes Mirsky, "that it was his increased knowledge of feminine nature, due to marriage, that enabled Tolstoy to annex this new province of psychological experience." It isn't clear to me how intimacy with "feminine nature" could have such an effect. His wife was only a single template, and there is tension, if not a contradiction, between the concept of "feminine nature" and the copiously detailed, God's-plenty procession of humanity that, in the mainstream of Tolstoy criticism, is the chief glory of his achievement.
The difficulty might be resolved by adopting the grand view of Tolstoy's greatness while quibbling over details, biographical and otherwise, that may or may not account for some aspect of his genius. But suppose one rejects the grand view in order to emphasize contrary details? Is it really such a stretch to suggest that his female characters seem less like "people we know" and more like idealized "types"? Perhaps my experience is limited but I do not know a single woman who reminds me of Natasha or her long-suffering cousin Sonia. Princess Mary comes to War and Peace by way of the template for homely, pious girls who, without scheming, win a good man--a fairy tale. Possibly I am the only reader of Anna Karenina annoyed by the ceaseless application to Kitty Scherbatskaya of such phrases as "dovelike purity," "her loving, truthful face," "the expression on her sweet face," "the same look of innocent truthfulness," and so on. When Kitty is going into labor, Tolstoy writes:
"Nothing," she said, coming from behind the partition with a lighted candle in her hand. "I didn't feel well," she added, with a particularly sweet and meaning smile.
That Tolstoy found it necessary to write "particularly" may persuade skeptics that I am not exaggerating. The relentless accumulation of sweet and meaning smiles and dear truthful looks cannot delineate a human being. What is delineated?
It was only afterward that he remembered that bated breath and realized what was going on in her dear, sweet soul when, while lying motionless at his side, she was awaiting the greatest moment in a woman's life.
An absurdly idealized abstraction of what Mirsky, in his mode of earnest praise, calls "feminine nature."
Around a hundred pages before Kitty goes into labor her sister, Dolly, is traveling by coach to visit Anna. Removed for a few hours from her household teeming with young children, she examines her life from every side and finds that her thoughts are "strange to her." Views such as those narrated as the midwife is summoned at the Levin home are subjected to withering scrutiny. The travail of childbirth, reflects Dolly, is not the real curse of Eve. It's the torture of pregnancy, the disfigurement, and the sore nipples. And in the end what is it all for? Her thoughts are colored by the death of her last baby, a boy who had died of croup. Those that survive, she predicts with cold realism, will be "unfortunate, badly brought-up and beggared children." The best that can be hoped for is that they will avoid being ne'er-do-wells. For this outcome, she is spending her life either pregnant or nursing, nipples sore, body disfigured, never a moment to think her own thoughts, a torment to others, including her carousing husband, who is repulsed by her. This sets off a reverie about an affair and a "new life." She wonders whether it is still possible, whether her looks are gone, and feels inclined to study herself in a small mirror she carries in her handbag. But, afraid she might look ridiculous should the coachman by chance turn his head, she represses the impulse, and the coach soon arrives at its destination.
I said in my last post that the later of the "paired scenes" seemed always superior. I should have said that it is the scene in a less major key. In Anna Karenina the finest things happen when the principals--Anna and Vronsky, Levin and Kitty--are off the stage. The unproposed proposal on the mushroom hunt and Dolly's travel thoughts are just two examples. The grand tapestry of the main story works mainly to bring out the details.
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