‘She too much wanted to live’: On Anna Karenina, Tokyo ‘23
In January 1872, Anna Stepanova Pigorovna threw herself under a train.
She had been cast off by her lover, in favour of a relationship with his children’s governess. The mangled corpse was taken to a railway shed not far from where Count Leo Tolstoy lived in the remote Russian village of Yasnaya Polyana. Partly because of his status as a landowner and partly because of his own morbid curiosity, he went to look at the mutilated corpse. Biographers often remark how profoundly upsetting Tolstoy found this sight (although few question why he wanted to expose himself to it). Was it because of his own suicidal tendencies? His disenchantment with his own marriage and relationships between men and women per se? A pervading sense of writer’s block? Either way within a year he had begun writing a novel about a woman called Anna, who, spurned by a lover, throws herself under five hundred and fifty tonnes of metal travelling at nearly a hundred miles per hour.
Even though I knew it was coming*, Anna’s brutal suicide haunted me for days. Her thoughts as she hit the tracks, her self awareness until the last. But I didn’t think very much about the method. Sadly, if you live in London, you are aware of people throwing themselves under trains quite regularly - an average of 64 a year. But for Tolstoy’s first readership, the suicide itself wasn’t particularly noteworthy. In Russia in the 1870s, Dostoevsky wrote about the large number of people committing suicide for no apparent reason. Contemporary newspapers carried daily stories of suicides unexplained and inexplicable. Pobodenotsev remarked “never was there a time where the human soul was valued at so low a price”. It was the fact that she’d killed herself with a train that was that was the new and shocking thing.
The railway to Tolstoy’s part of Russia was brand new. By the middle of the 1850s there were only seven hundred and fifty miles of track in the whole of the Russian Empire, (the lowest of any country in Europe). By the time of Anna Pigorovna’s suicide, there was fourteen thousand miles of track. This huge boom in railway building had made unimaginable distances traversable in days. Moscow to St Petersburg would have taken a minimum of five days before the advent of steam trains, by 1872 is took just eighteen hours.
For Tolstoy, even before seeing Anna Pigorovna’s body, darkness and foreboding was built in to the idea of the railways. Novelists all over Europe - including Charles Dickens (hugely admired by Tolstoy) - described forests being torn down for wood to be burned in diabolical furnaces, villages being destroyed as planners drew straight lines across endless miles of wild countryside, coal being hewn out of the earth, the deaths of tens of thousands of men press-ganged in to laying the countless miles of railway lines all in the name of progress. Goods and people being propelled around Russia at dizzying speeds. Fresh Oysters being eaten by the gentry in Moscow, three thousand miles from the sea, while men worked in inhumane conditions to get them there. No-one knew where modernity would end. Speeches were made by priests, worried that immediate social networks would break down in the face of people’s ability to be in different places very quickly.
This was a society not a million miles away from our own. Information travelling at dizzying speeds, the fabric of society being torn apart and environmental destruction, leading to huge social and political upheaval. A new technology being unleashed without a sense of the full scope of its power for good or ill. Modernity, when it arrived, was touted as emancipatory** but it didn’t solve the problems of the human condition. This linked to a general sense of powerlessness. And a suicide epidemic***.
When the first part of Anna Karenina was published in 1877, Russia was just twenty eight years from the first of its bloody revolutions. A great civilisation and social order that was once thought eternal would lie in ruins. Before his eyes, Tolstoy saw his generation of wealthy, powerful people dance off the edge of the earth in to oblivion.
Towards the conclusion of his novel Tolstoy writes of Anna,
“She too much wanted to live****. When she read the heroine of the novel looked after a sick man, she herself wanted to move about the sickroom with noiseless footsteps, when she read how a member of parliament had made a speech she wanted to have made the speech herself; when she reads how Lady Mary rode to her hounds or teased sister-in-law, or amazed everyone by her bravery she wanted to do it herself. But there was nothing to do, and while her little hands played with the smooth paper knife, she continued to read”.
Anna wants to live too much. She, like us, is envious of the shallow but dazzling reflections of other people’s lives. And as a result is horrified by her own failure. Unable to reconcile the conflict between her own imagination and multitude of roles that life has demanded of her (particularly as a woman). Tolstoy has looked at the body of his suicide and unflinchingly asked himself why it has come to this, and what does the mutilated body of this woman say about the way in which we live?
What is the point of it all, he thought? So Lev Tolstoy inserted himself in to the novel in the character of Levin. A sceptic who wants to believe in God but can’t. Who, despite this pervading sense of meaninglessness, wants to find a way of living and making it all bearable. Oscillating between Anna’s growing despair in trying to find a new way to live, and Levin’s messier attempts to find meaning in a simpler way of life within existing structures, (imagining his way in to both souls with astounding 4K clarity), Tolstoy offers us a knotty and imperfect route through. In laughter and in tears. In hope and in despair.
In the closing moments of the novel, Levin says to his wife Kitty, under the stars in spring, with quiet uncertain hope, that life does have meaning. In the face of a world on the edge looking in to an abyss, it has
“The total and unquestionable meaning of the good that is in our power to put in to it”.
What do our own contemporary Annas teach us? And how, in spite of it all, are we going to live? What world do want to bequeath to our children? The children who watch every move we make and absorb every emotion?
Countless film and theatre adaptations of Anna Karenina have tried to offer us a definitive reason for Anna’s suicide. Tolstoy does not. I’m not even convinced that it’s a love story for Anna, as many have told me it is - for her the romance seems to me to stop after Book 2. It’s the 600 pages of mess that happens afterwards that seems to fascinate him. The novel is full of people, places and things being themselves vividly and chaotically, brutally bashing in to each other, people, sky, children, trains, dogs, rocks, earth and water. For him it is the fact and the force of our life that is the most interesting thing about us. In the face of the chaos, Tolstoy is drawn to nihilism, to the darkest abyss, drawn to the railway shed to view tragic Anna’s body. But somehow the impulse of his art, is to try - desperately - to recapture life from that darkness.
PB
* - The one thing EVERYONE knows about Anna Karenina
**- It was for some. Mainly the people who owned the trains and the rails.
*** - In the UK in 2022 (according to the UK Office for National Statistics) there were 5,092 suicides. In Japan in 2022 (according to Statista) there were 21,881 suicides.
**** - My italics.
© Phillip Breen