ANNA KARENINA
LEO TOLSTOI
There are a few great works, both in art and literature, which impress us not so much by their beauty as by their compelling power. No one can listen to the “Ring of the Nibelungs” without feeling the hand of a master in the creation of the harmonies it contains. No one can look on the figures painted by Michael Angelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel without a sense of awe in the presence of forms of such majesty and power. The nameless bronze by St. Gaudens, known as the Adams Monument, in the Rock Creek Cemetery at Washington will impose silence upon a chattering group of visitors the moment they enter the enclosure of evergreens that surrounds it. The rage of Othello and the horror of Macbeth make us shudder whether we will or no. Dante has the same commanding power over his readers.
Among the writers of fiction there is none who impress us in this way more profoundly than Tolstoi. His novels are often quite formless. There is no carefully developed plot, as with Scott or Wilkie Collins. The characters are by no means so strongly marked, they are neither so admirable nor so detestable as those of Dickens or of Victor Hugo. There is little humor in the narrative. The conversation is seldom brilliant, and is sometimes tedious. The style has no ornamentation, yet its very simplicity commands, and while we read we feel that we are in the hands of a master.
Probably no one since Shakespeare has had the power of penetrating the springs of human thought and action more accurately than Tolstoi. He startles us with revelations of traits in our own character which we have never realized, or instants in our own lives which we have never recalled before and which we recognize at once when we see them upon his pages, so that at every turn we exclaim, “How true that is! I have known that myself!” He is the greatest of all realists—not a mere photographer, for the photographer reproduces the insignificant and the unessential. Tolstoi gives us no long preliminary descriptions of persons or things, such as we find in Balzac or Walter Scott, but the really suggestive fact or trait appears at the right moment and gives a vividness and reality to the picture which no detailed account could ever convey.
A mother is teaching her son. “The boy was reading aloud, but at the same time twisting and trying to pull from his vest a button that was hanging loose. His mother had many times reproved him, but the plump little hand kept returning to the button. At last she had to take the button off and put it in her pocket. ‘Keep your hands still, Grisha,’ said she, and again took up the bedquilt on which she had long been at work and which always came handy at trying moments. She worked nervously, jerking her fingers and counting the stitches.”
In another place a father is instructing his child. “The lesson consisted of a recitation of several verses of the Gospel and the review of the first part of the Old Testament. The lesson went fairly well, but suddenly the boy was struck by the appearance of his father’s forehead, which made almost a right angle near the temples, and he gave the end of the verses entirely wrong. The father concluded he did not understand what he was reciting and was vexed.”
The leader in a ball room pays a compliment to his partner. “‘It is restful to dance with you,’ said he, as he fell into the slow measures of the waltz. ‘Charming! Such lightness! such precision!’ This is what he said to almost all his dancing acquaintances.”
These slight touches give a better idea of what takes place than many words. The descriptions, as we have observed, are few and brief, but how graphic are they in their simple statements!
The visit of Levin, the country proprietor, to his stable to see a cow which has just calved is thus narrated. “Crossing the courtyard, where the snow was heaped under the lilac bushes, he stepped up to the stable. As he opened the door, which creaked on its frosty hinges, he was met by the warm, penetrating breath from the stalls, and the cattle, astonished at the unwonted light of the lantern, turned around from their beds of fresh straw. The shiny black and white face of his Holland cow gleamed in the obscurity. Berkut, the bull, with a ring in his nose, tried to get to his feet but changed his mind and only snorted when they approached his stanchion. The beautiful Pava, huge as a hippopotamus, was lying near her calf, snuffing at it and protecting it with her back as with a rampart from those who would come too close.
“Levin entered the stall, examined Pava, and lifted the calf, spotted with red and white, on its long, awkward legs. Pava bellowed with anxiety, but was reassured when the calf was restored to her and began to lick it with her rough tongue. The calf hid its nose under its mother’s side and frisked its tail.”