Masterpieces of the masters of fiction

by William Dudley Foulke

No one has ever described the coming of Spring more vividly yet more simply than Tolstoi. “It snowed on Easter Sunday. Then suddenly on the following day a south wind blew up, the clouds drifted over, and for three days and three nights a warm and heavy rain fell ceaselessly. On Thursday the wind went down, and then over the earth was spread a thick gray mist, as if to conceal the mysteries that were accomplishing in nature: the ice in every direction was melting and disappearing; the rivers overflowed their banks; the brooks came tumbling down with foamy, muddy waters. Towards evening the Red hill began to show through the fog, the clouds drifted away like white sheep, and Spring in reality was there in all her brilliancy. Next morning a bright sun melted away the thin scales of ice which still remained, and the warm atmosphere grew moist with the vapors rising from the earth. The dry grass immediately took a greenish tint, and the young blades began to peep from the sod like millions of tiny needles. The buds on the birch trees, the gooseberry bushes, and the snow-ball trees swelled with sap, and around their branches swarms of honey bees buzzed in the sun. Invisible larks sent forth their songs of joy to see the prairies free from snow. The lapwings seemed to mourn their marshes, submerged by the stormy waters. The wild swans and geese flew high in the air, with their calls of spring. The cows, with rough hair and places worn bare by the stanchions, lowed as they left their stalls. Around the heavy, flossy sheep gambolled awkwardly the young lambs. Children ran barefoot over wet paths, where their footprints were left like fossils. The peasant women gossiped gaily around the edge of the pond where they were bleaching their linen. From all sides resounded the axes of the peasants, repairing their plows and their wagons. Spring had really come.”

The shattering of an ideal by a single word of disparagement is thus shown when a young girl hears from her father that the pious Madame Stahl, whom she had idolized, kept her bed because one leg was shorter than the other and she did not wish it noticed. “Her ideal of holiness, as seen in Madame Stahl, which she had for a whole month carried in her soul, had irrevocably disappeared, as a face seen in a garment thrown down by chance disappears when one really sees how the garment is lying. She retained only the image of a lame woman who stayed in bed to conceal her deformity, and who tormented poor Varenka because her plaid was not arranged to suit her, and it became impossible for her imagination to bring back to her the remembrance of the former Madame Stahl.”

How could domestic discomfort be better pictured than when a mother, with her six children, arrives at her country home and undergoes the following tribulations:

“The roof was leaking, the water dripped in the corridor and the nursery, and the little beds had to be brought down into the parlor. It was impossible to find a cook. Among the nine cows in the barn, according to the dairy-woman’s report, some were going to calve and the rest were either too young or too old, and consequently they could not have butter, or even milk for the children. Not an egg was to be had; it was impossible to find a hen. They had for roasting or broiling one tough old purple rooster. No women were to be found to do the washing; all were at work in the fields. They could not drive because one of the horses was balky and would not be harnessed. They had to give up bathing because the bank of the river had been trodden into a quagmire by the cattle, and, moreover, it was too conspicuous.... Walking near the house was not pleasant because the tumble-down fences let the cattle into the garden and there was in the herd a terrible bull that bellowed and was reported to be ugly. In the house there was not a clothes-press. The closet doors either would not shut or flew open when any one passed. In the kitchen there were no pots or kettles; in the laundry there were no tubs, nor even any scrubbing-boards for the girls.”

Nowhere, perhaps, in all literature, is a hunting expedition so graphically described as in the account of the party that set forth from Levin’s. The feelings of the hunters and of the dogs themselves are given with quiet but convincing realism.

It may be doubted whether some of Tolstoi’s shorter works are not more artistic productions than either of his two long novels. To take the single instance of a rather commonplace official who falls ill and dies and to make out of it the terrible tragedy of “Ivan Ilytch” requires, perhaps, even higher powers than to give such variegated pictures of life as appear in “War and Peace” or in “Anna Karenina.” Yet the latter novel, being many-sided and comprehensive, is perhaps his most representative, as it is certainly his best known work, and it must justly be ranked as among the very foremost of the masterpieces of fiction.

The book opens with an account of the confusion in the house of the Oblonskys when the easy-going and good-tempered Prince Stepan is detected by his wife Dolly in an intrigue with the French governess, and whose “stupid smile” when confronted with the letter that betrays him, “causes the whole trouble.” The Prince can not really repent and persuade himself that he loves his wife, whose charms have faded; he regrets only that he had not hid the thing more adroitly, and his sister Anna is called from Petersburg to Moscow to secure a reconciliation. Although he was entirely wrong, almost every one in the house was on his side, except his little girl, who knew only that there was trouble and that her mother was unhappy and who blushed for her father when he asked her so lightly after her mother’s welfare, until he too blushed when he perceived it. About the same time Levin, the country proprietor, also comes to Moscow to woo Kitty, the younger sister of the unfortunate wife. He had fallen in love successively with each of the daughters of the house, but his affection was now centered on the youngest, whom he deemed a creature so accomplished that he scarcely dared aspire to her hand. They had been old friends for many years, but Kitty had then another admirer, one Vronsky, a brilliant young officer, to whom at the moment her preference was given and Levin’s blunt offer was rejected. But Vronsky, who had gone to the railway station to meet his mother (whom he did not love and to whom for that very reason he was all the more conventionally considerate) found her in company with Anna Karenina, who had come to Moscow to compose Dolly’s troubles with her husband. Anna is the beautiful and accomplished wife of Karenin, an estimable but matter-of-fact Russian official, greatly her senior in age, who was making for himself an enviable career in the public service. At the station and afterwards at a ball Anna meets the young officer, and the two instantly fall in love with each other with a passion so deep and lasting that it can not afterwards be extinguished. This passion is at first, however, expressed only by inferences. Thus, an accident occurs at the station; a train-hand is crushed, and a pitiful scene described when the widow perceives his dead body; Vronsky leaves two hundred roubles for her relief, an act which Anna sees and feels that it “concerns herself too closely.” Anna composes successfully the domestic trouble between Prince Stepan and his wife, and here, too, the complete reconciliation appears in the chiding and ironical banter renewed between the pair rather than from any express acknowledgment.

But Anna, who has thus healed the wound in her brother’s household, has torn open one far more fatal in her own. Vronsky, who has neglected Kitty for the brilliant creature in whom his whole soul is now absorbed, meets Anna again at the station as she leaves. “I came simply for this, to be where you are,” he said. “I could not do otherwise.” Her eyes belied the remonstrance that she forced to her lips, and when she returned to Petersburg, where her husband was waiting for her, her first thought as she gazed on his really distinguished face was, “Good Lord! Why are his ears so long?” When Vronsky afterwards meets her at a drawing-room in that city and she has forbidden him to speak of love, she feels that by the very use of the word “forbidden” she has recognized a certain jurisdiction over him which has encouraged him to speak.

Her husband, who had noticed that others were observing the tête-à-tête between his wife and the handsome officer, resolved to admonish her. “‘Anna, I must put you on your guard.’

“‘On my guard? Why?’ She looked at him so gayly, so innocently, that for any one who did not know her as her husband did the tone of her voice would have sounded perfectly natural, but for him, who knew that he could not deviate from the least of his habits without her asking the reason, who knew that her first impulse was always to tell him of her pleasures and her sorrows, the fact that Anna took special pains not to observe his agitation, or even to speak, was very significant to him. He felt by the very tone that she assumed that she had said openly and without dissimulation, ‘Well, thus it must be, and from henceforth.’ He felt like a man who should come home and find his house barricaded against him....