An aspiring writer reflects on lessons from the great Russian novelist
I came to Tolstoy when I was only a schoolgirl, an inveterate scribbler of stories looking for companionship among the library stacks. I have always told stories, from my earliest childhood. First to my siblings in the back seat during long car rides, then by setting those stories down on paper. One of my first memories is of my older sister retelling Enid Blyton’s The Castle of Adventure in our shared bedroom as she wrapped me tightly in my green quilt against Winnipeg’s winter chill. I first encountered Russian literature when Dostoyevsky’s brooding opus, Crime and Punishment, hurled me into a mercifully un-anesthetized fictional landscape of sin, suffering and redemption. Once I recovered from the acuity of Raskolnikov’s nerves and his shifting sense of guilt among the grinding subculture of impoverished Slavs, I searched out more Russian writers.
Reading Tolstoy was a revelation. How much harder would his muscular prose have struck me if I could have read in the original Russian? Yet even Rosemary Edmonds’ English translation, a 1400-page paperback with its cover depicting greatcoated officers retreating from the Battle of Borodino, was supple enough to knock me to the ground. I entered nineteenth century Russia: aristocrats and ballet girls, peasants and czars, where hectares of forest serve as marriage portions from teen brides to worldly older grooms. Here was another world where emotions weren’t neutered.
Tolstoy’s prose is simple, natural, without self-consciousness. He makes storytelling look easy, as if an invisible observer were transcribing the lives of real people. No detail is too mundane: we witness fits of pique, spite, and occasional high-mindedness. He exposes the suffocating tedium of society dinners and name-day parties.
We’re right next to Anna Karenina at the ball: black curls at the nape of her neck, the Venetian lace trim on her velvet gown setting off her sculptured ivory breast. Then his eye sweeps over the ballroom to settle on Kitty’s horror as she watches Count Vronsky gaze at Anna, and we begin to divine the disaster brewing for these players on this fateful night of starlight and music.
Throughout his novels, Tolstoy repeats this technique: closing in on one character, then widening his scope. He shows us both what his characters do and tells us what they think, so we understand how and where each fits into this stratified society.
Tolstoy isn’t afraid to describe corpulence or repulsive faces or rude gestures. He describes velvet settees and sumptuous roasts and the calm of country twilights. His creations shout and shriek and stammer and wail. And everyone matters to Tolstoy. Even minor characters, like the obsequious couple who share Anna’s train compartment, come across as complete human beings.
Tolstoy unfolds the real-life consequences of common tragedies. Constrained by oppressive social expectations for married women, Anna’s sister-in-law Dolly stays with her philandering husband as he burns through her dowry and cavorts with their children’s nanny.
As Ivan Ilyich lays dying, his wife, daughter, and her fiancé pose awkwardly in his sickroom before leaving for the opera. Tolstoy writes, “In the middle of the conversation, Fiodr Petrovich glanced at Ivan Ilyich and relapsed into silence. The others looked at him and fell silent. Ivan Ilyich was staring with glittering eyes straight before him, obviously furious with them.”
The dying man hates them for their falseness, and we hate them too. Later, as tears drip down the nose of Praskovya Fyodorovna, his pudgy, put-upon wife, we recall that she was once a slim provincial belle who fell in love with a rising young lawyer. If Tolstoy does yank at our strings, it’s a subtle nudge to liberate the truth beneath the artifice, to render individuals not as hell-bound, scarlet-lettered adulteresses or winged angels strumming on harps, but as complex beings containing multitudes, shot through by the basest as well as the most noble of impulses.
I follow Anna as she steals into her child’s bedroom bearing gifts on a clandestine visit after having been forced to leave him behind. Seriozha wakes and falls on her with pent-up love; she notices his “cheeks that had grown thinner, and those short-cropped curls on his neck, where she often used to kiss him. She passed her hand over it all and could not speak; tears choked her.”
When Karenin, her spurned husband, unexpectedly enters the nursery, Anna flees once more, and Tolstoy permits us to weep for all three: the abandoned child, the guilty mother, and Seriozha’s father, the cuckolded deceptively bloodless functionary whose sticking-out ears strike Anna so disagreeably after she falls for Vronsky.
Tolstoy plots his stories not like absurd fairy tales but as human chronicles which happen to real people. Girls are deceived by faithless suitors, wives fall out of love with pedantic and punctilious husbands, and soldiers die or lose their limbs. At home on furlough, they gamble away their family fortunes.
Tolstoy dissects life. He anatomizes death. He tortures Ivan Ilyich, himself, and his readers with his unflinching interrogation of an unexamined life and the malignancy which devours Ivan’s flesh and nearly consumes his soul. I read and reread Tolstoy’s stories, determined to learn how to make my readers cry, how to enrage and horrify and gladden them. I want to make my readers feel the suffering of a human heart at war with itself, to see how Anna brims with life even while hurtling to her death, by turns ecstatic, hopeful, and despairing.
He tackles the big, unanswerable questions. What defines a good life? What is sin? What is virtue? What does it mean to love? Are duty and honor ever negotiable? I long to pose the same unanswerable riddles to my readers. I’m ashamed to confess that so far, my own stories remain tentative, merely hinting at unvarnished truths.
Reading his works allows me to claim literary kinship with a serf-owning Russian nobleman who died long before I was born in Pakistan, the blood-drenched homeland carved out of India for Muslims. Pakistani law calls all citizens equal under Allah. I want to write about the class divisions of the Pakistani diaspora which still endure today, five decades after my family’s migration westward. At formal dinners my acquaintances are so intoxicated by their own fearful elegance they unwittingly reveal their terror of brotherhood; some prate of their wealth, others display their marriageable daughters with all the sensibility of farmers hawking livestock. They boast of their ancestral villages in the fertile Punjab, mouth the rhetoric of democratic reform and champion the cause of the common man while privately bemoaning the increasing disquiet of Pakistan’s tattered and threadbare masses.
But there are those who shine too, some countrymen I know and admire, who’ve imbued me with the elegance of their poetry and humble me daily with simple human kindness. Some of us fear the Lord and others fear man, and we crowd each other out for a brief moment in the sun as we cloak our foibles under a thin veneer of virtue.
I’m still afraid though, to boldly follow Tolstoy’s lead. I don’t tell anyone that I’m a writer. I worry what my relations here and overseas, what monied friends might think of me. I’m afraid our pitiless expatriate society might indict me for calling out the stupid and the vicious and the profane among us. In a recent essay I told in stark sentences of the brokenness of my own family, while hoping that no one I knew would read it. And yet, I’m slowly, slowly beating down my fears by writing something more ambitious still—a memoir in which I can slam my own truth home.
