Lectures on Russian Literature by Vladimir Nabokov

Author:Vladimir Nabokov
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Joseph Conrad, a British novelist of Polish descent, writing to Edward Garnett, a writer of sorts, in a letter dated the 10th of June, 1902, said: “Remember me affectionately to your wife whose translation of Karenina is splendid. Of the thing itself I think but little, so that her merit shines with the greater lustre.” I shall never forgive Conrad this crack. Actually the Garnett translation is very poor.

We may look in vain among the pages of Anna Karenin for Flaubert’s subtle transitions, within chapters, from one character to another. The structure of Anna Karenin is of a more conventional kind, although the book was written twenty years later than Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Conversation between characters mentioning other characters, and the maneuvers of intermediate characters who bring about the meetings of main participants—these are the simple and sometimes rather blunt methods used by Tolstoy. Even simpler are his abrupt switches from chapter to chapter in changing his stage sets.

Tolstoy’s novel consists of eight parts and each part on the average consists of about thirty short chapters of four pages. He sets himself the task of following two main lines—the Lyovin-Kitty one and the Vronski-Anna one, although there is a third line, subordinate and intermediary, the Oblonski-Dolly one that plays a very special part in the structure of the novel since it is present to link up in various ways the two main lines. Steve Oblonski ard Dolly are there to act as go-betweens in the affairs of Lyovin and Kitty and in those of Anna and her husband. Throughout Lyovin’s bachelor existence, moreover, a subtle parallel is drawn between Dolly Oblonski and Lyovin’s ideal of a mother which he will discover for his own children in Kitty. One should notice, also, that Dolly finds conversation with a peasant woman about children as fascinating as Lyovin finds conversation with male peasants about agriculture.

The action of the book starts in February 1872 and goes on to July 1876: in all, four years and a half. It shifts from Moscow to Petersburg and shuttles among the four country estates (because the country place of the old Countess Vronski near Moscow also plays a part in the book, though we are never taken to it).

The first of the eight parts of the novel has as its main subject the Oblonski family disaster with which the book starts, and as a secondary subject the Kitty-Lyovin-Vronski triangle.

The two subjects, the two expanded themes—Oblonski’s adultery and Kitty’s heartbreak when her infatuation for Vronski has been ended by Anna*—are introductory notes to the tragic Vronski-Anna theme which will not be so smoothly resolved as are the Oblonski-Dolly troubles or Kitty’s bitterness. Dolly soon pardons her wayward husband for the sake of their five children and because she loves him, and because Tolstoy considers that two married people with children are tied together by divine law forever. Two years after her heartbreak over Vronski, Kitty marries Lyovin and begins what Tolstoy regards as a perfect marriage. But Anna, who

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