Read-along – Anna Karenina (2 of 14)

Part One, Chapters 24-34, Part Two, Chapters 1-11 – and John Sutherland on Anna's English novel

Dear Anna Karenina readers,

We’ve finished our February instalment! What are your impressions after our second month of reading together? Here are mine:

Do share your thoughts, feelings and favourite quotations in the comments below!

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In the 1990s, Oxford University Press published a brilliant sequence of literary detective books by the critic John Sutherland: Is Heathcliff a Murderer? (1996), Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? (1997) and Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? (1999). Across these three volumes, Sutherland identifies and tackles 100 amusing puzzles from nineteenth-century fiction. They were collected in 1999 as The Literary Detective.

They’re out of print now, which is a shame because they’re huge fun, beautifully written and very well researched.

In the third volume, Sutherland discusses the train scene in chapter 29 of Anna Karenina and asks: ‘What English Novel is Anne reading?’ ‘It’s a wonderfully evoked scene,’ he writes – ‘familiar to anyone who has travelled through the night by train.’

The passage is shot through with omens—trains will not be lucky for Anna. But the attention of the English-speaking reader will be particularly drawn to the ‘English novel’ whose pages Anna is cutting and reading. We are given precise and detailed descriptions of its narrative. What, then, is it? Surely we can identify it by title? A. N. Wilson, in his life of Tolstoy, is in no doubt that Anna has in her hands a novel by Anthony Trollope. Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina between 1873 and 1878, and it is known that during this period he read and admired Trollope’s equally massive novel of parliamentary life, The Prime Minister. That novel, published in England in June 1876 (although it cannot have been translated into Russian until a few months later), had a momentous influence on Anna Karenina. Trollope’s narrative climaxes, brilliantly, with the suicide of the villainous Ferdinand Lopez, in
front of a speeding train.

Sutherland continues:

There is, however, no scene in The Prime Minister in which Lopez makes a speech in Parliament. That episode seems to belong to an earlier Trollope novel, Phineas Finn, the Irish Member (1869), whose narrative revolves around the hero’s initial failure to make a good maiden speech to the House, and his eventual success in doing so.

And the business about Lady Mary riding to hounds and teasing her sister-in-law seems to allude to still another Trollope novel, Is he Popenjoy? (1878), where the spirited heroine, Lady Mary Germain (née Gresley), outrages her husband’s strait-laced sisters by dancing and hunting. Mary Germain’s husband, however, attains his
Englishman’s idea of happiness not in the form of a ‘baronetcy and an estate’, but the unexpected legacy of a marquisate and an estate.

Tolstoy’s ‘baronetcy’ seems to be a recollection of Trollope’s The Claverings (1867), in which the hero, Harry, unexpectedly inherits a baronetcy, an estate (and some of the attendant guilt which Tolstoy mentions) when his distant cousins are drowned sailing.

As for the business of the heroine nursing a sick man—that would seem to be an allusion to a quite different novel—Charlotte Yonge’s sensational best-seller of 1853
The Heir of Redclyffe, in which the Byronic hero, Guy, is nursed on his lingering deathbed by his young wife Amy, and gradually repents his wild ways under her tender ministrations.

What, then, is Tolstoy aiming at with this mélange of bits and pieces of English fiction? . . . The point that Tolstoy makes is, I think, that Anna is not reading an English novel so much as ‘English fiction’ — with all its falsities and its childish addiction to ‘happiness’, particularly happy endings. To paraphrase the famous opening of Anna Karenina, all happy novels are alike, so it does not really matter which particular English novel the heroine is reading. What Anna is reading, we apprehend, is a generic English novel — a novel that never existed, but which typifies the genre. And to represent the quintessence of English fiction Tolstoy amalgamates a variety of works by that most English of English novelists, Anthony Trollope, the ‘Chronicler of Barsetshire’, with a dash of Miss Yonge. He, Count Leo Tolstoy, will write a different kind of novel: one that is harder, sadder, more realistic — Russian, in a word. A novel that does not succumb to the debilitating ‘English idea’. ‘Expect no pernicious “English happiness” in this Russian novel,’ is the implicit warning.

What English novel, then, is Anna Karenina reading? All of them and none of them.

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I hope you enjoy the next instalment! On Friday 28th March we will discuss Part Two, Chapters 12-29. These chapters formed the third instalment of Anna Karenina, first published in the Russian Messenger in March 1875.

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For reference, here are links to our previous Anna Karenina posts:

• The Schedule (18 December 2024)

• Leo Tolstoy (3 January 2025)

• 0. Introductions (10 January)

• 1. Part One, Chapters 1-23 – and Nabokov on Time (31 January)

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