Why TOLSTOY KILLED ANNA KARENINA? in relation to another Anna and another author, Claire Lispector and another singer/songwriter, Aimee Mann’s motive, means and opportunity

A longtime acquaintance, when I told her the name of my new book, laughed and said, yeah, Tolstoy did kill Anna Karenina but he didn’t kill her soon enough. She ranks as the one and only person I’ve spoken with who doesn’t care for Anna Karenina. Impossible to believe there aren’t others.

I believe when it comes to Tolstoy and Karenina it’s easy enough, without any malice, to say, who cares?

Afterall Tolstoy is if known at all is known as a legendary old time great literary figure. He’s not a man capable of killing. Anna is his character.

Anna means nothing more than----if and when she means anything at all--- what her creator determines she means. Anna is what happens to women who step out of line, and in doing so it is to be understood she earns her demise.

It truly is confusing. Anna may be a character, Anna may be Tolstoy’s creature, what she is not is a living human being with her own free will.

Which if what is wanted of Anna in her life and role in the Russian society in which Tolstoy presents her---it is the will of the society that determines she should have no free will; if she will just agree to what is expected of her, she will have a relatively good life and she will be allowed to live.

Come of think of it, it is amazing that one of the few things all humans in books have is no free will. Whether this makes someone in a book more or less realistic----is another matter.

People, some people, call the book by Tolstoy in which Anna dies a masterpiece. What is or is not a masterpiece and what makes any a masterpiece are cans of worms I think I’ll leave unopened.

For years, a short mile on the road to my place I’d pass a hand-lettered sign on the side of the road, it said Masterpieces Reasonable. For some reason that settled a lot about ideas about masterpieces.

My friend calls ANNA KARENINA tedious and supercilious. She also says Tolstoy seems to like Anna. I disagree, I believe he sets her up, right from the start. The evidence: her little red shoulder bag. It’s there in scene one, it’s there at the end when she dies under the wheels of, who knows, maybe the same train that took the life of some unnamed, unlucky non-entity who Tolstoy needed to bump off to get the book going. And for Anna and her little red handbag to witness. This satisfies the necessity of pre-meditation. What apologists for writers call it is foreshadowing.

When did it get to be required to address writers as if they are not responsible for what their characters do? Or when did it become typical to hear a writer talking about a character having a mind of their own or a plot having a will to take one set of steps rather than another.

On the part of the writer this sounds like grandiosity disguised as humility. Another version of the muse made me do it, it was the will of God, its inevitability inevitable. On the part of the audience, it sort of sounds like some kind of wink-wink, vicarious and therefore not complicit complicity.

As if-----what?----- a writer serves as only the means by which characters and what they do, or think is written down? No doubt there is some number of theories circulating somewhere arguing this is exactly so. Useless but for the sophistry of playing with the fictive fires of inconsequential action.

But it is true humans have to find some way to spend their time.

Do people still ask does the end justify the means or has that already been decided?

It is so weird. Anna Karenina would never have existed without Leo Tolstoy’s making her up and writing her down. She does not have any mind at all except for the one Tolstoy gives her. Her thoughts are his thoughts.

He toyed with her and her little red handbag right from his book’s beginning and then when it was time for her to go, he showed her exactly how to go about diving with her little red bag on her shoulder right under the wheels of the moving train; same station, same wheels of fate as the ones he used to start his book, same....................... In fact, he pushed her.

*

A few weeks ago, I started listening to Clarice Lispector’s COMPLETE STORIES. I suspected I would like her; it turns out I’m crazy about her. I lost my mind in favor of finding myself willingly turning the use of my mind over to Lispector’s. A choice I enthusiastically made.

For no good reason I told myself I could only listen to her stories on the road, in my car; this turned out to be okay because at least in the first fourth of the book the stories are short, sometimes very short, a few pages, so even if going far was not in the cards I’d hear a complete story or two. Eventually this changed, the stories got longer and fortunately I had some longish drives to make, 88.5 miles both ways, 63.8 miles both ways, 7.8 miles both ways many times, 9.4 miles both ways just about every day.

Soon I’d listened to, and adored, 61 Lispector stories.

This one day though I had a lot of cooking to do for it was the first time since March 2020; it was May 2021 and friends were coming for Sunday supper; my enthusiasm for cooking created a menu unspeakably overly ambitious and unnecessary.

Still, it meant I would be in the kitchen just about all day on a Saturday, a circumstance which caused me to change my mind and invite Clarice Lispector in, somewhat in the way one invites a vampire to step over your threshold.

Lispector turns out to be the opposite of a vampire. She gives blood. Her passion ignites brain firing in drowsing neurons and wakes up some altogether new ones. Does anyone ever call a man a pistol? She takes responsibility for every word and everything that happens in her stories.

While snapping a big basket of snap peas, thinking about what could follow the title “The Type of Person You Are” and getting nowhere with it when I heard or believed I heard “her scream was the scream of the train” and I woke up to focus only on what I was hearing read to me from Lispector’s COMPLETE STORIES.

Lispector’s story, “The Departure of the Train,” tracks a train’s passenger’s departure under the watchful eye of the world’s largest clock.

Is there any reasonable reason why cock-of-the-walk and clock rhyme so well? excepting the cock’s dawning alarm crowing as the sun comes up, andoften many other times of day as well. And why is a cock said to be crowingand not cocking? And what do crows think of this? And do they care?

Hearing Lispector’s character’s scream becoming one with the screaming train, it is as if I’m obligated to become obsessed with wondering if I will find mention of Anna Karenina in Lispector’s biography.

I turn through the Index pages of Why This World, Benjamin Moser’s biography of Lispector. I see no Anna Karenina there, I see no Tolstoy. Though I do see Kafka and Elizabeth Bishop, and I do see Flaubert. I’m glad to see Agatha Christie and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Claude Debussy, Katherine Mansfield, Dostoevsky, Nietzche, Nijinsky, Moby Dick, Edgar Allan Poe, Tristram Shandy, Fernando Pessoa, Proust, Gertrude Stein, Teresa of Avila, many more. Some of whom show up in comparison to Lispector, usually I’m guessing or often enough instigated by her biography/biographer.

Other index entries include animal nature, mysticism, sorcery, free will, search for god, silence of god, Spinoza(more than once), free love, cockroaches(more than once), superstition, infidelity (more than once), madness, orgasm(more than once), friendship, fortune tellers.

I do see where the index sends me to Virginia Woolf and to a letter to Lispector’s sister in which Lispector writes “I don’t want to forgive her for committing suicide. The terrible duty is to go on the end.”

I did not find any direct mention of Tolstoy but he may well be hiding in there somewhere.

Lingering on this Lispector side street because I’m glad to be there, I also see a spot where Lispector quotes Gustave Flaubert, “Madame Bovary c’est moi.” --- which oddly with only a small twist turns Flaubert into a suicide as a kind of cover for being a killer.

There’s plenty evidence a prosecutor could use against Tolstoy throughout Anna Karenina.

The most damning, and most of all, is how long, excruciatingly long, endlessly long he takes to kill her.

After creating her only to kill her, the book’s many words and many pages, many characters and many storylines amount to a sadistic prolonging of her pain, leading right up to her demise. Compounded by the nerve it takes to suggest she gets what she deserves.

Adding insult to injury, rubbing salt in a wound, twisting his knife, always adding fuel to Anna’s miserably burning fire. He makes her a bad mother, the worst kind, the selfish kind. He makes her, an awful woman, the jealous kind. He takes his time with her longing and with-holds satisfying it. According to his story he ruins her and then he takes her life.

I thought about my friend’s dislike of Anna and how I might try to convince her to shift her dislike of Anna on over to Anna’s creator, her maker; she is after all everything she is because he made her so. He chose every word and picture and thought and idea and feeling and the world where these take place.

His freedom to choose created Anna’s character and, it is his choice to send her under that train. Tolstoy’s responsible for Anna’s life and for Anna’s death. Little say did she have in either case.

Which calls into question-- in that way we have of saying it begs the question-- all the anguish and all the troubling of thoughts Anna goes through through-out the book. Is all her miserable thinking just about prolonging her suffering. Maybe it is. Making sure the book’s long enough, the book’s a sadistic long long twisting and turning while we wait for what we know is going to have to happen to Anna.

It’s not out of the ordinary to hear a writer praise themselves by saying their story, their character took on a life of its own, whatever happens happens because I made characters so vivid, so alive, they wound up with minds of their own and I, their maker, wash my hands of any and all consequences of their words and deeds. So like some of the gods I know. So like us to set something in motion and not have time to see it thru. To reject the will to see something thru comes easy, to let consequences be someone else’s jam to fix.

I understand this as fantasy, a wink-wink, you know what I mean situation. I’ve never understood why taking responsibility for who and what’s been brought into being appears to be less interesting than don’t blame me.

If there’s an as if I’m supposed to be hearing------- as in it’s as if these characters have lives of their own I guess it’s not loud enough for me to hear and believe. It feels as if would appear to be a helpful modification and useful addition, though possibly not as dramatic, not as super-natural, not so reminiscent of Biblical stories.

Too many writers get their morals from The Bible. Both kinds. The moral of their story and the morals in their stories.

Tolstoy blames everyone and everything but himself for Anna’s death.

*

There is another Anna, Anna Delvey, the one I know I know is brilliantly played by Julia Garner in the 2022 Netflix TV Miniseries INVENTING ANNA. This Anna invents herself; her free will wills and will not back down from the Anna she brings to the Anna she, in true life is, a “Anna Sorkin Russian-born German con artist and fraudster.”

According to Page Six she became “NYSDOC #19G0366. Penalty: 4 to 5 years imprisonment, $24,000 fine, $199,000 restitution, deportation to German; currently in ICE custody while fighting deportation and while waiting to turn herself into a valuable artist. She sold her story to Netflix for $320,000, her prison art is on sale for $10,000 per drawing. Fellow con artist Alredo Martinez who served time for forging Jean-Michel Basquiat took on the job of applying color to Delvey’s enlarged drawings for a group show handled by Christ Martine. It’s all kind of absurdly breath-taking.

And there is another Anna, the Anna of Elizabeth Bowen’s THE DEATH OF A HEART. It is not easy to be an Anna it seems. This Anna is said to be unsympathetic to everyone.

A palindrome is Anna. Recommended listening---Aimee Mann’s “Suicide Is Murder,” from her 2021 Queens of the Summer Hotel.

There’s an unofficial name for fear of palindrome and it is Aibohphpobia.

to be continued