"Anna Karenina" - a mirror of the "immoral" revolution, or How Tolstoy shook the Russian foundations

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

At school they tell a lot of different things about Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina. They do not even ignore the fact that at one time he replaced television series for ladies - he was published in magazines with a sequel (and Tolstoy perfectly understood what he was doing - because of this he treated his novel with disdain). But what not a single teacher of literature even thought to tell is the fact that "Anna Karenina" actually reflects all the burning issues of the quiet sexual revolution of the late nineteenth century.

The nineteenth century was not so prim

Just think: in the very middle of the century, ladies were afraid to be alone with a man even for five minutes, a short haircut was the lot of typhoid women and fallen women, and fluffy skirts were considered necessary due to the fact that in any other one could see the movement of the leg when walking (God, how indecent!). But in the sixties, the Russians seemed to have gone crazy: the young ladies cut off their braids, stormed the walls of institutes, studied academic painting (due to the need to study nudity, this was considered obscene) and calmly went to visit comrades in conviction for notebooks and textbooks.

In addition, in order to obtain the right to travel abroad, the girls quickly married like-minded people without pompous ceremonies - and left to study, not caring whether they would see their fictitious husbands again.

And after years it turned out that she was actually married (to a completely different person), he was actually married (to another lady from the same circles), both had a crowd of illegitimate children and they had been looking for each other through acquaintances for five years to officially divorce and legalize real relationships and the position of their offspring. So society had to get used to the fact that children in quite well-to-do families were massively born before the wedding, and divorce is not such an amazing thing.

With all the stiffness of the nineteenth century, girls step by step won the right to look at naked dead men in medical schools, at naked living men in art studios, to dress more or less comfortably, and many of them looked forward to the age of old maidens to start traveling. around the world alone. This applied not only to Russia, but also to another huge empire - Britain. However, the novel "Anna Karenina" is not at all about old maids, nihilists and students. He reveals the next stage of the sexual revolution - one that affected the most ordinary families.

Open marriages

Among the questions that were constantly raised by those same nihilists, as well as socialists and anarchists who were actually rotating in the same circles, was the sexual issue. They talked about hypocrisy and the existing marriage system, when a husband is declared faithful, who visits dozens or hundreds of fallen women (but not treason!) And sooner or later brings bad diseases of a truly faithful wife from them. They talked about the hypocrisy of the very system of prostitution of women, about the humiliating eroticization of punishing children and much more.

Not that society was inclined to listen to these speeches with enthusiasm, but thoughtful. Many families in large cities began to practice open marriages. As a rule, the condition was not to advertise these relations, that is, to observe external decency. In addition, it was expected that both husband and wife, tired of each other, would actually enter into long-term relationships with other people, and not just begin a free sex life.

Although Alexey Karenin is a man of the old school and sees the family as two spouses who have stuck to each other until the end of time, he is at the same time reasonable enough to accept the state of affairs as it is: Anna loves the other. He offers her just a popular version of an open relationship: when the spouses are free to enter into a long-term relationship with someone else, but they do not devote society to such a nuance of their married life, pretending that they are cheating on each other in the old fashioned way, as, for example, a friend did Anna Betsy Tverskaya.

However, not all families found it necessary to hide the real state of affairs. Turgenev and the Viardot couple, who lived in a triple alliance, were shown everywhere as the three of them, emphasizing that they were one family. However, this is not entirely about an open relationship. But there were such people in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Open marriages were practiced before this era. In the late eighteenth century, enlightenment and naturalists practiced them and denounced conjugal jealousy as a prejudice. Moreover, unlike the Karenin times, it was not considered necessary to establish long-term relationships on the side. So, Catherine, who confronted her secret husband Potemkin with the fact that their marriage was open, changed lovers every few years. But Kutuzov and his wife adhered to their "second partners" for a long time.

Divorces

In books about games with dolls, in which little girls were also told how a woman's life should be arranged, one doll taught the other: when you get married, love is not just unnecessary, it even interferes. The main secret of happiness is general peace of mind and … so that my husband buys beautiful dresses. The same was repeated to the young wives of their mothers: love is harmful, love interferes. Marriage is needed to be fruitful, multiply, and because a person is weak and cannot be without lust.

The youth of the sixties and beyond sharply condemned the approach when the relationship of two people is built on the material and on the need to somehow satisfy lust. They put at the forefront the unity of two souls, love, comradeship, companionship. Ideally, lust should not take up too much space at all in a person's life, be it a woman or a man, so that a person does not waste himself on all sorts of nonsense, but puts all his burning in work or study, in building a new society and creating a new person in the highest sense of these words.

However, from love as the basis of relationships, it also followed that if there is no love, no comradeship, no companionship, sticking to each other - for example, for the sake of external decency or just material benefit - is both meaningless and even immoral. This means that a failed relationship demanded an honest divorce - it doesn't matter whether a person later looks for his real mate or devotes himself entirely to work for the good of the people.

People increasingly began to demand a divorce or the very possibility of a divorce, the authorities had to meet halfway (since society immediately put forward the very open marriages, which were considered by the authorities as debauchery), and, accordingly, divorces became more frequent. That is why in the story of a radically new sexual relationship, which, among other things, was "Anna Karenina", part of the plot were the Karenins' divorce, which Anna and her main protector, her brother, sought. Alas, it was very difficult to divorce.

Divorces were practiced by Christians in the Middle Ages more actively than we think, and the church allowed them under certain conditions, but in Russia only one form was offered for them: one of the spouses goes to a monastery. More often than not, the husband, finding himself a fresh, young bride, hateful, exhausted by childbirth or just living with him, forced his wife to take a haircut as a nun under the threat of otherwise beating him to death (and he would have had nothing for it with a high probability). It was very rare for a man to become a monk, leaving a woman free.

Contraception

Perhaps this is somehow connected with the fact that women came en masse to obstetrics and gynecology as a profession - including the fact that it turned out to be easier to persuade professors to teach women in such a matter, referring to the nature and traditions of midwives - but in the second half of the nineteenth century contraception was thought and known much more than in the first, and it became much more reliable than in the eighteenth century, when people were content with a sponge with diluted vinegar or half a lemon.

Among married people, from man to man, the "right way" began to spread: stories about interrupted intercourse. The motive, however, was the preservation of the financial situation, which could sharply shake with the number of children more than three, and not the preservation of women's health from exhausting pregnancies without recovery between them. For example, the husband of the heroine of Maupassant's novel "Life" resorted to this method. Nevertheless, many found it uncomfortable - too much exposure was required.

But in "Anna Karenina", as it is believed, the original text described another method that was relevant at that time - the use of a rubber diaphragm. Of course, the woman had to tinker with her, but there was no trouble for the man, and it was in this that married couples seemed to be happy. The diaphragm was invented by the German scientist Mensing back in 1938, but it took time for hundreds or thousands of doctors and married couples to learn about it. When they argue about how Karenina was protected (when her story was published for Dolly, they were censored), they usually agree that she used the diaphragm - because she found out about the method of protection from the doctor, and in the medical environment it was the most popular.

Anna came to the need to protect herself because of Vronsky's grief over the fact that their common children were recorded by Karenin's children by default and Vronsky could not change this without a divorce. Contraception was considered a fundamentally immoral activity, but after Anna decided to ask for a divorce (which was also immoral by the standards of high society), she seems to be indifferent. In addition, the question with the fact that the children would belong to a stranger to them, she also could not help but torment her.

Now it is surprising to realize what a revolution in the minds of the recognized public authority Leo Tolstoy made by publishing a novel in a popular format for women dedicated to the current problems of their sex life. For most of his life, the writer was a moralizer and a cynical man in his treatment of women, and only strongly at the age, perhaps because he raised several daughters, did he write a novel in which he sympathized with a woman who did not fall in love with her husband, and a story exposing the murderers who were covering his desire and sense of power to end someone else's life with jealousy ("The Kreutzer Sonata").

However, trying to portray Karenina worthy of pity, Tolstoy did not burn too much love for her as a character. "My Anna has bothered me like a bitter radish": How the famous novel by Leo Tolstoy was created