The New York Review of Books - USA (2020-11-05)

22 The New York Review

Karenina’s Children

Yiyun Li

The Book of Anna
(Karenina’s Novel)
by Carmen Boullosa,
translated from the Spanish
by Samantha Schnee.
Coffee House, 182 pp., $17.95 (paper)

In 1899 Anton Chekhov wrote to
Maxim Gorky, an up-and-coming
writer whose stories had caught his and
Tolstoy’s attention:

The day before yesterday I was at

L. N. Tolstoy’s; he praised you very

highly and said that you were “a

remarkable writer.” He likes your

“The Fair” and “In the Steppe,”

and does not like “Malva.” He said:

“You can invent anything you like,

but you can’t invent psychology,

and in Gorky one comes across

just psychological inventions: he

describes what he has never felt.”

In another letter, Chekhov advised
Gorky against his tendency to write
like “a spectator in the theater who
expresses his delight with so little re-
straint that he prevents himself and
others from listening.” One wonders
if Gorky ever heeded this advice. In
his fiction, characters are often given
stage directions: “cried with jealousy
in his voice,” “exclaimed admiringly,”
or “laughed an indulgent laugh.” The
three- volume Autobiography of Maxim
Gorky, wonderfully populated with all
kinds of characters, would have been
more engaging if not for Gorky’s ha-
bitual emphasis on “this extraordinary
Russian life,” “the misery and murky
lives” of Russian people, or his own
awakening: “My swelling heart almost
split under pressure of many strange
emotions, and I felt an encompassing,
inarticulate love for all human beings
and all the earth.”
I thought of Gorky while reading
Carmen Boullosa’s new novel, The
Book of Anna, even before Gorky him-
self is briefly mentioned in it. “Anna”
in the title refers to Anna Karenina,
so I thought of Tolstoy also, and he too
makes an appearance, more demand-
ingly, as he “barges” into two charac-
ters’ dreams. It is a high-wire act for
a novel to present not only Gorky and
Tolstoy, but also their characters—
one group taken directly from Anna
Karenina, and another that seems to
have stepped out of Gorky’s work. The
audacity of taking such a risk is per-
haps all that matters. And falling short
is a feat too, when it is falling short of
the impossible.
Boullosa is one of the leading Mexi-
can voices in contemporary literature.*
Her novels share a mischievous joy in
storytelling, world-building, and blend-
ing history and fiction into dreamlike
landscapes. Her vivacity and humor
are infectious: a reader often feels
jostled. Her Texas: The Great Theft,
a novel set on the Texas–Mexico bor-
der in 1859 and featuring a large cast
of characters living in a historical mo-
ment rife with political and racial con-

flicts, is exhilarating both in scope and

imagination.

The Book of Anna starts with some

hypothetical questions: What happens

to Anna Karenina’s children—Ser-

gei, her son with Karenin, and Anya,

her daughter with Vronsky—after her

death? And what happens to the chil-

dren’s book that Anna was working on,

which we are given only a glimpse of in

Anna Karenina? “She’s writing a book

for children and doesn’t tell anybody

about it, but she read it to me,” Stiva,

Anna’s brother, tells Levin. It is the

only time that Anna’s work-in-progress

is mentioned.

Years ago, a radio host said to me

wistfully before we went on the air, “If

only Tolstoy didn’t let Anna die. We

should have a book with Anna living

on and marrying her lover.” To wish for

an alternative fate for a character—or

a continuation of the story—is proof

of a reader’s attachment. Only a hand-

ful of novels, though, sustain these re-

imaginations. Most, after all, are like

people we meet: we take them for who

they are, and we don’t feel the urge to

rewrite their pasts, or make changes to

their futures.

To take characters out of their orig-

inal habitats and create a variation on

their stories is not a new idea. Plenty of

Jane Austen’s characters meander in

the landscape of contemporary litera-

ture; see, for instance, Pride and Prej-

udice and Zombies. “The madwoman

in the attic,” freed from Charlotte

Brontë’s Jane Eyre, unfolds her own

story in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso

Sea. In The Book of Anna, Boullosa

ingeniously gives Sergei and Anya a

different kind of existence: they retain

their fictional origin and are known

to the other characters in the novel as

the Karenin siblings given birth to by

Tolstoy’s pen. Like celebrity children

growing up in the public eye, they have

gained notoriety not because of who

they are, but who their parents are.

Boullosa’s novel is set in St. Peters-

burg in 1905, twenty-seven years after

the publication of Anna Karenina. Ser-

gei, the boy abandoned by his mother,

has grown into a middle-aged, married

man, full of uncertainty and shame,

sensing too well that his being cannot be

separated from the novel that exposed

his mother. Dwelling upon his fate leads

him to imagine torments from others.

“You’re Karenina’s son; she fell in love

with Vronsky and abandoned you. And

what did she see in Vronsky?”—such is

the refrain that plagues Sergei’s mind.

His tormentors, enthralled by his

creator, are actually more concerned

with his social status. During intermis-

sion at a concert he is accosted by an

ambassador:

He takes a step into the box, cor-

nering Sergei. “I’ve read Tolstoy’s

novel so many times that you could

even say I’ve memorized it. I’m

overcome by the incredible op-

portunity to speak with one of its

characters....”

A similar fate befalls Anya, though, as

Boullosa writes, she “barely appears

in the novel in which she was born,

and that gives her personality more

breadth.” Hardly known to her birth fa-

ther, hardly loved by her birth mother,

and raised by Karenin with “combina-

tions of affection and hostility, tender-

ness and betrayal,” Anya, more than her

brother, is a brilliant creation, entirely

Boullosa’s. A fictional character like

Sergei, Anya nevertheless has enough

insouciance to treat their origin story,

monumental to her brother, as merely

accidental. Like the society ladies in

Tolstoy’s novels, Anya strives to enjoy

fully a material life lived on the surface.

What an inconvenient predicament

then that her own servants cannot for-

get her mother—downstairs the maids

speculate about the contraceptives

Anna used to avoid childbearing after

Anya’s birth. And what a disappoint-

ment when she fails to attract the right

people with her fictional origin. At the

concert, she is not recognized as Sergei

is:

Anya has passed unnoticed by the

eyes of this particular reader. Nei-

ther her beauty nor her likeness to

the protagonist caught his atten-

tion. “Another one who forgot I

was ever born,” she says under her

breath.

But it is 1905, and the tsar’s court and

aristocratic society are no longer the

center of the historical narrative. Ga-

ponists, anarchists, Bolsheviks, sailors

onboard the battleship Potemkin, and

myriad other characters together enter

the novel and put on what Lenin called

“the great dress rehearsal” for the Rus-

sian Revolution of 1917. Anya’s maid

marches next to Father Gapon himself,

the Orthodox priest and leader of the

Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill

Workers, on what came to be known

as Bloody Sunday. The wife of Maty-

ushenko, the leader of the Potemkin

mutiny, works in Anya’s kitchen. The

footman working for Sergei and his

wife, Claudia, makes up a song to enter-

tain himself that is accidentally picked

up by t he prote ster s a s t hei r bat t le hy m n.

This intersection between fiction and

history, however, does not make the his-

torical figures in the novel into success-

ful characters. For instance, Alexandra

Kollontai, the Marxist feminist who

later had a distinguished political and

diplomatic career serving the Soviet re-

gime, shows up in the novel on Bloody

Sunday. “From now on things are going

to be different,” she announces at the

march. In real life Kollontai was a wit-

ness to Bloody Sunday, but that fact

alone does not make her a convincing

character. The novel could have easily

arranged a persuasive connection for

her: a childhood friend working as a

maid at the Karenins’, a chance encoun-

ter w ith A nya or Sergei, or a n enc ou nter

with Clementine, a seamstress-turned-

anarchist whose two attempts at public

bombings bookend the novel. But the

connection that goes unmade raises a

theoretical question: Is it the birthright

of a historical figure to be included in a

novel set in their period? To what end

should a novel include a historical figure

like Kollontai—merely as a garnish?

One doesn’t have to look far to

discover historical figures as robust

Carmen Boullosa; illustration by Johnalynn Holland

*Boullosa is also the editor, with Al-
berto Quintero, of Let’s Talk About
Your Wall: Mexican Writers Respond
to the Immigration Crisis, just pub-
lished by the New Press.