24 The New York Review
characters. Napoleon in War and Peace
has a memorable performance, peel-
ing a glove off his white hand; sighing
over the wounded Bolkonsky on the
battlefi eld, “Voilà, une belle mort”;
and saying, in one of my favorite mo-
ments, when he is presented with a por-
trait of his young son right before the
Battle of Borodino, “Take him away”
while “pointing to the portrait with a
gracefully majestic gesture. ‘It is still
too early for him to look upon a fi eld of
battle.’” This is not only history’s Na-
poleon, but also Tolstoy’s Napoleon, a
dramatist who writes for himself, the
only actor who matters.
The historical fi gures in The Book of
Anna—Kollontai, Father Gapon, the
sailors on board the Potemkin—fulfi ll
their roles in the historical narrative
of 1905, but they, like wax fi gures in a
museum, don’t inspire imagination or
curiosity. One wishes that Boullosa’s
inventive touch extended to them, so
that Kollontai were not only history’s
Kollontai, but also Boullosa’s.Characters in fi ction start with un-
certainties and end with yet other un-
certainties—as people do in real life.
Figures in history end up with carved-
in-stone certainties. The gratifi cation
of recognizing a historical connection
in a novel is similar to that of recogniz-
ing a minor character who has stepped
out of Anna Karenina and into The
Book of Anna. It’s the gratifi cation of
being in the know.
Is that enough for a reader? Char-
acters—and, for that matter, you and
I—are, in the end, not knowable. It is
an author’s responsibility to make up a
reality, however fantastical or unreal it
may be, that allows the readers an il-
lusion of getting closer to the unknow-
able. The dilemmas and maneuvers
of Sergei and Anya in their reality—
being fi ctional characters among real
people—give us the illusion that we
have come to know them in The Book
of Anna. The historical fi gures in the
novel retain a few biographical facts
and stay fl at and unknown.
“I am too good for the world of mod-
ern literature,” Rebecca West wrote to
the editor of the Times Literary Sup-
plement after the publication of an un-
complimentary survey of her career,and the way I come off so badly
is that I know that I am not good
enough for my world. I fall short
and I fall short and only in parts of
The Birds Fall Down have I ever
felt that I was coming near what I
wanted to do.That statement alone makes West’s
novel a must-read for her admirers.
The Birds Fall Down takes place at the
same time as The Book of Anna, when
tsarists and revolutionaries are set to
change the course of Russian history.
Lenin, who is about to take the reins
of the Russian Communist Party, is
glimpsed briefl y. A reader gasps not
simply at Lenin’s presence, but because
a young revolutionary, having assassi-
nated a high-ranking party offi cial who
also served as the tsar’s spy, reveals that
he and Lenin are connected. Do we get
to know Lenin in The Birds Fall Down
better than we get to know Kollontai
in The Book of Anna? Not necessar-
ily. But we have rooted for the assassin
in our reading: he acts out of integrity,
and, more importantly, had he failed inthe assassination, we would have seen
the novel’s heroine, an innocent teen-
age girl, murdered by the double agent.
What relief to see her in safety. What
terror to know that the assassination
paves the way for Lenin to rise in his-
tory. One life saved leading to millions
more lost: it is much more chilling for
a reader to catch a glimpse of Lenin in
The Birds Fall Down than of Kollontai
in The Book of Anna.
The Birds Fall Down and The Book
of Anna are both self-indulgent novels,
and I say this in the most admiring way.
Both West and Boullosa are certain
about what they want to achieve. How-
ever, there is a risk in writing a self-
indulgent novel. It is not that the novel
might be misunderstood or rejected
by indifferent readers—who among us
wants our children to befriend peoplewho don’t care for them at all? The risk
of writing a self-indulgent novel is that
the author’s certainties may replace the
characters’ uncertainties, and it is the
latter that make up that illusory reality
of fi ction.
“You can invent anything you like,
but you can’t invent psychology.”
Tolstoy’s statement is worth a long
essay, but a shortcut to understanding it
is through Sergei and Anya. With their
fi ctional origin, they are the two char-
acters in The Book of Anna that come
most alive on the page—a cliché that
perhaps can be allowed this once. The
siblings’ adult existence is invented by
Boullosa. Their psychology, however,
is not. Their psychology is not even
invented by Tolstoy. Their childhoods
are. Their psychology, like yours and
mine, can be described and dissected,
but, like yours and mine, it remains
elusive.
What is invented by an author can
be changed into something else by a
stroke of the pen. Sergei’s happy mar-
riage to Claudia, deftly maintained by
her resourcefulness and care, might
have been an unhappy one to another
woman. Anya, the spitting image of
her mother, might have married a rich
man instead of relying entirely on Ser-
gei’s fi nancial support and goodwill.
But Sergei’s shame will remain. Anya’s
precarious in-between status cannot be
altered.
The risk Boullosa takes in writing
a novel featuring Tolstoy’s characters
pays off because underneath the slim
Book of Anna is Anna Karenina, a
novel that encompasses life, from hay-
making to ballroom dancing, with char-
acters in high society and the servants’
quarters. Her novel is fi lled with impish
touches that reminded me, as I read,
of watching dragonfl ies next to a pondwhen I was a child. They fl it around,
they pause in midair, and then at an un-
expected moment they skip across the
water’s surface so lightly that there is
no ripple to be seen. I laughed out loud
when Sergei tells Claudia that Uncle
Stiva, Anna’s brother, is considering
going to Texas for the cheap land there.
Absurd and electrifying, but of course
it makes perfect sense that Stiva thinks
of Texas as a solution to his fi nancial
ruin. Having crossed the border be-
tween Anna Karenina and The Book
of Anna, Stiva has remained Stiva.The stories of Sergei, Claudia, and
Anya are only half the novel. The other
half is about the 1905 revolution. The
characters—servants, orphans, arti-
sans, industrial workers, sailors—fol-low the politics that takes hold of their
hearts, and act as their beliefs dictate:
they pray, march, unionize the workers,
plant bombs. If there is a trait shared
by them, it is that despite their actions,
they don’t think much. Characters
without psychology are closer to props.
The novel opens with an anarchist,
Clementine, a skillful seamstress from
a young age. In Anna Karenina, after
returning with Vronsky to Russia from
Italy, Anna wears a dress ordered from
Paris to the theater—by then she is al-
ready shunned by society. In The Book
of Anna, Vronsky’s mother, out of dis-
dain for Anna, has donated her dresses
to a charity for fallen women. Wearing
one of Anna’s dresses after the one
she made for herself was confi scated
while she was in detention, Clemen-
tine moves around the city attempting
bombings and assassinations.
One reads with great hope for Clem-
entine, but she ends up being a charac-
ter made up of a few facts—she wants
to awaken Russia with her bombings,
she chastises the artisans for their lack
of rebellious spirit. When she blows up
herself and others, her disappearance
leads to a reaction akin to a shrug from
the bystanders in the novel, and from
readers, too. Stripped of the dress,
poor Clementine is not much, a laugh-
able heroine who can’t be taken seri-
ously by the novel, by history, or even
by her own comrades. Is it Boullosa’s
intention to treat the revolutionaries
as a joke? I don’t know. Yet, knowing
history, we know that they are anything
but a joke.
Even before Gorky was mentioned, I
had an uneasy feeling that his charac-
ters had slipped into The Book of Anna.
Vladimir, Clementine’s co- conspirator
who is blown up with her in the bomb-
ing, Aleksandra, Anya’s maid whoLeo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky“TWO^ GREAT^ NATIONS”^ “TWO^ LOST^ LEADERS”CRY IF YOU WILL
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