November 5, 2020 25
marches on Bloody Sunday, and all the
other followers of Father Gapon—they
possess a quality necessary for movie
extras: they are accomplished mimes.
It is not a surprise that at the end of
the Bloody Sunday section, the novel
reveals the characters’ origin: “The
heart of Gapon’s movement was made
up of all the wretched people living in
the Haven [a flood-prone area without
public utilities], a scene that resembled
one out of Gorky’s work.” If Gorky is
a spectator who expresses his delight
so loudly as to distract other specta-
tors, the Gorkyesque characters in The
Book of Anna are a troupe of actors
performing with emphatic gestures and
facial expressions.
Tolstoy’s novels have an equal range
of maids, orphans, clerks, hall porters,
seamstresses, coachmen, and peasants,
but even those who appear fleetingly
are given subtlety and depth. Take, for
instance, the mirror in the Rostovs’
Moscow house in War and Peace. A
generation of young counts and count-
esses look at themselevs in the mirror,
a commonplace activity. Hundreds of
pages later, when the house is left to the
care of the servants as the French army
approaches Moscow, “the yard porter,
arms akimbo, smiling joyfully, stood
before the big mirror. ‘See there!’ [said
the porter,] marveling at the smile
spreading across his face in the mir-
ror.” What joy, what amazement, what
an unforgettable experience to see one-
self for the first time in a mirror.
Gorky would have clapped fero-
ciously so that we wouldn’t miss the
importance of such a moment or its
echo of the beginning of the novel. But
a servant in Tolstoy’s novels never just
serves the engine of the plot. This may
be unfair to Boullosa, yet when a book
is so deeply rooted in Tolstoy’s work,
the bar is inevitably set at Tolstoy’s,
rather than Gorky’s, height.So far I have avoided discussing Anna’s
book, which gives the title to Boullo-
sa’s novel. Or Anna’s portrait—not the
mediocre one painted by Vronsky, but
the masterpiece painted by Mikhailov
during Vronsky and Anna’s sojourn in
Italy. In Anna Karenina, Levin pays a
visit to Anna long after she is forsaken
by society. That night he’s led to see
the painting first: “It was not a painting
but a lovely living woman.... Only, be-
cause she was not alive, she was more
beautiful than a living woman can be.”
And then he sees her, the real beau-
tiful woman, and nearly falls in love.
On the same visit, he learns from Stiva
that Anna is writing a children’s book,
which she is unwilling to give to the
publisher Vorkuev, another guest that
night, because she claims that “it’s all
so unfinished.”
Both Anna’s portrait and Anna’s
book appear in Boullosa’s novel. The
former is an important element of the
plot. The latter is presented as its own
chapter.
Anna’s book—the one Boullosa
imagines that Anna has written—is a
dark and sexual fairy tale. Anna, on
the first page, writes to Sergei that she
hopes that one day, if he has a daughter,
the story “will speak to her” when she
is a grown woman. Why does Boullosa
let Anna leave the book for her hy-
pothetical granddaughter instead of
Anya, her own daughter? Could it bethat the granddaughter, instead of
Anya, would be a twentieth-century
woman, awakened and liberated? I
do not know the answer, as I have
not yet grasped the meaning of the
fairy tale. In an interview Boullosa
called it “In Search of the Frightening
Clitoris”:And in A. K.’s pages she conquers
her own clitoris in the context of
a fairy tale, in a mode of popular
storytelling that I suffuse with lau-
danum to be able to give A. K., if
not her own voice, the voice of her
clitoris.The fairy tale features Anna, the
daughter of a poor woodsman, who is
granted luxury and freedom by a fairy
godmother named the Illuminata.
Along with this Cinderella transfor-
mation comes a forbidden key, through
which Anna discovers the pleasure
of masturbation. The story is febrile,
with elements of multiple fairy tales
(Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, the
girl who trod on the loaf, and others)
morphing into one another. There are
moments when it feels endless. No
doubt this is because Anna is writing it
under the influence of opium. Perhaps
reading it requires us to be in a similar
mood.
It is true that a second-rate produc-
tion within a novel may also leave an
enduring impression—for instance,
that mediocre portrait of Anna painted
by Vronsky in Anna Karenina. From
an explanatory note at the beginning of
The Book of Anna, we learn that the
children’s book written by Anna, men-
tioned briefly in Anna Karenina, wasthe seed for Boullosa’s novel. The fairy
tale may carry an important message—
every reader will have to come to his or
her own conclusion about it. I would
have to claim the position of naiveté,
unequipped with any theories that may
be required to decipher it.
The Book of Anna is not the first
time Boullosa has explored posterity
and recreation. In her novel Cleopatra
Dismounts, Cleopatra’s legend is given
a fresh presentation through Diome-
des, who records her dying words, and
through Diomedes’ scribe, whose job
is to make copies of Diomedes’ record.
“In those texts, Diomedes was trying
to recapture Cleopatra’s voice, trying
to get her to speak through him. Isn’t
recapturing a sort of assimilating, eat-
ing, digesting?” asks Diomedes’ scribe.
By recasting Sergei and Anya in their
adult lives, by recasting Anna as a
writer, The Book of Anna has done its
share of assimilating, eating, digesting,
too. Cleopatra and Anna and other
Boullosa creations point to a similar
preoccupation of the author: every
life deserves a retelling, and there are
many ways to do so.
Heavens on Earth, another Boullosa
novel, starts with a letter beginning,
“Dear Reader”: “This novel is not
written by an author, but rather by au-
thors plural. There are three characters
who claim to confess within its pages,
and two who claim to have written
it.” The Book of Anna does not begin
with a similar claim, though if it did,
it might have been some version of
this: “This novel is not written by an
author, but rather by authors plural:
Tolstoy, Gorky, and an imagined A nna
Karenina.” Q
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