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Friday
I write this post for Julia in honor of our 51st wedding anniversary, which is tomorrow. Last year, for our fiftieth, I looked at poems that describe long marriages. Today I feature my favorite literary couple, Levin and Kitty in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
Although Tolstoy famously opens his novel with the assertion that “happy families are all alike,” there is something special about this happy family.
The scene that moves me the most involves Levin’s dying brother. Levin at first does not want Kitty to accompany him to see the dissolute Nikolay because he doesn’t want her mixing with “the common wench” who is his brother’s mistress. At this point in their recent marriage, Levin paternalistically sees his new wife as a sweet little thing who won’t have much to contribute to a deathbed situation. He is startled when Kitty pushes back, saying she doesn’t care about Nikolay’s mistress. Levin starts off the following interchange:
“Well, for one thing then, because this woman’s there whom you can’t meet.”
“I don’t know and don’t care to know who’s there and what. I know that my husband’s brother is dying and my husband is going to him, and I go with my husband too….”
“Kitty! Don’t get angry. But just think a little: this is a matter of such importance that I can’t bear to think that you should bring in a feeling of weakness, of dislike to being left alone. Come, you’ll be dull alone, so go and stay at Moscow [with your family] a little.”
“There, you always ascribe base, vile motives to me,” she said with tears of wounded pride and fury. “I didn’t mean, it wasn’t weakness, it wasn’t … I feel that it’s my duty to be with my husband when he’s in trouble, but you try on purpose to hurt me, you try on purpose not to understand….”
Kitty refuses to be soothed with soft words and is so insistent that Levin finally gives in, even while kicking himself for not showing “more strength of will.”
When they arrive at Nikolay’s apartment, however, Levin discovers that Kitty has strengths he has not dreamed of. While he feels out of his depth in the sick room, Kitty marches right in:
“Kostya! take me to him; it will be easier for us to bear it together. You only take me, take me to him, please, and go away,” she said. “You must understand that for me to see you, and not to see him, is far more painful. There I might be a help to you and to him. Please, let me!” she besought her husband, as though the happiness of her life depended on it.
Levin was obliged to agree, and regaining his composure, and completely forgetting about Marya Nikolaevna [Nilolay’s mistress] by now, he went again in to his brother with Kitty.
Kitty, it turns out, makes an instant connection:
Stepping lightly, and continually glancing at her husband, showing him a valorous and sympathetic face, Kitty went into the sick-room, and, turning without haste, noiselessly closed the door. With inaudible steps she went quickly to the sick man’s bedside, and going up so that he had not to turn his head, she immediately clasped in her fresh young hand the skeleton of his huge hand, pressed it, and began speaking with that soft eagerness, sympathetic and not jarring, which is peculiar to women.
“We have met, though we were not acquainted, at Soden,” she said. “You never thought I was to be your sister?”
“You would not have recognized me?” he said, with a radiant smile at her entrance.
“Yes, I should. What a good thing you let us know! Not a day has passed that Kostya has not mentioned you, and been anxious.”
Kitty is able to scope out the situation because she looks at it through Nicolay’s eyes. “I am afraid you are not quite comfortable here,” she at one point says to him and then, turning to her husband, “We must ask about another room so that we might be nearer.”
Tolstoy contrasts the two and finds Levin wanting. The husband, who lives in his head, feels he should be able to control the situation and consequently feels defeated:
Levin could not look calmly at his brother; he could not himself be natural and calm in his presence. When he went in to the sick man, his eyes and his attention were unconsciously dimmed, and he did not see and did not distinguish the details of his brother’s position. He smelt the awful odor, saw the dirt, disorder, and miserable condition, and heard the groans, and felt that nothing could be done to help. It never entered his head to analyze the details of the sick man’s situation, to consider how that body was lying under the quilt, how those emaciated legs and thighs and spine were lying huddled up, and whether they could not be made more comfortable, whether anything could not be done to make things, if not better, at least less bad. It made his blood run cold when he began to think of all these details. He was absolutely convinced that nothing could be done to prolong his brother’s life or to relieve his suffering. But a sense of his regarding all aid as out of the question was felt by the sick man, and exasperated him. And this made it still more painful for Levin. To be in the sick room was agony to him, not to be there still worse. And he was continually, on various pretexts, going out of the room, and coming in again, because he was unable to remain alone.
His sweet little wife, by contrast, is thoroughly up to the moment:
But Kitty thought, and felt, and acted quite differently. On seeing the sick man, she pitied him. And pity in her womanly heart did not arouse at all that feeling of horror and loathing that it aroused in her husband, but a desire to act, to find out all the details of his state, and to remedy them. And since she had not the slightest doubt that it was her duty to help him, she had no doubt either that it was possible, and immediately set to work. The very details, the mere thought of which reduced her husband to terror, immediately engaged her attention.
We see her swing into action:
She sent for the doctor, sent to the chemist’s, set the maid who had come with her and Marya Nikolaevna to sweep and dust and scrub; she herself washed up something, washed out something else, laid something under the quilt. Something was by her directions brought into the sick room, something else was carried out. She herself went several times to her room, regardless of the men she met in the corridor, got out and brought in sheets, pillowcases, towels, and shirts.
Levin, who has been sent away for medicine, is struck by the results:
Levin found the sick man settled comfortably and everything about him completely changed. The heavy smell was replaced by the smell of aromatic vinegar, which Kitty with pouting lips and puffed-out, rosy cheeks was squirting through a little pipe. There was no dust visible anywhere, a rug was laid by the bedside. On the table stood medicine bottles and decanters tidily arranged, and the linen needed was folded up there, and Kitty’s broderie anglaise. On the other table by the patient’s bed there were candles and drink and powders. The sick man himself, washed and combed, lay in clean sheets on high raised pillows, in a clean night-shirt with a white collar about his astoundingly thin neck, and with a new expression of hope looked fixedly at Kitty.
Sometimes only Kitty can understand what Nikolay needs and takes charge to make sure he gets it:
No one could make out what he said but Kitty; she alone understood. She understood because she was all the while mentally keeping watch on what he needed.
“On the other side,” she said to her husband, “he always sleeps on that side. Turn him over, it’s so disagreeable calling the servants. I’m not strong enough…”
Terrible as it was to Levin to put his arms round that terrible body, to take hold of that under the quilt, of which he preferred to know nothing, under his wife’s influence he made his resolute face that she knew so well, and putting his arms into the bed took hold of the body…While he was turning him over, conscious of the huge emaciated arm about his neck, Kitty swiftly and noiselessly turned the pillow, beat it up and settled in it the sick man’s head, smoothing back his hair, which was sticking again to his moist brow.
To be sure, Kitty cannot save Nikolay’s life as he is past saving. But having proved herself in the face of death, she then discovers she is pregnant, and we have no doubt that she will rise to that occasion no less ably. Levin must radically revise his previous assumptions about his wife.
Fortunately, he has the humility, the intelligence, and the sensitivity to do so. It will be a good marriage.
Reading over this episode, I wonder if Julia and me dealing with my dying mother pushed our own marriage to a higher level. I’ve noticed in myself new levels of tenderness for her since those final weeks and days. Time and time again I saw Julia, like Kitty, intuiting what my mother most needed and building a deep rapport with her in the process. I emerged from the experience with a sense of awe and gratitude, just as, 23 years before, I was amazed as I watched Julia gather and exert her strength over and over in the hours-long delivery of our first son. Repeatedly, this woman who I thought I knew has expanded my horizons beyond what I thought was possible.
People may think they know what a marriage involves, but I’ve been in one for five decades and I’m still discovering wonders.
Happy anniversary, my dear.
