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August 6, 2020
Bob Blaisdell's Playlist for His Book "Creating Anna Karenina"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Bob Blaisdell's Creating Anna Karenina is a nuanced and engaging portrait of Tolstoy and the creation of his great novel.
Ian Frazier wrote of the book:
"That Creating Anna Karenina is a major contribution to Tolstoy scholarship makes it no less of a delight to read. Blaisdell's passion for the subject, and his always-surprising discoveries about the great man and his creation, kept me turning the pages unstoppably. This is a wonderful book"
In his own words, here is Bob Blaisdell's Book Notes music playlist for his book Creating Anna Karenina:
Tolstoy loved music and saw the similarity of its affects to literature: “One may sing in two ways: from the throat or from the chest. Is it not true that a voice from the throat is much more flexible than one from the chest, but then, on the other hand, it does not act on your soul? A chest voice, on the contrary, even if coarser touches you to the quick. As for me, if even in the most trivial air I hear a note taken from the depths of the chest, tears involuntarily come into my eyes. It is the same in literature: one may write from the head or from the heart. When you write from the head the words arrange themselves obediently and fluently on paper; but when you write from the heart, so many thoughts crowd into your mind, so many images into your imagination, so many memories into your heart, that the expressions become inexact, inadequate, intractable and rough. It may be a mistake, but I always checked myself when I began to write from my head, and tried to write only from my heart.”
In the mid-1870s, when he felt stuck, as he often did, writing Anna Karenina, he would play the piano for hours, and it annoyed his wife, maybe as much for the repetitions as for its indicating that he wasn’t working on the novel. She doesn’t name the music that he was playing, but Chopin was his favorite composer, so let’s say it was one of the Etudes, Preludes or Nocturnes. “Chopin in music,” Tolstoy once said, “is the same as Pushkin in poetry.” Chopin’s simplicity and sincerity made Tolstoy “love him with all the strength of his soul.”
The first summer of Tolstoy’s work on Anna Karenina, 1873, the whole family traveled hundreds of miles east on the Volga to a ramshackle farmhouse in the middle of the arid steppe … and they brought a piano.
There is not, however, a lot of music in Anna Karenina. Yes, there’s the ball where Vronsky makes his preference for Anna over Kitty obvious and they sweep each other off each other’s feet; there’s a musical evening that Anna attends at the end of Part 5 where she outrages the wife of an admirer and this causes a scene that leads to her and Vronsky relocating in the countryside, but Tolstoy scarcely describes the soprano’s arias.
“Music always exercised a powerful influence over Tolstoy. Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Chopin were his favorite composers. Yet his love for classical music did not in any way interfere with his fondness for folk and gypsy music,” writes his daughter Alexandra (Tolstoy: A Life of My Father). My favorite Russian Gypsy band is Loyko. It exhibits those lively and marvelous changes of speed and those “chest” voices that attracted Tolstoy. If you can find Loyko’s Gypsy Times for Nunja, listen to “Novo Bersh,” “Vishnya,” “Moroz” and “Osen.”
In Moscow, in the middle of December 1876, Tolstoy met the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who was twelve years his junior. Tchaikovsky admired Tolstoy so much that he had asked the head of the Moscow Conservatory, Nikolai Rubinstein, to set up a quartet ensemble in Tolstoy’s honor. Tchaikovsky remembered, “Maybe there was never a time in my life I was so flattered and touched in my authorial self-love as when L. N. Tolstoy, listening to the Andante of my first quartet and sitting beside me, filled up with tears.” Try Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet #1.
Tolstoy didn’t like opera for its artificiality, but he did like Mozart’s Magic Flute and Don Giovanni. For me, Anna’s suicide is so overwhelmingly, terrifyingly experiential. There’s nothing comparable to it in the arts except perhaps Don Giovanni’s being dragged into Hell.
Bob Blaisdell is Professor of English at the City University of New York’s Kingsborough College. He is a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Christian Science Monitor, and the editor of more than three dozen Dover literature and poetry collections. He lives in New York City.
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