Robin F Miller

This chapter investigates a key scene in Anna Karenina that, although involving ‘secondary’ characters, has resonances for the work as a whole, and had a marked influence on Chekhov’s artistic sensibility. As Miller notes at the start of her chapter, these two secondary characters, Sergei Koznyshev (Levin’s slightly pompous half-brother) and Varvara Andreevna – Varenka – contribute in multiple and important ways to the matrix of interconnections and doublings of theme in the novel; that is, they function as secondary characters usually do. Nevertheless, their brief foray to the edge of the woods to pick mushrooms reflects a sensibility on Tolstoi’s part that seems more akin to Chekhov’s later aesthetic vision than to what we tend typically to think of as Tolstoian. They step out of the role of the secondary character to enter a complex, free-standing and enclosed space of their own. Chekhov’s profound response to Tolstoi, and to Anna Karenina in particular, is visible in a number of his stories such as Anna on the Neck, Lady with Lapdog, At Home, The House with the Attic, About Love, Ariadne and The Nameday Party. Tolstoi’s admiration for Chekhov’s stories was, likewise, significant, as is the dialogue that developed between them both in their friendship and through subsequent stories they each wrote. Underpinning Miller’s approach is the question of readership, or, rather, how one reads. Miller contends that, when Varenka and Koznyshev break free of the Tolstoian frame of Kitty, Levin and ‘the Shcherbatskii element’ on Levin’s estate and wander off with the children to pick mushrooms, their excursion to the woods is also an excursion for Tolstoi into a different kind of writerly essence or quiddity, one that resembles Chekhov more than it does its own author. In other words, we may read this scene as though it were a Chekhov story, almost as if it were a fourth story alongside Chekhov’s trilogy (the three stories published in the summer of 1898, The Man in a Case, Gooseberries, and About Love) and thus temporarily envision it as part of a kind of imaginary thematic quartet comprised of similar themes and artistic strategies. What light does such a reading, taken out of the context of the novel, ultimately shed upon Anna Karenina? What happens when one deliberately foregrounds a minor character in one’s reading of a novel?