Abstract
This essay explores Tolstoy’s engagement with nineteenth-century energy science in Anna Karenina (1875–1877). Jillian Porter shows that despite his skepticism toward thermodynamics, Tolstoy relies on its principles for narrative structure and poetics. The idea of energy as a “power to make work” drives the continuous conversions of the novel’s bifurcated plot and generates metaphors for mind, body, and text. This unwitting energy dependency resonates with present-day ecological predicaments: as both an object of Tolstoy’s critique and a key source of Anna Karenina’s signifying power, energy holds the author and his readers in its thrall.
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Notes
- 1.
I rely on Joe Sachs’ and Cara New Daggett’s explications of Aristotelian energeia in Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, translated by Joe Sachs (Newbury, MA: Focus, 2002), viii; and Cara New Daggett, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 16. On the ascension of energy as the key term of nineteenth-century physics, see P. M. Harmon, Energy, Force, and Matter: The Conceptual Development of Nineteenth-Century Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982).
- 2.
L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moskva: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1835–1864, hereafter PSS, http://tolstoy.ru/creativity/90-volume-collection-of-the-works/), 46:106 (all translations in this chapter are my own unless otherwise noted—JP).
- 3.
On Tolstoy’s engagements with physics, see Boris Eikhenbaum, Tolstoi in the Seventies (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1982), 34–6, Donna Tussing Orwin, Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847–1880 (Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), 188–207; Donna Tussing Orwin, “Why is Levin Reading Tyndall?” in The Unlimited Gaze: Essays in Honour of Professor Natalia Baschmakoff, ed. Elina Kahla, Aleksanteri Series 2 (Helsinki: Kikimora Publications, 2009): 203–212; and Gary Saul Morson, Anna Karenina in Our Time: Seeing More Wisely (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2007), esp. 16–20, 156.
- 4.
Thomson first used “energy” in the modern physical sense in “An Account of Carnot’s Theory of the Motive Power of Heat” (1849) and elaborated it further in such papers as “On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy” (1852). In essays published between 1852 and 1855, William Rankine promoted energy as the new cornerstone of physics. This idea became well established after receiving support from Helmholtz and Maxwell in the late 1850s. Harmon, Energy, Force, and Matter, 41–65.
- 5.
Orwin, Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 233.
- 6.
Morson, Anna Karenina in Our Time, 26.
- 7.
Imre Szeman issues a forceful appeal to dismantle the systems of knowledge that are founded on the nineteenth-century scientific concept of energy in “Towards a Critical Theory of Energy,” in Energy Humanities: Current State and Future Directions, Mišík and Nada Kujundžić, eds. (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2021), 23–36, 24, 29.
- 8.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, esp. 41–8; Barri J. Gold, Thermopoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
- 9.
The 1870s was a decisive decade in the history of Russian petroleum, and the railroad gave a major impetus to its development. After the 1872 sale of state-held oil fields to private (foreign and domestic) investors initiated a period known as the “great oil fever,” production soared, and experimentation began that would soon lead to the adoption of fuel oil and petroleum-based lubricants as the primary means of driving Russian locomotives and greasing their wheels for maximum efficiency. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso, 2011), 34; Vagit Alekperov, Oil of Russia: Past, Present, and Future, trans. Paul B. Gallagher and Thomas D. Hedden (Minneapolis: East View Press, 2011), 78–81, 101–3.
- 10.
See Konstanine Klouchkine’s essay in the present volume. “The Energy of Chernyshevsky’s Vera Pavlovna in the Modern Cultural Economy,” in Energy Culture: Work, Power, and Waste in Russia and the Soviet Union, eds. Jillian Porter and Maya Vinokour (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 21–39.
- 11.
David Herman and Anna Berman have revealed similar dynamics at work in Tolstoy’s representation of human passions and his response to Darwinian thought, respectively. Herman proposes that “Anna Karenina conjures with the powers of passion before trying to escape and denounce them in the end,” and according to Berman, in War and Peace and Anna Karenina “Overt rejection is matched with an integration of Darwinian thought at a broader, more metaphorical level.” Tolstoy’s aestheticization of the thermodynamic principles he apparently rejects in Anna Karenina also calls to mind Stephanie LeMenager’s assertion that Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! (1927) unwittingly glorifies the petroleum-based culture it seeks to critique: “Even for one of the most ideologically driven American novelists, the aesthetic pleasures of petroleum undermine political solutions.” David Herman, “Allowable Passions in Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy Studies Journal 8 (1995): 5–32, 17; Anna Berman, “Darwin in the Novels: Tolstoy’s Evolving Literary Response,” The Russian Review 76 (2017): 331–51, 332; LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014), 69–70.
- 12.
English translations of Tolstoy’s text are from Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, revised by George Gibian, second ed. (New York: Norton, 1995). Parenthetical citations to the translation precede those to the original Russian text in the PSS.
- 13.
Hermann von Helmholtz’s 1847 memoir, On the Conservation of Force (Ueber die Erhaltung der Kraft) provided the major impetus to further work in the 1850s on what would be called the conservation of energy by William Thompson, William Rankine, Clausius, and others. The two laws of thermodynamics were first described by Clausius in “On the Moving Force of Heat” (“Ueber die bewegende Kraft der Wärme,” 1850). They took on the more familiar form I have cited in this paper in his book, The Mechanical Theory of Heat—with Its Application to the Steam Engine and to Physical Properties of Bodies (Ueber verschiedene für die Anwendung bequeme Formen der Hauptgleichungen der mechanischen Wärmtheorie, 1864–1865), which introduced the term “entropy.” Harmon, Energy, Force, and Matter, 41–71. Rudolf Clausius, The Mechanical Theory of Heat—With Its Applications to the Steam Engine and to Physical Properties of Bodies (London: J. Van Voorst, 1867), 365.
- 14.
Smil, Energies, x.
- 15.
A powerful example of such deconstruction can be found in Daggett, The Birth of Energy, esp. 17–9, 83–103.
- 16.
See, for instance, the drawings in Tolstoy’s notebooks from March 9 and 11, 1872. PSS 48:139.
- 17.
Lev Tolstoy, “Solar Heat,” trans. Leo Wiener, in The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy, vol. 12 (Boston: Dana Estes, 1904), 159; Tolstoi, “Solntse-Teplo,” PSS 22:651. Here and elsewhere in this essay, I have modified pre-Revolutionary Russian orthography in accordance with modern norms.
- 18.
On cultural anxieties about the second law, see Gillian Beer, “‘The Death of the Sun’: Victorian Solar Physics and Solar Myth,” in Open Fields: Science in Culture Encounter (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 219–41.
- 19.
Clausius, The Mechanical Theory of Heat, iii.
- 20.
Elizabeth Newswald, “Saving the World in the Age of Entropy: John Tyndall and the Second Law of Thermodynamics,” in The Age of Scientific Naturalism: Tyndall and His Contemporaries, eds. Bernard Lightman and Michael S. Reidy (London: Pickering and Chato, 2014), 15–31, 16; John Tyndall, Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion: Being a Course of Twelve Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in the Season of 1862 (New York: D. Appleton, 1863).
- 21.
Iulii Zhukovskii, “Vopros narodonaseleniia,” Vestnik Evropy 1 (1871), Prezidentskaia biblioteka imeni B. N. El’tsina, https://www.prlib.ru/item/323722, 167–205, esp. 181–2, 186.
- 22.
Like Tolstoy, both Zhukovsky and Iuzhakov use the Russian word “sila,” rather than “energiia,” when discussing concepts from thermodynamics. Sergei Iuzhakov, Organicheskii progress v ego otnosheniiakh k istoricheskomu progressu, Kindle edition Location 3593.
- 23.
References in one of Tolstoy’s notebooks to another work published in Herald of Europe over the course of 1871 indicate that he was reading the journal the year in which Zhukhovsky’s essay was published, but nothing indicates that he read the essay itself. PSS 48:409.
- 24.
Edwina Jannie Blumberg, “Tolstoy and the English Novel: A Note on Middlemarch and Anna Karenina,” Slavic Review 30, no. 3 (1971): 561–9.
- 25.
George Eliot’s ‘Fine Excess’: Middlemarch, Energy, and the Afterlife of Feeling, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 67, no. 2 (2012): 204–33, 205.
- 26.
As Morson points out, among Levin’s final philosophical insights is the belief that “Without friction, there is no traction.” Anna Karenina in Our Time, 201.
- 27.
The term “zabluzhdenie” could also be translated as “fallaciousness,” “misconception,” or even “error.” I have chosen “delusion” to highlight the word’s resonance with the illusions constructed by narratives and to match the English translation of the book Viktor Shklovsky titled with Tolstoy’s phrase. Viktor Shklovsky, Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot, trans. Shushan Avagyan (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007).
- 28.
Tolstoi to A. A. Tolstaia, April 6, 1876, in PSS, 62:408.
- 29.
Tolstoi to N. N. Strakhov, April 8, 1878, in PSS, 62:411.
- 30.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 38.
- 31.
Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991), 1–14, 6.
- 32.
Shklovsky, Energy of Delusion, 15.
- 33.
Helena Goscilo, “Motif-Mesh as Matrix: Body, Sexuality, Adultery, and the Woman Question,” Approaches to Teaching Anna Karenina, eds. Liza Knapp and Amy Mandelker (Modern Language Association, 2003), 83–9.
- 34.
On the train in Anna Karenina, see Boris Eikhenbaum, Tolstoi v semidesiatye gody (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1974), 185–90; Elisabeth Stenbock-Fermor, The Architecture of Anna Karenina: A History of its Structure, Writing, and Message (Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press, 1975), 65–74; Gary R. Jahn, “The Image of the Railroad in Anna Karenina,” Slavic and East European Journal 25, no. 2 (1981): 1–10; and Alyson Tapp, “Moving Stories: (E)motion and Narrative in Anna Karenina,” Russian Literature 59, no. 3 (2007): 341–61.
- 35.
On the history of the railroad in Russia, see Mikhail Voronin and Margarita Voronin, Pavel Melnikov and the Creation of the Railway System in Russia, 1804–1880, trans. John C. Decker (Danville, PA: Languages of Montour Press, 1995); J. N. Westwood, A History of Russian Railways (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964); Richard Haywood, The Beginnings of Railway Development in Russia in the Reign of Nicholas I (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1969); Richard Haywood, Russia Enters the Railway Age, 1842–1855 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1998).
- 36.
The mysteriously French-speaking muzhik (peasant) in Anna and Vronsky’s dreams is associated with the killed watchman not only by his continuous mutterings about “iron,” a potential reference to the iron rails of the train tracks, but also by Anna’s mistaken recognition of him in the figure of another peasant “stoo** over the carriage wheels” of the last train she takes in the novel (329, 692; 18:381, 19:345). Of the existing scholarly accounts of the dream peasant, Vadim Shneyder’s contention that he represents a nightmarish presentiment of industrial capitalism stands out as particularly satisfying. Russia’s Capitalist Realism: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov (Northwestern Univ. Press, 2021), 74–87.
- 37.
Alekperov, Oil of Russia, 45.
- 38.
Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 45.
- 39.
Tapp, “Moving Stories,” 349.
- 40.
I am indebted to my former student, Vince Lemke, for the comparison of parallel tracks to Tolstoy’s plotlines. On the “labyrinth of linkages,” see Tolstoi’s letter to N. N. Strakhov, April 23, 1876, in PSS, 62:268–9. Further strengthening this connection I am suggesting between Tolstoy’s image of an aesthetic “labyrinth of linkages” and the formal energetics of Anna Karenina is the semantic overlap in Russian between these “linkages” (stsepleniia) and the “bonds” (also stsepleniia) that Tolstoy elsewhere discusses in relation to the atomic structure of the universe. Consider this note from December 28, 1873: “Isn’t there just one axiomatic force, from which flow all the others (warmth, elect[ricity], grav[ity], and others). The force of earthly rotation. Gravitational pull to the earth, elasticity, and m[any] others, is simply the force of the bond of particles.” There are several other references to “bonds” in Tolstoy’s notes about physics from 1872. PSS, 48:68, 139, 151, 152, 156.
- 41.
Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 39–40, 42–8.
- 42.
Tyndall, Heat, iv–vi, 14, 151–80.
- 43.
Newswald, “Saving the World,” 29–31.
- 44.
Tyndall’s name comes up several times in Tolstoy’s writings. For example, in an 1877 manuscript for a work labeled “Discussants” (“Sobesedniki”), Tolstoy lists representatives of various schools of thought that he planned to put into dialog with one another on the subject of religion. The list includes idealists, positivists, and physicists, including Tyndall. According to a note left by his wife, the intention was to show the necessity of religion through this dialog. PSS, 17:733.
- 45.
Donna Tussing Orwin, “Why Does Levin Read Tyndall?” in The Unlimited Gaze: Essays in Honour of Professor Natalia Baschmakoff, ed. Elina Kahla, Aleksanteri Series 2 (2009): 203–12, 212.
- 46.
Tyndall, Heat, 60.
- 47.
Morson, Anna Karenina in Our Time, 58; Tyndall, Heat, 29.
- 48.
Vaclav Smil, Energies: An Illustrated Guide to the Biosphere and Civilization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 120–8.
- 49.
Tolstoy, “Galvanism,” in The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy, 12:152–5; Tolstoi, “Gal’vanizm,” PSS, 22:645–8. For a detailed treatment of Galvani and Volta’s experiments, see Marcello Pera, The Ambiguous Frog: The Galvani-Volta Contraversy on Animal Electricity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2014).
- 50.
On Tolstoy’s fascination with the metaphor of the “safety valve,” see Thomas Newlin, “Swarm Life and the Biology of War and Peace,” Slavic Review 71, no. 2 (2012): 359–84, 379–83.
- 51.
Michal Mrugalski, “Energieformen und Kraft des Lesens: Erweiterte Kognition und revolutionäre Gefühle in Lev Tolstojs Das Göttliche und das Menshchliche,” Poetica 52 (2021): 58–95.
- 52.
PSS, 58:94, 494, n. 259.
- 53.
PSS, 58:123; 38:434.
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Porter, J. (2023). The Energy Trap: Anna Karenina as a Parable for the Twenty-First Century. In: Porter, J., Vinokour, M. (eds) Energy Culture. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14320-5_3
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