Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

flirtatious lathers & childlike bewilderments

“‘Playing secrétaire?’ said the old prince, approaching.’”

That Tolstoy wrote the greatest ever sex scene isn’t a surprise. He bestrides the literary record books, Michael-Phelps-like: best hunting scene, best deathbed scene, best rant by a supporting character.

What is a surprise is that this greatest ever sex scene doesn’t feature any sex. It takes place at a dinner party, and no one involved removes so much as a cummerbund.

The scene comes a little less than halfway through Anna Karenina, at the home of Stiva Oblonsky, Anna’s golden retriever of a brother. For a number of chapters a handful of characters have been sitting around arguing heatedly over the sorts of things that Tolstoy characters argue heatedly about: the rights of women, the relative merits of various European countries, Russian communes.

And then Kitty and Levin — who we’ve been hoping will get together for four hundred pages — bump into each other in the doorway to the drawing room. Kitty says: “‘What’s all this love of arguing? No one ever convinces anyone else.’”

And Levin, who has never met an argument he won’t pummel into dust, experiences an epiphany.

He had often felt that sometimes during an argument you would understand what your opponent loves, and suddenly come to love the same thing yourself, and agree all at once, and then all reasonings would fall away as superfluous…

But alas, Levin thinks, he will never be able to articulate the full scope of what he’s realized.

But as soon as he began to explain, she understood… She had fully divined and expressed his poorly expressed thought.

Here we have the first hint that Tolstoy is up to something, and that that something involves a quasi-mystical union between Kitty and Levin.

In a giddy flirtatious lather they sit down at a card table, and Kitty begins drawing circles on the tablecloth with a piece of chalk. They get drawn into a conversation about the rights of women, and Kitty begins to make a point before cutting herself off, embarrassed. But now it’s Kitty’s turn to be understood intuitively, as if from within.

‘Oh! Yes!’ [Levin] said, ‘yes, yes, yes, you’re right, you’re right!’

Levin is rather excited by all this understanding (“…he felt in his whole being the ever increasing tension of happiness.”) And so he decides to test just how far this miraculous rapport goes.

‘Wait,’ [Levin] said, sitting down at the table. ‘There’s one thing I’ve long wanted to ask you.’

And rather than ask it outright, he starts writing letters on the table.

‘Here,’ he said, and wrote the initial letters: w, y, a, m: t, c, b, d, i, m, n, o, t.

We know, thanks to Tolstoy’s omniscient narration, that these letters mean “When you answered me: ‘that cannot be’, did it mean never or then?’ (Levin proposed to Kitty at the beginning of the book, and she refused him). But what possible hope is there that Kitty will understand this? What is she, a sorcerer?

Well:

She glanced at him seriously, then leaned her knitted brow on her hand and began to read. Occasionally she glanced at him, asking with her glance: ‘Is this what I think?’

‘I understand,’ she said, blushing.

‘What is this word?’ he said, pointing to the n that signified the word never.

‘That means the word never,’ she said, ‘but it’s not true!’

So we have our answer as to how far their rapport goes: it goes all the way.

They go on like this, writing strings of letters, effortlessly transcribing each other’s innermost thoughts, until they are down to a single, panting syllable: “‘Yes.’”

I’ve heard people complain about the implausibility of their understanding each other so easily — but this is like a child’s bewilderment as to how the seed from the man’s body could get into the egg from the woman’s. Kitty and Levin are not, for the duration of their conversation, separate people; they are joined, their inner maps have overlapped, they are one. And the miracle of the scene — the thing that makes it sexier than any romance novel — is that no one else at the dinner party knows it.

Just as they finish their frenzied exchange, Kitty’s father walks up to the table.

‘Playing secrétaire?’ said the old prince, approaching.’

This quiet coda — this hilariously mundane bit of balloon-puncturing — is the sentence that makes the scene for me. It’s The Wizard of Oz in reverse: a sudden transposition from the fevered colors of what we know Kitty and Levin’s conversation means into the sober grays of what, to everyone else, it looks like. I feel, reading this sentence, as if I’ve just come up from underwater and realized, from the sudden din and clatter, just how gloriously silent it was down there.

Kitty and Levin were, after all, playing secrétaire (a French game, apparently, in which you guess the words from their first letters). That they might have been doing anything more than that is their, and our, secret.