Tolstoy

As historians fleshed out a more rounded picture of Peter the Great in the more permissive atmosphere under Alexander II, a growing number of people began to question the official view of his reign, including Tolstoy’s American visitor Eugene Schuyler, whose own ‘historical biography’ was published in 1884.¹¹ It is likely he and Tolstoy discussed their shared fascination with Peter the Great at some point during his week-long stay at Yasnaya Polyana in 1868. In the course of his research, Schuyler came to believe Peter had forced Europeanisation on to Russia too early.¹² Since subsequent Russian rulers had then concentrated resources on increasing the nation’s military prestige at the expense of domestic reform (a scenario which would, of course, be played out again in the twentieth century), the cost of Peter’s reforms had in fact been paid by those who had least benefited from them – the millions of serfs who made up the majority of the population. The ‘Great Reforms’, when they eventually arrived in the 1860s, came too late, and certainly did not go far enough in the eyes of most educated Russians. But Tolstoy was typically neither on the side of the krepostniks – those members of the right-wing landed gentry who regretted the Emancipation of Serfdom Act – nor was he with those members of the intelligentsia on the left who sought more radical reform. He would take on both sides in Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy’s knowledge of the huge discrepancy between his own unmerited position of privilege and the poverty and backwardness of the peasantry was becoming increasingly painful for him as time went on, and made it morally difficult for him to continue writing for the educated classes. This is why he devoted so much time to his ABC, which he regarded as the most important thing he had ever done. At that time in his career, it was the best way he could find of personally helping to remedy a situation in which all the landed gentry were complicit. The utopian approach to the country’s social problems taken by many of Russia’s idealistic young students was far less practical. Just as Tolstoy was abandoning his Peter the Great novel in the spring of 1873, at a time when it seemed that his ABC project was turning into a complete fiasco,¹³ the more radical members of Russia’s student intelligentsia were beginning to think of revolution as the only solution to the country’s ills. Inspired by the populist ideas of thinkers like Alexander Herzen, who had advocated a Russian brand of socialism designed to enable the peasantry to bypass capitalism, they headed for the countryside to have direct contact with the people by distributing propaganda and setting up workshops and co-operatives.

The high-water mark of the ‘Going to the People’ movement was the summer of 1874 when the Russian countryside was invaded by literally thousands of earnest young ‘nihilists’ (the moniker they had been labelled with ever since the publication of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons in 1862, which denoted their scepticism towards accepted authorities). Many of them were women. But since most of these students came from the cities, and were essentially middle class, they had next to no direct knowledge of the peasantry, and they badly miscalculated. As it turned out, the peasants’ innate conservatism made them indifferent if not downright hostile to the students’ efforts to incite them to overthrow their tsar. Against all odds, they retained a deep loyalty and affection for the Romanovs. The peaceful ‘Going to the People’ movement failed, and the wave of arrests which followed led the more extreme Populists to turn to terrorism at the end of the 1870s. It was against this background of social upheaval that Tolstoy would set Anna Karenina. The casting of only a minor character as a nihilist belies the fact that in its defence of marriage and conservative family values, the whole novel is an assault on the kind of views espoused by the radical intelligentsia, for whom female emancipation was entirely consonant with their political goals.¹⁴ The aristocratic Tolstoy would never have deigned to engage in a direct polemic with his opponents, whose uncompromising stance was partly driven by the fact that, coming from poor backgrounds, they had nothing to lose. In its searching analysis of marriage as an institution, however, Anna Karenina is certainly an indirect response to the kind of women’s liberation championed in such classic nihilist texts as Chernyshevsky’s 1862 novel What Is to Be Done?, which celebrates ‘free love’.