Tolstoy

The seeds had been sown back in February 1870, when Tolstoy had begun drafting his article about the ‘woman question’, joining Strakhov in a comprehensive rejection of John Stuart Mill’s call for equality between the sexes. This was exactly when he first conceived the idea of writing a novel about a society woman who commits adultery. Then on a dark, cold evening in January 1872, a thirty-five-year-old woman called Anna Pirogova arrived at Yasenki station, just down the road from Yasnaya Polyana, with a bundle containing a change of underwear. After crossing herself, she threw herself under goods train No. 77. Anna Pirogova was a distant relation of Tolstoy’s wife. She had become the housekeeper and lover of his friend and neighbour Alexander Bibikov, then in his early fifties, with whom he had set up his short-lived distillery some years earlier. Bibikov had informed Anna he was going to marry his son’s governess, an attractive German girl.¹⁵ In a rage of jealousy and anger, she had sent him a note accusing him of being her murderer before taking her own life.¹⁶ Tolstoy went to the autopsy. He was badly distressed by seeing the mangled corpse of the grey-eyed, well-built woman he knew well. This was one of the first railway suicides on Russia’s young but rapidly expanding network, which had increased from about 500 miles of track at the time of Nicholas I’s death to over 10,000 by the 1870s. It was undoubtedly the first suicide at Tolstoy’s local station. He used the ‘iron road’ himself, of course, but he loathed this intrusion of modernity into his rural sanctuary, and he would shore up the complex architectural structure of Anna Karenina by thematically aligning events connected with the railway in his novel with death and destruction.

Another immediate stimulus for Anna Karenina came from France. In March 1873 Tolstoy wrote to his sister-in-law Tanya to ask if she had read L’Homme-femme, an essay by Alexandre Dumas fils which had created a storm in Paris the previous year and had already been reprinted several dozen times.¹⁷ Dumas wrote his essay as a reaction to coverage in the French press of the trial of a man who had murdered his ‘unfaithful’ wife, from whom he had separated. Specifically he was responding to an article which deplored the French laws which virtually condoned such crimes (the man was sentenced to a mere five years), and proposed divorce as the solution. This could never have been an option in this case. After a brief period following the French Revolution when France had the most liberal divorce laws in the world, divorce had been made illegal there in 1816 and would remain so until 1884.¹⁸ For Dumas, marriage was a bitter, irreconcilable struggle between the sexes in which the woman prevails, but he argued that in this case the husband was ultimately the moral arbiter, and so had the right to kill an unfaithful wife who continued to be recalcitrant. Tolstoy was deeply impressed with Dumas’s analysis of marriage. As well as introducing a discussion of his essay in one of the early drafts of Anna Karenina,¹⁹ he would take issue with many of its fundamental points in his account of Levin and kitty’s marriage. He would also engage, of course, with the entire tradition of the French novel of adultery that had been created by authors such as Flaubert, Zola and Dumas.²⁰