Tolstoy

This time Tolstoy carried on writing for quite a long while, but he was to change tack yet again. He had now constructed solid foundations for his novel by creating the ‘Levin’ storyline to act as a counterpoint to the karenin plot, with the ‘Oblonskys’ as the arch joining them together. For reasons of structural balance, he now decided against his central character of ‘Levin’ appearing in the first chapter, so he reserved the Zoological Garden for a skating scene later on and returned to his previous idea of opening the novel with ‘Oblonsky’ waking up after the row with his wife. He reworked the crucial opening scenes four times to get them exactly right, and these were the first chapters he gave Sonya to make fair copies of. Everything else stayed in draft form.²⁸ In all, Tolstoy produced ten versions of the first part of Anna Karenina, writing a total of 2,500 pages of manuscript before the novel was complete.²⁹ Almost a century would pass before the story of how Anna Karenina was written could be told with accuracy. The manuscripts were partially unravelled for publication in volume twenty of Tolstoy’s Complete Collected Works, published in 1939, but the first complete scholarly edition of the novel appeared only in 1970, and that now turns out to contain errors.

On 11 May 1873 Tolstoy took a deep breath and finally wrote to tell Strakhov that he had spent over a month working on a novel that had nothing to do with Peter the Great. He emphasised that he was writing a proper novel – the first in his life.³⁰ Indeed, he had been writing the word roman (‘a novel’) at the top of the page on each new draft of his opening chapter. At this early stage, he was still very excited by his new project, which he told Strakhov completely ‘enthralled’ him.³¹ But before he set off with the family at the beginning of June for their summer trip to Samara, where he was not intending to do much writing, a couple of events slowed his progress and cast the first shadows over a novel whose completion would prove increasingly difficult. First came the unexpected news of the death of Tolstoy’s five-year-old niece Dasha kuzminskaya, the eldest daughter of Sonya’s sister Tanya, who brought her children to stay at Yasnaya Polyana each summer. Dasha was adored by everyone, and her death brought the chilling realisation to Tolstoy that it could have easily been one of his own children. Sonya was grief-stricken. Tolstoy wrote a long letter of consolation to Tanya, and instructed her to learn by heart and recite Psalm 130 every day (‘Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord’).³²

Tolstoy was further upset that May on hearing that a Yasnaya Polyana peasant had been gored and killed by a bull he was untying.³³ He found it particularly troubling because this was the second such death in twelve months. Despite being in Samara on the previous occasion in the summer of 1872, Tolstoy had been held accountable by the coroner, who had placed him under house arrest while he investigated the incident. Tolstoy was incensed, both by having to submit to the authority of the young whippersnapper of a coroner who was curtailing his liberties, and by all the new laws which had introduced these procedures. He remembered the case of the peasant who had sat in Tula’s jail for a year and a half under suspicion of stealing a cow before it was finally established that he was innocent, and he feared the worst. Bizarrely, Tolstoy was also summoned as a juror for another case at the same time, and was promptly fined for not attending court.³⁴ In the heat of the moment he seriously considered taking Sonya and the children to England, where he believed civil liberties were respected. On 15 September 1872 he even wrote to Alexandrine to ask if she could put him in touch with some ‘good aristocratic families’, to enable the family to have a ‘pleasant’ life in England. Although he admitted that he found European life repellent, he told her he could raise about 200,000 roubles if he sold up everything he had in Russia, which he reckoned would be enough to buy a house with some land near the sea.³⁵ The new legal system which had been introduced in Russia in 1864 had created Western-style courts and the need for Western-style lawyers and other legal professionals, and Tolstoy’s other impetuous action was to begin writing a high-minded critical article titled ‘The New Laws and Their Application’.³⁶ In due course, Tolstoy would express his contempt for the new institutions through his alter ego Levin in Anna Karenina.