Tolstoy

Fortunately, Tolstoy did not usually stay in a state of apoplexy very long. The case against him was dropped, the article was never finished and the squires of Sussex never got to have a hot-headed Russian count as their neighbour. Following the second bull-goring incident in May 1873, Tolstoy spent three days tending to the injured peasant and was devastated when he eventually died.³⁷ It was not surprising he had not been able to concentrate on Anna Karenina that month, so when he returned home from the steppe at the end of the summer he was all the more eager to resume work on it. His health had been invigorated by all the koumiss he had drunk on his homestead, his conscience was clear after successfully publicising the famine that threatened to engulf Samara’s peasant farmers, and he was still waiting for the Moscow Literacy Committee to respond to his invitation to organise a trial of the teaching methods he had championed in his ABC books. There was nothing to stop him going back to fiction, and he worked productively for about a month. Even having to sit for his first portrait did not distract him too much from his purpose at this stage. Indeed, it provided him with another source of raw material for Anna Karenina.

Pavel Tretyakov had been keen to acquire to a portrait of Tolstoy for his art collection since 1869, but his tentative attempts to broach the topic had so far been rebuffed. Tolstoy no doubt wondered, perhaps not without aristocratic snobbery, why he should give up valuable hours of his time so that an obscure Moscow merchant could put up a picture of him in his house. As the son of a merchant of the second guild who had grown up in the Zamoskvorechie, Tretyakov’s beginnings were indeed humble, and he remained a personally abstemious and self-effacing man, but the immensely profitable textile business he built up with his brother, combined with his passion for art, ensured he did not remain obscure for long. He may have had a total of six paintings in 1860, but by the time kramskoy painted Tolstoy’s portrait in 1873, Tretyakov was already planning a separate building to house his expanding collection. In 1881 it was opened to the public, thus fulfilling Tretyakov’s great dream of establishing a national gallery of Russian art. In 1892, when he donated his collection to the city of Moscow (six years before the opening of the Russian Museum in St Petersburg, which was founded on the initiative of Alexander III), the Tretyakov Gallery contained nearly 3,000 works of art.³⁸

As a passionate Slavophile, Tretyakov had decided to concentrate exclusively on Russian painting, and in particular on contemporary works which expressed the national spirit. In the 1860s painting had become as vibrant as literature and music in Russia, and at the end of the decade Tretyakov decided his gallery should also include portraits of the greatest new figures in the Russian arts. For the first time in Russia’s history there was a whole phalanx of professional writers, composers and painters proud of their nationality, and producing work of international quality that was becoming known abroad. As well as buying portraits of artists who were already deceased (such as Fyodor Moller’s 1841 portrait of Gogol, who died in 1852), Tretyakov set about commissioning new works, and in 1872 Perov painted Turgenev and Dostoyevsky. As luck would have it, Ivan kramskoy, Russia’s leading portrait painter, happened to spend the following summer in Tula province, and when he realised his dacha was just down the road from Yasnaya Polyana, he decided to wait for the count’s return from Samara. On 5 September he persuaded Tolstoy to agree to pose for him, and started work the next day.