Tolstoy

Tolstoy ploughed on with Anna Karenina in October and November 1873, but there were further disruptions. As soon as kramskoy packed up his easel and returned to St Petersburg, he was host to the group of village schoolteachers whom he had invited to discuss his teaching methods. They stayed at Yasnaya Polyana for a week.⁴⁴ Then on 9 November the Tolstoys suffered their first bereavement with the sudden death of their youngest son, the previously healthy eighteen-month-old Pyotr (Petya). Shortly after that, Sonya’s sister Tanya kuzminskaya’s pregnancy ended in a stillbirth.⁴⁵ The family was devastated, particularly Sonya (who a few months later was also to lose her nineteen-year-old brother Vladimir, who died just after joining the hussars⁴⁶). On the clear frosty day when they were burying Petya next to his grandparents, Tolstoy started to think for the first time about where he would be buried. At this point he was still fairly sanguine, and in letters he wrote at the time he explained that the death of his brother Nikolay had in some way inured him to the pain of loss. He reasoned that the death of any other of the five elder children in the family would have been harder,⁴⁷ as this was like losing one’s little finger.⁴⁸ He was also frank that this ‘screaming’ baby had not yet been a source of any delight for him.⁴⁹

Sonya, who was four months pregnant when Petya died, felt differently. No other of her children had been so attached to her, and radiated such cheerful spirits and goodness, she wrote to her sister Tanya. She still kept expecting her jolly, chubby little boy to call out to her. Because of the weight of the grief she was carrying in her heart, she also feared for the new baby she had felt move inside for the first time just as Petya was dying. Her last memory of him was of the sun pouring in through the church window on to his body in its little coffin, and turning his hair gold. Christmas was a quiet affair at Yasnaya Polyana that year. While the children were outside tobogganing, Sonya sat inside getting on with copying and household chores, and looking forward to the evening troika rides that they organised as their entertainment. But the recent deaths had almost totally taken away her capacity to find happiness and tranquillity, she told Tanya.⁵⁰

Tolstoy had now been working on and off on his novel for nine months. At the end of 1873 he confided to Nikolay Strakhov that his work on Anna Karenina had gone well up until that point, even very well. He calculated that he had seven printer’s sheets all ready to be typeset, and he decided he would go ahead and print them as the first part of his novel in book form, without prior publication in a journal.⁵¹ Accordingly, in January 1874 Tolstoy went to Moscow to draw up an agreement for publishing Anna Karenina with Mikhail katkov’s printing house. He turned to katkov’s press as it had just produced a print run of 3,600 copies of his collected works in eight volumes (about 1,000 of them sold in the first year, at a price of twelve roubles).⁵² Technically this constituted the third edition of Tolstoy’s writings, since he counted the appearance of his work in journals as the first. The two-volume ‘second’ edition which had been published in 1864 was now swelled by War and Peace, but in the new format: four rather than six parts, with all the French translated into Russian and the authorial ruminations about history placed together in a new epilogue. The revisions to War and Peace had been partly dictated by the momentous changes wrought in Tolstoy’s thinking by his work on the ABC books, and his new ideas about reforming the way he wrote would also have an impact on Anna Karenina. Tolstoy was, of course, still very preoccupied with his educational work. It was during this brief visit to Moscow in January 1874 that Tolstoy appeared before the Moscow Literacy Committee, which accepted his proposal that his teaching method be tried out alongside the official method then in use.