Tolstoy

Sonya felt differently: she wondered whether it was worth her husband investing all his energy in a tiny corner of Russia – the district in Tula province where they lived. Writing to her sister Tanya, she did not conceal the fact that she heartily despised all her husband’s works with arithmetic and grammar. She was longing for her husband to get back to writing novels, which was an activity she both respected and loved:

I teach, breast-feed like a machine, from morning to night and from night to morning. I was copying out the ABC, but when I saw that it was not going to come to an end soon, I got so fed up with all those short words, and phrases such as ‘Masha ate kasha’ and so on that I gave up – let some clerk write it out. My work was copying out the immortal War and Peace or Anna, but that was boring.⁷⁰

Sonya and Lyovochka were beginning to grow apart. Sonya was tiring of the monotony and grind of her daily life, and was frequently ill. Her husband was beginning to be assailed by existential despair.

Subscribers to the Russian Messenger finally started reading Anna Karenina at the beginning of 1875, when the first chapters of the novel appeared in the January issue, nestled amongst materials as diverse as an article about the reform of Russian universities, an instalment of Wilkie Collins’s detective novel The Law and the Lady (only just published in England), notes on the defence of Sebastopol by a ‘Black Sea Officer’, a sketch of China and an article about education.⁷¹ It is unlikely readers dwelled long on the dry disquisition about the teaching of logic in high schools when there was a new novel by Count Tolstoy to read. The first chapters of Anna Karenina caused a sensation, and Strakhov wrote to tell Tolstoy that he had seen even the most highbrow people in St Petersburg jumping up and down in excitement.⁷² The first instalment ended with Anna leaving the ball early, having danced the mazurka with Vronsky, and thus brought kitty’s dreams crashing to the ground. Russian readers could not wait to read more. Sonya, the faithful copyist, had a right to feel hard done by when there were people blackening her reputation after Tolstoy’s death, for she had contributed several details to the crucial scene at the ball by acting as her husband’s fashion consultant and advising on Anna’s toilette:

She was not in lilac, which kitty had so set her heart on, but in a low-cut black velvet dress, revealing her ample shoulders and a bosom like old chiselled ivory, rounded arms and tiny slender hands. The entire dress was trimmed with Venetian lace. On her head, in her black hair, unaugmented by any extension, was a small garland of pansies, and there was another on the black sash ribbon around her waist, between pieces of white lace.⁷³

Tolstoy dressed Anna in a black dress, but it was Sonya who suggested the fabric should be velvet, and accentuated the overall sensual impression by making the lace around her waist white.⁷⁴

In the second instalment of Anna Karenina, which appeared in the February issue of the Russian Messenger, readers sympathised with the grieving kitty and Levin, both now spurned. They thrilled to Anna’s romantic nighttime encounter with Vronsky at a remote railway station in the middle of a snowstorm, but they were probably slightly disconcerted by the way this instalment ended. In the middle of chapter 10 of Part Two came two coy lines of dots representing the moment when Anna and Vronsky become intimate with each other.⁷⁵ They were followed by a passage in which the sexual act was clearly associated with murder:

As she looked at him, she felt physically humiliated, and she could say nothing more. He meanwhile was feeling what a murderer must feel when he looks at the body he has robbed of life. That body he had robbed of life was their love, the first period of their love. There was something terrible and loathsome in the memories of what this terrible price of shame had bought. Shame at her spiritual nakedness oppressed her and communicated itself to him. But in spite of the murderer’s deep horror before the body of his victim, the body must be hacked to pieces and hidden – the murderer must take advantage of what he has gained by murder.

Tolstoy experienced the first of several bruising encounters with his editor over this chapter. katkov objected to his ‘vivid realism’, and asked him to tone it down. Tolstoy refused to change a single word, however, arguing that this was one of those parts on which the ‘whole novel’ depended.⁷⁶