Tolstoy

Both Tanya and Sergey married in 1867. Tolstoy was opposed to Tanya marrying her cousin Alexander kuzminsky, as he thought she would be a good wife for his old friend Dmitry Dyakov, who had just been widowed. There was something distinctly curmudgeonly about the distaste he expressed ten years later when Dyakov (then fifty-five) married his daughter Masha’s former governess Sofya Robertovna, who was thirty-two.¹¹² After all, ‘Sofesh’, as she was affectionately known, was the same age as his own wife, and two years older than Tanya.¹¹³ After Sergey finally married Maria they moved to his Pirogovo estate. They were to have a total of eleven children, of whom four survived, but their marriage was not happy. Maria felt painfully aware of their different social backgrounds, and was shy and retiring in the company of her brother’s family. Tolstoy always showed Maria Mikhailovna the greatest of respect, and repeatedly invited her to accompany Sergey to Yasnaya Polyana, but she was reluctant to come, even when Sonya had the idea of asking her to become godmother to their son Andrey, born in December 1877.

If Tolstoy had essentially stopped keeping a diary while he was writing Anna Karenina, it was partly because he was able to give voice to matters that concerned him on the pages of his novel. Through the relationship of Levin and kitty he had wanted to chart a ‘third way’ between the European-style marriage favoured by Anna, notable for the small number of children, and the ‘traditional’ peasant-style marriage of Dolly, who raises a large number of children despite being from the same noble background as Anna. Over the course of the novel Tolstoy had woven many thinly disguised autobiographical details into the story of Levin’s courtship and marriage of kitty (the communication via letters written in chalk, the oversight of leaving out a clean shirt for Levin to wear to the wedding and so forth), but in the second half of Part Six, he began to voice through Dolly one particular immediate concern: his horror of contraception.

After the death of Varvara in November 1875, Sonya’s health had remained precarious, and in January 1877 she made her first visit to St Petersburg to spend a week with her mother (whom she had not seen for three years) and consult the famous Dr Botkin, court physician to the Tsar. She also met Alexandrine for the first time, who immediately wrote to tell Tolstoy how much she liked his wife. She told him that she had found ‘Sophie’ sincere, intelligent, warm and straightforward, and had taken to her at once. It was Alexandrine who also conveyed a euphemistic message from Dr Botkin about Sonya’s ‘health’ which resulted in her becoming pregnant again in a matter of weeks.¹¹⁴ Since the death of Varvara, Sonya had so dreaded having another child that she had done everything in her powers to avoid becoming pregnant, including considering contraception, and it had clearly had an impact on the marriage. It was just at this time that Tolstoy wrote the chapter in Anna Karenina in which Dolly reacts with extreme shock to Anna’s revelation that she has been using contraception. For Dolly, and for Tolstoy, contraception was immoral.

While Sonya was in Petersburg, Tolstoy got on with finishing Anna Karenina, turning to Trollope for light relief. He was reading The Prime Minister, the penultimate of the six Palliser novels, and recommended it highly to his brother Sergey.¹¹⁵ Anna Karenina reflects Tolstoy’s engagement with the French novel of adultery, but also his enthusiasm for English fiction, which he highly revered – he once stated quite baldly that English books were the best, and that he always found something fresh and new in them.¹¹⁶ The English novel Anna reads on the train at the beginning of Anna Karenina may well have been by Trollope, since it mentions Members of Parliament, fox-hunting and peers.¹¹⁷ Trollope had decided early on that his spirited heroine Lady Glencora would eventually grow to love her upright, dry, statesman husband Plantagenet, who is altogether more benign than his Russian counterpart karenin. And without the burden of a didactic tradition to weigh him down, opting for a happy ending was unproblematic for a writer devoted to his full-time job at the Post Office. Trollope was mercifully immune to the kind of self-doubt which increasingly bedevilled Tolstoy as he struggled to finish Anna Karenina.