Tolstoy

Tolstoy finally finished Anna Karenina in 1877. Russian readers had certainly been patient. They had, after all, begun reading it two years earlier, and they were probably as disconcerted as Tolstoy’s editor was when the instalments had suddenly stopped in April 1875, a third of the way into the novel, and again in 1876. katkov had even felt obliged to publish a notice explaining that the hiatus was not due to the journal’s editors but to ‘circumstances preventing the author from completing his novel’, whose publication, they hoped, would now continue ‘without interruption’. Tolstoy’s readers remained enthusiastic, however. One young acquaintance of Tolstoy later recalled that he and his fellow students waited with bated breath for each new issue of the Russian Messenger, and then immediately ‘devoured’ every page whenever there was an instalment of Anna Karenina.¹¹⁸ But Tolstoy was fairly nonplussed when Strakhov wrote from Petersburg in May 1877 to tell him that the most recent reviews were hailing him to be a writer as great as Shakespeare, and that even Dostoyevsky was waving his arms about and calling Tolstoy a ‘god of art’.¹¹⁹ Dostoyevsky, however, would shortly change his tune when he came to read the novel’s final chapters, in which Tolstoy threw down the gauntlet to Pan-Slavists like himself.

Anna Karenina was nothing if not topical, and Tolstoy’s slow progress enabled him to reflect in its pages not just the most recent debates about agriculture, but also the latest political developments as they unfolded in Russia. Here Tolstoy was in new territory, but his increasing indifference to purely artistic questions made him fearless about voicing unpopular opinions and set him on a collision course with the Russian establishment. The April 1877 issue of the Russian Messenger contained the last chapters of Part Seven, which end with Anna’s death, and they were greeted with wide acclaim. This issue should have also contained the novel’s epilogue (as Part Eight was originally called), but Tolstoy had once again fallen out with his editor, and he was still awaiting a third set of revised proofs in mid-May.¹²⁰ The sticking point was politics, and specifically the ‘unpatriotic’ opinions expressed in the novel about the Russian volunteer movement in aid of the Serbs, who since the end of June 1876 had been at war with the Ottoman Empire. This is the movement which Vronsky joins at the end of Anna Karenina: we see him getting on a train at the Smolensky station in Moscow as he sets off on a journey from which we know he will never return.

The Serbo-Turkish War was just one aspect of the ‘Eastern Question’ which reared its head once again in the 1870s, this time driven by the Balkan nations’ desire for liberation from centuries of Ottoman rule. Pan-Slavists saw the conflict as a golden opportunity to further their goal of uniting all the Slavic nations, ideally under Russia’s sovereignty. The fact that Pan-Slavism had its roots in Russia’s diplomatic isolation and humiliating defeat in the Crimean War was not lost on Tolstoy, whose experience fighting in that campaign had turned him into a committed pacifist. He found this new war greatly troubling. He had no wish to be caught up in contemporary politics, but his concern over the events unfolding in the Balkans caused him to put aside his disdain for the press temporarily and follow the war’s progress. Foreseeing Russia’s ineluctable involvement in the Serbo-Turkish War, he had actually gone to Moscow to find out more about it in November 1876. He was there when Alexander II gave a speech from the kremlin in which he gave the Turks an ultimatum, and could not have avoided the patriotic crowds lining the streets and shouting, ‘War! War!’ along with the customary ‘Hurrah!’¹²¹ What really made Tolstoy’s blood boil was the part he believed was played by the press and the ‘Slavic Committee’ in whipping up enthusiasm for war, and in the last pages of Anna Karenina he began to speak out.