Anna Karenina

While inspecting land hundreds of miles from home in 1869, Tolstoy wakes in the middle of the night and is overcome by fear of death. He is exhausted and vulnerable after the effort of writing War and Peace. He starts planning a play on Peter the Great, then decides it should be a novel. He opts for hard physical labour on his estate instead, then decides to learn Greek. With his usual skill for languages, he immerses himself in Homer, Plato and others. Between 1870 and 1872 he writes a series of textbooks for children that are panned by the critics but are moderately popular with the general public. He puts Peter aside.

In 1873 he begins the novel that becomes Anna Karenina. It explores the fate of the title character, a married woman from the aristocracy who falls so deeply in love with another man that she leaves her husband and young son. Like Tolstoy’s neighbour, his leading lady throws herself under a train and, like his sister Marya, she falls pregnant to a man that is not her husband (p270, Tolstoy, Wilson). In a parallel storyline, Tolstoy’s own personality and preoccupations helps to define the character of Constantine Levin who is first rebuffed by Kitty Shcherbatskaya, then marries her. In essence the book is about the private lives of people from Tolstoy’s own social sphere in contemporary Russia.

Words flow fast initially but then he is distracted by what is happening in the schools that he has recently reopened and a round of deaths within the family: the babies Poytr and Nicholas, the newborn Varvara, his aged Aunt Toinette, and old Aunt Pelagya, not long after she moves in with the Tolstoys from the convent in which she has been living. In the same three-year period his siblings Tanya and Sergey also lose offspring. Suicide is in epic proportions in Russia at the time and, as a precaution, he hides guns and ropes from himself. It is a struggle to keep writing.

The first chapters of Anna Karenina are published in the Russian Messenger in early 1875, but only after the editor of the competitive journal The Contemporary, NA Nekrasov, has been asked if he can match the 20,000 rouble sale price. It is a record price in Russia but it is a big hit (p277, Tolstoy, Wilson). As the last sections appear, Russia declares war on Turkey. The editor Mikhail Katkov refuses to publish Tolstoy’s epilogue as it stands, knowing that many of his readers will find it unpatriotic. It comes out in booklet form instead in 1878. In the same year a revised version of the story comes out as a three-volume book. “What’s so difficult about describing how an officer gets entangled with a woman?” Tolstoy tells anyone who will listen. “There’s nothing difficult in that, and above all, nothing worthwhile. It’s bad, and it serves no purpose.”