In early February Tolstoy “read aloud with his wife the novel of Gustave Droz, Babolain, which T.,” Sofia told her sister, “ ‘very much likes.’ ”XLIV
Whenever Sofia took her turn reading (assuming they took turns), did Tolstoy sit, eyes closed, nodding, murmuring approval or interest or surprise? Was it something like a couple watching TV together? When he read was Sofia sewing, mending, daydreaming? Was Tolstoy smoking? We can assume they were reading it in French. Their French had to be very good. From recordings made near the end of his life, we can hear Tolstoy’s reedy actual voice in Russian as well as a couple of short messages that he delivered in French, German, and English.XLV But what about Sofia’s voice? Tolstoy would soon describe Anna Karenina’s “chesty laugh,” but I am unaware of anything mentioned by him about Sofia’s or Kitty’s voices or laughs. His own laughter, recalled Aylmer Maude, “which began on a high note, had something wonderfully infectious about it. His head would hang over on one side, and his whole body would shake.”XLVI
In February, Tolstoy’s brother Sergei, perhaps still grieving, visited Yasnaya Polyana. Strakhov, passing through on his way south from St. Petersburg, came to visit the Tolstoys at Yasnaya Polyana on February 18–19.
Even for some of us who love Russian literature, Nikolai Nikolaevich Strakhov might seem just a name (his name in fact means fears); he pops up in biographies of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. He didn’t write fiction or plays or poetry; he was not a giant or some wildman whose life would inspire his colossal friends’ stories or inspire them to reconstruct him into a character. Unmarried, unreligious (though the son of a priest), he had a background in science and philosophy and wrote learned articles about them; he had argued and would continue arguing for recognizing the importance of Darwin’s theories, but he was, primarily, “a critic.” Who needed him?
The more I learned of Tolstoy’s life during his Anna Karenina years, the more necessary Strakhov became; obviously Tolstoy needed him! Strakhov had written long, smart, appreciative essays about War and Peace as it was being published. Later, in 1871, working for a journal, he wrote to Tolstoy to solicit an article, and Tolstoy straight off invited Strakhov to visit Yasnaya Polyana and become acquainted. From 1871 to the end of Strakhov’s life in 1896, he was liked and valued by the entire family. Sofia appreciated his influence on Tolstoy. Strakhov was modest. He was Tolstoy’s admirer without being a flatterer. Though they were the same age, Strakhov knew his literary place was far below Tolstoy’s, so there was no rivalry or assumption of equality between them.
Nikolay Nikolayevich Strakhov (1828–1896), Tolstoy’s literary conscience and closest friend during the writing of Anna Karenina.XLVII
It’s not likely that Tolstoy confessed to Strakhov this February that he had jumped ship from the Peter the Great project, because a couple of weeks later he complained to him that the writing still wasn’t moving. When in mid-March Tolstoy did abandon Peter the Great for Anna the Greatest, he delayed telling Strakhov.
Two editors, having seen a news item that winter that Tolstoy was working on a novel, contacted him about their interest in publishing it. He ignored their queries.
After a letter-writing dry spell, Tolstoy, as was his habit, wrote several on one day, March 1. He was newsiest and liveliest with his sister-in-law Tatyana; he told her that they had a new English governess, Emily Tabor (Tatyana’s family, living in Russian Georgia, was employing the Tolstoys’ previous English governess, Hannah, whose health needed a warmer climate); he asked if Tatyana had read Alexandre Dumas fils’s essay about marriage, The Man-Woman (L’homme-femme). He didn’t mention to her that it’s a series of cynical reflections in which Dumas famously suggests that if husbands would only beat their wives at the first sign of wandering interest in another man, the wives would stay in line forever.XLVIII (There are a couple of references to Dumas’s essay in Anna Karenina.)
In two of the new month’s letters, Tolstoy complained about the stagnation of the Peter novel. He wrote Strakhov: “My work’s not moving, and again doubt has been found.”XLIX He told Alexandrine he was looking forward to the family summer in Samara at his small simple farm there. Meanwhile, “My work goes poorly. Life is so good, light and short, but the presentation of it comes out so ugly, heavy and long.”L
Strakhov, having meditated on Tolstoy’s various hesitations, wrote, on March 15, all the right things: that is, his esteemed friend did not have to top himself:
With all my soul I desire that the work that so deeply and seriously occupies you gets going finally (as I love these excitements of yours, as they excite me too!). But remember, Lev Nikolaevich, that if you don’t write anything, you all the same remain the creator of the most original and substantial production in Russian literature. When there’s no longer a Russian kingdom, the new people will study War and Peace to find out what the Russian people were.LI
On March 17, 1873, the day before he forsook Peter the Great for the character who became Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote to Fet and remarked again that “My work is not moving.”LII
2 A Very Very Rough Rough Draft: March 18, 1873–June 2, 1873
We know that Tolstoy’s reading of a collection of Alexander Pushkin’s fiction on March 18, 1873, brought on an urge to write; sometime later that day, his right hand picked up his pen and, instead of trying again to inspire himself about the court of Peter the Great in 1700, he began describing a modern high-society party where a floozy of a wife was carrying on an affair under the nose of her good, honest husband. The thought of that cuckolded husband mocked by a depraved society evoked more pity and alarm in Tolstoy than the thought that that same wife would kill herself. Her husband, who had been humiliated while she lived and cheated, would soldier on. Or would he kill himself too? Tolstoy wondered. How her suicide would happen, Tolstoy didn’t know or care. The poor husband!
Sofia wrote, in her “Various Notes for Future Reference”:
Last night L. suddenly said to me: “I have written a page and a half, and it seems good.” I assumed this was yet another attempt to write about the Peter the Great period, and didn’t pay much attention.
She must have heard something like this often enough from her husband that his vague mention of that night’s accomplishment did not impress her:
But then I realised that he had in fact embarked on a novel about the private lives of present-day people.
How exactly did she realize that? Had Tolstoy stood up and walked over to her and shyly handed over the page and a half? Did she start to read it and become confused? But, Levochka, what does this have to do with Peter’s time? That’s not true of Peter’s time!
She only remarked in the notes to herself: “So strange, the way he just pitched straight into it.”
… this evening he read various other excerpts from the [Pushkin] book, and under Pushkin’s influence he sat down to write. He went on with his writing today, and said he was well pleased with it.I
In the next four years of working on Anna Karenina, Tolstoy would communicate having had one, maybe two more experiences of being “well pleased” with what he had written that given day. Some of the pleasure of these first two days of work may have had to do with his relief of escaping the complications of the Peter project.
Sofia added a detail concerning the second day of his work that helps dissolve the image we might conjure up of artists as relentless slaves to their work. Tolstoy was not working all day; sometimes he was out playing: “At the moment he is out looking at the fox with his two sons, their tutor Fyodor Fyodorovich and Uncle Kostya. This fox runs past the bridge near our house every day.”II
That fox might be seen running through Tolstoy’s procrastinating mind for the next several years; mostly in periods of feeling unable to write, he would, grumbling about his frustration, get up from his desk and go hunting.
Sofia was now excited for him, for them, and on March 19 wrote her sister Tatyana: “Last night Levochka suddenly unexpectedly began writing a novel of contemporary l
ife. The subject of the novel—an unfaithful wife and all the drama proceeding from this.”III
After Tolstoy had been working happily on Anna Karenina for a week, he wrote to Strakhov. After commiserating with his friend’s health problems, he shyly opened up: “Now I’ll tell you about myself, but please, keep it a great secret, because nothing may come of what I have to say.”
Nearly all my working time this winter I have spent studying Peter, i.e., summoning up spirits from that time, and suddenly a week ago Seryozha, my eldest son, began to read Yury Miloslavsky with enthusiasm. I thought he was too young, and read it with him, then my wife brought up The Tales of Belkin, thinking she would find something suitable for Seryozha, but of course found he was too young. After work I happened to pick up this volume of Pushkin, and as is always the case, read it all through (for the 7th time, I think), unable to tear myself away and seemingly reading it for the first time. But more than that, it seemed to resolve all my doubts.IV
The resolution of his doubts had to be about quitting the Peter project. The light from Pushkin’s brilliance exposed Tolstoy’s efforts’ seeming lifelessness.
It’s as if Tolstoy woke up in Pushkin-world and put on his own seven-league boots and started striding over the heads of all the other writers:V
Not only Pushkin, but nothing else at all, it seemed, had ever aroused my admiration so much before. The Shot, Egyptian Nights, The Captain’s Daughter!!!VI And then there is the fragment The guests were arriving at the country house. Involuntarily, unwittingly, not knowing why and what would come of it, I thought up characters and events, began to go on with it, then of course changed it, and suddenly all the threads became so well and truly tied up that the result was a novel which I finished in draft form today, a very lively, impassioned and well-finished novel which I’m very pleased with and which will be ready in 2 weeks’ time if God gives me strength, and which has nothing in common with all that I’ve been wrestling with for a whole year.VII
Let’s consider this prediction of Anna Karenina being “ready in 2 weeks’ time” as one of the biggest miscalculations in literary history. And what could Tolstoy have meant by “a novel which I finished in draft form”? Some of us think of drafts as compositions that run all the way from the beginning to end. All the material is on the page; it just needs to be rewritten, reordered, revised. But Tolstoy didn’t mean that. His “draft” of the novel consisted of a few scenes and a list of notes.
His first plan, a story in four parts plus an epilogue, looks like this:
Prologue. She leaves her husband under happy “auspices.” She goes
Part 1.
Chapter 1. The guests gathered at the end of winter, and were awaiting the Karenins and talking about them. She arrived and conducted herself indecently with Gagin.
Chapter 2. She has it out with her husband. She reproaches him for previous indifference. “It’s too late.”
Chapter 3.
4th Chapter. Dinner at the Karenins’ with Gagin. The husband, conversation with the brother. St[epan] Ark[ad’ich] calms things down on the account of the German party and on account of his wife.
5th Chapter. The races—he falls.
Chapter 6. She runs to him, reveals her pregnancy, revelation to her husband.VIII
The basic story had come to him in a few scenes. He would not hereafter be inventing all the plot points. Those of us who have read the novel can recognize these notes’ connections to it. But Tolstoy has not created the Anna we know yet. The most cinematic pre-cinema scene in literature, the horserace, is in place—with the consequent fall. Tolstoy never imagined Vronsky winning that race. No matter what, Vronsky will fall off his horse, and his fall will precipitate Anna’s announcement of her pregnancy to her husband.
Part 2.
Chapter 1. The lovers sit, and he begs her to separate from her husband. She separates and says that “I’m dying.”
Chapter 2. The husband is in Moscow, S[tepan] A[rkad’ich], wearing himself out, goes off to the club, the conversation with his wife. The family of S A. The unhappiness of A[leksei] A[leksandrovich], he says that there is no way out, it is necessary to bear the cross.
Chapter 3. Her dream again. Her terror <—the devil>. Leaving him and the son.
Chapter 4. Birth, both sob.—Safe.
5th Chapter. She steadies herself on Christian feeling, she lowers the blinds, and remembers everything and suffers. They whisper to themselves that this is impossible.
6th Chapter: St[epan] Ark proposes the divorce. The last futile [?], he agrees and leaves.
<3rd Part.>
Chapter 6: St[epan] Ark engineers the request of G[agin] and N[ana], and A[leksei] A[leksandrovich] agrees to turn the oth[er] cheek.X
Of Part 2, drifting into Part 3, we see the primary characteristic of Karenin: he will bear the suffering.
Part 3.
Chapter 1. Guffawing in society. They want sympathy. He comes; but at home he sobs.
Chapter 2. [She is]
Chapter 3. He pulls away, the son to the motherXI, and he writhes like a butterfly.
4th Chapter. Nihilists at her place. He leaves> he scolds them.
5th Chapter. He plays at the club. They are in the country, nothing besides animal relations; they built a life for what? He leaves. {“}So I leave, too.{”}
6th Chapter. It is established: he is in society, she is at home, her despair.XII
Things are bad for Anna. Even if we cannot detect much sympathy from Tolstoy in these little details, we see at least her isolation.
4th Part.
Chapter 1. A[leksei] A[leksandrovich] hangs about like an unhappy person and is destroyed. His brothers. St[epan] Ark sees her and feels she is unhappy and wants to help her. The only thing—Christian love. She pushes away. The dispersal of finances. The ice melts. She complains and despairs.
2nd Chapter. He is happy, he comes. A babbler excites her jealousy. But the home is unhappy. It’s impossible to go to war.
3rd Chapter. An affront from Prince M. on children. Babbler, jealousy, “debacle” feeling. Holiday [?] [indecipherable], another dream.
4th Chapter. A[leksei] A[leksandrovich] comes.> With Gag[in] a terrible scene. I’m not guilty.
5th Chapter. She leaves the house and casts herself away.
6th Chapter. Both the husband, the brother.
Finally:
Epilogue. A[leksei] A[leksandrovich] raises
These couple of pages, containing some seeds that will grow and some that won’t, sprout into several hundred pages.
Later this spring, Tolstoy imagines what will become Part I of the novel. He sketchily invents Stiva’s tumultuous life and in “Variant No. 4” creates Levin:
Part 1
Ch. 1 Stepan Arkad’ich wakes up and explains himself to his wife.
Ch. 2 Stepan Arkad’ich sees Ordyntsev [Levin]. Ordyntsev is full of life. A bunch of business.
Ch. 3 At the zoological garden, Ordyntsev with the bull and skates with Kitty.
Ch. 4 Dinner
Ch. 5
Ch. 6
Ch. 7
Ch. 8 The arrival of Anna Ka
renina. At the railroad.
Ch. 9 She captivates everyone.
Ch. 10 The ball at the governor’s and departure for Petersburg with Udashev [Vronsky].XIV
* * *
Even though by 1873 Tolstoy had been a professional writer for twenty years and had had enough experience to estimate the time that a piece would require, he was never professional in the sense that he held himself to deadlines or page counts. When he was guessing that he could write Anna Karenina in two weeks, he must have been foreseeing a novel the size of Childhood or Family Happiness (about ninety pages). Even given two weeks, Tolstoy never composed at the terrific speed Dostoevsky could occasionally desperately summon. God or luck gave Tolstoy strength, but not the kind of strength that flows like a river. Tolstoy’s power for composition was more like a thunderstorm. Here today, maybe tomorrow, but then gone for weeks or months at a time.
Professionalism is nothing to despise in an artist; Anton Chekhov and Anthony Trollope, two of Tolstoy’s greatest literary contemporaries, both of whose work he admired, took pride in their ability to meet publishers’ and editors’ deadlines and specifications. Those two wrote so fast that the deadlines even helped them stay paced and focused. Professionalism did not make them lesser artists.
Tolstoy, on the other hand, only rushed when readying a truly finished book or a new collected edition, when he didn’t have the patience or interest to proofread. But in the midst of creating a work, he never rushed, never completed something just because a deadline was looming and an editor was pleading for the promised manuscript.
What Tolstoy saw “in draft form” on March 25 and what he would finish four years later are different in focus, size, and dimension. He did not suspect in which of many possible directions the creative fires of Anna Karenina would burn. If he could have known the effort the novel was going to take, he probably would have stopped in his tracks and extinguished what he had started.
Creating Anna Karenina Page 5