Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  To guess what he meant, I have to retreat to what has kept the novel as powerful and significant as it is: simply his discovery of Anna and the ensuing creation of her. The novel’s other characters spring to life because she is the sun and they are the planets revolving around her. Despite her being so alive, or frighteningly because she is so alive and conscious, she descends into suicidal thoughts that she cannot escape. Fortunately, because of his realization of her tragedy, Tolstoy after all survived his own descent into depression. The keystone, then, is the Anna Karenina that Tolstoy discovered and created.

  Sofia Tolstaya was twenty-four years old in 1866, when this photograph was taken in Tula with her and Tolstoy’s first two children, Sergei (Seryozha, born in 1863) and Tanya (1865).

  In 1871 Sofia nearly died from puerperal fever, contracted with the birth of her daughter Maria. In order to get relief from cold compresses, Sofia had to shave her head, which she covered here with a scarf. Anna Karenina would also almost fatally succumb to puerperal fever.

  The house at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s mother’s estate, which he inherited.

  Tolstoy’s first four children in a photographic studio in Tula in 1870. From left to right: Ilya, Lev, Tanya, and Seryozha.

  Maria Tolstaya, the Tolstoys’ second daughter (1871–1906), in 1874. Her birth nearly proved fatal to her mother.

  The house at Yasnaya Polyana was nationalized by the USSR in 1919 and soon became an official cultural attraction. In modern times, it remains a popular year-round tourist site.

  Seryozha Tolstoy was fourteen or fifteen when this photo was taken in 1878.

  Daughter Tanya, c. 1884.

  This is artwork by Konstantin Pechurichko (b. 1931) of the Patrovka steppe and the sharp Shishka hill, imagined by him at about the time in the 1870s when Tolstoy had a farmhouse here.

  The Patrovka historian Valentina Petrovna Salazkina at the site-marker of Tolstoy’s farmhouse in 1873. The Shishka is the sharper of the hills in the background. Tolstoy loved strolling “like Adam” over the steppe.

  The site-marker of Tolstoy’s second Patrovka farmhouse.

  The title page of the first book edition of Anna Karenina in January of 1878. It reads Anna Karenina / Novel / Count / L. N. Tolstoy / In Eight Parts / Volume the First.

  Tolstoy’s sister-in-law, Tatyana Kuzminskaya (1846–1925), when she was still Tatyana Andreevna Bers, in 1864. Sofia’s lively younger sister inspired Tolstoy’s creation of Natasha in War and Peace.

  Tolstoy’s close relative Alexandrine Tolstaya (1817–1904), one of his lifelong confidants, photographed here in the 1860s.

  Tatyana Kuzminskaya, Tolstoy’s sister-in-law, in 1872, in Tiflis (present day Tbilisi), where her husband was a Russian government official.

  Tolstoy’s brother-in-law Stepan Bers (1855–1910) in about 1870. He sometimes served as Tolstoy’s traveling companion; sometimes he helped his sister with her children when Tolstoy was away.

  Mikhail Katkov (1818–1887), c. 1866, was the publisher of the Russian Herald’s serialization of Anna Karenina.

  Afanasy Fet (1828–1894). The poet was one of Tolstoy’s closest friends in the 1870s. They discussed literature, family life, God, and, most enthusiastically, horses.

  Tolstoy’s daughter Tanya Sukhotina-Tolstaya and her first and only child, her daughter Tatiana, in 1905.

  A manuscript page of a first draft of Anna Karenina. Tolstoy wrote by day and Sofia happily but wearily recopied by night, leaving a large margin for him to write his revisions. She then recopied and again left him a margin to insert revisions. And so on and so on, until Tolstoy finally sent off the serial installments of the novel.

  This caricature of Tolstoy in a popular periodical was based on the 1876 photograph below. Though copies of Anna Karenina are part of the heap of books, the boys seem more inspired by Boina i Mir (War and Peace).

  A galley of Anna Karenina with Tolstoy’s rewriting of the entire page. Tolstoy revised many passages in this manner.

  An image of Tolstoy in 1876 that was caricatured above.

  Though we never see Mikhailov’s painting of Anna that awes everyone who sees it, readers and artists have been illustrating the novel in their imaginations and on paper ever since. These are three from the Soviet era:

  By Mikhail Ksenofontovich Sokolov (1946): Anna at Vronsky’s horse race.

  By Aram Vramshapu Vanetsian: From Part 5, Anna enters her husband’s house to see her beloved son Seryozha on his ninth birthday.

  By Konstantin Ivanovich Rudakov (1940): From Part 1 of the novel: At the train station in St. Petersburg, Anna introduces Captain Vronsky to her husband Karenin, who has come to greet her on her return from Moscow.

  Nikolai Gusev was Tolstoy’s secretary for part of the last decade of Tolstoy’s life. He became a biographer and his books chronicling Tolstoy’s daily life and work have been the most prominent scholarly sources for this book.

  Sophia Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” ring.

  Tolstoy’s grave on the grounds of Yasnaya Polyana. It sits on a rise above one of Tolstoy’s favorite groves.

  Acknowledgments

  I wouldn’t have written this book if not for the translators whose work allowed me to read my book of books in English more than forty years ago. I read Anna Karenina in at least a half-dozen different translations before deciding I had better try to do the heavy lifting myself and, at the age of forty-five, learn Russian. I was inspired at that time by a friend who had taken up Russian in his forties. If he could do it, I could do it. Well, if I had been as smart as he and known the difficulty and time it would take, I would not have started. Along the way I was encouraged and guided by tutors in St. Petersburg and at Yasnaya Polyana, among them Albina Kuznetsova and Svetlana Voloshchikova, but especially and most regularly over the last fifteen years in New York City by Dina Kupchanka. Bolshoe spasibo!

  I eventually had to have enough Russian to be able to read not only Анна Каренина but the hundreds of letters by Tolstoy in these years that were not translated by R. F. Christian, whose 1978 two-volume collection of letters by Tolstoy remains the only large sampling in English of Tolstoy’s letters to various correspondents. I beg his forgiveness for occasionally carping at his selections or the incompleteness of his excerpts. I am an amateur in Russian in all senses of the word (the first being “lover”), and the errors in my translations are, I hope, only in rough sense and not in spirit. For almost two decades Michael A. Denner has encouraged me in my efforts to understand and appreciate Tolstoy, not only through his gift of letting me review books for Tolstoy Studies Journal, my favorite periodical in the world, but through guidance to the fundamental Russian texts that would give me the most abundant details about Tolstoy’s life and writings.

  I never met the late Hugh McLean of the University of California, Berkeley, but his writings on Tolstoy, collected in In Quest of Tolstoy, continually reminded me that the primary and best form of criticism is to be as straightforward and as engaged as one can be as a reader. Literary theories be damned!

  The biographers of Tolstoy I have most learned from and leaned upon include Rosamund Bartlett, who was kind enough to engage in email correspondence about the great man, and Tikhon Polner, whose Tolstoy and His Wife was probably the first biography of a literary figure I ever read. I was probably twenty-one, by which age I had already read Anna Karenina a half-dozen times. Polner whetted my curiosity to keep learning about the author of the most vital book of my life. Ernest Simmons’s two-volume biography, as well as Aylmer Maude’s, gave me the happy illusion of completeness, but as Tolstoy says, there can’t be a complete biography of anybody. In Russian, I owe the backbone of this biographical study to Nikolai Gusev, whose Materials and Chronicle of Tolstoy’s life describe his day-to-day interactions and movements, and never neglects Tolstoy’s wife Sofia Tolstaya’s input, as so many other sources have. For the translations of her My Life and Diaries and the married couple’s selected correspondence, I have to thank John Woodswor
th, Arkardi Klioutchanski, Cathy Porter, and Liudmila Gladkova. For her appreciative recent Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography, scholars and readers should thank Alexandra Popoff.

  As a reviewer, I have had several editors who were kind enough to indulge me and assign me books about and by Tolstoy, thus contributing to my knowledge and appreciation of my hero: at the San Francisco Chronicle, Oscar Villalon and then John McMurtrie; at the Christian Science Monitor, the late and generous Marjorie Kehe; and most wonderfully, Boris Dralyuk at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Christopher Edgar at Teachers & Writers Collaborative oversaw our edition of Tolstoy as Teacher: Leo Tolstoy’s Writings on Education and Stephen Mitchell at Prometheus brought my edition of Tolstoy’s children’s stories to light. At Dover Publications, John Grafton and Susan Rattiner allowed me to include important essays by Tolstoy in various anthologies.

  Readers of various drafts of this biography include Ian Frazier, Ross Robins, and John Wilson, whose comments and suggestions greatly sharpened a more discursive and less-focused work. Kia Penso and Max Schott, to whom I dedicate this book, each patiently and painstakingly read and critiqued a couple of versions, each time helping to encourage me while steering me back on track and into greater clarity. Jessica Case, deputy publisher of Pegasus, seemed to understand better than I what I was hoping to show of Tolstoy’s achievement and suggested important improvements, including the title. I have very much appreciated Mary Hern for her editing and for her astute queries and apt suggestions; the remaining errors or awkwardnesses are all mine. Maria Fernandez has expertly designed the pages, for which I am grateful.

  Sections or early versions of parts of this book have appeared in Russian Life, Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, the Tolstoy Commons, New York University’s Jordan Center’s All the Russias’ Blog, and Former People. Thank you to, among others, Paul E. Richardson, Susan Alice Fischer and Jane Miller, Ani Kokobobo, and Maya Vinokour.

  To work on language and biographical projects at Tolstoy’s estate at Yasnaya Polyana and home in Moscow, I thank the reviewers of my fellowship leave and the granters of three PSC-CUNY research awards. Galina Vasil’evna Alekseeva, the director of Yasnaya Polyana’s academic research, shared her expert opinions and information about Tolstoy’s relationships to American and British authors. My attendance at the City University of New York’s Biography Clinic at the Leon Levy Center for Biography in 2015 was useful. My chair at Kingsborough Community College (CUNY), Dr. Eileen Ferretti, was generous in her support for my sabbatical project to begin writing this biography. My colleague Dr. Lea Fridman ever kindly encouraged me throughout every stage. My friend Caroline Allen of the Literature faculty at the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, invited me to speak to her class about Tolstoy and the novel as did my sister Carol Blaisdell’s reading group in Silver Spring, Maryland, where I learned why Anna Karenina indeed still matters. My dear friend the author Jervey Tervalon invited me to speak at LitFest Pasadena in May 2020 so that I could discuss with the novelist Janet Fitch and Professor Vadim Shneyder of UCLA the meaningfulness of Tolstoy’s relationship to his heroine. (Maybe next year!)

  Finally, I thank Suzanne Carbotte for her emotional support and patience throughout my studies and travels. As happy as Lev and Sofia Tolstoy were in the first ten years of their marriage, I have been as happy in the almost three decades of ours.

  Bob Blaisdell

  New York City

  March 1, 2020

  About the Author

  Bob Blaisdell is a professor of English at the City University of New York’s Kingsborough Community College. He edited Tolstoy as Teacher: Leo Tolstoy’s Writings on Education (Teachers & Writers Collaborative) and more than three dozen Dover literature and poetry collections. A frequent reviewer for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Russian Life, and The Christian Science Monitor, he lives in New York City.

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