Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  Tolstaya, Tanya, 3, 13–16, 38, 46, 75, 89–91, 120, 126, 140–45, 148, 153, 161, 187, 220, 257–58, 268, 271, 299–302, 313–14, 325

  Tolstaya, Vara, 204, 226

  Tolstoy, Alexei, 282, 314

  Tolstoy, Andrey (that is) Tolstoy, Andrey Lvovich (son), 368–70

  Tolstoy, Ilya (that is) Tolstoy, Ilya Lvovich (son), 3, 12–14, 58–59, 62, 268, 302, 367

  Tolstoy, Lelja (that is) Tolstoy, Lev (Lelja) Lvovich (son), 120, 222, 299–300

  Tolstoy, Leo August 1873–December 1873, 76–97

  August 1874–December 1874, 131–48

  beginning drafts, xv–xxiii, 1–51

  birth of, 1

  career of, 2–10

  challenges for, xv–xvii, 20, 28–51, 76–130, 149–50, 200–205, 235–37, 266–77, 362–63

  children of, 2–4, 7, 11–25, 29–30, 38, 44–47, 54, 58–59, 62–65, 74–75, 89–92, 95–96, 115, 119–29, 140–45, 148, 153, 156–61, 187–91, 198, 204, 220, 222, 226, 240, 257–58, 268, 271, 299–302, 313–14, 325, 367–70

  comments on novel, 29–37, 126–27, 371–74

  conception of novel, ix–xix, 5, 30–42

  critique of, ix–xi, 373–74

  delusion and, x–xi

  depression in, 20–21, 44, 55–56, 121–28, 151, 156–57, 190, 197–202, 207–8, 222–23, 253–58, 270–71, 279–83, 298–99, 305–7, 323, 334–39, 365–68, 374

  diaries of, xv, 5, 19, 112, 166–67, 233, 308

  distractions for, 76–97

  early years of, 1–4

  education articles by, 51, 101–4, 117–22, 131–38, 167, 172, 197, 204, 213

  education of, 1–2

  everyday life of, xvi–xviii, 2–18, 21–25, 206–7

  Fall 1875, 194–211

  false starts on novel, 98–130

  family woes for, 76–97

  illness of, 44, 55, 206, 279, 313, 366

  illustrations by, 98–99, 99

  January 1874–August 1874, 98–130

  January 1875–June 1875, 149–87

  January 1876–May 1876, 212–64

  January 1877–May 1877, 289–328

  June 1876–December 1876, 265–88

  March 1873–June 1873, 28–51

  marriage of, 2–4, 10–11

  May 1877–January 1878, 344–74

  money concerns of, 131–48

  moral transformation of, 243–44

  novellas by, xv–xvi, 2, 10, 22, 34, 46, 213, 231, 238, 279, 371

  parents of, 1

  photos of, 8, 221, 277

  portraits of, 79–85, 83, 88

  procrastination by, xv–xvi, 20, 29, 88, 120–21, 149–50, 200–205, 235–37, 266–77

  on religion, 22–25, 111–12, 195–96, 204–6, 222–25, 234, 239, 244, 247, 271, 307–8, 323, 342

  routine of, 7–10, 50–51, 57–58, 73–74, 93, 350–51

  September 1872–March 1873, 1–27

  siblings of, 2, 12, 20–25, 46–47, 60, 80, 87, 116, 121–23, 144, 159, 194, 197, 206, 213–14, 217–18, 222–23, 239–42, 265–68, 289, 368

  spellings of, xiii

  starting novel, xv–xxiii, 1–51

  on suicide, xi, xvi–xix, xxii–xxiii, 10, 28, 40–43, 85, 111, 121, 125, 196, 201–2, 222, 231, 239–40, 254, 258, 329–31, 335–41, 357–67, 374

  Summer 1873, 52–75

  Summer 1875, 188–93

  vacations of, 52–77, 120–29, 135–37, 186–93, 266–73

  Winter 1875, 194–211

  writer’s block and, 20, 203–4, 362–63

  writing preparations, xv–xxiii, 1–27

  Tolstoy, Lev, 15, 16, 225, 268

  Tolstoy, Nikolai (that is) Tolstoy, Nikolai Nikolaevich (brother), 2, 12, 47, 217–18

  Tolstoy, Nikolay Tolstoy, Nikolay Lvovich (son), 119, 122

  Tolstoy, Petya Tolstoy, Petya Lvovich (son), 17, 44–47, 63, 65, 74–75, 89–92, 95–96, 115

  Tolstoy, Sergei Tolstoy, Sergei Nikolaevich (brother), 20–23, 25, 46, 60, 80, 87, 116, 122, 144, 159, 194, 197, 206, 214, 222, 223, 267, 289

  Tolstoy, Sergei Tolstoy, Sergei (Seryozha) Lvovich (son), 3, 12–15, 29–30, 58, 62–64, 124–29, 188, 191, 240, 268, 302, 367

  Tolstoy, Valerian Petrovich (Maria Nikolaevna Tolstaya’s husband), 214–15

  Tolstoy on Education, 133, 197, 352

  Tretyakov, Pavel, 79–81, 83, 85

  Trollope, Anthony, 34, 40–41, 109–10, 193, 224, 235, 249, 267, 290, 353, 356, 369

  Tur, Evgenia, 327

  Turgenev, Ivan, 2, 124, 160, 214, 246, 304, 314, 324, 327

  Turner, C. J. G., 36, 39, 351, 352, 353

  U

  Urussov, S. S., 63, 225, 311

  Ushakov, Sergei P., 222

  V

  Van Gogh, Vincent, 207

  Vermeer, Johannes, 135

  Verne, Jules, 98

  Viardot, M., 160

  Victoria, Queen, 11

  Virgin Soil, 304, 314

  Voice, The, 363, 370

  W

  Wanderer, 346

  War and Peace, ix–xi, xvii, 2, 4, 8–11, 21, 24–27, 44–50, 66–67, 75–78, 93, 112, 124, 134, 152, 204, 213, 219, 231–32, 246, 250–51, 255, 292, 347, 371

  Watch, The, 246

  What Is Art?, 210, 264

  Winter 1875, 194–211

  Woolf, Virginia, 253

  Y

  Yasnaya Polyana (pedagogical journal), 45, 51, 53, 101, 119, 121, 132

  Youth, 2, 10, 371

  Yury Miloslavsky, 30

  Z

  Zaidenshnur, Z. E., 39–40, 182, 352

  Zakhar’in, Professor, 186, 204, 308

  Zhdanov, V. A., 39–40, 182, 352

  Endnotes

  Introduction

  I. R. F. Christian, ed. and trans., Tolstoy’s Diaries, Volume 1: 1847–1894 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), 73–74, October 24, 1853.

  II. C. A. Behrs [Stepan Bers], Recollections of Count Leo Tolstoy, trans. Charles Edward Turner (London: William Heinemann, 1896), 2.

  III. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: McClure, Phillips and Co., 1901), Part 7, Chapter 11, http://www.literatureproject.com/anna-karenina/anna_200.htm. The electronic edition from which I am cutting and pasting quotations is the 1901 two-volume edition, published as Anna Karenin (no concluding a) in New York by McClure, Phillips and Co. This is my main resource for passages from Anna Karenina throughout this book.

  IV. Nikolai Gusev quotes this news story from the Tula Provincial Gazette, January 8, 1872. The Russian calendar was twelve days behind in the 19th century. For the rest of the Western world, the date of the suicide was January 16. See N. N. Gusev, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi: Materialy k Biografii s 1870 po 1881 god (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1963), 134. (Hereafter, this reference will be listed as Gusev, Materials.)

  V. Andrew Donskov, Л. Н. Толстой—Н. Н. Страхов. Полное собрание переписки [L. N. Tolstoy – N. N. Strakhov, Complete Correspondence Vol. 1] (Ottawa: University of Ottawa, 2003), http://tolstoy-lit.ru/tolstoy/pisma-tolstomu/pisma-strahova/letter-16.htm. (Hereafter, this reference will be listed as Donskov, L. N. Tolstoy – N. N. Strakhov.)

  VI. Why this description does not appear in The Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy, I don’t know. It appears in Лев Толстой в воспоминаниях современенников. [Reminiscence of Lev Tolstoi by His Contemporaries], trans. Margaret Wettlin (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House), 93. No date, but this edition was published after 1960.

  VII. Anna Karenina, Part 1, Chapter 18, http://literatureproject.com/anna-karenina/anna_18.htm.

  VIII. One advantage of being a non-native reader of Russian is that my recognition of her smile bending her lips occurs at the speed of life, rather than of frictionless instantaneousness. The first time I read the novel in Russian I was as bedazzled and transfixed as Vronsky is. “В этом коротком взгляде Вронский успел заметить сдержа�
�ную оживленность, которая играла в ее лице и порхала между блестящими глазами и чуть заметной улыбкой, изгибавшею ее румяные губы.” I read that sentence something like this: “In this short glance Vronsky succeeded in noticing the held-back liveliness that played on her face and fluttered between the shining eyes and the barely noticeable smile, bending her red lips.” Yes, Garnett’s is better. But my herky-jerky understanding gave me something like the appreciation of a basketball player’s move replayed in super slow-motion.

  IX. Anna Karenina, Part 1, Chapter 18, http://literatureproject.com/anna-karenina/anna_18.htm.

  X. In the ballet of the novel, conceived in 1967 in Moscow by Maya Plisetskaya and her colleagues at the Bolshoi Theater, “That scream of the brakes resonates throughout the score such that Karenina dies continually in her imagination before the train actually arrives.” Simon Morrison, Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today (New York: Liveright, 2016), 381.

  XI. Anna Karenina, Part 8, Chapter 2, http://literatureproject.com/anna-karenina/anna_222.htm.

  XII. Donskov, L. N. Tolstoy – N. N. Strakhov, July 23, 1874, footnote 3, http://tolstoy-lit.ru/tolstoy/pisma-tolstomu/pisma-strahova/letter-16.htm.

  XIII. A “friend”? Tolstoy somehow disassociates in Vronsky’s mind the fact that Stiva, who has physical resemblances to his sister, is Anna’s brother.

  XIV. Anna Karenina, Part 8, Chapter 5, http://literatureproject.com/anna-karenina/anna_225.htm.

  1 Readying for “a new big labor”: September 1872–March 1873

  I. Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, trans. S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1920), 75.

  II. Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Literacy,” Our World in Data, accessed July 8, 2016, https://ourworldindata.org/literacy/.

  III. Tatyana Tolstoy, Tolstoy Remembered, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), 108–109.

  IV. Leo Tolstoy, “On Methods of Teaching the Rudiments” from On Education, trans. Leo Wiener (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967 [originally 1904]), 33.

  V. Being an amateur, I may well know Tolstoy’s stories for children as well as any native English speaker could; I have crawled over them ever since I began learning Russian. I have read them on my own and with tutors; I compiled and syncretized the available English translations for a selected edition of them (Tolstoy’s Classic Tales and Fables for Children, Prometheus, 2002) and have since published translations of several more (in the magazines Chtenia, Russian Life, and Fungi).

  VI. Samuel Northrup Harper, Russian Reader, sixth edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), x.

  VII. V. G. Chertkov, ed., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 90 volumes (Moscow: 1928–1958), 21: 18. Hereafter, this reference will be abbreviated as PSS; the numbers listed here refer to volume 21, page 18. “Kak mal’chik rasskazyval o tom, kak on perestal boyat’sya slepykh nishchikh.”

  VIII. This new primer would be a best seller for the rest of his life and long into the Soviet era. There were hundreds of Russian picture books of individual or thematically connected Azbuka stories.

  IX. To my dismayed curiosity, Tolstoy never told us what he imagined Anna has written about. This dismay resulted, twenty years ago, in my having written one for her. Everyone who has tried to read my creation has agreed that it’s terrible, which means that it’s not the “remarkable” work that Anna would have written.

  X. His “двоюродная тетка” (literally “cousin aunt”) Alexandrine is variously identified in biographies and notes as his “great-aunt,” “second aunt,” “cousin,” or “second-cousin.” Tolstoy sometimes took an odd tone in his letters to her; it is not the tone he took with anyone else; it doesn’t seem to me especially candid; he was flirty, as if with a long-ago ex-girlfriend. Back in 1857, he had considered her as a possible wife: “In the poetical setting of a spring in Switzerland […] their friendship continued to grow, and it seemed as though real feeling would develop. But the countess was eleven years Tolstoy’s senior; he noticed the first lines on her sweet, animated face, and often in his diary he sadly exclaimed, ‘If she were only ten years younger!…’ They never became more than friends.” Tikhon Polner, Tolstoy and His Wife, trans. Nicholas Wreden (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1945), 34.

  XI. Christian, Tolstoy’s Letters, 245–246, March 31, 1872.

  XII. Christian, Tolstoy’s Letters, 251–254, October 26?, 1872.

  XIII. Aylmer Maude, The Life of Tolstoy: First Fifty Years (London: Archibald Constable and Co., 1908), 320.

  XIV. WikiArt.org, https://www.wikiart.org/en/ilya-repin/leo-tolstoy-working-at-the-round-table-1891, accessed June 13, 2016.

  XV. Polner, Tolstoy and His Wife, 92–93.

  XVI. Polner, Tolstoy and His Wife, 100–102.

  XVII. Polner, Tolstoy and His Wife, 58.

  XVIII. Polner, Tolstoy and His Wife, 75.

  XIX. Sophia Tolstoy, The Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy, trans. Cathy Porter (New York: Random House, 1985), xxvi. From the abundance of evidence the Tolstoy children have provided us, Papa Tolstoy was demonstrably not “distant and inaccessible.” Thou is an informal archaic English form of the second-person singular “you.” The translator means to suggest that children addressed their father informally with ty (ты) and their mother more formally with vy (вы).

  XX. I would prefer to translate the phrase Летом мы ездили купаться as: “In the summer we went swimming.” We can assume, then, it happened the recent summer of 1872, spent at home in Yasnaya Polyana. The ambiguous “used to go” could suggest a long time ago, which I doubt Tolstoy would mean when he was illustrating points about the budding personalities of his boys.

  XXI. Anna Karenina, Part 1, Chapter 3, http://literatureproject.com/anna-karenina/anna_3.htm.

  XXII. See insert for this photograph: Tanya (Tat’yana Lvovna Sukhotina-Tolstaya) and her daughter, Tatyana Mikhailovna Sukhotina, c. 1907. Source: http://www.zapas-slov.com.ua/kiev-metro-i-lev-tolstoj-izrail-obedinyaet/.

  XXIII. Christian, Tolstoy’s Letters, 252–254, October 26?, 1872.

  XXIV. Gusev, Materials, 115, letter of October 28, 1872.

  XXV. PSS 61: 340, letter of early November 1872.

  XXVI. The Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy, January 16, 1873.

  XXVII. Gusev, Materials, 190, letter of November 19, 1872.

  XXVIII. Gusev, Materials, 190, letter of November 30, 1872.

  XXIX. N. N. Gusev, Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva L’va Nikolaevicha Tolstogo, (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennoi Literatury, 1958), 397, letter of December 3, 1872. (Hereafter, this reference will be listed as Gusev, Letopis’.)

  XXX. PSS 61: 344, letter of December 7–8, 1872.

  XXXI. Boris Eikhenbaum, Tolstoi in the Seventies, trans. Albert Kaspin (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982), 86, letter of December 17, 1872.

  XXXII. PSS 61: 350, letter of December 17–20?, 1872.

  XXXIII. PSS 62: 8, letter of January 12, 1873.

  XXXIV. Gusev, Materials, 116–117.

  XXXV. Gusev, Materials, 124.

  XXXVI. Gusev, Letopis’, 399.

  XXXVII. Tolstoy wrote Master and Man in the 1890s but set it “in the seventies.” Leo Tolstoy, Master and Man, trans. Aylmer and Louise Maude (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913; Project Gutenberg 2009), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/986/986-h/986-h.htm.

  XXXVIII. Censored as “п…ть” in the Jubilee edition, PSS 62: 7.

  XXXIX. Christian, Tolstoy’s Letters, 256, January 30, 1873.

  XL. Ibid.

  XLI. PSS 62: 8.

  XLII. PSS 62: 8–9.

  XLIII. Christian, Tolstoy’s Letters, 257.

  XLIV. Gusev, Letopis’, 400. Droz’s novel is readable online in an 1873 English translation from the 1872 French original that Tolstoy read. Babolain is narrated as a memoir; Babolain is the na
rrator’s uncle.

  XLV. “Rare! Tolstoy Reads in 4 Languages,”: YouTube video, accessed June 23, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXQ-KrXCAIQ. Audio available at Nekommercheskaya Elekronnaya Biblioteka “ImWerden”: https://imwerden.de/publ-132.html.

  XLVI. Maude, The Life of Tolstoy: First Fifty Years, 368.

  XLVII. Wikipedia: Die freie Enzyklopadie. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Nikolajewitsch_Strachow#/media/File:Nikolay_Strakhov.jpg. Accessed June 17, 2017.

  XLVIII. Alexandre Dumas fils, Man-Woman; or The Temple, the Hearth, the Street, trans. George Vandenhoff (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippencott & Co, 1873), see particularly pp. 59–64, https://archive.org/details/manwomanortempl00dumagoog.

  XLIX. PSS 62: 12, letter of March 1?, 1873.

  L. PSS 62: 13.

  LI. Donskov, L. N. Tolstoy – N. N. Strakhov; http://feb-web.ru/feb/tolstoy/texts/selectpe/ts6/ts62097-.htm.

  LII. PSS 62: 15, letter of March 17, 1873.

  2 A Very Very Rough Rough Draft: March 18, 1873–June 2, 1873

  I. The Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy, 848, letter of March 19, 1873.

  II. Ibid.

  III. Gusev, Materials, 133, letter of March 19, 1873.

  IV. Christian, Tolstoy’s Letters, 258, March 25, 1873.

  V. A thank-you to Kia Penso for this image.

  VI. Only the first title is from The Tales of Belkin; the volume Tolstoy read seems to have included all of Pushkin’s fiction, which even in collections today includes the “fragments.”

  VII. Christian, Tolstoy’s Letters, 258, March 25, 1873.

  VIII. PSS 20: 3–4. Note: The guesswork indicia < > are those of the editors of the 90-volume Soviet edition. They examined and attempted to decipher Tolstoy’s multiple cross-outs and insertions. Some of the indicia open and do not close. As I have not examined the manuscripts myself, I have chosen to represent those incomplete marks as they left them.

  IX. The fancy brackets {} indicate my editorial insertion.

  X. PSS 20: 3–4.