There was always a provocative side to Tolstoy’s genius, and it was most often what spurred him to write. Anna Karenina is a tissue of polemics on all the questions then being discussed in aristocratic salons and the newspapers, with Konstantin Levin acting as spokesman for his creator. There are arguments with the aristocracy as well as with the nihilists on the ‘woman question’; with the conservative Slavophiles as well as with the radical populists on the question of ‘going to the people’ and the exact geographical location of the Russian soul; with both landowners and peasants on questions of farm management; with advocates of old and new forms of political representation - local councils, provincial elections among the nobility - and of such judicial institutions as open courts and rural justices of the peace; with new ideas about the education of children and of peasants; with the new movements in art and music; with such recent fashions among the aristocracy as spiritualism, table-turning, pietism and non-Church mysticism, but also with the ‘official’ Church, its teachings and practices; with corrupt and ineffective bureaucrats, lawyers, capitalists foreign and domestic; with proponents of the ‘Eastern question’ and supporters of the volunteers who went to aid the Serbs and Montenegrins in their war with the Turks (Tolstoy’s handling of this last issue was so hot that his publisher refused to print the final part of the novel, and Tolstoy had to bring it out in a separate edition at his own expense).
There is, in other words, no neutral ground in Tolstoy’s novel. His writing is ‘characterized by a sharp internal dialogism’, as Mikhail Bakhtin has noted, meaning that Tolstoy is conscious at every moment not only of what he is presenting but of his own attitude towards it, and of other possible attitudes both among his characters and in his readers’ minds. He is constantly engaged in an internal dispute with the world he is describing and with the reader for whom he is describing it. ‘These two lines of dialogization (having in most cases polemical overtones) are tightly interwoven in his style,’ as Bakhtin says, ‘even in the most “lyrical” expressions and the most “epic” descriptions.’a The implicit conflict of attitudes gives Tolstoy’s writing its immediate grip on our attention. It does not allow us to remain detached. But, paradoxically, it also does not allow Tolstoy the artist to be dominated by Tolstoy the provocateur. His own conflicting judgements leave room for his characters to surprise him, lending them a sense of unresolved, uncalcu lated possibility. Pushkin, speaking of the heroine of his Evgeny Onegin, once said to Princess Meshchersky, ‘Imagine what happened to my Tatiana? She up and rejected Onegin ... I never expected it of her!’ Tolstoy loved to quote this anecdote, which he had heard from the princess herself.
II
Tolstoy was mistaken when he told Strakhov that the main lines of Anna Karenina were already traced out. In an earlier letter, dated 25 March 1873 but never sent, he spoke even more optimistically about finishing the book quickly. The letter is interesting for its description of what started him writing. For more than a year he had been gathering materials - ‘invoking the spirits of the time’, as he put it - for a book set in the early eighteenth century, the age of Peter the Great. That spring his wife had taken a collection of Pushkin’s prose down from the shelf, thinking that their son Sergei might be old enough to read it. Tolstoy says:
The other day, after my work, I picked up this volume of Pushkin and as always (for the seventh time, I think) read it from cover to cover, unable to tear myself away, as if I were reading it for the first time. More than that, it was as if it dispelled all my doubts. Never have I admired Pushkin so much, nor anyone else for that matter. ‘The Shot’, ‘Egyptian Nights’, The Captain’s Daughter!!! There was also the fragment, ‘The guests arrived at the summer house’. Despite myself, not knowing where or what it would lead to, I imagined characters and events, which I developed, then naturally modified, and suddenly it all came together so well, so solidly, that it turned into a novel, the first draft of which was soon finished - a very lively, very engaging, complete novel, which I’m quite pleased with and which will be ready in fifteen days, if God grants me life. It has nothing to do with what I’ve been plugging away at for this whole year.
As it happened, the novel took him not fifteen days but four more years of work, during which much that had come together so suddenly through the agency of ‘the divine Pushkin’ was altered or rejected and much more was added that had not occurred to him in that first moment of inspiration.
The earliest mention of the subject of Anna Karenina comes to us not from Tolstoy but from his wife, Sophia Andreevna, who noted in her journal on 23 February 1870 that her husband said he had ‘envisioned the type of a married woman of high society who ruins herself. He said his task was to portray this woman not as guilty but as only deserving of pity, and that once this type of woman appeared to him, all the characters and male types he had pictured earlier found their place and grouped themselves around her. “Now it’s all clear,” he told me.’ Tolstoy did not remain faithful to this first glimpse of the guiltless adultress when he began writing the novel three years later, but she re-emerged in the course of his work and finally overcame the severe moral judgement he tried to bring against her.
The fate of Tolstoy’s heroine was suggested to him by a real incident that occurred in January 1872, a few miles from his estate. A young woman, Anna Stepanovna Pirogov, the mistress of a neighbouring landowner and friend of the Tolstoys, threw herself under a goods train after her lover abandoned her. Tolstoy went to view the mangled body in the station house. It made an indelible impression on him.
Thus, well before inspiration struck him in the spring of 1873, Tolstoy had in mind the general ‘type’ of his Anna and her terrible end. When he did begin writing, however, despite his admiration for Pushkin’s artless immediacy (‘The guests arrived at the summer house’), he began with his ideas. And the main idea, the one he struggled with most bitterly and never could resolve, was that Anna’s suicide was the punishment for her adultery. It was from this struggle with himself that he made the poetry of his heroine.
In the first versions, Anna (variously called Tatiana, Anastasia, and Nana) is a rather fat and vulgar married woman, who shocks the guests at a party by her shameless conduct with a handsome young officer. She laughs and talks loudly, moves gracelessly, gestures improperly, is all but ugly - ‘a low forehead, small eyes, thick lips and a nose of a disgraceful shape ...’ Her husband (surnamed Stavrovich - from the Greek stavros, ‘cross’ - then Pushkin, and finally Karenin) is intelligent, gentle, humble, a true Christian, who will eventually surrender his wife to his rival, Gagin, the future Vronsky. In these sketches Tolstoy emphasized the rival’s handsomeness, youth and charm; at one point he even made him something of a poet. The focus of these primitive versions was entirely on the triangle of wife, husband and lover, the structure of the classic novel of adultery. Tolstoy planned until very late in his work to have the husband grant a divorce and the wife marry her lover. In the end, the renegades were to be rejected by society and find a welcome only among the nihilists. The whole other side of the novel, the story of Levin and Kitty, was absent from the early variants; there were no Shcherbatskys, the Oblonsky family barely appeared, and Levin, called Ordyntsev and then Lenin, was a minor character.