Tolstoy re-entered civilian life at an exciting time in Russian history. After Nicholas I died in February 1855, the new Tsar, his son Alexander II, allowed scores of political exiles to return from Siberia, amongst them surviving Decembrists and Dostoevsky, and it became easier for Russians to travel abroad. The censorship was relaxed, paving the way for the foundation of new journals such as the Russian Messenger in 1856, and books and articles by Western thinkers suddenly became accessible. A number of important new cultural institutions opened, amongst them public libraries, the Mariinsky Theatre, the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, and the St Petersburg and Moscow Conservatoires. To accompany Russia’s belated embrace of industrialization, an extensive national railway network was finally inaugurated, with lines converging on the emerging business metropolis of Moscow. In 1867 a station on the main line to Kursk opened at Yasenki, a few miles from Yasnaya Polyana, enabling Tolstoy to make the two-hundred-mile journey north to Moscow in half the time it had previously taken. And, most importantly, the great ‘Tsar Liberator’, as Alexander II came to be known, also introduced a number of far-reaching political reforms at the beginning of his reign, chief of which was the long-awaited Abolition of Serfdom in 1861. These new developments naturally exerted an impact on all the Russian arts, including Russian literature, which in the 1860s entered a glorious decade.
The era of the great Russian realist novel began in the dynamic early years of Alexander II’s reign with the publication of Turgenev’s Rudin in 1856. His masterpiece, Fathers and Sons (1862), provides a vivid depiction of the social ferment in Russia in the immediate aftermath of the abolition of serfdom, but sparked controversy by presenting an ambivalent portrait of a nihilist from the new revolutionary generation. Incensed on behalf of this new generation, Chernyshevsky responded with his novel What Is To Be Done? (1863), in which he creates a wholly positive revolutionary hero, and advocates woman’s liberation and free love. Dostoevsky also concerned himself with contemporary Russia in his new, post-Siberian fiction, but diverged dramatically from both the urbane Westernizer Turgenev and the radical atheist Chernyshevsky. Beginning with Notes from Underground (1864), he launched a sustained assault on the Western political and philosophical ideas of utopian socialism he believed were contaminating Russian youth. In 1866 Crime and Punishment appeared in the Russian Messenger alongside the first chapters of War and Peace. Tolstoy shared his fellow writers’ preoccupation with Russia, and their strong moral impulse, but was highly unusual in choosing to deal with an earlier historical period in his fiction during such a turbulent time.
By 1875, when Tolstoy began publishing Anna Karenina in monthly instalments (also in the Russian Messenger), Alexander II had been on the throne for twenty years, and much of the optimism which had greeted his accession had subsided. The terms of the emancipation proved to be so unsatisfactory that the radical intelligentsia began immediately to contemplate revolution, and the first assassination attempt was made on the Tsar’s life in 1866. Even those of a more liberal persuasion were disconcerted when their peaceful attempts to inculcate the peasantry with a desire to embrace socialism failed in 1874. Amidst waves of arrests and a rapid deceleration in the progress of reform, hardened Populists turned to terrorism. The new mood of uncertainty and unease pervading Russian society is reflected in Anna Karenina. ‘Everything was confusion in the Oblonskys’ house’, we read in the opening lines of the novel. Everything was also confusion in Russia. It is thus understandable why, at a time of such social and political upheaval, some of Tolstoy’s more progressive readers were nonplussed by the idea of a novel about an aristocratic woman who has an affair with an army officer. It seemed out of date to them, and their author out of kilter with his age. But of course Anna Karenina is very much more than a society novel. Through his characters Levin and Kitty, who embrace traditional values, Tolstoy constructs his own response to Chernyshevsky’s inflammatory text and its utilitarian ideas, and the extensive sections in Anna Karenina devoted to agrarian issues engage in a very practical way with the seemingly intractable problems facing Russian rural inhabitants (who made up most of the population) as they struggled to survive in conditions which proved to be barely viable and highly unstable.
There was, however, nothing premeditated about the way in which Tolstoy began writing Anna Karenina. He first conceived the idea of writing about a high-society woman who has committed adultery a year after completing War and Peace in 1870, when his imagination was briefly struck by the idea of making her character pitiable but not guilty. At the same time, he began drafting an article about the ‘woman question’, a topic debated as hotly in Russia as elsewhere in Europe during this period. John Stuart Mill’s influential The Subjection of Women had just been published, but the conservative Tolstoy rejected his call for equality between the sexes, and agreed with an article on the subject by Nikolay Strakhov, who argued that a woman’s place was in the home. No doubt Tolstoy had also found much to concur with in Schopenhauer’s article ‘On Women’ (1851), which he would have devoured along with all the German philosopher’s other works in 1869, and which negated the idea of women’s independence.
Tolstoy next proceeded to throw his energies into compiling a 700-page ABC book designed to help teach millions of illiterate Russian children how to read and write, and into trying to write a novel about Peter the Great. Two years later, however, a concatenation of chance occurrences served to bring the idea about the adulterous woman back into Tolstoy’s mind. In January 1872 he was shaken after attending the autopsy of a young woman of his acquaintance called Anna Pirogova. Spurned by her lover, she had thrown herself under a goods-train at Yasenki, the railway station close to Yasnaya Polyana which had opened only five years earlier. Then, in the spring of 1873, Tolstoy was very taken with the analysis of marriage he read in a much-discussed article by Alexandre Dumas fils, for whom the struggle between man and woman was the central conflict in life. Prompted by reactions in the press to a controversial trial in which a husband was given a light prison sentence for murdering his unfaithful but estranged wife (divorce being illegal in France between 1816 and 1884), Dumas argued in L’Homme-femme (1872) that a husband ultimately had the right to kill an unfaithful wife. Finally, in March 1873 Tolstoy also stumbled across an unfinished sketch for a story by Pushkin, the immediacy of whose narrative style launched him straight into the first draft of the opening of Anna Karenina.