Suddenly lie had an illumination. He remembered an occurrence that had deeply affected him the previous year. A neighbor and friend of his, Bibikov, the snipe hunter, lived with a woman named Anna Stepanovna Pirogova, a tall, full-blown woman with a broad face and an easy-going nature, who had bceome his mistress. But he had been neglecting her of late for his children's German governess. He had even made up his mind to marry the blond Fraulein. Learning of his treachery, Anna Stcpanovna's jealousy burst all bounds; she ran away, carrying a bundle of clothcs, and wandered about the countryside for three days, crazed with grief. Then she threw herself under a freight train at the Yasenki station.! Before she died, she sent a note to Bibikov: "You are my murderer. Be happy, if an assassin can be happy. If you like, you can see my corpse 011 the rails at Yasenki." That was January 4, 1872. The following day Tolstoy had gone to the station, as a spectator, while the autopsy was being performed in the presence of a police inspector. Standing in a corner of the shed, he had observed every detail of the woman's body lying on the table, bloody and mutilated, with its skull crushed. How shameless, he thought, and yet how chaste. A dreadful lesson was brought home to him by that white, naked flesh, those dead breasts, those inert thighs that had felt and given pleasure. He tried to imagine the existence of this poor woman who had given all for love, only to meet with such a trite, ugly death.
Her image haunted him for a long time, but not specifically as material for a book. But in 1870, he had had an idea for a novel about an upper-class woman guilty of adultery. Sonya had even made a note in her diary, on February 23, 1870: "He told me that the whole prol> lem, for him, was to make the woman pitiable but not contemptible, and that when this creature came into his mind as a type, all the masculine characters he had previously invented immediately grouped themselves around her." Yet when Anna Stcpanovna's suicide occurred two years later, lie did not immediately link the incident to the story of the unfaithful wife. For over a year the two subjects—infidelity and violent death—had co-existed in his mind without connecting. Then, by some mysterious process, each began to round out the other. The real-life woman gave her tragic ending and her name to the fictional one. At the very moment Tolstoy was brooding over Peter the Great, Tsarcvich Alexis and the boyars, men and women in modern dress were flitting through his historical visions: the figures who became Anna Karenina, Vronsky, Levin, Kitty, Oblonsky. . . .
Although he refused to follow literary fads, Tolstoy could not remain oblivious to the vogue for the psychological novel abroad. World opinion was all agog with the problems of marriage and women's rights. In France, Alexandre Dumas fils, who had become famous in 1852 with the resounding success of La Dame avx Camelias, had just published a
t The little station of Yasenki was on the Moscow-Kursk railway line that passed through Tula.
study of conjugal infidelity: L'Homme-Femme. On March 1, 1873 Tolstoy wrote to Tanya Kuzminskaya: "Have you read L'Homme-Femme? I was staggered by it. One would not expect a Frenchman to have such a lofty concept of marriage and relations between men and women in general."
A few days later, on March 18, he went into his son Sergey's room and noticed a book lying 011 a table, which the boy had started to read: Pushkin's Byelkin Tales. He leafed through it and was as charmed as ever by that lively prose. The story called Loose Leaves began with the sentence, "The guests were arriving at the country house . . ." For Tolstoy this leap into the heart of the matter was the summit of artistry. He thought of it in relation to his own characters, and his desire to write returned at last, after months of indecision—irresistible, dizzying, painful as thirst. He rushed into his study, seized a pen and wrote down the first words of an opening chapter, "After the opera, the guests reassembled at the home of the young Countess Vraski."*
The next day, March 19, Sonya wrote in her diary, "Yesterday evening Lyova suddenly announced, 'I have written a sheet and a half and I think it's coming all right.' Assuming he had been trying once more to write something 011 the period of Peter the Great, I did not pay much attention; but then I learned that he has begun a novel on the private lives of contemporary people." That day she let her joy overflow in a letter to her sister: "Yesterday Leo suddenly started to write a novel on contemporary life. The subject is the unfaithful wife and all the ensuing tragedy. I am very happy."
The first chapters were dashed off in a state of elation. As with War and Peace, he took his models from the people around him. He gave some of Sonya's features to Kitty, put a great deal of himself into Levin, borrowed from various friends to portray Oblonsky, Koznyshev, Va- renka, Mikhailov; he made Levin's brother a replica of his own brother Dmitry, who had died of tuberculosis. Vronsky probably owed a good deal to Sonya's first suitor, Mitrofan Polivanov, and Karenin was compounded of the minister of finance Valuycv, Tanya's husband Kuzmin- sky, and Sukhotin the chamberlain; physically, Anna Karenina herself was said to resemble Marya Alexandrovna Hartung, the poet Pushkin's daughter. The Karenins were actually called Pushkin in the first draft. Tolstoy had met Mrs. Hartung at General Tulubyev's home in Tula, and had been impressed by her beauty, "her smooth gait," "the
• In the final version this sentence, somewhat altered, appears at the beginning of Chapter VI of Part II. It W3s a long standing and erroneous family tradition that Tolstoy had begun his book with the sentence, "Everything was topsy-turvy in the Oblonsky house."
Abrabian ringlets that betrayed her ancestry." There was African blood in her father's family, her mother was Natalya Nikolayevna Goncharov, the most beautiful woman in Russia. Fascinated by this handsome creature, Tolstoy looked for a soul to put inside her. Anna's personality was thought to be based on that of another woman famous for her learning and intelligence: Countess Sofya Tolstoy, wife of the poet Alexis Kon- stantinovich Tolstoy and friend of the philosopher Vladimir Solovyev. Other details of the novel he was to find around him, in the story of his friend Dyakov's sister, for one, who had remarried after divorcing S. M. Sukhotin. lie also made use of the open liaison between Kisclev and Princess Golitsin, who had deserted her husband and caused a scandal in high society.