Another immediate stimulus for Anna Karenina came from France. In March 1873 Tolstoy wrote to his sister-in-law Tanya to ask if she had read L’Homme-femme, an essay by Alexandre Dumas fils which had created a storm in Paris the previous year and had already been reprinted several dozen times.17 Dumas wrote his essay as a reaction to coverage in the French press of the trial of a man who had murdered his ‘unfaithful’ wife, from whom he had separated. Specifically he was responding to an article which deplored the French laws which virtually condoned such crimes (the man was sentenced to a mere five years), and proposed divorce as the solution. This could never have been an option in this case. After a brief period following the French Revolution when France had the most liberal divorce laws in the world, divorce had been made illegal there in 1816 and would remain so until 1884.18 For Dumas, marriage was a bitter, irreconcilable struggle between the sexes in which the woman prevails, but he argued that in this case the husband was ultimately the moral arbiter, and so had the right to kill an unfaithful wife who continued to be recalcitrant. Tolstoy was deeply impressed with Dumas’s analysis of marriage. As well as introducing a discussion of his essay in one of the early drafts of Anna Karenina,19 he would take issue with many of its fundamental points in his account of Levin and kitty’s marriage. He would also engage, of course, with the entire tradition of the French novel of adultery that had been created by authors such as Flaubert, Zola and Dumas.20
Dumas’s own life, meanwhile, or rather that of his wife, provides interesting commentary on the themes of Anna Karenina, for he was married to Nadezhda Naryshkina, a Russian aristocrat who had committed adultery and borne an illegitimate child. Naryshkina had also been involved in an infamous murder case in Moscow in 1850 which shocked and thrilled Russian polite society, Tolstoy included. She was a captivating woman who had been married at a young age to Alexander Naryshkin, a scion of one of Russia’s most distinguished aristocratic families. After bearing him a daughter, she resumed her career as one of the grandes dames of Moscow high society, and was renowned for arriving last at soirées, preferably no earlier than midnight. Tolstoy, who was her contemporary, was also living in Moscow at this time, and he described her as ‘très à la mode’ in a letter to Aunt Toinette. In 1850, when she was twenty-five, she began an affair with a Vronsky type – a handsome, wealthy aristocrat called Alexander Sukhovo-kobylin, who was a talented dramatist and had the reputation of being a Don Juan. Naryshkina then became caught up and later implicated in the murder of his French mistress, a crime for which Sukhovo-kobylin was (probably wrongly) arrested and imprisoned, along with two serfs who were convicted and sent to Siberia. Pregnant with her lover’s child, the flame-haired femme fatale hastily decamped with her daughter to Paris, where she immediately made a name for herself in the city’s top salons. It was in Paris that she met Dumas, the illegitimate son of Dumas père, who had come to fame after the publication of his 1848 novel La Dame aux camélias, inspired by his relationship with a celebrated Parisian courtesan (and later turned into Verdi’s opera La Traviata). Naryshkina’s husband refused to give her a divorce, also threatening to take their daughter away from her, and she was able to marry Dumas only after Naryshkin’s death in 1864.
Tolstoy wrote to tell Toinette about the scandalous murder case which was a subject of Moscow gossip for many years,21 and he may well also have heard about Naryshkina’s high-profile relationship with Dumas during his later visits to Paris. Dumas’s reflections on marriage in L’Homme-femme were clearly the product of his experience as husband to Nadezhda Naryshkina, with whom he had two daughters, and they struck a chord with Tolstoy. It was Aunt Toinette, however, who had perhaps the greatest influence on Tolstoy’s views about adultery. In his memoirs, in which he writes about her at length, Tolstoy records telling her late one night about an acquaintance of his, whose wife had been unfaithful and absconded. When he expressed the view that his friend was probably glad to be shot of his wife, he describes how Toinette at once assumed a serious expression and urged instead forgiveness and compassion.22 This is the precisely the sentiment Tolstoy voices through his unsung heroine Dolly in Anna Karenina. When karenin tells Dolly about his predicament at the end of Oblonsky’s dinner party in Part Four of the novel, she pleads with him not to bring shame and disrepute on his wife by divorcing her, as it would destroy her. Toinette’s general view, that one should hate the crime, but not the person, was essentially Tolstoy’s, and holds the key to why Anna karenina is one of the most compelling and complex literary characters ever created.
The story of how Tolstoy actually came to begin Anna Karenina has gone down in the annals of Russian literary history, and involves Sonya, Toinette and his eldest son. Sergey, then nine years old, had been badgering his mother to give him something to read aloud to Toinette, who was by then old and frail and in need of diversion. Sonya recorded in her diary on 19 March 1873 that she had given Sergey the fifth volume of the family’s edition of Pushkin, which contained his Tales of Belkin. Aunt Toinette apparently soon nodded off, and Sergey also lost interest in Pushkin’s immortal prose, but Sonya was too lazy that day to take the book back to the library, and so left it upstairs on the windowsill in the drawing room. Tolstoy naturally picked it up, and a few days later he wrote excitedly to Strakhov to tell him he had been unable to put it down, even though he was reading the Tales of Belkin for about the seventh time. The volume also contained some unfinished sketches for novels and stories, including one fragment beginning ‘The guests arrived at the dacha’ which particularly caught Tolstoy’s eye. He was riveted by how Pushkin got straight down to the action, without even bothering to set the scene first or describe the characters. After the thirty-three false starts with Peter the Great, this was a revelation for Tolstoy, and it showed him how he himself should proceed in his own fiction. (Oddly, he seemed to have forgotten that he had more or less used precisely this technique with War and Peace, which also begins at a high-society soirée.) ‘I automatically and unexpectedly thought up characters and events, not knowing myself why, or what would come next, and carried on…,’ Tolstoy wrote unguardedly in the letter he drafted to Strakhov, which he later thought better about sending.23 The idea of writing about the consequences of a woman’s infidelity was there from the start,24 but it would be a long time before his novel was called Anna Karenina, and began with that famous opening line: