All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Everything was confusion at the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had found out about the husband’s liaison with the French governess previously living in their house, and had told her husband she could not live under the same roof as him…
The narrator of Pushkin’s fragment, which dates from the end of the 1820s, goes on to describe a drawing room filling with guests who have just attended a performance of a new Italian opera. The ladies take up position on the sofas, surrounded by gentlemen, while games of whist are started at tables nearby. Tolstoy also started the first draft of his as yet unnamed new novel with a scene in an aristocratic drawing room:
The hostess had just managed to take off her sable fur coat in the hall and give instructions to the butler about tea for the guests in the large drawing room, when there was the rattle of another carriage at the front door…25
As in Pushkin’s fragment, the guests in Tolstoy’s new novel have all just been to the opera – a performance of Don Giovanni, a work all about seduction and adultery. Their conversation focuses on the senior civil servant Mikhail Mikhailovich Stavrovich (the future karenin) and his wife Tatyana Sergeyevna (the future Anna): she has been unfaithful, and he seems ignorant of the fact. The couple then arrive in person, followed later on by Ivan Balashov (the future Vronsky), who proceeds to have an intimate and animated conversation with Tatyana, scandalising those present. Stavrovich now realises the misfortune that has befallen him, and his wife is henceforth no longer invited to society events. It is a scene slightly reminiscent of the soirée at Princess Betsy’s in Part Two of Anna Karenina.
In his first draft Tolstoy sketched out eleven further chapters. Tatyana (Tanya) becomes pregnant and Balashov loses a horse race when his mare falls at the last fence. Stavrovich then leaves Tatyana and moves to Moscow; she gives birth and her husband agrees to a divorce. Tatyana’s second marriage is no happier, however, and after Stavrovich informs her their marriage can never be broken off, and that everyone has suffered, she drowns herself in the Neva. Balashov goes off to join the khiva campaign (Russian troops attacked the city and seized control of the khanate of khiva in 1873, just when Tolstoy was writing).
Tatyana has a brother in the first sketch (a prototype of Oblonsky), while her husband has a sister called kitty, but there is no trace of Levin and his brothers yet, nor any member of the Shcherbatsky family. Stavrovich is portrayed sympathetically, while his wife is intriguingly both ‘provocative’ and ‘meek’. Tolstoy had never before sketched a synopsis of a fictional work in advance, but in any case this raw material soon changed significantly. He developed and dramatically expanded every part of this storyline in future drafts except for his evocation of the state of mind of Balashov’s horse during the race, which he subsequently decided to cut. Balashov’s English groom is called Cord, as in the final version of the novel, but his mare is not Frou-Frou yet. To begin with she bears the English name of ‘Tiny’, and is referred to as ‘Tani’ (as the name becomes when transliterated) and also as ‘Tanya’, thus drawing an indelible link with his lover, which remains in the final version, although the association is not articulated.
Tolstoy was nowhere near ready to give any of this material to Sonya to copy out yet. Instead, he started a new draft of the beginning of his noveclass="underline"
After the opera, the guests drove over to young Princess Vrasskaya’s house. Having arrived home from the theatre, Princess Mika, as she was called in society, had so far only managed to take off her fur coat in the brightly lit hall in front of the mirror, which was festooned with flowers; with her small gloved hand she was still unhooking the lace which had caught on a hook of her fur coat…26
This time he called his heroine Anastasia (‘Nana’) Arkadyevna karenina, and replaced her yellow lace gown with the black velvet she will wear to the ball in the final version. Her husband is now firmly called Alexey Alexandrovich, but her lover’s name has switched from Balashov to Gagin. Tolstoy ended up discarding this draft, but he would save up the detail of the caught lace for Anna to unhook in the final version of the novel, when she is leaving Princess Betsy’s soirée after her fateful encounter with Vronsky.
Tolstoy wrote several more pages, but he was already beginning to chafe at the bit. He wanted to write a novel of adultery, but he did not want to be constrained by writing only about St Petersburg high society, even if his attitude towards it was sharply critical. With a few exceptions (Stavrovich, for example, has a conversation with a nihilist on a train), his social radius was thus far stiflingly small, and so he decided to introduce in his third draft the character of kostya Neradov, a prototype of Levin. Neradov is a rural landowner, and both a friend of Gagin (the future Vronsky) and his rival for the hand of kitty Shcherbatskaya, who also now makes her first appearance. The action, moreover, now moves to Moscow.
4. The fourth draft of the opening of Anna karenina, 1873
Tolstoy was gradually finding his way into his new novel. His fourth stab at an opening now received the title ‘Anna karenina’, followed by ‘Vengeance is Mine’ as an epigraph. This draft begins with the familiar scene of a husband waking up after a row the night before with his wife, who has discovered his infidelity. ‘Stepan Arkadyich Alabin’ is almost Oblonsky. Anna comes to Moscow as peacemaker, and she meets Gagin at the ball. But still Tolstoy was not satisfied: there was no tension in the relationship between the Levin and Vronsky prototypes, as they were friends. He decided to change their names to Ordyntsev and udashev, and now made them rivals for kitty’s hand rather than friends. It was time to try another beginning. Tolstoy took out a fresh sheet of paper and started a fifth opening draft:
There was a cattle exhibition in Moscow. The Zoological Garden was full of people. Beaming with his pleasant, open face and full red lips, wearing his hat slightly tilted to one side on his thinning, light brown curly hair, the grey of his beaver collar merging with his handsome greying sideburns, Stepan Arkadyich Alabin, well known to all of Moscow society, was walking along…27
Ordyntsev, who is about to run into his old friend Alabin, has come up to Moscow to show his calves and his bull.
This time Tolstoy carried on writing for quite a long while, but he was to change tack yet again. He had now constructed solid foundations for his novel by creating the ‘Levin’ storyline to act as a counterpoint to the karenin plot, with the ‘Oblonskys’ as the arch joining them together. For reasons of structural balance, he now decided against his central character of ‘Levin’ appearing in the first chapter, so he reserved the Zoological Garden for a skating scene later on and returned to his previous idea of opening the novel with ‘Oblonsky’ waking up after the row with his wife. He reworked the crucial opening scenes four times to get them exactly right, and these were the first chapters he gave Sonya to make fair copies of. Everything else stayed in draft form.28 In all, Tolstoy produced ten versions of the first part of Anna Karenina, writing a total of 2,500 pages of manuscript before the novel was complete.29 Almost a century would pass before the story of how Anna Karenina was written could be told with accuracy. The manuscripts were partially unravelled for publication in volume twenty of Tolstoy’s Complete Collected Works, published in 1939, but the first complete scholarly edition of the novel appeared only in 1970, and that now turns out to contain errors.