The singleness of purpose emanating from the expression fixed in krams-koy’s portrait was what enabled Tolstoy to write to his friend Fet in between sessions on 23 September 1873 and tell him that he was already finishing Anna Karenina. In a letter sent to Strakhov on the same day he was more candid, but still optimistic about finishing his novel by the end of the year. Before signing off, he mentioned his interest in the murder of Anna Suvorina, which kramskoy had just told him about. Just days earlier the thirty-three-year-old mother of five had been shot in the face with a revolver in a fashionable hotel on the Nevsky Prospekt in St Petersburg. She had been murdered by her lover, a young former officer and family friend called Timofey komarov, who then proceeded to shoot himself.41 Even at a time when there seemed to be a rash of suicides in Russia, it was a sensational case, covered in all the newspapers.42 Tolstoy was interested because he knew the victim’s husband. Back in 1861 he had paid Alexey Suvorin, then a penniless writer, fifty roubles for a story he had commissioned for his Yasnaya Polyana journal, and he was shortly to resume contact with him. Originally from a peasant background, Suvorin was now a successful journalist and publishing supremo, and was fast becoming a power in the land. (kramskoy would paint his portrait in 1881, by which time he was editor of Russia’s most popular newspaper.)
Tolstoy was, of course, also interested in the komarov case because he was writing a novel in which his hero Levin thinks about suicide, his heroine’s lover Vronsky attempts suicide, and his heroine Anna actually does commit suicide. The fact that in his letter to Strakhov Tolstoy also mentions Goethe’s Werther and a schoolboy who took his own life because he had trouble learning Latin confirms that suicide was in his mind at this time. Nor was his interest purely academic, as he would shortly be contemplating his own voluntary exit. In his writing, Tolstoy was in some ways following a trend as it was just at this time that the incidence of suicide in Russia reached what has been described as epidemic proportions. This may have been partly a mass-hysterical reaction to the widespread and often daily coverage during the early 1870s of suicide in the Russian press, which had finally been unmuzzled in the 1860s and now also covered the new public trials.43
Tolstoy ploughed on with Anna Karenina in October and November 1873, but there were further disruptions. As soon as kramskoy packed up his easel and returned to St Petersburg, he was host to the group of village schoolteachers whom he had invited to discuss his teaching methods. They stayed at Yasnaya Polyana for a week.44 Then on 9 November the Tolstoys suffered their first bereavement with the sudden death of their youngest son, the previously healthy eighteen-month-old Pyotr (Petya). Shortly after that, Sonya’s sister Tanya kuzminskaya’s pregnancy ended in a stillbirth.45 The family was devastated, particularly Sonya (who a few months later was also to lose her nineteen-year-old brother Vladimir, who died just after joining the hussars46). On the clear frosty day when they were burying Petya next to his grandparents, Tolstoy started to think for the first time about where he would be buried. At this point he was still fairly sanguine, and in letters he wrote at the time he explained that the death of his brother Nikolay had in some way inured him to the pain of loss. He reasoned that the death of any other of the five elder children in the family would have been harder,47 as this was like losing one’s little finger.48 He was also frank that this ‘screaming’ baby had not yet been a source of any delight for him.49
Sonya, who was four months pregnant when Petya died, felt differently. No other of her children had been so attached to her, and radiated such cheerful spirits and goodness, she wrote to her sister Tanya. She still kept expecting her jolly, chubby little boy to call out to her. Because of the weight of the grief she was carrying in her heart, she also feared for the new baby she had felt move inside for the first time just as Petya was dying. Her last memory of him was of the sun pouring in through the church window on to his body in its little coffin, and turning his hair gold. Christmas was a quiet affair at Yasnaya Polyana that year. While the children were outside tobogganing, Sonya sat inside getting on with copying and household chores, and looking forward to the evening troika rides that they organised as their entertainment. But the recent deaths had almost totally taken away her capacity to find happiness and tranquillity, she told Tanya.50
Tolstoy had now been working on and off on his novel for nine months. At the end of 1873 he confided to Nikolay Strakhov that his work on Anna Karenina had gone well up until that point, even very well. He calculated that he had seven printer’s sheets all ready to be typeset, and he decided he would go ahead and print them as the first part of his novel in book form, without prior publication in a journal.51 Accordingly, in January 1874 Tolstoy went to Moscow to draw up an agreement for publishing Anna Karenina with Mikhail katkov’s printing house. He turned to katkov’s press as it had just produced a print run of 3,600 copies of his collected works in eight volumes (about 1,000 of them sold in the first year, at a price of twelve roubles).52 Technically this constituted the third edition of Tolstoy’s writings, since he counted the appearance of his work in journals as the first. The two-volume ‘second’ edition which had been published in 1864 was now swelled by War and Peace, but in the new format: four rather than six parts, with all the French translated into Russian and the authorial ruminations about history placed together in a new epilogue. The revisions to War and Peace had been partly dictated by the momentous changes wrought in Tolstoy’s thinking by his work on the ABC books, and his new ideas about reforming the way he wrote would also have an impact on Anna Karenina. Tolstoy was, of course, still very preoccupied with his educational work. It was during this brief visit to Moscow in January 1874 that Tolstoy appeared before the Moscow Literacy Committee, which accepted his proposal that his teaching method be tried out alongside the official method then in use.
Tolstoy worked furiously to finish the first part of Anna Karenina at Yasnaya Polyana while the six-week teaching trial was conducted in Moscow. He was still making up his mind about how his new novel should begin. At some point during this time he crossed out Anna Karenina as a title and wrote in Two Marriages, and inserted titles for each chapter, such as ‘Family Quarrel’, ‘Meeting at the Railway Station’, ‘The Ball’. He also replaced the modern Russian words of his earlier epigraph (‘Mine is the Vengeance’) with the Church Slavonic equivalent taken from the Bible, and gave Stepan Arkadych the surname of Oblonsky (now relegating Alabin to his dream). Before he took the manuscript to the printers during his next visit to Moscow in early March, he had changed his mind again, however: now the novel once again bore the title Anna Karenina, and Levin was Tolstoy’s new and final name for Ordyntsev, which he and many of his friends pronounced ‘Lyovin’, like his first name, Lyov (Лëв), in accordance with Russian practice.53 To Sonya, her husband was always Lyovochka. Tolstoy estimated that the manuscript of Part One which he handed over for typesetting in March constituted about a sixth of the total word-count for the novel, and he was still confident Anna Karenina would soon be finished. He did not manage to complete the novel in 1874, in 1875, or even in 1876, however. The concluding sentence was not written until 1877.