Sonya felt differently: she wondered whether it was worth her husband investing all his energy in a tiny corner of Russia – the district in Tula province where they lived. Writing to her sister Tanya, she did not conceal the fact that she heartily despised all her husband’s works with arithmetic and grammar. She was longing for her husband to get back to writing novels, which was an activity she both respected and loved:
I teach, breast-feed like a machine, from morning to night and from night to morning. I was copying out the ABC, but when I saw that it was not going to come to an end soon, I got so fed up with all those short words, and phrases such as ‘Masha ate kasha’ and so on that I gave up – let some clerk write it out. My work was copying out the immortal War and Peace or Anna, but that was boring.70
Sonya and Lyovochka were beginning to grow apart. Sonya was tiring of the monotony and grind of her daily life, and was frequently ill. Her husband was beginning to be assailed by existential despair.
Subscribers to the Russian Messenger finally started reading Anna Karenina at the beginning of 1875, when the first chapters of the novel appeared in the January issue, nestled amongst materials as diverse as an article about the reform of Russian universities, an instalment of Wilkie Collins’s detective novel The Law and the Lady (only just published in England), notes on the defence of Sebastopol by a ‘Black Sea Officer’, a sketch of China and an article about education.71 It is unlikely readers dwelled long on the dry disquisition about the teaching of logic in high schools when there was a new novel by Count Tolstoy to read. The first chapters of Anna Karenina caused a sensation, and Strakhov wrote to tell Tolstoy that he had seen even the most highbrow people in St Petersburg jumping up and down in excitement.72 The first instalment ended with Anna leaving the ball early, having danced the mazurka with Vronsky, and thus brought kitty’s dreams crashing to the ground. Russian readers could not wait to read more. Sonya, the faithful copyist, had a right to feel hard done by when there were people blackening her reputation after Tolstoy’s death, for she had contributed several details to the crucial scene at the ball by acting as her husband’s fashion consultant and advising on Anna’s toilette:
She was not in lilac, which kitty had so set her heart on, but in a low-cut black velvet dress, revealing her ample shoulders and a bosom like old chiselled ivory, rounded arms and tiny slender hands. The entire dress was trimmed with Venetian lace. On her head, in her black hair, unaugmented by any extension, was a small garland of pansies, and there was another on the black sash ribbon around her waist, between pieces of white lace.73
Tolstoy dressed Anna in a black dress, but it was Sonya who suggested the fabric should be velvet, and accentuated the overall sensual impression by making the lace around her waist white.74
In the second instalment of Anna Karenina, which appeared in the February issue of the Russian Messenger, readers sympathised with the grieving kitty and Levin, both now spurned. They thrilled to Anna’s romantic nighttime encounter with Vronsky at a remote railway station in the middle of a snowstorm, but they were probably slightly disconcerted by the way this instalment ended. In the middle of chapter 10 of Part Two came two coy lines of dots representing the moment when Anna and Vronsky become intimate with each other.75 They were followed by a passage in which the sexual act was clearly associated with murder:
As she looked at him, she felt physically humiliated, and she could say nothing more. He meanwhile was feeling what a murderer must feel when he looks at the body he has robbed of life. That body he had robbed of life was their love, the first period of their love. There was something terrible and loathsome in the memories of what this terrible price of shame had bought. Shame at her spiritual nakedness oppressed her and communicated itself to him. But in spite of the murderer’s deep horror before the body of his victim, the body must be hacked to pieces and hidden – the murderer must take advantage of what he has gained by murder.
Tolstoy experienced the first of several bruising encounters with his editor over this chapter. katkov objected to his ‘vivid realism’, and asked him to tone it down. Tolstoy refused to change a single word, however, arguing that this was one of those parts on which the ‘whole novel’ depended.76
All in all, February 1875 was not a good month for Tolstoy. If he felt completely indifferent to all the accolades he was receiving for Anna Karenina, it was because there had been another death in the family.77 This time it was Nikolay, their ten-month-old baby, who passed away after three weeks of harrowing illness. It was particularly agonising for Sonya, who was still breast-feeding. Instead of the sunshine which had accompanied Petya’s funeral, the day of Nikolay’s burial was one of the coldest that winter – minus twenty degrees, with fierce, biting winds which tore at the muslin he was wrapped in and the crown on his head, traditionally a part of Orthodox funerals. Sonya told Tanya that she felt as if she had turned to stone.78 Three months later, she was pregnant again.
There were further instalments of Anna Karenina in March and April 1875, but Russian readers then had to wait eight months for the next chapters to be published. The reason for the delay was simple: Tolstoy had not finished them. It was unprecedented for the serial publication of a novel to be interrupted in this way, and only a writer of Tolstoy’s stature could have got away with it. He could not back out of his deal with katkov, but he found it hard to muster the necessary enthusiasm to carry on. He was still wrapped up in his educational ideas, and preoccupied with the publication of his New ABC, which won immediate acclaim as soon as it appeared in June 1875. He was also becoming very depressed and needed distraction.
That summer the whole family returned to Samara, accompanied by Sonya’s brother ‘uncle Styopa’, their English governess Emily Tabor and Jules Rey, the bespectacled but athletic Swiss tutor who had arrived at Yasnaya Polyana that January.79 He was a spruce, neatly turned out young man of twenty-three with a secret drink problem, and he made a bee-line for Emily.80 At the beginning of August Tolstoy organised a traditional Bashkir horse race – five laps of a three-mile circular course marked out on his land – for which he offered prizes.81 Tents sprang up all around it in the days leading up to the race as Bashkirs arrived with their horses, and Tolstoy offered a lame foal and a few sheep for the feasting that went on beforehand. It was thrilling for the Tolstoy children, who had never encountered throat singing or the traditional dancing that accompanied the songs performed on the quray, the long Bashkir flute. Thirty-two riders took part in the race, which drew hundreds of spectators. A handful were local Russians, including Tolstoy on a mount he had bought specially for the occasion, but the rest were Bashkir and kirghiz horsemen, one of whom claimed the top prize of a rifle. It was a far cry from the horse races in Anna Karenina, attended by the court. Tolstoy was hatching a plan to start breeding horses, and he brought home some kirghiz horses, prized for their speed and stamina, as well as two donkeys christened Bismarck and MacMahon after two opponents in the Franco-Prussian War.82