If Tolstoy had essentially stopped keeping a diary while he was writing Anna Karenina, it was partly because he was able to give voice to matters that concerned him on the pages of his novel. Through the relationship of Levin and kitty he had wanted to chart a ‘third way’ between the European-style marriage favoured by Anna, notable for the small number of children, and the ‘traditional’ peasant-style marriage of Dolly, who raises a large number of children despite being from the same noble background as Anna. Over the course of the novel Tolstoy had woven many thinly disguised autobiographical details into the story of Levin’s courtship and marriage of kitty (the communication via letters written in chalk, the oversight of leaving out a clean shirt for Levin to wear to the wedding and so forth), but in the second half of Part Six, he began to voice through Dolly one particular immediate concern: his horror of contraception.
After the death of Varvara in November 1875, Sonya’s health had remained precarious, and in January 1877 she made her first visit to St Petersburg to spend a week with her mother (whom she had not seen for three years) and consult the famous Dr Botkin, court physician to the Tsar. She also met Alexandrine for the first time, who immediately wrote to tell Tolstoy how much she liked his wife. She told him that she had found ‘Sophie’ sincere, intelligent, warm and straightforward, and had taken to her at once. It was Alexandrine who also conveyed a euphemistic message from Dr Botkin about Sonya’s ‘health’ which resulted in her becoming pregnant again in a matter of weeks.114 Since the death of Varvara, Sonya had so dreaded having another child that she had done everything in her powers to avoid becoming pregnant, including considering contraception, and it had clearly had an impact on the marriage. It was just at this time that Tolstoy wrote the chapter in Anna Karenina in which Dolly reacts with extreme shock to Anna’s revelation that she has been using contraception. For Dolly, and for Tolstoy, contraception was immoral.
While Sonya was in Petersburg, Tolstoy got on with finishing Anna Karenina, turning to Trollope for light relief. He was reading The Prime Minister, the penultimate of the six Palliser novels, and recommended it highly to his brother Sergey.115 Anna Karenina reflects Tolstoy’s engagement with the French novel of adultery, but also his enthusiasm for English fiction, which he highly revered – he once stated quite baldly that English books were the best, and that he always found something fresh and new in them.116 The English novel Anna reads on the train at the beginning of Anna Karenina may well have been by Trollope, since it mentions Members of Parliament, fox-hunting and peers.117 Trollope had decided early on that his spirited heroine Lady Glencora would eventually grow to love her upright, dry, statesman husband Plantagenet, who is altogether more benign than his Russian counterpart karenin. And without the burden of a didactic tradition to weigh him down, opting for a happy ending was unproblematic for a writer devoted to his full-time job at the Post Office. Trollope was mercifully immune to the kind of self-doubt which increasingly bedevilled Tolstoy as he struggled to finish Anna Karenina.
Tolstoy finally finished Anna Karenina in 1877. Russian readers had certainly been patient. They had, after all, begun reading it two years earlier, and they were probably as disconcerted as Tolstoy’s editor was when the instalments had suddenly stopped in April 1875, a third of the way into the novel, and again in 1876. katkov had even felt obliged to publish a notice explaining that the hiatus was not due to the journal’s editors but to ‘circumstances preventing the author from completing his novel’, whose publication, they hoped, would now continue ‘without interruption’. Tolstoy’s readers remained enthusiastic, however. One young acquaintance of Tolstoy later recalled that he and his fellow students waited with bated breath for each new issue of the Russian Messenger, and then immediately ‘devoured’ every page whenever there was an instalment of Anna Karenina.118 But Tolstoy was fairly nonplussed when Strakhov wrote from Petersburg in May 1877 to tell him that the most recent reviews were hailing him to be a writer as great as Shakespeare, and that even Dostoyevsky was waving his arms about and calling Tolstoy a ‘god of art’.119 Dostoyevsky, however, would shortly change his tune when he came to read the novel’s final chapters, in which Tolstoy threw down the gauntlet to Pan-Slavists like himself.
Anna Karenina was nothing if not topical, and Tolstoy’s slow progress enabled him to reflect in its pages not just the most recent debates about agriculture, but also the latest political developments as they unfolded in Russia. Here Tolstoy was in new territory, but his increasing indifference to purely artistic questions made him fearless about voicing unpopular opinions and set him on a collision course with the Russian establishment. The April 1877 issue of the Russian Messenger contained the last chapters of Part Seven, which end with Anna’s death, and they were greeted with wide acclaim. This issue should have also contained the novel’s epilogue (as Part Eight was originally called), but Tolstoy had once again fallen out with his editor, and he was still awaiting a third set of revised proofs in mid-May.120 The sticking point was politics, and specifically the ‘unpatriotic’ opinions expressed in the novel about the Russian volunteer movement in aid of the Serbs, who since the end of June 1876 had been at war with the Ottoman Empire. This is the movement which Vronsky joins at the end of Anna Karenina: we see him getting on a train at the Smolensky station in Moscow as he sets off on a journey from which we know he will never return.
The Serbo-Turkish War was just one aspect of the ‘Eastern Question’ which reared its head once again in the 1870s, this time driven by the Balkan nations’ desire for liberation from centuries of Ottoman rule. Pan-Slavists saw the conflict as a golden opportunity to further their goal of uniting all the Slavic nations, ideally under Russia’s sovereignty. The fact that Pan-Slavism had its roots in Russia’s diplomatic isolation and humiliating defeat in the Crimean War was not lost on Tolstoy, whose experience fighting in that campaign had turned him into a committed pacifist. He found this new war greatly troubling. He had no wish to be caught up in contemporary politics, but his concern over the events unfolding in the Balkans caused him to put aside his disdain for the press temporarily and follow the war’s progress. Foreseeing Russia’s ineluctable involvement in the Serbo-Turkish War, he had actually gone to Moscow to find out more about it in November 1876. He was there when Alexander II gave a speech from the kremlin in which he gave the Turks an ultimatum, and could not have avoided the patriotic crowds lining the streets and shouting, ‘War! War!’ along with the customary ‘Hurrah!’121 What really made Tolstoy’s blood boil was the part he believed was played by the press and the ‘Slavic Committee’ in whipping up enthusiasm for war, and in the last pages of Anna Karenina he began to speak out.