Moscow had always been the epicentre of Russian Pan-Slavism. The first charitable Slavic Committee had been founded there in 1858 to provide support to Slavic peoples under Ottoman or Habsburg rule, and the city hosted the second Slavic Congress in 1867. In 1877, the Slavic Committee was run by the Slavophile journalist Ivan Aksakov, with active support from his wife Anna, and Tolstoy wrote in particularly withering tones to Fet about her self-appointed role in artificially drumming up support for war when he returned home from his Moscow visit.122 Anna Aksakova, daughter of the poet Tyutchev, was Tolstoy’s old acquaintance, and formerly the governess to Alexander II’s youngest children (when she married in 1866 she had been succeeded by Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstaya – Alexandrine). Another key figure in Moscow’s Slavophile circles was the former guards officer Alexander Porokhovshchikov. In 1872 he built the Slavic Bazaar Hotel close to Red Square to be an embodiment of his vision of Slavonic brotherhood; the deliberately pre-Petrine style of its design was complemented by its interiors while the main dining room featured an enormous canvas depicting Russian, Polish and Czech composers commissioned from the young artist Ilya Repin. It was from here that Porokhovshchikov organised the recruitment of Russian volunteers for the Serbo-Turkish War,123 and as an eligible retired officer, this is where Vronsky would have come to enlist in Anna Karenina.
Russia went on to declare war on the Ottoman Empire in April 1877, just as Tolstoy was writing his epilogue to Anna Karenina. As a prominent Pan-Slavist, and also the editor of an influential conservative newspaper, katkov was incensed to see the volunteer movement dismissed in Tolstoy’s manuscript as a ‘fashionable enthusiasm’ for the idle rich. He also did not like to see the press criticised for claiming to represent the ‘voice of the people’, and publishing ‘much that was unnecessary’. For his part, Tolstoy was infuriated that a ‘mere journalist’ should dare to try to correct his manuscript. He had never made any attempt to hide the fact that the sentiments voiced by Levin and old Prince Shcherbatsky were his own. To his friends he openly declared that newspapers were ‘a most evil thing, and it would be better if they did not even exist’. He reiterated that the Russian people neither knew anything about the Slavs, nor wanted to fight.124 Tolstoy refused point-blank to make the changes katkov demanded, and in the end withdrew his manuscript in order to publish it separately. katkov retaliated by publishing a statement in the Russian Messenger:
In the previous issue the words ‘to be concluded’ followed the novel Anna Karenina. But the novel really ends with the death of the heroine. According to the author’s plan, a short epilogue was to have followed, in which readers could have found out that Vronsky, grief-stricken and confused after Anna’s death, sets off for Serbia as a volunteer, and that all the other characters are alive and well, with Levin staying in his village and getting angry at the Slavic Committees and the volunteers. The author may perhaps develop these chapters for a separate edition of his novel.125
Tolstoy was naturally even more furious when he read this, and immediately sat down to draft a letter to Alexey Suvorin, now the editor of the St Petersburg New Times, in which he objected to the way in which his epilogue was dismissed as being of little value, but then summarised anyway. ‘How about summarising the rest of the novel in ten lines?’ he thundered: ‘There was a lady who left her husband. After falling in love with Mr Vronsky, she grew angry with various things in Moscow and threw herself under a train…’126 Tolstoy also objected to katkov’s instruction to the reader as to how to interpret Anna Karenina, that is, as a ‘novel about high society’, and greatly resented being effectively told how to end it. But it was Sonya, signing as ‘C[ountess] S[ofya] ***’ and quoting from her husband’s draft, who finally announced to the readers of New Times why the epilogue to Anna Karenina was not published in the Russian Messenger.127
No doubt the Russian public was gratified with the explanation, but not all readers relished the epilogue. Levin’s disparaging remarks about the Balkan Question and the Russian Volunteer Movement were highly contentious, and ran exactly counter to those of Tolstoy’s great rival Dostoyevsky, whose messianic nationalism (or jingoistic Orthodox megalomania, depending on your viewpoint) was centred on Russia’s role as crusading saviour in the Balkans. Although Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy never met, they were, of course, aware of each other, but were natural antipodes who found many shortcomings in each other’s work. As a journalist, it was more or less incumbent upon Dostoyevsky to deliver a verdict on Tolstoy’s novel, and after much prevarication he finally came out in print with an opinion of Anna Karenina in early 1877. Tolstoy, however, never returned the compliment of publicly commenting on any of Dostoyevsky’s fiction, remaining, as always, aloof.
To begin with, Dostoyevsky was generous with his praise of Anna Karenina. He was particularly enthusiastic about Levin as a literary character, and he devoted several pages to the novel in the February issue of his Diary of a Writer, the independent monthly journal he had started up in 1876 to explore the character and destiny of the Russian people. But when he read the epilogue later in the year, Dostoyevsky was beside himself. In the July–August issue he lambasted Levin for being egocentric, unpatriotic and out of touch with the Russian people.128 He took a dim view of Levin’s claim that the Russian people shared his lack of concern for the predicament of the Balkan Slavs, and took strong exception to his declared unwillingness to kill, even if it resulted in the prevention of atrocities. It is here, of course, that we meet in embryonic form the idea of non-resistance to violence which would lie at the heart of the new religious outlook which Tolstoy would develop over the next decade. People like Tolstoy were supposed to be our teachers, Dostoyevsky concluded at the end of his lengthy tirade, but what exactly were they teaching us? Needless to say, Dostoyevsky did not receive a response either in 1877 or in the years leading up to his death in January 1881. But Tolstoy made up for that by then spending the next thirty years of his long life doing little else but answering that very question.
10
PILGRIM, NIHILIST, MUZHIK
If I was on my own, I wouldn’t be a monk, I would be a holy fool – that is, I wouldn’t cherish anything in life, and would do no one any harm.
Letter to Nikolay Strakhov, 6 November 18771
AS SOMEONE WHO CAME TO BELIEVE fervently in the idea that our lives are made up of seven-year cycles, and who was also extremely superstitious, Tolstoy was bound to look upon his forty-ninth year as being of special significance – particularly since this birthday fell in the seventh year of the seventh decade of the century. And so it was, for looking back in October 1884, when seven more years had passed, he realised that the most radical change in his life had indeed been, as he put it numerically in a letter to his wife, ‘7 × 7 = 49’.2 It was in 1877 that Tolstoy began to tread more firmly on the path he had first tentatively started out on when he set up his Yasnaya Polyana school – the path of living in accordance with Christian ethics. Twice he had been diverted – when he married and again when he committed himself to writing Anna Karenina. But this time there was to be no straying, and the further he progressed along the path that was taking him away from his artistic calling as a novelist, and also away from his wife, the lighter his step became. He did not stop writing fiction entirely, but it became secondary to the more pressing task of exposing the hypocrisy and immorality he saw around him.