9. NOVELIST

At that time he read a lot of English family novels and sometimes joked about them, saying, 'These novels always end up with him putting his arm round her waist, then they get married, and he inherits an estate and a baronetcy. These novelists end their novels with him and her getting married. But a novel should not be about what happens before they get married, but what happens after they get married.'

Reminiscence of Tolstoy's son Sergey¹

TOLSTOY HAD BEEN ITCHING to get back to fiction ever since he delivered the manuscript of the last part of his ABC to the printers in February 1872. This time there was none of the restless casting around for a subject as there had been at the end of War and Peace.Tolstoy now knew exactly where he was going, but his imagination was not yet captured by the unruly curls of a beguilingly beautiful society woman destined to become one of the greatest of literary heroines. His mind was instead occupied by the relentless energy and alcohol-fuelled sadism of a seven-foot-tall syphilitic buffoon who also happened to be Russia's first great revolutionary: Peter the Great. To be fair, Tolstoy only uncovered these traits during the course of his painstaking research, but they led him to the realisation that he no longer wanted to write a novel about the 'tsar-reformer'. It was this discovery which made him receptive to the chance flash of inspiration which then launched Anna Karenina, but it came at the end of a very serious engagement with the available sources on late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Russian history. Tolstoy tried to start his novel about Peter the Great thirty-three times.²

Tolstoy was not the only Russian artist interested in Peter the Great in 1872, for this was when the composer Musorgsky started to plan an ambitious new historical opera set at the time of Peter's accession. But there was a particular reason why Peter I was in the public eye that year: it was the bicentenary of his birth. Nicholas I had actively encouraged the cult of Peter's personality during his reign, and the anniversary was celebrated with due pomp and circumstance. A new battleship was named after Peter, a statue of him was put up in Petrozavodsk (St Petersburg was not the only city he founded bearing his name), and Tchaikovsky wrote a cantata in honour of the occasion, to name just some of ways in which the bicentenary was marked. There was also a flurry of new publications—1,049 to be exact, ³ and a great deal of eulogy from Russian historians, some of whom were still inclined to see Alexander II, the country's next 'great reformer', as a latter-day Peter. Amongst those who idolised Peter the Great was the nation's leading historian, Professor Sergey Solovyov, newly appointed as Rector of Moscow University. 'Two hundred years have passed since the day that the great man was born,' he intoned in the first of his twelve 'Public Lectures about Peter the Great' in 1872. 'Everywhere one hears the words: we must celebrate the bicentenary of this great man; it is our duty, our holy, patriotic duty, because this great man is one of us, a Russian man.'⁴

Solovyov was a scholar of Tolstoyan industry who also published on a Tolstoyan scale. He had read the twelve volumes of Karamzin's pioneering History of the Russian State (1806-1826) at least a dozen times by the time he was thirteen, and then in 1851 he started publishing his own history of Russia—a project which would absorb him until his death in 1879. Karamzin had covered Russian history up until the accession of the first Romanov tsar in 1613, but the twenty-nine volumes of Solovyov's History of Russia from the Earliest Times extended the survey up to 1774, the year of the Pugachev Rebellion (which was brutally crushed by Catherine the Great). Tolstoy, of course, read Solovyov's magisterial history very carefully, and particularly those volumes concerning the reign of Peter the Great. Solovyov sought to present a unified view of Russia's evolution as a nation. As a pronounced Westerniser who believed in historical progress, he saw Peter's reforms as a natural and inevitable development which had placed Russia on the path to the rule of law, and brought her closer to European civilisation. For Tolstoy, however, Solovyov's history revealed pre-Petrine Russia as a country of 'cruelty, theft, beatings, coarseness, and an inability to do anything', and it signally failed in his opinion to acknowledge the contribution of the people in turning Russia into the great and united state that had made such rapid advances in the eighteenth century. He was inevitably critical of yet another history which seemed to concentrate on the policies and actions of Russia's rulers.⁵ Tolstoy shared Solovyov's admiration for Peter's down-to-earth tastes, but not much else.

In order to gain a sense of what it was like to live in Russia during Peter's reign, Tolstoy surrounded himself with an enormous number of books and articles. They ranged from the thirty volumes of Ivan Golikov's reverent Deeds of Peter the Great, Wise Reformer of Russia, published at the end of the eighteenth century, to the latest contemporary portraits by Slavophile historians, whose attitude to Peter's reign was far more ambivalent. And then there were studies by historians such as Mikhail Semevsky, who respected Peter's achievements but was repelled by his sacrilegious, Rabelaisian behaviour. General histories, monographs, memoirs, diaries, letters—Tolstoy devoured everything he could lay his hands on.⁶ He also perused pictures and contemporary portraits.

Musorgsky also revelled in the profusion of new books and articles which were gradually filling in the blank spots of Russian history, but he was extremely sceptical as to whether Peter's reforms had really been beneficial. In the letter he sent to Stasov in June 1872, written in his typically opaque style, Musorgsky asserted that Russia had not progressed as a nation:

The power of the black earth will reveal itself when you dig down to the very bottom. It is possible to dig the black earth with tools alien to it. And at the end of the seventeenth century they did dig Mother Russia with just such tools, so she did not immediately realise what they were digging her with, and, like the black earth, she opened up and began to breathe. And so she, our beloved, received actual and privy councillors, who never gave her, the long-suffering one, the chance to collect herself and to think: 'Where are you pushing me?'...'We've moved forward!'—you lie—'We're still stuck back there!'...⁷

Musorgsky was overwhelmed by the task of having to fashion a libretto himself from the many disparate primary sources he was working with, and he never managed to finish the score for his opera. Tolstoy was not at all perturbed by the dimensions of his task, but his project never even got off the ground, as the more he read about Peter the Great, the less he attractive he became as a potential character in a novel. He was disappointed by the personality of Russia's first emperor, later dismissing him as a 'drunken jester'.⁸

Musorgsky's alcoholism also played a part in diminishing any interest Tolstoy might have had in his music (it drove the composer to an early death in 1881, when he was just forty-two). Although he was later surprised how much he liked the Musorgsky songs performed for him in 1903, Tolstoy generally had little interest in contemporary Russian music, and remained oblivious to its achievements. Tolstoy and Musorgsky had a surprising amount in common, however, despite never coming into contact. They shared a passion for Russia and its history, a deep interest in the rich textures of the Russian language (while Tolstoy was composing his ABC, Musorgsky was reproducing children's speech in his exquisite song cycle The Nursery), and a studious concern for authenticity which embraced the tiniest detail. In trying to conceive a way of writing about Peter the Great's Azov campaigns against the Turks, in January 1873 Tolstoy wrote to a family acquaintance who lived in the south of Russia to ask very precise questions about the landscape by the River Don. What were the riverbanks like? What sort of grasses grew there? Were there bushes? Was it pebbly? Tolstoy certainly entertained high hopes for his Peter the Great novel, ⁹ but he found he could not breathe life into his many drafts, no matter how hard he tried. It is somewhat ironic that in February 1873, just as the public was informed of his latest work in progress in a newspaper column, he was on the verge of giving it up.¹⁰ Within weeks he would be seized with a desire to write on contemporary themes, setting his new novel in the turbulent age in which he lived.

As historians fleshed out a more rounded picture of Peter the Great in the more permissive atmosphere under Alexander II, a growing number of people began to question the official view of his reign, including Tolstoy's American visitor Eugene Schuyler, whose own 'historical biography' was published in 1884.¹¹ It is likely he and Tolstoy discussed their shared fascination with Peter the Great at some point during his week-long stay at Yasnaya Polyana in 1868. In the course of his research, Schuyler came to believe Peter had forced Europeanisation on to Russia too early.¹² Since subsequent Russian rulers had then concentrated resources on increasing the nation's military prestige at the expense of domestic reform (a scenario which would, of course, be played out again in the twentieth century), the cost of Peter's reforms had in fact been paid by those who had least benefited from them—the millions of serfs who made up the majority of the population. The 'Great Reforms', when they eventually arrived in the 1860s, came too late, and certainly did not go far enough in the eyes of most educated Russians. But Tolstoy was typically neither on the side of the krepostniks—those members of the right-wing landed gentry who regretted the Emancipation of Serfdom Act—nor was he with those members of the intelligentsia on the left who sought more radical reform. He would take on both sides in Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy's knowledge of the huge discrepancy between his own unmerited position of privilege and the poverty and backwardness of the peasantry was becoming increasingly painful for him as time went on, and made it morally difficult for him to continue writing for the educated classes. This is why he devoted so much time to his ABC, which he regarded as the most important thing he had ever done. At that time in his career, it was the best way he could find of personally helping to remedy a situation in which all the landed gentry were complicit. The utopian approach to the country's social problems taken by many of Russia's idealistic young students was far less practical. Just as Tolstoy was abandoning his Peter the Great novel in the spring of 1873, at a time when it seemed that his ABC project was turning into a complete fiasco, ¹³ the more radical members of Russia's student intelligentsia were beginning to think of revolution as the only solution to the country's ills. Inspired by the populist ideas of thinkers like Alexander Herzen, who had advocated a Russian brand of socialism designed to enable the peasantry to bypass capitalism, they headed for the countryside to have direct contact with the people by distributing propaganda and setting up workshops and co-operatives.

The high-water mark of the 'Going to the People' movement was the summer of 1874 when the Russian countryside was invaded by literally thousands of earnest young 'nihilists' (the moniker they had been labelled with ever since the publication of Turgenev'sFathers and Sons in 1862, which denoted their scepticism towards accepted authorities). Many of them were women. But since most of these students came from the cities, and were essentially middle class, they had next to no direct knowledge of the peasantry, and they badly miscalculated. As it turned out, the peasants' innate conservatism made them indifferent if not downright hostile to the students' efforts to incite them to overthrow their tsar. Against all odds, they retained a deep loyalty and affection for the Romanovs. The peaceful 'Going to the People' movement failed, and the wave of arrests which followed led the more extreme Populists to turn to terrorism at the end of the 1870s. It was against this background of social upheaval that Tolstoy would set Anna Karenina. The casting of only a minor character as a nihilist belies the fact that in its defence of marriage and conservative family values, the whole novel is an assault on the kind of views espoused by the radical intelligentsia, for whom female emancipation was entirely consonant with their political goals.¹⁴ The aristocratic Tolstoy would never have deigned to engage in a direct polemic with his opponents, whose uncompromising stance was partly driven by the fact that, coming from poor backgrounds, they had nothing to lose. In its searching analysis of marriage as an institution, however, Anna Karenina is certainly an indirect response to the kind of women's liberation championed in such classic nihilist texts as Chernyshevsky's 1862 novel What Is to Be Done?,which celebrates 'free love'.

The seeds had been sown back in February 1870, when Tolstoy had begun drafting his article about the 'woman question', joining Strakhov in a comprehensive rejection of John Stuart Mill's call for equality between the sexes. This was exactly when he first conceived the idea of writing a novel about a society woman who commits adultery. Then on a dark, cold evening in January 1872, a thirty-five-year-old woman called Anna Pirogova arrived at Yasenki station, just down the road from Yasnaya Polyana, with a bundle containing a change of underwear. After crossing herself, she threw herself under goods train No. 77. Anna Pirogova was a distant relation of Tolstoy's wife. She had become the housekeeper and lover of his friend and neighbour Alexander Bibikov, then in his early fifties, with whom he had set up his short-lived distillery some years earlier. Bibikov had informed Anna he was going to marry his son's governess, an attractive German girl.¹⁵ In a rage of jealousy and anger, she had sent him a note accusing him of being her murderer before taking her own life.¹⁶ Tolstoy went to the autopsy. He was badly distressed by seeing the mangled corpse of the grey-eyed, stocky woman he knew well. This was one of the first railway suicides on Russia's young but rapidly expanding network, which had increased from about 500 miles of track at the time of Nicholas I's death to over 10,000 by the 1870s. It was undoubtedly the first suicide at Tolstoy's local station. He used the 'iron road' himself, of course, but he loathed this intrusion of modernity into his rural sanctuary, and he would shore up the complex architectural structure of Anna Karenina by thematically aligning events connected with the railway in his novel with death and destruction.

Another immediate stimulus for Anna Karenina came from France. In March 1873 Tolstoy wrote to his sister-in-law Tanya to ask if she had read L'Homme-femme, an essay by Alexandre Dumas fils which had created a storm in Paris the previous year and had already been reprinted several dozen times.¹⁷ Dumas wrote his essay as a reaction to coverage in the French press of the trial of a man who had murdered his 'unfaithful' wife, from whom he had separated. Specifically he was responding to an article which deplored the French laws which virtually condoned such crimes (the man was sentenced to a mere five years), and proposed divorce as the solution. This could never have been an option in this case. After a brief period following the French Revolution when France had the most liberal divorce laws in the world, divorce had been made illegal there in 1816 and would remain so until 1884.¹⁸ For Dumas, marriage was a bitter, irreconcilable struggle between the sexes in which the woman prevails, but he argued that in this case the husband was ultimately the moral arbiter, and so had the right to kill an unfaithful wife who continued to be recalcitrant. Tolstoy was deeply impressed with Dumas's analysis of marriage. As well as introducing a discussion of his essay in one of the early drafts of Anna Karenina, ¹⁹ he would take issue with many of its fundamental points in his account of Levin and Kitty's marriage. He would also engage, of course, with the entire tradition of the French novel of adultery that had been created by authors such as Flaubert, Zola and Dumas.²⁰

Dumas's own life, meanwhile, or rather that of his wife, provides interesting commentary on the themes of Anna Karenina, for he was married to Nadezhda Naryshkina, a Russian aristocrat who had committed adultery and borne an illegitimate child. Naryshkina had also been involved in an infamous murder case in Moscow in 1850 which shocked and thrilled Russian polite society, Tolstoy included. She was a captivating woman who had been married at a young age to Alexander Naryshkin, a scion of one of Russia's most distinguished aristocratic families. After bearing him a daughter, she resumed her career as one of the grandes dames of Moscow high society, and was renowned for arriving last at soirées, preferably no earlier than midnight. Tolstoy, who was her contemporary, was also living in Moscow at this time, and he described her as 'très à la mode' in a letter to Aunt Toinette. In 1850, when she was twenty-five, she began an affair with a Vronsky type—a handsome, wealthy aristocrat called Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin, who was a talented dramatist and had the reputation of being a Don Juan. Naryshkina then became caught up and later implicated in the murder of his French mistress, a crime for which Sukhovo-Kobylin was (probably wrongly) arrested and imprisoned, along with two serfs who were convicted and sent to Siberia. Pregnant with her lover's child, the flame-haired femme fatale hastily decamped with her daughter to Paris, where she immediately made a name for herself in the city's top salons. It was in Paris that she met Dumas, the illegitimate son of Dumas père, who had come to fame after the publication of his 1848 novel La Dame aux camélias, inspired by his relationship with a celebrated Parisian courtesan (and later turned into Verdi's opera La Traviata). Naryshkina's husband refused to give her a divorce, also threatening to take their daughter away from her, and she was able to marry Dumas only after Naryshkin's death in 1864.

Tolstoy wrote to tell Toinette about the scandalous murder case which was a subject of Moscow gossip for many years, ²¹ and he may well also have heard about Naryshkina's high-profile relationship with Dumas during his later visits to Paris. Dumas's reflections on marriage in L'Homme-femme were clearly the product of his experience as husband to Nadezhda Naryshkina, with whom he had two daughters, and they struck a chord with Tolstoy. It was Aunt Toinette, however, who had perhaps the greatest influence on Tolstoy's views about adultery. In his memoirs, in which he writes about her at length, Tolstoy records telling her late one night about an acquaintance of his, whose wife had been unfaithful and absconded. When he expressed the view that his friend was probably glad to be rid of his wife, he describes how Toinette at once assumed a serious expression and urged instead forgiveness and compassion.²² This is precisely the sentiment Tolstoy voices through his unsung heroine Dolly in Anna Karenina. When Karenin tells Dolly about his predicament at the end of Oblonsky's dinner party in Part Four of the novel, she pleads with him not to bring shame and disrepute on his wife by divorcing her, as it would destroy her. Toinette's general view, that one should hate the crime, but not the person, was essentially Tolstoy's, and holds the key to why Anna Karenina is one of the most compelling and complex literary characters ever created.

The story of how Tolstoy actually came to begin Anna Karenina has gone down in the annals of Russian literary history, and involves Sonya, Toinette and his eldest son. Sergey, then nine years old, had been badgering his mother to give him something to read aloud to Toinette, who was by then old and frail and in need of diversion. Sonya recorded in her diary on 19 March 1873 that she had given Sergey the fifth volume of the family's edition of Pushkin, which contained his Tales of Belkin. Aunt Toinette apparently soon nodded off, and Sergey also lost interest in Pushkin's immortal prose, but Sonya was too lazy that day to take the book back to the library, and so left it upstairs on the windowsill in the drawing room. Tolstoy naturally picked it up, and a few days later he wrote excitedly to Strakhov to tell him he had been unable to put it down, even though he was reading the Tales of Belkin for about the seventh time. The volume also contained some unfinished sketches for novels and stories, including one fragment beginning 'The guests arrived at the dacha' which particularly caught Tolstoy's eye. He was riveted by how Pushkin got straight down to the action, without even bothering to set the scene first or describe the characters. After the thirty-three false starts with Peter the Great, this was a revelation for Tolstoy, and it showed him how he himself should proceed in his own fiction. (Oddly, he seemed to have forgotten that he had more or less used precisely this technique with War and Peace, which also begins at a high-society soirée.) 'I automatically and unexpectedly thought up characters and events, not knowing myself why, or what would come next, and carried on...,' Tolstoy wrote unguardedly in the letter he drafted to Strakhov, which he later thought better about sending.²³ The idea of writing about the consequences of a woman's infidelity was there from the start, ²⁴ but it would be a long time before his novel was called Anna Karenina, and began with that famous opening line:

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 j'ust 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 that their marriage can never truly be ended, 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 novel:

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 ofAnna 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.

On 11 May 1873 Tolstoy took a deep breath and finally wrote to tell Strakhov that he had spent over a month working on a novel that had nothing to do with Peter the Great. He emphasised that he was writing a proper novel—the first in his life.³⁰Indeed, he had been writing the word roman ('a novel') at the top of the page on each new draft of his opening chapter. At this early stage, he was still very excited by his new project, which he told Strakhov completely 'enthralled' him.³¹ But before he set off with the family at the beginning of June for their summer trip to Samara, where he was not intending to do much writing, a couple of events slowed his progress and cast the first shadows over a novel whose completion would prove increasingly difficult. First came the unexpected news of the death of Tolstoy's five-year-old niece Dasha Kuzminskaya, the eldest daughter of Sonya's sister Tanya, who brought her children to stay at Yasnaya Polyana each summer. Dasha was adored by everyone, and her death brought the chilling realisation to Tolstoy that it could have easily been one of his own children. Sonya was grief-stricken. Tolstoy wrote a long letter of consolation to Tanya, and instructed her to learn by heart and recite Psalm 130 every day ('Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord').³²

Tolstoy was further upset that May on hearing that a Yasnaya Polyana peasant had been gored and killed by a bull he was untying.³³ He found it particularly troubling because this was the second such death in twelve months. Despite being in Samara on the previous occasion in the summer of 1872, Tolstoy had been held accountable by the coroner, who had placed him under house arrest while he investigated the incident. Tolstoy was incensed, both by having to submit to the authority of the young whippersnapper of a coroner who was curtailing his liberties, and by all the new laws which had introduced these procedures. He remembered the case of the peasant who had sat in Tula's jail for a year and a half under suspicion of stealing a cow before it was finally established that he was innocent, and he feared the worst. Bizarrely, Tolstoy was also summoned as a juror for another case at the same time, and was promptly fined for not attending court.³⁴ In the heat of the moment he seriously considered taking Sonya and the children to England, where he believed civil liberties were respected. On 15 September 1872 he even wrote to Alexandrine to ask if she could put him in touch with some 'good aristocratic families', to enable the family to have a 'pleasant' life in England. Although he admitted that he found European life repellent, he told her he could raise about 200,000 roubles if he sold up everything he had in Russia, which he reckoned would be enough to buy a house with some land near the sea.³⁵ The new legal system which had been introduced in Russia in 1864 had created Western-style courts and the need for Western-style lawyers and other legal professionals, and Tolstoy's other impetuous action was to begin writing a high-minded critical article titled 'The New Laws and Their Application'.³⁶ In due course, Tolstoy would express his contempt for the new institutions through his alter ego Levin in Anna Karenina.

Fortunately, Tolstoy did not usually stay in a state of apoplexy very long. The case against him was dropped, the article was never finished and the squires of Sussex never got to have a hot-headed Russian count as their neighbour. Following the second bull-goring incident in May 1873, Tolstoy spent three days tending to the injured peasant and was devastated when he eventually died.³⁷ It was not surprising he had not been able to concentrate on Anna Karenina that month, so when he returned home from the steppe at the end of the summer he was all the more eager to resume work on it. His health had been invigorated by all the koumiss he had drunk on his homestead, his conscience was clear after successfully publicising the famine that threatened to engulf Samara's peasant farmers, and he was still waiting for the Moscow Literacy Committee to respond to his invitation to organise a trial of the teaching methods he had championed in his ABC books. There was nothing to stop him going back to fiction, and he worked productively for about a month. Even having to sit for his first portrait did not distract him too much from his purpose at this stage. Indeed, it provided him with another source of raw material for Anna Karenina.

Pavel Tretyakov had been keen to acquire a portrait of Tolstoy for his art collection since 1869, but his tentative attempts to broach the topic had so far been rebuffed. Tolstoy no doubt wondered, perhaps not without aristocratic snobbery, why he should give up valuable hours of his time so that an obscure Moscow merchant could put up a picture of him in his house. As the son of a merchant of the second guild who had grown up in the Zamoskvorechie, Tretyakov's beginnings were indeed humble, and he remained a personally abstemious and self-effacing man, but the immensely profitable textile business he built up with his brother, combined with his passion for art, ensured he did not remain obscure for long. He may have had a total of six paintings in i860, but by the time Kramskoy painted Tolstoy's portrait in 1873, Tretyakov was already planning a separate building to house his expanding collection. In 1881 it was opened to the public, thus fulfilling Tretyakov's great dream of establishing a national gallery of Russian art. In 1892, when he donated his collection to the city of Moscow (six years before the opening of the Russian Museum in St Petersburg, which was founded on the initiative of Alexander III), the Tretyakov Gallery contained nearly 3,000 works of art.³⁸

As a passionate Slavophile, Tretyakov had decided to concentrate exclusively on Russian painting, and in particular on contemporary works which expressed the national spirit. In the 1860s painting had become as vibrant as literature and music in Russia, and at the end of the decade Tretyakov decided his gallery should also include portraits of the greatest new figures in the Russian arts. For the first time in Russia's history there was a whole phalanx of professional writers, composers and painters proud of their nationality, and producing work of international quality that was becoming known abroad. As well as buying portraits of artists who were already deceased (such as Fyodor Moller's 1841 portrait of Gogol, who died in 1852), Tretyakov set about commissioning new works, and in 1872 Perov painted Turgenev and Dostoyevsky. As luck would have it, Ivan Kramskoy, Russia's leading portrait painter, happened to spend the following summer in Tula province, and when he realised his dacha was just down the road from Yasnaya Polyana, he decided to wait for the count's return from Samara. On 5 September he persuaded Tolstoy to agree to pose for him, and started work the next day.

Kramskoy was in many ways a painter after Tolstoy's own heart: he came from a lowly background and was deeply committed to national subjects and contemporary issues, but more importantly in 1863, while still a student, he had led a famous rebellion against the Imperial Academy's classical strictures in the name of artistic freedom.³⁹ This did not stop him becoming an academician in 1869, however. (Tolstoy himself was elected as a corresponding member of the literary section of the Academy of Sciences in 1873.) Kramskoy spent about a month working on two paintings: one for Tretyakov and another portrait for Yasnaya Polyana, stuffing one of Tolstoy's trademark blouses with bed linen and tying it with a belt so he could concentrate on the writer's face during their sessions, and minimise the time he had to pose for him. His portrait of the author sitting in a relaxed pose, hands folded in his lap but staring intensely straight ahead, with his mind probably on his latest draft of the opening of Anna Karenina, was immediately and universally acclaimed as an astounding likeness. It is this portrait, which seems to have captured Tolstoy's difficult and complex character as well as his greatness, and simultaneously portrays him both as a quintessential Russian peasant and as an aristocrat, that began to give rise to the popular perception of him being of towering physical stature. Kramskoy was electrified by Tolstoy's personality, and later claimed that he had never seen a more handsome man than Tolstoy when he was astride his horse dressed to go out hunting.⁴⁰ Tolstoy may have regretted the time he gave up to sit for Kramskoy, but he squirrelled away all sorts of details that later came in very useful when writing the chapters in Anna Karenina about the artist who paints Anna's portrait.

The singleness of purpose emanating from the expression fixed in Kramskoy'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 magnate, 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 theABC 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 (flee), 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 Kareninawould 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.

Sonya had started making a fair copy of Part Two while Tolstoy was in Moscow in January, ⁵⁴ but in April she had to stop to give birth to Nikolay, their seventh child, whom they could not help calling Petya.⁵⁵ The joy was not unalloyed, as a few weeks earlier there had been another stillbirth in the family, suffered by her sister-in-law Maria Mikhailovna, Sergey's wife.⁵⁶ Tolstoy also stopped work on Anna Karenina at this point. The trial comparing his teaching method with the one officially approved by the Russian government had now come to an end, and the results were inconclusive. Far from being deterred, however, Tolstoy was even more determined to fight for his educational ideas to be recognised. He could not let matters stand, as this meant far more to him than his fiction. First he sent a letter to the Minister of Education, in which he argued that the 'pedantic' German teaching system approved by the ministry would not help the cause of popular education because it was based on 'pointlessly complex and false principles' and was 'completely alien and even contrary to the spirit of the Russian language and people'.⁵⁷ His offer to put together a comprehensive teaching and learning programme for popular education was not taken up. At this point he decided to move into the public arena, and he now threw his energies into writing the long article on popular education mentioned earlier that he regarded as his personal credo. Anna Karenina was set aside.

The more deeply Tolstoy immersed himself in his educational crusade, the more rapidly his enthusiasm for his novel diminished. Indeed, on 10 May 1874 he informed Strakhov that he frankly no longer liked it, ⁵⁸ and later in the month he decided to bring the printing process to a halt.⁵⁹ But there was another reason Tolstoy's heart was no longer in continuing Anna Karenina. His tyotushka (auntie) Tatyana Alexandrovna—Toinette, his surrogate mother—died on 20 June. She was eighty-two. Tolstoy frankly admitted to Alexandrine in a letter that for the last few years, as her life had ebbed away, she had not been part of their family life, particularly after she had moved at her request to a downstairs room, so as not to leave bad memories, but her death made a deep impression on him. In her last years she had confused Tolstoy with his father, whom she had worshipped, and called him Nicolas. He would drop in on her room late at night, when she and Natalya Petrovna were already sitting in their dressing gowns and nightcaps, with shawls round their shoulders, and would help lay out the cards for patience with her at the small table in front of her bed.⁶⁰ 'I've lived with her my whole life. And I feel awful without her,' he wrote to Alexandrine. Toinette had been loved and respected by everyone. Tolstoy described to Alexandrine how peasants from every house in the village had stopped the funeral procession so they could give money to the priest for him to say prayers to her memory.⁶¹

The summer was never a time when Tolstoy sat inside at his desk very much and Yasnaya Polyana soon filled with relatives and friends. Strakhov tried to rekindle his interest in Anna Karenina in July 1874 when he came to stay, but Tolstoy had lost momentum by that time, and referred to his novel now as 'vile' and 'disgusting'.⁶² The only positive result of his picking up the proofs of the thirty chapters that had already been typeset was the decision he took to write the whole beginning again.⁶³ In August Tolstoy took his eldest son Sergey for a short trip to their Samara estate, so there was a further hiatus. One of the main reasons Tolstoy did go back to Anna Karenina that autumn was that he needed money. He had invested heavily in his Samara estate, and that summer estimated that he made a loss ofabout 20,000 roubles. After three years ofdrought there was a bountiful harvest generally in the Samara region in 1874—except on the land that he had sown, he noted sardonically.⁶⁴ The family's German tutor had left, the children were growing up, and Tolstoy was also on the hunt for new teachers for them. That meant paying a wage of between 300 and 600 roubles a year for a governess for Tanya and Masha, and between 500 and 1,000 roubles for a tutor to teach Sergey, Ilya and Lev. Meanwhile, he suddenly needed 10,000 roubles as the deposit on some extra land he was purchasing next to his Nikolskoye estate, and his friend Afanasy Fet refused to give him a loan.⁶⁵ One tactic was to chop down some of the forest on the estate, and sell the wood (which is something that Oblonsky does in Anna Karenina), ⁶⁶ but the surest source of revenue was royalties. There was no money in education, as Tolstoy had learned to his cost (he had not yet published his New ABC), which meant he had to get on with his novel, and he now changed his mind in favour of printing Anna Karenina in instalments in a monthly journal.

Tolstoy could only reasonably ask for 150 roubles per printer's sheet for his article on popular education, but there was more than one journal interested in Anna Karenina, and he reckoned he could drive a hard bargain for it. He had sold War and Peacefor 300 roubles per printer's sheet, but for Anna Karenina he held out for 500 roubles, with an advance of 10,000 (the exact sum he needed). No other writer in Russia could hope to earn what would be a total of 20,000 roubles for a novel, and after protracted negotiations, in November Tolstoy finally opted to publish in Katkov's Russian Messenger. This was galling for the editors of Notes of the Fatherland in St Petersburg. They had agreed to publish Tolstoy's outspoken article on popular education more or less on the assumption that they would have first refusal on his next novel, and now they were left with the awkward task of accommodating the count's mixture of highly idiosyncratic nihilism and conservatism in a journal known for its openly Populist, left-wing orientation.

Now all Tolstoy had to do was finish Anna Karenina, which was easier said than done. He had extensively written and rewritten the opening chapters, so he could buy time to begin with, but the bulk of the novel, now that he no longer wanted it to be just the story of high-society marital infidelity, was as yet unwritten. The problem was that in 1874, and for most of 1875, his heart was still in pedagogy. He was in charge of seventy schools in his district, working on the proofs of his New ABC and developing proposals for teacher training.⁶⁷ Fiction seemed trivial by comparison, not least the tawdry story of an adulterous love affair. Having found it impossible to sustain his interest in writing a novel ofadultery on the French model, he had found a way out by broadening its scope and introducing an autobiographical character through whom he could explore topics that interested him, such as ploughing techniques, but writing Anna Karenina was still profoundly irksome. Tolstoy wrote to tell Alexandrine in December 1874 that he had once again become entranced by the thousands of little children whose education he was involved with, as he had been fifteen years earlier when he had first started his school. When he went into a school, he told her, and saw a 'crowd ofragged, dirty, thin children, with their bright eyes and often angelic expressions', he felt like someone trying to save people from drowning. He wanted to save all the little Pushkins and Lomonosovs who would otherwise perish.⁶⁸ To his publisher Katkov he even declared openly that every single page of his ABC had cost him more effort and had more significance than all the fictional writings for which he received 'undeserved praise'.⁶⁹

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 night-time 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

Back in Yasnaya Polyana at the end of August, rested and sunburnt, Tolstoy declared that the experience of witnessing first-hand the clash of sedentary Russian and nomadic Bashkir lifestyles, and putting up with flies and dirt out on the steppe, was infinitely superior to listening to speeches in the English Houses of Parliament, which he regarded as a dubious privilege. He had not picked up a pen for two months.⁸³ He forced himself to return to 'boring, banal' Anna Karenina in the autumn of 1875, but both he and Sonya were soon in low spirits again. On 12 October Sonya wrote in her diary that their excessively isolated country life was now unbearable, and that the monotony of her routine over months and years had led to an overwhelming apathy and indifference to everything which she could no longer fight. Her husband's gloom was infectious: 'He sits miserably and despondently for days and weeks on end without doing anything, without work, without energy, without joy and seems to have reconciled himself to this state of affairs. It is a kind of moral death, but I don't want to see it in him, and he himself can't go on living like this.'⁸⁴

At the end October Sonya fell gravely ill with peritonitis, and then went into labour. Varvara, born three months premature, died a few hours after she was born.⁸⁵ 'Fear, horror, death, children cavorting, eating, fuss, doctors, falsity, death, horror' was how Tolstoy defined the situation at Yasnaya Polyana in a letter to his correspondent Fet.⁸⁶ A further source of stress was that the house was full of people just at that time. After Toinette's death the previous summer, Tolstoy's other aunt, seventy-eight-year-old Polina, had moved to Yasnaya Polyana from her Tula convent, and she took over running the household while Sonya was ill, but there were also lots of guests: Sonya's brother Sasha and his wife, her uncle Kostya Islavin, Pyotr Samarin and his wife and another family friend. On the most critical day of Sonya's illness, Jules Rey's sister arrived from Geneva to become the children's new governess.⁸⁷

Tolstoy found some solace in writing a very long letter to Strakhov about philosophy, but ended up confronting the meaning of life and the inescapable truth that his own life was just an 'empty and stupid joke'. He had just turned forty-seven, and he felt he was entering old age—a time when there was no longer anything in the 'outside world' that interested him, and all he could see ahead was death. He had now started the long descent back to where he had originated, he wrote, aware that whatever his desire—breeding a particular kind of horse, shooting ten hares in one field, learning Arabic—it could not bring him any true satisfaction. His only hope was that he had understood the meaning of life wrongly.⁸⁸ Meanwhile, to be on the safe side, he went hunting without a gun, so that he could not turn it on himself, and boasted to his brother Sergey that he had managed to bag six hares with his dogs without firing a shot.⁸⁹

Sonya did not have the luxury of contemplating the meaning of life. Usually she was too busy with household chores, and now, not the first time, she was actually close to death. Her long convalescence was immediately beset by new problems. Jules Rey's sister was not a success as a governess, and there was friction: soon Sonya could no longer bear her.⁹⁰ And then, in December 1875, came the slow, painful demise of tyotushka Polina.⁹¹ It was Sonya who had to look after her during her last illness when she was confined to bed. It was Sonya who had to change her soiled bed linen and suffer her shouting and cursing from the pain that the slightest movement caused her. Polina, who conversed in French with her nephew to the last, was terrified of dying, and finally passed away after great suffering on 22 December. She was buried two days later. It was another quiet Christmas.⁹²

Tolstoy was greatly saddened, as the last living link with his parents had now been irrevocably sundered. As he wrote to Alexandrine in March, the death of this old woman had affected him profoundly—more than any other. Despite feeling as fed up with Anna Karenina as with a 'bitter radish', ⁹³ he had to soldier on, however. Another third of the novel was printed in the first four issues ofthe Russian Messenger in 1876. The April issue contained a substantial section of Part Five, ending with a chapter recounting the last days of Levin's brother Nikolay.⁹⁴ As with many other parts of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy drew on his own personal experience to write it. For the character of Nikolay, he recalled aspects of his eccentric late brother Dmitry, and also resurrected in his memory the last days of his dearly loved brother of the same name who had died in his arms. Death seemed to be everywhere. Tolstoy told his one surviving brother Sergey in February that, like his character Levin, he was finding it impossible to get away from thoughts of death, and the notion that nothing else remained for him in life.⁹⁵ Sergey was familiar with the feeling as he himself was a depressive, but so was their sister Maria, who wrote to Tolstoy from Heidelberg in March 1876 to tell him she had been feeling suicidal too:

I'm in such an appalling moral state, loneliness is affecting me so dreadfully, with the constant worry which hangs over on me like the sword of Damocles, and which I think about day and night, that I sometimes get frightened. Thoughts of suicide have begun to hound me, I mean really hound me and so relentlessly that it's become a kind of illness or madness.⁹⁶

Maria's 'constant worry' was Elena, the illegitimate daughter she had given birth to in September 1863, months after the Tolstoys' first child Sergey was born.⁹⁷ In 1876 Elena turned thirteen, and Masha, as a widowed single woman, was still too ashamed to bring her to Russia.

Russian society had begun to change rapidly in the 1860s, but the patriarchal structures enshrined in law by the state remained in place. Tolstoy struck a chord with thousands of female readers suffering unhappy marriages when he wrote Anna Karenina. Even though few had the bravery of Anna Arkadyevna, they identified with her. The paradox of Tolstoy writing with such sympathy about Anna while at the same time writing a novel which clearly condemns adultery is partly explained by the fate of his sister Masha, whose unhappy experience of marriage was one of the many life stories which served as the raw material for his 'family' novel. It is almost as if Masha read her brother's mind, as in the letter she sent him in March 1876, she also spoke of the bitter life lessons she had learned, and directly identified herself with his heroine. 'If all those Anna Kareninas knew what awaited them,' she wrote, 'how they would run from ephemeral pleasures, which are never, and cannot be pleasures, because nothing that is unlawful can ever constitute happiness.' This, of course, was Tolstoy's own view.

Until the publication of Tolstoy's correspondence with his siblings in 1990, Masha was a somewhat shadowy figure in Tolstoy's biography, ⁹⁸ but she was an important person in his life, and they remained close (his letters to her are some of the most touching he ever wrote). Masha had lived to regret her marriage to Valerian Petrovich Tolstoy and buried her sorrows in foreign travel, travelling with her children to spas where she could treat the various illnesses she believed she was suffering from. It was in Aix-les-Bains in 1861 that she met the handsome Swedish Viscount Hector Victor de Kleen, with whom she spent the next two winters in Algiers. Her brothers learned they were living together when she made a trip back to Russia in the summer of 1862, just when Tolstoy was about to get married. The following autumn, fearing their censure, she wrote from Geneva to tell them she had given birth to a little girl. Both Tolstoy and his brother Sergey had fathered illegitimate children themselves, and were sympathetic. Tolstoy hastened to reassure Masha of their support, and resolved to try to help her.⁹⁹ In January 1864 he and Sergey met with Valerian Petrovich, who acknowledged his responsibility in the breakdown of the marriage and agreed to a divorce. Tolstoy obtained the necessary permission from the bishop, and then sent the documents for Masha to sign and return. She was scared to set things in motion, however, as Valerian Petrovich sent her a threatening letter, telling her a divorce would 'harm his position and bring him a great deal of unpleasantness'. In a letter to Toinette she asked pitifully if she had the right to go through with it, even though he had made her suffer so much.¹⁰⁰

Masha was understandably hesitant about going through with divorce. It was extremely rare in Russia, and the risk of social disgrace was very real. In 1857, the year in which divorce first became possible in an English court of civil law, the sanctity of marriage as a religious institution in Russia was upheld by the publication of the third edition of the Imperial Law Code. A divorce in Russia could only be obtained through the Church, which viewed marriage as a holy sacrament which could not be dissolved, ¹⁰¹and accorded illegitimate children no legal rights. Article 103 of Chapter 1 in Volume One of the Law Code specifically forbade married couples from living apart, except in cases of exile to Siberia, while articles 106 and 108 upheld male authority within wedlock:

A husband shall love his wife as his own body and live with her in harmony; he shall respect and protect her, forgive her shortcomings, and ease her infirmities. He shall provide his wife nourishment and support to the best of his ability ... A wife shall obey her husband as the head of the family, abide with him in love, respect and unlimited obedience and render him every satisfaction and affection as the mistress of the house...¹⁰²

Female subjugation was not exclusive to Russia, of course, but the state had a vested interest in supporting patriarchal structures, as it equated domestic stability with political stability. Tolstoy could have picked no better way of portraying the disintegration of late imperial Russian society than to decide to write a novel with the theme of the 'family'.

Over the course of the nineteenth century the Orthodox Church had made marital separation more rather than less difficult. Petitions for divorce had to be made to the diocesan authorities, and entailed an expensive, bureaucratic and lengthy process, with nine separate stages. Adultery, furthermore, could only be proved with the testimony of witnesses, as Alexey Alexandrovich discovers to his horror when he goes to consult the 'famous St Petersburg lawyer' in Part Four of Anna Karenina. It is thus hardly surprising so few petitions were made—seventy-one in the whole of Russia in i860, and only seven made on the grounds of adultery.¹⁰³ But with the Great Reforms, urban growth and the expansion of education came new attitudes towards marriage, and pressure to simplify and update divorce, so it was a constant topic of discussion in the ecclesiastical press in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹⁰⁴ A committee set up by reformers in 1870 proposed transferring divorce proceedings to the civil courts, thus saving the ecclesiastical authorities from having to investigate such matters, 'which are full of descriptions of suggestive and disgusting scenes, in which the whole stench of depravity is often collected'.¹⁰⁵ In May 1873, just when Tolstoy was starting Anna Karenina, the Holy Synod overwhelmingly rejected this proposal, as it did a proposal to introduce civil marriage (which had already been introduced elsewhere in Europe) on the grounds that it was 'legalised fornication'. Nevertheless, the number of divorces rose steadily, from 795 in 1866 to 947 in 1875.¹⁰⁶ Both Sonya's elder sister Liza (the clever one Tolstoy had shrunk from marrying) and their brother Alexander obtained divorces during this period.¹⁰⁷

Tolstoy's research on behalf of his sister served him well when dealing with the topic of divorce in Anna Karenina, as did the experience of witnessing divorce proceedings close at hand. In 1868 his old friend Dmitry Dyakov's sister Maria Alexeyevna divorced the stuffy, Karenin-like Sergey Sukhotin, having created a scandal by abandoning him and their young children for another man, with whom she had an illegitimate child.¹⁰⁸ In the event, his sister Masha did not need to go through with the divorce from her husband, as the weak-willed and impoverished viscount returned to Sweden to marry someone with better financial prospects, leaving Masha mired in debt. His family had been reluctant to see him marry a woman with four children who would also soon bear the stigma of divorce, and had persuaded him to leave her. Masha returned to Russia and Valerian Petrovich died the following year, but she remained deeply unhappy in her personal life, having left her daughter Elena behind in Switzerland. As she wrote in the desperate letter to her brother in 1876 in which she likened herself to Anna Karenina, she knew of no single woman from their background with the 'courage' to admit to the existence of an illegitimate child.¹⁰⁹

Tolstoy himself certainly contemplated divorce too on occasion, but his increasingly troubled marriage was stable and conventional when compared to the marriages of his relatives and friends. His brother Dmitry spent his last years living with a former prostitute (as Nikolay does in Anna Karenina), and his brother Sergey was married to a gypsy. While Tolstoy was trying to rescue Masha in 1864, and write War and Peace, he suddenly found himself also having to deal with the romantic crisis Sergey had become embroiled in. The previous summer, after his fourteen-year relationship with Maria Shishkina, the gypsy singer from Tula whom he had 'bought out' from her choir, Sergey had suddenly fallen madly in love with Sonya's vivacious sister Tanya (with whom Tolstoy himself was also slightly enamoured, if the truth be told). Sergey proposed to Tanya, but quite apart from the fact that he was twenty years older (Tanya was a very young seventeen), he already had three children with Maria Shishkina and was expecting a fourth. In the end, his conscience got the better of him. It broke his heart to see Maria praying on her knees in front of an icon in floods of tears, and meekly submitting to fate.¹¹⁰ In June 1865, a month after his daughter Vera was born, he broke off the engagement.¹¹¹

Both Tanya and Sergey married in 1867. Tolstoy was opposed to Tanya marrying her cousin Alexander Kuzminsky, as he thought she would be a good wife for his old friend Dmitry Dyakov, who had just been widowed. There was something distinctly curmudgeonly about the distaste he expressed ten years later when Dyakov (then fifty-five) married his daughter Masha's former governess Sofya Robertovna, who was thirty-two.¹¹² After all, 'Sofesh', as she was affectionately known, was the same age as his own wife, and two years older than Tanya.¹¹³ After Sergey finally married Maria they moved to his Pirogovo estate. They were to have a total of eleven children, of whom four survived, but their marriage was not happy. Maria felt painfully aware of their different social backgrounds, and was shy and retiring in the company of her brother's family. Tolstoy always showed Maria Mikhailovna the greatest of respect, and repeatedly invited her to accompany Sergey to Yasnaya Polyana, but she was reluctant to come, even when Sonya had the idea of asking her to become godmother to their son Andrey, born in December 1877.

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 Kareninareflects 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.¹¹⁶The 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.

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 i877, 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...'¹²⁶Tolstoy 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 ofTolstoy'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.

  

1. Tolstoy in his army uniform as a newly promoted ensign in Moscow in 1854, shortly before transferring to active duty in Bucharest. He decided to make the journey from the Caucasus, where he had been stationed, via Yasnaya Polyana, which involved a detour of about six hundred miles.

  

2. Tolstoy with his brother Nikolay in Moscow shortly before travelling to the Caucasus, where he would enlist in the army, 1851.

  

3. Sergey, Nikolay, Dmitry and Lev Tolstoy in Moscow, February 1854. This was the last time the four brothers were all together. They met during Tolstoy's month of leave, before he travelled south to fight in the war against Turkey.

 

4. The writers associated with the journal The Contemporary, St Petersburg, 1856. From left to right: Goncharov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Grigorovich, Druzhinin and Ostrovsky. This picture was taken by the celebrated 'patriarch of Russian photography' Sergey Levitsky, and Tolstoy later hung it on the wall of his study at Yasnaya Polyana.

  

5. Tolstoy in Brussels, March 1861. Tolstoy was at this point nearing the end of his second and final trip abroad. He had been away for nine months, during which time his brother Nikolay died in the south of France, and he had studied foreign educational methods in preparation for developing his own pedagogical activities.

 

6. Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstaya (Alexandrine), 1860s. Tolstoy enjoyed a close friendship with his father's cousin, who was an attractive woman of formidable intellect. As a lady-in-waiting at court, she later became very useful as a conduit for letters of appeal when Tolstoy took up the cause of social and religious injustice, but there was friction when he abandoned his Orthodox beliefs.

  

7. The future Sofya (Sonya) Tolstaya and her younger sister Tatyana (Tanya) Bers, Moscow 1861. This photograph was taken the year before Tolstoy married Sonya. The sisters remained close, and it was in letters to Tanya that Sonya gave the most honest account of her life at Yasnaya Polyana.

 

8. Sonya in the drawing room at Yasnaya Polyana, 1902. This corner of the spacious drawing room was where the family and their guests would traditionally gather for evening tea. Above Sonya's head is a portrait of Tolstoy's profligate grandfather, Ilya Andreyevich.

  

9. The old Yasnaya Polyana mansion built by Sergey Volkonsky, where Tolstoy was born in 1828, and which he sold to a neighbouring landowner after heavy gambling losses in 1854. It was dismantled and moved, brick by brick, to the new owner's estate twenty miles away, where this photograph was taken in 1892.

 

10. Tolstoy's house at Yasnaya Polyana before the addition of a final extension in the 1890s. Originally, this building was intended as one of two identical guest wings which flanked the old mansion. Tolstoy made it his main residence when he retired from the army after the Crimean War. Extensions were added in the 1860s, 1870s and 1890s to accommodate his burgeoning family and the retinue of tutors and governesses.

  

11. Ivan Kramskoy, portrait of Tolstoy, Yasnaya Polyana, 1873. The painting was acquired by the merchant Pavel Tretyakov for his growing collection of Russian art. Tolstoy had initially turned down requests to sit for a portrait, but was persuaded to change his mind by the personal charm of the celebrated painter, who had been staying at a dacha near to Yasnaya Polyana.

  

12. Repin, Tolstoy ploughing, Yasnaya Polyana, 1887. Tolstoy started working in the fields as a young man in the late 1840s, and increased his time working alongside the peasants as his feelings of guilt over their exploitation grew. After he turned his back on writing fiction for the upper classes, he preached that each person should live by the sweat of their brow, working the land. He was about to turn sixty when this portrait was painted.

 

13. Repin, Tolstoy in his study at Yasnaya Polyana, 1891. Tolstoy moved his study at Yasnaya Polyana several times, but this famous arched room on the ground floor, where old Prince Volkonsky had used to hang cured meats, was where he worked in the early 1860s and from 1887 to 1902. It was where he began War and Peace, and where he later worked on The Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection.

  

14. Repin's first portrait of Tolstoy, 1887. Repin had met Tolstoy back in 1880, but he wanted to get to know him well before attempting his first portrait. By this point, Tolstoy had gone through his spiritual 'crisis' and achieved international celebrity for works such as Confession and What I Believe, both ofwhich were banned in Russia.

  

15. Sonya standing by aportrait of her deceased son Ivan (Vanechka), Yasnaya Polyana, 1897. Sonya was devastated by the death ofher youngest son. The portrait hung above an informal shrine to his memory. Sonya took up photography after Vanechka's death, and enjoyed setting up shots such as this one, arranged on the balcony at Yasnaya Polyana.

  

16. Tolstoy and his Starley Rover bicycle, 1895. Tolstoy had an irrepressible appetite for trying out new enthusiasms, and when he was sixty-five, just after Vanechka Tolstoy died, he took up cycling. After buying a British-made bicycle, he went to have lessons, and then successfully acquired the licence which permitted him to cycle around Moscow.

  

17. Tolstoy and Sonya, August 1895. Their youngest son Vanechka had died six months earlier, so they were still in mourning.

  

18. The Tolstoy children with their mother in Gaspra, Crimea, 1902. From left to right: Ilya, Andrey, Tanya, Lev, Sonya, Misha, Masha, Sergey, Alexandra. Tolstoy came close to dying during a long period of illness which started in 1901, after he was excommunicated. Despite his hatred of luxury, he accepted an invitation to spend the winter at a palatial villa in the more temperate climate ofthe Crimea. Members ofhis close family all came to visit, thinking they would be paying their last respects. In 1902, the Tolstoys' eldest child Sergey was nearly forty, while their youngest, Alexandra, was eighteen.

 

19. Tolstoy and his sister Maria (Masha), 1908. Despite the fact that his sister became a nun, Tolstoy remained close to Masha, who had earlier led an unhappy life, with marriage to an abusive husband and the stigma of an illegitimate child.

  

20. Tolstoy on horseback in the environs of Yasnaya Polyana, 1908. Tolstoy was a passionate horseman from early childhood. There was a point at the end of his life when he came to see even riding as a self-indulgent activity when there were peasants starving around him, and he pondered giving it up. He reasoned that his horse was old, however, and so continued riding.

  

21. Tolstoy at the opening of the People's Library in Yasnaya Polyana village, 31 January 1910. As a young man, Tolstoy had been passionate about setting up schools, since there was no provision for the peasants to receive any education. The library, set up by the Moscow Literary Society, consisted of one small room with two bookcases. Pictured with Tolstoy are four pupils of his first Yasnaya Polyana school.

  

22. Repin, Lev Tolstoy Barefoot, 1901. This famous portrait of Tolstoy 'at prayer' in the grounds of Yasnaya Polyana was first exhibited in St Petersburg just after Tolstoy was excommunicated, and drew hundreds of admirers who adorned it with flowers as if it was a popular icon. Seeking to avoid public disturbances, the authorities ordered it to be withdrawn when the exhibition travelled on to other cities.