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, well-built 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
Another immediate stimulus for