Tolstoy

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 just 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 their marriage can never be broken off, 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).