Tolstoy

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.) krams-koy 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 krams-koy’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 supremo, 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