Tolstoy

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 (Лëв), 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 Karenina would 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