Tolstoy

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 of about 20,000 roubles. After three years of drought 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 Oblovsky 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 Peace for 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 of adultery 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 of ragged, 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