Tolstoy

Moscow had always been the epicentre of Russian Pan-Slavism. The first charitable Slavic Committee had been founded there in 1858 to provide support to Slavic peoples under Ottoman or Habsburg rule, and the city hosted the second Slavic Congress in 1867. In 1877, the Slavic Committee was run by the Slavophile journalist Ivan Aksakov, with active support from his wife Anna, and Tolstoy wrote in particularly withering tones to Fet about her self-appointed role in artificially drumming up support for war when he returned home from his Moscow visit.¹²² Anna Aksakova, daughter of the poet Tyutchev, was Tolstoy’s old acquaintance, and formerly the governess to Alexander II’s youngest children (when she married in 1866 she had been succeeded by Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstaya – Alexandrine). Another key figure in Moscow’s Slavophile circles was the former guards officer Alexander Porokhovshchikov. In 1872 he built the Slavic Bazaar Hotel close to Red Square to be an embodiment of his vision of Slavonic brotherhood; the deliberately pre-Petrine style of its design was complemented by its interiors while the main dining room featured an enormous canvas depicting Russian, Polish and Czech composers commissioned from the young artist Ilya Repin. It was from here that Porokhovshchikov organised the recruitment of Russian volunteers for the Serbo-Turkish War,¹²³ and as an eligible retired officer, this is where Vronsky would have come to enlist in Anna Karenina.

Russia went on to declare war on the Ottoman Empire in April 1877, just as Tolstoy was writing his epilogue to Anna Karenina. As a prominent Pan-Slavist, and also the editor of an influential conservative newspaper, katkov was incensed to see the volunteer movement dismissed in Tolstoy’s manuscript as a ‘fashionable enthusiasm’ for the idle rich. He also did not like to see the press criticised for claiming to represent the ‘voice of the people’, and publishing ‘much that was unnecessary’. For his part, Tolstoy was infuriated that a ‘mere journalist’ should dare to try to correct his manuscript. He had never made any attempt to hide the fact that the sentiments voiced by Levin and old Prince Shcherbatsky were his own. To his friends he openly declared that newspapers were ‘a most evil thing, and it would be better if they did not even exist’. He reiterated that the Russian people neither knew anything about the Slavs, nor wanted to fight.¹²⁴ Tolstoy refused point-blank to make the changes katkov demanded, and in the end withdrew his manuscript in order to publish it separately. katkov retaliated by publishing a statement in the Russian Messenger:

In the previous issue the words ‘to be concluded’ followed the novel Anna Karenina. But the novel really ends with the death of the heroine. According to the author’s plan, a short epilogue was to have followed, in which readers could have found out that Vronsky, grief-stricken and confused after Anna’s death, sets off for Serbia as a volunteer, and that all the other characters are alive and well, with Levin staying in his village and getting angry at the Slavic Committees and the volunteers. The author may perhaps develop these chapters for a separate edition of his novel.¹²⁵

Tolstoy was naturally even more furious when he read this, and immediately sat down to draft a letter to Alexey Suvorin, now the editor of the St Petersburg New Times, in which he objected to the way in which his epilogue was dismissed as being of little value, but then summarised anyway. ‘How about summarising the rest of the novel in ten lines?’ he thundered: ‘There was a lady who left her husband. After falling in love with Mr Vronsky, she grew angry with various things in Moscow and threw herself under a train…’¹²⁶ Tolstoy also objected to katkov’s instruction to the reader as to how to interpret Anna Karenina, that is, as a ‘novel about high society’, and greatly resented being effectively told how to end it. But it was Sonya, signing as ‘C[ountess] S[ofya] ***’ and quoting from her husband’s draft, who finally announced to the readers of New Times why the epilogue to Anna Karenina was not published in the Russian Messenger.¹²⁷