Tolstoy (39 page)

9. NOVELIST

At that time he read a lot of English family novels and sometimes joked about them, saying, 'These novels always end up with him putting his arm
round her waist,
then they get married, and he inherits an estate and a baronetcy. These novelists end their novels with him and her getting married. But a novel should not be about what happens before they get married, but what happens after they get married.'

Reminiscence of Tolstoy's son Sergey
¹

TOLSTOY HAD BEEN ITCHING
to get back to fiction ever since he delivered the manuscript of the last part of his
ABC
to the printers in February 1872. This time there was none of the restless casting around for a subject as there had been at the end of
War and Peace.
Tolstoy now knew exactly where he was going, but his imagination was not yet captured by the unruly curls of a beguilingly beautiful society woman destined to become one of the greatest of literary heroines. His mind was instead occupied by the relentless energy and alcohol-fuelled sadism of a seven-foot-tall syphilitic buffoon who also happened to be Russia's first great revolutionary: Peter the Great. To be fair, Tolstoy only uncovered these traits during the course of his painstaking research, but they led him to the realisation that he no longer wanted to write a novel about the 'tsar-reformer'. It was this discovery which made him receptive to the chance flash of inspiration which then launched
Anna Karenina,
but it came at the end of a very serious engagement with the available sources on late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Russian history. Tolstoy tried to start his novel about Peter the Great thirty-three times.
²

Tolstoy was not the only Russian artist interested in Peter the Great in 1872, for this was when the composer Musorgsky started to plan an ambitious new historical opera set at the time of Peter's accession. But there was a particular reason why Peter I was in the public eye that year: it was the bicentenary of his birth. Nicholas I had actively encouraged the cult of Peter's personality during his reign, and the anniversary was celebrated with due pomp and circumstance. A new battleship was named after Peter, a statue of him was put up in Petrozavodsk (St Petersburg was not the only city he founded bearing his name), and Tchaikovsky wrote a cantata in honour of the occasion, to name just some of ways in which the bicentenary was marked. There was also a flurry of new publications—1,049 to be exact,
³
and a great deal of eulogy from Russian historians, some of whom were still inclined to see Alexander II, the country's next 'great reformer', as a latter-day Peter. Amongst those who idolised Peter the Great was the nation's leading historian, Professor Sergey Solovyov, newly appointed as Rector of Moscow University. 'Two hundred years have passed since the day that the great man was born,' he intoned in the first of his twelve 'Public Lectures about Peter the Great' in 1872. 'Everywhere one hears the words: we must celebrate the bicentenary of this great man; it is our duty, our holy, patriotic duty, because this great man is one of us, a Russian man.'
⁴

Solovyov was a scholar of Tolstoyan industry who also published on a Tolstoyan scale. He had read the twelve volumes of Karamzin's pioneering
History of the Russian State
(1806-1826) at least a dozen times by the time he was thirteen, and then in 1851 he started publishing his own history of Russia—a project which would absorb him until his death in 1879. Karamzin had covered Russian history up until the accession of the first Romanov tsar in 1613, but the twenty-nine volumes of Solovyov's
History of Russia from the Earliest Times
extended the survey up to 1774, the year of the Pugachev Rebellion (which was brutally crushed by Catherine the Great). Tolstoy, of course, read Solovyov's magisterial history very carefully, and particularly those volumes concerning the reign of Peter the Great. Solovyov sought to present a unified view of Russia's evolution as a nation. As a pronounced Westerniser who believed in historical progress, he saw Peter's reforms as a natural and inevitable development which had placed Russia on the path to the rule of law, and brought her closer to European civilisation. For Tolstoy, however, Solovyov's history revealed pre-Petrine Russia as a country of 'cruelty, theft, beatings, coarseness, and an inability to do anything', and it signally failed in his opinion to acknowledge the contribution of the people in turning Russia into the great and united state that had made such rapid advances in the eighteenth century. He was inevitably critical of yet another history which seemed to concentrate on the policies and actions of Russia's rulers.
⁵
Tolstoy shared Solovyov's admiration for Peter's down-to-earth tastes, but not much else.

In order to gain a sense of what it was like to live in Russia during Peter's reign, Tolstoy surrounded himself with an enormous number of books and articles. They ranged from the thirty volumes of Ivan Golikov's reverent
Deeds of Peter the Great, Wise Reformer of Russia,
published at the end of the eighteenth century, to the latest contemporary portraits by Slavophile historians, whose attitude to Peter's reign was far more ambivalent. And then there were studies by historians such as Mikhail Semevsky, who respected Peter's achievements but was repelled by his sacrilegious, Rabelaisian behaviour. General histories, monographs, memoirs, diaries, letters—Tolstoy devoured everything he could lay his hands on.
⁶
He also perused pictures and contemporary portraits.

Musorgsky also revelled in the profusion of new books and articles which were gradually filling in the blank spots of Russian history, but he was extremely sceptical as to whether Peter's reforms had really been beneficial. In the letter he sent to Stasov in June 1872, written in his typically opaque style, Musorgsky asserted that Russia had not progressed as a nation:

The power of the black earth will reveal itself when you dig down to the very bottom. It is possible to dig the black earth with tools alien to it. And at the end of the seventeenth century they did dig Mother Russia with
just
such tools, so she did not immediately realise what they were digging her with, and, like the black earth, she opened up and began to breathe. And so she, our beloved, received actual and privy councillors, who never gave her, the long-suffering one, the chance to collect herself and to think:
'Where are you pushing me?'
...'We've moved forward!'—you lie—'We're still stuck back there!'...
⁷

Musorgsky was overwhelmed by the task of having to fashion a libretto himself from the many disparate primary sources he was working with, and he never managed to finish the score for his opera. Tolstoy was not at all perturbed by the dimensions of his task, but his project never even got off the ground, as the more he read about Peter the Great, the less he attractive he became as a potential character in a novel. He was disappointed by the personality of Russia's first emperor, later dismissing him as a 'drunken jester'.
⁸

Musorgsky's alcoholism also played a part in diminishing any interest Tolstoy might have had in his music (it drove the composer to an early death in 1881, when he was just forty-two). Although he was later surprised how much he liked the Musorgsky songs performed for him in 1903, Tolstoy generally had little interest in contemporary Russian music, and remained oblivious to its achievements. Tolstoy and Musorgsky had a surprising amount in common, however, despite never coming into contact. They shared a passion for Russia and its history, a deep interest in the rich textures of the Russian language (while Tolstoy was composing his
ABC,
Musorgsky was reproducing children's speech in his exquisite song cycle
The Nursery),
and a studious concern for authenticity which embraced the tiniest detail. In trying to conceive a way of writing about Peter the Great's Azov campaigns against the Turks, in January 1873 Tolstoy wrote to a family acquaintance who lived in the south of Russia to ask very precise questions about the landscape by the River Don. What were the riverbanks like? What sort of grasses grew there? Were there bushes? Was it pebbly? Tolstoy certainly entertained high hopes for his Peter the Great novel,
⁹
but he found he could not breathe life into his many drafts, no matter how hard he tried. It is somewhat ironic that in February 1873, just as the public was informed of his latest work in progress in a newspaper column, he was on the verge of giving it up.
¹⁰
Within weeks he would be seized with a desire to write on contemporary themes, setting his new novel in the turbulent age in which he lived.

As historians fleshed out a more rounded picture of Peter the Great in the more permissive atmosphere under Alexander II, a growing number of people began to question the official view of his reign, including Tolstoy's American visitor Eugene Schuyler, whose own 'historical biography' was published in 1884.
¹¹
It is likely he and Tolstoy discussed their shared fascination with Peter the Great at some point during his week-long stay at Yasnaya Polyana in 1868. In the course of his research, Schuyler came to believe Peter had forced Europeanisation on to Russia too early.
¹²
Since subsequent Russian rulers had then concentrated resources on increasing the nation's military prestige at the expense of domestic reform (a scenario which would, of course, be played out again in the twentieth century), the cost of Peter's reforms had in fact been paid by those who had least benefited from them—the millions of serfs who made up the majority of the population. The 'Great Reforms', when they eventually arrived in the 1860s, came too late, and certainly did not go far enough in the eyes of most educated Russians. But Tolstoy was typically neither on the side of the krepostniks—those members of the right-wing landed gentry who regretted the Emancipation of Serfdom Act—nor was he with those members of the intelligentsia on the left who sought more radical reform. He would take on both sides in
Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy's knowledge of the huge discrepancy between his own unmerited position of privilege and the poverty and backwardness of the peasantry was becoming increasingly painful for him as time went on, and made it morally difficult for him to continue writing for the educated classes. This is why he devoted so much time to his
ABC,
which he regarded as the most important thing he had ever done. At that time in his career, it was the best way he could find of personally helping to remedy a situation in which all the landed gentry were complicit. The utopian approach to the country's social problems taken by many of Russia's idealistic young students was far less practical. Just as Tolstoy was abandoning his Peter the Great novel in the spring of 1873, at a time when it seemed that his
ABC
project was turning into a complete fiasco,
¹³
the more radical members of Russia's student intelligentsia were beginning to think of revolution as the only solution to the country's ills. Inspired by the populist ideas of thinkers like Alexander Herzen, who had advocated a Russian brand of socialism designed to enable the peasantry to bypass capitalism, they headed for the countryside to have direct contact with the people by distributing propaganda and setting up workshops and co-operatives.

The high-water mark of the 'Going to the People' movement was the summer of 1874 when the Russian countryside was invaded by literally thousands of earnest young 'nihilists' (the moniker they had been labelled with ever since the publication of Turgenev's
Fathers and Sons
in 1862, which denoted their scepticism towards accepted authorities). Many of them were women. But since most of these students came from the cities, and were essentially middle class, they had next to no direct knowledge of the peasantry, and they badly miscalculated. As it turned out, the peasants' innate conservatism made them indifferent if not downright hostile to the students' efforts to incite them to overthrow their tsar. Against all odds, they retained a deep loyalty and affection for the Romanovs. The peaceful 'Going to the People' movement failed, and the wave of arrests which followed led the more extreme Populists to turn to terrorism at the end of the 1870s. It was against this background of social upheaval that Tolstoy would set
Anna Karenina.
The casting of only a minor character as a nihilist belies the fact that in its defence of marriage and conservative family values, the whole novel is an assault on the kind of views espoused by the radical intelligentsia, for whom female emancipation was entirely consonant with their political goals.
¹⁴
The aristocratic Tolstoy would never have deigned to engage in a direct polemic with his opponents, whose uncompromising stance was partly driven by the fact that, coming from poor backgrounds, they had nothing to lose. In its searching analysis of marriage as an institution, however,
Anna Karenina
is certainly an indirect response to the kind of women's liberation championed in such classic nihilist texts as Chernyshevsky's 1862 novel
What Is to Be Done?,
which celebrates 'free love'.

The seeds had been sown back in February 1870, when Tolstoy had begun drafting his article about the 'woman question', joining Strakhov in a comprehensive rejection of John Stuart Mill's call for equality between the sexes. This was exactly when he first conceived the idea of writing a novel about a society woman who commits adultery. Then on a dark, cold evening in January 1872, a thirty-five-year-old woman called Anna Pirogova arrived at Yasenki station, just down the road from Yasnaya Polyana, with a bundle containing a change of underwear. After crossing herself, she threw herself under goods train No. 77. Anna Pirogova was a distant relation of Tolstoy's wife. She had become the housekeeper and lover of his friend and neighbour Alexander Bibikov, then in his early fifties, with whom he had set up his short-lived distillery some years earlier. Bibikov had informed Anna he was going to marry his son's governess, an attractive German girl.
¹⁵
In a rage of jealousy and anger, she had sent him a note accusing him of being her murderer before taking her own life.
¹⁶
Tolstoy went to the autopsy. He was badly distressed by seeing the mangled corpse of the grey-eyed, stocky woman he knew well. This was one of the first railway suicides on Russia's young but rapidly expanding network, which had increased from about 500 miles of track at the time of Nicholas I's death to over 10,000 by the 1870s. It was undoubtedly the first suicide at Tolstoy's local station. He used the 'iron road' himself, of course, but he loathed this intrusion of modernity into his rural sanctuary, and he would shore up the complex architectural structure of
Anna Karenina
by thematically aligning events connected with the railway in his novel with death and destruction.