Tolstoy (41 page)

There was a cattle exhibition in Moscow. The Zoological Garden was full of people. Beaming with his pleasant, open face and full red lips, wearing his hat slightly tilted to one side on his thinning, light brown curly hair, the grey of his beaver collar merging with his handsome greying sideburns, Stepan Arkadyich Alabin, well known to all of Moscow society, was walking along...
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Ordyntsev, who is about to run into his old friend Alabin, has come up to Moscow to show his calves and his bull.

This time Tolstoy carried on writing for quite a long while, but he was to change tack yet again. He had now constructed solid foundations for his novel by creating the 'Levin' storyline to act as a counterpoint to the Karenin plot, with the 'Oblonskys' as the arch joining them together. For reasons of structural balance, he now decided against his central character of 'Levin' appearing in the first chapter, so he reserved the Zoological Garden for a skating scene later on and returned to his previous idea of opening the novel with 'Oblonsky' waking up after the row with his wife. He reworked the crucial opening scenes four times to get them exactly right, and these were the first chapters he gave Sonya to make fair copies of. Everything else stayed in draft form.
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In all, Tolstoy produced ten versions of the first part of
Anna Karenina,
writing a total of 2,500 pages of manuscript before the novel was complete.
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Almost a century would pass before the story of how
Anna Karenina
was written could be told with accuracy. The manuscripts were partially unravelled for publication in volume twenty of Tolstoy's
Complete Collected Works,
published in 1939, but the first complete scholarly edition of the novel appeared only in 1970, and that now turns out to contain errors.

On 11 May 1873 Tolstoy took a deep breath and finally wrote to tell Strakhov that he had spent over a month working on a novel that had nothing to do with Peter the Great. He emphasised that he was writing a proper novel—the first in his life.
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Indeed, he had been writing the word
roman
('a novel') at the top of the page on each new draft of his opening chapter. At this early stage, he was still very excited by his new project, which he told Strakhov completely 'enthralled' him.
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But before he set off with the family at the beginning of June for their summer trip to Samara, where he was not intending to do much writing, a couple of events slowed his progress and cast the first shadows over a novel whose completion would prove increasingly difficult. First came the unexpected news of the death of Tolstoy's five-year-old niece Dasha Kuzminskaya, the eldest daughter of Sonya's sister Tanya, who brought her children to stay at Yasnaya Polyana each summer. Dasha was adored by everyone, and her death brought the chilling realisation to Tolstoy that it could have easily been one of his own children. Sonya was grief-stricken. Tolstoy wrote a long letter of consolation to Tanya, and instructed her to learn by heart and recite Psalm 130 every day ('Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord').
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Tolstoy was further upset that May on hearing that a Yasnaya Polyana peasant had been gored and killed by a bull he was untying.
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He found it particularly troubling because this was the second such death in twelve months. Despite being in Samara on the previous occasion in the summer of 1872, Tolstoy had been held accountable by the coroner, who had placed him under house arrest while he investigated the incident. Tolstoy was incensed, both by having to submit to the authority of the young whippersnapper of a coroner who was curtailing his liberties, and by all the new laws which had introduced these procedures. He remembered the case of the peasant who had sat in Tula's jail for a year and a half under suspicion of stealing a cow before it was finally established that he was innocent, and he feared the worst. Bizarrely, Tolstoy was also summoned as a juror for another case at the same time, and was promptly fined for not attending court.
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In the heat of the moment he seriously considered taking Sonya and the children to England, where he believed civil liberties were respected. On 15 September 1872 he even wrote to Alexandrine to ask if she could put him in touch with some 'good aristocratic families', to enable the family to have a 'pleasant' life in England. Although he admitted that he found European life repellent, he told her he could raise about 200,000 roubles if he sold up everything he had in Russia, which he reckoned would be enough to buy a house with some land near the sea.
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The new legal system which had been introduced in Russia in 1864 had created Western-style courts and the need for Western-style lawyers and other legal professionals, and Tolstoy's other impetuous action was to begin writing a high-minded critical article titled 'The New Laws and Their Application'.
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In due course, Tolstoy would express his contempt for the new institutions through his alter ego Levin in
Anna Karenina.

Fortunately, Tolstoy did not usually stay in a state of apoplexy very long. The case against him was dropped, the article was never finished and the squires of Sussex never got to have a hot-headed Russian count as their neighbour. Following the second bull-goring incident in May 1873, Tolstoy spent three days tending to the injured peasant and was devastated when he eventually died.
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It was not surprising he had not been able to concentrate on
Anna Karenina
that month, so when he returned home from the steppe at the end of the summer he was all the more eager to resume work on it. His health had been invigorated by all the koumiss he had drunk on his homestead, his conscience was clear after successfully publicising the famine that threatened to engulf Samara's peasant farmers, and he was still waiting for the Moscow Literacy Committee to respond to his invitation to organise a trial of the teaching methods he had championed in his
ABC
books. There was nothing to stop him going back to fiction, and he worked productively for about a month. Even having to sit for his first portrait did not distract him too much from his purpose at this stage. Indeed, it provided him with another source of raw material for
Anna Karenina.

Pavel Tretyakov had been keen to acquire a portrait of Tolstoy for his art collection since 1869, but his tentative attempts to broach the topic had so far been rebuffed. Tolstoy no doubt wondered, perhaps not without aristocratic snobbery, why he should give up valuable hours of his time so that an obscure Moscow merchant could put up a picture of him in his house. As the son of a merchant of the second guild who had grown up in the Zamoskvorechie, Tretyakov's beginnings were indeed humble, and he remained a personally abstemious and self-effacing man, but the immensely profitable textile business he built up with his brother, combined with his passion for art, ensured he did not remain obscure for long. He may have had a total of six paintings in i860, but by the time Kramskoy painted Tolstoy's portrait in 1873, Tretyakov was already planning a separate building to house his expanding collection. In 1881 it was opened to the public, thus fulfilling Tretyakov's great dream of establishing a national gallery of Russian art. In 1892, when he donated his collection to the city of Moscow (six years before the opening of the Russian Museum in St Petersburg, which was founded on the initiative of Alexander III), the Tretyakov Gallery contained nearly 3,000 works of art.
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As a passionate Slavophile, Tretyakov had decided to concentrate exclusively on Russian painting, and in particular on contemporary works which expressed the national spirit. In the 1860s painting had become as vibrant as literature and music in Russia, and at the end of the decade Tretyakov decided his gallery should also include portraits of the greatest new figures in the Russian arts. For the first time in Russia's history there was a whole phalanx of professional writers, composers and painters proud of their nationality, and producing work of international quality that was becoming known abroad. As well as buying portraits of artists who were already deceased (such as Fyodor Moller's 1841 portrait of Gogol, who died in 1852), Tretyakov set about commissioning new works, and in 1872 Perov painted Turgenev and Dostoyevsky. As luck would have it, Ivan Kramskoy, Russia's leading portrait painter, happened to spend the following summer in Tula province, and when he realised his dacha was just down the road from Yasnaya Polyana, he decided to wait for the count's return from Samara. On 5 September he persuaded Tolstoy to agree to pose for him, and started work the next day.

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.
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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.) Kramskoy 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.
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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 Kramskoy'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.
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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.
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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 magnate, 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.
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Tolstoy ploughed on with
Anna Karenina
in October and November 1873, but there were further disruptions. As soon as Kramskoy packed up his easel and returned to St Petersburg, he was host to the group of village schoolteachers whom he had invited to discuss his teaching methods. They stayed at Yasnaya Polyana for a week.
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Then on 9 November the Tolstoys suffered their first bereavement with the sudden death of their youngest son, the previously healthy eighteen-month-old Pyotr (Petya). Shortly after that, Sonya's sister Tanya Kuzminskaya's pregnancy ended in a stillbirth.
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The family was devastated, particularly Sonya (who a few months later was also to lose her nineteen-year-old brother Vladimir, who died just after joining the hussars
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). On the clear frosty day when they were burying Petya next to his grandparents, Tolstoy started to think for the first time about where he would be buried. At this point he was still fairly sanguine, and in letters he wrote at the time he explained that the death of his brother Nikolay had in some way inured him to the pain of loss. He reasoned that the death of any other of the five elder children in the family would have been harder,
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as this was like losing one's little finger.
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He was also frank that this 'screaming' baby had not yet been a source of any delight for him.
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