“Anna Karenina”. A novel that will live forever

On March 29, 1873, Leo Tolstoy began work on a “novel of modern life” called Anna Karenina.

Lev Nikolaevich began working on the novel in 1873 and finished in 1877. He has been writing Anna Karenina for four years (five if counted before the release of a separate edition in 1878), and the action in the novel takes place from 1872 to 1876, that is, also four years. It turns out that Tolstoy actually writes about what is happening outside the window. Therefore, the novel aroused great interest among the public. The novel was published in parts, the first of which was published in 1875 in the Russian Bulletin. Readers were eagerly awaiting the release of new chapters.

It is curious that after the publication of War and Peace, Tolstoy had two grandiose plans: an alphabet reader for children and a novel about Peter I. The first issue of the alphabet failed, Leo Tolstoy collects material for the novel, starts writing, but … it doesn’t work.

And so he sits down for a novel about private life – “Anna Karenina”, and the process drags him out, Tolstoy is so carried away that it seems to him that he will complete the work in 20 days.

Lev Nikolaevich sat down to work on “Anna Karenina” under the impression of Pushkin’s prose. This is evidenced both by the testimonies of Sophia Tolstaya and the author’s own notes. In a letter to the literary critic Nikolai Strakhov, Leo Tolstoy wrote:

“… Somehow, after work, I took this volume of Pushkin and, as always (it seems to be the seventh time), re-read everything, was unable to tear myself away and seemed to be reading again. But more than that, he seemed to have resolved all my doubts. Not only Pushkin before, but it seems that I have never admired anything so much: “The Shot”, “Egyptian Nights”, “The Captain’s Daughter”!!! And there is an excerpt “The guests were going to the dacha.” I involuntarily, inadvertently, without knowing why or what would happen, conceived faces and events, began to continue, then, of course, changed, and suddenly it began so beautifully and abruptly that a novel came out, which I now finished in rough outline, the novel is very lively, hot and finished, which I am very pleased with and which will be ready, if God grants health, in two weeks.

As a result, he has been writing the novel for four years, in letters to Nikolai Strakhov and Afanasy Fet Tolstoy calls him “vulgar”, “nasty”, complains that “Anna” is “tired like a bitter radish”, that he dreams of getting rid of her as soon as possible and doing another job. . But Lev Nikolaevich had already received a fee for the novel (Tolstoy sold it in advance to the publisher of Russkiy Vestnik, Mikhail Katkov – S.I.) and, like it or not, had to submit new chapters to the magazine.

“For the first time, the idea to write a novel about female adultery came to Tolstoy at the beginning of 1870,” writes Pavel Basinsky in his book The True Story of Anna Karenina (edited by Elena Shubina, 2022). – On February 24, Sofya Andreevna writes in her diary: “Last night he told me that he saw a type of woman, married, from high society, but who had lost herself. He said that his task was to make this woman only miserable and not guilty, and that as soon as this type was presented to him, all the faces and male types that had been presented before found a place for themselves and grouped around this woman. (…)

Having begun writing Anna Karenina in the spring of 1873, Tolstoy at first feels joy and slight dizziness from the fact that the novel is easy for him to write. “This novel, just a novel, the first in my life, really touched me by the soul. I am passionate about them all, ”he tells Strakhov. But then doubts, torments and dissatisfaction with what he is doing begin. Several times he is even ready to quit writing Anna Karenina, takes long breaks (…) But then he nevertheless returns to Anna, as a lover returns to a woman who has tormented him, because “it cannot be otherwise.”

According to the writer’s contemporaries, Tolstoy borrowed some features for the image of the main character from Maria Alexandrovna Gartung, Pushkin’s daughter. Lev Nikolaevich saw Maria in the winter of 1868 in Tula at a ball with General Tulubyev. This is how Tatyana Kuzminskaya (Lev Tolstoy’s sister-in-law, the younger sister of his wife Sofya Andreevna – S.I.):

The door of the front room opened and an unfamiliar lady in a black lace dress entered. Her light gait carried a rather plump but straight and graceful figure. When they introduced Lev Nikolaevich to Maria Alexandrovna, he sat down at the tea table near her; I don’t know their conversation, but I know that she served as his model for Anna Karenina. He himself admitted it.”

Unusual sophistication of manners, wit, charm distinguished her from other women of that time.

“The rare beauty of her mother was mixed in her with the exoticism of her father, although the features of her face, perhaps, were somewhat large for a woman,” a contemporary wrote about Maria Aleksandrovna Gartung, nee Pushkina. It was these wrong features that formed the basis of the external appearance of the main character of Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Anna Karenina”.

At a ball at General Tulubyev’s, Maria immediately attracted the attention of the count. And when, in response to his question, he was told who this woman was, Lev Nikolaevich exclaimed: “Yes, now I understand where she got these thoroughbred curls on the back of her head!”.

Let us recall the description of Anna in the novel: “On her head, in black hair, her own without admixture, there was a small garland of pansies and the same on a black ribbon of a belt between white laces. Her hair was invisible. Were noticeable only, decorating her, these masterful short rings of curly hair, always knocking out at the back of her head and temples. There was a string of pearls on a chiseled strong neck.

Not far from Yasnaya Polyana, at the church cemetery in the village of Kochaki, where the Tolstoy family burial is located and Tolstoy’s grandfather, mother, father, brother Dmitry, wife Sofya Andreevna, children, beloved sister-in-law Tatyana Kuzminskaya and other relatives, there is one modest grave, which none of I did not notice visitors to the cemetery until a sign was placed near it.

“The tombstone is a modest limestone sarcophagus, on which is engraved: “Under this stone lies the body of the daughter of the lieutenant, the maiden Anna Stepanovna Piragova. Her life was 32 years. His death was on January 4, 1872. The stone was placed by her heartbroken mother and sister, ”Pavel Basinsky writes in the book“ The True Story of Anna Karenina ”. – She was the mistress of Leo Tolstoy’s neighbor on the estate, the landowner A.N. Bibikova, for whom she served as a housekeeper, (…) was jealous of him and threw herself under the train. It was Anna Pirogova (the modern spelling of the surname is S.I.) gave Tolstoy a scene that is one of the most powerful in the novel and that any world actress dreams of playing. And they played: from Greta Garbo to Vivien Leigh, from Sophie Marceau to Keira Knightley, from Tatiana Samoilova to Tatiana Drubich and Elizaveta Boyarskaya. And everyone tried to play it in their own way, as effectively as possible. For an actress to throw herself under a train is the same as for an actor to utter Hamlet’s monologue “To be or not to be?”. I don’t think Tolstoy himself would have thought of this: to throw a young woman under the wheels of a freight train. In Russian literature, the heroines preferred to drown themselves: Lisa at Karamzin’s, Katerina Kabanova in Ostrovsky’s Thunderstorm, Katerina Izmailova in Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District… All three works were written before Anna Karenina. By the way, in the draft version of the novel, the body of the heroine is also first found in the Neva. But Tolstoy crosses out this passage and gives the “railroad” version. (…) Thus, a private provincial history, which in 1872 drew the attention of only one Tula newspaper, became an important part of the world masterpiece. And the unfortunate girl, whose grave orphanedly sheltered next to Tolstoy’s family, with her death gave eternal life to his heroine. Because without a train there is no Anna Karenina. The train is the visible embodiment of her fate, the fate that haunts her from the very beginning of the novel.

From a note by Tolstoy’s wife, Sophia Andreevna:

“We have a neighbor of 50 years old, not rich and uneducated – A.N. Bibikov. He had a distant relative of his wife in the house, a girl of about 35, who took care of the whole house and was his mistress. Bibikov took a beautiful German governess to his son and niece’s house, fell in love with her and proposed to her. His former mistress, whose name was Anna Stepanovna, left his house in Tula, as if to see his mother, from there with a bundle in her hand (the bundle contained only a change of linen and dress) returned to the nearest station – Yasenki and there threw herself onto the rails, under a freight train . Then they dissected her. Lev Nikolaevich saw her with a naked skull, all naked and cut up in the Yasenkovskaya barracks. The impression was terrible and sunk deep into him. Anna Stepanovna was a tall, plump woman, with a Russian type and face and character, a brunette with gray eyes, but not beautiful, although very pleasant.

Sofya Andreevna’s note is entitled “Why Karenina Anna and what exactly suggested such a suicide?”.

“It was written after the publication of Anna Karenina in Russkiy Vestnik and the release of the novel as a separate edition,” Pavel Basinsky clarifies. – The name Anna is underlined by Sofya Andreevna. She had no doubt that it was Anna Pirogova who gave the name to the main character. Interestingly, in the rough sketches, the future Anna Karenina (Tolstoy was still choosing her name) is also shown as a plump and ugly woman, but pleasant. Later Anna would become “beautiful,” capable of driving not only Vronsky crazy, but also the staunch moralist Levin. Tolstoy was not exactly friends with Bibikov. They were neighbors, hunted together, sometimes Tolstoy came to him with his wife. Sofya Andreevna, the housekeeper Bibikova, was pretty. After her death, she refused Bibikov from the house.

Vronsky, after Anna’s suicide, feels guilty before her and goes to the Balkan war, wanting to die. A person who goes to war with such thoughts is likely to actually die.

Bibikov, having learned about the death of Anna Pirogova, did not even come to Yasenki. As Sofya Andreevna writes about this, “this made little impression on Bibikov, and he nevertheless married a German woman who was a good wife to him …”

Leo Tolstoy’s novel begins with the epigraph “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.” This is a quotation from the Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Romans, which, in turn, was a quotation from Deuteronomy.

“From the very beginning, Tolstoy subordinates his narrative to one important thought that he wants to express,” writes Pavel Basinsky in his book The True Story of Anna Karenina. – Tolstoy does not serve the novel – he forces the novel to serve the author’s main idea. But the artistic mystery of the work is that there is no author in it. Nabokov spoke about this, noting that in the novel “the pressure of the author’s pen is not felt.”

Even Vladimir Nabokov said that the clock of this novel strikes the same as the clock of any time. And this is also its mystery – 146 years have passed since it was written, and we read it as an absolutely modern novel.

Anna Karenina remains one of the most popular and filmed novels in the world. The questions that he poses remain the same now: a wife’s betrayal of her husband, love, jealousy, a child born to her husband from another person …

“Why does this novel draw us in and not let go not only during the first reading, but also during the second, and the third, and the tenth? – asks Pavel Basinsky. – Why are endless film versions of such a famous story born? Perhaps because the content of the novel is not so obvious? (…) The content of Anna Karenina changes with each new reading. Everything changes, and everyone changes, all the characters! We know how it will end, but we will never understand why it happened the way it did. (…) Each time we reread the scenes, we see them differently…”

The novel has more and more new interpretations. This suggests that such works already live independently of their author, confirms that the novel lives on, it has not become covered with dust, has not become archival, museum. He really continues to live.

Sergei Ishkov.

Photo from the site https://interesnyefakty.org