Tolstoy (42 page)

Sonya, who was four months pregnant when Petya died, felt differently. No other of her children had been so attached to her, and radiated such cheerful spirits and goodness, she wrote to her sister Tanya. She still kept expecting her jolly, chubby little boy to call out to her. Because of the weight of the grief she was carrying in her heart, she also feared for the new baby she had felt move inside for the first time just as Petya was dying. Her last memory of him was of the sun pouring in through the church window on to his body in its little coffin, and turning his hair gold. Christmas was a quiet affair at Yasnaya Polyana that year. While the children were outside tobogganing, Sonya sat inside getting on with copying and household chores, and looking forward to the evening troika rides that they organised as their entertainment. But the recent deaths had almost totally taken away her capacity to find happiness and tranquillity, she told Tanya.
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Tolstoy had now been working on and off on his novel for nine months. At the end of 1873 he confided to Nikolay Strakhov that his work on
Anna Karenina
had gone well up until that point, even very well. He calculated that he had seven printer's sheets all ready to be typeset, and he decided he would go ahead and print them as the first part of his novel in book form, without prior publication in a journal.
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Accordingly, in January 1874 Tolstoy went to Moscow to draw up an agreement for publishing
Anna Karenina
with Mikhail Katkov's printing house. He turned to Katkov's press as it had just produced a print run of 3,600 copies of his collected works in eight volumes (about 1,000 of them sold in the first year, at a price of twelve roubles).
⁵²
Technically this constituted the third edition of Tolstoy's writings, since he counted the appearance of his work in journals as the first. The two-volume 'second' edition which had been published in 1864 was now swelled by
War and Peace,
but in the new format: four rather than six parts, with all the French translated into Russian and the authorial ruminations about history placed together in a new epilogue. The revisions to
War and Peace
had been partly dictated by the momentous changes wrought in Tolstoy's thinking by his work on the
ABC
books, and his new ideas about reforming the way he wrote would also have an impact on
Anna Karenina.
Tolstoy was, of course, still very preoccupied with his educational work. It was during this brief visit to Moscow in January 1874 that Tolstoy appeared before the Moscow Literacy Committee, which accepted his proposal that his teaching method be tried out alongside the official method then in use.

Tolstoy worked furiously to finish the first part of
Anna Karenina
at Yasnaya Polyana while the six-week teaching trial was conducted in Moscow. He was still making up his mind about how his new novel should begin. At some point during this time he crossed out
Anna Karenina
as a title and wrote in
Two Marriages,
and inserted titles for each chapter, such as 'Family Quarrel', 'Meeting at the Railway Station', 'The Ball'. He also replaced the modern Russian words of his earlier epigraph ('Mine is the Vengeance') with the Church Slavonic equivalent taken from the Bible, and gave Stepan Arkadych the surname of Oblonsky (now relegating Alabin to his dream). Before he took the manuscript to the printers during his next visit to Moscow in early March, he had changed his mind again, however: now the novel once again bore the title
Anna Karenina,
and Levin was Tolstoy's new and final name for Ordyntsev, which he and many of his friends pronounced 'Lyovin', like his first name, Lyov
(flee),
in accordance with Russian practice.
⁵³
To Sonya, her husband was always Lyovochka. Tolstoy estimated that the manuscript of Part One which he handed over for typesetting in March constituted about a sixth of the total word-count for the novel, and he was still confident
Anna Karenina
would soon be finished. He did not manage to complete the novel in 1874, in 1875, or even in 1876, however. The concluding sentence was not written until 1877.

Sonya had started making a fair copy of Part Two while Tolstoy was in Moscow in January,
⁵⁴
but in April she had to stop to give birth to Nikolay, their seventh child, whom they could not help calling Petya.
⁵⁵
The joy was not unalloyed, as a few weeks earlier there had been another stillbirth in the family, suffered by her sister-in-law Maria Mikhailovna, Sergey's wife.
⁵⁶
Tolstoy also stopped work on
Anna Karenina
at this point. The trial comparing his teaching method with the one officially approved by the Russian government had now come to an end, and the results were inconclusive. Far from being deterred, however, Tolstoy was even more determined to fight for his educational ideas to be recognised. He could not let matters stand, as this meant far more to him than his fiction. First he sent a letter to the Minister of Education, in which he argued that the 'pedantic' German teaching system approved by the ministry would not help the cause of popular education because it was based on 'pointlessly complex and false principles' and was 'completely alien and even contrary to the spirit of the Russian language and people'.
⁵⁷
His offer to put together a comprehensive teaching and learning programme for popular education was not taken up. At this point he decided to move into the public arena, and he now threw his energies into writing the long article on popular education mentioned earlier that he regarded as his personal credo.
Anna Karenina
was set aside.

The more deeply Tolstoy immersed himself in his educational crusade, the more rapidly his enthusiasm for his novel diminished. Indeed, on 10 May 1874 he informed Strakhov that he frankly no longer liked it,
⁵⁸
and later in the month he decided to bring the printing process to a halt.
⁵⁹
But there was another reason Tolstoy's heart was no longer in continuing
Anna Karenina.
His
tyotushka
(auntie) Tatyana Alexandrovna—Toinette, his surrogate mother—died on 20 June. She was eighty-two. Tolstoy frankly admitted to Alexandrine in a letter that for the last few years, as her life had ebbed away, she had not been part of their family life, particularly after she had moved at her request to a downstairs room, so as not to leave bad memories, but her death made a deep impression on him. In her last years she had confused Tolstoy with his father, whom she had worshipped, and called him Nicolas. He would drop in on her room late at night, when she and Natalya Petrovna were already sitting in their dressing gowns and nightcaps, with shawls round their shoulders, and would help lay out the cards for patience with her at the small table in front of her bed.
⁶⁰
'I've lived with her my whole life. And I feel awful without her,' he wrote to Alexandrine. Toinette had been loved and respected by everyone. Tolstoy described to Alexandrine how peasants from every house in the village had stopped the funeral procession so they could give money to the priest for him to say prayers to her memory.
⁶¹

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 ofabout 20,000 roubles. After three years ofdrought 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 Oblonsky 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 ofadultery 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 ofragged, 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

Sonya felt differently: she wondered whether it was worth her husband investing all his energy in a tiny corner of Russia—the district in Tula province where they lived. Writing to her sister Tanya, she did not conceal the fact that she heartily despised all her husband's works with arithmetic and grammar. She was longing for her husband to get back to writing novels, which was an activity she both respected and loved:

I teach, breast-feed like a machine, from morning to night and from night to morning. I was copying out the
ABC,
but when I saw that it was not going to come to an end soon, I got so fed up with all those short words, and phrases such as 'Masha ate kasha' and so on that I gave up—let some clerk write it out. My work was copying out the immortal
War and Peace
or
Anna,
but that was boring.
⁷⁰

Sonya and Lyovochka were beginning to grow apart. Sonya was tiring of the monotony and grind of her daily life, and was frequently ill. Her husband was beginning to be assailed by existential despair.

Subscribers to the
Russian Messenger
finally started reading
Anna Karenina
at the beginning of 1875, when the first chapters of the novel appeared in the January issue, nestled amongst materials as diverse as an article about the reform of Russian universities, an instalment of Wilkie Collins's detective novel
The Law and the Lady
(only just published in England), notes on the defence of Sebastopol by a 'Black Sea Officer', a sketch of China and an article about education.
⁷¹
It is unlikely readers dwelled long on the dry disquisition about the teaching of logic in high schools when there was a new novel by Count Tolstoy to read. The first chapters of
Anna Karenina
caused a sensation, and Strakhov wrote to tell Tolstoy that he had seen even the most highbrow people in St Petersburg jumping up and down in excitement.
⁷²
The first instalment ended with Anna leaving the ball early, having danced the mazurka with Vronsky, and thus brought Kitty's dreams crashing to the ground. Russian readers could not wait to read more. Sonya, the faithful copyist, had a right to feel hard done by when there were people blackening her reputation after Tolstoy's death, for she had contributed several details to the crucial scene at the ball by acting as her husband's fashion consultant and advising on Anna's toilette: