13 R. Bartlett, Tolstoy: A Russian Life (London, 2010), 241.
14 Amy Mandelker, Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question and the Victorian Novel (Columbus, Ohio, 1993), 4.
NOTE ON THE TEXT AND TRANSLATION
THE text of Anna Karenina has a complicated history. During the course of the novel’s protracted composition between 1873 and 1877, Tolstoy changed not only the names of the major characters, in some cases several times, but also many key elements in the storyline, and indeed the title itself. And it was always his habit to make further changes at proof-stage. In addition to authorial amendments, the final text of the novel was also affected by minor changes made by Tolstoy’s wife Sofya, who made fair copies, and his friend Nikolay Strakhov, who assisted in revising the text for publication in book form. Ultimately, the final text of the novel proceeded from five separate drafts filling two and a half thousand manuscript pages.
As in the Pushkin fragment which first sparked Tolstoy’s creative imagination, the characters who open his first draft have all just been to the theatre in St Petersburg to attend a performance of Don Giovanni, Mozart’s opera about seduction and adultery. In a scene slightly reminiscent of the soirée at Princess Betsy’s in Part Two of Anna Karenina, we meet guests arriving at an aristocratic salon, where they discuss the civil servant Mikhail Mikhailovich Stavrovich (the future Karenin) and his wife Tatyana Sergeyevna (the future Anna). It transpires that she has been unfaithful to him, and he seems ignorant of the fact. The couple then arrive in person, followed later on by Ivan Balashov (the future Vronsky), who proceeds to have an intimate and animated conversation with Tatyana, scandalizing those present. Stavrovich finally realizes the misfortune that has befallen him, and his wife is henceforth no longer to be invited to society events.
In this first draft Tolstoy sketched out a further eleven chapters. Tatyana becomes pregnant and Balashov loses a horse race when his mare falls at the last fence. Stavrovich then leaves Tatyana and moves to Moscow; she gives birth and her husband agrees to a divorce. Tanya’s second marriage is no happier, however, and after Stavrovich informs her that their marriage bonds can never be sundered, and that everyone has suffered, she drowns herself in the Neva. Balashov goes off to join the Khiva campaign, echoing real-life events, as Russian troops attacked the city and seized control of the Khanate of Khiva in 1873, just when Tolstoy was writing. Tatyana has a brother in the first sketch (a prototype of Oblonsky), while her husband has a sister called Kitty, but there is no trace of Levin and his brothers at this early stage, nor any members of the Shcherbatsky family. Stavrovich is portrayed sympathetically, while his beautiful wife is intriguingly described as both ‘provocative’ and ‘meek’, and also ‘demonic’ at certain points.
Tolstoy had never before sketched a synopsis of a fictional work in advance, but this initial raw material soon changed significantly. He developed and dramatically expanded every part of this storyline in future drafts. By the time Tolstoy began his third opening draft Tanya had become Anastasia (‘Nana’), her husband is now firmly Alexey Alexandrovich, and Balashov is named Gagin. Tolstoy was beginning to shift attention away from the tragedy of Stavrovich’s predicament to that of Anastasia, who has fallen in love with someone to whom she is not married. She becomes increasingly sympathetic as a character, while the reverse happens with Stavrovich. With a few exceptions (Stavrovich, for example, has a conversation with a nihilist on a train), Tolstoy’s social radius was at first stiflingly small, and he therefore decided to introduce in his third draft Kostya Neradov, a prototype of Levin, who becomes an increasingly important character. Neradov is a rural landowner, and both a friend of Gagin (the future Vronsky) and his rival for the hand of Kitty Shcherbatskaya, who also makes her first appearance in the third draft. The action, moreover, now moves from St Petersburg to Moscow.
Tolstoy’s fourth draft received the title ‘Anna Karenina’, followed by ‘Vengeance is Mine’ as an epigraph. This draft begins with the familiar scene of a husband waking up after a dreadful quarrel the previous evening with his wife, who has discovered his infidelity. ‘Stepan Arkadyich Alabin’ is the prototype of Oblonsky. Anna comes to Moscow as peacemaker, and she meets Gagin at the ball. But Tolstoy was still not satisfied: there was no tension in the relationship between the Levin and Vronsky prototypes, as they were friends. He decided to change their names to Ordyntsev and Udashev, and now made them rivals for Kitty’s hand rather than friends.
Tolstoy 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. Tolstoy reworked the crucial opening scenes four times to get them exactly right, and these were the first chapters he gave Sofya to make fair copies. Everything else stayed in draft form.
In all, Tolstoy produced ten versions of the first part of Anna Karenina, and he changed his mind several times about how his new novel should begin. At one point 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’. The modern Russian words of the earlier epigraph (‘Mine is the Vengeance’) were now replaced with the Church Slavonic equivalent taken from the Bible, and Stepan Arkadyich was given the surname of Oblonsky (now relegating Alabin to his dream). Tolstoy initially planned to publish his novel in book-form rather than follow the more customary practice of initial publication via instalments in a literary journal. Accordingly, in March 1874 he delivered to his Moscow printer the first thirty-one chapters of Part One for typesetting, by which time the novel once again bore the title Anna Karenina and Levin was Tolstoy’s new and final name for Ordyntsev. In this draft Vronsky is a more attractive character than he is in the final version of the novel, and his intentions towards Kitty are much more serious.
Tolstoy had intended to press on with Anna Karenina, but by the summer of 1874 he had, for various reasons, lost momentum, and now referred to his novel as ‘vile’ and ‘disgusting’. He returned to it that autumn, however, not least because he needed money. One moneyraising tactic was to chop down some forest and sell the wood (which is something that happens in Anna Karenina), but his main potential source of revenue was royalties. Tolstoy now changed his mind in favour of printing Anna Karenina in instalments in a monthly journal. He had sold War and Peace for 300 roubles per printer’s sheet, but for Anna Karenina he demanded 500 roubles, with an advance of 10,000 roubles (the 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 1874, Tolstoy finally agreed to publish in Mikhail Katkov’s journal the Russian Messenger. When he finally picked up the proofs of the chapters that had already been typeset, he proceeded to rewrite the opening one last time.
Parts One and Two and the first twelve chapters of Part Three of Anna Karenina were published in the first four issues of the Russian Messenger in 1875, between January and April. After an eight-month gap, the rest of Part Three was published in the January 1876 issue of the journal, followed by Part Four and the first twenty chapters of Part Five in the February, March, and April issues. Another long hiatus followed. Chapters 20 to 33 of Part Five appeared in December 1876, Part Six was published in the January and February 1877 issues of the journal, and Part Seven appeared in the March and April issues. Katkov refused to print the novel’s eighth and final part for political reasons (see Introduction, p. xiii), and it was eventually published separately by Tolstoy. In early 1878 Anna Karenina was published for the first time as a complete novel. This was the standard edition until its appearance in the ninety-volume ‘Jubilee Edition’ of Tolstoy’s complete works, which was launched in 1928, the centenary of the writer’s birth. The respective volumes, 18, 19, and 20, were published in 1934, 1935, and 1939. A new, authoritative edition of Anna Karenina was published by the Academy of Sciences ‘Literary Monuments’ series in 1970, however, and it is this edition which has been used for the present translation.