One of his plans concerned the period of Peter the Great and his Westernizing reforms that engendered a Europeanized elite in a profoundly non-European country. In War and Peace Tolstoy had looked for the ways to remedy this rupture; now he wanted to go back to its roots. Having established a subject, Tolstoy decided to shift the form from drama to historical novel, a genre much more comfortable to him.
Historians always emphasized the personal role of the tsar in the Westernization of Russia, but this approach contradicted Tolstoy’s philosophy of history. For the start of the novel, he chose the confrontation between the young tsar and his sister Sophia, then acting as a regent. Peter escaped from Moscow to the Troitsky (Trinity) monastery, leaving his sister in the Kremlin and thus allowing people to switch loyalties, moving from one camp to another. Tolstoy compared this precarious moment to a tilt in the scales: when someone starts pouring grain on one side, the opposite side with the weight stays, at first, solidly in place, but an extra handful suddenly lifts it in the air, where it hangs in the balance and any light touch may tip it either way.
Tolstoy’s research for the new novel was even more intensive and profound than when he had written about 1812. He studied chronicles, copied out words and expressions from historical dictionaries, read books about everyday life in the period. In spite of all this he struggled to empathize with his characters – they were too remote. He could not achieve the desired effect of immediate presence, when the actions and words of the protagonists give the impression of having been recorded from reality rather than invented. His wife was right when she wrote to her sister that ‘all the characters of the time of Peter the Great are ready, dressed and put in their places, but do not breathe’ (CW, XVII, p. 632). She expressed the hope that they might yet come to life.
This was, of course, far from impossible. Tolstoy knew how to rework his drafts and cope with narrative problems. He believed that ‘the whole knot of Russian life resides’ in the Petrine period and wanted to unravel it. But the deeper Tolstoy delved into the end of the seventeenth century, the more clearly he saw that he would be unable to proceed. In December 1872 he wrote to Strakhov that ‘he has surrounded himself with books about Peter I and his time, made efforts to write, but could not’ (CW, XVII, pp. 629–30). Suddenly he found himself writing a novel in which the action was proceeding in the immediate present.
In March 1873 Tolstoy finally started writing the new novel in earnest. This time his progress was quick: in May he informed Strakhov that he had finished a novel ‘in draft form’ (AK, p. 747) and in September wrote to him that he would be completing the novel soon. This was somewhat premature, but in the second half of 1874 Tolstoy started thinking about publication. In November Tolstoy asked Katkov to pay him the hefty sum of 10,000 roubles as an advance payment. When Katkov started bargaining, Tolstoy approached Nekrasov, who had acquired the magazine Notes of Fatherland after Sovremennik had been closed by the authorities. When Nekrasov expressed interest, Katkov doubled the advance. On 1 January 1875, Strakhov congratulated Tolstoy on having been paid 20,000 roubles, ‘an unheard price for a novel’.8
The first instalments of Anna Karenina appeared in the Russian Herald from January to April 1875, then from January to April 1876 and from December 1876 to April 1877. The long intervals were caused by Tolstoy’s characteristic procrastination, and his slow and painstaking rewriting and editing of the text. At the same time, this peculiar rhythm of publication helped the illusion that the plot was unfolding in real time. The novel, as it progressed, absorbed events taking place in the outside world: the consequences of military reform, fresh court intrigues, a visit by a foreign opera company to St Petersburg and the country sliding into war with the Ottoman Empire. Katkov’s publications were the main force rallying public opinion around the Slavic cause: the national movements in Bulgaria and Serbia fighting against the Turks for independence. In April 1877 an initially reluctant emperor bowed to public pressure and declared war. Political developments that could not have been envisaged when Tolstoy started his novel filled its pages and changed the fates of the characters.
Tolstoy was wary of the Panslavicist and imperialist ideology espoused by the Russian Herald. In the last part of the book he resoundingly attacked the war and the bellicose spirit of its proponents. The final chapters were prepared for publication in the May 1877 issue, but Katkov insisted on cutting the most explicit passages. When Tolstoy rejected this demand, Katkov refused to publish the ending, instead providing readers with a very short summary and a reference to a full edition under preparation. Infuriated, Tolstoy answered with an indignant letter and cut all relations with the editor. The last part appeared as a separate publication in June 1877, and the full text, once again revised with Strakhov’s help, in January 1878.
Notwithstanding this scandal, the ideological orientation of Anna Karenina made it more appropriate for a conservative magazine than a progressive one. Tolstoy was writing a novel about adultery. The problem of the emancipation of women was not confined to post-reform Russia, it was one of the most prevalent issues in European thought and social practice at that time. Despite the remarks he had made in an unsent letter to Boborykin, this problem had always deeply concerned Tolstoy. In 1863, when he began working on War and Peace, his old foe Chernyshevsky had smuggled out a revolutionary novel from captivity in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg. The incredible incompetence of the Russian censors had allowed Nekrasov to publish What Is to Be Done? in Sovremennik. Artistically weak, it made an easy target for the critics, but it was the first book in Russia to deal with the problem of sexual compatibility and to suggest divorce and cohabitation as possible solutions to family problems. Tolstoy had already refuted Chernyshevsky in the epilogue to War and Peace, but his rage was still boiling.
In 1868 Tolstoy drafted an imagined conversation with his female would-be critics, in which he argued that the highest and most sacred mission of a woman was motherhood. No great man, argued Tolstoy, who lost his mother at the age of two, had ever been brought up without maternal care. In the following year John Stuart Mill published his essay The Subjection of Women, forcefully arguing for gender equality. The essay achieved immediate fame and was twice translated into Russian. In a polemical reply, Strakhov reiterated the idea of the sanctity of familial bonds, but conceded that ‘sexless’ women, who had failed to discover their true calling or passed their procreative age, could possibly benefit from formal education and social activity.
Such compromises were not in Tolstoy’s nature: he wrote a letter to Strakhov, fully supporting his main argument but insisting that there are no ‘sexless’ women, ‘just as there are no four-legged people’ (Ls, I, p. 227). Those not fortunate enough to have their own families could help bring up other women’s children. Tolstoy went so far as to repeat Schopenhauer’s assertion that prostitutes helping to channel away the excesses of male sexuality are more socially beneficial than the women working in offices. Probably unwilling to scandalize his correspondent, whom he had not yet met personally, Tolstoy decided against sending the letter.