No wonder Tolstoy’s new novel lacked the ‘elemental force’ that stunned Fet in the previous one. He compensated for that with an unsurpassable mastery of form that made William Faulkner, himself not alien to the secrets of the genre, call Anna Karenina ‘the best novel ever written’. In the draft of the introduction to War and Peace, Tolstoy insisted that he was not writing a novel and that ‘Russians in general do not know how to write novels’ (WP, p. 1087). Now he was challenging those who were inclined to take him too literally. Gone were the fascinating weaknesses of his first major narrative: irritatingly long digressions, unprepared transformations of the characters, illogical holes in the plot, such as the thirteen-month pregnancy of Prince Andrei’s first wife. The existential horror that permeates the pages of Anna Karenina had to be finely balanced by the perfection of the text. The Russian educator Sergey Rachinsky, one of the few representatives of his profession who had admired Tolstoy’s ABC and The Primer, wrote to Tolstoy that Anna Karenina was composed of two magnificent, but hardly connected novels. Tolstoy responded that he was ‘proud of the architecture – the arches have been constructed in such a way that it is impossible to see where the keystone is’ (Ls, I, p. 311). Such a defence of one of his completed works was nearly unique in the tens of thousands of letters Tolstoy wrote.
In May 1873, when finishing the first rough draft, Tolstoy wrote to Fet that ‘good and evil are only materials out of which beauty is made’. Waiting for Anna to appear in the study of Vronsky’s house, Levin gazes at the ‘wonderful picture on the wall’:
It was not a picture, but a living and charming woman with curly black hair, bare shoulders and arms, and a dreamy half-smile on her lips, covered with elegant down, looking at him victoriously and tenderly with eyes that troubled him. The only thing that showed she was not alive was that she was more beautiful than a living woman could be. (AK, p. 630)
When Anna enters she turns out to be ‘less brilliant’, but Levin fails to notice it as ‘there was something about her, new and attractive, which was not in the portrait’ (AK, p. 630). The world that Tolstoy created was falling apart, but it was inherently beautiful. The author depicted it always staying on the scaffolding, without detaching himself from it in the manner of Flaubert. The effect of absolute realism was achieved not because Tolstoy ‘objectively’ portrayed the development of his characters, but because he portrayed himself portraying his characters, thus guaranteeing that the picture was true to life.
Anna Karenina provoked the ire of radical critics. Nekrasov, possibly still reeling from his failure to acquire the rights for the manuscript, wrote that Tolstoy had ‘proved with patience and talent that a woman, being a mother and a wife, should not engage herself in affairs with officers or courtiers’,12 attempting with an epigram to reduce Tolstoy’s novel to nothing more than trivial moralizing. Another critic, Petr Tkachev, called the novel ‘a newest epic of aristocratic amours’.13 These predictable barbs could still not reduce the success of the book, which became evident immediately after the publication of the first instalments and only grew after that. Readers were eager to read instalments as they were published and to buy the book; Tolstoy expected the planned collected edition of his work that was to include Anna Karenina to bring a profit of more than 60,000 roubles. Many critics’ assessments were also more glowing than anyone could have dared to expect.
Tolstoy should have been especially flattered by the praise of Dostoevsky, who had always interested him as one of the ‘martyrs of 1848’ and as a writer. Tolstoy had mixed views on his major novels, but considered Notes from the House of the Dead ‘the best book in all modern literature, Pushkin included . . . sincere, natural and Christian’ (Ls, II, p. 338). This quasi-documentary narrative raised a topic eternally close to Tolstoy’s heart: the meeting between a noble intellectual and people from the lower classes, brought together in the morbid environment of a hard labour camp. In his review, Dostoevsky wrote that Tolstoy’s novel is marked by ‘depth and potency with a realism of artistic portrayal hitherto unknown in Russia’ and asserted that the book was the ultimate answer to the question of what Russia can give to Europe (AK, pp. 760–61). The final part of the novel, with its denunciation of the Balkan war, left the militarist Dostoevsky profoundly disappointed.
Shortly after the completion of Anna Karenina Tolstoy wrote a letter to Turgenev asking for forgiveness, stating that he ‘bore no hostility’ towards his former friend and offering ‘all the friendship he was capable of’ (Ls, I, pp. 318–19). The letter could not have arrived at a more appropriate time. Turgenev’s health as well as his creative energy were on the wane. He had gone out of fashion with the reading public and regarded promoting Russian literature in Europe as his main mission. Tolstoy was his greatest asset. He cried on reading the letter and at the first possible occasion came to visit his old friend and foe at Yasnaya Polyana; they met five times in the remaining years of his life. Turgenev charmed Tolstoy’s family with funny stories about Paris life and once even danced the cancan in front of his daughters. Contrary to his habits, Tolstoy did not argue or interrupt, but just recorded the event in the diary he had by then resumed: ‘Turgenev – cancan. Sad’ (Ds, p. 177).
Turgenev was initially not very receptive to both Tolstoy’s major novels. He found ‘truly magnificent pages (the race, the scything, the hunt)’ in Anna Karenina, but on the whole found it ‘sour’ and ‘smelling of Moscow, of incense, of old maidishness, of Slavophilism, aristocratism and so on’ (AK, p. 748). Now he reversed his earlier opinions. In 1879 the first French translation of War and Peace was published in Paris. Turgenev possibly encouraged this enterprise and sent a letter full of glowing praise to Edmond About, the editor of the Parisian newspaper XIXe Siècle. He called the novel ‘a great work by a great writer and . . . genuine Russia’ (WP, p. 1108). Turgenev also sent copies of the French edition to leading French critics and writers including, of course, his literary hero.
Flaubert was quick to respond. In his letter, which Turgenev copied to Tolstoy in January 1880, he criticized the author for repetitions and philosophizing, but his general impression was more than favourable. He found the book to be ‘of the first order’, noting the author’s art and psychology, and passages ‘worthy of Shakespeare’, and confessed that during the long reading he could not contain himself from ‘outcries of admiration’ (TP, I, 192). The author of Madame Bovary died the same year and did not have a chance to read Anna Karenina as its French translation appeared only in 1885.
Tolstoy’s reaction to this new level of recognition is unknown. Most likely he was unfazed. At first, relieved from the burden of Anna Karenina, he was contemplating a return to his earlier literary plans, albeit radically revised: the novels about Peter the Great and the Decembrists. The former took the shape of an epic narrative provisionally entitled A Hundred Years, which was to unfold simultaneously in parallel settings at court and in a peasant hut, covering the whole period from the birth of the modernizing tsar up to the beginning of the reign of Alexander I in 1801. The latter was to deal with the aftermath of the 1825 rebellion, when the former conspirators encountered the people they had hoped to liberate in Siberian exile. When added to the already completed War and Peace and Anna Karenina, these works would have amounted to a tetralogy stretching over two centuries of national history.