Reading the First Drafts of Anna Karenina

We know that Tolstoy’s reading of a collection of Alexander Pushkin’s fiction on March 18, 1873, brought on an urge to write; sometime later that day, his right hand picked up his pen and, instead of trying again to inspire himself about the court of Peter the Great in 1700, he began describing a modern high-society party where a floozy of a wife was carrying on an affair under the nose of her good, honest husband. The thought of that cuckolded husband mocked by a depraved society evoked more pity and alarm in Tolstoy than the thought that that same wife would kill herself. Her husband, who had been humiliated while she lived and cheated, would soldier on. Or would he kill himself too? Tolstoy wondered. How her suicide would happen, Tolstoy didn’t know or care. The poor husband!

Sofia wrote, in her “Various Notes for Future Reference”:

Last night L. suddenly said to me: “I have written a page and a half, and it seems good.” I assumed this was yet another attempt to write about the Peter the Great period, and didn’t pay much attention.

She must have heard something like this often enough from her husband that his vague mention of that night’s accomplishment did not impress her:

But then I realized that he had in fact embarked on a novel about the private lives of present-day people.

How exactly did she realize that? Had Tolstoy stood up and walked over to her and shyly handed over the page and a half? Did she start to read it and become confused? But, Levochka, what does this have to do with Peter’s time? That’s not true of Peter’s time!

She only remarked in the notes to herself: “So strange, the way he just pitched straight into it.”

. . . this evening he read various other excerpts from the [Pushkin] book, and under Pushkin’s influence he sat down to write. He went on with his writing today, and said he was well pleased with it.

In the next four years of working on Anna Karenina, Tolstoy would communicate having had one, maybe two more experiences of being “well pleased” with what he had written that given day. Some of the pleasure of these first two days of work may have had to do with his relief of escaping the complications of the Peter project.

Sofia added a detail concerning the second day of his work that helps dissolve the image we might conjure up of artists as relentless slaves to their work. Tolstoy was not working all day; sometimes he was out playing: “At the moment he is out looking at the fox with his two sons, their tutor Fyodor Fyodorovich and Uncle Kostya. This fox runs past the bridge near our house every day.”

That fox might be seen running through Tolstoy’s procrastinating mind for the next several years; mostly in periods of feeling unable to write, he would, grumbling about his frustration, get up from his desk and go hunting.

Sofia was now excited for him, for them, and on March 19 wrote her sister Tatyana: “Last night Levochka suddenly unexpectedly began writing a novel of contemporary life. The subject of the novel—an unfaithful wife and all the drama proceeding from this.” After Tolstoy had been working happily on Anna Karenina for a week, he wrote to Strakhov. After commiserating with his friend’s health problems, he shyly opened up: “Now I’ll tell you about myself, but please, keep it a great secret, because nothing may come of what I have to say.”(...)

The resolution of his doubts had to be about quitting the Peter project. The light from Pushkin’s brilliance exposed Tolstoy’s efforts’ seeming lifelessness.

It’s as if Tolstoy woke up in Pushkin-world and put on his own seven-league boots and started striding over the heads of all the other writers:

Not only Pushkin, but nothing else at all, it seemed, had ever aroused my admiration so much before. The Shot, Egyptian Nights, The Captain’s Daughter!!! And then there is the fragment The guests were arriving at the country house. Involuntarily, unwittingly, not knowing why and what would come of it, I thought up characters and events, began to go on with it, then of course changed it, and suddenly all the threads became so well and truly tied up that the result was a novel which I finished in draft form today, a very lively, impassioned and well-finished novel which I’m very pleased with and which will be ready in two weeks’ time if God gives me strength, and which has nothing in common with all that I’ve been wrestling with for a whole year.

Let’s consider this prediction of Anna Karenina being “ready in two weeks’ time” as one of the biggest miscalculations in literary history. And what could Tolstoy have meant by “a novel which I finished in draft form”? Some of us think of drafts as compositions that run all the way from the beginning to end. All the material is on the page; it just needs to be rewritten, reordered, revised. But Tolstoy didn’t mean that. His “draft” of the novel consisted of a few scenes and a list of notes.

His first plan, a story in four parts plus an epilogue, looks like this:

Prologue. She leaves her husband under happy “auspices.” She goes <to meet> to console the bride and meets Gagin [the name of the future Vronsky].

Part 1.

Chapter 1. The guests gathered at the end of winter, and were awaiting the Karenins and talking about them. She arrived and conducted herself indecently with Gagin. 

Chapter 2. She has it out with her husband. She reproaches him for previous indifference. “It’s too late.” 

Chapter 3. <In the artels> Gagin from the riding-ring gathers himself to go to the meeting. His mother and brother advise him to go to her. <Party at her place. The husband.> 

4th Chapter. Dinner at the Karenins’ with Gagin. The husband, conversation with the brother. St[epan] Ark[ad’ich] calms things down on the account of the German party and on account of his wife. 

5th Chapter. The races—he falls. 

Chapter 6. She runs to him, reveals her pregnancy, revelation to her husband.

The basic story had come to him in a few scenes. He would not hereafter be inventing all the plot points. Those of us who have read the novel can recognize these notes’ connections to it. But Tolstoy has not created the Anna we know yet. The most cinematic pre-cinema scene in literature, the horserace, is in place—with the consequent fall. Tolstoy never imagined Vronsky winning that race. No matter what, Vronsky will fall off his horse, and his fall will precipitate Anna’s announcement of her pregnancy to her husband.

by Bob Blaisdell, LitHub | Read more:

Image: Anna Karenina, uncredited
[ed. If you haven't read this masterpiece yet, what are you waiting for!]