Anna Karenina in the making

Leo Tolstoy hoped to finish Anna Karenina quickly. Within a year of beginning the novel in early 1873, he was already looking forward to its rapid publication in book form. The entire “carcass” of what we now know as the novel had already been written, including Anna’s death at the train station, but Tolstoy, dissatisfied and distracted, would not begin serialized publication until 1875. Instalments appeared in the journal The Russian Messenger over the course of three hivernal seasons, and significant episodes were written hastily, just before their publication. As a result many scenes that appear earlier in the plot were written later than succeeding ones. (Thus, Anna killed herself long before her lover, Vronsky, tried to do the same, though his suicide attempt comes 200 pages earlier.) According to Mikhail Dolbilov, unlike War and Peace, in which episodes were composed in the order of their appearance in the final text, Anna Karenina’s growth resembled that of a tree that quickly shoots up to nearly its full height, then grows stubbornly, tortuously and prodigiously in lateral directions.

Zhizn’ tvorimogo romana: Ot avanteksta k kontekstu “Anny Kareninoi” (The Life of a Novel in the Process of Creation: From the avant-text to the context of “Anna Karenina”) provides a thoroughly new look at the genesis and evolution of Tolstoy’s widely read novel. Envisioned as the story of an aristocratic woman’s adultery, Anna Karenina expanded to become a tale of two marriages – Anna’s broken union with her awkward but respected St Petersburg husband and the uneven but eventually successful courtship of a young Muscovite woman by Levin, a landowner with a passion for farming and political views close to the author’s. (Levin was not part of Tolstoy’s original plan but he muscled his way in, eventually displacing the heroine and occupying the entire final section of the book, a settler colonialist of narrative space.)

Dolbilov has had access to Tolstoy’s unpublished manuscripts and has written an unparalleled account of the novel’s process of creation. The author is a historian who has pulled off the enviable feat of writing an archivally informed intellectual and political history of Russia in the 1870s while also providing a subtle analysis of the novel, informed by anglophone, French and Russian literary theory. Zhizn’ tvorimogo romana ingeniously studies three temporalities and the linkages between them: the passage of time in the novel, the passage of time in Tolstoy’s life as he wrote it, and the relation of both temporalities to events and discussions occurring in Russia during the time of its composition.

Among other surprises, Dolbilov paints a portrait of Anna Karenina as reflecting Tolstoy’s sustained interest in the court of Alexander II, which was marked by two paradoxically reinforcing tendencies: a culture of rigid piety surrounding the empress, about which Tolstoy was regularly informed in letters from his cousin, a lady in waiting; and a newly rampant libertinism, exemplified both by the tsar’s long-time liaison with the mother of his illegitimate children and by numerous sexual scandals involving his relatives. Who knew that the annoying foreign prince, addicted to hedonistic pleasures and “as fresh as a green, waxy Dutch cucumber”, was inspired by the future Edward VII, visiting St Petersburg for the marriage of his brother while Tolstoy was working on the novel? While not arguing that Anna Karenina is a roman à clef, Dolbilov shows how the underlying tension between Anna’s domestic milieu and the world of Vronsky was founded on Tolstoy’s understanding of the conflicting forces at the court. The connections were more obvious in the initial drafts, but they played an important role in the shaping of the plot. (In its turn the novel was noticed by the court, where it was read aloud to the empress and reduced one of her courtiers to tears.)

Prominent as well in the manuscripts was the homoeroticism that informs Vronsky’s storyline. Vladimir Nabokov claimed that one early scene in the novel, in which Vronsky is disgusted by an effete pair of officers, contains “the first homosexuals in modern literature”, but Dolbilov shows how Vronsky is surrounded throughout by homoerotic temptations that emerge with greater clarity in the drafts. His encounter with Serpukhovskoi, a friend of long standing from the Imperial Page Corps – a preparatory institution well known as a locus of aristocratic homosexual encounters – comes at a crucial moment in his affair with Anna. Androgynously handsome, with a “seductive” and “almost feminine smile”, Serpukhovskoi warns Vronsky about the dangers posed by women to a man intent on a brilliant military career. The attention paid by Tolstoy to Serpukhovskoi’s physicality in the novel’s final version disturbed at least one prominent critic, who found it “unnecessary”, but in the drafts the rapport between the two young officers is markedly more intimate. Serpukhovskoi serves as a model for the pleasures and glories that lie within Vronsky’s grasp until the latter affirms his heterosexuality by resigning his commission and travelling abroad with Anna.

Dolbilov’s monograph offers a fundamentally new understanding of Vronsky’s character as a projection of Tolstoy’s frustrations as an author. Vronsky has sex with Anna having desired this consummation “for nearly a year”, but Dolbilov shows that his sense of timing is internally inconsistent, with many other details indicating that only a couple of months have passed. Rather, Vronsky’s chronology as portrayed here reflects Tolstoy’s own impatience: without achieving a sense of authorial satisfaction, he had been working on the novel for nearly a year when he wrote those words. Dolbilov reads the scene in which Vronsky shoots himself – an action that Tolstoy claimed surprised even him – as a depiction of the author’s own compositional difficulties, with the gun in Vronsky’s hand standing in for the pen in Tolstoy’s. (His unsuccessful suicide attempt is followed immediately by his equally unexpected and equally unfruitful attempt to become an artist.)

Many readers of Anna Karenina are puzzled by Anna’s refusal to accept a divorce from her husband when one is finally offered. Her decision seems the fatal step that leads eventually to her death on the tracks. Dolbilov details Tolstoy’s extensive vacillation over this question. At one point he permitted Anna to remarry, before suddenly revoking this dispensation as publication loomed. The author’s irresolution introduced several continuity errors into the final text. At no point, however, was this decision going to be of consequence to Anna’s fate. She was always going to die by her own hand; Tolstoy’s uncertainties were more to do with how to bring her to that point of despair where, with the least contrivance, she could throw herself in front of that inexorably approaching train.

Zhizn’ tvorimogo romana deserves an English translation, perhaps with a better title and more disciplined control over the incorporation of historical materials. (At one point Dolbilov tells readers interested solely in the novel that they can skip the next subchapter’s discussion of court intrigues.) The only book in English on the composition of Anna Karenina is Creating Anna Karenina: Tolstoy and the birth of literature’s most enigmatic heroine (2020), an entertaining if essentially second-hand biography of Tolstoy during the mid-1870s, in which Bob Blaisdell, assuming the role of a nagging spouse, repeatedly voices his frustration at the author’s penchant for slacking off from his work. Dolbilov, on the contrary, argues that the novel’s complexity and depth stem precisely from its stalled, recursive composition. Tolstoy famously wrote that, to understand Anna Karenina, one had to seek its “inner connections”. Dolbilov uncovers those connections in the novel’s drafts and in the tensions between them and the “final” version, portraying the variants as alternative and competing universes. Precisely because some of the later sections were composed before episodes that precede them, readers often find themselves resisting the omniscient assertions of the narrator as they try to pursue the logic of the version that appeals to them in the face of a conflicting earlier or later one.

For more than a century readers of Anna Karenina have been fascinated by the parallel but ultimately diverging stories of its two central couples. Now we see that each of these narrative lines has its own competing parallels embedded in the history of the novel’s composition, and that these alternative versions still make themselves felt in the final text. Tolstoy was proud of his book’s “architecture”, but Mikhail Dolbilov demonstrates triumphantly that, in this case, understanding the success of a novel’s architecture is dependent on an appreciation of its archaeology.

Eric Naiman teaches Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley

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