How the novel "Anna Karenina" was conceived, why Tolskoy did not like his heroine and other little-known facts

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The appearance of the pages of the novel "Anna Karenina" was accompanied by a huge number of edits. All this hard labor of rewriting the crossed out, corrected passages, fragments of the future work, fell, as it always happened, on the shoulders of Sofia Andreevna Tolstoy. For help in preparing the text of Anna Karenina, Lev Nikolayevich later presented his wife with a ring with a ruby and diamonds.

"Private" story about the novel of an ugly woman who drowned in the Neva

When creating the work, the writer relied on episodes from his own biography, on what he saw and heard in society. He wrote a novel about contemporary life, in contrast to the one published a few years earlier - "War and Peace": it was a story about bygone times and past generations. To explore all the depths of the meaning of "Anna Karenina" is an occupation for specialists, literary scholars, and this work will not be completed soon, perhaps it will not be completed at all. But what is on the surface - the story of the appearance of the plot, the names, the description of the characters - is no less curious than the philosophical questions and problems of being raised by the writer.

Konstantin Levin, a character whose image was largely "copied" from Leo Tolstoy himself, appeared far from the first days of working on the novel. In the original version, there was neither Levin, nor the entire storyline associated with him, which in later versions became parallel to the story of the love of Anna and Vronsky. At first, the writer was going to tell only the story of a woman from high society, a woman who, after her fall, loses her habitual position. finds no place for himself in new circumstances and ends his life tragically. The plot was not taken out of thin air, on the contrary, several similar stories unfolded before Tolstoy's eyes, which were then combined into one on paper. There was an example of Sofia Bakhmeteva-Miller, who left her husband for the sake of Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy - it was her that the beloved writer would devote lines Accidentally Amid a Noisy Ball, set to music by Tchaikovsky.

Roman Tolstoy intended to end with a description of the death of the heroine. She received a divorce, lived with her lover, raising two children. But the society in which the couple revolved changed forever - their lives passed surrounded by "ill-mannered writers, musicians, painters", and the ex-husband, who at first tried to kill his wife and thus wash away the shame with blood, then began to call her to "religious revival" … At the end, the heroine quarrels with her lover, after which the woman decides to take her own life, drowning herself in the Neva. But life itself has made adjustments to Tolstoy's work on the novel. In 1872, a terrible story happened to the writer’s neighbor in Yasnaya Polyana, Alexander Nikolaevich Bibikov - his housekeeper, with whom the landowner had an affair, threw herself under a train after a quarrel or break. Tolstoy knew this woman, Anna Stepanovna Pirogova, and saw her body after the tragedy - this made a heavy impression on the writer. Then it will find expression in the novel.

The theme of the railroad permeates the entire work. At the station, the first meeting between Anna and Vronsky takes place, at the same time - a tragedy that made Anna think of a bad omen. As the plot develops, images associated with the train appear in the dreams of the heroes; on the railroad, the heroine meets her sad end. Even little Seryozha Karenin, separated from his mother, plays the "railroad". It should be noted that in life, more precisely, in the death of Leo Tolstoy himself, the railroad also played a special role. The writer met his death at the Astapovo station.

What changed in the novel as it was written

Tolstoy himself married in 1862, and conceived a novel eight years later. Therefore, awareness, reflection of the first years of his family life is clearly manifested in the storyline about Levin. The inspiration for the beginning of the work was Pushkin's sketch "Guests gathered at the dacha" - Tolstoy will later transfer this first scene to the pages of his work. Tolstoy wrote about the text itself: “This is how we write. Pushkin gets down to business."

However, there were several options for the beginning of the novel - until the moment when Tolstoy settled on the well-known "All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." One of the original texts generally began like this: "There was a cattle exhibition in Moscow." By the way, when Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote a critical note about him after the publication of the work, he called Anna Karenina a “cow novel”.

At first, Anna had to become ugly: “with a low forehead, a short, almost upturned nose and too fat. She is so fat that a little more and she would become ugly. It is easy to see from the drafts that the heroine did not arouse particular liking for Tolstoy. Gradually, the writer was imbued with more and more sympathy for her. It is believed that when describing the heroine, Tolstoy recalled the features of Maria Alexandrovna Hartung, Pushkin's daughter - for example, during one of the meetings, the writer drew attention to the curl of dark hair, a stray strand of her hairstyle, later this stroke became one of Anna's striking features.

There were ten options for the beginning of the novel. And there are at least three “working” titles: “Well done-baba”, “N. N. and “Two Marriages” - and in the latter case, it is unclear whether there were two storylines with the families of Anna and Levin in mind, or whether it was about two marriages of the heroine herself - official and de facto.

What names did the characters in the novel manage to try on?

The surname "Karenin" was probably taken from the Greek "karenon", which means "head" - a direct indication that the life of this person is controlled by reason, not emotions. Before she became Anna Arkadyevna Karenina, the heroine managed to visit in Tolstoy's drafts by Anastasia (Nana), Tatiana Sergeevna Stavrovich. Karenin received the name Mikhail Mikhailovich Stavrovich. Before the name Vronsky, several variants of names were tested - Ivan Petrovich Balashev, Alexei Vasilyevich Udashev, Alexei Gagin. The name Vronsky may have been suggested by the English wrong.

Levin's name in the drafts of the novel was Kostya Neradov, then Nikolai Ordyntsev. Steva "changed" several names, including Alabin, Obolensky, eventually changed to Oblonsky. Dolly Tolstoy kept in his head the image of his wife Sofya Andreevna, completely immersed in taking care of the house and children.

The novel was written in 1873 - 1877 and was published in parts in magazine publications. He became fashionable - he raised too painful questions. Soon after the publication, something similar to the story of Karenina happened to the wife of the writer's second cousin, Alexandra Leontyevna Turgeneva, who left her husband, Nikolai Alexandrovich Tolstoy, leaving him with three children. She created a new family with Alexei Bostrom, but could not marry him, since she was left "in the everlasting celibacy" by the decision of the spiritual court. By the way, in this love triangle, the railway played its amazing role: a jealous husband, finding his lovers in the train compartment, shot at his rival. True, the tragedy did not happen, and the shooter himself was acquitted, since he defended the honor of the family.

The novel "Anna Karenina" is one of the leaders in terms of the number of film adaptations. The first film of the same name appeared during the life of Tolstoy in 1910, this version was lost. The last film adaptation was released in 2017. A film by Karen Shakhnazarov recognized as one of the best adaptations of Russian classics.