Anna Karenina

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We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

- W. B. Yeats

I

‘I am writing a novel,’ Tolstoy informed his friend the critic Nikolai Strakhov on 11 May 1873, referring to the book that was to become Anna Karenina. ‘I’ve been at it for more than a month now and the main lines are traced out. This novel is truly a novel, the first in my life ...’

Tolstoy was then forty-five. He had been writing and publishing for over twenty years. Along with some remarkable shorter pieces - ‘The Snowstorm’, ‘Two Hussars’,‘Three Deaths’, ‘The Wood Felling’, ‘Sebas topol Stories’,‘Family Happiness’ - he had produced longer works which he himself referred to as novels. For instance, it was as ‘the first part of a novel’ that Tolstoy sent the manuscript of Childhood, the opening section of the trilogy Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, to Nikolai Nekrasov, editor of The Contemporary, in 1852. Ten years later, apologizing to the editor Mikhail Katkov for his delay in producing the book he had promised him in return for a loan of a thousand roubles, he wrote: ‘I’ve only just settled down to the novel I sold you the rights to, I couldn’t get to it earlier.’ This was The Cossacks, begun in 1857, worked on intermittently, and finished ‘with sweat and blood’ in 1862. In 1864, again writing to Katkov, Tolstoy mentioned that he was ‘in the process of finishing the first part of [his] novel on the period of the wars of Alexander and Napoleon’, known then as The Year 1805 but soon to be renamed War and Peace. Why, then, did he call Anna Karenina his first novel?

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