Читаем Anna Karenina полностью

‘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?

It is true that the early trilogy and The Cossacks are semi-fictionalized autobiography and in retrospect Tolstoy may have decided they could not properly be considered novels. But what of War and Peace? Isn’t it the quintessential novel, the greatest of the species? Not according to its author. In a statement published after the appearance of the first three volumes, he declared enigmatically: ‘What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, still less is it a poem, and even less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed.’ For Tolstoy, a ‘true novel’ was evidently something more specific than a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length.

In fact, none of the great Russian prose writers of the the nineteenth century, with the possible exception of Turgenev, was on easy terms with the novel as a genre. Gogol called Dead Souls, his only novel-length work, a poem. To define this unusual ‘poem’ he invented the notion of a hybrid genre, midway between epic and novel, to which he gave the name ‘minor epic’. He found the novel too static a form, confined to a conventional reality, involving a set of characters who all had to be introduced at the start and all had to have some relation to the hero’s fate, and whose possible interactions were too limited for his inventive gifts. It was the form for portraying ordinary domestic life, and Gogol had no interest in ordinary domestic life. Dostoevsky, who also referred to his work as ‘poetry’, transformed the novel into another sort of hybrid — the ‘novel-tragedy’ of some critics, the ‘polyphonic novel’ of others. Nikolai Leskov, an artist almost equal in stature to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, though less known outside Russia, made masterful use of the forms of the chronicle, the legend, the tale, the saint’s life, even the local anecdote and the newspaper article, but lost all his gifts when he turned to the novel. As for Chekhov, though he tried several times to write one, the novel was simply alien to his genius.