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Thus, well before inspiration struck him in the spring of 1873, Tolstoy had in mind the general ‘type’ of his Anna and her terrible end. When he did begin writing, however, despite his admiration for Pushkin’s artless immediacy (‘The guests arrived at the summer house’), he began with his ideas. And the main idea, the one he struggled with most bitterly and never could resolve, was that Anna’s suicide was the punishment for her adultery. It was from this struggle with himself that he made the poetry of his heroine.

In the first versions, Anna (variously called Tatiana, Anastasia, and Nana) is a rather fat and vulgar married woman, who shocks the guests at a party by her shameless conduct with a handsome young officer. She laughs and talks loudly, moves gracelessly, gestures improperly, is all but ugly - ‘a low forehead, small eyes, thick lips and a nose of a disgraceful shape ...’ Her husband (surnamed Stavrovich - from the Greek stavros, ‘cross’ - then Pushkin, and finally Karenin) is intelligent, gentle, humble, a true Christian, who will eventually surrender his wife to his rival, Gagin, the future Vronsky. In these sketches Tolstoy emphasized the rival’s handsomeness, youth and charm; at one point he even made him something of a poet. The focus of these primitive versions was entirely on the triangle of wife, husband and lover, the structure of the classic novel of adultery. Tolstoy planned until very late in his work to have the husband grant a divorce and the wife marry her lover. In the end, the renegades were to be rejected by society and find a welcome only among the nihilists. The whole other side of the novel, the story of Levin and Kitty, was absent from the early variants; there were no Shcherbatskys, the Oblonsky family barely appeared, and Levin, called Ordyntsev and then Lenin, was a minor character.

In the early versions, Tolstoy clearly sympathized with the saintly husband and despised the adulterous wife. As he worked on the novel, however, he gradually enlarged the figure of Anna morally and diminished the figure of the husband; the sinner grew in beauty and spontaneity, while the saint turned more and more hypocritical. The young officer also lost his youthful bloom and poetic sensibility, to become, in Nabokov’s description, ‘a blunt fellow with a mediocre mind’. But the most radical changes were the introduction of the Shcherbatskys - Kitty and her sister Dolly, married to Anna’s brother, Stiva Oblonsky - and the promotion of Levin to the role of co-protagonist. These additions enriched the thematic possibilities of the novel enormously, allowing for the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and family happiness played out among Stiva and Dolly, Anna and Karenin, Kitty and Vronsky, Anna and Vronsky, Kitty and Levin. The seven main characters create a dynamic imbalance, with one character always on the outside, moving between couples, uniting or dividing them, and shifting the scene of the action as they move - from Petersburg to Moscow, from Russia to Germany, from the capitals to the provinces. At some point each of the seven plays this role of shuttle. The novel they weave together goes far beyond the tale of adultery that Tolstoy began writing in the spring of 1873.

III

‘Levin is you, Lyova, minus the talent,’ Sophia Andreevna said to her husband after reading the first part of Anna Karenina. (And she added, ‘Levin is an impossible man!’) Indeed, though Tolstoy often lent features of his own character to his protagonists, Levin is his most complete self-portrait. He has the same social position as his creator, the same ‘wild’ nature, the same ideas and opinions, the same passion for hunting, the same almost physical love of the Russian peasant. He shares Tolstoy’s favourite method of criticism by feigned incomprehension, applied here to such matters as government bureaucracy, the provincial elections, and the latest fashions in music (the fullest development of this method is found in Tolstoy’s What Is Art?, published in 1898, particularly in his deadpan treatment of Wagner’s operas). Levin’s estate reproduces Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana, and his marriage to Kitty duplicates Tolstoy’s marriage to Sophia Andreevna in the minutest details - his unusual way of proposing, his turning over of his diaries, his compunction about confessing before the ceremony, his visit to the Shcherbatskys on the day of the wedding, even the forgotten shirt. The death of Levin’s brother Nikolai is drawn from the death of Tolstoy’s own brother Nikolai, also from consumption. In fact, most of the major characters in the novel and many of the minor ones, including the servants, had their counterparts in Tolstoy’s life. The only notable exceptions, interestingly enough, are Anna and Vronsky.