Tolstoy's Life and the Making of the Novel
Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 into the landowning nobility at Yasnaya Polyana, the estate south of Moscow that remained his home for most of his life. He was orphaned young, educated erratically, and spent his twenties in a pattern of gambling, debauchery, and military service in the Caucasus and Crimea before the success of his early fiction established him as Russia's foremost living writer. In 1862 he married Sophia Andreyevna Bers, eighteen years his junior, and the early years of their marriage were by his own account the happiest of his life — the period that produced War and Peace (1869). By the early 1870s, however, Tolstoy was entering a prolonged spiritual crisis, a growing conviction that educated, comfortable life was morally indefensible. Anna Karenina was composed directly across this crisis: he began it in 1873 and published it in serial installments in Russky Vestnik between 1875 and 1877, completing it in 1877; the whole novel appeared as a book in 1878. The novel is therefore not a serene achievement but a work written under pressure, and the tension between domestic happiness and existential dread that Levin experiences in Parts Seven and Eight is inseparable from what Tolstoy was living through as he wrote.
Several elements of the novel draw on Tolstoy's direct experience. His management of Yasnaya Polyana, his experiments in cooperative farming, his philosophical arguments with his half-brother and with visiting intellectuals, and his genuine religious unbelief followed by a groping return to faith all pass almost undisguised into Levin's story. The mowing scene in Part Three, Chapter 4, the night on the haycock, and the spiritual illumination in Part Eight, Chapters 11 and 12, are among the most autobiographical passages in nineteenth-century fiction. Tolstoy also drew on a real incident for the novel's catastrophic opening image: in January 1872, a woman named Anna Stepanovna Pirogova, the mistress of a neighbor, threw herself under a freight train at Yasenki station after being abandoned. Tolstoy attended the post-mortem examination. The biographical source does not determine the meaning of Anna Karenina's death, but it explains the physical precision with which Tolstoy renders it.
Russia in the 1870s
The Russia of Anna Karenina is the Russia of the Great Reforms and their aftermath. Tsar Alexander II had emancipated the serfs in 1861, the most consequential domestic event in nineteenth-century Russian history. The emancipation is not dramatized in the novel — it lies just behind the action — but it saturates every conversation about agriculture. The debates at Sviazhsky's estate in Part Three, the arguments between Levin and the gray-whiskered landowner, and Levin's repeated failures to make his cooperative farming system work all reflect the genuine crisis facing the Russian nobility after 1861: freed from compulsory serf labor, landowners had to compete in a market economy for which most were unprepared, while the peasantry, though legally free, remained bound by communal land tenure and deeply resistant to the rationalized, European-style agriculture that progressive landlords like Levin wished to introduce.
The 1860s and 1870s also saw the rapid expansion of the Russian railway network, the growth of a commercial and financial class, and the rise of the intelligentsia and radical political movements. Tolstoy regards all of these with suspicion. The railway speculator Malthus in Part Six, the fashionable nihilism that destroyed Nikolay Levin, and the hollow progressive opinions of characters like Pestsov are all targets of the novel's quiet conservatism. Tolstoy does not argue for a return to serfdom, but he is deeply skeptical of imported European solutions — whether liberal, socialist, or positivist — applied to Russian conditions.
The novel's final section is shaped by a specific historical event: the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, fought ostensibly in defense of Slavic Christians under Ottoman rule in the Balkans. A wave of Pan-Slavic sentiment swept educated Russian society in 1876–77, producing a volunteer movement that sent thousands of Russians, including many officers, to fight alongside Serbian and Montenegrin forces before the Russian state formally declared war. Tolstoy was deeply hostile to this enthusiasm. The debate in Part Eight between Levin and Sergey Ivanovitch about whether private citizens can sanction killing in the name of a cause, and Levin's pointed use of the peasant Mihalitch to demonstrate that ordinary Russians had no independent opinion on the Slavic question, directly reflect Tolstoy's own public skepticism — a skepticism that caused the editor of Russky Vestnik, Mikhail Katkov, to refuse to publish the final installment of the novel because of its anti-war tone. Part Eight was published separately by Tolstoy himself in 1877.
The Social World of the Novel
The aristocratic and bureaucratic world Tolstoy depicts — the Petersburg ministries, the Moscow clubs, the provincial nobility elections, the opera boxes — is rendered from the inside by a man who had lived in it. The Orthodox wedding ceremony, the steeplechase at Krasnoe Selo, the zemstvo institutions, and the provincial elections are all accurately observed social realities of 1870s Russia, not invented settings. The divorce law that traps Anna is equally real: under Russian imperial law, divorce required proof of adultery established by witnesses, carried severe social penalties, and left the guilty party unable to remarry in the Orthodox Church. Karenin's consultation with the lawyer in Part Four, Chapter 5, and the subsequent involvement of the charlatan Landau in blocking the divorce in Part Seven, Chapters 21 and 22, reflect the genuine entanglement of ecclesiastical authority, bureaucratic procedure, and personal influence that made divorce practically impossible for most Russians.
Timeline of Key Real Events
- 1828 — Leo Tolstoy born at Yasnaya Polyana.
- 1861 — Emancipation of the serfs under Alexander II; the central social fact behind the novel's agricultural debates.
- 1862 — Tolstoy marries Sophia Andreyevna Bers.
- 1869 — War and Peace completed.
- 1872 — Anna Pirogova dies under a freight train at Yasenki; Tolstoy attends the post-mortem.
- 1873 — Tolstoy begins writing Anna Karenina.
- 1875–77 — Novel published in serial installments in Russky Vestnik.
- 1876–77 — Pan-Slavic volunteer movement; Russian public enthusiasm for the Serbian cause depicted in Part Eight.
- 1877–78 — Russo-Turkish War; Russia declares war on the Ottoman Empire in April 1877.
- 1877 — Final part refused by Russky Vestnik for its anti-war stance; Tolstoy publishes Part Eight independently.
- 1878 — Complete novel issued in book form.