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Initially the publisher Katkov did not want to pay the 10.000 roubles advance payment that Tolstoy had asked for, but Tolstoy managed to successfully play him out against his competitor Nekrasov, and then he promptly agreed. Tolstoy did not have Dostoevsky’s need to meet a deadline because of some impending disaster, and so he could afford to procrastinate, and the readers of The Russian Messenger were more than once left in suspense for months on end. Well, the boots may have been on, but they did not move very fast! Not meeting deadlines We can indeed picture Tolstoy doing just that. “It’s as if Tolstoy woke up in Pushkin-world and put on his own seven-league boots and started striding over the heads of all the other writers” writes Andrei Zorin about this moment in literary history. He enthusiastically wrote to his friend Strakhov* about this incident: “I automatically and unexpectedly thought up characters and events, not knowing myself why, or what would come next, and carried on.” Interestingly enough one of the things that struck him about Pushkin’s prose was his tendency to start a story in medias res, apparently forgetting that he had done so himself with War and Peace. Around that time he picked up a volume of Pushkin’s prose, read it for the umpteenth time and started to write Anna Karenina. The more research he did, the less he liked Peter. In March 1873 Tolstoy abandoned a novel about Peter I that he had started 33 times.

Tolstoy attended the autopsy and was very shaken by what he saw. She was the mistress and housekeeper of one of Tolstoy’s neighbours. On the 4th of January 1872 a young woman threw herself under a train. Most of the time during those four years Tolstoy was not writing, but procrastinating, avoiding, giving up, writing other things and often simply dealing with family affairs. The novel was first published in instalments in the literary magazine The Russian Messenger from 1875 to 1877*. Tolstoy was working on Anna Karenina from 1873 to 1877. But does that mean that he hated his own creation, as is often assumed? He even referred to it as a horrible thing, ‘vile’ and ‘disgusting’. It’s a well known fact that Tolstoy struggled with his novel Anna Karenina.