Editing Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy by Susanne Fusso;

Author:Susanne Fusso; [Fusso, Susanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609092252
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

The work that depicted a Russian family “in connection with Russian history” is War and Peace; and the “misanthropic grandson” is Liovin in Anna Karenina.15

No reactions by Tolstoy to either Avseenko’s articles or Dostoevsky’s ending to A Raw Youth have come down to us. But as publication of Anna Karenina resumed in early 1876, contemporary issues of the kind that were to be banned from the Non-Contemporary began to occupy a much more prominent place in the novel, most strikingly in the scene of the dinner party at Stiva Oblonsky’s (February 1876), in the extensive summary of Liovin’s book on agriculture (April 1876), and continuing to the novel’s controversial end. It is as if Tolstoy was demonstratively rejecting any idea that Anna Karenina is a historical novel, untouched by what Nikolai Semionovich calls “nostalgia for the present moment [toska po tekushchemu]” (Dostoevskii, PSS, 13:455). It is this engagement with current events that led to Tolstoy’s violent break with Katkov in the spring of 1877.

It is well known that Katkov refused to publish the eighth and final part of Anna Karenina, probably because of its harsh treatment of the movement of Russian volunteers traveling to Serbia to assist the “brother Slavs” in their struggle with the Ottomans, and that Tolstoy had to resort to publishing it as a separate brochure. What is less obvious is that part 8 of Anna Karenina is only the most blatant and explicit attack on some of Katkov’s most favored policies and programs to be found in it. In his extensive, illuminating work on Anna Karenina and its context in print culture, Todd has pointed out that the Russian Herald published articles on many of the current topics discussed by the characters in Anna Karenina.16 But the directedness of Tolstoy’s novelistic discussions against the policies of Katkov and the Russian Herald merits further study. The attack on the Russian volunteer movement in part 8 was not a sudden, unanticipated burst of negativity towards one of Katkov’s pet causes; it was only the last in a series of such attacks within the novel, and no doubt had the effect of a last straw. To understand the context of Katkov’s rejection of part 8, it will help to consider in some detail the ways in which Anna Karenina, both in its initial general conception and in its intensified engagement with current events beginning in February 1876, is permeated by opposition to the program of Katkov’s journal, that program that Katkov had been vigorously defending since the journal’s inception twenty years before.

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