Slavonic and East European Review, 99, 2, 2021 Reviews Blaisdell, Bob. Creating Anna Karenina: Tolstoy and the Birth of Literature’s Most Enigmatic Heroine. Pegasus Books, New York and London, 2020. xxiii + 389 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Works cited. Index. $29.95. Creating Anna Karenina is, as the title suggests, the biography of a book. After C. J. G. Turner’s 1993 A Karenina Companion (Waterloo, ON), it offers the second detailed English-language history of the inspiration, composition and reception of what Tolstoi considered his first genuine novel. Where Turner provided a textually focused (and certainly a more concise) overview of the novel’s production and reception, Bob Blaisdell ambitiously follows events in Tolstoi’s personal and emotional life as his novel developed. Thus Creating Anna Karenina is also a biography of Tolstoi and his family members during the period between 1872, when Lev Nikolaevich completed his children’s primer, the Azbuka, and December 1877, when the first full edition of Anna Karenina (including the controversial eighth chapter which Tolstoi’s editor Mikhail Katkov had refused to publish) went on sale in book form. This halfdecade was by any standards a challenging time. Three children were born to the Tolstois, and three died; after nine successive pregnancies, Sofia Tolstaia’s health declined; Tolstoi himself underwent successive mental and physical crises, while poor harvests wracked his new land acquisitions in Southern Russia. Once Anna Karenina was published, Tolstoi’s creative direction shifted radically towards self-critical nonfiction like the 1882 Confession. Small wonder that Tolstoi frequently procrastinated or excoriated his novel, calling it ‘repulsive and disgusting’. Creating Anna Karenina is also a close reading of the novel and its characters in order of the original instalments. Blaisdell’s core assertion is that the tasks of writing Anna Karenina, and of punishing its heroine, prevented Tolstoi from punishing himself. The fictional Anna’s spiral into self-harm alerted Tolstoi to his own suicidal urges. This is a conclusion already posited elsewhere by Gary Saul Morson; Blaisdell cites the passage in Confession where Tolstoi admitted his compulsion to hang or shoot himself. Anna’s death, he argues, is simultaneously a rehearsal and a rebuttal of self-murder: Tolstoi ‘wrote out his own suicide [in Anna]… and thereby prevented it from really happening’ (p. 366). Blaisdell’s admiration for the novel and his vigorous interpretations of its text, both praised by Boris Dralyuk in his brief foreword, richly repay in enthusiasm what this approach loses in objectivity. Repeatedly, Blaisdell pictures himself (and the reader) in the position of Tolstoi’s earliest audiences: whether the (apparently unimpressed) acquaintances whom Tolstoi invited to listen to a first draft of the first chapter in March 1874, or readers of the SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 336 Russian Herald, where the novel appeared serially between January 1875 and May 1877. ‘Can we imagine ourselves well-off educated Russians […]?’ Blaisdell challenges his readers, envisioning Tolstoi’s contemporaries ‘poring over’ or even ‘devouring’ the latest Anna Karenina segment in that ‘fat issue of the Russian Herald that has been delivered in the mail’ (p. 152). Speculative as these images are, Blaisdell manages to reinforce the materiality of Tolstoi’s literary community with abundant citations from contemporary and later critics, as well as the correspondence, diaries and memoirs of Tolstoi, Sofia Tolstaia and their children. He is not uncritical of these sources, noting Sofia’s tendency to rewrite history in her own favour, often (not without great provocation) implicitly critiquing her husband’s behaviour. Of Tolstoi himself, he comments insightfully that the writer ‘almost always eventually renounced not only others’ ideas but the best ideas he himself ever had’ (p. 48). The critic Nikolai Strakhov emerges as the single most dedicated and consistent supporter of Tolstoi (and of Anna Karenina), becoming the novel’s earliest cheerleader and its author’s unpaid amanuensis. It is hard not to warm to Strakhov when we are told ‘he could fall off his chair in amazement and insist that the great chapters he had just heard read to him were sublime — and he would be right’ (p. 113). Blaisdell rightly emphasizes Tolstoi’s lifelong devotion to pedagogical reform — even when this distracted him from writing...
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