Creating Anna Karenina

Starred review from June 15, 2020
Anna Karenina affords an intimate look at Tolstoy's life. For Blaisdell, a book critic and professor of English, Anna Karenina is nothing less than a masterpiece: "a holy book, a work of art" worthy of the intense attention he has devoted to it. Besides producing a meticulous close reading of the novel--summaries of chapters as they appeared in serial form, his responses as a reader, and his speculations about how Tolstoy's contemporaries might have responded--Blaisdell draws on letters, memoirs, drafts, proofs, and Tolstoy's various other writings to offer a detailed examination of the context of Tolstoy's life during the four years of the novel's creation. Tolstoy's wife, Sofia, who "saved everything she could of what he wrote" and kept a disarmingly candid diary, proves central to Blaisdell's sources. In addition to chronicling their life, she was closely involved in Tolstoy's work, copying drafts and revisions. In appreciation for what she describes as her "zealous transcribing," Tolstoy rewarded Sofia with a diamond and ruby ring. As Sofia portrays him, Tolstoy was a "distractible and fitful" writer, often occupied with matters other than his latest work of fiction: boisterous family life; various illnesses in their family; Sofia's frequent pregnancies; business negotiations; the acquisition and care of horses; and especially pedagogy. Tolstoy was much concerned with teaching literacy, for which he established a school, wrote texts for students, and worked assiduously on tracts for teacher training. Among Tolstoy's correspondents, letters to and from literary critic and philosopher Nikolai Strakhov are especially revealing. Strakhov, Blaisdell asserts convincingly, was Tolstoy's "most important friend" as he faced the challenges of creating characters that came to seem more real to him than people he knew. "I have adopted her," Tolstoy wrote of his doomed heroine. Anna, Blaisdell asserts, "is the character through whom Tolstoy dramatized and experienced his deepest terrors." While some general readers may find the exegesis of the novel to be overkill, the author makes it personal and interesting enough to overcome that minor flaw. A revelatory portrait of a towering writer.

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Starred review from June 22, 2020
Blaisdell, an editor of Dover prose and poetry collections, offers a riveting account of Tolstoy’s composition of Anna Karenina. Blaisdell’s primary strength lies in going granular: he focuses intently on the years from late 1872 through early 1878, during which Tolstoy conceived, outlined, began, abandoned, picked up, abandoned again, and finally completed a masterpiece he disliked (an “abomination”). Throughout, Blaisdell uses letters, journals, and memoirs to show how Tolstoy’s own life story was woven into the fabric of Anna Karenina. Blaisdell argues that Tolstoy staved off his own suicidal thinkings by creating the suicidal Anna, and, among the male characters, identified as much with the worldly Oblonsky as the idealist Levin. Blaisdell finds vivid characters, too, among the people in Tolstoy’s life, notably including Tolstoy’s long-suffering and serially pregnant wife, Sofia, and his close friend Nikolai Strakhov, whose cheerleading was key in getting Anna Karenina across the finish line—and for whom Tolstoy, Blaisdell contends, had a repressed homoerotic attraction. Most of all, however, Tolstoy comes to life as a complex individual defying easy classification. Tolstoy’s fans will relish learning from, and, occasionally, arguing with Blaisdell’s opinions. This passionate book is almost impossible to put down.