Early Manuscripts of the Novel Anna Karenina

The article is devoted to the initial versions of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, the chronological sequence of which has become a subject of disagreement for researchers. N.K. Gudziy’s point of view is reflected in the accompanying articles and commentaries on his first publications of draft manuscripts of the novel, and above all in Volume 20 (1939) of the 90-volume Jubilee Edition of Leo Tolstoy’s Complete Works. A different approach to the first autographs of Anna Karenina is presented in the Description of the Manuscripts of Fiction by Leo Tolstoy (1955), as well as in V.A. Zhdanov’s monograph The Creative History of Anna Karenina (1957). The current stage of studying and commenting on the novel is associated with the preparation of the academic Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy in 100 volumes (published since 2000), in which the manuscripts will be presented in full for the first time. Variants of the beginning of Anna Karenina will be included in Volume 11 (series 2) of this edition. A new study of the novel’s early autographs begun by L.D. Gromova-Opulskaya and continued by the authors of this article, confirmed the correctness of N.K. Gudziy, who called the first attempt at the novel Anna Karenina a sketch entitled “A Brave Woman” (“Molodets-baba”). The main justification for this conclusion was, along with textual evidence, the comparison of Tolstoy’s text with the Pushkin passage “The guests were arriving at the country house...,” the artistic images and plot features of which determined the origin and formation of Tolstoy’s idea.

Alexander Pushkin · Anna Karenina · autographs · early drafts · Leo Tolstoy · literary genesis · manuscript versions · Classical Studies and Philology · Libraries, Manuscripts, and Books · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies