As usual we are all of us very busy. The winter is the working time for us proprietors, just as much as summer is for the peasants. Leo is still reading historical books of the time of Peter the Great, and is much interested in them. He notes down the characters of various people, their traits, as well as the way of life of the boyars and the peasants, and Peter's activity. He does not yet know what will come of it all, but it seems to me we shall have another prose poem like War and Peace; but of the time of Peter the Great.
1873
A few months later he definitely abandoned the project. His opinion of Peter the Great ran directly counter to the popular one, and he felt out of sympathy with the whole epoch. He declared there was nothing great about the personality or activity of Peter, whose qualities were all bad. His so-called reforms, far from aiming at the welfare of the people, aimed simply at his own personal advantage. He founded Petersburg because the boyars, who were influential and consequently dangerous to him, disapproved of the changes he made, and because he wished to be free to follow an immoral mode of life. The changes and reforms he introduced were borrowed from Saxony, where the laws were most cruel, and the morals most dissolute—all of which particularly pleased him. This, Tolstoy holds, explains Peter's friendship with the Elector of Saxony, who was among the most immoral of rulers. He also considers that Peter's intimacy with the pieman Ménshikof and with the Swiss deserter Lefort, is explained by the contempt in which Peter was held by all the boyars, among whom he could not find men willing to share his dissolute life. Most of all, Tolstoy was revolted by the murder of Peter's son Alexis, in which crime Tolstoy's own ancestor had played a very prominent part.
Almost simultaneously with the abandonment of the project to which he had devoted so much time and attention, Tolstoy, without any special preparation, began to write his second great novel, Anna Karénina.
The year before, a lady named Anna who lived with Bíbikof, a neighbouring squire mentioned on a previous page, had committed suicide by throwing herself under a train, out of jealousy of Bíbikof's attentions to their governess. Tolstoy knew all the details of the affair, and had been present at the post-mortem. This supplied him with a theme; but it was not till March 1873, and then as it were by accident, that he actually began to write the book. One day a volume of Poúshkin happened to be lying open at the commencement of A Fragment, which begins with the words, 'The guests had arrived at the country house.' Tolstoy, noticing this, remarked to those present that these words, plunging at once into the midst of things, are a model of how a story should begin. Some one then laughingly suggested that he should begin a novel in that way; and Tolstoy at once started on Anna Karénina, the second sentence, and first narrative sentence, of which is, 'All was in confusion in the Oblónskys' house.'
In May Tolstoy and his whole family went for a three months' visit to Samára, where he had recently purchased some more land.
This summer he hired a Bashkír named Mouhamed Shah, who owned and brought with him a herd of milking mares. This Mouhamed Shah, or Románovitch as he was called in Russian, was polite, punctual, and dignified. He had a workman to drive the herd, and a wife (who retired behind a curtain in his kotchévka when visitors came to see him) to wait upon him. In subsequent years this worthy man repeatedly resumed his engagement with the Tolstoys.
This was the first year the whole estate had been ploughed up and sown. It was fortunate for the district that some one who had the ear of the public, happened to be there; for the crops in the whole neighbourhood failed utterly, and a famine ensued. So out-of-the-world were the people and so cut off from civilisation, that they might have suffered and died without the rest of Russia hearing anything about it, had not Tolstoy been at hand to make their plight known in good time by an appeal for help, which the Countess prompted him to draw up, and which appeared on 17th August, in Katkóf's paper, the Moscow Gazette.
In this article on the Samára Famine, Tolstoy describes how the complete failure of the harvest, following as it did on two previous poor harvests, had brought nearly nine-tenths of the population to destitution and hunger.
To ascertain the real state of things Tolstoy took an inventory at every tenth house in the village of Gavrílovka—the one nearest his estate; and of the twenty-three families so examined, all but one were found to be in debt, and none of them knew how they were to get through the winter. Most of the men had left home to look for work, but the harvest being bad everywhere, and so many people being in search of work, the price of labour had fallen to one-eighth of what it had previously been.