We have one grief after another; you and Márya Petróvna will certainly be sorry for us, especially for Sónya. Our youngest son, ten months old, fell ill three weeks ago with the dreadful illness called 'water on the brain,' and after three weeks' terrible torture died three days ago, and we have buried him to-day. I feel it hard through my wife; but for her, who was nursing him herself, it is very hard.
In the same letter he mentions Anna Karénina, and immediately afterwards he makes an allusion to the first idea of his Confession, which was not actually written till 1879:
It pleases me very much that you praise Karénina and I hear that she gets praised; but assuredly never was writer so indifferent to his success as I am!
On the one hand what preoccupies me are the school affairs, and on the other, strange to say, the subject of a new work, which took possession of me just at the worst time of the boy's illness,—and that illness itself and death....
From Tourgénef I have received the translation, printed in the Temps, of my Two Hussars, and a letter written in the third person asking to be informed that I have received it, and saying that other stories are being translated by Madame Viardot and Tourgénef,—both of which were unnecessary. [Tolstoy means that they need neither have sent him the translation, nor informed him of what they were doing.]
The commencement of Anna Karénina did not find favour with Tourgénef, who on 14th March wrote from Paris to A. S. Souvórin, the novelist and proprietor of the Nóvoye Vrémya (New Times):
His [Tolstoy's] talent is quite extraordinary, but in Anna Karénina he, as one says here, a fait fausse route; one feels the influence of Moscow, Slavophil nobility, Orthodox old maids, his own isolation, and the absence of real artistic freedom. Part II is simply dull and shallow—that's what's the matter.
And writing in similar strains to Polónsky the poet, Tourgénef said:
Anna Karénina does not please me, though there are some truly splendid pages (the steeplechase, the mowing, and the hunt). But it is all sour: smells of Moscow, holy oil, old maidishness, Slavophilism, and the aristocracy, etc.
The cordiality of Tourgénef's appreciation of Tolstoy's writings in general, is sufficient guarantee that it was no personal prejudice that led him to speak in this way of a book which is one of Tolstoy's three most important novels, and which many people hold to be the best of them all. What really caused his harsh judgment, is a matter I will deal with later on.