The Life of the Created Novel. From Avant-Text to the Context of Anna Karenina

What kind of relationships do the time of action in the work and the historical time of its creation enter into with each other in the novel "Anna Karenina"? How do specific events and incidents intrude into the fictional reality... of the novel? In what way do they change the author's original intention? In search of answers to these questions, historian M. Dolbilov examines the genesis of the text of Tolstoy's masterpiece in his book, reconstructing the evolution of a whole series of themes, character traits, motifs, allusions, scenes, plot elements, and even individual significant phrases. This approach allows us to see in "Anna Karenina" not so much an encyclopedia as a commentary on the life of Russia in the post-reform era — a commentary whose own inaccuracies and exaggerations raise new questions about historical reality.
Mikhail Dolbilov is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA.