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Anna Karenina
also: Анна Каренина
Leo Tolstoy's novel (serialized 1875-1877), which Chekhov says he occupied himself with reading the whole way on his overnight train journey to Petersburg -- his "dear and precious Anna" of this letter's joking address.
Reading notes
- The Duel §84 Anna Karenina
Tolstoy's novel of adultery and social ruin; Laevsky recalls its heroine's dislike of her husband's ears when he catalogs his own irritation at Nadezhda Fyodorovna.
- The Bride §49 Anna Karenina
The tragic heroine of Leo Tolstoy's 1875-1877 novel of the same name; picturing her is Nina Ivanovna's way of coping with her own sleepless nights.
- To the Chekhovs, 10 March 1887. Petersburg. §4 Anna Karenina
Tolstoy's novel, which Chekhov says occupied him for the whole overnight journey; the mock-tender address "my dear and precious Anna" plays on speaking of a book as if it were a travelling companion, a small joke flagged for the family with the author's own footnote in the source text.
- To A. S. Suvorin, 27 October 1888. Moscow. §5 In "Anna Karenina" and in "Onegin" not a single question is resolved
Tolstoy's novel, invoked alongside Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" as the letter's central illustration of Chekhov's aesthetic principle -- that the artist's duty is to pose questions correctly, not to resolve them.
- To A. S. Suvorin, 11 November 1888. Moscow. §13 In Rassokhin's catalogue there's a play called "Anna Karenina."
The play listed in Rassokhin's catalogue is presumably an unauthorized theatrical adaptation of Tolstoy's novel (already established in this corpus, first appearance), not a work by Tolstoy himself or otherwise connected to him; Chekhov offers the listing without comment, evidently as an item of curious or amusing theatrical trivia, and no further connection between this catalogue entry and Chekhov's own work should be assumed absent additional evidence.
- To A. S. Suvorin, 24 July 1891. Bogimovo. §4 pass off "Anna Karenina" as my own work
Tolstoy's novel, cited here as the paradigm case of an already-famous, ready-made masterpiece Chekhov could (absurdly, and only in an "immoral" hypothetical) claim as his own to solve his money troubles -- a joke, not a real proposal.