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some relation to the hero’s fate, and whose possible interactions were too limited for his inventive gifts. It was the form for portraying ordinary domestic life, and Gogol had no interest in ordinary domestic life. Dostoevsky, who also referred to his work as ‘poetry’, transformed the novel into another sort of hybrid — the ‘novel-tragedy’ of some critics, the ‘polyphonic novel’ of others. Nikolai Leskov, an artist almost equal in stature to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, though less known outside Russia, made masterful use of the forms of the chronicle, the legend, the tale, the saint’s life, even the local anecdote and the newspaper article, but lost all his gifts when he turned to the novel. As for Chekhov, though he tried several times to write one, the novel was simply alien to his genius.

When Tolstoy called Anna Karenina his first novel, he was conceiving the form in the same restricted sense that Gogol found so uncongenial. He was deliberately embracing the conventional limits of the genre. This was to be a novel in excelsis, portraying a small group of main characters (in the final version there are seven, all related by birth or marriage), set in the present and dealing with the personal side of upper-class family and social life. Indeed, Anna Karenina introduces us to the most ordinary Russian aristocrats of the 1870s, concerned with the most ordinary issues of the day, behaving in the most ordinary ways, experiencing the most ordinary joys and sorrows. The one character who might seem out of the ordinary - Konstantin Levin - is also most ordinary, as Dostoevsky pointed out in his Diary of a Writer (February 1877, II, a): ‘But of Levins there are a great many in Russia, almost as many as Oblonskys.‘ The author’s task was to manoeuvre us, for some seven or eight hundred pages, through and among these ordinary people and their doings. It was not that Tolstoy was so charmed by ordinary life. In 1883, six years after finishing Anna Karenina, he would begin the second chapter of a famous novella with the words: ‘Ivan Ilyich’s life was most ordinary, and therefore most terrible.’ As with the novella, so with the novel: the polemic of Anna Karenina rests on the ordinariness of its characters.

Anna Karenina is polemical, first of all, in its genre. To publish such a book in the 1870s was an act of defiance, and Tolstoy meant it as one. By then the family novel was hopelessly out of fashion. The satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin noted at the time that the family, ‘that warm and cosy element ... which once gave the novel its content, has vanished from sight ... The novel of contemporary man finds its resolution in the street, on the public way, anywhere but in the home.’ The radical intelligentsia had been attacking the ‘institution’ of the family for more than a decade. Newspapers, pamphlets, ideological novel-tracts like N. G. Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, advocated sexual freedom, communal living and the communal raising of children. Questions of women’s education, women’s enfranchisement, the role of women in public life, were hotly debated in the press. On all these matters Tolstoy held rather conservative views. For him, marriage and childrearing were a woman’s essential tasks, and family happiness was the highest human ideal. As Nabokov observed in his lecture notes on Anna Karenina, ‘Tolstoy considers that two married people with children are tied together by divine law forever.’ An intentional anachronism, his novel was meant as a challenge, both artistic and ideological, to the ideas of the Russian nihilists.

There was always a provocative side to Tolstoy’s genius, and it was most often what spurred him to write. Anna Karenina is a tissue of polemics on all the questions then being discussed in aristocratic salons and the newspapers, with Konstantin Levin acting as spokesman for his creator. There are arguments with the aristocracy as well as with the nihilists on the ‘woman question’; with the conservative Slavophiles as well as with the radical populists on the question of ‘going to the people’ and the exact geographical