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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
As successive instalments of Anna Karenina appeared in The Russian Herald from 1875 onwards, the public greeted them with great excitement and enthusiasm. So, at least, Tolstoy's friend Strakhov reported to him: ‘Everyone is taking up your novel. It's incredible how many people are reading it. Only Gogol and Pushkin have been read like this’ (? Feb. 1877). Amongst critics there was once again considerable difference of opinion, owing in part to the fact that reviews were often dominated by the political views of the journal for which they were written; they were also written in response to quite short instalments of the text, which may further explain some of the more surprising incomprehension regarding the novel's overall artistic power. There were those who, doubtless with War and Peace in mind, thought this a poor sequel, its intellectual hero Levin ‘busy not with the freemasons or with Napoleon but with red skewbald cows’ (Solovyov, St Petersburg News, 1875, no. 65). Even Anna was said to be uninteresting, and Vronsky's unhappiness ‘boring … the reader expects descriptions of another reality from a writer as talented as Count Tolstoy’ (Ibid. no. 105). Another reviewer asked: ‘Is it really worth studying this high society which has been exhausted by our so-called upper-class authors and which Count Tolstoy himself does not regard at all favourably?’ (Chuyko, Voice, 1875, no. 105).
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