Mikhail Dolbilov’s study of the manuscripts for Anna Karenina represents a new stage in working with Lev Tolstoi’s archive, which has become much more than a codex for posthumous publications and verification of authoritative texts. Beginning with a 1933 edition of unpublished drafts, in which Isaak Nusinov observed that Tolstoi’s manuscripts were invaluable in revealing his creative process, numerous draft publications and studies have appeared, including volumes devoted to the drafts for major and minor works in two academic editions of the collected works, and skillful analysis of these in monographs by Evelina Zaidenshnur, V.A. Zhdanov, and Kathryn Feuer.

Zhdanov’s Creative History of “Anna Karenina,” the significant predecessor to Dolbilov’s work, is primarily a skillful juxtaposition of the drafts with the final version, demonstrating how Tolstoi perfected the novel through revision. Dolbilov does something different here, approaching his project as a work of genetic criticism, in which the draft is considered worthy of the same level of analysis as the published work. His title refers to the novel’s “avant-texte,” a term from genetic criticism referring to the manuscripts in their textual autonomy, liberated from subordination to the final text. Genetic criticism does not operate with a specific theoretical framework and incorporates many different critical approaches, including Dolbilov’s, based on close reading of the drafts in their historical context. When Tolstoi suddenly began writing Anna Karenina in 1873, he shifted his attention from the past (War and Peace and his planned novel about Peter I) to the present, describing contemporary everyday life and the establishment of a new social order. Dolbilov makes a thorough reading of the historical background the basis of his study, arguing that it is the foundation for the famous architecture of the novel. As an historian of the period, he is well-suited to the project. Where Zaidenshnur and Zhdanov worked with insider knowledge of Tolstoi’s creative practice gained through years of work at the Tolstoi museum, Dolbilov approaches from outside this world. He provides the most authoritative account of novel’s manuscripts to date, but also brings them into dialogue with collections at the Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) and other major archives, as well as memoirs, diaries, and letters from the time, and the drafts for Podrostok, Fedor Dostoevskii’s social novel from the same period.

Tolstoi wrote to Nikolai Strakhov in March 1873 that he had finished a draft of the novel in a week’s time and would be done with it in another two weeks, intending to publish it as a book, rather than serially. Instead, the writing process lengthened and was belabored, and Dolbilov systematically examines how the book became caught in its historical moment: how current events shaped the writing of the work over four years, and how the novel’s serialization affected the writing. His attention to this process motivates textological analysis not for the sake of refinement of Tolstoi’s biography but because a precise chronology of the writing process is important for the linkages he makes to events in Russian society at the time. His five chapters, divided into substantial subsections, alternate between readings of historical context and analysis of the way it is used in the writing of the novel. In both modes Dolbilov is exacting, drawing from close reading of the manuscripts and from his expertise in Russian imperial history, which is focused on government and military circles. Describing, for example, the steeple chase as a heterotopian space where the private life of the ruling circles came into public view, he then provides precise historical details as to how people were moving in that space at the time.

Although Dolbilov aligns his work with the French school, he also represents continuities within the Russian academy, rooted in strong corpus analysis and historical contextualization. This is a great example of cross-fertilization, as the French approach sanctioned his expansion of the historical framing and teleological potentials of the final text. The writing is lively, and the reading is fulfilling to the end, where Dolbilov returns to an idea he has established in the introduction: that Tolstoi’s journal editors, who created a workable pace for publication, and his tireless copyists, who allowed him to edit and re-edit the work, became “inseparable from the very motor of creation” (33). The result is a study that carves new space not only in the study of Tolstoi’s creative process and in Russian genetic criticism, but also for the position of the historian in literary studies.