Publishers Weekly
★ 06/22/2020
Blaisdell, an editor of Dover prose and poetry collections, offers a riveting account of Tolstoy’s composition of Anna Karenina. Blaisdell’s primary strength lies in going granular: he focuses intently on the years from late 1872 through early 1878, during which Tolstoy conceived, outlined, began, abandoned, picked up, abandoned again, and finally completed a masterpiece he disliked (an “abomination”). Throughout, Blaisdell uses letters, journals, and memoirs to show how Tolstoy’s own life story was woven into the fabric of Anna Karenina. Blaisdell argues that Tolstoy staved off his own suicidal thinkings by creating the suicidal Anna, and, among the male characters, identified as much with the worldly Oblonsky as the idealist Levin. Blaisdell finds vivid characters, too, among the people in Tolstoy’s life, notably including Tolstoy’s long-suffering and serially pregnant wife, Sofia, and his close friend Nikolai Strakhov, whose cheerleading was key in getting Anna Karenina across the finish line—and for whom Tolstoy, Blaisdell contends, had a repressed homoerotic attraction. Most of all, however, Tolstoy comes to life as a complex individual defying easy classification. Tolstoy’s fans will relish learning from, and, occasionally, arguing with Blaisdell’s opinions. This passionate book is almost impossible to put down. (Aug.)
Professor Michael Denner
"Despite scores of biographies in dozens of languages, we know remarkably little about Tolstoy in the 1870s, a decade when the writer conceived and wrote Anna Karenina, one of the world’s best-know and best-loved novels. In Creating Anna Karenina, Bob Blaisdell is the first to provide a granular, stop-action, magnifying-glass-level look at the creation of this astonishingly great book; Blaisdell conjures the novelist’s world, and painstakingly reveals the overlaps with the world of the novel. Tolstoy breathed in his world, and exhaled the novel."
The New Republic
In its study of the comings and goings of the Tolstoy household at the time of the novel’s composition, Creating Anna Karenina asks if one of the world’s greatest novels was in fact just as much a product of everyday minutia—like who stops by for a visit with what kind of gossip to tell—as it was the culmination of long-simmering ideas about morality and desire.
Ian Frazier
"That Creating Anna Karenina is a major contribution to Tolstoy scholarship makes it no less of a delight to read. Blaisdell's passion for the subject, and his always-surprising discoveries about the great man and his creation, kept me turning the pages unstoppably. This is a wonderful book."
Los Angeles Review of Books - Janet Fitch
Captivating. How did Anna Karenina evolve from a trivial high-society adulteress, whom Tolstoy despised, into one of the deepest, most sensitive tragic heroines in all of literature? What happened inside Tolstoy to condition this metamorphosis? Creating Anna Karenina is a worthy companion to the novel.
Boris Dralyuk
A fuller understanding of any work—and especially of its creation—requires the resurrection of its creator and his milieu. Blaisdell manages to do precisely that.
MARCH 2021 - AudioFile
Actress Gemma Dawson’s British training and experience shine in this account of how Tolstoy’s ANNA KARENINA was written. Blaisdell’s account gives perceptive insights on how, as in WAR AND PEACE, Tolstoy’s life is mirrored in the novel. Insights on Tolstoy’s family life, especially his relationship with his wife, Sonya, along with his interactions with his servants and his colleagues in the publishing community, are all given in detail. Tolstoy’s wife acted as his scribe, and she is probably not given as much credit as she should be for her influence on her husband’s work. Dawson’s English accent gives an academic tone to this production, and her pacing, inflection, and enunciation are all perfect. She makes this work a most rewarding experience. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2020-05-29
Anna Karenina affords an intimate look at Tolstoy's life.
For Blaisdell, a book critic and professor of English, Anna Kareninais nothing less than a masterpiece: “a holy book, a work of art” worthy of the intense attention he has devoted to it. Besides producing a meticulous close reading of the novel—summaries of chapters as they appeared in serial form, his responses as a reader, and his speculations about how Tolstoy’s contemporaries might have responded—Blaisdell draws on letters, memoirs, drafts, proofs, and Tolstoy’s various other writings to offer a detailed examination of the context of Tolstoy’s life during the four years of the novel’s creation. Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia, who “saved everything she could of what he wrote” and kept a disarmingly candid diary, proves central to Blaisdell’s sources. In addition to chronicling their life, she was closely involved in Tolstoy’s work, copying drafts and revisions. In appreciation for what she describes as her “zealous transcribing,” Tolstoy rewarded Sofia with a diamond and ruby ring. As Sofia portrays him, Tolstoy was a “distractible and fitful” writer, often occupied with matters other than his latest work of fiction: boisterous family life; various illnesses in their family; Sofia’s frequent pregnancies; business negotiations; the acquisition and care of horses; and especially pedagogy. Tolstoy was much concerned with teaching literacy, for which he established a school, wrote texts for students, and worked assiduously on tracts for teacher training. Among Tolstoy’s correspondents, letters to and from literary critic and philosopher Nikolai Strakhov are especially revealing. Strakhov, Blaisdell asserts convincingly, was Tolstoy’s “most important friend” as he faced the challenges of creating characters that came to seem more real to him than people he knew. “I have adopted her,” Tolstoy wrote of his doomed heroine. Anna, Blaisdell asserts, “is the character through whom Tolstoy dramatized and experienced his deepest terrors.” While some general readers may find the exegesis of the novel to be overkill, the author makes it personal and interesting enough to overcome that minor flaw.
A revelatory portrait of a towering writer.
