In order to amuse old Aunt Tatyana Alexandrovna Ergolskii, I sent my son Serge, who was her godson, to read aloud to her Pushkin's _Tales of Byelkin_. She fell asleep while he was reading, and Serge went up to the nursery, leaving the book on a table in the drawing-room. Leo Nikolaevich took up the book and started to read a passage beginning with the words: "The guests were arriving at the country-house of Count L----"{ 30} "How good, how simple," said Leo Nikolaevich. "Straight to business. That's the way to write. Pushkin is my master."{ 31} That same evening Leo Nikolaevich began to write _Anna Karenina_ and read the opening chapter to me; after a short introduction about the families he had written: "Everything was in a muddle in the house of the Oblonskiis." That was on 19 March, 1872.
When he had written the first part of _Anna Karenina_ and had given me the second part to be copied, Leo Nikolaevich suddenly stopped working at it and became interested in education. In 1874 he wrote to Countess Alexandra Andreevna Tolstoy: "I am again deep in education, as I was fourteen years ago. I am writing a novel, but I cannot tear myself away from the living in order to describe imaginary people."{ 32}
However difficult I might find it to combine the copying with my maternal and other duties, when I had not got it, I missed it and waited impatiently for my husband's artistic work to begin again.
The conditions under which _Anna Karenina_ was written were much more difficult than those under which _War and Peace_ was written. Then we had undisturbed happiness, now there died in succession three of our children{ 33} and two aunts.{ 34} I became ill, grew thin, coughed blood, and suffered from pains in the back. Leo Nikolaevich became alarmed, and in Moscow, on the way to get kumiss, he consulted Professor Zakharin, who said: "It is not yet consumption, but her nerves may be shattered"; and he added reproachfully: "You have neglected her, though." He forbade me to teach the children or do the copying, and he prescribed a régime of silence. For a long time I got no better, especially as we had to spend the summer on the Samara steppes in very inconvenient surroundings and living on kumiss, which I could not drink. Miserable and ill, I wrote to my sister: "Levochka's novel is published and is said to be a great success. In me it arouses strange feelings; there is so much sorrow in our house, and we are everywhere made so much of."