“Thorough Bass”: on the History of a Musical Image in L. N. Tolstoy’s Novel Anna Karenina

The article deals with the history of a musical term, transformed by L. N. Tolstoy in his novel Anna Karenina into imagery employed for the conveying of ideas about running farmlands in Russia, which are so important for the author and his character Konstantin Levin. Having chosen a musical term to express his idea in the most accurate way, Tolstoy draws parallels between various narrative arcs and certain parts in a polyphonic composition where the main role is that of the “thorough bass” which is Levin’s impressions of the household of an old and wise peasant. Quite expectable of the writer, who loved and studied music, this artistic solution seemed to be so unusual to the editors preparing the publications of Anna Karenina during the entire 20th century that they considered it to be a misspell of a copying clerk or a type setter. As a result, a polysemic musical term “thorough bass” was replaced by “fundamental basis”. Looking up in the autographs does not give the answer to the question, which of these two options is correct, as manuscript collection has not been fully preserved. The only formal source which allows a textual critic to reconstruct the initial version is the text of the first publication of the novel in the magazine Russky Vestnik (1875–1877) corrected by Tolstoy himself in 1877, in accordance with which Anna Karenina is being published in academic Complete works of L.N. Tolstoy in 100 volumes.