The Spontaneous Feeling of Text and Time: On Reading a Book by Mikhail Dolbilov The Life of a Novel in the Making. From the Avant-text to the Context of “Anna Karenina”, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie Publ., 2023. 703 p.

The review discusses historical and textological issues raised by Mikhail Dolbilov in his new book The Life of a Novel in the Making, dedicated to the process of the creation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The reviewer also analyzes, on the basis of the classical textological tradition, the novelty of the research method proposed by Dolbilov that prescripts not the reconstruction of the “last will of the author”, but the study of the “avant-text” of the novel as a set of “layers” of the text, each of which somehow manifests itself in the printed version of Anna Karenina, but at the same time retains autonomy and an independent artistic value. The reviewer examines the genesis and forms of expression of the antithesis of “spontaneous feeling” and “falsehood” in Tolstoy’s novel, which Dolbilov considers to be the central element of the narrative organisation of Anna Karenina. Finally, the reviewer makes comments on the textual interconnections between Tolstoy’s novel and E. Trollope’s Prime Minister, as well as the impact of E. von Hartmann’s theory of the unconscious on the plot organization and psychological portrayal of the characters in Tolstoy’s novel.