29 March — Leo Tolstoy began work on the novel "Anna Karenina".
The writer’s wife and his eldest son, Sergey, recalled that that morning Tolstoy happened to glance through a volume of Pushkin and read the unfinished fragment "Guests were arriving at the dacha...". "That’s how one should write!" Tolstoy exclaimed.
That same evening, the writer brought his wife a handwritten sheet bearing the now-classic line: "Everything was in confusion in the Oblonsky household." Although in the final version of the novel it became the second, not the first, yielding its place to "all happy families"...
By that time, the writer had long been nurturing the idea of composing a novel about a "fallen woman" rejected by society.