Leo Tolstoy, writing Anna Karenina, experienced his characters as autonomous, alternate personalities, who were not under his control.

In what “has often been cited by scholars as Tolstoy’s aesthetic credo…He gave an example: the scene of Vronsky’s suicide…When Tolstoy was revising this chapter, Vronsky, ‘completely unexpectedly’ for him, the author, ‘but quite decidedly, proceeded to shoot himself ’…Tolstoy then leveled his anger at literary critics: ‘And if critics now already understand what I want to say…then I congratulate them and can confidently assure them that they know more than I do.’

“Twentieth-century literary critics tend to read this much-quoted formula as a claim of art’s superiority over other forms of expression, affirming art’s ability—and Tolstoy’s—to produce inexhaustible meaning, perhaps to express the inexpressible. But at precisely the time Tolstoy coined this formula, he was considering retreating from literature and abandoning Anna Karenina. In this context, we may read Tolstoy’s words somewhat differently: as an admission of art’s inherent inability to deliver a clear message and a complaint about the author’s lack of control over his text” (1, pp. 44-45).

1. Irina Paperno. “Who, What Am I?”: Tolstoy’s Struggles to Narrate the Self. Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2014.