em.

When "Anna Karenina" began to come out in the "Russky Vyestnik," [10]
long galley-proofs were posted to my father, and he looked them through
and corrected them.

At first the margins would be marked with the ordinary typographical
signs, letters omitted, marks of punctuation, etc.; then individual
words would be changed, and then whole sentences, till in the end the
proof-sheet would be reduced to a mass of patches quite black in places,
and it was quite impossible to send it back as it stood, because no
one but my mother could make head or tail of the tangle of conventional
signs, transpositions, and erasures.

My mother would sit up all night copying the whole thing out afresh.

In the morning there would lie the pages on her table, neatly piled
together, covered all over with her fine, clear handwriting, and
everything ready so that when "Lyovotchka" got up he could send the
proof-sheets off by post.

My father carried them off to his study to have "just one last look,"
and by the evening it would be just as bad again, the whole thing having
been rewritten and messed up.

"Sonya my dear, I am very sorry, but I've spoiled all your work again; I
promise I won't do it any more," he would say, showing her the passages
he had inked over with a guilty air. "We'll send them off to-morrow
without fail." But this to-morrow was often put off day by day for weeks
or months together.

"There's just one bit I want to look through again," my father would
say; but he would get carried away and recast the whole thing afresh.

There were even occasions when, after posting the proofs, he would
remember some particular words next day, and correct them by telegraph.
Several times, in consequence of these rewritings, the printing of the
novel in the "Russky Vyestnik" was interrupted, and sometimes it did not
come out for months together.

In the last part of "Anna Karenina" my father, in describing the end of
VRONSKY'S career, showed his disapproval of the volunteer movement and
the Panslavonic committees, and this led to a quarrel with Katkof.

I can remember how angry my father was when Katkof refused to print
those chapters as they stood, and asked him either to leave out part of
them or to soften them down, and finally returned the manuscript, and
printed a short note in his paper to say that after the death of the
heroine the novel was strictly speaking at an end; but that the author
had added an epilogue of two