The year before, a lady named Anna who lived with Bíbikof, a neighbouring squire mentioned on a previous page, had committed suicide by throwing herself under a train, out of jealousy of Bíbikof's attentions to their governess. Tolstoy knew all the details of the affair, and had been present at the post-mortem. This supplied him with a theme; but it was not till March 1873, and then as it were by accident, that he actually began to write the book. One day a volume of Poúshkin happened to be lying open at the commencement of _A Fragment_, which begins with the words, 'The guests had arrived at the country house.' Tolstoy, noticing this, remarked to those present that these words, plunging at once into the midst of things, are a model of how a story should begin. Some one then laughingly suggested that he should begin a novel in that way; and Tolstoy at once started on _Anna Karénina_, the second sentence, and first narrative sentence, of which is, 'All was in confusion in the Oblónskys' house.' In May Tolstoy and his whole family went for a three months' visit to Samára, where he had recently purchased some more land. This summer he hired a Bashkír named Mouhamed Shah, who owned and brought with him a herd of milking mares. This Mouhamed Shah, or Románovitch as he was called in Russian, was polite, punctual, and dignified. He had a workman to drive the herd, and a wife (who retired behind a curtain in his _kotchévka_ when visitors came to see him) to wait upon him. In subsequent years this worthy man repeatedly resumed his engagement with the Tolstoys. This was the first year the whole estate had been ploughed up and sown. It was fortunate for the district that some one who had the ear of the public, happened to be there; for the crops in the whole neighbourhood failed utterly, and a famine ensued. So out-of-the-world were the people and so cut off from civilisation, that they might have suffered and died without the rest of Russia hearing anything about it, had not Tolstoy been at hand to make their plight known in good time by an appeal for help, which the Countess prompted him to draw up, and which appeared on 17th August, in Katkóf's paper, the _Moscow Gazette_. In this article on the Samára Famine, Tolstoy describes how the complete failure of the harvest, following as it did on two previous poor harvests, had brought nearly nine-tenths of the population to destitution and hunger. To ascertain the real state of things Tolstoy took an inventory at every tenth house in the village of Gavrílovka--the one nearest his estate; and of the twenty-three families so examined, all but one were found to be in debt, and none of them knew how they were to get through the winter. Most of the men had left home to look for work, but the harvest being bad everywhere, and so many people being in search of work, the price of labour had fallen to one-eighth of what it had previously been.