"Often we think of the bearded 19th-century greats as having somehow predated technology and its vicissitudes, but when you go back and look at the books, so much of it is there already. Tolstoy was really attuned to the distorting potentialities of the latest advances in telecommunication, which was, in his time, the telegraph."
She goes on to point out that in Anna Karenina, it's a misspelled telegram that announces her heroine's first appearance and later, a misinterpreted telegram from Vronsky that prompts her suicide: "Anna's life story is beaten, formed and malformed by the pressures of her time. So there's something fitting about Tolstoy's own novels getting malformed by technologies, albeit of a kind he couldn't have imagined."
Good article
