Vronski case, however, the link is an oppressive and hideous nightmare with dreadful prophetic implications.
As some of you may have guessed, I am politely but firmly opposed to the Freudian interpretation of dreams with its stress on symbols which may have some reality in the Viennese doctor's rather drab and pedantic mind but do not necessarily have any in the minds of individuals unconditioned by modern psychoanalytics. Hence I am going to discuss the nightmare theme of our book, in terms of the book, in terms of Tolstoy's literary art. And this is what I plan to do : I shall go with my little lantern through those murky passages of the book where three phases of Anna's and Vronski's nightmare may be traced. First: I shall trace the formation of that nightmare from various parts and ingredients that are found in Anna's and Vronski's conscious life. Second: I shall discuss the dream itself as dreamed both by Anna and Vronski at a critical moment of their intertwined lives — and I shall show that although the ingredients of the twinned dream were not all the same with Anna and with Vronski, the result, the nightmare itself, is the same, although somewhat more vivid and detailed in Anna's case. And third: I shall show the connection between the nightmare and Anna's suicide, when she realizes that what the horrible little man in her dream was doing over the iron is what her sinful life has done to her soul—battering and destroying it—and that from the very beginning the idea of death was present in the background of her passion, in the wings of her love, and that now she will follow the direction of her dream and have a train, a thing of iron, destroy her body.
So let us start by studying the ingredients of the double nightmare, Anna's and Vronski's. What do I mean by the ingredients of a dream ? Let me make this quite clear. A dream is a show—a theatrical piece staged within the brain in a subdued light before a somewhat muddleheaded audience. The show is generally a very mediocre one, carelessly performed, with amateur actors and haphazard props and a wobbly backdrop. But what interests us for the moment about our dreams is that the actors and the props and the various parts of the setting are borrowed by the dream producer from our conscious life. A number of recent impressions and a few older ones are more or less carelessly and hastily mixed on the dim stage of our dreams. Now and then the waking mind discovers a pattern of sense in last night's dream; and if this pattern is very striking or somehow coincides with our conscious emotions at their deepest, then the dream may be held together and repeated, the show may run several times as it does in Anna's case.
What are the impressions a dream collects on its stage? They are obviously filched from our waking life, although twisted and combined into new shapes by the experimental producer, who is not necessarily an entertainer from Vienna. In Anna and Vronski's case the nightmare takes the form of a dreadful-looking little man, with a bedraggled beard, bending over a sack, groping in it for something, and talking in French—though he is a Russian proletarian in appearance—about having to beat iron. In order to understand Tolstoy's art in the matter, it is instructive to note the building up of the dream, the accumulation of the odds and ends of which that nightmare is going to consist—this building up starts at their first meeting when the railway worker is crushed to death. I propose to go through the passages where the impressions occur of which this common nightmare will be formed. I call these dream-building impressions the ingredients of the dream.
The recollection of the man killed by the backing train is at the bottom of the nightmare that pursues Anna and that Vronski (although with less detail) also sees. What were the main characteristics of that crushed man? First, he was all muffled up because of the frost and thus did not notice the backward lurch of the train that brought Anna to Vronski. This
'muffled up' business is illustrated before the accident actually happens by the following impressions: these are Vronski's impressions at the station as the train bringing Anna is about to come:
Through the frosty haze one could see railway workers in winter jackets and felt boots crossing the rails of the curving lines, and presently as the engine puffs in one could see the engine driver bowing in welcome—all muffled up and gray with frost.
He was a wretched, poor man, that crushed fellow, and he left a destitute family—hence a tattered wretch.
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Mark incidentally the following point: this miserable man is the first link between Vronski and Anna, since Anna knows that Vronski gave money for the man's family only to please her—that it was his first present to her— and that as a married woman she should not accept gifts from strange gentlemen.
He was crushed by a great weight of iron.
And here are some preliminary impressions, Vronski's impression as the train draws in: 'One could hear the rolling of some great weight.' The vibration of the station-platform is vividly described.
Now we shall follow up these images —muffled up, tattered man, battered by iron, through the rest of the book.
The 'muffled up' idea is followed up in the curious shifting sensations between sleep and consciousness that Anna experiences on her way back to Petersburg on the night train.
The muffled up conductor covered with snow on one side and the stove-heater whom she sees in her half- dream gnawing the wall with a sound as if something were torn apart, are nothing but the same crushed man in disguise—an emblem of something hidden, shameful, torn, broken, and painful at the bottom of her new-born passion for Vronski. And it is the muffled man who announces the stop at which she sees Vronski. The heavy iron idea is linked up with all this during these same scenes of her homeward journey. At that stop she sees the shadow of a bent man gliding as it were at her feet and testing the iron of the wheels with his hammer, and then she sees Vronski, who has followed her on the same train, standing near her on that station platform, and there is the clanging sound of a loose sheet of iron worried by the blizzard.
The characteristics of the crushed man have by now been amplified and are deeply engraved in her mind. And two new ideas have been added, in keeping with the muffled-up idea, the tattered element and the battered-by-iron element.
The tattered wretch is bending over something.
He is working at the iron wheels.
Anna's red bag is prepared by Tolstoy in chapter 28 of part one. It is described as 'toy-like' or 'tiny' but it will grow. When about to leave Dolly's house in Moscow for Petersburg, in a fit of bizarre tearfulness Anna bends her flushed face over the little bag in which she is putting a nightcap and some cambric handkerchiefs. She will open this red bag when she settles down in the railway car to take out a little pillow, an English novel and a paper-knife to cut it, and then the red bag is relinquished into the hands of her maid, who dozes beside her. This bag is the last object she sheds when she gets rid of her life four years and a half later (May 1876) by jumping under a train when this red bag, which she tries to slip off her wrist, delays her for a moment.
We now come to what was technically known as a woman's 'fall. ' From the ethical viewpoint, this scene is far removed from Flaubert, from Emma's euphoria and Rodolphe's cigar in that sunny little pinewood near Yonville. Through this episode runs a sustained ethical comparison of adultery in terms of a brutal murder—Anna's body, in this ethical image, is trampled upon and hacked to pieces by her lover, by her sin. She is the victim of some crushing force.
'That which for Vronski had been almost a whole year the one absorbing desire of his life . . . that which for Anna had been an impossible, awful, and even for that reason most entrancing dream of bliss, that desire had been fulfilled. He stood before her, pale, his lower jaw trembling. . . .
' 'Anna! Anna!' he kept saying in a trembling voice. . . . He felt what a murderer must feel, when he sees the body he has robbed of life. That body, robbed by him of life, was their love, their young love. . . . Shame at their spiritual nakedness 114
crushed her and him. But in spite of all the murderer's horror before the body of his victim, he must hack it to pieces, hide the body, must take advantage of what he has gained by murder.
'With fury, with passion, the murderer falls on the body, and drags it and hacks at it. And thus he covered her face and shoulders with kisses.' This is a further development of the death theme that started with the muffled-up guard being cut in two by the train that brought Anna to Moscow.
Now we are ready for the two dreams a year later. This is part four, chapter 2.
'When he got home, Vronski found there a note from Anna. She wrote, T am ill and unhappy. I cannot come
