Lectures on Russian literature

out, but must see you. Come this evening. My husband goes to the Council at seven and will be there till ten.' He was struck by the strangeness of her inviting him despite her husband's insisting on her not receiving him; he decided to go.

'Vronski had that winter got his promotion, was now a colonel, had left the regimental quarters, and was living alone.

After having some lunch, he lay down on the sofa, and in five minutes memories of the disgusting scenes he had witnessed during the last few days [he had been attache to a foreign prince visiting Russia, who had been shown all the most lurid sides of gay rich life] got mixed up with the image of Anna and of a peasant [a trapper] who had played an important part in a certain bear-hunt, and Vronski fell asleep. He woke up in the dark [it was evening by now] trembling with horror, and made haste to light a candle. 'What was it? What? What was the dreadful thing I dreamed? Yes, yes; I think a little dirty man resembled that trapper with the disheveled beard, stooping down doing something; and all of a sudden he began saying some strange words in French. 'Yes, there was nothing else in the dream,' he said to himself. 'But why was it so awful?' He vividly recalled the peasant again and those incomprehensible French words the peasant had uttered, and a chill of horror ran down his spine.

'What nonsense!' thought Vronski, and glanced at his watch. [He was late for his visit to Anna. As he entered the house of his mistress he met Karenin coming out.] Vronski bowed, and Karenin, chewing his lips, lifted his hand to his hat and went on. Vronski saw him, without looking round, get into the carriage, the footman handed him the lap-robe and the opera-glass through the window, and the carriage drove off. Vronski went into the hall. His brows were scowling, and his eyes gleamed with a proud and angry light in them. . . .

'He was still in the hall when he caught the sound of her retreating footsteps. He knew she had been expecting him, had listened for him, and was now going back to the drawing-room. [He was late. The dream had delayed him.]

'No,' she cried, on seeing him, and at the first sound of her voice the tears came into her eyes. 'No; if things are to go on like this, it will happen much, much sooner.'

' 'What will happen, my dear?'

' 'What? I've been waiting in agony for an hour, two hours. . . . No, ... I can't quarrel with you. Of course you couldn't come.'

She laid her two hands on his shoulders, and looked a long while at him with a profound, passionate, and at the same time searching look. . . .

[Note that the first thing she says to him is connected vaguely with the idea that she will die.]

' 'A dream?' repeated Vronski, and instantly he recalled the peasant of his dream.

''Yes, a dream,' she said. 'It's a long while since I dreamed it. I dreamed that I ran into my bedroom, that I had to get something there, to find out something; you know how it is in dreams,' she said, her eyes wide with horror; 'and in the bedroom, in the corner, stood something.'

' 'Oh, what nonsense! How can you believe . . .'

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'But she would not let him interrupt her. What she was saying was too important to her.

' 'And the something turned round, and I saw it was a peasant with a disheveled beard, little, and dreadful- looking. I wanted to run away, but he bent down over a sack, and was fumbling there with his hands . . .' [She uses the same word—

disheveled. Vronski in his dream had not made out the sack or the words. She had.]

'She showed how he had moved his hands. There was terror in her face. And Vronski, remembering his dream, felt the same terror filling his soul.

' 'He was groping for something in the sack, and kept talking quickly, quickly, in French, you know: Il faut le battre, le fer, le broyer, le petrir [beat it, the iron, crush it into shape]. . . . And in my horror I tried to wake up, and woke up . . . but woke up in the dream. And I began asking myself what it meant. And Korney [a servant] said to me: 'In childbirth you'll die, ma'am, you'll die. . . .' And I woke up.' [It is not in childbirth she will die. She will die in soul birth, though, in faith birth.] . . .

'But all at once she stopped. The expression of her face changed instantly. Horror and excitement were suddenly replaced by a look of soft, solemn, blissful attention. He could not understand the meaning of the change. She was listening to the stirring of the new life within her.'

[Notice how the idea of death is associated with the idea

of childbirth. We should connect it with that of the

flickering light symbolizing Kitty's baby and with the light

Anna will see just before she dies. Death is soul birth for

Tolstoy.]

Now let us compare Anna's dream and Vronski's dream.

They are essentially the same of course and both are

founded in the long run on those initial railway

impressions a year and a half before—on the railway guard

crushed by a train. But in Vronski's case the initial tattered

wretch is replaced, or let us say acted, by a peasant, a

trapper, who had participated in a bear hunt. In Anna's

dream there are added impressions from her railway

journey to Petersburg— the conductor, the stove-tender. In

both dreams the hideous little peasant has a disheveled

beard, and a groping, fumbling manner—remnants of the

'muffled-up' idea. In both dreams he stoops over

something and mutters something in French—the French

patter they both used in speaking of everyday things in

what Tolstoy considered a sham world; but Vronski does

not catch the sense of those words; Anna does, and what

these French words contain is the idea of iron, of

something battered and crushed—and this something is

Nabokov's comparison of Anna's and Vronski's dreams.

she.

Anna's Last Day

The sequence and the events of Anna's last days in the middle of May 1876 in Moscow are quite clear.

Friday she and Vronski quarrelled, then made it up and decided to leave Moscow for Vronski's country estate in Central Russia on Monday or Tuesday, as she desired. Vronski had wished to go later because of some business he had to wind up but had then given in. (He was selling a horse, and also a house belonging to his mother.)

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Saturday a telegram comes from Oblonski who is in Petersburg, about 350 miles north of Moscow, telling them that there is very little chance that Karenin will grant Anna a divorce. Anna and Vronski have another quarrel that morning, and Vronski is away all day settling business matters.

On Sunday morning, the last day of her life, she was waked by a horrible nightmare, which had already recurred several times in her dreams, even before she and Vronski had become lovers. A little old man with a rumpled beard was doing something bent down over some iron, muttering meaningless French words, and she, as she always did in this nightmare (it was this that made the horror of it), felt that this peasant was taking no notice of her, but whatever his horrible business with iron, it was something performed over her. After seeing that hideous nightmare for the last time, Anna notices from her window Vronski in a brief pleasant conversation with a certain