him up for another love, and did not regret the exchange till that love was satisfied. And with loathing she thought of what she meant by 'that love,' her carnal passion for Vronski.
She arrives at the station, and takes a local train for Obiralovka, the nearest station to Countess Vronski's estate. As she takes a seat in the railway car two things happen simultaneously. She hears some voices talking affected French and at the same moment she sees a hideous little man, with tangled hair and all covered with dirt, stooping toward the wheels of the railway carriage. With an unbearable shock of supernatural recognition she recalls the combination of her old nightmare, the hideous peasant hammering at some iron and muttering French words. The French—symbol of artificial life—and the tattered dwarf—symbol of her sin, filthy and soul-stunting sin —these two images come together in a fateful flash.
You will note that the coaches of this suburban train are of a different type from those of the night express between Moscow and Petersburg. In this suburban train, each carriage is much shorter and consists of five compartments. There is no corridor. Each compartment has a door on either side, so people get in and out, with a great slamming of five doors on each side of the coach. Since there is no corridor, the conductor, when he has to pass while the train is in motion, has to use a footboard on either side of each coach. A suburban train of this kind has a maximum speed of about thirty miles per hour.
She arrives twenty minutes later at Obiralovka and from a message brought by the servant discovers that Vronski is not willing to come at once—as she had pleaded with him to do. She walks along the platform, talking to her own tortured heart.
'Two maid-servants turned their heads, stared, and made some remarks about her dress. 'Real,' they said of the lace she was wearing. . . .A boy selling soft drinks stared at her. She walked further and further along the platform. Some ladies and children who had come to meet a gentleman in spectacles paused in their laughter and chatter and stared at her too. She quickened her pace and walked on to the end of the platform. A freight train was backing in. The platform vibrated. And all at once she thought of the man crushed [the day she had first met Vronski, more than four years ago, as that train of the past came back for her]. And she knew what she had to do. With a swift light motion she went down the steps that led from a water tank to the rails and stopped quite near the train that was lumbering by slowly. [She was now on the level of the tracks.] She looked at the lower part of the cars, at the screws and chains and the tall iron wheels of a car slowly moving by, and her eyes tried to find the middle between the front and back wheels to seize the moment when that middle point would be opposite her [the middle point, the entrance to death, the little archway]. 'Down there,' she said to herself, looking into the shadow of the car, at the coal dust on the sleepers, 'down there, in the very middle, and I will punish him, and escape from everyone and from myself.'
'She meant to fall under the wheels of the first car, as its middle part came level with her, but the little red bag [our old friend] which she tried to slip off her wrist delayed her, and it was too late, the middle entrance had already passed. She waited for the next car. It was like entering the water when bathing in a river, and she crossed herself. This familiar gesture brought back a flood of young memories, and suddenly the fog that had just been covering everything was torn apart, and she glimpsed all the brightness of her past life. But she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the approaching car, and exactly at the moment when the middle point between the wheels came opposite her she flung aside the red bag and, drawing her head in, fell on her hands under the car, and lightly, as though she would rise again at once, dropped to her knees. And at the same instant she was terrified. 'Where am I? What am I doing?' She tried to get up, to turn, but something huge and merciless struck her on the back, and dragged her along. She prayed, feeling it impossible to struggle.
[In a last vision] the little peasant muttering to himself was working at his iron, and the candle by which she had read the book of troubles, deceit, grief, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, illumed for her all that had been darkness, sputtered, began to dim and went out for ever.'
C H A R A C T E RIZ A T I ON
All was confusion in the Oblonski household, but all is order in Tolstoy's kingdom. A vivid array of people, the main characters of the novel, already start to exist for the reader in part one. Anna's curiously dual nature is already perceptible in the double role she plays at her first appearance when she restores, by means of tender tact and womanly wisdom, 119
harmony in a broken home but simultaneously acts as an evil enchantress by destroying a young girl's romance. With his fond sister's assistance quickly recovering from his despicable plight, the blond-whiskered, moist-eyed bon-vivant Oblonski is already—in his meetings with Lyovin and Vronski—acting the role of master of ceremonies which he will play in the novel. Through a series of deeply poetical images Tolstoy conveys the tenderness and fierceness of Lyovin's love for Kitty, which is at first unrequited, but is to attain later, in the course of the book, what was to Tolstoy the difficult and divine ideal of love, namely marriage and procreation. Lyovin's proposal comes at the wrong time and brings into special relief Kitty's infatuation with Vronski —a kind of sensuous awkwardness which adolescence will live down. Vronski, a strikingly handsome but somewhat stockily built fellow, very intelligent but devoid of talent, socially charming but individually rather mediocre, reveals in his behavior toward Kitty a streak of bland insensitivity which may easily grade into callousness and even brutality later on. And it will be noted by the amused reader that it is not any of the young men of the book, but dignified Karenin of the homely ears, who is the triumphant lover in part one; we approach here the moral of the tale: the Karenin marriage, lacking as it does true affinity between its partners, is as sinful as Anna's love affair is to be.
Here, too, in part one the dawning of Anna's tragic romance is fore-glimpsed; and in thematic introduction and contrast to her case, three different examples of adultery or cohabitation are given by Tolstoy: (1) Dolly, a faded woman of thirty-three with many children, happens to find an amorous billet addressed by her husband, Steve Oblonski, to a young French woman who some time ago had been the governess of their children; (2) Lyovin's brother Nikolay, a pitiful figure, lives with a kind-hearted albeit uncultured woman whom, in an ecstasy of social reform common to his time, he took from a low-class brothel of which she had been a passive inmate; (3) in the last chapter of part one Tolstoy clinches it with the Petritski-Baroness Shilton case of cheerful adultery in which no deceit and no family ties are involved.
These three illustrations of irregular amours, Oblonski's, Nikolay Lyovin's, and Petritski's, are traced in the margin of Anna's own ethical and emotional troubles. It will be marked that Anna's troubles start the minute she meets Vronski. Indeed, Tolstoy arranges matters in such a manner that the events in part one (which occur about a year before Anna actually becomes Vronski's mistress) foreshadow Anna's tragic destiny. With an artistic force and subtlety unknown to Russian letters before his day, Tolstoy introduces the theme of violent death simultaneously with that of violent passion in Vronski's and Anna's life: the fatal accident to a railway employee, coincident with their first meeting, becomes a grim and mysterious link between them through Vronski's quietly helping the dead man's family merely because Anna happens to think of it. Married ladies of fashion should not accept presents from strange gentlemen, but here is Vronski making Anna the gift, as it were, of that railway guard's death. And it will also be marked that this act of gallantry, this flash of connivance (with a chance death for chance subject), is something that Anna regards as shameful in retrospection, as if it were a first stage in her unfaithfulness to her husband, an event not to be mentioned either to Karenin or to the young girl Kitty who is in love with Vronski. And more tragically still, Anna feels all at once, as she and her brother are leaving the station, that the accident (coincident with her meeting Vronski and her coming to arrange the affairs of her adulterous brother) is an omen of evil. She is strangely upset. One passerby says to another that such an instantaneous death is also the easiest one: this Anna happens to overhear; this sinks into her mind ; this impression will breed.
Not only is unfaithful Oblonski's state of mind in the beginning of the book a grotesque parody of his sister's destiny, but another striking theme is foreglimpsed in the events of his morning—the theme of significant visions in sleep. In regard to Steve's fickle and carefree mind the dream he dreams has exactly the same value of characterization as has, in regard to Anna's deep and rich and tragic personality, a certain fateful nightmare she will be made to see later.
TOLSTOY'S TI MING
The chronology of
