Anna
Romantic heroine – or life force
woman?
Sophie Marceau as Anna
Anna and Levin
• Like Levin, is caught in a struggle between her
sexuality and moral imperatives.
• “She is a tragic heroine, unlike the comic Stiva,
because she inwardly acknowledges the choice
between good and evil. This similarity between Anna
and Levin sets up the contrast that Fet [a poet and
friend of Tolstoy] observed. Both live morally: one
chooses evil and dies, while the other chooses good
and lives. This choice is possible only when both
freedom and moral law exist.” (Orwin 178 – my
italics.)
Her name
• Anna – associated with Russia, a symbolic name
• Do we have to do with a symbolic representation of
Russia itself?
• Note that she communicates with Vronsky in French,
reads English novels, follows English fashions, is
associated with St Petersburg, a “Westernized” city,
but dies when she is in Moscow
• Can her fate be read as the potential fate of Russia if
it does not turn away from imported, Western values?
Her Surname
• Karenin – suggests the verb karat’ – to punish
• Subliminal echoes of Dostoevsky
• Cf. “Vengeance is mine and I will repay”: another
echo of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment
• Echoed also in the scene of the seduction (2, X-XI, p.
149): the mention of an axe, a victim’s body
• The clunk of metal in Anna’s nightmares.
• The (unmentioned) wheel that will strike her.
Vronsky and Karenin
• Both are limited, living to a rigid code: Vronsky the
officer and Karenin the bureaucrat.
• Vronsky’s attempted suicide is his answer to his
dishonour (Nabokov)
• Karenin refuses to consider a duel: therefore Vronsky
turns the gun on himself.
• Karenin is not a man: Anna cannot love him.
• Why did he marry her? Is he at least partly
responsible for her fate?
• Is this a case of the evil of the arranged marriage?
Question
• Is it Anna who is evil – or the society that
hypocritically condemns her?
• What destroys her: divine vengeance or her
hypocritical husband’s refusal to divorce her
and acknowledge her need to see her son?
Beauty of the picture
• Question of painting:
- the portrait of Anna by Mikhailov that hangs in
the house in Moscow (7, IX, p. 696)
- Anna as an object of visual beauty, to be
adored by men – “gaze”
- Tolstoy’s own adoration of her: men’s desire to
view and possess
- Is she destroyed by this desire (and by the
hatred this invokes in other women)?
Suicide
• Suicide as a theme: Anna is slowly drawn to
self-destruction
• Anna kills the “Dolly” side of herself: no
feelings for Annie, her daughter.
• NB the novel contradicts statistical reality:
usually women attempt suicide, but men
commit it.
• Later Chekhov the doctor and clinician will
show the real pattern.
Is Anna evil?
• Tolstoy driven not by the demands of Romanticism to
portray a “tragic victim of passion,” but a clinical and
psychological observation of a woman trapped by her
need for physical fulfilment.
• Levin’s counterpart in her refusal to compromise, to
accept second best
• Unfortunate in that the person who arouses her
physically (Vronsky) is mediocre and self-focussed.
Does Tolstoy try to condemn her?
• Arguments that she is narcissistic.
• Looks in mirrors
• Her servant is Annushka, daughter Annie,
takes care of English girl Hannah
• Why are we left sympathizing with Anna and
liking her?
• Curious balance in Tolstoy between the
judgemental moralist and the objective,
dispassionate portrayer of human behaviour.
Forebodings of final blow
• Death of railway worker (One, xviii, p. 64)
• Anna’s dream on the train (One, xxix, pp. 100101)
• The snow-storm (pp. 101-102): echoes of
Pushkin’s poem “The Devils”
• Vronsky’s dream (Four, ii, p. 355)
• Anna’s dream (Four, iii, pp. 361-362)
• Anna’s suicide (Seven, xxxi, p. 768)
Anna’s final hours
(7, XXX pp. 762-768)
• Her agony of doubt and anger and jealousy
• Insatiable need for reassurance beyond anything
Vronsky can give
• The disintegration of a relationship based on sexual
passion faithfully rendered by the author
• Irrational nervous crisis: is this God’s judgement, or
the clinically carefully observed effect of hormonal
imbalance and depression?
• Tolstoy leaves us between a naturalistic explanation
and a moralistic condemnation of an adulteress.