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. 100-101)

• 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.