Lectures on Russian literature

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Some time before Vronski met Anna, a young official in her husband's department had confessed his love to her and she had gaily relayed it to her husband; but now, from the very first look exchanged with Vronski at the ball, a fateful mystery enfolds her life. She says nothing to her sister-in-law about Vronski's giving a sum of money for the widow of the killed railway guard, an act which establishes, through death as it

  were, a kind of secret link between her and her future lover.

  And further, Vronski has called on the Shcherbatskis the

  evening before the ball at the exact moment when Anna

  remembers so vividly her child from whom she is separated

  for the few days she has spent in Moscow smoothing her

  brother's troubles. It is the fact of her having this beloved

  child which will later constantly interfere with her passion

  for Vron-ski.

  The scenes of the horse race in the middle chapters of part

  two contain all kinds of deliberate symbolic implications.

  Firstly there is the Karenin slant. In the pavilion at the races

  a military man, Karenin's social superior, a high-placed

  general or a member of the royal family, kids Karenin,

  saying—and you, you're not racing; upon which Karenin

  replies deferentially and ambiguously, "the race I am

  running is a harder one, " a phrase with a double meaning,

  since it could simply mean that a statesman's duties are

  more difficult than competitive sport, but also may hint at

  Karenin's delicate position as a betrayed husband who

  must conceal his plight and find a narrow course of action

  between his marriage and his career. And it is also to be

  marked that the breaking of the horse's back coincides

  with Anna's revealing her unfaithfulness to her husband.

  A far deeper emblematism is contained in Vronski's actions

  The final page in Nabokov's teaching copy of Anna Karenin,

  at that eventful horse race. In breaking Frou-Frou's back

  with his concluding comments.

  and in breaking Anna's life, Vronski is performing

  analogous acts. You will notice the same "lower jaw

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  trembling" repeated in both scenes: the scene of Anna's metaphysical fall when he is standing over her adulterous body, and the scene of Vronski's physical fall when he is standing over his dying horse. The tone of the whole chapter of the race with the building up of its pathetic climax is echoed in the chapters relating to Anna's suicide. Vronski's explosion of passionate anger—anger with his beautiful, helpless, delicate-necked mare whom he has killed by a false move, by letting himself down in the saddle at the wrong moment of the jump—is especially striking in contrast to the description that Tolstoy gives a few pages earlier, when Vronski is getting ready for the races—"he was always cool and self-controlled" —

  and then the terrific way he curses at the stricken mare.

  "Frou-Frou lay gasping before him, bending her head back and gazing at him with her exquisite eye. Still unable to realize what had happened, Vronski tugged at his mare's reins. Again she struggled like a fish, and making the saddle flaps creak, she freed her front legs but unable to lift her rump, she quivered all over and again fell on her side. With a face hideous with passion, his lower jaw trembling and his cheeks white, Vronski kicked her with his heel in the stomach and again fell to tugging at the rein. She did not stir, but thrusting her nose into the ground, she simply gazed at her master with her speaking eye.*

  "'A—a—a!' moaned Vronski, clutching at his head. 'Ah! what have I done! The race lost! And my fault! shameful, unpardonable! And this poor, lovely creature killed by me!'

  Anna almost died giving birth to Vronski's child.

  I shall not say much about Vronski's attempt to kill himself after the scene with Anna's husband at her bedside. It is not a satisfactory scene. Of course, Vronski's motives in shooting himself may be understood. The chief one was injured pride, since in the moral sense Anna's husband had shown himself, and had seemed to be, the better man. Anna herself had called her husband a saint. Vronski shoots himself much for the same reason as that for which an insulted gentleman of his day would have challenged the insulter to a duel, not to kill his man, but on the contrary to force him to fire at him, the insulted one. Exposing himself to the other man's forced fire would have wiped away the insult. If killed, Vronski would have been revenged by the other's remorse. If still alive, Vronski would have discharged his pistol in the air, sparing the other man's life and thus humiliating him. This is the basic idea of honor behind duels, although of course there have been cases when both men were out to kill each other. Unfortunately, Karenin would not have accepted a duel, and Vronski has to fight his duel with his own self, has to expose himself to his own fire. In other words, Vronski's attempt at suicide is a question of honor, a kind of hara-kiri as understood in Japan. From this general point of view of theoretic morals this chapter is all right.

  But it is not all right from the artistic viewpoint, from the point of view of the novel's structure. It is not really a necessary event in the novel; it interferes with the dream-death theme that runs through the book; it interferes technically with the beauty and freshness of Anna's suicide. If I am not mistaken, it seems to me that there is not a single retrospective reference to Vronski's attempted suicide in the chapter dealing with Anna's journey to her death. And this is not natural: Anna ought to have remembered it, somehow, in connection with her own fatal plans. Tolstoy as an artist felt, I am sure, that the Vronski suicide theme had a different tonality, a different tint and tone, was in a different key and style, and could not be linked up artistically with Anna's last thoughts.

  The Double Nightmare : A dream, a nightmare, a double nightmare plays an especially important part in the book. I say

  "double nightmare" because both Anna and Vronski see the same dream. (This monogrammatic interconnection of two individual brain-patterns is not unknown in so-called real life.) You will also mark that Anna and Vronski, in that flash of telepathy, undergo technically the same experience as Kitty and Lyovin do when reading each other's thoughts as they chalk initial letters on the green cloth of a card table. But in Kitty-Lyovin's case the brain-bridge is a light and luminous and

  *

  Mrs. Garnett translates, "gazed at her master with her speaking eyes," to which VN adds the note in his teaching copy, "A horse can't look at you with both eyes, Mrs. Garnett." Ed.

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  lovely structure leading towards vistas of tenderness and fond duties and profound bliss. In the Anna and 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 night
mare 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.

  The Red Bag

  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

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  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 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.]