" '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 pétrir [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 young lady and her mother whom the old Countess Vronski from her suburban estate had asked to transmit to him some business papers to be signed in connection with the house she is selling. Without any reconciliation with Anna, Vronski leaves. First he drives to the racing stables where he keeps a horse that he is about to sell, then sends the carriage back for Anna's use in the day and proceeds by local train to his mother's estate in the suburbs in order to get her signature in connection with those papers that she has sent him. A first message, urging him not to leave her alone, is sent by Anna with coachman Michael to the stables; but Vronski has already left, the messenger and message come back: Vronski has already gone to the station to take that train to his mother's place a few miles out of town. Anna sends the same Michael with the same note to old Countess Vronski's place and simultaneously sends a telegram to that place, urging him to return at once. The abrupt telegram will come before the pathetic note comes.
In the afternoon around three she goes to Dolly Oblonski in her victoria; driven by coachman Theodore; and we shall analyze in a moment her thoughts on the way. First let us proceed with this scheme. Around six she drives home and finds an answer to her telegram—Vronski wires that he cannot be home before ten in the evening. Anna decides to take a suburban train and get off at the Obiralovka station near his mother's estate; she plans to leave the train there and get in touch with Vronski, and if he does not join her and come
back to town with her she plans to travel on, no matter
where, and never to see him again. The train leaves
Moscow city at eight p.m. and some twenty minutes later
she is at Obiralovka, the suburban station. Remember it is a
Sunday, and lots of people are around, and the impact of
various impressions, festive and coarse, mingles with her
dramatic meditations.
At Obiralovka, she is met by Michael, the coachman whom
she had sent with the message, and he brings a second
answer from Vronski saying again that he cannot return
before ten in the evening. Anna also learns from the
servant that the young lady, whom the old Countess
Vronski wishes her son to marry, is there with Vronski at
his mother's place. The situation assumes in her mind the
fiery colors of a devilish intrigue against her. It is then that
she decides to kill herself; she throws herself under an
oncoming freight train, on that sunny Sunday evening in
May 1876, forty-five years after Emma Bovary had died.
This is the pattern; now let us go back five hours earlier to
the afternoon of that Sunday and to some details of her
last day.
Nabokov's account of the events preceding Anna's decision to
commit suicide.
The Stream of Consciousness or Interior Monologue is a
method of expression which was invented by Tolstoy, a
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Russian, long before James Joyce, character's mind in its natural flow, now running across personal emotions and recollections and now
going underground and now as a concealed spring appearing from underground and reflecting various items of the outer world. It is a kind of record of a character's mind running on and on, switching from one image or idea to another without any comment or explanation on the part of the author. In Tolstoy the device is still in its rudimentary form, with the author giving some assistance to the reader but in James Joyce the thing will be carried to an extreme stage of objective record.
We return to Anna's last afternoon. Sunday in Moscow, May 1876. The weather has just cleared up after a morning drizzle.
The iron roofs, the sidewalks, the cobble-stones, the wheels, the leather, and the metal plates of carriages—everything glistens brightly in the May sunshine. It is three o'clock on Sunday in Moscow.
As Anna sat in the corner of the comfortable horse-driven carriage, a victoria, she ran over the events of the last days, recalling her quarrels with Vronski. She blamed herself for the humiliation to which she had lowered her soul. Then she fell to reading the signs of the stores. Now comes the device of stream of consciousness: "Office and warehouse. Dentist. Yes, I'll tell Dolly all about it. She does not like Vronski. I shall be ashamed but I'll tell her. She likes me. I'll follow her advice. I won't give in to him. Won't let him teach me. Filipov's bun shop. Somebody said they send their dough to Petersburg. The Moscow water is so good for it. Ah, those cold springs at Mytishchi and those pancakes! . . . Long long ago, I was seventeen, I had gone with my aunt to the monastery there, in a carriage, there was no railway yet there. Was that really me? Those red hands? Everything that seemed to me so wonderful and unattainable is now so worthless, and what I had then is out of my reach forever! Such humiliation. How proud and smug he will be when he gets my note begging him to come. But I'll show him, I'll show him. How awful that paint smells. Why is it they're always painting buildings? Dressmaker. Man bowing. He's Ann Ushka's husband. Our parasites. [Vronski had said that.] Our? Why our? [We have nothing in common now.] What's so awful is that one can't tear up the past. . . . What are those two girls smiling about? Love, most likely. They don't know how dreary it is, how degrading. The boulevard, the children. Three boys running, playing at horses. Seryozha!
[her little boy]. And I am losing everything and not getting him back."
After her inconclusive visit to Dolly, where incidentally she sees Kitty, she drives home. On the way home the stream of consciousness resumes its course. Her thoughts shuttle between the incidental (specific) and the dramatic (general). A fat ruddy gentleman takes her for an acquaintance, lifts his glossy top hat above his bald glossy head, then perceives his mistake. "He thought he knew me. Well, he knows me as little as anyone in the world knows me. I don't know my own self.
I only know my appetites, as the French say. Those children want that dirty icecream; this they do know. Ice-cream seller, bucket, takes the bucket off his head, wipes the sweat off his face with a towel. Same towel. We all want what is sweet: if not expensive candy, then cheap dirty ice-cream in the street, and Kitty's the same: if not Vronski then Lyovin; and we all hate each other, I, Kitty, Kitty me. Yes, that's the truth. [Now she is struck by the grotesque combination of a funny Russian name and the French word for hairdresser. Mark that the little Russian peasant in her nightmare muttered French words.]
Tyutkin, coiffeur. Je me fais coiffer par Tyutkin. [I go to Tyutkin for my hairdo. She improves upon the impression with this lame little joke.] I'll tell him that when he comes—she smiled. But immediately she remembered that now she had no one to tell anything amusing to." The stream of consciousness flows on. "And there is nothing amusing either. All is hateful.
Church bells. How carefully that merchant crosses himself. Slow. Afraid of letting something drop out of his inside pocket.
All those churches and ringing, all that humbug. Simply to conceal that we all hate each other like those cab-drivers there who are insulting each other."
With coachman Theodore driving, and footman Peter sitting beside him on the box, she drives to the station to take the train to Obiralovka. The stream of consciousness takes up again on the way to the station. "Yes, what was the last thing I thought of so clearly? Tyutkin hairdresser? No, not that. Yes, hatred, the one thing that holds men together. No use your going [mentally addressing some people in a cab, evidently going on an excursion to the country]. And the dog you are taking with you will be of no help. You can't get away from yourselves. Dead drunk factory worker, lolling head, he has found a quicker way. Count Vronski and I did not find that intoxication though we expected so much. . . .
"Beggar woman with a baby. She thinks I am sorry for her. Hate, torture. Schoolboys laughing. Seryozha! [Again the lyrical inward cry.] I thought I loved my child, used to be touched by my own tenderness, but I have lived without him, and I gave 118
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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
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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.
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