Anna

1
Anna

• Romantic heroine or life force woman?

2

• Sophie Marceau as Anna

3
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.)

4
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?

5
Her Surname

• Karenin suggests the verb karat to punish
• Subliminal echoes of Dostoevsky
• Cf. Vengeance is mine and I will repay another
  echo of Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment
• Echoed also in the scene of the seduction (2,
  X-XI, p. 149) the mention of an axe, a victims
  body
• The clunk of metal in Annas nightmares.
• The (unmentioned) wheel that will strike her.

6
Vronsky and Karenin

• Both are limited, living to a rigid code Vronsky
  the officer and Karenin the bureaucrat.
• Vronskys 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?

7
Question

• Is it Anna who is evil or the society that
  hypocritically condemns her?
• What destroys her divine vengeance or her
  hypocritical husbands refusal to divorce her and
  acknowledge her need to see her son?

8
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
• Tolstoys own adoration of her mens desire to
  view and possess
• Is she destroyed by this desire (and by the
  hatred this invokes in other women)?

9
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.

10
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.
• Levins 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.

11
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.

12
Forebodings of final blow

• Death of railway worker (One, xviii, p. 64)
• Annas dream on the train (One, xxix, pp.
  100-101)
• The snow-storm (pp. 101-102) echoes of Pushkins
  poem The Devils
• Vronskys dream (Four, ii, p. 355)
• Annas dream (Four, iii, pp. 361-362)
• Annas suicide (Seven, xxxi, p. 768)

13
Annas 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 Gods
  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.