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 naturaclass="underline" 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 nightmare 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.