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.