It is precisely this "spreading out," these digressions, this profusion of gratuitous ideas that an impatient judge might hold against Tolstoy. Some passages are definitely too long: the descriptions of the Levins' life in the country, the debates on serfdom and emancipation, die rut in which the peasants live and their unwillingness to change, the county justices of the peace. But the author's skill as a storyteller is so great that just when the reader is about to lose paticncc, he is caught up and delighted anew. Scenes such as the hay mowing, drenched in sunlight and pagan joy, or the race and the fall of the marc Froufrou, or Anna's secret meeting with her son, or the death of Nicholas, or the suicide in the little railway station, are marvels of precision, fullness of design and controlled emotion.
Here, as in War and Peace, it is accuracy of psychological observation combined with a felicitous choice of detail that carries conviction. Returning to St. Petersburg after first meeting Vronsky, Anna suddenly notices that her husband's ears are very big, and she is annoyed because his habit of cracking his knuckles seems to be growing worse. On her wedding day, Kitty's friends find her "much less pretty than usual" in her white dress. Under the strain of her false position after she has left her husband, Anna acquires a habit of screwing up her eyes slightly when she speaks. Oblonskv has a disarming smile that appears
at the most unexpected moments and wins people's sympathy. Looking at herself in a mirror on her way to the ball, Kitty is entranced by the black velvet rifolxm around her ncck. "She might entertain some doubt about the rest of her attire, but as for the velvet ribbon, no, decidedly, nothing could be said against that. She felt on her shoulders and arms that marble coolness she so loved."
But although the same descriptive process is used in Anna Karenina and War and Peace, the general tone of the two works is very different. After dealing with a historical conflict between peoples in War and Peace Tolstoy narrowed his field of vision in Anna Karenina, to concentrate on a few persons and forage into their darkest recesscs. What the picture loses in scope, it gains in depth. Hie cpic is no longer played out in the open air, but within, in the dark shadows of the conscience. rIlie battles are those of emotions, and they rage with the same incoherence and fury as the others.
Just as the outcomc of military encounters is not determined by the strategists, so the fate of the individual most often escapes his own will. Actions are determined by circumstance, by the circlcs in which people move, the friends around them, a thousand imponderables collected together under the name of fatality. The fatality that presides over Anna Karenina is not, as in War and Peace, the god of war, bloated by politics and reeking of carrion and gunpowder, but the breathless god of passion. There are a hundred times more corpses in War and Peace than in Anna Karenina, yet the first seems a broad, optimistic, sun-filled work, while Anna Karenina is enveloped in gray, troubled clouds. War and Peace is an act of faith in life, a poetic glorification of the couple, the family, patriarchal traditions, a hymn to the triumph of the Russian armies over the invader. Victory ennobles all the sacrifices made to obtain it, and the heroes emerge purified by the sufferings they have undergone in the defense of their native soil. None of this is true of Anna Karenina, where the air is weighted down with ominous dreams, forebodings, hallucinations and supernatural presences. The very first meeting between Vronsky and Anna at the Moscow railway station is marked by the death of a switchman, crushed beneath a train. After the accident, Oblonsky sees his sister's lips quivering and tears glittering in her eyes.
"What's the matter, Anna?" he asks.
And she answers:
"It's a bad omen."
Later, leaving the train, she is seized by a feeling of anguish and chaos as she steps out onto the platform in the snowstorm. After Vronsky's decisive words—"I am going to St. Petersburg to be where
you are!"—the night, the cold and noise and the fleeting silhouettes of the passengers all conspire to plunge the young woman into a world of fantasy. "The wind, as though it would overcome all obstacles, beat the snow from the carriage roofs and triumphantly brandished a sheet of metal it had ripped loose, and the locomotive's whistle emitted a demented howl. Anna became even more exhilarated by the tragic splendor of the storm: she had just heard the words her reason dreaded and her heart longed for."
A still more awesome menace is Anna's famous dream, in which a little muzhik in rags appears, bending over an iron plate and mumbling incomprehensible words in French, "and she sensed that he was performing some strange ritual over her with this piece of iron, and awoke drenched in cold sweat." She had this nightmare several times; Vronsky himself was affcctcd by it through a kind of telepathy; and the moment Anna throws herself under the wheels of the train, she sees, in a flash, "a little man, muttering to himself and tapping on the iron above her."
Another symboclass="underline" the death of the mare Froufrou. Through Vron- sky's fault, she falls and breaks her back during the steeplechase, prefiguring Anna's suicide, to which she was driven by her lover's indifference. Even the words Tolstoy chooses to describe the fallen mare and the fallen woman arc oddly similar. Here is Vronsky with Anna, who has finally yielded to him: "Pale, his lower jaw trembling, he urged her to be calm." And here he is beside his fatally wounded horse: "He was pale, his lower jaw trembling, his face transfigured by rage."
The evil omens become more clearly defined when Anna, returning to the hotel after her meeting with her son, removes from an album the photographs she had kept of him: "There was only one left, the best. . . . Her quick fingers, more nervous than ever, vainly tried to prize it out of the frame; there was no paper cutter nearby, so she poked at the stiff paper with another photograph she had picked up without looking, a portrait of Vronsky, taken in Rome." This incident strikes her as a warning from God: her lover driving out her son. . . .
Equally significant is the symbol of the candle that burns brighter just before going out. The first time she watchcs the wavering flame, Anna is seized by an irrational, morbid dread, and quickly, her heart pounding, lights another candle as though by doing so she might ward off the shadow of death. The sccond time is in the instant she loses consciousness under the wheels of the train: "And the candle by whose light she had read the book of life, full of conflict, trcachcry, sadness and honor, flared up more brightly than ever, lighting all the pages that
had remained in darkness before, and then sputtered, flickered and went out forever."
Anna is not the only person to be affcctcd by dread. Oblonsky's wife Dolly fears for her children's future; Princess Sherbatsky is beset by funereal presentiments at night; Levin's brother Nicholas is haunted by fear of what lies beyond life; the only chapter in the book that bears a title is Chapter XX of Part V: Death. All the characters' struggles to achieve happiness end in failure. Even Kitty and Levin are not exempt from the curse hanging over all couples who are bound by the flesh. In telling their story, the author tried to contrast the blessings that flow from conjugal love and the havoc caused by unsanctificd love; but even the bliss of family life proves to be only a snare and a delusion. The happily married Levin is equally consumed by doubt. All his efforts at social improvement fail, and he saves himself in extremis only by grasping at the primitive faith of the muzhik. All in all, the hell of forbidden passion in which Anna and Vronsky are consumed is scarcely less perilous than the heaven of family affection in which Kitty and Levin slowly decompose.