Anna's Dream
As is often the case with dreams, the surface features of Anna Karenina’s terrifying nightmare are not particularly terrifying. She merely enters her room to find a hideous peasant in the corner, hunched over, working on a piece of metal and muttering to himself some indistinguishable words of French. But to the ugly peasant, the piece of metal, and the words he speaks there is annexed for the dreamer a completely extraneous and completely paralyzing sense of dread. Anna herself is convinced that the dream is a premonition of her death.
On what will prove to be the last day of her life, Anna decides to confront Vronsky at his mother’s estate where, on some pretext or other, he has gone to get away from her. Vronsky, of course, is the lover for whom she has utterly ruined herself and whom she now believes is deceiving her—a belief which, though unfounded, has succeeded both in driving him away and, in combination with the other consequences of her infidelity, such as her ostracism from polite society and the loss of her young son, of pushing her perilously close to breaking point. On a whim, while travelling to the train station in her carriage, she decides to stop at the Oblonsky’s to confide in Dolly. If you have become fond of Anna while reading the novel, you are anxious for this to happen. You feel that it is a final cry for help, a revolt against the dark fate which, in some final, besieged hinterland of light in her darkening consciousness, she still wishes to avoid. But Dolly is entertaining Kitty, a girl who had actually been engaged to Vronsky until he jilted her for Anna, and the visit is therefore short and awkward. It is only one of several strokes of fate (there is also a thimblerig of missed and misconstrued notes and telegrams) that together constitute a sort of evil teleology, or auctorial conspiracy, drawing Anna on towards her end. Back in her carriage, she decides, rather vaguely, that after confronting Vronsky, she will take a train to the first town and stay there—a feeble attempt to compromise on a much darker though still latent impulse to remove herself from the world entirely, and sadly, one that will not prevail. Sitting on the train that is about to carry her to the scene her death, Anna then sees, “a dirty, ugly peasant in a peaked cap” who passes by her window and bends down to the wheels of the carriage. “There is something familiar about that hideous peasant,” she thinks and, recalling her dream, she rushes for the door in a sudden access of superstitious terror. But the way is blocked by a husband and wife who are boarding the train (another countercheck by her determined fate) and when the conductor asks if she wishes to get off, Anna returns to her seat without answering him. The last whistle sounds. The train shunts forward. Anna sits with her hands in her lap. At the next station, she gets off and wanders absentmindedly across the platform and the final stroke of malevolent serendipity occurs—for when some ladies and children, laughing and talking loudly, fall silent and watch her as she passes, Anna quickens her pace to escape their gaze and reaches the end of the platform. And it is just here, delivered by the seemingly random concatenation of incidents to precisely this moment, at precisely this location, in precisely this state of mind, that Anna remembers the man who was run over by a train on the day she met Vronsky and knows what she must do. With a quick, light step, she goes down the stairs to the rails and stops close to an approaching train that, it now seems to the reader, has been waiting for her since the clockwork universe first whirred into life. She waits for the midpoint of the carriage to draw even with her, throws her handbag aside, and (with a feeling reminiscent of preparing to go into the water for a swim) draws her head down and falls on her hands under the carriage. At that same instant she is horrified by what she is doing. She wants to rise up or throw herself back but something huge and implacable pushes at her head and drags her over. “Lord forgive me!” she cries. And nearby, a little peasant, muttering to himself in French, is working over some iron. § The circumstances leading up to Anna's death invite us to imagine a slightly more sinister scenario. In Tolstoy’s novel, Anna heeds the first sign that her premonition is coming true: When she sees the peasant out the carriage window, she is spooked and tries to get off the train. But the way is blocked, and out of exhaustion, or resignation, or because the idea suddenly appears silly, she returns to her seat.[1] Given the impulsive character of her suicide, and the fatal role played by chance events right up until the final moment, it is reasonable to suppose that she would not have died if she had followed through on her first impulse to get off the train because she would have wandered absent-mindedly along a different platform, subject to a different set of external influences. Perhaps she would have sent another telegram to Vronsky, or taken a cab to his mother’s estate. The dream and the peasants, despite the terror they inspire, must therefore be considered a benevolent force in the novel because they attempt to warn her of her death and almost succeed in helping her avoid it. But what if Anna, spooked by the sight of the peasant from her dream through the carriage window, had in fact left the train? Rudely shoving her way past the boarding husband and wife, she wanders absent-mindedly across the alternative platform—but it is on this platform that she is stared at by strangers, to escape the gaze of which she quickens her pace; and it is down the steps at the end of this platform that she descends to the tracks on a sudden despairing impulse and stops close to an approaching train… Imagine, in other words, a premonition, a dream, that, rather than warning against the death it foreshadows, is itself the death that it foreshadows; a dream that hastens the dreamer to his or her death; an ironic and malevolent premonition which it is fatal to heed… One thinks of the death of Calchas who died of laughter when the day on which his death had been prophesied arrived without (so it seemed to him) mishap; or of Aeschylus who went into the middle of a field to avoid a prophecy that he would be killed by a falling object and was killed in that field to which he had fled when a tortoise dropped by an eagle struck him in the head. [1] Because a peasant, corresponding to the peasant from her dream in every way, is nearby at the moment of her death, the peasant she sees out the window of the carriage is a waking premonition of the fulfillment of her premomition; the second of three warnings, the third of which, as in fairy tales, always comes too late.
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