About Lev Tolstoy and his work "Anna Karenina" /part 3/

Anna is perish by the atrocities of life: "Everything is unrighteous, everything is a lie, everything is deceit, everything is evil!" Through the tragic image of the heroine, Tolstoy takes her sentence not only over the false sense of her sacrifice, but also over the public system. Thus, the moral-ethical concept that the author puts in the image of Anna acquires profound social meaning. Adding to Anna's intolerable personal and social situation and the inability and perhaps Vronsky's unwillingness to perceive her mental state, the writer brings the heroine to the logical end of her sufferings - suicide. Anna puts into action all her female charm, all her emotional and spiritual highness, to sustain with unwavering force the feelings and attention of Vronsky to her.

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She reads books, talks about sports, ie. subordinates his interests to Vronsky's interests, but everything is in vain. All this activity exhausts the heroine's spiritual potential to the point where she no longer notices that she does not love her child. This is actually an interesting psychological moment to which Tolstoy draws attention to revealing Anna's mental contradictions. Vronsky and Karenin's images are opposed, but not as positive and negative, by temperament, vitality, and emotionality. Vronsky, though a representative of the "golden youth", is not deprived of positive qualities. He is smart, educated and honest - something that puts him higher than secular society. The author reported that circumstances forced Vronski to resort to a lie and deception, "who were so hostile to his nature." In her first encounter with Anna Vronsky she was struck not so much by her exterior as though from her inner, spiritual beauty. On the other hand, Anna - this extraordinary woman, would not fall in love with Vronsky if he was a mediocre person. Notwithstanding these qualities, Vronsky does not appreciate the great sacrifice made by Karenina for his sake. And that's precisely his fault! At the end of the novel, however, our writer painted it as a tragic image of a hero who did not find happiness in life or rather lost it after Anna's suicide.

The characteristic, which is most common in contemporary studies of Karenin's image as a dry and lifeless person, a "conservative of political convictions unknown to the natural and normal manifestations of human sentiment," does not exhaust his essence. That is to say, half of his nature, which is revealed primarily through Anna's perceptions. "Only ambition, just a desire to succeed - that's all he's hiding his soul," Anna thought of him. This characteristic, which Anna makes to Karenin, is reinforced by some not very pleasant external features. It is about the "slow slim voice", the "still, cloudy eyes" or the ugly and big ears that Anna notices after her meeting with Vronsky. All this is true. But if Karenin was not a lifeless, bureaucratic person who would not stifle Anna's way of living, thinking, and behaving emotionally, he would not repel her: "I love! Can he love? ... He does not even know what love is, "she thinks. Karenin's stated mental qualities, though not subject to justification, do not completely exhaust his image. His positive qualities arose before Anna's death when, despite the insult, he had the power to forgive her and to love her second child, Vronsky's.

part 1

part 2