Coming Full Circle in Anna Karenina

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What happens when you cut yourself off from society, or are cut off by it? This

is the main question that Leo Tolstoy explores in Anna Karenina. Isolated from

society, Anna is destroyed by a conflict of wills. The desire of the individual is forced

to give way to society’s restrictions and requirements, represented in the image of the

railroad. Those who do not conform to society will ultimately face death, a fate, that

both Anna and Vronsky will not be able to outrun as a consequence of their illegitimate

relationship. Besides personifying the necessity of living within society’s realm of

expectations, the railroad serves a central role in the organizational plan of the novel. The

major railway scenes can be interpreted as pillars supporting the structure of the novel by

connecting the Anna/Vronsky storyline. It is at a railway station where Anna is

introduced to Vronsky, where he admits his love to her and where Anna makes her first

and last appearance. The recurrence of motifs and the final return to initial associations

within Anna Karenina serve to create the symmetrical architecture of the work.

The first mention of the railroad is in context of children and their games, which

serves as a premonition of the events to come. The children who are aware of the current

distraught household are playing with a box, representing a train. Stiva’s eldest girl is

heard telling off her younger sibling, telling him that “[she] told [him] not to put the

passengers on the roof”, instructing him to “[pick them up !” (Anna Karenina p.7).

The children’s games foreshadow not only the accident at the station but Anna’s suicide

at the conclusion of the novel. ...

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result of Anna’s willingness to abandon her home and husband to build her

happiness on other human being’s suffering. Anna’s action causes Kitty to suffer

heartbreak as she loses Vronsky, the man she loved, to Anna. In addition, Anna and

Vronsky’s relationship breaks up Anna and Karenin’s marriage and causes Serezha to

grow up without his mother’s presence. The wrath of society punishes Anna for her sin

by crushing her, metaphorically as well as literally.

Bibliography

Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Translated by Yuri Corrigan. London: Genius Translators Press, 1999.

Bayley, John. Tolstoy and the Novel. London, 1966.

Gustafson, Richard. Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger. Princeton, 1986.

Jahn, Gary. The Image of the Railroad in Anna Karenina. The Slavic and East European Journal Vol. 25, No. 2 (Summer, 1981), pp. 1-10

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