Vronsky leaves her. He goes to his mother, the natural enemy of his mistress. As soon as she is alone, Anna Karénina feels as though torn in every fibre of her being: he must come back; she will fall on her knees before him; she will humiliate herself like a naughty child. She has written him to return, but she has not the strength to wait for him; she hurries to meet him, and stops at an intermediate station, when by a telegram she informs him of her arrival. The train arrives. Only the count’s valet appears, bringing a note in which Vronsky dryly announces that he is coming back. The tone of the note is interpreted by Anna as a new proof of the death of a love which in her alone has grown with time and possession. She tells herself that there is no more reason to live, and a series of fatal circumstances unite at this critical moment to hasten her to her death. She wishes to escape the inquisitive eyes of the loiterers at the station, who are struck by her strange behavior: she leaves the platform, and steps down upon the track. She remembers the terrible accident which a train-hand had met with at Moscow on the very day of her first meeting with Vronsky. A sort of reflex action takes place in her brain: a freight-train is coming along; she goes to meet it.
“She looked under the cars, at the chains and the brake, and the high iron wheels; and she tried to estimate with her eye the distance between the fore and back wheels, and the moment when the middle would be in front of her.
“‘There,’ she said, looking at the shadow of the car thrown upon the black coal-dust which covered the sleepers, ‘there in the centre he will be punished, and I shall be delivered from it all,—and from myself.’
“Her little red travelling-bag caused her to lose the moment when she could throw herself under the wheels of the first car: she could not detach it from her arm. She awaited the second. A feeling like that she had experienced once, just before taking a dive in the river, came over her, and she made the sign of the cross. This familiar gesture called back to her soul memories of youth and childhood. Life, with its elusive joys, glowed for an instant before her, but she did not take her eyes from the car; and when the middle between the two wheels appeared, she threw away her red bag, drawing her head between her shoulders, and, with outstretched hands, threw herself on her knees under the car. She had time to feel afraid. ‘Where am I? What am I doing? Why?’ thought she, trying to draw back; but a great, inflexible mass struck her head, and threw her upon her back. ‘Lord, forgive me all!’ she murmured, feeling the struggle to be in vain. A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard. And the candle by which she read, as in a book, the fulfilment of her life’s work, of its deceptions, its grief, and its torment, flared up with greater brightness than she had ever known, revealing to her all that before was in darkness; then flickered, grew faint, and went out forever.”
Certainly when one reads this brutally frightful dénouement in the light of the motto of the book, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” one might be tempted to interpret Jesus’ word in its Judaic sense. Yet it would be a serious mistake. It is very certain that this sudden and tragic end in the novelist’s mind was meant for Anna Karénina’s deliverance: out of pity for her, he granted her the favor of death. Death alone could put an end to the torment of this soul, and this torment began with the sin. Here is the true punishment of guilty love: all the illusion which exalted the senses, as long as they are pastured in “love’s shadow,” as one of Shakspeare’s characters calls it, vanishes as soon as one is sated of love itself.
“What had been for Vronsky for nearly a year the only and absolute aim of his life, was for Anna a dream of happiness, all the more enchanting because it seemed to her unreal and terrible. It was like a dream. At last the waking came; and a new life began for her, with a sentiment of moral decadence. She felt the impossibility of expressing the shame, the horror, the joy, that were now her portion. Rather than put her feelings into idle and fleeting words, she preferred to keep silent. As time went on, words fit to express the complexity of her sensations still failed to come to her, and even her thoughts were incapable of translating the impressions of her heart. She hoped that calmness and peace would come to her, but they held aloof. Whenever she thought of the past, and thought of the future, and thought of her own fate, she was seized with fear, and tried to drive these thoughts away.
“‘By and by, by and by,’ she repeated, ‘when I am calmer.’
“On the other hand, when during sleep she lost all control of her imagination, her situation appeared in its frightful reality: almost every night she had the same dream. She dreamed that she was the wife both of Vronsky and of Alekséi Aleksandrovitch. And it seemed to her that Alekséi Aleksandrovitch kissed her hands, and said, weeping, ‘How happy we are now!’ And Alekséi Vronsky, he, also, was her husband. She was amazed that she could believe such a thing impossible; and she laughed when she seemed to explain to them that every thing would simplify itself, and that both would henceforth be satisfied and happy. But this dream weighed on her spirits like a nightmare, and she always awoke in a fright.”
That is the moral punishment. What keen psychology! What an admirable commentary, and what a powerful interpretation of the “surgit amari aliquid!” And it is not only her punishment as a woman which Tolstoï has described, it is also her punishment as a mother, when the separation, long postponed by the husband’s own will, becomes indispensable to the two paramours, both of whom have returned from the doors of death, and returned more morbidly, more hopelessly, in love with each other than ever before.
During the first part of this separation, Anna Karénina had wonted herself to think that it was her duty to give up all that had hitherto gone to make her happiness, and to leave in her husband’s hands as a compensation, such as it was, all the elements of her past happiness which she had exchanged for another kind. “I give up all that I love, all that I appreciate most in this world,—my son and my reputation!” She succeeds for some time in lulling, in deceiving, the maternal sentiment, in substituting in place of her affection for her son her tender and constant care for the daughter, the child of her liaison with Vronsky. But Vronsky is obliged suddenly to leave Italy where they have been together; he and Anna reach Petersburg; the mother is again in the neighborhood of the house where her son is living; she wishes to enter it, to see him; she begs for permission, and it is harshly refused; she determines to go to her husband’s at any cost, and make her way to the child by bribing the servants. The reader will not blame me for quoting this admirable scene.[53]