94 pages • 3 hours read
Anna Karenina
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Symbols & Motifs
Hunting and Horses
This motif reinforces the theme of gender roles in the text. Levin does well when he hunts with those he trusts; his first shoot with Stiva is generally successful, while his trip with Veslovsky and Oblonsky only goes well when he hunts alone. Veslovsky, Levin’s adversary, is a poor driver who gets the cart stuck in the mud and overworks a horse; he is mocked for his generous size and less masculine demeanor and clothing choices. The narrator describes his “big, new boots that reached halfway up his fat haunches” (575), indicating that he is a dilettante and inactive. Levin and Stiva are drastically different, but the fact that both enjoy hunting helps establish their friendship. Levin’s social awkwardness does not extend to this conventionally masculine pursuit—he can perform a key social ritual for a man of his class.
Vronsky is a cavalry officer and skilled horseman. This is one of his areas of contrast with Karenin, which Karenin notes when he contemplates that a duel between the two of them would end likely in his death. At one point in the novel, Vronsky is preparing for a horse race with fellow officers, riding a sensitive mare. The mare is vulnerable, temperamental, and striking. Vronsky is devoted to her and invested in her care. But it is his mistake on the racecourse that results in her death. This episode takes place after Anna has revealed her pregnancy. Vronsky’s love for his horse and role in her death foreshadows Anna’s own suffering and death because of their affair.
Speech and Silence
Anna and Vronsky frequently misinterpret one another or leave things unsaid. This is particularly apparent when she informs him of her pregnancy. Anna first thinks to herself, “better not to tell, why test him” (187). Vronsky tries to persuade her that the pregnancy is a turning point to speak to Karenin, but Anna does not agree. In despair, she says, “I’ll become your mistress and ruin everything”; the narrator says, “she was going to say ‘my son’ but could not utter the word” (190). Anna cannot honestly speak of how motherhood divides her loyalties and makes her social position so much worse than his, and Vronsky does not ask.
Vronsky, too, relies on tacit understandings, especially after Anna is publicly understood to be his mistress but is not divorced. In Italy, Vronsky reflects that the people he and Anna can socially meet “pretended to understand fully the significance and meaning of the situation, to acknowledge it and even approve of it, but considered it inappropriate and unnecessary to explain it all” (461). Like Anna, Vronsky relies on silence for realities he cannot fully face.
Unlike Anna, Levin finds conversation particularly awkward—especially when in Moscow, he hardly knows how to speak to Kitty or what to say to her, and he upsets her when he tells her too directly that he has come to propose. She silently communicates her apology, while he communicates his despair. For Levin, silence is generative, even hopeful. The mere sight off Kitty’s face in the passing carriage, months later, reminds him that he cannot give up marriage. When the two are reunited at Oblonsky’s dinner party, Levin proposes by writing with chalk in coded language Kitty deciphers. When they do quarrel in words, Levin stays up to resolve the matter, like the night before Kitty goes into labor when he explains his visit to Anna. As part of his arguments about family and gender norms, Tolstoy use this motif to establish which couple he thinks are healthy for one another.
Trains and Railway Travel
Throughout the text, train travel advances the plot, connects the characters, and facilitates social relationships among the nobility. When the novel opens, Stiva is meeting Anna’s train in Moscow and Vronsky is meeting his mother’s. This is when Vronsky first realizes he is drawn to Anna’s beauty. But a worker dies on the tracks and Anna sees this as an “omen” (65). Levin travels to Moscow by train as well, initiating his romantic and personal quest. Levin meets Kitty again when he realizes she is leaving from a train station, and later emphasizes this memory to her when he is trying to explain he still loves her. Levin and Karenin’s brief meeting is also on a train, prior to their official meeting at the dinner party where Stiva is trying to understand Anna’s marriage and facilitate Levin’s.
Anna’s final journey to the railway station marks her mental deterioration, as she despises all around her and realizes that her affair with Vronsky was always doomed: She cannot live without his love or stop feeling the jealousy that he resents. She openly thinks of their first meeting and the watchman’s death on the tracks, taking inspiration from this memory and her nightmare as she comes to see death by suicide as her only escape.
At the novel’s end, Vronsky is also at a railway station, and meets Oblonsky there, as he did in Part One. Vronsky, too, is seeking a kind of death by suicide in battle. He tries to remember Anna as she was, as the woman he loved, but his surroundings make him haunted by memories of her death and his loss. While traveling to see the rest of the family, Levin’s brother Sergei also meets Vronsky at the station. It is during this visit that Levin is processing his religious epiphany and overcoming his own impulses for self-harm. His internal journey is punctuated briefly by meeting guests who have travelled to his home. Meeting Sergei again reminds Levin that his epiphany will not solve all of his problems, though it has given his life direction. Trains and travel reinforce the novel’s preoccupation with mortality and moral questions while illustrating moments of change in family and marriage arrangements.
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By Leo Tolstoy
