As schoolchildren, in literature lessons we often played the guessing game “what the author wanted to say”. Back then, finding out the “correct” answer was important for the most part in order to get a good grade. Now, when we have matured, it has become really interesting to understand what the classic really meant, why his characters behave this way and not otherwise.
Why Anna Karenina rushed under the train?
A combination of factors led to Anna’s tragic ending. The first is social isolation: they stopped communicating with Anna, condemning her for her connection with Vronsky, almost all people significant to her. She was left alone with her shame, pain at being separated from her son, anger at those who threw her out of their lives. The second is a disagreement with Alexei Vronsky. Jealousy and suspicion of Anna, on the one hand, and his desire to meet friends, to be free in desires and actions, on the other hand, heat up their relationship.
Society perceives Anna and Alexei differently: all doors are still open before him, and she is despised as a fallen woman. Chronic stress, loneliness, lack of social support reinforce the third factor — the heroine’s impulsiveness and emotionality. Unable to bear the heartache, the feeling of abandonment and uselessness, Anna dies.
Anna sacrificed everything for the sake of relations with Vronsky — in fact, she committed social suicide
American psychoanalyst Karl Menninger described the famous suicidal triad: the desire to kill, the desire to be killed, the desire to die. Anna probably felt rage against her husband, who refused to give her a divorce, and the representatives of high society destroying her with contempt, and this rage lay at the basis of the desire to kill.
Pain, anger, despair find no way out. Aggression is directed to the wrong address — and Anna either bullies Vronsky, or suffers, trying to adapt to life in the village. Aggression turns into auto-aggression: it transforms into a desire to be killed. In addition, Anna sacrificed everything for the sake of relations with Vronsky — in fact, she committed social suicide. A real desire to die arose in a moment of weakness, disbelief that Vronsky loved her. Three suicidal vectors converged at the point where Karenina’s life ended.
Could it be otherwise?
Undoubtedly. Many of Anna’s contemporaries sought divorce and remarried. She could continue trying to soften her ex-husband’s heart. The mother of Vronsky and the remaining friends could ask for help and do everything possible to legitimize the relationship with her lover.
Anna would not have been so painfully lonely if she had found the strength to forgive Vronsky for the offenses caused to her, real or imagined, and gave herself the right to make her own choice instead of aggravating the pain by mentally repeating to herself the reproaches of the world.
But the habitual way of life, which Anna suddenly lost, was, it seems, the only way she knew how to exist. To live, she lacked faith in the sincerity of the feelings of another, the ability to rely on a partner in a relationship, and the flexibility to rebuild her life.