“There is less charm in life when one thinks of death, but there is more peace.”
-- Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina
It all began the day Anna Karenina stepped of the train and the rail worker stepped in front of it. The sight of the rail worker’s death causes quite the disruption in Anna’s seemingly peaceful life. The beautiful Anna is the dutiful, if not loving, wife of the respected, but much older Karenin, a public official. Anna has resigned herself to this life, but she has not truly devoted herself to it. Anna imagines she has come to Moscow on a goodwill mission to reconcile her sister-in-law, Dolly, to Anna’s unfaithful brother, Stiva. After seeing the untimely and disturbing death of the rail worker at the Moscow station, Anna perceives a bad omen, but she cannot understand it. Her peaceful life is about to be run over by a train of its own, a train of her own making.
Tolstoy’s study and critique of hypocrisy in his contemporary Russian society play a vital role in the novel. Anna’s undulating path begins with her own hypocritical choice to accept the advances of Count Alexei Vronsky even as she reconciles her brother to his wife after his own latest affair. Anna hypocritically refuses to halt Vronsky’s advances, allowing his attention to come between her and Karenin. She begins to compare him unfavorably to Vronsky, not Vronsky as he is, but Vronsky as she has come to create him.
