Quote 2
In
that brief glance Vronsky had time to notice the restrained animation
that played over her face and fluttered between her shining eyes
and the barely noticeable smile that curved her red lips. It was
as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed
itself beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now
in her smile.
These lines in Part One, Chapter 18,
detail the first fateful meeting between Anna and Vronsky at the
train station. Tolstoy’s description recalls the stereotype of “love
at first sight” popular in romance novels of both Tolstoy’s day
and our own time. In the case of Vronsky and Anna, they share much
more than a glance, as both are immediately captivated. Red lips
and shining eyes are traditional attributes of the romantic heroine.
The device of showing the male as the active looker and the female
as the object gazed at is similarly traditional in the romance novel.
Words like “fluttered” and “overflowed” might just as easily be
found in a trite love scene as in a serious work of literature.
Tolstoy, however, avoids the comic extremes of romance
writing by adding a mystical and philosophical dimension to Vronsky
and Anna’s meeting. The abundance that Anna displays is an excess
of “something,” a mysterious undefined entity that raises the moment into
the realm of spiritualism and religion, beyond language and rational
thought. Similarly, the “restrained animation” on Anna’s face foreshadows
the restraint—in the form of laws, social conventions, duties—that
she later fights against as she pursues her illicit love with Vronsky.
The description also emphasizes Anna’s “animation,” her life force,
with a word that in both Russian and English is derived from the
word for soul. Even in the first moment of Vronsky and Anna’s meeting
we sense that much more than a physical passion is at stake: their
interaction is a study of the soul and the indefinable spiritual
qualities that, for Tolstoy, make humans human.
