Ultimately, not a single character in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina manages to escape the shadows of Anna, the entitled tragic character. It is perhaps this inevitability within the novel that drove Tolstoy in the later years of his life to view the novel with indifference and loathing, and that which greatly troubled him during the years of its development. While a wide range of interpretations are feasibly drawn within Anna Karenina, there are nevertheless fundamental meditations that underly the text, and exist as loose nonverbal conceptualizations. Aside from Anna, I find all other interesting facets within the novel in relation mere variants of wishful thinking, throughout the text all of which and who are seen in Anna’s light.

Tolstoy drew from a deep dark truth of life and fate. His career drifted through many fluctuating passages, and when not concerned with domestic political affairs like public education, when projected far into his work, Tolstoy was compelled by the:

“‘Scaffolding’ [that] arose under his feet, and there appeared that ‘energy of delusion, an earthly, spontaneous energy which is impossible to invent,’ and without which ‘it is impossible to begin’” (Eikhenbaum, 126).

Tolstoy paints a picture of Anna, as if the “famous Italian artist” in Anna K., whose glance at once communicates a dark truth unsaid.

It is no wonder the state one finds Levin in the last book of Anna Karenina, who some recall as Tolstoy’s most autobiographical character.  Did Tolstoy feel the dispair of being left in Anna’s shadow? For what he had expressed of himself through her character, had uncovered the bottom of his soul all the base justifications of a life that stated through her actions. Does one understand something indescribable of Anna’s mind as they looked into the eyes of her grand portrait, or do they see her actions as just?

Aside from this internal world of darkness is her far discrepened life in the city of Petersburg, in her jaunts to Moscow, abroad with Vronsky, to the country, to their rural home not from from Petersburg, etc. Life follows Anna everywhere through the text; aside her reality, and aside from the conflicts she broods upon there – her strange masked world of inner comprehension, her peace through reconciliation – she is nothing, and thus vitually indisposed to her conditioned life.

And thus Tolstoy employes this obvious incongruence between Anna’s feelings and the confines of her life. Larklin’s film portarys Karenin with the appearance and utterences of a priest, begging and informing his wife of the violations commited by her adultressness. Anna begins to negate her husband and their empty matrimony after a trip to Moscow, to reconcile her brother’s affair. There in Moscow she meets a young military man, Vronsky, and finds in him a passion long stifled within her – an outlet for the stronger feelings of her deep soul.

Eikhenbaum – in his article Tolstoi in the Seventies – cites a poem of Tyutchev called “Oh, how we murderously love…” and explains how Tolstoy drew from Tyutchew and other contemporary poets, elaborating his prose through their fundamental emotions. The poem recalls a reader to Anna and Vronsky’s initial meeting at the train station.

The glance he catches in her eye, which instantly stole into it his fate – less a tragedy bourne unto him then to her “On her life it lay!”) – was a look of understanding, of comprehending everything within him and the world. Where they met and fell tragically in love, began for Anna a blending of lives.

In the realm of gods, where Anna’s dark nature would be openly acknowledged, as if among friends, her commitment to Vronsky would there be cited as both her decisive departure from and dedication to, her fatal flaw. Anna’s heart is won over by young Vronsky is empathetic of her nature and makes an outward reflection of her inward desires – though simultaneously she is condemned: having justified the long term decisions of her life by reasons of raw emotion over rationality, which Levin never manages to escape, and by which rational grounds he pursues marriage himself.

A most frightening scene from Larklin’s beautiful adaptation to film: Anna leaving Dolly, goes to play with the children in the echoes of their silent home. Having left Dolly to forgive and then forget forever, as it “must be,” in the film is felt the strikingly terrible undertones of evil and decit that are justified by her doing so. Anna opening and shutting the door from the hallway to playroom, the children gently swarm to her and outstrech their arms to her, all who sense not a drop of ill faculty. Anna transcends the forsight of children, which at a point in the novel Tolstoy describes with the great power of sensing the entire truth. She transcends by way of making new and strongly justifiying the endlessness of compromise in life.

Though her proceedings are wholly illogical among the dated society in which she lives, her emotional considerations encompass an open ended timespan that consider importance not to lie in the specific emotional details, but rather in the moral overarching framework of events and functionings of individual fates. One can read Anna as if the peasant from her own delusional dream, ranting absurd incoherent prophecies, bending iron and welding with time.