Thoughts on Literary Suicide

Part 1, Anna Karenina

Anna falling onto the tracks, from a 1914 Russian film version of the novel, now mostly lost.

Once upon a time I put a good deal of effort into writing a novel based on my great-grandfather’s suicide in1914. Eventually, I abandoned the novel mostly, I think, because I couldn’t figure out how to write the actual suicide. Also, in some crucial way, I couldn’t endorse his reasons, such as I knew them, for killing himself. Times have changed since 1914 (in a provincial village in Ontario). Exposure of sexual peccadilloes is no longer a good reason for killing yourself. Witness Donald Trump. Probably, it’s a personal failing that I could not just imagine how it felt at that time to be accused of sleeping with your neighbour’s wife. But no matter how I tried to gin myself up for the task, the act itself, and therefore my grandfather, always seemed weak and pusillanimous. I found this uninspiring to write about. Instead of a novel, I wrote an essay. You can read it here.

But I have always remained curious about how other writers handled their suicides. I have a long list and a short list and not much room here, so the short list will have to do: Anna’s suicide by jumping under a train in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Emma’s suicide by swallowing arsenic in Flaubert’s Madama Bovary, and Lily’s death by taking chloral hydrate in Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (there is some debate as to whether she actually commits suicide or dies of an accidental overdose). To these, I’ll add a fourth, Kirillov’s famous suicide by shooting himself in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (famous for its dumb-ass absurdity, which Albert Camus took as a keynote for his essay on absurdity The Myth of Sisyphus).

The first three are about women trapped between accepted social roles and their own impertinent desires, as they were seen at the time. Nowadays, we might just say they were trapped between accepted social roles in a male and class dominant hierarchy and their desire to be different, to be themselves. In novels this desire usually takes the form of inappropriate love choices. For many individuals of varying genders, classes, and races things have not changed much.

In Anna Karenina, first published in magazine instalments 1875-1877, the respectably married Anna falls in love with a sporty cavalry officer named Vronsky and leaves her dull, rigid husband. Almost at once, the doors of her cage start clanging shut. Anna’s husband won’t give her a divorce and refuses to let her take her young son. She and Vronsky have to leave town and embark on a seemingly endless pilgrimage through the spas and capitals of Europe (luckily, money is not a problem). Vronsky is mostly well-intentioned but self-impressed, shallow, and careless. Because they can’t marry, they can’t be accepted back into good society, nor does Anna have that formal assurance of Vronsky’s loyalty and love. There seems to be no resting place, no end point, for their relationship. Eventually, back in Russia she tries again for a divorce, which again is refused. Vronsky seems to be losing interest.

This was not speculation. She clearly saw this in that penetrating light which had revealed to her the meaning of life and human relations.

“My love keeps getting more passionate and selfish, but his keeps dying, and this is why we are drifting apart,” she continued to think. “There’s no help for it. For me everything is in him alone, and I need him to give himself to me entirely more and more. While he wants to get away from me more and more. It is as if we had been heading toward one another until we connected, and since then we have been moving in opposite directions irresistibly, and this cannot change.

Frantic and despairing, she sends Vronsky a telegram asking him to meet her when her train arrives, but he doesn’t show up. She’s surrounded by chattering, extravagant characters, drunken workmen, mismatched couples, shouting students, the clangor of shunting trains. Snippets of overheard conversation seem like messages meant for her.

“That is why man was given reason, to rid himself of what disturbs him,” the lady was saying in French, evidently pleased with her phrase and lisping.

These words seemed like an answer to Anna’s thought.

Finally, what seems like a chance memory clarifies her intentions. “Suddenly, recalling the man who was crushed the day she first met Vronsky, she realized what she had to do.” Of course, this is not a chance memory; it’s a repeated detail in Tolstoy’s grand novel design. Anna first met Vronsky, some 800 pages earlier on this same station platform. A peasant, a station employee, has been crushed beneath the wheels of Anna’s train as it pulled into the station. In effect, Vronsky and Anna meet and their first impressions of one another are consecrated over the peasant’s corpse.

…but as they were coming out of the car several men suddenly ran by with frightened faces. The stationmaster ran by as well, wearing a service cap of an unusual color. Something untoward had happened, evidently. The crowd from the train was running back.

“What? … What? … Where? … Jumped! … Crushed!” These words were heard among those passing. Stepan Arkadyevich¹ with his sister on his arm, also looking frightened, had gone back, and paused by the door to the car to avoid the crowd.

The ladies went into the car, while Vronsky and Stepan Arkadyevich followed the crowd to learn the details of the accident.

A guard, whether drunk or too muffled against the bitter frost, had failed to hear the train backing out and had been crushed.

Before Vronsky and Oblonsky could return, the ladies had learned these details from the butler.

Oblonsky and Vronsky had both seen the mangled corpse. Oblonsky was obviously suffering. He frowned and looked as if he were about to cry. “Oh, how horrible! Oh, Anna, if you had seen it! Oh, how horrible!” he kept repeating.

Vronsky said nothing; his handsome face was grave but utterly calm.

“Oh, if you had seen it, Countess,” said Stepan Arkadyevich. “And his wife is here. … It was horrible to see her. … She threw herself on the body. They say he was the sole provider for a large family. What a horror!”

“Can’t something be done for her?” said Madame Karenina in an agitated whisper.

Vronsky took one look at her and left the car.

Vronsky, heeding Anna and her words, has hurried off to bestow 200 rubles on the dead man’s wife, a gesture that cements his image in her mind. What also fixes itself in her mind, though unconsciously, is the unseen image of the peasant going under the clanging iron wheels of the train. Tolstoy’s construction of the image is canny. It’s both psychologically credible and structurally necessary. Just as she goes under the train wheels herself, she remembers it. Thus the dead peasant and his memory bookend Anna’s love affair, and, at the end, she is briefly aware of the dreadful fatedness of her trajectory.

Of course, Tolstoy repeats the peasant several other times in the course of the novel, reminding the attentive reader (the re-reader especially) of what has already happened while signaling that something else is going to happen. In literary works, patterns seek completion; that’s how they achieve meaning and also integrate themselves into the work.

Another train station, not long after their initial meeting:

Meanwhile, some people were running, chatting gaily, creaking across the boards of the platform and constantly opening and closing the big doors. The stooped shadow of a man slipped underfoot, and she heard the sound of a hammer on iron.

And this. In this iteration, the peasant has a sack. In later versions, he is rummaging in the sack. Anna, who dreams of him, even imitates this rummaging for a horrified Vronsky.

The dashing conductor, giving a whistle while still moving, jumped down, and behind him impatient passengers began getting off one by one: a Guards officer holding himself erect and looking around sternly; a restless merchant carrying a valise and smiling cheerfully; a peasant with a sack over his shoulder.

Later, we’re introduced to a series of nightmares. What’s fascinating is that we’re told that she had the nightmare before she met Vronsky, before the peasant died under the train. In a sense, the real peasant becomes part of a pre-existing dream-network in Anna’s mind. As if what happens was always foretold. But also notice the psychological aptness of the dream image, which as time goes on accretes new elements: old peasant, the beard, the iron, and finally “something horrible with the iron over her,” which is a precursor of the train wheels that will kill her.

In the morning, a terrible nightmare, which had been repeated in her dreams even before her liaison with Vronsky, came to her again and woke her up. A little old peasant with an unkempt beard was doing something, leaning over something iron, muttering meaningless French words, and she, as always in this nightmare (which is what made it so horrible), felt that this little peasant was paying no attention to her but was doing something horrible with the iron over her, something horrible over her. She woke up in a cold sweat.

But then, marvelous to behold, Vronsky has the same nightmare. She hasn’t told him about her nightmare. His is auto-generated and psychologically unrealistic; it’s an aesthetic dream, a dream ordained in the novel’s patterning.

He awoke in the darkness, trembling from terror, and hastily lit a candle. “What’s this? What? What terrible thing did I dream? Yes, yes. The peasant beater, I think, that short, filthy man with the rumpled beard, leaned over doing something and suddenly started speaking such strange words in French. Yes, that’s all I dreamed,” he told himself. “But why was it so awful?” Once again he vividly recalled the peasant and those incomprehensible French words this peasant had uttered, and horror ran down his spine like ice.

Then Anna dreams the dream again and finally tells Vronsky who remembers his own dream with horror but can offer only an anodyne macho reassurance. Nonsense, nonsense—what you always say to hysterical women. In her telling, Anna predicts her own death, though at this early stage she imagines it will come in childbirth. Nonetheless, she understand that her death will solve all their problems.

“It’s not going to be the way we’ve been thinking. I didn’t want to tell you this, but you’ve forced me. Soon, very soon, everything will disentangle itself, and all of us, all of us will calm down and be tormented no longer.”

“I don’t understand,” he said, understanding her.

“You asked when? Soon. And I won’t survive it. Don’t interrupt!” She hastened to finish. “I know this, and I know it for certain. I’m going to die, and I’m very happy that I’m going to die and free myself and you.”

Tears streamed from her eyes; he leaned over her hand and began kissing it, trying to conceal his agitation, which, he knew, had no foundation, but he could not overcome it.

“There, that’s it, and it’s better that way,” she said, pressing his hand with a powerful movement. “This is the one thing, the one thing we have left.”

He recovered and looked up.

“What nonsense! What idiotic nonsense you’re speaking!”

“No, it’s the truth.”

“What? What’s the truth?”

“That I’m going to die. I had a dream.”

“A dream?” Vronsky repeated, and he instantly recalled the peasant in his dream.

“Yes, a dream,” she said. “It was a long time ago that I had this dream. I dreamed that I was running into my bedroom, that I needed to get something there, find out something. You know how it is in a dream,” she said, opening her eyes wide in horror. “And in the bedroom, something was standing in the corner.”

“What nonsense! How can you believe …”

But she would not let herself be cut off. What she was saying was too important to her.

“That ‘something’ turned around, and I saw it was a peasant with a rumpled beard, and he was small and frightening. I wanted to run, but he leaned over a sack and rummaged through it.”

She imitated him rummaging in the sack. Horror was on her face. And Vronsky, recalling his own dream, felt the same horror that had filled his soul.

“He was rummaging around and saying something in French, very quickly, and you know, he was using French r’s: ‘Il faut le battre le fer, le boyer, le pétrir.’ And from terror I wanted to wake up, and I did, but when I woke up I was still dreaming, and I began asking myself what it meant, and Kornei told me, ‘Labor, you’re going to die in labor, labor, good mother.’ Then I woke up.”

“What nonsense, what nonsense!” said Vronsky, but he himself could feel the lack of conviction in his voice.

The effect of all this repetition, dream, and nightmare is to create an eerie and uncanny backdrop for Anna’s suicide. She doesn’t understand it, but is inexorably drawn to her own death.

What is truly awful in these scenes is Vronsky’s insistent and ambiguous denial. Earlier in the novel, Anna has watched from the stands as Vronsky rides his horse to death in a steeplechase. The scene is a gorgeously orchestrated set piece, an analogue to the novel as a whole. Vronsky’s carefree, passionate egomania, his romantic panache, is both charming and fatal, first drawing Anna in, destroying her old life, then gradually abandoning her as his interest wanes.

Pechorin, the protagonist of Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, is a model here. That novel was published in 1840 (revised in 1841). Tolstoy included it in a list of books that were exceptionally important to him. Pechorin is a dashing army officer and a compulsive seducer of women whom he has no intention of marrying. He also rides his horse to death.

Everything would have been saved had my horse’s strength lasted for another ten minutes! But suddenly, as we emerged from a small ravine at the end of the defile where there was a sharp turn, he crashed onto the ground. I nimbly jumped off, tried to make him get up, tagged at the bridle—in vain. A hardly audible moan escaped through his clenched teeth; a few minutes later he was dead.

Pechorin thinks of women and horses as comparable beings. “Breeding in women, as in horses, is a great thing: a discovery, the credit of which belongs to young France. It—that is to say, breeding, not young France—is chiefly to be detected in the gait, in the hands and feet; the nose, in particular, is of the greatest significance.”

The fascinating thing about Pechorin is his aptitude for self-knowledge; he’s supremely aware of what he’s doing. He likes drama and is easily bored (his boredom comes up over and over). But he’s also sensitive, astute at analyzing character, and his excitement, when it happens, always seems to inspire excitement in his victims. His enthusiasm for life, for diversion, is charming.

It’s just that his passions are all transitory. After killing his horse, he breaks down in tears, like an inconsolable child. But two paragraphs later he says that, well, it was all for the best and after his little bout of tears beside the dead horse he was able to get a good night’s sleep for a change.

I don’t mean to go on about Pechorin. But in Lermontov’s novel you see Anna Karenina from Vronsky’s point of view, so to speak, and we come to understand how Anna’s suicide was destined not just by her own choices but by the combination of Vronsky’s charms and his monumental self-regard, which destroys her.

And yet he loves her. He shares her dreams.

1. Stepan Arkadyevich Oblonsky, just to be clear, is Anna’s brother.