(It’s easier to understand why little Anya doesn’t even cross Anna’s mind before she throws herself onto the tracks: the little girl never held a place in her heart. But her adored Sergei, whom she said she had given all the love she was capable of giving? She conceived her daughter and gave birth to her, but her second child was a stranger to her. It’s not so hard to comprehend when we remember that she didn’t want to have her; she was completely in love with Vronsky, and the pregnancy was unwanted, a biological accident. She herself said that she had already given everything she had to give her offspring to Sergei; the well had run dry. It wasn’t that she was hard-hearted—she had saved the family of the drunk English gardener who, when he died, left them destitute; she took his orphaned daughter in and gave her lessons so she could read and write proper Russian. She provided for those helpless English people, but she didn’t think about them, either, when she threw herself onto the tracks. She thought about Vronsky. Only Vronsky. She killed herself to get back at Vronsky. She followed through on the threat she had made hours earlier, but not just for revenge. She wanted to punish Vronsky, but she also wanted to run away, from herself more than anyone, as the author made perfectly clear…. Compared with Karenina’s final step, her love affair with Vronsky is a brief, comic interlude, the intermission of a frivolous dramatist. The Countess Vronskaya wanted to tear her son away from the whirlwind—the tornado—that was Anna’s suicide. She proudly accompanied him to the train station from whence he would depart for the war. She buried him with pride, and though he was no hero, she arranged for him to be decorated. “He gave his life to liberate our brothers from Ottoman oppression.” Someone at the funeral had the nerve to say that if Vronsky hadn’t died, the Russian volunteers would have taken Constantinople. For Anna, on the other hand, there was no mass, no headstone, no pardon. Vronsky was martyred for two causes: the Slavs and evil womankind. Anna had already sacrificed herself before she died—“A woman who can’t be happy and prioritize her child’s honor is heartless.” It’s quite possible Anna’s soul still wanders the earth. Her soul doesn’t deserve eternal rest, but how would we know? We’re not mediums, we don’t play Ouija, we’re not concerned with the fate of ghosts but with those who walk the face of the earth, for better or worse, in the land of the living.)