It is a marvellous place, quite unintelligible to the uninitiated, and yet daily used by thousands who only know that when they get there, they are to do what someone tells them. The space occupied by the convergent rails seems to be sufficient for a large farm … Here and there and around there is ever a wilderness of waggons, some loaded, some empty, some smoking with close-packed oxen, and others furlongs in length black with coals, which look as though they had been stranded there by chance, and were never destined to get again into the right path of traffic. Not a minute passes without a train going here or there, some rushing by without noticing Tenway in the least, crashing through like flashes of substantial lightning, and others stopping, disgorging and taking up passengers by the hundreds.
Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister
The idea of coming to a crossroads is a commonplace. For most of us, a crossroads really is something that we pass through without too much thought. And a junction is simply a junction. If you have a satnav, or trainline app, you know where to go, although you can be scuppered by the confusion of escalators at Reading and the difficulty of establishing exactly which train you need to get to find your way to Paddington. If you don’t find out in time, you might be a little late. It’s usually not fatal. But there are those for whom a junction really is a matter of life and death.
Anna’s life ends too soon, but not soon enough for her. Too soon – for how could you ever wish the end of a woman full of irritating passion, complexity and kindness, with her quick movements and laughing head of black curls. Only four years after her story begins, it reaches its end. Her marriage over, her love affair has turned sour, Anna gets into her calèche and rattles away to a railway station. On this final journey, she is heading towards Nizhny Novgorod station, a low-roofed building to the south-east of Moscow. She is a married woman, trying to find her lover, chasing the evening train to Obiralovka, now Zheleznodorozhny. It’s a journey that seems to make almost no logical sense. We do not know what she intends to achieve when she gets there, but she is compelled to keep moving. She takes a purse out of her small red bag, and her servant Pyotr buys her the ticket. She endures a bumpy ride in a carriage with another couple. Everything, to Anna, feels suddenly ugly and damaged. Arriving at Obiralovka, she finds a note in scrawled handwriting, a careless hand. He will not return until later. She reads this as a sign that her lover no longer cares. Her marriage is over. The affair is over. It is a May afternoon. The landscape is level, interrupted by clusters of larch trees on the horizon. A series of bruised clouds stretch flatly along the sky. A goods train goes by.
Her death is too soon. But it is also too late. At this critical moment, Anna Karenina is left hanging around. Precise as ever, she wanted to fall halfway between the wheels of the front car, but she cannot let go – or something holds on to her. Her little red handbag which she began to take off her arm delayed her. She waits for the next truck, and as she waits, it feels as if the years of her childhood are called up to her. She thinks about being a girl again, and brightness. It flashes before her. But still, she keeps her eyes on the train, waiting for the next car. Just when she judges the moment is right – as the mid-point of the car passes her – she throws away her red bag. Almost as if she is about to dive into a swimming pool, she drops her head down between her shoulders, and throws her hands forwards, and drops onto the tracks, and onto her knees, lightly, as if she is just about to rise again.
Anna, of course, does not rise. She falls off the platform, off the earth, off the page. There are many suicides in fiction, but this, for me, is the worst. She falls and at that same moment regret pierces her. Time splits in two. She is horror-struck at her own decision. Bewildered. Lost. Where am I?, she asks herself. What am I doing? Why?
Then she tries to get up, to rise, to lift herself up, but the iron freight train strikes her head, and she is dragged down under its wheels. An image of a candle flashes across her mind, flaring up brightly as if illuminating all of her life. And then the candle flickers. It grows dim. It goes out.
This is a terrible imagining. It happens not for real, of course, but in the pages of a book set long ago, and far away from me. But something not unlike this still happens most days, all around the world. In twenty-first-century Britain, two hundred people a year step, or jump, or run off a platform. Two hundred desperate bodies, flying, jumping, crushed by metal. It usually happens on a weekday, most often on Mondays (rarely, for some reason, on Wednesdays). Anna is early, not late, in this sense. She kills herself on a Sunday evening, and Tolstoy catches, in her fall, every moment of regret and missed chances and possibilities and waste. He catches the hopes of those who are loved, and who are gone. The moment is shot through with bright light – the intensity of Anna’s thoughts, the image of the candle, and perhaps most poignantly, the sudden memories of being a girl. Anna, we realise, is only twenty-eight years old. To be fair, she has lived more than most. She has a husband and a lover, and two children – a son from the marriage, a daughter from the affair. She has a reputation. She could have had it all. And now she lies on the railway line, pale, twisted, gone – her skull crushed by freight.
So much of this is invented by Leo Tolstoy. So much of this I invent, and elaborate in my mind. But something of this is real. In January 1872, just before he began writing Anna Karenina, one of Tolstoy’s neighbours jumped in front of a train at the busy railway station Yasenki. Her name was Anna Pirogova.
You can still visit Yasenki, a broad low building in an expanse of snow. If you walk through the main entrance, decorated with its pictures of Tolstoy’s military ancestors and incongruous orange gathered curtains, you will come to the platform that Anna Pirogova would have walked down, past the slatted fences. Heavy goods trains still pass through. Witnesses say that they saw this real Anna cross herself before she jumped.
Tolstoy has taken the genuflection, and her name, but added a detail, a variation. In the middle of this tragedy, though, is the lightness of comedy. Anna Pirogova carried something pragmatic – almost poignantly necessary. The newspaper account from 1872 reports that, in her hand, this Anna carried a bundle with a change of underwear. The bundle, the baluchon, is a fairy-tale object, but this Anna was in no fairy tale.
Nor was Tolstoy’s. Anna Karenina carries not a bundle, but a handbag – a handbag that gets in the way. Her little red handbag which she began to take off her arm delayed her. It might seem like a mere detail. But its presence here, as wardrobe malfunction, lifts us up for a moment. Its awkwardness, the way it hangs off her arm, signifies all that holds her down. The idea of being held up by a handbag as you try to end your life is almost laughable. The flash of colour against the freight train allows us a flickering hope of a change of mind.