In Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, tracing the image of the muzhik throughout the novel provides insight into the psyche and subconscious of Anna Karenina. The peasant is encountered during Anna and Vronsky's first meeting, a miserable peasant crushed to death by a swerving backwards of the train that brings Anna to Vronsky. Then the peasant resurfaces on Anna's train back to St. Petersburg as the fruit of her hallucinations. Then, the peasant, presented as a dirty man leaning over a sack muttering “incomprehensible” words in French, haunts the dreams of Vronsky and Anna. The peasant appears three more times on the last day of Anna's life just before her death, muttering iron and muttering incomprehensible things. The recurring symbol of the moujik is more than just a brutal foreshadowing of Anna's suicide: the moujik communicates Anna's subconscious to the reader, shows the damage her (Vronsky) sins have done to her soul, and makes manifest the inevitability of destiny. .Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The first image of the muzhik is at the train station where Anna met Vronsky. Vronsky observes “a peasant with a bag on his shoulder” (p. 75) getting off the train. This image is shortly followed by the death of the miserable railway worker, crushed to death by a swerve behind the train which brought Anna and Vronsky together. The moujik, "a guard... too wrapped up against the intense frost, had not heard a train reversing and had been crushed". (p. 77) After the moujik dies at the railroad, Vronsky gives money to the worker's wife to impress Anna, his first flirtatious/indecent act towards Anna. Thus, the death of the moujik constitutes the first link between Anna and Vronsky. Although this example of the moujik symbol is one of the only ones that the reader does not perceive from inside Anna's subconscious, Tolstoy uses the situation to establish the moujik symbol as an ominous sign and the beginning of the downfall of Anna. Anna immediately recognizes the muzhik's death as a bad omen, and the image comes back to her again during her train journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg. During her hallucinations in the wagon, a long-waisted peasant woman gnaws at something on the wall and “then there were frightening screams and snaps, as if someone were being torn to pieces.” (108) She is awakened from her hallucinations by “the voice of a man muffled and covered in snow.” (p. 108) This moujik, “wrapped up” like the dead railway worker was, announces the stop where Anna discovers that Vronsky has followed her to Moscow. Then, at this train stop, Anna sees "the bent shadow of a man passing at her feet, and she hears the sounds of a hammer on iron." (109) Both on the train and at the Moscow station, Anna's mujiks are directly preceded by feelings of shame/confusion towards Vronsky. The moujiks are both metaphysical manifestations of Anna's innate shame and a foreshadowing of Anna and Vronsky's unhappy relationship. During their adulterous relationship, Anna and Vronsky experience the common nightmare of the moujik. This episode of shared, subconscious telepathy is particularly significant because it is Vronsky's first encounter with the moujik as a prophetic symbol as opposed to a purely physical entity. Although their dreams are fundamentally similar, the variations in their experiences provide insight into each character's subconscious. In both dreams, the moujik is a hideous, disheveled man with a dirty beard, rummaging in a bag in French (the language of the Russian aristocracy). Vronsky is very bothered by the incomprehensibility of the moujik's words, wondering: "'But why was [the dream] so horrible?' Heremembered very clearly again the peasant and those incomprehensible French words that the peasant had spoken, and a shiver ran down his spine. (p. 308) She says: "I dreamed that I was running into my room, that I had to get something out of it, discover something, you know how it is in dreams... in the room, in the corner, there was something'...'and the something I turned around, and I saw that it was a peasant with a disheveled beard, short and awful-looking. I wanted to run away, but he leaned over a bag and rummaged in it with his hands...'he was looking for something in the bag and he spoke quickly, quickly, in French, you know: "We must le batte, le fer, le broy, le petrir” [beat it, le iron, crush it to give it shape” (p. 386) The motif of hammered iron is clearly more present in Anna's dream. than in Vronsky's, and while Vronsky is most bothered by the incomprehensibility of the moujik's words, Anna seems more frightened by the moujik's indifference towards her. She says that she "wanted to run away", but. the moujik paid no attention, rummaging in her bag for something, just as she had hoped to do when she entered the room. In other words, Anna is very shaken by the inevitability of the moujik: her dreams are unconscious and cannot be controlled, so no matter what she does, the moujik will continue to ignore her, muttering about iron and fumbling with his bag. In this scene, the moujik seems to represent Anna's helplessness: her relationship with Vronsky seems to her both inevitable and unavoidable, and she seems to sense that it will end badly. The last day of Anna's life begins with the symbol of the moujik. . On the morning of that fateful day, she was awakened by her recurring nightmare: “A little old man with an unkempt beard was doing something leaning over an iron, muttering meaningless French words, and she, as she always did in this nightmare (that's what made it so horrible), had the impression that this peasant wasn't paying attention to her, but was doing something horrible with the iron... on her. (p. 757) Although Anna's horror of going unnoticed remains the same, there is a fundamental shift in Anna's perception of the moujik who seems to herald her end. She no longer understands what the moujik is saying, which can be interpreted as Anna's loss of contact with her subconscious, her inner being. This change makes sense, given the spiel of slightly nonsensical ramblings circulating through Anna's head the day she died. Once Anna sits in her train car heading to Obiralovka, two things happen almost immediately. First, she hears a young girl speaking with strange French affectations, then she sees, "a deformed peasant, covered in dirt, wearing a cap from which his tangled hair stuck out all around, passing in front of this window, stooping towards the car wheels... remembering her dream, she moved away towards the opposite door, trembling with terror. » This is the second time that the moujik appears to him on the same day, once in a dream and once in real life. The moujik reappears just before Anna's death, and it is unclear whether he appears to her in reality or in her imagination. After throwing herself under the train, she appears to have a moment of clarity, questioning who she is and what she is doing (thus reinforcing the claim that she had previously lost contact with her inner being). She said: “God forgive me everything!” » she murmured, feeling the impossibility of fighting. A little moujik, muttering to himself, was working on iron. (p. 802) The symbol of the moujik persists throughout Anna's suicide sequence, both in reality and through Anna's subconscious, and is consistent with the apparent intention of.