AustLit

'Early in the Constance Garnett translation of Anna Karenina a few lines appear that suggest something more historically significant than Anna’s emotional turmoil. Anna is travelling back from Moscow to her husband and son in St Petersburg, just after a ball where her romance with Vronsky begins. She has been in Moscow to help repair her brother’s marriage; now her own is at risk. “Moments of doubt were continually coming upon her, when she was uncertain whether the train were going forwards or backwards, or were standing still altogether . . . ‘What’s that on the arm of the chair, a fur cloak or some beast? And what am I myself? Myself or some other woman?’” A cloak is protective. It can be fashionable. A beast is a dangerous monstrosity; terrifying and unknowable. The same object flickers between these poles, and the viewer, herself in a state of extreme personal uncertainty, must stabilise her vision, for the object cannot be both things. At the same time there is some confusion about the actual progress of the train. Is it going forward? Is it going backwards? Is it going nowhere? This dire uncertainty also applies to Soviet Russia, which at one time seemed socially protective, progressive, indeed fashionable to many outsiders, before Stalin’s monstrosity came into full view. Some of these outsiders, Katherine Susannah Prichard included, never really emerged from under Stalin’s cloak.' 

(Introduction)