Is Anna Karenina modeled on Psyche (is she an anti-Psyche)? I've been re-reading Anna Karenina to prepare myself for seeing the new film, and this scene struck me as being ripped from the pages of "Cupid and Psyche" with ironic role-reversals (maybe already well known to Russian scholars, but it had not occurred to me before):
He was in the study fast asleep. She went over to him and, lighting his face from above, looked at him for a long time. Now, when he was asleep, she loved him so much that, looking at him, she could not keep back tears of tenderness; but she knew that if he woke up he would give her a cold look, conscious of his own rightness, and that before talking to him of her love, she would have to prove to him how guilty he was before her. She went back to her room without waking him up and, after a second dose of opium, towards morning fell into a heavy, incomplete sleep, in which she never lost awareness of herself.
1 comment:
I find this very interesting since I took a class on Russian Literature as an Undergrad. The passage you post is eerily similar to the story of Cupid and Psyche. I know that Tolstoy was very well educated and that at that time, a good education almost always included the study of Latin. When I looked into the matter, all I could find was that Tolstoy did study Latin but that he wasn't very good at it. Especially since Apuleius was not considered one of the 'canon' Latin authors, I am dubious whether Tolstoy would have read him per se. But I can vouch for the fact that most high school Latin students (who have never read Apuleius) would be familiar with the scene described above from retellings and just a general knowledge of Roman mythology. Therefore, I believe it very likely that Tolstoy had some knowledge of the Cupid and Psyche story as told by Apuleius and it is very possible that it served as a model for that scene.
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