“Voices” in Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (post 3): Anna’s “inner voice” comes out and speaks of love; a “voice” takes one side of her husband’s inner debate.

In post 2, I quoted a literary scholar, making the conventional interpretation of Anna’s “doubling,” that it is a metaphor for her moral and emotional conflicts. But that interpretation does not explain how “her inner voice” can participate in a conversation with Count Vronsky, saying the word “Love” (as quoted below). Only an “inner voice” that is an alternate personality can take part in a conversation with someone else.

“Anna Arkadyevna [Karenina]…listened with delight to what Vronsky was saying…

“…he said, ‘but you know it’s not friendship I need, for me there is only one possible happiness in life, this word you dislike so…yes, love…..

“ ‘Love…’ she repeated slowly with her inner voice, and suddenly…added: ‘That’s why I don’t like this word, because it means too much for me, far more than you can understand…’ ”

Soon after the above, when her husband is debating with himself what his wife is up to, his own “voice” takes one side in the debate:

“…Alexei Alexandrovich [Karenin] found nothing peculiar or improper in the fact that his wife [Anna Karenina] was sitting at a separate table with Vronsky and having an animated conversation about something; but he noticed that to the others in the drawing room it seemed something peculiar and improper, and therefore he, too, found it improper. He decided that he ought to say so to his wife…

“ ‘But, finally,’ he asked himself…, ‘what has happened? Nothing. She talked with him for a long time. What of it? A woman can talk with all sorts of men in society…but…some voice said to him that this was not so, that if others had noticed it, it meant there was something…” (1, pp. 141-143).

The author appears to think, probably on the basis of his own psychology, that voices are a routine aspect of everyone's psychology. The fact is, most people do not have voices. But people with multiple personality do sometimes hear the rational voices of their alternate personalities. And these alternate personalities sometimes do come out and participate in conversations, typically incognito.

1. Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, Penguin Books, 2000/2002.