More evidence of multiple personality in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (post 4): Anna’s experience of a “double soul” and her post-switch or hair-pulling headache.

Double Soul

Having confessed infidelity to her husband, Anna was beside herself:

“She felt that everything was beginning to go double in her soul” (p. 288).

“And again she felt things beginning to go double in her soul” (p. 290).

“Again she felt that things had begun to go double in her soul” (p. 293).

Post-Switch or Hair-pulling Headache

“ ‘Ah, what am I doing!’ she said to herself, suddenly feeling pain in both sides of her head. When she came to herself, she saw that she was clutching the hair on her temples and squeezing them with both hands” (p. 288).

“…that gesture, which was terrible for her even in remembrance, when she had clutched her hair with both hands…” (p. 302).

“When she came to herself” (switched from an alternate personality back to her regular self), she found her hands clutching her hair, which she didn’t recall doing, and which was a gesture that was uncharacteristic of her (which is why she said, “Ah, what am I doing!”).

Given the ambiguous way that Tolstoy and/or the translators worded the above, I cannot be sure whether the pain in her head was due to pulling the hair—“clutching” and “squeezing” do not necessarily mean painful pulling and pressing—or whether she had a headache so severe that she grabbed at her hair in agony.

In short, Anna had head pain for one of two reasons: First, some people with multiple personality have headaches, sometimes severe, when they switch personalities. Second, an alternate personality may have pulled, or made her pull, her hair, causing the pain. In either case, since Anna knew that pulling her hair like that was something she would never do, it had been very frightening to find herself doing it.

Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina. Trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, Penguin, 2000/2002.