the prose of suicide following the injunction to rend the curtain which every novel worthy of the name must do, destroy, experiment, say NO! to current interpretations, to the given & pre-interpreted, the world of logic, of the rational, & both the common & privileged points of view

Let us review the situation: Anna has gone to the station to find Vronsky, not to kill herself; once she is on the platform, she is suddenly surprised by a memory and seduced by the unexpected chance to give her love story a finished, beautiful shape; to tie its beginning to its end by the same railroad station and the same motif of death beneath the wheels; for, without knowing it, mankind lives under the seductive spell of beauty, and Anna, stifled by the ugliness of existence, has become all the more susceptible to it.

“A sensation gripped her like one she used to feel long ago when, off for a swim, she prepared to plunge into the water.”

– Milan Kundera (quoting in the second case Tolstoy), The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, trans. Linda Asher, Harper Collins, New York, 2006, p. 25