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