In Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, tracing the muzhik image throughout the novel provides insight into Anna Karenina's psyche and subconscious. The peasant meets at the moment of the first meeting between Anna and Vronsky, an unfortunate peasant crushed to death by a backward jolt of the train carrying Anna to Vronsky. Then, the farmer reappears on Anna's train ride back to St. Petersburg as a result of her hallucinations. Then, the peasant, presented as a dirty man hunched over a sack mumbling "unintelligible" words in French, haunts the dreams of both Vronsky and Anna. The farmer appears three more times on the last day of Anna's life, immediately before dying, banging on the iron and mumbling incomprehensibly. The recurring symbol of the muzhik is more than a simple prefiguration of Anna's suicide: the muzhik communicates to the reader Anna's subconscious, shows the damage that her sins (Vronsky) have done to her soul, and makes manifest the inevitability of fate. .Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The first image of the muzhik is at the train station where Anna met Vronsky. Vronsky observes "a peasant with a sack on his shoulders" getting off the train (p. 75). This image is followed shortly after by the death of the unfortunate railway worker, crushed by a backward jolt of the train that united Anna and Vronsky. The muzhik, "a guard... too gagged against the severe frost, had not heard the train reversing and was crushed." (pg. 77) After the farmer dies at the railway, Vronsky gives money to the worker's wife to impress Anna, his first flirtatious/indecent act towards Anna. Therefore, the death of the peasant is the first connection between Anna and Vronsky. Although this example of the muzhik symbol is one of the few that the reader does not experience from within Anna's subconscious, Tolstoy uses the situation to establish the muzhik symbol as an omen and the beginning of Anna's downfall. Anna immediately recognizes the muzhik's death as a bad omen, and the image visits her again during the train ride from Moscow to St. Petersburg. During her hallucinations in the carriage, a long-lived peasant girl gnaws something on the wall and "then there are terrible screams and bangs, as if someone were being torn to pieces." (108) She is awakened from her hallucinations "by the voice of a muffled, snow-covered man." (p. 108) This mugik, “gagged” just as the dead railway worker had been, announces the stop at which Anna discovers that Vronsky has followed her to Moscow. Then, at that train stop, Anna sees "the bent shadow of a man flash at her feet, and hears the sound of a hammer on iron." (109) Both on the train and at the Moscow train station, Anna's peasants are directly preceded by feelings of shame/confusion towards Vronsky. The muzhiks serve as both a metaphysical manifestation of Anna's innate shame and a harbinger of Anna and Vronsky's ill-fated relationship. In their adulterous relationship, Anna and Vronsky experience the shared nightmare of the muzhik. This episode of shared, subconscious telepathy is particularly important because it is Vronsky's first encounter with the muzhik as a prophetic symbol as opposed to an exclusively physical entity. Although their dreams are fundamentally similar, the variations in their experiences provide insight into each character's subconscious. In both dreams, the muzhik is a hideous, disheveled, filthy-bearded man rummaging through a sack while mumbling in French (the language of the Russian aristocracy). Vronsky is very annoyed by the incomprehensibility of the mugik's words and asks himself: "But why [the dream]Was it so terrible?" He remembered again vividly the farmer and those incomprehensible French words the farmer had uttered, and a shiver ran down his spine. (p. 308) He says: "I dreamed that I was running in my bedroom , that I had to take something from there, to discover something, you know how it is in dreams... in the bedroom, in the corner, there was something'...'and that something I turned and saw that it was a farmer with an unkempt beard, small and scary looking. I wanted to run away, but he bent over a sack and was fumbling with his hands...'...' he was looking for something in the sack and spoke quickly, quickly, in French, you know. : "Il faut le battre, le fer, le broyer, le petrir” [beat it, shape it]”. (p. 386) The motif of the pounding iron is clearly maintained in Anna's dream much more than in Vronsky's, and while Vronsky is more annoyed by the incomprehensibility of the mugik's words, Anna seems more frightened by the mugik's indifference in his comparisons. She says she "wanted to escape," but the muzhik paid her no attention, rummaging through his sack for something, just as she had hoped to do when she entered the room. In other words, Anna is very shaken by the muzhik's inevitability: her dreams are unconscious and cannot be controlled, so whatever she does, the muzhik will continue to ignore her, mumbling in iron and fumbling with his sack. In this scene the muzhik seems to represent Anna's helplessness: her relationship with Vronsky seems inevitable and unavoidable to her, and she seems to sense that it will end badly. Anna's last day of life begins with the symbol of the muzhik. On the morning of that fateful day, she is woken up by her recurring nightmare: “An old man with an unkempt beard was doing something bent over an iron, mumbling senseless French words, and she, as she always did in this nightmare (and that was what horrified ), she felt that this farmer didn't care about her, but was doing something horrible with the iron... on her. (p. 757) Although Anna's horror at going unnoticed remains the same, there is a fundamental change in Anna's perception of the muzhik that seems to spell her end. She can no longer understand what the muzhik says, which can be interpreted as if Anna has lost contact with her subconscious, with her interiority. This change makes sense, given the talk of slightly crazy ramblings that were circulating in Anna's head on the day of her death. After Anna sits in her train car to Obiralovka, two things happen almost immediately. First he hears a young girl speaking with strange French affectations, and then he sees: «a peasant with a deformed appearance, covered in earth, with a cap from which his disheveled hair protruded all around, pass in front of that window, bending towards the carriage wheels... remembering his dream, he walked away towards the opposite door, trembling with terror. "This is the second time the muzhik appears to her on the same day, once in a dream and once in real life. The muzhik reappears just before Anna's death, and it is unclear whether he appears to her in reality or in her imagination. After throwing herself under the train, she appears to have a moment of clarity, wondering who she is and what she is doing (further supporting the claim that she had previously lost touch with her inner being. She says, "God forgive me everything!"). he murmured, feeling the impossibility of struggling. Little muzhik, muttering to himself, was working an iron (p. 802) The symbol of the muzhik persists throughout the sequence of Anna's suicide, both in reality and through. Anna's subconscious, and is in line with Tolstoy's apparent intention for the muzhik: to highlight Anna's lack of control over her situation and her status as a victim of fate..