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

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