Vronsky Quotes

I ask one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now." Vronsky

Count Vronsky: I love you! Anna Karenina: Why? Count Vronsky: You can't ask Why about love!

They [human lives] are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.

On one memorable occasion Vronsky played all the parts in an abridged version of Anna Karenina when the rest of the cast were on strike for more blinis.

 I didn’t know you were going. What are you coming for?" she said, letting fall the hand with which she had grasped the doorpost. And irrepressible delight and eagerness shone in her face.   "What am I coming for?" he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. "You know that I have come to be where you are," he said, "I can’t help it.

This child, with his naive outlook on life was the compass which showed them the degree of their departure from what they knew but did not want to know.

It's wrong, what you say, and I beg you, if you're a good man, to forget what you've said, as I forget it," she said at last. "Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget...

Yes, I suppose so," answered Anna, as though wondering at the boldness of his question; but the irrepressible, quivering brilliance of her eyes and her smile set him on fire as she said it.

For love? What antediluvian notions you have! Can one talk of love in these days?" said the ambassador's wife. "What's to be done? It's a foolish old fashion that's kept up still," said Vronsky.

That’s my one desire, to be caught," answered Vronsky, with his serene, good-humored smile. "If I complain of anything it’s only that I’m not caught enough, to tell the truth. I begin to lose hope.

Vronsky meanwhile, in spite of the complete fulfilment of what he had so long desired, was not completely happy. He soon felt that the realization of his longing gave him only one grain of the mountain of bliss he had anticipated. That realization showed him the eternal error men make by imagining that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes. When first he united his life with hers and donned civilian clothes, he felt the delight of freedom in general, such as he had not before known, and also the freedom of love—he was contented then, but not for long. Soon he felt rising in his soul a desire for desires—boredom. Involuntarily he began to snatch at every passing caprice, mistaking it for a desire and a purpose.

He knew that Vronsky could not be prevented from amusing himself with painting; he knew that he and all dilettanti had a perfect right to paint what they liked, but it was distasteful to him. A man could not be prevented from making himself a big wax doll, and kissing it. But if the man were to come with the doll and sit before a man in love, and began caressing his doll as the lover caressed the woman he loved, it would be distasteful to the lover. Just such a distasteful sensation was what Mihailov felt at the sight of Vronsky’s painting: he felt it both ludicrous and irritating, both pitiable and offensive.

Anna had been preparing herself for this meeting, had thought what she would say to him, but she did not succeed in saying anything of it; his passion mastered her. She tried to calm him, to calm herself, but it was too late. His feeling infected her. Her lips trembled so that for a long while she could say nothing.

These prin­ciples laid down as in variable rules: that one must pay a card sharper, but need not pay a tailor; that one must never tell a lie to a man, but one may to a woman; that one must never cheat any one, but one may a husband; that one must never pardon an insult, but one may give one and so on. These principles were possibly not reasonable and not good, but they were of unfailing certainty, and so long as he adhered to them, Vronsky felt that his heart was at peace and he could hold his head up.

He [Vronsky] himself felt that, except that crazy fellow married to Kitty Shcherbatsky, who, quite irrelevantly had with rabid virulence told him a lot of pointless nonsense, every nobleman whose acquaintance he had made had become his partisan.

And just as the hungry stomach eagerly accepts every object it can get, hoping to find nourishment in it, Vronsky quite unconsciously clutched first at politics, then at new books, and then at pictures.

Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt himself as a king, not because she had made an impression on Anna-he did not yet believe that-but because the impression she had made on him gave him happiness and pride.

In that brief glance Vronsky has time to notice the restrained animation that played over her face and fluttered between her shining eyes and the barely noticeable smile that curved her red lips. It was as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now in her smile. She deliberately extinguished the light in her her eyes, but it shone against her will in a barely noticeable smile.

I'm afraid I'm becoming ridiculous.

Vronsky is one of the sons of Count Kirill Ivanovitch Vronsky, and one of the finest specimens of the gilded youth of Petersburg.

Now that Vronsky had deceived her, she was prepared to love Levin and to hate Vronsky.

Vronsky meanwhile, despite the full realization of what he had desired for so long, was not fully happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is in the realization of desires.

She saw that they felt themselves alone in that crowded room. And Vronsky’s face, always so firm and independent, held that look that had struck her, of bewilderment and humble submissiveness, like the expression of an intelligent dog when it has done wrong. Anna smiled, and her smile was reflected by him. She grew thoughtful, and he became serious. Some supernatural force drew Kitty’s eyes to Anna’s face. She was enchanting in her simple black dress, enchanting were her round arms with their bracelets, enchanting was her firm neck with its thread of pearls, fascinating the straying curls of her loose hair, enchanting the graceful, light movements of her little feet and hands, enchanting was that lovely face in its animation, but there was something terrible and cruel about her charm.

Historian Peter Vronsky hypothesizes that while several factors must align to make a murderer (genetics and frontal lobe injuries being two common ones), World War II was responsible for this golden age of serial killers a generation later.

Anna Karenina was about how there were two kinds of men: men who liked women (Vronsky, Oblonsky) and men who didn’t really like women (Levin). Vronsky made Anna feel good about herself, at first, because he loved women so much, but he didn’t love her in particular enough, so she had to kill herself. Levin, by contrast, was awkward, boring, and kind of a pain, seemingly more interested in agriculture than in Kitty, but in fact he was a more reliable partner, because in the bottom of his heart he didn’t really like women. So Anna made the wrong choice and Kitty made the right choice.

A man could not be prevented from making himself a big wax doll, and kissing it. But if the man were to come with the doll and sit before a man in love, and begin caressing his doll as the lover caressed the woman he loved, it would be distasteful to the lover. Just such a distasteful sensation was what Mihailov felt at the sight of Vronsky’s painting: he felt it both ludicrous and irritating, both pitiable and offensive.

So at least it seemed to Vronsky, just as it seems to a man with a sore finger that he is continually, as though on purpose, grazing his sore finger on everything.

Medieval Italian life had recently become so fascinating for Vronsky that he even began wearing his hat and a wrap thrown over his shoulder in a medieval fashion, which was very becoming to him.

Speaking of novels,’ I said, ‘you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust’s rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more, impossibly rude hostesses, please let me speak, and even ruder guests, mechanical Dostoevskian rows and Tolstoian nuances of snobbishness repeated and expanded to an unsufferable length, adorable seascapes, melting avenues, no, do not interrupt me, light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of metaphors, described—by Cocteau, I think—as “a mirage of suspended gardens,” and, I have not yet finished, an absurd, rubber-and-wire romance between a blond young blackguard (the fictitious Marcel), and an improbable jeune fille who has a pasted-on bosom, Vronski’s (and Lyovin’s) thick neck, and a cupid’s buttocks for cheeks; but—and now let me finish sweetly—we were wrong, Sybil, we were wrong in denying our little beau ténébreux the capacity of evoking “human interest”: it is there, it is there—maybe a rather eighteenth-centuryish, or even seventeenth-centuryish, brand, but it is there. Please, dip or redip, spider, into this book [offering it], you will find a pretty marker in it bought in France, I want John to keep it. Au revoir, Sybil, I must go now. I think my telephone is ringing.

At one time,' Golenishchev continued, either not observing or not willing to observe that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, 'at one time a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conception of religion, law, and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed. They grow up in ideas of negation in everything -- in other words, utter savages.

Sight-seeing, aside from the fact that everything had been seen already, could not have for him--and intelligent Russian--the inexplicable importance attached to it by the English.

Early in the novel that Tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. This symmetrical composition - the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end - may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

Vronsky’s interest in art and the Middle Ages did not last long. He had sufficient taste for art to be unable to finish his picture. He ceased painting it because he was dimly conscious that its defects, little noticeable at first, would become striking if he went on.

He looked at people as if they were things. A nervous young man across from him...came to hate him for that look. The young man lit a cigarette from his, tried talking to him, and even jostled him, to let him feel that he was not a thing but a human being, but Vronsky went on looking at him as at a lampost, and the young man grimaced, feeling that he was losing his self-possession under the pressure of this non-recognition of himself as a human being...

Wait, wait,' he began, interrupting Oblonsky. 'Aristocratism, you say. But allow me to ask, what makes up this aristocratism of Vronsky or whoever else it may be - such aristocratism that I can be scorned? You consider Vronsky an aristocrat, but I don't. A man whose father crept out of nothing by wiliness, whose mother, God knows who she didn't have liaisons with... No, excuse me, but I consider myself an aristocrat and people like myself, who can point to three or four honest generations in their families' past, who had a high degree of education (talent and intelligence are another thing), and who never lowered themselves before anyone, never depended on anyone, as my father lived, and my grandfather. And I know many like that. You find it mean that I count the trees in the forest, while you give away thirty thousand to Ryabinin; but you'll have rent coming in and I don't know what else, while I won't, and so I value what I've inherited and worked for... We're the aristocrats, and not someone who can only exist on hand-outs from the mighty of this world and can be bought for twenty kopecks. 'But who are you attacking? I agree with you,' said Stepan Arkadyich sincerely and cheerfully, though he felt Levin included him among those who could be bought for twenty kopecks.

As he looked round, she too turned her head .Her shining gray eyes, that looked dark from the thick lashes, rested with friendly attention on his face, as though she were recognizing him, and then promptly turned away to the passing crowd, as though seeking someone. In that brief look Vronsky had time to notice the suppressed eagerness which played over her face, and flitted between the brilliant eyes and faint smile that curved her red lips. It was as though her nature were so brimming with something that against her will it showed itself now in the flash of her eyes, and now in her smile. Deliberately she shrouded the light in her eyes, but it shone against her will in that faintly perceptible smile.

(It can be argued that the current rise of serial killers can be perhaps attributed to a new evolutionary prerogative for the demise of our species; Mother Nature’s little way of saying, in among several other ways, that there might be too many humans on the planet.)

It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

Primitive humans developed a neurosis, an irrational or imaginary fear, one not caused by an actual threat: necrophobia—a fear of the dead.

Love, most likely. They don't know how dreary it is, how degrading.

Not the stout balding man. Not a Nikolai. A Vronsky.

I ask only one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now; but if even that is impossible, command me to disappear and I will do it. -Vronsky

I was so taken by HIM, but he was not Count Vronsky or Rhett Buttler. But in my little world he was as dashing and handsome. I knew it was a doomed affair. I knew it instinctively.

Tout de même, supporter tant de mépris... Vronski, pire que Vronski.

... great novels engange my sympathies and make me desire things. When I look at the "Demoiselles d'Avignon", I don't "want" anything from it. The pleasure is in seeing it as it is. But when I read books, I do experience desire: I want Isabel Archer to be happy, I want things to work out for Anna and Vronsky, I even want Jesus to be pardoned instead of Barabbas. Again it might be that I am a narrow-minded and rather vapid reader, sentimentally wishing the best for everyone (except Barabbas); but if I wished the opposite, that Isabel should make a bad marriage, that Anna should throw herself under the train, it would just be a variation on the same experience. The point is that my sympathies are engaged, I'm no longer disinterested.

The chief reason why the prince was so particularly disagreeable to Vronsky was that he could not help seeing himself in him. And what he saw in this mirror did not gratify his self-esteem. He was a very stupid and very self-satisfied and very healthy and very well-washed man, and nothing else... He was equable and not cringing with his superiors, was free and ingratiating in his behavior with his equals, and was contemptuously indulgent with his inferiors... for this prince he was an inferior, and his contemptuous and indulgent attitude to him revolted him.

Vronsky’s life was particularly happy in that he had a code of principles, which defined with unfailing certitude what he ought and what he ought not to do. This code of principles covered only a very small circle of contingencies, but then the principles were never doubtful, and Vronsky, as he never went outside that circle, had never had a moment’s hesitation about doing what he ought to do.

Few would disagree that Herbert Mullin, who thought he was saving California from the great earthquake by killing people, and Ed Gein, who was making chairs out of human skin, were entirely insane when they committed their acts. The question becomes more difficult with somebody like law student Ted Bundy, who killed twenty women while at the same time working as a suicide prevention counselor, or John Wayne Gacy, who escorted the first lady and then went home to sleep of thirty-three trussed-up corpses under his house. On one hand their crimes seem "insane," yet on the other hand, Bundy and Gacy knew exactly what they were doing. How insane were they?

That which for Vronsky had been almost a whole year the one absorbing desire of his life, replacing all his old desires; that which for Anna had been an impossible, terrible, and even for that reason more entrancing dream of bliss, that desire had been fulfilled. He stood before her, pale, his lower jaw quivering, and besought her to be calm, not knowing how or why. “Anna! Anna!” he said with a choking voice, “Anna, for pity’s sake!…” But the louder he spoke, the lower she dropped her once proud and gay, now shame-stricken head, and she bowed down and sank from the sofa where she was sitting, down on the floor, at his feet; she would have fallen on the carpet if he had not held her. “My God! Forgive me!” she said, sobbing, pressing his hands to her bosom. She felt so sinful, so guilty, that nothing was left her but to humiliate herself and beg forgiveness; and as now there was no one in her life but him, to him she addressed her prayer for forgiveness. Looking at him, she had a physical sense of her humiliation, and she could say nothing more. He felt what a murderer must feel, when he sees the body he has robbed of life. That body, robbed by him of life, was their love, the first stage of their love. There was something awful and revolting in the memory of what had been bought at this fearful price of shame. Shame at their spiritual nakedness crushed her and infected him. But in spite of all the murderer’s horror before the body of his victim, he must hack it to pieces, hide the body, must use what he has gained by his murder.

M— knew of literature: she had been to Cambridge in the 1950s where she knew Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. This was deeply impressive in 1980s Tasmania. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath may as well have been Count Vronsky and Anna Karenina.

For the media covering serial murder it is not the number of victims that counts anymore. But their celebrity status or credit rating. The trade off these days is one upscale SUV in the driveway for every 10 dead hookers in a dumpster.

Specifically, according to Vronsky, while all American soldiers who fought in WWII were trained to kill, a small contingent used the cover of state-sanctioned violence to also rape, torture, and collect human body parts as trophies. Though most returning GIs successfully reintegrated into society, some brought the brutality of war into their homes, abusing their families behind closed doors. That abuse, occurring as it did in a culture openly promoting war, created the fertile ground from which the first major crop of American serial killers would spring.

You and Whitney would not be the first couple to find yourselves on opposite sides of a mountain,” I say. “Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina and Vronsky. Maria and Tony. Jack and Rose.” Edison looks at me in horror. “You do realize that in every example you just gave me, at least one of them dies?

-¡Venga, deja de leer, que te vas a quedar sin vista! -Más vale que salgas a jugar, hace un tiempo estupendo. - ¡Apaga la luz! ¡Es tarde! Sí, siempre hacía demasiado buen tiempo para leer, y de noche estaba demasiado oscuro. Fijémonos en que se trata de leer o no leer, el verbo ya era conjugado en imperativo. En el pasado ocurría lo mismo. De manera que leer era entonces un acto subversivo. Al descubrimiento de la novela se añadía la excitación de la desobediencia familiar. ¡Doble esplendor! ¡Oh, el recuerdo de aquellas horas de lecturas clandestinas debajo de las mantas a la luz de la linterna eléctrica! ¡Qué veloz galopaba Ana Karenina hacia su Vronski a aquellas horas de la noche! ¡Ya era hermoso que aquellos dos se amaran, pero que se amaran en contra de la prohibición de leer todavía era más hermoso! Se amaban en contra de papá y mamá, se amaban en contra del deber de mates por terminar, en contra de la «redacción» que entregar, en contra de la habitación por ordenar, se amaban en lugar de sentarse a la mesa, se amaban antes del postre, se preferían al partido de fútbol y a la búsqueda de setas..., se habían elegido y se preferían a todo... ¡Dios mío, qué gran amor! y qué corta era la novela.

Alexey Alexandorivich had seen nothing striking or improper in the fact that his wife was sitting with Vronsky at a separate table, in eager conversation with him about something. But he noticed that to the rest of the party this appeared to be something striking and improper. He made up his mind that he must speak of it to his wife.

Suddenly a million males, most of whom had been raised under the tenets of Western Judeo-Christian values but had rarely ventured beyond their hometowns, were catapulted thousands of miles overseas among strangers into a savagely primitive world of warfare stripped of the rules and inhibitions of civilization. It was a mini Stone Age war but with machine guns and flamethrowers, in which our soldiers were called upon to behave like our primitive ancestors in a reptilian state of killing for survival.

A schoolfellow of Vronsky’s and of the same age, he was a general and was expecting a command, which might have influence on the course of political events; while Vronsky, independent and brilliant and beloved by a charming woman though he was, was simply a cavalry captain who was readily allowed to be as independent as ever he liked.

While a facilitator, detective magazines or porn on their own do not necessarily make people into serial killers.

Jim Cavanaugh, from the Isaac Ray Center in Chicago, invited Dr. Kent Kiehl into the proceedings. Kiehl recorded their initial meeting in his book, The Psychopath Whisperer.

In June 1996 she published a book Out of the Shadows: Fred West’s Daughter Tells Her Harrowing Story of Survival.

It is a bit unnerving sitting across from a convicted serial killer. But

Zombie,” which he’d adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’s 1995 novella by the same name. She, in turn, had based her work partly from the life and crimes of cannibalistic serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer.

The Karenins, husband and wife, continued living in the same house, met everyday, but were complete strangers to one another. Alexey Alexandrovitch made it a rule to see his wife everyday, so that the servants might have no grounds for suppositions, but avoided dining at home. Vronsky was never at Alexey Alexandrovitch’s house, but Anna saw him away from home, and her husband was aware of it

Add to that the age-old principle of Ockham’s razor in problem-solving: “If there are a number of possible solutions, the simplest one, based on the fewest assumptions, is most likely to be correct.

Though one of the greatest love stories in world literature, Anna Karenin is of course not just a novel of adventure. Being deeply concerned with moral matters, Tolstoy was eternally preoccupied with issues of importance to all mankind at all times. Now, there is a moral issue in Anna Karenin, though not the one that a casual reader might read into it. This moral is certainly not that having committed adultery, Anna had to pay for it (which in a certain vague sense can be said to be the moral at the bottom of the barrel in Madame Bovary). Certainly not this, and for obvious reasons: had Anna remained with Karenin and skillfully concealed from the world her affair, she would not have paid for it first with her happiness and then with her life. Anna was not punished for her sin (she might have got away with that) nor for violating the conventions of a society, very temporal as all conventions are and having nothing to do with the eternal demands of morality. What was then the moral "message" Tolstoy has conveyed in his novel? We can understand it better if we look at the rest of the book and draw a comparison between the Lyovin-Kitty story and the Vronski-Anna story. Lyovin's marriage is based on a metaphysical, not only physical, concept of love, on willingness for self-sacrifice, on mutual respect. The Anna-Vronski alliance was founded only in carnal love and therein lay its doom. It might seem, at first blush, that Anna was punished by society for falling in love with a man who was not her husband. Now such a "moral" would be of course completely "immoral," and completely inartistic, incidentally, since other ladies of fashion, in that same society, were having as many love-affairs as they liked but having them in secrecy, under a dark veil. (Remember Emma's blue veil on her ride with Rodolphe and her dark veil in her rendezvous at Rouen with Léon.) But frank unfortunate Anna does not wear this veil of deceit. The decrees of society are temporary ones ; what Tolstoy is interested in are the eternal demands of morality. And now comes the real moral point that he makes: Love cannot be exclusively carnal because then it is egotistic, and being egotistic it destroys instead of creating. It is thus sinful. And in order to make his point as artistically clear as possible, Tolstoy in a flow of extraordinary imagery depicts and places side by side, in vivid contrast, two loves: the carnal love of the Vronski-Anna couple (struggling amid their richly sensual but fateful and spiritually sterile emotions) and on the other hand the authentic, Christian love, as Tolstoy termed it, of the Lyovin-Kitty couple with the riches of sensual nature still there but balanced and harmonious in the pure atmosphere of responsibility, tenderness, truth, and family joys.

But the ultimate truth is that they aren't dead, those people. The writers of books do not truly die; their characters, even the ones who throw themselves in front of trains or are killed in battle, come back to life over and over again. Books are the means to immortality: Plato lives forever, as do Dickens, and Dr. Seuss, Soames Forsyte, Jo March, Scrooge, Anna Karenina, and Vronsky. Over and over again Heathcliff wanders the moors searching for his Cathy. Over and over again Ahab fights the whale. Through them all we experience other times, other places, other lives. We manage to become much more than our own selves. The only dead are those who grow sere and shriveled within, unable to step outside their own lives and into those of others. Ignorance is death. A closed mind is catafalque.

She did not kill anyone, Perry insisted, because at the time of the 1990 murders, “Donna” did not exist. Whatever evidence the police had was associated with Douglas Perry, her former male incarnation.

You do not admit the conceivability at all?' he queried. 'But why not? We admit the existence of electricity, of which we know nothing. Why should there not be some new force, still unknown to us, which...' 'When electricity was discovered,' Levin interrupted hurriedly, 'it was only the phenomenon that was discovered, and it was unknown from what it proceeded and what were its effects, and ages passed before its applications were conceived. But the spiritualists have begun with tables writing for them, and spirits appearing to them, and have only later started saying that it is an unknown force.' Vronsky listened attentively to Levin, as he always did listen, obviously interested in his words. 'Yes, but the spiritualists say we don't know at present what this force is, but there is a force, and these are the conditions in which it acts. Let the scientific men find out what the force consists in. Not, I don't see why there should not be a new force, if it...' 'Why, because with electricity,' Levin interrupted again, 'every time you rub tar against wool, a recognized phenomenon is manifested, but in this case it does not happen every time, and so it follows it is not a natural phenomenon.

It was only in the mid-1970s, after Ted Bundy started abducting and killing middle-class white college girls at schools, shopping malls, ski chalets, national parks and public beaches, that the media suddenly began paying close attention.

why does Anna Karenina kill herself? the answer seems clear enough: for years people in her world have turned away from her; she is suffering at the separation from her son, Seryozha; even if Vronsky still loves her, she fears for that love; she is exhausted with it, overexcited, unwholesomely (and unjustly) jealous; she feels trapped. Yes, all that is clear; but is a trapped person necessarily doomed to suicide? So many people adapt to living in a trap! Even if we understand the depth of her sorrow, Anna's suicide remains an enigma.

In former days," said Golenishtchev, not observing, or not willing to observe, that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, "in former days the free-thinker was a man who had been brought up in ideas of religion, law, and morality, and only through conflict and struggle came to free-thought; but now there has sprung up a new type of born free-thinkers who grow up without even having heard of principles of morality or of religion, of the existence of authorities, who grow up directly in ideas of negation in everything, that is to say, savages.

On the day of the races at Krasnoe Selo, Vronsky had come earlier than usual to eat beefsteak in the common messroom of the regiment. He had no need to be strict with himself, as he had very quickly been brought down to the required light weight; but still he had to avoid gaining flesh, and so he eschewed farinaceous and sweet dishes. He sat with his coat unbuttoned over a white waistcoat, resting both elbows on the table, and while waiting for the steak he had ordered he looked at a French novel that lay open on his plate. He was only looking at the book to avoid conversation with the officers coming in and out; he was thinking.

Most modern authors dealing with Erzsébet's life and crimes have produced works of fiction, including Jozo Niznansky's The Lady of Čachtice (1932); Kálmán Vándor's Báthory Erzsébet (1940); La Comtesse sanglante, by Valentine Penrose (1962), Alejandra Pizarnik's Acerca's de la Contessa sangrienta (1968); Comtesse de Sang, by Maurice Périsset (1975); Andrei Codrescu's The Blood Countess (1995); Ella, Drácula, by Javier García Sanchez (2002); Alisa Libby's The Blood Confession (2006); Alexandre Heredia's O Legado de Báthory (2007); The Countess, by Rebecca Johns (2010); Maria Szabó's Én, Báthory Erzsébet (2010); and The Blood Countess by Tara Moss (2012).

Northern Kentucky University's criminal sociologist J. Robert Lilly, looked closely at the statistics of wartime rapes committed by American GI's serving in Britain, France and Germany. To everyone's horror, Lilly reported that American liberators raped 14,000 to 17,000 women between 1942 and 1945 in those 3 European countries alone.

The 60s just felt more murderous than the 50s. It seemed like a man made plague of violence in the middle of an apocalyptic siege, with serial killers being catapulted like diseased carcasses over the protective walls of civilization harboring the tattered remains of the illusory innocent America we had believed in the decade before.

Werewolves had been so rationalized and medicalized by the year 1000 that they became subject to a medieval type of “heroin chic” romanticism in literature, in which they were frequently portrayed as attractive, lonely, suffering, victimized, self-sacrificing, chivalrous heroes in fictional and mythological tales emerging during the Grail romance era. The “chivalrous werewolf” narratives often feature a noble knight or prince who transforms into a werewolf to protect the subject of his romantic love, but while he is a werewolf she betrays him by stealing his transformative device—either a potion, a ring, a belt or his clothes—trapping him forever in his lovelorn werewolf state.25

Historian Peter Vronsky hypothesizes that while several factors must align to make a murderer (genetics and frontal lobe injuries being two common ones), World War II was responsible for this golden age of serial killers a generation later. Specifically, according to Vronsky, while all American soldiers who fought in WWII were trained to kill, a small contingent used the cover of state-sanctioned violence to also rape, torture, and collect human body parts as trophies. Though most returning GIs successfully reintegrated into society, some brought the brutality of war into their homes, abusing their families behind closed doors. That abuse, occurring as it did in a culture openly promoting war, created the fertile ground from which the first major crop of American serial killers would spring.

Anna is not just a woman, not just a splendid specimen of womanhood, she is a woman with a full, compact, important moral nature: everything about her character is significant and striking, and this applied as well to her love. She cannot limit herself as another character in the book, Princess Betsy, does, to an undercover affair. Her truthful and passionate nature makes disguise and secrecy impossible. She is not Emma Bovary, a provincial dreamer, a wistful wench creeping along crumbling walls to the beds of interchangeable paramours. Anna gives Vronski her whole life, consents to a separation from her adored little son—despite the agony it costs her not to see the child and she goes to live with Vronski first abroad in Italy, and then on his country place in central Russia, though this "open" affair brands her an immoral woman in the eyes of her immoral circle. (In a way she may be said to have put into action Emma's dream of escaping with Rodolphe, but Emma would have experienced no wrench from parting with her child, and neither were there any moral complications in that little lady's case.) Finally Anna and Vronski return to city life. She scandalizes hypocritical society not so much with her love affair as with her open defiance of society's conventions.

for example, the post-9/11 notion that we now need to sacrifice some of our deeply held beliefs in individual liberty and privacy in the name of collective security against terrorism. It is not reaching too far to compare our current fear of terrorists with our past fear of witches. For example, the chance of an American being killed by a terrorist is an extraordinarily unlikely 1 in 20 million, compared to being killed in a car accident (1 in 19 thousand), drowning in their own bathtub (1 in 800 thousand), or being struck by lightning (1 in 1.5 million), yet society is in an acute state of anxiety over the terrorist “threat.”26 It’s not about logic but perception.

At this time, there was a superstition among upper class women that the blood of young children helped keep the bloom of youth and that young fat helped conserve a young skin. There was also TB raging through the city; at that time, it was a disease that was one hundred percent fatal, as in those years there was no penicillin, but there was a popular belief that ingested human blood soothed and healed tuberculosis. Enriqueta now began kidnapping children of all ages, some for prostitution and some to be killed to create her healing tonics and “facial crèmes.” Everything that she possibly could she used from these children: the blood, bones (that she pounded into powder), and the fat.

The definitive characteristic of the sexosophy of Christendom is the doctrine of the split between saintly love and sinful lust. This doctrine is all-pervasive. It penetrates all the institutions of contemporary Christendom . . . The cleft between saintly love and sinful lust is omnipresent in the sexuoerotic heritage of our culture. Love is undefiled and saintly. Lust is defiling and sinful. Love exists above the belt, lust below. Love is lyrical. Lust is lewd. Love is heralded in public. Lust is hidden in private. Love displayed is championed, but championships for lust are condemned. Love is candid, and speaks its name. Lust is clandestine and euphemizes its name. In some degree or other, the cleavage between love and lust gets programed into the design of the lovemaps of all developing boys and girls.12

A goods train was approaching. The platform shook, and it seemed to her as if she were again in the train. Suddenly remembering the man who had been run over the day she first met Vronsky, she realized what she had to do. Quickly and lightly descending the steps that led from the water-tank to the rails, she stopped close to the passing train. She looked at the bottom of the trucks, at the bolts and chains, and large iron wheels of the slowly-moving front truck, and tried to estimate the middle point between the front and back wheels, and the moment when that point would be opposite her. She wanted to fall half-way between the wheels of the front truck, which was drawing level with her, but the little red handbag which she began to take off her arm delayed her, and then she was too late. The middle had passed her. She was obliged to wait for the next truck. A feeling seized her like that she had experienced when preparing to enter the water in bathing, and she crossed herself. The familiar gesture of making the sign of the cross called up a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness, that obscured everything for her, broke, and life showed itself to her for an instant with all its bright past joys. But she did not take her eyes off the wheels of the approaching second truck, and at the very moment when the midway point between the wheels drew level, she threw away her red bag, and drawing her head down between her shoulders threw herself forward on her hands under the truck, and with a light movement as if preparing to rise again, immediately dropped on her knees. And at the same moment she was horror-struck at what she was doing. ‘Where am I? What am I doing? Why?’ She wished to rise, to throw herself back, but something huge and relentless struck her on her head and dragged her down. ‘God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling… A little peasant muttering something was working at the rails. The candle, by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up with a brighter light, lit up for her all that had before been dark, crackled, began to flicker, and went out for ever.

A man can spend several hours sitting cross-legged in the same position if he knows that nothing prevents him from changing it; but if he knows that he has to sit with his legs crossed like that, he will get cramps, his legs will twitch and strain towards where he would like to stretch them. That was what Vronsky felt with regard to society.

Every one, knowing intimately all the complexities of his own circumstances, involuntarily assumes that these complexities and the difficulty of clearing them up are peculiar to his own personal condition, and never thinks that others are surrounded by similar complexities. And so thought Vronsky.

But if in the end we resist calling Tolstoy a gossip, it has nothing to do with the topics he considers. It is entirely possible to talk a lot about someone’s intimate existence, to take an interest in the details of their divorce, to wonder about their career or to reflect on their disgrace – and still not to be guilty of gossiping in any way. The activity is not defined by a particular subject matter, solely by the manner in which it is being considered. The China Daily or the Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti could easily have turned the bare facts of Anna Karenina and Vronsky’s affair into gossip, just as Tolstoy could have transformed news of Wang Baoqiang and Ma Rong’s breakup into a masterful slice of Sino-Russian literature.

Młody, nerwowy człowiek, urzędnik sądu okręgowego, siedzący naprzeciwko niego, znienawidził go za wyraz, odbijający się na jego twarzy: młody człowiek prosił go o ogień do papierosa, zaczynał rozmawiać z nim i nawet potrącił go, chcąc dać do zrozumienia Wrońskiemu, że nie jest martwym przedmiotem, lecz człowiekiem; pomimo to Wroński spoglądał na niego, jak na latarnię, wiszącą na środku wagonu, a młody człowiek krzywił się, czując, że traci panowanie nad samym sobą, gdyż nie jest uznawanym za człowieka.

Le « signe de vie » lui est inconnu. Vronski, et encore : un Vronski élevé dans le marxisme-léninisme, passé dans le Komsomol et membre du Parti. Parfaitement pragmatique.

Relisant le cahier de l'année dernière : ce n'était pas plus brillant, très vide. Cela ne console pas. Je commence à souffrir de l'absence de S. une semaine, six jours, après le dernier rendez-vous. À ce moment-là, je cesse de vouloir écrire pour lui, je veux écrire pour l'oublier, me détacher de lui, qui m'apparaît toujours sous le visage de Vronski.

shack-dwelling,

molestation. The “Tin Lizzie” sat next to railway lines and was littered with construction materials, old cars, and dangerous wreckage. Of course, there was the occasional accident and certain areas parents

When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. —MARK TWAIN

Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives (1988) by John Douglas,

nurturers in our society: women to whom children

20 March - All the Leeds trains have been cancelled and I am wandering the station not knowing what to do when Rupert discovers me, having managed to get on to a Scottish train and change at Doncaster. Greatly elated by this we have a supper at La Grilla (halibut and chips) and then drive homeward in good spirits. Except that just after the Addingham bypass R. cries out and I see a grey shape in the headlights and he hits a badger - a young one, I would have thought and which, with its striped nose now lies senseless by the kerb. We drive back round the roundabout and then up the road again - and for one exultant moment it seems to have picked itself up and gone, but there it is, lying like an old rug by the roadside. We discuss running it over again to make sure it is dead - but neither of us can face it. R. is devastated; it's like Vronsky breaking his horse's back - a moment he can never call back - and feeling himself guilty and polluted by everything he hates - heedless cars, thoughtless motorists with him now one of their number. What particularly upsets him is that I have never seen a live badger - all the badgers I have seen like this one is now, a dirty corpse by the roadside. We drive on in sadness and silence.

The videotapes of Nobel’s interview with Adam Leroy Lane reveal him as a sanctimonious fat-fuck of a good ol’ boy redneck cracker. He drawls, “I got manners. I treat people the way I want to be treated...

Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters.xxi

unidentified serial perpetrators on the loose like the “Long Island Killer” suspected in as many as thirteen recent murders, the “Bone Collector” linked to thirteen murders in New Mexico, or the “February 9 Killer” who has killed at least two women in Salt Lake City on the same date in different years.ix The

biography of globe-hopping serial killer Charles Sobhraj. A peek inside

year, is veteran true crime superstar author and forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland, who has written 47 books and over 1,000 articles on serial killers, CSI, vampires, forensic science, mass murder, sex offenders and ghosts. Joining us also is this year’s winner of

Yashvin, a gambler and a rake, a man not merely without moral principles, but of immoral principles, Yashvin was Vronsky’s greatest friend in the regiment.