Authors

Ksenia Chistopolskaya¹; Sergey Enikolopov²;  ¹ Eramishantsev Moscow City Clinical Hospital, Russian Federation;  ² Mental Health Research Centre, Russian Federation

Discussion

Anna Karenina is one of the most popular Tolstoy’s works, which portrays the problem of suicide. The paper argues that the novel corresponds to and maybe even influenced many theories of suicide, starting from the sociological study in suicide by Emile Durkheim. Anna Karenina was translated into French in 1885, while Durkheim published his book in 1897, more than 10 years after he could read it. The novel contains 4 descriptions of suicidal activity: suicidal ideation (Levin), attempt (Vronsky’s attempt to shoot himself), completed suicide (Anna) and volunteer fighters (Vronsky and other men going to war). We argue that these 4 depictions correspond to 4 types of suicide according to Durkheim: anomic, egoistic, fatalistic and altruistic. Besides, we note that lots of changes in worldviews of the main characters happen after their mortality was made salient, which corresponds to Terror Management Theory in social psychology (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon, 1986) and works of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker (1973). In the end, we look at Anna’s presuicidal state from the point of view of Narrative Crisis Model of Suicide by Igor Galynker (2017). Thus, all these theories of suicide and death contemplation can be illustrated by Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina.