fe through all its realities and can then understan death. Intellect and spirit merely bypass essential truths. While in the world of the living, Tolstoy shows the reader the delusions of life through various characters. Especially apparent isthe princess Betsy Tverskoy who is so caught up in her daily life and is unable to change. She throws extravagant dinner parties for that part of society which feasts on delusions. The irony behind it is that they, despite their disillusionment, mocks Anna at one of the parties where she had shown up with her lover, Vronsky. This is in essence the downfall of Anna, who has succumbed to passion for her lover. The themes of life and death will come to review itself in the novel. As for Anna, she embodies the both of them even thought she didn't know it. In the end as Anna traces the career which drives her to suicide in her long soliloquy, she discovers that her love had turned to hate, that her life has become a "stupid delusion" and death provides the only alternative. Anna now accepts death as she she had spontaneously and naturally confronted her love. Anna's death is an affirmation of her deep commitment to life and that death is the final truth to her illustrious career. "And the candle by which she _ had been reading the book filled with trouble and deceit, sorrow and evil, flared up with a brighter light, illuminating for her everything that before had been enshrouded in darkness, flickered, grew dim, and went out forever." (Tolstoy,p.816) Tolstoy cleverly uses the themes of life and especially death beneath the other themes in an intricate structure. Tolstoy uses thethemes as a vehicle to link the themes together to relate it to the readers. The theme of death is most critical to the novel, because it invokes the characters in the novel to do what they do. That fear of death and not being able to understand it, is the reason for characters' actions. It is the backbone for the oth...
