Poetics of Wakefulness: The Three Paintings of the Painter Mijáilov in Anna Karénina, of Lev Tolstói

Abstract

In the fifth part of Anna Karenina, the female protagonist encounters in a smalltown of Italy a remarkable character: the painter Mikhailov. Three of his works are described in detail. The first of them, his masterwork, represents Jesus before Pilatus; the second, a couple of children fishing. The third is a portrait of Anna that the artist paint as a commissioning, in which he is able to capture, in an extraordinary manner, the immaterial enchantment of his model. Such a portrait gains prominence in the seventh part, since it frames and presides one of the most relevant episodes of the novel, the encounter between Anna and Lievin. Mikhailov conceives the creative process as a sort of unveiling, as carefully removing the veils that cover the essence of things, trying not to damage them. It is a way to get closer to thetruth that suggest, at a different level, the possibility of a reading of Anna Karenina through the metaphoric way of the paintings. Such a reading will be the object of this paper, in which the themes portrayed, as well as the circumstances that surround them, will be proposed as away to unveil, in Mikhailov’s manner, some of the meanings that underlie this inexhaustible novel of Tolstoy.