The visage speaks. Anna Karenina’s epiphany

Abstract

The paper examines descriptions of the main heroine’s physical appearance in L. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina through the prism of E. Levinas’s philosophy. The starting point of the study is defined by Anna’s question, “Can one ever tell anyone what one is feeling?” The author analyzes the relationship between the visual and the verbal in a depiction of inner experience. Levinas’s belief that the epiphany of the face is a whole language in itself presents a possibility to demonstrate how an unspoken feeling becomes visibly present and is transformed into a medium for ethical meaning. The analysis focuses on scenes where the characters’ facial expressions offer insights into what cannot be put into words. In this context, mimetic representation appears as a distinct mode of constitution of meaning, in which the face functions as an ethical appeal and a call to responsibility. Therefore, Tolstoy’s poetics of the face is interpreted as a space for encountering the Other, where the aesthetic dimension is inseparable from the ethical one, which in turn offers a new perspective for the exploration of the interaction between mimesis, language, and responsibility in Tolstoy’s artistic world.