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Anna Karenina's nightmare about the peasant mumbling in French is a critical moment in Tolstoy's novel. Scholars interpret the passage in different ways. It seems never to be omitted from any film version of the text, and it invariably catches the reader's attention. In the first chapter of the novel, however, there is another dream-Stiva Oblonsky's-that scholars generally bypass:
"Yes, yes, what was going on?" he thought, remembering his dream. "Yes, what was going on? Yes! Alabin was giving a dinner in Darmstadt; no, it wasn't Darmstadt but something American. Yes, but Darmstadt was in America there. Yes, Alabin was giving a dinner on glass tables, yes-and the tables were singing Il mio tesoro, except it wasn't Il mio tesoro but something better, and there were some little decanters and they were women," he remembered. (Tolstoy 3-4)
Il mio tesoro is the beginning of the famous aria from Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. The question as to why we find a reference to the opera at the beginning of Anna Karenina seems obvious at first: Stiva is a kind of Don Juan, a fact he doesn't hide: "[W]omen are the pivot on which everything turns. I'm in a bad way too, very bad. [...] Let us suppose you are married, and you love your wife, but you are attracted to another woman..." (Tolstoy 42). Levin, to whom these remarks are addressed, "could not help himself from smiling." Stiva's "women frenzy" (^enodecne-a word from Dal's Dictionary) initially seems amusing, but already in this dialogue, the comedic element is partly removed, by Stiva himself, who, speaking about the fullness of life and lovers, suddenly concludes: "It's a terrible drama" (Tolstoy 44).
It seems completely appropriate that Stiva has dreamed of Mozart's music: In the opera, Don Juanism is presented in both comedic and tragic keys. This generic peculiarity of Mozart's Don Giovanni has been discussed before. It is fundamentally important to note that the comedic and tragic in the opera are not mixed but rather coexist organically:
The thematic unity of Mozart's opera [...] reveals the mutual reversibility of opposites [...] and even demonstrates a new generic quality: the 'diffuse' interpenetration of tragic and comedic, which is not reduced to a single...