Lev Tostoy is commonly identified with his character Levin in "Anna Karenina", but the discovery that the author repeats himself in other male characters and pre-eminently in his heroine Anna, questions the relation of a male author to the female he has engendered and the unstated reasons for the destruction of a character who is also himself. This close textual analysis deals with the formal, psychoanalytic and ideological devices and discourses of the novel, attempting to prove that a so-called monological text is a heteroglossia in which the silences speak as loudly as the voices. Judith Armstrong is author of "The Novel of Adultery", "In the Land of Kangaroos and Gold-Mines" and "Essays in Honour of Nina Christesen" (editor with Rae Slonek).