Winter cold day. Zheleznodorozhnaya station (in 1877 a IV class station) of a small town of the same name, 23 kilometers from Moscow (until 1939 - Obiralovka). It was in this place that, according to L. Tolstoy, terrible tragedy. It's quiet here today. I get off the platform and approach the tracks. Sparkling in the sun, they blind the eyes. I can’t help imagining that moment: how Karenina stands, stunned by despair, ready at any second to throw herself under the wheels of a rumbling freight train. She has already decided everything and is just waiting for the opening between the heavy wheels of the carriage to open...
- No! Everything was wrong! - Vladimir Sarychev, a local resident, an engineer by profession, now a businessman and also a long-time researcher of the history of Russian railways, stops my thoughts. “She didn’t throw herself under the train at all.” And she couldn’t even do it the way Tolstoy talked about it. Read more carefully the scene of the death of Anna Karenina: “...She did not take her eyes off the wheels of the passing second carriage. And exactly at that moment, when the middle between the wheels caught up with her, she threw back the red bag and, pressing her head into her shoulders, fell under the carriage on hands and with a slight movement, as if preparing to immediately stand up, she sank to her knees.”
- She couldn't have ended up under a train, falling into full height, explains Vladimir. - It's easy to see in the diagram.
He takes a pen, draws a human figure, standing nearby with a freight train. Then he depicts the trajectory of the fall: the figure, in fact, falling, rests his head on the casing of the car.
“But even if she managed to find herself between the wheels,” continues Vladimir, “she would inevitably run into the brake bars of the car.” The only way, in my opinion, of such suicide is to stand, sorry, on all fours in front of the rails and quickly stick your head under the train. But it is unlikely that a woman like Anna Karenina would do this.
History testifies: as soon as trains appeared, suicides immediately flocked to them. But they left for another world in the usual way - they jumped onto the rails in front of the moving train. There were probably quite a few such suicides, since special devices were even invented for locomotives that clung to them from the front. The design was supposed to gently pick up a person and throw him aside.
By the way, the freight train that “ran over” Karenin was made at the Aleksandrovsky foundry; it weighed up to 6,000 poods (about 100 tons) and moved at a speed of about 20 kilometers per hour. The rails on which her rebellious soul rested were cast iron, 78 millimeters high. Width railway track at that time was 5 feet (1524 millimeters).
Despite the dubious (without touching on the artistic side, of course) suicide scene, the writer nevertheless chose Obiralovka not by chance, Vladimir believes. The Nizhny Novgorod road was one of the main industrial routes: heavily loaded freight trains often ran here. The station was one of the largest. In the 19th century, these lands belonged to one of the relatives of Count Rumyantsev-Zadunaisky. According to the directory of the Moscow province for 1829, in Obiralovka there were 6 households with 23 peasant souls. In 1862, a railway line was built here. In Obiralovka itself, the length of sidings and sidings was 584.5 fathoms, there were 4 switches, a passenger and residential building. 9 thousand people used the station annually, or an average of 25 people per day. The station village appeared in 1877, when the novel Anna Karenina itself was published. There is nothing left of the previous buildings at the current station...
Frankly, I left the former Obiralovka somewhat discouraged. On the one hand, I was “rejoiced” for Anna Karenina. If she really existed, then her fate would not have ended so tragically. On the other hand, it was a little disappointing that the classic seemed to mislead us a little. Indeed, to a large extent it is thanks to the tragic final scene The novel became popular "among the masses" by Anna Karenina. Whichever local I asked: “Do you know that in your city Anna Karenina...”, I invariably heard the answer: “Is she the one who threw herself under the train?” And it must be said that most of those surveyed did not really hold the book in their hands.
- Do you have trains here? Lately no one rushed? - just in case, I asked Vladimir, referring to a certain tragic aura of this area.
“As long as I’ve been living here, I don’t remember a single incident,” the interlocutor answered.
Whether it was my imagination or not, I heard disappointment in his voice. He probably already regretted that he so imprudently began to destroy the legend.
On March 29, 1873, the famous Russian writer Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy began work on the novel Anna Karenina.
The writer’s wife Sofya Andreevna and his eldest son Sergei recalled that that morning Tolstoy accidentally looked into Pushkin’s volume and read the unfinished passage “The guests were arriving at the dacha...”. "This is how to write!" - Tolstoy exclaimed. That same day in the evening, the writer brought his wife a handwritten piece of paper, on which there was a now textbook phrase: “Everything was mixed up in the Oblonsky house.” Although in the final version of the novel it became the second, and not the first, giving way to “all happy families", as is known, similar friend on a friend...
By that time, the writer had long been nurturing the idea of composing a novel about a “sinner” rejected by society. Tolstoy completed his work in April 1877. In the same year, it began to be published in the Russian Bulletin magazine in monthly portions - all of reading Russia was burning with impatience, waiting for the continuation.
The prototype of Karenina was the eldest daughter of Alexander Pushkin, Maria Hartung. Extraordinary sophistication of manners, wit, charm and beauty distinguished Pushkin’s eldest daughter from other women of that time. Maria Alexandrovna's husband was Major General Leonid Hartung, manager of the Imperial Stud.
According to the plot of the novel, Anna, realizing how difficult and hopeless her life is, how senseless her cohabitation with her lover Count Vronsky is, rushes after Vronsky, hoping to explain and prove something else to him. At the station, where she was supposed to board the train to go to the Vronskys, Anna remembers her first meeting with him, also at the station, and how on that distant day some lineman fell under the train and was crushed to death. The thought immediately occurs to Anna that there is a very simple way out of her situation that will help her wash away the shame and untie everyone’s hands. And at the same time it will be great way take revenge on Vronsky. Anna throws herself under the train. 
Could this happen tragic event in fact, in the very place that Tolstoy describes in his novel? Zheleznodorozhnaya station (in 1877 a IV class station) of a small town of the same name, 23 kilometers from Moscow (until 1939 - Obiralovka). It was in this place that the terrible tragedy described in the novel “Anna Karenina” occurred.
In Tolstoy's novel, the scene of Anna's suicide is described as follows: "... she did not take her eyes off the wheels of the passing second carriage. And exactly at that moment, when the middle between the wheels caught up with her, she threw back the red bag and, pressing her head into her shoulders, fell under the car in her arms and with a slight movement, as if preparing to immediately get up, she dropped to her knees.”
In reality, Karenina is not could have done this the way Tolstoy told about it. A person cannot end up under a train, falling to his full height. In accordance with the trajectory of the fall: while falling, the figure rests its head against the casing of the carriage. The only way All that remains is to kneel in front of the rails and quickly stick your head under the train. But it is unlikely that a woman like Anna Karenina would do this.
Despite the dubious (without touching, of course, on the artistic side) suicide scene, the writer nevertheless chose Obiralovka not by chance. The Nizhny Novgorod road was one of the main industrial routes: heavily loaded freight trains often ran here. 
The station was one of the largest. In the 19th century, these lands belonged to one of the relatives of Count Rumyantsev-Zadunaisky. According to the directory of the Moscow province for 1829, in Obiralovka there were 6 households with 23 peasant souls. In 1862, a railway line was built here. In Obiralovka itself, the length of sidings and sidings was 584.5 fathoms, there were 4 switches, a passenger and residential building. 9 thousand people used the station annually, or an average of 25 people per day. The station village appeared in 1877, when the novel Anna Karenina itself was published. Nothing remains of the previous buildings at the current station.
While selecting materials for the post, I came across the opinion that Anna Karenina’s suicide is convincing from an artistic point of view, but dubious from, so to speak, a “technical” point of view. However, there were no details - and I wanted to figure it out myself.
As you know, the prototype of Anna Karenina is a combination of the appearance of Maria Hartung, Pushkin’s daughter, the fate and character of Maria Alekseevna Dyakova-Sukhotina, and tragic death Anna Stepanovna Pirogova. We'll talk about the latter.
In the original plan, Karenina's name was Tatyana, and she was leaving her life in the Neva. But a year before the start of work on the novel, in 1872, a tragedy occurred in the family of Tolstoy’s neighbor, Alexander Nikolaevich Bibikov, with whom they maintained good neighborly relations and even started building a distillery together. Together with Bibikov as housekeeper and common-law wife lived Anna Stepanovna Pirogova. According to recollections, she was ugly, but friendly, kind, with an inspired face and easy character.
However, recently Bibikov began to give preference to the German governess of his children and even decided to marry her. When Anna Stepanovna found out about his betrayal, her jealousy crossed all boundaries. She ran away from home with a bundle of clothes and wandered around the area for three days, beside herself with grief. Before her death, she sent a letter to Bibikov: “You are my killer. Be happy, if a murderer can be happy at all. If you wish, you can see my corpse on the rails in Yasenki" (station not far from Yasnaya Polyana). However, Bibikov did not read the letter, and the messenger returned it. Desperate Anna Stepanovna threw herself under a passing freight train.
The next day, Tolstoy went to the station while an autopsy was being performed there in the presence of a police inspector. He stood in the corner of the room and saw in every detail what was lying on the marble table. female body, bloodied and mangled, with a crushed skull. And Bibikov, having recovered from the shock, soon married his governess.
This is the background, so to speak. Now let's re-read the description of the unfortunate heroine's suicide again.
With a quick, easy step, she went down the steps that led from the water pump to the rails, and she stopped right next to a passing train. She looked at the bottom of the cars, at the screws and chains and at the high cast-iron wheels of the slowly rolling first car and with her eye tried to determine the middle between the front and rear wheels and the moment when this middle would be against her.
"There! “- she said to herself, looking into the shadow of the carriage, at the sand mixed with coal with which the sleepers were covered, “there, in the very middle, and I will punish him and get rid of everyone and myself.”
She wanted to fall under the first carriage, which was level with her in the middle. But the red bag, which she began to remove from her hand, delayed her, and it was too late: the middle had passed her by. We had to wait for the next carriage. A feeling similar to the one she experienced when, while swimming, was preparing to enter the water, came over her, and she crossed herself. The habitual gesture of the sign of the cross evoked in her soul whole line girlish and childhood memories, and suddenly the darkness that covered everything for her was torn apart, and life appeared to her for a moment with all its bright past joys. But she did not take her eyes off the wheels of the approaching second carriage. And exactly at that moment, when the middle between the wheels caught up with her, she threw back the red bag and, pressing her head into her shoulders, fell under the carriage on her hands and with a slight movement, as if preparing to immediately get up, sank to her knees. And at the same moment she was horrified by what she was doing. "Where I am? What am I doing? For what?" She wanted to get up, to lie back; but something huge, inexorable pushed her in the head and dragged her behind her back. “Lord, forgive me everything!” - she said, feeling the impossibility of fighting. The little man was working on the iron, saying something. And the candle, by which she was reading a book full of anxiety, deception, grief and evil, flared up with a brighter light than ever, illuminated for her everything that had previously been in the darkness, crackled, began to fade and went out forever.
The fact that Anna Karenina threw herself under a freight train and not a passenger train is absolutely correct from a technical point of view. Whether Tolstoy’s powers of observation played a role here or whether he specifically paid attention to the structure of the carriages is unknown, but the fact remains: throwing yourself under a pre-revolutionary passenger carriage was extremely difficult. Note the undercarriage boxes and iron braces for strength. The unlucky suicide would rather have been crippled and thrown onto the platform.
Here's a freight car. According to the description, it was approximately under this that the unfortunate heroine threw herself. There are no undercarriage boxes here, there are a lot free space and you can “count” the middle quite easily. If we take into account that Anna managed to “dive” under the carriage, fall on her hands, kneel down, be horrified by what she was doing, and try to get up, then it becomes clear that the train was moving very slowly.
...fell under the carriage on her hands and with a slight movement, as if preparing to immediately get up, sank to her knees.
But here I disagree with the classic: you can fall between carriages, and under the carriage will still have to “dive”, that is, bend over, lean forward and only then fall onto the rails. For a lady in a long dress with a bustle (according to the fashion of that time), in lace and a hat with a veil (ladies with bareheaded they didn’t go out into the street, and the text above mentions that “horror was reflected on her face under the veil”), a difficult task, but in principle possible. By the way, pay attention - she took off the “bag” and threw it away, but not the hat.
« Something huge, inexorable pushed her in the head and dragged her behind her back“- here Tolstoy took pity on his readers and tried to avoid excessive realism. The nameless “something” is a heavy cast-iron wheel (or rather, a pair of wheels). But I won’t go deeper either, because it’s actually scary to imagine.
“But why didn’t she just throw herself under the locomotive?” – I asked S. – Why did you have to dive under the carriage?
- What about the front bumper? This is precisely why it was installed - so that, if necessary, to push cows, goats and other Karenins out of the way... She would simply be thrown aside, and instead of a romantic death there would be deep disability. So the method is technically correct, although not very convenient for a lady dressed in the fashion of that time.
In short, we did not find any “technical” mistakes in the description of Anna Karenina’s death. Apparently, Tolstoy did not just observe the autopsy deceased Anna Pirogova, but also talked with the investigator, collecting eerie, but necessary material to describe the suicide.
Forward to the past!
Most of all toponyms in Russia are formed from proper names - Mikhailovka, Nikolaevka, Aleksandrovka. And the name “Nikolskoye” is one of the most popular in Russia. There are several hundred villages and stations with this simple name; there are eighteen of them in the Moscow region alone. There is also Nikolskoye in the east of the Moscow region. Nikolsko-Arkhangelskoye, the patrimony of the Dolgorukov counts, is now a modest Nikolskoye platform, where not every train stops.
Silver and gold ponds
IN Imperial Russia The Nikolskoye-Arkhangelskoye estate was gorgeous. The Dolgorukovs began to arrange it especially intensively when they hoped to marry the young Tsar Peter II to their Masha Dolgorukova. It was then that the famous cascade of ponds appeared on the estate. By water It was easy to get from Tsar’s Izmailovo to Gorenki and to the Dolgorukovs - approximately as it is now in Moscow by river bus. There were more than a dozen ponds: Peasant, Knyazhiy, Serebryany, Sterlyazhy, Zhelty, Tarelochkin and Stepan Stepanovich, etc. Today, only a few ponds have been more or less preserved - for example, Yellow. Of the entire cascade, he was the most beautiful.
The size of the land was almost five hundred acres. The tithe is a little more than a hectare, and, mentally dividing up the Dolgorukovs’ lands for gardening, we get about ten average gardening partnerships for five hundred plots, and a single prince-owner over the entire team of thousands of serfs. Sorry - summer residents.
Levitan often painted these places 150 years later. In most of his most famous paintings turn of XIX-XX centuries, the eastern suburban outskirts are depicted - Vladimirskaya road and Saltykovka, adjacent to Nikolsky.
The times, meanwhile, were anti-Semitic, and some patriots were very indignant that a certain Isaac Ilyich dared to paint Russian fields. Moreover, if you look closely, it’s not even Ilyich, but Elyashevich-Leibovich! Levitan was not touched by indignation - he needed to earn a living, to create, and his sick heart hinted that there was little time for this. The artist, who was born in Mariampolsky district (present-day Lithuania) in a place where Jewish and Scottish communities lived, suddenly had the most Russian landscapes - isn’t it wonderful! Yellowed fields, skies of all shades of gray and blue, lakes with water lilies and dark fairy-tale forests - all this remains with us on his canvases.
Would you like to order to Obiralovka?
The Vladimirsky tract and the parallel Nosovikhinskaya road, a little smaller in scope, were very popular trade routes. The path connected Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod. But the dense forests and flooding rivers of Meshchera (it is in the Meshcherskaya lowland that the entire east of the Moscow region is located) hid not only nightingales and hares. Residents of the surrounding villages were hiding in the ditches in great pleasure, waiting for a merchant's cart to pass along the road.
This hybrid of customs, racketeering and the traffic police service worked properly in the 17th and 18th centuries. The merchants were robbed and released, often unharnessing their priceless horse. Getting around Nosovikha was long and tedious, so, willy-nilly, the merchants considered risk a noble cause. The area was named Obiralovka. The efforts of Count Rumyantsev-Zadunaisky, who called the land Sergeevka, by name youngest son, did not bring success. Only the determined Bolsheviks managed to break the tradition. In the thirties, they named the station and town “Zheleznodorozhny” - now it, along with Saltykovka, Nikolsky and Kuchino, is officially part of the almost half a million population of Balashikha near Moscow.
And in the nineteenth century, despite the gloomy name, Obiralovka grew and expanded. The strategically successful place was overgrown with signs of civilization - railroad station, post office, water pumping station, trading yard and, finally, telegraph office. Obiralovka was no longer known as a deserted forest village; now it was a full-fledged stopping point with class I and II halls and four railway switches.
“The artel workers ran up to her, offering her their services; either the young people, knocking their heels on the boards of the platform and talking loudly, looked around at it, then those they met walked away in the wrong direction,” Count Tolstoy wrote about Obiralovka, looking at it through the eyes of the tormented Anna Karenina, and added: “Two maids walking along the platform , bent their heads back, looking at her, thinking something out loud about her toilet: “Real,” they said about the lace that she was wearing. The young people did not leave her alone. They again, looking into her face and laughingly shouting something in an unnatural voice, passed by. The stationmaster, passing by, asked if she was coming. The boy, the kvass seller, didn’t take his eyes off her.”
Even if we make allowances for the specific perception of reality of the morphine addict Karenina, who imagines that the whole world is unkindly surrounding her, the picture comes out lively and rich. The platform is more than twenty miles from Moscow - and, please: maids discussing fashion, helpful artel workers, sellers of kvass. In a few minutes, in front of this entire motley crowd, Anna will throw herself between the cars of the clanging locomotive and remain there forever.
By the way, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy knew Obiralovka firsthand. Nearby, in the village of Kuchino, there was the estate of his relative Nikolai Ryumin. Tolstoy went there quite regularly, and it was there that he was introduced to young Praskovya Shcherbatova, who became the prototype of Kitty Shcherbatskaya.
“I went to the Ryumins with boredom and drowsiness,” the count writes in his diary, “and suddenly it washed over me. P. Shch. is lovely. Fun all day long." It was Ryumin who worked with the serf boy Savva Morozov, who ransomed his sons for the legendary seventeen thousand rubles (according to modern rate- about 280 thousand dollars).
And Praskovya Shcherbatova, dear Kitty, grew up into Countess Uvarova, chairman of the Moscow Archaeological Society, professor at six universities - Dorpat, Kazan, Kharkov, Moscow, St. Petersburg Archaeological and Lazarevsky Institute of Oriental Languages.
Praskovya Nikolaevna, the Obiralovo princess, initiated work on creating full catalog domestic antiquities. This work is one hundred and ten years old, and it is still going on. The grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren of Praskovya Uvarova, an archaeological beauty and mother of seven children, are named Dominic-William, Luc-Gerard, Caspar-Serge and Lara-Alexandra. They live in Europe.
Kuchino Island
The village of Kuchino is mentioned in the letters of Ivan Kalita. This happened, it turns out, seven hundred years ago. Twenty-eight generations have changed - and yet Moscow, the capital, still has a small suburb, no longer rural, quite small-town, a neighbor of the former Obiralovka.
After the landowner Ryumin, Tolstoy's relatives, the Ryabushinskys bought the estate a few years later. And twenty-two-year-old Dmitry Ryabushinsky did not begin to carve out continuous dachas from the estate - as did, say, resourceful and similar young Alexander Torletsky, the owner of the estate next door - Ryabushinsky conceived a different, progressive idea. On the right bank of the local river Pekhorka, he built the world's first Aerodynamic Institute under the direction of Moscow University professor Nikolai Zhukovsky. The professor taught young Dmitry Pavlovich mechanics at the school of commerce and made the young man from a merchant family fall in love with science.
Not even a year had passed since the Wright brothers took off the first airplane, and at the end of 1904 the Aerodynamic Institute was already functioning in Kuchino. Construction began in July, and the institute was ready by November. Zhukovsky personally monitored the material and technical equipment of the laboratory, proving the importance of building a wind tunnel of a certain length.
Dmitry Ryabushinsky spent one hundred thousand rubles on the construction – that’s almost two million dollars at the current exchange rate. He allocated another 36 thousand per year (about 600 thousand modern dollars) for the annual allowance of the institute.
In 1918, Ryabushinsky, already a serious entrepreneur and philanthropist, gave the institute to the Land of Soviets with a personal request to nationalize the institution for the benefit of the people.
"All productive work at this time in Russia it became impossible. The most prominent people were killed in Petrograd artillery technicians- N.A. Zabudsky, generals Matafanov and Dubnitsky. I […] stayed in Moscow to protect the Aerodynamic Institute from the destruction that had already begun, and to ensure the situation of those working there.”, - this is from his own memories.
The Bolsheviks did not appreciate the impulse and lightly marinated Dmitry Pavlovich in their famous cellars. Ryabushinsky soon left there, alive and well, but immediately to Denmark. From Denmark he left for France, and lived there for another forty years, until his death. All his life Ryabushinsky lived on the “Nansen” passport of a Russian emigrant, renounced all honorary citizenships, lectured on aeronautics and aerodynamics, defended his dissertation at the Sorbonne, and became a corresponding member French Academy Sci. He stood at the origins of the creation of the Parisian Society for the Preservation of Russians cultural values abroad.
“For 27 years of being outside the borders of our Motherland, I have invariably pursued two goals: 1 - participation, to the best of my ability, in increasing the Russian contribution to world science, 2 - storage, upholding the meaning and promoting the increase, despite any passing situation, of our domestic cultural values",” wrote the philanthropist to the president of the French Academy of Sciences.
In the USSR, meanwhile, they shot a patriotic film about the biography of Zhukovsky. On the screen, the greedy and narrow-minded merchant Ryabushinsky is sternly interrupted by the harsh but principled Professor Zhukovsky, who comes from simple, poor engineers - an image very appropriate to the time.
Dmitry Pavlovich Ryabushinsky is buried in the Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois cemetery. The grandchildren of the founder of Europe's first aerodynamic institute live in France, the USA and Switzerland.
Unfortunately, Lev Nikolaevich, who was actually very attentive to all the details of the text being created, did not bother to indicate the type, serial number and the year of manufacture of the steam locomotive under which Anna Karenina threw herself. There are no clarifications other than that the train was a freight train.
– What kind of locomotive do you think Anna Karenina threw herself under? – I once asked the great ferroequinologist of all LJ.
“Most likely, under the “Sheep”,” answered S., after thinking. “But, perhaps, under the “Solid Sign.”
"Solid sign" 
I decided that, most likely, Tolstoy described “a train in general,” and he was not interested in the type of locomotive. But if contemporaries could easily imagine this very “steam locomotive in general,” then for posterity it is much more difficult. We assumed that for readers of that time, the “locomotive in general” was the popular “Sheep”, known to everyone, young and old.
However, while checking the post that had already been posted, it turned out that we were both hasty in jumping to conclusions. S. didn’t remember exact date publication of the novel and dated it to the end of the 1890s, when both “Ov” and “Kommersant” were already widely used on railways Russian Empire, and when checking, I got confused in the series and letters and, due to inexperience, simply “adjusted” the release dates to the publication date. Alas, everything turned out to be not so simple.
The novel was conceived in 1870, published in parts in the magazine "Russian Bulletin" in 1875-1877, published as a separate book in 1878. The start of production of O series locomotives dates back to 1890, and the Kommersant series - even to the end of 1890- X. Consequently, the heroine threw herself under some much more archaic locomotive, which is difficult for us to imagine now. I had to turn to the encyclopedia "Locomotives of Russian Railways 1845-1955".
Since we knew that Karenina threw herself under a freight train, and we also knew the name of the road on which the tragedy occurred (Moscow-Nizhny Novgorod, opened for train traffic on August 2, 1862), then the most likely candidate can be considered a freight steam locomotive of the G series 1860 's release. For Moscow-Nizhny Novgorod railway Such locomotives were built by French and German factories. Feature- a very large, expanding upward pipe and a half-open booth for the driver. In general, on our modern look, this miracle of technology looks more like a children's toy :)
Station
Just in case, let me remind you that Anna Karenina threw herself under a train at the Obiralovka station, located 23 kilometers from Moscow (and not in Moscow or St. Petersburg). In 1939, at the request local residents The station was renamed Zheleznodorozhnaya. The fact that Tolstoy chose Obiralovka once again confirms how attentive he was to all the details of the plot. At that time, the Nizhny Novgorod road was one of the main industrial highways: heavily loaded freight trains often ran here, under one of which the unfortunate heroine of the novel died.
The railway line in Obiralovka was built in 1862, and after some time the station became one of the largest. The length of sidings and sidings was 584.5 fathoms, there were 4 switches, a passenger and residential building. 9 thousand people used the station annually, or an average of 25 people per day. The station village appeared in 1877, when the novel “Anna Karenina” itself was published (in 1939 the village was also renamed the city of Zheleznodorozhny). After the release of the novel, the station became a place of pilgrimage for Tolstoy's fans and acquired great importance in the life of the surrounding villages.
When the Obiralovka station was the final station, there was a turning circle here - a device for turning 180 degrees for locomotives, and there was a water pump mentioned in the novel “Anna Karenina”. Inside the wooden station building there were office premises, a telegraph office, goods and passenger ticket offices, small hall 1st and 2nd class and a common waiting room with two exits to the platform and the station area, on both sides of which cab drivers “guarded” passengers at the hitching posts. Unfortunately, now nothing remains of the previous buildings at the station.
Here is a photo of Obiralovka station ( late XIX- beginning of the 20th century): 
Now let's look at the text of the novel:
When the train approached the station, Anna got out in a crowd of other passengers and, like lepers, avoiding them, stood on the platform, trying to remember why she had come here and what she intended to do. Everything that had seemed possible to her before was now so difficult to imagine, especially in the noisy crowd of all these ugly people who would not leave her alone. Then the artel workers ran up to her, offering her their services; first the young people, knocking their heels on the boards of the platform and talking loudly, looked around it, then those they met walked away in the wrong direction.
Here it is, the plank platform - on the left side of the photo! Read on:
“Oh my God, where should I go?” – she thought, walking further and further along the platform. At the end she stopped. The ladies and children, who met the gentleman in glasses and were laughing and talking loudly, fell silent, looking at her when she caught up with them. She quickened her pace and walked away from them to the edge of the platform. A freight train was approaching. The platform shook, and it seemed to her that she was moving again.
And suddenly, remembering the crushed man on the day of her first meeting with Vronsky, she realized what she had to do. With a quick, easy step, she went down the steps that led from the water pump to the rails, and she stopped right next to a passing train.
By “water pump” we mean the water tower clearly visible in the photograph. That is, Anna walked along the plank platform and went down, where she threw herself under a freight train passing at low speed. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves - the next post will be devoted to a railway-philological analysis of suicide. On this moment one thing is clear - Tolstoy visited the Obiralovka station and had a good idea of the place where the tragedy occurred - so well that the entire sequence of Anna’s actions in last minutes her life can be reconstructed from a single photograph.