Orwell's concept of Doublethink may also have owed something to a superb example from Vronsky's code of principles, in Anna Karenina, 'that one must pay a
cardsharper, but need not pay a tailor; that one must never tell a lie to a man, but one may to a woman; that one must never cheat anyone, but one may a husband; that one must never pardon an insult, but may give one, and so on'.
And while the fertile vein of close-up scenarios of
cardsharpers and musicians, alongside forceful religious paintings, their intensity enhanced by extreme contrasts of light and dark, had run its course in Italy within 50 years, today these paintings are again finding an audience.
Dorothy, a contemporary woman, is presented as essentially a mask, "the dark in the wood." She is present only as a nonpresence, "unhistorical, unremembering, unrhetorical," negations that place her on the "threshold," outside the sequential structures of time and language, just as the
cardsharpers and Pullman attendants are on the margins of society.