Anna Karenina

The next morning Vronsky goes to the station to meet his mother off the Petersburg train. In the carriage doorway he passes a woman whose glance stops him: shining grey eyes under thick lashes, and a kind of suppressed eagerness that keeps breaking out in her smile however hard she tries to hide it. She is Anna Arkadyevna Karenina, Stiva’s sister and the wife of a powerful Petersburg official, and she has come to rescue her brother’s marriage. She has spent the journey chatting with Vronsky’s mother about their sons.

As they leave the platform there is a commotion. A railway guard, muffled up against the bitter frost, did not hear a train backing up and has been crushed to death. Vronsky quietly gives the station-master two hundred roubles for the widow. In the carriage afterwards, Anna’s lips are trembling. “It’s an omen of evil,” she tells Stiva.

At the Oblonskys’ house Anna performs a small miracle. She does not excuse her brother. She listens to Dolly, cries with her, and reminds her that Stiva, for all his faults, has never stopped needing her. By dinner Dolly is calling her husband “Stiva” again and nobody mentions separation. Kitty, meeting this famous Petersburg beauty, falls half in love with her, the way young girls do with older married women. Anna seems so simple and open, and yet there is a serious, almost mournful look in her eyes that Kitty cannot explain.

A few days later comes the great ball, which Kitty is sure will be the happiest night of her life: tonight Vronsky will propose during the mazurka. She has pictured Anna in lilac. Anna arrives in plain black velvet with a little wreath of pansies in her hair, and Kitty suddenly understands that Anna’s charm is that she always stands out from her dress; the dress is never what you see. Then Kitty watches Vronsky dancing with Anna and sees on his face an expression of humble, frightened adoration, and on Anna’s a radiance she recognizes, because she has felt it herself. The mazurka goes to Anna. While the orchestra plays, an eighteen-year-old’s world falls to pieces.

Levin, meanwhile, visits his elder brother Nikolai, a consumptive, hard-drinking radical who lives in squalor with a former prostitute named Masha, and then retreats to his estate, Pokrovskoe, where his old nurse Agafya Mikhailovna and the work of the farm slowly put him back together.

Anna, ashamed of what she has done to Kitty, cuts her visit short. On the night train to Petersburg she tries to read an English novel and cannot follow a line. At a stop called Bologova she steps out into a howling snowstorm for air, and there on the platform is Vronsky. He has followed her. “You know that I have come to be where you are,” he tells her; he cannot help it. She orders him to stop, and is flooded with joy. When the train pulls into Petersburg her husband, Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, is waiting for her, and her first thought on seeing him is a small, devastating one: why do his ears stick out like that?

Through the winter Vronsky follows Anna everywhere, especially to the glittering salon of his cousin, Princess Betsy Tverskaya, where gossip is the main sport and a married woman’s admirer is a fashionable accessory. Karenin is a high-ranking civil servant, twenty years older than his wife: cool, punctual, intelligent and almost incapable of showing feeling. When society starts to whisper, he does not ask Anna what she feels. He worries about how things look, prepares a little speech, and delivers it in their bedroom. She laughs it off, and he does not know how to reach her.

After nearly a year of pursuit, Anna becomes Vronsky’s lover. Tolstoy does not describe the act; he skips to the aftermath, with Vronsky standing over her like a murderer over a body and Anna sobbing with shame. It is one of the boldest pieces of restraint in the novel.

Kitty, humiliated and heartbroken, falls ill, and her family takes her to a German spa. There she meets Varenka, a calm, selfless young woman who nurses the sick, and for a while Kitty tries to become a saint herself, until she realizes that borrowed goodness is just another kind of pretence. Back at Pokrovskoe, Levin shoots woodcock with Stiva in the spring dusk and watches him sell Dolly’s forest to a merchant for far less than it is worth. Levin, who loves the land, cannot understand how anyone can treat it so lightly.

In summer, at the officers’ steeplechase at Krasnoe Selo, Vronsky rides his beautiful, nervous mare Frou-Frou. He has just learned that Anna is pregnant, and he is wound tight. He leads the field, but at one obstacle he drops back into the saddle at the wrong moment and breaks the mare’s back. She is shot. Vronsky, unhurt, is wild with grief and rage: it was his own clumsy movement that killed her. Tolstoy never says it is a symbol. He does not need to.

In the stand, Anna cannot hide her terror when he falls, and the whole of society sees it. In the carriage home Karenin reproaches her for her behaviour, and she tells him the truth: “I love him, I am his mistress; I can’t bear you; I’m afraid of you, and I hate you.” Karenin’s response is to think. He considers a duel and decides against it; he considers divorce and shrinks from the scandal. Then he writes her a letter: everything is to go on as before, for the sake of appearances and their son, Seryozha. Anna realizes he will never let her go and never let her be.

Levin, meanwhile, spends a day mowing hay alongside his peasants and loses himself in the rhythm of the scythe, in one of the most joyful scenes Tolstoy ever wrote. Driving at dawn after a night in a haystack, dreaming of giving up his old life, perhaps even of marrying a peasant girl, he sees a carriage pass on the road, with Kitty at the window looking out at the sunrise. In that instant he knows he will never love anyone else.

One evening Karenin meets Vronsky on his own doorstep, and something in him snaps. He consults a lawyer about divorce, then travels to Moscow on government business. There, at a dinner Stiva gives, Levin and Kitty find themselves alone at a card table. Levin takes a piece of chalk and writes only the first letters of a long question; Kitty reads every word and answers in initials too. It is a proposal in code, and it works. (Tolstoy proposed to his own wife, Sofia, the same way.)

Karenin, meanwhile, receives a telegram from Anna: she is dying after giving birth to Vronsky’s daughter, and begs him to come and forgive her. He suspects a trick but goes. Anna, delirious with fever, tells him there is another woman inside her, one she is afraid of, who fell in love with the other man; the real Anna wants only his forgiveness. Something breaks open in Karenin. Seeing her suffering, he feels a joy of forgiveness he has never known, forgives her completely, and takes Vronsky’s hands away from his face. Vronsky, humiliated by the generosity of the man he wronged, goes home and shoots himself in the chest. He survives.

Anna recovers too, and finds that she cannot bear Karenin’s goodness any more than his coldness. He even offers her a divorce, taking the blame on himself. Instead she simply leaves with Vronsky, without a divorce, and abandons Seryozha. Vronsky resigns his commission and, with it, a brilliant career.

Levin and Kitty marry in Moscow, and Levin, who had dreamed of floating blissfully along like a little boat on a lake, discovers that a boat needs steering. They quarrel about nothing and make up, and he is happy, just not in the way he expected. When Nikolai lies dying in a grim provincial hotel, Levin wants to leave Kitty behind. She insists on coming, and while he stands frozen with horror and pity, she simply gets to work: fresh linen, washing, a priest. Levin sees that his young wife knows something about life and death that all his reading never taught him. Soon afterwards she is pregnant.

Anna and Vronsky travel in Italy. They are free and, for a while, blissful. But Vronsky, without his regiment, is bored. He dabbles in painting, and when they visit a real artist, Mikhailov, and see his portrait of Anna, Vronsky quietly gives up his own. Vronsky has everything he wanted, and has found it to be no more than a grain of sand from the mountain of happiness he imagined.

They return to Petersburg, where the doors that were open to Anna are now shut. Seryozha has been told his mother is dead. On his birthday Anna bribes her way into her old house at dawn and wakes him. They cling to each other, crying, until she hears Karenin coming and flees, forgetting even to give him the toys she bought. Then, against Vronsky’s advice, she goes to the opera to hear the great soprano Patti, sits in a box in full view of society, and is publicly insulted by a woman in the next box. Vronsky decides they must leave for the country.

Dolly drives across the countryside to visit Anna at Vronsky’s estate, Vozdvizhenskoe, and finds a luxurious, modern establishment: English governess, a tennis court, a hospital Vronsky is building, guests at dinner. Anna is more beautiful than ever, and more brittle. Late at night she lets Dolly understand that she does not intend to have more children, and Dolly, mother of a houseful, is shocked. Vronsky takes Dolly aside to ask for help: their little daughter, Annie, is legally a Karenina, and any sons would be too. Only a divorce can fix it. Dolly leaves feeling that the whole visit was a performance, and is glad to get home to her own chaotic family.

At Pokrovskoe, Levin plays host to Dolly’s children, his half-brother Sergei Koznyshev and Kitty’s friend Varenka. Koznyshev means to propose to Varenka during a mushroom hunt, but they end up talking about mushrooms, and the moment passes for good. A silly young guest, Vasenka Veslovsky, flirts with the pregnant Kitty, and Levin, sick with jealousy, throws him out of the house.

In the autumn Vronsky goes to the provincial elections, where noblemen argue over procedure, and Anna, alone and jealous, writes that Annie is ill to bring him home. They move to Moscow to wait for a divorce. There Levin meets Anna for the first time, after a night out with Stiva, and is enchanted by her and by Mikhailov’s portrait of her. Kitty is furious. Soon afterwards she gives birth to their son, Mitya, after a long, terrible night in which Levin, who has no faith, finds himself praying. In Petersburg, Stiva pleads with Karenin for the divorce, but Karenin is now under the influence of the pious Countess Lidia Ivanovna and a fashionable French clairvoyant, Landau. After Landau pronounces from a trance, Karenin refuses.

In Moscow, Anna’s world shrinks to one man. She cannot go into society; Vronsky can, and does. She takes morphine to sleep, and every absence of his looks to her like proof that he no longer loves her. He grows defensive and cold, which seems to prove it. In one quarrel she tells him that respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.

One morning after a bad night, Vronsky goes out to see his mother, who wants him to marry a suitable young princess. Anna sends a note begging him to come back, then a telegram; his answer is that he cannot come before ten. She calls on Dolly and finds Kitty there, polite and cool, and feels like an outcast. Driving through Moscow she sees everything with a terrible, distorted clarity: shop signs, people in the street, all of them, she thinks, hating one another, all lying. She decides to follow Vronsky and takes a train to Obiralovka, the station near his mother’s house.

On the platform a servant hands her his reply to her note: he is sorry it missed him, and will be back at ten. Nothing more. A goods train is coming in. She remembers the man crushed on the day she first met Vronsky, and she knows what she will do. She goes down to the rails, drops her red bag, and throws herself under a carriage. In the same instant she is terrified at what she is doing, and tries to get up, but it is too late. Her last words are a prayer: “Lord, forgive me all!” Tolstoy ends the chapter with the image of a candle that had lit up a book full of troubles, lies, sorrow and evil, flaring brighter than ever, then going out.

Two months later, in the summer of 1876, Russia is in a fever of enthusiasm for the Serbs fighting the Turks, and volunteers are heading south. At a Moscow station Koznyshev meets Vronsky’s mother, who tells him bitterly that Anna was a bad woman who ruined two good men. Karenin has taken Anna’s little daughter. Vronsky is going to Serbia with a squadron he is paying for himself. When Koznyshev speaks to him, Vronsky has a raging toothache, and says he may be of some use as a weapon, but as a man he is a wreck. Watching the wheels of the train, he remembers Anna’s body on the table in the station shed.

The last word belongs to Levin. Happy in his marriage, a father, in perfect health, he has been so tormented by the question of why he is alive and why he must die that he hides a rope from himself and is afraid to take his gun out. The answer comes from a peasant, Fyodor, who says that one man lives for his belly, but another lives for his soul and remembers God. Levin feels as if a door has opened. He has always known what goodness is; no one taught it to him by reason.

That evening a storm breaks over the woods where Kitty has taken the baby, and lightning splits an oak; Levin finds them safe and realizes how much he loves his son. Later, alone on the terrace under the Milky Way, he decides not even to tell Kitty about his new faith. He will still lose his temper, still argue, still fail to understand why he prays. But his life, he decides, now has the meaning of goodness that he has the power to put into it.

This final part never appeared where the rest had. The Russian Messenger’s editor, Mikhail Katkov, a fierce supporter of the Serbian cause, refused to print Tolstoy’s sceptical view of the volunteer movement, so Tolstoy published Part Eight separately in 1877, and the complete novel came out as a book in 1878.

Anna’s husband, Karenin, worries about appearances rather than feelings, and has no idea how to reach her. After a year of pursuit, Anna becomes Vronsky’s lover and soon falls pregnant. At an officers’ steeplechase Vronsky’s mare, Frou-Frou, breaks her back through his own mistake, and Anna’s open terror gives her away. In the carriage home she confesses everything to Karenin, who tells her that, for the sake of their son and his reputation, they must carry on as if nothing has happened.

Meanwhile Kitty recovers abroad, and Levin finds joy mowing hay with his peasants and realizes he still loves her. At a dinner they become engaged in a code of chalked initials. Anna nearly dies after giving birth to Vronsky’s daughter; Karenin, summoned to her bedside, forgives her with his whole heart, and Vronsky, humiliated by that generosity, shoots himself but survives. When she recovers, Anna turns down a divorce and leaves with Vronsky for Italy, abandoning her beloved son, Seryozha.

Levin and Kitty marry. Their happiness is real but full of quarrels and surprises, and when Levin’s brother Nikolai dies, it is Kitty who knows what to do. Anna and Vronsky, bored in Italy, return to Russia to find society shut against her, though not against him. She sneaks into her old home to see her son on his birthday and is driven out when Karenin appears, then is publicly insulted at the opera. They retreat to Vronsky’s country estate, where Dolly visits and finds Anna beautiful, restless and unhappy, and then to Moscow, waiting for a divorce that Karenin, now steered by the pious Countess Lidia Ivanovna, refuses.

Cut off from everything except Vronsky, Anna becomes jealous and sleepless and takes morphine to sleep. Their quarrels grow bitter. After a final fight he goes to visit his mother; Anna follows him to a railway station outside Moscow, remembers the guard who died on the day they met, and throws herself under a train.

Two months later Vronsky, shattered, leaves to fight as a volunteer in Serbia, telling a friend he may be useful as a weapon but is a wreck as a man. Levin, now a father, has been so tormented by the meaning of life and death that he has hidden a rope from himself. A peasant’s remark that some people live for their bellies and others for their souls opens his eyes: he has always known what goodness is. Under the stars he decides that, though he will still argue and lose his temper, his life now has the meaning of goodness he can put into it. The magazine that serialized the novel refused to print this final part over its view of the Serbian war, so Tolstoy published it on its own.