“Karenin rose: sobs choked his voice. Vronsky rose too, and, standing with bowed head and humble attitude, looked up at Karenin, without a word to say. He was incapable of understanding Karenin’s feelings, but he felt that such magnanimity was above him, and irreconcilable with his conception of life.”
But Anna recovers, and her old guilty love for Vronsky returns. She flees with him to other countries in Europe, but the tumult in her soul will not subside and social ostracism confronts her everywhere. She returns with Vronsky and lives for a time on his estates in Russia, and there are brief intervals of happiness. Dolly visits her and finds that “Anna was all aglow with that elusive beauty which comes to a woman through the assurance of love returned. Her smiles which, as it were, flew over her face, her brilliant eyes, her graceful and quick motions, her voice, her whole person, from the dimples of her cheeks and the curve of her lip, with its full, rich sounds, and even the quiet, friendly manner in which she replied to a visitor who asked permission to mount her horse, was instinct with a seductive charm. It seemed as if she herself knew it, and was pleased.”
But this is for a moment. In spite of her passion and the constant devotion of her lover quarrels continually arise, jealousies, the fear of abandonment, and at last the desire for revenge upon one who she unjustly imagines is false or indifferent. Her final resolution is suicide, “to make him repent.” She accomplishes her purpose at a railway station under the same conditions as those when she first met her lover.
“Suddenly she remembered the man who was run over on the day when she saw Vronsky for the first time, and she knew then what was in store for her. With light and swift steps she descended the stairway which led from the pump at the end of the platform down to the rails, and stood very near the train, which was slowly passing by. She looked under the cars, at the chains and the brake, and the high iron wheels, and she tried to estimate with her eye the distance between the fore and back wheels, and the moment when the middle would be in front of her.
“‘There,’ she said, looking at the shadow of the car thrown upon the black coal-dust which covered the sleepers, ‘there, in the center, he will be punished, and I shall be delivered from it all,—and from myself.’
“Her little red travelling-bag caused her to lose the moment when she could throw herself under the wheels of the first car: she could not detach it from her arm. She awaited the second. A feeling like that she had experienced once, just before taking a dive in the river, came over her, and she made the sign of the cross. This familiar gesture called back to her soul memories of youth and childhood. Life, with its elusive joys, glowed for an instant before her, but she did not take her eyes from the car; and when the middle, between the two wheels, appeared, she threw away her red bag, drawing her head between her shoulders, and, with outstretched hands, threw herself on her knees under the car. She had time to feel afraid. ‘Where am I? What am I doing? Why?’ thought she, trying to draw back; but a great, inflexible mass struck her head, and threw her upon her back. ‘Lord, forgive me all!’ she murmured, feeling the struggle to be in vain.... And the candle by which she read, as in a book, the fulfilment of her life’s work, of its deceptions, its grief, and its torment, flared up with greater brightness than she had ever known, revealing to her all that before was in darkness, then flickered, grew faint, and went out forever.”
Side by side with this tragedy of unlawful passion, the scenes alternating every few chapters, is the development of the normal love of Levin for Kitty, in scenes which are believed to have been taken from the life of Tolstoi himself. Strange to say that, if this be so, the passages of his own experience are less impressive (if not less realistic) than his imaginative story of the guilty pair. There are long and inconsequent discussions of agrarian problems, and a revelation of Levin’s varying moods, which are, indeed, extremely true to life, but awaken less sympathy or interest than the drama between Anna and Vronsky. Levin proposes to Kitty again, rather awkwardly, one would say, with chalk initials written on a card table, the meaning of which she guesses and answers in kind, an answer which he readily devines. Before their marriage he makes to her a full written confession of all the shortcomings of his past life. She is not at all alarmed or startled at his declaration of religious unbelief, but certain passages revealing past immoralities impress her as “terrible.” He finds her in tears, and she reproaches him for showing it to her, yet grants him forgiveness. The wedding is graphically described, especially the incident which shows the bridegroom “ramping with despair like a wild beast in its cage” while the people were waiting in church, because he could not find his shirt. Then comes the honeymoon, in which he finds that married life was utterly different from his dreams.
“His surprise was great to find this charming and poetic Kitty, thinking, planning, taking charge of the linen, the furniture, the mattresses, the table service, the kitchen. The decided way in which she refused to travel, so that they might come immediately to their country home, and her willingness to let it be known that she knew something about domestic economy, and could think of such things in spite of her love, had struck him even during their engagement. It vexed him then, and now he felt still more vexed to find that she cared for these wearisome minutiae and the material side of life. But he saw that it was unavoidable.”
Their early quarrels are delineated with convincing realism, and perhaps the strongest chapters in this part of the work are those in which he describes Kitty’s insistence on going with him to visit his profligate brother, Nikolai, who is dying with consumption and in great poverty, being tended only by a poor creature who had long lived with him as his wife. Levin at first refused to allow her to go, declaring it impossible.
“‘I tell you, if you go, I am going too. I shall certainly go with you,’ said she with angry determination. ‘I should like to know why it would be impossible. Why did you say that?’