Anna Karenina

The story begins with the Oblonsky house turned upside down: Stiva, Anna's brother, was caught by his wife Dolly cheating with the children's governess. The house lives through days of tension, with the children feeling the mood without understanding why and the servants avoiding the hallway where Dolly cries alone.

Anna Karenina travels from Petersburg to Moscow at her brother's request, determined to reconcile the couple. She arrives serene, the kind of woman who walks into a room and sorts out other people's emotional mess just by talking calmly. No one there imagines that the same Anna who fixes her brother's marriage is about to set her own on fire.

Dolly gives in and agrees to stay married, swallowing her hurt because of the children and the lack of any practical alternative for a woman of that era. The book makes it clear in this very first chapter that forgiving in the name of the family has a price, and each character pays theirs in a different way throughout the story.

At the station where Anna steps off the train in Moscow, she meets the eyes of Count Vronsky for the first time, a young, rich officer known for collecting admirers without committing to any of them. The attraction between them is immediate, the kind both feel but pretend not to notice.

On the same platform, a railway worker is run over and killed in front of everyone. Vronsky, in a gesture of public generosity, donates money to the man's widow. Anna witnesses the scene and remarks, uneasy, that it seems like a bad omen for the day. Right there, on the first page of their meeting, the book plants the image that will close the whole story: a body and a train.

It is a device Tolstoy uses without hurry: the reader forgets the station scene for hundreds of pages, busy with balls and dinners, until it comes back with full force at the end.

Before the ball, young Kitty Shcherbatskaya turns down a marriage proposal from the landowner Konstantin Levin, a longtime friend of the family, whom she admires but does not love the way she thinks is necessary. Kitty bets everything on a proposal she expects to receive from Vronsky that same season.

At the ball, though, Vronsky spends the whole night beside Anna, not Kitty. The whole room reads the scene: an interested man making it publicly clear whom he is captivated by. Kitty leaves humiliated, sick with shame and disillusionment, not yet understanding that her rival hadn't even noticed, that night, the damage she caused.

Anna goes back to Petersburg uneasy about her own behavior, for having, without planning to, stolen the attention of a suitor who was never hers. She tries to convince herself that nothing has changed, but the book already shows her feeling the ground shake for the first time in years.