to recover from her ill health. There, they meet the wheelchair-using Pietist Madame Stahl, who is accompanied by the kind and virtuous Varenka, her adopted daughter. Influenced by Varenka, Kitty becomes extremely pious and concerned for others, but when her father joins them she becomes disillusioned after learning from him that Madame Stahl is faking her illness. She then returns to Moscow.

Part 3

Kostya continues working on his estate, a setting closely tied to his spiritual thoughts and struggles. He wrestles with the idea of falseness, wondering how he should go about ridding himself of it, and criticizing what he feels is falseness in others. He develops ideas relating to agriculture, and the unique relationship between the agricultural laborer and his native land and culture. He comes to believe that the agricultural reforms of Europe will not work in Russia because of the unique culture and personality of the Russian peasant.

When Kostya visits Dolly, she attempts to understand what happened between him and Kitty and to explain Kitty’s behavior. Kostya is very agitated by Dolly’s talk about Kitty, and he begins to feel distant from Dolly as he perceives her loving behavior towards her children as false. Kostya resolves to forget Kitty and contemplates the possibility of marriage to a peasant woman. However, a chance sighting of Kitty in her carriage makes Kostya realise he still loves her. Meanwhile, in St. Petersburg, Karenin refuses to separate from Anna, insisting that their relationship will continue. He threatens to take away Seryozha if she persists in her affair with Vronsky.

Part 4

When Anna and Vronsky continue seeing each other, Karenin consults a lawyer about obtaining a divorce. During the time period, a divorce in Russia could only be requested by the innocent party in an affair and required either that the guilty party confess or that the guilty party be discovered in the act of adultery. Karenin forces Anna to hand over some of Vronsky’s love letters, which the lawyer deems insufficient as proof of the affair. Stiva and Dolly argue against Karenin’s drive for a divorce.

Karenin changes his plans after hearing that Anna is at risk of death after the difficult birth of her daughter, Annie. At her bedside, Karenin forgives Vronsky. However, Vronsky, embarrassed by Karenin’s kindness, unsuccessfully attempts suicide by shooting himself. As Anna recovers, she finds that she cannot bear living with Karenin despite his forgiveness and his attachment to Annie. When she hears that Vronsky is about to leave for a military posting in Tashkent, she becomes desperate. Anna and Vronsky reunite and flee to Italy, leaving behind Seryozha and Karenin’s offer of divorce.

Meanwhile, Stiva acts as a matchmaker with Kostya: he arranges a meeting between him and Kitty, which results in their reconciliation and engagement.

Part 5

Kostya and Kitty marry and start their new life on his country estate. Although the couple are happy, they undergo a bitter and stressful first three months of marriage. Kostya feels dissatisfied at the amount of time Kitty wants to spend with him and dwells on his inability to be as productive as he was as a bachelor. When the marriage starts to improve, Kostya learns that his brother, Nikolai, is dying of consumption. Kitty offers to accompany Kostya on his journey to see Nikolai and proves herself a great help in nursing Nikolai. Seeing his wife take charge of the situation in an infinitely more capable manner than he could have done himself without her, Kostya’s love for Kitty grows. Kitty eventually learns that she is pregnant.

In Italy, Vronsky and Anna struggle to find friends who will accept them. Whilst Anna is happy to be finally alone with Vronsky, he feels suffocated. They cannot socialize with Russians of their own class and find it difficult to amuse themselves. Vronsky, who believed that being with Anna was the key to his happiness, finds himself increasingly bored and unsatisfied. He takes up painting and makes an attempt to patronize an émigré Russian artist of genius. However, Vronsky cannot see that his own art lacks talent and passion, and that his conversation about art is extremely pretentious. Increasingly restless, Anna and Vronsky decide to return to Russia.

In St. Petersburg, Anna and Vronsky stay in one of the best hotels, but take separate suites. It becomes clear that whilst Vronsky is still able to move freely in Russian society, Anna is barred from it. Even her old friend, Princess Betsy, who has had affairs herself, evades her company. Anna starts to become anxious that Vronsky no longer loves her. Meanwhile, Karenin is comforted by Countess Lidia Ivanovna, an enthusiast of religious and mystic ideas fashionable with the upper classes. She advises him to keep Seryozha away from Anna and to tell him his mother is dead. However, Seryozha refuses to believe that this is true. Anna visits Seryozha uninvited on his ninth birthday but is discovered by Karenin.

Anna, desperate to regain at least some of her former position in society, attends a show at the theater at which all of St. Petersburg’s high society are present. Vronsky begs her not to go, but he is unable to bring himself to explain to her why she cannot attend. At the theater, Anna is openly snubbed by her former friends, one of whom makes a deliberate scene and leaves the theater. Anna is devastated. Unable to find a place for themselves in St. Petersburg, Anna and Vronsky leave for Vronsky’s country estate.

Part 6

Dolly, her children, and her mother, the Princess Shcherbatskaya, spend the summer with Kostya and Kitty. The couple’s life is simple and unaffected, although Kostya is uneasy at the “invasion” of so many Shcherbatskys. He becomes extremely jealous when one of the visitors, Veslovsky, flirts openly with the pregnant Kitty. Kostya tries to overcome his jealousy, and briefly succeeds during a hunt with Veslovsky and Oblonsky, but eventually succumbs to his feelings and asks Veslovsky to leave. Veslovsky immediately goes to stay with Anna and Vronsky at their nearby estate.

When Dolly visits Anna, she is struck by the difference between Kostya and Kitty’s aristocratic-yet-simple home life and Vronsky’s overtly luxurious and lavish country estate. She is also unable to keep pace with Anna’s fashionable dresses or Vronsky’s extravagant spending on a hospital he is building. In addition, all is not quite well with Anna and Vronsky. Dolly notices Anna’s anxious behavior and her uncomfortable flirtations with Veslovsky. Vronsky makes an emotional request to Dolly, asking her to convince Anna to seek a divorce from Karenin so that the two might marry and live normally.

Anna has become intensely jealous of Vronsky and cannot bear when he leaves her, even for short excursions. When Vronsky leaves for several days of provincial elections, Anna becomes convinced that she must marry him to prevent him from leaving her. After Anna writes to Karenin again seeking a divorce, she and Vronsky leave the countryside for Moscow.

Part 7

While visiting Moscow for Kitty’s confinement, Kostya quickly gets used to the city’s fast-paced, expensive and frivolous society life. He accompanies Stiva to a gentleman’s club, where the two meet Vronsky. Kostya and Stiva pay a visit to Anna, who is occupying her empty days by being a patroness to an orphaned English girl. Kostya is initially uneasy about the visit, but Anna easily puts him under her spell. When he admits to Kitty that he has visited Anna, she accuses him of falling in love with her. The couple are later reconciled, realizing that Moscow society life has had a negative, corrupting effect on Kostya.

Anna cannot understand why she can attract a man like Kostya, who has a young and beautiful new wife, but can no longer attract Vronsky. Her relationship with Vronsky is under increasing strain, because he can move freely in Russian society while she remains excluded. Her increasing bitterness, boredom, and jealousy cause the couple to argue.

Anna begins to abuse morphine to help her sleep, a habit she began while living with Vronsky at his country estate, and becomes addicted to the narcotic. Meanwhile, after a long and difficult labour, Kitty gives birth to a son, Dmitri, who goes by the nickname Mitya and Kostya is paradoxically both horrified and profoundly moved by the sight of the tiny baby.

Stiva visits Karenin to seek his commendation for a new post. During the visit, Stiva asks Karenin to grant Anna a divorce with her as the innocent party (which would require him to confess to a non-existent affair), but Karenin’s decisions are now governed by a French clairvoyant recommended by Lidia Ivanovna. The clairvoyant apparently had a vision in his sleep during Stiva’s visit and gives Karenin a cryptic message that he interprets in a way such that he must decline the request for divorce.

Anna becomes increasingly jealous and irrational towards Vronsky, whom she suspects of having love affairs with other women. She is also convinced that he will give in to his mother’s plans to marry him off to a rich society woman. They have a bitter row and Anna believes the relationship is over. She starts to think of suicide as an escape from her torments. In her mental and emotional confusion, she sends a telegram to Vronsky asking him to come home to her, and then pays a visit to Dolly and Kitty. Anna’s confusion and anger overcome her and, in conscious symmetry with the railway worker’s death on her first meeting with Vronsky, from ground level at the end of a railway platform, she commits suicide by throwing herself under a passing freight train.

Part 8

Sergei Ivanovich’s (Kostya’s brother) latest book is ignored by readers and critics and he participates