No novelist has ever opened a book more confidently. Tolstoy states a law — as if it were a law of physics, as if he had surveyed every family in Russia and could report the finding. Happy families are alike. Unhappy ones each fail in their own particular fashion. The reader has barely read the sentence before the argument over whether the claim is true has begun, and that argument will be running inside the reader's head for the next nine hundred pages.

Having made the pronouncement, Tolstoy drops us straight into an example. The Oblonsky house in Moscow is in chaos. The wife, Dolly, has discovered that her husband — amiable, plump, easygoing Stiva — has been sleeping with the children's French governess. She will not speak to him. The servants have taken sides. The cook has lost her mind. The English nanny is packing. The children have heard shouting and do not understand what has happened but know something is wrong. Stiva himself, waking up on the sofa where Dolly has banished him, stretches comfortably, remembers what he has done, and is sorry, but not very sorry; he is the kind of man who is always slightly pleased with himself even when he is in trouble.

This is a masterpiece of opening exposition. We have not yet met Anna. We have not yet met Vronsky, or Levin, or Kitty. But the whole moral weather of the book is here already. There is a marriage, and the marriage has failed in an ordinary way, and the world around it — children, servants, cooks, nannies, Moscow itself — is rearranging around the failure like water around a dropped stone.

When Anna arrives a hundred pages later, it will be to fix this marriage. She is Stiva's sister. She is coming from Petersburg on the overnight train to persuade Dolly to forgive him. Because she is good at persuading, because she is beautiful, because her own marriage is exemplary, because she is exactly the kind of woman whose presence fills a room and calms a household. She will step off the train and Dolly will forgive Stiva, as promised. And Anna's own life will end, from that hour, on a parallel track that will take her, over seven hundred pages, to a different station on the same line.

Tolstoy does not foreshadow this. He does not need to. The first sentence has told us already: each unhappy family unhappy in its own way. The Oblonskys will patch themselves up and go on being comfortably unhappy, in the way everyone is. Anna, whose unhappiness has not yet started, is coming to Moscow to fix somebody else's marriage with the last good hours of her own.

Anna arrives in Moscow on the night train. Vronsky is at the station for a different reason — he is meeting his mother off the same train — and he sees Anna on the steps of the carriage for the first time before he has any idea who she is. Tolstoy describes her in a famous paragraph: a suppressed liveliness playing between her face and her eyes, a soft grey fur, quick dark lashes, a charm of the whole person. Vronsky stops. He has to make himself move on.

She is, it turns out, the wife of a senior minister in Petersburg. A woman of thirty, mother of a young boy, well-known, well-liked, faultless. Her brother Stiva — Vronsky's friend — introduces them quickly on the platform. It is the briefest meeting. There is, in any honest reading, nothing in the brief meeting itself. They nod, they exchange a sentence, they separate.

And then the accident happens. A railway worker, coming in to check under the cars, is struck and killed. Tolstoy gives it in a paragraph. The crowd crowds; the station-master blusters; the worker's wife is somewhere, screaming. Vronsky, who does not yet know he is in love, walks over to the station-master with a large tip and asks that it be given to the widow — a gesture not of generosity so much as of unease, the desire to convert a bad feeling into a manageable transaction. Anna watches him do it. Later, in the carriage, she will say to her sister-in-law: it was a bad omen.

That sentence is the hinge of the book. Tolstoy is too old and too skeptical a craftsman to use omens in the operatic sense; he does not believe in fate in the way a Russian opera libretto believes in it. But he believes, very precisely, in the way human beings read their own futures into the accidental events around them. Anna, married, content, faultless, has seen a man stop at the sight of her. She does not yet know she has seen it. She says the man on the tracks was a bad omen because she is not yet willing to say anything more precise.

The train — its steam, its iron, its crushing indifference to persons — is already the book's controlling image, on page eighty of nine hundred. It brought her. It killed a stranger in front of her. It will bring Vronsky after her to Petersburg. It will carry her, eventually, to the last platform. Tolstoy lays all of this out without raising his voice. The novel is already complete in what the reader does not yet realize she has been told.

Tolstoy is writing two books at once, and the second one is about Levin. Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin — rural landowner, shy to the point of paralysis, honest to the point of embarrassment, tall and awkward and serious-minded — is Tolstoy's autobiographical hero. He has come up from his estate in the country to Moscow to do one thing: ask a young woman named Kitty Shcherbatskaya to marry him.

He finds her, beautifully, at the skating rink in the Zoological Gardens. She is eighteen. She is in a brown velvet dress. She skates with the small, quick strokes of a girl who is good at it without having thought about being good at it. Levin stands at the rail and watches her. The whole early part of the book opens into happiness in this scene — a young man in a cold, bright, correctly-lit Moscow afternoon, looking at the girl he is about to ask.

He asks her the next day in her mother's drawing room. He does it very badly. The word he says is not the word he meant. He has rehearsed a speech and it will not come out. What comes out is something blurted: I came… I, I love you. She understands him. And she refuses him.

Tolstoy handles this refusal with the delicacy of a man who has been refused himself. Kitty does not refuse because she does not like Levin; she refuses because Vronsky, the brilliant officer, has been paying her attentions, and she believes — and her mother believes, and society believes — that Vronsky is going to propose to her instead. She is eighteen. She is wrong about Vronsky. She is also, at the specific moment when Levin asks, answering honestly for the eighteen-year-old she is. She says no, gently, and watches him leave, and immediately knows she has made a mistake she will not be able to take back by her own strength.

Levin goes home to the country and tries, as country men do, to disappear into work. He will reappear in a hundred pages mowing hay in the field with his peasants, sweat running down into his beard, happy for the first time since Moscow. Kitty will fall ill from shame and go abroad. Vronsky, meanwhile, will have met Anna at the station.

This is the book's deep architecture. Two engagements are being formed at the same party: one with a husband, one with a lover. The novel will spend its length watching both. The one that looks like an adventure will end at a rail platform; the one that looks like a disappointment will end, improbably, as the closest thing to happiness Tolstoy ever found on a page.

The affair between Anna and Vronsky has been consummated for some weeks by the time Vronsky rides his mare in the officers' steeplechase. Anna, not yet openly compromised, is in the crowd — her husband Karenin is also in the crowd, because the whole Petersburg world is in the crowd. Tolstoy spends two long chapters on the race. It is the great set-piece of the second part of the book.

The mare is called Frou-Frou. She is thin-boned, quick, high-spirited; Vronsky has been training her for months. He loves her in the uncomplicated way men love horses they are going to win on. The race is going well. He has cleared the difficult water jump. He is ahead at the last jump. And at the last jump, gathering the mare's stride, he makes a single unnecessary movement with his seat — a hair's weight of a misjudgement, nothing any other rider in the field would have noticed — and Frou-Frou lands on her back.

Her back is broken. She struggles, thrashes, tries to get up. Vronsky stands over her in his mud-streaked silks and kicks her, twice, in rage, as if she had done it to him. Then a soldier comes up with a pistol and shoots her. Vronsky turns away.

This is the scene the whole book has been waiting for, and it is disguised, brilliantly, as a horse race. Because out in the crowd Anna's husband Karenin has seen something else. He has watched his wife during the fall. She did not react like a society lady whose friend had taken a tumble; she reacted like a woman whose lover had just been killed. She could not hide it. She stood up; she put her hand to her mouth; she was white.

The carriage ride home afterward is the end of her marriage. Karenin, in his careful, hurt, bureaucratic way, tells her he has seen what he saw. Anna, who has been pretending for months, stops pretending. She tells him, flatly, that she loves Vronsky. She is his mistress. She cannot stand her husband and she will not stop. It is the sentence from which no marriage recovers, and both of them know it.

Tolstoy's craft here is almost cruel. The race has been about Vronsky. But Vronsky has been the horse. He has been ridden by a passion he does not quite control, asked to do more than he can manage, and broken by a tiny excess of pressure at exactly the wrong moment. Frou-Frou is Anna, and Frou-Frou is also the affair. The man who kicks the horse in his own frustration will, six hundred pages later, kick something else.

Anna is pregnant by Vronsky. She has been in labour for hours — it is a terrible delivery, she is in high fever, she is raving. Karenin, her husband, has been summoned. He comes to the house expecting to be asked for a divorce, and he comes intending to refuse. He is a dry, correct, unhappy man who has been humiliated in public for months. Everyone in Petersburg society knows he has been humiliated. He has spent those months planning how, legally and morally, to be harder than his wife. He walks into the sickroom in that frame of mind.

And in the sickroom Tolstoy does one of the most astonishing things in fiction. Anna, half dead, sees her husband come in and, in her fever, forgets everything she has felt about him. She weeps. She grabs his hand. She calls him by his first name — something she has not done in years — and she tells him he is a good man, that she sees now that he is a good man, that she loves him. She asks him to forgive her. She asks him to forgive Vronsky, who, she cries, is a good man too. Vronsky is also in the room. Karenin looks at Vronsky. Vronsky has covered his face with his hands and is crying like a child.

And Karenin, the driest man in the book, suddenly cannot hold his own heart. Something breaks open in him that he had not known was there. He forgives them both. He kneels down and lays his head on Anna's arm. He weeps. He tells Vronsky, in a voice no one has ever heard from him, that he wishes him well. He means it. For an hour, while Anna is dying, three people in a bedroom have loved each other in a way that none of them has managed, or will manage, in the ordinary weather of their lives.

And then Anna does not die. She recovers.

This is the secret mechanism of the whole book. Tolstoy does not punish his characters for their moments of grace. He punishes them for not being able to stay inside them. Anna, returned to health, cannot live as the woman who wept and begged her husband's forgiveness; the role is unbearable, it is not who she is, it is a person invented by fever. Vronsky, returned to his uniform, cannot live as the weeping boy on the bedroom floor. Karenin, returned to his ministry, cannot hold on to the man who knelt down and forgave. Within weeks they are all three back inside their old architectures. The affair resumes. The bureaucratic cruelty resumes. The disaster resumes.

And for a single hour it was not going to have to.

While the Anna-Vronsky plot rolls toward its station, Tolstoy keeps quietly turning to Levin on his estate in the country. Levin has a problem not unlike Anna's: he does not know what his life is for. He has lost Kitty. He has inherited land. He has read German philosophy and remained depressed. One summer day, without quite planning it, he picks up a scythe and goes out with the peasants to mow.

He is terrible at it for an hour. The peasants, a line of forty men, go smoothly through the tall grass; Levin cannot find the rhythm. His back hurts. The scythe does not seem to want to go where he wants it to go. He is a gentleman in a linen shirt among men who have been doing this since they could walk. He nearly stops. He does not stop.

And then, slowly — Tolstoy gives it the slowness it needs — the thing happens. Levin finds the rhythm. He stops thinking about the scythe. He stops thinking about where his hip goes or how his feet are placed. The scythe begins to swing as if it were swinging him. He notices that he has moved fifty yards without noticing and that the grass behind him is cut.

Tolstoy calls what Levin finds minuty zabven'ya — moments of self-forgetting. He gives them to us in the plainest language. The sun is hot. Sweat runs into the eyes. The hay smells. The line of men keeps moving. At a certain point one of the old peasants, a man named Titus, offers Levin a bottle of water and a piece of black bread, and Levin thinks that he has never tasted bread and water so good.

This is the novel's answer, such as it ever gives an answer, to Anna's problem. Anna has lived her life asking what she wants, following what she wants, demanding that her wants be honoured. Levin, in the meadow, has stopped asking. He has climbed inside a rhythm that is older than he is — a rhythm of the land, the season, the line of mowers — and for an afternoon the question of what he wants has gone quiet. He has not solved anything. His proposal was still refused. He still does not know what he believes about God. But a slot has opened in his life into which work and season and body can pour.

Tolstoy does not turn this into a sermon. He does not say that Anna should try mowing. He merely places the chapter across the river from the affair, and lets the reader see that inside the same novel there is one person finding a way to live and another person slowly running out of ways. The book is not a polemic. It is a pair of parallel lives, and one of them, by fifty pages from the end, will quietly arrive somewhere and the other will quietly arrive nowhere.

Anna's end, when it comes, is not dramatic. Tolstoy does not permit it to be. She has been with Vronsky for months in a country villa. They have been fighting in the way people fight who know the fight is not about the thing the fight is about. She has become jealous of everything he does — a young princess he talked to, a letter from his mother, a planned trip to his estate — because the affair is the whole of her life now, and he has a life outside it, and she cannot forgive him for that.

They quarrel one last time in Moscow. He goes out, angrily, to visit his mother for the day at her country house. Anna is left alone. She writes him a note telling him to come back. He does not answer. She gets into a carriage and drives to the station to go after him. She has not yet decided to do anything terrible. She is simply unable to sit inside her own skin. At the station at Obiralovka — a small, ugly, unimportant suburban stop — she walks along the platform waiting for the train.

Tolstoy's craft in the last pages is harder than it looks. He puts us inside her head, but he does not dramatize. He notes the two dirty peasants walking past her on the platform. He notes a filthy red bag a woman has dropped. He notes the lantern on the front of the incoming engine. He notes that she is thinking small petty thoughts, the kind of thoughts anyone might think on an ordinary afternoon, about a dress and about Vronsky's mother. And then he notes, in a clause almost not there, that she had a sudden memory of the man who was killed at the Moscow station on the day she first arrived — the bad omen — and he notes that she understood, with a small clear movement of the head, what she had to do.

She does it. Tolstoy does not make it cinematic. The train comes; she kneels down; she is gone. The candle by which she has been reading the book of her own life, he writes, flares up and goes out. Nine hundred pages collapse to a paragraph.

The novel does not end here. There are a hundred more pages — Vronsky going off to war in despair, Karenin adopting the baby daughter, Levin on his estate in late summer lying on his back looking at the sky and deciding, tentatively, that he believes in something, he is not quite sure what. Tolstoy refuses to let Anna be the only verdict. But her death is the book's one irreversible fact, and the book, with its first sentence still hanging in the air above all of it, does not try to explain her. It lays her down, quietly, at the small suburban station where she chose to stop.