Chapter 1 — Anna Karenina

One affair turns an aristocratic Moscow household into a place no one knows how to run. Dolly has learned about Stiva and the former French governess and refuses to share a home with him. For three days she stays in her room, he sleeps in his study, the children run wild, and staff quarrel or quit. The cook walked off at dinner; the coachman and kitchen-maid gave warning. Everyone feels the family has less in common than strangers parked in the same inn.

On the third morning Stiva wakes from a pleasant, incoherent dream about glass tables and singing, reaches for the dressing-gown that always hung beside his bed, and only then remembers why he is on the study sofa. The cheer drains away. He replays the fight as his own fault even when he tells himself he is not to blame, and the worst sting is not the affair alone but the instant he faced Dolly with the proof in her hand.

He had come home from the theater in a good mood, pear in hand, and found her in the bedroom holding the letter. When she asked what it was, his face betrayed him: instead of apology or sober grief, it snapped into the habitual good-humored smile she knew from easy days. She flinched as if struck, answered with cruel heat, and shut him out. Since then she will not see him. He blames that smile for everything and ends asking what is to be done, without an answer.