Chapter 76 — Anna Karenina

While Stiva is in Petersburg performing the familiar bureaucratic ritual of reminding the ministry he exists, spending the household cash at races and summer villas, Dolly takes the six children to Ergushovo to cut expenses. The old lodge is dilapidated; Stiva's spring repairs covered cretonne and flowers but not cows, staff, cupboards, or a safe bathing place. Dolly hoped for the country idyll of her childhood and for Kitty to visit; instead she inherits leaks, a restive horse, a terrifying bull, and constant small crises.

After rain floods the corridor and nursery, every practical system fails at once: no kitchen maid, scarce milk and eggs, stringy fowls, floors unscrubbed, cupboards that burst open, no washhouse copper. The bailiff offers only respectful helplessness about the peasants. Dolly suppresses tears until Marya Philimonovna, the household's quiet fixer, builds her acacia "club" with the bailiff's wife, elder, and clerk and makes things actually work within a week.

Peace with six children remains impossible, yet Dolly's suffering and her husband's absence are also bound up with motherhood itself. Illness, need, and bad moods alternate with joys so small they pass like gold in sand. In country solitude she more often sees only the joy: six charming children in six different ways, a pride she tries to doubt and cannot.