Everything is upset at the Oblonskys'

The novel opens on its premise — 'All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way' — and then on a household proving it. Everything is upset in the Oblonskys' Moscow house: three days ago Darya Alexandrovna, Dolly, found out about her husband's affair with their former French governess and declared she would not go on living under the same roof with him. The servants have taken sides or given notice, the children run about uneasily, the cook has vanished. Prince Stephen Arkadyevich Oblonsky — Stiva — wakes at eight on the morocco sofa in his study, pleased by a dream of singing glass tables and decanters that were really women, and reaches for a dressing-gown that is not there. Remembering, he groans. What torments him is not the discovery so much as his answer to it: caught, he smiled his 'usual kindly and therefore silly smile'.

The opening aphorism is a promise the novel spends 239 chapters complicating. Tolstoy withholds his title character and gives the first consciousness to the man who will pass through the book unharmed, making the Oblonsky adultery a comic rehearsal for Anna's. Guilt enters as social embarrassment about a smile, not as conscience.