Part One, Chapter 16
Vronsky has never known family life
Both lines
Summary
Vronsky has never known family life: his father he barely remembers, his mother was a brilliant Society woman with many known love affairs, and he was raised in the Cadet Corps before joining the wealthy military Petersburg set. Moscow has given him something new, the delight of intimacy with an innocent girl who has fallen in love with him, and it never enters his head that there is any wrong in it. He has said nothing to Kitty that could not be said before everybody, and does not know that his behaviour has a name — decoying a girl with no intention of marrying her — or that it is common among brilliant young men like himself. Marriage has never presented itself as a possibility; in his bachelor world a husband is alien, hostile and ridiculous. Leaving the Shcherbatskys' feeling purer and better, he declines the Club and the Château des Fleurs and goes home to sleep.
Analysis
The most damning chapter in Part One, and it contains no villainy. Tolstoy withholds the word for what Vronsky is doing until the paragraph in which he tells us Vronsky does not know it, so the reader convicts him of ignorance rather than malice — the same defence, and the same insufficiency, that will attend everything he does to Anna.
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