The English novel on the train

In the dim sleeping compartment beside her maid Annushka, Anna is relieved it is over and that tomorrow she will see Serezha and Alexis Alexandrovich and her good accustomed life will go on. She fixes her reading-lamp and opens an English novel, but reading the reflection of other people's lives is unpleasant when she is too eager to live herself: she wants to nurse the sick man, make the speech, ride to hounds as Lady Mary does. When the hero nears his baronetcy she feels he must have been ashamed, and then that she is ashamed of the same thing — of what? Reviewing her Moscow memories she reaches Vronsky and an inner voice says 'warm, very warm, burning'. She presses the cold paper-knife to her cheek, nearly laughing with unreasoning joy, her nerves like strings drawn tighter round pegs, unsure whether the train moves or stands, whether she is herself or another. At a station she goes out for air.

Tolstoy's great set piece of consciousness dissolving, and he builds it out of a woman failing to read a novel. The complaint against fiction — that it substitutes another's life for your own — is the charge Anna is about to escape by acting, and the hallucinated peasant at the wall arrives here to be waiting at the end of Part Seven.