The murderer and the body

What had been Vronsky's sole desire for nearly a year and Anna's dreadful bewitching dream has come to pass. He stands over her pale and trembling, begging her to be calm; she slips from the sofa to the floor at his feet, sobbing 'My God! Forgive me!' — having no one left in the world, she addresses even her prayer for forgiveness to him. He feels what a murderer feels looking at the body he has deprived of life, and the body is their love; and as a murderer throws himself on the corpse and hacks at it, he covers her face and shoulders with kisses. She kisses the hand of her accomplice and says it is all over, that she has nothing but him. When he speaks of bliss she recoils in horror and forbids another word. Afterwards she can find neither words nor thoughts for what she feels, and puts it off until she is calmer. The calm never comes. Nearly every night she dreams that both men are her husbands at once, and wakes in horror.

Tolstoy skips the act entirely and gives the aftermath a murder metaphor sustained past the point of comfort, which is the point. The consummation is written as a death, and the thing killed is named — the first period of their love. Anna's dream of two husbands is the only place she is permitted to state her position plainly, and it comes as a nightmare.