The grease spot on the sketch

The cards arrive while Mikhaylov is quarrelling with his wife about the landlady and the rent, and he locks himself behind the partition, where he works best when things go badly. He is sketching a man in a fit of anger, is dissatisfied, retrieves the discarded version his children have been given, and finds it spotted with candle grease — and the grease spot has given the figure a new pose. He seizes it, borrows the chin of a shopman who sold him cigars, and the inanimate figure comes alive; the corrections that follow only remove what obscures what was revealed. Then he makes up with his wife, puts on an olive-green overcoat, and goes to meet the grand Russians, his successful drawing already forgotten. Of the picture on the easel he privately knows that what he wanted to express has never been expressed by anyone, and yet any stranger's remark moves him, since he always credits his judges with seeing more than he does. Approaching, he absorbs the soft light on Anna in the porch without noticing that he has. His visitors find him commonplace.

The grease spot is Tolstoy's account of how art actually happens: not chosen from a school but stumbled on, then uncovered by removing what hides it. Set against Vronsky's easy imitation two chapters earlier, it settles the comparison before either man speaks. Mikhaylov storing Anna's face in the porch, unaware, is the same faculty as the shopman's chin.