Petersburg makes Oblonsky younger

Petersburg refreshes Oblonsky after the mustiness of Moscow, where his wife's reproaches, the children's education and his debts begin to weigh. Here Prince Chechensky keeps two families and takes his eldest son to visit the second because it develops him; children are brought up in establishments rather than given every luxury while the parents work; and the Service rewards a felicitous remark or a useful trick. Best of all is the outlook on money: Oblonsky's twenty thousand of debt makes Bartnyansky, who owes a million and a half and has nothing, laugh at his luck. In Petersburg he feels ten years younger, as old Prince Peter Oblonsky does after Baden and Paris. Calling on Betsy he carries the bantering courtship further than he can get out of, and is rescued by Princess Myagkaya, who says Anna acted splendidly by refusing to deceive, and that Karenin is half-witted. The answer Oblonsky was promised has become an invitation to Lydia Ivanovna's — where Landau, once a Paris shop assistant, now Count Bezzubov by adoption, will be consulted.

Tolstoy lays out Petersburg as a machine for making guilt unnecessary — families doubled, debts inflated past shame, careers made by tricks — and lets Oblonsky feel ten years younger in it. Princess Myagkaya, who tells her own story instead of listening, still delivers the fairest verdict on Anna in the part. The divorce now depends on a clairvoyant, and the chapter tells us so as gossip.