The zest is gone

In the carriage the impressions keep coming: a party driving out of town with a dog, a nearly dead-drunk workman led off by a policeman, a shop-assistant on a hired horse. For the first time Anna turns her light on the affair itself. Vronsky sought not love so much as the satisfaction of vanity; she remembers his faithful-setter look in the early days, decides he boasted of her and now has nothing to boast of, and says in English that the zest is gone. Her love grows more passionate as his dwindles; she is not jealous but dissatisfied, and she can be nothing but his mistress, which disgusts him. She knows he has no designs on Sorokina and is not in love with Kitty, and it does not help; kindness from duty would be hell. She tests her own wish — divorce, Serezha returned, marriage to Vronsky — pictures Karenin's cracking fingers with revulsion, and answers that no absence of torture is possible. At the Nizhny station Peter asks whether to take a ticket to Obiralovka; she has forgotten where she is going, says yes, and waits on the star-shaped couch.

Anna's clearest thinking in the novel arrives here, and Tolstoy neither endorses nor refutes it: most of what she concludes about Vronsky is accurate, and it is being produced by a mind that has stopped being able to want anything. The piercing light that pleases her is the symptom. Forgetting, when asked, where she is going is the chapter's quiet hinge.