What makes this such a human-scaled and heartbreaking description of loneliness, real loneliness, loneliness as it actually occurs in the world, is that we’ve watched Marya go through all of this from a position inside her. A story with less internality might have produced a simple feeling of pity (“Oh, that poor, lonely person”). We’d understand Marya as the Lesser Other. But the story’s virtuosic internality implicates her, even as it draws us in. She’s not a perfect person who is lonely. She’s an imperfect person who is lonely. We feel pity for lonely imperfect Marya in the same way we would feel pity for someone lonely and imperfect we loved, or for imperfect (lonely) us.

It was, to him, an encounter of sudden intimacy in this public place; the angle of her head, her posture, her hands. He watched as a man – soused and staggering, every careful step an acknowledgement of the spinning earth and its axial tilt – fell into the vacant chair opposite her, giving Helena a slow, marinated gaze until his head fell, weighty as a curling stone, and slid across the table. John and another onlooker jumped up to help at the same time and, between them, dragged the man to the back of the pub to sleep it off.

The silence has lasted rather a long while when the woman suddenly, “involuntarily, reflexively,” starts to talk about mushrooms. Then silence again, and the man casts about for a way to declare himself, but instead of speaking of love, “on some unexpected impulse” he too talks about mushrooms. On the way home they go on discussing mushrooms, powerless and desperate, for never, they know it, never will they speak of love.

Back at the house, the man tells himself that he did not devalue his love because of the memory of his dead mistress, which he cannot betray. But we know perfectly well: It is a false excuse he invokes only to console himself. Console himself? Yes. Because we can resign ourselves to losing a love for a reason. We would never forgive ourselves for losing it for no reason at all.

This very beautiful little episode is a kind of parable for one of Anna Karenina’s great feats: bringing to light the causeless, incalculable, even mysterious aspect of human action.

What is action?— the eternal question of the novel, its constitutive question, so to speak. How is a decision born? How is it transformed into an act, and how do acts connects to make an adventure?

Out of the mysterious and chaotic fabric of life, the old novelists tried to tease the thread of a limpid rationality; in their view, the rationally accessible motive gives birth to an act, and that act provokes another.

She throws herself beneath the train without having taken the decision to do so. It is rather the decision that takes Anna. That overtakes her. Like the man who talked about mushrooms instead of love, Anna acts “on some unexpected impulse.” Which does not mean that her act is senseless. But its sense lies outside the rationally apprehensible causality. Tolstoy had to use (for the first time in the history of the novel) an almost Joycean interior monologue to reconstruct the subtle fabric of fleeting impulses, transient feelings, fragmentary thoughts, to show us the suicidal journey of Anna’s soul.

When they were deciding whose place to go back to, he said they could go to his, but she should know he lived with his parents. She was amused again, said “very unusual” and kissed him, lightly holding his face between cool, pale hands. At her flat, which was decorated like an adult’s, with paintings and wooden furniture, he felt like a mortal who’d climbed Mount Olympus and with one outstretched, trembling hand, touched the breast of a god. It became one of his favourite memories, making him smile whenever he thought of it. But it never occurred to him to ask her out again. In later years, he couldn’t understand why. He suspected that this was a chance of happiness blithely overlooked.