This chapter functions as the psychological hinge of Anna's final descent, rendering her consciousness almost entirely through free indirect discourse. Tolstoy moves seamlessly between Anna's spoken words and her unspoken thoughts, collapsing the boundary between external reality and interior distortion. The technique implicates the reader in her perspective while simultaneously allowing ironic distance: we know, as she does not, that Vronsky's telegram is a reply to hers and that he has not yet received her note. Her misreading of his message is therefore not merely emotional but epistemological—a failure of interpretation that mirrors the broader breakdown of her capacity to read the world accurately.
The street vignettes Anna observes from the carriage—the ice-cream boys, the self-satisfied gentleman, the merchant crossing himself, the quarrelling cab drivers—operate as a chain of ironic analogues. Each scene is filtered through her increasingly totalizing logic until she arrives at the bleak axiom borrowed from Yashvin: everyone wishes to strip everyone else of their shirt. This movement from particular observation to universal misanthropic principle dramatizes the solipsistic collapse of her reasoning: the world becomes a mirror of her own hatred rather than an independent reality. The French phrase "Je me fais coiffer par Tiutkin" is especially poignant—a trivial witticism she instinctively frames as something to share with Vronsky, only to remember in the same breath that she has no one left to tell.
The motif of hatred saturates the chapter with almost incantatory repetition: Anna hates Kitty, Kitty hates Anna, she hates the servants, the walls, the things in the house, and finally declares she has never hated anyone as she hates Vronsky. This rhetorical escalation charts the inversion of love into its destructive opposite, a transformation Tolstoy presents not as melodrama but as the logical terminus of Anna's isolation. The house itself participates in this affective collapse: its shadow falls across the street as she departs, a visual emblem of the oppressive weight she associates with everything inside it.
Anna's decision to go to the railway station carries heavy structural irony for the reader who knows the novel's ending. Her packing of a traveling bag "for a few days" and her certainty that she will never return crystallize the chapter's atmosphere of irreversible threshold-crossing. The railway timetable consulted in a newspaper—a mundane, bureaucratic object—becomes the instrument of fate, lending the scene a quality of tragic determinism in which Anna herself supplies the agency that destroys her. Tolstoy's refusal to editorialize leaves the horror implicit in the gap between her practical, almost businesslike preparations and the catastrophe they are moving toward.
Throughout, food and appetite serve as a condensed symbol of Anna's alienation from bodily life: the smell of bread and cheese at dinner is enough to disgust her, just as the ice-cream boys' desire for sweetness is absorbed into her vision of universal, unsatisfiable craving. The body's ordinary hungers have become intolerable to her, suggesting a dissociation from life itself that prepares the reader for what follows.