This brief chapter is a masterpiece of psychological realism, focusing not on dramatic event but on the paralysis that settles between two people when a marriage has been hollowed out. Tolstoy's opening declaration — "a new life began" — is immediately undercut by "Nothing special happened," a deliberate anticlimax that signals how thoroughly the crisis has been driven inward. The chapter's real subject is the gap between intention and action, between the self one wishes to be and the self one involuntarily performs.
The ox simile — "Like an ox with head bent, submissively he awaited the blow which he felt was lifted over him" — is one of Tolstoy's most economical and devastating images. It reduces Alexey Alexandrovitch, a man of enormous political power, to a dumb animal awaiting slaughter. The simile works on multiple levels: it conveys his passivity, his lack of agency within the domestic sphere, and the physical, almost bodily nature of his dread. Power in the public world, Tolstoy implies, confers no authority in the intimate one.
Central to the chapter is the motif of failed speech. Alexey Alexandrovitch rehearses tenderness and persuasion daily, yet each attempt collapses into his "habitual tone of jeering." This is not mere hypocrisy; Tolstoy presents it as a kind of involuntary self-betrayal, the way a deeply ingrained social persona can override sincere feeling. The ironic register that has served Karenin in bureaucratic life becomes a prison in the marital one, making the very words of reconciliation sound like mockery.
Anna's defence — "a barrier… made up of a sort of amused perplexity" — is rendered entirely from Alexey Alexandrovitch's perspective, which keeps her interiority opaque and reinforces his (and the reader's) sense of her as unreachable. This limited focalization is a deliberate narrative choice: we are trapped inside Karenin's helplessness, unable to see around it, just as he is. The phrase "spirit of evil and deceit" reveals how he is beginning to moralize the situation, a psychological defence that will harden as the novel progresses.
Thematically, the chapter interrogates the relationship between social performance and authentic selfhood. Both Anna and Alexey Alexandrovitch maintain outward forms — she attends society, he goes through the motions of marital concern — while their inner lives have fundamentally diverged. Tolstoy suggests that the social codes governing their world are not merely superficial conventions but forces that actively shape, and ultimately distort, the self.