Sergei occupies the very same seat that his mother did when, accompanied by Princess Varvara (of the questionable reputation), she attended the theater in defiance of the way she had been ostracized for living with Vronsky. It was the very same concert where Madame Kartasova spat out “I’m ashamed to sit next to her.” Today’s letter has made him hypersensitive, and everything from the dirty snow outside the theater to the box that reminds him of Kartasova sharpens the pain of that insult, flagellating him, as if it had been directed at him. It’s like a menacing cloud that burns and asphyxiates him.

But more than anything else, it’s Anya that’s upsetting him. Because she looks so much like Anna, it’s like a megaphone is repeating, You’re Karenina’s son; she fell in love with Vronsky and abandoned you. And what did she see in Vronsky? You saw something, his bald spot, you saw it from the window in your wet nurse Marietta’s room.

Anya had exacerbated his father’s sadness, and even worse, she was a constant reminder that he and Anya had been written by Tolstoy. That’s what he really can’t bear.

What’s wrong? Sergei? Claudia asks with a pointed look (because Anya is sitting between them). She also says, Stop heaving such deep sighs, calm down!

I don’t know why my heart’s so heavy, Sergei replies silently with an anxious look.

When the lights go down and the music starts, Sergei still feels the same; he can’t enjoy what he’s hearing. I’m sunk, he tells himself once more, I’m utterly and completely sunk, as if he’s in his own personal opera, now sharp, now serious, now quick, now slow, sunk, sunk! It’s as if Sergei’s composing his own aria.

Anya is listening without hearing a thing. The music has a pleasant effect on her, apart from the fact that, paradoxically, it makes her both more sociable and more withdrawn. She deals with these contradictory impulses by picking up the mother-of-pearl opera glasses she inherited from her mother. The opera glasses and the relative stillness of the audience conspire to engross her in her own thoughts.