“How do you know he’s fine if he hasn’t come back?”

Giorgi leans into the window too. “I need to get going, the Karenins will be leaving the theater soon. Aleksandra, you’re in good hands.” And to Volodin: “Shall I come back for her?”

“We’ll look after her. No need.”

“All right, Aleksandra?”

“Thank you, Giorgi, thank you. I’m fine.”

Aleksandra gets out of the carriage. Giorgi says goodbye and takes the reins; the horses set off at a trot.

“That’s how children get run over!” Volodin says to Aleksandra. “They pass through the streets without heeding anything but their own desires…. They think they own this city.”

They enter a dark alley. Aleksandra takes small, mincing steps—the elegant summer shoes she wears (a gift from her employer) keep her from making much progress through the snow, but Volodin is a fish in water.

10. More Specifics about Sergei

10. More Specifics about Sergei

It’s not easy to pin down dates in Sergei’s life. In 1873, when Tolstoy first wrote about him—Anna Karenina’s son appears early in the novel—and began to publish his story in the Russian Messenger, Sergei was eight years old. An eight-year-old newborn. He’s eight years old again when the first edition of the complete novel is published in 1878, but a few pages later, when the dramatic events of the novel take place, he’s two years older. So, for our purposes, he has three birthdates: 1873, when Tolstoy created him; 1865, when he was born in the novel; and 1878, when he appears in print for all posterity. For the monolingual English reader, Sergei arrives on this earth in 1886, the year the first English translation appeared; from his own point of view he was born in ’78 (though for our purposes, he was already ten years old by then).

This bafflement of dates might help us understand Sergei’s frame of mind at the concert, a sort of trance that cannot be attributed only to the arrival of today’s letter at his home, or to the presence of his sister, Anya, or to the fact that he’s been seated in the box made famous by Karenina, or to the comments of the ambassador recently arrived in St. Petersburg. Because Sergei becomes so wrapped up in himself and the music that it’s like something out of a novel, you could even say it’s mystical, though that’s not the case. When he comes out of this spiritual trance, Sergei is resolved, an unusual state of mind for him; he’s not normally decisive.