Chapters (53)
- Cover
- Title Page
- An Explanation of What This Book Is About
- Part One: Anna’s Sergei and Anya’s City: St. Petersburg, Saturday, January 8, 1905
- 1. On the Heels of Clementine, the Anarchist
- 2. Claudia and Sergei
- 3. Clementine Defends Herself
- 4. To the Concert
- 5. The Tsar’s Letter
- 6. In the Theater
- 7. What Giorgi, the Karenins’ Coachman, Did
- 8. Intermission at the Concert
- 9. Near the Port
- 10. More Specifics about Sergei
- 11. Kapitonich, Hall Porter at the Karenin Palace
- 12. Claudia and Sergei at Table
- 13. Aleksandra and Volodin Go to the Haven
- 14. Our Moment of Greatness
- 15. With Father Gapon
- 16. Clementine, in Pursuit of the Night
- 17. In the Karenin Palace Kitchen
- 18. We’ll Give Our Lives!
- 19. The Karenins Take Dinner
- Part Two: Bloody Sunday: Sunday, January 9, 1905
- 20. Anya Karenina without Aleksandra
- 21. The Karenins’ Reply to the Tsar
- 22. Piotr
- 23. The Three Women
- 24. Claudia’s Impatience
- 25. Unexpected Guests at the Karenin Palace
- 26. What on Earth Was the Tsar Thinking?
- 27. Back in the Karenin Palace Kitchen
- 28. The Reverend’s Beard
- Part Three: Karenina’s Portrait: Three months later
- 29. Karenina’s Portrait
- 30. About Clementine
- 31. The Critics Examine the Portrait
- 32. Vladimir
- 33. The Reason for the Proposed Purchase
- 34. The Portrait Departs
- 35. Between the Dream and the Battleship Potemkin
- 36. Claudia’s Regrets
- 37. In Claudia’s Hands
- Part Four: The Book of Anna: No date or place
- 38. An Opium-Infused Fairy Tale: The Book of Anna by Anna Karenina
- Part Five: Finale: St. Petersburg, June 1905
- 39. After Reading
- 40. The Plot
- 41. The Boxes
- 42. Anya Karenina
- 43. The Wind
- Funder Acknowledgments
- The Publisher’s Circle of Coffee House Press
“But no one could tell where the sound was coming from—”
“No one expected there to be a bomb on the tram—”
“There wasn’t even an investigation—”
“Are you sure?” Clementine asks.
“Absolutely. I have it on authority from an excellent source.”
“But it didn’t explode—”
“It didn’t explode!”
“I’m telling you it did—” Clementine defends herself again.
“No, Clementine, it didn’t explode, it let one off!”
“Silent but not deadly!”
“A real stink-bomb, we made!”
The anarchists begin to laugh. Their pent-up nerves momentarily turn them into a clutch of madmen, not activists.
“I told you that sacrificing yourself to make sure the bomb detonates is the only way.”
“Keep on dreaming!” Clementine says. “It wouldn’t have made so much as a hole in my dress even if I’d been holding it when it exploded. The bomb was faulty. It was poorly made.”
17. In the Karenin Palace Kitchen
17. In the Karenin Palace Kitchen
In the Karenin Palace kitchen, all the staff has gathered, except Kapitonich. In their distress over Aleksandra’s escape, they’re all speaking at once, unable to hear each other. They speak over one another, their tones not of grief or jubilation but of worry. Because they’re so upset, they say things that they normally never would. The conversation slowly begins to evolve.
“Say what you want, Madame Karenina was the salt of the earth. She died because of the opium drops she took to help her sleep. Poor thing, she had no relief from her torments…. Each night she took more.”
“Opium kills.”
“That wasn’t what killed her, it was what she did to keep from having children. That’s what did her in,” the old cook says.
“What did she do to avoid getting pregnant?” It’s not an innocent question. The young woman who asks (Valeria) doesn’t want to have children if she can’t be sure they won’t be born into a life of misery. She breaks her back working in vain; she tries to save money but her efforts get her nowhere: the price of a tram ticket keeps going up, her husband’s salary (good old Matyushenko, who’s at sea on a submarine) doesn’t arrive regularly, her mother is ill….
“The only one who knows what on earth madame was doing to keep herself from having children is Kapitonich.” That’s the cook again.
“How on earth would Kapitonich know that? Impossible! It’s not a man’s business.”
“They say he went out to get it for her because he’s the only one she trusted,” the cook says.
“But that’s wrong, completely wrong! Because when she was living here, she didn’t use those ointments.”