The footman who was carrying her slowed to a stop outside the Karenin Palace and put the portrait down on its side. Anna, floating above the street, as if she were lying down in the boy’s bed to help him go to sleep after reading him a bedtime story. Anna, face-to-face with her son, in broad daylight.

This vision, as Vronskaya had crassly predicted, pierced Sergei’s heart like a poisoned dart. It literally made him sick: he developed a fever much like the one he’d had seventeen months earlier, when Anna had come to visit for his birthday.

On that occasion, when Anna Karenina surprised him, Sergei hadn’t been afraid at all; even if they had told him his mother was dead, he wouldn’t have believed them; he could feel it, he knew it, he was certain that “death doesn’t exist.” That day, his birthday, she was there when he awoke, sitting on the edge of his bed, alive, whole, gazing at him, loving him.

But when her portrait appeared, even if they had tried to hide the fact that she was no longer alive, he would have felt that she was dead, he knew it. In the light of day, against all logic, she had appeared. Luminous, the most beautiful, most perfect—most feared and most desired—of all ghosts, there in front of him, in the street, about to enter his house….

Rescued from obscurity in 1905, Mikhailov’s portrait of Anna is neither the reappearance of a ghost nor the incarnation of death. Claudia looks at it while the servants dust it off and hang it where a landscape used to hang on a wall in Sergei’s office: she’s no expert, but to her it looks like the canvas is the masterwork of some fictional painter.

30. About Clementine

30. About Clementine

Let’s try to retrace Clementine’s steps back to the day when Vronskaya played her little trick, exposing Karenina’s portrait to the elements and piercing Sergei’s heart. Like a poisoned dart from far-off lands, decorated with feathers for a momentous occasion, crafted with great skill, it’s not the decoration that makes the portrait great, but its accuracy—if the dart flies well and hits its target, it’s because of the restraint with which it captures beauty; the precision of its flight is assured by the painting’s painstaking execution, the components that compose that beauty are what allow it to fly true, tracing the fine arc of perfection. The dart and the portrait are finely wrought but weightless.