# Kitty's Crisis of Conscience explained — Anna Karenina

> Chapter companion for Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

## What happens

A cheerful family picnic, buoyed by Prince Shcherbatsky's high spirits, contrasts with Kitty's inner turmoil. Following her father's arrival, she confronts Varenka about the Petrovs, leading to a heated confession where Kitty denounces her own 'sham' attempts at virtue and self-improvement. After a tearful reconciliation, Kitty experiences a profound disillusionment with the world of sickly piety she had embraced and resolves to return to Russia, her eyes opened to her own hypocrisy.

## Themes in this chapter

### Hypocrisy and Social Pretense

Kitty's central crisis: she realizes her attempts at moral perfection and helping the sick were a 'sham' performed 'to seem better to people, to myself, to God' rather than arising from genuine feeling.

### Search for Meaning

Kitty's entire journey at the spa culminates here. She rejects a path of principled, self-sacrificing virtue after finding it inauthentic, seeking a more genuine way of life back in Russia.

## Character check-ins

### Kitty Shcherbatskaya

Experiences a crisis, accusing herself of living a 'sham' by forcing virtue and self-improvement. She feels alienated from the world of sickness and resolves to return to Russia.

### Mademoiselle Varenka

The target of Kitty's outburst; tries to soothe her and reveals the Petrovs' quarrel was partly about Kitty's presence. Accepts Kitty's apology.

### Prince Shcherbatsky

His jovial, earthy nature and critique of foreign 'institutions' provides a stark contrast to the artificial world Kitty has been inhabiting, triggering her reevaluation.

### Princess Shcherbatskaya

Observes the family picnic and notices Kitty's distress, calling her away to show her father a necklace.

## Key lines

> "It serves me right, because it was all sham; because it was all done on purpose, and not from the heart."

Kitty condemns her own actions as calculated performances, not genuine expressions of her character.

_The core of her confession to Varenka._

> "I can’t act except from the heart, and you act from principle."

Kitty draws a distinction between her own need for emotional authenticity and Varenka's life of disciplined virtue.

_Highlights the conflict between innate feeling and adopted principle._

> "Her eyes were, it seemed, opened; she felt all the difficulty of maintaining herself without hypocrisy and self-conceit on the pinnacle to which she had wished to mount."

Kitty gains painful clarity, seeing the hypocrisy required to sustain her idealized self-image.

_The narrator describes the consequence of her outburst._

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/anna_karenina_se/chapters/part-ii-xxxv
- Book: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/anna_karenina_se
- All chapters: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/anna_karenina_se/chapters