# XXIX explained — Anna Karenina

> Chapter companion for Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

## What happens

After her painful encounter with Kitty, Anna's despair deepens into a bitter, misanthropic worldview. She sees universal hatred and hypocrisy in everyone around her, including herself. Receiving Vronsky's delayed telegram, she is consumed by fury and a desire for revenge. Resolving to confront him, she packs a bag, leaves her home with finality, and heads for the railway station.

## Themes in this chapter

### Isolation and Misunderstanding

Anna feels completely alienated and 'an outcast'; she believes no one can understand or communicate true feeling, and that everyone, including herself, is locked in mutual hatred.

### Hypocrisy and Social Pretense

Anna interprets all social and religious rituals (vespers, crossing oneself) as mere 'humbug' designed to conceal the fundamental truth that 'we all hate each other.'

## Character check-ins

### Anna Arkadyevna Karenina

Plunged into profound isolation and bitterness after meeting Kitty; perceives universal hatred and hypocrisy; decides to leave home forever to confront Vronsky.

### Kitty Shcherbatskaya

Anna fixates on Kitty's imagined jealousy and hatred, seeing her as a mirror of the mutual contempt she believes defines all human relationships.

### Darya Alexandrovna Oblonskaya

Anna believes Dolly would secretly delight in her misery, envying her past happiness.

### Count Alexey Kirillovitch Vronsky

His brief, delayed telegram ('I can’t come before ten o’clock') is the final trigger for Anna's furious decision to go to him.

### Annushka

Anna finds her and all the servants hateful and irritating as she prepares to leave.

### Pyotr

Anna's footman; his presence and questions annoy her as she departs in a state of high agitation.

## Key lines

> “How they looked at me as something dreadful, incomprehensible, and curious!”

Anna feels herself to be a monstrous and alien spectacle in the eyes of society.

_Highlights her profound sense of being judged and ostracized._

> “I know my appetites, as the French say. They want that dirty ice cream, that they do know for certain.”

People are driven by base, simple desires, which are the only truths they truly understand.

_Anna reduces human motivation to crude instinct, reflecting her cynical despair._

> “Why these churches and this singing and this humbug? Simply to conceal that we all hate each other...”

She sees religious and social ceremony as a facade masking universal mutual hatred.

_The core of her nihilistic revelation in this chapter._

> “Never have I hated anyone as I hate that man!”

Her love for Vronsky has curdled into its most potent opposite: pure hatred.

_Marks a critical emotional turning point, fueling her final, fateful actions._

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/anna_karenina_se/chapters/part-vii-xxix
- Book: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/anna_karenina_se
- All chapters: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/anna_karenina_se/chapters