This section presents the parallel careers of Levin and Anna in striking contrast. As Levin embarks to fulfill his life through his courtship and marriage to Kitty, we see his career as an affirmation of his life. This part of his story already points to the happy ending in his struggle to overcome death. Anna's imminent death in this section, however, portends disaster.
Just as death reverses life, Anna's deathbed crisis reverses the process of her love affair. From this point on, we see the slow-motion deterioration of her relationship with Vronsky and its corresponding effect on her lover and husband.
As Vronsky and Karenin exchange roles during this crisis, they both achieve an emotional intensity neither have previously experienced. At the point of losing Anna, Vronsky rises to the pinnacle of his love but finds himself unable to cope with his humiliation and debasement. With Karenin exalted, Vronsky's "code of prescribed behavior" offers no solution to his present crisis. His life based on regimented social values to sustain his ego, Vronsky cannot countenance this sudden loss of honor. He responds by trying to destroy his suddenly meaningless life now that it can no longer conform to formulistic interpretation. Tolstoy shows us that Vronsky is too rigid to sustain the intensity of his passion. The attempted suicide tells us of the ultimate futility of Vronsky's attempt to maintain the emotional depth of love that Anna demands from him.
For Karenin, Anna's deathbed crisis acts as a catalyst releasing his latent emotions of love and forgiveness --emotions which he has spent his life trying to repress. His exaltation results from his sudden discovery of universal love and the truth of "turning the other cheek," a basic tenet in Tolstoyan Christianity. No longer resisting evil, Karenin's confrontation with evil allows him to overcome it. Death for Alexey Alexandrovitch becomes the basic truth which makes him a living human being capable of love.
With a masterful touch of irony, Tolstoy also brings Anna to a point of reversal when she is near death. In her fever, Anna's "real self" begs forgiveness while she gazes with tender affection at her husband. However, when she returns to health, Anna chooses in favor of Vronsky. Tolstoy's device here is a Dostoevskian twist to show how the moment of death illuminates life's truths, whereas the state of health provides the conditions for illusion.
This awareness of life-in-death provides the climax of the novel, with the main characters perceiving truth from the heights of their emotional intensity. Hate and deceit no longer exist in the presence of death, and Anna, Vronsky, and Karenin live a moment of pure innocence. From the point of Anna's recovery, however, the novel portrays the human condition as if after the Fall of Grace. Karenin, despite his ennoblement, finds Anna cannot love him. Vronsky pursues his ill-fated love, while Anna follows through toward her already doomed destiny.
Thus Tolstoy provides a crossroad in this section of the novel, defining the direction his main characters will take from now on. Levin's path ascends toward light and love, while Anna's career points to tragedy.
