These chapters define the characters of Karenin and Vronsky, and with Anna Arkadyevna caught "double-souled" between them, they have reached a stalemate. Both men have gone as far as their characters and experiences allow them to go. Until a crisis, the situation is to remain static.
Vronsky is a representative character of the milieu of army and court nobility which has made his career. His motivations are socially conditioned according to his social role and function as a promising career man in the military. Guided by his "code of behavior" Vronsky concludes a duel will occur, thus solving the problem of his honor. With confusion, he realizes that a duel will not solve Anna's disgrace. Now that her condition demands his assuming responsibility for her future, a resolve he has not yet decided, Vronsky's imagination stops.
Karenin, shown as almost the very symbol of bureaucracy, approaches his domestic problems the same way he meets problems at the office. Tolstoy tells us this as Alexey Alexandrovitch first dispatches a letter to Anna, then turns to the business of the Native Tribes Commission. Karenin sees Vronsky as an enemy like Stremov, a rival to be overcome through political, rather than personal, application. Human impulses are sunk deep within him. Religion, whose principles he applies as an afterthought, is for Karenin just a set of highly institutionalized rules. Since a duel solves no problems for a bureaucrat, Karenin issues no challenge. He must compromise emotional problems and avoid their poignancy through the principle of expediency.
