Reading Anna Karenina is a surprise after another. The latest, sweet and bitter, was Serëža and his inner thoughts. He is a nine-year-old boy who takes after his mother Anna rather than his father. Up until this point, he had only been peripheral to the narrative, but Tolstoj makes him suddenly come alive in just a few pages: we learn that he doesn’t believe in the concept of death, not really (“He did not believe that people he loved could die, and especially that he himself would die”), and that he spends much of his time daydreaming; and though it is never explicitly said, we can infer from fragments of information, glimpses into his daily life, that it is living with his father that drives him to draw inward.