Anna Karenina: Moscow, Petersburg and Italy

Levin goes looking for Kitty. At four o'clock he "stepped out of a hired sledge at the Zoological Gardens" and walked past the frozen mounds to the skating ground, where he knew she would be. Among all the skaters he finds her at once, "by the rapture and the terror that seized on his heart." The Moscow Zoo was founded in 1864, so the garden already existed in Tolstoy's day.

Visitor guidance: Moscow Zoo is still there; the skating ground of the novel is not marked.

Next day Vronsky drives to "the station of the Petersburg railway" to meet his mother, and on the great flight of steps he finds Oblonsky, who is waiting for his sister Anna off the same train. Then the crowd runs back from the tracks, and both men see the mutilated corpse of a guard crushed by the train. The book gives no name to the station; the Moscow end of the Petersburg line, built between 1844 and 1851 by Konstantin Thon, is today's Leningradsky station.

Location precision: The novel calls it only the station of the Petersburg railway; the pin marks Leningradsky station, the Moscow end of that line.

Visitor guidance: A working station with trains to Saint Petersburg.

Anna is travelling home to Petersburg when a snowstorm stops the night train. She steps onto the platform and "the driving snow and the wind rushed to meet her." Vronsky, who had got out at Bologova for seltzer water, is there: "You know that I have come to be where you are," he says. "I can't help it." Bologoye lies about halfway between Moscow and Petersburg and became a station on the line in 1851.

Visitor guidance: Bologoye is still a stop on the Moscow–Petersburg line.

Anna returns home on the Petersburg train, and "the first person that attracted her attention was her husband." Looking at his frigid figure she thinks, "Oh, mercy! why do his ears look like that?" and feels an "unpleasant sensation" under his tired glance. The book names no station. The oldest preserved station in the city, built in 1844-51 to a design by Thon, is today's Moskovsky station, a twin of the one in Moscow.

Location precision: The novel does not name the Petersburg terminus; the pin marks Moskovsky station, where the Moscow line ends.

Visitor guidance: A working terminal for the Saint Petersburg–Moscow line.

On the day of the races at Krasnoe Selo, Vronsky rides Frou-Frou, a beast "of medium size". Near the end he makes a clumsy movement, and "had broken her back." He stands up unhurt, to his misery, and the mare is shot. In the pavilion Anna, wholly engrossed in the race, becomes aware of her husband's cold eyes fixed on her. The book names only the town, not the course; Krasnoye Selo was where the emperor presided over annual military manoeuvres.

Location precision: The novel names the town but not the course; the pin marks the centre of Krasnoye Selo.

Karenin's "permanent summer villa was in Peterhof". That year Countess Lidia Ivanovna "declined to settle in Peterhof" near Anna, as she usually did, and instead hinted to Karenin at the unsuitability of Anna's close intimacy with Betsy and Vronsky. The book gives the villa no street or view, only the town. Peterhof, on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland, is best known today for its palaces and gardens laid out on the orders of Peter the Great.

Location precision: The novel does not place the villa on a street; the pin marks the town of Peterhof.

A famous doctor prescribes Soden waters for Kitty, "a remedy obviously prescribed primarily on the ground that they could do no harm." Months later her father arrives and says he likes even "your horrid Soden for making you so well again." Bad Soden am Taunus is a spa town in Hessen, known for springs containing carbonic acid gas and iron oxides.

Location precision: The book names the spa but no building; the pin marks the town of Bad Soden.

Anna and Vronsky leave Russia together. They "had been traveling for three months together in Europe" and had visited Venice, Rome and Naples before settling in a small Italian town that Tolstoy never names. Vronsky paints studies from nature under an Italian professor, but the life soon strikes them as "intolerably tedious." Venice, a coastal city in northeastern Italy, is the first stop of the trip and the only one that can honestly be pinned.

Location precision: The scene takes place in an unnamed small Italian town; the pin marks Venice, the first city on their tour.

Anna drives "under the low-pitched roof of the Nizhigorod station," and her servant asks, "A ticket to Obiralovka?" At the suburban platform she is pestered by crowds and waits for a note from Vronsky. This is where her story ends. Obiralovka grew from 1861 around the station and became famous as the place where Anna dies. It was renamed Zheleznodorozhny in 1939. The town now lies east of Moscow.

Location precision: The pin marks Zheleznodorozhnaya station in the town that grew from Obiralovka; the novel does not describe the exact platform.

Visitor guidance: Zheleznodorozhnaya station is served by suburban trains.