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Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg © Alinari Archives/The Image Works; Portrait of a Lady by Franz Xaver Winterhalter/Private Collection/Photo © Christie’s Images/The Bridgeman Art Library; Portrait of an Unknown Woman, 1883 by Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoy; Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina © SV Bilderdienst/DIZ Muenchen/The Image Works; Greta Garbo by George Hurrell; Movie star © Ronald Grant Archive/Mary Evans/The Image Works; Man reading icon made by Freepik from Flaticon.com; Dead chicken © mhatzapa/Shutterstock; Gerry Mulligan © Bob Willoughby/Redferns/Getty Images; Carey Mulligan © Tom Belcher/Capital Pictures/Retna Ltd.; A Hubble Space Telescope image of the typical globular cluster Messier 80/NASA; Mona Lisa Paint-by-Numbers courtesy of Don Brand (Mobii); Nabokov Metamorphosis notes © Vladimir Nabokov, courtesy of the Vladimir Nabokov Archive at the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC; Joyce drawing courtesy of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University; Drawing of Three Women Boarding a Streetcar While Two Men Watch by William Faulkner, used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.; Lion Tamer by Gibson & Co. courtesy the Library of Congress; Roland Barthes © Ulf Andersen/Getty Images; Nabokov novel map © Vladimir Nabokov, courtesy of the Vladimir Nabokov Archive at the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC; The Hobbit © The J R R Tolkien Estate Limited 1937, 1965. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publisher Ltd; William Wordsworth by Edwin Edwards courtesy of The British Library; scene from Last Year at Marienbad, photo: The Kobal Collection at Art Resource, NY; The Ecstasy of St. Teresa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini courtesy of Alinari/Art Resource, NY; Pipe by Magritte © VOOK/Shutterstock; Achilles by Ernest Hester © Panagiotis Karapanagiotis/Alamy; Pentagon courtesy of the Library of Congress; Mercury Comet courtesy of Ford Images

“Levin gazed at the portrait, which stood out from the frame in the brilliant light thrown on it, and he could not tear himself away from it … It was not a picture, but a living, charming woman, with black curling hair, with bare arms and shoulders, with a pensive smile on the lips, covered with soft down; triumphantly and softly she looked at him with eyes that baffled him. She was not living only because she was more beautiful than a living woman can be.”

—Anna Karenina