The photograph taken of Sub-Lieutenant Count Tolstoy in 1854, showing him in his dark artillery officer's uniform, the epaulet proudly displayed beside the sable collar of his cloak, might be taken as an image of the size, arrogance and power of the Russian empire. The curling side-whiskers, moustache, and bullet head, emphasize that famously penetrating stare, but in a wholly worldly and imperial context. This could almost be the terrible kumir, the Bronze Horseman of Pushkin's poem.

It could also almost be a likeness of Vronsky, the figure of power and glamour in Anna Karenina, who brings so much joyous exultation and inflicts so much damage, on himself and on the heroine. There is no doubt about Tolstoy's feeling for Vronsky – almost, it might be said, his nostalgia for him – as the kind of man he himself might once have been. Tolstoy despised and hated men like Napoleon, with their inhuman lust for conquest and power; but his secret affection for high-born men of action, generous in their ambitions and in their passions, remained undiminished with age, and perhaps even increased. Throughout the novel he emphasizes Vronsky's physicality, and his sense of himself, which though it is greatly enhanced by his love for Anna still remains separated from it. When the couple are happiest in their love the novel sees them alone and apart from each other. We never see them happy together, as we see the married couples at the end of War and Peace. At the time of the famous horse-race, when Vronsky's mare Frou-Frou breaks her back over a jump, Vronsky is incongruously happy, but he is happiest at the prospect of seeing Anna, not when he is actually with her. In his carriage he becomes conscious of the sprain he got in the accident.