Just for the record: at one of my L.A. book events last month, someone in the audience wanted my pick to win the NCAA Championship, which was just getting underway. I went “Kansas,” to gasps and boos from a UCLA-lovin’ audience. Just for the record.

So I’m still swimming upstream through 900 pages of Anna Karenina. I’ve finshed a few other books in the meantime, and I’m simultaneously reading Fantagraphics’ awesome new reprints of Love and Rockets, so I’ve got a couple thousand pages of Mexican wrestling on my plate as well. I’m only about 2/3 of the way through Anna.

I just read the pivotal scene where the awkward gentleman farmer Levin proposes to Kitty Shcherbatskaya. (For the second time, actually. She turns down his first proposal.) Intriguingly, nerdily, he decides to propose using a word game!

It’s not Boggle. He and Kitty are playing the game secrétaire, apparently a French game in which players try to communicate in sentences reduced to their initial letters. Levin might write “I.l.y.,” for example, and Kitty would understand “I love you.”

Except the dialogue in the book isn’t nearly that plausible. In the Constance Garnett translation, Levin coyly writes, “w. y. t. m. i. c. n. b. d. t. m. n. o. t.” Try to figure that one out. Take a second. (Don’t take too long; Kitty isn’t meant to be any kind of rocket scientist. Also, the heady blush of first romance doesn’t tend to make young people smarter.)

But Kitty figures it out and responds, “t. i. c. n. a. d.”–which Levin understands immediately.

Since there’s no way any person in the history of the universe could ever reconstruct this conversation, I’ll help you out. Levin asked, “When you told me it could never be, did that mean never or then?” Kitty says, “Then I could not act differently.”

Yeah. Unless this game is substantially easier in Russian or French or whatever bored Petersburg aristocrats spoke back then, I’m not buying it, Count Tolstoy.

Feel free to suggest hilarious alternate meanings to the conversation over on the message boards. If this peep into 19th-century literary word games is a huge success and gets me Slashdotted with billions of hits, I have a follow-up all ready to go about the charade tableaus in Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre!