Neohelicon DOI 10.1007/s11059-014-0279-0

Vengeance and mercy in Anna Karenina From biblical epigraph to novelistic text John Burt Foster Jr.

 Akade´miai Kiado´, Budapest, Hungary 2014

Abstract Tolstoy’s famous novel begins with an epigraph, ‘‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay,’’ which leaves out the purported speaker of these words in Romans 12:19 (‘‘sayeth the Lord’’). As a result, these opening words allow for major ambiguities in understanding the motives of the novel’s characters. The Lord’s power to avenge wrongdoing, which asks that human beings strive to be merciful, can become the prerogative of any first-person subject. As is seen in Vronsky’s mother’s harsh condemnation of Anna near the novel’s end, such language allow for pitiless selfrighteousness to overwhelm the true goal of humble forgiveness. This paper considers the implications of this ambiguity by examining the dialectic of vengeance and mercy that runs through Tolstoy’s novel. Emphasis falls on Anna and her husband Karenin, but the discussion also includes telling episodes involving Dolly Oblonsky (Anna’s sister-in-law) and Konstantin Lyovin, Anna’s counterpart in the novel’s second plot. The issues explored range from the power of compassionate forbearance and the problematic impact of authoritative words on people’s behavior to social ostracism, the transience of peak experiences, and the anguish of losing one’s capacity to forgive, not just other people, but—tragically—one’s very self. Keywords Revenge
Mercy
‘‘Vileness’’
Forgiveness
Novelistic Discourse
Variability of ‘‘Mine’’ and ‘‘I’’
Schopenhauer Anna Karenina begins with the epigraph ‘‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay.’’ No source is given, but in the original Russian text the passage reads ‘‘mne otmshchenie, i az vozdam,’’ where the obsolete word ‘‘az’’ marks the quotation

J. B. Foster Jr. (&) George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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as biblical (Tolstoy 1964, vol 8.7).1 Though it can be argued that the epigraph is the novel’s true opening sentence, discussion of Tolstoy’s novel has not paid it as much attention as to the much-cited dictum at the opening of the first chapter about happy and unhappy families. As for these earlier framing words, the Russian formalist Boris Eikhenbaum has proposed (1982, pp. 137–147), in his monumental but once suppressed and still somewhat neglected study of Tolstoy’s contexts and sources, that the novelist decided to use them as the result of a passage defending their ethical significance in Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation.2 This book, which Tolstoy’s friend, the poet Afanasy Fet,3 was translating into Russian, had cited these words of St. Paul’s from Romans 12:19 to reinforce the pessimistic philosopher’s emphasis on humanity’s deep-seated urges for revenge and on the law’s importance in controlling them. In this context it becomes clear that the epigraph’s first-person pronouns are not meant to justify the actions of people eager to exact retaliation on their own. This was not the case with Schopenhauer or with St. Paul, and we shall see that it is not the case with Tolstoy either, despite possible appearances to the contrary. For Schopenhauer the power to curb vengeful acts, being legal, lies with the state. This secular orientation befits his status as the first unequivocal atheist in Western philosophy. Yet in quoting the full Biblical text, which gives that governing authority to God, Schopenhauer differs strikingly from Tolstoy, who leaves the speaker unidentified. As the King James translation puts it, ‘‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, I will repay.’’ An earlier version of the epigraph that Eikhenbaum found among the drafts for Anna Karenina, which simply but vigorously read ‘‘otmshchenie moe,’’ or ‘‘Mine is the vengeance,’’ lent further support to a link running from Tolstoy back to Schopenhauer. In particular, this version’s stress on the personal possessive led Eikhenbaum to conclude that Tolstoy must have preserved some memory of how the Bible’s language had been worded in the philosopher’s German, with which the novelist was familiar: ‘‘Mein ist die Rache’’ (1982, pp. 144–145). This philological precision did not, however, lead Eikhenbaum to pursue an equally detailed investigation of the impact of his findings on the novel as a whole. This paper will explore what these origins for the epigraph mean for understanding the functions of vengeance and its counterpart mercy throughout Anna Karenina. The intertextual background for the words suggests that Tolstoy omitted ‘‘sayeth the Lord’’ because naming the divine source for punishment mattered less for him than the urgency with which Schopenhauer raised authoritative barriers to the unleashing of human 1

Citations from Anna Karenina will hereafter appear in English, in the recent Pevear and Volokhonsky translation (Tolstoy 2001). A romanized transliteration of the Russian wording will be included with the parenthetical in-text references. To allow for the numerous editions of Tolstoy’s writings, these references will give the part and chapter number for the scenes in which the cited material appears. They will also provide the volume and page number for these citations in Tolstoy (1964), a Russian edition of Tolstoy’s works that is widely available in libraries.

2

Schopenhauer’s discussion of the passage occurs in Volume I of The World as Will and Representation, toward the end of Sect. 62. Eikhenbaum’s study of Tolstoy in the 1870s is the third in a three-volume work that was written in the 1920s and 1930s, but this volume only appeared in 1959; for more details, see McLean (1982).

3 Fet’s translation of The World as Will and Representation eventually appeared in 1881, several years after the serialized publication of Anna Karenina (1875–1877) and its appearance as a book in 1878.

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vengefulness. Accepting this premise, this paper will consider some key ways in which this view of Tolstoy’s intentions in choosing and phrasing the epigraph resonates within Anna Karenina.4 It assumes that, despite the spiritual crisis and conversion that he underwent shortly after he finished this novel, criticism should be wary about reading the later religious writings back into his fiction.5 Supporting this view, many readers have noticed a discrepancy between the high artistic quality of Tolstoy’s imaginative works and the ploddingly insistent nature of his expository ones. A memorable proponent of this view was the political theorist Isaiah Berlin, active in England but originally from Latvia and with a wide knowledge of Russian intellectual life. Berlin used a poetic fragment by the early Greek poet Archilochus to diagnose Tolstoy as a many-sided fox who, despite the brilliance of his fiction in capturing a variety of vivid specifics, strove mightily to become a hedgehog with a ‘‘single central vision (1953, pp. 1–3).’’6 As a result, despite the detailed studies of Tolstoy’s developing spiritual beliefs by Gustafson (1986) and more recently Medzhibovskaya (2008),7 this paper focuses on how issues raised by the epigraph, understood in both its truncated and original versions, play out within the novel itself. Tolstoy has stressed the relevance of this approach in a much-cited account of how he handled ideas in Anna Karenina. Writing the critic and philosopher Nikolai Strakhov, he pointed to the ‘‘context of connections’’ within which any ideas necessarily appeared, so that no idea could be expressed ‘‘immediately by words,’’ but only indirectly through ‘‘characters, actions, situations’’ (qtd. Turner 1993, p. 42)8—that is, by characteristically 4

Ironically, however, Tolstoy’s editing of St. Paul has caused some readers who did not recognize the epigraph’s biblical origin, and who may also have been misled by translations lacking the biblical flavor of Tolstoy’s wording, to read these initial words as a vindictive outburst. At times, in a gross distortion of Tolstoy’s attitude, some readers have even assumed that he wrote the novel to exact vengeance on Anna by having her throw herself beneath the train. See, for example, Lawrence’s iconoclastic manifesto, ‘‘The Novel,’’ which undercuts his praise for Tolstoy’s vividly depicted characters with the complaint that he ‘‘loved to kill them off or muss them over’’ (1925, p. 195). To support this accusation, the essay surprisingly focuses on Vronsky rather than Anna, as well as on Pierre in War and Peace and on Nekhliudov in Resurrection. A recent discussion that applies the epigraph even more immediately to the novel would be Boot, who asserts ‘‘it is not God’s vengeance that strikes Anna down but Tolstoy’s own’’ (2009, p. 11).

5 Thus Jahn comments that only after Anna Karenina did Tolstoy go on to ‘‘a radical reformulation of the meaning of life,’’ while the novel’s two main characters ‘‘were forced to choose between the two responses that presented themselves to the author in the mid-1870s’’ (2003, p. 73). 6

The fragment from Archilochus reads ‘‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,’’ which, as Berlin acknowledges, ‘‘may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defense’’ (1953, p. 1).

7

Gustafson draws attention to Tolstoy’s ‘‘lifelong attempt to ground his understanding of Christianity and the doctrine of God in his own reading of the Four Gospels ‘divorced from the Old Testament and St. Paul’’’ (1986, p. 144). Medzhibovskaya’s discussion of the epigraph in relation to Anna Karenina takes a somewhat different view of Eikhenbaum’s findings than this essay (2008, pp. 175–184).

8

This letter to Strakhov is dated April 23, 1876, after more than half the novel had appeared in monthly installments. The phrases cited above come in a passage that describes Tolstoy’s need ‘‘to gather interconnected ideas to express myself; but each idea, when expressed in words separately, loses its sense and is terribly foreshortened when taken alone out of its context of connections. And the connection itself is not formed by the idea (I think) but by something else, and there is no way to express the basis of this connection immediately by words; but one can do it only mediately—describing characters, actions, situations by words.’’ In the original Russian, the word for ‘‘character’’ is ‘‘obraz,’’ which could also mean ‘‘image.’’

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novelistic means. Hence, in this case, to study literature and religion requires careful attention to the workings of the literary text. In the English-speaking world, Tolstoy’s reputation as a didactic writer was encouraged by a notable delay in translating his literary works up to and including Anna Karenina. From the 1890s onward, fictions written decades earlier came out at the same time as, and even somewhat after, his later expository works on moral and religious topics or the fable-like short stories that he did write in a didactic spirit.9 Thus the widely read Garnett translation of Anna Karenina only appeared in 1901, a quarter century after it was written. This novel, as the essay will show, does not simply tell, in a didactic manner, how it responds to the epigraph. Instead, it shows that response in the ways that it develops the epigraph’s implications in the twists of its plots and in the comparisons, both latent and explicit, that take place among its characters and their actions. A full generation after Anna, in a story that picks up on the truncated epigraph’s stark assertion of first-person acts of vengeance, the short novel Hadji Murat (published in 1912, but written between 1896 and 1904) featured some vivid expressions of its ethic of direct personal retribution. On several occasions the title character, who is portrayed as admirable in many ways, explains key actions in his life not just as the result of an ingrained urge to strike back at people who have injured him but as the self-conscious fulfillment of a solemn duty to do so. Thus, because the imam Shamil helped kill a friend of Murat’s earlier in Russia’s long war in the Caucasus, Murat decided to join the Russians, whom he otherwise distrusts, to fight Shamil (13; vol 14.80).10 Murat’s enemies make the same commitment to get back at him, so that when he dies fighting, an enemy’s son is present to glory in the deed (25; vol 14.148). In the same spirit Murat sees wisdom in a folk song in which a dying man implores his brothers to seek retribution (20; vol 14.119). Vengeful acts on the order of such murderous feuds do not figure in Anna Karenina, except in Karenin’s anxiety, once he must take active notice of Vronsky’s affair with Anna, about challenging this officer to a duel (III.13; vol 8:329–330). But even here the story emphasizes an inner struggle with one’s own vengeful feelings, not the commission of actual deeds of violence. What violence does occur is self-inflicted, when Vronsky, humiliated by Karenin’s magnanimity during Anna’s near death in childbirth (to be discussed later), absurdly tries to shoot himself (IV.18; vol 8:485–489). In short, the treatment of revenge in this novel has turned inward to focus on feelings and impulses, not on lethal acts against others like in Hadji Murat. Indeed, Tolstoy turns out to be just as, or even more intent on naming and exploring the 9

As Bartlett describes the situation, ‘‘Readers outside Russia thus became acquainted with Tolstoy’s religious writings and his major fiction simultaneously, as if his entire career to date had been telescoped’’ (2011, p. 317). In one telling example, Aylmer Maude, who knew Tolstoy personally, translated What is Art? in 1899, in which the author notoriously condemned all of his best-known fiction, almost immediately after the 1898 Russian edition. This was several years before the Garnett translation. Maude and his wife would do their own translation of this novel in 1918, well after their versions of late works like Resurrection (1900) or Twenty-Three Tales (1906).

10

References to Hadji Murat follow the same system as the one used for Anna Karenina that was described in note 1. The passages mentioned can be located either by chapter number (e.g., in Tolstoy 2012) or by the pagination in Tolstoy (1964).

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psychic counterweights to revenge in mercy and the capacity to forgive. Thus, in tacit contrast to the omission of the Lord’s name from the epigraph, the opening chapters invoke Him directly at several points, notably in the expression, ‘‘gospodi pomiluj,’’ or ‘‘Lord have mercy.’’ Both Kitty Shcherbatsky and her mother utter this brief prayer after Kitty refuses Lyovin’s first marriage proposal (I.15; vol 8.69,71).11 Much later, after his second proposal has succeeded, he hears these words at an Orthodox service he attends in preparation for their wedding (V.1; vol 9.10). Still later, in his agitation while Kitty is giving birth to their first child, Lyovin repeats the prayer, despite having left the church as a young man under the influence of his scientific education (VII.13; vol 9.320). In counterpoint to these invocations of mercy at turning points in the couple’s deepening relationship, vengeful feelings have also risen to the surface. A striking example occurs when Lyovin comes home late after visiting Anna, at the only point in this double-plot novel when the two main characters cross paths. Jealousy at her husband’s neglect merges with Kitty’s continued hurt feelings at losing Vronsky to Anna much earlier to produce an outburst that denies all worth to any pity Lyovin might feel for Anna: ‘‘You have fallen in love with that vile woman!’’ (VII.11; vol 9.314: ‘‘Ty vliubilsia v etu gadkuiu zhenshchinu’’). This incident chimes with the couple’s earlier quarrel over Lyovin’s returning home late. There, however, the narrative specified the presence of vengefulness in Lyovin. Kitty’s anger shocks and offends him, arousing the feelings of ‘‘a man who, receiving a blow from behind, angrily and revengefully turns round to find his assailant and realizes that he has accidentally knocked himself’’ (V.14; vol 9.59: ‘‘chelovek, kogda, poluchiv vdrug sil’nyj udar szadi, s dosadoj i zhelaniem mesti oborachivaetsia, shtoby najti vinovnogo, i ubezhdaetsia, shto eto on sam nechaianno udaril sebia…’’). In its immediate context, this incident supposedly shows how close their marriage has brought Lyovin to his wife, leaving no real separation between them. On a broader view, however, this fusion of identities remains incomplete as the novel ends, where readers find that Lyovin cannot share his ‘‘soul’s holy of holies’’ with Kitty (VIII.19; vol 9.445: ‘‘sviataia sviatykh moej dushi’’). As a result, the earlier passage’s enduring interest lies in its fleeting suggestion that retaliatory impulses lodge so deep in human nature that someone can mistakenly take revenge on oneself. This issue, which recalls Schopenhauer’s understanding of revenge, will recur with Anna. Interplay between vengeance and mercy or forgiveness leading to problematic resolutions has marked some early scenes involving sexual/marital issues. Right at the start, when Kitty’s sister Dolly discovers her husband Stiva’s adultery, she feels a sharp desire to ‘‘punish him, put him to shame, avenge on him some little part at least of the suffering he had caused her’’ (I.4; vol 8.17: ‘‘nakazat’, osramit’ ego, otomstit’ emu khot’ maloiu chast’iu toj boli, kotoruiu on ej sdelal’’). As her emotions intensify, Tolstoy’s sentence shows revenge to be their ultimate focus. Soon after, Stiva’s sister Anna arrives to mend the marital rift and succeeds in 11 English versions of Anna Karenina often render this character’s name as ‘‘Levin,’’ but ‘‘Lyovin’’ comes closer phonetically to the Russian pronunciation, which derives from Tolstoy’s first name of ‘‘Lyov.’’

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persuading her sister-in-law to forgive her husband. However, she must hesitate for a moment before she can clinch her argument by affirming that she could do the same herself: ‘‘I could forgive it, and forgive it as though it had never been, never been at all…’’ (I.19; vol 8.87: ‘‘… prostila by, i tak prostila by, kak budto etogo ne bylo, sovsem ne bylo’’). The novel will go on to test, in the course of Anna’s own life, whether she actually possesses such a deep capacity to be merciful. In the other main plot, Lyovin takes an equally convoluted path to forgiveness when, in a conversation with Anna’s brother, he takes back his verdict on fallen women as ‘‘vile creatures,’’ where ‘‘vile’’ looks ahead to Kitty’s language in attacking Anna (I.11; vol 8.53: ‘‘gadiny’’). Earlier in the meal, when he recalls his own sexual transgressions, he had yearningly imagined the forgiveness he might receive from a future wife. It would be granted ‘‘not according to my deserts but out of mercy’’ (I.10; vol 8.51: ‘‘ne po zaslugam prosti menia, a po miloserdiiu’’). Left unresolved in this vacillation between harsh judgment of others and a rueful examination of his own conscience is whether he is capable of forgiving himself, a question that will arise with painful force for Anna. During this episode Lyovin has also recited Pushkin’s lines of painful self-scrutiny from ‘‘Remembrance’’ (‘‘Vospominanie’’): ‘‘with disgust reading over my life, I tremble and curse, and bitterly complain…’’ (I.10; vol 8.51: ‘‘s otvrashcheniem chitaia zhizn’ moiu, ia trepeshchu i proklinaiu, i gor’ko zhaluius’…’’). The anguish that so abruptly surfaces in this turn on the self remains hanging as the scene comes to a close, in a stark, though implicit contrast with Lyovin’s vision of obtaining mercy from a spouse. A striking, fully developed answer to this hope comes with the portrayal of Karenin’s ability to forgive Anna, at least for a time, which occurs at the end of Volume I in two-volume editions of Anna Karenina.12 This scene, which brought such shame to Vronsky, brought strong praise from Dostoevsky, despite his usual reservations about Tolstoy.13 It surprises most readers because it follows right after the husband vents his bitterness about Anna and Vronsky to Dolly. She had tried to speak up for Anna by echoing Anna’s advice to her, ‘‘I have forgiven and you must forgive’’ (IV.12; vol 8.462: ‘‘Ia prostila, i vy dolzhny prostit’!’’), but Karenin refuses to listen. Though he belongs to a prominent circle of believers in the Russian capital and takes the Bible seriously, his reported thoughts show him responding at first with a legalistic quibble, ‘‘He had known all that, but it could not apply to his case’’ (IV.12; vol 8.463: ‘‘Eto on davno znal, no eto ne moglo byt’ prilozhimo k ego sluchaiu’’). But once this coldly reserved man starts to talk, his words veer off into raw emotion, with the original Russian insisting on the impossibility of transcending one’s personal feelings of hatred: ‘‘Love them that hate you, but you can’t love them 12

During the novel’s serialization over a three-year period, with long interruptions in the warmer months, this scene lacked the same emphasis. In that format it occupied the first half of an installment that ran over into what would become the first episode of Part V, at the beginning of the second volume. 13

Sorokin has judged the review of Anna Karenina in Diary of a Writer to be ‘‘perhaps Dostoevsky’s most substantial work of criticism’’ (1979, p. 128). Even though that discussion attacked Tolstoy in ways Sorokin denounces as ‘‘personal, underhanded, and vicious’’ (p. 135), Dostoevsky did hold that by expressing ‘‘truths of universal importance’’ Karenin’s forgiveness of Anna revealed ‘‘Tolstoy’s genius at its best’’ (pp. 130, 131).

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whom you hate’’ (IV.12; vol 8.463: ‘‘Liubite nenavidiashchikh vas, a liubit’ tekh, kogo nenavidish’, nel’zia’’; literally, ‘‘to love those whom you hate is impossible’’). Readers learn later of Karenin’s special regard for Paul (V.24; vol 9.99), yet this outburst ignores that such anger might produce the vengeful state of mind against which the unedited Pauline epigraph had meant to warn. Only later will Karenin admit to these feelings when he confesses to Vronsky that ‘‘I was pursued by a desire to revenge myself on you and on her’’ (IV.17; vol 8.485: ‘‘zhelanie mstit’ vam i ej presledovalo menia’’). Even more ironically, when he takes leave of Dolly after this conversation by asking that she forgive him for burdening her with his troubles, his words have merely ended their talk in a socially acceptable way (IV.12; vol 8.463). Despite these evasions, once Karenin meets Anna on what they think is her deathbed, he feels an unexpected upsurge of real forgiveness; and, what is more, he experiences these feelings in a way that seems to qualify the epigraph’s admonitory force. As the text explains, ‘‘He did not think that the Christian law, which he had been all his life trying to follow, enjoined on him to forgive and love his enemies; but a joyous feeling of love and forgiveness for his enemies filled his heart’’ (IV.17; vol 8.483: ‘‘On ne dumal, shto tot khristianskij zakon, kotoromu on vsiu zhizn’ svoiu khotel sledovat’, predpisyval emu proshchat’ i liubit’ svoikh vragov; no radostnoe chuvstvo liubvi i proshcheniia k vragam napolnialo ego dushu’’). In this crisis, when his behavior has lived up to the epigraph’s full spirit, Karenin has consciously heeded neither its words nor any similar Biblical passage. Such a breakthrough into merciful feeling could suggest a faith that, in shattering his legalistic literalism, has penetrated into his being to become second nature. Or perhaps, in a psychological reading, life itself, in the urgency of the moment, has opened up a spontaneous potential for forgiveness, even in this man who can’t bear to see others cry. In that case, this scene would show that the epigraph corresponded to lived reality in the experiences of this unhappy family, with its words acting less as a stern order to curb vengeful feelings (‘‘sayeth the Lord’’) than as a token of mercy’s natural power (with ‘‘I will repay’’ becoming a nightmarish ethical imperative). Later, when this peak experience has begun to fade, Karenin seems to have an inkling of this second possibility: ‘‘he knew that when, without the slightest idea that his forgiveness was the action of a higher power, he had surrendered directly to the feeling of forgiveness, he had felt more happiness than now, when he was thinking every instant that Christ was in his heart’’ (V.22; vol 9.94: ‘‘on znal, shto kogda on, vovse ne dumaia o tom, shto ego proshchenie est’ dejstvie vysshej sily, otdalsia etomu neposredstvennomu chuvstvu, on ispytal bol’she schast’ia, chem kogda on, kak teper’, kazhduiu minutu dumal, shto v ego dushe zhivaet Christos…’’). As shown by the overtones of his name14 as well as in this passage’s swirling dialectics, Karenin is a man of the head, not the heart. By this point he still

14 As Turner notes, Sergei Tolstoy’s memoirs indicate that Karenin’s name came from ‘‘karenon,’’ a Greek word for ‘‘head’’ that his father had probably encountered while learning to read Homer (1993, p. 48).

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understands but is no longer capable of directly feeling the meaning of what he experienced at Anna’s bedside. Of course, as Lyovin’s projects throughout the novel for a new life also show, each begun with ardor only to end in disillusionment or simply forgetfulness, peak experiences in Tolstoy tend to subside. This point is certainly true with Karenin, whose spiritual renewal yields, in a characteristically bureaucratic manner, to several instances of delegated vengeance. Through Lydia Ivanovna, a member of his religious circle, he acquiesces in the obstacles that she raises against letting Anna see her son, resulting in Anna’s frustrating visit on the boy’s birthday (V.29-30; vol 9.116–124). Then, swayed by the recent craze for spiritualism, he allows a medium’s ambiguous utterances to block the last-ditch efforts by Anna’s brother to remedy his sister’s situation (VII.17-18; vol 9.331–39). At novel’s end, Karenin has taken responsibility for Anna’s child with Vronsky, but the meaning of this act is uncertain. Is it one last stab at the man he had avoided facing in a duel, as Vronsky’s mother may suggest (VIII.4; vol 9.401)? Or does it mark a return to his lofty spiritual mood during Anna’s illness, when he was the only person in the household to think of looking after the baby and probably saved her life (IV.19; vol 8.490)? The recent movie, with a Tom Stoppard screenplay (2012, p. 197), suggests the second option in a last closing shot, which shows a kindly and now retired Karenin with the baby. But the novel simply reports the bare facts, leaving the meaning in doubt. Vengeance and mercy in Anna’s character undergo an even more complex development, due both to other factors that contribute to her tragedy and, more narrowly, to her second chance at life after recovering from childbed fever. Before that turning point, while her marriage with Karenin is deteriorating but before the couple has separated, her refusal to see any redeeming qualities in her husband reveals her failure to practice the forgiveness she had recommended to Dolly. It is probably not surprising that, eager to justify herself, she should reckon ‘‘against him every defect she could find in him, forgiving him nothing for the great wrong she herself was doing him’’ (II.23; vol 8.224: ‘‘ne proshchaia emu nichego za tu strashnuiu vinu, kotoruiu ona byla pred nim vinovata’’). However, Tolstoy goes on to show how this dearth of a forgiving spirit reacts back on Anna to create an allconsuming fear of not deserving forgiveness herself. This insight emerges in a vivid scene marked by the proto-modernist sharpness of imagery that Nabokov admired in Tolstoy.15 A day after Anna confronts her husband with her love for Vronsky, she feels disoriented. She steps outside to clear her mind, but her mood worsens when she catches sight of ‘‘the crowns of the aspen trees waving in the wind, with their freshly washed, brightly shining leaves in the cold sunshine’’ (III.15; vol 8.342: ‘‘na kolebavshiesia ot vetra vershiny osiny s obmytymi, iarko blistaiushchimi na kholodnom solntse list’iami’’). Her first buoyant response to seeing the radiant foliage tossing in the wind turns chilling once she senses the presence of a ‘‘cold sun’’ overhead. Anna intuits that ‘‘they would not forgive her, that everyone and 15 Nabokov aligned Anna Karenina with this trend in modernism when he praised the novel’s Proust-like ‘‘flow of extraordinary imagery’’ (1981, p. 147). For more on how he read Tolstoy, see Foster (2013).

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everything would be merciless to her now as was that sky, that green’’ (‘‘oni ne prostiat, shto vsyo i vse k nej teper’ budut bezzhalostny, kak eto nebo, kak eta zelen’’’). Ostracism rises up in its cold, harsh clarity, with the sky and then even the leaves turning ominous. Though Anna does not yet realize that women will cause her the most pain, as at the opera when a lady insists pointedly on leaving once her husband tries to resume normal social relations with Anna (V.33; vol 9.135–36), she has rightly started to fear that a hypocritical social elite will identify in spirit with the epigraph’s first-person pronouns, in effect replacing divine authority with their own. Before Vronsky this ‘‘they’’ had not played a large part in Anna’s life (II.4; vol 8.152), and she would not have envisioned their disapproval with such terror had her own capacity to forgive not fallen off so drastically. After Anna recovers and the couple goes to Italy, forgiveness remains an issue at this time of seeming liberation. While living abroad, Anna does not face the social stigma that will bring her such grief in Russia. Yet despite a veneer of radiant happiness, as captured in her portrait by the artist Mikhailov,16 the narrative can twice call her ‘‘unpardonably happy’’ (V.8; vol 9.37, 38: ‘‘neprostitel’no schastlivoiu’’). This superlative phrase, like the showy luxury at Vronsky’s estate once they return to Russia, proves to be hollow. The adverb ‘‘unpardonably’’ in these passages registers Anna’s fear that others will not understand her unconventional situation and her own deep, often suppressed sense of not deserving the new lease on life granted to her after nearly dying in childbirth. Passing over Anna’s deepening misery to come to the catastrophe, we find Tolstoy stressing the interaction between vengeful feelings and her inability to forgive. At this point Vronsky is Anna’s sole contact with an elite whose attention she now misses despite not having previously been a full-fledged socialite. Hence he becomes the main target for her frustrations. Though her urge to retaliate lacks any outlet in action or indeed any real basis, it escalates to the point where her lack of a forgiving spirit slides over into a realm of nightmarish shadows: ‘‘All the most cruel words that a brutal man could say, he said to her in her imagination, and she could not forgive him for them, as though he had actually said them’’ (VII.26; vol 9.368–69: ‘‘Vse samye zhestokie slova, kotorye mog skazat’ grubyj chelovek, on skazal ej v ee voobrazhenii, i ona ne proshchala ikh emu, kak budto on dejstvitel’no skazal ikh’’). This is the state of upheaval in which, if she even retains any control over her actions, Anna resolves on suicide. Her more general feelings of anger crystallize in the form of revenge, which now emerges as her main motive: ‘‘‘I know what I must do,’ she said, and feeling a vague fury and craving for revenge rising up within her, she ran upstairs’’ (VII.29; vol 9.380: ‘‘ia znaiu, shto mne delat’,— skazala ona, i, chuvstvuiu podnimaiushchijsia v sebe neopredelennyj gnev i 16 Since Mikhailov’s portrait of Anna could itself bear the title ‘‘Anna Karenina,’’ this scene has special importance as a reflection in miniature of key issues raised by the novel as a whole (i.e., as a mise-enabyme). It is thus meaningful that the painter shows more interest in Anna than in her companions (V.11; Vol 9.47) and that his portrait eclipses Vronsky’s own effort to paint her (V.13; Vol. 9.54). These responses from an uninvolved but sensitive observer, whose vocation as an artist complements Lyovin’s role as an alter-ego for Tolstoy, suggests, first, Anna’s exceptional potential vis-a`-vis her aristocratic milieu and, then, the presence of something not quite right in her situation with Vronsky, which can help account for her feeling of ‘‘unpardonable happiness.’’

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potrebnost’ mesti, ona vzbezhala naverkh’’).17 Up until her fatal leap beneath the train, she remains fixated on a desire to pay Vronsky back, even as she yearns to escape the harsh pressures directed against her by others and, even more importantly, erupting uncontrollably in herself. The narrative sums matters up with the forceful simplicity of Tolstoy’s style at its best: ‘‘I shall punish him and escape from everybody and from myself’’ (VII.31; vol 9.388: ‘‘Ia nakazhu ego i izbavlius’ ot vsekh i ot sebia’’). For Anna by this point, vengeance has indeed become ‘‘mine,’’ for with the erosion of her ability to forgive it has turned into an all-encompassing destructive urge directed at last against herself. Yet that is not Anna’s final word, for even when she crouches on the tracks, she is able to say to herself, prompted by the memory of a childhood prayer, ‘‘Lord, forgive me everything!’’ (VII.31; vol 9.389: ‘‘Gospodi, prosti mne vse!’’). In this last-minute lifting of Anna’s torment, the novel has qualified Schopenhauer’s pessimism, whose philosophy Lyovin had briefly tried to accept, but only after making a drastic editorial change of his own. ‘‘Love’’ needs to replace Schopenhauer’s ‘‘will’’ as a basic principle (VIII.9; vol 9.412). The novel also shows more generosity toward Anna than the brief obituary offered by Vronsky’s mother, which wavers between explosive words of harsh judgment and rote expressions of merciful forbearance: ‘‘her very death was the death of a vile woman, of no religious feeling. God forgive me, but I can’t help hating the memory of her…’’ (VIII.4; vol 9.401: ‘‘samaia smert’ ee—smert’ gadkoj zhenshchiny bez religii. Prosti menia bog, no ia ne mogu ne nenavidet’ pamiat’ ee…’’). Veering toward the pitiless self-righteousness embedded in the adjective ‘‘vile’’ (‘‘gadkij’’), this member of the imperial elite is beginning to internalize the stance of outright condemnation embedded in the epigraph’s firstperson pronouns. This is the attitude that some readers have accused Tolstoy of taking toward Anna, but those readers miss the fluidity, complexity, and subtlety with which this novel portrays the affects and judgments of vengeance and mercy in both her and others. A Biblical epigraph that when edited by Tolstoy hovers between a divine punishment that surpasses every personal agency and an all-too-human urge to retaliate, acquires multiple applications once it enters into the interplay of attitudes and values promoted by novelistic discourse. Within this arena of textual forces, it has suggested the power of compassionate forbearance, revealed the problematic impact of authoritative words on people’s behavior, exposed the harshness and hypocrisy of social ostracism, and dramatized the transience of a peak experience. Above all, it has evoked the anguish of losing the capacity to forgive, not just the inadequacies and bad actions of others, but—incipiently with Lyovin and tragically with Anna—one’s very self.

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Since nouns in Russian are gendered, Tolstoy’s wording makes it clear that only Anna’s anger is ‘‘undefined’’ (the masculine adjective agrees with the masculine noun). Her ‘‘craving,’’ which is feminine and hence unmodified, signals a more sharply defined feeling, one that tellingly has come to center on vengeance.

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