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 self-righteousness 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.
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Notes
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.
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).
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.
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).
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).
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).
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).
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.”
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).
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.”
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.
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).
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).
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-en-abyme). 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-à-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.”
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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Foster, J.B. Vengeance and mercy in Anna Karenina . Neohelicon 42, 403–413 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-014-0279-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-014-0279-0