Anna_Karenina

Anna Karenina The world of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is a world ruled by chance. From the very opening chapters, where a watchman is accidentally run over by a train at Moscow's Petersburg station, to the final, climactic scenes of arbitrary destruction when Levin searches for Kitty in a forest beset by lightning, characters are brought together and forced into action against their will by coincidence and, sometimes, misfortune. That Anna and Vronsky ever meet and begin the fateful affair that becomes the centerpiece of the novel is itself a consequence of a long chain of unrelated events: culminating Anna's sharing a berth with Vronsky's mother on her way to reconcile Dolly and Stiva in Moscow. And yet, as an epigraph to this seemingly chaotic world of chance event, a seemingly amoral world that would seem to neither punish sin nor reward good, Tolstoy chooses a quotation that comes originally from the book of Deuteronomy's song of Moses: "Vengeance is mine; I will repay." Originally (and somewhat narrowly) thought to refer to Anna's final ostracism from the upper echelons of society that punish her for her misdeeds, the epigraph is the key to Tolstoy's subtle and philosophically complex conception of anna, karenina, life, levin, world, anna, levin's, oblonsky, man, tolstoy, tolstoy's, love, yet, reason, experience, novel, moral, lives, way, through, social, part, never, anna's, vronsky, structure, sky, live, karenina, both, beauty, very, vault, religious, reality, over, order, morality, first, create, characters, character, blue, between, been, words, vengeance, variety, upon, society, separate, search