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Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina with a sentiment known to all the Abrahamic faiths as an assertion of the supremacy of the Almighty: "Vengeance is mine, and I shall repay." Although the quote, which Tolstoy leaves without attribution, makes more than one appearance in the Bible, Boris Eikhenbaum was the first to point out that the wording is more similar to a direct translation from a passage of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, which Tolstoy closely read and with which he held deep disagreements (Medzhibovskaya 176, 194). Regardless of the origins of the phrasing in Schopenhauer, "Vengeance is mine, and I shall repay" references two specific passages in the Bible, one of which is found in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 32: 35), and the other in the New Testament (Romans 12: 19). Whereas a more vengeful God speaks of how he will punish the wicked in Deuteronomy, a merciful God tells his followers in Romans to forget themselves and their egos because they are fleeting in comparison with the eternality and omniscience of God.
Tolstoy's contemporaries and some later critics examine the epigraph from the Old Testament stance and tend to focus on Anna. Eikhenbaum (138) and Dostoevsky (1070-1071) see Anna as a "fallen" woman who has transgressed against universal mores, regardless of what societal mores might be, and a vindictive God accordingly punishes her. Viktor Shklovsky, following a New Testament reading, finds that God has not exacted vengeance on Anna, but rather society in general has both judged and passed sentence on her contrary to the message of the epigraph (436). Nekrasov takes yet another view as he places the author, Tolstoy, as the omniscient figure that claims vengeance as his own and punishes Anna (690).
More recent critics continue a similar orientation toward Anna with few exceptions. Inessa Medzhibovskaya in her recent study of Tolstoy's conversion regards the epigraph as part of a larger experiment in which the extent of freedom is tested within a network of individual reactions to responsibility. She finds Anna's suicide to be a desperate cry for help, an admission of her inability to resist the evil force bearing its weight down upon her (180-182). Robert Louis Jackson sees the epigraph as...