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 morality that denies the existence of a u

Tolstoy's prose is the importance of point of view, and often Tolstoy will recount the same scene from many different vantage points -- even to the

and to her reasons for suicide. Stephen Oblonsky, the first character we encounter in the novel, is at home in the turbulent and unstructured world that Tolstoy depicts, and lives at ease with the often meaningless turns of fate that occur to him and others. "You wish all the facts of life to be consistent, but they never are," he says to Levin in Part I. "You want the activity of each separate man to have an aim, and love and family life always to coincide -- and that doesn't

live not for his belly, but for "Truth," a goodness that is beyond the chain of cause and effect that so binds the other characters in the novel --

and the peasant class that, at different stages of artistic development symbolized for Tolstoy the triumph of nature over the stained upper

Levin's rival for Kitty's affection, Vronsky, leaves Levin "desecrated."

Some common words found in the essay are:
Characteristic Tolstoy's, Anna Karenina, Stephen Oblonsky, Earth Schopenhauer's, World Representation, Chapter XII, VIII Levin's, Karenina Schopenhauer, Anna Levin, Immanuel Kant, anna karenina, variety charm, charm beauty, variety charm beauty, charm beauty life, beauty life, beauty life light, nonverbal communication, mine repay, stephen oblonsky, vengeance mine repay, vengeance mine, life light shade, oblonsky live, family life,
Approximate Word count = 2930
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page double spaced)