great influence over Tolstoy's evolving theory of the relationship between reason and reality, epistemology and ontology. For Schopenhauer, man is free from the imposed order that other philosophers saw as arising from the nature of reality -- in such a way, Oblonsky can live naively in the world and never need recourse to morality. Yet, through use of reason, man can transcend the purely physical concerns of his life and choose to become moral and to identify moral laws. Anna must do this -- without an effort of will to reason, she would never have realized how she is trapped by a social marriage into a drastically restricted life. Paralleling (although not, importantly, imitating, as happens in Flaubert's Madame Bovary) the lives of women in fiction who break free of their situations by strength of mind, by the will to see what previously they had considered their necessary duties as falsehoods, she creates her own moral necessity -- to be honest about her adulterous love of Vronsky to Karenin, and to embrace the difficult life of a woman who elevates the ideal of consummated romantic love above that of convenient social marriage.Yet this very act that frees her also dooms her. In destroying the false idol of social order she must necessarily adopt a new set of rules. "Vengeance is mine: I will repay." Schopenhauer, in his text The World as Will and Representation makes a distinction between punishment, which can only occur in the context of a society greater than the individual, and vengeance. Punishment is directed towards the future, and attempts to correct the individual's actions to make them confirm to a certain system of laws held in common. Vengeance is dependent only upon the actions of the past, which may be seen in the Faulknerian sense of the past remaining in a new form in the present, and requires only the individual. Anna has not, as has been said, been punished by the upper class society in which she once lived -- alth...
