ough her "social death" when she attempts to reenter Moscow life after her prolonged absence was painful to her, the people from which she was estranged are far from her thoughts during the last moments of her life.The original source of the quotation, Deuteronomy, implies that God's judgement, "eternal justice," will correct the injustices committed by the imperfect societies of man on Earth. In Schopenhauer's partly solipsistic conception, it implies that man lives and dies by the structures he places on the world. For Tolstoy, it performs a similar function -- Anna makes an Faustian pact to free herself and to be defined by desire (paralleling Schopenhauer's idea that freedom comes in definiting oneself in terms of freely chosen laws), and when Vronsky's attentions begin to waver, her world falls apart according to the same logic as it opened up, as the belief that love brings life shows its corollary, that the absence of love brings death. Anna's complete abandonment to her self-determined morality in denial of the pressures of reality shows in the interior monologue at the track a few moments before her suicide: "...a whole series of girlish and childish memories ... broke, and life showed itself to her for an instant with all its bright past joys. But she did not take her eyes of the wheels." Anna is immovable in the face of the purely pleasurable and uninterpreted aspects of life -- "girlish delights" -- that are Oblonsky's daily bread.Anna is thus a tragic hero in the strict Aristotelian sense of being destroyed by the logical evolution of her personality. Yet it is also true that Tolstoy resists the tragic form in the overall structure of his novel by continuing into Part VIII and into Levin's life after Anna's death. While Anna fails to sustain a life centered in "romantic morality," the Goethian ideal of complete devotion, not to the loved one, but the condition of being in reciprocal love itself, Levin finds, at the end of t...
