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The Epigraph of Anna Karenina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Martha M. Flint
Martha M. Flint*
Affiliation:
University of Bridgeport
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Extract

David H. Stewart, in his “Anna Karenina: The Dialectic of Prophecy” (PMLA, lxxix, 266–282), mentions the epigraph of the novel (“Vengeance is mine, I shall repay, saith the Lord”) without making it clear that it is a well-known Biblical quotation (Romans xii.19) and without considering the implications of this fact. I shall give the verse and the two which follow it in full (in the King James version) because of the importance of the original context of the statement:

19 Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written [a reference to Deut: xxxii.35] Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.

20 Therefore, if thine enemy hunger feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.

21 Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

Type
Notes, Documents, and Critical Comment
Information
PMLA , Volume 80 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1965 , pp. 461 - 462
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965

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References

1 L'Évolution religieuse de Tolstoï (Paris, 1960), pp. 94 and 456–457.

2 Third edition of 1889 cited by Weisbein, p. 509. I have examined copies of the editions of 1822 and 1879 in the Yale University Library.

3 “Exposition of Romans,” The Interpreter's Bible, ix (New York and Nashville, 1954), 594.

4 Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul to the Romans, quoted by Cragg, p. 595.

5 For discussions of Vindicta mihi in connection with Elizabethan revenge tragedy, see Fredson T. Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (Gloucester, Mass., 1959 [c. 1940]), p. 78, and S. F. Johnson, “The Spanish Tragedy, or Babylon Revisited,” in Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley (Columbia, Missouri, 1962), pp. 31–32.

6 L'Évolution, p. 227.