was present when the inquest was held. The cause of the suicide was a romance.
Intending to write a story of a society lady who had left her husband, Tolstoy chose as a motto the biblical saying, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay,” with the intention of explaining the fundamental idea of the story as that people have no right to judge others—that judgment belongs to the Creator of the laws governing the existence of humanity. For human relations there is but one law: that of mercy. Among all the literary critics, only the novelist Dostoevsky understood “Anna Karenin” in this sense. He wrote a splendid article in his “Diary of an Author”:
“There is One who says, ‘Vengeance is Mine; I will repay.’ Only He knows the whole mystery of this world and the eventual fate of mankind. Man should not judge with the pride of his infallibility; the hour and time have not yet come. The man who judges must recognise in his own heart that the balance and measure will be an absurdity in his hands if he himself will not bow before the law of inscrutable mystery, and seek the only way out—mercy and love. And this issue has been shown to man in order that he may not perish of despair through not seeing his path or his destiny, and through the conviction that evil is mysterious and
