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 the novel, a way to live that transcends the demands of reality. In the folk culture of the peasants
that he encountered near the very beginning of the novel, he finds the peasant Theodore who understands Levin’s need to leave the mundane, to
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 –
Dolly, for example, who, unable to apply reason outside of pragmatic thought to her life, continues to live, pathetically, with her unfaithful husband.