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DISSERTATION
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ABSTRACT
In my dissertation I perform a close reading of The Cossacks, War and Peace, and Hadji-Murat, three important novels completed by the major Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, in his mature years. My aim in reading these novels is to analyze the way in which the writer artistically depicts human beings in their search for stable meaning in a fluid world.
In these works Tolstoy writes about this universal existential problem in a way that is both precise and attentive to the uniqueness of every human being and to the specificity of each individual human experience. Given that, the reader of the works is charged with the task of remaining attentive to the specificity of the details, while attempting to understand at the same time how those details may be seen to be part of a larger aesthetic and philosophical whole. How do the existential struggles of one character in a novel relate to those of another character in that novel? How do the formal and other artistic elements of each novel deepen and/or complicate our understanding of the existential searchings of the characters themselves? What is the relationship between how each of these novels depicts characters in their search for meaning and what each novel “means”? These are some of the questions that will interest me throughout my analysis.
My thesis about the three novels I analyze is that they contain a unifying principle, and that this principle is to be found not in an idea, but in the organic process of the novels themselves, in their capacity to create, break down, and recreate again ordering systems, in the same way that the characters depicted in them are continually discovering, rejecting, and rediscovering truths about themselves and their world.
In order to develop this thesis, I combine evidence gained from close readings of
specific passages in the texts themselves with the evidence of a variety of fictional and non-fictional material produced by Tolstoy throughout his lifetime. I also draw on the work of a rich tradition of Tolstoy scholarship, past and present, as well as on some of the insights and analytical techniques of more recent literary theory. For instance, I am interested in Tolstoy’s manipulation of the narrative voice and in his use of the technique of repetition. I am also interested in the subtle irony often pervading his texts. These are subjects which have recently become the object of intensive study in literary scholarship, and increasingly in Tolstoy scholarship, as well. My interest in such aspects of Tolstoy’s fiction serves the purpose of helping me to understand these works of art as organic wholes, as complete acts of human expression, in which the form and the content are inextricably linked in the act of communication itself.
Although I draw on some of the techniques and insights of contemporary literary
scholarship, the theoretical assumptions underlying my analysis are different from those
underlying the so-called “cultural studies” and other post-modernist approaches to literature
that have recently become dominant in Slavic Studies and in other fields of literary scholarship. Scholars who adhere to these approaches tend to read artistic texts as complex structures of meaning which may be “decoded” to reveal hidden ideologies of the author and/or larger social, political, and cultural patterns of the time period in which the text was written. I share the assumption of many contemporary scholars that meaning in a piece of fiction, as in any work of art, is the product of a complex network of rhetorical devices. But my analysis of that network of devices in Tolstoy’s novels is largely for the purpose of better comprehending the philosophical depth and communicative power of those works as they speak about and themselves embody the existential strivings of human beings, not their political or social concerns. That Tolstoy’s works contain ideas related to the social and political issues of the time in which they were written is undeniable, and many excellent works of scholarship have been devoted to this dimension of the author’s writings. That Tolstoy’s novels also speak to universal human concerns which transcend time and place,
and specifically to man’s search for existential order, is a different sort of proposition,
and one that requires for its illumination a sensitivity to the intangible, metaphysical
element contained within Tolstoy’s poetics.
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