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EXPERTISE
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PERSONAL STATEMENT OF ACADEMIC PURPOSE
By Dr. Andrew D. Kaufman
Written in Los Angeles, California, May 2003
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Doctoral Dissertation and Subsequent Scholarly Work
on Leo Tolstoy
I have developed this scholarly perspective in depth in my doctoral
dissertation and subsequent work on Leo Tolstoy. Since so much of my current and
projected future scholarly work is an outgrowth of my doctoral research on Tolstoy,
let me first describe my dissertation, “The Searching Subject in Tolstoy’s The Cossacks,
War and Peace, and Hadji-Murat”. In the dissertation I perform a close reading
of The Cossacks, War and Peace, and Hadji-Murat, three important novels
completed by 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 searching 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 interest me throughout my analysis.
My thesis about the three novels I analyze is that they contain a unifying principle. 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, my theoretical assumptions 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 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 only their political, social, or economic concerns. One of the core elements of the philosophical depth of Tolstoy’s prose is its capacity to combine an idealized sense of life’s unity with an acute awareness of the discord that underlies that unity. Therein lies Tolstoy’s unique brand of realism, I argue. To illuminate this aspect of Tolstoy’s prose requires sensitivity to the intangible, metaphysical element (akin to what Konstantin Leontiev called veyanie) contained within Tolstoy’s poetics.
In addition to an article published (“Microcosm and Macrocosm in War and Peace: The Interrelationship of Poetics and Metaphysics,” Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 43, No. 3(1999): pp. 495-510), two more articles, based on the work of my dissertation, are currently under consideration for publication. “Existential Searching in Tolstoy’s The Cossacks,” is under consideration at Tolstoy Studies Journal, and “Perceptions of the Real, Visions of the Ideal: Nikolai Strakhov’s Engagement with War and Peace” is going through a round of revisions suggested by the referee readers from Slavic and East European Journal. I am also working on a book-length treatment (based on my dissertation) of the problem of realism and idealism in Tolstoy’s prose. This book studies the relationship between Tolstoy’s poetics and his metaphysics, his art and his non-artistic ideological writings. It analyzes Tolstoy’s particular use of the form of the novel to create an all-encompassing vision of life which celebrates human possibility over limitation, completeness over fragmentation.
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