Leo Tolstoy and the Alibi of Narrative

305 Pages·2011·17.15 MB·English

by  Justin Weir

Leo Tolstoy
and the
Alibi of Narrative
Russian Literature and Thought
gary saul morson, series editor
L T
eo oLsToy

and The
a n
Libi of arraTive
Justin Weir
New Haven & London
Copyright © 2011 by Justin Weir. All rights reserved. This book may
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weir, Justin.
Leo Tolstoy and the alibi of narrative / Justin Weir.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-15384-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910--Criticism
and interpretation. I. Title.
PG3410.W35 2011
891.73’3--dc22
2010024722
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ConTenTs
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
part i tolstoy’s narrative alibi 9
1 Guilty Stories 11
2 An Author of Absence 34
part ii legitimate lives 51
3 Legitimate Fictions and Narrative Diversions 53
4 Soldiers’ Stories 68
part iii authentic lives 95
5 Family Histories 97
6 The Recovery of Childhood 109
part iv a language of love 121
7 The World as Love and Representation 123
8 Anna Incommunicada 135
vi Contents
part v suspicious stories 147
9 The Poetics of Romantic Betrayal 149
10 After Love and Language 166
part vi the death of an author 179
11 The Role of Violence in Art 181
12 On Tolstoy’s Authorship 215
Notes 231
Index 275
aCknowLedgmenTs
Research for this book was completed with assistance and funding from a
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Northwestern University, the Senior Faculty
Research Fund of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard
University, the Davis Center’s John F. Cogan Fund for Faculty Research in
Russian Studies, and the Dean’s Fund for Faculty Research at Harvard University.
Portions of chapter 8 first appeared as “Anna Incommunicada: Language
and Consciousness in Anna Karenina” (Tolstoy Studies Journal 8 [1997]): 99–111.
An earlier version of part of chapter 10 appeared in Russian as “Tema liubvi v
pozdnoj proze Tolstogo” (The Theme of Love in the Late Prose of Tolstoy), in
Lev Tolstoy i mirovaia literatura: Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferen-
tsii, ed. Galina Alekseeva and Nikolai Sviridov (Tula: Izdatel’skii Dom “Yasnaya
Polyana,” 2007), 63–70. Passages in chapters 2 and 8 were published as “Tolstoy
Sees the Truth but Waits: The Consequences of Aesthetic Vision in Anna
Karenina,” in Approaches to Teaching Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” ed. Liza
Knapp and Amy Mandelker (New York: Modern Language Association, 2003),
173–79. And chapter 11 contains work published as “Tolstoy’s The Realm of
Darkness and Violence,” in Anniversary Essays on Tolstoy, ed. Donna Tussing
Orwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
I want to thank first and foremost Gary Jahn, who introduced me to Tolstoy
over twenty years ago and advised my senior thesis on Tolstoy’s “Death of Ivan
Ilyich” and his essay On Life. Few intellectual experiences have had such a
profound and lasting effect on me. Gary Saul Morson and Andrew Wachtel
have been influential teachers, advisers, and sources of inspiration. Saul
Morson’s unique and sometimes provocative work has definitively shaped my
view of Tolstoy, and he has helped me at every stage of this book.
vii
viii Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to Harvard colleagues Jonathan Bolton, Svetlana Boym,
Patricia Chaput, Michael Flier, George Grabowicz, John Malmstad, Joanna
Nizynska, and especially Julie Buckler, Stephanie Sandler, and William Mills
Todd, III, who offered help in ways big and small, from reading and comment-
ing on my manuscript to providing teaching and leave opportunities that helped
me to complete my work.
Tim Langen has been one of my most important interlocutors and collabo-
rators. I would have never finished the book without his help. I am also in
debt to Caryl Emerson, who has generously read my work on Tolstoy for many
years. And many thanks to Galina Alekseeva, Vladimir Alexandrov, Michael
Denner, Nina Gourianova, Peter Thomas, Liza Knapp, Ronald LeBlanc, Amy
Mandelker, Robin Feuer Miller, Donna Orwin, David Sloane, and Paul J. Weir
for reading and commenting on parts of my manuscript, answering questions,
or providing help with different aspects of the book as it has taken shape. I
appreciate, too, Andrew Frisardi’s wonderful copyediting, the excellent advice
from my anonymous readers for Yale University Press, and the assistance of my
editor, Alison MacKeen. Alexander Gontchar, Ian Chesley, and Richard
Freeman contributed crucial assistance in gathering and organizing materials
for me.
In spite of the time I spent studying Tolstoy’s increasingly dismal views on
romance, my own happy family grew significantly while I wrote this book. I
dedicate it to my wife, Joy, and our children, Fiona, David, and Daniel.
inTroduCTion
When Tolstoy states dramatically in his aesthetic treatise What Is Art? that
“the interpretation of works of art by words only indicates that the interpreter is
himself incapable of feeling the infection of art,”1 one forgets, for just a moment,
that Tolstoy himself is using words to tell us how to understand art. For me, the
exploration of this kind of mild contradiction is part of what makes reading
Tolstoy enjoyable. Sometimes the contradiction is really nothing more than the
thematic chiaroscuro of a story, as when Tolstoy celebrates fidelity in vivid
stories of adultery, or cherishes the innocence of childhood by repeatedly dwell-
ing on its loss. At other times, the contradiction may be more fundamental to
Tolstoy’s aesthetics, as when he seems to suggest that language both is and is not
adequate for conveying an author’s meaning. I use the term narrative alibi in
this study to describe how Tolstoy creates a model of authorship out of these
more fundamental contradictions.
A narrative alibi works in two ways. In the simplest sense, it can be a story
that exculpates, removes blame or transfers responsibility. Many of Tolstoy’s late
stories rely on this kind of narrative, as they explain away the author’s immoral
youth and minimize his early literary career by telescoping the author’s progress
toward eventual religious conversion. Tolstoy’s Confession (1879–82) describes
the author’s earlier dissolute life, crisis, and ultimate religious conversion, and
it exemplifies this first sense of narrative alibi. Works such as “Father Sergius”
and Resurrection also conform to this sense of narrative alibi, because their plots
describe lives wasted early in the pursuit of pleasure and fame but later recuper-
ated by moral reflection and action. These stories are redemptive, and we are
meant to see that Tolstoy’s very authorship of them is redemptive as well. In
What Is Art? he claims his own aesthetic taste was “perverted” by his aristocratic
upbringing, relegates his past work to the category of “bad art,” and commits
1