Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T14:40:05.906Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Gazing on Life's Page: Perspectival Vision in Tolstoy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Thomas Seifrid
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Abounding in visual metaphors and situations, Tolstoy's works are permeated with the conviction that it is the nature of truth to be seen. This attitude exemplifies the ocularcentrism that has characterized European thought since the Greeks, though the Tolstoyan corpus also displays some of the tension between ocularcentrism's eastern and western European recensions that obtains in the Russian context. The quintessential visual situation in Tolstoy is emphatically perspectival—despite the attractions of more “Russian” ways of seeing. The scenes constituting that situation work, in a way reminiscent of the camera obscura, to present life in an intellectually and morally apprehensible form by turning it into a planar visual surface. Ultimately Tolstoy's impulse can be linked with the material nature of books, which foster this very kind of experience when the eye is trained on the page, and this linkage has implications for Russian culture as well as for the relation between the verbal and the visual in general.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 113 , Issue 3 , May 1998 , pp. 436 - 448
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Alpers, Svetlana The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.Google Scholar
Anderson, Roger “The Optics of Narration: Visual Composition in Crime and Punishment.” Russian Narrative and Visual Art: Varieties of Seeing. Ed. Anderson and Debreczeny, Paul. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1994. 78–100.Google Scholar
Isaiah, Berlin The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History. New York: Simon, [c. 1953].Google Scholar
Florenskij, P A. “” [The Antinomies of Language]. [Questions of Linguistics] 6 (1988): 88–125.Google Scholar
Florenskij, P “” [Summations]. [At the Watersheds of Thought. Supplement to the Journal Questions of Philosophy]. Vol. 2. Moscow: Pravda, 1990. 341–34.Google Scholar
Frank, Joseph Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Galassi, Peter Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography. New York: Museum of Mod. Art, 1981.Google Scholar
Tolstogo, Gosudarstvennyj muzej L. N. [Lev Tolstoj in Photographs by Contemporaries]. Moscow: Akademija Xodožestv SSSR, 1960.Google Scholar
Gustafson, Richard F Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and Theology. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Husserl, Edmund Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy. Trans. and introd. Lauer, Quentin. New York: Harper, 1965.Google Scholar
Jackson, Robert L “The Ethics of Vision: Turgenev's ‘Execution of Tropmann,‘ and Dostoevsky's View of the Matter.” The Poetics of Ivan Turgenev. Ed. Lowe, David A. Occasional Paper 234. Washington: Kennan Inst. for Advanced Russian Studies, 1989. 27–43.Google Scholar
Jay, Martin Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.Google Scholar
Jay, Martin “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” Vision and Visuality. Ed. Foster, Hal. Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture 2. Seattle: Bay, 1988. 3–23.Google Scholar
Krieger, Murray “Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or, Laokoön Revisited.” The Poet as Critic. Ed. McDowell, Frederick P. W. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1967. 3–26.Google Scholar
Locke, John “An Essay concerning Human Understanding.” The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill. Ed. Burtt, Edwin A. New York: Modern Library, 1967. 238–402.Google Scholar
Majackij, Mixail “” [Some Approaches to the Problem of Visuality in Russian Philosophy]. Logos 6 (1995): 47–76.Google Scholar
Mandelker, Amy Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Mitchell, W. J. T Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.Google Scholar
Mitchell, W. J. T Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.Google Scholar
Morson, Gary Saul Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in War and Peace. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Morson, Gary Saul “The Reader as Voyeur: Tolstoi and the Poetics of Didactic Fiction.” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 12.4 (1978): 465–46.Google Scholar
Nabokov, Vladimir Laughter in the Dark. 1938. New York: Vintage, 1989.Google Scholar
Ong, Walter J The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. New Haven: Yale UP, 1967.Google Scholar
Orwin, Donna Tussing Tolstoy's Art and Thought, 1847-1880. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Panofsky, Erwin Perspective as Symbolic Form. Trans. Wood, Christopher S. New York: Zone, 1991.Google Scholar
Parthé, Kathleen “Masking the Fantastic and the Taboo in Russian Literature: A Hierarchy of Grammatical Devices.” Diss. Cornell U, 1979.Google Scholar
“Peep Show.” Britannica Online. Encyclopaedia Britannica. 9 July 1997 <http://www.eb.com/>..>Google Scholar
Pelikan, Jaroslav Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Pelikan, Jaroslav The Spirit of Eastern Christendom, 600-1700. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974. Vol. 2 of The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine.Google Scholar
Plato The Portable Plato. Ed. Buchanan, Scott. New York: Viking, 1977.Google Scholar
Pomorska, Krystyna “Tolstoi: Contra Semiosis.” Jakobsonian Poetics and Slavic Narrative: From Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn. Ed. Baran, Henryk. Durham: Duke UP, 1992. 57–64.Google Scholar
Rorty, Richard Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Šklovskij, Viktor “” [Art as Device]. [On the Theory of Prose]. 1929. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985. 7–23.Google Scholar
Stenbock-Fermor, Elisabeth The Architecture of Anna Karenina: A History of Its Writing, Structure, and Message. Lisse: Ridder, 1975.10.1075/zg.127CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tolstoj, Lev Nikolaevič [Complete Collected Works]. 90 vols. Moscow: Xudožestvennaja Literatura, 1928-64.Google Scholar
Uspensky, Boris A Poetics of Composition. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973.Google Scholar
[…] [Magic Lantern]. Saint Petersburg: Tipografija V. Plavil'ščikova, 1817. Moscow: Kniga, 1988.Google Scholar
Wortman, Richard S The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wortman, Richard S Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in the Russian Monarchy. Vol. 1. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Zholkovsky, Alexander “Before and after ‘After the Ball’ : Variations on the Theme of Courtship, Corpses, and Culture.” Text-Counter-Text: Rereadings in Russian Literary History. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. 59–87.Google Scholar
Žolkovskij, A. K., and Ščeglov, Ju. K. “” [The Expressive Device of “Eclipsing” and Its Place in the Invariant Structure of L. N. Tolstoy's Children's Stories]. [The Poetics of Expressiveness. A Collection of Articles]. Spec. issue of Wiener slawistischer Almanack 2 (1980): 115–11.Google Scholar