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Poetics of Brotherhood: Organic and Mechanistic Narrative in Late Tolstoi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Ilya Kliger  and
Nasser Zakariya
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Abstract

In this article, Ilya Kliger and Nasser Zakariya treat Lev Tolstoi's conception of brotherhood from a narratological perspective. In the process, they trace the outlines of late Tolstoian narrative poetics, situating it within a variegated landscape of Tolstoi's own more properly “realist” literary practice, and offering broader suggestions on the workings of narrative in its capacity to model social relations and ethical action. A narratological focus here allows them to elucidate how stories take part in contemporary understandings of social influence, human connectedness, and alienation— not only on the level of themes but also, and more deeply, on the level of the narrative organization of events. Their main focus is on one of Tolstoi's late novellas “The Forged Coupon” and his last novel Resurrection.

Type
Late Tolstoi
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 70 , Issue 4 , Winter 2011 , pp. 754 - 772
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2011

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References

For their engaged comments, critiques, and suggestions on a number of earlier drafts of this article, we would like to thank Jeff Love, Donna Orwin, Inessa Medzhibovskaya, Lina Steiner, and Kate Holland.

1. Our use of "brotherhood" echoes Tolstoi's. One of Tolstoi's central terms for human unity, one that resonates with scriptural sources, "brotherhood" is, in his use, uncritically applied as a gender-neutral term.

2. Tolstoy, Leo, Tolstoy's Short Fiction, ed. with revised translations by Katz, Michael R., 2d ed. (New York, 2008), 232.Google Scholar

3. We should make clear that when speaking of Tolstoian brotherhood, we do not mean to imply that such brotherhood is necessarily actualized, either from our point of view or that operating within Tolstoi's work. We intend here no more than the explication of Tolstoi's attempts to envision or represent what he takes brotherhood to be.

4. They have been treated with particular attention and insight in a collection of essays: Donskov, Andrew and Woodsworth, John, eds., Lev Tolstoy and the Concept of Brotherhood (Ottawa, 1996).Google Scholar

5. For more detail, see our earlier work, Kliger, Ilya and Zakariya, Nasser, “Organic and Mechanistic Time and the Limits of Narrative,” Configurations 15, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 331-53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Williams, Raymond, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York, 1983), 228.Google Scholar

7. Hutton, James, System of the Earth, 1785; Theory of the Earth, 1788; Observations on Granite, 1794; Together with Playfair's Biography of Hutton (Darien, Conn., 1970), 34Google Scholar. See also Kliger and Zakariya, "Organic and Mechanistic Time," 347-52.

8. Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace, trans. Pevear, Richard and Volokhonsky, Larissa (New York, 2007), 1065.Google Scholar

9. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, trans. Bernard, J. H. (New York, 1951), 219Google Scholar.

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11. Tolstoy, Tolstoys Short Fiction, 127-28.

12. White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1975), 36.Google Scholar

13. Tolstoy, Leo, The Kingdom of God Is within You, trans. Constance Garnett (Mineola, N.Y., 2006), 94.Google Scholar

14. These are common figures of that organic unity, turning on particular understandings of tree and cell. For the latter case, note for example Tobias Cheung's discussion of the "organismic" and German Idealism. Thus, for example, "In his Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie (1808-11), Lorenz Oken defined 'organisms' as entities in which the whole is represented in its parts and the part transforms into the whole. Oken called these parts 'cells' or 'vesicles.'" Tobias Cheung, "From the Organism of a Body to the Body of an Organism: Occurrence and Meaning of the Word 'Organism' from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries," BJHS39, no. 3 (September 2006): 333.

15. For a discussion of the synecdochal sense of self in Tolstoi, see Gustafson, Richard F., Leo Tolstoy Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and Theology (Princeton, 1986), 94-96Google Scholar. For a broader overview of the persisting importance of unity for Tolstoi, see Orwin, Donna Tussing, Tolstoy's Art and Thought, 1847-1880 (Princeton, 1993), 188-207Google Scholar.

16. Tolstoi, L. N., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. Chertcov, V. G. (Moscow, 1928-1958; hereafter PSS), 66:241.Google Scholar Cited in Opul'skaia, L. D., Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi: Materialy k biografii s 1892 po 1899 god (Moscow, 1998), 11.Google Scholar

17. Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is within You, 95.

18. Opul'skaia, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi, 11.

19. See, for example, Smith, Crosbie and Norton Wise, M., Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin (Cambridge, Eng., 1989 Google Scholar); and Norton Wise, M., “German Concepts of Force, Energy, and the Electromagnetic Ether: 1845-1880,” in Cantor, G. N. and Hodge, M. J. S., eds., Conceptions of Ether: Studies in the History of Ether Theories, 1740-1900 (Cambridge, Eng., 1981), 269-307Google Scholar. Note that these examples demonstrate how difficult it is to separate the organic and the mechanistic, at least once the question of narrative in its broadest sense is introduced into consideration. This is indeed part of the argument of our earlier article.

20. Kliger and Zakariya, "Organic and Mechanistic Time," 341-46.

21. See, for example, Steiner's, Peter overview of these early discussions of siuzhet and fabula in his Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Ithaca, 1984), 85-86, 115-16.Google Scholar

22. As we have noted in earlier work, subsequent narratological theory seems to have understood this formalist dichotomy in just this way. A number of alternative oppositions have been used: the discursive versus the narrative (Gérard Genette), the integrational versus the distributional (Roland Bardies), the configurational versus the episodic (Paul Ricoeur), the mydiic versus the fabulaic (Iurii Lotman), and so on. Despite their differences, all of these dichotomies recapitulate the vision of narrative implicit in the formalist opposition of siuzhet and fabula. For a related discussion, seejonadian Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Itiiaca, 1981), 170.

23. Kliger and Zakariya, "Organic and Mechanistic Time," 342.

24. See Tolstoy, Leo, “The Forged Coupon,” in The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, trans. McDuff, David (London, 2004), 175-254.Google Scholar

25. On character zones, see Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael, ed. Holquist, Michael (Austin, 1981), 316-20.Google Scholar

26. See Tolstoi, PSS, 53:197.

27. Chatman, Seymour, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, 1978), 53-54.Google Scholar

28. Tolstoy, War and Peace, 210-14.

29. Tolstoy, Tolstoy's Short Fiction, 91.

30. Tolstoy, Leo, What Then Must We Do? trans. Maude, Aylmer (London, 1935), 154-56.Google Scholar

31. Ibid., 162. For an excellent brief discussion of Tolstoi's engagement with the concept of Bildung as one particular instantiation of societal organicism, see Medzhibovskaya, Inessa, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time: A Biography of a Long Conversion, 1845-1887 (Lanham, Md., 2008), 131–57.Google Scholar

32. Shklovskii, Viktor, Theory of Prose, trans. Sher, Benjamin (Elmwood Park, 111., 1990), 5.Google Scholar

33. Tolstoy, War and Peace, 560.

34. Frye, Northrop, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 47.Google Scholar

35. Even in "The Forged Coupon," the special case where organic connectedness is thoroughly narrativized, the onset of this narrativization takes place in prison.

36. Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is within You, 223.

37. Tolstoi, Resurrection, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (London, 1966), 564.

38. Ibid., 535.

39. Ibid., 559.

40. Ibid., 95.

41. This is of course not to say that Tolstoi's earlier works are entirely devoid of coinci-dence. War and Peace, for example, contains scores of them. But given the sheer number of events and characters involved, coincidental convergences are significandy less conspicu-ous than in Tolstoi's later works, and in Resurrection in particular, where the entire weight of the novel rests on this single event. Moreover, we would argue that even in the earlier novel, coincidence is not scoffed upon primarily in the socially marginal circumstances of the war (the convergence of Prince Andrei and Napoleon, the encounter between Princess Maria and Nikolai Rostov). Coincidence in society is primarily engineered, artificial, and baneful. It is of course in relation to the events of the war—where real life happens—that Tolstoi famously endorses his "law of coincidence" (zakon sovpadeniia).

42. Tolstoi, Resurrection, 219, 255.

43. Tolstoi initially intended for them to get married but was relieved when he found a way to avoid such an ending. See Tolstoi, L. N., Sobranie sochinenii v dvadtsati tomakh, ed. Mikhail Borisovich Khrapchenko (Moscow, 1978-84), 13:465Google Scholar.

44. Tolstoi, PSS, 36:561.