Chapter 5 returns to the primal Sikh moment, the divine revelation of Guru Nanak. Autobiographically recounted in Majh Ballad, his sensuous experience of the infinite One is corroborated in early Sikh sources like the Janamsākhīs. This chapter is a three-mirrored kaleidoscope: (1) how the songster/bard (ḍhāḍī) Nanak relays his revelatory event in sonic aesthetics; (2) how poet (shāir) Nanak shares his numinous encounter in poetic ingenuity; and (3) how jeweller/goldsmith (suniāru) Nanak artistically stages his revelations for his audiences to reexperience his transcendent aesthetics. Art as idealized by Martin Heidegger, Amrita Sher-Gil, Leo Tolstoy, and Rabindranath Tagore is fulfilled by Guru Nanak’s gesamtkunstwerk. His multiple art forms function as art to show how the transcendent One is aesthetically lived in this world. Raising spiritual and social consciousness, Nanakian art is not for art’s sake alone; it redresses issues of social and environmental injustice and suffering. With his voice recorded in the GGS as a rich resource, Guru Nanak’s own perception of his aesthetic vocation comes to light.

Shortly after completing the manuscript of Austerlitz in the year 2000, W.G. Sebald was awarded a NESTA Fellowship in order to research his next book, which he referred to as the ‘W. W.’ (World War) Project. His grant application refers to ‘an extensive narrative which will encompass the period 1900-1950’. Over the next eighteen months he visited France and Germany several times in order to visit sites, archives and people. This essay examines Sebald’s plans for the project as well as interviews and recollections from the time, including reflections on his own family history and his late schoolfriend, Barbara Aenderl. It considers how the finished book might have developed the more traditional approach to narrative evident in Austerlitz, culminating in a comparison with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a text which also combines fiction, history and critical reflection. Through considering both Tolstoy’s view of history and Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay on the subject, it suggests that Sebald’s unfinished World War Project would have constituted a similar panoramic attempt to interrogate both history and fiction as modes of writing.

Vladimir Kataev explores the bonds and rifts that shaped the course of Chekhov’s writing, providing overviews of his acquaintance with prominent figures of his time, including Pablo de Sarasate, Nikolai Leskov, Leo Tolstoy, and Pyotr Tchaikovsky; and exploring his closer, more complex friendships with such figures as Vladimir Korolenko, Ivan Leontiev-Shcheglov, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, and Alexei Suvorin.

Robin Feuer Miller closes the volume with a meditation on Chekhov’s career-long search for new ways to end stories and plays, distinguishing his intervention into literary endings from the work of other major Russian writers and showing how he took great pains to craft the overtone of an “eidetic” ending, the kind that retains the sharpness of its image long after one looks away from the text.

Rosamund Bartlett examines the case of Chekhov’s most important literary influence, placing the younger writer’s lifelong admiration of Leo Tolstoy as an artist, arbiter of good taste, and moral authority, alongside his gradual divergence from Tolstoy over the value of culture, the importance of art and beauty, the questions of marriage and adultery, and the state and future of the peasantry.

The chapter provides an overview of literary predecessors whose influence is evident across Mailer’s work, but perhaps most notably in his early work: John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Theodore Dreiser, Herman Melville, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and Leo Tolstoy, among others.

Given Mahler’s Bohemian-Moravian upbringing in a German linguistic enclave by a culturally aspirational bibliophile father, a gymnasium education in Iglau that was almost certainly orientated toward classical literature, and early friendships with a number of cultured figures, many of whom would go on to play distinguished professional roles within the Austrian intelligentsia (Guido Adler, Friedrich Löhr, Emil Freund, Josef Steiner, Anton Krisper, Albert Spiegler, and Siegfried Lipiner), it is unsurprising that Mahler’s life developed strongly intellectual dimensions and that in his early years he even toyed with the idea of pursuing a literary career. Those interests are reviewed here, in sections on texts that he set musically (principally the poetry of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Friedrich Rücket, and Hans Bethge) and personal literary interests (above all, Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky). From this selection certain general features of Mahler’s literary taste can be gleaned, confirming the basic conservatism remarked by Alma.

The Introduction identifies some important questions about religious experience, and it considers Tolstoy's position that relates religious experience to the meaning of human life. It also comments on the relation between religious experience and evidence for God's existence and on the bearing of science on religious experience. In addition, it looks at the bearing of religious disagreement on religious experience. Finally, the Introduction offers summaries of the book's chapters.

This chapter explores the activities of a group of young rural teachers who, in the 1910s and 1920s, sought to develop a radically alternative form of lifelong education as a basis for transforming and ‘humanizing’ industrializing Japan. Their chief source of inspiration was the White Birch (Shirakaba) movement, named after the journal Shirakaba, founded in 1910. The White Birch movement’s founders were members of Japan’s social elite, and the movement is often seen as an intellectual coterie removed from the social realities of early twentieth century Japan. I argue, though, that the schoolteachers who took up and tried to practice the group’s ideas had a much greater connection to everyday social problems. The chapter discusses events such as the Togura Incident of 1918, in which actions by White Birch Teachers led to clashes with the authorities, and goes on to highlight the direct and indirect links which were formed between the White Birch activists and like-minded communities overseas, including the Dartington Hall group in Britain and, in India, Rabidranath Tagore’s agrarian and educational communities and the Andretta craft community.

Stanislavsky’s artistic development is tracked in its various phases during the years preceding the 1917 Revolution and according to his strongest affinities and the most important influences that he absorbed into his guiding principles for the Moscow Art Theatre. Attention is focused on Abramtsevo, the artistic colony and utopian community founded by Savva Mamontov, a family friend and significant part of the habitus that shaped Stanislavsky’s cultural attitudes and tastes. It is at Abramtsevo and also at Mamontov’s Private Opera Theatre in Moscow that Stanislavsky saw communal artistic aspirations in action and how leading visual artists, composers and singers, notably Chaliapin, combined their different talents and skills, providing him with reference points for his ensemble theatre and its aim for harmoniously integrated productions.

Related inspiration to do with Old Believer Orthodoxy and its values, Tolstoy’s beliefs, Sulerzhitsky’s Tolstoyan perspectives, Vrubel’s mystical paintings and Scriabin’s ecstatic music, along with numerous other experiences of the Russian Silver Age, not least Mikhaïl Chekhov’s stage experiments, contextualize and illuminate Stanislavsky’s theatre work in its fullest sense. Sociopolitical factors similarly situate Stanislavsky’s endeavours in the first ‘half’ of his life in art.

Imperial Russia’s most popular historical novel was not War and Peace but a story of folkloric origins that celebrated freedom and poked fun at authority. The Legend of How a Soldier Saved Peter the Great from Death appeared in multiple versions from 1843 onward and drew upon mythologies of the Fool – in sacred accounts, the Holy Fool (Iurodivyi); in secular tales, little Ivan the Fool (Ivanushka-Durachok). The hero of Russia’s first commercialized folktale, Tsarevich Ivan, the Firebird, and the Grey Wolf, tricks a tsar as the protagonist of the contemporaneous children’s classic, The Little Humpbacked Horse. The freedom of fools was attractive enough in traditional society; amidst multi-dimensional change after the Emancipation, the idea of release from traditional constraint was electrifying. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and others created a dialogue between the familiar and the new by peopling their works with recognizable characters, foremost among which was the Fool. In so doing they illuminated ideas of self-fulfillment free from oppressive and unjust authority. But the era’s authors and readers also knew that when authority seemed most in shadow, it could return in force. The tension between freedom and order reflected ambivalence toward each that endured in Russian traditions and new works.

The mirror image of the Fool who succeeds despite himself is the rebel doomed to fail. Centuries of institutionalized servitude had begotten both actual and dreamed-of rebellion, with songs, poems, and legends that immortalized the rebels and their acts. Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, and Nikolai Gogol all had explored themes of freedom and rebellion, and post-Emancipation writers took these themes into the nascent medium of popular commercial fiction in the form of the adventure novel. The novels delivered excitement while reinforcing the wisdom of generations; to wit, that Russia’s secular and religious order could not be violated with impunity. Tolstoy in Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov innovated within a traditional mythology of rebels that had long served at once to question and accentuate the oppressive authority of tsarist rulers. At the time they were writing, the conventions that had led larger-than-life heroes and heroines to fulfillment or destruction were already changing in the shared Russian imagination. The cult of doomed rebellion associated with rebels had begun to give way to a new and growing emphasis on the agency and power of ordinary people.

Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy imagined a diverse nation in different ways, but each embraced humanity in all its diversity and did so not only as artist but also as citizen and moral spokesman. In Chekhov’s The Island of Sakhalin (1895) and Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899), the writers led the evolution of the artist’s role as a new civic actor on the national stage. Russian writers began to dream in the 1860s of an inclusive big tent of the arts, but just what and how the disparate elements of Russian society might share in a common culture was contested. Tolstoy and Chekhov expressed their own views on the topic in their books Resurrection and Sakhalin, which were neither backward-looking glorifications of peasant traditions nor forward-looking visions of modernization. Rather, the authors described people sharing the vast landscape of the empire in recognition of their commonality, acceptance of diversity, and rejection of parochial interests. They emphasized place rather than time. Both authors carved out a shared national space, within which they offered readers a new view of their fellow citizens. Of the two authors, it would be Chekhov rather than Tolstoy who transitioned successfully into the next wave of innovation in art.