Tolstoys Art and Thought, 1847-1880 :Tolstoy's Art and Thought, 1847-1880

Publication subTitle :Tolstoy's Art and Thought, 1847-1880

Author: Orwin Donna Tussing  

Publisher: Princeton University Press‎

Publication year: 2013

E-ISBN: 9781400820887

P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780691069913

Subject: I Literature;I06 Literature, Literature Appreciation

Keyword: 文学

Language: ENG

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Description

"My aim is to present Tolstoy's work as he may have understood it himself," writes Donna Orwin. Reconstructing the intellectual and psychic struggles behind the masterpieces of his early and middle age, this major study covers the period during which he wrote The Cossacks, War and Peace, and Anna Karenina. Orwin uses the tools of biography, intellectual and literary history, and textual analysis to explain how Tolstoy's tormented search for moral certainty unfolded, creating fundamental differences among the great novels of the "pre-crisis" period.

Distinguished by its historical emphasis, this book demonstrates that the great novelist, who had once seen a fundamental harmony between human conscience and nature's vitality, began eventually to believe in a dangerous rift between the two: during the years discussed here, Tolstoy moved gradually from a celebration of life to instruction about its moral dimensions. Paying special attention to Tolstoy's reading of Rousseau, Goethe, Schopenhauer, and the Russian thinker N. N. Strakhov, Orwin also explores numerous other influences on his thought. In so doing, she shows how his philosophical and emotional conflicts changed form but continued unabated--until, with his religious conversion of 1880, he surrendered his long attempt to make sense of life through art alone.

Chapter

Two: The Young Tolstoy’s Understanding of the Human Soul

Tolstoy, the Psychological Analyst

Synthesis and the Influence of Rousseau

Three: The First Synthesis: Nature and the Young Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s Understanding of Nature in the Early 1850s

A Maturing Philosophy of Nature (Tolstoy and Fet)

Botkin and the Exploration of the Feelings

Sterne

N. V. Stankevich

Nature, Reason, and the Feelings (‘‘Lucerne’’)

Objective and Subjective Poetry

The Metaphysics of Opposites and Goethe Again

PART TWO: THE 1860s

Four: Nature and Civilization in The Cossacks

Natural Necessity in The Cossacks

The Morality of Self-Sacrifice in the Stag’s Lair

The Cossack as Savage Man

Five: The Unity of Man and Nature in War and Peace

Nature and History in War and Peace

Circular versus Faustian Reason in War and Peace

The Morality of Nature in War and Peace

The Importance of Spirit in Wartime

Reason, Morality, and Nature in the Human Soul

The Rostovs and ‘‘Living Life’’

The Bolkonskys

Pierre

‘‘Lyrical Daring’’ in War and Peace

PART THREE: THE 1870s

Six: From Nature to Culture in the 1870s

Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer and Arzamas

Nature after Schopenhauer

Linking Happiness and Morality in Anna Karenina

Seven: Drama in Anna Karenina

The Symposium in the Restaurant

Anna as Heroine of a Novel

Anna’s Radical Individualism

To Judge or Not Judge Anna

Eight: Science, Philosophy, and Synthesis in the 1870s

The Enduring Importance of Unity for Tolstoy

Atomism

Kantian Epistemology

The Attack on the Individual

The Denigration of the ‘‘Personality’’

The Morally Free Individual in Anna Karenina

Synthesis and Lyrical Daring Once Again

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

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