Slot: 29C-1 Dec. 29, 1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Panel: Tolstoy as Artist and Critic
Chair: Inessa Medzhibovskaya, The New School
Title: “L’Russe Besuhof”: Names in War and Peace
Author: Karin Beck, Columbia University
What is the name of one of the major
characters of War and Peace?
Is it Pierre Bezukhov or Пьер Безухов?
Or is it Петр Кириллович?
Or is it, according to his own manipulation, L’Russe Besuhof? In War and
Peace, names are even
more confusing than in other Russian novels. Almost every member of the aristocracy has a Russian and a
French name and these aristocrats in turn use different names for Napoleon –
Bonaparte or Buonaparte, depending on their attitude to him. Naming in this
text frequently has a symbolic connotation.
War and Peace has been called a bi-lingual text
(Vinogradov) and this bi-lingual character and the interaction of the two
languages is reflected in the use of names. This paper analyzes the use of
different versions of names in different settings in the context of the
bi-lingual and bi-cultural setting. Pierre Bezukhov is the most prominent example
for this cultural symbolism of names: his first name is French, written in the
narrative consistently in Cyrillic (as his patronymic indicates). His existence
within both cultures is thus emphasized already in his name. However, the
bilingual character of names does not stop with Pierre and Napoleon. Even the
Rostov siblings address each other sometimes as “Natalie” and “Nicholas”,
indicating how deeply French has penetrated everyday life.
Reading the
bi-lingual and sometimes trans-lingual character of names as emblematic for
Tolstoy’s innovative use of different languages can help document the degree of linguistic innovation in War
and Peace and to see
this innovation as part of a poetic search for a new, all encompassing
language.
Title: Tolstoy’s Dialogue with the Sources
Author: Tim West, Princeton University
Among the episodes gleaned by Tolstoy from historical
memoirs in order to dramatize them in War and Peace, two stand out as illustrations of the
narratological problems and possibilities presented by historical fiction. Both concern events that occurred
during the summer of 1812 early in Napoleon’s march eastward.
The first
episode is the account of the swimming of the Viliya by a squadron of Polish
Uhlans in which Tolstoy enters a polemic with his sources on matters of
historical fact. Not having been
present himself, faced with numerous conflicting reports and motivated by his
own polemical aims, Tolstoy can arguably have chosen no more effective means of
promoting his depiction of Napoleon than to offer this, his own parodic and
selective “eye-witness account.”
Feigning nescience, his narrator’s version of events contains the
persuasive force of a memoir even as it surpasses the actual memoirs in
perceived reliability, deriving as its source the very omniscience which
reveals the thoughts of various characters in adjoining passages.
In the second
episode, which dramatizes an interview between Napoleon and an unnamed Cossack,
Tolstoy exploits the differences in discourse modes between fiction and
historical writing to look beyond questions of historical fact and enter a
dialogue with historiography itself.
Whereas the cacophony of voices emanating from the Uhlan episode’s multiple
accounts occasioned Tolstoy’s decision to conspicuously ignore them, the
scarcity of sources in the case of the Cossack episode leads him to carefully
examine the single existing account and render what is initially a deceptively
faithful retelling. By means of a
simple detail, however, Tolstoy undermines the presumption of the memoirist’s
reliability and, by implication, utterly subverts the epistemic hubris of
Napoleon and his historians.
Title: Denying Shakespeare: Tolstoy’s Essay
against Literary Imperialism
Author: Nicholas K. Kupensky, Bucknell University
This paper will investigate Tolstoy’s
understanding of nation and history and how these theories lead him to
construct a distinctively Russian genealogy in history and literature that is
not subject to Europe. I will focus
specifically on Tolstoy’s enigmatic essay “Shakespeare and the Drama” (1906),
which energetically confronts the West by denying Shakespeare’s reputation as a
transcendent figure of literary genius.
Harold Bloom has suggested that all poets in one way or another are
forced to confront the imposing figure of Shakespeare, for the Bard casts a
shadow into the future from which no poet can entirely emerge. Tolstoy is no exception.
Because much of nineteenth-century Russia
assimilated Shakespeare into its literary landscape – Pushkin’s Boris
Godunov (1825) “arranged
according to the system of our Father Shakespeare” (Levin 80), Turgenev’s
“Hamlet and Don Quixote” (1860), or Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1865) – some critics have read
“Shakespeare and the Drama” alongside Tolstoy’s heavy moralizing and rigid
aestheticism of his later writings.
I will propose that Tolstoy’s denial of Shakespeare is primarily an
attempt at illegitimizing a Western figure of authority, and thus continuous
with the same gesture made in War and Peace.
This reading of “Shakespeare and the
Drama” will consider Tolstoy’s attempts at placing himself as a Russian writer
adjacent to a European intellectual empire, which in literature has Shakespeare
at its center. Indeed, Edward Said
mentions the possibility of a “Zulu Tolstoy” (25) when considering the efficacy
of intellectual and aesthetic colonization. What this approach to Tolstoy’s denial of Shakespeare does,
then, is trace Tolstoy’s lifelong commitment to exposing and opposing an
intellectually privileged Europe and examine ways in which national and
canonical literatures take form.
References
Levin, Yury D. “Shakespeare and Russian Literature: Nineteenth Century
Attitudes.” Russian Essays on
Shakespeare and His Contemporaries.
Ed. Alexandr
Parfenov and Joseph G. Price.
Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New
York: A. A. Knopf, 1993.