Tolstoy's Art and Thought, 1847-80

"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.

ISBN 0691069913   Pages 282 ISBN13 9780691069913 (What's this?)   Volumes 001 Publisher Princeton University Press   Weight (grammes) 600 Imprint Princeton University Press   Published in New Jersey Format Hardback   Height (mm) 241 Publication date 17 Aug 1993   Width (mm) 160 Library of Congress PG3415.P5O   Spine width (mm) 24 DEWEY 891.733   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC20

		Acknowledgments
		Note on Documentation
		Introduction		3
Pt. 1		The 1850s
1		Analysis and Synthesis		15
		The Hegelian Atmosphere of the 1850s		15
		Chernyshevsky		16
		The Contemporary Reception of Tolstoy's Work		18
		Tolstoy and Chernyshevshy		19
		Subjective Reality for the Early Tolstoy		22
		Tolstoy's Goethean Realism		26
2		The Young Tolstoy's Understanding of the Human Soul		31
		Tolstoy, the Psychological Analyst		31
		Synthesis and the Influence of Rousseau		36
3		The First Synthesis: Nature and the Young Tolstoy		50
		Tolstoy's Understanding of Nature in the Early 1850s		52
		A Maturing Philosophy of Nature (Tolstoy and Fet)		53
		Botkin and the Exploration of the Feelings		58
		Sterne		62
		N. V. Stankevich		64
		Nature, Reason, and the Feelings ("Lucerne")		68
		Objective and Subjective Poetry		73
		The Metaphysics of Opposites and Goethe Again		76
Pt. 2		The 1860s
4		Nature and Civilization in The Cossacks		85
		Natural Necessity in The Cossacks		85
		The Morality of Self-Sacrifice in the Stag's Lair		86
		The Cossack as Savage Man		93
		More...

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