Foster, John Burt, Jr. Transnational Tolstoy: Between the West and the World (review)

Abstract

SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 516 other discussions of Ivanov’s image of Skriabin would be helpful (e.g. Pamela Davidson, ‘Viacheslav Ivanov’s Ideal of the Artist as Prophet: From Theory to Practice’, Europa Orientalis, 21, 2002, 1, pp. 157–202). The essay is full of thoughtprovoking material, but it attempts to cover too much ground, suffers from repetition and loses focus as a result (as is the case with several contributions to this volume). In a fresh and invigorating essay — responding to an exhibition of Russian realist art held in Italy in 2007 — Chiara Cantelli discusses the nature of realism, tracing connections from the work of the Peredvizhniki through to Lenin’s Mausoleum and the Moscow metro. The apocalyptic theme surfaces occasionally, but is not the main focus of the study. Andrea Oppo uses Derrida’s concept of différance to analyse the last experimental production of the avantgarde Polish theatre director, Jerzy Grotowski, Apocalpysis cum Figuris (1968, not staged until 1980). The closing essay brings the literary and visual strands of apocalypse to bear on its expression in cinema. Alessio Scarlato links Andrei Tarkovskii’s lecture on the Apocalypse to the symbolic imagery of his last film, The Sacrifice. As in many collections, the contributions are disparate in approach, uneven in quality and do not add up to a coherent account of the subject (only three essays are on Eastern European representations of apocalypse, as opposed to seven on Russian topics). The high proportion of contributions translated from other languages into English (six out of ten essays, as well as the preface and introduction) leads to an opaque, non-native style of English writing, occasionally compounded by errors, such as the surprising reference to ‘the social issue, anticipated by an idealistic humanitarianism in the 1940s and the populistic and nihilistic movements of the 1960s that culminated with the Marxist ideology’ (p. 26), resulting from the mistranslation of the Italian for 1840s and 1860s. Despite these reservations, readers will undoubtedly find unusual materials, novel approaches and stimulating ideas in this volume, which is attractively produced and pleasant to handle. UCL SSEES Pamela Davidson Foster, John Burt, Jr. Transnational Tolstoy: Between the West and the World. Bloomsbury Academic, New York and London, 2013. xiv + 248 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £17.99: $29.95 (paperback). It is no secret that comparative literature is a discipline in search of itself. If one claims that comparative literature, like the modern novel, is a discipline whose essence is to have no essence, this search takes on a particularly deliquescent irony.Andthisisnoidleirony.Comparativeliteratureisbesetbyaninsuperable REVIEWS 517 tension between a certain universality, the urge to be everywhere at home, and the unavoidable accidence of history, that its objects of investigation are products of particular histories. One of the signal merits of John Burt Foster Jr.’s book is its attempt to address the issue head-on by examining a remarkable case of this tension: the literature of Lev Tolstoi. Indeed, Foster’s approach is refreshing in its eagerness to exploit this tension as the creative basis for comparative literature, its very condition of possibility. Foster does so by emphasizing a conceptual tag that has gained popularity of late: transnationality. The transnational attempts a critique of the nation state and the national narrative as the central form of societal selfexpression without thereby erasing the significance of the nation state in an ostensibly dissolutive cosmopolitanism. To the contrary, the transnational serves to reveal and exploit the dynamic interaction among nation states that the latter seek so often to deny or marginalize. Foster’s book pursues the transnational approach in three parts, each consisting of four chapters. The first part provides a series of case studies that describe specific instances of interaction between Russian and European cultural values developed in Tolstoi’s major novels including traditional cases of influence such as that of Stendhal on Tolstoi. The second part examines the shifting significance of the terms realism and modernism in regard to Tolstoi’s novels as they are interpreted in different national contexts, from Virginia Woolf to the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The third looks to Tolstoi’s anticipation of a broader world literature focusing on...