On Life: A Critical Edition by Tolstoy Leo Inessa Medzhibovskaya Michael Denner Inessa Medzhibovskaya Tolstoy and His Problems: Views from the Twenty-First Century by Medzhibovskaya Inessa (review)

Abstract

SEER, 98, 1, JANUARY 2020 156 twentieth century’. Russian culture was placed ‘outside of modern history as an imaginary sanctuary of eternal ideas and passions’ and presented as a sort of ‘secular religion’ that justified a sense of ‘spiritual superiority’ (p. 767). If the History has a ‘tendency’ or a thesis to make, this is probably it. It is made in the face of Russia’s current repressive messianic nationalism. The book itself is so thick and long that any singular thesis or bias is swallowed up in the multi-dimensional mass. But one can detect a profession de foi of sorts in its tiny three-page Conclusion, which circles round to a question asked in the Introduction: ‘Why, and how, have the grand narratives of sacredness and exceptionalism in literature and history been so durable?’ (p. 5). Russian verbal culture is very, very good — but it is not sacred, superior, exceptionalist, prophetic or salvational. It is just literature, made by mortal hands, and when it experiments and frolics about, it has the right to stumble like every other free human craft. Readers have the right to ignore it. Thus the History endorses the alternative to the exceptionalist view, which is ‘to demonstrate the transformations of literature rather than emphasize perennially repeating elements and structures’ within it (p. 5). And it could be argued that this is something of an outsider’s view, one not shared by many Russian writers of genius. This includes the prophets of the nineteenth century, of course, but also those who would throw the Russian classics overboard, dreaming of being just ordinary workers whose special skill happens to be language and the arrangement of sounds and ideas on the page. Many Russian writers, even the most modernist, postmodernist, democratic and playful, treasure their special status. A ‘secular religion’ is precisely what they assume the word should be. Losing this special status is — like every genuine liberation — an act of orphaning as well as an exhilaration. The Oxford History paves the way. Princeton University Caryl Emerson Tolstoy, Leo. On Life: A Critical Edition. Edited by Inessa Medzhibovskaya. Translated by Michael Denner and Inessa Medzhibovskaya. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2019. xii + 246 pp. Illustration. Notes. $27.95 (paperback). Medzhibovskaya,Inessa(ed.).TolstoyandHisProblems:ViewsfromtheTwentyFirst Century. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2019. xiv + 233 pp. Illustrations. Notes. $39.95 (paperback). These two books, both edited by Inessa Medzhibovskaya, make a significant contribution to Tolstoi studies. The first one provides essential guidance to any scholar, Russian or international, who wants to understand On Life. Written in REVIEWS 157 1886–87, it is Tolstoi’s most thorough statement of his philosophical position in the later part of his life: in a letter in 1889 he identified it along with What I Believe (1883–84) as his most important work (L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [PSS], vol. 64, p. 317). The Orthodox Church during imperial times and then the Soviet government regarded it as subversive. Today the Church and government are still suspicious (with good reason) of Tolstoi’s thought, while others, remembering the Tolstoi they were taught during Soviet times, regard him as old hat and too Soviet. So, in an irony of history that Tolstoi would have appreciated, it has been left to an American scholar, Professor Medzhibovskaya, to produce an edition of On Life that would have been admired by the great textologists and scholars who worked on the so-called Jubilee edition of Tolstoi’s writings (1928–58). These include A. I. Nikiforov, who prepared On Life for volume 26. He provides a detailed account (PSS, vol. 26, pp. 748–844) of its conception and writing, its publication and its rewriting in 1888 and later. He compares the 1884 version with later ones and describes the drafts of the work and compares them. What he could not do when the volume came out in 1936, at the height of Stalin’s purges, is analyse its meaning. Not labouring under such constraints, Medzhibovskaya focuses her edition on the development of Tolstoi’s ideas through its writing, and also its publication history. She includes reviews and responses to it, adding Tolstoi’s...