Paperno, Irina ‘Who, What am I?’ Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 331 Souls and Dostoevskii’s ‘Mr Prokharchin’. As in previous chapters, the discussion is firmly set within its historical, social and lexicological context. Porter convincingly shows that, despite Gogol´’s initial desire to offer up Dead Souls as a force for moral change (something he was to turn to only in the novel’s unfinished second part, thereby ironically draining it of its originality and vitality), the miserly Pliushkin, with his ‘grotesque destabilization of all distinct forms of value’ (p. 132), obstinately refuses to adopt this particular role. In her final paragraph Porter returns full circle to the question with which the study begins — Russian literature’s ambivalent relationship with France and French cultural and social paradigms. We see Mr Prokharchin labelled as ‘a Napoleon’, and the accusation that he is a prey to French ambition as a ‘death sentence that brings a new life of heightened significance’ (p. 141). This is an impressive addition to the rich corpus of Russian literary criticism. Not the least of its virtues is the inclusion of judiciously chosen illustrations that complement and enhance the argument. It concludes with an appendix on the contrasting definitions of the various words for ambition (the French ambition, together with the Russian liubochestie, chestoliubie and ambitsiia), followed by detailed notes and a comprehensive bibliography. Economies of Feeling may be a relatively slim volume, but it packs more of substance and interest in its pages than books twice its size. However familiar readers might feel they are with the texts discussed here, they will find a book that refreshes their minds, challenges any received ideas and, above all, encourages them to return to the stories themselves. University of Exeter Roger Cockrell Paperno, Irina. ‘Who, What am I?’ Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2014. x + 229 pp. Appendix. Notes. Index. $35.00. Starting from the deceptively simple idea that Tolstoi’s central project was to transform his innermost (zadushevnaia) life into a book, Irina Paperno has written an invaluable study of the narratological and philosophical paradoxes at the heart of Tolstoi’s life and work. For despite Tolstoi’s remarkable philosophical and literary talents, his lifelong attempt to narrate ‘the book of his life’ was, from the very beginning, doomed. As Tolstoi understood better than most, even if it were possible for an individual to comprehend the unbounded and infinite nature of a consciousness that exists in a realm beyond time, space and language, it could never be adequately represented in written language. Yet despite his understanding of the philosophical and literary impossibility of the task, Tolstoi never abandoned this quest. While Paperno sees Tolstoi’s SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 332 efforts as heroic, readers less captivated by the ‘Sage of Yasnaya Polyana’ might see it as a sign of obstinance and hubris. Although ‘Who, What Am I?’ is a short book, its author manages to cover all the major periods of Tolstoi’s writing career, beginning with his first attempts at keeping a personal diary in 1847 and ending in 1910 as a dying Tolstoi attempts to dictate his thoughts to his daughter Aleksandra and his disciple Chertkov. Few scholars can match Paperno’s mastery of the more than sixty volumes of non-fictional writings in Tolstoi’s collected works, her knowledge of modern European philosophy, literature and intellectual history, and even fewer can write about complex matters with such concise and intelligent lucidity. In an introduction and six closely argued chapters, she lays out Tolstoi’s decades-long obsession with ‘narrating the self’ in diaries, letters, personal confessions, autobiographical fragments and religious tracts, reading his works as a dialogue with philosophers like Hegel and Schopenhauer and literary autobiographers like Augustine, Rousseau, Goethe and Stendhal. The central paradox that emerges from her study is that Tolstoi’s utopian attempt to imagine a discourse adequate to describe his innermost life directly from the first person led him to reject the infinitely complex and subtle third-person representation of consciousness of fictional characters that he had achieved in his novels and stories (e.g., Natasha Rostova at the ball, Anna Karenina before her suicide, Ivan Ilych on his deathbed). Paperno’s...