Tolstoy: Art, Mind, and Morbidity

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel brings together three papers on Tolstoy that explore aspects of the writer's views of self and consciousness. Stephen Blackwell's paper examines various relationships between two minds in Tolstoy's late fiction, with attention to different degrees of mind-reading in juxtaposition to empathy. David Herman looks into the conflicting tension, or even outright contradiction, between the urge for self-expression in Tolstoy's art and the urge toward selflessness seen in his theory of art. William Nickell examines a practical case of the effect of one person's thought on another: Tolstoy's son Lev L'vovich and his troubled experience as a follower of the Tolstoyan worldview, along with Tolstoy's own reflections on the possible morbidity of his own philosophy. Together, these three papers hope to add depth to the picture of Tolstoy as a portrayer and theorist of individual selves and the boundaries and interactions between them.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 19th Century

Chair

• Elizabeth Frances Geballe, Indiana U Bloomington

Papers

• Empathy and Mind-reading in the (Mostly) Late Tolstoy - Stephen Blackwell, U of Tennessee

• What is Art?: The Struggle to Fictionalize Selflessness - David M.B.L. Herman, U of Virginia

• Zdravyi smysl and the Perception of Tolstoy’s Moral Philosophy as a Morbid Worldview - William Scott Nickell, U of Chicago

Discussant

• Robin Feuer Miller, Brandeis U