Accidental art: Tolstoy's poetics of unintentionality

Philosophy and Literature

Volumn 27, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 284-303

  Denner, Michael A ^a  

^a STETSON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950475526     PISSN: 01900013     EISSN: 1086329X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/phl.2003.0042     Document Type: Review

References (12)

1. Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? and Essays on Art, trans. Aylmer Maude (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962 [1898]), p. 123
2. Max Fasmer, Ètomologicheskij slovar' russkogo jazyka (Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language) (Moscow: Progress, 1964), vol. 2, p. 79. The English infect comes from the Latin inficere, "to dip in, stain, taint, impregnate," and meant originally to taint or mix dyes
3. Leo Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenij L. N. Tolstogo v 90-i tomakh (Complete Collected Works of L. N. Tolstoy in 90 volumes, traditionally referred to as the Jubilee Edition), ed. V. G. Chertkov, et al. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaja literatura, 1928-1958), vol. 51, p. 13
4. Quoted in Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 104. Lunacharsky's remark was in response to the views on art expressed by Eikhenbaum in "On the Formal Method."
5. Jubilee, v. 30, p. 439
6. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 9-11
7. Gustafson persuasively argues for a vision of Tolstoy's experience of life as a constant, often abrupt, vacillation between two poles, between Tolstoy's sense of himself as a Resident in the world, as someone participating in a reciprocal belonging with the world; and his sense of himself as a Stranger, as someone not related to others: "The Stranger is the direct opposite of the Resident.... The two exist, however, in a dialectical relationship: the extreme of one echoes the other. Solitude calls out for solidarity." See Richard Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 20
8. Iskrennost', the Russian word for sincerity, may also derive from kraj, edge or land. Svetlana Boym also distinguishes between a Russian and Western sense of the word. She maintains that the etymological meaning, which she derives from root (koren'), suggests kinship, proximity, closeness. Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 97
9. Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 77
10. Saul Morson, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in War and Peace (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), p. 30
11. Jubilee, vol. 30, pp. 434-39
12. See Krystyna Pomorska, "Tolstoy: Contra Semiosis," International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 25-26 (1982): 383-90. Pomorska's semiotic-based article discusses Tolstoy's preference for natural, non-meditated and intuitive behavior. She, too, underscores the ultimately paradoxical task that Tolstoy sets for himself: Tolstoy "tried to represent without the means of representation, to deal with language by avoiding language or reducing its scope" (p. 390)