Presentations by Streams

Tolstoy's novels are complex statements that can be read through a variety of contexts. The papers in this panel examine Tolstoy's famous texts from three not-so-obvious perspectives. 1. How did Tolstoy's critique of political nihilism manifest itself in “War and Peace” and his other texts of the time, how did Tolstoy take part in the broad discussion of this phenomenon in the 1860s, and what did Tolstoy actually understand by the term “political nihilism”, analysing it from the perspective of his own political theory? 2. How can we interpret Tolstoy's reader’s reactions to Anthony Trollope's novel “The Bertrams” (1859) and understand his strange feeling of writer’s competition? What makes Tolstoy speak of Trollope's “murderous skill”, let him feel envy and despair while reading far not the best and not the best-known novel of the English author? In this case we can speak about the special reader’s position from which Tolstoy can see the similarity of writing techniques and identify himself with the characters in "The Bertrams. 3. The third paper in this section concentrates on Tolstoy's connections with the American religious movement Mind Cure and looks at his correspondence with spiritualist Christian preachers Lucy Mallory and Alice Bunker Stockham. Reading Mind Cure texts changed Tolstoy's ideas about Christianity and determined the religious credo of the novel “Resurrection” (1899). The genesis of late Tolstoy's favourite conceptions, such as the “loving communion of men”, the idea of an “inner” god living within every man, and the concept of a “good contagion”, can be traced from Tolstoy’s readings and correspondences with the Mind Cure activists.