Leo Tolstoy's Struggle with the Limits of Fiction

FAIN: FA-54100-08

David Herman
University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA 22903-4833)

Work on a book on the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy's objections to the immorality of all fiction and the untruthfulness of language and his attempts to cure these problems by inventing a new kind of purified fiction that would be both moral and truthful ? or, if none can be found, to abandon fiction altogether. Since we are in the habit of assuming fiction is capable of anything, the project has broad ramifications for literature and its study.