Transnational Tolstoy: Between the West and the World
FAIN: FB-55415-11
John B. Foster, Jr
George Mason University (Fairfax, VA 22030-4444)
Drawing on recent initiatives in comparative literature, "Transnational Tolstoy" aims to relate this major novelist in important new ways to fiction from Western Europe and around the world. Emphasis falls on Tolstoy's work with greatest international relevance, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and the posthumous Hadji Murad. Despite Russian nationalism or Soviet cultural policy, these books engage in illuminating cross-border dialogues with writers from Goethe and Stendhal to Mahfouz and Rushdie. In eleven case studies of a larger process, the book seeks to enlarge appreciation of Tolstoy's role and significance as a novelist and to promote transnational approaches to writers of his stature. Topics include anti-Western stereotyping, the psychology of vengeance, critiques of Bonapartism, global consciousness in literature, and the transformations of fictional realism. Since drafts of most chapters already exist, the fellowship year will be devoted to producing a polished, readable whole.