The Legacy of Leo Tolstoy Inside and Outside Russia, 1920-1928

FAIN: FT-278699-21

Tatyana Gershkovich
Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3815)

Archival research in Moscow and writing two chapters of a book on the reconstruction and the reinterpretation of Tolstoy's works by Communists in the Soviet Union and by Russian émigrés who fled Russia after 1917.

Tolstoy Red and White will be the first comparative account of Tolstoy’s literary and philosophical afterlife in the Soviet Union and in Russian emigration. Drawing on archival material in Berlin, Prague, Paris and Moscow, I reconstruct a “White Tolstoy”—the Tolstoy of the émigrés—alongside the “Red” one. By comparing Tolstoy Red and White, how these figures were formed and how they were put to use, I elucidate how these two rival societies, each defining itself against the other, navigated their indebtedness to the same cultural past. I expect to shed new light on Tolstoy, too. By examining his double afterlife pedagogically, performatively, and in posthumous publications, and doing so in the context of his own ideas on education, art, law, and religion, I show how Tolstoy’s texts resisted or failed to resist these attempts to assimilate and domesticate them.