Why Literature Can Reveal What Law Cannot: Leo Tolstoy and Gleb Uspensky on "The Hidden Horror of Modern Life"

FAIN: FT-60922-13

Anna Schur
Keene State College (Keene, NH 03435-0001)

Leo Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata and Gleb Uspensky's sketch "One on One" (1885) focus on murderous husbands. Whereas Tolstoy's protagonist is fictional, Uspensky examines the-then sensational but now forgotten trial of Vasily Pishchikov who brutally killed his pregnant wife. Despite the different verdicts (an acquittal and a life sentence), both writers are unhappy with the legal proceedings they describe. Their critique of law, however, reverses the common argument that attributes the supremacy of literary imagination over legal reasoning to literature's commitment to human singularity. Law fails not because it deals in abstractions but because it is distracted by details; literature succeeds not due to its heightened attention to particularity of experience but due to its ability to strip this experience of the incidental and unrepeatable. The utopian politics and literary aesthetics the two works advocate depend not on highlighting but on attenuating human unrepeatability.

Associated Products

" 'Maria Ivanovna Was Reclining on a Settee': Gleb Uspensky's Search for a New Optics (Article)
Title: " 'Maria Ivanovna Was Reclining on a Settee': Gleb Uspensky's Search for a New Optics
Author: Anna Schur
Abstract: To Gleb Uspensky’s contemporaries, his preference for short forms like sketches, notes, and fragments masked an artistic flaw – his inability to produce a novel. The paper reconsiders Uspensky’s generic choices as a deliberate critique of the novel form. This critique reflected Uspensky’s anxiety about the significance of individual personality and experience overvalued by the novel. Uspensky’s aspiration to transcend the novel’s preoccupation with an individual human fate in order to lay bare the conditions shaping the shared destiny of all led him to exchange the novel’s “microscopic” optics for a broader, panoramic lens. Such change in perspective dictated several other elements of his poetics: from rejecting the novel’s aesthetics of small detail to reconfiguring the traditional character structure.
Year: 2016
Access Model: subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Slavic Review
Publisher: Slavic Review

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