"My aim is to present Tolstoy's work as he may have understood it himself," writes Donna Orwin. Reconstructing the intellectual and psychic struggles behind the masterpieces of his early and middle age, this major study covers the period during which he wrote The Cossacks, War and Peace, and Anna Karenina. Orwin uses the tools of biography, intellectual and literary history, and textual analysis to explain how Tolstoy's tormented search for moral certainty unfolded, creating fundamental differences among the great novels of the "pre-crisis" period.Distinguished by its historical emphasis, this book demonstrates that the great novelist, who had once seen a fundamental harmony between human conscience and nature's vitality, began eventually to believe in a dangerous rift between the two: during the years discussed here, Tolstoy moved gradually from a celebration of life to instruction about its moral dimensions. Paying special attention to Tolstoy's reading of Rousseau, Goethe, Schopenhauer, and the Russian thinker N. N. Strakhov, Orwin also explores numerous other influences on his thought. In so doing, she shows how his philosophical and emotional conflicts changed form but continued unabated--until, with his religious conversion of 1880, he surrendered his long attempt to make sense of life through art alone.

Acknowledgments
Note on Documentation

Introduction 3

Pt. 1 The 1850s

1 Analysis and Synthesis 15

The Hegelian Atmosphere of the 1850s 15

Chernyshevsky 16

The Contemporary Reception of Tolstoy's Work 18

Tolstoy and Chernyshevshy 19

Subjective Reality for the Early Tolstoy 22

Tolstoy's Goethean Realism 26

2 The Young Tolstoy's Understanding of the Human Soul 31

Tolstoy, the Psychological Analyst 31

Synthesis and the Influence of Rousseau 36

3 The First Synthesis: Nature and the Young Tolstoy 50

Tolstoy's Understanding of Nature in the Early 1850s 52

A Maturing Philosophy of Nature (Tolstoy and Fet) 53

Botkin and the Exploration of the Feelings 58

Sterne 62

N. V. Stankevich 64

Nature, Reason, and the Feelings ("Lucerne") 68

Objective and Subjective Poetry 73

The Metaphysics of Opposites and Goethe Again 76

Pt. 2 The 1860s

4 Nature and Civilization in The Cossacks 85

Natural Necessity in The Cossacks 85

The Morality of Self-Sacrifice in the Stag's Lair 86

The Cossack as Savage Man 93

5 The Unity of Man and Nature in War and Peace 99

Nature and History in War and Peace 100

Circular versus Faustian Reason in War and Peace 107

The Morality of Nature in War and Peace 109

The Importance of Spirit in Wartime 117

Reason, Morality, and Nature in the Human Soul 121

The Rostovs and "Living Life" 123

The Bolkonskys 126

Pierre 129

"Lyrical Daring" in War and Peace 132

Pt. 3 The 1870s

6 From Nature to Culture in the 1870s 143

Schopenhauer 150

Schopenhauer and Arzamas 154

Nature after Schopenhauer 157

Linking Happiness and Morality in Anna Karenina 164

7 Drama in Anna Karenina 171

The Symposium in the Restaurant 171

Anna as Heroine of a Novel 179

Anna's Radical Individualism 180

To Judge or Not Judge Anna 183

8 Science, Philosophy and Synthesis in the 1870s 188

The Enduring Importance of Unity for Tolstoy 188

Atomism 189

Kantian Epistemology 192

The Attack on the Individual 195

The Denigration of the "Personality" 196

The Morally Free Individual in Anna Karenina 200

Synthesis and Lyrical Daring Once Again 204

Conclusion 208

Notes 219

Works Cited 253

Index 263