Abstract

In my dissertation I perform a close reading of The Cossacks, War and Peace, and Hadji-Murat, three important novels completed by the major Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, in his mature years. My aim in reading these novels is to analyze the way in which the writer artistically depicts human beings in their search for stable meaning in a fluid world. ;My thesis about the three novels I analyze is that they contain a unifying principle, and that this principle is to be found not in an idea, but in the organic process of the novels themselves, in their capacity to create, break down, and recreate again ordering systems, in the same way that the characters depicted in them are continually discovering, rejecting, and rediscovering truths about themselves and their world. ;In order to develop this thesis, I combine evidence gained from close readings of specific passages in the texts themselves with the evidence of a variety of fictional and non-fictional material produced by Tolstoy throughout his lifetime. I also draw on the work of a rich tradition of Tolstoy scholarship, past and present, as well as on some of the insights and analytical techniques of more recent literary theory. For instance, I am interested in Tolstoy's manipulation of the narrative voice and in his use of the technique of repetition. I am also interested in the subtle irony often pervading his texts. These are subjects which have recently become the object of intensive study in literary scholarship, and increasingly in Tolstoy scholarship, as well. My interest in such aspects of Tolstoy's fiction serves the purpose of helping me to understand these works of art as organic wholes, as complete acts of human expression, in which the form and the content are inextricably linked in the act of communication itself