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Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time
A Biography of a Long Conversion, 1845-1885
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2009
Summary
The first book-length study on the subject in any language, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time treats Tolstoy's experience as a massive philosophical and religious project rather than a crisis-laden tragedy. Inessa Medzhibovskaya explains the evolution of Tolstoy's religious outlook based on his ongoing dialogue with the tradition of conversion in Europe and Russia, as well as on the demands of his own heart, mind, and spirit. The author contextualizes Tolstoy's conversion, comparing his pattern of religious conversion with that of other notable religious converts-Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Luther, Pascal, Rousseau-as well with that of Tolstoy's countrymen-Pushkin, Gogol, Chaadaev, Stankevich, Belinsky, Herzen, and Dostoevsky. Stressing the importance of the religious culture of his time for Tolstoy, this study investigates the nineteenth century debates that inspired and repelled Tolstoy as he weighed arguments for or against faith in his dialogues with the culture of his time, covering widely differing fields and disciplines of experimental knowledge. The author considers German Romantic philosophy, the natural sciences, pragmatist religious solutions, theories of social progress and evolution, and the historical school of Christianity. Medzhibovskaya stresses the fact that influential intellectual currents were as important to Tolstoy as believers and nonbelievers were from and beyond his immediate environment. The author argues that, in this sense, Tolstoy's conversion emerges as deeply intertextual, and this surprising discovery should not diminish our trust in Tolstoy's sincerity during his religious evolution, which occurred both spontaneously as well as deliberately. The polyphony of discreet spiritual moments that Tolstoy created by fusing in his narratives of conversion religious and artistic realms is arguably his greatest contribution to spiritual autobiography.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2009
ISBN-Print
978-0-7391-2533-5
ISBN-Online
978-0-7391-4076-5
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
406
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Preface and Acknowledgments No access
Introduction No access
Chapter 01. Challenges of Modernity: The Russian Vertigo in Personal Experience and Literature to 1847 No access
Chapter 02. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Nonbeliever No access
Chapter 03. Superfluity and the Religion of Writing (1851–1863) No access
Chapter 04. Belief System in War and Peace (1863–1869) No access
Chapter 05. The Unfinished Battle: The Case With the Epilogues No access
Chapter 06. Tolstoy’s Path toward Conversion: 1869–1875 No access
Chapter 07. The Course of Tolstoy’s Conversion: From Philosophy to Christ (1875–1878) No access
Chapter 08. Turning with Christ (1878–1881) No access
Chapter 09. Religious Experience and Forms of Accounting No access
Chapter 10. Logos and its Life in the World (1880–1886) No access
