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The Ends of “Personality”: Tolstoy and the Problem of Modern Identity
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John Bartle, Michael C. Finke, and Vadim Liapunov, eds. From Petersburg to Bloomington: Essays in Honor of Nina Perlina. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2012, 355–72. (Indiana Slavic Studies, 18.) The Ends of “Personality”: Tolstoy and the Problem of Modern Identity Lina Steiner In recent years we have witnessed a remarkable resurgence of interest in the topic of “personality” or lichnost’.1 Once the focal point of Rus-‐‑ sian philosophical and cultural debates, over time this problem lost its cutting-‐‑edge quality: the nineteenth-‐‑century emphasis on personal in-‐‑ tegrity gained such broad acceptance in the Soviet-‐‑era scholarship that it became commonplace. Some of us still remember the textbooks and scholarly studies in which literary characters were judged in terms of their genuineness and integrity and not infrequently castigated as morally suspect if these qualities were found lacking. Suffice it to re-‐‑ call the famous “superfluous person,” that is, a character who was either doomed, like Goethe’s Faust, never to attain the end of his quest, or who so lacked spiritual energy that he was unable to pursue any quest in the first place. When viewed from the point of view of per-‐‑ sonal integrity, Pushkin’s Onegin, Lermontov’s Pechorin, Goncharov’s Oblomov, and practically all of Turgenev’s male protagonists were deemed flawed and thus hopelessly “superfluous” to history, aimed at triumph of the fully realized and well-‐‑rounded human personality. One novelist whose works and characters were typically exempt from the textbook lists of “superfluous” heroes is L. N. Tolstoy, even though several of his characters—particularly those from his earlier works, like Prince Dmitry Nekhliudov from “The Landlord’s Morn-‐‑ ing” and Olenin from The Cossacks—represent paradigmatic cases of both social irrelevance and personal incompleteness and unhappiness. Another hero from Tolstoy’s oeuvre whose name could be added to the lists of perpetual seekers is Pierre Bezukhov from War and Peace. 1 See, for example, a cluster of essays addressing the topic of “lichnost’ kak is-‐‑ toricheskaia konventsiia” in Novoe literaturnoe obozreniie 91 (2008). It includes essays by Nikolai Plotnikov, Dmitrii Kalugin, Viktor Zhivov, and Petr Rezvykh. 356 Lina Steiner Indeed, upon closer examination, it appears that all of the central male characters—Andrei Bolkonsky, Pierre Bezukhov, and, to a lesser de-‐‑ gree, Nikolai Rostov—view their lives as personal quests.2 Though taking very different routes, all these quests are aimed at the same objective, which is to attain a sense of personal fulfillment or “authen-‐‑ ticity” (in Charles Taylor’s sense of the term).3 In War and Peace Tolstoy carefully examines the problem of indi-‐‑ vidual identity-‐‑formation and comes to the conclusion that not every human being is able to or should be pushed to develop a very strong self-‐‑consciousness or a strong feeling of their unique vocation in life.4 Not all those who lose or relinquish their ties to organic communities manage to develop a sufficiently strong individual identity, whereas those who do often compromise their family happiness, and the ethical and political stability of their social milieu.5 In making this observation Tolstoy—who was undoubtedly not only a great artist, but also a 2 Female characters in War and Peace express themselves and reach maturity not through quest, but by getting married and becoming centers of the basic organic unit of society, the family. Thus, the woman’s social function is to help create and sustain communities, whereas males often transcend the bor-‐‑ ders of their communities, precipitating cultural change, which, as I will ex-‐‑ plain in this paper, may even lead to the demise of the given community. 3 Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-‐‑ sity Press, 1992). Taylor views authenticity as an ability to build one’s life and world into a meaningful whole with the help of language and conceptual and cultural paradigms created through language. In some other works Taylor ex-‐‑ plains that this modern approach to meaning-‐‑making emerged in the wake of the linguistic turn in philosophy, which Taylor calls “expressivism.” The lat-‐‑ ter term describes the conviction that thought exists only in and through human linguistic self-‐‑expression. Taylor credits Herder and his student Hum-‐‑ boldt with this paradigm shift. See Taylor’s monographs Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) and Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 4 I discuss Tolstoy’s pedagogical writings and their relationship to War and Peace in...
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