“I slew my love with my own hand”: On Tolstoy’s Influence on Mikhail Naimy and the Similarity between Their Moral Concerns

Mikhail Naimy, one of the creators of the modern Arabic literary tradition, was affected by several literary influences, including a Russian one. This article gives an example of Leo Tolstoy’s impact on Naimy’s Memoirs of a Vagrant Soul or The Pitted Face (1917), which repeats Tolstoy’s contributions with variation. I discuss this in addition to the influence that Tolstoy exerted as a philosopher, social critic, and writer on Naimy. Both authors also had similar underlying, unresolved psychological complexes, which made Naimy particularly interested in Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata (1889). This research contributes to scholarship about the history and development of the modern Arabic literary and translation traditions and the process of world literature, and it sheds light on Arab-Russian cultural ties. It might be used for reading the two novels from a comparative perspective, which follows the modern movement to contextualize literature within different transnational and global movements.