Transnational Literature

Is the corpse of Weltliterature worth resuscitating, and what might it look like if we got it back on its feet? John Burt Foster, Jr. fights the battle on multiple fronts, deploying perhaps the worldliest (in a variety of senses on which he elaborates) of not just Russian but European literary forces of the 19th century in his Transnational Tolstoy. The stakes here are a wide-reaching (re)consideration of Tolstoy, attempted via a spectrum of case-studies, predominately focused on the canonical positioning and lineage of Anna Karenina and War and Peace, and the broader goal of defining and exercising "transnationalism" as a means of reviving and re-anteing on behalf of the comparative project. The persistent question throughout is: why bother?

Foster's choice of Tolstoy is self-consciously motivated by the seeming contradiction that while each of the aforementioned novels is routinely considered an example of the height of the form, neither is considered an automatic inclusion in either a "world literature" course or even a 19th century Russian literature survey. What is added, though, by the wide-spanning and rigorous trans-nationalizing of Tolstoy's work is not imminently obvious from the concept itself. Each of Foster's case studies could warrant a review in itself, but in his introduction and summary chapters, he offers a few metrics by which we can judge their relative success, consistency, and relevance to the broader project at hand. In so doing, we can lay out the components of his transnationalism and consider what a transnational Tolstoy means for literature and the study thereof.

The goal of transnationalism is, at least in part, to "leave room" for both international and domestic readings; Foster refers to this latitude as a "wider contextual vision" (6) for fictive literature's cross-cultural potentialities. Transnational readings have the added benefit of addressing shifting borders (both figurative and literal) in places where nationalism is problematic, which Foster obviously sees as the case in Tolstoy's Russia. The extent of nationalism's sway in a burgeoning Russian literary tradition in the 19th century is an interesting one; the Romantic poets had given way to the first champions of long-form prose in Lermontov, Push-kin, and Dostoevsky by the time Tolstoy's literary career begins in earnest. Whether or not this is a nationalist tradition is arguable, but it's worth noting that Tolstoy is a member of a native lineage alongside the transnational one Foster proposes. This in itself does not necessarily serve to weaken his argument; it is simply a reminder that Tolstoy is not on an island even in his mother country. As such, the question remains: is transnationalism a generic designation? Is it topical, thematic, stylistic? Or is it a genealogy, with vertical components concerning influence and antecedence and those horizontal concerning similarity and kinship in the author's own time?

Foster's case studies begin with the latter, comparing the use of the symbol of Russians traveling to Europe in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, then expanding the comparison, a bit confusingly, to Thomas Mann's German spa in Magic Mountain. The result of this first comparative experiment, however, is perhaps to draw the Russians closer to one another than to demonstrate similarity with the German writing a half-century later, in that "it would be a strange error…to remarginalize these once marginalized Russian classics by aligning them…so seamlessly with the West"; instead, Foster deems them "fictions of direct transnational contact." The difference seems to rest on affect, as the success of the transnational novel is based, at least in part, on the degree to which it expresses sympathy and "psychological upheaval" in its face-to-face address with foreign peoples, lands, cultures, etc. Foster will return to the affective argument as he expands on Tolstoy's own late, aesthetic theses as laid out in his What is Art?

The second study attempts a more pointed, dialogic lineage between Stendhal's Chaterhouse of Parma and Tolstoy's Anna...