This talk draws on my recently published book Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel, an exploration of what creates and sustains the reader’s sense of novelistic characters’ autonomous, embodied existence. Through readings of Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s major works, I trace a productive tension between the power to create lifelike characters and the ambition to transform the reader. This talk will focus on problems of characterization in Tolstoy’s later fiction. I suggest that in his novel Anna Karenina (1875-77), Tolstoy tried but failed to create a protagonist who could be detached from the closed aesthetic frame of the literary text. His sense of this failure propelled him toward the realist parables of his later career, where he experimented with new techniques for creating characters whose lifelike specificity would transcend the particular words that narrate them. I read “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (1885) as a programmatic statement of this project, which probes in the same gesture the limits of novelistic characterization and the limits of embodied earthly life. Subverting the foundations of realist fiction while attempting to maintain its compelling vividness, Tolstoy asks questions about the ethical and spiritual stakes of novel reading that remain equally vital in our own day.
Chloe Kitzinger is Assistant Professor in the Russian and East European Languages and Literatures Department at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. from Berkeley, and has been a fellow at the Princeton Society of Fellows. Her research interests include 19th-century Russian literature and culture, narrative theory and the theory of the novel, serialization and adaptation, translation studies, and science fiction. She is the author of Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel (Northwestern University Press, Sept. 2021).
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If you have any questions, please contact Yoon sun Lee at ylee@wellesley.edu
