Brett Cooke - Böcker

Tolstoy’s epic novel is one of the most famous pieces of Russian literature and is on the short list of the most important works of literature in the world. This volume examines Tolstoy’s unique achievement through a number of thought-provoking essays, and the interplay of the many genres of the text, including historical fiction, war drama, romance and realism.

What were the consequences of Tolstoy’s unusual reliance on members of his family as source material for War and Peace? Did affection for close relatives influence depictions of these real prototypes in his fictional characters? Tolstoy used these models to consider his origins, to ponder alternative family histories, and to critique himself. Comparison of the novel and its fascinating drafts with the writer’s family history reveals increasing preferential treatment of those with greater relatedness to him: kin altruism, i.e., nepotism. This pattern helps explain many of Tolstoy’s choices amongst plot variants he considered, as well as some of the curious devices he utilizes to get readers to share his biases, such as coincidences, notions of “fate,” and aversion to incest.

Anticipating some Soviet Union developments, Evgenii Zamyatsin's We (1920) is a futuristic dystopic novel in which D-503, builder of the first rocket ship, extols the glories of the Single State and discovers another way of life beyond his highly controlled society. From the newer field of biopoetics, which applies evolutionary psychology to art instead of emphasizing the social construction of human behavior and consciousness, Cooke (Texas A&M U.) explores themes in the novel including workforce mechanization, the symbolic roles of food-sharing, eugenics, and writing as subversion. Comparisons are made with other dystopian literature (e.g. Brave New World ), and novels by Russian authors including Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy.