National Research University Higher School of Economics As A

National Research University Higher School of Economics as a manuscript Tulyakova Anastasia Andreevna L.N. TOLSTOY’S « THE CIRCLE OF READING»: GENESIS AND POETICS PhD Thesis Summary for the purpose of obtaining Philosophy Doctor in Philology and Linguistics HSE Academic supervisor: Galina V. Zykova PhD, Associate Professor Moscow 2019 The late period of L.N. Tolstoy's oeuvre is characterized by a variety of genres. Aside from religio-ethical treatises, collections of wise thoughts and pamphlets, Tolstoy discovered a genre form that seems to have no parallel in either fictional or non-fictional heritage of the writer. The calendar as a collection of wise thoughts for each day of the year started to hold a special place in Tolstoy’s work since the 1880-s when the writer made his mind to compile The Circle of Reading. Putting the idea into life proved to be a challenging task that stretched out for 25 years - up to his death; Tolstoy kept perfecting his calendar, the first version of which was published as a separate edition in 1903 under the title The Thoughts of Wise Man for Every Day. Tolstoy did not abandon the idea of adding new sayings into the calendar and returned to it in 1906, simultaneously finishing his work on another calendar – The Circle of Reading. However, Tolstoy was not satisfied with the latter compilation of wise thoughts either, so the editing process of the text lasted for two years, and the writer could not see the final version of the text published. In the last years of his life, he also worked on the collections For Every Day (1906- 1910) and Path of Life (1910). Although all Tolstoy’s calendars should be seen as chapters of one text that took the writer quarter century to complete, we consider The Circle of Reading the most comprehensive and, therefore, the most significant one of them all, as it surpasses all other texts of the genre in the heterogeneity of its content and form. The Circle of Reading (1906, 1908) is a didactic compilation of aphorisms and short stories for daily reading arranged by the calendar principle. The text is divided into the twelve months of the year, and each day of a month comprises thematically homogenous sayings of great thinkers of the past and present. Each week is separated from the next one by “weekly readings” – short stories and excerpts from journalistic and religio-ethical works of those writers and philosophers with whom Tolstoy sided in ethical matters. The Circle of Reading is the only calendar-type compilation that combines wise thoughts with full-length texts or textual fragments. Whereas the formal originality of the compendium leaves no doubt, its genesis and its underlying structural principles defy straightforward interpretations. It is the synthetic nature of The Circle of Reading that presents challenges for a scholar: being a whole, the text is heterogeneous in many respects: in its genesis, genre, content, and even in its philosophy. Therefore, we consider simplistic and controversial the few existing interpretations of The Circle of Reading that downplay the dialectical nature of the text for the sake of moral ideas of Tolstoy and other thinkers scattered through it. The genesis of The Circle of Reading as a synthetic text and distinctive characteristics of it heterogeneous nature have never been the subject of a special study. The organizing principles of the text that render it unique remain unclarified: the compilation form of The Circle of Reading comprising aphorisms, both fictional and non-fictional, was unrivalled for its time despite its apparent resemblance to its predecessors – calendars. In Tolstoy studies, the place The Circle of Reading occupied in Tolstoy's late period has not been firmly established either: treating the compendium of aphorisms and short stories on a par with the writer's culminating texts fails to account for its significance in the last decade of Tolstoy’s life. Consequently, substantial gaps in the studies of The Circle of Reading that have not been filled yet impede its comprehensive understanding as a definitive text for the Tolstoy of the 1900s that set cardinal directions of the writer’s work of that period. In this respect, a systematic study of The Circle of Reading and its multi-level analysis appear to be particularly topical. The novelty of the present research stems from the fact that in Tolstoy studies, The Circle of Reading has rarely been addressed as a synthetic text. Principles of adding texts of various genres into the calendar as well as criteria that guided Tolstoy in selecting texts for The Circle of Reading still wait to be uncovered. Whereas the aphorisms included in the compilation have become a subject of several special studies, the corpus of “weekly readings” has never been considered in the context of the general poetics of the compilation and of Tolstoy’s system of beliefs at large. In this work, we will demonstrate how The Circle of Reading resolves philosophical and ethical contradictions incipient in Tolstoy's early writings; reveal the mechanisms that shaped the form and content of the compilation; and finally, specify the role of The Circle of Reading against the backdrop of the writer’s other didactic writings. The object of this research is Circle of Reading1, a compilation of wise thoughts whereon Tolstoy worked during the last decade of his life, and a complex of the writer's fictional texts and his works on ethics and religion, illuminating the key ideas of The Circle of Reading and summating the tenets of the writer’s system of beliefs. We also focus on the writer’s diaries and correspondence to trace distinctive features of his system of beliefs. The object of research includes Russian literary calendars of the first half of the nineteenth century, as one section in the first chapter of the dissertation is devoted to comparing them with Circle of Reading. Analysing “weekly readings”, we address fictional and journalistic writings of other authors, so they should be mentioned in this regard as well. The subject of this research is the genre and biographical genesis of The Circle of Reading that helps problematize the temporality of the compilation of wisdom; principles of internal and external structure of Circle of Reading; the ideological context of the calendar regarded in terms of the conscious and the unconscious in Tolstoy’s late period; and the poetics of the fictional “weekly readings”. 1 As the object of this research, we use the second edition of The Circle of Reading published in the Complete Works of L.N. Tolstoy: 90 vv. (1928-1964). It is necessary to indicate that The Circle of Reading as it was printed in this and other editions took shape as early as 1904, when the writer completed the final draft of the compilation. In January 1905, Tolstoy sent the collection to I.I. Gorbunov-Posadov for printing. In 1907, the author decided to conduct a thorough revision of Circle (although Tolstoy had been making changes to the text during the two previous years). Having made numerous corrections, in 1908 Tolstoy noted in his diary (diary entry: February 9) that he had completed the editing work. As N.N. Gusev points out in his commentary to The Circle of Reading (42; 577), the revision was mainly targeted at aphorisms, which Tolstoy kept adding, excluding, and correcting. The following fictional “weekly readings” appeared in the second edition of the compilation: “Non-believer”, “Poor People” and “The Power of Childhood” by V. Hugo, “Thief's Son” after N.S. Leskov, “Free Man” (excerpt from the novel “Resurrection”) and “The Sisters” after G. Maupassant. Conclusions regarding the tendencies in the writer's work of the 1900s, presented in the third chapter of this work, are based exclusively on our observations concerning the conception of The Circle of Reading that remained unchanged from 1904 to 1908; stylistic changes and insignificant content revisions (with regard to “weekly readings”) made by Tolstoy for the second edition have no bearing upon our conclusions. The aims of this research are to identify the role of The Circle of Reading in Tolstoy’s late period of work and to expound the principles of its structural organization by analysing the corpus of “weekly readings”. To reach these aims we need to address the following objectives: 1. To consider The Circle of Reading in the context of the calendar tradition of the second half of the nineteenth century; 2. To analyse the problem of temporality in Tolstoy’s writings and the ways of solving it in Circle of Reading; 3. To articulate the principles of internal and external structure of Circle of Reading; 4. To expound those aspects of the plot and ideas of The Circle of Reading that resolve hitherto unresolved contradictions in the writer’s philosophy – the relationship between the subjective and the objective, the conscious and the unconscious, the rational and the moral, etc.; 5. To explicate the poetics of the fictional “weekly readings” that most clearly illuminate Tolstoy’s ideology of that period and demonstrate the principles of selecting texts for Circle of Reading. The methodological basis of the research consists of methods aimed at the multi-multifaceted study of The Circle of Reading as a text combining both fictional and non-fictional elements. In Chapter 1 of the dissertation, we deploy methods of historical and genetic criticism to analyse calendar sources (the genesis of The Circle of Reading and the way of its transformation informed by Tolstoy’s objectives); methods of typological analysis (to analyse typical calendars of that time and their reflection in Circle of Reading), and genre analysis (to explore the genre peculiarities of Circle of Reading, their evolution and operation in different contexts).

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