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The Haptic in Lev Tolstoi's Anna Karenina

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The Haptic in Lev Tolstoi's Anna Karenina View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository THE HAPTIC IN LEV TOLSTOI’S ANNA KARENINA Natalia Chernysheva A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures. Chapel Hill 2017 Approved by: Christopher Putney Hana Pichova Irene Delic Stanislav Shvabrin Gabriel Trop © 2017 Natalia Chernysheva ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Natalia Chernysheva: The Haptic in Lev Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina (Under the direction of Christopher Putney) This dissertation discusses Tolstoi’s representation of touch in Anna Karenina, contextualizing it within the author’s moral vision and the interdisciplinary discourse on haptic perception in Western philosophical, literary, cultural, and artistic traditions. Through a close reading, this dissertation argues that Tolstoi’s representation of the characters’ haptic sensations and physical contact with one another are strongly informed by the writer’s anxieties over human physicality. In addition, by revealing a previously overlooked link between Tolstoi’s moral views and his characters’ physical experiences in Anna Karenina, the dissertation points to the potential for fruitful haptic readings of Tolstoi’s other works. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation advisor Dr. Christopher Putney for his unfailing academic and moral support during my work on this project. This dissertation would not have been possible without his encouragement and patience. I would also like to express my gratitude to the members of the dissertation committee, Hana Pichova, Irene Delic, Stanislav Shvabrin, and Gabriel Trop, for their helpful suggestions on the further development of the project beyond the scope of the dissertation. I would also like to thank my colleagues and friends Elena Pedigo Clark, Yelena Zotova, Kevin Reese, Jenya Mironava, and Ekaterina Turta, as well as the participants of the GSLL Dissertation Colloquium, for sharing their comments, suggestions, and ideas with me. Their keen insights have helped me shape and refine my argument, contributing greatly to the project’s development. I would also like to thank Abby Dennison for her throughtful proofreading and editing of this dissertation. Finally, I would like to thank my grandparents, Lubov’ Zelivianskaia and Arkadii Chernyshev, and my parents, Alla and Viktor Chernyshev, for their support throughout my study at graduate school and completing this project. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 I. What is the “Haptic”? ............................................................................................................ 12 1. Touch in Western Philosophical Tradition ........................................................................ 14 2. The Body and the Senses in Orthodox Christianity ........................................................... 33 II. Tolstoi’s Moral Vision: Between the Carnal and the Spiritual .......................................... 41 1. Sexuality: Between Sex and Abstinence ............................................................................ 41 2. The Society: Between Nature and Civilization .................................................................. 52 3. The Spiritual: Between the Metaphysical and the Moral ................................................... 61 4. The Body between the Carnal and the Spiritual ................................................................ 67 III. The Haptic in Anna Karenina ............................................................................................ 69 1. Stiva ................................................................................................................................... 69 2. Dolly .................................................................................................................................. 88 3. Anna ................................................................................................................................... 95 4. Levin and Kitty ................................................................................................................ 140 5. Karenin ............................................................................................................................. 178 6. Vronskii............................................................................................................................ 199 v 7. Koznyshev and Varen’ka ................................................................................................. 223 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 232 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 249 vi Introduction The conflict between the body and the spirit is central to Lev Tolstoi’s thought and art. An examination of Tolstoi’s moral vision shows the way in which his attitude towards the body evolved over the course of his literary career. Tolstoi holds a manifestly positive attitude towards human physicality in the 1850s–60s, seeing it as an embodiment of the natural life force. He becomes suspicious about the body in the 1870s, and undergoes a grave spiritual crisis in 1879, which leads him to choose the spiritual over the physical and pronounce chastity as his ideal in the 1880s. Anna Karenina (1877), finished shortly before Tolstoi’s spiritual crisis, reflects an early manifestation of his anxiety over the body. Numerous scholars and commentators have discussed Tolstoi’s depiction of bodily states and perceptions, both as an element of style that imbues his fiction with verisimilitude and striking vividness, and as a means of psychological and moral characterization. While a great deal of research has been done on the stylistic and psychological notions of Tolstoi’s bodily descriptions, no systematic research has been conducted on the relationship between Tolstoi’s representation of the body (and particularly bodily sensations) and his moral views. This research thus aims to contribute to our understanding of this link by investigating Tolstoi’s representation of the body in his depictions of unity and alienation among the characters in Anna Karenina. Tolstoi’s personal susceptibility to sensory impressions seems to have contributed to his style. His autobiographical notes “My life” (“Моя жизнь”) (1878) include sensory recollections 1 from his early infancy, which alone can provide the key to his first years of life, the “shadowy region between the unconscious and the conscious” (Simmons 44). Having no conscious memories, he recalls the physical sensations of being bathed in a tub and swaddled, and the not unpleasant smell of bran (23:469–70). In his diary of 1851, he records standing by an open window contemplating nature with all of his senses, except for touch: “всеми чувствами, исключая осязание, наслаждался я природой” (46:80). The precision with which he excludes touch (he enjoys the world of nature while being indoors at that particular moment) underscores his conscious attention to sensory impressions. Tolstoi’s power of observation informs his artistic method as well. Tolstoi the artist strives to capture his or his characters’ perceptions of the world with precision in order to convey his “vision” to the reader as closely to reality as possible (“перелить в другого свой взгляд при виде природы … [о]писание невозможно” (46:65). However, as is evident from the below scholarly investigations of Tolstoi’s portrayal of the characters’ bodies and sensory perceptions, these details serve a broader purpose in Tolstoi’s fiction, pronouncing psychological or ethical judgments of the characters described. In Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (Толстой и Достоевский), Dmitrii Merezhkovskii paves the way for investigations of the body, perception, and sensory impressions in Tolstoi’s oeuvre, famously describing Tolstoi as the “тайновидец плоти/seer of the flesh” (119) and highlighting the richness of his fiction’s sensory data. Merezhkovskii underscores the expressive power of Tolstoi’s bodily imagery, by which he means the writer’s “uniquely Tolstoian” manner of capturing a sensation in all of its physiological and psychological accuracy and complexity. For instance, Nikolai’s recollection of Sonia’s kiss in War and Peace (Война и мир) is comprised of several interwoven sensory impressions, “запах пробки, смешанный с чувством поцелуя/the 2 smell of cork, mixed with the feel of the kiss” (102), rendering Nikolai’s experience rich and distinctive. Dolly’s painful sensation in her nipples in Anna Karenina illustrates the hardships of her experience of motherhood. In “The Death of Ivan Il’ich” (“Смерть Ивана Ильича”) the protagonist’s sensation leads to his spiritual epiphany. Ivan Il’ich recalls the abundance of saliva in his mouth when he, as a child, would get to the stone of a prune. The recollection evokes childhood memories, causing him to compare his childhood happiness to his current dread of death, and his past youthful innocence to the corruption of his adulthood. A “ничтожная подробность/trifling detail,” Merezhkovskii concludes, leads to a “обобщени[е]/generalization”
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