Bapatla 1 Introduction: Like Many Twenty-First Century Readers, I Was

Bapatla 1 Introduction: Like many twenty-first century readers, I was introduced to the works of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy through film: the 2012 Joe Wright adaptation of his novel, Anna Karenina. The novel tells the love stories of two couples — the illicit affair between an army officer, Alexei Vronksy, and Anna Karenina, a Tsarist minister’s wife; and the courtship of a Moscow princess, Kitty Shcherbatskaya, by Konstantin Levin, a rural aristocrat. Translating any text to screen is tricky, but by the end of Wright’s adaptation, I could not figure out why Levin was included in the film at all. While the parallelism was clear — the conservative Levin-Kitty love story foils the tumultuous, passionate Vronsky-Anna romance — the reason for establishing a binary opposition escaped me. Sure, conventional courtships occur in Russian society, and so do torrid affairs, but what’s the association? Wright’s film, which marginalizes the contemporary political discussions of the novel, fails to develop the theme at its heart: what it means to be Russian. Through their love stories, Levin- Kitty and Vronksy-Anna present two competing examples of the family, the fundamental unit of Russian life in the novel. They also serve as visions for Russia’s future as the country confronts modernity. The novel asks the reader, will the future Russia be rooted in its traditions or succumb to the temptations of Westernization? These are questions of social identity, which incorporate, among other things, idea of ethnicity. Adaptations are a selective process. It is impossible to include every aspect of a book in its screen adaptation. I am not suggesting works that engage with Tolstoy’s writing necessarily converse with any particular Tolstoyan theme. However, I find it interesting that such a significant theme be often ignored. Popular re-imaginings of Tolstoy’s work, especially those produced outside Russia, rarely engage with Tolstoy’s discourse on ethnicity. Notably, Tolstoy’s Bapatla 2 discussion of other sociopolitical issues is more often addressed in adaptation. Nilo Cruz’s 2002 play Anna in the Tropics, which re-imagines the plot of Anna Karenina set in 1920s Tampa, Florida in the Cuban emigre community, features Tolstoy’s gender and class politics prominently. Even Wright’s Anna Karenina film makes passing commentary on gender barriers and class inequality. The lack of engagement with Tolstoy’s discussion on ethnicity has led to a poor understanding of his intellectual legacy in the English-speaking world, even in learned circles. In a now infamous incident, the American novelist Saul Bellow quipped, “who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” to undermine African intellectual contributions by comparing them to Western literary achievements. However, Bellow’s remark reflects an unexamined assumption that Tolstoy belongs to a Western canon of authors in the first place. Bellow is not alone. Harold Bloom features Tolstoy prominently in his work, The Western Canon, as a pillar of Western literary tradition. While Bellow and Bloom are not wrong to say Leo Tolstoy has a profound influence on Western writing, they mistake his place in world literature. Tolstoy, as a nineteenth-century Russian male, wrote in the context of his social identity. Russia, perceived as a nation without fixed standing in Europe and Asia, had a precarious place in the colonize or be colonized world of the 1800s (Kotkin). In a world divided ideologically between Occident and Orient, the country did not unambiguously belong to either category. This middle status provided fertile intellectual ground for Russian authors to debate questions of identity. Tolstoy’s works weigh in heavily on the issues of the day, and on the whole suggest a notion of Russian identity that is not Western. Bellow’s and Bloom’s attempts to claim Tolstoy are problematic given the author’s definition of Russianness as a largely nonwestern identity. Bapatla 3 There is a complicated discussion of ethnicity as a form of social identity that is at the center of Tolstoy’s works. For the purposes of the essay, I will be defining ethnicity as practices, institutions, beliefs, and customs of a social group with a similar historical and familial background. This essay attempts to examine that discussion and propose that a well-recognized component of his writings — the notion of the self — is rooted in said discussion. I will show that the Tolstoyan notion of the self contains ethnic signifiers marked on the body and the self’s lived space. The interplay between body and space, through behavior, constructs signifiers seen on both. Tolstoy’s works suggests there is a way to be “true” to the self — rooting the self in tradition — and that authenticity to the self is a moral imperative. I begin by delineating how ethnicity functions in two works: Hadji Murat (1896-1904) and Anna Karenina (1873-1877). Hadji Murat, Tolstoy’s last written work and one of the few with an overtly multiethnic cast, is set during Tsar Nicolas I’s war of subjugation against Caucasian tribes in Dagestan and Chechnya. It tells the tragic story of Hadji Murat, an Avar warrior caught between the caprices of the invading Tsarist government and the resisting Caucasian leaders. I will use Hadji Murat to identify techniques of marking ethnicity found consistently in Tolstoy’s works. I will then turn to Anna Karenina to show how these techniques are utilized in that text in ways that have not been noted before. This will the form the pattern for the essay’s first two sections; Hadji Murat, the late novella in which theme of ethnic identity is firmly expressed, will provide a framework for understanding the earlier novel which discusses ethnicity less overtly, Anna Karenina. Finally, I discuss the implications of authenticity versus inauthenticity to the self. Nationalism, Ethnicity, and the Self: Bapatla 4 It should be noted that the question of what Russianness is precisely has no easy answer. Is it a national identity, as Hans Rogger considers in National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia, bound to the forces of Westernized nation building that enveloped Europe in the modern era? In one sense, yes. However, that definition fails to account for concepts of Russianness that do not fall within the boundaries of national identity; for instance, an individual may be a member of the Russian state while having non-Slavic ancestry. For that reason, in this essay I will be considering Russianness as an ethnic identity, since that terminology emphasizes localism and an attention to long-standing traditions. It also seems more in line with what Tolstoy’s works attempt to explore. That said, we cannot completely ignore the idea of Russianness as national identity, especially its history. It is difficult to pinpoint the origins of nationalism as an ideology, but Rogger rules out the possibility of nationalism existing before the eighteenth century (1). It begins in Northwestern Europe, in England, France and the Netherlands, and from there aspects of it have been exported to the rest of Europe, including Russia. Therefore, nationalism is a recent phenomenon. While it draws from ancient ideas and traditions, as Hobsbawm points out, it just as easily invents ideas and traditions that “automatically implies continuity with the past” (1). It is Western on some level, with many of the connotations that the label suggests. It is Western in the sense that the nation is linked to ideas such as the rule of law, a national polity, and institutions that derive power from the masses – in a word, liberalism –, as scholars like Kotkin argue. But it is also Western in the sense that the nation and its guiding principles are often defined as being in contradistinction to what is perceived as Eastern – backward, savage, uncivilized –, as postcolonial theorists like Said in Orientalism contend. Neither of these aspects of Westernism apply entirely to Russia. Politically, the successive governments of Russia have Bapatla 5 had a fraught relationship with liberalism. And as Bideleux points out, eastern Europe, including Russia, has a long history of being Orientalized by geographically western European countries. All of this is to say, nationalism has two key characteristics that are complicated in the Russian context: its newness and its foreignness. Nationalism, according to Rogger, does not truly exist in Russia until the nineteenth century. This is because Russia in the 1700s had not sufficiently developed liberally or culturally – in the sense that Russia had not invented traditions and ideas that were unique to itself and based on prior history (2). Still, the 1700s provided the groundwork for many of the ideas of the nineteenth century, including those Tolstoy grappled with (4). A theme of central importance was what is called “the discovery of the folk.” The folk refer to the Russian word narod, which could also be translated as “the people.” Rogger’s translation conveys the provincial connotations of the original word, whereas mine emphasizes the popular ones. In short, the narod are the Russian rural masses, which in the eighteenth century meant the Russian serfs. Serfdom, a system that has drawn a number of comparisons to American chattel slavery, was a source of embarrassment for some Russians who felt that it reflected on Russia’s perceived backwardness (Kolchin 809). Like slavery, it was justified by its perpetrators due to perceived inherent differences between the elite landowning class and the workers (Kolchin 809, 810). However, in the eighteenth century, the conditions of serf life began to form a source of pride, and later, patriotism among the elite Russian class. The serf villages were idealized as places of true Russianness. It existed in sharp contrast to the “artificial city created by Peter, the seat and source of bureaucratic absolutism and its foreign servitors…alien to the true interests and traditions of the Russian land” (Rogger 126).

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