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

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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). In other words, everything the cityscape of elite Bapatla 6

Russians was, the countryside of the people was not. In the course of the century, the once reviled peasantry came to be seen as equal or even superior to their owners.

This depiction saw its expression in works that included those edifying the rulers of Russia.

The modernizing Catherine the Great was especially fond of the play “The Slavs” (1781) by

Ippolit Bogdanovich. “The Slavs” depicts the ancient Macedonian emperor Alexander the Great entering Slavic territory and falling in love with a Slavic peasant woman. As he ingratiates himself among her people, he comes to see the nobility and wisdom of her people’s ways, even as greater than those of the Greeks in Athens. Of the play, Rogger points out, “the case for official nationalism could hardly have been stated more directly if Paris had been substituted for

Athens, the Enlightenment for Athenian philosophy and Catherine for the Slav ruler who had established sound morals and institutions in his country” (134-136). In this way, we can see that the “discovery of the folk” in the eighteen century often had close ties with the consolidation of state power. And interest in the common people only grew as Russia entered the nineteenth century.

The Russian imperial state expanded at a breathtaking rate. Between the time of Ivan IV to its end, the empire would grow at an average pace of fifty square miles per day (Kotkin 11).

With that level of expansion, more and more groups of people found themselves within the

Russian empire. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Russian Empire was comprised of 70% ethnic Great Russians, but by the end of the nineteenth-century, Russians comprised only

44% of the population. The new peoples of the empire were not only Slavs from modern-day

Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland, but also non-Slavic peoples, like “Lithuanians, Latvians,

Estonians, Finns, Germans, Georgians, Armenians, Tatars, Qalmyqs, and Siberian indigenes”

(Kotkin 12). Imperial officials, noting the growing number of national and ethnic groups under Bapatla 7 the auspices of the state, sought to make sense of their expanding empire. Thus, the second half of Russia’s nineteenth century saw a renewed interest in ethnography.

In 1855, Russian naval minister Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich called for “‘young talented writers’ [to] investigate the ‘way of life’ of people in Archangel, Astrakhan, Orenburg, and along the Volga” (Clay 46). The role of writers as chroniclers of the empire’s far reaches was not new. In the early part of the century, they were often viewed as authoritative figures on the subject of ethnography, in ways strictly objective ethnographers were not. Layton notes that the forerunner of Russian language literature in the nineteenth century, Alexander Pushkin, served a similar role during his time. “So important was the urge to read Pushkin for information that the literary historian Mikhail Alekseev once declared that consumers of [Pushkin’s]

Caucasian tale were looking ‘not for make-believe nor captivating inventions…but rather for facts’” (20). Many in the Russian government, wary of how this cultural tradition might skew research, balked at Konstanin Nikolaevich’s proposal (Clay 48). However, Konstantin

Nikolaevich, being aware of the emerging public interest in realism, in accuracy over the romantic exaggeration of earlier generation, allowed his ethnographers a great deal of freedom

(49-51). The result was ethnographic expeditions spanning 1856-1862, which, Clay comments,

“began to link the various peoples in the empire, the imperial state and educated Russia at a time of social and political dislocation” (45).

While the scope of these ethnographic expeditions was not comprehensive to the entire empire, the ethnographers’ work was nonetheless influential on the Russian discourse on ethnicity of its time (45). Perhaps not surprisingly, the ethnographic details the expeditions focused on bears similarities to how ethnicity is examined in Tolstoy’s work. The writers selected by the naval ministry were reputed for their “depictions of daily experience”, and Grand Bapatla 8

Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich sought writing that would “draw vivid images” of Russian life (46,

49). In other words, imagery and daily experience, as well as activities, were defining aspects of the ethnography. The emphasis on imagery of daily experiences is exemplified in the work of

Aleksei Potekhin. Potekhin, situating himself in a Saratov fishing camp, presented highly detailed portraits of ways of life in the camp. Clay says, “He focused on the construction and use of fishing technology, not only as material culture but as a social process” (56). Clay goes on to describe the elaborate notes Potekhin made of the fishing processes, from where fishermen set up camp, to the kind of wood used for building material, to how rope was woven into nets.

The literary ethnography of 1853-1862 also shares strikingly similar motifs with the eighteen century’s idea of the discovery of the folk. Both involve learned Russians going to the people uneducated in the ways of the urban elite. They both are accompanied by, perhaps even the result of, the development of the Russian state. While the literary ethnographers did not wish to emulate the ways of their subjects like the discovers of the folk did – if anything, some tried to change the people’s ways – both movements sought to make sense of the non-elite classes of their times. In this manner, literary ethnography can be seen as a continuation of the discovery of the folk, updated for the late imperial age. But in lieu of a single, largely uniform folk of the eighteenth-century, the nineteenth-century perceptions of the folk took a more dimensional, multiethnic perspective.

It is into this world that Leo Tolstoy finds himself furtively writing his first story, “A

History of Yesterday”, in 1851. It goes unpublished, but, as Irina Paperino notes, it firmly established an important theme in Tolstoy’s writing – the notion of the self. “The metaphor of the self, or life, as a book, an image to which Tolstoy would return throughout his life, makes its first appearance here” (14). It is a theme that appears wildly unrelated to the wider discussions of Bapatla 9 nationalism and literary ethnography – for one, the Konstantin Nikolaevich-sponsored ethnographic expeditions would not begin until 1856 --, but from how the Tolstoyan self is articulated even in his early works, I believe that the idea of ethnicity is not too far from

Tolstoy’s pen. “A History of Yesterday” is an outgrowth of Tolstoy’s diaries, what might be seen as his earliest writings, began in 1847 (9, 14). His first diary entry, written as Tolstoy convalesced in a hospital ward for treatment of a venereal disease, was deeply introspective with a moral goal: “to exert control over his wayward life” (9). “A History of Yesterday” likewise begins with the narrator’s faults – gambling, carousing, illicit flirtation, and staying up far too late – and his inability to rein those habits in.

The moral aspect of the self is something that pervades Tolstoy’s writings. “In all of

Tolstoy’s self-narratives, from his first diaries to his religious treatises, there is an essential moral and social dimension to the question of the self” (3). Like many scholars, cautions that readers should not make the mistake of confusing the novelist with his characters, she argues that the notion of the self in Tolstoy’s nonfiction self-narratives differ from the notion of the self in his fictional works. However, the idea that the self should have a moral focus finds itself even in his fiction, such as long works like Anna Karenina or shorter ones like Hadji Murat. In spite of the disparate kinds of genres, styles, and ideas that Tolstoy’s works engage in, there are identifiable and consistent ideas of the self throughout.

The moral focus of the self should be geared toward moral action, argues one of Tolstoy’s later nonfictional works, “What Should We Do Then?” -- the very title suggests the emphasis on moral action. The article, a result of Tolstoy’s volunteering in poor neighborhoods in Moscow between 1882-1886, explores the conditions of the dispossessed urban masses and what elite

Russians should do to ameliorate conditions of poverty. “At the core of this treatise … stands the Bapatla 10 philosophical problem of the self and the other” (Paperino 104). The self – in the article’s case, elite and wealthy Russians -- should be morally compelled to act in the interests of looking out for the other – poor, indigent members of society. From this, we can extrapolate two crucial aspects of the Tolstoyan notion of the self here. The self manifests itself through action, and the self is socially defined. Throughout Tolstoy’s writing, the self is never divorced from a social position. The self for “What Should We Do Then?” is the self of the article’s presumed reader, a privileged and elite member of society in a position to effect change.

Unlike Tolstoy’s nonfictional works, where there is generally a single “self” being explored, often, the self of the narrator; in his fictional works, there are multiple selves. In Anna

Karenina for instance, the self of Anna Karenina is distinct from the self of Konstantin Levin.

Her self is, in part, defined by her status as the wife of a high-ranking Petersburg bureaucrat, whereas Levin is defined by his rural origins and his modest aristocratic background. Their selves are manifested by the behaviors they engage in, although I will explain how more thoroughly in the later sections.

The selves that appear in Tolstoy’s fiction are as numerous as the people that populate the

Russian state. In his works, readers encounter rich and poor, Slavic and non-Slavic, male and female, urban and rural, Western and non-Western selves. The works consistently examine the lives of characters through an ethnographic eye. The characters’ daily experiences are depicted in rich images. Similar to the work of Potekhin, the subjects’ material realities are presented in painstaking detail, emphasizing that reality as a “social process.” Finally, echoing Konstantin

Nikolaevich’s initial call for ethnographic sketches of Russia, Tolstoy’s works attempt to get at their characters’ “ways of life.” In the following section, I will go into more detail about how ethnicity is described in Tolstoy’s works, using a close text analysis of scenes from Hadji Murat Bapatla 11 and Anna Karenina. First I will show how this functions in Hadji Murat, extrapolate a framework, and apply this framework to an analysis of Anna Karenina.

Ethnicity Marked on the Body:

Ethnic Signifiers in Hadji Murat:

Hadji Murat opens with the eponymous protagonist quietly riding into a Chechen aoul.

Immediately the narrator assumes his role as literary ethnographer. Layton, in her analysis of the novella, comments that, “Tolstoy insists on Hadji Murat’s distinctive cultural identity…the first chapter details characteristic architecture and the furnishings of a house, particular types of utensils and foods, and the native dress of men and women, and Islam as a respected creed”

(267). What Layton calls cultural, I call ethnographic.

Riding up to the second saklya in the lane, dug into the hillside, he stopped and looked around. There was no one on the porch in front of the saklya, but on the roof, behind the freshly whitewashed clay chimney, a man lay covered with a sheepskin coat…An old man rose from under the sheepskin coat, in a nightcap and a shiny, tattered beshmet… “Aleikum salaam,” said the old man… recognizing Hadji Murat, and, getting up on his skinny legs. (5)

In the passage, we not only see examples of architecture, clothing, and language, we see how densely ethnographic material is contained in such a short space. Layton’s key word is

“insists.” Readers are given little help in understanding unfamiliar words and phrases, requiring them to assume an outsider position. The narrator does not privilege his Russian audiences’ desire to understand completely, but first forces them to consider Chechen culture as autonomous and unconcerned with their own needs.

Hadji Murat is soon welcomed into the saklya of his aoul contact. Along with Hadji Murat and the old man, the narrator describes three other men in the opening scene: Sado, Hadji

Murat’s contact; Eldar, Hadji Murat’s murid, a member of Hadji Murat’s retinue; and Bato, a

Chechen guide. Each man’s body is richly marked with signifiers, revealing clues about they live Bapatla 12 their lives. In other words, ways of living bear evidence on the body. Some signifiers are largely held in common, while others appear specific to individuals. It is in the interplay of individual and common signifiers that the Tolstoyan discourse of ethnicity exists. I will focus on signifiers marked on legs, but my analysis could apply to signifiers marked in other places on the body as well.

Eldar enters Sado’s saklya “stepping softly … with the big strides of his strong legs” (7).

Signifiers, being descriptions, are often expressed grammatically through modifiers. The signifiers contained in this line are the adjectives “big” and “strong.” Eldar is marked by the strength of his legs and the size of his strides. Crucially, we see a link between the physical characteristic, strong legs, and the action, big strides. Just this brief line reveals an key aspect of the Tolsotyan discourse on ethnicity; characteristics imply behaviors. The reader can then consider why Eldar’s body is marked in this manner.

There are likely two main reasons. Eldar is a protector of an endangered man. Physical leg strength would be an asset to anyone in his situation. Eldar, as a Caucasian warrior, is a skilled horseman. The respective reasons are unique to Eldar as an individual and common to a group of people’s ways of life, creating an interplay that manifests on his body in the form of strong legs.

If Eldar had strong legs only for his individual reason, we could not say his leg strength was an ethnic signifier, since it was not rooted the horse-riding practices of his larger community.

However, if the Eldar marked for the reason common among Caucasian peoples only, the narrator would not have been explicating ethnicity, but engaging in a discourse of Othering. In other words, Eldar’s individual and cultural identities must be presented in tandem to signify his ethnicity. Bapatla 13

The behavior-characteristic interplay is mostly straightforward in the sense that behavior leads to characteristics. But there is a third factor that is involved in a relationship of exchange: status. Eldar has the status of a murid of a fugitive Avar chief, which requires him to take certain actions, like extensive time riding horses. There does not appear to be a clear causal relationship between behavior and status — or, for that matter, characteristics and status. While Eldar’s large legs are a symbol of his power, the man with the greatest status in Hadji Murat’s entourage is a man with a limp: Hadji Murat himself. Hadji Murat’s status as an Avar chief supersedes Eldar’s status. Now we will turn to Anna Karenina, where affecting characteristics can be a means of attaining status.

The Affectation of Ethnic Signifiers in Anna Karenina:

The narrator of Anna Karenina is not the same literary ethnographer of Hadji Murat, but he is nevertheless equally involved in examining ethnicity. Anna Karenina opens with Konstantin

Levin, an aristocrat living out in the country, arriving in Moscow to ask for the hand of Princess

Kitty Shcherbatskaya in marriage. His arrival comes immediately after his friend, Stepan

Arkadyevich Oblonsky is discovered as having an affair by his wife.

Levin editorializes throughout Anna Karenina and often supplants the narrator’s need to operate as literary ethnographer. As Russian translator Pevear points out, Tolstoy’s own wife noted the striking similarities between the character and the writer by saying, “‘Levin is you’”

(xii). It is a somewhat flawed lens through which to view the novel, but we can imagine Levin, for practical purposes, as a surrogate for many of the novel’s opinions. The literary ethnographer of Anna Karenina is therefore not the narrator, but the character Levin.

A second distinction between the ethnographer of Hadji Murat and Levin is their means of describing ethnicity. Hadji Murat’s narrator views and describes ways of living, framing a point Bapatla 14 of view for the reader without dictating an opinion. The narrator of Anna Karenina allows readers to view the vantage point of the novel’s ethnographer, allowing them to critique him, but the narrator also allows Levin to directly discuss ethnicity in a way that does not occur in Hadji

Murat.

In spite of their incredible personality gap, Oblonsky and Levin have remained close. For advice on the proposal, Levin consults Oblonsky over dinner. The Moscow restaurant, which

Oblonsky has chosen, disturbs Levin. Oblonsky asks after him, to which he replies:

“‘Me? Yes, I’m preoccupied. But, besides, I feel constrained by all this,’ he said. ‘You can’t imagine how wild all this is for a countryman like me — or take the nails of that gentleman I saw in your office…’ ‘…In the country we try to keep our hands in a condition that makes them convenient to work with; for that we cut our nails and sometimes roll up our sleeves. While here people purposely let their nails grow as long as they can, and stick on saucers instead of cuff-links, so that it would be impossible for them to do anything’” (35-36)

Levin articulates a clearly similar discourse on ethnicity. He identifies a link between behavior and physical characteristic by saying, “we try to keep our hands in a condition that makes them convenient to work with.” The evidence of manual labor is borne on the worker’s hands, in the form of nails; short nails signify the frequent practice of manual labor, long nails signify the absence. While this passage does not highlight the specificities of individual life, it does suggest ways of living within separate groups leading to the formation of distinct signifiers.

The long nails are not simply emblematic of a single clerk but are marked on many of his profession.

There is a notable addition to the Tolstoyan discourse of ethnicity that we see in this passage and not the opening scene of Hadji Murat (although it is present in later scenes): the notion of the affected versus the authentic. Oblonsky’s response to Levin’s anxieties in the previous passage demonstrates this. “Yes, it’s a sign that he has no need of crude labour. His Bapatla 15 mind works…” (36). Strikingly, Oblonsky himself identifies his clerk’s nails as a “sign” or signifier for his behavior. This strongly suggests that the grooming of the clerk’s nails was a conscious attempt to signal characteristics to others. In other words, the clerk wanted shape his peers’ perception of him by affecting markings.

It is an unusual decision for Levin because, for him, the body’s characteristics serves a linear, casual purpose. Like he says of rural works, “we cut our nails and sometimes roll up our sleeves” to do a specific task that requires short nails and sleeves. There is no reason to grow one’s nails to do manual, let alone mental, labor. What confuses Levin is that the system of signifiers functions differently for Oblonsky, as a Muscovite aristocrat. The signs are a form of social currency, where a sign stands in for a not entirely related behavior. As a social currency, the sign is affected to show others that one behaves a certain way because one possesses a certain status. By affecting characteristics, the implication is that the clerk is fabricating signs, instead of allowing them to authentically originate. In other words, the evidence the clerk bears on his body is false.

The narrator, engaging in a free and indirect discourse with Levin, suggests that the inauthenticity of Muscovite society poses a spiritual crisis: “These surroundings of bronze, mirrors, gas-lights, Tartars — it was all offensive to him. He was afraid to soil what was overflowing in his soul” (35). While Hadji Murat is more ethnographic, in Anna Karenina the narrator more closely establishes a link between ethnicity and the self. Levin’s soul in this passage could easily be described as Levin’s self; the relevant point is that both words describe an inner being. Levin’s surroundings are markedly urban, cosmopolitan -- there are no gas-lights and Tatars in the countryside where he comes from. The characterization of the surroundings is in line with Rogger’s contrast between the inauthenticity of the urban, Westernized setting and Bapatla 16 the authenticity of the countryside of the narod. In this passage, we see quite viscerally the contrast; the urban surroundings are essentially attacking Levin’s self, like a disease attacking the body.

It is curious that Levin, in making sense of ethnicity, engages in ethnic prejudice. The

Tatars, who work as waiters, become mere ornaments in Levin’s description of the restaurant – objects that he feels are showy, but unreflective of true life. Levin is not alone in objectifying the

Tatar waiters; they are likely hired by the restaurant to exude an urbane and sophisticated environment, where aristocratic Russians can get a taste of the exotic right in the city. This is part of what Oblonsky when he suggests civilization is expressed through leisure. Levin contests

Oblonksy’s concept of civilization; however, he does not contest objectification of the Tatar waiters. In this way, we can note an interesting facet of the Tolstoyan discourse on ethnicity. It may reject Westernizing impulses, but not necessarily for the sake of egalitarianism.

Ethnicity Marked on Domestic Space:

If ethnicity is the way actions leave signifiers on the body, then environments, which facilitate and limit a range actions, must play a crucial role in creating ethnicity. The focus of the following section will therefore be on ethnicity’s relationship with space, with an emphasis on domestic spaces — in other words, homes. Characters in Hadji Murat and Anna Karenina use their homes to facilitate and construct a way of life, and through their homes, selves. We begin again with the opening scene of Hadji Murat to look at the home life of Sado, Hadji Murat’s

Chechen contact. We continue to the domestic lives of key Russian imperial officials living in the Caucasus and their attempts, in microcosm, to colonize the space they inhabit. We then turn to Anna Karenina and Alexei Vronksy in Anna Karenina and how they construct a way of life Bapatla 17 beyond Russian society in Italy. Finally, we end with the home lives of Kitty and Levin within the heart of Russia, markedly detached from the cosmopolitan urban ways of life in Moscow and

Petersburg. The two works make an argument that there is a relationship between where one lives and the ethnic signifiers one finds on their bodies. There is an element of determinism in how space impacts ethnicity; certain spaces tend to give rise to certain behaviors, which bear evidence on the body.

Ethnic Signifiers in Spaces in Hadji Murat:

The ethnographic gaze Tolstoy’s narrator fixes on bodies in the Chechen aoul is first focused on the aoul's surroundings. Like much of Russian literature on the Caucasus, the novella begins with images of the mountains. However, in a departure from Russian literary convention,

Hadji Murat only briefly touches on the inorganic aspects of the aoul and places a heavy emphasis on life:

The strained chanting of the muezzin had just died down, and in the clear mountain air, saturated with the smell of kiyak smoke, one could hear distinctly, through the lowing of cows and the bleating of sheep dispersing among the saklyas, stuck tightly together like a honeycomb, the guttural sounds of arguing male voices and women’s and children’s voices coming from the spring below. (5)

Layton points out that “Tolstoy persistently constitutes the cultural rather than ‘mountain’ milieu throughout the novel” (268). Indeed, this, the third sentence of the novella’s narrative, strains under the weight of the number of ethnographic details. The readers see a wide panorama of animal, insect, and human life. The images that are not visual — the auditory and olfactory details — are also deeply organic. In contrast to the terra nullius depictions of the Caucasus employed by earlier Russian authors with their emphasis on the mountains and the Russian Bapatla 18 poetic hero, Tolstoy’s narrator begins his anti-colonial novella with striking imagery of

Caucasian life.

In much the same way that leg strength and skin tans form signifiers of ethnicity marked on the body, organic images form ethnic signifiers marked on the environment. I am not suggesting that land has ethnicity, but land certainly bears evidence of its people’s ways of living. A land teeming with sheep, cows, and bees is home to a people with an agrarian means of living.

Presumably, people with agrarian forms of living do extensive manual labor, and the impact of the labor appears on the body — for instance, in the skin tans that mark almost all the members of the Chechen aoul.

In and of itself, the notion that bodies that exist in rural environments are physically changed by them is hardly noteworthy, but in the Tolstoyan discourse on ethnicity, rural environments have implications on behavior and the self beyond the obvious. There is a consistent correlation in Tolstoy’s work between, on the one hand, rural life and intimacy, and, on the other hand, conservatism and urban living, isolation, and modernism. Particularly, this paradigm manifests itself most strongly in depictions of women.

The women of Eldar’s saklya, living in a rural milieu, are dedicated to domestic labor. As soon as Hadji Murat enters, Eldar’s wife respectfully greets him and sets about arranging a place for him to sit. All this in spite, the readers later learn, her misgivings about welcoming a fugitive into her home. “‘Your coming bodes good fortune,’ she [Eldar’s wife] said and, bending double, she began to arrange the pillows by the front wall for the guest to sit on. ‘May your sons live long,’ replied Hadji Murat.” In addition to respect, there is a warmth to this interaction. While the two may be trading polite greetings customary in their situation, it is hard not to note Bapatla 19 intimacy in their words. Eldar’s wife praises Hadji Murat, while Hadji Murat sends blessings to some of the closest members of her family.

In spite of the warmth between the men and women in the saklya – a Chechen home --, there is a distance. As the men become situated, the women of the saklya come forth to serve them:

One was Sado’s wife, the same thin, middle-aged woman who had arranged the pillows. The other was a very young girl in a red sharovary and a green beshmet, with a curtain of silver coins covering her whole breast. At the end of her black braid, not long but stiff, thick, which lay between the shoulder blades on her thin back, hung a silver rouble; the same black-currant eyes as her father and brother shone merrily on her young face, which was trying to look stern. She did not glance at the guests, but was obviously aware of their presence. (9).

The narrator implies that the young girl deliberately does not directly address the guests. She also attempts, albeit unsuccessfully, to affect a stern manner around the men. This may be due to a cultural custom or this particular girl’s personality — although, it is likely the former — but either way, there is a tacit acknowledgement of the separateness of male and female spheres in her behavior. Adding to the conservative behavior of the young girl is the conservative clothing she wears. Her skin is largely covered in this scene by either jewelry or clothing and therefore separated from the gazes of the men. The separateness she demonstrates through her behavior is manifested on her body as well. In that way, again, we see a link between behavior and the body.

But what is new is the third element in this scene — the space in which she enacts this behavior.

The merry gleam in her eyes suggests that, naturally, the young girl has a vivid and lively personality. In another context, she might be a gregarious and amiable presence in the novella.

However, in the saklya in the midst of men, she adjusts her behavior toward modesty.

Hadji Murat offers the scene of a second domestic space, one that contrasts sharply with scene of the sakyla. The fortress of inhabited by the Russian Prince Semyon Mikhailovich Bapatla 20

Vorontsov, the commander of the Kurinsky regiment, although located in the heart of the

Caucasus, has a distinctly high society flavor. The narrator remarks, “To Vorontsov, especially to his wife, it seemed that they lived not only a modest life, but one filled with privation; but this life astonished the local people by its extraordinary luxury” (15). From the modesty of the saklya, the novella transitions fairly quickly to the false modesty of the fortress. The luxury of

Vorontsov’s lifestyle itself is a signifier, much like the long nails on Oblonsky’s clerk. And as with the nails, the luxury of their home is affected — the word luxury, by its very definition, implies an excess. Vorontsov’s way of life is not designed for necessity, but in order to make an impression on others. It is not coincidental, therefore, that the first scene at the fortress is during a small party.

The readers enter the scene of a card game between Voronstov and other officers, with

Marya Vassilievna spectating. Poltoratsky, an officer under Voronstov, becomes intoxicated by the wife of his superior. “In her words, and in her glances, and in her smile, and in all the movements of her body, and in the scents that wafted from her, there was something that drove

Poltoratsky to obliviousness of everything except the awareness of her proximity, and he made mistake after mistake” (15). The attitude Poltoratsky has toward Marya Vassilievna is markedly different than Hadji Murat’s men toward Sado’s relatives. In place of the conscious attempts to avoid eye contact, we see intermittent glances between the officer and the wife. In place of the covered body of the young girl, we see direct mention of Marya Vassilievna’s body and an aroma exuding from her. In place of the clear acknowledgement of their relationship, we see flirtations with the boundary that separates Poltoratsky and Marya Vassilievna. The irony of this openness is that Poltoratsky and Marya Vassilievna are enacting a farce. While there may appear to be more intimacy between the two than any man and woman in the saklya, their intimacy is Bapatla 21 predicated on the affectation of inauthentic selves. In truth, they are isolated from one another, since they do not interact through their true selves but affected selves. Neither comes away with true knowledge of the other.

The novella suggests this party is symptomatic of a larger urban culture in Russian society.

The narrator also goes out of his way to note that Marya Vassilievna, Voronstov’s wife, is a famous Petersburg beauty, therefore that she is a highly sought-after socialite in Petersburg society. Since women played a central organizing role in social events and often cultivated a party’s atmosphere, the mention that Marya Vassilievna comes from Petersburg is no small detail

(Jeske 1). The novella posits that the card game party, as a product of a prominent Petersburg socialite, is a reproduction of Petersburg society in the Caucasus. The fortress becomes the imposition of the ways of living in the Westernized, urbanized St. Petersburg on a Caucasian setting. It is an old idea, one that Rogger explains: “Town and court are corrupting influences not merely by the accident of environment or geography, but by the fact that the social groups that consider them their territory have become estranged from the real Russia” (132). We could also substitute the phrase “real Russia” with real life. The distinction between households in Hadji

Murat largely adheres to Rogger’s paradigm, with Sado’s saklya being the real life of the place and Voronstov’s fortress being estranged from that real life.

Ethnic Signifiers in Spaces in Anna Karenina:

In a way, homes form the center of Anna Karenina as a domestic novel. As their relationship flourishes, Vronsky and Anna consciously take the idea of constructing a way of living through a house in a different direction than any character in Hadji Murat. They move to

Italy and begin to enact of lifestyle of a Europeanized tourist. Their ability to maintain this way of living rests on the palazzo that becomes their home: Bapatla 22

The old, neglected palazzo, with stucco moldings on its high ceilings and frescoes on its walls, with mosaic floors, heavy yellow damask curtains on its high windows, urns on consoles, and mantelpieces, carved doors and sombre halls hung with pictures — this palazzo, once they had moved into it, by its very appearance maintained the agreeable illusion in Vronksy that he was not so much a Russian landowner, a chief equerry without a post, as an enlightened amateur and patron of the arts — and also a modest artist himself — who had renounced the world, connections, ambition for the woman he loved. (466) [my italics]

This passage highlights not only how homes become an extension of the self, but how characters in Tolstoy’s work can construct homes to affect a false sense of self. Again, readers see ethnic signifiers all over the interior of the palazzo — high ceilings and frescos, mosaic floors — that evoke ideas of a medieval Italian cultural milieu. For Vronsky, these signifiers matter a great deal, since the palazzo “by its very appearance” maintains an illusion for him of a way of living.

The signifiers not only suggest that he lives in a medieval Italian home, but that he is

“enlightened” and “a patron of the arts” — in a phrase, a renaissance man. And what better place to become a renaissance man than in Italy?

Even more interesting than what Vronksy attempts to become through his palazzo is the identity he forgoes. Vronsky’s reasoning curiously suggests there is a dichotomy between being an enlightened man and a Russian landowner — or, at the very least, a mutual exclusivity. The word enlightened is itself charged, since it evokes ideas not only of a progressive political persuasion, but the Western philosophical movement, the Enlightenment. Thus, Vronsky believes his Italian way of living is, in contrast to a backward, orthodox, and repressive Russian lifestyle, progressive, Western, and egalitarian

Unlike what Vronksy may believe, the Italian trip is, in multiple ways, highly Russian. It reflects what Alexander Etkind calls the “cosmopolitan project” of the Russian empire (5). He cannot maintain his lifestyle without income from his land, worked tirelessly by menial laborers.

His near effortless mobility is tied to his status as a Russian aristocrat; a member of the lower Bapatla 23 classes would not have been able to journey to Italy, let alone live there. The Russian political system was designed to be “a viable and competitive power” of its time, comparable to “other

European empires” (Etkind 5). In other words, Vronsky is able to live in Italy, not in spite of being Russian, but because he is Russian. The narrator makes reference to the irony by pointing out Vronsky’s new identity is “an agreeable illusion.”

The agreeable illusion not only facilitates a new identity, but new ways of living. The readers see Vronsky and Anna engage in a domestic life. Violators of Russian societal norms, they attempt to adopt through Italy a new cultural milieu to fit their lives. It is one predicated on a more egalitarian relationship between man and woman, where the woman in a romantic heterosexual relationship can engage intellectually with the man and his male friends. This can be seen when Golenishchev, a Russian also living in Italy, visits Vronsky and Anna’s Italian palazzo. Vronksy, who has taken up painting in Italy, strikes up a conversation with

Golenishchev about a reputed local painter. Throughout Golenishchev and Vronksy’s conversation, Anna interjects, asks questions about the painter, including one about artistic interpretation, meaning, and significance. Throughout the conversation, Anna is depicted as

“cautiously exchanging glances with Vronsky”, especially when she realizes Vronsky is bored by the topic (468). It is not as though other male and female partners in the novel are incapable of non-verbal communication – Levin and Kitty are often seen doing that – but it is the willingness of Anna to put herself so centrally in an intellectual conversation among men that is striking. It is behavior from a female character that cannot happen in any other setting in the novel except a modern, Westernized space dedicated to forging a new lifestyle. But based on novel’s contempt for Vronsky and Anna’s Italian experiment, the novel seems to suggest that there is something not Russian about breaking down strict gender barriers. Bapatla 24

In contrast to the home life of Vronsky, the Russian landowner who tries to distance himself from that status, Levin embraces his status as a rural Russian aristocrat. The rural aspects of his way of living invigorate him:

And, going out to the yard, Levin, like a tree in spring, not yet knowing where and how its young shoots and branches, still confined in swollen buds, will grow, did not himself know very well which parts of his beloved estate he would occupy himself with now…First of all he went to see the cattle. The cows had been let out into the pen and, their new coats shining, warmed by the sun, they lowed, asking to go to pasture. (153).

The richness of imagery in this passage is reminiscent of the opening scenes of Hadji Murat.

Both feature a rural setting, saturated with multiple kinds of imagery. The emphasis on forms of life — trees, cows, for instance — mark Levin’s estate as distinctly agrarian. In this passage, we also see the strongest interaction between the self and environment. The simile of Levin as a tree in spring blurs the line between self and environment, since Levin becomes figuratively part of his surroundings. Even his behavior — searching for things to do on his estate — is likened to the behavior of plants. The convergence between Levin and his rural estate clearly has a therapeutic effect on him, since exposure to the estate constitutes a kind of regrowth. This harmony between self and surroundings, where the environment so strongly confirms and repairs the self, is not experienced by any other character in any other setting in the novel.

In accordance with the Tolstoyan discourse on ethnicity, Levin’s rural estate is a markedly conservative space. Where Vronksy’s Italian palazzo serves as a mechanism for experimenting with progressive male-female relationships, Levin’s estate is a place for traditionalism. After describing Anna and Vronsky’s Italian trip, the novel transitions to Levin’s and Kitty’s life as newlyweds, as if to draw contrasts between beginnings of both relationships. It appears that

Anna and Vronsky are doing better, since we see Levin and Kitty feud almost immediately after the wedding. The first confrontation results from Levin arriving home from the fields a half an Bapatla 25 hour late and Kitty suspecting infidelity. They quietly and separately contemplate the encounter, each coming to understand part of the other’s personality. Eventually…

They made peace. Realizing that she was wrong, but not saying so, she became more tender towards him, and they experienced a new, redoubled happiness in their love. But that did not keep such confrontations from being repeated and even quite frequently, for the most unexpected and insignificant causes. These confrontations also often took place because they did not yet know what was important for the other. (482)

There is a contrast from Anna and Vronsky in the way Levin and Kitty communicate. While both involve understanding one another nonverbally, Levin and Kitty are markedly distant. In lieu of in the moment glances, they feud, separate, brood, and come back together without directly addressing their issues. It is also a little unsettling how frequent their arguments appear to be.

The novel’s suggestion is that in the traditional space of the rural country estate, this is how couples traditionally get along. They are separate, introspective, and reserved in what they say to one another. It is a dubious suggestion to a twenty-first century audience that this is true martial happiness, but the narrator later tells the readers that through their process, Levin and Kitty eventually understand one another. Interestingly, by the end of the novel Anna and Vronsky’s communication method totally breaks down, causing an irreparable rift that ends with Anna’s death.

The Self and Ethnicity:

In Tolstoy’s work, we have seen a moral direction to ethnicity, where some ethnic practices are presented as more “authentic” and others “artificial” and even foreign. Those who follow artificial practices are corrupted by their way of life, whereas those who pursue authentic lifestyles find fulfillment and peace. That ways of life are ethnically defined in Tolstoy’s work might suggest that his works support an idea of ethnic loyalty. After all, in Anna Karenina Bapatla 26

Vronksy and Anna, the Russian couple that abandons their Russian way of life are destroyed in their attempt to adopt a progressive, Western lifestyle. But what to make of Hadji Murat in Hadji

Murat, the Caucasian warrior who abandons the jihad of Shamil, leader of the Caucasian peoples? Or the Russians in that work, who, in service of the Russian Empire, lay waste to civilian settlements and murder children? The most interesting idea that emerges from Tolstoy’s discussion of ethnicity is that the self should be true to his ethnic roots but avoid becoming absorbed in large causes that dubiously relate to him, even if that cause is ethnically defined. The self, instead, should calibrate himself to what is the fundamental unit of ethnicity, his family.

The Song of Hadji Murat’s Mother:

Layton describes Hadji Murat as an “anti-imperial” work, but curiously it is difficult to describe its protagonist as an anti-imperial hero (263). The beginning of the work finds Hadji

Murat attempting to defect from Shamil’s jihad to join the invading Russians. Needless to say, anti-imperial heroes do not frequently fight for the imperialists. As the novella progresses, the readers discover the reason for Hadji Murat’s defection – Shamil’s men have slain members of

Hadji Murat’s family and nearly killed Hadji Murat himself. He also holds what remains of Hadji

Murat’s family and threatens to execute them as well if Hadji Murat does not submit to his rule.

He allies himself with the Russians in hopes of extricating his family from Shamil’s clutches.

Therefore, Hadji’s alliance with the Russians is an act of realpolitik in the interest of protecting those dearest to him. Unfortunately, Hadji Murat finds in the Russians unsympathetic comrades, with the Russian leaders much more interested in personal pleasure than good governance.

The respective leaders of the Caucasian and Russian forces, Shamil and Tsar Nicholas I are not depicted as highly concerned with the cause of protecting or promoting the culture they lead.

Shamil does not appear to be primarily interested in the cause of defending the Caucasian Bapatla 27 peoples’ way of life nor is Nicolas I engaged in the civilizing mission his imperial forces maraud under. Instead, Layton points out, Shamil and the Nicholas I are tyrannical in similar ways, interested above all in personal image (276). Let us turn to Nicholas.

The Russian Tsar is presented as a fickle minded and venal presence that Russian administrators have to work around – though his Russian administrators are not much better.

Despite the fact that the plan of a slow movement into enemy territory by means of cutting down forests and destroying provisions was the plan of Ermolov and Velyaminov, and the complete opposite of Nicholas’s plan, according to which it was necessary to take over Shamil’s residence at once and devastate that nest of robbers, and according to which the Dargo expedition of 1845 had been undertaken, at the cost of so many human lives – despite that, Nicholas also ascribed to himself the plan of slow movement, the progressive cutting down of forests, and the descruction of provisions. It would seem that, in order to believe that the plan…was his plan, it would be necessary to conceal the fact that he had precisely insisted on the completely opposite military undertaking of the year forty-five. But he did not conceal it and was proud both of his plan of the expedition … and the plan of slow movement…(70).

The seemingly small aside in this passage “at the cost of so many human lives” is in many ways this passage’s crux. The narrator lays out the laborious work needed to maintain Nicholas’s sense of himself as an intelligent leader of the Russian forces, presenting each step in a plan that must be ratified and approved at the highest levels – in other words, each step that Nicholas must take pride in. He is not made to reflect on, yet alone feel remorse for, the deaths his ill- considered strategies causes. The deaths, instead, become an aside for him, as they are in the passage. It is a startling portrait of a man who is purported to be the benevolent leader of Russian peoples, Christ’s intermediary on Earth, and thus caretaker of even the weakest of his flock.

Instead, the weakest of his flock become causalities in the project of Nicholas I’s ego, certainly not martyrs in the cause of spreading Christendom and the Russian way of life.

Nicholas’s feelings toward ethnic identifications, in spite of being the official fount of

Russian values, is strikingly artificial. The narrator comments, “He had done much evil to the Bapatla 28

Poles. To explain that evil he had to be convinced that all Poles were scoundrels. And Nicholas regarded them as such and hated them in proportion to the evil he had done them” (71). This is not a man with a nuanced, considered view of ethnic differences, the importance of tradition in maintaining community, etc. Nicholas, instead, adopts whatever opinion of large groups of people he needs to justify his actions.

In sharp contrast to Nicholas and Shamil is Hadji Murat’s relationship to tradition. Near the end of the novella, as he contemplates abandoning his shaky alliance with the Russians that has failed to reunite him with his son, Hadji Murat remembers his mother.

Hanefi’s song reminded him of another song, one that his mother had made up. This song told about something that had actually happened – it had happened when Hadji Murat was just born, but his mother had told him about it. The song went like this: “Your Damascus dagger tore my white breast, yet I put it to my little sun, my boy, I washed him in my hot blood, and the wound healed without herbs and roots, I did not fear death, nor will my dzhigit boy” (103).

The song tells the story of Hadji Murat’s birth. His mother was ordered to nurse the newly born son of the khan, her ruler. However, she refused, not wanting to leave her own son. Hadji

Murat’s father, in a rage, attacked his mother. The song is taken from her reply to her husband.

The song is both newly invented and rooted in tradition. It is rooted in tradition in the sense that oral storytelling was very much a longstanding part of Caucasian culture. Unlike the artificial ways Nicholas and Shamil live, the song is natural. Layton comments of the song, “In this case, Tolstoy insists upon the naturalness of song-making as part of the tribes’ world, while underscoring culturally distinct experiences of childhood” (278). The song, in this way, is a demonstration of ethnicity as we have so far described: originating in a common experience but accounting for individual experience as well. The dual newness and traditionalness allows the song to function as an organic expression of ethnicity; the song takes from the old but adapts to Bapatla 29 fit to present needs. In other words, it does not argue for ethnic identification that is recalcitrant or based on blind ethnic loyalties.

The song’s nature is noteworthy, since it is about defiance to larger causes for the sake of one’s family. It is the fullest expression of a novella that presents large organizations as fatally apathetic and pitted against the needs of ordinary people. This paradigm leaves Hadji Murat with a dilemma. If he does not fit in with the Russians or the Caucasians, where does that place him?

As Hadji Murat considers where his self belongs, he realizes his self belongs to his family. In the same way he inherits his mother’s traditional song and her will to be true to her ways of living, he inherits his ethnically defined self through his mother.

The Serbian War and the Self in Anna Karenina:

This emphasis on familial loyalty, in contrast to loyalty to larger causes, is seen in Anna

Karenina as well. The epilogue of the novel sees a broken Vronsky attempting to make sense of his life in the aftermath of Anna’s suicide. Like many members of the Russian intelligentsia, including Levin’s own brother, he becomes immensely interested in the cause of Serbian nationalism, as part of what we may call a greater pan-Slavic cause (Petrovich 420). The novel does not depict Vronsky directly -- the readers learn of his decision through conversation between the women of the Levin household – so it is difficult to truly make sense of his actions, but based on Vronsky’s character, some critiques can be made. It is an interesting decision for

Vronsky, who once turned his back on Russian society, to now stake his life for the sake of

Russian values in Serbia. Perhaps his decision is precisely the result of his abandonment of

Russia earlier in the novel. He may view his turning from Russia as a catalyst in Anna’s death, and he views fighting for Serbian independence as a kind of penance. However, Levin remains dubious of the cause of the Serbs and pan-Slavism. Bapatla 30

In spite of his great interest in Sergei Ivanovich’s plan – something completely new to him and which he had not heard to the end – for how the liberated forty millions of the Slavic world, together with Russia, were to start a new epoch in history … as soon as he left the drawing room and was alone he at once remembered his morning thoughts. And all those considerations about the meaning of the Slavic element in world history seemed insignificant to him compared to what was happening in his soul (813).

Levin’s philosophical musings in the epilogue place the self above pan-Slavism and even greater historical events. It appears contradictory to the thesis that the self is ethnically defined, if – as it appears in this passage – the self is above or separate from concerns of ethnicity. After all, Sergei

Ivanovich purportedly fights on the behalf of the “liberated forty millions of the Slavic world.”

However, I do not believe Levin is placing the self outside the bounds of ethnicity; he instead places the self outside the vaguely defined political causes that are more rooted in ideas than human life. Levin’s “morning thoughts” are those of faith and family, conventional identifiers of ethnicity. He attempts to reconcile various world faiths, which again may suggest the self exists outside of ethnicity. However, his stance on faith is rooted in his faith in Christianity, as a

Russian male. I believe this is the novel suggesting that the practice of ethnicity should allow for some fluidity, instead of being rigidly set. His morning thoughts reach their conclusion in some of the last lines of the novel:

I’ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I’ll accuse her in the same way of my own fear then regret it …but my life now… every minute of it, is not only meaningless, as it was before…but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it! (817).

What Levin describes, to me, appears quite similar to the “daily experiences” that the ethnographic expeditions of 1856-1863 tried to capture. These are mundane, everyday social encounters, each too insignificant to record on their own, but for Levin “every minute of it” is what is meaningful. They are marked as domestic behaviors, the kinds of actions that often occur Bapatla 31 in a conservative rural space like the Russian estate. The community, locality, and insularity of loved ones and faith as bearers of ethnicity are where the Tolstoyan self finds itself.

Conclusion:

As I have demonstrated, ethnicity is a central component of Tolstoy’s work. The self, an often-noted aspect of his work, is ethnically defined. Ethnicity, on some level, implies morality; characters that abandon their ethnic ties do so at their own peril. However, ethnic ties should not be confused with ties to greater causes, but instead the self should root himself in his local surroundings and community as much as possible. It is difficult to make sense of works like

Anna Kareninak, which, on the surface, do not have a focus on ethnicity, without a focus on ethnicity. The dual stories of the novel, the romance between Anna and Vronsky and the marriage of Levin and Kitty, has little cogency without attention to how these characters craft a sense of self through their ethnicity. The ethnically defined self is manifested first through the body of the self, extending outward to the self’s lived space. The self’s behavior within his environment leads to the manifestation of ethnic signifiers on the body. However, ethnic signifiers can be fabricated on the body as well as on the self’s lived space. This false evidence is the product of a lifestyle that is removed from authentic ways of living. An analysis of works like

Anna Karenina can begin with works like Hadji Murat, which feature clearly multiethnic casts.

On the whole, I hope I have presented an analysis that can better enrichen our understanding of this author’s remarkable intellectual legacy. It is one that continues to provide readers insight into our world to this day. Bapatla 32

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