"Who, What Am I?"

Irina Paperno teaches Russian literature and intellectual history at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams and Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia.

Introduction

Chapter 1. "So That I Could Easily Read Myself": Tolstoy's Early Diaries

Tolstoy Starts a Diary—The Moral Vision of Self and the Temporal Order of Narrative—What Is Time? Cultural Precedents—“A History of Yesterday”— Time and Narrative—The Dream: The Hidden Recesses of Time—What Am I? The Young Tolstoy Defines Himself—What Am I? Cultural Precedents

Interlude: Between Personal Documents and Fiction

From Diaries to Childhood: Tolstoy Becomes a Writer (1852)—“I Think I Will Never Write Again”: Tolstoy Attempts to Renounce Literature (1859)—“I . . . Don’t Even Think about the Accursed Lit-t-terature and Lit-t-terateurs”: Tolstoy Renounces Literature Again (1870); and Again (1874–75)

Chapter 2. “To Tell One’s Faith Is Impossible. . . . How to Tell That Which I Live By. I’ll Tell You, All the Same. . . .” Tolstoy in His Correspondence

“What Is My Life? What Am I?”: Tolstoy’s Philosophical Dialogue with Nikolai Strakhov—“I Wish that You, Instead of Reading Anna Kar [ enina ], Would Finish It. . . .”—“In the Form of Catechism,” “In the Form of a Dialogue”—To Tell One’s Life—Rousseau and His Profession/Confession—The Parting of Ways: Tolstoy Writes His Confession, and Strakhov Continues to Confess in His Letters to Tolstoy

Chapter 3. Tolstoy’s Confession : What Am I?

Tolstoy Publishes his Confession—The Conversion Narrative: Excursus on the Genre—Tolstoy’s Confession : Step by Step—Tolstoy’s Confession Related to Rousseau’s and Augustine’s—After Confession: “Presenting Christ’s Teaching as Something New after 1,800 Years of Christianity”—Coda: Tolstoy’s Influence

Chapter 4. “To Write My Life ”: Tolstoy Tries, and Fails, to Produce a Memoir or Autobiography

The Author Biography—“My Life”: “On the Basis of My Own Memories”—“Reminiscences”: “More Useful Than All That Artistic Prattle with Which the Twelve Volumes of My Works Are Filled”—“Reminiscences”: “I Cannot Provide a Coherent Description of Events and States of Mind”—“The Green Stick”: “Où Suis-Je? Pourquoi Suis-Je? Que Suis-Je?”—Tolstoy and the Autobiographical Tradition

Chapter 5. “What Should We Do Then?”: Tolstoy on Self and Other

“Why Have You, a Man from a Different World, Stopped near Us? Who Are You?”—Master and Slave: Tolstoy Rewrites Hegel—Tolstoy and the Washerwoman—The Order of Things: The Church, the State, the Arts and Sciences—“Master and Man”—Coda: Nonparticipation in Evil

Chapter 6. “I Felt a Completely New Liberation from Personality”: Tolstoy’s Late Diaries

Tolstoy Resumes his Diary—The Temporal Order of Narrative: The Last Day—“On Life and Death ”—The Diary as a Spiritual Exercise—“I, the Body, Is Such a Disgusting Chamber Pot”—“I Am Conscious of Myself Being Conscious of Myself Being Conscious of Myself. . . .”—“I Have Lost the Memory of Everything, Almost Everything. . . . How Can One Not Rejoice at the Loss of Memory?”—Sleeping, Dreaming, and Awakening—Tolstoy’s Dreams—Dreams: The World beyond Time and Representation—The Book of life: “It Is Written on Time”—The Circle of Reading: “To Replace the Consciousness of Leo Tolstoy with the Consciousness of All Humankind”—“The Death of Socrates”—Tolstoy’s Death

Appendix: Russian Quotations

Notes
Index