Rhetoric, metapoesis, and moral instruction in Tolstoy's fiction: 'Childhood, Boyhood, Youth', 'War and Peace' and 'Anna Karenina'

This thesis examines Tolstoy's rhetoric, metapoetics, and moral training of his readers in Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, War and Peace, and Anna Karenina to show how Tolstoy transformed mimetic "infection" into a didactic instrument. Artistry and moralism can seem at odds in Tolstoy's works because his techniques vary depending on his immediate goal: his methods include lectures, laboratory experiments, and classroom discussion. Recent scholarship disputes the concept of "two Tolstoys" but does not foreground the contradictory effects of the author's rhetoric. In fact, Tolstoy's works elicit readerly "mistakes," doubts, and ironic awareness even while putting in place the author's vision of life as the locus of an essential harmony. The first three chapters of this study enter Tolstoy's laboratory and demonstrate that his texts make infectious yet also express the pathos of the author's striving to circumvent mediation. Tolstoy adopts Rousseau's notion that feeling eludes expression in discursive form, and he exalts non-linear, irreducible forms of thought, expression, and communication. These include dreamwork, associative and expressive language, music, and pictures--all metaphors for the transcendence of corporeal and social limits in art, a domain where linkages overcome both contingency and moral separation. At times, Tolstoy adopts a "musicalized" or a "pictorialized" form to transport readers beyond Kantian determinants. By means of his fiction, he forges ties between aesthetic experience, moral striving, and metaphysical inquiry, though he evinces anxiety over art's capacity to circumvent reason. Contra Bakhtin, this study contends that Tolstoy engages his audience dialogically, implicating the reader and subjecting art to moral scrutiny (as in The Kreutzer Sonata and What Is Art?). The dissertation's fourth chapter anchors itself in the phenomenology of reading to examine Tolstoy's classroom in Anna Karenina, where instruction pivots around sympathy for flawed characters. The thesis echoes Morson's call for a poetics of instruction and comments on his influential theory of "prosaics." It also discusses the relationship between Tolstoy's views on art and the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Zola.