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No More Horsing Around: Sex, Love, and Motherhood in Tolstoi's Kholstomer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Ronald D. LeBlanc
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Abstract

By giving us a horse's perspective on human life, Lev Tolstoi's Kholstomer (1886) has usually been recognized in the west as a stellar example of the author's use of “defamiliarization.” Most of the critical attention the story has received in Russia, by contrast, consists of Soviet-era studies diat examine the creative history of the text and/or remark on its satiric elements. In this article, Ronald D. LeBlanc examines instead the treatment of the themes of sex, love, and motherhood in Tolstoi's story about a castrated horse. In particular, he explores the significance that castration— with its accompanying cessation of sexual desire—appears to have in this story about a selfless gelding, a tale that may be read as the expression of a desire on the author's part to be unburdened of the affliction of sexual lust and thus to be freed to pursue a more spiritual, less carnal existence on earth.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 70 , Issue 3 , Fall 2011 , pp. 545 - 568
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2011

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References

1 Epigraphs taken from Ivan Bunin, Osvobozhdenie Tolstogo (Paris, 1937), 45, 104. Il'ia Tolstoi is reported to have made this remark about his famous father in a private conversation with Bunin. An earlier version of this article, “Tenia liubvi v povesti Kholstomer” was presented as a paper at the International Conference, “Tolstoy and World Literature,” held at Iasnaia Poliana in August 2008. I wish to thank Mark D. Steinberg, Jane T. Hedges, and the two anonymous readers for Slavic Review for their helpful suggestions about the manuscript. I also wish to thank the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of New Hampshire for providing the travel support that helped me to conduct research on Tolstoi's Kholstomer and the copyright subvention that allowed for the reproduction of Olaf Gulbransson's caricature. Turgenev recounted this episode to S. N. Krivenko in 1881. See Kleman, M. K., comp., and Piksanov, N. P., ed., /. 5. Turgenevvvospominaniiakhrevoliutsionerov-semidesiatnikov (Moscow-Leningrad, 1930), 237–38.Google Scholar Later that same day, Tolstoi wrote in his diary: “I feel like writing the story of a horse.” See Tolstoi, L. N., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. Chertkov, V. G. (Moscow, 1928–1958; hereafter PSS), 47:78.Google Scholar

2 The deceased writer's brother, A. A. Stakhovich, recounted the story outline for The Adventures of a Piebald Gelding to Tolstoi during a carriage ride die two of them took together from Moscow to lasnaia Poliana in 1859 or 1860. A. A. Stakhovich was the owner of a large horse farm in Orlov province and one of the founders of die Petersburg racing association. Boris Eikhenbaum discusses in detail the relationship between Stakhovich's, M. A. The Adventures of a Piebald Gelding and Tolstoi's Kholstomer in his Lev Tolstoi. Kniga vloraia: 60-egody (Moscow-Leningrad, 1931; reprint, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1965), 154-76.Google Scholar

3 As Andrea Rossing McDowell points out, the title of Tolstoi's story has been rendered into English variously as Strider, The Yardstick, and The Bachelor. See McDowell, , “Lev Tolstoy and die Freedom to Choose One's Own Path”, Journal of Critical Animal Studies 5, no. 2 (2007):Google Scholar 13nl. I will leave the horse's name untranslated, however, because, as we shall see, die etymology of his Russian name (originally Khlystomer, later Kholstomer) best reflects the story's sexual subtext.

4 For critical studies that focus on ostranenie, see, for example, Ginzburg, Carlo, “Making Things Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary Device,” Representations, no. 56 (Fall 1996): 8–28;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Il'ia Nichiporov, “Mir glazami zhivotnogo (Kholstomer L. N. Tolstogo i Sny Changa I. A. Bunina),” in Alekseeva, Galina, ed., Lev Tolstoi i mirovaia literatura: Malerialy VI Mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii (lasnaia Poliana, 2010), 233-38;Google Scholar Pinfold, Debbie, The Child's View of the Third Reich in German Literature: The Eye among the Blind (Oxford, 2001);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Reeves, Charles Eric, “Wittgenstein, Rules, and Literary Language”, Neophiblogus& l, no. 1 (January 1983): 15-20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Shklovskii, Viktor discusses Kholstomeras an example of Tolstoi's signature narrative technique of defamiliarization in 0 teorii prozy (Moscow, 1929), 14–17.Google Scholar

5 See, for example, Opul'skaia, L. D., “Tvorcheskaia istoriia povesti Klwlstomer: Ranniaia redaktsiia (1861–1863)”, in Makashin, S. A., ed., Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 69 (Moscow, 1961), bk. 1, pp. 257–66;Google Scholar Myshkovskaia, L., “Rabota Tolstogo nad Kliolstomerom,“ L. Tolstoi: Rabota i stil’ (Moscow, 1938), 330–68;Google Scholar and Loshchinin, N. P., “Povest’ L. N. Tolstogo Kholstomer” in Popovkin, A. I., ed., Iasnapolianskii sbornik: Stat'i i materialy (Tula, 1960), 27–43.Google Scholar It is Loshchinin who refers to Tolstoi's satire as being “Shchedrinesque” in nature (38).

6 Although largely ignored by Soviet critics, the sexual component in Tolstoi's story about a castrated horse did not escape the attention of some of the author's contemporaries. Vladimir Sollogub, for instance, when reviewing an early redaction of the manuscript in 1863, warned Tolstoi that the explicit sexual language and imagery in Kholstomer were likely to offend the rehnedsensibilitiesof many of his readers. “The very word gelding is itself just as unpleasant as the words eunuch and castrate,” Sollogub wrote to Tolstoi when providing feedback. “It is a direct allusion to the genital parts of the body. Words such as teats and suckling and scenes such as the gelding of the horse and especially the coupling of the mother-mare with the seducer-stallion may probably pass for horsebreeders, but the uninitiated public will wince at this.” See Gruzinskii, A. E., ed., Pis'ma Tolstogo i k Tolstomu: lubileinyi sbornik (Moscow-Leningrad, 1928), 260.Google Scholar

7 “I was twenty-five years old,” Serpukhovskoi reminisces at one point during his visit, “I had an income of 80,000 silver rubles at that time, I had not a single grey hair on my head, I had all my teeth, like pearls … now it is all ended.” See Tolstoi, PSS, 26:34.

8 Susan Layton discusses how one of Afanasii Fet's poems can be read, in part, as a polemical response to this condemnation of luxurious dining in Tolstoi's Kholstomer. See Layton, , “A Hidden Polemic with Leo Tolstoy: Afanasy Fet's Lyric ‘Mine was the madness he wanted …'” Russian Review 66, no. 2 (April 2007): 220-37.Google Scholar

9 Tolstoi, PSS, 26:15.

10 Ibid., 26:14.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., 26:15.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., 26:16.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid., 26:16–17.

18 Ibid., 26:17.

19 Ibid.

20 “Xolstomer's being gelded is not only a perversion of nature,” writes Karen Ryan-Hayes, “but also a senseless waste of his valuable blood lines. Tolstoj succeeds in exposing the landed gentry (represented by Xolstomer's present owner and Serpuxovskoj) as wastrels who unjustly reap the benefits of other men's labors.” See Ryan-Hayes, , “Iskander and Tolstoj: The Parodical Implications of the Beast Narrator,” Slavic and East European Journal 32, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 229.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 In some of his own works, Tolstoi makes this close association between horses and the sex drive. In The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), for example, when Pozdnyshev is describing his wife's animal sexuality, he remarks, “She was like a well-fed, harnessed horse, who had been standing for too long and whose bridle has now been removed.” Tolstoi, PSS, 27:47. The young males of Pozdnyshev's social class, meanwhile, are said to consume the types and quantities of food that inflame their sensuality. “The men of our circle,” Pozdnyshev asserts in a variant version of the text, “are kept and fed like breeding stallions.” Ibid., 27:303.

22 Ibid., 26:17–18.

23 Ibid., 26:18.

24 Ibid., 26:20–21.

25 Ventslova, Tomas [Venclova], “Kvoprosu o tekstovoi omonimii: Puteshestuievstranu guigngnmovi Kholstomer,” in Halle, Morris etal., eds., Semiosis.Semiotics and the History of Culture: In Honorem Georgii Lotman (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1984), 240.Google Scholar Emphasis in the original. Venclova asserts that Gulliver's tirades against the corrupt morals of the Yahoo, especially their voracious sexual appetite, are echoed in Tolstoi's The Kreutzer Sonata (244).

26 Shklovskii, Viktor, “Kholstomer,” in Shklovskii, Izbrannoe v dvukh tomakh (Moscow, 1983), 2:547.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., 2:556.

28 Mirsky, D. S., A History ojRussian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900, ed. Whitfield, Francis J. (Evanston, 1999), 268.Google Scholar

29 Tolstoi, PSS, 26:21.

30 Ibid., 23:47.

31 Costlow, Jane and Nelson, Amy, “Introduction: Integrating the Animal,” in Cosdow, Jane and Nelson, Amy, eds., Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History (Pittsburgh, 2010), 10.Google Scholar Annalisa Zabonati examines Kholstomer in the context of Tolstoi's attitude toward animal rights as well as his evolving vegetarian beliefs. See “La nostra came, la loro came: Tolstoj e gli animali non umani,” Veganzetta: Notizie dal mondo vegan, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 1-15, at www.veganzetta.org/?p=685 (last accessed 31 May 2011).

32 Tolstoi, PSS, 26:5.

33 Ibid., 26:7.

34 Ibid., 23:41.

35 Ibid., 23:22-23.

36 Armstrong, Judith M., The Unsaid Anna Karenina (New York, 1988), 18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar “From his youth to his old age,” writes Ruth Crego Benson, “Tolstoy was body-haunted, obsessed equally by sexual desire and the guilt of sexual satisfaction.” See Benson, , Women in Tolstoy: The Ideal and theErotic (Urbana, 1973), 2.Google Scholar

37 Rancour-Laferriere, Daniel, Tolstoy on the Couch: Misogyny, Masochism, and the Absent Mother (New York, 1998), 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 Mandelker, Amy, Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel (Columbus, 1993), 6. 39.Google Scholar Tolstoi, P5S, 27:81.

40 Miller, Peter Ulf, Postlude to The Kreutzer Sonata: Tolstoj and the Debate on Sexual Morality in Russian Literature in the 1890s, trans. Kendal, John (Leiden, 1988), 192.Google Scholar

41 “The Skoptsy are right when they say that coitus with one's wife is a sin if it is performed without spiritual love and only for the sake of lust, because it does not take place in time [during the woman's ovulation period],” Tolstoi wrote to Vladimir Chertkov in March 1888. “But they are wrong to say that coitus with one's wife is a sin when it is performed for the sake of giving birth and in spiritual love. This is not a sin, but rather the will of God.“ Tolstoi, PSS, 86:139.

42 Edwards, Robert, “Tolstoy and Alice B. Stockham: The Influence of ‘Tokology’ on The Kreutzer Sonata,” Tolstoy Studies Journal 6 (1993): 89.Google Scholar

43 Edwards points out that Stockham's views on sex within marriage, especially those expressed in her later book, Karezza, Ethics of Marriage (1896), did not completely coincide with Tolstoi's; he did not share his American colleague's confidence that under certain conditions nonprocreative sex would be permissible, perhaps even desirable, within marriage. See Edwards, “Tolstoy and Alice B. Stockham,” 91-93.

44 In his diary entry for 9 April 1889, Tolstoi wrote: “I read the Shakers. Excellent. Complete sexual abstinence. How strange that I should receive this precisely now, when 1 am occupied with these questions.” Tolstoi, PSS, 50:64. ‘Just recently I received some letters and brochures from Shakers in America,” Tolstoi wrote to Chertkov later that same month. “Are you familiar with their teachings? They are especially against marriage: that is to say, not against marriage, but for the ideal of chastity over and above marriage. This is the problem that occupies me now, and precisely as a problem.” Ibid., 86:224.

45 For an account of Tolstoi's attitude toward the Dianic program, see Nickell, William, “The Twain Shall Be of One Mind: Tolstoy in ‘Leag’ with Eliza Burnz and Henry Parkhurst,” Tolstoy Studies Journal 6 (1993): 123-51.Google Scholar Nickell correctly observes that the Dianic program of “highly sublimated sensualism” was not entirely in accord with the stern ascetic principles Tolstoi was expressing in his writings during this period (123). Indeed, Nickell's article is especially valuable for the way it shows how Diana was “Christianized“ (purged of its pagan elements) and “Tolstoianized” in Tolstoi's review of this American pamphlet (“On the Relations between the Sexes“). See especially 135–43.

46 “I had become what is called a fornicator [bludnik],” Pozdnyshev confesses about his purported sexual addiction. “To be a fornicator is a physical condition like that of a morphine addict, a drunkard, or a smoker. As a morphine addict, a drunkard, or a smoker is no longer a normal human being, so too a man who has known several women for his pleasure is no longer a normal human being but is a man perverted forever, a fornicator. … A fornicator may restrain himself, may struggle, but he will never have those pure, simple, clear, brotherly relations with a woman…. And so I had become a fornicator and I remained one, and it was this that brought me to ruin.” Tolstoi, PSS, 27:19.

47 Kopper, John, “Tolstoy and the Narrative of Sex: A Reading of ‘Father Sergius,' ‘The Devil,’ and The Kreutzer Sonata,’” in McLean, Hugh, ed., In the Shade of the Giant: Essays on Tolstoy (Berkeley, 1989), 162.Google Scholar

48 Ibid., 168.

49 Matich, Olga, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia's Fin de Siecle (Madison, 2005), 41.Google Scholar

50 Etkind, Aleksandr, Khlyst: Seltty, literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow, 1998), 98.Google Scholar Emphasis in the original. For a detailed study of the rituals and ideology of the Khlysty and Skoptsy religious sects, examined from the perspective of a folkorist and ethnographer, see Panchenko, A. A., Khristovshchina i skopchestvo: Fol'klor i traditsionnaia kul'tura russkikh misticheskikh sekt (Moscow, 2002).Google Scholar

51 Etkind, Khlyst, 99.

52 Ibid., 85-86. Etkind notes that the expression used most frequently for ritual castration among the Skoptsy was “to sit on a piebald horse [sesl’ na pegogo konia’].” Ibid., 93-94.

53 Tolstoi, PSS, 70:224.

54 See the two letters Tolstoi wrote (on 31 December 1897 and 11 March 1898) to G. P. Mer'shenin, an active member of a local sect of self-castrators who corresponded briefly with Tolstoi during the late 1890s. Ibid., 70:223–25, 303–6. Engelstein, Laura discusses Tolstoi's exchange of letters with Mer'shenin in Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale (Ithaca, 1999), 155–57.Google Scholar “Christ preaches chastity, but chastity, like every other virtue, is meaningful when it is achieved by an effort of will, supported by faith, not when it is achieved by the impossibility of sinning,” Tolstoi explains in the first of his two letters to Mer'shenin. “It would be the same,” he adds (resorting to an edifying alimentary analogy), “as if a person, in order not to overeat, were to produce a stomach ailment.“ Tolstoi, PSS, 70:224.

55 “You have to make an effort in order to abstain from sexual relations; the task of life consists in this struggle against temptations,” Tolstoi once explained in a conversation with an elderly Skopets reported by Vladimir Chertkov. “For if a drunkard does not get drunk because he has no money or because no tavern is nearby, then he is not so virtuous. No, you must abstain from sexual relations when there is a possibility of sinning.” See “Svidanie s L. N. Tolstym v Kochetakh,” Reck', 7 November 1913, as quoted in Mark Aldanov, Zagadka Tolstogo, ed. Thomas G. Winner (Providence, 1969), 82-83.

56 Tolstoi, PSS, 86:140.

57 Ibid., 27:7.

58 Ibid., 70:225.

59 McDowell, “Lev Tolstoy and the Freedom to Choose,” 11.

60 Mailer, Postlude to The Kreutzer Sonata, xi, xvii.

61 Tolstoi, PSS, 26:348.

62 Ibid., 28:77, 78.

63 Mikhail O. Menshikov, a literary critic for the journal Nedelia and one of Tolstoi's most zealous followers on issues concerning sexual morality, advocates the same preference for love-as-compassion ﹛zhalenie) over love-as-desire (zhelanie) in his book, 0 liubvi (1899). See Mailer, Postlude (oThe Kreutzer Sonata, 206.

64 Tolstoi, PSS, 46:133–34.

65 These two selves—the one animal, the other divine—that Tolstoi posited in each human being are delineated quite clearly in the narrator's characterization of the young hero, Dmitrii Nekhliudov, in Resurrection (1899): “In Nekhliudov, as in every man, there were two beings,” writes the narrator. “One was the spiritual man, seeking only that kind of happiness for himself that would constitute the happiness of all; the other was the animal man, seeking only his own happiness, and ready to sacrifice to it the happiness of the rest of the world. At this period of his insane egoism, which was brought on by his life in St. Petersburg and in the army, this animal man ruled supreme in him and completely crushed the spiritual man.” Ibid., 32:53.

66 Etkind, Khlyst, 99. Etkind argues that the debauched Serpukhovskoi's surname derives from the Russian word for “scythe” (serf), which implicitly alludes to the motif of castration.

67 Tolstoy, Leo, The Relations of the Sexes, trans. Tchertkoff, V. and A. C.Fifield, (Christchurch, 1901), 42.Google Scholar

68 Tolstoi compared vasdy differing types of death—those of a wealdiy lady, a peasant, and a tree—most famously in “Tri smerti” (Three Deaths, 1859).

69 Bunin, Osvobozhdenie Tolstogo, 224.

70 Tolstoi, PSS, 26:36.

71 Ibid.

72 U Tolstogo 1904-1910: “Iasnopolianskie zapiski” D. P. Makovitskogo. Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 90 (Moscow, 1979), bk. 2, p. 347.

73 “For Kholstomer, as for Ivan Il'ich, death is a liberation,” writes Sergio Campailla in an article that compares Tolstoi's “story of a horse” with Giovanni Verga's “story of an ass” (Storia dell'asino di San Giuseppe, 1881). See Campailla, , “Discorso anomalo su Verga e Tolstoj: La Storia dell'asino di San Giuseppe e Cholstomjer” Italianistica 11, no. 1 (January- April 1982): 67.Google Scholar In her essay, “Tolstoy's Peaceable Kingdom,” Robin Feuer Miller claims that Kholstomer “dies the most ideal death anywhere in Tolstoy's oeuvre.” See Orwin, Donna Tussing, ed., Anniversary Essays on Tolstoy (Cambridge, Eng., 2010), 69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

74 Tolstoi, PSS, 26:37.

75 Ibid., 26:18. In one of the text's variants, when Kholstomer is explaining why Serpukhovskoi does not recognize him, the horse thinks: “He did not recognize me because he is a human being, but I recognized him right away … not him, but his corpse, which was moving and walking on two feet.” Ibid., 26:484.

76 McDowell, “Lev Tolstoy and the Freedom to Choose,” 11. Emphasis in the original.

77 Luke 9:59–60.

78 Ian M. Helfant examines the evolving image of the wolf in late nineteenth-century Russia, where for many years it was culturally demonized as an evil predator. See Helfant, “That Savage Gaze: The Contested Portrayal of Wolves in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” in Costlow and Nelson, eds., Other Animals, 63–76. “Until the final decades of the nineteenth century,” he writes, “it was difficult to find any sort of empathy for wolves, let alone an understanding of their place in a natural system where predation played a necessary role“ (63). Helfant asserts that Tolstoi, who renounced hunting in the 1880s and who wrote the preface to an influential anti-hunting essay, Zlaia zabava (An Evil Pastime, 1890), composed by his friend Vladimir Chertkov, was one of the few voices raised in protest against the widespread animus felt toward wolves in Russia's anti-predator culture.

79 Venclova writes that the wolf-mother in Kholstomer should remind the reader of the mythological lupine mother of Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of ancient Rome. See Ventslova [Venclova], “K voprosu o tekstovoi omonimii,” 240.

80 Myshkovskaia, “Rabota Tolstogo nad Kholstomerom,” 366.

81 John Wright makes a strong case for considering Tolstoi's equine hero a Christfigure in an insightful conference paper titled “Polysemy in Kholstomer: Disassembly of Eucharist, Incarnation, and Resurrection” (paper, annual meeting of AATSEEL, Chicago, December 2007).

82 Jahn, Gary, “A Note on Miracle Motifs in the Later Works of Lev Tolstoy,” in Mandelker, Amy and Reeder, Roberta, eds., The Supernatural in Slavic and Baltic Literature: Essays in Honor of Victor Terras (Columbus, 1988), 191-92.Google Scholar

83 Tolstoi, PSS, 23:50-57. Inessa Medzhibovskaya discusses Tolstoi's understanding of the meaning of the Eucharist and examines his commentary on Nikolai Ge's artistic rendering of the Last Supper (in the painting Tainaia vecheria, 1862) in Medzhibovskaya, , “On Moral Movement and Moral Vision: The Last Supper in Russian Debates,” Comparative Literature, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 23–53 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84 Tolstoi, PSS, 28:54.

85 Mandelker, Amy, “Tolstoy's Eucharistic Aesthetics,” in Donskov, Andrew and Woodsworth, John, eds., Lev Tolstoy and the Concept of Brotherhood (Ottawa, 1996) ,117.Google Scholar

86 John Wright makes precisely this argument in his AATSEEL conference paper, “Polysemy in Kholstomer.” The symbolic connection with the Eucharist might have been even more prominent if Tolstoi had decided to preserve the horse's original name, Khlystomer, since the name of the flagellant religious sect from which the Skoptsy derived (Khlystovshchina) is believed to be a corruption of its original name, Khristovshchina (the “Christ Faith“). See Engelstein, Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom, 13; and Panchenko, Khristovshchina i skopchestvo, 8–9.

87 Cruise, Edwina, “The Ideal Woman in Tolstoi: Resurrection,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 11, no. 2 (1977): 281.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

88 Ibid.

89 For insightful discussions of Tolstoi's treatment of female sexuality, see Cruise, Edwina, “Women, Sexuality, and the Family in Tolstoy,” in Orwin, Donna Tussing, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy (Cambridge, Eng., 2002), 191–205;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Benson, Women in Tolstoy.

90 Cruise, “Women, Sexuality, and the Family in Tolstoy,” 197.

91 Tolstoi, PSS, 85:348.

92 Cruise, “The Ideal Woman in Tolstoi,” 284.

93 Benson, Women in Tolstoy, 11.

94 “A woman's major vocation is to be a mother,” Tolstoi writes in a letter to Valeriia Arseneva, “to be a mother and not simply a childbearer.” Tolstoi, PSS, 60:122.

95 Ibid., 52:157.

96 Gustafson, Richard, Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger. A Study in Fiction and Theology (Princeton, 1986), 14.Google Scholar

97 In terms of Tolstoi's evolved views on sex, love, and marriage, Kholstomer's relationship with Viazopurikha, the filly who initially arouses his carnal appetite when he is a young colt but later befriends him and shows deep compassion for him when he is a decrepit old gelding abused by others, may be said to anticipate the author's postconversion belief that husband and wife ought to strive to maintain a nonprocreative conjugal relationship, living together chastely, like brother and sister, not like sexual lovers.

98 Hugh McLean, “Resurrection,” in Orwin, ed., Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, 106. Emphasis in the original.

99 Feuer, Kathryn B., “Recent Works on Leo Tolstoy,” Russian Review 28, no. 2 (April 1969): 217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar According to Feuer, there is one important difference, however. Tolstoi's heroes, she notes, “lack their creator's brains and talents” (217). Mark Aldanov seems to share this view: “Irtenev, Olenin, Nekhliudov, Levin, each of these people is, of course, a little bit of Tolstoi himself, but only a bit and not entirely.” Aldanov, Zagadka Tolstogo, 90-91. “All of Tolstoi's fiction is autobiographical in some way,” Donna Orwin asserts unequivocally in “Introduction: Tolstoy as Artist and Public Figure,” in Orwin, ed., Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, 54.

100 Ginzburg, Lidiia, O psikhologicheskoi proze (Leningrad, 1977), 299.Google Scholar

101 Shklovskii maintains that Tolstoi's own life experiences are to be found woven into the fabric of Kholstomer: “Tolstoi was a thoroughbred person, he was a man of genius, but he was a piebald both in life and in literature; his peculiar color, his special position in the world, and his apartness were denied recognition.” Shklovskii, Viktor, Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, vol. 2, Lev Tolstoi (Moscow, 1974), 312.Google Scholar

102 “I am ugly, awkward, slovenly, and socially inept,” Tolstoi reports in his diary in 1854. Tolstoi, PSS, 47:8.

103 See, for example, Armstrong, The Unsaid Anna Karenina, 7, 30; and Benson, Women in Tolstoy, x, 4.

104 Rancour-Laferriere, Tolstoy on the Couch, 9, 42–48.

105 Orwin, “Introduction: Tolstoy as Artist and Public Figure,” 49.

106 Feuer, “Recent Works on Leo Tolstoy,” 218.

107 It should strike us as equally ironic that Tolstoi would select a wolf, a predatory animal closely associated with greed, egoism, and violence, when seeking to create a fictional mother who illustrates the Christian doctrine of an all-encompassing altruistic and