Leo Tolstoy and the Alibi of Narrative

In this study, Justin Weir illuminates new aspects of Tolstoy's notoriously complex narrative strategies and describes how they shaped Tolstoy's authorial career. Tolstoy's "narrative alibi" developed out of both personal and professional concerns, Weir explains. Tolstoy cared not only about how his work would be interpreted but also about the light in which his own life would be cast. He responded by employing two distinct forms of narrative strategy. Often Tolstoy inscribed significant absences into his stories as a way of retaining authorial control. At other times, he used a quite different form of alibi to explain the apparent contradiction between aspects of his own immoral youth and his later religious conversion. In both cases, Weir argues, Tolstoy's narrative aesthetics defy our expectations about how and why his career evolved as it did.

Elaborating this theory of authorship while revisiting Tolstoy's most famous works of fiction, Weir offers new interpretations of the Childhood trilogy, The Cossacks, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, as well as a host of such later stories as "The Kreutzer Sonata" and "The Death of Ivan Ilyich." Weir concludes with a discussion of Tolstoy's place within the tradition of western authorship theory.

Justin Weir is professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard University.