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Death Masks in Tolstoi
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Extract
Tolstoi made the accurate and poetic description of death a literary problem to be solved: how does a writer use the resources of language to describe the actual sensation of dying, an experience which the living can never fully comprehend? Experimenting with various linguistic means to create and use ambiguity, Tolstoi worked on a solution to this problem over many years in Childhood, Sevastopol Tales, “Three Deaths,” War and Peace, “Notes of a Madman,” and The Death of Ivan ll'ich. There are critics who feel that his achievement in this area is virtually unsurpassed; a recent book on death in world literature devotes more attention and praise to Tolstoi than to any other writer.
The most powerful of all death scenes in Tolstoi's fiction is the one that portrays Prince Andrei Bolkonskii in War and Peace. The specter of death that Andrei sees in a dream, a substantiation of his fear of dying, is designated simply by the neuter pronoun ono (it). Konstantin Leont'ev was struck by this ono which he felt was so terrifying and mysterious that it could be identified with death itself. What makes ono so immediately striking is that although it is a neuter form, it is used intentionally (by being underlined) to refer directly to the word smert' (death), which is a feminine noun.
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References
1. Death in Literature, ed. R. Weir (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), chap. 11.
2. Leont'ev, K., Analiz, stil’ i veianie (Moscow, 1911; rpt. Providence, R. I.: Brown University Press, 1965), p. 61Google Scholar; English translation in Essays in Russian Literature, ed. and trans. S. Roberts (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1968).
3. B., Eikhenbaum, The Young Tolstoi, ed. and trans. G. Kern (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1972), pp. 61, 109Google Scholar.
4. For a fuller discussion of masking, refer to Kathleen Parthé, “Masking the Fantastic and the Taboo in Russian Literature: a Hierarchy of Grammatical Devices” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1979), pp. 1-38.
5. “Is it a long time since he grew worse? When did this happen?” Tolstoi, L. N., Voina i mir, in Sobranie sochinenii, 20 vols. (Moscow, 1961—65), 7:66Google Scholar. Translations from the Russian are my own.
6. Ibid.
7. “Princess Mar'ia understood what Natasha meant by the words: two days ago suddenly this happened,” ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 68.
9. Ibid., p. 71.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., p. 72.
12. Ibid.
13. “She has come!” ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 74.
15. “He felt himself nearer to it,” ibid
16. “And that fear was the fear of death: behind the door stood it,” ibid., p. 75.
17. Ibid.
18. “Da, smert’ — probuzhdenie!” ibid.
19. “This was what happened to him two days before Princess Mar'ia's arrival,” ibid., pp. 75-76.
20. Leont'ev, Analiz, p. 52. In praising the narration of Prince Andrei's final hours as “simple, brief, and clear,” Leont'ev especially applauds the author's switch in viewpoint as “natural” and “truer” than keeping Andrei as indirect narrator up to the last second (as Tolstoi did with characters in Sevastopol Tales and The Death of Ivan Il'ich).
21. V. V., Vinogradov, “O iazyke Tolstogo” Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 35-36 (1939): 187-88Google Scholar.
22. Leont'ev, Analiz, p. 61.
23. Ralph, Matlaw, ed., Tolstoy: a Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 3Google Scholar. Actually, ono occurs four times here as well as a number of times elsewhere in the novel.
24. Ibid.
25. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 4:201.
26. Ibid., 6:126.
27. Ibid., p. 157.
28. Ibid., p. 158.
29. In an analysis of the use of pronouns in Tolstoi's fiction (basically a taxonomy of usage), T. Krestinskaia examined this euphemistic to: “She is afraid to name it [death] directly because the thought of her father's death is closely connected for her with a complicated mental struggle. She both awaits this death as a deliverance and is at the same time tormented by remorse for wishing the death of her father, and is afraid of losing a person very close to her. Hence the peculiar weightiness of this euphemistic to in which complex psychological threads are skillfully woven” (T. P. Krestinskaia, “Stilisticheskie funktsii mestoimenii v iazyke khudozhestvennoi prozy L. Tolstogo [Kandidat diss., Moscow University, 1946], p. 54).
30. Tolstoi, , Sobranie sochinenii, 5:331Google Scholar.
31. Spence, G. W., Tolstoy the Ascetic (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), p. 33Google Scholar.
32. ‘ “There it is! …It again!’ Pierre said to himself, and an involuntary shudder ran down his spine,” Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 7:116.
33. One may find examples of both skrebet ( “there is a clawing” ) and ono skrebet ( “it is clawing” ), for instance.
34. la. I. Gin, “Iz nabliudenii nad grammaticheskoi katagoriei roda v russkoi narodnoiskazke,” in lazyk zhanrov russkogo fol'klora (Petrazavodsk, 1977), pp. 121-23. F. I. Buslaev notes further: “that which is abstract and vaguely represented, language records mainly through use of the neuter” ( Buslaev, , htoricheskaia grammatika russkogo iazyka [Moscow, 1959], p. 380Google Scholar).
35. Gin, “Iz nabliudenii,” pp. 121-23; Buslaev, , htoricheskaia grammatika, p. 380Google Scholar.
36. Gin, “Iz nabliudenii,” p. 122.
37. Tolstoi, , Sobranie sochinenii, 10:242Google Scholar.
38. Spence, Tolstoy the Ascetic, p. 73; J., Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 89Google Scholar.
39. T., Todorov, The Fantastic: a Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. R. Howard (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 25–27 Google Scholar.
40. The pursuit in War and Peace is roughly similar to Dutlov's pursuit by the evil spirit in “Polikushka” (see Parthe, K, “Masking the Fantastic and the Taboo in Tolstoj's ‘Polikuška,'” Slavic and East European Journal, 25, no. 1 [Spring 1981]CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
41. Eikhenbaum, , Young Tolstoi, p. 61Google Scholar.
42. Tolstoi, , Sobranie sochinenii, 7:72Google Scholar.