Trip Report: Ronald LeBlanc Travels to Russia

Ronald LeBlanc, professor of Russian, received one of the 2004-05 CIE Faculty International Travel Grants funded by the VPAA to support travel to Russia. Below is his report.

On Aug. 18, 2005, I travelled to Russia to participate in an international conference, ""Leo Tolstoy and World Literature," held at the Tolstoy family estate at Yasnaya Polyana Aug. 22-25, 2005. As its title suggests, the conference was dedicated to the influence exerted by the great Russian writer, thinker, and social activist, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910), on writers from world literature. Slavic scholars from the United States, Canada, Russia, France, Italy, England, Germany, Japan, and other countries around the world delivered papers on various aspects of Tolstoy’s art, life, and thought.

Ronald LeBlanc Professor of Russian

In the paper “Artsybashev’s Sanin as a Response to Tolstoy and Tolstoyism,” I examined how some of Tolstoy’s later writings on the issue of sexual morality – including fictional works such as The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) and The Devil (1890), as well as moralizing essays such as “The First Step” (1892) and The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) – prompted the modernist writer Mikhail Artsybashev (1878-1927), a champion of pagan liberation of the body and its senses, to respond by writing a countertext that attacks the moral Puritanism and sexual asceticism Tolstoy was publicly advocating during his later years. I argue that Artsybashev’s so-called pornographic novel of 1907, Sanin, can be read very productively as a text that challenges the principle of sexual abstinence preached by Tolstoy and his Tolstoyan followers in early 20th century Russia.

In addition to a wonderful two-hour tour of the Chekhov estate-museum at nearby Melikhovo during the return trip to Moscow, the highlight of the conference for most of the participants was undoubtedly the opportunity to spend four days at the 1,100-acre Tolstoy family estate of forests, streams, and meadows near the bucolic village of Yasnaya Polyana, located some135 miles south of Moscow. This was the rural setting where Tolstoy wrote such immortal literary works as War and Peace (1865) and Anna Karenina (1877); it also served as the author’s permanent home during the last decade of his life. Tolstoy, who was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901 due to his unorthodox religious beliefs, was buried in a simple unmarked grave on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, which quickly became a shrine and place of pilgrimage for many spiritually minded Russians during the Soviet period.

In 1994, shortly after the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the Russian Minister of Culture shocked many people by appointing the writer’s great-great-grandson, the 32-year-old Vladimir Ilych Tolstoy, to serve as the new director of the Tolstoy estate museum at Yasnaya Polyana. By all accounts, he has succeeded in preserving his family’s country estate as a close approximation of the cultural ideal of traditional Russian estate life at the same time as he has turned this famous site into a financially viable and sustainable tourist attraction.

Although Tolstoy’s novels were widely published and discussed during the Soviet period, his moral and religious essays have only come into open public discourse in Russia since the collapse of communist rule in late 1991. Not surprisingly, many of the conference papers delivered by the Russian participants focused upon these moral and religious ideas that Tolstoy came to advocate after the spiritual crisis he experienced during the late 1870s, while many of the international scholars spoke about his reception as an artist and thinker in foreign lands (including the United States) at the turn of the century.

What I believe I will take back with me from this conference is primarily a greater appreciation for the complexity and subtlety of both Tolstoy’s art and thought. I hope that the insights I gained from listening to the papers delivered at this international conference and from discussing Tolstoy’s works and ideas with my fellow conferees will enhance the courses on Russian literature – such as RUSS 522 (Morality, Sex, and Revolution in Russian Literature), RUSS 593 (Dostoevsky and Tolstoy), and RUSS 691 (Readings in Russian Literature) – that I regularly teach in the Russian Program within the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures here at UNH.