Dr. Tatyana Gershkovich contests the familiar opposition of Tolstoy the moralist and Nabokov the aesthete. She argues that their divergent stylistic and philosophical trajectories were in fact parallel flights from the same fear: that one’s experience of the world might be entirely one’s own, private, and impossible to share through art.
Yet unlike modernist and postmodernist authors for whom such doubt ends in absurdity or despair, Tolstoy and Nabokov both hold out hope that an artwork, when made in the right way, can serve to assuage our skeptical fears.
About the Speaker: Tatyana Gershkovich is the William S. Dietrich Associate Professor of Russian Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of Art in Doubt: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds (Northwestern UP, 2022).
CREECA Lecture Series Podcast