Leo Tolstoy’s theory of everything - Salon.com
Excerpted from “'Who, What Am I?': Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self”
Tolstoy’s
first diary, started on March 17, 1847, at the age of eighteen, began
as a clinical investigation launched under laboratory conditions: in the
isolation of a hospital ward, where he was being treated for a venereal
disease. A student at Kazan University, he was about to drop out due to
lack of academic progress. In the clinic, freed from external
influences, the young man planned to “enter into himself” for intense
self-exploration (vzoiti sam v sebia ; 46:3). On the
first page, he wrote (then crossed out) that he was in complete
agreement with Rousseau on the advantages of solitude. This act of
introspection had a moral goal: to exert control over his runaway life.
Following a well-established practice, the young Tolstoy approached the
diary as an instrument of self-perfection.
But
this was not all. For the young Tolstoy, keeping a diary (as I hope to
show) was also an experimental project aimed at exploring the nature of
self: the links connecting a sense of self, a moral ideal, and the
temporal order of narrative.
From the very beginning there were
problems. For one, the diarist obviously found it difficult to sustain
the flow of narrative. To fill the pages of his first diary, beginning
on day two, Tolstoy gives an account of his reading, assigned by a
professor of history: Catherine the Great’s famous Instruction (Nakaz), as compared with Montesquieu’s L’Esprit de lois.
This manifesto aimed at regulating the future social order, and its
philosophical principles, rooted in the French Enlightenment (happy is a
man in whom will rules over passions, and happy is a state in which
laws serve as an instrument of such control), appealed to the young
Tolstoy. But with the account of Catherine’s utopia (on March 26),
Tolstoy’s first diary came to an end.
