Aleksej Konstantinovic Tolstoj and Russian Romanticism

Aleksej Konstantinovic Tolstoj is, perhaps, Russia's most Romantic poet and, as N. Kotljarevskij wrote in the nineteenth century, its most religious writer. Tolstoj had the hubris to advance a world view, to re-write Dante and the Bible and to offend every political and literary interest. Touched by Catholicism as had been Novalis and the German Romantics, Tolstoj's works were most thoroughly shaped by German Idealism and the radical Protestant sects of the early nineteenth century. The poet's works are invested with a private mythology and a symbolic significance. The writer started as a poet of supreme individualism and aestheticism. His views of Christianity are aesthetic and moral. He was among the first to deal blows to religious Slavophilism and Russian nationalism. The character of Tolstoj's oeuvre, its ties to Voltairianism and late, decadent Classicism, places it historically within that of the Puskin Pleiad. The writer's quest for God presents a significant parallel to the works of Dostoevskij and those of the poet's cousin, L. N. Tolstoj. The poet's militant mystical individualism contrasts with the collectivistic trends that dominated the era. Humor, destructively nihilistic, inseparably blends with a high-strung religious and moral earnestness.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Slavic Languages and Literatures

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Ivancin, Michael Walter

• Literature, Slavic and East European

Identifier

(UMI)AAI8409962

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/71567