Art in Doubt

Leo Tolstoys and Vladimir Nabokovs radically opposed aesthetic worldviews emanate from a shared intuitionthat approaching a text skeptically is easy, but trusting it is hard Two figures central to the Russian literary traditionTolstoy, the moralist, and Nabokov, the aestheteseem to have sharply conflicting ideas about the purpose of literature. Tatyana Gershkovich undermines this familiar opposition by identifying a shared fear at the root of their seemingly antithetical aesthetics: that ones experience of the world might be entirely ones own, private and impossible to share through art. Art in Doubt: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds reconceives the pairs celebrated fiction and contentious theorizing as coherent, lifelong efforts to reckon with the problem of other peoples minds. Gershkovich demonstrates how the authors shared yearning for an impossibly intimate knowledge of others formed and deformed their fiction and brought them through parallel logic to their rival late styles: Tolstoys rustic simplicity and Nabokovs baroque complexity. Unlike those authors for whom the skeptical predicament ends in absurdity or despair, Tolstoy and Nabokov both hold out hope that skepticism can be overcome, not by force of will but with the right kind of text, one designed to withstand our impulse to doubt it. Through close readings of key canonical worksAnna Karenina, The Kreutzer Sonata, Hadji Murat, The Gift, Pale Firethis book brings the twin titans of Russian fiction to bear on contemporary debates about how we read now, and how we ought to.