Leo Tolstoy: The Power of Dissent

by Ani Kokobobo

Overview

The Tolstoy that emerges from this volume is a thinker who resists easy answers, explores contradictions, and seeks deeper reconciliation. This collection presents him as an open-ended conversation partner rather than a moral authority, grappling urgently with dilemmas of identity, human relationships, colonial violence, and integrity. The Tolstoy I have always sought—and hope is foregrounded here—is one whose meanings remain open, engaging in dialogue with both our present and an unknown future. From his time, he speaks to today’s most pressing issues. In an era of polarization and simplistic narratives, Tolstoy offers a methodology of dissent and independent thought. This is Tolstoy the dissenter, whose voice is extraordinarily valuable for our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798887197326
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	05/20/2025
Series:	Myths and Taboos in Slavic Culture
Pages:	246
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Dr. Kokobobo is Professor of Modern Languages and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She has published over thirty-five articles and written or edited multiple books. Her public writings have appeared with Time Magazine, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Washington Post.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 

Leo Tolstoy: The Power of Dissent.

I. The Subject, Physicality, and Mobility in Space

1)Trembling Napoleon and Fat Kutuzov: Bodies, Historical Figures, and Historical Determinism in War and Peace

2)Society, Mobility, and the Construction of Gender in Early Tolstoy 

3)Using Digital Technologies to Uncover the Geographical Dimension of Tolstoy’s War and Peace 

II. Coming to Terms with Sexuality and Identity

4)The Young Tolstoy Struggles to Integrate Desire into Art

5)Strange Bedfellows: Leo Tolstoy and Andrea Dworkin

6)Sexual Citizenship and the Legacy of the Novel of Adultery in a Twenty-First-Century Adaptation of Anna Karenina

III. Religious Heresies 

7)Authoring Christ: Novelistic Echoes in Tolstoy’s Harmonization and Translation of the Four Gospels 

8)The Self as Animal or Corpse: The Grotesque Subject in Tolstoy’s Late Theology and Fiction and in Mikhail Artsybashev’s Sanin

9)Can Tolstoy Mourn?

IV. Defying Empire in Hadji Murat

10)Tolstoy’s Enigmatic Final Hero: Holy War, Sufism, and the Spiritual Path in Hadji Murat

11)“Why Does Russia Need Hadji Murat’s Head?” Hadji Murat Dagestani Identity, and Russia’s Colonial Exploits 

Conclusion: Tolstoy Today

Editorial Reviews

This fascinating volume offers a series of innovative interpretations of Tolstoy’s fictional and non-fictional works through the lens of contemporary theoretical methodologies, ranging from gender studies to postcolonial critique. This fresh approach challenges the writer’s petrified image as a revered, bearded classic from a bygone era. Instead, Tolstoy emerges, from this book, as a conflicted and intensely modern figure, whose critique of established ideologies and conventions (what Kokobobo calls his “dissent”) resonates powerfully with the concerns of the present moment.”

— Valeria Sobol, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

“Leo Tolstoy —The Power of Dissent is a timely book. In clear and lively prose, Kokobobo analyses a wide range of Tolstoy's writings, from his famous novels to his later statements on religion, sexuality, and imperialism. Her commentary brings Tolstoy into dialogue with our own time at a moment when many of the issues that motivated his constant questioning are facing us once again.”

—Anne Lounsbery, Professor and Chair, Department of Russian & Slavic Studies, New York University

“Ani Kokobobo’s Tolstoy rebels against received wisdom. Starting in part one with the early trilogy and continuing with War and Peace, gender in his writings turns out to be a social construct based on the dynamic (borrowed from the philosophy of J. J. Rousseau) of comme il faut. Digital mapping charts how characters—male, female, positive and negative—move within space – especially centers and peripheries—in War and Peace as a bildungsroman. Part two discusses Tolstoy’s heterodox treatments of sexuality. Part three delineates his unorthodox treatment of religion and even of death in non-fiction and fiction; and part four—of colonialism in the late masterpiece Hadji Murad. The conclusion points out the contemporary relevance of Tolstoy’s themes and positions, including for the current Russo-Ukrainian War. Throughout he is put in dialogue with other writers and theoreticians.” 

—Donna Tussing Orwin, Professor Emerita and FRSC Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, University of Toronto

“This book will engage readers who know little about Tolstoy and intrigue scholars who know much. Kokobobo presents the well-known Tolstoy opposing violence and oppression; the teacher who demands attention. But she also departs from the familiar with descriptions of the physicality of Tolstoy’s characters, their sexuality, their movement in geographic space, their embodiment of gender, and their sense of art. For example, Kokobobo highlights Tolstoy’s sly humor in contrasting the scrawny Napoleon to the corpulent Kutuzov. She mines Tolstoy’s minor as well as major characters for the features that give his work vitality and depth. The book is fun to read, solidly researched, and full of refreshingly new perspectives.”

—Jeff Brooks, author of The Firebird and The Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolshevik

From the Publisher