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This chapter probes the distinction between higher and lower levels of artistic creativity developed in works by an intergenerational cohort of supremely gifted Russian writers, with Nietzsche’s disillusionment in Wagner as a parallel. In imagined renditions of exceptional achievement in music, painting, or fiction, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Nabokov enact their own high literary aspirations even as they allow for rivalries with lesser talents, for the blindness and hostility of various authorities, and for the urgency imparted by Russian belatedness vis-à-vis the West. In Pushkin’s tragedy of Mozart poisoned by the lesser composer Salieri, inspiration, originality, and many-sidedness emerge as hallmarks of literary/artistic creativity at its fullest. These qualities reappear in the paintings of Tolstoy’s alter ego, the expatriate artist Mikhailov, which include a portrait of Anna Karenina that eclipses the artistic efforts of her lover Vronsky, and in the pseudo-memoir by Nabokov’s megalomaniacal murderer Hermann, whose grandiose delusions are punctured by the parodic virtuosity of the hidden real author. “Genius,” the honorific word often used for exceptional creativity, applies most directly to Pushkin’s portrayal of Mozart (as well as to Pushkin himself). But Tolstoy’s Mikhailov chapters undercut the exceptionality of genius with their dawning interest in emotional infectiousness, which can unite artists with their audiences. In a further qualification, Hermann’s belief in his own genius perverts the ideal of exceptional creativity, indeed reveals its purely destructive potential; while Nabokov in the background gives the issue another twist, in his dazzling experiments with parody as second-order creativity.

Tolstoy’s famous novel begins with an epigraph, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” which leaves out the purported speaker of these words in Romans 12:19 (“sayeth the Lord”). As a result, these opening words allow for major ambiguities in understanding the motives of the novel’s characters. The Lord’s power to avenge wrongdoing, which asks that human beings strive to be merciful, can become the prerogative of any first-person subject. As is seen in Vronsky’s mother’s harsh condemnation of Anna near the novel’s end, such language allow for pitiless self-righteousness to overwhelm the true goal of humble forgiveness. This paper considers the implications of this ambiguity by examining the dialectic of vengeance and mercy that runs through Tolstoy’s novel. Emphasis falls on Anna and her husband Karenin, but the discussion also includes telling episodes involving Dolly Oblonsky (Anna’s sister-in-law) and Konstantin Lyovin, Anna’s counterpart in the novel’s second plot. The issues explored range from the power of compassionate forbearance and the problematic impact of authoritative words on people’s behavior to social ostracism, the transience of peak experiences, and the anguish of losing one’s capacity to forgive, not just other people, but—tragically—one’s very self.

Tolstoy’s concise, highly suggestive short novel Hadji Murad (posthumously published in 1912) emphasizes war but also includes two distinct depictions of erotic attachment across the Russian/Muslim border. If Stendhal was a theorist of love before becoming a novelist, and if Lawrence’s love novels became increasingly expository, Tolstoy represents a third alternative: his best thinking about love takes place in narrative. As Isaiah Berlin noted in a different context, he was a Heraclitean fox, splendidly attentive to varied details, rather than a hedgehog expounding one big idea. Hadji Murad ’s first key set of scenes gives parallel accounts of Nicholas I’s and the imam Shamil’s love lives, which undermine sharp distinctions between Christian monogamy and Muslim polygamy. Another group of scenes shows the responses of Murad and the Russian army officer Butler to Marya Dmitrievna, the lower-class mistress of another officer. These scenes of erotic attraction explore potential disruptions in boundaries between cultures and classes alike only to drop the possibility when this war-torn novel ends in brutal tragedy. Further comparison with Stendhal and Lawrence addresses Fabrizio and Clelia in The Charterhouse of Parma and love conflict in “The Princess.” In highlighting each novelist’s fascination with love across borders, these situations bring out Tolstoy’s relative restraint in an intertextual series where treatment of this motif led to operatic grand passion or intimacy gone horribly awry. The essay ends by reflecting on love across borders in Tolstoy's earlier fiction and its implications for What Is Art?

1. Narratives may be fractured in many ways. In comparing Tolstoy with his Indian admirer Premchand with an eye both to broken story-lines and to the authors’ ties to Gandhi that put them on a cusp between colonialism and postcoloniality, this essay needs to begin with the disruptions brought by censorship and similar intrusions on the freedom of literary expression. This external pressure on narrative continuity, along with the more intrinsically literary ones to be addressed later, comes to a focus in two historical fictions about proto-imperial military actionsinthe1850s,Tolstoy’sposthumouslypublishedshortnovelHadji Murat and Premchand’s short story ‘The Chess Players’. 1 Tolstoy worked on his novel sporadically between 1896 and 1904, afewyears after Gandhi,duringhisLondonperiod,hadread thedidactic moral and religious works that Tolstoy had been writing after he finished Anna Karenina in 1878. The two men corresponded briefly in 1910, the year of the writer’s death, and at this time Gandhi, who was then active in South Africa, founded a utopian settlement named ‘Tolstoy Farm’ in the author’s honour. Gandhi lived there for extended periods before returning to India in 1914 and becoming a leader in the independence struggle. In the meantime Hadji Murat, which Tolstoy had laid aside in his lifetime, in part due to his doubts about the value of even writing fiction, was finally published in 1912. A dozen years later, in 1924, Premchand wrote ‘The Chess Players’, three years after joining Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement and taking the decisive step of resigning his government post as a teacher. At some point during this period, probably

Christopher Prendergast, ed., Debating World Literature London and New York: Verso, 2004, xiii + 353 pp. Comparatists interested in issues involving world literature will recognize Christopher Prendergast as Mary Ann Caws's associate in putting together the HarperCollins World Reader (1994). This ambitious, wide-ranging editorial project represented one of the first attempts at giving a truly global scope to world-literature anthologies in the United States, which at that time were almost exclusively Western in emphasis. Prendergast, who was then affiliated with the City University of New York, has now moved to Cambridge University; and this collection of fifteen essays, ten of which have previously appeared elsewhere, reflects that itinerary. No fewer than six come from scholars at Cambridge, four more from New York and its environs, and two others from London, leaving two essays from Denmark and one by Stanford's Franco Moretti as improbably "exotic" additions. Possible doubts about a narrowly North Atlantic and Anglo-American agenda, however, are quickly dispelled by the book's broad range of topics. Taking its origin in Prendergast's divided response to Pascale Casanova's La Republique mondiale des lettres (1999), which he admires for its scope but which he contends defined world literature too exclusively in terms of national literatures competing for dominance in a global market, Debating World Literature avoids any single overarching thesis. Unlike David Damrosch, whose What Is World Literature? proposed the criterion of "works that circulate well in translation," or Sarah Lawall, who recommends attending to the acknowledged masterpieces from other cultures while recognizing that one's own culture must have some priority, Prendergast believes that world literature still has the same status that it had for Goethe: it remains a concept "open to indefinitely extended reflection and debate" (viii). In this spirit the essays in DebatingWorld Literature seek to critique at least four assumptions of varying orders of magnitude that have guided thinking on this subject. The most basic critique centers on the concept of literature itself. Reminding us in his own essay that the original republic of letters featured writing that would not qualify as literary today, Prendergast follows up with Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig's discussion of the distinctly non-belle-lettristic view of literature behind Goethe's famous coinage. Variations on this theme continue with Moretti's comparatist manifesto, "Conjectures on World Literature," with its iconoclastic call for a "second-hand" scholarship (151) that, instead of pursuing the hopeless goal of reading the world's literatures, would limit itself to synthesizing the conclusions of specialists from disparate locales and regions. Only by avoiding a traditional immersion in specific works might students of world literature come to learn the true nature of a field whose basic procedures still need to be established. Equally provocative is Simon Goldhill's "Literary History without Literature," whose case studies of Greek, Roman, and early Christian antiquity bring out their widely varying practices of "language production and consumption."He thereby suggests "the destructive poverty of the category of 'literature' " without even having to leave a familiarly "Western" terrain (196). A similar critique of narrowly literary definitions of verbal art marks Bruce Clunies Ross's "Rhythmical Knots: The World of English Poetry." Ranging from the Caribbean to Australia, from Ireland to the United States, and through England itself (and addressing Indian or Nigerian bilingualism as well), Ross shows how variations in contemporary spoken English undermine the vision of poetry as purely written that was associated with older, imperial doctrines of standard English. Prendergast gives this point its fullest global reach when he acknowledges that "both historically and geographically, the oral vastly exceeds the written" (4). …

Back in the early days of postcolonial studies, critics of Eurocentrism would sometimes deplore the West's devaluation of "alternative epistemologies" elsewhere in the world. Anyone aware of the polemics among German idealists, French rationalists, and British empiricists might doubt the existence of any such "central" European doctrine of knowledge, but what these postcolonialists usually meant had little to do with the philosophy practiced by philosophers. They were concerned, instead, with Foucauldian regimes of gathering and interpreting information that fed the institutions involved in Europe's empires. There was little attention to whether some alternative mode of actual

The Description for this book, Heirs to Dionysus: A Nietzschean Current in Literary Modernism, will be forthcoming.

There are two varieties of Virginia Woolf studies. One variety, which includes the studies of Auerbach, Naremore, Leaska, and others, describes Woolf's technical experiments.' The other, represented by Marder, Heilbrun, Showalter, and Bazin, describes her ideology.2 The two varieties do not, however, represent opposing schools of opinion, for the authors of each type, rejecting the distinction between form and content, generously tend to derive the other type's conclusions from their own premises. Woolf herself lends authority to this procedure, for she equates the modernist novel with the androgynous sensibility she advocates, and argues that the Edwardian realist novel's dogmatism and concern with purely external detail is symptomatic of the moral and artistic decrepitude of the patriarchy.3 The equation of feminist content and modernist form is misleading, for it connects certain political ideas with formal principles within which those ideas cannot be argued with integrity. If the modernist novel, as Woolf insists, must not be tendentious, but must instead record the impressions that fall upon the mind like an "incessant shower of innumerable atoms," then advocacy, even of those values necessary for writing such a work, can have no place within its "semi-transparent envelope."4 Were Woolf to preach in To the Lighthouse, she would, apparently, flaw that novel no less than the narrator's outbursts, according to Woolf, flaw Jane Eyre. How is it, then, that To the Lighthouse can be, as it is, at the same time an example of a form that has renounced overt persuasion, and a powerful presentation of certain moral and political ideas that its author expects the reader to adopt? Form and content, it seems, are not only to be distinguished, they are to be opposed. Perhaps our mistake is to assume that form and content must be consonant with each other, when in fact their dissonance may reflect those contradictions that artists, like everybody else, must, and yet cannot ever, resolve. Phyllis Rose has lucidly argued that the androgyny Woolf advocates in A Room of One's Own is, essentially