The Power of Dissent engages the theme of anti-sociality that scholars of Lev Tolstoi from Boris Eikhenbaum to Kathryn Feuer have long noted organizes much of the writer’s thought, but it does so from a newly contemporary angle. Beginning with this common notion among scholars that “Tolstoy had no adequate sense of being a responsible member of a complex community,” Ani Kokobobo investigates Tolstoi’s rejection of social institutions as in fact a socially valuable mode of dissent (9). In Kokobobo’s treatment, Tolstoi’s life-long dissension is a mode of independent thinking that variously accommodates both an extreme individualism and a kind of communal sentiment that is always in excess of actually existing relations (spiritual brotherhood, for example). Dissent is the organizing principle that unites the different sides of Tolstoi, such as thinker and novelist. Tolstoi emerges less a “netovshchik” (naysayer) in the manner of the nineteenth century than an enduringly relevant pluralist who is greatly accommodating of especially individual differences but nonetheless has decisive moral principles of his own.
The book’s highly accessible chapters on sexuality, religion, and empire present a modern Tolstoi that is sure to appeal to undergraduate students and offer instructors nuanced answers to some of their common questions: recalling the COVID-19 pandemic, what would Tolstoi say about mourning individual life? Considering contemporary interest in identity politics, what does Tolstoi have to say about the fluidity of both of gender and sexuality? In the midst of such imperial projects as Russia’s war in Ukraine, how do Tolstoi’s texts serve as models for colonial narratives of resistance? There is value in the book’s dialogue with the present, and it is unusual for its emphasis on the modern as opposed to the historical side of the exchange. While underemphasized, the historical context of Tolstoi’s corpus is not wholly absent, especially in a chapter on Tolstoi’s place in the culture of the fin-de-siècle.
While extremely lucid, the primary claim about Tolstoi’s dissent seemed at times to evoke some unresolved contradictions. For Kokobobo, Tolstoi is a social rebel. Yet he vehemently rejects even the smallest reform effort. As Kokobobo intriguingly argues, Tolstoi seems to question “heteronormative” institutions, but he is equally insistent that no new kind of institution take their place. This is wholly fitting with Kokobobo’s picture of Tolstoi—“always negate!,” his motto might be—but one could see the same elements from a different political angle. In fact, this negativity has been explored (Jeff Love, “Tolstoy’s Nihilism,” in Tolstoy in the 21st Century, ed. Inessa Medzhibovskaya [Evantson, 2018]) and warrants more historically focused studies. Such a historical portrait may show Tolstoi’s negativity as uncomfortably aware of the period’s definitive interest in reform and revolution. Left out of Kokobobo’s account are Tolstoi’s pedagogical articles of the 1860s that illuminate what he in fact did not want to negate: “authentic” bases of religion, family, and the state and especially the endangered estate system (soslovie) of social grouping.
Though Kokobobo shows Tolstoi’s reworking of all of these in his own individualist and, convincingly in the case of religion, novelistic manner, the existing institutions are externally unchanged. It is in contrast to these that Tolstoi labels everything else pure indoctrination, especially the social movements of his own day. The book’s claims that Tolstoi questioned marriage and the family in, for example, Levin remaining isolated from Kitty at the end of Anna Karenina, or in various works condemning sexuality, do not seem strong enough to withstand the many instances of the author’s conservatism, which can be found even in these same instances. Instead of embracing social openness, Tolstoi’s writings may be said to abstract communal needs into a spiritual realm without really addressing them—as in fact he argues for in the treatise What Then Shall We Do? From this perspective, identity pluralism replaces rather than supports changes to actually existing social relations. Such concerns are important for Tolstoi and his period but not sufficiently treated in the book, though its arguments lend themselves productively to this kind of debate. Given recent attempts to better understand Tolstoi’s noble class interests (Bella Grigoryan, Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762–1861 [Ithaca, 2019]; Mikhail Dolbilov, Zhiznʹ tvorimogo romana. Ot avanteksta k kontekstu “Anny Kareninoi” [Moscow, 2023]), for example, Kokobobo’s very modern—and in many ways American—Tolstoi could take some of these concerns into account to give more nuance to its central ethical-political claim. Regardless, with lucid structure and engaging themes, The Power of Dissent continues the tradition of liberal education in important ways: it negotiates a connection between great art and pluralist ethics in ways that will certainly help us in the classroom and beyond.
