Modelling the Future in War and Peace: Forms and Meanings

Katalin Kroó

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Modelling the Future in War and Peace: Forms and Meanings

In: Tolstoi and the Evolution of His Artistic World

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Katalin Kroó

Katalin Kroó
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 161–179

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004465633_009

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Abstract

This chapter takes an altogether different approach to War and Peace. The central premise of this chapter is the various forms and meanings of Tolstoi’s presentation of the future itself. However, his modelling of the future has not only its own forms and meanings, but plays a major poetic part in developing questions of causality, and in the elaboration of the theme of the human soul. That is, the structural approach of ‘future-modelling’ in the novel has far-reaching consequences for our overall understanding of its meaning. At the same time, this angle of analysis broaches another crucial dilemma that appears in the work: how may we forecast and designate a future given that it is under constant change and development? All this means that the semantic ways of conceptualizing and modelling time (the future) and form go hand in hand in War and Peace. Based on close readings of specific scenes in the novel, the analysis concludes with a discussion of the impact of these elements on an overall reading of the novel. To read their souls (the form of expression of which this language contributes to), the characters of War and Peace have to combine looking into the future with looking into the past. And in the metaphorically emphatic moments of the characters’ achieving different stages of self-knowledge by both projecting the future and remembering the past, we read all the past moments of text-development in the scenes where the heroes are thinking of the future.

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Tolstoi and the Evolution of His Artistic World

Series: Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics, Volume: 64 and Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics Online, Volume: 64

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004465633

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 23 Jul 2021

Subjects
- Literature and Cultural Studies
- Slavic and Eurasian Studies
  - Literature & Linguistics

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Modelling the Future in War and Peace: Forms and Meanings

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Tolstoi and the Evolution of His Artistic World

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