Rehabilitation of Parody (the Late Tolstoy as Moliere’s Hero). The Second Article

In the prose of Leo Tolstoy and the comedies of Molière, a “pervasive” family plot unfolds through the dynamic of similar psychological and ideological positions, each giving rise to the other. A husband’s jealousy towards his wife and fear of her infidelity lead him to religion, which initially serves as a means of controlling the family but ultimately leads him away from it due to a broader alienation from the world. However, unlike Molière, Tolstoy uses the trajectory of this psychological plot to contemplate the destinies of the world, framed by his own understanding of its ideal movement. Consequently, the logic driving these familial conflicts is evaluated by Tolstoy within sociocultural coordinates that were either foreign or unknown to Molière: the peasant-landowner harmony of co-being within nature; its religious core, inherent to Russia; as well as the new meanings of “nature” and “the people” established in the Age of Enlightenment by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Sturm und Drang movement led by Johann Gottfried Herder, respectively. The collapse of the manorial idyll in post-reform Russia, coupled with Tolstoy’s so-called “existential crisis” of the 1880s (in part under the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer’s ideas), led the writer to a sequential rejection of familial eros and the family as such. Based on this, in his novella The Kreutzer Sonata (1887–1889), he progressed to a virtual denial of the expediency of further human procreation. As a result, Molière’s assessments of his negative characters and their behavioral strategies are reversed in the later Tolstoy. This, it would seem, demonstrates the logic governing the evolution of psychological universals within the dynamics of different sociocultural systems.