Creation of the Writer-of-the-People's Subjectivity in Leo Tolstoy's Late Aesthetics

The article analyses Leo Tolstoy's respond to the system transformations in the literary field and his invention of subjectivity of a writer "of the people". The integrative processes of the second half of the 19th century resulted in increasing literacy among the peasants comprising the greatest majority of the country's population. This yielded the emergence of a number of self-taught writers; some of them successively incorporated into professional literature mostly due to the development of periodicals and their readers who requested more intelligible texts. Nonetheless, a writer "of the people" was not yet acclaimed as an independent creative subject, but was thought as an object of a cultural impact, education and training. Thus, some renown writers still refused autodidactic writers to be members of the literary field, but not Leo Tolstoy. Perceiving the peasant as the Other, Tolstoy revised the border between subjects and the ways to eliminate it. Due to his knowledge of Hegel's master-slave dialectic, Tolstoy enforced the resolution of the conflict of the two oppositions not through the "cultivation" of the slave to the master level, but through a merge of the master and the slave. Literature played the key role there as a space of subjects' communication. The early steps in the invention of the self-taught writer's subjectivity were some pedagogical experiments at Yasnaya Polyana, where Tolstoy tried to create stories together with peasant children, and articulated the rules of how to teach a pupil his/her own creative speech. As a Rousseauist, Tolstoy believed in the peasants' closeness to a natural state, in their intactness by civilization. During his spiritual metamorphosis, he discovered that ordinary people endured daily calamities much easier and more submissively than noblemen, since they possessed the true sense of life. The moral and philosophical quests led the novelist to a comprehension of art as a tool to unite people by infecting them with the same feeling that an artist has when creating a composition. Since the 1880s, Tolstoy directly stated that he was then writing for the peasant reader. Simultaneously, he denied the opposition of folk and non-folk people, since he ranged people according to their closeness to nature, but not to their social class affiliation. He paid special attention to autodidactic writers, taught them, advised some books for reading and proofread their manuscripts. He anchored his hopes on them considering them as creative subjects able to preach natural verity. Nonetheless, Tolstoy could praise and also criticize self-taught writers. This discrepancy may be explained by Tolstoy's idea to place people in between nature and civilization; this idea explained his basic duality in the perception of peasants: on the one hand, peasants had to incorporate themselves into the culture process, thus getting their own voices to translate their experience; on the other hand, peasants kept silent being a part of nature.

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