Poetics of Brotherhood: Organic and Mechanistic Narrative in Late Tolstoi

In this article, Ilya Kliger and Nasser Zakariya treat Lev Tolstoi's conception of brotherhood from a narratological perspective. In the process, they trace the outlines of late Tolstoian narrative poetics, situating it within a variegated landscape of Tolstoi's own more properly “realist” literary practice, and offering broader suggestions on the workings of narrative in its capacity to model social relations and ethical action. A narratological focus here allows them to elucidate how stories take part in contemporary understandings of social influence, human connectedness, and alienation— not only on the level of themes but also, and more deeply, on the level of the narrative organization of events. Their main focus is on one of Tolstoi's late novellas “The Forged Coupon” and his last novel Resurrection.