IEW: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and the Universal: Talk by D. Brian Kim

The names of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky are synonymous with the great Russian novel of the nineteenth century. While both writers are celebrated for their insights into the human condition and remembered for the parts they played in the shaping of Russian as well as world literature, they were guided in their work by different priorities and worldviews that colored their respective pronouncements on the possibilities of discovering unity amid the realities of human diversity. In spite of their disparate approaches, both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky maintained an intense belief in the significance and power of interpersonal connections. Drawing on literary examples as well as such extraliterary statements as Dostoevsky’s Pushkin Speech and Tolstoy’s treatise on aesthetics, D. Brian Kim will examine the ways in which these authors experimented with, struggled against, and attempted to define the concept of the universal. Their imagining of and engagement with this idea, he argues, underlay their individual philosophies as well as their activities in the sphere of verbal art.

D. Brian Kim is an alumnus of Williams College and is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

https://rees.sas.upenn.edu/people/d-brian-kim

Sponsored by the German Russian Department, the Center for Global Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, the Lecture Committee, the Oakley Center, and the Class of ’46 Fund for World Brotherhood.

More Information