Slavic Colloquium - Irina Reyfman: Leo Tolstoy in the Eighteenth Century

In her talk entitled "Leo Tolstoy and the Eighteenth Century," Professor Irina Reyfman (Columbia University) will briefly discuss Tolstoy’s interest in pre-nineteenth-century Russian history and then will concentrate on the unfinished prose project about the time of Peter the Great, on which he worked in the 1870s. For this project, Tolstoy penned thirty-three drafts that together cover the time from the last years of Czar Aleksei Mikhailovich’s reign to 1708 or 1709 and, probably, beyond. She will attempt to interpret Tolstoy’s plan for this historical fiction as it can be deduced from the drafts. She will consider Tolstoy’s project in the context of his views on the causes of historical processes and his criticism of the contemporary progressivist view of history.