Tolstoy and the writing of nihilism

Abstract

The article analyzes the presence and significance of nihilism in Tolstoy’s art and thought. I argue that Jacobi’s philosophical criteriology, his definition of idealism as a nihilism, reaches the essence of what can be called “Tolstoy’s nihilism”, shedding light on a writing that translated, simultaneously, the nihilism and anti-nihilism of the thinker and artist of Iasnaia Poliana. In the same way, I argue that the narcissism that inhabits idealism found in the writing of the Russian novel an experience of interruption that sought, as we find in Tolstoy’s writing, to go beyond the excesses of a consciousness incapable of going outside itself. Finally, I argue that the conflicts between art and philosophy, which remained uninterruptedly present in Tolstoy’s work, should be read in the light of the rootlessness of Russian modernity, the excesses of a consciousness embodied in his Hamlets, and in the quixotic search, which is the anti-nihilist principle of the Russian novel, for a truth that lies outside the isolated person