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Description of  Art in Doubt: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory)

Leo Tolstoys and Vladimir Nabokovs radically opposed aesthetic worldviews emanate from a shared intuitionthat approaching a text skeptically is easy, but trusting it is hard Two figures central to the Russian literary traditionTolstoy, the moralist, and Nabokov, the aestheteseem to have sharply conflicting ideas about the purpose of literature. Tatyana Gershkovich undermines this familiar opposition by identifying a shared fear at the root of their seemingly antithetical aesthetics: that ones experience of the world might be entirely ones own, private and impossible to share through art. Read more