Tolstoy and Mazeppa

The link between Tolstoyanism and Mazeppism is deep. Indeed, Mazeppism is but a variety of Tolstoyanism. Both are a species of sober Romanticism--although Tolstoy's Romanticism is frequently over-looked by Tolstoy scholars, if not altogether denied.

Instead, Tolstoy's Enlightenment rationalism is emphasized--ignoring the fact that Tolstoy's hero of the French Enlightenment was Rousseau, perhaps the founding figure of Romanticism.

Other scholars will look to novels like The Cossacks as evidence that Tolstoy was tempted by Romanticism in his youth but then turned away from it in the same way that Olenin's romantic illusions about life in the Caucasus mountains are shattered by the experiences he has while living there.

To read this novel (or any novel) as its author's autobiography, however, is an unwise practice.

Likewise, to regard Romanticism as a unitary phenomenon is equally perilous.

I think it true that Tolstoy rejected Romantic modes not tempered by what Wallace Stevens termed "reality," but such tempering does not automatically vitiate one's Romanticism: it sobers and seasons it.

Tolstoy's philosophical forbears (Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer, Fichte), his privileging of peasant life, his Slavophile sympathies, and his Orientalism are all indicia of a profoundly Romantic attitude and orientation. The Mazeppist would not be the Mazeppist without having first become a Tolstoyan. For Tolstoy was continually negotiating "East" and "West," unable to embrace one to the exclusion of the other. This is the Mazeppist's dilemma, blessing, and curse. The two are inextricably linked and inter-related.