TOLSTYE JOURNALY MANUAL

Like Franklin, Tolstoy marked his moral development along the temporal progression of the calendar but, like Newton, he focused on his follies rather than his feats - he divided the page of his calendar-notebook into columns for potential weaknesses like laziness, indecision, and vanity, marking with small crosses the days on which the respective vice manifested.Īlongside this notebook, Paperno notes, Tolstoy kept another, titled Journal of Daily Occupations - a time-log in which each page was divided into two vertical columns, one for the future and one for the past. Paperno points to one particularly intriguing notebook from his mid-twenties, titled Journal for Weaknesses, which fell partway between Benjamin Franklin’s agenda of virtues and Isaac Newton’s litany of self-professed sins. Tolstoy’s early journals, in fact, were at once a moral checklist and narrative cartography of time. This is the entire essence of life: Who are you? What are you?Īnd so for the young Tolstoy lying at the hospital, the diary was as much “an instrument of self-perfection” with which to steer his wayward life as it was “an experimental project aimed at exploring the nature of self” through concepts like morality, memory, consciousness, and time.

Tolstoy liked to trace the origin of his fascination with this question to his old nanny, who used to lie in solitude, listening to the clock and hearing in its ticking a question: “Who are you - what are you? Who are you - what are you?” In the clock’s question, Paperno argues, Tolstoy found his eternal quest: Caught up in his obsessive project of intentional moral organization, he saw the self as a forceful function of supposed to rather than a peaceful bearing witness to being, an embracing of is. But what emerges, above all, is the sense that Tolstoy was a man of intense intellect, continually crucified by the compulsive shoulds in which that very intellect was trapped. What makes these diaries especially intriguing is their parallel existence in the past and the future - Tolstoy combined narrative reflections on the micro scale of autobiography with moral resolutions on the macro scale of character. Portrait of Leo Tolstoy by Ivan Kramskoy, 1873 That journey is what Russian literature scholar and historian Irina Paperno explores in “Who, What Am I?”: Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self ( public library) - a remarkably insightful account of the beloved author’s “paradoxical efforts to create a narrative representation of both the self and the selfless being,” and an inquiry into the broader, more universal concerns with what actually constitutes a self, that elusive and often self-defeating appendage of existence. He was already on the cusp of being expelled from university for poor academic performance, so the forced sabbatical at the hospital led him to begin a journey of self-exploration - in the dual sense of both examining himself and contemplating the notion of the self - which would stretch and coil across his entire life. Tolstoy wrote his first diary entry at the age of eighteen, in March of 1847, while relegated to a hospital bed during treatment for a venereal disease.

But the most psychologically formative and creatively intriguing journaling is that of Tolstoy’s youth.

TOLSTYE JOURNALY MANUAL

The same intense inward gaze that produced Tolstoy’s record of spiritual awakening became, by the end of his life, an effort to assemble a manual on the meaning of existence. Some of humanity’s greatest writers championed the creative benefits of keeping a diary, but hardly any literary titan has explored the medium’s spiritual and existential value more intimately than Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828–November 10, 1910).

Tolstye journaly