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Suspicion on Trial: Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata and Nabokov's “Pozdnyshev's Address”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Tatyana Gershkovich
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Abstract

The postcritique debate tends to presuppose that reading suspiciously or restoratively is largely a matter of choosing to do so and that texts themselves do not incline us to read them one way or another. Drawing on works by Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Nabokov, this essay contests these presumptions. Both authors regarded distrust as a state of mind to which we are ineluctably condemned; only by reading artworks designed to allay our suspicion can we hope to be briefly relieved of it. Tolstoy's famous Kreutzer Sonata and Nabokov's little-known variation on it, “Pozdnyshev's Address,” explore strategies for disarming readerly distrust. If these authors are right that suspicion is our existential condition rather than a freely chosen interpretive stance, the project of prescribing the ways that readers ought to relate to texts is unlikely to succeed—or cease. We might instead set ourselves the task of investigating how particular texts shape the ways they are read.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 134 , Issue 3 , May 2019 , pp. 459 - 474
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2019

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