The Sand-Glass: Tolstoy’s Concept of Time in War and Peace with Andrei Zorin

Tolstoy's heroic effort to bridge the rupture that 1861 made in Russian life by recreating the uninterrupted flow of time connecting the years of Napoleonic Wars and the immediate present of 1860s. By personalizing national past he transformed history into the family archive. The events of 1805-1812 and the catastrophe of 1835 looming on the horizon of the novel become a part of quasi autobiographical narrative that, according to Tolstoy, is the only kind of history that can aspire to be faithful to the actual lived experience of generations.

Andrei Zorin is a cultural historian and literary scholar whose work focuses on Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Professor Zorin received his undergraduate and graduate degrees (Dissertation and Habilitation) from Moscow State University. From 1993 to 2004 he taught at the Russian State University for Humanities. In the U.S. he has taught at Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Michigan, in addition to delivering lecture courses in France, Finland, and Japan. He is on the editorial boards of New Literary Review (Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie), Slavic Review, and Cahiers du Monde Russe and has published extensively in Russian, English, German, French, and Italian. His recent work includes Feeding the Two-headed Eagle: Russian Literature and State Ideology in the Last Third of the 18th and First Third of the 19th Centuries (Moscow 2001, 2nd ed. 2004). Since 2004 he has been a Professorial Fellow and Professor of Russian at New College, University of Oxford.

In the fall of 2012, the Jordan Center will host two public lectures reflecting on the 200th anniversary of the events that transformed Russia, Europe and the world in 1812. Our speakers will consider 1812’s legacies in the broadest sense, touching on film and music, nationalisms and empires, warfare and violence, Tolstoy and post-Soviet film.

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Link to written event recap