Virtual Lecture by Dr. Laurel Schmuck of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures

In Lev Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata (1890), the frenetic and disturbed Pozdnyshev describes his motive for killing the woman he married. In his diatribe against contemporary sexual and social relations, Tolstoy’s antihero calls for universal celibacy. Pozdnyshev’s theory, which essentially reverses Darwinian natural and sexual selection, is deduced with pseudoscientific flare. He imagines an erasure of sexual difference, and eventually of humanity itself, as he projects the gradual disappearance of species in contrast to Darwin’s study of their emergence. Through the strange monolog of this homicidal critic, Tolstoy reworks many of the ideological discourses he was processing at the time of Kreutzer Sonata’s composition. The two major sources that inspire Pozdnyshev’s proposal are the creation story of Genesis and an 1888 article by Nikolai Chernyshevsky about Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Pozdnyshev’s language is fraught with the lexicon of the creation story, and his argumentation parodies evolutionary biology while taking the principle of perfectibility to its logical, though absurd, end—that of the voluntary extinction of humanity.

Laurel Schmuck received her Ph.D. in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture from the University of Southern California in 2018. Her dissertation, “The ‘Impersonal Project’ in Lev Tolstoy’s Prose,” analyzes impersonal narrative techniques in Tolstoy’s writing and aims to challenge his status as primarily a psychological writer. Laurel has taught Russian language, 

literature and culture at Dalhousie University, University of Southern California and University of Colorado, Boulder. She has published original research in Slavic and East European Journal, European Journal of American Studies and Iasnopolianskii sbornik, the Tolstoy Museum’s journal in Russia. Laurel also has an article in the forthcoming issue of Tolstoy Studies Journal. Her current book project, Tolstoy’s Formal Anarchy, explores how Lev Tolstoy’s forays into the natural sciences, mathematics and economics informed an anarchist ethos beneath the narrative form and ideology of War and Peace.

Please contact jillian.porter@colorado.edu with any questions, including about accessibility.