SOURCE: "Tolstoy and the Narrative of Sex: A Reading of 'Father Sergius,' 'The Devil,' and The Kreutzer Sonata,'" in In the Shade of the Giant: Essays on Tolstoy, edited by Hugh McLean, University of California Press, 1989, pp. 158-86.

In the excerpt below, Kopper concentrates on various aspects of sexuality in Tolstoy's late short fiction, emphasizing the consequences of the writer's narrative strategies for the historical development of narrative literature.

Like their confrères in France twenty years before, the generation of Russian writers who began their careers around midcentury—Turgenev, Goncharov, Tolstoy, and Pisemsky—found a stubborn problem of narrative lying across their path. The enterprise that they collectively pursued demanded the bodying forth of a fluid social world, filled with the motions of decay and resurgence, mobility and disruption. Railroads made travel easier and extended the possibilities of economic and social commerce both within...