by Leo Tolstoy
15. Sovremennik 12 (1856). Perhaps from a confusion about the full semantic range of the Russian term, which has both a spiritual and a more strictly mental meaning, the concluding phrase (dialektika dushy) is sometimes translated as ‘dialectic of the soul’, even though the doctrinaire materialist Chernyshevsky is speaking of mental, rather than of spiritual processes, of definite psychic events and mechanisms rather than of a transcendental religious or metaphysical category whose existence he would probably have denied anyway.
Notes
1 . L. N. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. L. D. Gromova-Opul’skaia et al., 100 vols (Moscow: Nauka, 2000), 1: 11–276.
2. As Tolstoy put the issue in an aphoristic notebook entry of 16 October 1853: ‘The art of writing well … consists not in knowing what to write but in knowing what doesn’t need to be written; no additions, however brilliant, can improve a work so much as deletions will.’
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First published in Russian from 1852 to 1857
This edition first published in Penguin Classics 2012
Translation, introduction and notes copyright © Judson Rosengrant, 2012
Cover: Leo Tolstoy in 1849, from Schenfeld's daguerreotype (Photograph © RIA Novosti/TopFoto)
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ISBN: 978-0-241-95706-6
