1982/01/01 by Kathleen Parthé
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Ambiguity #Art #Discourse Analysis and Cultural Communication #Dream #History #Linguistics #Literature #Philosophy #Poetry #Praise #Psychology #Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies
paper · doi:10.2307/2496345
openalex publication_date 1982/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Tolstoi made the accurate and poetic description of death a literary problem to be solved: how does a writer use the resources of language to describe the actual sensation of dying, an experience which the living can never fully comprehend? Experimenting with various linguistic means to create and use ambiguity, Tolstoi worked on a solution to this problem over many years in Childhood, Sevastopol Tales , “Three Deaths,” War and Peace , “Notes of a Madman,” and The Death of Ivan ll'ich . There are critics who feel that his achievement in this area is virtually unsurpassed; a recent book on death in world literature devotes more attention and praise to Tolstoi than to any other writer. The most powerful of all death scenes in Tolstoi's fiction is the one that portrays Prince Andrei Bolkonskii in War and Peace . The specter of death that Andrei sees in a dream, a substantiation of his fear of dying, is designated simply by the neuter pronoun ono (it). Konstantin Leont'ev was struck by this ono which he felt was so terrifying and mysterious that it could be identified with death itself. What makes ono so immediately striking is that although it is a neuter form, it is used intentionally (by being underlined) to refer directly to the word smert' (death), which is a feminine noun.