Art in Doubt Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds

Two figures central to the Russian literary tradition-Tolstoy, the moralist, and Nabokov, the aesthete-seem to have sharply conflicting ideas about the purpose of literature. Tatyana Gershkovich undermines this familiar opposition by identifying a shared fear at the root of their seemingly antithetical aesthetics: that one's experience of the world might be entirely one's own, private and impossible to share through art.
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