Доклад Ani Kokobobo "Strange Bedfellows – Leo Tolstoy and Andrea Dworkin"

At a first glance, few thinkers would seem as diametrically opposed to one another as Leo Tolstoy and Andrea Dworkin. One is a nineteenth-century Russian prolific writer and revered patriarch often seen as a misogynist, who, after penning major works of world literature, like War and Peace and Anna Karenina, disavowed sexuality and preached abstinence, pacifism, and anarchy. The other is a twentieth-century, second-wave American feminist, former sex worker, and staunch critic of patriarchy and pornography. As different as these positionalities seem, Dworkin and Tolstoy arrived at similar conclusions about gender and sexuality through their different paths. I trace the significant intellectual connection between these two thinkers. My intent is not to argue for influence but rather for affinity: thinking about these two thinkers in tandem helps us understand both of them better – the similarity to Tolstoy reveals why Dworkin might have been perceived as far too conservative during the feminist civil wars of the 1980s, while Tolstoy’s ideological overlap with Dworkin suggests that perhaps the author was never quite the misogynist he is often seen as. Международный научный семинар Школы филологических наук ВШЭ "Русский роман XIX века: корпус, поэтика, социальное воображаемое" 23 сентября 2021 года