Tatyana Gershkovich

At the Academy, Gershkovich will work on her next book project, “Tolstoy Red and White: 1920 -1928.” The tenth anniversary of Leo Tolstoy’s death, in 1910, served as the pretext for the first public meeting of the Russian Journalists Union in Berlin. For these Russian intellectuals who had fled the Soviet regime, it was an occasion not only to celebrate the great author but also to claim him as their own. They affirmed that they, not their Soviet counterparts, were the true heirs of Tolstoy’s cultural legacy. There were Russian speeches, congratulatory remarks from German luminaries, and a performance of Tolstoy’s play The Fruits of Enlightenment. Backstage, meanwhile, there was a heated debate with visiting Soviet actors about whether the violence of the Bolshevik Revolution could ever be justified. The Soviets, too, sought to claim Tolstoy, starting with Lenin himself. But Tolstoy’s literary and socio-religious works could not easily be assimilated into either the radical Left agenda of Soviet critics or the liberalism of many émigré circles.

While in Berlin, Gershkovich will focus on the part of her book project that concerns what she calls “White Tolstoy,” or what Tolstoy’s legacy meant for a Russian émigré society in Berlin as they struggled to preserve a coherent cultural community in the face of dispersion, linguistic isolation, and poverty. She plans to mine the archival records of many Berlin institutions founded by the extensive émigré communities of White Russians, including the Union of Russian Journalists, the newspaper Rul’, and the Russian Institute, as well as émigré intellectuals such as Iulii Aikhenvald, Mark Aldanov, and Sergei Gessen. By considering where these Left and liberal critics succeeded in making Tolstoy’s texts align with their agendas, and where they failed, Gershkovich aims to reassess the cultural battle lines of the Russian Revolution—and to examine anew the vexed interplay of politics and aesthetics.