LeBlanc, Ronald D

English

UNH Scholars' Repository

University of New HampshireUniversity of New Hampshire Scholars' RepositoryLanguages, Literatures, and Cultures Scholarship Languages, Literatures, and Cultures2007Review Article: Daniel Rancour-Laferriere’sRussian Literature and PsychoanalysisRonald D. LeBlancUniversity of New Hampshire - Main Campus, ronald.leblanc@unh.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/lang_facpubThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at University of New Hampshire Scholars'Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Scholarship by an authorized administrator of University of NewHampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact nicole.hentz@unh.edu.Recommended CitationLeBlanc, Ronald, D., "Review Article: Daniel Rancour-Laferriere’s Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis" Дениэл Ранкур-Лаферьер,Русская литература и психоанализ (Москва: Ладомир, 2004). Tolstoy Studies Journal, V. 19 (2007) p. 119-123. Review Article: Daniel Rancour-Laferriere’s Russian Literature and  Psychoanalysis  Ronald D. LeBlanc University of New Hampshire Ранкур-Лаферьер, Дениэл. Русская литература и психоанализ. Москва: Ладомир, 2004. 1017 стр. Cloth. ISB, 5-86218-440-6.  sychoanalysis,” Daniel Rancour-Laferriere writes in a Preface ad-dressed to Russian readers of the new collection of translations of his writings, “is the ability to summon forth and to compre-hend so-called free associations” (5). A psy-choanalytical approach to literary criticism, he adds, involves making sense of the “free asso-ciations” called forth in the mind of the phi-lologist-reader by a fictional character, an author, and/or the images present in a work of literature (7). In this sense, the philologist-reader's relationship to the artistic text closely resembles that of a clinical psychoanalyst to the patient lying on his or her couch. The im-portant difference, however, is that the phi-lologist-reader seeks to make sense of the free associations in order to attain understanding rather than undergo therapy, to provide inter-pretive literary insights rather than assist psychological healing. Slavicists in the English-speaking world have long been familiar with the numerous interpretive insights into Russian literary texts, their authors, and the fictional charac-ters who inhabit the created worlds of these texts that Rancour-Laferriere has provided in his rich scholarly output over the past thirty years. In the post-Soviet period, Russian read-ers are likewise beginning to become ac-quainted with some of Rancour-Laferriere’s psychoanalytical studies through translations of such works as The Mind of Stalin: A Psy-choanalytic Study (1988) (Психика Сталина: Психоаналитическое исследование (1996)), The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering (1995) (Рабская душа России: Проблемы нравственного мазохизма и культ страдания (1996)), and Russian Nationalism from an Interdisciplinary Perspective: Imagining Russia (2000) (Россия и русские глазами американского психоаналитика: в поисках национальной идентичности (2003)). The book under re-view here continues this process of acquaint-ing Russian readers with the principal works of this American Slavicist famous for his psy-choanalytical approach to Russian literature and culture. The opening section of Русская литература и психоанализ («Статьи разных лет», 9-282) contains new Russian transla-tions of fourteen articles written by Rancour-Laferriere between 1976 and 1998. They range from interpretations of the dreams of Push-kin’s Tatyana Larina and Gogol’s Ivan Shponka to psychoanalytic profiles of Stalin (as an ac-tual historical figure as well as a literary cha-racter) and from analyses of poems by Pushkin and Lermontov to studies of Formalist theory, Soviet satire, and masochism in Russian litera-ture. What is of especial importance in Русская литература и психоанализ for Tolstovedy, however, are the two remaining sections of the book, Пьер Безухов: Психобиография (283-120 / Tolstoy Studies Journal Vol. XIX 2007  538) and Лев Толстой на кушетке психоаналитика: женоненавист-ничество, мазохизм и ранняя утрата матери (539-856), which provide new Russian translations of two books Rancour-Laferriere published during the 1990s: Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezukhov: A Psychoanalytic Study (1993) and Tolstoy on the Couch: Misogyny, Masochism, and the Absent Mother (1998). As its subtitle suggests, Пьер Безухов: Психобиография provides a psychoanalytic biography—or “psychobiography”—of the famous hero of War and Peace, a highly medit-ative, inner-directed fictional character who is thinking about himself almost constantly throughout the novel. Pierre Bezukhov, as Rancour-Laferriere points out, is a narcissistic personality who “spends much time actually free-associating on a couch” (287). Treating Pierre as if he were a real person and explor-ing the hero’s self-revealing mental processes (to which Tolstoy gives readers of War and Peace such deep and immediate access), the author provides illuminating psychoanalytic explanations for this fictional character’s thoughts, desires, and behavior. Пьер Безухов: Психобиография helps us better understand a number of things about the hero: for example, the lingering effect upon Pierre of his “orphan” status (his unresolved relationship with an absent mother and a rarely present father); the attraction the busty Hélène Kuragina holds, as a pre-oedipal self-object, for the infantile Pierre; the similarities between old Count Bezukhov and young Dolokhov, both of whom serve as “father icons” for the hero; the man-ner in which Pierre’s association with the Masonic brotherhood allows him to “deflect” (or sublimate) his homoerotic urges into a humanitarian impulse to help mankind (to practice brotherly love); and the soothing therapeutic effect that Platon Karatev, as a maternal figure, has on Pierre, launching him on the road to personal autonomy and adult maturity.  Readers are apt to find especially illuminat-ing Rancour-Laferriere’s discussion of how Pierre, when he rekindles his love for Natasha Rostova near novel’s end, following his epi-phanic experiences during French captivity, essentially “backslides” on the independence of self he had managed to achieve under Kara-taev’s tutelage. Platon, the author explains, had helped Pierre to learn at last how to overcome his infantile narcissism and to treat loved ones as separate, autonomous objects. The re-entry of Natasha into Pierre’s life, however, suddenly presents the hero with a woman who provides an almost unlimited source of what Otto Feni-chel calls “narcissistic supplies,” and she very quickly succeeds in taking control over his life. As Rancour-Laferriere puts it, “Tolstoy hands Pierre the perfect self-object on a silver platter, and Pierre can hardly refuse” (498). This pre-cipitous retreat from freedom that the hero experiences in the final sections of War and Peace provides, in part, the basis for the life of conjugal bliss and domestic tranquility that Pierre and Natasha are shown to be leading in the controversial Epilogue Tolstoy appended to his epic novel.  In Лев Толстой на кушетке психоанал-итика, it is not one of Tolstoy’s fictional cha-racters but the writer himself who is placed on the psychoanalytic couch, where Rancour-Laferriere examines at close range, and in a detailed, unflattering manner, a whole series of psychic disturbances and neurotic behavioral patterns that he claims afflicted Lev Nikolae-vich during his life and career, including mega-lomania, moral masochism, grandiose narciss-ism, depressive anxiety, low self-esteem, chronic masturbation, hypomanic mood swings, and sadistic impulses. Rancour-Laferriere takes a frank and penetrating look at what he calls “the dark, misogynistic side of Tolstoy’s psyche” (541), focusing primarily on what he perceives to be the famous Russian writer’s persistently hostile attitude toward women, which he traces back, ontogenetically, to the death of Tolstoy’s mother when he was still very young. The author’s primary concern in this book, he declares, is to seek a satisfacto-ry explanation for Tolstoy’s ambivalent, at Ronald D. LeBlanc Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis / 121  times contradictory, feelings about women and sexuality, which are expressed most promi-nently in The Kreutzer Sonata. “Tolstoy’s re-pudiation of sex,” Rancour-Laferriere explains, is embedded within a complex of polarized feelings about women and sexuality. Tols-toy both desired women and punished himself for his desire. He both needed to damage a woman with his sexuality, and to refrain from damaging her. He both idea-lized women in their maternal role and hated mothers. These and other personal ambivalences spawned the many and fasci-nating ambiguities of his novella on human sexuality. (547) To discover why and how Tolstoy came to create the disturbingly misogynistic images that dominate The Kreutzer Sonata, Rancour-Laferriere examines closely not only the nu-merous drafts and variants of this bleak novel-la about an unhappy marriage, but also entries in Tolstoy’s personal diaries and his corres-pondence during the period when he was working on the manuscript. The extreme ar-gument for sexual abstinence that Tolstoy develops in The Kreutzer Sonata is shown to have been generated mainly by his troubling sense of guilt over the uncontrollable rage and anger he felt toward the “absent” mother who did not breastfeed him and who abandoned him by her early death. The novella thus con-stitutes, in Rancour-Laferriere’s words, “more an expression of outright hatred of the ‘aban-doning’ mother than nostalgia for her” (609). Tolstoy, according to the author, expresses this repressed animosity indirectly, displacing it onto other women who, in his unconscious mind, bear a resemblance to his actual mother: that is, such maternal icons as his own wife Sonia, his fictional heroine Anna Karenina, and, ultimately, the unnamed wife whom Pozdny-shev murders. After charting the symptoms of Tolstoy’s psychopathology that allegedly mani-fested themselves while he was working on The Kreutzer Sonata, Rancour-Laferriere ex-amines the writer’s stormy relationship with Sonia, “Lev’s major self-object and his primary maternal icon” (796). Concluding his study on a feminist note, Rancour-Laferriere asserts that Tolstoy essentially drove his poor wife crazy, making her “hysterical” through his intense ambivalence about heterosexual inte-raction. The volume concludes with an appendix that includes the republication of the quasi-autobiographical story, Whose Fault Is It? (Чья вина? По поводу «Крейцеровой сонаты» Льва Толстого. Написано женой Льва Толстого (1895)), a counter-text that repre-sents Sophia Andreevna’s artistic response to her husband’s controversial novella, a lengthy list of works cited, a list of the original works in English by Rancour-Laferriere that are translated in this volume, and a brief biograph-ical sketch of the author. Some readers in Russia—tolstovedy, in particular—will no doubt be seriously offended by the author’s brutally frank psychoanalytic diagnosis of this famous writer and the unflattering picture he paints of the revered sage of Yasnaya Polyana. Moreover, the psychoanalytic approach to literature continues to have its detractors among Slavic literary scholars worldwide. Freud, of course, has come under increasing attack in recent years in the United States as well, where the scientific validity and thera-peutic value of his psychoanalytic theories have been questioned, challenged, and in some cases discredited. Not too long ago his picture appeared on the cover of an issue of Time magazine accompanied by the question, “Is Freud Dead?” It seems to be the case, however, that Freud is re-emerging in a much more favorable light in the former Soviet Union, where for many years his works had been repressed and his name vilified. It will be in-teresting, therefore, to see how well Rancour-Laferriere’s psychobiography of Pierre Bezuk-hov and his analysis of Tolstoy’s own troubled psyche will be received among readers in post-communist Russia. Although there is much in Русская литература и психоанализ to recommend it 122 / Tolstoy Studies Journal Vol. XIX 2007  for Russian-speaking tolstovedy, there are nonetheless a few technical shortcomings in this volume, most of which may well reflect more on the publisher or editor than the au-thor. First of all, there is the choice of title. Not only does it fail to indicate that the vast majori-ty of the book (approximately two-thirds) is devoted to Tolstoy and his works; it also could easily mislead some readers, fluent in both Russian and English, into thinking that they will be getting here a Russian translation of Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis (1989), the collection of critical essays by various scholars that was edited by Rancour-Laferriere nearly twenty years ago. Secondly, the exces-sive length of this book (over a thousand pag-es) makes demands not only on the reader but also on the binding. My copy arrived with the covers already torn away from the binding and scotch-taped back together in a very makeshift way. It seems to me that the “Ladomir” pub-lishing house would have been well advised to publish separate Russian editions of Rancour-Laferriere’s two books on Tolstoy or, alterna-tively, publish translations of the two books together, but without the fourteen articles and essays that are largely unrelated to Tolstoy. It also would have been preferable if the two books on Tolstoy, which are ably rendered into Russian here by Iu. S. Evtushenkov and Iu. N. Maslov, respectively, would have been trans-lated by the same person to ensure consistency in the rendering of psychoanalytical terminol-ogy as well as in preserving the author’s voice, style, and manner of expression. Finally, the inclusion of Sophia Andreevna’s Whose Fault Is It?, immediately following the author’s dis-cussion of The Kreutzer Sonata, makes for a nice addition to the volume. It should have been accompanied, however, by at least some brief commentary that places Sonia’s story in the context of the immediate aftermath of the publication of her husband’s controversial novella, when various parodies and pastiches appeared as part of the burgeoning debate over sexual morality that ensued within Rus-sian literature and culture (cf. Peter Ulf Møller, Postlude to The Kreutzer Sonata: Tolstoj and the Debate over Sexual Morality in Russian Literature of the 1890s (1988)). These technical quibbles are minor in na-ture, however. All in all, the “Ladomir” publish-ing house is to be highly commended for bring-ing out in Russian translation the important and insightful works of scholarship that Daniel Rancour-Laferriere has written on Tolstoy. Whether Russian readers will, in the end, mainly agree or disagree with the author’s analyses, Русская литература и психоанализ is likely, nonetheless, to have quite a profound impact on Tolstoy studies in post-communist Russia for the foreseeable future.  

Review Article: Daniel Rancour-Laferriere’s Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis

University of New Hampshire

University of New Hampshire
University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository
Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Scholarship Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
2007
Review Article: Daniel Rancour-Laferriere’s
Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis
Ronald D. LeBlanc
University of New Hampshire - Main Campus, ronald.leblanc@unh.edu
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/lang_facpub
This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at University of New Hampshire Scholars'
Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Scholarship by an authorized administrator of University of New
Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact nicole.hentz@unh.edu.
Recommended Citation
LeBlanc, Ronald, D., "Review Article: Daniel Rancour-Laferriere’s Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis" Дениэл Ранкур-Лаферьер,
Русская литература и психоанализ (Москва: Ладомир, 2004). Tolstoy Studies Journal, V. 19 (2007) p. 119-123.
 
Review Article: 
Daniel Rancour-Laferriere’s 
Russian Literature and  
Psychoanalysis  
Ronald D. LeBlanc 
University of New Hampshire 
Ранкур-Лаферьер, Дениэл. Русская 
литература и психоанализ. Москва: 
Ладомир, 2004. 1017 стр. Cloth. ISB, 5-
86218-440-6.  
sychoanalysis,” Daniel Rancour-
Laferriere writes in a Preface ad-
dressed to Russian readers of the 
new collection of translations of his writings, 
“is the ability to summon forth and to compre-
hend so-called free associations” (5). A psy-
choanalytical approach to literary criticism, he 
adds, involves making sense of the “free asso-
ciations” called forth in the mind of the phi-
lologist-reader by a fictional character, an 
author, and/or the images present in a work of 
literature (7). In this sense, the philologist-
reader's relationship to the artistic text closely 
resembles that of a clinical psychoanalyst to 
the patient lying on his or her couch. The im-
portant difference, however, is that the phi-
lologist-reader seeks to make sense of the free 
associations in order to attain understanding 
rather than undergo therapy, to provide inter-
pretive literary insights rather than assist 
psychological healing. 
Slavicists in the English-speaking world 
have long been familiar with the numerous 
interpretive insights into Russian literary 
texts, their authors, and the fictional charac-
ters who inhabit the created worlds of these 
texts that Rancour-Laferriere has provided in 
his rich scholarly output over the past thirty 
years. In the post-Soviet period, Russian read-
ers are likewise beginning to become ac-
quainted with some of Rancour-Laferriere’s 
psychoanalytical studies through translations 
of such works as The Mind of Stalin: A Psy-
choanalytic Study (1988) (Психика Сталина: 
Психоаналитическое исследование (1996)), 
The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and 
the Cult of Suffering (1995) (Рабская душа 
России: Проблемы нравственного 
мазохизма и культ страдания (1996)), and 
Russian Nationalism from an Interdisciplinary 
Perspective: Imagining Russia (2000) (Россия 
и русские глазами американского 
психоаналитика: в поисках национальной 
идентичности (2003)). The book under re-
view here continues this process of acquaint-
ing Russian readers with the principal works 
of this American Slavicist famous for his psy-
choanalytical approach to Russian literature 
and culture. The opening section of Русская 
литература и психоанализ («Статьи разных 
лет», 9-282) contains new Russian transla-
tions of fourteen articles written by Rancour-
Laferriere between 1976 and 1998. They range 
from interpretations of the dreams of Push-
kin’s Tatyana Larina and Gogol’s Ivan Shponka 
to psychoanalytic profiles of Stalin (as an ac-
tual historical figure as well as a literary cha-
racter) and from analyses of poems by Pushkin 
and Lermontov to studies of Formalist theory, 
Soviet satire, and masochism in Russian litera-
ture. What is of especial importance in Русская 
литература и психоанализ for Tolstovedy, 
however, are the two remaining sections of the 
book, Пьер Безухов: Психобиография (283-
120 / Tolstoy Studies Journal Vol. XIX 2007 
 
538) and Лев Толстой на кушетке 
психоаналитика: женоненавист-ничество, 
мазохизм и ранняя утрата матери (539-
856), which provide new Russian translations 
of two books Rancour-Laferriere published 
during the 1990s: Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezukhov: A 
Psychoanalytic Study (1993) and Tolstoy on 
the Couch: Misogyny, Masochism, and the 
Absent Mother (1998). 
As its subtitle suggests, Пьер Безухов: 
Психобиография provides a psychoanalytic 
biography—or “psychobiography”—of the 
famous hero of War and Peace, a highly medit-
ative, inner-directed fictional character who is 
thinking about himself almost constantly 
throughout the novel. Pierre Bezukhov, as 
Rancour-Laferriere points out, is a narcissistic 
personality who “spends much time actually 
free-associating on a couch” (287). Treating 
Pierre as if he were a real person and explor-
ing the hero’s self-revealing mental processes 
(to which Tolstoy gives readers of War and 
Peace such deep and immediate access), the 
author provides illuminating psychoanalytic 
explanations for this fictional character’s 
thoughts, desires, and behavior. Пьер Безухов: 
Психобиография helps us better understand a 
number of things about the hero: for example, 
the lingering effect upon Pierre of his “orphan” 
status (his unresolved relationship with an 
absent mother and a rarely present father); the 
attraction the busty Hélène Kuragina holds, as 
a pre-oedipal self-object, for the infantile 
Pierre; the similarities between old Count 
Bezukhov and young Dolokhov, both of whom 
serve as “father icons” for the hero; the man-
ner in which Pierre’s association with the 
Masonic brotherhood allows him to “deflect” 
(or sublimate) his homoerotic urges into a 
humanitarian impulse to help mankind (to 
practice brotherly love); and the soothing 
therapeutic effect that Platon Karatev, as a 
maternal figure, has on Pierre, launching him 
on the road to personal autonomy and adult 
maturity.  
Readers are apt to find especially illuminat-
ing Rancour-Laferriere’s discussion of how 
Pierre, when he rekindles his love for Natasha 
Rostova near novel’s end, following his epi-
phanic experiences during French captivity, 
essentially “backslides” on the independence 
of self he had managed to achieve under Kara-
taev’s tutelage. Platon, the author explains, had 
helped Pierre to learn at last how to overcome 
his infantile narcissism and to treat loved ones 
as separate, autonomous objects. The re-entry 
of Natasha into Pierre’s life, however, suddenly 
presents the hero with a woman who provides 
an almost unlimited source of what Otto Feni-
chel calls “narcissistic supplies,” and she very 
quickly succeeds in taking control over his life. 
As Rancour-Laferriere puts it, “Tolstoy hands 
Pierre the perfect self-object on a silver platter, 
and Pierre can hardly refuse” (498). This pre-
cipitous retreat from freedom that the hero 
experiences in the final sections of War and 
Peace provides, in part, the basis for the life of 
conjugal bliss and domestic tranquility that 
Pierre and Natasha are shown to be leading in 
the controversial Epilogue Tolstoy appended 
to his epic novel.  
In Лев Толстой на кушетке психоанал-
итика, it is not one of Tolstoy’s fictional cha-
racters but the writer himself who is placed on 
the psychoanalytic couch, where Rancour-
Laferriere examines at close range, and in a 
detailed, unflattering manner, a whole series of 
psychic disturbances and neurotic behavioral 
patterns that he claims afflicted Lev Nikolae-
vich during his life and career, including mega-
lomania, moral masochism, grandiose narciss-
ism, depressive anxiety, low self-esteem, 
chronic masturbation, hypomanic mood 
swings, and sadistic impulses. Rancour-
Laferriere takes a frank and penetrating look 
at what he calls “the dark, misogynistic side of 
Tolstoy’s psyche” (541), focusing primarily on 
what he perceives to be the famous Russian 
writer’s persistently hostile attitude toward 
women, which he traces back, ontogenetically, 
to the death of Tolstoy’s mother when he was 
still very young. The author’s primary concern 
in this book, he declares, is to seek a satisfacto-
ry explanation for Tolstoy’s ambivalent, at 
Ronald D. LeBlanc Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis / 121 
 
times contradictory, feelings about women and 
sexuality, which are expressed most promi-
nently in The Kreutzer Sonata. “Tolstoy’s re-
pudiation of sex,” Rancour-Laferriere explains, 
is embedded within a complex of polarized 
feelings about women and sexuality. Tols-
toy both desired women and punished 
himself for his desire. He both needed to 
damage a woman with his sexuality, and to 
refrain from damaging her. He both idea-
lized women in their maternal role and 
hated mothers. These and other personal 
ambivalences spawned the many and fasci-
nating ambiguities of his novella on human 
sexuality. (547) 
To discover why and how Tolstoy came to 
create the disturbingly misogynistic images 
that dominate The Kreutzer Sonata, Rancour-
Laferriere examines closely not only the nu-
merous drafts and variants of this bleak novel-
la about an unhappy marriage, but also entries 
in Tolstoy’s personal diaries and his corres-
pondence during the period when he was 
working on the manuscript. The extreme ar-
gument for sexual abstinence that Tolstoy 
develops in The Kreutzer Sonata is shown to 
have been generated mainly by his troubling 
sense of guilt over the uncontrollable rage and 
anger he felt toward the “absent” mother who 
did not breastfeed him and who abandoned 
him by her early death. The novella thus con-
stitutes, in Rancour-Laferriere’s words, “more 
an expression of outright hatred of the ‘aban-
doning’ mother than nostalgia for her” (609). 
Tolstoy, according to the author, expresses this 
repressed animosity indirectly, displacing it 
onto other women who, in his unconscious 
mind, bear a resemblance to his actual mother: 
that is, such maternal icons as his own wife 
Sonia, his fictional heroine Anna Karenina, and, 
ultimately, the unnamed wife whom Pozdny-
shev murders. After charting the symptoms of 
Tolstoy’s psychopathology that allegedly mani-
fested themselves while he was working on 
The Kreutzer Sonata, Rancour-Laferriere ex-
amines the writer’s stormy relationship with 
Sonia, “Lev’s major self-object and his primary 
maternal icon” (796). Concluding his study on 
a feminist note, Rancour-Laferriere asserts 
that Tolstoy essentially drove his poor wife 
crazy, making her “hysterical” through his 
intense ambivalence about heterosexual inte-
raction. 
The volume concludes with an appendix 
that includes the republication of the quasi-
autobiographical story, Whose Fault Is It? (Чья 
вина? По поводу «Крейцеровой сонаты» 
Льва Толстого. Написано женой Льва 
Толстого (1895)), a counter-text that repre-
sents Sophia Andreevna’s artistic response to 
her husband’s controversial novella, a lengthy 
list of works cited, a list of the original works 
in English by Rancour-Laferriere that are 
translated in this volume, and a brief biograph-
ical sketch of the author. Some readers in 
Russia—tolstovedy, in particular—will no 
doubt be seriously offended by the author’s 
brutally frank psychoanalytic diagnosis of this 
famous writer and the unflattering picture he 
paints of the revered sage of Yasnaya Polyana. 
Moreover, the psychoanalytic approach to 
literature continues to have its detractors 
among Slavic literary scholars worldwide. 
Freud, of course, has come under increasing 
attack in recent years in the United States as 
well, where the scientific validity and thera-
peutic value of his psychoanalytic theories 
have been questioned, challenged, and in some 
cases discredited. Not too long ago his picture 
appeared on the cover of an issue of Time 
magazine accompanied by the question, “Is 
Freud Dead?” It seems to be the case, however, 
that Freud is re-emerging in a much more 
favorable light in the former Soviet Union, 
where for many years his works had been 
repressed and his name vilified. It will be in-
teresting, therefore, to see how well Rancour-
Laferriere’s psychobiography of Pierre Bezuk-
hov and his analysis of Tolstoy’s own troubled 
psyche will be received among readers in post-
communist Russia. 
Although there is much in Русская 
литература и психоанализ to recommend it 
122 / Tolstoy Studies Journal Vol. XIX 2007 
 
for Russian-speaking tolstovedy, there are 
nonetheless a few technical shortcomings in 
this volume, most of which may well reflect 
more on the publisher or editor than the au-
thor. First of all, there is the choice of title. Not 
only does it fail to indicate that the vast majori-
ty of the book (approximately two-thirds) is 
devoted to Tolstoy and his works; it also could 
easily mislead some readers, fluent in both 
Russian and English, into thinking that they 
will be getting here a Russian translation of 
Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis (1989), 
the collection of critical essays by various 
scholars that was edited by Rancour-Laferriere 
nearly twenty years ago. Secondly, the exces-
sive length of this book (over a thousand pag-
es) makes demands not only on the reader but 
also on the binding. My copy arrived with the 
covers already torn away from the binding and 
scotch-taped back together in a very makeshift 
way. It seems to me that the “Ladomir” pub-
lishing house would have been well advised to 
publish separate Russian editions of Rancour-
Laferriere’s two books on Tolstoy or, alterna-
tively, publish translations of the two books 
together, but without the fourteen articles and 
essays that are largely unrelated to Tolstoy. It 
also would have been preferable if the two 
books on Tolstoy, which are ably rendered into 
Russian here by Iu. S. Evtushenkov and Iu. N. 
Maslov, respectively, would have been trans-
lated by the same person to ensure consistency 
in the rendering of psychoanalytical terminol-
ogy as well as in preserving the author’s voice, 
style, and manner of expression. Finally, the 
inclusion of Sophia Andreevna’s Whose Fault 
Is It?, immediately following the author’s dis-
cussion of The Kreutzer Sonata, makes for a 
nice addition to the volume. It should have 
been accompanied, however, by at least some 
brief commentary that places Sonia’s story in 
the context of the immediate aftermath of the 
publication of her husband’s controversial 
novella, when various parodies and pastiches 
appeared as part of the burgeoning debate 
over sexual morality that ensued within Rus-
sian literature and culture (cf. Peter Ulf Møller, 
Postlude to The Kreutzer Sonata: Tolstoj and 
the Debate over Sexual Morality in Russian 
Literature of the 1890s (1988)). 
These technical quibbles are minor in na-
ture, however. All in all, the “Ladomir” publish-
ing house is to be highly commended for bring-
ing out in Russian translation the important 
and insightful works of scholarship that Daniel 
Rancour-Laferriere has written on Tolstoy. 
Whether Russian readers will, in the end, 
mainly agree or disagree with the author’s 
analyses, Русская литература и психоанализ 
is likely, nonetheless, to have quite a profound 
impact on Tolstoy studies in post-communist 
Russia for the foreseeable future. 
 


https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1051&context=lang_facpub

Review Article: Daniel Rancour-Laferriere’s Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis

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