8. Tolstoy cannot be silent

Abstract

For his last thirty years, from Confession to ‘I Cannot Be Silent’, Tolstoy often spoke out in the first person, dispensing with the veil of fiction. These late works were widely disseminated. In ‘I Cannot Be Silent’, Tolstoy spoke out with the intention of inspiring and provoking everyone, from the tsar to readers around the globe. This felt more urgent to him as he approached death. ‘Tolstoy cannot be silent’ considers how in ‘I Cannot Be Silent’, Tolstoy shows—in a highly concentrated form—the devices, techniques, and subject matter that give his fiction its power. Tolstoy returned to the questions about love, death, brotherhood, and the pain of others that he had posed from the start.