Slum Bodies: Leo Tolstoy’s What Should We Do Then?, the Moscow Poor, and Late Nineteenth‐Century Russian Slum Literature

Abstract

This article analyzes Tolstoy’s narrative on the Moscow poor in What Should We Do Then? in the context of the tradition of slum literature in late nineteenth‐century Russia. It focuses on the interplay between the human body and the environment in a literary tradition that is heavily influenced by the biomedical discourse of degeneration. It compares then the slum discourse with Tolstoy’s representation of the poor. The argument is that Tolstoy recalls some elements of this discourse with the intention of distancing himself from it and proposing a new perspective on the slum reality. Tolstoy attempts to individualize and differentiate what may initially seem like an amorphous, threatening human mass, in order to highlight the anthropological normality of slum space and its dwellers. This aligns with his philanthropic program based on mutual love between rich and poor. However, his normalization and differentiation strategies eventually collapse due to the persistence of a threatening bodily otherness within the slums. The ultimate failure of Tolstoy’s “naïve” plan for social amelioration is manifested in the persistence of the disturbing degenerate reality of slum bodies and spaces as a mirror image of the monstrosity of society.