Mann’s View of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in Times of War and Peace

This essay examines Thomas Mann’s views of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Mann’s acquaintance with Russian literature, which he read in German translation, began in his early youth, facilitated by the increasing translation of nineteenth-century Russian literature into German in the 1880s (by Wilhelm Wolfson, Friedrich Bodenstedt et al.). Russian literature always remained an important theme for Mann’s own philosophical writing: he wrote three essays on Tolstoy (1922, 1928, 1939), one on Dostoevsky (1945), and a third on Chekhov (1954).

While living in the United States during World War II, Mann worked on his major novel Doctor Faustus (1943–47). In 1949, this process found its reflection in his essay The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of ‘Doctor Faustus’ (1949). My chapter draws on both works to demonstrate Mann’s understanding of the values of nineteenth-century Russian literature, and to identify parallels between the storyline of Adrian Leverkühn’s renunciation of God, Germany’s fall to the power of Nazis and the final catastrophe (reflected in The Story of a Novel), and the revival of Mann’s own interest in Dostoevsky and rereading of his texts.