In a review of War and Peace, N. N. Strakhov, the critic who was later to become one of Tolstoy’s closest friends, wrote that the novel was about “the idea of the heroic life.”An essential ingredient of heroism is courage, which was a cardinal virtue for Tolstoy. A war hero himself, he first became known to the general public as the author of war stories about the siege of Sevastopol, at which he fought. (His earlier works had been signed with initials.) As the epigraph to this chapter suggests, his contemporaries perceived him, for better or for worse, as obsessed with courage. These qualities are apparent as well to those who only know him through his writings: an admiring Ernest Hemingway, for instance, saw him as a fighter without equal. The purpose of this essay is to explore what Tolstoy meant by courage, and why it was so important to him.

Not surprisingly, from the time Tolstoy arrived in the Caucasus at the age of twenty-two in 1851 and joined the army in 1852, he began a struggle to define what courage is. The war stories that he wrote in this period were anti-romantic, and most of what passes for courage in them stands revealed as mere show. In the early war stories and War and Peace, Tolstoy, sometimes sympathetically and often sarcastically, illustrates how men, inwardly trembling, outwardly strut their courage on the battlefield to win medals and fame. While debunking romantic heroism, however, he strove to replace it with “true” courage. The narrator of his first war story, The Raid (1852), finds this in the behavior of the modest Captain Khlopov (ch. 10). Dissatisfied with this effort, Tolstoy returns obsessively to the theme.

At the end of Sevastopol in May, Tolstoy makes a famous claim, central to his fiction and startling in its simplicity and boldness: “The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the strength of my soul, whom I have attempted to depict in all of his beauty, and who was, is and will always be sublime, is the truth.” In notes toWar and Peace a decade or so later, he wrote: “I was afraid that the necessity to describe the significant figures of 1812 would force me to be governed by historical documents rather than the truth.” But what did Tolstoy mean by “truth” in works of fiction which have, since Aristotle, been understood to describe not what is but what might be?

Given that both works contain this Tolstoyan truth, it makes sense to search for it in their intersection. At first, this approach may seem unpromising, however. Sevastopol in May, a feuilleton, focuses on the day-to-day life of a few “randomly chosen” soldiers during a short period of time in an enclosed space. War and Peace, set entirely in the past, sprawls over multiple characters and huge chunks of time and space. In other ways, however, Sevastopol Sketches and War and Peace are quite similar. Both are constructed of “real” material taken from life (and especially from Tolstoy’s biography), while that same material is fitted into a context that disguises its provenance. Tolstoy was in Sevastopol.

In June 1887, while a guest at Tolstoy’s estate, Iasnaia Poliana, the eminent jurist Anatolii Koni told Tolstoy a remarkable story from his own practice. In the early 1870s, while Koni was serving as prosecutor for the St. Petersburg district court, a well-dressed young man “with a pale, expressive face and restless, burning eyes” had come to his office. He asked Koni to overrule a prison official who had refused to transmit without first reading it a letter to a female prisoner named Rozalia Oni. Rozalia Oni was a prostitute of Finnish origin. Convicted of having robbed a client of 100 roubles, she had been sentenced to four months' confinement. Without revealing his motives, the young man said that he wanted to marry the woman.

The young man, Koni knew, belonged to a well-known family, was well educated, and held a responsible post in the civil service. Koni tried to dissuade him, saying that Rozalia could never be happy with him, but it was to no avail. Rozalia herself had eagerly agreed to the marriage. Koni refused to expedite the wedding, however, and the advent of Lent necessitated further postponement. During this waiting period Rozalia caught the typhus endemic in Russian prisons and died. As Koni sententiously put it, “The Lord drew a curtain over her life and stopped the beating of her poor heart.”

In Tolstoy’s time the phrase “popular literature” (narodnaia literatura, “literature for or of the common people”)subsumed a variety of related products. It included, first, the literature of the people, especially the narrative forms of folklore: heroic songs, fairy tales, religious legends, and the like. Produced and orally perpetuated among the common people themselves, usually by quasi-professional performers, this category of popular literature assumed written or printed form only through the efforts of folklorists and other transcribers of its oral performance. Once such works became known it was not long before stylizations of them followed. These are clearly not “of the people” but imitate as closely as possible the spirit and forms of their models. Stylizations, particularly of the Russian fairy tale, are well represented in nineteenth-century Russian literature. Well-known examples are Pushkin’s Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish (Skazka o rybake i rybke), V. F. Odoevskii’s Moroz Ivanovich, S. T. Aksakov’s The Little Crimson Flower (Alen'kii tsvetochek), and P. P. Ershov’s The Little Humpbacked Horse (Konek-gorbunok). Tolstoy wrote many works, in particular his score or so of Stories for the People (narodnye rasskazy) which may be assigned to this category, but, as will appear below, not exclusively to it.

This essay discusses how poet and reader perform gender in Dickinson's poetry. Our discussion depends on a two-pronged general argument: first, that both gender and the lyric poem in and of themselves constitute performances and, second, that reading a lyric poem interpretively - that is, reading it seriously - also constitutes a performance. These general propositions, which borrow from performance and reader-response theories, support our more particular claims that Dickinson's poetry and the reading of gender in Dickinson's poetry constitute intersecting performances even beyond the level generic to lyric poetry. Specifically, Dickinson both constructs alternatives to a traditional, fixed binary gender system (woman/man) and opens opportunities for the reader to perform alternative genderings. Moreover, she implies that the woman poet herself cannot be conventionally gendered. Despite the fact that Dickinson's work is frequently literally performed and many critics have commented on the extent to which it demands active response from its readers, the ways in which textual performance underscores Dickinson's writing has not been examined. In this essay we outline the principles supporting our argument and then analyze performances of gender in and of Dickinson's poems to show that her variant performances of gender are crucial to the general construction of her poetry.

When Emily Dickinson's poems began appearing in slim volumes during the 1890s, many readers viewed her as an avant-garde writer. Her innovations and transgressions in subject and style were the occasion for either censure or celebration. “'Alcohol' does not rhyme to 'pearl,'”sniffed one English reviewer, scowling at the first stanza of “I taste a liquor never brewed” - while implying that the intoxicating experiment did not go well with aesthetic, “pearly” permanence. “She reminds us,” he added, “of no sane or educated writer.” Alice James, the brilliant sister of William and Henry James, noted with patriotic delight that British critics were deaf to Dickinson's peculiar, and peculiarly American, excellence. “It is reassuring to hear the English pronouncement that Emily Dickinson is fifth-rate,” she reflected in January 1892, “they have such a capacity for missing quality; the robust evades them equally with the subtle.”

During the first century of public distribution of her literary work, many facts about Emily Dickinson's writing practices and about her decades-long alliance with her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, have become clearer. As her poems moved from manuscript and hand circulation to printed volumes and various editions, tools such as Thomas H. Johnson's variorum The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955), his three-volume The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958) with Theodora Ward, Jay Leyda's two-volume Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (1960), R. W. Franklin's two-volume The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (1981), and his three-volume variorum The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998) have proved indispensable for Dickinson scholars.

While a host of feminist scholars, beginning in the 1970s, are principally responsible for Emily Dickinson's remarkable surge to the front ranks of major American authors, these same scholars have, for the most part, shown little interest in recuperating the poetry of other American women writers of Dickinson's day. Instead, by largely ignoring this sizable body of writing, they have helped maintain the cordon sanitaire that has, since the early decades of the twentieth century, cut the Amherst poet off from her peers. With only two exceptions - Cheryl Walker and Joanne Dobson - those Dickinson scholars who have touched on this subject, myself included, have done so largely at these other women poets' expense, setting them up not as authors in their own right but as so much prima facie evidence for Dickinson's genius and her ability to transcend the limits of her time, place, and gender. Thus, for example, the introduction to my 1990 study of Dickinson concludes, “At a period when, it seems, virtually every woman poet in the United States failed to rise above the limitations imposed on women's poetry by women's complicity in a system that oppressed them, Emily Dickinson sought 'taller feet.'” This assertion, at which I shudder now, implicitly treats the discussion of Dickinson qua nineteenth-century American woman poet as a zero sum game. The less her women poet peers could be said to have achieved, the greater Dickinson's own accomplishment became. Conversely, anything one gave to them, took from her.

“There was a 'war between the houses,'”wrote Mary Lee Hall of the disputes between Lavinia Dickinson (Emily Dickinson's sister), Susan Gilbert Dickinson (Dickinson's intimate friend and the wife of her brother, Austin Dickinson), and Mabel Loomis Todd (Austin's lover for thirteen years) over the first volumes of Emily Dickinson's Poems and Letters edited and published by Todd and Thomas Higginson in the 1890s. This early and primarily female “war,” which “had as its site and center the volcanic and transgressive love relationship between Dickinson and Sue,”has continued into the present with disputes between male editors such as R. W. Franklin and feminist critics such as Susan Howe over the proper editing of Dickinson; the 1993 publication of New Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by William H. Shurr, proposes to add 498 “new” poems to the Dickinson canon; and the 1998 publication of Franklin's long-awaited and already much-debated variorum edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson adds seventeen poems to the Dickinson canon and promises to replace the standard edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson edited by Thomas H. Johnson in 1955. As Christopher Benfey observes, “For a century now . . . the editing of Emily Dickinson's poetry has been entangled with human passions, sex, and blindered partiality, as though the editors were (and sometimes they were) . . . despairing lovers tossing on their beds.”This is the stuff of American soap opera. And yet these ongoing Dickinson wars have produced a heady mix of sex and text that has left its mark not only on past and recent editions of Dickinson's work but also on the making of American literary history.

It is always tempting to regard Dickinson as a confessional poet - one whose poems, for all their innovative brilliance, are nonetheless outpourings of her own private feelings toward love, death, nature, and immortality. A closer look at her vast poetic project, however, reveals a far more complex artistic purpose, one that revels in both the possibilities and the impossibilities of language to evoke the experiences of life and mind. Dickinson, I wish to argue, constructs scenarios in verse, dramatizes the predicaments or states of mind or perceptions of imagined speakers, personae. “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse,”she explains to her “preceptor”Thomas Wentworth Higginson in an early letter, “it does not mean - me - but a supposed person” (L 268). The distinction is exceedingly important for she is presenting herself not as a sentimental “poetess”but as a Woman of Letters with an artistic agenda of profound scope and vision, reflecting what Matthew Arnold would term “high seriousness.” In that same letter to Higginson she proclaims, “My Business is Circumference”: a wonderfully compact way of asserting that her poetic project embraces concerns that are relevant to the entire human sphere, not just to herself.

To enter into the experience of reading a Dickinson manuscript is to relinquish previous notions about the effect of her poetry. The manuscripts of Emily Dickinson provide a playground for this singular poet who wished to experiment with word variants, framing of stanzas, idiosyncratic enjambment, and dashes that ascend, descend, shorten and lengthen. Studying any one Emily Dickinson fascicle, the reader begins to notice the dialogues that the poems carry on with each other. They carom off each other, and the movement doesn't stop, so that when the reader returns and reopens the book, the voices still vibrate. This is the case for Fascicle 16, a grouping of poems that demonstrates a skillful interplay of Gothicism and the problems inherent in identity formation. The fascicle supplies all the accouterments of Gothic effects - apparitions, mirrors, windows, smoke, ghosts, things that wink in the gloaming, lightning, a funeral, repetitious beating sounds, and eerie depths - but it also widens out in other poems to encompass larger questions of the unity of identity.

In this poem Emily Dickinson seems at her furthest remove from Walt Whitman. His “I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul . . . The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue” (Song 21) in its inclusive, expansive energy poses the most extreme counterpoint to Dickinson's exclusions, retractions, and renunciations.I wish to argue, however, that Dickinson’s work addresses cultural forces and challenges in ways continuous with Whitman’s, although ultimately with a difference in cultural position from his, that remains fundamental.