REMEMBRANCE AS PHYSIOLOGICAL STYLE IN EARLY TOLSTOY.

Leo Tolstoy's early diaries have long been understood to be a staging ground for the style of his earliest fictional works, but these journals also gradually acquire a discrete form of their own. This article traces this diaristic style's evolution over the course of the 1850s, and argues that one of its major motivations is Tolstoy's attempt to textually represent his quotidian, bodily sensations. His earliest diaries meticulously record instances of illness, sexual desire, and semi-conscious impressions in a frustrated attempt to analyze and regulate his body; as this continues to fail, his diaristic style acquires a more terse, immediate style that better captures the incomprehensibility of bodily sensation. This style, moreover, begins to inform Tolstoy's fiction, although when transferred to published prose, it functions to represent intense shock instead of quotidian experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]