ABSTRACT
The twenty-first century has seen the development of the concept of soft power in world politics and international relations (Nye 2004). Russia has played its part in the global trend of seeking to influence hearts and minds in the information age with a number of initiatives in the first decade of the century designed to promote its image abroad (see Introduction). The year 2014 marked a shift towards nationalism in Russia’s narrative of national identity and in the way it presented itself and was received on the global stage, largely due to the annexation of Crimea (Teper 2016: 387). In the same year the Russian government introduced a state cultural policy focused on promoting national unity with a basis in a shared Russian cultural heritage preserving traditional values. Following this initiative, it is timely to examine how canonical works and writers of the past are appropriated in current discourses on Russian culture. This chapter seeks to examine the tensions around Lev Tolstoy, one of Russia’s greatest cultural icons and an opponent of all forms of state intervention in civic life, in the light of the Russian state’s aim to use culture to conserve and reinforce a historically founded, unified image of Russia. Ultimately I aim to determine what factors are influencing the formation of the literary canon in Russia today, and how these factors affect the contemporary reception of Tolstoy in Russia. I shall use War and Peace as a case study to explore tensions between national and transnational information flows and to shed light on the mutual interplay between canon formation, national identity and nation branding in the era of globalization.
