The complexity of human rights in Tolstoy's works: approximations between literature and the impure theory of human rights

Abstract

This work starts from the approximation between the categories of critical theory of human rights, by Joaquín Herrera Flores, and the literature of Tolstoy, aiming to understand a complex view of human rights based on the issues raised by the Russian writer's literature. For this, it is questioned to what extent do elements of a complex vision of human rights are perceptible by the reading of Tolstoy. The research starts from a study of the writer's intertext, analyzing the different contexts concerning the cultural history of Russia; the diverse conceptions that the author demonstrated during his life; and the most significant books of his production according to the objective of the work. It demonstrates how the universality of human rights creates problems regarding the subsumption of different realities to abstract norms, ignoring colonial relations. Finally, it identifies the complexity of human rights in Tolstoy's literature, based on reflection on the essential categories for a critique of the notion of universality in the author's works. To pursue these objectives, this exploratory research as to its objectives promotes a bibliographic review procedure of works related to the critical theory of human rights and others selected by the author, namely, War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Resurrection. This investigation seeks to understand, in the first chapter, how Russian cultural history influences Tolstoy's literature, in the context of his writing. It then discusses and problematizes the formation of the Western narrative of the universality of human rights, to, in the end, respond to the proposed problem, namely: to what extent elements of a complex vision of human rights are perceptible, according to Joaquín Herrera Flores’s theory, from the three selected works of Tolstoy.