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Record W2594814099 · doi:10.1111/russ.12134

Darwin in the Novels: Tolstoy's Evolving Literary Response

2017· article· en· W2594814099 on OpenAlexaff
Anna A. Berman

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Russian Review · 2017
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicFolklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsDarwinismTeleologyDarwin (ADL)EpistemologyPhilosophyFaithNatural (archaeology)TrilogyLiteratureSociologyHistoryArt

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Although Tolstoy was deeply critical of Darwin in his notebooks, diaries, letters, and essays, his literary imagination was profoundly influenced by Darwinian theory. Tolstoy's major novels are Darwinian in form–modeling his ideals of gradual development, chance, and interconnectivity–while rejecting Darwin in their explicit discussions of his ideas. War and Peace is set in a pre‐Darwinian world where only the author, not the characters, has access to the new worldview opened up by ideas of evolution, natural selection and the struggle for existence. In this work, Darwinian ideas are manifest in the way Tolstoy conceived of the struggle of nations and individuals at the heart of the book and also in the “Second Epilogue,” where he references Darwin directly to help explain and justify his theory of history. Anna Karenina, by contrast, unfolds in the new Darwinian age, where both the characters, as well as the author, engage with Darwin's theories. His influence can be felt in the structuring worldview of the author, which emphasizes chance over teleology and interweaves multiple plotlines. However, the characters' own engagements with Darwin are designed to undermine his ideas, vindicating faith over the new scientific worldview. Anna embraces the “struggle for existence” as natural law and ends her life, while Levin turns away from Darwin and is saved from despair.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.006
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.009
Threshold uncertainty score0.056

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.006
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0030.002
Science and technology studies0.0030.010
Scholarly communication0.0090.004
Open science0.0010.004
Research integrity0.0020.004
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.050
GPT teacher head0.301
Teacher spread0.252 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2017
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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