Cervantes, Stendhal and Tolstoy: Comparing Three Romantic-Realist Soldiers

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Marie Henri Beyle, writing as Stendhal, and Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy are not primarily remembered for being soldiers or technocrats. If understood as modern writers, however, it makes sense that they each spent a significant part of their lives engaged with bureaucratic systems and technologies of war-making. Apart from being soldiers, Cervantes and Stendhal both held posts in government administration. Though Tolstoy came from the class holding many of the highest positions in the imperial bureaucracy, his role after military service was always that of a reformist outsider. In their fictional worlds, they established a human ground for challenging the romantic nostalgia for the past, and a pivot point for resisting modernity. Joined by their contributions to the development of what might loosely be referred to as modern romantic realism, their experiences within the military and developing nation state deserve special appraisal as a means for understanding the formation of modern distinctions among culture, science and technology, and civilian and military values. In this class we will compare the three authors as exemplars of the shift.

Michael Budd, Ph.D., is the author of “The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire” (Macmillan UK/ NYU Press 1997). He has written for scholarly and popular venues, including the International Journal of Sport History, as well as Afterimage. Michael's current research focuses on global consumer identity and the national body in relation to technology, memory, violence and authoritarian ideas. He earned his B.S. degree from the University of Oregon and his M.A. and Ph.D. in modern European history from Rutgers University. He is a professor in Salve Regina University’s history department and the humanities Ph.D. program.