Mortality and Meaninglessness: Leo Tolstoy and Mickey Sachs Reconsidered

Filmmaker Woody Allen’s interest in nineteenth-century Russian literature is evident in several of his movies, most notably 1975s Love and Death (a humorous homage to Tolstoy’s War and Peace and other classic Russian novels) and 1989s Crimes and Misdemeanors (based in part on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment). Likewise, according to Allen, the basic structure of his Hannah and Her Sisters (1987)—the intersecting lives, loves, and families of three sisters—was inspired by Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. But it is another work of Tolstoy, the autobiographical Confession, that seems to inform that film’s most philosophically interesting subplot: the existential crisis of Hannah’s suicidal ex-husband Mickey Sachs. Like Tolstoy—who at the height of his career, wealth, and reputation experienced a near-fatal crisis of faith and meaning—Allen’s Mickey becomes fixated on thoughts of impermanence, suicide, and God. The narratives of both stories document their protagonists’ efforts to resolve their pressing existential predicaments. At first glance, these parallel crises end in very dissimilar ways, with Tolstoy seemingly moving toward and Mickey backing away from religious faith. Indeed, for years I have juxtaposed these works—or more precisely, several scenes from Allen’s film and the highly abbreviated version of Tolstoy’s Confession often found in textbooks and anthologies—in my introductory classes. And while the contrasting of these vivid spiritual journeys has proven effective in the classroom, by examining his Confession as a whole and several of its author’s subsequent nonfiction works, my chapter argues that the lifesaving “transformations” of Leo Tolstoy and Mickey Sachs turn out to have much in common.