Big Read: The Death of Ivan Ilyich  Tags: slavic literature  

Write a debate between Tolstoy and Susan Sontag, using her book Illness as Metaphor ; and, AIDS and its metaphors (on Undergrad reserve). What is Tolstoy's attitude toward medicine and the medical profession? What is Tolstoy's definition of health? How do the mind and body relate, according to Tolstoy? What purpose does suffering serve? How does Sontag reframe these questions? Archive your debate.

Research tips: Be sure to check the suggestions under "Searching for Tolstoy", "Google Books", "Another Approach", "Media", and "Biography and Bibliography" if you are having trouble getting started.

Tolstoy's attitude toward health, medicine, doctors, pain and suffering, and the mind-body relationship is evident in many of his writings, both fiction and non-fiction. It has also been the subject of study by historians, journalists, literary scholars, and others. In some databases, such as Google Books, most combinations of search terms bring up such vast quantities of Tolstoy's own writings that it can be hard to find anything anyone else has written on the topic. Luckily, Google offers an option that will separate books by Tolstoy from books about Tolstoy (see highlighted portion in image below). Other databases will also allow you to refine your search in this way, although it may take more than a single click to do so.

Sometimes, useful material on Tolstoy's attitude toward medicine appears in an individual chapter within a book devoted to a larger subject, and this can also be hard to find. In cases like these, it is important to try a variety of search terms before concluding that the database does not contain the information you need. Two combinations of search terms that appear to work well in Google Books are "tolstoy suffering" and "tolstoy medical". These lead to book chapters such as "Tolstoy and the Beginning of Psychotherapy in Russia" and "Lev Tolstoy's Moral Masochism in the Late 1880's".

Another resource that can be useful for this topic is Periodicals Contents Index (PCI). Here again the amount of material retrieved by a search can be overwhelming. Another way to refine your search results is to add additional terms relating to the same topic, which should, in theory, have the effect of isolating articles that are saturated with these terms from articles that just happen to mention "Tolstoy" and "health" in passing. It also makes it easier to sift through the results: a search in Periodicals Contents Index for "tolstoy health" yields over 800 hits, while a search for "tolstoy health doctors medicine" yields under 100. Some sample results from this last search are reproduced below.

Even a search that uses four search terms can bring up a lot of irrelevant material, depending on the search engine and how the terms are entered. There is always a tension between making sure that your search results are relevant and making sure that nothing important is missed.