The individual-author myth about Leo Tolstoy in M. Gorky’s essay “Leo Tolstoy” (To the problem of Tolstoy’s text in M. Gorky’s work)

Abstract

In the article on the material of M. Gorky’s essay “Leo Tolstoy” elements of Tolstoy’s text as a named supertext of literature are considered. It is stated that the basis of this text is a myth about Leo Tolstoy, which has been actively developing for a century and a half, but takes on a particular relevance in the early 20th century during the popularization of the spiritual heritage of the writer and the understanding of his tragic departure from Yasnaya Polyana. The Tolstoy text in the works of M. Gorky is extensive, with mythologized constant representations appearing in almost all of the writer’s fiction texts. The intermediate result of the writer’s mythologizing of Leo Tolstoy’s personality was an essay about him with the same name. This research shows how exactly in this publicist text Gorky creates his own unique myth of Leo Tolstoy, which reflects both the particular attitude of his younger contemporary to the great Russian writer, and his own beliefs about the contradictions and ambiguities of the real genius. Attention is focused on the uniqueness of Tolstoy’s text in the work of “the first proletarian writer”. The Tolstoy myth, as any other myth, can have a sacred or profane nature, in the essay M. Gorky combines both directions.