Leo Tolstoy's novella “The Prisoner of the Caucasus”: on the question of creative history

Abstract

For the first time, the article presents a comparative analysis of Alexander. Pushkin's remarks about his poem “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” and Leo Tolstoy's short story of the same name, written for children's reading and placed in "The Alphabet Book". In the second half of the 1850s, Leo Tolstoy carefully and with numerous notes read the biography of Pushkin, published by Pavel Annenkov for the collected works of the great author. We can assume that from this time the writer begins a conscious study of Pushkin's prose, which previously had not attracted him. In this book, Leo Tolstoy marks out in pencil, among other information, the unsent Pushkin’s letter to Nikolay Gnedich, in which the author of the poem critically examines its shortcomings. In the late 1860s and the early 1870s, Leo Tolstoy was experiencing a serious creative crisis caused by dissatisfaction with the state of fiction, especially language, of that time. He begins to focus on the language of "folkish literature", for the first time applying new "writing techniques" when creating children's stories for "The Alphabet Book". Comparison of Pushkin's critical remarks about his work with the content, images of the main characters, minor characters and their storylines in Leo Tolstoy's story "The Prisoner of the Caucasus" convinces that the writer took into account Pushkin's remarks, having received from Puskin a genuine lesson in skill.