and the texture
Leo Tolstoy “Confession”
The first of the works of Leo Tolstoy, in which he preached the moral-religious teaching (Tolstoyanism) that appeared in his mature age, was Confession (started in 1879 and completed in 1882). At one time she was not missed by Russian censorship. Printed in Geneva and in Russia distributed in lists. Confession is above all that he wrote afterwards; in purely literary terms, this is a masterpiece that is on a par with such things as the Book of Job, Ecclesiastes, and Confession of Blazh. Augustine. It is one of the greatest and forever living expressions of the human soul in the face of the eternal mystery of life and death. Continue reading
Image and theme of the war in Tolstoy’s “Sevastopol Stories”
In the military stories (“Raid”, “Forest Cutting”, “Sevastopol in December 1854, in May and August 1855”) Tolstoy dwells on the question of how legitimate war, demanding so many bloody victims, is legitimate . This idea is particularly clear in his “Sevastopol Tales” (see their analysis), which describe the famous defense of Sevastopol during the Crimean War.
Battles and wars were depicted many times in Russian and foreign literature … – Almost always, these pictures are different, “poetizatsii”, elevated tone, a kind of “militarism, glorifying the exploits of warriors and leaders … Continue reading
Bunin “Loopy ears”
Bunin’s story “Petty ears” is very inferior to “The Lord from San Francisco”, but written in the same powerful manner, with the same force of a full-sound and wonderfully heavy word. A terrible impression is made by the picture of night Petrograd, sustained in amazing colors. Reality is turned into dark fantasy. You believe the author on the word, on the word of the artist, the power that “at night, in a fog, Nevsky is terrible. He is deserted, dead; mist, fogging it, seems to be part of the very Arctic mist that comes from where the end of the world is, where something incomprehensible to the human mind is hidden and called the Pole. Continue reading
