BIOGRAPHY OF LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY IN DIFFERENT HISTORICAL PERIODS

Abstract

The article is a study of biographies of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, written in different historical periods. The researcher considers one of the first lifetime biographies, written in 1894 by the literary critic Yevgeny Andreevich Solovyov, a work of the Soviet period dedicated to the life of L.N. Tolstoy, the book of the famous fat expert Alexander Ivanovich Popovkin “L.N. Tolstoy. Biography: A manual for students” (1958) and, finally, the book by Andrei Leonidovich Zorin “The Life of Leo Tolstoy. Reading experience” (2019). Belonging to different historical periods and, accordingly, reflecting the topical issues of their time, biographies in different ways open for the reader the figure of L.N. Tolstoy. Special attention in each of the presented biographies of L.N. Tolstoy is devoted to an examination of how in a special way the authors understand the spiritual formation of the hero, his life path and, in accordance with this, chose their own concept of narration, therefore the purpose of this article is to consider the concept of each author. An important part of the study of biographers is not only the external life of the writer, but also, as an integral part of it, the spiritual component. The relevance of the article is due to the unremitting interest of researchers in the study of the life of Tolstoy. Showing interest in different facets of the personality of the great writer, each author carries his own interpretation of his biography. The materials for this study are biographies L.N. Tolstoy. To achieve the goal of the study, the researcher uses comparative historical, typological methods, as well as the method of biographical analysis. The subsequent study of the biographies of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy seems extremely promising, as it gives an opportunity to look at the figure of the great writer in the context of various interpretations.