Рассказ Л. Н. Толстого «Свечка»: от замысла к художественному воплощению
“Candle”, a Short Story by L. N. Tolstoy: from Conception to Artistic Embodiment

Summary/Abstract: The topic of the article is the history of the text of style of Tolstoy’s folk short stories “Candle” (1886). For the first time, the article presents in full the draft manuscripts of the short story (autograph, two copies and proofreading without author’s edits), which were arranged in accordance with the chronology of the writer’s work on them. The textological analysis led to the conclusion that the plot, the system of images, and the composition of the short story were already formed at the stage of the autograph, and the author’s corrections were not so much stylistic as semantic and, above all, took into account the new addressee of Tolstoy’s work - the reader from the common people. The writer’s main focus in the course of creative work was to make the central idea of the short story - non-resistance to evil by violence - understandable and accessible to the reader, who is not experienced in understanding the artistic subtleties of the work. This determined the introduction of a more detailed description of the serf morals into the short story, the persistent aggravation of the conflict between the peasants and the clerk, and the strengthening of didactic pathos through the introduction of gospel quotations and the moral maxim of the narrator that completes the short story. At the same time, Tolstoy wrote a literary text in which the idea was embodied by various means of figurative expression, not a journalistic treatise or a teaching of a religious nature.

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