“They Divided the Estate During the War”: L. N. Tolstoy’s Traditions in the Estate Text of the 20th Century

Abstract

The article is the first to reconstruct the estate theme in L. N. Tolstoy’s works in its intersection with the war theme. It turns out that the estate in Tolstoy’s works dedicated to war and revolutionary struggle plays a plotforming role. Using the examples of the stories “Caucasian Prisoner,” “Divine and Human,” the epic novel “War and Peace,” the author of the article traces the motif of the prodigal son’s return to his father’s house, his main phases of “departure” (“isolation”), “test” and “return” (“gaining new connections with the world”). War in this plot scheme appears as a limenal space of testing, the initiation of the soul on the path of returning to its true home. Summing up the results, it can be concluded that Tolstoy’s images of an ideal estate and house are opposed to war and are associated with biblical motifs of the Garden of Eden, a vineyard, symbolizing the “kingdom of God.” Tolstoy’s paradigm of the perception of the ideal estate as an image of righteous management and peacemaking, pacification of passions in serving God and people, becomes decisive in the depiction of the estate during the war in the literature of the 20th century.