Childhood guide. Review of the monograph by M.A. Perepelkin “Around “Nikita's Childhood”: world - word - meaning”

Abstract

The article is a review of the monograph by M. Perepelkin Around Nikitas Childhood: world word meaning (Samara, 2021). Having established that the monograph author sees his task in introducing extensive factual material into historical and literary use and reasoned comments on both textual and iconographic documents, the reviewer focuses his attention on those aspects that seem to him the most important. Such aspects include, for example, the intricacies of landowners property relations, one of which was A. Bostrom - the A. Tolstoys stepfather, blanks in A. Tolstayas biography - the writer's mother, the objective world of A. Tolstoys childhood and the childhood of his literary hero, the reading circle of the Tolstoy family and the many-faced circle of people who lived or visited the Bostrom-Tolstoy house in Sosnovka. In the reviewers opinion, the most fundamental and meaningful information comprises also the monograph section devoted to the history of perpetuating the memory of writer A. Tolstoy in Samara and the Samara region. All the above stated allows the reviewer to conclude that the monograph under review tends towards the commentary book genre, and after its reading not only the Nikita's Childhood story, but also the Zavolzhsky cycle works, and a whole number.