Samara within the scope of “The Eighteenth Year” novel by A.N. Tolstoy

Abstract

The article considers one of the aspects of depicting Samara in the novel by A.N. Tolstoy The Eighteenth Year (19271928), namely the use of Notes on the 1918 Czechoslovak Rebellion to show the battles on the city streets in June 1918, which are now kept as part of the writer's archive in the Manuscript Department of the A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature under RAS. Tolstoy re-conceptualized the information and supplemented it with artistic images to describe the events and give them historical reliability. The article gives examples of the writer's work with documentary materials that were reflected both in the chronological context of the narrative and in single episodes of the novel.