Between Folklore and Literature: Mastery of A.N. Tolstoy-Storyteller

–The study of the interaction of traditional folk culture and professional art, folklore and literature for more than a century is considered to be one of the main directions of humanitarian knowledge. The article is devoted to the analysis of the author’s transformations of Russian folklore in the “fairy-tale” works of Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1883-1945). The relevance of the research is determined by the special role of folklore images, motifs and plot patterns in the writer's works. The folklore-mythological aspect of the works of the “third” Tolstoy is less studied by scholars, although in a number of works about the writer there are judgments about the general influence of folk culture, folklore borrowings and deep knowledge of the author in the field of folklore. A holistic analysis of Tolstoyan folklorism, its origin, evolution and aesthetics in the scientific literature is absent. The subject of the research is the aesthetic foundations and stable features of the poetics of the writer’s works for children focused on folklore and folk mythology. For the analysis of the ways of understanding and transmitting the philosophical and artistic experience of the folklore tradition, in addition to the traditional cultural-historical method, the methodological tools of comparative studies and philological analysis of the text are used. The purpose of this work is to provide a comprehensive description of the phenomenon of folkloric character of A.N. Tolstoy’s fairy tales, as a phenomenon of world outlook, and a certain set of artistic techniques of the writer, the specifics of one’s literary technique.