Original scientific paper
The Tolstoy “Connection”: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle Through the Prism of Peasant Proverbs in War and Peace and Anna Karenina
Kevin J. Mckenna
Abstract
Like his nineteenth-century predecessor, Leo Tolstoy, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn displayed a keen fascination for the folk wisdom and simple speech of Russian peasants. And, like Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn was fond of interspersing large numbers of proverbs into the speech of central characters and protagonists of his fiction. A case in point is his novel In the First Circle, which shares a number of features in common with Tolstoy’s masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina: in particular, the predilection of his predecessor to resolve the ethical-moral crisis faced by his protagonist through the introduction of a Russian peasant into the narrative, whose folksy wisdom and speech succeed in shedding light on the existential search in the novel, undertaken by the protagonist.
Keywords
Russian proverb; peasant speech; Russian folk wisdom; Russian Literature; War and Peace; Anna Karenina; In the First Circle; Pierre Bezukhov; Platon Karataev; Konstantin Levin; Fyodor the peasant; Gleb Nerzhin; Spiridon Yegorov
Hrčak ID:
278386
URI
Publication date:
31.8.2013.
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