The conquest of Siberia in Leo Tolstoy's literary optics. The short story "Yermak" as a part of the Second Russian Book for Reading: Redactions, poetics of "linkages"
Authors:   Siberian Federal University, Anisimova Evgeniya E. ,   Krasnoyarsk State Pedagogical University named after V.P. Astafyev
Published: December 2024

The work examines the cycle-creating poetics of Tolstoy, the author of the Second Russian Book for Reading, in which the story "Yermak" (1862; 1872) occupies an essential place and, as demonstrated in the article, may be regarded as one of the key poles in the artistic structure of this collection of prose works. In the course of the analysis, the poetics of "linkages" intrinsic to Tolstoy is reconstructed and evaluated as a key factor in the design of the cycle as an entity. The reconstruction of the implicit interrelations of the story "Yermak" with other works incorporated into the Second Russian Book for Reading sheds light on Tolstoy's moral and historiosophical concept, which he developed in the 1870s. The source base comprises two editions of "Yermak" and other stories of the Second Russian Book for Reading, Tolstoy's pedagogical articles, diaries and letters, 17th-century Siberian chronicles, Nikolai Karamzin's and Aleksey Suvorin's works on the conqueror of Siberia, etc. The theoretical problem of equivalence ("labyrinth of linkages", as Tolstoy has put it) is in the focus of this research that aspires to reveal Tolstoy's view of the Cossack leader in the broad context of national and world history, social and natural patterns, writer's intention to correlate him with famous characters of folklore and fiction. The methodological basis of this article is works of A.S. Yanushkevich, L.E. Lyapina, M.N. Darwin and V.I. Tyupa on cyclization, W. Schmid on narrative equivalence, V.B. Shklovsky,
S.G. Bocharov and Yu.V. Lebedev on Tolstoy's techniques of "defamiliarization" and "linkages", as well as M.B. Plyukhanova's observations on the folk motif of death in water. The article compares two versions of the story "Yermak", identifies their historical sources, analyzes the changes in the image of Yermak from the 1860s to the 1870s and the development of Tolstoy's concept of the conquest of Siberia. The article shows that Tolstoy perceives the historical process as a series of correspondences, which in his artistic practice he comprehends and expresses by connecting texts dedicated to these events, using "linkages" as main device. The dominating images and motifs that form the meaning for the story of the conqueror of Siberia were gradually included in the book and developed from one work to another (the plot of the peoples' migrations, anthropomorphic and animalistic plots about mercy, the image of the "hero of water", etc.). Thus, in order to understand Tolstoy's view of Yermak the necessary explanatory context was created, and within this context the hero's semantic and functions were clarified. It is concluded that multiple "linkages" of this selected story with other stories within the Second Russian Book for Reading allowed the reader to see in the image of the conqueror of Siberia and in the epic-heroic finale of his life a complete correspondence to the popular ideal.