The narrative structure of The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy

The paper investigates the formation process and originality of the narrative structure in the Cossacksby Leo Tolstoy. The analysis involves Tolstoy's diaries and letters that give evidence to thebroad range of the writer's reading in belles-lettres, historical and scientific Russian and Europeanliterature, including Homer's Iliad, the prose and The Songs of Western Slavs by A. Pushkin, TheHistory of the Russian State by N. Karamzin, Buffon's Natural History, and The Caucasian Hunt by N.Tolstoy. The paper analyses two types of narration seen as the ways of artistic presentation of the author'sconcept of a personality, which focuses on the problems of interrelation between the human andthe world, as well as the dynamics of their interpenetration, or, in Tolstoy's notion, their "merging".The synthesis of the genres generated by Tolstoy in his autobiographical trilogy and continued in TheSevastopol Stories found its further development in The Cossacks. Tolstoy's idea of different ways ofman's spiritual development through the complex dialectics of the personal and the universal is reflectedin the Cossacks sketch-type and novelistic narrative synthesis. The types of narration (definedby Tolstoy as "tones") trace back to different literary-historical traditions. The epic and sketch-typenarrative "tone" is connected with various kinds of sketch literature and classical epos, whose style ischaracterized by accuracy, precision of detail, and plasticity of description meant to depict the broadcanvas of common life. The article examines the method of "introductions", or "zachiny", bearingsketch content that determine space and time reference points of nature and people's life. Being recurrentin many chapters, these "zachiny" acquire a universal character, integrating the text of the storyinto a single whole, and at the compositional level encircle the chapters that are opened by novelisticdialogues or an announcement of some event. Thus, they keep reminding about the "eternal", introducethe issue of significance of common life in all its diversity of daily and heroic manifestations, andinclude the hero in the course of the great national history. The other "tone" - "the interrogative andsubjective poetry of sincerity" - genetically stems from the lyrical genre of elegy and sentimental psychologicalprose; it is designed to demonstrate the dialectics of the character's and the narrator's innerlife. "Interrogative and subjective poetry" in The Cossacks became a form of the hero's confession anda story of the work of his soul. The poetic, emotional-expressive style connected with the motives ofremembrance and love experience captures the novelistic level of the plot development. However,through the word of the narrative author, who, like the hero, masters the music of repetitions, this toneenters the descriptions of landscapes, animals, events and other heroes, and, merging with the sketchtypeand descriptive tone, creates a unique poetic fusion that produces an epically complete and emotionallystrained picture of organic unity of the world and the hero therein. Merging and interpenetrationof these inherently different "tones" is based on their poetical nature conditioned by the significanceof the author's idea, which is expressed through these tones, that the individual's spiritual perfectionis possible through the intercourse with the world of universal human and national values.

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