“Our Brother-In-Law Harald Is Going to Sail”: Russian History in the Ballads of Aleksey K. Tolstoy

The article studies the ballads by Aleksey K. Tolstoy as a stage in the history of the genre. The attention is focused on structural and semantic transformations of the ballad canon in the poet’s work, as well as on self-commentaries to his own texts presented in Tolstoy’s epistolary heritage. The key thesis of the article is as follows. The ballad works by Tolstoy as a whole are an effort to transfer the plot on the origin of the hero, the debate on his legitimacy (sometimes ambiguous) onto the historical and ideological grounds. Such a deliberate ideolo-gization of the ballad text was organically included into the context of mid-19th-century scientific and public discussions on the genesis and future fate of Russia and echoed with disputes about the dominance of European, Asian, or symbiosis of both, elements in its history. From an instrumental point of view, the poet’s genre experiment was presented in relation to the romantic ballad by Vasily Zhukovsky as a consistently developed system of “minus-devices” that transformed, primarily, the levels of artistic modality, intonation, and plot-motif organization of the text. As it is shown in the work, the poet, basing on the plots of Karamzin’s The History of the Russian State and his concept of the “Tatar Yoke”, reflected his own view of national history in his ballads. Karamzin’s main idea, which had an impact on Tolstoy’s worldview and creative practice, was the idea of the originally European nature of Russia’s statehood and culture and, consequently, the drastic distortion of the both caused by the influence from the Golden Horde. Works by S.S. Averintsev, V.I. Tyupa, and A.S. Yanushkevich on the historical poetics of the genre and by I.Yu. Vinitsky, T.T. Guzairov, A.L. Zorin, and V.S. Kiselev on the historical and ideological potential of Russian classical texts (first of all, works by Zhukovsky as the founder of the ballad canon in Russian literature) have become the methodological basis of the study. The author also uses works by A.I. Reitblat in the field of biography studies. The study of Tolstoy’s historical ballads allowed drawing the following conclusion. In the works that used the plots taken from the pre-Mongol period, the poet sought to place medieval Russia in the coordinates of the great European history, and put the Rurik dynasty on a par with the prominent Western royal families. Tolstoy modeled history according to the sample of the romantic ballad: he demonstrated the idyllic union of Russia and the Varangians in the fabric of artistic works in the semantic coordinates of love and marriage relations which were destroyed by the lawless invasion of the Horde, whose khans replaced the Scandinavians and threw their “seed” on Russian soil. The next problem that is formulated and partially solved in the article is the essence of Tolstoy’s relationship with Zhukovsky’s poetic heritage. The author of “Prince Serebrenni”, in his correspondence, contrasted his “major” ballads with the “minor” works by “the first Russian Romanticist”. The article also examines the echoes of Tolstoy’s reputation, whose personal biography, in this respect similar to that of Zhukovsky, was burdened with rumors on the legality of the origin, creating a certain background for emphasizing the plot on family ties, which Tolstoy puts in the vicissitudes of medieval history.

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