Aleksey Tolstoy’s Prince Serebrenni as a “novel on Yermak”: The problem of a silenced plot

Exemplifying the “historical tale” by E. Samoilov “Ataman-Koltso, or the Embassy to Czar Ivan the Terrible” (1899), a popular fiction remake of Aleksey Tolstoy’s Prince Serebrenni, the article demonstrates how significant the role of motifs related to Yermak was in the poetics of a novel written by a “senior classic” and then extracted out of his text and rearranged by a “wannabe” writer Samoilov. The article investigates the roots of Prince Serebrenni s narrative double-plot structure (story of the main hero and information on the conquest of Siberia), reveals linkages between the main hero and Yermak, analyses the plot on aggressor vs. hero interaction, familiar to narratologists, in the perspective of behavioral practices peculiar to the Russian culture - e.g., “departure” and “self-giving”, also taking into account their European analogies, such as tactics of “antisubordination” (Michel de Certeau). The problem of the plot structure of the novel Prince Serebrenni lies in the ambiguity of the main story on which the composition rests. The reader, however, may not immediately identify the device: obviously, the phenomena of “text within text” (Yuri Lotman) or a clearly expressed double-plot construction subordinated to rhetorical and didactic tasks, as in Anna Karenina, cannot be seen in Prince Serebrenni. The events conveyed by Tolstoy belong to the same epoch and are given in a continuous chain. However, attention is drawn to the image of Ivan Koltso, which appears in the plot under the name of Ivan Persten’. The hero is important both as an intradiegetic narrator who provides readers with data about Yermak and as a figure to whom the author imparts a certain metatextual energy - the ability to compose and perform as a jester. It is the image of Ivan Koltso that the compiler writer E. Samoilov focuses attention on. At the same time, it is worth mentioning that Samoilov’s reworking of Tolstoy’s novel became possible only because the latter is based on a covertly dual basic story. In other words, the simplified remake indicates a significantly more complex poetic nature of the original. What is openly given in Samoilov’s naive opus as a triad of acting, “living” characters, Tolstoy presents in the form of a somewhat “shifted” triangle, one of whose “vertices” (Yermak) is overshadowed, and Yermak is not listed among the fabula personages. The hidden likening of Prince Serebrenni to Yermak provided by Tolstoy has a complex narrative and cultural-historical nature. The structuralist approach to plots of this type (Claude Bremond) implies two options for the development of events: resistance or escape. The Russian 16th-century culture adds a third option - a departure. The narrative possibilities of the latter were discovered by science in the post-structuralist period (Michel de Certeau). The departure is represented by more or less self-willed “withdrawal” of the hero from the center of authority, and his attempt to flee on the far periphery of a huge state that constantly wages wars on its borders, i.e., the desire to combine service to the state as a generalized historical subject with independent personal choice. Yermak’s fate was of that type. It is precisely this typological background that can be seen in the poetics of Prince Serebrenni’s artistic image. The article compares the options of departure taken by different characters (Serebrenni, Maxim Skuratov, Yermak). The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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