The Military Life of Lieutenant-General Dorokhov and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: historical and biographical parallels of the image of Fyodor Dolokhov

The prime aim of the article was to expand the field of historical parallels and prototypes for Fyodor Dolokhov, one of the prominent characters in the narrative structure of Tolstoy's novel War and Peace. As one of the basic sources we attracted the manuscript titled The Military Life of Lieutenant-General Dorokhov. Having been written in the 19th century by Rufin Ivanovich Dorokhov and now kept in the Division of Manuscripts of the National Library of Belarus, it has never been studied by Tolstoy researchers. Rufin Dorokhov is recognized by the literary scholars as one of the main Dolokhov's prototypes. However, the biography of his father Ivan Alexandrovich, written by Rufin, allowed us to trace a number of significant plot and motif coincidences with Tolstoy's oeuvre. These very observations in turn helped us to conclude that Dolokhov as a character is deeply rooted in historical and cultural context of the early 19th century -regardless the fact whether Tolstoy read and used Dorokhov's family chronicle while composing the source base for his greatest novel. The life of Ivan Alexandrovich, the hero of the Patriotic War against Napoleon in 1812, is compared with Tolstoy's story The Two Hussars, whose protagonists - father and son - immediately recall the association with the Dorokhov family. The motif equivalences and characteristics of both the War and Peace personage Fyodor Dolokhov and Dorokhov, the protagonist of the military biography, are analyzed. The differences in the author's position are traced along with the general comparison of the two texts: while Tolstoy creates an ethically ambiguous image of Dolokhov, Rufin Dorokhov on the contrary idealizes his father whose life finally becomes similar to the paragons of military hagiography of the past. The mechanism of incorporation of true historical details within the structure of the literary image revealed by Yuri Lotman and applied by this scholar to another War and Peace character, captain Tushin, is used in the course of the analysis of Fyodor Dolokhov's literary image. The significant conceptual affinity of the studied manuscript to the Tolstoy's novel with its pretexts eventually allowed us to place The Military Life of Lieutenant-General Dorokhov within the circle of the "background" typological parallels to the ''Dolokhov's plot'' - one of the most remarkable biographical lines of War and Peace, as well as to supply the prototypes and historical "reflections" of this character with yet another persona - Ivan Alexandrovich Dorokhov.

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