The poetics of embodying the image of the common man in Leo Tolstoy's and Dmitry Grigorovich's "short prose": A linguo-stylistic aspect

This article investigates the linguo-poetic and stylistic approaches employed by Leo Tolstoy and Dmitry Grigorovich in embodying the material and social world of their literary works, particularly concerning the image of the peasant. The analysis is conducted on the understudied yet highly illustrative corpus of their "short prose," a genre that provides detailed insight not only into the realities of a specific historical epoch but also into the specifics of each author's worldview and its linguistic interpretation. Using general philological and linguistic textual methodologies, the study determines the expressive and evaluative potential of the linguistic variants (primarily lexical and syntactic) used by Grigorovich and Tolstoy to detail their portrayal of the common man. A contrast is traced between the laboring people and the high society that reaps the fruits of this labor. For Grigorovich, as one of the founders of the "Natural School," this is done with utmost clarity, whereas in the stories of Tolstoy from the 1900s-1910s, the emphasis shifts from differences between social groups to those qualities which, regardless of social standing, are capable of uniting the Russian people. One characteristic of the common man is his perception of himself as part of a larger whole, as evidenced by the peasants' traditional use of the pronoun "we" for self-identification (see examples in Tolstoy's story "Conversation with a Passerby"). This same characteristic is often incorporated into the structure of the common man's image in the artistic world of Grigorovich's works as well. Representatives of the nobility are portrayed by both authors as being somewhat "isolated" from one another. The paucity of forms of communicative contact and their indifference to the lives of others attest to the absence of a unified world within high society. Both writers assert that the common man inherently prioritizes the spiritual over the material. In "Conversation with a Passerby," the literary portrait plays a significant role in embodying this idea. A readiness for selfless mutual aid is observed in the heroes of many works by the aforementioned authors (e.g., Olgushka in Tolstoy's "Berries," Vasilisa and Alexei in Grigorovich's "The Passerby"). Tolstoy's story "The Strength of Childhood," completed in 1908, is particularly indicative in this regard. A child's compassion compels an angry mob to instantly forgive a man towards whom everyone initially felt hatred. One notable ideological and compositional feature of the story is the conscious downplaying of the opposition between the people and the authorities. A lexical analysis of the descriptions of the policeman's emotional state reveals a semantic contrast used by the author to characterize the transformation that occurs within the character. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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