"Family Happiness" by L. Tolstoy in the Pages of the Novel "Into the Wild" by J. Krakauer

The story of Chris McCandless, whose life tragically ended in an abandoned bus in Alaska, became not merely a media event but also the occasion for a profound philosophical inquiry. This analysis examines two key interpretations of his fate: the biography written by his sister Carine, which attributes his departure to family trauma and psychological causes, and the reconstruction by journalist Jon Krakauer. In Into the Wild, Krakauer views Chris's act as a conscious form of escapism from consumer society, inspired by literary authorities.The subject of the study is the system of literary references in K. McCandless's archive, which serves as a mediator between psychological trauma (the sister's interpretation) and ideological escapism (Krakauer's interpretation). The central focus of this work is a comparative analysis of McCandless's "archive"—his personal library. Special attention is given to the dialogue between Leo Tolstoy's Family Happiness and Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, both of which Chris actively annotated. The study traces how the protagonist undergoes a trajectory analogous to that of Tolstoy's heroine: from a thirst for passion and self-assertion, through doubt, to the realization that "true happiness exists only when shared with others." Thus, Chris's spiritual evolution, reconstructed through his literary preferences, emerges as an inversion of Tolstoy's plot: his escape from the "family happiness" of mainstream society into the solitude of the wilderness ultimately leads him to reassess the familial values he had initially rejected.The novelty of the research lies in identifying the intertextual dialogue between Chris's marginalia in Family Happiness and Doctor Zhivago, making it possible to present his trajectory as a Tolstoyan inversion for the first time.