“Sevastopol Stories” by l. Tolstoy: a Trilogy About the Tragedy of Life in Heroic Circumstances

Tolstoy’s literary legacy has always been of interest to critics. V. Dneprov compared Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s novels. F. Gurevich investigated romantic and realistic traditions in great writer’s works. K. Kedrov studied the difficult destinies of Tolstoy's heroes. E. Polyakova devoted articles to the relationship of the main actors with nature, the surrounding world. A. Chicherin, I. Vishnevskaya described the spiritual quest. N. Gusev revealed the plasticity and expressiveness of Tolstoy's artistic images. Practically in each of these studies, they discussed the topic of anti-war message in Tolstoy’s novels. But there are no works devoted to the description of Tolstoy's methods depicting the unnatural nature of war, the problem of choosing a line of conduct in a combat situation when everyone can be a hero or a coward. This article is aimed to study this aspect. The subject of this work is to generalize the techniques that help L. Tolstoy to create a special image of war in “Sevastopol Stories”. A detailed description of artistic means proves that the writer perceives war as an ambiguous drive. The aim of the article is to identify the means of expressing the same tragedy of everyday affairs and military events in “Sevastopol stories”. Objectives are following: – to identify the features of the time in which “Sevastopol Stories” were created; – to show L. Tolstoy's attitude to the war; – to describe the tragic background of heroic behavior. The research methodology is a comparative literary analysis.