Gender stereotypes in the reading and research reception of Leo Tolstoy’s heroines
https://doi.org/10.26907/2074-0239-2021-64-2-159-169
Abstract
The article is devoted to the problem of stereotypes in the perception of Leo Tolstoy’s gender views. Unlike N. Nekrasov, I. Turgenev and I. Goncharov, Leo Tolstoy was not perceived by his contemporaries and is not perceived today as a writer who glorified the Russian woman. Researchers prefer to discuss only the family theme in the writer’s work, his skill of a psychologist, the creator of female images. Traditional approaches to the consideration of female images in the works of Leo Tolstoy are limited to the conclusions that the ideal heroine of Leo Tolstoy is “a faithful wife and a virtuous mother”, that the writer’s gender views do not go beyond Tolstoy’s approval of Anton Chekhov’s story “Dushechka”, which, as we know, Tolstoy interpreted in a very peculiar way. The main Tolstoy’s ideal was always assigned to Natasha Rostova, the heroine of “War and Peace”, which led and leads to a distortion not only of “a folk thought”, but also of “a family thought”. The article suggests some correction of the established views on Tolstoy’s heroines. We consider the reasons why Leo Tolstoy’s contemporary critics practically failed to notice the image of Princess Mary in “War and Peace”, and also suggest reading the theme “hero and people” in terms of female images in the work. The article proposes a new look at the paradoxical “Epilogue” of “War and Peace”, in which the “family thought” extends to the image of a peculiar Lysogorsky world-community. We consider Tolstoy’s paradoxical approach to the portrayal of the “femme fatale” in the light of his rejection of romantic and other literary cliches.
About the Author
E. Poltavets
Moscow City Тeacher Training University
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Elena Yuryevna Poltavets, Ph.D. in Philology, Associate Professor
129226
4, 2 Sel'skokhozyaistvennyi Proyezd
Moscow
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Review
For citations:
Poltavets E. Gender stereotypes in the reading and research reception of Leo Tolstoy’s heroines. Philology and Culture. 2021;(2):159-169. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.26907/2074-0239-2021-64-2-159-169
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