The winter path and the winter dream by Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy

In his story “The Blizzard” (1856) and the novel “Anna Karenina” (1873), Leo Tolstoy consistently reinterprets the motifs of Petr Grinev’s dream in Pushkin’s novel “The Captain’s Daughter” (1836) and through its prism – the key motif of the novel: the winter path as a metaphor for a life path. Grinev’s path is his service with the aim to fulfil the principle of noble honor, included in the epigraph of the story. The educational content of this path is his choice between “duty” and “will”. Grinev subordinates the “will” of his desires to “duty”, but follows his “will”, protecting the life and honor of his betrothed. Pugachev, embodying the elemental principle of nature as the source of human “will”, acts as a paradoxical assistant to the hero in affirming his “will” as the highest level of the “norm”. By reproducing the image of Pugachev as the robber from Grinev’s dream in the protagonist’s second dream of “The Blizzard”, Tolstoy presents him as the embodiment of the folk-nature existence, only intuitively indicated in the blizzard movement without a path. The further reinterpretation of this image in the dreams of Anna Karenina and Vronsky was determined by the fact that the cultural and behavioral norm of nobility, stated in “The Captain’s Daughter”, became a historical past for Tolstoy in the 1870s. In particular, it was the motif of “heroic hedonism”, varied by Pushkin in his late works, which allowed taking a wife away from her unloved husband and a bride from her unwanted groom. For a nobleman, the “family thought” in “Anna Karenina” made the only possible way back. The “man with a black beard”, referring us to Pugachev, appeares in the winter dreams of Anna and Vronsky, who betrayed the “family thought”, and symbolizes their boundless and fatal “self-will”.

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