Kazan in Aleksey Tolstoy’s biography and works: Between fact and fiction

Abstract

This article is devoted to identifying and understanding the “Kazan text” in the biography and works of Aleksey Tolstoy. Having got acquainted with the city in his youth, the writer visited Kazan many times, mentioned it in his letters to the loved ones, and described it on the pages of fiction - in the trilogy “The Road to Calvary” and in the story “The Viper”. However, in Tolstoy’s case, close knowledge of the city and urban realities did not prevent the artistic rethinking and mythologization of the Kazan episodes of his own biography, on the contrary, it implied such a rethinking: this was precisely the writer’s method of working with historical material drawn from non-fiction reality. Encrypting the facts of his own biography and the biographies of his loved ones, shifting accents and mixing reality and fantasy, Alexey Tolstoy created a complex and voluminous artistic image of the city and himself as part of this image, living in the space between fact and fiction.