“IN THE MOSCOW ESTATES”: A. N. TOLSTOY’S NOVEL PETER THE FIRST AS AN ESTATE TEXT

The childhood of Alexey Nikolaevich Tolstoy passed on the steppe farm Sosnovka where his stepfather’s A. A. Bostrom’s estate was located. Subsequently, the writer reproduced both external appearance of the estates familiar to him, and the inhabitants of the estates and their way of life on the pages of his works. Everything that Tolstoy saw in his childhood (peasant yards, the life of a small-scale Samara estate (called ‘khutor’), a city estate) found reflection in his works and, in particular, in the manor texts, which undoubtedly include the novel Peter the Great. The paper considers the A. N. Tolstoy’s novel Peter the Great as an ‘estate text’. The first book of the novel is set in Moscow, in Kitay-Gorod. Tolstoy recreates in great detail the life of the city and its inhabitants that has gone into the past, which in the late 17th – early 18th centuries, according to the historian I. E. Zabelina looked like a big village. The descriptions of the peasant household, Moscow nobles estates and princely mansion are based, on the one hand, on the writer’s impressions and, on the other, on historical sources and represent the image of the estate. The estate plot closely connected with the characters living (both fictional and historical ones), with life of the city and the state. The novel provides a comprehensive description of the courtyard of the poor peasant Brovkin, the impoverished nobleman Volkov, as well as based on the testimony of the French envoy De Neuville and the work of S. M. Solovyov, a detailed image of the Moscow chambers of Prince V. V. Golitsyn. Childhood memories, historical sources and creative imagination allow Tolstoy to painstakingly recreate on the pages of the novel not only the image of the lost Moscow of Peter’s time, but also the ones of its inhabitants.