“The Competitors” by A.N. Tolstoy: the Question of the Developing the Image of the Estate in the Writer’s Prose

Abstract

The article presents the first publication of the draft autograph entitled “The Competitors.” It based on the text from a manuscript written by A.N. Tolstoy in 1909, which is now kept in the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences and contains poetry and prose, sketches and notes to the works of the 1910s. The novel “The Competitor” (singular) was published in the Saint Petersburg almanac “Love” in 1910. The textology of Tolstoy’s first works, the novel-stylizations “The Competitor” and “The Jasper Notebook”, did not attract the attention of researchers. Meanwhile the draft autograph contains not only the original version of the title of the story but also details of the description of manor’s life and characteristics of the main character uncle Kobelev. Preparing the text for publication, the author abandon them. The examples of author’s edits are studied in the introduction. The dynamic transcription helps us to show Tolstoy’s work on the images of the old hussar and his nephew. The comparison of the draft autograph with the published story makes it possible to describe the development of the text, to characterize the images of the main characters and the features of the image of the manor in the writer’s early prose. Tolstoy returned to the story “The Competitor,” corrected it and included in the collected works which attests to the value in the writer’s work one of the first texts devoted to the ‘manor theme’ and to the description of the estate’s life.

Keywords

• a.n. tolstoy
• ‘manor text’
• world of things
• draft autograph
• manuscript
• transcription