Два века русской классики (Mar 2021)
The Issue of Criticizing the Text of the Short Story “Where Love Is, There God Is Also” by Leo Tolstoy
Abstract
The article is devoted to the issue of criticizing the text of Leo Tolstoy's short story “Where Love Is, There God Is Alsoˮ (1885), its purpose is to substantiate the choice of the main source of the text for publication and to cleanse it of distortions. In the research literature, the issue of clarifying the history of formation of the given work as an artistic whole is open, details of the final stages of its creation have not been reconstructed, the editorship of this literary monument has not been concretized. The proposed work was performed in a certain sequence. First, all the discrepancies between the first lifetime editions of 1885–1886 were identified, and then a comparative analysis of them with handwritten materials was carried out. At the final stage, the classification of these discrepancies was correlated with the textual practice of the predecessors. As a result, the choice of the twelfth part of “The Works of Count L. N. Tolstoy” (1886) as the main text source for publication was theoretically justified, a list of recommended corrections based on manuscripts was compiled and argued. The tradition of criteria for scientific criticism of literary monuments has been supplemented with new principles. This is the transparency of editorial intrusions into someone else's text, the obligatory references to manuscripts or earlier publications in the list of corrections, a comprehensive disclosure of its composition (not a truncated format), the inadmissibility for a text critic to act as a co-author of the writer.
Keywords
