Reflections on the New Edition of the Correspondence Between Leo Tolstoy and Nikolay Strakhov
Keywords:
correspondence, Tolstoy, Strakhov, “publishing incident”, commentary activity, the nature of confessionAbstract
The review is devoted to reflections on the new edition of Correspondence between two outstanding people, Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Strakhov. The review article touches on the history of the publication of the Correspondence, the differences between editions and the features of the latest edition. The author examines not philological or stylistic features, but mainly the philosophical presentation of Nikolay Strakhov and Leo Tolstoy within the latest edition. The author notes both the advantages and disadvantages of the identified approach to considering the worldview of two correspondents. The review notes as a merit of the edition the high quality of the research work, the inclusion of S.A. Tolstoy’s letters from S.A. Tolstoy. At the same time, the problematic part of the new edition is the active inclusion of the subjective historical and cultural commentary context and value judgments contained both in an unnecessarily cumbersome introductory article and in a number of comments on individual letters.
