PETER THE GREAT REVISED: ON THE HISTORY OF THE TEXT OF ALEXEY TOLSTOY’S NOVEL

The paper was written at the A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences with the support of the grant of the President of Russian Federation for young Russian scientists and scholars with a PhD title (МК-9079.2016.6). Abstract: The article examines Alexey Tolstoy’s incomplete revisions (1944– 1945) of the first book of his novel Peter the Great. These revisions were taken into account in the course of the text’s preparation for the first Collection of Complete Works (1946) compiled and edited after Tolstoy’s death. On the one hand, the revisions of 1944–1945 continued the main line of Tolstoy’s work on his previous editions (general tendency to conciseness, elimination of colorful epithets, cuttings, clarification of images and historical realities). On the other hand, Tolstoy returned to those images what he had repudiated when preparing one of the first drafts of the text (as for example, the image of Nikita Pustosvyat). Besides, according to A. V. Alpatov, the author cut out the “erroneous moments” related to the mention of Germans and German influence on Peter in the novel (“the elements of idealization in the depiction of Kukuy”). One of the main directions in the author’s revisions had to do with the image of the main character, Peter the First. Tolstoy idealized Peter by cutting the descriptions of his disease and seizures and by correcting the scenes representing his wrath and mad, explosive temper. Thus, in 1944–1945 Tolstoy seriously reworked his novel including its contents