Artistic Perception of Leo Tolstoy’s Conception in V. P. Aksyonov’s Trilogy Generations of Winter: On the Question of the Individual in History

This article investigates V. P. Aksyonov’s argument with L. N. Tolstoy about the role of personality in history in his trilogy Generations of Winter. The saga protagonists’ spiritual awakening and self-identification are discussed in the context of Tolstoy’s view on the activity of the general mass of people who take part in a historical event and determine its outcome. This allows to elicit Aksyonov’s view on man’s personal responsibility under Stalinism. The main sources of this paper are Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Aksyonov’s Generations of Winter. Its purpose is to explain Aksyonov’s artistic conceptualization of the role of the masses and the individual under the Stalinist regime and in the Great Patriotic War. The major results of the research have been achieved by comparing the artistic devices employed by Tolstoy in fracturing the myth of Napoleon’s genius as leader of the general mass with Aksyonov’s approach in satirical portrayal of Stalin. The article explores Aksyonov’s contribution to the literary tradition of the grotesque, his utilization of the functions of the body “bottom” and of Russian popular demonic motifs in the depiction of Stalin. The paper’s author utilizes a comparative hermeneutical analysis and concludes that Aksyonov’s metaphor of “Stalinist hypnosis” is the writerly equivalent of Tolstoy’s conception of “swarm behavior”, and that Aksyonov’s argument with Tolstoy’s negation of the role of the individual in history is a postmodern playful ironic device, a means for his conceptualization and revision of Leo Tolstoy’s philosophic-historical view for the twentieth century