Abstract
The article examines the images of mother and child based on Leo Tolstoy’s autobiographical novella Childhood (from the trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, Youth) and his novel Anna Karenina. The relevance of the topic is determined by the analytical focus on “motherhood and childhood”: the inseparable bond between the images of mother and child, their indivisibility is reflected in meaningful details at every level of the artistic whole. In the autobiographical work, the narrator’s memory preserves the images of childhood down to the smallest details. Within this chosen perspective, the article asserts the relevance of identifying and studying the very connection between the images of mother and child in the world of childhood as represented in nineteenth-century Russian classics. Tolstoy’s logic in realizing his artistic conception is traced in the following words: “…only then is it achieved, and to the extent that the artist finds those infinitely small moments from which the work of art is composed” (cited from [19, 159]). The article analyzes Nikolai Irtenev’s memories of his mother (Childhood) and the episode of Anna Karenina’s meeting with Seryozha (Anna Karenina). In Childhood and Anna Karenina, both in their general design and in their details Tolstoy captures the indivisible eternal images of mother and child in two hypostases – the earthly and the sublime, for the “mother and child” bond is associatively perceived as conceptual, visually captured in art, and iconic (the Theotokos, the Madonna and Child).
Keywords
Leo Tolstoy, Childhood, Anna Karenina, images of mother and child, art of detail, psychological depth.