Information about the author:

Аbstract:

The article examines one of the sides of the political views of the Count A.K. Tolstoy in connection with the content of the book by V.A. Kotelnikov dedicated to the his life and work. Aleksey Tolstoy’s attitude to Russian statehood is compared with N.V. Gogol. The basis for comparison is not only the fact that the writers were contemporaries, but also the fact that both had representatives of the Cossack foremen in their family, i. e. Ukrainian hetmans. The aticle shows how a firm position on the issue of statehood determines the personal fate of a person on the example of two Russian writers — hetman’s descendants. It shows also the difference in approaches to the high patriotic service of Count Tolstoy, a friend of the Heir, a childhood friend of Emperor Alexander II, and Gogol, who became close in the 1830s with another friend of the Tsarevich, Count I.M. Vielgorsky, and then intended to take the place of an educator at the Court — under the son of the Heir, Grand Duke Nikolai Alexandrovich. The author of the article restores ideological and political context, which makes it possible to adequately assess Tolstoy’s well-known review of Gogol in a letter to his cousin L.M. Zhemchuzhnikov in 1852. The conclusion consists in the fact that the consistent position of the creator of “Taras Bulba” in relation to the historical future of Little Russia as part of a united Russia.