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Abstract:

The article discusses the principles of creating the image of home using the example of the works by A.N. Tolstoy, which comprise the Trans-Volga series: the novellas Mishuka Nalymov, Cockerel, Dreamer and stories Arkhip, The Actress, Matchmaking. In Trans-Volga series Tolstoy turned to the phenomenon of home as a basic component of the Russian mentality and presented it as a paradigm of a changing type of culture, as a transition of family ties to a different type of relationship. With object-based visual means, the author created the image of home in which the idea of stability, orderliness, and arrangement is destroyed. In Tolstoy’s prose of the period under review, the house is empty without an owner, and a person who does not have his own home is defenseless. The image of home is associated with the motives of care, orphanhood, loneliness, illness, boredom, and melancholy. With the loss of a true home, family and kinship ties, the feeling of ‘homeliness’ as a special, original property of the Russian consciousness also disappears.