Information about the author:
Anna S. Akimova
Anna S. Akimova, PhD in Philology, Senior Researcher, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian
Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 а, 121069 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0732-1854
E-mail:
Acknowledgements: This study was carried out at the A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IWL RAS) with a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (project no. 23-28-00802).
Abstract:
One of the historical sources of A.N. Tolstoy’s novel Peter the Great was the fundamental work of S.M. Solovyov The History of Russia since Ancient Times what literary critics and professional historians pointed out back in the 1930s. The study of historical sources of the novel and, in particular, the work of Solovyov (Book 3), was undertaken in his research by A.V. Alpatov. The article is the first attempt to compare extracts from Tolstoy’s notebooks with the text of a historical source, as well as to describe Tolstoy’s notes in an edition from his personal library. This will allow to establish the extent of use of the source in the work of fiction and describe the writer’s methodology.