The history of creation and edition of Leo Tolstoy’s novella “Kholstomer” in the 1850s-1860s: from “The History of a Horse” (1856, 1859) to “Khlystomer” (1863-1864)

The study aims to reconstruct the history of creation and edition of Leo Tolstoy’s novella “Kholstomer” and to date the stages of the author’s work on this piece in the 1850s-1860s. The article presents a new perspective on Tolstoy’s process of creating “Kholstomer”: the writer’s biography, personality, psychology, the “biographical author”, and the “artistic author” are considered as defining moments of his creative work, based on a broad factual foundation of Tolstoy’s diary, correspondence, memoirs of his close friends and contemporaries – writers and literary critics, and Tolstoy’s reading circle (George Eliot, Octave Feuillet, François Rabelais, Victor Hugo). The scientific novelty of the work lies in connecting the history of creation of “Kholstomer” with Tolstoy’s creative search in the 1850s-1860s, his artistic and aesthetic pursuits (the genre of “story from life”, <“Fantastic Story”>, the novel “Family Happiness”, the novellas “The Cossacks” and “Polikushka”, approaches to the novel “War and Peace”, “Speech at the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature”), clarifying the tentative dating of V. A. Sollogub’s letter to Tolstoy from March 20 (no year given), T. A. Bers’ letters to S. A. Tolstoy <1864>, stored in the Manuscript Department of the State Museum of Leo Tolstoy, and substantiating Tolstoy’s refusal to finish and publish “Kholstomer” in the historian M. P. Pogodin’s “almanac” as a consequence of the writer’s departure from the socio-literary struggle of the 1860s. The study results in the classification of new stages in the chronology of Tolstoy’s early work on the piece (1856 → 1859 → 1863-1864); it is proven that Tolstoy’s reluctance to complete and publish it in M. P. Pogodin’s “almanac” in 1864-1865 was caused not so much by the writer’s fascination with the “History of 1812” as by the transformation of his previous aesthetic views on the “normativity” of art.