THE SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION OF NIKOLENKA IRTENYEV IN LEO TOLSTOY’S TRILOGY

The article describes the formation and development of the personality of the main character Nikolenka Irtenyev in Leo Tolstoy’s trilogy “Childhood,” “Boyhood” and “Youth.” Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy is known all over the world not only as a talented master of words, a great thinker, but also as a subtle psychologist. In the writer’s mind, man flows like a river. Therefore, one of the main tasks of a writer is to understand a person from inside his soul and reveal the secrets of his spirit. The relevance and novelty of the work lies in the fact that when analysing Tolstoy’s trilogy, researchers in most cases consider the mental processes in Nikolenka’s childhood, but his spiritual evolution from childhood to youth has not been sufficiently studied in modern literary criticism. The purpose of the article is to analyse Irtenyev’s mental life, as well as his age-individual qualities in specific circumstances of life in the novels “Childhood,” “Boyhood” and “Youth.” Nikolenka is an aristocrat who, as a child, had a harmonious life and, entering to boyhood and youth, painfully sought a path to freedom, to truth. Special attention of our article is paid to the fact that in Irtenyev, despite his age, there are always two opposite parts: one is sincere and kind, and the other is hypocritical and evil. A keen sense of life, a penchant for constant analysis and introspection are the hallmarks of the central character of the trilogy. The article concludes that already in the first book of the trilogy Tolstoy shows that his hero has the highest capacity for moral growth.