Мифопоэтические построения в «Войне и мире»

Lecture by Helena Tolstoy
(The lecture will be given in Russian)

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Tolstoy wrote during the 1860s, the most “prosaic” and “anti-poetic” of epochs. How-ever, he never entirely excluded mythopoetic elements and devices from his art. On the con-trary, he developed new and subtle methods to embed mythopoetic meanings within his seemingly dry and matter-of-fact prose.

Helena Tolstoy taught Russian literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She organized three confer-ences at the University, on Jewish-Russian writing in 2009, on Leo Tolstoy in 2011, and on Jabotinsky in Rus-sia in 2013, and published three collections of their ma-terials. She authored monographs on Chekhov (1994, 2003), Aim Volynsky (2013, an English version in 2017) and her grandfather Aleksei Tolstoy (2005, 2013, and 2022), and research on Nabokov, Platonov, and Nadezhda Bromley (2022), who was a brilliant prosaic of late 1920s. Her 2017 NLO book ‘Igra v klassiki” (A Game of Classics) includes mini-monographs on Tolstoy (Tainye figury v ‘Voine I mire’- Secret Figures in ‘War and Peace’) and Turgenev (‘Nakanune’ Turgeneva: Prevrasceniia romantizma’ – Turgenev’s ‘On the Eve’: Metamorphoses of Romanticism’).