The Man Comme Il Faut in the Artistic Consciousness of L.N. Tolstoy: the Development of the Image

The relevance of addressing this topic is determined by the unfl agging attention of modern science to the formation and development of the human personality in the works of Leo Tolstoy. Until now the person comme il faut, his invariants and the specifi cs of his embodiment in the writer’s artistic world have received little attention, although the features of this personality type can be found in a number of his characters, which is the novelty of this study. By comparing the characteristics of the person comme il faut in Alexander Pushkin’s novel “Eugene Onegin” and Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Youth” we can identify a fundamental diff erence in the interpretation of this French expression in the artistic world of these two works. In the course of analyzing the character of Boris Drubetskoi, who occupies a signifi cant place in the events and character system of the novel “War and Peace”, it is established that he meets all the criteria of a comme il faut person listed in the novel. Through the lens of his fate Tolstoy shows how the norms of etiquette, which were initially purely external rules of behavior, begin to permeate other areas of life, and how the principle of “how it should be” is extended to the ethical realm, serving as a moral guide. According to the fi ndings, the traits of a comme il faut person correlate with the qualities of Tolstoy’s characters that Yu.M. Lotman defi ned (according to the type of artistic space characteristic of them) as “heroes of their place (their circle), heroes of spatial and ethical immobility”. In contrast to the “heroes of the path”, whose most important feature is the movement along a moral trajectory and the associated internal evolution, these characters remain.