The Concept of the Novel as a Creative Dialogue Between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: “War and Peace” and “Crime and Punishment”

Creativity is dialogical. It is the accidental and conscious reception of ideas, images, and themes by different authors. Such dialogues and polylogue are often unexpected and diverse. In the mid-1860s, an apparently ordinary event happened in Russia. In 1865, the publication of Leo Tolstoy’s work “One Thousand Eight Hundred and Fifth Year” began in the Russian Bulletin maga- zine, continuing in 1866 and ending in 1869 with a separate edition of the work under a different name — “War and Peace.” At the same time, during 1866, Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment” was published in the journal. Leo Tolstoy was clearly aware that he was writing something other than a novel — a work in an entirely new genre. Dostoevsky always set himself the task of making his next novel original, both among his own works and among European novels. Dostoevsky’s new genre was preceded by the experience with the novels “Poor Folk” and “Humiliated and Insulted,” his discovery of his original genre of St. Petersburg novels and “The House of the Dead.” In the genesis of the novel “Crime and Punishment” there was a transformation of the idea — the synthesis of the story “Drunk” and confessions of a murderer gave rise to the emergence of a new genre — Dostoevsky novel. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy belonged to different poetic traditions. The former was characterized by tragic Shakespeareanism, the latter — by Homeric epic and declarative anti-Shakespeareanism. Despite the external antagonism, the poetics of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy have much in common. Their concept of a new genre is strikingly similar. They are characterized by a free epic form, the discovery of new characters, the analysis of the author’s idea as a principle and the ideas of the characters as the subject of depiction, and moralism in evaluating characters and phenomena. It is no coincidence that Dostoevsky’s novel precedes A. Fet’s sonnet condemning the crimes of the mob and the “evil genius,” and one of the common themes of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s works is the demythologization of Bonapartism. It is noteworthy that many cases of reception arose but were not published long before the novel “Crime and Punishment” was conceived and written. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s search for and acquisition of the genre opened the new Russian novel in world literature.