The image of estate in the story by A.N. Tolstoy “The night in the steppe”

The article is devoted to the one of the less-studied A.N. Tolstoy’s stories “The Night in the Steppe” which was written in Paris in 1911, but based on his memories about life on the Sosnovka where the writer spent his childhood. Biographic, socio-cultural and textological methods for examining texts allow to recreate the historical and literary context of the time when the story was created, to study the intertextual and autointertextual connections of the story. It reflected Tolstoy’s family economic concerns and relations with landowners of the nearest estates, in particular, with the member of the famous Shikhobalov’s family. It also showed the unrest in the Samara Region, that took place after the beginning of Stolypin’s agrarian reform. In the article the comparative analysis of two texts of this story was attempted: the first text was published in the newspaper “Rech” in 1911 and the second was corrected by the author for the second book of works, published in 1912. Tolstoy corrected the story for the volume of his collected works as a result the images of the willful owner of the estate and his daughter were transformed. Tolstoy strengthened the sarcastic tonality in the image of the estate and its inhabitants and eliminated the romantic characteristics referred to the estate tests of Russian literature of the 19th century. As a result of copyright editing, a generalized image of a Russian noble estate of the turn of the century was created, in which only external signs of life and lifestyle of the owners, unsuitable for rapidly changing sociopolitical and economic conditions, were preserved.