“The seal of the antichrist to be shaving of beard”: documentary sources of the conspiracy against the tsar in A.N. Tolstoy’s novel “Peter the First”

The article considers the documentary sources that helped A.N. Tolstoy to build the plot line of the conspiracy against Peter the Great in the third book of the novel. The central source for the writer was the work of N.Y. Novombergsky “Word and Deeds of the Sovereign” (1909), which was first pointed out by A.V. Alpatov in the monograph ‘Alexei Tolstoy - Master of Historical Novel” (1958). “Words and deeds of the sovereign” prompted Tolstoy details of the private life of the tsarevnas Catherine Alexeevna and Maria Alexeevna, the circumstances of their secret correspondence with Sophia Alexeevna. The material served as the names of real persons, general facts, rumours about the tsarevnas. In addition, Tolstoy perceived the investigation cases as a sample of oral speech of the early 18th century, so in some cases the writer introduced quotations from documents into the text of the novel (this is how the tsarevnas’ trip to Nemetskaya Sloboda is described). On the example of a small scene with the interrogation in the Preobrazhensky order it was possible to show that from the wanted files published by Novombergsky, Tolstoy took biographical information of a real person (Kostroma priest Grigory Eliseev), a number of quotations from the herbalist of the 18th century. Tolstoy studied the investigative files of the Preobrazhensky order not only on the basis of Novombergsky’s publications, he also used materials about schismatics Gregory Talitsky, Samuel Vymorkov from the studies of G.V. Esipov “Schismatic investigations of the 18th century” (1861), M.I. Semevsky “Word and Deed! 1700-1725” (1885), S.V. Soloviev’s “History of Russia since Ancient Times” (1901). These books have been preserved in the writer’s personal library with numerous underlines and notes.