Tolstoy’s theme in the creative biography of R.P. Kumov

The article is devoted to the Tolstoy theme in the creative biography of the Don writer R.P. Kumov (1883-1919). In the legend story “Tolstoy the Wanderer”, he recreates the image of Leo Tolstoy, wandering through Russia after his death. The legendary plot is projected by Kumov onto the real facts of Tolstoy’s biography and his personality traits. The real-historical basis of the story is connected with the writer’s role in organizing assistance to starving peasants and reflecting the theme of hunger in his work. The theme of departure and wandering, archetypal for Russian culture, which defines the great writer’s otherness in the story, is equally biographical. The article explores his creative history related to Kumov’s collaboration in the magazine “Life for All”. Its founder and editor, V.A. Posse, communicated closely with Tolstoy and contributed to the lifetime and posthumous publication of his works in his magazine and publishing house. Kumov’s legend story, published in 1914 in this magazine, was a success with readers. With them, the writer opens his collection “Essays and Short Stories” (1915), marking the beginning of a new stage of his artistic quest. If in the first collections “Immortelles” (1909) and “Tatiana’s Night” (1913) Chekhov was the main artistic reference point, themes, plots, stylistic techniques of which he used in a creative dialogue with his beloved writer, now he has replaced the steppe priests, selflessly bringing the light of the Gospel to their parishioners, rural teachers, peasant wanderers with the sum, intellectuals looking for the meaning of life and faith in the immortality of the soul, tragicomic figures of the county inhabitants, etc. come characters of a different plan. These are the heroes of Kumov’s drama “The End of the Korostomyslov family” (the first edition of “The Voice of Blood” was published in “Life for All”) - strong characters who do not know how to restrain their passions, ready to transgress through blood. The leitmotif of the drama is the biblical story of Cain, on which its action is projected. The images of these characters, marked with the Cain seal, evoke allusions to Dostoevsky’s heroes, and the denouement of the drama is sustained in the spirit of Tolstoy’s religious and moral ideas of the 1880s-1890s about the structure of life based on brotherhood, love, forgiveness. The victims refuse to take revenge, take the blame on themselves, tearing apart the value of evil. Murderers commit suicide and die unable to bear the burden of their sin. The motives of repentance and spiritual insight echo the didactic pathos of Tolstoy’s play “The Power of Darkness” and his folk stories of the 1880s. The influence of Tolstoy’s ideas is also found in a number of other works by Kumov. His literary legacy is being introduced into the circle of Tolstoy studies for the first time.