The emblem in the works of L. N. Tolstoy

Abstract

This article tells about the elements of the Baroque emblems in Tolstoy’s works. The emblematic method of representation and interpretation of the reality has parallels with the artistic attitudes of Tolstoy, his works reflect one of the basic properties of the emblem — to extract Supreme and eternal meanings hidden in visible image. At the same time in Tolstoy’s texts the emblematic combination reveals also the other sides — it manifests itself as a mnemonic device and as a “technique of defamiliarisation”. We can find an example in an episode from War and Peace — the dream of Pierre “about the ball from living moving drops”. The structure of this episode, which is important for the understanding of the metaphysics of Tolstoy, refers to the emblematic triad — inscription or title (inscriptio), image (pictura) and epigram (subscriptio). The plot of the middle part — the description of the globe — is associated with a specific emblem from the collections, which is important to the Rosicrucian circle.While working on War and Peace Tolstoy read a lot of Masonic literature and studied the archives and documents of the Moscow Rosicrucians. This emblem could be quite known to the writer what is implicitly pointed by both the visual images of the dream and its semantic contents where religious and philosophical ideas of the Rosicrucians is very notable. The writer also utilises this special formation of sense, combining visuality and reflection, in the depiction of the war in Sevastopol stories and War and Peace. The analysis of the battle scenes leads to the conclusion that the emblematic mechanism serves as one of the techniques of “defamiliarisation” of Tolstoy. Moreover, by doing so the writer created a series of “meaning-images”, his own kind of thesaurus of the military theme.