A History for the Common People in Leo Tolstoy’s “Ermak”: The Stroganov Plot

Abstract

The article attempts to contextualize Leo Tolstoy’s short story “Ermak,” to study the range of sources that were in the author’s field of view, and, finally, to correlate the story with the long-standing debate on the role of the Stroganov merchant family in the acquisition of Siberia. The article shows how this short story, adapted for the common people, inherits the historiosophical program formulated by the writer in the novel “War and Peace.” The article analyzes the discussion on the degree of reliability of the Stroganov chronicle, initiated by prominent historians such as G.I. Spassky, P.A. Slovtsov, N.G. Ustryalov, P.I. Nebolsin, etc. It also shows that the basis of Tolstoy’s plot was the creatively rethought idea of migration of peoples posed by S.M. Solovyov in his work “The History of Russia Since Ancient Times.” In the course of the analysis, the prime attention was directed on Tolstoy’s views on the driving forces of history, the evolution of “Ermak” initial concept regarding its dependence on the story “The Cossacks,” motif-plot and imagological links with several stories of the “The Second Russian Book for Reading” and other Tolstoy’s 1860s–1870s works.