Alexander Pushkin’s Sources of the Meaning of the People’s War in L. Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace

The aim of the study is to characterize the relationship between the image of the people’s war in L. Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace and the image of the Pugachev rebellion, as depicted in A.S. Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter . The character of Fyodor Dolokhov uniquely embodies the symbolic polyvalence of the notion of “war” in Tolstoy’s War and Peace . On one hand, he epitomizes its negative aspect - aristocratic pride and egoism, the central maladies of Russian life. On the other, Dolokhov’s predatory “ferocity” and “savagery” make him a key agent of the 1812 Patriotic War, which affirms the idea of “peace” as a universal, “communalswarm” existence. In this, Dolokhov channels the primal, “elemental-hunting” spirit of popular war, personified by Tikhon Shcherbaty. The prototype for such war, as an uprising of primitive hunting instincts, appears in Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter through Pugachev’s rebellion. Its leader reveals the rebellion’s essence to Grinyov via a Kalmyk tale of an eagle and raven: Better to drink living blood once than feed on carrion for three hundred years. Meanwhile, the turncoat Shvabrin exposes the logic behind Dolokhov’s amoral noble “self-will” - first adopting the “elemental-hunting” ethos as a mark of distinction, then dissolving into it completely. Like Shvabrin as Grinyov’s “useful saboteur” , Dolokhov plays an analogous role for Tolstoy’s protagonists (Pierre Bezukhov, Nikolai and Natasha Rostov). Both antagonists compel the heroes to harness that same primal vitality and will, rooted in nature yet guided by reason, measure, and morality. The following conclusions have been made in this research: within the literary universes of Pushkin and Tolstoy, a dialectical interaction between raw nature and human nature is revealed; by threatening to plunge the ordered world into primordial chaos, the elemental force of war, uprising, distraction ultimately reinforces its very structure.