The Garden as a Mirror of Love and Family Relationships in the Story by L.N. Tolstoy “Family Happiness”

Abstract

The article, devoted to direction 5.9.1. Russian literature and literatures of the peoples of the RF (philological sciences) examines the problem of love and family happiness of a woman in L. Tolstoy’s story “Family Happiness” (1859). The purpose of the study is to trace how the psychological state of the main character is reflected through the garden, which serves as a kind of mirror. The work was created during a period of heated debate in Russia about women. Tolstoy, long before his marriage, thought about the ideal of marriage. Indifferent to the women's issue, Tol- stoy limited a woman's happiness to a feeling of love for children and their father. Based on histori- cal, literary and biographical methods of analysis, it turns out that the writer was a poet when he depicted his first love in the story. The intimate space of the garden, especially in the moonlight, becomes a catalyst for a love story. The garden plays the role of a mirror, reflecting the concept of life as a holiday. The garden plays the role of a mirror, reflecting the concept of life as a holiday. However, Tolstoy inexorably deprives the woman of poetry, which is reflected in the very everyday and prosaic description of the garden in the second part of the work, when the heroine becomes a wife and mother. The phenomenological approach reveals that ideology prevails over psychological truth.