THE TOLSTOY “CONNECTION” ALEKSANDR SOLZHE-NITSYN’S IN THE FIRST CIRCLE THROUGH THE PRISM OF PEASANT PROVERBS IN WAR AND PEACE AND ANNA KARENINA

Abstract

Like his nineteenth-century predecessor, Leo Tolstoy, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn displayed a keen fascination for the folk wisdom and simple speech of Russian peasants. And, like Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn was fond of interspersing large numbers of proverbs into the speech of central charac-ters and protagonists of his fiction. A case in point is his novel In the First Circle, which shares a number of features in common with Tolstoy’s masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina: in particular, the predilection of his predecessor to resolve the ethical-moral crisis faced by his protagonist through the introduction of a Russian peasant into the narrative, whose folksy wisdom and speech succeed in shedding light on the existential search in the novel, undertaken by the protagonist.