The Reflection of L. N. Tolstoy’s Ideological and Artistic Quests in the Story “A Billiard-Marker’s Notes”

The article is devoted to the originality of L. N. Tolstoy’s early story “A Billiard-Marker’s Notes” and the history of its writing with the use of preparatory materials. The author aims to analyze and show the interrelation of a wide range of psychological, socio-ethical, and ideological issues raised in the story, which deeply worried the writer in the 1850s. The article proves that the artist’s choice of the genre of “notes” and first-person narratives allowed him to diversify the plot, methods of psychological analysis, and images of the characters’ inner world. The article pays considerable attention to such a feature of “A Billiard-Marker’s Notes” in terms of narratology as the presence of two characters-narrators, opposite to each other in age, social status, level of development, and bearers of different speech styles. This technique allows the writer to depict dramatically Nekhlyudov’s loneliness, “lostness,” and the existing blatant gap between the worldview of the nobility and the people and their ethics. The narrator’s expressive word, completing the work, brings it to the existential level. The image of the character-marker and his perception of reality testifies to the connections of “A Billiard-Marker’s Notes” with the traditions of the “natural school,” its humanistic principles, and democracy. This story, along with other works of the 1850s, contains the origins of the religious and philosophical views of the writer-thinker.