WOMEN’S WRITING AND WOMEN’S FREEDOM: ABOUT TOLSTOY’S NOVEL “FAMILY HAPPINESS”

Abstract

The article is devoted to aspects of women’s writing and women’s freedom in Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Family Happiness” (1859), which is studied by researchers widely, including the context of the “women’s freedom”, despite the fact that it is not solved in it “progressively”. Tolstoy does not justify the feminist expectations of the reader, whose attention is attracted not so much by the question of the social status of women in a patriarchal society or in the big world (although this topic is also being significantly rethought), as by the path of self-knowledge that runs through experience and understanding the essence of love, flirt, and happiness. Each of the spouses must go this way by oneself; only then will the broken bonds of marriage be sealed again, and the spouses will find unity in real “family happiness” – children. Such a result contradicts what the gender approach, sometimes attributed to the works of the classics. The main subject of the narrative – the question of happiness – is considered ambiguously, in the conflict of male and female writing: both ideologically (in reasoning) and metaphorically (in so-called “lyrical digressions”). The narrative, ideological layers, and the layer of imagery of Tolstoy’s novella cannot be distinguished: the plot twists turn out to be in relation to the images of nature and demonstrate the evolution of the heroine’s understanding of happiness.