Leo Tolstoy as a Singer of the Russian Empire

The article is devoted to the study of a unique literary phenomenon: the transformation of the subjective anti-state aspirations of the artist into images glorifying the Russian Empire in the work of Leo Tolstoy. The originality of Tolstoy’s poetic principles is largely determined by the unity of his personal religious faith and creative method, psychological in nature. The Russian Empire is considered by the author of the article as the highest expression of the ideals of the Third Rome, opposite to Tolstoy’s, which received their formalization in the organizing formula of S. S. Uvarov “Orthodoxy – Autocracy – Nationality.” It is proved that imperial insights and revolutionary paradoxes in the creative world of Tolstoy form an indissoluble unity, where paradox is always a necessary condition for insight, its tool, its driving force. On the material of the Sevastopol stories, the epic novel “War and Peace”, the novel “Anna Karenina” it is shown how the subjective epic nature of the writer’s works in contact with the material of Russian reality “grows” with objective meanings, acquiring the features of a truly national, imperial epic. Simultaneously with the research article, it is methodological in nature; the principles of a strictly authentic interpretation of Leo Tolstoy’s heritage as a whole are formed in the work.