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Vassilkov Ya. The Indian parable of ‘Man in the Well’ and its transformation in ‘A Confession’ by Leo Tolstoy

Ya. Vassilkov - Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences St. Petersburg, Russian Federation ORCID: 0000-0001-5508-5900
E‑mail: yavass011@gmail.com

 

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ABSTRACT. The paper analyzes the Indian, Old Russian and other sources of ‘Man in the Well’ parable, which was used by Leo Tolstoy in his ‘A Confession’ to express the depth of his despair during his existential crisis of the 1870s. The analysis of the Indian parable demonstrates that its initial message was a negation and even a parody (from the standpoint of the soteriological religions: Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainisim) of the archaic Indo-Aryan (basically Indo-European) world pattern realized in the rituals of the ‘maypole’ type widespread in India and across Europe. The Indian parable strongly influenced the concept of Tolstoy’s ‘A Confession’ and became the pivot of all reasoning in the first half of its text. The article is the first to elucidate the link between the parable narrated at the beginning of ‘A Confession’ and the description at its end of the dream Tolstoy had three years later, when he reread his essay before submitting it to the publisher. The article demonstrates that the dream is not merely related to the parable, recreating a similar situation and using the keywords from its narration by Tolstoy. The ‘dream’ is a transformation of the parable implying a reversal of values. If the parable was a denial of the mythological view of the universe, in Tolstoy’s dream the parable itself underwent a denial. His exceptional artistic intuition helped Tolstoy to penetrate into the text of an alien ancient culture so deeply that he was able to extract from it the archaic mytho-ritual pattern, the negation of which resulted in the emergence of the parable originally.

 

DOI 10.31250/2618-8600-2020-4(10)-80-100

УДК 82-96

 

KEYWORDS: parable, Old Russian literature, Indo-European world pattern, calendar rites in Europe and India, religions of India, visions, dreams, Leo Tolstoy, psychology of creative work

 

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