War and medicine in Leo Tolstoy's "The Raid": two doctors, two pathologies

The topic “Tolstoy and medicine” has long been the object of scholarly attention, since the writer himself was interested in medical knowledge, expressed his own ideas about it, and often gave an assessment of various medical ideas. At present, interest in this topic is growing, as the study of the relationship between literature and medicine in modern philology is an important area of research. Meanwhile, the artistic system of Leo Tolstoy's works is hardly considered in scientific works devoted to medical discourse. The object of research in this article is the story “The Raid”. This text is marked by the appearance of the figure of a doctor in the narrative, it represents the processes of illness and dying, therefore we consider it as “pathographic” (as defined by K. A. Bogdanov). The purpose of the research is to study in detail the medical trace in the story. The medical component of the work is revealed, on the one hand, on the level of the characters, and on the other hand, which is especially interesting, on the level of the narrator. The episodic appearance of the doctor is significant, the pathology that he notes does not sound medical, but Tolstovian and is repeated by the narrator. The function of treatment is not realized in the story, since the violation of the integrity of an individual in war and the very space of war are painful processes that cannot be rationally ordered. In contrasting the rational knowledge of the doctor and the irrational knowledge of the “wounded”, the author's reassessment of the first experiences of writing is revealed. In addition, the very impossibility of restoring integrity indicates the autonomous nature of the existence of the disease in the structure of the work. The following methods were used in the research: structural and hermeneutic.

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