| Summary: | The article presents the first systematic examination of the thanatological motive in L. Tolstoy’s early works. Basing on a number of Lev Tolstoy’s novels and stories written in the first half of 1850s (“Childhood”, “Boyhood”, “Cossacks”, “The Raid”, “A Billiard-Marker’s notes”, “The Cutting of the Forest”, “How Soldiers Die”, “Sevastopol in December”, “Sevastopol in May”, “Sevastopol in August 1855”, “Three Deaths”), the article analyzes the thanatological features to demonstrate, how the suffering in young ages predetermined the writer’s art. In his early novels, Tolstoy wanted to understand why people kill each other. He demonstrated, that war is evil, but as a writer at war, a participant of the events he described, he admired the courage of a simple soldier, his attitude to life and death.
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