Three Thieves by L. Tolstoy

About the author:

Pierre Marillaud, Dr. of Linguistics, Associate Researcher, University Toulouse-Jean Jaurès (France); Inspector of the Honorary Academy; p.marillaud.cals@orange.fr

Abstract:

Leo Tolstoy’s tales, short stories, and fables appeal to many of us with their humor, their cold view of the realities of life, and their ignorance of the demands of conformist morality. For a number of reasons, one of the tales, entitled Three Thieves, led the author of this article to thinking about the discrepancy between the tale and the quaint preface that one must read before taking up the book, published by Leo Tolstoy in 1888 in the Plon-Paris publishing house.

In the first part of this article, the author confines to a semi-linguistic approach to the tale in order to determine what might be called its “general meaning”. In the second part, the author studies what Leo Tolstoy really had in mind when he wrote this tale. A discussion whether this tale does not contradict the preface given earlier follows then. The conclusion once again confirms a positive answer to this question.

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