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Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
While "God Sees the Truth But Waits" begins in a Russian village called Vladimir, its most striking setting is the penal settlement in Siberia where Aksyonov is sent to be punished for a crime he never committed. This is where much of the story takes place, and the location of Aksyonov's complete spiritual transformation, as Makar Semyonov is eventually sent to the same camp for a separate crime.
Unlike many other countries that have prisons spread throughout, Siberia existed for centuries in the Russian literary and cultural imagination as an entire region of the country dedicated to punishment allowing it to serve as fertile ground for the artistic imagination. Siberia is a landscape represented in many other famous Russian novels, from Dostoevsky's House of the Dead to Pasternak's Zhivago to Tolstoy's own unfinished novel concerning the Decemberist Uprising. Often, it is freezing, stark, and barren in mood as well as environmental setting.
There is almost no description of Siberia in "God Sees the Truth But Waits" as this landscape would be so familiar to Tolstoy's readership from both having read other novels featuring Siberia, and having heard descriptions of the real-life penal colonies that existed in rural Russia. The transformation of Aksyonov's hair from grey to shock-white comes to symbolize the harsh nature of the Siberian climate as much as it symbolizes Aksyonov's spiritual transformation.
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