La femme fatale: Typological Artistic Comparisons of W. M. Thackeray and I. S. Turgenev (‘The History of Henry Esmond’ and ‘Smoke’)

The article is a comparative genetic and typological study of the thematic, problematical, and artistic similarities between two works by prominent realists of the 19th century – the novels The History of Henry Esmon by W. M. Thackeray and Smoke by I. S. Turgenev. Exploring these novels, the author of the article works with diverse national material (though belonging to one stage of the development of world literature – the stage of socio-psychological realism), deals with different genre modifications of the novel as the main genre of the literary era (though relying on the same figurative and plot constants – la femme fatale and unrequited love). Based on this material, the paper demonstrates both similar and individual aspects of the writers' solution of the eternal theme of love and the eternal images of lovers. Also, the uniqueness of the writers’ work with archetypal images and archetypal plot situations is demonstrated. The novelty of the approach to understanding the image of la femme fatale and its plot embodiment in these novels is connected with the demonstration of the uniqueness of the dynamics of the image in the system of socio-realistic and realistic-psychological reсоnstruction of the world, whose aesthetic positions in the European literature of the 1850s and 1860s were strengthening. The research emphasis in the article is placed on the aesthetic, problem-themed, and artistic-analytical proximity of the novels The History of Henry Esmond and Smoke, but especially – on the obvious overlap of the novels at the level of the central characters, whose fates turn out to be the original embodiment of the writers’ visions of the complexity, inconsistency, and importance of reproducible eras. An analysis of the functioning of the image of la femme fatale in the novels shows that the writers fill it with deep realistic and psychological meaning, significantly transforming the figurative stereotype, subordinating it to the ethical, aesthetic, socio-historical, and moral-ideological tasks they set themselves when creating these works.