"On the eve of the people of action": a new type of woman in the works of George Eliot and I. S. Turgenev

The essay, written on the basis of typological and comparative methods, deals with the issues of typological convergences and artistic peculiarities of the two great writers of the 19th century, George Eliot and I. S. Turgenev, when they depict a 'new hero / heroine' and 'a new social reality' of the 1860s - 1870s. The author of the essay speaks on the very fact of good friendship between these two masters and on social, cultural, aesthetical, etc. bases of their close personal and artistic ties, their thorough mutual interest and understanding. The author shows some serious typological simultaneity of George Eliot and Turgenev in constructing the artistic worlds of their novels when two writers construct their heroes / heroines, when they analyze social, cultural and moral changes in the lives of English and Russian societies of that time, and when they think of the role of literature under these new circumstances. A special stress is put on the type of new woman and her fate in a changing social life represented in the works of these two writers, on the struggle of conservative and progressive tendencies in Russian and English societies of the time as Turgenev and Eliot saw and understood it; their similar attitudes towards the new processes and new generations appeared due to the social changes are analyzed in the article. The basis of the typological and comparative thoughts of the essay's author are two novels - Middlemarch by George Eliot and On the Eve by Turgenev, and their two heroines - Dorothea Brook and Elena Stakhova, as the principal stress is put on the writers' peculiarities of artistic understanding of 'the women question', which sharpened at that time both in England and in Russia, much as though specifically in each country. The author of the essay analyzes interrelations of the realistic and romantic, the lyrical and dramatic (tragic) in the structures of the novels and the images of the heroines. The co-existence of the writers' irony and admiration is under deep analysis too.