Adoption and development of borrowed plots in fiction (the novel Jacques by G. Sand and the Russian narrative story of the 1850s)

The paper presents the features of assimilation of the plot of the novel Jacques by G. Sand by the Russian fiction of the 1850s. The plot of the novel is described as a productive model which is not only the basis for imitation, but also the origin for creation of various plot modifications. The latter can mirror demands of the Russian social and literary life of the middle of the 19th century. The theme of marriage developed in the plot line of the characters of G. Sand's Jacques is topical in the Russian j ournalism and fiction of the 1850s. The novel is productive because its ideological program contains gaps which allow filling them up. The influence of G. Sand's Jacques on the ideas about marriage in the Russian journalism and fiction of the 1850s is mediated by a multitude of literary and critical sources. During this period, magazines publish materials that develop topics connected with women's emancipation. The topic of the author's interest is a particular and peripheral element in this ideological complex. A precedent text, the Russian version of the Western novel, a narrative story Polenka Saks by A.V. Druzhinin influences the reception of the ideas of G. Sand's novel in the 1850s. Fiction writers use ideas that are presented not only in Jacques, but also in Polenka Saks; they borrow the changes the ideological complex underwent in the text-imitation. In this connection, the narrative stories of the 1850s based on the novel by G. Sand are classified as "imitations to an imitation". Fiction writers reproduce the plot "outline" where ideas open in the pre-text. The paper contains a detailed analysis of various principles of the fiction "work" with the Western plot: actualization of the "probabilistic" potential of the plot of the pre-text, modification of the "valency" connections of the plot situations which result in the variability of the plot structure. The role of the novel by G. Sand is not limited by its influence on the topic of marriage in the historical and literary process of the 1850s. It is an impulse to the development of the love theme which is new for the Russian literature. This theme is formed as a result of the transfer of the characterological opposition a weak man - a strong woman represented in the novel Jacques. The process of assimilation is accompanied by the affinity of the Western plot with the plots of Russian literature of the Pushkin and Turgenev direction.

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