The feuilleton novel in Yegor Kovalevsky's and Fyodor Dostoevsky's works

The article examines traditions of the feuilleton novel in the works of Yegor Kovalevsky and Fyodor Dostoevsky. In the 1840s, both writers were influenced by the ideas of utopian socialists. In this sense, the social novel was especially important for the Petrashevists, in particular, The Mysteries of Paris by Eugene Sue. Both Kovalevsky and Dostoevsky start from Sue's social novel, but bring the necessary national flavor to their works. The article deals with the genre nature of the feuilleton novel - the plot that is “amenable to serial deployment”. Various types of heroes, characters, a kaleidoscope of situations that replace one another will find a logical continuation in Kovalevsky's feuilleton novel Petersburg Day and Night and in Dostoevsky's novel Humiliated and Insulted. The genre core of any feuilleton novel is a certain mystery associated with the origin of the main hero or heroine. The realistic depiction of destitute people's life and the romantic explanation of their fate, the path to the bottom of society - all this is embodied through the fate of the Singer in Sue's work, Oborvysh (Ragamuffin) in Kovalevsky's work, and Nelly and her mother in Dostoevsky's work. The “mystery” becomes an objective picture of the narrative, and its solution is the answer to the question of the origin of the hero's poverty. The genre of the feuilleton novel involves certain types of characters. Following the traditions of Sue, both Kovalevsky and Dostoevsky build the plot through the mystery associated with the fate of the child. The novel by Kovalevsky could interest Dostoevsky not only by its obvious parallels with the French feuilleton novel. Petersburg Day and Night is one of the Russian novel fiction's images of the 1840s, which reflects the advanced social and democratic ideas of the time. Kovalevsky's interest in social problems in the novel was connected not only with the depiction of life's contrasts, but to a large extent with the study of the complex, dramatic fate of the 1840s generation - he depicts the fate of people from different social orders, draws their psychology and changing portrait. These same problems concern Dostoevsky both in his youth and during the period of writing of the novel. The realistic details with which both Kovalevsky and Dostoevsky describe the fates of their characters, the ideas of time that are transformed in their views are manifested through the synthesis of natural and sentimental forms. The works of Dostoevsky and Kovalevsky, written at different times, have a close relationship with each other, which is based on the commonality of both ideas and ways of their embodiment.

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