George Eliot and Leo Tolstoy (pastoral traditions in Adam Bede and Resurrection)

The plot of Leo Tolstoy's Resurrection (an innocent love of a gentleman and a beautifulcountry maid and following seduction) has deep literary roots: it is a part of a pastoral tradition ascending to the Antiquity. Tolstoy wasnot the first writer, who noticed fruitfulness of pastoral tradition use in a realistic novel. Creative reconsideration of pastoral traditions isthe main theme of George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859), which Tolstoy knew well. We suppose Tolstoy used Eliot's experience creatingResurrection. The considerable proximity of the two novels' images and motives also indicates it. George Eliot's first novel may becalled a pastoral encyclopaedia without any exaggeration. It absorbs features of practically all pastoral genre modifications - bucolics,georgics, country-house poem. Different traditions of pastoral genres may also be discovered in Nekhlyudov's recollections. It is of nowonder that the main heroines of both novels - Hetty Sorrel and Katyusha Maslova - have considerable resemblance. To our mind, thereason is Eliot's and Tolstoy's attempts to make the heroines the centre of the pastoral and anti-pastoral motives collision. Traditionalpastoral motives are indeed present in Adam Bede to some extent. The novel's second part overthrows all idyllic bases of the universe: itturns out that the pastoral heroine is her child's murderer; the young esquire is a scoundrel, who disgraced honest farmers. Katyusha'sfurther life description in the beginning of Resurrection is also given in contrast with the pastoral picture of Nekhlyudov's recollections.Some features of social reality comprehension also bring Resurrection closer to Adam Bede: thus, representing prison and a court sittingboth authors accentuate inhumanity and affectation of the events. Pastoral traditions were necessary for Tolstoy in Resurrection forshowing the possibility of existence of a counterpoise for the evil, which triumphs in society. The writer's trend to future, his propagationof active moral conversion, reflected in Resurrection, was bound to have support in the past. The pastoral idea of the Golden Ageand the georgic ideology as a genre were the most organic construction for this connection of the past and the future. In the narrationNekhlyudov works for the return of his ideal past. Resurrection, in fact, becomes a novel about a return to the initial human and worldmorality in youth. And it is only in the light of this idea of the return and by contrast with it that the grotesque representation of all socialinstitutions becomes possible. Thus, George Eliot's Adam Bede became an example of active reconsideration of the pastoral aestheticsand genre directions for Tolstoy, which he used in his last novel's creation.

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