Perfecting female character in George Eliot's and Leo Tolstoy's works

The problem ''Leo Tolstoy and George Eliot'' has not been a subject of special consideration so far, though Tolstoy's diary, letters and materials of writer's own library confirm that he was an attentive reader of the English writer's works. The base of the research is an analysis of Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical edition from Tolstoy's library. There are Tolstoy's notes in this book; the writer's secretary V.F. Bulgakov confirmed their authoring. Four fragments, which Tolstoy set off, are a part of the main characters' dialogue. Felix Holt sees the true moral sense in Esther Lyon, the vain beauty, and this prompts him to talk straightly about her disposition and purposes. ''I want you to change'', - Felix Holt repeats during their dialogue, which Tolstoy noted. In our view, the plot of Felix and Esther relations corresponds with Tolstoy's unusual experience - correspondence with Valeria Arsenyeva in the autumn of 1856. We are convinced these letters can be considered as independent literary materials. Tolstoy ''modelled'' his future wife in the letters, teaching her and implanting his own views. Real Valeria is pushed to the background - actually Tolstoy in his letters made a perfecting female character, which will be a base for the appearance of Masha from Family Happiness, Kitty Shcherbatskaya, Katyusha Maslova. Tolstoy does not take notes on the following chapters of Felix Holt, the Radical, but the plot of further relations of Esther and Felix also corresponds with the continuation of ''romance'' of the characters invented in Tolstoy's letters - Khrapovitsky and Dembitskaya. Tolstoy recommences these relations in the novel Family Happiness. Masha becomes a completed variant of Dembitskaya: here she obediently chooses the road of perfection, suggested by the male character. A number of psychological details in the description of Masha's inner development are similar to the situations in Eliot's novel (for example, the metaphor of light: Esther, like Masha, feels Felix ''seemed to light up her life''). The same ''alignment of forces'' in the system of characters also unites the novels: like Sergey Mikhailovich, Felix Holt is gradually pushed to the background as the female character's inner transformation is going on. Both authors lead their female characters into temptations testing their new convictions. So we can assert that the presence of a dominant in the poetics and content draws together Tolstoy's and Eliot's works, which shows in a number of similar methods in composition, system of characters, and moral conception. Both authors proclaim the necessity of self-development and self-perfection, search and preservation of true purport of life. This common Tolstoy's and Eliot's philosophy of work caused writers' equal attention to a perfecting female character, who advances under male characters' influence, goes through a situation of agonising moral choice and then finds her own path.

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