Leo Tolstoy’s resurrection and English crime fiction: Between western tradition and new ideas

The article deals with analysis of typological similarities of the English social-criminal novel and Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection. Its relevance is conditioned by the opportunity to extend the background of Russian-English literary cross-cultural relationships in order to specify the points of attraction and repulsion between the English criminal novels and that by Tolstoy as well as their different national traditions and literary epochs. The similarities of English and Russian novel models are obvious at various levels: focus on a fact, social determinism of the heroes, criticism of unjust social system, trial scenes, origin of hero-criminal, system of characters, oppositions in time and space depiction, descriptions of prison. However, taking into account the differences in historical periods, conditions of literary evolution and individual development, one could say that these features were incorporated into a new context of the Russian classical novel with great modifications.¹