Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Honoré de Balzac was an extremely important author for Dostoevsky’s own development as a writer, and he continued to read Balzac throughout his life. Significantly, Dostoevsky’s first literary publication in 1844 was his free translation of Balzac’s novel, Eugénie Grandet, and this was also the first publication of this novel in Russia. Young Dostoevsky’s experience as a translator of Eugénie Grandet allowed him to immerse himself fully in Balzac’s writing style, and his first close interaction with Balzac’s text had a profound influence on his own later novels. Dostoevsky was attracted to Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet because of this novel’s great emotional and psychological tension, and its powerful central female character. In Eugénie Grandet, Balzac created a compelling portrait of a virtuous, deeply loving, and self-sacrificing woman, who, in her youth, briefly cherished hopes for family happiness and love, but whose aspirations and dreams were crushed, and whose unfulfilled emotional life continued for many years in quiet suffering and spiritual loneliness. This paper focuses on tracing the influence of the main character Eugénie on Dostoevsky’s images of the ideal woman in his works, specifically on the heroine of “The Meek One,” Alyosha’s mother from “The Brothers Karamazov,” and Alexandra Mikhailovna from “Netochka Nezvanova.”