Next to François Fénelon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the utopian idyll of Europe and Africa in the novel “Paul and Virginia” by Bernardin de St. Pierre

The author of the study examines the specifics of the idyllic in the novel “Paul and Virginia” by Bernardin de St. Pierre (1788), whose feature is the depiction of a different natural and cultural space running counter to the “increment of life” “to the native country” (Mikhail Bakhtin). The prerequisites for the unity of human and nature are established, due to the writer’s orientation towards the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and François Fénelon, and the image of a different nature is associated with the travel experience of St. Pierre himself, the desire to find an imaginary ideal in the process of nostalgia for his homeland, and separately the influence of the utopian in Fénelon’s novel “The Adventures of Telemachus” (1699). During the analysis, it becomes clear that with the external opposition of Europe and Africa, a synthesis of European and exotic cultures and flora takes place inside the island, which expresses the author’s nostalgic experience of a break with his homeland (Hans- Jürgen Lüsebrink). It is concluded that St. Pierre, relying on his predecessors, rethinks the idyllic by depicting it outside strictly national borders, as well as synthesising elements of different cultures, at the same time he represents its loss, which is a characteristic feature of sentimental experience.