MOTIVES OF DICKENS AND DOSTOEVSKY IN MODERN ENGLISH WOMEN’S LITERATURE (BASED ON THE NOVELS OF S. WATERS)

The article is devoted to the study of the motivic structure of the novelistic prose of Sarah Waters, the modern British writer. Despite the recognition of her merits in Great Britain, numerous nominations of her books for various awards and their translations into many languages of the world, including Russian, the works of this author have not yet received proper scientific understanding. In particular, the undoubted connection between S. Waters’ works and the Russian literary tradition, which manifests itself in the writer’s novels at the level of the motivic structure, in which one cannot help but notice the influence of F. M. Dostoevsky, was not examined in detail. While intertextual echoes of the writer’s work with English novels of the 19th century, including those written by Charles Dickens, were noted by individual researchers. The motives in the writer’s novels are varied, but the proposed study separately examines two groups of motives that relate the author’s poetics to the legacy of English and Russian literature. The study proves that these elements of the motivic structure function in the legacy of S. Waters as a continuation of the classical literary tradition, but at the same time are the basis for postmodernist literary experiments.