Mother’s Death: A Turning Point in the Lives of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and Lev Tolstoy’s Nikolay Irtenev
Mother’s Death: A Turning Point in the Lives of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and Lev Tolstoy’s Nikolay Irtenev

Summary/Abstract: Although it is not possible to establish exactly when Lev Tolstoy started reading Charles Dickens, it was in the 1850s, he was reading David Copperfield, which was one of his most favourite novels by the English writer. David Copperfield is probably the most popular of all Dickens’s novels, and it is certainly the most autobiographical. The tendency to combine personal with general in an ambiguous generic package was also present from the beginning of Tolstoy’s career. His Childhood can be described as a pseudo-autobiography that imitates autobiography in all aspects, except one: its author and narrator are not the same person. A strong mother-son relationship is clearly visible in David Copperfield and Childhood. The theme of love to mother is also developed with sincerity and tenderness in both the novels. David’s mother as well as Nikolenka’s mother embody all the features of a perfect mother: a kind, sensitive, caring, gentle and loving woman. The tenderness of the nature of the mothers of David and Nikolenka is also manifested in their close relationships to their nannies and housekeepers: Clara Peggotty and Natalya Savishna. In David Copperfield and Childhood there are few things more moving, more tender, more human, yet more poignantly painful, to be found than the description of the mother’s prescience of death, of her hopeless yearning to see her children once more before she dies. In both the novels childhood – a period of happiness and light-heartedness – ends with the death of the protagonists’ mothers. To their surprise, both Nikolay and David soon find that after their mothers’ death, life continues according to its former pattern.

• Details
• Contents