Is French Revolution a Catastrophy? Charles Dickens and Hilary Mantel in a Dialogue Through Ages

Abstract

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel are in the centre of the essay’s author’s reflection. The two novels have the same topic – the French Revolution of 1789–1794; they have the same issue – the fate of humanity under very much complex revolution circumstances. While analyzing psycho- and socio-analytical approaches to depicting the Revolution and the issues it raises, its genesis, its progress, its participants, winners and victims, the essay demonstrates some obvious similarity of artistic reconstruction of a human being’s fate, despite this human being’s various degree of involvement into revolution process. It is the similarity of tragic coverage of such humanity phenomena as love, friendship, dignity, trust, etc. that the essay stresses. On the other hand, some fundamental peculiarities of both novelists in their depicting of the Revolution are demonstrated4 they are based on the differences of writers’ understanding of historical novel message and, what is more, on the writers’ different paradigms of reconstruction of the past: predominantly sensitive, romantic, didactic in Dickens’s narrative, and realistic, sometimes deliberately impassive and documentary tone in Mantel’s work. The writers’ share psychological dominant is differently realized: in Dickens’s novel the author voice determines the narrative development; in Mantel’s – narrative polyphony dominates where the voices of the personages, documents, other cultural artifacts are equal. Keywords: Charles Dickens, Hilary Mantel, historical novel, the French Revolution, humanity, document and imagination.