Studia Litterarum (Mar 2022)
I.S. Turgenev as a Walter Scott’s Reader (on Turgenev’s Personal Library). Part 1
Abstract
The article covers the issue of Turgenev’s perception of Walter Scott’s literary works, using a hitherto understudied materials from I.S. Turgenev’s personal library. Research attention is focused on the analysis of Turgenev’s multiple notes left on the pages of multivolume collected works of the English novelist. The traces of his attentive reading are connected with the desire to comprehend the peculiarities of the English writer’s artistic method, to understand the essence of his objective manner of storytelling, determined by historicism and manifested in the development line of the protagonists. Reading the novels of Scott, Turgenev was drawing his special interest to the image of the common people as well as a carrier of the national element. The personal touch of Turgenev’s perception of folk characters created by the English author is that the Russian writer paid attention to the synthesis of comic and tragic features in the characters and their behavior. At the same time, the life-affirming nature of this synthesis was fundamentally important. Turgenev’s aesthetic position during the reading of Scott’s novels was manifested in the assimilation of the educational concept of the personality, declared by the English writer. A large number of notes are associated with a description of the fate and nature of the characters, which represent common national life in Scott’s works, in its daily everyday manifestations. This interest in the position of the author and the image of the national element coincided with the development of Turgenev himself in the 1840-s.
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