Ivan Turgenev's ancestors as readers: Nikolay Lavrov and Virgil (on the material of the writer's family collection of books)

The article focuses on a specific aspect of the issue of the creative interaction between Ivan Turgenev and the artistic tradition of the "Mantuan Swan" - Publius Vergilius Maro. On the material of Turgenev's private (family) book collection located in Oryol (Russia), the writer's notes are analyzed. The notes were made on the sheets of a four-volume French edition of The Aeneid' (L'Eneide, 1804) translated by Jacques Delille, a classicist poet. In the course of the analysis, the identity of the most probable reader and, consequently, the author of the notes was determined - Nikolay Lavrov (1761-1813), Turgenev's maternal grand-uncle. The peculiarity and uniqueness of Lavrov's personality (Alexander Suvorov's and Mikhail Kutuzov's confederate, the confidant of the Count Alexey Arakcheyev, a Russian General and statesman under the reign of Alexander I), its heroic nature (the veteran of glorious military expeditions and the 1812 war battlefield general) are closely related to the style of the notes on the pages of The Aeneid. The numerous marginal notes and notes in the text (thick curved lines) give an opportunity to characterize the specifics of his interest to the motives and images of Virgil's epic poem and, as a consequence, to visualize the figure of a sensitive and attentive reader. While reading the famous poem, Lavrov laid emphasis on the peculiarities of the writing style (its expressive means: epic comparisons, metaphors), the distinctive places from the emotional and psychological perspectives, as well as the significant moments of the moral-belief and heroic generalization. General Lavrov, the hero of the Patriotic War whose portrait was certainly supposed to adorn the Military Gallery of the Winter Palace, is the right figure to interpret the content from the perspective of a direct participant of the historical events of the war (the epoch of the awakening national identity and civil exaltation). The elements of the lyrical-epic narration he marked in the literary work corresponded to his emotional and psychological states and to his ethical and philosophical position. Highly popular in its time, Delille's translation of The Aeneid could happen to appear in the hands of Turgenev at a certain point (probably, in the period of his interest in the literature of Rome), and the notes could become part of his aesthetic reflection. The writer's own way to Virgil was deeply idiosyncratic and, to some extent, contradictory. However, a certain faint likeness of typological approximation between Turgenev's artistic interpretation (letters, novellas of the 1870s "A Lear of the Steppes", "Spring Torrents") and the preceding reader's (Lavrov's) interpretation can be traced.

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