The Fortunes of Nigel by W. Scott and prose works by M.Yu. Lermontov. Article Two

On the material of the comparative-typological analysis of M. Lermontov's Story "Shtoss" and The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), a novel by Sir Walter Scott, referred to in the draft of The Hero of Our Time, s the question is studied of the role of the English author's work in the creation of the fantastic background in the last novel by the Russian writer. The studies of the genre nature of this story as fantastic and romanticist, or anti-romanticist, or ambivalent in relation to the romantic tradition, give names of Irving, Maturin, Hoffmann, Balzac, Vl. Odo-evsky, Gogol, Pushkin. But in a strange way the conversation about the fantastic misses the name of W. Scott, while in the 1830s the Russian reader knew him not only as a poet and novelist actively using fantastic elements in his works, but also as the author of the famous "Letters in demonology and witchsraft" (1830). In Letters Scott presents an enormous amount of material which includes, in addition to the theoretical arguments of the author, a large number of stories describing ghosts, phantoms and creating the "fantastic" text itself. It is for the first time that works of W. Scott, the author of the novels with a lot of fantasy elements and the creator of "Letters in demonology and witchcraft" have been analyzed in the context of the study of M. Lermontov's novel. Scott formulated his understanding of the fantastic in the "Preface" to the novel The Fortunes of Nigel as a way of the author's penetration into the essence of the real depiction that requires special poetics, which proved relevant for the Russian aesthetic and artistic thought of the 1830s-1840s. The problem of the fantastic, being the subject of attention and heated debate between Russian writers such as Pushkin, Gogol, Vl. Odoevsky and others, was a certain watershed between romanticism and realism in their complex comprehension of the moral and philosophical meaning of life. The analysis of the content of "Shtoss" made by the writers studying the problem reveals facts of typological convergence of Lermontov and W. Scott in the understanding of the fantastic and in the methods of creating the fantastic reality pictures. Lermontov's proximity to B. Scott manifested in the type of narrative associated with the fantastic element in the development of motives of the ghost, game, in the description of interiors, portraits of heroes. The article hypothesizes Lermontov's possible use of the novel The Fortunes of Nigel and its inclusion in creating a plan for the story hoax as a way to start a dialogue between the romanticist and realistic ideas of beauty and of the relationship between the real and the ideal.

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