Ivan Turgenev as the Reader of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding (On the Materials of the Writer's Family Library)

The article dwells on the study of the literary and aesthetic dialogue between Ivan Turgenev and humanistic traditions of the Enlightenment novel. This study focuses on Turgenev's reception of Henry Fielding's discoveries brightly and completely reflected in his comic novel The History of Tom Jones. a Foundling (1749). The problem of the reader's reception of Fielding's novel is first addressed on the materials of Turgenev's personal (family) library. Numerous marks (notes in English) and sidenotes (nail marks, pencil lines and dots) Turgenev left on the pages of Tom Jones are analysed for the first time ever. From the first pages, Fielding's well-known novel captured Turgenev. In the form of a humourous conversation about food, Fielding poses a theoretical question on the nature of human wealth and diversity. When reading the four parts of the first book, Turgenev focused on the representation of England's ordinary provincial life (Mr. Allworthy and the inhabitants of Little Baddington). He was interested in the aesthetic method of representing the English society's inner processes and the poetics of Fielding's humor. Turgenev turned to the features of the characters' nature and behaviour, which displayed the common, often inferior life. However, in the universal sense of existence, the comic context makes this life interesting and significant. In the theory of the Enlightenment novel, Turgenev noticed the traits testifying to both the coming Romanticism, characterised by the demonstration of contradiction extremes, and the Realism insisting on the coexistence of contrasts in one character or phenomenon. Turgenev's understanding of Fielding's comic narrative, which combined the reality's satiric depiction and the poetic creation of the world's beauty, found reflection in the principles of literary characterology of his tale The Diary of a Superfluous Man (1849). Turgenev remade the response amplitude of Fielding's contrast and represented it in Chulkaturin's confession. By doing this, the author overcame the fatal determinism of the Natural School. The belief in human abilities, as well as the irreconcilable criticism of the vices of the epoch that imprisoned the main character, added the sense common to all mankind to the concept of a “superfluous man”. Chulkaturin's confession is based on Fielding's novel model as a conversation with a reader who, one would think, is not taken into consideration. The obvious orientation on the Tom Jones tradition is seen in the descriptions of nature and the character's emotional experience. Turgenev, as well as Fielding, introduces a direct appeal to the nature by showing his character's natural commitment to the beautiful and simultaneously his inviability.

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