The Pirate by Walter Scott in Ivan Turgenev’s Perception: From Reading to Explication (On Turgenev’s Personal Library Materials)

The article covers the writings of Ivan Turgenev and Walter Scott in a comparative perspective. The authors focus on the Russian writer’s perception of Scott’s The Pirate (1821). For the first time, Turgenev’s personal library is used to raise and study the issue of the reception of Scott’s historicism and educational concept of personality in the 1840s. Turgenev’s notes on the pages of The Pirate allow concluding that the Russian writer was primarily interested in the choice of the romantic place of action-the Shetland Islands, including the cliff and the sea as embodiments of the harsh northern region. In their image, Turgenev found the reflection of a patriarchal psychology, a strong character, and a deep connection of man with mythology. He adopted Scott’s historicism as a recreation of the process of the inevitable breaking up of patriarchal morals that had begun as a result of the Scots coming into Shetland. Turgenev was interested in the relationship between the indigenous romantic types (Magnus Troil and his daughters), who valued their way of life and national independence, and the strangers settled in the island: Mordaunt Mertoun, his father, and Triptolemus. Turgenev’s new interest in The Pirate fell on 1860 and was associated with the emergence and execution of his own plan-the novel Fathers and Sons. Creatively continuing Scott’s tradition, Turgenev creates a novel about the drama of a strong personality, which has become the exponent for the cultural-historical and moral-philosophical crisis. Using the image of a young nihilist as an example, on Russian material, Turgenev solves the problem mothered by the epoch of bourgeois development-the problem of individualism as a complex social, moral, and psychological unit. In The Pirate, this important historical aspect is interpreted in the fate of Clement Cleveland, whose soul became the battlefield of the laws of “black piracy” and the foundations of Shetland life. Turgenev draws his character in the ideological and typological parallel with Scott through the construction of his role positions: the relationship with other characters, the conflict, which develops into a straight-line collision, the plot of love and foredoomed happiness. Besides, the vivid description of nature, its inclusion in the well-being of a person, performs its special function. If Scott’s image of Cleveland is artistically completed: the character’s moral fluctuations (between the duty of a pirate leader and an understanding of life’s truth) end in an atonement and a noble death, in the case of Bazarov, the tragedy of his personality turns into a fundamental incompleteness. Turgenev does not see a way out of the painful contradiction for his character, for this contradiction is rooted deep inside the man himself, not in external circumstances.

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