I. S. Turgenev and the romantic concept of Shakespeare (based on the materials of the writer’s family library)

It was in the second half of the 1830s - 1840s when I. S. Turgenev’s artistic and aesthetic concept of Shakespeare was formed. This fact is proved not only by the writer’s letters and works but also by the book collection of his library. While getting to understand Shakespeare, Turgenev was going through a serious school of Shakespearean romantic criticism: from the representatives of West European romanticism to the proper national interpretation forms. Hamlet was the central image of this period for the writer. Turgenev’s perception of Hamlet was extremely complex and ambiguous. Turgenev paid particular attention to the L. Tick’s “Shakespearean Preparatory School,” in particular, to the introductory article for the first volume. The author’s marginalia on the introductory pages not only testify to a focus of interest to the key phenomena in the history of the Elizabethan drama but also reveal the nature of perception of Shakespeare through the experience of his predecessors and contemporaries. A well-known essay “The life of Shakespeare” by F. Guizot (published as a general preface to the multi-volume edition of works by Shakespeare) was essential for Turgenev to understand the English playwright. The aesthetic manifest of French romanticism provided a historical and philosophical concept of Shakespeare’s art. Turgenev combined the European theory of Shakespearean art with Russian Romantic tradition. The writer underwent the way from a sublime poetical view, cultivated by N. V. Stankevitch and the members of his circle, to the aesthetic-philosophic and social-historic understanding, which Belinskiy came to in the 1840s. In the story “The Hamlet of the Shtchigri District,” Turgenev presented his version of an artistic-critical interpretation of the Prince of Denmark. By estimating Hamlet from the contemporary point of view, Turgenev objectively expresses its deeply tragic sounding on the material of Russian reality.

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