Ivan Turgenev - the reader of Shakespeare's Predecessors by Ludwig Tieck (Based on Turgenev's family library materials)

The article focuses on the issue of an essential representation of Shakespearean art in Ivan Turgenev's literary works. The research attention aims at the writer's life in Berlin. This was an important period of Turgenev's life characterized by the formation of his ideological and aesthetic views on Shakespeare's creative system. During Turgenev's education abroad, he was engaged in an active study of Hegel's Encyclopaedia and captivated by the literary findings of the "Great Bard". One of the key parts of this process is a thoughtful attention to the common factors of the development of the Elizabethan theatre. Turgenev adopted the history of the English theater development and formation deeply and fundamentally, and for the contemporaries, he became a distinguished specialist in this field. Turgenev was fully inspired with the Old English plays and special historical works, stored in a separate quality in the library of Turgenev's family estate in Spasskoye. The writer was especially interested in the two-volume Shakespeare's Predecessors (Shakespeares Vorschule, 1823-1829). Ludwig Tieck, a preeminent member of Jena Romanticism, prepared this edition. By being an engaged Romanticist, he made a contribution to Shakespearean romantic culture formation in Germany. By continuing August Schlegel's translation and edition of the complete Shakespearean heritage, Ludwig Tieck at the same time started to collect and publish the first tentative dramas of his predecessor and contemporaries. While reading Shakespeare's Predecessors, the Russian writer carefully focused on the foreword of the first volume - a kind of an aesthetic manifesto of the German culture. In the manifesto, the Romanticist tried to perform plainly and simply the early stage of the English drama development. Turgenev's six-page opening chapter has several pencil notes of different types: handwritings, marks, marginal and in-text lines. The writer's marginal notes allow characterising adequately his special interest to the English theater at the turn of the 17th century and the uniqueness of his aesthetic view of Shakespeare's creative genius. Turgenev highlighted the most important points for him: the drama folk roots and the influence of Ancient culture, the role of usualness (everyday culture) and heroic (history) in the literary artwork, their interpenetration, the language and style uniqueness, the principles of dramatic nature. These and other elements further influenced Turgenev by making him think deeply in the frame of his own Shakespearean literary work.

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