I.S. Turgenev and H. de Balzac: On the Way to Shakespeare (On the Materials of the Writer's Family Library). Article Two

The article dwells on the issue of the artistic interaction of I.S. Turgenev and H. de Balzac. For them, from the aesthetic point of view, W. Shakespeare's heritage, which became an important crossing point, finds traces in the structure of the authors' artistic dialogue. For the first time, the issue of Turgenev's personal attitude to the literary work of the French Romanticist is studied on the materials of the writer's personal (family) library. During his lifetime, Turgenev had been repeating a negative attitude to Balzac's artistic method; however, the Russian writer admitted his "great talent". Turgenev's statements gave an important reason to parallel two aesthetics, which resulted in the development of typological and contact connections on different grounds. Younger Turgenev's coevals became interested in the probable proximity of the Russian writer to Balzac (P. Bourget, E.-M. de Vogue, G. Moore, P.D. Boborykin). For the most part, they argued Turgenev's claim that Balzac's artistic method was "alien" to him. Later, significant common and different traits of the two aesthetics were introduced into Russian and foreign research works of the 20th century (by D.S. Gutman, M.P. Alekseev, M.G. Ladaria, L.P. Grossman, C. Culianu-Georgescu). A Month in the Country (1850) marked an important period of the Russian writer's early contact with the French novelist's tradition. From Balzac's play The Stepmother, Turgenev accurately learned the way of making the main female character image with sharp contradictions. Based on this example, Turgenev made a psychologically heterogeneous image of his female image. However, the writer did not adopt the French author's deep and limited social context of the character (cheating on her husband, a bastard child, etc.). On the contrary, following Shakespeare, Turgenev filled his own female image with a vast moral and philosophical content. The artistic polemic with Balzac, focusing, among other matters, on the grandiose Shakespeare's tragic characters, is represented in the comedy Fortune's Fool (1848). Expressed in line with Shakespeare's imagery, the father drama of a "little man", in its everyday and intimate family version, is approaching the problem set of Old Goriot (1834) in Turgenev's work. Following Balzac, on the example of a noble family, Turgenev shows the dramatic chaos of the whole national existence. Many years later in his story "A Lear of the Steppes" (1870), Turgenev gets back to develop the issue of Lear, which includes the new reading of Balzac's novel.

Keywords

Authors

References