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Abstract: The article is devoted to the study of a private aspect in the history of Russian-English literature connections. In the center of the study, there is a topical issue of a creative dialogue between I.S. Turgenev and W. Shakespeare, which was accompanying the writer almost through all his all life. The research attention is drawn to the period of Turgenev’s study in Berlin University (1838–1841) which was special in its content and meaning for him. The unknown materials from the personal (family) library of the writer (Oryol city) are proving this fact pointedly and authentically. For the first time, Turgenev's marks and marginal notes (ink and pencil lines and underlines, words and collocations, marks «+», «?» and «NB»), which were left on the pages of the one-volume collection «The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare» (Leipzig, 1833), are described, systematized and interpreted. The big volume of Shakespeare's plays and poems in English was gifted to the writer in Berlin in 1838 by T. N. Granovsky. This «Shakespearean gift» (with a symbolic inscription on it) marks a special significant stage in the serious, complete and systematic study of the artistic system of the British genius by Turgenev. The future professor at Moscow University, who himself studied the diversity of the creative world of Shakespeare quite well and who is well acquainted with his contemporary critical thinking (the works of the brothers Schlegel and L. Tik), thus forever dedicated the Russian writer to "the ardent Shakespearians". Being in the center of German enlightenment and comprehending the laws of Hegel’s philosophy at the very point of their origin, Turgenev at the same time was focusing his attention on the creative world of «the swan of Avon». Now when reading the book we can see the key moments of Turgenev’s careful attention to the aesthetics and poetics of the English play-writer (language and style, genre synthesis, lyrical beginning etc.). The obvious prior Turgenev’s perception of the Shakespearean drama (the reader’s perception) reveals its interconnection with the separate moments of his appeal to Shakespearean images and motives.