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Abstract: The article deals with Ivan Turgenev’s attitude to English Literature. The focus of the study is on the comic play of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, which became the object of the Russian writer’s reflection in 1840s, firstly, as a reader and later as a creator. The English writer’s play “Money” (1841) is subjected to comparative analysis with Turgenev’s one-act comedies “Lack of Money” (1846) and “Where It is Thin, There it Breaks” (1848). Turgenev and Bulwer-Lytton put forward uniform requirements for the national theatre, which were based on turning the dramatic focus to the life of an ordinary person, the vicissitudes of an individual in their daily existence. Both writers put “the suffering of an ordinary person” at the forefront of modern drama. In the initial period of his work, Turgenev turned to Bulwer-Lytton’s drama “Money”, focusing on the problem of depicting a modern personality on the background of interaction between social, ethical and psychological motivations, acutely posed by the English author. In the plays “Money” and “Lack of Money” the money is a vivid social symbol, which hovers over the fate of the characters starting with the title. Their role is laid down by the authors in the very technique of drama and consists in ensuring the unity and dynamics of the action. Bulwer-Lytton assigns each moment of his five-act play to the course of a monetary intrigue, the turns of which subjugate almost equal bends of human psychology and morality. Turgenev organizes his comic scenes in a more convex connection between the main motive and the character’s well-being, deepening the dramatic sound (outwardly, the conflict in the finale is removed, but inner differences turn out to be insurmountable). The comedy “Where It is Thin, There it Breaks” gives a slightly different version of the perception of Bulwer-Lytton’s drama, since the line of interpretation here is built in an almost tragic way. Hamlet’s imagery in the depiction of Evelyn, which is part of the character of Yevgeny Gorsky, becomes the object of Turgenev’s creative reflection. In Bulwer-Lytton’s character, the Russian writer discerned the internal duality, indecision and irony oriented towards Shakespeare’s poetics as a means of interaction with the outside world. During the period of work on “Where It is Thin, There it Breaks” he used the theme of love and marriage as a problem of life choice of a constantly reflecting character. As a result, Turgenev’s creative reflection reveals another important name in the space of the writer’s interaction with Western European literature. The writer, who highly appreciated and knew English literature very well, turned to Bulwer-Lytton as the author of a socio-psychological comedy during the formation of his own artistic skills. For Turgenev, it was important not only and not so much to focus on the “naturalness” and sharpness of the image of the modern personality and its environment, but to discover the action of dramatic passions in the vicissitudes of human life, which could acquire a Shakespearean scale due to their internal tension and contradiction.

About the author(s) :

Ivan O. Volkov
National Research Tomsk State U niversity (Tomsk, Russia)
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6317-8397

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 10.07.2022; date of publication: 29.12.2022

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