Character in the short prose of Ivan Sergeevič Turgenev
By: Sander Brouwer.
Series: Studies in Slavic literature and poetics -- v. 25
Publisher: Rodopi
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 307
Subjects: Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich, -- 1818-1883 -- Characters.; Characters and characteristics in literature.
Description: In this book, the problem of literary character is investigated in a series of detailed analyses of short stories by I.S Turgenev: Bezhin Lea, Mumu, A Journey into Poles'e, The Dog, and Punin and Baburin. Up until roughly the 1920's (in Russia: before Formalism), the approach to character in literary criticism was based on the implicit assumption that literary character somehow reflected characters in real life, who were thought to have a fixed inner essence (psychological and/or ideological).

In post-formalist, structuralist studies, on the other hand, character as it were, dissolved into the textual fabric of the work. In this book, the basic viewpoint of structuralist theory of character, namely its exclusively textual nature, is retained. But in that case, how is the structure of character in texts of the pre-modernist era to be described, in which the belief in the existence of an inner essence in actual as well as in fictional characters had hardly yet been shaken? In order to tackle this problem, the author turns to Roman Jakobson's idea, taken up and developed by W. Schmid and A.

Hansen-Love, that the meaning of a work of literature is generated by the interaction of paradigmatic and syntagmatic mechanisms. The image of character in Turgenev's stories is the result of devices characteristic of "narrative" as well as of "verbal art". It is partly created with the help of leitmotivs that form sequences of equivalences, and of intertextual references. Thus (social) representation is supplemented by lyrical and philosophical overtones. Comparable observations have been made by V. M. Markovic (1982) on Turgenev's novels, as well as on those by Puskin, Gogol and Lermontov.

For the assessment of intra- and intertextual equivalences it has been found of great importance to pay more attention than is usually done to folkloric connotations of details in Turgenev's fictional world. Thus new layers of meaning can be uncovered in stories that have been considered well-studied; and a first-ever interpretation is given of The Dog, a story traditionally regarded as incomprehensible.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 285-305).

Afterword in German and summary in Russian.