The dramatic nature of the story "A Lear of the Steppes" by I. Turgenev (according to the manuscript heritage)
The article examines the features of the genre of the late story "A Lear of the Steppes" written by I. Turgenev on the material of its draft and fair autographs. The story is divided into five parts which are tragic actions. The tragic form I. Turgenev used serves for the dramatic, tense action and simultaneously for the dynamic development of the story. This text construction is notional. Certainly, the five-act structure of Turgenev's story refers to the similar structure of Shakespeare' tragedy King Lear. In terms of the content, the tragic element takes shape through the constant death motive going through the whole story. The motive actualises the life drama of the main character. On the one hand, the writer understood death as an irrevocable reality of everyday life. On the other hand, death was regarded as the manifestation of the incomprehensible power of the being. In "A Lear of the Steppes" Turgenev comes to the understanding of the death category through the Shakespeare image. The mortal problems in Shakespeare's tragedy are closely interrelated with Lear's philosophical question of guilt and innocence of man. In the design of the dramatic story, the main place is given to the description of bad weather which betokens the character's revolt and death. The tragic landscape tonality is an original resonator that absorbs the tragedy of Martyn Petrovich and multiplies it with its own means. The other side of the genre specificity of the work is the introduction of the tragic into the epic material. Turgenev conducts a thorough work on the epic content of the story, includes elements that are already marked with the sign of a life drama. Firstly, the creation of epic stories is connected with the principles of the narrative structure and with the method of the speech structure in the story. Secondly, it is based on the introduction of a lot of national-historical and cultural material. These elements extend the artistic space, deepen problems of images and bring additional aspects in the interpretation of the entire work. Thirdly, the epic content of the story is expressed owing to the author's modelling of dimensional images of characters and to the thorough setting of landscapes. A particular significance of the story belongs to the description of nature in its pacific and gentle state. A pictorial image carries an evident imprint of the poetry of V. Zhukovsky, "visible and material in its plot and descriptive basis".