Walter Scott’s Saint Ronan’s Well in Ivan Turgenev’s Artistic Perception

Abstract

The article brings forth and develops the problem of I.S. Turgenev’s consequent perception of W. Scott’s SaintRonan’s Well (1824). The author focuses, firstly, on the I.S. Turgenev’s notes on the pages of the English novel and, secondly, on the analysis of Turgenev’s Clara Militch (1883), whose artistic composition reflects Walter Scott’s motifs and images. Saint Ronan’s Well was in the area of Turgenev’s reader interest in the early 1840-s. While reading the novel, he left notes in the form of short lines on the margins and underlined separate words, using either a pencil or his nail. On the one hand, Turgenev’s notes demonstrate his reader interest to the ironic impression of the entire Saint Ronan’s Well society and its individual representatives (for example, the images of Mac Turk, Mister Winterblossom, Earl Etherington). On the other hand, Turgenev emphasizes four leading and minor characters. Paired by Turgenev, they have an antithetic mode: the comic images of Peregrine Touchwood and Meg Dods and dramatic images of Lord Etherington and John Mowbray. Turgenev is sensitive to W. Scott’s principle of depiction, based on the deep and acute contradiction between individual characters and within their feeling worlds.