“I CONCEIVED THIS THING IN A HARD TIME”: ON THE QUESTION OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STORY ENOUGH IN THE WORKS OF I.S. TURGENEV

Abstract

The article deals with I. Turgenev’s story Enough in terms of its role in the writer’s work, which has not yet been determined, despite of the increased interest in texts created after Fathers and Sons in recent decades. Enough traditionally attracts researchers as an example of Turgenev’s philosophical narrative, saturated with numerous allusions, and as an experience of a new literary form, which, however, is not always seen as successful and relevant to the tasks set by the writer himself. In general, scientific analytics is dominated by the history of the perception of this work by Turgenev’s contemporaries, who, with rare exceptions, reacted to Enough negatively. The article offers a brief overview of the responses to Turgenev’s story. The main attention of the author of the article was attracted by the judgments of L. Tolstoy. His assessments of Turgenev’s Enough varied throughout his life. At first, Tolstoy took the general position of denying this text, although the author of the article saw in some of the writer’s ‘Schopenhauer’ statements in War and Peace an indifferent polemic with Turgenev’s judgments from Enough. But already in the 1880s Tolstoy develops a view that Enough is Turgenev’s key text, which most capaciously and accurately expresses one of the most important “phases” (in total Tolstoy counted three of them) in the life and work of the writer. Tolstoy was attentive to Turgenev’s “phase” of “doubt in everything”, appreciated his sincerity and honesty in this matter and saw a close connection between Turgenev’s extreme doubt and faith and new religiosity. The author of the article also proposes an analysis of the poetics of Enough in the light of the key topoi and motifs of the writer’s prose of the 1850s, traces the correlation of the novel with the characteristic trends in the development of Turgenev’s lyrical prose miniature (a combination of lyrical subjectivity and generalization), which confirms the correctness of Tolstoy.