Solitude in Russia

Abstract

This article focuses on the issue of the solitude of a creative personality by drawing from writings of Ivan Turgenev. It argues that Turgenev has in part been misunderstood as a result of a stereotypical approach to his life and work. Many Russian literary critics and historians (e.g., Vissarion Belinsky, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, and Vasily Rozanov) represented Turgenev as a solitary author, comparing him to other major writers such as Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Anton Chekhov. Turgenev considered the subject of solitude from different perspectives, including outsider loners, the aggressive crowd, and the Russian provinces. In classical Russian literature, solitude is often portrayed as an invariant of boredom, which is a correlation that contributes to elements of the absurd. The author considers the four discourses within which Russian literary critics and historians have interpreted Turgenev, and then focuses on Turgenev’s treatment of solitude as a playwright. Additionally, the article discusses the writer’s experimentation with the genre when determining the chronotope and age of his characters, describing the setting (from the estate to the road), verbalizing solitude (the transformation of dialogues and monologues), and constructing the format of his plays (including the short plays).