The hero's existential dilemma in the story "First Love": the Hamletian question

Abstract

The article is devoted to the existential dilemma of the hero in I. S. Turgenev's story "First Love", which goes back to the eternal Hamletian question. The traumatic experience of the hero of the story is analyzed, in the image of which it is possible to find moral and psychological traits peculiar to Hamlet, transferred in the context of Russian cultural tradition. The object of the study is the political and ethical dilemma of the hero in the story "First Love". The subject of the study is the unusual love experience of the protagonist of the story and the social and family relations connected with it. The main purpose of the work is to analyze Shakespearean reminiscences in the story, to identify the Hamletian question behind the hero's tragic love. The following research methods were applied in the work: the method of holistic analysis of the artwork, descriptive, comparative, as well as the method of linguocultural interpretation. The research shows that I. S. Turgenev presents the story of the young hero's first love as a socio-political allegory, an allusion to the existential dilemma of the young generation at a critical period. It is the inability to resolve this dilemma that leads the hero of the story to a tragic finale, which should be seen as a warning from the writer. The results described in this article will contribute to a deeper understanding of the late work of I. S. Turgenev, as well as can be introduced as a scientific material in the educational process at the Faculty of Philology. The scientific novelty of the study consists in the fact that the paper is the first to study in detail the Hamlet question in Turgenev's story, which is usually paid little attention to, and to discover the reason for the formation of the Russian Hamlet from the double dilemma (political and ethical) of the protagonist.