Turgenev as a Reader

Abstract

In his book Zvučaščee slovo (Moskva 2010) the author dealt with the mutual relations between the theory of versification and the theory of declamation and with the question of how Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Blok used to read literary texts aloud, and, in addition, with their general attitude towards the “sounding word”. In this study, starting from B.M. Ejchenbaum’s remark that Turgenev is always striving to “tell” and “always addresses himself to a listener”, the author examines several aspects of the role that the “sounding word” played in the writer’s life and work. The most important sources he used are the memoirs of Turgenev’s contemporaries and his letters. It turns out that readings of still unpublished literary works in small circles played an unexpectedly large role. This can be explained by the writer’s wish to test the reaction of the public, but also by sociocultural factors: the atmosphere of friendly competition that reigned during that period in the aristocratic republic of Russian ‘literary workers’.