In the article, on the material of Ivan Turgenev’s library and his short story “The Jew”, the issue of reading and creative perception is examined. Turgenev’s perception of Ivanhoe by Walter Scott is in the focus. The research attention is developing from the interpretation of several Turgenev’s notes left in the English version of the novel to the analysis of the creative perception of the images of Isaac and Rebecca, which became the ideological and semantic basis of “The Jew”. The reading of Ivanhoe in the original in the early 1840s became for the writer a penetration into Scott’s individual writing system. Turgenev’s few notes indicate that he became acquainted with Scott’s creative manner: the ability to voluminously weave comic elements into the pathetic-heroic atmosphere of action, the combination of historical and artistic material, the boldness of the ironic tone, and the mastery of speech characteristics. The reader’s perception of Scott’s novel was soon replaced by its creative interpretation, as a result of which “The Jew” appeared. Following the example of the English novelist, the object of Turgenev’s artistic reflection is a Jewish father and his daughter, who find themselves in a socio-historical and moral-psychological crisis — the Patriotic War of 1812 and the Foreign Campaigns of the Russian Army. There is an obvious similarity between Scott’s Rebecca and Turgenev’s Sarah: from the elements of the external description and the details of the portrait to the moral and psychological characteristics. The two young girls are especially united by the sense of pride and the awareness of their dignity, which clearly manifest themselves in the moments of danger that threatens them. Besides, the relationship between the Jewish girl and the Russian officer in Turgenev’s story vaguely resembles the situation of Rebecca and Ivanhoe. But the love line in “The Jew” does not develop in full. Considering William Shakespeare’s and Gotthold Lessing’s experience, following Walter Scott, Turgenev reflects on the universal nature of the “humiliated tribe”. The Russian writer depicts the psychology of the experiences of the Jew Girshel, accused of spying for the French. In the tradition of objectivity and epic literature, inherited from Scott, Turgenev draws a tragic line related to the position of an ordinary person. But, unlike the English novelist, Turgenev brings the torment of the character to the highest limit – the death penalty. At the same time, the Russian writer explicates sharp contradictions in the image of his character that turns out to be a carrier of suffering, on the one hand, and a source of laughter, on the other. This shows Turgenev’s orientation on the features of Shakespeare’s image of a person, in which the tragic invariably coexists with the comic. Walter Scott sensitively learned the law of ambivalence from Shakespeare, too.
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