Philosophy, Myth, and Art in Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter

In Hamlet from Shchigry District, one of the sketches in Ivan Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter (1852), the narrator's unknown interlocutor refuses to give his name, merely calling himself a provincial Hamlet. The reason is that he bitterly resents what he calls his lack of originality. He keenly feels the irony of being deemed original by his naive rural neighbors whereas he himself is convinced that he lacks uniqueness. Representing an as yet novel type in the Russian provinces, he was nevertheless born a copy of someone else' and spent his life imitating various models, mainly culled from Western literature. Incapable of the creative acts of rearing a son and heir, or educating a disciple, he instead reproduces himself by cloning. Twin brothers of his are beginning to appear even in remote rural districts, he states, and apparently he is right. Among the guests in the manor house which offers the setting for the sketch, its author catches a glimpse of a young man of about twenty years of age, myopic, with fair hair and draped in black from head to foot. He is painfully shy and self-conscious, but he smiles caustically.2 In another twenty years' time he will probably be telling a life story which in all essential aspects duplicates the one the reader is about to learn from the current Hamlet. Perhaps he already senses this outcome, since his caustic smile betrays that, like all Hamlets, he too is fatally self-centered. Self-consciousness makes the Hamlets unoriginal (to use their own terminology) and the more they cultivate an artificial eccentricity, such as draping themselves in black, the more they emphasize that they are copying someone else, for example, Shakespeare's hero. Needless to say, their imitation is but a caricature, since Shakespeare's Western prince, being the first Hamlet, was original and tragic whereas his Russian rural copies are actors in a farce, a notoriously imitative genre

Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Mythology · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Philosophy · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies

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