Wasilij Szczukin

The text of the article contains a series of reflections on the tragic concept of life and metaphysics of death in the works of Ivan Turgenev in the 1870s and early 1880s, which the reader can easily find in most of his works of this period. Life on earth is seen as a great universal tragedy, in which an individual human being is doomed to defeat in the fight against the metaphysical power of nature, with an iron necessity for death and mortal love disease – the most beautiful manifestation of humanity, which is also a death sentence. The precursor of Turgenev’s vision of the world was the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer; regardless of the author of Fathers and children, similar thoughts appear in the works of Charles Baudelaire and Guy de Maupassant. The authors emphasize two main reasons for Turgenev’s global pessimism: firstly, a personal tragedy associated with a deeply and deeply lived love for Paulina Viardot, condemned to failure; and secondly, the powerful influence of Neoplatonism and the pantheistic Romantic philosophy under the sign of Schelling, within which the writer’s views developed during his youth. An analysis of a number of works created in the last years of Turgenev’s life, in which pictures of the transcendent world or longing for it appear more and more frequently, as evidenced by the regularly occurring oneiric motifs and the motif of a meek expectation of death. At the same time, the writer defends the human right to a dignified death, appropriate to the inalienable dignity of every human being. 

In the first part of the novel Crime and Punishment, waking up after sleeping on exhausted horses, Raskolnikov refuses to commit the murder of Alyona Ivanovna, but then for some unknown reason goes by the house on Sennaya square. This inexplicable act was fatal for him: on the square, he learned that tomorrow Alyona will be home alone and took the final decision to put into action the axe. The article substantiates the assumption that the “topographic error” of the hero is closely connected with the mythical reputation of the Haymarket and nearby alleys as places where the devil confuses people the right way. More Alexander Pushkin (Secluded Cabin on Vasilievsky Island) tied the motif of wandering through the labyrinth streets of St. Petersburg with the intervention of the devil, and Nikolai Gogol (Diary of a Madman) put the phrenetic Poprishchin in the Zverkov’s house, in the Stolyarny lane, near Kokushkin bridge. In the same Stolyarny lane Lermontov places the house titular counselor Stoss of the eponymous story. Right there on the corner of the Sredniaya Meshchanskaya street and Stolyarny lane, settled Dostoevsky and Raskolnikov. The hero of the story Stoss, the painter Lugin, wandering in these places, following the absurd instructions of the boy, offering him to go to the roundabout, just as it does Raskolnikov, going home through Sennaya square. Thus, Dostoevsky accurately taken into account the literary reputation of this place that goes back to Gogol and Lermontov.