Authors
- Dzhanumov Seyran Doctor of Philology, Professor
Annotation
The purpose of the article is to reveal the role and signifi cance of folk proverbs and sayings, as well as of some other genres of Russian folklore (songs, memorates) in I. S. Turgenev’s dramaturgy, that is, where earlier this problem did not attract the attention of researchers.
Quite a lot of proverbs and sayings in one of Turgenev’s most famous plays — a comedy in fi ve acts A Month in the Village (1850), where action takes place in a noble manor. And although in the center of the dramatic confl ict of the play is a commoner, a student Belyaev (it is worth mentioning that this play was originally called Student), but there are no proverbs and sayings in any of his cues. But other characters in the play quite often use them in their speech. It is, fi rst of all, Rakitin, who loves his friend’s wife, Natalya Petrovna, a wife of a wealthy landlord Islaev. In every action of comedy A Month in the country in the cues of certain characters the author aptly uses folk proverbs and sayings. And not only proverbs and sayings, but also folk songs.
Summing up the works reviewed in our article, we can conclude that proverbs and sayings (less often — songs and memorates) are elements of Turgenev’s dramatic style. The principles of using folklore in various Turgenev’s plays are not the same. Sometimes proverbs and sayings are used to describe the situation, recreate the local colour, to reveal the personality and psychology of a particular character, especially the characteristics of his (her) speech. Sometimes the author of the plays tends to embellish the replicas of the characters, using abundantly the small genres of folklore, and sometimes folk songs and memorates. In some comedies proverbs and sayings emphasize and reinforce the basic idea of the work, are naturally and unobtrusively intertwined in the speech of the characters.
In his dramaturgy Turgenev transforms in his own way, and sometimes reinterprets traditional folklore images and motifs, often paraphrases folk proverbs and sayings in accordance with the ideological conception of the work and its poetics. From the treasury of the people’s speech Turgenev chooses words and expressions, phraseological phrases rich in semantic nuances, folklore comparisons that give the characters’ cues a special mettle, brilliance and expressiveness. The creative development and use of diff erent genres of Russian folklore in Turgenev’s plays testifi es to the excellent knowledge of the traditions of oral folklore by the author, and, possibly, the folklore collections of his and the previous time, which was even more evident in the Notes of the Hunter.