Aleksandr Turgenev's letters to Vasily Zhukovsky: Composition, problematics, plots

The ongoing project to publish the complete works and letters of Vasily Zhukovsky clearly posed the problem of a systematic scientific approach to the understanding of his epistolary heritage In this context, the work on textological preparation, commenting, publication and introduction into scholarly discourse of response letters from Zhukovsky's correspondents seems to be of fundamental importance. This review article presents an attempt to systematize the epistolary works of Aleksandr Turgenev, who had a long friendship with Zhukovsky, as evidenced by the impressive corpus of correspondence. The material of the study was 143 letters by Turgenev of 1823-1852, 129 of which are first introduced into scholarly discourse. A frontal study of Turgenev's letters showed the irregular nature of the correspondents' dialogue. For example, the period of intensive correspondence between Turgenev and Zhukovsky falls on the six-year period from 1834 to 1839 and includes half of the entire corpus of Turgenev's letters; against this background, there are few messages earlier, in the 1820s - early 1830s, but their content shows that Zhukovsky and Turgenev maintained their friendly relationship. In this sense, Turgenev's epistolary of 1840-1852 seems to be more orderly: the less active written communication, due to the objective circumstances of both correspondents, is still stable. In terms of content, it is symptomatic that Turgenev's letters of 1823-1833. are distinctly autobiographical, while starting from the second half of the 1830s the semantic space of correspondence is shifting to the field of autopsychology. At the same time, it seems impossible to identify the leading theme of this epistolary dialogue: Turgenev's letters are invariably connected with the issues of the life of his family, but also show the ebullient, active nature of their author, who found himself in cramped material conditions. From this point of view, Turgenev's later letters addressed to Zhukovsky the family man are very indicative: the letters are extremely intimate, and Turgenev here claims to be a kind of a mentor, an older friend. It is no coincidence that it was in the letters of the 1840s that Turgenev for the first time enters into a dialogue with Zhukovsky the poet. Thus, it can be concluded that, with a high degree of probability, some part of Turgenev's epistolary works has been lost, but the composition of the letters that have been preserved allows identifying the general semantic context of the dialogue between Turgenev and Zhukovsky: this seemingly private correspondence, over time, more and more clearly begins to display a philosophical intonation of reflections on life in general.