Lermontov’s reminiscences in the story of I. S. Turgenev “Bezhin Meadow”

The article examines the story of I.S. Turgenev “Bezhin Meadow” in the context of the novel “Hero of our Time” by M.Y. Lermontov, since the issues raised in “Bezhin Meadow” and in “Fatalist” have much in common: the heroes, bearers of the Western cultural tradition, are waiting for a “common man” to answer the question, whether there is such thing as predestination – the question they don’t get answered. An analysis of the progress of Turgenev’s work on the text of “Bezhin Meadow” and of its draft versions shows that Turgenev kept reworking his text by making it closer to the “Fatalist”. In the story “Bezhin Meadow” in the pair “a simple man / a bearer of Western cultural tradition”, a redistribution of roles occurs (in comparison with the “Fatalist”): the bearer of Western cultural tradition remains in doubt, but Pavlusha is a peasant boy who has determination and is a bearer of Russian consciousness. The worldview of the “common man” combines the incongruous: both the idea of determinism and absolute freedom, illustrating the ambivalence of the Russian consciousness. The collision of the doubting hero with the bearer of national consciousness does not resolve the doubts of the hero and, rather, confirms the hopelessness of his search. The emphasized (in relation to the “Fatalist”) activity of the “common man” makes it impossible to find a hero of the time among the “heirs of Pechorin” and opens a new stage in the search for a national hero. The correlation of the narrator from “A Sportsman’s sketches” with Pechorin allows us to take a fresh look at the problem of creative ties between Turgenev and Lermontov, to clarify the way Turgenev looked at Lermontov’s hero and at the problems raised in the novel “Hero of Our Time” in the early 1850s.