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Literary magazine. Lecture: The problem of integrity and features of the organization of the "Hunter's Notes"

Growing up in a village in central Russia, fond of hunting and therefore walking around several provinces with a gun, Turgenev could not help but get used to Russian nature, could not help but fall in love with her. Turgenev's love for nature is clearly reflected in those stories that were later combined under the general title "Notes of a Hunter".

These stories describe those pictures of nature that Turgenev most often observed both in childhood and later. Meadow, steppe, forest - not only are they generally significant for the writer, but every tree, every hillock - they are all part of the overall picture. The meadow landscape described by the author in the story “Knocking!” Is so captivating that even the peasants who take a closer look at it still vividly feel its beauty. Steppe grass, always fresh and green, thanks to numerous streams and rivers, is clean, pleasant, caresses and soothes the soul. In addition to its beauty, the nature of the meadows is very rich and varied. The meadows provide excellent food for domestic animals, the best hay in Russia, the rivers that feed the meadows abound with fish.

Such are meadows and steppe. The forest presents a different picture. Huge centuries-old trees, occupying vast spaces, make it look like the sea. At the same time, the calmness of this green sea, its immobility, strikes the soul. A person feels that nature does not share either his sufferings or his joys, that the harsh mysterious forest will survive many more generations, everything is just as calm and indifferent. The immensity of the majestic green kingdom puts pressure on the human consciousness, one wants to leave these shady vaults and go out into the sunny expanse.

At different times of the day and year, Turgenev described nature. In the story "Bezhin Meadow" there is a description of a summer evening, which is observed by peasant children in the "night". They see the forest, the fields and the river, the starry sky above their heads. It is not surprising that children's souls tune in to a poetic mood, and seven-year-old Vanya enthusiastically compares bright stars with bees. The story "Kasyan with a Beautiful Sword" describes a morning in the forest, when the sky resembles a bottomless sea, and the leaves on the trees shine like emeralds. In the story "Date", the author compares the feelings of an abandoned girl with autumn and gives a colorful description of this time of year.

This connection between man and nature turns Turgenev's descriptions into an elegant frame in which all the stories are inserted, united by the common title "Notes of a Hunter". A special charm of all these descriptions is given by the simplicity and artlessness, which are highly inherent in the talent of the author. Turgenev in his images of nature reaches the highest degree of brightness and liveliness, without resorting anywhere to exaggerations and amplifications,

In the later period of the great writer's work, that complete fusion with nature, which critics noticed in the "Notes of a Hunter", especially in the story "Bezhin Meadow", was even more clearly manifested.

Similarly, the poetics of the Notes includes aesthetic layers of various origins. According to numerous external signs of the artistic order, Turgenev's cycle is a typical work of the natural school, which most tangibly expressed its orientation towards the "scientific" paradigm. According to the genre "Notes of a hunter" - a series of essays, as well asfamous collection of 1845 "Physiology of St. Petersburg”, a literary manifesto of the “natural” direction, in which, for the first time in Russian literature, samples of a “physiological” description were proposed, dating back to the French “Physiology”, originally conceived as artistic analogues of meticulous and impartial “scientific” descriptions of a natural object to be studied. The “physiological” style is answered in the “Notes” by the very figure of the hunter, presented as a direct eyewitness to the events, fixing them, as it should be for an essayist, with protocol, “photographic” accuracy and a minimum of the author’s emotional assessment. Turgenev's portrait and landscape descriptions are also brightly "physiological" - an indispensable part of the overall stylistic composition of each essay. They are “scientifically” detailed, thorough and finely detailed, in full accordance with the requirements of the “microscopic” method of the natural school, when the described object was depicted as if seen through a microscope - in all the numerous small details of its external appearance. According to K. Aksakov, Turgenev, describing the appearance of a person, "almost counts the veins on the cheeks, the hairs on the eyebrows." Indeed, Turgenev's portrait is almost excessively detailed: information is given about the hero's clothes, the shape of his body, general build, while depicting the face in detail - with an accurate indication of color, size and shape - the forehead, nose, mouth, eyes, etc. are described. In the landscape, the same refined detail, designed to recreate a “realistically” truthful picture of nature, is complemented by a mass of information of a special nature.

At the same time, in Turgenev's portrait and landscape, despite all their conspicuous "realistic" naturalness, another is hidden - a romantic tradition of depicting nature and man. Turgenev, as if for this reason, cannot stop in listing the features of the character’s external appearance, which depicts not so much a variety of a certain human type generated by the “environment”, as was the case with the authors of “Physiology of Petersburg”, but what the romantics called secret individualness. The means of representation - in the positivist era - became different: "scientific" and "realistic", while the subject of the image remained the same. The heroes of the "Notes of a Hunter", whether they are peasants or nobles, "Westerners" or "Easterners", are not only types, but every time a new and in a new way, alive and mysterious individual soul, microcosm, small universe. The desire to reveal the individuality of each character as fully as possible explains such a technique constantly used in essays as “pair composition”, which is reflected, among other things, in their names (“Khor and Kalinich”, “Yermolai and the Miller’s Woman”, “Chertophanov and Nedopyuskin” ), and the method of comparing the hero with a "great personality". In the same way, nature in the "Notes of a Hunter" has its own soul and its own secret. Turgenev's landscape is always spiritual, nature in it lives its own special life, often reminiscent of a human one: it yearns and rejoices, mourns and rejoices. The connection between the natural and the human that Turgenev discovers has no “scientific” confirmation, but it can be easily interpreted in the spirit of the resurrected romantics (primarily Jena and Schellingian romantics) of the archaic concept of the relationship between the human micro- and natural macrocosm, according to which the soul of each of man is connected by mysterious threads with the World Soul spilled in nature. An obvious tribute to this concept is Turgenev's method of psychological parallelism, when a certain state in which the "soul" of nature finds itself directly correlates with the state of the hero's soul that is similar in internal content. Psychological parallelism underlies the composition of such essays as Biryuk, Date, and partly Bezhin Meadow. It can be said that it also determines the general composition of the cycle that opens human essay "Khor and Kalinich" and completed by a fully dedicated nature essay "Forest and Steppe" (with the same principle of "pairing" in the title).

In the poetics of A Hunter's Notes, signs of Turgenev's already begun reorientation from Gogol's "negative" style to Pushkin's "positive" style are obvious. Following Gogol in the circles of supporters of the natural school was considered the norm: a writer depicting the brute truth of life should at least to some extent be an accuser. The accusatory tendency is felt in the frankly "social" essays of the Turgenev cycle, where the social roles of the characters are clearly distributed and, as a rule, significant surnames are given to the "negative" ones (Zverkov, Stegunov, etc.). But the main Turgenev's installation is still not accusatory. He is closer to Pushkin's desire to reconcile contradictions while maintaining the bright individuality of the characters portrayed. Not only "scientific" objectivity, not only the liberal idea of respect for the rights of the individual, but also Pushkin's "aesthetics of reconciliation" force Turgenev to portray the life of peasants and nobles, "Westerners" and "Easterners", people and nature with equal interest and benevolent attention.

In 1847, Sovremennik published an essay “Khor and Kalinich”, which formed the basis of the Notes. He was successful and therefore Turg. began to write similar essays, to-rye in 1852 came out otd. book. In "Hora and K." Turg. acted as an innovator: he portrayed the Russian people as a great force suffering from serfdom. Nicholas I was furious when he saw the book - when the essays were published separately, it was normal, but when the author arranged them in a book in a strict order, they became anti-serfdom. character -> the composition of the "Notes" is very important, this book is yavl. not a collection, but a whole product. Heroes of Turg. one with nature, and images merge with each other. Antiserfdom. pathos of the conclusion in the depiction of strong folk characters, which spoke of the illegality of serfdom; to Gogol's gallery of dead souls, the author added living ones. Although the peasants are slaves, they are internally free. From "Khorya and K." at the beginning to "Forest and Steppe" at the end this motif grows. One image of a peasant clings to another. This creates an integral picture of the life of the people, the lawlessness of the landowners. At Turg. there is such a technique: he portrays peasants, whom the landlords force to do unnecessary things: in the essay “Lgov” a certain Kuzma Sitchok is depicted, whom the master of 7 years forces to fish in a pond where it is not found. The French are depicted (Lezhen in Odnodvorets Ovsyannikov, Count Blangiya in Lgov), whom the Russian government made nobles, although they were completely fools. Dr. example: in "Two landowners" it is told how one landowner ordered to sow poppies everywhere, because. it is more expensive - this is the undermining of the foundations of the cross. Turg. indicates that the tyranny of the nobility leads to the fact that many peasants began to lose their opinion, completely obey the opinion of the master. The image of nature is important in the book. Turg. showed 2 Russia - "live" (peasant) and "dead" (official). All characters belong to one or the other pole. All "peasant" images are given by Ch. we will produce a collection - "Khorem and K.". Khor is businesslike and practical, Kalinich is poetic. Burmister Sofron takes over from Khory his worst qualities (selfishness), and Ovsyannikov's one-palace takes over his best (practicality, tolerance for reasonable novelty). This shows the change in character, its development in different people. Kalinych's successors are Yermolai (but he is closer to nature than Kalinych) and Kasyan (in him "naturalness" is absolute). Ch. the linking image is the hunter-storyteller. Although he is a nobleman, he is first and foremost a hunter, which brings him closer to the people. It is important that some "+" nobles also for the author yavl. "the power of Russia". In Notes of a Hunter, Turgenev spoke out against serfdom and its defenders. However, the significance of the "Notes of a Hunter", as well as the significance of "Dead Souls", is not only in direct protest against serfdom, but also in the general picture of Russian life that has developed under the conditions of serfdom. The fundamental difference between The Hunter's Notes and Gogol's poem was that Turgenev added a gallery of living souls, taken primarily from the peasant environment, to Gogol's gallery of dead souls. Those people, about whom Gogol reflected in the famous lyrical digression, stood up to their full height in the Notes of a Hunter. Real people appeared next to the Stegunovs and Zverkovs - Kalinich, Yermolai, Yakov Turk, peasant children. Next to the "statesman" Penochkin was a truly statesman - Khor. The false "humanity" of the landowner was opposed by the harsh humanity of Biryuk and the poetic humanity of Kasyan. Enthusiastic lovers of the arts, landowners-patrons, these, according to Turgenev, "clubs smeared with tar", showed their true value next to such a true connoisseur of art as the Wild Master, and the stupid Andrei Belovzorov, Tatyana Borisovna's nephew, artist and conqueror of hearts, caricature in itself, became even more caricature when compared with the great artist of the people Yakov Turk.

It is also important that many peasant characters in The Hunter's Notes turned out to be not only carriers of positive spiritual qualities: they are depicted as carriers of the best features of the Russian national character. This, above all, was Turgenev's protest against serfdom. Turgenev in connection with the "Notes of a Hunter" was repeatedly accused of idealizing the peasantry and retreating from realism. In fact, showing the high spiritual qualities of people from the people, emphasizing and sharpening the best features of the Russian peasants, Turgenev developed the traditions of realistic art and created typical images filled with great political content; defending the serfs, Turgenev at the same time defended the national dignity of the Russian people. Choir and Kalinich embodies the combination of practicality with poetry in the Russian warehouse of the soul; the presence in the Russian people of such people as Khor serves the author as proof of the national nature of the activities of Peter I. The folk humanistic philosophy of Kasyan was inspired by his contemplation of his native land and native nature: “After all, I never went anywhere! And I went to Romyon, and to Sinbirsk, the glorious city, and to Moscow itself, golden domes; I went to the Oka-nurse, and to the Tsna-dove, and to the Volga-mother, and I saw a lot of people, good peasants, and visited honest cities ...

And I'm not the only sinner ... many other peasants in bast shoes walk, roam the world, looking for the truth ... » (I, 116). Russian nature and folk poetry form the worldview of peasant children; “a Russian, truthful, ardent soul sounded and breathed” in the singing of Yakov Turk, and the very spirit and content of his song were again inspired by Russian nature: “something dear and boundlessly wide, as if the familiar steppe was opening before you, endless distance" (I, 214). That is why such close attention of the author in "Notes of a Hunter" is attracted by the forces and elements of Russian nature.

Nature in the "Notes of a Hunter" is not a background, not a decorative picture, not a lyrical landscape, but precisely an elemental force, which the author studies in detail and unusually closely. Nature lives its own special life, which the author seeks to study and describe with all the fullness accessible to the human eye and ear. In Bezhin Meadow, before starting to tell about people, Turgenev draws the life of nature during one July day: he shows her history for that day, tells what it is like in the early morning, at noon, in the evening; what type, shape and color clouds have at different periods of the day, what is the color of the sky and its appearance during this day, how the weather changes during the day, etc. Turgenev introduces the exact names of plants and animals into his landscapes. In the story "Death" for one paragraph of half a page, we meet a list of birds: hawks, falcons, woodpeckers, thrushes, orioles, robins, siskins, warblers, finches; plants: violets, lilies of the valley, strawberries, russula, volvyanki, milk mushrooms, oak trees, fly agaric.

Animals are depicted with the same close attention, only their "portraits" are given with greater intimacy, with their good-natured approach to a person. “The cow went to the door, breathed noisily twice; the dog growled at her with dignity; the pig passed by, thoughtfully grunting ... "("Khor and Kalinich"; I, 12). In describing the individual properties of a dog, Turgenev is especially inventive and virtuoso. Suffice it to recall Yermolai's dog, Valetka, whose remarkable property "was his incomprehensible indifference to everything in the world. ... If it were not about the dog, I would use the word: disappointment” (I, 20).

Nature in the "Notes of a Hunter" actively influences the heroes of the work - ordinary people and the narrator-author. Sometimes she takes on a mysterious appearance that inspires a person with a sense of fear and despondency, but most often in the "Notes of a Hunter" nature subdues a person not with her mystery and hostility, not with her indifference, but with her mighty vitality. Such is the nature in the story "Forest and Steppe", which closes the cycle. The story about the forest and the steppe with various, important and solemn events in their lives, with the change of seasons, day and night, heat and thunderstorms, is at the same time a story about a person whose spiritual world is determined by this natural life. In this story, nature inspires a person with an inexplicable spiritual silence, then a strange anxiety, then a longing for the distance, then, most often, cheerfulness, strength and joy.

Not only peasants are endowed with national-Russian features in the "Notes of a Hunter"; Russian people by nature are among Turgenev and some landowners who escaped the corrupting influence of serfdom. Pyotr Petrovich Karataev is no less Russian than the peasants; No wonder the story about him was originally called "Rusak". And he is also a victim of serfdom: he was ruined by love for someone else's serf girl, whom he cannot marry because of the wild tyranny of her owner. National traits of character are also emphasized in the moral character of Chertop-hanov. He is magnificent in his natural pride, independence and instinctive sense of justice. He is a landowner, but he is not a serf-owner. Such is Tatyana Borisovna, a patriarchal landowner, but at the same time a simple being with a straightforward Russian heart. According to Turgenev, serfdom itself is anti-national. The landowners, who are not typical serf-owners, appear to him as the living force of Russian society. He directs his blows not against the nobility as a whole, but only against the feudal landowners. Unlike the revolutionary democrats, Turgenev hoped for the Russian nobility, trying to find healthy elements in it.

In Notes of a Hunter, an effort is noticeable to rise above the physiological basis to an all-Russian, all-human content. Comparisons and associations with which the narrative is equipped - comparisons with famous historical people, with famous literary characters, with events and phenomena of other times and other geographical latitudes - are designed to neutralize the impression of local limitations and isolation. Turgenev compares Khor, this typical Russian peasant, with Socrates (“the same high, knobby forehead, the same small eyes, the same snub nose”); the practicality of Khorya’s mind, his administrative acumen, remind the author of nothing more than a crowned reformer of Russia: “From our conversations, I made one conviction ... that Peter the Great was predominantly a Russian person, Russian precisely in his transformations.” This is already a direct way out to the fiercest contemporary disputes between Westerners and Slavophiles, i.e., to the level of socio-political concepts and generalizations. The text of Sovremennik, where the story was first published (1847, No. 1), also contained a comparison with Goethe and Schiller (“in a word, Khor was more like Goethe, Kalinich was more like Schiller”), a comparison that for its time had increased philosophical load, since both German writers figured as peculiar signs not only of different types of psyche, but also of opposite ways of artistic thought and creativity. In a word, Turgenev destroys the impression of isolation and local limitations in the direction both social and hierarchical (from Khor to Peter I) and international (from Khor to Socrates; from Khor and Kalinich to Goethe and Schiller).

At the same time, in the development of the action and the arrangement of the parts of each of the stories, Turgenev retained much from the "physiological sketch". The latter is built freely, "not embarrassed by the fences of the story," as Kokorev said. The sequence of episodes and descriptions is not regulated by a rigid novelistic intrigue. The arrival of the narrator in any place; meeting with some remarkable person; a conversation with him, an impression of his appearance, various information that we managed to get about him from others; sometimes a new meeting with the character or with persons who knew him; brief information about his subsequent fate - such is the typical scheme of Turgenev's stories. Internal action (as in any work), of course, is; but the external is extremely free, implicit, blurry, disappearing.

full, tall, about seventy years old ... "); for the end, just a default figure is enough: “But maybe the reader is already tired of sitting with me at Ovsyanikov’s one-palace, and therefore I eloquently keep silent” (“Ovsyanikov’s one-palace”).

With such a construction, a special role falls to the lot of the narrator, in other words, to the presence of the author. This question was also important for "physiology", and important in a fundamental sense that goes beyond the limits of "physiologism". For the European novel, understood rather than as a genre, but as a special kind of literature, focused on the disclosure of a “private person”, “private life”, the motivation for entering this life, its “eavesdropping” and “peeping” was necessary. And the novel found a similar motivation in the choice of a special character who performed the function of an "observer of private life": a rogue, an adventurer, a prostitute, a courtesan; in the choice of special genre varieties, special narrative techniques that facilitate entry into the behind-the-scenes spheres - a picaresque novel, a novel of letters, a criminal novel, etc. (M. M. Bakhtin). In "physiology", the author's interest in nature, the orientation towards the steady expansion of the material, towards the extortion of hidden secrets, served as a sufficient motivation for the disclosure of the reserved. Hence the spread in the “physiological essay” of the symbolism of looking out for and extorting secrets (“You must discover secrets peeped through the keyhole, noticed from around the corner, taken by surprise ...” Nekrasov wrote in a review of “Physiology of Petersburg”), which in will later become the subject of reflection and controversy in Dostoevsky's Poor Folk. In a word, “physiologism” is already a motivation. "Physiologism" is a non-romantic way of reinforcing novelistic moments in the latest literature, and this was its great (and not yet revealed) historical and theoretical significance.

Returning to Turgenev's book, it should be noted in it the special position of the narrator. Although the title of the book itself did not appear without a hint of chance (the editor I. I. Panaev accompanied the journal publication “Khorya and Kalinych” with the words “From the notes of a hunter” in order to indulge the reader), but the “highlight” is already in the title, i.e. in the peculiarity of the author's position as a "hunter". For, as a "hunter," the narrator enters into peculiar relations with peasant life, outside the direct property-hierarchical ties between the landowner and the peasant. These relations are freer, more natural: the absence of the usual dependence of the peasant on the master, and sometimes even the emergence of common aspirations and a common cause (hunting!) contribute to the fact that the world of folk life (including from its social side, i.e. from serfdom) reveals its veils before the author. But he does not reveal it completely, only to a certain extent, because as a hunter (the other side of his position!) the author nevertheless remains an outsider for peasant life, a witness, and much in it seems to escape from his gaze. This secrecy is especially evident, perhaps, in Bezhina Meadow, where in relation to the characters - a group of peasant children - the author acts doubly alienated: as a "master" (although not a landowner, but an idle man, a hunter) and as an adult (observation L M. Lotman).

It follows from this that mystery and understatement are the most important poetic moment of the Hunter's Notes. A lot is shown, but behind this many guess more. In the spiritual life of the people, huge potentialities have been groped and foreshadowed (but not fully described, not illuminated), which will unfold in the future. How and in what way - the book does not say, but the very openness of the perspective turned out to be extremely consonant with the public mood of the 1940s and 1950s and contributed to the enormous success of the book.

And success not only in Russia. Of the works of the natural school, and indeed of all previous Russian literature, Zapiski Okhotka won the earliest and lasting success in the West. The revelation of the strength of a historically young people, genre originality (for Western literature was well aware of the novelistic and novelistic processing of folk life, but the work in which the relief folk types, the breadth of generalization grew out of the unpretentiousness of "physiologism" was new) - all this caused countless rave reviews owned by the most prominent writers and critics: T. Storm and F. Bodenstedt, Lamartine and George Sand, Daudet and Flaubert, A. France and Maupassant, Rolland and Galsworthy ... Let us quote only the words of Prosper Mérimée, referring to 1868: “. .. the work “Notes of a Hunter” ... was for us, as it were, a revelation of Russian morals and immediately made us feel the power of the author’s talent ... The author does not defend the peasants as ardently as Mrs. Beecher Stowe did in relation to the Negroes, but the Russian the peasant of Mr. Turgenev is not a fictitious figure like Uncle Tom. The author did not flatter the peasant and showed him with all his bad instincts and great virtues. Mapping

with Beecher Stowe's book was suggested not only by chronology ("Uncle Tom's Cabin" was published in the same year as the first separate edition of "The Hunter's Notes" - in 1852), but also by the similarity of the theme, with it - as the French writer felt - different solution. The oppressed people - American Negroes, Russian serfs - appealed to compassion and sympathy; meanwhile, if one writer paid tribute to sentimentality, the other retained a severe, objective coloring. Was Turgenev's manner of processing the folk theme the only one in the natural school? Far from it. The polarization of pictorial moments noted above was also manifested here, if we recall the style of Grigorovich's stories (primarily the character of the depiction of the central character). We know that in "sentimentality" Turgenev saw the common moment of two writers - Grigorovich and Auerbach. But, probably, we are facing a typologically broader phenomenon, since sentimental and utopian moments in general, as a rule, accompanied the processing of the folk theme in European realism of the 40-50s of the 19th century.

And success not only in Russia. Of the works of the natural school, and indeed of all previous Russian literature, Zapiski Okhotka won the earliest and lasting success in the West. The revelation of the strength of a historically young people, genre originality (for Western literature was well aware of the novelistic and novelistic processing of folk life, but the work in which the relief folk types, the breadth of generalization grew out of the unpretentiousness of "physiologism" was new) - all this caused countless rave reviews , which belonged to the most prominent writers and critics: T. Storm and F. Bodenstedt, Lamartine and George Sand, Daudet and Flaubert, A. France and Maupassant, Rolland and Galsworthy ... Let us quote only the words of Prosper Mérimée, referring to 1868: "... the work" The Hunter's Notes "... was for us, as it were, a revelation of Russian morals and immediately made us feel the strength of the author's talent ... The author does not defend the peasants as ardently as Mrs. Beecher Stowe did in relation to the Negroes, but the Russian peasant of Mr. Turgenev is not a fictional figure like Uncle Tom. The author did not flatter the peasant and showed him with all his bad instincts and great virtues. Mapping

"Notes of a Hunter" was an event in the literary life of the early 50s of the XIX century. Turgenev showed the deep content and spirituality of the Russian peasant, the variety of characters that are most fully manifested against the backdrop of the landscape.

Nature in "Notes ..." performs several functions. First of all, Turgenev depicts nature in order to show the beauty of Russia, its greatness and mystery. The writer creates lyrical pictures of morning, sunrise, beautiful July day. With love, Turgenev describes a thunderstorm, endless expanses of fields, meadows and forests of places close to him. Such descriptions are especially vivid in the stories "Raspberry Water", "Yermolai and the Miller's Woman". In the essay "Forest and Steppe", the writer unfolds a wide canvas of the landscape. The steppe breathes freedom, freshness; spring brings renewal to everything, a person feels more cheerful, happier. But even in autumn the forest is devoid of gloom and despondency. Its smell intoxicates, makes the heart beat faster. Turgenev reveals the life-affirming power of nature, its immortal beauty. He writes with love about those who live in harmony with nature, who know how to feel and understand it. The images of Kasyan, who knows how to “talk” with birds, Lukerya, who hears how “the mole digs under the ground”, the amazing Kalinich, endowed with a subtle sense of beauty, are fanned with poetry.

The second function of nature is psychological. Describing the actions, characters of people, the internal state of a person, Turgenev shows their reflection in nature. In the story “Biruk”, the state of the narrator before meeting the hero is conveyed through a picture of pre-stormy nature, which is as gloomy and gloomy as the author going to the village. The state of joy, intoxication with one's own talent, the creative rise of the hero are reflected in the summer landscape in the story "Singers".

The third function of the landscape is to prepare the reader for the perception of events and characters. This function is especially clearly manifested in the story "Bezhin Meadow". The boys sitting by the fire seem to be dissolved in nature. Nature for them is both the sphere of life and something mysterious, imperishable, incomprehensible. The children's mind is not yet able to explain a lot in nature, so the boys come up with their own explanations for the incomprehensible, compose various scary stories, "bylichki" about mermaids, brownies, goblin.

Those phenomena of nature that children can explain become close to them, but they treat the inexplicable with apprehension and superstition. They master the unknown in fantastic forms. Each "strange" story of the boys is preceded by an image of something disturbing, obscure, secret in nature.

Turgenev psychologically correctly shows how the perception of nature in children is changing. What was mysterious at night, fraught with danger, caused fear, in the morning seems alive and cheerful. The sequence of describing nature and its perception by children in the morning, afternoon, and night prepares them for understanding the reasons for the emergence of stories and beliefs. In Bezhin Meadow, Turgenev shows how a peasant boy, subject to the forces of nature, seeks to understand and explain everything around him, using his mind and imagination. What is close to peasant children is alien - / to the narrator. He feels his "non-merging" with nature, estrangement from it and the people's world. But "the chest was sweetly embarrassed, inhaling that special, lingering and fresh smell - the smell of a Russian summer night." And Turgenev writes about the thirst for connection with the outside world, about love for all living things.

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