SOURCE: Brouwer, Sander. “Literary Character in Turgenev's Prose.” In Character in the Short Prose of Ivan Sergeevič Turgenev, pp. 31-73. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996.

In the following excerpt, Brouwer studies elements of Romanticism and Realism in Turgenev's short stories, suggesting that the author creates a tension between the two styles in his short prose.

2.1 Some Problems of Turgenev's Prose

As P. Brang noted (Brang: 50), Turgenev's prose, especially the short stories, reveals a tension between the Realist and the Romantic style. Turgenev himself first indicated this tension in his 1870 draft for the novel Virgin Soil, whose main character is called a ‘romantic of Realism’, a term which would be applicable to a greater or lesser degree to the protagonists in all of his novels. S. I. Rodzevič (1918) adopted the term and regarded it as a key to Turgenev's oeuvre as a whole, but especially to the short stories. Various other critics...