SOURCE: Waddington, Patrick. “Two Authors of Strange Stories: Bulwer-Lytton and Turgenev.” New Zealand Slavonic Journal (1992): 31-54.

In the following essay, Waddington investigates the possible influence of the British author Edward Bulwer-Lytton on Turgenev's fantastical fiction.

My subject is the possible influence of Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-73) upon Ivan Turgenev (1818-83). The most natural starting-point is a shared title: A Strange Story. Both men published works with this name, Bulwer-Lytton in 1861-62 and Turgenev in 1869-70. Turgenev's tale ‘Strannaya istoriya’ is so obviously different from the Bulwer novel that many might assume the Russian author had never read and perhaps never heard of A Strange Story. Was Turgenev's title therefore a coincidence? After all, there may have been many other stories which used it. But even leaving aside for a moment the question of historical evidence, such a line of argument seems implausible in view of Turgenev's great erudition where...