“...No worse than king Lear”: statue “Tsar Ivan the Terrible” by M.M. Antokolsky in the perception of I.S. Turgenev

The article provides a problem analysis of “Notes ”, written and published by Ivan Turgenev in 1871. This short essay, viewed through the prism of Turgenev’s recent work, testifies to the congeniality of the sculpture of the Russian Tsar created by the young artist. Through the comparison of the specifics of the image of the protagonist of the story “Steppe King Lear” with the image of M. Antokolsky it is possible to establish the genesis of the writer’s impression. Discovery of a tragic contradiction and its further development turns out to be principal for the Russian writer. Turgenev, in his depiction of Ivan the Terrible, significantly emphasizes an aesthetic synthesis that originates in the “classical” interpretation by Nikolay Karamzin. However, the correlation of polarities is a complex object for Turgenev, since it is built not only on a clear contrast, but also on an established internal “harmony”. Turgenev in his novella creates the character of a Russian landowner, based on the typological features of the historical image. These features are dramatically processed in a dialogue with W. Shakespeare (the tragedy “King Lear”), which was already manifested at the level of poetics; Turgenev transfers this artistic complex of simple and significant, constant and national, specific and general to a clay sculpture. In the statue of the tsar, created by Antokolsky, he finds a lively response to his own ideas. Looking closely at every detail of the plastic drawing, verbally deduces a complex psychological characteristic that largely corresponds to the image he had previously created, which as a result complicates the origin of the simple essay and deepens its content.