I.S. Turgenev’s novella “The first love” as a palimpsest of Dante Alighieri’s “Divine comedy”

In this article we are looking at I.S. Turgenev’s novella “The First Love” as a palimpsest of Dante Alighieri’s works, particularly his “Inferno”. As our starting point we choose the theory of rhetoric developed by G. Henderson, on the basis of K. Burke’s idea that rhetoric is meant for identification, which can be achieved through expressing inner experience, both conscious and subconscious, but also through building up an emotional connection between the sender and the receiver of the message, in this case, the artistic expression. Specifically, “The First Love” is linked to Dante’s “Inferno” by the diegetic space, i. e. the fact that the main character enters the place of action through an encounter with wild animals, which makes him find his “Virgil”, and, in the end, he unexpectedly leaves the kingdom of despair through its very center. This interconnection has to do with Turgenev’s rhetorical strategy of offering identification through similarities between the “Divine Comedy” and “The First Love”. As in Dante’s “Inferno”, likewise in “The First Love” the difficulty of telling one’s experience is emphasized. With this background in mind, Turgenev’s novella is connected with the “Divine Comedy” particularly due to the motif that the narrator is middle-aged, and so is the author, Turgenev himself. In both cases this narrator deals with the topic of his first love, which was a painful experience and ended soon. In this sense Zinaida is paralleled to Francesca da Rimini rather than to Beatrice, especially since she does not have Beatrice’s purity. Many identifications arise due to the motif of “reading within the reading”, which links Turgenev’s novella to the whole tradition of romances. In particular, identification arises due to the fact that, both in Dante and in Turgenev, the narrator is linked to the female character’s suffering by his compassion. Thus, the connection between “The First Love” and the “Inferno” enables the narrator to express his feelings and helps to build up multiple identifications between the characters, the narrator, the author and the reader in the traditions of literature, starting from the Bible and the medieval romances.