The reception of I.S. Turgenev's works in China

Ivan Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons” is a certain paradigm for world literature, for authors writing about the relationship between generations. The article analyzes the theme of fathers and children in the prose of the old and, in more detail, the new China. This paper is mainly devoted to the famous novel by Ivan Turgenev “Fathers and Sons” (1861), which has invariably attracted increased attention from literary scholars and writers. This phenomenon is explained by the fact that the socio-historical situation prevailing in China of that period, recently freed from feudal relations, had similarities with that in Russia during the crisis years of when the novel was created. To show the influence of Turgenev’s work, the authors of the article refer to the moral relations between parents and children in real life of China, in the history of Chinese literature and its change as the work of the Russian writer spreads across China. The authors are interested in what differences and similarities exist in the works of writers from these two countries, revealing the role of the father in the family, the character traits of the father and children, the relationship of the father’s generation and the new one, the conflicts between different generations and the reasons for their occurrence, as well as the method of conflict resolution. Considerable attention is paid to identifying and analyzing the genetic and typological relationships between Turgenev’s novel and the works of Chinese prose writers, in particular, Ding Ling’s stories (1927), Ba Jin’s novel “Family” (1931), and Zhou Keqin’s novel “Xu Mao and his Daughters” (1980).