Article

Name: Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote and the poetics of paired images in Ivan Turgenev’s short prose

Authors: Ivan O. Volkov, Emma M. Zhilyakova

Tomsk State University, Tomsk, Russian Federation

In the section Study of literature

Abstract:

This article examines the reception of Don Quixote in Ivan Turgenev’s short prose and the role of the paired-image principle in shaping his artistic system. The focus is on the transformation of the Cervantine “double image” (Don Quixote and Sancho Panza) within nineteenth-century Russian literature. The analysis draws on Turgenev’s works, including Khor and Kalinych, Two Landowners, Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin, Two Friends, and Punin and Baburin. Here, character pairing recurs consistently, serving compositional and philosophical functions by expressing human duality, the interaction of idealistic and practical elements, and their necessary unity. Whereas Cervantes’ paired images generate a holistic, multilayered picture of national life and preserve internal dynamic harmony, Turgenev’s model undergoes a significant transformation. Within nineteenth-century Russian reality, the unity of opposites is disrupted: the ideal loses its transformative power, while the practical principle is deprived of moral content, resulting in the disintegration of the holistic personality. Unlike Cervantes’ broad epic narrative, Turgenev’s short prose focuses on local “moments of life,” revealing the inner structure of human existence. This shift transfers the tragedy from external action to inner reflection, registering the crisis of the humanistic ideal as a defining condition of the era. Thus, Turgenev’s engagement with the Cervantine tradition represents a profound artistic dialogue in which the classical model of paired images is not merely reproduced but reinterpreted in accordance with new historical and cultural conditions. Short prose emerges as the optimal form to expose the dramatic loss of human wholeness in the nineteenth-century world.

Keywords: Ivan Turgenev, Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, short prose, paired images, duality principle, poetics

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