Ivan Turgenev Critical Essay | Critical Essay by William E. Sheidley

Critical Essay by William E. Sheidley

SOURCE: Sheidley, William E. “‘Born in Imitation of Someone Else’: Reading Turgenev's ‘Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District’ as a Version of Hamlet.” Studies in Short Fiction 27, no. 3 (summer 1990): 391-98.

In the following essay, Sheidley argues that the character of Vasily in “Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District” embodies the Hamletic type described in Turgenev's essay “Hamlet and Don Quixote.”

A number of characters in Ivan Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches (1852) exemplify the “Hamlet type” that Turgenev later defined in his famous essay “Hamlet and Don Quixote” (1860).¹ As the opposing pole to the selfless, idealistic, and crusading Don Quixote figure in human nature, Turgenev's Hamlet possesses an analytical intelligence—accompanied by a keen sense of his own worthlessness—that undermines his belief in anything outside of himself. Inclined toward beauty just as the Don Quixote type is inclined toward duty, Hamletic personalities become paralyzed by skepticism and self-doubt and tend...
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