The Theatre of Fiction in Turgenev’s Rudin

Abstract

One of the distinguishing features of Turgenev’s work is that he is a master of structure. What Turgenev was less well-known for were his plays, and though he wrote such short fiction as The Diary of a Superfluous Man (1850) and A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852) before he wrote Rudin, he was also writing plays at the same time. The question arises: What stylistic effect(s) did playwriting have on his novel writing and how was that manifested? A close reading of Rudin not only reveals how his experience in playwriting affected the structure of Rudin, but, at the same time, offered a new and somewhat “experimental” approach to fiction writing; that is, a kind of “theatre of fiction” which is at the core of this chapter.