THE ROLE OF DREAMS AND FANTASY IN IVAN TURGENEV’S POLITICAL NOVELS AND JOSEPH CONRAD’S UNDER WESTERN EYES
THE ROLE OF DREAMS AND FANTASY IN IVAN TURGENEV’S POLITICAL NOVELS AND JOSEPH CONRAD’S UNDER WESTERN EYES

Summary/Abstract: Despite the polemic with Fyodor Dostoevskyin Joseph Conrad’s “Russian” novel, Ivan Turgenev’s presences can also at some point be identified in Under Western Eyes, and various details of a descriptive, psychological and intellectual nature can be faced back to Turgenev’s political novels: Smoke,Rudin, On the Eve and Virgin Soil. Preoccupation with dreams and fantasy also echoes in Turgenev and Conrad’s works. Both writers shared with the German Romantics their beliefs in the significance of dreams and fantasy, and in the borderline world where dream seems to merge with reality. Whereas Turgenev’s dreams are purely prophetic and visionary, in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes illusion and hallucinations are seen to be bound up with the moral culpability of preferring subjective fantasies to objective knowledge. The more Conrad’s protagonist acts selfishly the more subject he is to hallucinations and misperceptions, and the more a person flees from the truth the less he knows what the truth is. The mysterious and strange events that fascinated Turgenev and Conrad are another manifestation of the theme that constantly absorbed them – man’s helplessness before the dreadful and inexplicable forces of nature which are hostile to him and threaten him with inevitable destruction. Is it a chance or fate? This is the question that runs through all of Turgenev and Conrad’s works, and Turgenev’s Insarov, Nezhdanov, and Conrad’s Razumov are either casualties of absurd chance or victims of malevolent and implacable forces which control man.

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