Turgenevian girls: Socio-educational manipulations of common places from Turgenev's works in Soviet and post-Soviet culture

Abstract

The article presents a diachronic study of the concept of turgenevskaia devushka “Turgenevian girl” (a female whose behavior, character or style seems similar to that of a lady from Turgenev's novels), which has become frmly rooted in the phraseological fund of modern Russian language and culture. However, we are not interested in its meaning in the language, but in the process of how it was formed and the reasons for changes in how it was interpreted. To show how the perception of heroines from the novels of Turgenev, which are part of the “golden treasury” of classical Russian literature, has changed during the XXth century, we examine training texts and the surrounding media context. From our observation of the rises and the falls in popularity of images of Turgenevian girls outside the bounds of of the original literary texts, their social acceptance or rejection, their inclusion or exclusion in school curricula, and their being marked the characters as a part of an obsolete past, or, conversely, as being vitally relevant, we conclude that the dynamics of how this collective image and the social memory of it has been affected by the rhythm of alternation of “Culture-1” and “Culture-2” (V. Paperny).