In the 60s of the XIX century from the pen of the famous Russian writer I. S. Turgenev published a number of stories devoted to the theme of the mystical and the supernatural. Subsequently, literary critics christened them "Mysterious Tales". It is possible that they were written under the influence of some personal experience experienced by the writer.
Realist and Ghosts
In 1863, the story "Ghosts" was published, with the subtitle "Fantasy". Soviet critics refer to the "mental crisis" experienced by the writer during this period against the background of "the intensification of the class struggle." Turgenev himself, in a letter to his closest friend V. P. Botkin on January 26, 1863 writes: "This is a series of some kind of emotional dissolving-views (foggy pictures. - Auth.) Caused by the transitional and really heavy and dark state of my" I ".
The researcher of Turgenev's work I. Vinogradov notes: "A sober realist, who always amazed with the amazing authenticity of his paintings, - and suddenly mystical stories about ghosts, about posthumous love, about mysterious dreams and dating the dead … Many were confused."
It seems that the author foresaw that such a topic would cause misunderstanding from critics. Therefore, he called his "Mysterious Tales" "rubbish", "trifles" and "trinkets". Many considered them as such.
Particularly skeptical was the story "Dog" (1864), whose hero, a ruined Kaluga landowner, faces, as they would say today, the phenomenon of poltergeist. The satirical magazine "Alarm" published a poetic review of a certain PI. Weinberg for this work:
I read your "Dog"
Promotional video:
And from now on
There's something scratching in my brain
How is your Trezor.
Scratches by day, scrapes at night
Not lagging behind
And very strange questions
Asks me:
“What does a Russian writer mean?
Why why
Mostly he cums
The devil knows what?"
The "Dog" was followed by "A Strange Story" (1869), "Knock … Knock … Knock!.." (1870), "Clock" (1875), "Sleep" (1876), "The Story of Father Alexei" (1877), "The Song of Triumphant Love" (1881), "After Death" (1882) and a number of "mysterious stories", the last of which was the unfinished story "Silaev", written already in the late 1870s.
Flights in a dream and a goblin in the "night"
Maybe, after all, behind the "stories" about the mysterious there was something more than fantasy? Take at least the same "Ghosts". His hero travels at night over the earth with the ghost of a woman named Ellis. “Everyone who happens to fly in a dream will understand me,” such a phrase slips through the text. Most likely, Turgenev transferred his own impressions to paper.
Only more than a hundred years later, when the Russian press began to actively write about various "paranormal" phenomena, some researchers drew attention to how exactly the details of the "Ghosts" coincide with the stories of people about the "isolation of the astral body" in a dream or in an altered state of consciousness … As a rule, in these cases, eyewitnesses say that their soul left the corporeal shell and traveled to various places, became a witness to events, information about which was not available to a person in his physical body.
Sometimes "going out of the body" was carried out at will, became the result of meditation. So, D. Whiteman in his book "The Mysterious Life" describes more than 600 such "astral travel". In turn, R. Monroe in his book "Travels outside the body" claims to have experienced more than 900 such experiences.
Turgenev also does not ignore folklore. So, in the story "Bezhin Meadow" from the "Notes of a Hunter", peasant children in the "night" tell each other stories about brownies, mermaids, goblin, water, the dead and other mystical phenomena. And one of the young heroes hears the voice of a drowned man and at the end of the story dies, falling from a horse. “I didn't want to give this story a fantastic character,” the author justifies in a letter to E. M. Feoktistov.
Horror in the forest
Researcher Maya Bykova in the book "Legend for Adults" tells about a story that happened to Turgenev in his youth, which, perhaps, is the key to the entire cycle of "Mysterious Tales".
For the first time, Ivan Sergeevich publicly told about this in Paris, in the salon of Pauline Viardot, when among the guests they talked about the terrible and inexplicable. The details of his story were reflected by the no less famous French writer Guy de Maupassant in the novel "Horror".
Somehow young Turgenev went hunting. It took place in central Russia. In the evening he went to the bank of a forest river and wanted to swim. Suddenly he felt that someone was touching his shoulder and, turning, saw a strange creature - either a woman or a monkey. She had a wide, wrinkled face, as if grimacing, her bare breasts dangled like sacks, long matted hair fluttering behind her …
The young man felt a chilling fear and turned sharply to the shore. However, the creature constantly caught up with him, touching his neck, back, legs. At the same time, it emitted a joyful squeal.
Having got out to the shore, Turgenev ran as fast as he could, grabbing neither clothes nor a gun. The creature followed him … Fortunately, they met a shepherd boy, who began to lash the monster with a whip and thus put him to flight. Screaming in pain, the "monkey woman" disappeared into the forest thickets.
Oddly enough, this incident never became a topic for the story. But people who at least once had a chance to encounter something from the sphere of the "unknown" often then show interest in it all their lives. Apparently, this is what happened to one of the most prominent Russian classic writers.