Poems in Prose by I.S. Turgenev: the Cycle’s Title as a Historical Literary Issue

The article deals with the I.S. Turgenev’s last cycle Poems in prose which title has been changed several times throughout his work on it. The cycle put together the main aspects of writer’s previous creative works which led to the continuous search for the most suitable title to fully express author’s intentions: from the original Posthuma which is focused on the life after death experience to the last Poems in prose which additionally underlines the uniqueness of the form used for Turgenev’s last creative work. The study reveals the main theories on the cycle’s titles and the reasons behind their changes as well as suggests the own vision of the evolution of concepts “after death” and “senile” which are seemed to be bound in writer’s world view. The sequential analysis of the existing cycle’s titles undertaken in the current research finds the logic of Turgenev’s title transformations where the fear of death is gradually replaced by the thoughts of future new life which will be continued beyond the Earth life. The significance of the research lies in the absence of the unified approach to the naming and understanding of the Turgenev’s last cycle while the title of the book was considered to change the work’s perception even by Turgenev’s contemporaries. The scientific novelty of the work is added by using the author’s French edition of Poems in prose which up until now hasn’t been studied properly. It allows to expand the material of the research and look thoroughly into Turgenev’s strategy of naming his final cycle which was preserved for the foreign publication as well.