Seeing his mother: the experience of psychoanalytic interpretation of a dream in “Meeting” by I. S. Turgenev
The study is devoted to the psychoanalytic consideration of I. S. Turgenev’s miniature “Meeting” from the “Prose Poems” cycle. The purpose of the article is to view the “Meeting” prose poem as a representation of personal experience, revealed at the level of the unconscious creating the basis for the lyrical utterance of the author. The research is carried out using psychoanalytic and biographical methods. The article reveals the text of the “Meeting” miniature as an artistic expression of Turgenev’s personal experiences caused by his relationship with his mother, V. P. Turgenev, and expands the idea of the character of the lyrical origin in his late cycle of prose miniatures. It is concluded that the image of a woman presented in the dream space in the text of the miniature can be interpreted as the mother image actualized in the unconscious part of the author’s psyche in connection with a sense of guilt caused by the family conflict. This conclusion confirms the reasons Turgenev refused to publish some of the prose poems having a clearly expressed intimate and personal subtext.