The scientific program entitled The Antique Literary Sources of the Poetics of Turgenev’s Fiction (Virgil and Ovid) aims at setting the selected problematics and the directions of its investigation in the fields of classical studies and modern slavistic philology into the framework of a methodologically unified basic research. The interdisciplinary approach elaborates the assigned topic of investigation incorporating the theoretical and practical aspects of thematic elaboration, intertextuality studies and methodology theory, opening up new perspectives for a deeper dialogue between the research of 19th century Russian literature and that of Antiquity.

The characteristics of the research include the following aspects:

– it offers a special reading of Virgil’s and Ovid’s selected works (Aeneis, Metamorphoses) from the point of view of the Turgenevian literary reception to be revealed by methods based on the theoretical achievements crystallized in modern slavistic philology;

– on the other hand, it strives to integrate several traditional interpretations of the antique literary works under scrutiny into the analyses of some of Turgenev’s prose works (e.g. Вешние воды, Rudin);

– through elucidating Turgenev’s literary reception of antique literature it is possible to delineate a more general context of the history of literary reception of antiquity;

– the analyses of the prose works lead to theoretical conclusions, closely related to intertextuality studies.