The article investigates the nature of the influence of sentimental naturalism, or the "school of the young Dostoevsky" on the work of early Turgenev. The object of the study includes two texts - Dostoevsky's novel "Poor Folk", the central novel in the Russian literature of the 1840s, and Turgenev's comedy "The Bachelor". The study focuses, first of all, on the similarities in the plots of these two works of literature, and the references to plot situations and character parts (for example, villain, writer, etc.) from Dostoevsky's novel in Turgenev's play, as well as significant, obvious for the reader (viewer) deviations in "The Bachelor" from the canvas of Dostoevsky's "Poor Folk". Despite the long tradition in literary criticism to consider early Turgenev dependent on stylistic solutions and humanistic problems that Dostoevsky actualized in his first novel, which became a marked event for his contemporaries, the nature of Turgenev's "apprenticeship" at the "school of the young Dostoevsky" and his own work with recognizable elements from "Poor Folk" in his early writings has not been studied in detail yet, which stimulated the work on this article. The article reveals the similarities in these two texts, stemming from the unity of the plot about a poor official in love, which is developed in Dostoevsky's "Poor Folk" and Turgenev's "The Bachelor", and analyzes the nature of the transformations that this plot acquires in Turgenev's comedy. The author of the article puts forward a hypothesis according to which the references to the theme of Russian sentimental naturalism of the 1840s and, first of all, to Dostoevsky's "Poor Folk" as the central work of this school, perform the function of an artistic device in "The Bachelor". This device consists in the fact that the literary pretext (including stylistically accentuated, as in the case of "Poor Folk" in "The Bachelor") must certainly be read by the audience so that they see other, variant resolutions of the plot situation or motif familiar to them from the precedent text. The story of how a poor official married a girl he had blessed, which Dostoevsky resolves dramatically (if not tragically) in "Poor Folk", is unfolded by Turgenev in "The Bachelor" differently - in a different modality and, as it were, less dramatic than his predecessor. Meanwhile, Dostoevsky's text begins to "work" in a special way in Turgenev's play, complicating its outward simplicity. From a simple anecdote about an official in love with a happy ending, it transforms into a complex dramatic story about the quirkiness of human happiness, about the mystery of love and gratitude, about poverty, which has not only social, but also moral coordinates. And without taking into account the eventfulness and problems of Dostoevsky's "Poor Folk", it would be difficult for Turgenev to achieve this. The article also points out the idea that the tactics of Turgenev's work with the text of Dostoevsky's novel in "The Bachelor" was not unique to him, but generally distinguished the poetics of his works of the 1840s and was the result of a conscious writer's strategy.
