The article covers the analysis of Ivan Turgenev's novels through the perspective of William Shakespeare's poetics. The object of analysis is the central images of the epic genre with significant features of Shakespeare's characters. The focus is on the way Turgenev artistically shapes the portrait of the "hero of the time" in close connection with Prince Hamlet's moral and psychological image. Turgenev's critical thoughts on the essence of Hamlet's image were expressed in a programmatic article "Hamlet and Don Quixote". In the article, on the example of Hamlet's image, Turgenev developed the problem of a tragic character emphasizing the disharmony of his inner world. To a large extent, the article followed the artistic and aesthetic motif shaped in Turgenev's tale "Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District". Simultaneously, Turgenev came to his own artistic form of understanding Hamlet's ambivalent traits of character. On the material of the novel, through Shakespeare's imagery, the writer created an unordinary personality that vividly expressed the massive contradictions of Russian life. All six novels by Turgenev are conventionally subdivided into two equal groups on the basis of the author's method of developing the problem of the "hero of the time". On the one hand, Rudin shows the development of an image of a young idealist who craves to actively participate in the life of the big world. However, he is unconfident and doubting; and later he even shies away from making a choice, a situation which is unnerving for him. Along with Rudin, On the Eve shows the weakness of a person's nature which either obstructs the performance of the artistic talent (Shubin), locks the talent in a narrow field (Bersenev), or, finally, makes a person feel serious concerns and doubts in a critical moment (Insarov). Fifteen years later, Virgin Soil becomes a much more complicated variant of the so-called Russian Hamlet with the help of which Turgenev not only showed the tragic failure of a reflecting personality as a permanent motor of historical processes but also claimed the necessity of a hero of a different nature: a representative of an ordinary prosaic world rather than a master of the Universe with a desire to accomplish a feat. On the other hand, Fathers and Sons is a novel about a conflict of a self-made person with the world of a natural and immediate feeling (in a broad sense). Home of the Gentry and Smoke also develop the idea of a broken personality which is torn between a consolation in the small favours and a desire to "rise" (to redeem oneself). The problems of the novels in this group dramatically shift to the sphere of the personal. In other words, the drama is mostly caused by the internal disagreement of the person's mental and intellectual world. The majestic character of Shakespeare's hero, part of each Turgenev's novel, makes the epic genre more dramatic.
