We are reminded here of Father Zosima and the "comely youth, a peasant" in The Brothers Karamazov (book vi, chapter 2). In a wider perspective, however, this pair, the old spiritual father and his young disciple, is an archetypal pair in the Orthodox tradition, known from both icon painting (St. John and Prokhor) and hagiography. In Pasternak's novel, the representation of this archetype brings the hero's life-story to its conclusion. It has taken him to the threshold between death and resurrection foreshadowed in his dream before the Siberian exile, where the connection between the sacrificial death of Christ and his own creative work as a poet is already established:
The poem he is writing is neither about the entombment nor about the resurrection but about the days that pass between them. He is writing the poem "Confusion" . . .
Glad to be near him were hell, corruption, dissolution, death; yet equally glad to be near him was spring, and Magdalene, and life. - And time to wake up . . . Time to wake up and arise. Time for resurrection (part vi, section 15)
In Siberia, Zhivago has experienced the reality of death and dissolution, but he has also been initiated into the mysteries of love, poetic creativity and life, bringing back with him his collection of poems. In these poems the lyrical I discovers his true self by seeing his own life and suffering as a re-enactment of Christ's life and suffering. This accords with Pasternak's own ideas of human history after Christ as expressed in his autobiography Safe Conduct (1931 ). Here he defines the history of our culture as a "chain of symbolic equations" in which the fundamental pattern of the Bible represents the constant element, while the unknown, the new, is the actual moment in the cultural development.22
In the Russian novel, the idea of creativity as a repetition with variations on a single underlying pattern took the form of a continuous dialogue with the words of the Gospel about the true meaning of life. In their struggle against the ossified dogma of the Orthodox Church and the atheist theories of Communism, Russian novelists used their artistic imagination to discover new meanings in the already given, opening up the story of Christ in the Gospel to new interpretations and new life.
NOTES
1. Jerome Bruner, "Two Modes of Thought," Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 11-43.
2. Michael Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures (Oxford University Press, 199z), p. 84.
3. Yurii M. Lotman, "Russo i russkaia kul'tura XVIII - nachala XIX veka," in Izbrannye stat'i v trekh tomakh (Tallin: Aleksandra, 1992-93), vol. 11, pp. 40-99, 79.
4. Yurii M. Lotman, Roman A. S. Pushkina "Evgenii Onegin" (Leningrad: Pro-sveshchenie, 1980).
5. Yurii M. Lotman, "Siuzhetnoe prostranstvo russkogo romana XIX stoletiia," in Izbrannye stat'i, vol. in, pp. 91-106 (pp. 99H.).
6. Yurii V. Mann, V poiskakh zhivoi dushi: "Mertvye dushi": pisatel' - kritika -chitatel' (Moscow: Kniga, 1984), pp. 301-23.
7. Victor and Edith Turner, "Religious Celebrations," in V. Turner (ed.), Celebration, Studies in Festivity and Ritual (Washington: Smithsonian Institution
PreSS, I982), pp. 2OI-I9, 202ff.
8. Victor Turner, "Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology," in Janet C. Harris and Roberta J. Park (eds.), Play, Games and Sports in Cultural Contexts (Champaign, 111.: Human Kinetics Publications, 1983), pp. 123-64.
9. Aleksandr I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow: Izd. Akademii Nauk, 1954-64) 27, i,p. 217.
10. Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
11. Victor Terras, A Karamazov Companion (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), p. 52.
12. Christos Yannaras, Elements of Faith: An Introduction to Orthodox Theology, trans. Keith Schräm (Edinburgh: T amp;T Clark, 1991), pp. i7ff., i49ff.
13. Richard Peace, Dostoevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels (Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 262f.
14. Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky and "The Idiot": Author, Narrator, and Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 84, 88.
15. Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus (London: Watts and Co., 1935), pp. 227, 215.
16. Sergei Bulgakov, Svet nevechernii: Sozertsaniia i umozreniia (Moscow: Res-publika, 1994), P- 5-
17. Malcolm V. Jones, Dostoevsky: The Novel of Discord (New York: Barnes amp; Noble, 1976), pp. 54-64.
18. Mikhail Botkin (ed.), Aleksandr Andreevich Ivanov: Ego zhizn' i perepiska 1806-1858 (St. Petersburg, 1880), pp. 202ff.
19. Hugh McLean, "Tolstoy and Jesus," in Robert P. Hughes and Irina Paperno (eds.), Russian Culture in Modern Times, vol. ? of Christianity and the Eastern Slavs, California Slavic Studies, 17 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), PP- 103-23.
20. Tolstoi to P. M. Tret'iakov, 30 June 1890, quoted in Hugh McLean, "Tolstoy and Jesus," p. no.
21. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York:
Walter de Gruyter, 1995), p. 112. 22. Boris Pasternak, "Okhrannaia gramota," in Pasternak, Sochineniia, 3 vols. (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), vol. 11, pp. 203-94, quotation from
p. 263.
7
ANDREW WACHTEL
Psychology and society
It is by now a commonplace that the classic Russian novelists - Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoi - are distinguished by an unparalleled ability to portray the complex inner mental states of their characters. As early as 1856, the Russian critic Chernyshevskii praised Tolstoi for his superlative rendering of the "dialectics of the soul," by which he meant Tolstoi's painstaking dissection of the inner life of his heroes. And in the English-speaking world, Virginia Woolf summed up a review of Tolstoi's The Cossacks by remarking: "They do not rival us in the comedy of manners, but after reading Tolstoi we always feel that we could sacrifice our skill in that direction for something of the profound psychology and superb sincerity of the Russian writers."1
I have no wish to dispute the near unanimous critical opinion that the Russian novel is particularly attuned to psychological analysis. Instead, in the essay that follows, I would like to ask why Russian novelists have been so concerned with psychology, and, as a corollary question, when this concern has been most in evidence. My central points will be two. First, that Russian novelists, with few exceptions, are concerned with individual psychology because it provides a window onto what might be called social psychology; that is, the individual is crucial not primarily for him or herself, but because he or she is seen to be representative of a larger group. Although this is sometimes the case in the works of non-Russian novelists as well, it seems to me that George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert and other masters of European psychological prose are more usually interested in portraying individuals as individuals than are their Russian counterparts. Second, that psychological portraiture is usually associated with disease, or at least, with distress; to paraphrase Tolstoi, all happy individuals have the same psychology, but all unhappy individuals have unique and fascinating psychologies worth exploring. In practice, what this means is that psychological analysis in the classic Russian novel tends to disappear if and when a major character finds happiness and to be
foregrounded at those moments when he or she is most diseased. By disease, I do not mean what we in the late twentieth century might recognize as a bona fide mental illness - schizophrenia, manic depression and the like -although some characters suffering such maladies can be identified in Russian literature.2 Rather, the novels tend to present astute portrayals of general human psychological problems - pride, doubt, lassitude, spite, envy.
Thus, on the whole, Russian psychological prose is concerned with exploring the ramifications of fairly common human failings through careful analysis of the mental states of characters who are meant to be seen as representative of Russians (or types of Russian) in general. The analysis can be carried out in one of two ways; either the character himself is the narrator, in which case he must be sufficiently self-aware to recognize at least dimly his own affliction, or else a third-person narrator able to penetrate, present, and weigh the character's inner thoughts is employed. It will be noticed that the characters treated in this essay are almost exclusively male. This is not accidental; the classic Russian psychological novel generally deals with a weak (read psychologically diseased) male character who is provided with a foil in the person of a healthy woman (who is, therefore, not treated psychologically). The exceptions to this rule, of course, are precisely those Russian novels that transcend this as well as most other models: The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov of Dostoevskii and Tolstoi's Anna Karenina about which there will be more below.
It is worth pointing out that Russia's earliest great writers of prose fiction, Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol, practically eschewed psychological portraiture altogether, and showed almost no interest in portraying an inner essential self. This was despite the fact that Pushkin at least was well aware of late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century French fiction with its intense psychological portraiture. Nevertheless, in the brilliant novel in verse Evgenii Onegin (1823-31), Pushkin's narrator does not make his reader privy to the characters' inner states. Instead, he provides highly nuanced external description which the reader, who has long been sure that these states must exist within the characters, can use to intuit convincing psychological explanation. The lone exception is in Pushkin's presentation in chapter 4 of a dream by his heroine, Tatiana Larina. Here we are presented with an encoded exposition of her attitude towards the novel's eponymous hero. Through complicated and symbolically laden dream imagery, Pushkin reveals her ambivalence toward Evgenii, her simultaneous desire to be ravished by him and her fears and hopes. It is of course significant that this section is set off as a dream, for here the normal internal laws of Pushkin's novel can be suspended, allowing for a display of complex mental states normally unavailable.
Gogol's famous short stories from the 1830s and early 1840s ("The Nose," "The Overcoat," "Nevskii Prospect") and his epic Dead Souls (1842) avoid psychology even more thoroughly than do Pushkin's works. While Gogol does tell us what his heroes are thinking, this disclosure yields no knowledge about a given character's inner life because the thoughts presented are either empty or so metaphorically extravagant that they tell us nothing. The absence of psychological analysis is particularly striking in Gogol's short story "Notes of a Madman." The entire story is composed of the diary of Poprishchin who goes progressively insane. But the narrator has no understanding of what is happening, and, because of his almost complete lack of self-consciousness, the story cannot be said to be psychological prose of the type that will become so characteristic of Russian literature.
By the end of the 1830s, however, the situation slowly began to change, particularly in the work of those writers born after 1815. At first, a burgeoning interest in psychological analysis appeared not in fiction, but rather in the life of the newly appearing intelligentsia. As Lidia Ginzburg has shown in her broad-ranging analysis On Psychological Prose, all the narrative techniques that would be used later in the Russian psychological novel, as well as the tendency to link personal and social analysis, can already be found in the letters and diaries of such men as Herzen, Bakunin, Belinskii and Ogarev, well before any psychological novels had appeared.3
The first novel in which the incipient interest in the psyche is manifest is A Hero of Our Time. Lermontov's novel is composed of five loosely related stories, all revolving around a single individual, Grigorii Pechorin. What sustains our interest in A Hero of Our Time as a novel is not the plot (which is fragmentary) but rather Lermontov's gradual unveiling of Pechor-in's personality. The novel's main figure appears for the first time triply distanced from the reader - in time, space and narrative frame: we hear about him in the chapter called "Bela" through a story told to the narrator by an old veteran of the Caucasus about events that occurred a number of years previously in another location. The veteran's insistence on and description of Pechorin's remarkable qualities piques our curiosity. The rest of the novel gradually brings this mysterious figure into focus, first through a meeting with him in the present (the story "Maxim Maximych"), and then through three stories supposedly taken from Pechorin's own diary ("Taman," "Princess Mary," and "The Fatalist").
It is in this final trio of stories that Lermontov unveils, for the first time in Russian literature, the complex inner life of a character. Pechorin indeed possesses remarkable abilities, yet he is bored, bilious and a scoundrel. The novel's central concern is to show us why and how such a paradoxical
combination has come to pass. What is remarkable about Pechorin (and this will become typical of the type) is the contrast between, on the one hand, his seemingly highly developed self-understanding coupled with his evident talent, and, on the other, his inability to accomplish anything except the production of misery for himself and those around him. The explanation for this lies in the fact that the only psychological categories Pechorin possesses for self-understanding are the polarities of Byronic Romanticism - either/or: an angel or a demon. Through Pechorin's pitiless self-analysis we come to recognize the mechanism of psychological development in which he believes. A person possesses certain internal, clearly defined qualities; depending on how they are received by society, they can either be developed to their full potential or turned into their opposite.
What makes the novel work is not Pechorin's outdated Byronism (which is even parodied by Lermontov through the presence of Pechorin's "double" Grushnitskii in the story "Princess Mary"), but our recognition that the limited poles provided by Romantic psychology are not sufficient to compass him. As the novel progresses, we begin to recognize that although Pechorin seems filled with self-knowledge, something is missing. He is trying too hard to fit his life into the Byronic poles that are all he possesses for self understanding. Byronism is a mask, a disease, which ultimately makes him incapable of self-understanding, despite what seem to be valiant efforts. Interestingly enough, something of the same problem seems to have afflicted Lermontov himself, whose attempts to live the Romantic life climaxed in his own death in a duel at the age of 27.
From the perspective of this essay, however, Pechorin's psychology is less important than Lermontov's characterization of his own novel, which he provided in an authorial introduction added to the second edition (1841). Lermontov begins by complaining about unjust criticisms his book has received, particularly from those who claimed that the main character was nothing but a self-portrait. In response, Lermontov makes the counter claim that Pechorin is best understood not as an individual but as a social portrait: "A Hero of Our Time … is a portrait composed of all the vices of our generation in the fullness of their development."4 His novel, Lermontov goes on to say, is not meant to give a cure for the disease he has portrayed, but rather an explication of it. These parallel claims, that psychological analysis serves to portray disease and that what seems to be a nuanced portrait of a unique individual's psychology is best understood as a presentation of the psychology of a group or type, were destined to have a long history in Russian culture. As we shall see, some authors strove consciously to provide psychological snapshots of specific types or even whole generations through the description of individual psychology, others
tried to avoid this, but Russian critics and readers always tended to assume that this was occurring.
The character of the "superfluous man," as the Pechorin-type figure came to be dubbed in Russian culture, was treated in a realist rather than a romantic key in Ivan Goncharov's novel Oblomov (1859). This outstanding work gives the lie to the belief that the Russian novel is necessarily characterized by grand passions and exciting plots. For what is remarkable about Oblomov is that practically nothing whatsoever happens in it; the first 150 pages or so describe neither more nor less than the main character's attempt to get out of bed in the morning. What saves the novel from being as boring as its title character, however, is its subtle focus on Oblomov's inner life. Certainly, Goncharov's ability to explore the hidden recesses of his hero's mind, to ferret out the wellsprings of his action (or inaction as the case may be) and to recognize the possibility of the coexistence in his mind of seemingly incompatible thoughts is light years ahead of Lermontov's. In place of the Romantic dualist view of the mind that dominated Pechorin's, and Lermontov's, vision of self, Goncharov recognizes that the mind is a complex instrument, and that human motivation falls primarily in a prosaic gray area rather than in stark black and white.
The following passage is a fine example of Goncharov's ability to reproduce the complex associative mechanisms of human thought. It appears in the first part of the novel immediately after Oblomov's manservant Zakhar has insulted his master by having the temerity to compare him to others, suggesting that if they can move then so can he:
He tried to grasp the whole meaning of that comparison and analyse what the others were and what he was, and to what an extent a parallel between him and other people was justified, and how gravely Zakhar had insulted him. Finally, he wondered whether Zakhar had insulted him consciously, that is to say, whether he was convinced that he, Oblomov, was the same as "another", or whether the words had escaped him without thinking.5
These thoughts about himself and others lead Oblomov to question the very nature of his own being. And in so doing, he must face the fact that he is incapable of doing anything, in short that he is a superfluous man.
Oh, how dreadful he felt when there arose in his mind a clear and vivid idea of human destiny and the purpose of a man's life, and when he compared this purpose with his own life … He felt sad and sorry at the thought of his own lack of education, at the arrested development of his spiritual powers, at the feeling of heaviness which interfered with everything he planned to do; and was overcome by envy of those whose lives were rich and full, while a huge rock seemed to have been thrown across the narrow and pitiful path of his
own existence. Slowly there arose in his mind the painful realization that many sides of his nature had never been awakened, that others were barely touched, that none had developed fully. (p. 101)
As opposed to Pechorin, who had a convenient theory to explain his superfluity and provide him with a code of action, Oblomov cannot fully explain his inability to realize his own potential. In a sense, the entire novel can be seen as a two-pronged attempt on the part of Oblomov first to answer the question he asks immediately after this moment of insight: "Why am I like this?" and then to escape the deadening weight of his own psychological complexes.
Of these two prongs, the most interesting from our point of view is the former, because Goncharov provides, in the famous section called "Oblomov's Dream," an overtly psychological (as opposed to political or sociological) explanation. The "Dream" (which was, incidentally, the first section of the novel to be published, a full decade before the rest) transports Oblomov back to the idyllic world of his childhood, to the family estate of Oblomovka, an earthly paradise characterized by a cocoon-like softness and safety. And the narrator suggests that precisely the childhood impressions Oblomov drew from this bucolic paradise are what made him what he was as an adult. Because no one around him ever did anything, the boy came to believe that lassitude was the natural order of things. Goncharov suggests that our basic psychological make-up is set in earliest infancy, never to change thereafter no matter what external circumstances might arise.
The rest of the novel, which deals with Oblomov's ultimately unsuccessful attempts to escape from his torpor, either through love or friendship, need not concern us here. What is of cardinal importance, however, is the history of the novel's reception. Immediately after the work's appearance, one of Russia's leading literary critics, Nikolai Dobroliubov, wrote an appreciative essay entitled "What is Oblomovitis?" which forever fixed Russian critical opinion of Oblomov. Despite the fact that Oblomov is drawn with a realist's fine brush and seems, at first glance, to be a quite specific character, Dobroliubov saw the novel's hero not as an individual but as a social portrait.
The story of how Oblomov, a lazy Mr Nice Guy, lies around and sleeps and can be roused neither by friendship nor love is not much of a story. But Russian life is reflected in it, we see in it a vivid contemporary Russian type, sculpted with pitiless severity and accuracy. A new word in our social development has been pronounced here clearly and firmly without despair or childish hope, but with the full knowledge of the truth. The word is
Oblomovitis and it serves as a key to the solution of many phenomena of Russian life.6
The expectation that a carefully drawn psychological portrait of a literary character is actually meant to be a criticism of Russian society is one that Goncharov may well have shared, for he was on record as having said that the novel can only depict types.7 Be that as it may, Dobroliubov's article fixed in the mind of the reading public the belief that literary characters were interchangeable with real people, and that the diseased fictional psychologies described by novelists could and should be seen as social psychologies. In the future, few Russian novelists would do anything to overturn this opinion.
Withal, the Russian novelist of the nineteenth century whose works provide the most comprehensive attempt to fix through the portrayal of individual psyches the stages of Russian social development is Ivan Turgenev. Although his characters may lack the shattering power of Dostoevskii's greatest portraits and the astoundingly fine-grained detailing typical of Tolstoi's heroes, Turgenev's central fictional creations provide the best examples of psycho-social types in Russian literature. Such was Turgenev's intention from the beginning of his career; describing A Sportsman's Sketches (185z), a collection of short stories of a rather unpsycho-logical bent, Turgenev himself described his method as extracting the essence of his characters. Gradually, in the course of a series of novels starting with Rudin (1856) and culminating with Fathers and Children (1862), Turgenev perfected his own psychological method, one that was fully in accord with the Russian expectation that individual characters should reflect more general truths about the nation. "Turgenev also indicates that his characters face uncertainties and contradictions within themselves and in their relationships with others that are akin to those the Russian nation as a whole had to confront to establish its own identity and autonomy."8 That is to say that any problem of personal identity in a Turgenev novel (and in pretty much any other Russian novel for that matter) can be and invariably was read as a problem of national self-definition. It is this fact that lends a certain epic quality to the Russian psychological novel.
Although it is beyond the scope of this essay to delineate exactly the sources of Russia's concern with its national identity, it would not be amiss to note here that the roots of the problem lie in the schism that opened up in Russian society in the wake of the reforms of Peter the Great. Although the process began earlier, Peter was credited (or blamed) with orienting Russia toward Europe and away from Asia and her own national roots. By
the end of the eighteenth century, educated Russians were as conversant with European culture as any European of the day, but they had lost touch with the pre-Petrine Russian past. The mass of the peasant population, however, was more or less untouched by Europeanization. The gap between educated Russians and the people, as well as the vague fear of having become nothing but a European cultural colony, dominated Russian thought in the post-Napoleonic period. Its strongest expression was in the "First Philosophical Letter" of Petr Chaadaev (written, characteristically enough, in French in the late 1820s and published in 1836). There Chaadaev lamented the fact that Russians belonged to none of the major families of humankind, and claimed that this outside status precluded Russia from making the progress toward perfection that nineteenth-century thinkers believed to be the birthright of European civilization. Chaadaev's anguished soul-searching found general agreement among educated Russians, who broke into two camps in their attempts to find a solution to this problem: the Slavophiles called for a return to Russia's own roots, while the Westernizers wished for full assimilation with Europe.
Thus, like Chaadaev, Turgenev's main characters (as well as many of Tolstoi and Dostoevskii) are, in attempting to discover their essence, standing in for an entire country that was desperately trying to do the same. Perhaps the best Turgenevan hero to examine in this regard is his most controversial creation, Bazarov, the central character of Fathers and Children. Bazarov appears in the novel as an angry young man from a relatively poor background. He believes in nothing except physiology (symbolized in the novel by his constant desire to dissect frogs), convinced that the dualism of the body and mind is specious, and that the way to all understanding is through a thorough knowledge of the workings of the nervous system. In the course of the novel, however, Turgenev gradually, lovingly, and gently, shows us the breakdown of Bazarov's system in the face of human life, which turns out, in essential ways, to be different from the amphibian.
In particular, Bazarov's system crumbles under the onslaught of love, an emotion whose existence he had never acknowledged. Turgenev carefully prepares us to recognize the developments that are occurring in Bazarov's mind by first describing external changes: "Bazarov, whom Anna Sergeevna [Odintsova] obviously favored, although she seldom agreed with him, had begun to show signs of unprecedented perturbation: he was easily irritated, reluctant to talk, he gazed around angrily, and couldn't sit still in one place, as though he were being swept away by some irresistible force."9 The metaphors Turgenev uses here, of elemental forces and illness, hint that love has softened up Bazarov to such an extent that he has become a
candidate to be treated psychologically; that is, he is sufficiently diseased for his formerly impregnable psychic defenses to have been breached.
Bazarov's friend and disciple, Arkadii Kirsanov, notices that something has changed in his formerly rock-solid mentor, and Turgenev's narrator hastens to add:
The real cause of this "change" was the feeling Mrs. Odintsov inspired in Bazarov, a feeling that tortured and maddened him, one that he would have instantly denied with scornful laughter and cynical derision if anyone had even remotely hinted at the possibility that it existed inside him. Bazarov was a great admirer of women and of female beauty, but love in the ideal or, as he put it, romantic sense he termed lunacy, unpardonable imbecility. He regarded chivalrous sentiments as something on the order of a deformity or disease . . . In his conversations with Anna Sergeevna, he expressed calm contempt for everything romantic more firmly than ever, when he was alone, though, he indignantly perceived the romantic in himself.10
The psychology Turgenev describes here is infinitely more complex than that described by Lermontov or Goncharov; whereas their central figures were characterized by either/or, Bazarov suffers from the disease of both/ and. His conscious mind struggles as hard as it can to avoid the conclusions that his subconscious is drawing, and as a result, contradictory world views exist simultaneously within him. Worse yet, when Bazarov finally allows his subconscious feelings to come to the surface in a confession of love, Odintsova rejects him. He realizes, therefore, that he had not only misunderstood himself, but that his analysis of her character (and of the feminine character in general) had been incorrect. His response is to control himself through flight, but it is clear from his actions in the rest of the novel that this temporarily successful effort to master his emotions has so weakened him as to lead to his destruction.
The case of Bazarov is not different from that of most of Turgenev's male heroes. The conscious mind, Turgenev says, functions to protect us from the trauma that unbridled emotion would cause. This view of the mind's workings is part and parcel of Turgenev's overall view of human nature. In the words of one of Turgenev's most sensitive recent readers:
As Turgenev represents human nature in his works, he contributes to a venerable tradition - going back at least to the stoics in the West and continuing through Freud - that dwells on the susceptibility of human beings to suffering. Within this tradition, the goal of human existence is to minimize pain, not to maximize pleasure . . . Turgenev's psychology [as manifested in his characters], and the ethics derived from it, anticipated Freud in that Turgenev too could be said to have reduced the sources of suffering to three, not so different from Freud's: nature, other people, and the irrational.11
This observation leads us to the further conclusion that the novel was, in fact, a substitute for scientific study of the mind in Russia in the nineteenth century. As has been pointed out by the historian David Joravsky, most Russian novelists had nothing but contempt for academic psychology and psychiatry, perhaps because they realized that their own powers of psychological observation and explanation far outstripped anything that contemporary science had achieved.12
While in the novels of Turgenev internal psychological analysis is always balanced by external narrative description (as is the case in the passage describing Bazarov falling in love, quoted earlier), in Dostoevskii's novels the psychological takes pride of place. Dostoevskii's primary concern, throughout all his great novels, is to explore the psychology of individuals who are possessed by an idea. Every one of Dostoevskii's major novels has at its center a character whose task is to comprehend the mystery of his own personality. Dostoevskii, like Freud who so admired him, believed that the human mind was an enigma begging to be solved; his central artistic concern was to show, by a process of unparalleled artistic intuition, the ways in which the human mind attempts to hide from itself and then, when this becomes intolerable, discovers its own inner workings. This concern was already apparent in one of his earliest works, the 1846 novella The Double. Here Dostoevskii borrows the popular Romantic theme of the Doppelgänger but he characteristically shifts the center of interest from the eerie and supernatural to the psychological. The entire narrative interest of the piece comes from our observation of the gradual mental breakdown of the hero, one Mr. Goliadkin, as he tries desperately to escape his self-created double.
What sets The Double apart from the novels that Dostoevskii wrote after his return from Siberian exile is that Goliadkin's obsession is primarily personal, while those of Dostoevskii's greatest heroes are social and philosophical. They are, of course, refracted through the very specific characters Dostoevskii creates (which is why his heroes seem far more like individuals than like types). Nevertheless, the idea that the obsessions Dostoevskii portrays are meant to be read as portraits of his age lies at the very foundation of all his ideological novels. In the case of Notes From Underground (1864) the link between the diseased individual and the overall state of society (or at least part of it) is made explicit from the beginning. In his short authorial preface, Dostoevskii makes the following startling claim for the inner veracity of his fiction:
Both the author of the Notes and the Notes themselves are, of course, fictitious. Nonetheless, such persons as the author of such memoirs not
only may, but must exist in our society, if we take into consideration the circumstances that led to the formation of our society.13
The hundred-odd pages of rambling first-person narrative that follow provide us with a more-than-adequate self-portrait of the Underground Man himself. From the mesmerizing first lines - "I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased"14 - we see a person who has literally been devoured by an idea, in this case a hypertrophied belief in determinism which seemed to follow from nineteenth-century materialism. The only impulse as strong as the Underground Man's belief in determinism, it turns out, is his hopeless desire to preserve some kind of freedom of action. All of the degrading, masochistic, and pitiful actions the Underground Man describes are rooted in his paradoxical attempts to find an outlet for his free will. Thus, with supreme mastery, Dostoevskii shows us the psychological dialectic by which the Underground Man, in his hopeless fight against his own belief, has constructed a prison from which there can be no escape.
In Crime and Punishment (1866), the first of Dostoevskii's great long novels, the author again focuses on an individual consumed by an idea. Originally, the novel was to have been written in confessional form and it was to be
the psychological account of a crime … A young man, who was expelled from the university, of petit-bourgeois origins and living in utter poverty, through irresponsible thinking, through shaky notions, having fallen under the influence of those strange, "incomplete" ideas which are floating about in the air, has decided to break out of his horrible position in a single stroke. He has decided to kill an old woman.15
As Dostoevskii worked on the novel, he abandoned first-person narrative, but the new third-person perspective did not interfere with his ability to depict the inner workings of his confused hero's mind.
In its final version Crime and Punishment is a detective story with a twist; from the first pages we know that the murderer was the book's central character, the poor student Rodion Raskolnikov. The mystery is why he murdered and what psychological changes his having done so will effect in him. There is a further twist in that Raskolnikov himself does not fully know why he acted as he did. It is in this sense that the novel is a psychological thriller, for it depicts, with frightening analytic depth, the process by which Raskolnikov discovers his own motivations. Dostoevskii gradually unveils the complex ideas that have taken possession of his hero. The first is the modish utilitarian calculus which tells him that since he would do some wonderful things with the money, and the old pawnbroker
he murders does nothing but hoard, then the greatest good for the greatest number will be produced if he kills her and steals the money. This theory is overlapped and partially contradicted by another, the "idea of Napoleon"; that is, the notion that there exists in the world a class of human beings who do not have to follow the moral laws that bind everyone else. Raskolnikov suspects that he belongs to this group, and in part he murders in order to prove it to himself. In the aftermath of the crime, however, confronted by the enormity of his own deeds, Raskolnikov slowly begins to recognize the speciousness of his theories. When he finally chooses to confess to his crimes, he does so primarily because the psychological weight of his guilt becomes heavier than he can bear.
Crime and Punishment also brings up the fascinating issue of when psychology does not appear in the Russian psychological novel. As we have noted before, its primary function is to make clear the illness of individuals who are suffering from ailments which beset an entire generation or class. Thus, it should not be surprising that the psychological approach is abandoned precisely at those moments when Dostoevskii wishes to show that his character is either healthy or no longer representative (or both, since the two often overlap). The most obvious example of this different method of writing comes in the epilogue to Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov confesses his crime, is convicted and exiled to Siberia. Sonia, whose moral purity inspired him to confession in the first place, joins him there. At first, Raskolnikov seems not to have changed much, but after a serious illness, he recognizes the possibility of happiness, of an escape from the psychological demons that have tortured him. Raskolnikov lies in his bunk thinking of Sonia:
He remembered how continually he had tormented her and wounded her heart. He remembered her pale and thin little face. But these recollections scarcely troubled him now; he knew with what infinite love he would now repay all her sufferings. And what were all, all the agonies of the past! Everything, even his crime, his sentence and imprisonment, seemed to him now in the first rush of feeling an external strange fact with which he had no concern. But he could not think for long together of anything that evening, and he could not have analyzed anything consciously; he was simply feeling. Life had stepped into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself out in his mind.16
Psychological self-analysis is a sign of illness, and health can only be reached at those moments when it is overcome. This is a paradoxical conclusion when considering the work of the author who is generally conceded to be one of the two great masters of psychological prose; but it is unavoidable. The Underground Man, Raskolnikov, Stavrogin in The Devils
and Ivan Karamazov are all ill. Of these striking creations, only Ras-kolnikov is vouchsafed the ultimate happiness of an escape from self-analysis; the Underground Man apparently continues to rave, Stavrogin commits suicide when the secrets of his mind are pierced by Father Tikhon (whom Stavrogin, in one memorable scene, calls a "dammed psychologist"), and Ivan lapses into brain fever at the close of The Brothers Karamazov.
When we turn from Dostoevskii to the other master of Russian psychological prose, Lev Tolstoi, we move from a world characterized by tension, extremes of emotion, and psychological obsession to one in which the concerns are much more quotidian. While Tolstoi does provide the occasional character who seems to be a refugee from a Dostoevskii novel (Anna Karenina being the most prominent example), the majority of his characters are portraits of normal human beings with normal human emotions. This does not mean, however, that Tolstoi's analysis is any less subtle or penetrating than Dostoevskii's; they are simply describing different types of worlds. What it does mean, however, is that Tolstoi uses psychology in his novels for different purposes than had his predecessors. Where all the great Russian novelists discussed above based their characters on the concept of type (even if Turgenev's and Dostoevskii's greatest creations rise above it), Tolstoi is fascinated by the uniqueness of each individual. "To say about a person: he is original, good, intelligent, stupid, logical and so forth . . . such words do not give any idea about a person but they pretend to describe him while only throwing you off," wrote Tolstoi in a very early diary entry.17 The point is that what Tolstoi attempted to do in all his novels was to show how the human personality, which looks like a smooth and finished whole from the outside, is in fact constructed of a mass of frequently self-contradictory elements held in unstable equilibrium by the self.
Tolstoi's interest in and talent for dissecting individual psychological motivations was already apparent in his earliest work, the pseudo-autobiographical novel Childhood (1853). The hero of this novel, Nikolai Irtenev, is the first of the line of Tolstoian heroes that includes Olenin of The Cossacks, Pierre Bezukhov of War and Peace and Konstantin Levin of Anna Karenina. Through constant self-analysis, these questing heroes attempt to achieve happiness through self-understanding. In this they function as autobiographical avatars, for Tolstoi's diaries reveal that he himself employed pitiless self-analysis as a tool for improvement and development. As opposed to the heroes of Dostoevskii's novels (who are prevented from reaching self-knowledge because they have been possessed by an external idea), Tolstoi's central characters are held back by far more mundane and realistic enemies: doubt, self-pity, illusion, physical desire.
These enemies, however, are no less dangerous for being prosaic, and, in the Tolstoian universe, the heroes are those who successfully navigate the path to self-knowledge avoiding the diseases of everyday life to which others fall prey. Paradoxically, however, self-knowledge, when achieved, allows the Tolstoian hero to stop thinking. In this respect, Tolstoi may be seen as a precursor to Freud, for he, like his contemporary Dostoevskii, believes that the sign of a complete cure is the overcoming of the need to analyze.
Probably the best illustration of how Tolstoi uses his unparalleled ability to explore the inner life of his characters is Anna Karenina (1877). From a psychological point of view, Anna Karenina can be read as a contrast between two very different ways of perceiving the world. On the one hand, we have Konstantin Levin, who is introduced at the beginning of the novel as something of a provincial boor, simply unable to grasp the ways and wiles of the city. Tolstoi constantly analyzes Levin's thoughts, but the curious thing about the character is that the more he thinks the less he understands. We are told instead that the only time he truly feels at home is when he is working on his farm, which also happens to be the one place in the novel where he is able, for the most part, not to think. Levin's battle, throughout the novel, will be to learn to trust the instinctual, non-thinking parts of his nature. When he is able to do this, he is happy, although the strength of his mind's desire to understand is such that this happiness is quite unstable. Such famous scenes as the hay-mowing (part ?, chapter 4), in which Levin gets so caught up in the physical exertion of the task at hand that he forgets to think, echo the epilogue of Crime and Punishment with their shared assertion that thinking too much is a disease which can be cured only by unconscious epiphany.
Anna is introduced at the beginning of the novel as an entirely natural person. She is able to comfort her sister-in-law precisely because of the natural, unthinking, goodness that radiates from her. As she falls in love with Vronskii, however, this naturalness begins to disappear. She has been infected with a particularly virulent form of the disease of self-consciousness. Her marriage, which had given her satisfaction before she began to think about it, turns bitter. However, we are meant to recognize that this change in feeling reflects not the truth about her life, but rather her attempts to justify her affair with Vronskii. As Anna gradually becomes more psychologically aware she becomes a more interesting, even a heroic character (despite the fact that Tolstoi did not wish for this). Self-awareness, however, leads slowly to a kind of solipsism in Anna, and by the end of the novel she lives in an inner world of her own creation; indeed, as is the case with most of the characters I have discussed here, we can say that
self-awareness is itself Anna's disease. The last scenes of part VII of the novel depict, in pitiless detail, the results of self-absorption. Anna travels in a railway carriage listening to the innocuous conversations around her. Functioning like a psychological black hole, she swallows and internalizes everything she hears, reinterpreting it to apply to herself and her own perceived condition. For the first time, Tolstoi applied the method that has come to be known as "stream of consciousness" to depict the disjointed patterns of Anna's thought. Unfortunately for Anna, by the end of part VII the disease of self-analysis has advanced to a critical stage. The self-created world of her thoughts comes to an all-encompassing prison, and the only escape is suicide.
Of course, the schema I have described as characteristic of Anna Karenina is complicated by the fact that each of the main characters is accompanied by a more or less permanent "unconscious" companion. After a youthful fling with consciousness which she quickly grows out of, Levin's wife Kitty is as naturally and unconsciously good as Anna is at the novel's outset. Vronskii, too, is a primarily unconscious actor, but in his case, lack of self-awareness leads directly to evil. Thus, Tolstoi seems to be saying, the absence of the disease of self-consciousness is not in itself a good. It only becomes one when one has struggled through consciousness and come out the other end. Because they both struggle actively to escape the snares of consciousness Anna and Levin are the central and most similar characters in the novel. That the results of their struggles are diametrically opposite only shows what a dangerous disease self-awareness can be.
The early 1880s brought about a crisis in the Russian novel. With the death of Dostoevskii in 1881, of Turgenev in 1883, and Tolstoi's rejection of literature at about the same time, the giants of the Russian psychological novel had disappeared. It was unclear whether further development of psychology in the framework of the novel would be possible or even whether the genre itself had any life left in it. And indeed, the period from the 1880s through the 1910s proved unpropitious for the Russian novel. Smaller genres dominated at this time. By the 1890s Chekhov had begun to show how the techniques for realistic psychological analysis that had been perfected by Tolstoi could be used in the short story. Even more important, Chekhov expanded a concern with analysis of the mental states of characters into the world of the drama, creating in The Seagull (1896), The Three Sisters (1899), Uncle Vania (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1903) unprecedented masterpieces of psychological drama.
The first Russian novelist to come out of the long shadow of Mssrs Dostoevskii, Turgenev, and Tolstoi and to do something original with the depiction of psychology in the novel was Andrei Belyi (pseudonym for
Boris Bugaev) in Petersburg (1916, revised 1922.). Belyi's novel flamboyantly avoids the conventions of Realist narrative, foregrounding narrative play, intertextual reference, and symbolic organization. In terms of psychology, it breaks new ground in its attempt to show that all actions (including narrative gestures) proceed from psychological states rather than the other way around. The central psychological concept in the novel is what Belyi calls "cerebral play," which is indulged in by the narrator (in order to create characters), by the characters themselves (in order to create their own internal and external worlds), and by the reader (in order to make sense of and derive pleasure from the narrative). The characters whose minds are depicted for us are Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov (a high-ranking government official), his son, Nikolai Apollonovich, and Nikolai's erstwhile friend, the revolutionary Dudkin. Each of these characters is remarkable for his ability to create entire worlds via mental processes. Although Apollon Apollonovich is physically unprepossessing, we are told that from his cranium gigantic forces pour forth, both forces that seek to control the growing anarchy and chaos that are enveloping Russian society around the year 1905 and those that create this disorder. "Apollon Apollonovich was like Zeus: out of his head flowed goddesses and genii."
For all his efforts at control, however, Apollon Apollonovich is not even able to keep his own son under control. Nikolai Apollonovich's head becomes identified with revolutionary chaos through its equation with the bomb which he agrees to store for Dudkin. When he absentmindedly winds the bomb up, we know that an explosion will take place in the senator's house within twenty-four hours. In some of the most brilliant passages of the novel, we read in horror as the ticking of the bomb is registered inside Nikolai Apollonovich's head; the mind and the bomb becoming one. In this framework, the narrative itself becomes an arena for psychological discovery. The narrator has enclosed us in cerebral games, which distract us from the awful events about to unfold, but leave our minds, too, in a state of expectation which can only be relieved by an explosion. Instead of viewing the characters objectively (as we are encouraged to do by the conventions of Realism), in Belyi's novel we are meant to think and respond as if we were one of the characters, that is, the reader becomes part of the novel's psychological universe rather than an observer.
The connection of psychology with disease, and the identification of individual characters with psycho-social types is, however, preserved in Belyi's novel, despite all its modernist trappings: Apollon Apollonovich is an incarnation of the bureaucratic state, his mind a microcosm of its collapsing ideology. The hallucinating terrorist Dudkin, who loses his mind by the end of the novel, is, for all his individuality, meant to be représenta-
tive of the Russian revolutionary class. Finally, Nikolai Apollonovich himself signifies the confused and divided loyalties of the younger generation of the Russian intelligentsia. All three are profoundly ill, as is Russian society as a whole, and Belyi's narrator, with his vaguely out of control cerebral play, is part of the same collapsing universe. Thus, although the narrative techniques for depicting psychology have changed, its function in Belyi's great novel remains analogous to that of its nineteenth-century predecessors.
Although the 1920s saw a renaissance of the novel in Russia, prose fiction in this period was generally more concerned with registering the impact of the revolution and civil war on Russian society than with exploring the inner lives of characters. The man of action became the model figure of Soviet society, and such literary embodiments of this figure as Gleb Shumalov in Fedor Gladkov's celebrated Cement (1925) were distinguished primarily by their ability to get the job done rather than by their complex thought processes. There was, however, one major novel of this period, Envy (1927) by Iuri Olesha, which employed subtle psychological analysis to thematize the conflict between a cerebral and active approach to the world. Envy is narrated by Nikolai Kavalerov, a holdover from pre-Revolutionary Russian culture, a self-pitying failure at everything he puts his hand to and an alcoholic. But Kavalerov's greatest sin is that he thinks too much, and the result is that, like some latter-day Underground Man, he can do nothing but envy the activity of those around him. In particular, his overly cerebral attitude towards the world is contrasted to the transcendent physicality of his sometime benefactor, the materialist sausage-maker of the future, Andrei Babichev. As the novel unfolds, we recognize that the formula "psychology equals disease," which we have come to expect from nineteenth-century Russian literature, is not being used as simplistically as we might have thought. Indeed, Kavalerov is ill, but his envy is accompanied by other traits which we are not so anxious to lose - compassion, aesthetic feeling, emotional responsiveness. Although in theory we should condemn Kavalerov as a hopelessly atavistic representative of the past, we begin to sympathize with him. And despite the fact that Babichev and his adopted son (the soccer player Sergei Makarov) embody the healthy - read unthinking - happiness of the perfect socialist future, we somehow do not like them. Thus, although Olesha's novel seems at first to have endowed his superfluous hero with all the negative and diseased traits of psychologism, by the end of the book, we recognize that the cure may well be worse than the disease. In this respect, Olesha's novel breaks new ground. In the pre-Soviet period, the healthy individual without psychology was often seen as a kind of ideal, a person who had overcome the diseases
inherent in Russian culture which he embodied in his diseased state. When the healthy, unpsychological individual became the official societal norm, however, it was possible to see such people from a new angle, and to recognize the dangers as well as the advantages of the state.
Socialist Realism, which dominated Soviet literature between the 1930s and the 1950s had nothing to add to the techniques of psychological analysis that had been perfected by the Realists of the nineteenth century. What is more, those novelists who produced fiction "for the desk drawer" -an expression used to denote work that could not be published under conditions of Soviet censorship - were generally not interested in new or unusual ways of depicting the human psyche. Indeed, such great novels as Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita or Andrei Platonov's Chevengur are almost completely devoid of psychological insight. Some Russian emigre novelists, however, continued to be fascinated by the potential of psychological analysis. In his pseudo-autobiographical novel The Life of Arsenev (written mostly during the late 1920s), Ivan Bunin uses masterfully the techniques of nineteenth-century psychological prose to show the interplay of the personal with the literary and historical worlds of his pre-Revolutionary youth and thereby to rescue them from oblivion. Vladimir Nabokov combined the insights of traditional psychological prose with some of the playfulness that characterized Andrei Belyi's Petersburg to produce such complex and compelling novels as The Defense (1930), Despair (1936), and Invitation to a Beheading (1938).
In the Soviet Union it was not until the "Thaw" period after 1953 that it became possible for writers with an interest in psychological exploration to turn their attention to an examination of the psyche of Soviet man, a psyche that had been traumatized by the horrors of Revolution, war, collectivization, and The Terror. One such novel is Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, which was originally meant for publication in the USSR but was instead published in Italy in 1957 after having been banned in the author's own country. Pasternak's work follows the life of his hero, Iurii Zhivago, a doctor and poet, from his pre-Revolutionary childhood through the years of Revolution and Civil War until his death in 1929. The novel is, in many respects, a throwback to the Russian nineteenth-century classics, mixing penetrating psychological analysis of the heroes with a broad description of the historical, philosophical issues of the period. But Pasternak does add one significant item to the arsenal of techniques for providing the reader with psychological insight into his main character. As a poet, Pasternak was certainly aware of the limitations that novelistic form imposes on the depiction of a given character's lyrical side, particularly if that character is himself a poet. In Zhivago, Pasternak extends
the form by providing in an epilogue twenty-five lyric poems "written" by his hero. The poems, which are masterpieces of Russian poetry in their own right, add significantly to our understanding of the mind of the main character, and the coupling of novelistic and lyric extends dramatically the possibilities of the standard psychological novel.18
Perhaps the most astute explorer of the post-Stalinist Soviet psyche among authors who could be published in the USSR was the Moscow writer Iurii Trifonov. Of Trifonov's novels, his masterpiece is The House on the Embankment (1976). Set in the 1970s, this book describes what we might today call "recovered memory syndrome." In the course of the novel, we watch the main character and central narrator, Glebov, recover and attempt to come to terms with memories of the 30s and 40s, memories he had semi-consciously tried to suppress. In particular, he must relive and confront the cowardice that led to his betrayal of his dissertation advisor and potential future father-in-law. As a parallel to the memories of Glebov, Trifonov introduces a second narrator into the novel, an unnamed man who grew up with Glebov and recalls many of the same scenes. He does so, however, from an entirely different perspective, revealing in the process how distorted Glebov's memories are. The point, it appears, is to show how the conditions of Stalinist Russia encouraged most of a generation to fall into a state of collective amnesia, a state they were unable to escape even when the external reasons for it had disappeared. Thus, insofar as it depicts the psychology of an individual whose psychological diseases mark him as representative of an entire generation, Trifonov's moral psychological novel is a true heir to the nineteenth-century Russian tradition.
NOTES
1. Virginia Woolf, "Tolstoy's 'The Cossacks'," in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie, 4 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1987), vol. II, p. 79.
2… It is, of course, extremely dangerous to provide psychiatric diagnoses of literary characters, particularly when one is not a psychiatrist and when the characters themselves were created before the discipline of psychiatry existed. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to say that such characters as Poprishchin in Gogol's "Diary of a Madman," Goliadkin in Dostoevesky's The Double, and the central character of Garshin's story "The Red Flower" are indeed mentally ill in the medical sense of the term.
3. Lidia Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, trans. Judson Rosengrant (Princeton University Press, 1991), see especially pp. 2.7-101. As Ginzburg puts it in discussing Belinsky: "[He] traced the psychological process in earnest both in its general significance and in its individual specificity, but most importantly in its details, details that were still beyond the reach of the novel in the first third of the nineteenth century." (p. 83).
4. Mikhail Lermontov, Geroi nashego vremeni, in Lermontov, Sobranie sochinenii
v chetyrekh tomakh (Leningrad, 1981), vol. IV, p. 184. English translation from A Hero of Our Time, trans. Vladimir and Dmitri Nabokov (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988), p. 2.
5. I. Goncharov, Oblomov, part I, chapter 8, trans. David Magarshak (London: Penguin, 1954), p. 93.
6. N. A. Dobroliubov, "Chto takoe oblomovshchina," in Dobroliubov, Literatur-naia kritika, 2 vols. (Leningrad, 1984), vol. 1, p. 344.
7. "It is difficult, . . . and in my opinion simply impossible, to portray a life that has not yet taken form, where its forms have not settled and characters have not been stratified into types." Quoted in Milton Ehre, Oblomov and His Creator: The Life and Art of Ivan Goncharov (Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 74.
8. Elizabeth Cheresh Allen, "Introduction. Turgenev Today," in Allen, (ed.), The Essential Turgenev (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994), p. xxiv.
9. Turgenev, Ottsy i deti, chapter xvn. Translation from Allen (ed.), The Essential Turgenev, p. 644.
10. Turgenev, Ottsy i deti, chapter win. Translation from Allen (ed.), The Essential Turgenev, pp. 646-47.
11. Elizabeth Cheresh Allen, Beyond Realism, Turgenev's Poetics of Secular Salvation (Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 55-56.
12. See David Joravsky, Russian Psychology, A Critical History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 118-19.
13. F. M. Dostoevskii, "Zapiski iz podpol'ia," in Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972-90), vol V, p. 99. Translation in Dostoevsky, "Notes from Underground," trans. Jessie Coulson (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 13.
14. Dostoevskii, "Zapiski iz podpol'ia," p. 99. Translation mine.
15. Quoted in the notes to F. M. Dostoevskii, Prestuplenie i nakazanie, in Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 10 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1956-58), p. 579. Translation mine.
16. F. M. Dostoevskii, Prestuplenie i nakazanie, in Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol 6, p. 422. Translation from Crime and Punishment, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Bantam, 1981), pp. 471-72.
17. L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia litera-tura, 1929-64), 91 vols, vol. xlvi, p. 67.
18. This thought was suggested to me by Justin Weir, a graduate student in the Northwestern University, Department of Slavic Languages and Literature.
8
GARY SAUL MORSON
Philosophy in the nineteenth-century novel
When one considers the impact of Russian literature on world literature, one thinks first of all of the novel. Russia excelled in the novel to the extent that the Greeks and the English excelled in tragedy. To the extent - but not in the same way, because Greek and English tragedies offer the defining examples of the form, whereas the Russian masterpieces, while surely the greatest novels, defy, rather than define, their genre.
From the time Russian novels began to be widely read abroad, two features struck Western readers: their inclusion of long philosophical arguments and their violation of the formal expectations of the genre. It was also clear that these features are intimately connected, because it is in part the philosophical passages that turn these novels into "loose, baggy monsters." The essays in War and Peace, Levin's internal dialogues on the meaning of life at the end of Anna Karenina, Kirillov's mad meditations in The Devils, and Ivan Karamazov's "Grand Inquisitor" legend - all these striking sections, which seemed to have few counterparts in Western masterpieces, define the spirit of the Russian novel. Their Russianness, it appeared, lay in their transcendental ungainliness. And while some argued that War and Peace would be better without the essays, no one could imagine what Russian novels would be like if all their metaphysical protuberances were lopped off. Their greatness seemed closely connected to their flaws, and this fact offered a challenge to the traditional canon of the novel.
Viewed from a Russian perspective, however, the problem of philosophy in the novel looks rather different. The great nineteenth-century writers were not part of the philosophically obsessed intelligentsia, but rather chose to set themselves apart from it, often expressing unrestrained hostility to it. "In Russia an almost infallible gauge of the strength of an artist's genius is the extent of his hatred for the intelligentsia," observed the critic Mikhail Gershenzon in Landmarks.1 If we allow for Gershenzon's habitual polemical exaggeration, the statement is largely correct. The great Russian
novel (and story and drama) was negatively philosophical: it was directed against the faith in abstract ideas and ideology so common among the intelligentsia in pre-revolutionary Russia and in the rest of the world ever since. Read by Western intellectuals, who were increasingly philosophically inclined themselves, this key fact about Russian novels was lost, and they were sometimes transformed, more or less, into their opposite.
By and large, the great Russian novels are novels of ideas only insofar as they are novels that fight against the primacy of ideas. In their critical evaluation of theory, they are closer to Edmund Burke than to Hegel. Among Western thinkers, some Existentialists and, especially, Wittgenstein were closest in spirit to the Russian novelists they admired.2
Russian fiction relentlessly satirized the view, so common to members of the intelligentsia, that life is well lived, well governed, and well understood if approached in terms of the right theory. Thus it developed a set piece, the gathering of the intelligently (members of the intelligentsia), who madly and comically exchange ideological formulae while behaving like children and treating each other with puerile cruelty. The most famous of these scenes is, of course, the chapter "A Meeting" ("Unashikh") in The Devils, but there were several others, most notably the visit of Bazarov and Arkady to Kukshina's in Fathers and Children and the eponymously smoke-filled gathering at the "great thinker" Gubarev's in Turgenev's Smoke. Minor characters in the great novels seem to carry the aura (or smoke) of such ideological meetings with them as they repeat intelligentsial phrases like mantras. In Crime and Punishment, Lebeziatnikov (the name means roughly one who "fawns" on ideas), who is described as a participant in one of those "powerful, all-knowing, all-despising, and all-exposing [intelligentsia] circles," intones the formulae of a mind-numbing feminism -progressive husbands should provide their wives with lovers - and a form of socialism in which every aspect of daily life will be regulated. "We've gone further in our convictions," he proclaims, "we negate more."3 Rakitin in The Brothers Karamazov, the Burdovskii crew in The Idiot, and Nikolai Levin in Anna Karenina mouth similar radical clichés, as do numerous characters in Turgenev and Chekhov. In Fathers and Children, Bazarov himself comes to refer to revolutionary truisms as mere "commonplaces in reverse," as shallow as the mindless conservative ones they supposedly supersede.
The whole mad atmosphere of theory-driven intelligenty is sometimes evoked in a single telling phrase. The devil who visits Ivan Karamazov mocks him by treating his ideas as if they had been invented by an ordinary intelligent. Paraphrasing Ivan's argument that "if there is no God, all is permitted," the devil queries, "That's all very charming; but if you want to
swindle why do you want a moral sanction for doing it? But that's our modern Russian [intelligent] all over."4 In The Cherry Orchard, Semenov-Pishchik offers an intelligentsial suggestion for saving the estate: "Nietzsche . . . the philosopher. . . the greatest, most renowned … a man of gigantic mind . . . Says in his works that one may forge banknotes."5
The Russian writers never ceased to satirize the intelligentsial faith that ideas, especially borrowed ones pushed to the extreme, would save the world. As Dostoevskii once remarked, a Russian intelligent is someone who can read Darwin and promptly resolve to become a pickpocket for the good of humanity. Such thinkers were millenarians for whom Hegel, Marx and other philosophers took the place of the Bible: for the intelligentsia, Marxism (or Nietzschean philosophy or some other ideology) was Revelation and rival interpretations were heresy. The novelists saw this tendency as at best misguided and at worst extremely dangerous.
If all they had done was point out the absurdity or danger of the intelligentsia's addiction to abstractions, the Russian writers would have deserved a place in literature alongside the other great satirists of ideas, from Aristophanes and Lucian to Swift and Voltaire. But they did something else: they developed a series of counter-ideas of their own. In my view, these counter-ideas constitute the most durable contribution of Russian thought. They are what make the Russian philosophical novel an incomparable achievement, both intellectually and aesthetically: for to express these counter-ideas effectively, the Russian writers undertook some radical and brilliant innovations in the form of the novel. Although these innovations made the novels seem formless to many early readers, the novels have come to be regarded as incomparable examples of realism that somehow, inexplicably, rose above their obvious "flaws." I would like to focus on the counter-ideas that seem to me of greatest significance.
No class in Russian history has had a more momentous impact on the destinies of that nation or indeed of the modern world than the intelligentsia.
(Martin Malia)
We get the word "intelligentsia" from Russia, where it came into circulation around 1860. Virtually all commentators have noted that the Russian term did not mean the same thing as its English counterpart (or, for that matter, as the Soviet use of the term). The word is very difficult to define because it was used in various ways, because it changed its meaning somewhat from decade to decade, and, most importantly, because it had honorific overtones: debates on Russia's destiny often took the form of redefining the "true" intelligent. Nevertheless, there was a group that almost everyone
would have acknowledged as intelligenty in the strict sense, and it was this group that most offended the great writers.
One might readily identify three characteristics of the intelligentsia in this sense. First, an intelligent was expected to identify above all as an intelligent. To be an intelligent was not like being an Anglophile, a general, or a poet, all of which were compatible with a primary identity as a nobleman. Whereas an English intellectual might be a nobleman or professional who happened to be interested in the arts, a Russian intelligent owed his first loyalty, indeed the very sense of who he or she was, to the intelligentsia. A profession was to be pursued simply to make a living, and was to be abandoned whenever the (usually revolutionary) demands of the intelligentsia required. That is the point behind the comment made about Kirillov in The Devils: is it wise to hire an engineer who believes in universal destruction?
Second, an intelligent was expected to adhere to a particular set of beliefs. From this expectation derived an extreme intellectual conformity and a willingness to slander anyone who disagreed, characteristics that especially offended the major literary figures. Required beliefs differed over time, but they always included a commitment to socialism, atheism, and revolution. Most important of all, they involved a faith that the intelligentsia itself was destined to save society and that others could and might be sacrificed to realize its theories and dreams. "I am beginning to love mankind à la Marat," Belinskii had declared; "to make the least part of it happy I believe I could destroy the rest of it with fire and sword."6 Nechaev and the terrorists of the 1870s also viewed their contemporaries and people from other groups as so much raw material to be expended in making a revolution, a perspective taken for granted by Lenin and severely criticized in Landmarks. Dostoevskii precisely caught the importance of the intelligentsia's belief in itself when he had Raskolnikov divide humanity into a few extraordinary people who have the right to kill and the many ordinary people who serve as mere breeders. Raskolnikov comes to realize that none of his theories for saving humanity really matters to him; what matters is membership of the extraordinary. The intelligentsia's beliefs about economics or the peasant may change, Dostoevskii suggests, but the core idea that will remain is its megalomaniac aspirations for itself.
Finally, an intelligent was expected to live a certain sort of properly sordid life. Bad manners like Chernyshevskii's were regarded as essential.7 The nihilists in The Idiot, for instance, treat rudeness itself as a form of good manners according to the radical code - and, as Myshkin wryly observes, they then demand the respect accorded to traditional good manners and take offense at the slightest rudeness directed at themselves,
measured against both codes. Eager from radical principle to offend others' dignity, they insist on the most punctilious respect for their own (another form of commonplace in reverse).
For the writers, those beliefs spelled a stifling intellectual conformity. It was clearly impossible to create anything but crude propaganda if one adhered to a code in which anything but certain beliefs was automatically "reactionary." Asked to join a typical intelligentsia "circle," Chekhov replied with a statement of his fundamental values - personal honesty and simple acts of kindness for which "you've got to be . . . just a plain human being. Let us be ordinary people, let us adopt the same attitude towards all, then an artificially overwrought solidarity will not be needed."8 Pressed to break with his conservative friend Suvorin, Chekhov replied by denouncing the intelligentsia's enforcement of conformity. What would such people do if they ever gained real political power? he asked. "Under the banner of science, art, and oppressed free thinking among us in Russia, such toads and crocodiles will rule in ways not known even at the time of the Inquisition in Spain" - a comment which, if anything, was to prove an understatement.9
The novel is above all a genre that deals with the particulars of experience, and so it became a tool directed at the abstractions of ideological thinking. One may, in fact, identify a masterplot of an ideological novel: a hero proclaims a set of theory-driven beliefs with great energy and charisma; but in the course of the novel, events take place that reveal to the hero himself that reality is infinitely more complex than theories allow. In Fathers and Children, for instance, Bazarov regards love, art, and nature from an entirely "materialist" point of view, and considers romance and beauty to be sheer rot; but, seduced by fragrant spring air, elegance, and a beautiful woman, he finds himself feeling the sort of love that "the minnesingers and troubadours" praised. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan, who believes that all is permitted, finds himself feeling guilty for a crime he has only desired. In these and many similar cases, the governing trope is what might be called the "irony of outcomes": the lived consequences of a theory, not another theory, refute it. Life ambushes ideology. An "irony of origins" is also often used: we see that what leads a hero or heroine to a set of beliefs is not theoretical cogency, as they seem to think, but some complex psychological factor ideology does not even accommodate but that the novelist traces with supreme subtlety. In Fathers and Children we see that Arkady becomes a nihilist so as to seem more grown up, which is, of course, itself a childish thing to do; and so when denouncing all authority he looks to his mentor Bazarov for approval.
There is in such cases a strong metaliterary aspect to this kind of
novelistic disproof, because (as in Bazarov's case) the realist, psychological novel is itself a form typically rejected by the ideological hero. Bazarov is quite explicit about that, as are all heroes who bow to the "men of the sixties." The novel responds by making the very rejection of novels and all they presuppose - love, the soul, particularity, and the superiority of experience over theory - itself a central or important secondary theme, as it is in Fathers and Children and The Devils.
The intelligently typically relied on a strong ethical appeal, and so a central theme of the Russian philosophical novel became a kind of counter-ethics. In one of the dialogues contained in Herzen's quasi-novel From the Other Shore - probably his finest work from a literary point of view - one skeptic of ideologically driven hope points to the intense cruelty likely to result from Utopian longings. Willing to sacrifice real people for the sake of a theoretical goal, the intelligent becomes the cruelest tyrant of all:
If progress is the end, for whom are we working? . . . Do you truly wish to condemn all human beings alive today to the sad role … of wretched galley slaves, up to their knees in mud, dragging a barge with some mysterious treasure and with the humble words "progress in the future" inscribed on its bows? . . . This alone should serve as a warning to people: an end that is infinitely remote is not an end, but, if you like, a trap: an end must be nearer -it ought to be, at the very least, the labourer's wage, or pleasure in the work done.10
In The Brothers Karamazov, Father Zosima also contends that love and goodness must be directed at particular people in particular situations: love for mere abstractions is always false and turns rapidly into its opposite. He describes a doctor he once knew:
"I love humanity," he said, "but . . . the more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams … I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together, as I know by experience . . . But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity."
(BK,?. 64)
This contrast between dreams and theory on the one hand and experience on the other shapes Dostoevskii's plots as well, and so Zosima's comments have real narratological significance. We are told, for instance, that Alesha, though dedicated to God, has the same mentality as the socialists and materialists: he believes in miracles, sudden change, and "immediate action" based on a model, which is why he is so disappointed when the
expected miracle fails to occur on Zosima's death: Zosima's corpse unexpectedly stinks and the chance to astonish non-believers is lost. But at Grushenka's he hears the splendid story of "the onion," which suggests to him that a small act of kindness is what God wants, and he performs such an act for Grushenka. When he returns to the monastery, he hears the story of the marriage at Cana read over Zosima's body and he realizes what it is that Zosima has been trying to teach him.
Pause for a moment on the extraordinary choice of this story as the central Christian text of this highly Christian novel. The incident has nothing to do with Jesus' mission - "mine hour is not yet come," Jesus tells his mother when he is reluctant to perform the miracle. Or as Alesha thinks, "was it to make wine abundant at poor weddings that He had come down to earth?" (BK, p. 434). In a real sense it was: the Christ of this novel, and the novel about this Christ, teach that goodness comes from small, prosaic, barely noticed acts of kindness. Zosima explains that one does not have to know the consequences of good acts to believe in them, for each small act of good (or evil) shapes another small act in an endlessly complex concatenation of causes and influences beyond human view. Small acts are like seeds bearing fruit with more seeds, an image that provides the epigraph to The Brothers Karamazov and is developed at length in The Idiot. In The Idiot, Ippolit is right for a change when he remarks on one of his rare good deeds: "But how can you tell what seed may have been dropped in his soul? . . . You know it's a matter of a whole lifetime, an infinite multitude of ramifications hidden from us. The most skilful chessplayer, the cleverest of them, can look only a few moves ahead . . ."11 At the end of The Brothers Karamazov, Alesha teaches this lesson to the boys. And so the novel turns out to have a double plot, one about the fate of ideologues and passionate men, and the other about unremarkable people who learn small acts of kindness. In The Devils, Shatov achieves his brief moment of salvation when his wife is in labor and he realizes that even the right ideology - even the Slavophilism to which Dostoevskii himself was inclined - kills what is real in life, that is, caring for specific people.
A similar contrast underlies many of Chekhov's plays and stories, for Chekhov above all believed in small acts of kindness. Uncle Vania's radical mother neglects him while making notes on the margins of her pamphlet, and the old professor ("I have my knife out for professors," Chekhov wrote)12 neglects people for dead ideas, while Sonia, the real heroine of the play, is quietly kind to all around her. Even Elena voices the Chekhovian truth when she observes: "You, Ivan Petrovich, are an educated and intelligent man, and I should think you would understand that the world is perishing not from robbers and fires . . . but from all these petty
squabbles." Apocalyptic or extremist thinking - "robbers and fires" -distracts us from the small actions that really are life and that shaped Chekhov's distinctive undramatic dramas.
Stated positively, what the great Russian novelists proposed was a revival of casuistry, that is, reasoning by cases.13 Bakhtin's early treatise, "Toward a Philosophy of the Act," makes this approach, already developed by the novelists, explicit.14 The tradition he opposes - he calls it "theoretism" -sees ethics as the application of the right rules to particular situations. But in Bakhtin's view real morality must go from the bottom up, not the top down; "oughtness" begins with where I am at a particular unrepeatable moment in a specific situation unlike all others if viewed finely enough. It begins - I begin - with my "singular singularity" (p. 112). "That which can be accomplished by me (right now) cannot be accomplished by anyone else, ever" (p. 112). Consequently, "There are no definite moral norms signifying in themselves, but there is a moral subject … on which one must rely" (p. 85).
In an evident allusion to the revolutionaries, Bakhtin cautions that one invites cruelty when one thinks of oneself as a mere representative of some party, historical force, theory, or great idea: in that case, one becomes a mere "pretender" and seeks an impossible "alibi" for one's own ethical choice. But "there is no alibi," Bakhtin repeats. As his later works make explicit, Bakhtin's anti-theoretist view of ethics was indebted to his favorite genre and especially to his favorite Russian writer, Dostoevskii.
War and Peace and Anna Karenina are both concerned to demonstrate the superiority of ethically sensitive case reasoning to any conceivable theory. Pierre and Levin reach the Tolstoian truth when they give up their abstract theories and learn to judge by cases. Thus, at the end of both novels Tolstoi describes how his hero judges rightly by giving a list of particular choices - "To Petr, who was paying ten percent a month to a moneylender he must lend money . . . But he could not let off peasants from paying their rent," and so on - a list that goes on for about a page, but he never provides the rule his heroes follow: because they do not follow a rule.15 They draw instead on the whole experience of their lives and on very close observation of the particular person in front of them. These parallel passages in the two novels illustrate how their plots, for all their differences, resemble each other. In each novel, one hero or heroine believes in an abstraction (Prince Andrei in glory, Anna in romance) that proves as mistaken as it is seductive; whereas the other (Pierre or Levin) comes, after many errors, to see the world casuistically.
When, at the end of part VIII of Anna Karenina, Koznyshev asks Levin whether he would kill a Turk about to harm a child before his eyes, Levin
answers that he does not know, that he would have to decide on the moment. Though weak theoretically - no rule for how he would make the decision is offered - this is the right answer for Tolstoi. No rule should decide, because the particularities are too unpredictable and the consequences of a wrong judgment, either way, are too terrible. The right thing to do is to develop a good moral sense over a lifetime and then trust one's morally trained eyes over any abstract philosophy. That is why the raising of children is so important a theme in Tolstoi (and Dostoevskii) and why they judge so severely the intelligentsia's tendency to undervalue such prosaic activities. For if one does not develop a significant moral sense in childhood, one can never really make up for it (the story of Vronskii).
Here again we come to the Russian novel's self-awareness. If morality is a matter of sensitive attention to particulars, then novels are the best form for ethical education. More than philosophers' or sociologists' examples, novels provide the richest and "thickest" descriptions of specific moral cases. They educate by example and exemplification, but they do not encourage us to apply theories. The richer, more detailed, and more complex the cases, the better the moral education: which is one reason Tolstoi's novels are so long.
After looking for theories and finding only despair, Levin understands that he was seduced by the "pride" of intellect: "And not merely the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And most of all the deceitfulness, yes, the deceitfulness of intellect" (p. 831). But where intellect deceives, an educated attentiveness informs. As Wittgenstein likes to say, "don't think, but look!"16 Tolstoi's novels - Russian realist novels in general - are conceived as exercises in teaching one to look, to see the richness of particular cases that theories generalize away.
In fact, it appears that the novel began as a casuistical genre. After casuistry had been discredited philosophically (especially by Pascal in The Provincial Letters), it took refuge in more popular publications, and gave birth to something like our advice columns. Daniel Defoe wrote such articles, some at great length and evidently made up. As they lengthened, they grew into his novels. Banished from philosophy, which had come to emphasize the general over the particular, the abstract over the experience, and the timeless over the timely, casuistry thus found a home in the novel. A century and a half later, the Russian novel in effect made this "form-shaping" idea of the genre, an idea that was long forgotten, newly explicit and self-conscious. In so doing, it set itself radically apart from all those who believed in the primacy of theory and rules.
Casuistry was closely related to a set of ideas that I have elsewhere called prosaics.17 Developed most explicitly by Tolstoi, prosaics became an idea -
better, a sense of life - with which other Russian writers contended. In opposing intelligentsial apocalypticism, for instance, Dostoevskii was torn between a counter-apocalypticism and prosaics. The struggle between these two ideas - between Sonia and Razumikhin, between the apocalyptic and prosaic sides of Prince Myshkin - shapes the peculiar ideological dialogue of his works. Marked as Tolstoian, the prosaic sensibility thereby plays a prominent, though not uncontested role in his all major novels, as well as in The Diary of a Writer. It was important to Turgenev as well, and it may fairly be argued that Chekhov became the most orthodox heir of Tolstoian prosaics, loyal to the sensibility of War and Peace and Anna Karenina even after Tolstoi had rejected those works.
Deeply suspicious of the claims of theory to accommodate the world, prosaics sees the life of individuals and society as fraught with contingency, which operates not just at grand historical junctures but also at every moment of our daily lives. Whereas the impulse of the theoretists is to detect (or invent) some underlying order or law beneath the apparent mess of the world - the dream of a social science - prosaics makes just the opposite assumption. In prosaics, the fundamental state of the social world is mess, and order is always the precarious result of human effort. As Bakhtin was to say, order is a "task," a project posited and never quite completed. Almost unique for his time, Tolstoi relentlessly denies the existence of historical laws, especially the one that seemed the most obvious to his contemporaries, a law of progress.
In War and Peace, battle serves as an emblem of concentrated history. The generals who think they can plan battle repeatedly overlook the radical contingency of combat, what Prince Andrei calls "the hundred million diverse chances" that will be decided "on the moment" and that no one can foresee. Tolstoi had a supreme sense of presentness, the complexity of each moment leading to outcomes that no knowledge of the past, and no conceivable principles, laws, or strategies would allow one to predict, even in principle. The wise generals, like Kutuzov and Bagration, know this, and are aware that it is line officers, who seize opportunities that arise contingently and unexpectedly, who decide battles. That is why Kutuzov falls asleep at councils of war and recommends, as the best preparation for a battle, not more plans but "a good night's sleep." It is also why the most effective soldier we see is not Prince Andrei, with his dreams of glory and his early faith in military genius, but the utterly untheoretical and un-intellectual Nikolai Rostov, who keeps his wits about him and makes the most of opportunities that arise fortuitously.
Pierre begins the novel as a sort of intelligent before the name - the critics condemned Tolstoi for such anachronisms - who believes that either
there is a theory to explain life or else there is no such theory, and so all is relative and meaningless. Alternating between Utopian hope and metaphysical despair, he consumes theory after theory, each of which parodies some intellectual flaw of the theoretical world view in general. When Pierre adopts Masonic numerology supposedly allowing him to predict when and how Napoleon will be defeated, Tolstoi means us to see all substantive philosophies of history as equally absurd. Of course, Pierre calculates that he himself is destined by history to kill Napoleon, much as the intelligentsia (as a group and often as individuals) imagined itself as the Napoleon destined to defeat Napoleon, or whoever was the enemy at the time. As Porfirii Petrovich insinuates to Raskolnikov, don't we Russian intellectuals all imagine ourselves to be little Napoleons? "Inside every maximalist [intelligent]," wrote Sergei Bulgakov in Landmarks, "there is a little Napoleon of socialism or anarchism . . . But life is an everyday affair."18 One reason the "Napoleon idea" plays such a large role in Russian fiction is that it is the opposite of prosaics: it assumes the value of theoretical genius and grand action, rather than small acts of ordinary people in everyday situations.
By the end of the novel, Pierre learns the value of the ordinary, a key tenet of prosaics. "In everything near and comprehensible he had [previously] seen only what was limited, petty, commonplace, and meaningless. He had equipped himself with a mental telescope and gazed into the distance where the petty and commonplace had seemed to him great and infinite only because they were not clearly visible."19 The telescope he abandons is theory, and he learns to appreciate not the laws supposedly behind experience but experience itself. "Now, however, he had learned to see the great, the eternal, the infinite in everything, and therefore … he had naturally discarded the telescope through which he had till then been gazing over the heads of men, and joyfully surveyed the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him" (p. 1320). He now appreciates in this prosaic sense the words he had learned as a child, "God is here and everywhere." That great reader of Tolstoi, Wittgenstein, was to write: "The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one's eyes.) . . . And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful" (PI, section 129, p. 50e).
God must have loved the ordinary events because he made so many of them. For Tolstoi and Chekhov, life is good when it is lived well moment by moment. In one of his late essays, "Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?," Tolstoi retells a story about the painter Briullov, who corrected a student's
sketch. You only touched it a tiny bit, the student remarks, but it is quite a different thing. Briullov replies that art begins where that "tiny bit" begins, and Tolstoi adds that what is true of art is true of life. True life is lived not where noticeable changes occur - where people move about, fight, and slay one another - but where infinitesimally small changes take place.
Tolstoi's description of human psychology depends on his sense of "tiny alterations" of consciousness. When Prince Andrei, listening from the next room, hears the moans of his dying wife in labor, he registers the cry of an infant, and says to himself, "Why have they taken a baby in there?" Of course, a split second later he realizes that his child was born, a conclusion which is so obvious that most of us would never remember the stray thought that passed after an infinitesimal instant. But Tolstoi records the thought, because his technique is to take the smallest mental act that we remember or that other writers record and to show that it can in fact be subdivided much further. This use of "tiny alterations" provides another reason his novels are so long.
Tolstoi further argues that Dostoevskii's Raskolnikov (in Crime and Punishment) lived his true life not when he formulated his theories about Napoleon or decided that all is permitted, but when he was just lying on his couch, thinking about the most ordinary events in life. At such moments, so ordinary he rarely remembers them, infinitesimally small changes take place. In Raskolnikov's case, these infinitesimals of mental life lead to the death of the old woman and her sister even though Raskolnikov never quite decided on murder. Tolstoi precisely caught what Dostoevskii was up to here: the murder was the result not of a theory or plan, but of a climate of mind, which is why Raskolnikov can never decide which theory he had in mind and never behaves according to any of his plans.
If history and individual lives are shaped by the sum total of ordinary events, too small to notice, then historical and biographical narratives radically misrepresent the shape of events. They do so for a variety of related reasons. First, as Tolstoi points out, historians typically rely on records, and people generally record only what is unusual or exceptional. Historians are therefore strongly predisposed to underestimate the significance of ordinary events that nobody bothers to record. Something similar happens in novels, which usually rely on dramatic actions to explain a life. Second, both histories and novels rely on a coherent plot, which leaves out loose ends and eliminates contingency: indeed if they do not, critics usually describe the work as flawed. But if life is made by ordinary events, which usually lead nowhere in particular, then this criterion of great art almost compels narratives to lie about bow events happen.
This line of thinking informs what is perhaps the most famous, and most
often misunderstood sentence of Russian literature, the opening of Anna Karenina: "All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Happy families resemble each other because their lives are filled with undramatic incidents that do not make a good story, but unhappy lives each have a story: and each story is different. In his notebooks and letters of the period, Tolstoi twice quotes a French saying, "happy people have no history." Plot is an index of error.
If real life is lived outside of plot, then the whole way in which novels are written will have to change. That is basically the reason Tolstoi gives for insisting that War and Peace is not a novel nor, for that matter, an example of any received narrative genre. War and Peace relies on a form of "negative narration": interest is sustained by dramatic events in the foreground, which, however, are shown to be empty and meaningless, whereas the real story lies where there is no story, on the margins. And so in Anna Karenina we have the scenes where Dolly takes pleasure in her children and the joy of the Shcherbatskii parents when Kitty becomes engaged. Chekhov was to make remarkable use of this technique in his undramatic dramas and in many of his stories. When Vania comes out shooting, that is pure theatre in the pejorative sense, but when Sonia or the old nurse quietly care for those around them, we have no drama at all: we have, instead, a sense of what really makes a life valuable and what actually allows it to go on. Chekhov's metatheatre - theatre that shows what is wrong with the whole histrionic view of life contained in the very form of the "well-made play" -transfers to the stage the radical innovations Tolstoi made in the form of the novel.
Tolstoi restores contingency to the world by including a large number of incidents that lead nowhere in particular. When in Great Expectations Pip gives a pie to a convict, we know it must lead somewhere or the author would not have included it. But "pies" are given all the time in War and Peace and Anna Karenina, with no more discernible effect than most of our daily donations. That is why when events do work out novelistically in War and Peace, they possess tremendous power, because we know, from the experience of reading, that they very well may have worked out differently. Critics at the time and since have faulted Tolstoi for this mass of contingent details - they are yet another reason Tolstoi's novels are so long - but it is in part their presence that makes the feeling of experience in these works so close to that of life.
In short, a key factor that provoked radical innovations in the form of the novel was a deep concern with the philosophy of time. Whereas the intelligentsia constantly favored models of closed time, in which history had a plot guaranteed to lead to a predetermined Utopian ending, several of
the great writers favored models of open time allowing for human freedom, contingency, and the unpredictable: in short, for what Bakhtin was to call "surprisingness." "If we concede that human life can be governed by reason, then the possibility of life is destroyed," Tolstoi concludes in War and Peace (1354). The existence of laws of psychology or history would reduce people to piano keys or organ stops, complains the Underground Vian. There is no libretto to history, declares Herzen in From the Other Shore: "In history, all is improvisation, all is will, all is ex tempore" (p. 39). "Don't say: It could not have been otherwise" wrote Pushkin. "If that were true, then the historian would be an astronomer and events in the life of humanity could be predicted in calendars, like eclipses of the sun. But Providence is not algebra."20
The Russian writers also keenly sensed that determinism is already implicitly endorsed by the very plots of traditional novels. This, in fact, was their great insight, leading to dramatic innovations in the form of the novel. They saw, for instance, that foreshadowing already closes down time, because it allows earlier events to be caused by later ones; the characters' sense of freedom becomes an illusion when the reader is given signs of a future already written. Similarly, structure, which by its very nature ensures that all events figure in a pattern, necessarily eliminates contingency and chance. So does closure, which makes all events gravitate forward, to a conclusion that ties up all loose ends. In short, however much a writer might wish to endorse open time, traditional plotting almost forces a model of closed time upon him. How is this problem to be solved?
The Russian novelists came up with at least two remarkable solutions, which I have called "creation by potential" and "sideshadowing."21 It was the use of these devices, more than anything else, that led to the strange form of the Russian novel. I am suggesting that the incomparable feel of realism of these works - which made Matthew Arnold declare that Anna Karenina is not a piece of art but a piece of life,22 that if life could write itself, it would write like Tolstoi - depends more than anything on a concern with the philosophy of time and its implications for literary plotting.
"Creation by potential" is a form of composition in which the writer literally does not know what is going to happen next, a technique that precludes the very possibility of foreshadowing, structure, and closure. Events are necessarily caused only by prior events and by present chances, and not by a future to which everything is invisibly tending. In his essay "Some Words about the Book War and Peace" - note that he called his work a "book," not a novel - and in his drafts for an introduction to the work, Tolstoi promised that he would write so that each part of the work would have "an independent interest . . . which would consist not in the
development of events but in development [itself]."23Development itself -the experience of pure process and autonomous presentness - meant that at each point he would develop potentials he had planted before and would plant new ones for the future; events would simply happen, not tend anywhere; and serial publication would ensure that the author could not go back and correct earlier parts so as to leave out loose ends. Creation by potential ensures that time flows only forward, and it necessarily results in numerous loose ends - that is, it makes the story resemble life as we actually experience it.
This technique was also used to a considerable extent in Anna Karenina. Part VIII of the novel devotes considerable attention to the Eastern War, a topic that could not have been part of any original plan because when Tolstoi published the first part of the novel that war had not yet begun. For today's readers, history is telescoped, and so we are likely to miss what must have been a striking fact: the author was incorporating events from the real world, chance events outside his control, into the very fabric of his story. The Idiot also incorporates reports of real crimes that had not taken place when the first installments of the novel appeared. A still more radical technique results in Dostoevskii's Diary of a Writer: A Monthly Publication, in which the work as a whole and many specific narratives in it are deliberately left open to chance events of the real world on which Dostoevskii reported but which he could not control.
In fact, more than one of Dostoevskii's novels was written with the author discovering events as he wrote them. This practice was probably forced on him by financial pressures, but he seems to have made a virtue of necessity. The incomparable thrill we identify as Dostoevskian - something beyond mere suspense - results from the fact that he was as uncertain as his readers and characters of what would happen next, and he managed to convey that uncertainty in the novel itself. Critics often fault The Idiot for its "structural flaws" and loose ends, but typically the same critics then remark on the novel's uncanny ability to rise above those flaws. However, there is less paradox here than meets the eye if we recognize that there can be structural flaws only if one insists on reading in terms of structure: The Idiot, like War and Peace, was created by potential. So, it appears, were other masterpieces of Russian fiction, like Evgenii Onegin.
Dostoevskii's novels also may serve to illustrate "sideshadowing." The opposite of foreshadowing, sideshadowing conveys the sense that time is open and that each moment contains real alternatives. For the determinist, and in a plot based on structure and closure, whatever happens had to have happened; the impression of other possibilities is a mere illusion, the product of ignorance recognized as such when the narrative is over. But in
the world of sideshadowing, the illusion is inevitability itself. Something else was possible at each moment. Instead of casting a foreshadow from the future, it casts a shadow "from the side," that is, from the other possibilities. Along with an event, we see its alternatives; with each present, another possible present. Sideshadows conjure the ghostly presence of might-have-beens and might-bes. Two (or more) alternative presents, the actual and the possible, are made simultaneously visible.
Time therefore appears as a field of possibilities. Each moment has a set of possible events that could take place in it. From this field, a single event emerges - perhaps by chance, perhaps by choice, perhaps by some combination of both with the inertia of the past, but in any case contingently. Dostoevskii's novels typically work by making this field visible. In one scene in The Devils, for instance, Liza Nikolaevna and Stavrogin jostle against each other in the doorway after their visit to the mad prophet Semen Iakovlevich:
I fancied they both stood still for an instant, and looked, as it were, strangely at one another, but I may not have seen rightly in the crowd. It is asserted, on the contrary, and quite seriously, that Liza, glancing at Nikolai Vsevolodo-vich, quickly raised her hand to the level of his face, and would certainly have struck him if he had not drawn back in time. Perhaps she was displeased with the expression of his face, or the way he smiled, particularly just after such an episode with Mavrikii Nikolaevich. I must admit I saw nothing myself, but all the others declared they had, though they certainly could not all have seen it in such a crush, though perhaps some may have. But I did not believe it at the time. I remember, however, that Nikolai Vsevolodovich was rather pale all the way home.24
"Though . . . though . . . however"; "I fancied," "perhaps," "it is asserted quite seriously": with qualification piled on qualification, tentative judgments no sooner made than withdrawn and perhaps ambiguously reasserted, the narrator claims not to be sure what he himself has seen. Reports of others are probably even more unreliable, and apparently contradictory, though not necessarily groundless. Frivolous people with a taste for scandal seriously say things that differ from what the narrator himself has seen, although of course, he may have missed such a vague event and does not trust his own eyes "in such a crush." He concludes by saying that he did not believe in the reported event - does he accept it now? - and then giving evidence that it might just be true anyway. Moreover, the action in question was checked before it happened - the action that may have taken place was a slap not given - and so one has in any case to distinguish between an unrealized possibility and nothing at all.
What we are given here is not one but many possible stories. The real point is that whatever did happen, any of these incidents could have happened. What is important is the field of possibilities, not the one actualized. By depriving any version of undeniable actuality, Dostoevskii reveals the field itself. The sideshadows crowd out the actual event.
Readers will identify this kind of narration as quintessentially Dostoevskian. His novels proceed by allowing for many possible stories, a sea of rumors, and - as in The Devils - the refusal to specify, even for key events, what did actually happen. All this is part of Dostoevskii's war on determinism, his sense that if the tape were replayed, something else might have happened. The most important lesson of sideshadowing is: to understand an event one must know not only what did happen, but also what else might have happened. For Tolstoi, sideshadowing and creation by potential served as ways to illustrate contingency; for Dostoevskii, they demonstrated human freedom.
The sense of open time also implies that we ourselves are not the inevitable product of history, and that, if some other chain of events had taken place, we might see the world quite differently. If that is so, then the hubris characteristic of the intelligentsia's way of judging the past is entirely unearned. Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, Turgenev, and Chekhov were repulsed by that supreme tone of authority with which the intelligentsia judged figures of the past (and their non-intelligentsia contemporaries), sure that, somehow, they were wiser for having been born later (and for having the right intelligentsia theory). In War and Peace, Tolstoi mocks what he calls "the stern tribunal" of professors and critics who cast their little stones at Alexander I - in this the tsar was progressive, in that reactionary - as if the critics' view were necessarily beyond question: "All the famous people of that period, from Alexsander and Napoleon to Madame de Staël, Photius, Schelling, Fichte, Chateaubriand, and the rest pass before their stern tribunal and are acquitted or condemned according to whether they promoted progress or reaction" (pp. 1351-52). Naturally, progress is defined as proximity to the beliefs of the historians themselves.
As there is such a thing as ethnocentrism, the unjust and unjustified privileging of the prejudices of one's own culture, so there is also such a thing as "chronocentrism," which confers unjustified privilege on the prejudices of one's own time. Chronocentrism combines rather easily with a "centrism" of profession. In Tolstoi's phrase, it is "natural and agreeable" for intellectuals to think this way, just as it is agreeable for them to think that the world is best understood in terms of theory and is most likely to be redeemed by the application of the right ideology. For if what we need is not theory, but practical reasoning - in Aristotle's terms, phronesis - then
how would intellectuals justify their claim to pre-eminence in solving problems? They have never been famed for having much practical wisdom. The idea that philosophy is about the abstract, the timeless, the general, and the theoretical had dominated European thought since Descartes. The Russian novel gives new life to an older and rival philosophical tradition -extending from Aristotle to Montaigne and revived in our time by Wittgenstein - that places the highest value on the particular, the local, the timely, and on accumulated experience. The insights produced by this way of thinking constitute the great contribution of the Russian philosophical novel and led to the remarkable series of formal innovations that made them aesthetic, as well as philosophical, masterpieces.
NOTES
1. Mikhail Gershenzon, "Creative Self-Consciousness," in Mikhail Gershenzon (ed.), Vekhi/Landmarks: A Collection of Articles About the Russian Intelligentsia (originally published in 1909), trans. Marshall Shatz and Judith Zimmerman (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), p. 60.
2. On Wittgenstein's debt to Tolstoy, see Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp. 177, 200-01, 205, 206, 224, 229.
3. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment: A Novel in Six Parts with Epilogue, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Knopf, 1992), pp. 261, 266-67. Part v, chapter 1 of the novel is a satirical compendium of radical clichés.
4. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Modern Library, 1963), p. 789. Further references to this are to BK.
5. Opening of act ?.
6. V. G. Belinsky, Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages, 1956), p. 168 (Letter to Botkin, 28 June 1841).
7. On such codes of behavior, see Vladimir C. Nahirny, The Russian Intelligentsia: from Torment to Silence (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1983), and Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford University Press, 1988).
8. Anton Chekhov, letter to I. L. Leontiev-Shcheglov, 3 May 1888, cited in Ernest J. Simmons, Chekhov: A Biography (Boston: Little Brown, 1962), p. 165.
9. Anton Chekhov, letter to A. N. Pleshcheev, 27 August 1888, cited in ibid.
10. Alexander Herzen, "From the Other Shore," in Herzen, "From the Other Shore" and "The Russian People and Socialism" ed. Moura Budberg (Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 36-37.
11. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Modern Library, 1962), p. 385.
12. Anton Chekhov, letter to Suvorin, 27 November 1889, cited in Simmons, Chekhov: A Biography, p. 197.
13. On the tradition of casuistical reasoning, see Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988). On philosophy's turn from the timely to the timeless - from Montaigne to Descartes and after - see Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990).
14. See M. M. Bakhtin, "K filosofii postupka," in the 1984-85 issue of Filosofiia i sotsiologiia nauki i tekbniki, a yearbook (ezhegodnik) of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), pp. 80-160. For a detailed summary of this essay, see Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, "Introduction: Reading Bakhtin," in Morson and Emerson (eds.), Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), pp. 5-30.
15. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, the Garnett translation revised and edited by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova (New York: Modern Library, 1965), p. 824.
16. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Ans-combe, 3rd edn (New York: Macmillan, 1958), section 66 (p. 31e). Further references to this are to PI.
17. I coined the term "prosaics" in Morson, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in "War and Peace" (Stanford University Press, 1987); Morson, "Prosaics: An Approach to the Humanities," The American Scholar (Autumn 1988), 515-28; and Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford University Press, 1990).
18. Sergei Bulgakov, "Heroism and Asceticism (Reflections on the Religious Nature of the Russian Intelligentsia)," in Gershenzon (ed.), Vekhi/Landmarks, p. 32.
19. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York: Signet, 1968), p. 1320.
20. Pushkin, "O vtorom tome Istoriia russkogo naroda Polevogo" (1830), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 17 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo AN SSSR, 1937-59), vol. XI, p. 127.
21.1 discuss "creation by potential" in detail in my Hidden in Plain View; "side-shadowing" is the key idea of my more recent book, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). On "side-shadowing," see also Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
22. Matthew Arnold, "Count Leo Tolstoy," in Arnold, Essays in Criticism: Second Series (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1888), p. 260.
23. L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. V. G. Chertkov, 91 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1929-64), vol. XIII, p. 55.
24. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed (The Devils), trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Modern Library, 1963), p. 341.
3
THE LITERARY TRADITION
9
SUSANNE FUSSO
The Romantic tradition
All novels are Romantic in the sense that they defy generic categories, combining poetry and philosophy, reportage and fantasy. "Der Roman ist ein romantisches Buch" ("The novel is a Romantic book"), according to Friedrich Schlegel, one of the greatest of Romantic theoreticians.1 But to speak more strictly, there is such a thing as a Romantic novel, as distinct from other types of novels (realist, science-fiction, etc.). The Romantic novel, mainly cultivated by the German Romantics (Schlegel, Novalis, Eichendorff and, to some extent, Goethe), is a free, lyrical form, often incorporating lyric poetry, concerned less with linear plot than with the exploration of inner spiritual states, of love, the mystical and the supernatural. Another type of novel that may be termed "Romantic" is the tale of exotic adventure in the manner of Chateaubriand and Scott. Both these types of Romantic novel are represented in Russian literature of the early nineteenth century, but only among the works of second-rank writers like Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, Aleksandr Odoevskii, and Nikolai Polevoi. The first two great Russian novels, Aleksandr Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin (1823-31, published in full 1831) and Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1840), are already engaged in a struggle with Romanticism that in its intensity and explicitness goes well beyond the self-conscious play known as "Romantic irony."2 From the very beginning the Russian novel, unlike the Russian lyric poem, stands to one side of Romanticism, engaging in dialogue with it but not belonging to it. In this essay I will first provide an overview of the various ways Russian novelists have confronted Romanticism, and then discuss in more detail the reflection of the Romantic legacy, specifically Romantic poetry, in three novels: Fedor Dostoevskii's The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Andrei Belyi's Petersburg (1913-14, 1916), and Andrei Bitov's Pushkin House (1964-71, published in full in 1978).
It is inevitable that so amorphous and multifarious a concept as Romanticism means different things to different people. Within the Russian
context, the general idea of Romanticism has given rise to variants such as "Romantic Realism" (the fantastic, Gothic realism of Dostoevskii and Gogol), and "Revolutionary Romanticism," the literary mode proposed by Soviet writers and critics in the 1920s to capture the heroic and elemental qualities of the Revolution.3 As might be expected, Russian novelists differ widely in the ways they interpret Romanticism. For Lermontov, Romanticism is primarily the cult of Byron. In many of his lyric poems he explores the Byronic persona: the talented, sensitive, but disillusioned and bitter man whose best hopes and aspirations have been thwarted by the unfeeling world. In Lermontov's lyric this persona is, for the most part, presented with a straight face, but in his great novel it is embodied with savage irony in the compelling but often ludicrous figure of Pechorin, sarcastically dubbed the "hero of our time." Pushkin had, of course, begun the work of demolishing the Byronic hero in Evgenii Onegin. Later hypostases include Bazarov, the hero of Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Children (1862), who begins as a hard-headed nihilist rejecting all forms of Romantic idealism but ends by committing what amounts to suicide (dissecting a typhus victim without gloves) in grief over an unrequited love. One of the most complex examples of late-Romantic ironization of the Romantic hero is Karolina Pavlova's poema, Quadrille (1843-59). A poema (narrative poem) in form but a novel in spirit, Quadrille offers a feminine perspective on the death of Russian Romanticism, in which the hitherto naive heroine is finally allowed to see through the Byronic hero and to liberate herself from his moral (or immoral) influence.
An essential component of the Byronic myth is the exaltation of Napoleon as a world-historical figure (see, for example, Byron's "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte" and "Napoleon's Farewell," and Lermontov's "The Last New Home"). The Romantic individualist cult of Napoleon, and his status as a hero capable of influencing the course of human affairs for better or worse, is thoroughly and systematically dismantled by Lev Tolstoi, in his anti-heroic War and Peace (1865-69). Tolstoi's theory of history as the study of the laws common to all the equal and inseparably interconnected infinitesimal elements of free will, rather than the study of the movements of "great men," has its narrative counterpart in his presentation of Napoleon as a character in the novel. The "great man" becomes just another supernumerary on Tolstoi's epic stage, and far from the most interesting one.
Nikolai Gogol assimilated German Romantic aesthetic theories early in his career. His collection of stories and essays Arabesques (1835) displays at every turn the influence of German thinkers and their Russian popular-izers. In his novel Dead Souls (1842), this legacy survives in the scene of
Pliushkin's overgrown garden, an aesthetic manifesto that asserts the beauty of imperfection, ruin, entanglement, and fragmentation. Such is the beauty of Dead Souls, which combines grotesquely naturalistic descriptions of Russian provincial life with exalted lyrical effusions, which has very little plot and no ending, but which is nevertheless one of the most artistically successful of Russian novels. The novel closest to Dead Souls in setting and spirit is Fedor Sologub's The Petty Demon (1907), and here again a Romantic aesthetic is provocatively combined with a sharply satirical view of a godforsaken Russian provincial town. The fin-de-siècle Symbolist movement to which Sologub belonged, in its preoccupation with the mystical and transcendental, is a neo-Romantic movement. The Petty Demon is a compendium of the late-Romantic obsessions catalogued in Mario Praz's classic study The Romantic Agony: the demonic, the beauty of the horrid, sado-masochism, androgyny, and synesthesia (the perception of one sense modality in terms of another). This novel's aesthetic manifesto is Charles Baudelaire's 1857 poem "Correspondances," in which "man walks through forests of symbols / That observe him with familiar glances." In a characteristically Russian twist, Baudelaire's lyric persona is parodied in the figure of the paranoid schoolteacher Peredonov, who feels that nature is full of petty human emotions, and that the trees are whispering about him and the sun is spying on him from behind a cloud.
Romanticism remains an important element in the twentieth-century Russian novel. The Master and Margarita (1928-40), by Mikhail Bulgakov, includes among its array of intertextual references many allusions to works of Romantic art, particularly works belonging to the year 1830: Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir {The Red and the Black), Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (Fantastic Symphony), Pushkin's Skupoi rytsar' {The Covetous Knight).4More important, The Master and Margarita is one of the most brilliant examples in Russian literature of the use of the supernatural, introduced by Romantic writers at the beginning of the nineteenth century under the influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann, among others. In The Master and Margarita, the Gospel account of the Crucifixion is retold in a way that downplays the supernatural, in the Master's realistically textured novel about Pontius Pilate. The charged symbols of Biblical discourse (the fig tree, Christ's garments at the foot of the Cross) are transformed into passing incidental details in a naturalistically observed scene. The Master has turned Holy Writ into a historical document reminiscent of the "historical Jesus" movement in Biblical scholarship. At the same time, the Moscow of the 1930s, in which materialism would seem to have triumphed, is invaded by supernatural forces, as conventional figures of speech ("The Devil take me," "Off with his head") are instantly
and magically realized by the Devil's henchmen. The Master's novel invests the narrative of an event long shrouded in legend with the detailed texture and believability of an eyewitness account; the magical and miraculous is transferred to the contemporary scene, forced upon homo Sovieticus through the agency of the quintessential Romantic hero, the Devil.
One of the most explicit statements on Romanticism by a twentieth-century writer is to be found in Boris Pasternak's autobiographical work Safe Conduct (1931). Pasternak sees in Vladimir Maiakovskii an exponent of the "Romantic manner," which he formulates as the understanding of life as the life of the poet. Pasternak claims that in order to "protect" Maiakovskii from the vulgarity of the similarities between the two of them, he has made a conscious decision to avoid the Romantic manner in his own work. Pasternak sees the Romantic world view as a seductive variant of Orphism and Christianity, in which the poet "posits himself as the measure of life and pays for this with his own life" (Part ill, chapter 11).5 The falsity of the Romantic manner lies in the poet's need for an audience of non-poets, the evil of mediocrity: "Romanticism always needs philistinism, and without the petty bourgeoisie it loses half its content" (part 3, chapter 11).
Although in 1931 Pasternak claimed to have purged his own work of "the Romantic manner," in his novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) he offers a poet-hero who, like his real-life counterparts, Maiakovskii and Esenin, partakes of the Orphic-Christian myth. Iurii Zhivago "needs philistinism" in the best Romantic tradition; near the end of the novel, while listening to his friends discussing intellectual topics, he thinks, "The only vivid and bright thing in you is that you have lived at the same time as I have and you have known me" (part xv, chapter 7). This is an echo of Christ's words in the last of the "Poems of Iurii Zhivago," "Garden of Gethsemane": "God has given you the honor / To live during my days." Similarly, the lyric hero of the first poem, "Hamlet," states, "I am alone, everything sinks into Pharisaism." Zhivago clearly "posits himself as the measure of life," the novel is steeped in what Keats called (in relation to Wordsworth) the "egotistical sublime." Nature is constantly echoing the thoughts of Zhivago, sympathizing with him, expressing his essence: "The winter evening breathed an unprecedented sympathy, like a witness who felt it all along with him. It was as if it had never grown dark in this way before, and as if evening were falling for the first time only today, in order to console him, a person orphaned and fallen into loneliness" (part xiv, chapter 13).6
The intensity of Zhivago's sense of his own individuality is seconded by the highly Romantic concept of Christianity that is threaded through the novel, presented as the teachings of Zhivago's philosopher uncle. In a brilliant passage comparing the parting of the Red Sea to the Virgin Birth,
it emerges that in Christianity's new dispensation, the story of the free human personality has come to replace the epic of nations and leaders: "The individual human life became the story of God, and it filled the expanses of the universe with its content" (part XIII, section 17). Zhivago's Romantic individualism is undoubtedly meant to counter the traces of "Revolutionary Romanticism" that survive in the Socialist Realist novel, in which the Old Testament focus on nations and leaders remains in force.
Beginning with Evgenii Onegin, Russian literature has been interested as much in Romantic readers as in the Romantic writer. By Romantic readers I mean readers who identify too strongly with the literature they read, who seek to live their lives according to the books they read, who confuse their own personalities with the personality of the author or characters. In Russian literature the paradigm of the Romantic reader is Tatiana, who falls instantly in love with Onegin because she thinks she already knows him from Richardson's novels. The most famous example in world literature is Flaubert's heroine Emma Bovary, whose prosaic marriage is doomed by comparison with the Romantic visions she has imbibed from her schoolgirl reading. (Romantic reading is often called "bovarism"; in view of Tatiana's historical priority, "larinism" might be more appropriate.) Romantic literature as a whole conduces to the folly of Romantic reading, but the Romantic lyric in particular, with its emphasis on the immediate expression of individual feelings and with the illusion of spontaneity it achieves by eschewing prescribed genres, seems to invite the reader to merge his own "I" with the "I" of the lyric persona. Paradoxically, the most personal of literary expressions is the most transferable to readers removed from the author in time and place, because it seems to have freed the individual of the constraints of society, history, and convention.
As I have said, it is hard to find a distinctly Romantic work among the masterpieces of Russian prose. The greatest works of Russian Romanticism are works of lyric poetry by Pushkin, Lermontov, Evgenii Baratynskii, Fedor Tiutchev, and others. So for the later Russian novel, the quotation of lyric poems is one way of infusing the Romantic spirit into an otherwise realist, modernist, or postmodernist work. When poetry is quoted by characters in a prose narrative, the problem of Romantic reading comes to the fore. I will now consider the role played by the Romantic reading of poetry in three works that brilliantly represent three stages in the post-Romantic development of the Russian novel: psychological realism The Brothers Karamazov (1880), modernism Petersburg (1913-14, 1916), and Soviet postmodernism Pushkin House (1964-71).
Dostoevskii is a good geneticist. When he describes the personalities of a
character's parents, one can be sure that the parents' traits will be subtly but distinctly reflected in the character's own personality. Much has been made of Alesha Karamazov's vivid memory of his mother praying to an icon of the Mother of God, a memory that clearly plays a strong role in Alesha's life of spiritual striving under the guidance of Father Zosima.7 But less attention has been paid to Dmitrii's legacy from bis mother. Unlike Alesha and Ivan's mother, the daughter of an obscure deacon whose sons gravitate naturally to the clergy and the radical intelligentsia, Dmitrii's mother is a member of the nobility whose son just as naturally becomes a dissolute army officer. She belongs to what the narrator calls the "Romantic generation." Accordingly, her act of virtual suicide in marrying the disgusting Fedor Karamazov is characterized by a phrase from Lermontov, "the irritation of a captive mind" (book 1, chapter 1).8 Although the phrase is taken from one of Lermontov's most anti-Romantic poems, "Ne ver' sebe" ("Do not trust yourself," 1839), which questions the usefulness and morality of poetry and inspiration, the phrase itself, in Lermontov as in Dostoevskii, is a characterization of the Romantic personality. Thus Dmitrii's Romantic pedigree is established: along with her more obvious traits (passion, boldness, impatience, physical strength) Dmitrii has inherited his mother's link to Romanticism. Indeed the spirit of Russian Romantic lyric poetry plays as vital a role in his fate as devotion to the image of Christ plays in Alesha's.
Dmitrii bears many of the outward signs of the Russian Romantic poet. His early career is markedly similar to that of Lermontov: military service in the Caucasus, duelling, carousing, promotion for exemplary service alternating with disgrace and demotion. Although he possesses great physical strength, his face expresses "something sickly" (book 11, chapter 6), an echo of Lermontov's description of poetic inspiration in "Don't trust yourself": "It is the heavy delirium of your sick soul."9 His gaze is abstracted, like that of someone listening to an inner voice, a stereotypical feature of the Romantic poet. Most strikingly, in his "confession in verse" to Alesha, Dmitrii explicitly identifies himself with Afansasii Fet's definition of the lyric poet. In an essay on Tiutchev, Fet claims that the poet must combine insane daring with extreme caution. The former quality is expressed in a metaphor that Dostoevskii ridiculed in his 1861 article "Mr. Dobroliubov and the Problem of Art." "Whoever is incapable of throwing himself head first out of the seventh floor, in the unshakeable faith that he will soar into the sky, is not a lyric poet."10 Dmitrii repeatedly promises to accomplish a similar feat: "If I'm going to fly into the abyss, then I'll go straight into it, head first and heels up"; "tomorrow I'll fly from the clouds . . . Have you ever experienced, have you ever dreamed how it feels when
you fall off a mountain into a deep pit? Well, I'm flying now, and not in a dream" (book III, chapter 3).
Despite all this, Dmitrii is not a writer of lyric poetry; his complete works consist of three lines of fairly crude verse. He is, however, a reader of lyric poetry. Somehow, somewhere, something inspired this seemingly brutish and debauched army officer to devour and memorize - and take to heart - reams of verse. In chapter 3 of book in, "The Confession of an Ardent Heart. In Verse," Dmitrii speaks to Alesha in a monologue that is a tissue of poetic quotations.11 Their talk takes place in a typically Romantic setting, a gazebo in an overgrown garden. We are even told that the gazebo was built about fifty years ago, i.e. circa 1816, the heyday of Russian Romanticism. The gazebo is decayed and rotten, like Romanticism itself in the 1860s, but Dmitrii's confession demonstrates that the spirit of Romanticism has not decayed.
The main poet Dmitrii quotes in this scene is Friedrich Schiller, who in Germany is not considered a Romantic writer. But Dmitrii does not read Schiller as a German writer; he admits to Alesha that the title "An die Freude" is the only German he knows. He reads Schiller in the translations of Vasilii Zhukovskii and Fedor Tiutchev, translations that are monuments of Russian Romantic poetry in their own right. In the Diary of a Writer of June 1876, Dostoevskii claimed that Schiller had been absorbed into the Russian soul through the translations of Zhukovskii and had given his name to a period in the history of Russian cultural development. For Dostoevskii and many other Russians, the period of "Schillerism" is virtually synonymous with "Romanticism."
Dmitrii is a Romantic reader of poetry: he reads the lines as though they had been directed at him personally. For example, he recites a passage from Zhukovskii's translation of Schiller's "Das Eleusische Fest" ("The Eleusin-ian Festival," 1798), which describes the brutality and degradation of pre-agricultural humanity and ends with the following lines:
No matter where Ceres looks
With her sad eyes -
She sees man everywhere
In deep degradation! (book 111, chapter 3)
It is truly tempting to read this scene of a bereft mother beholding the spectacle of human debasement as having direct reference to the Karamazov story, and Dmitrii does not resist the temptation: "In degradation, my friend, in degradation even now . . . Brother, I think of almost nothing else than that degraded man, if only I'm not lying … I think about that man because I myself am such a man" (book in, chapter 3). Dmitrii makes
a similar move after quoting (out of order) two stanzas from Tiutchev's translation of Schiller's "An die Freude" ("To Joy," 1785). The final four lines that Dmitrii quotes describe the gifts of Joy:
She has given us friends in misfortune,
The juice of fruit, the wreaths of the muses,
To insects - sensuality. . .
The angel - is to stand before God! (book III, chapter 3)
Dmitrii again reads these lines as referring to him personally: "Brother, I am that very insect, and this was said specifically about me" (book III, chapter 3).
In this scene and throughout the novel, Dmitrii's Romantic reading is naive, perhaps, but by no means foolish. Richard Peace has demonstrated that when Dmitrii learns of the cult of Mother Earth from Schiller's ode to Ceres ("Das Eleusische Fest"), he is making contact with a source of spiritual redemption that has its counterpart in Alesha's kissing of the earth after Zosima's death.12 The theme of wine and drunkenness (marked repeatedly in the various Russian texts Dmitrii quotes by the word kubok, "goblet") is of similar importance. Not only is the drinking of wine seen as a sacred, bonding ritual in "The Eleusinian Festival" and "Ode to Joy," but in a poem Dmitrii quotes later, Schiller's "Das Siegesfest" ("The Victory Feast," 1803) in Tiutchev's translation, wine is a healing elixir:
As soon as blessed wine Begins to gleam in the feasting cup, Our sorrow will tumble into Lethe And go like a key to the bottom.13
Dmitrii's resolution, inspired by Schiller, to enter into a holy bond with Mother Earth has its counterpart in Alesha's watering of the earth with his tears. Alesha's epiphany is triggered by his vision of the first Gospel miracle, the marriage at Cana, in which Christ provided wine for a human celebration: "It was not people's sorrow but their joy that Christ shared when he performed a miracle for the first time, he helped human joy . . . One cannot live without joy, Mitia says" (book VII, chapter 4). It is no accident that Alesha thinks of Dmitrii at this moment, for the high significance of wine as messenger and consecrator of human joy is another of the lessons Dmitrii has learned from Schiller-Zhukovskii-Tiutchev. At the moment Alesha is kissing the earth, Dmitrii is bringing wine to a human feast, the party at Mokroe where he and Grushenka acknowledge their love.
Russian Romantic verse continues to sound in Dmitrii's head throughout
his ordeal. He is sustained during his interrogation by a line from Tiutchev's "Silentium" (1830?), a line that reminds him that his tormentors cannot have access to his inner world, the world of his soul: "Molchi, skryvaisia i tai I chuvstva i mechty svoi" ("Be silent, hide yourself and conceal / Your feelings and dreams") (Tiutchev, Lirika, vol. 1, p. 46). Although Dmitrii remembers the line in a garbled version, "Terpi, smiriaisia i molchi" ("Be patient, be humble, and be silent") (book iv, chapter 4), he correctly applies the poem's moral to his own situation, refusing for as long as possible to allow the interrogators into what he calls his "private life," his inner spiritual world.14 An even more important moment in which Dmitrii is visited by the spirit of verse comes somewhat earlier: it is his moment of truth in the garden, when he finds himself on the verge of murdering his own father.
When Dmitrii stands in the garden looking into his father's window and sees the old debauchee craning his neck to watch for Grushenka, his greatest fear is realized: he is overcome by physical revulsion for his father, the "personal loathing" that he knows will tempt him to murder. In an earlier novel, The Insulted and Injured (1861), Dostoevskii established that it is precisely "Schilleresque natures" who are overcome by murderous impulses when faced with the physical embodiment of moral corruption. In a brilliant scene, the novel's narrator, a Petersburg dreamer, has a long conversation with the depraved Prince Valkovskii, who repeatedly mocks him as a "Schiller." The narrator is overcome by a wave of revulsion as he looks at the Prince: "He produced on me the impression of some kind of slimy creature, some kind of huge spider that I wanted terribly to squash" (part III, chapter 10). Perceptive as all Dostoevskii's villains are, Valkovskii accurately describes the narrator's feelings: "What are you angry at? Just at my external appearance, isn't that right?" (part III, chapter 10).
At this crucial moment in The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitrii is for some reason saved from committing the crime that his jealousy and outraged moral feelings are urging him to perpetrate. He offers several interpretations for his decision to turn away from the window without harming his father: God or a guardian angel was watching over him, a bright spirit kissed him, or his mother prayed to God for him (book VIII, chapter 4; book ix, chapter 5). Moments after mentioning his mother to the interrogators, Dmitrii mocks his own story in terms that are highly significant: "Having tragically described how I wanted to kill him and how I had already pulled out the pestle, I suddenly ran away from the window … A poem! In verse!" (book ix, chapter 5). It would seem that "a poem in verse" is used here as a synonym for "fairy tale," but combined with Dmitrii's mention of his mother a moment earlier it reminds us that his legacy from his mother is the legacy of Romantic poetry and the high moral teachings
Dmitrii has been able to draw from it. It is no accident that two lines of verse, one by Pushkin and one by himself, float through Dmitrii's head as he stands in the garden: " 'I tol'ko shepchet tishina', - mel'knul pochemu-to etot stishok v golove ego" ("'And only the silence whispers,' - this little line of verse flashed through his head for some reason") (book VIII, chapter 4). "'Kalina, iagody, kakie krasnye!' - prosheptal on, ne znaia zachem" ("'The guelder-rose, the berries, how red they are,' - he whispered, not knowing why") (book VIII, chapter 4).15 Dmitrii does not know why either of these snatches of verse is visiting him at this moment. But the reader does know, if he has read attentively. Dmitrii was a neglected child who never really knew his mother, and learned from his father only about the deep degradation in which humanity abides. Although his mother's Romanticism led her rashly to abandon him, it also sank deep into his soul and made him receptive to another, higher vision of humanity, the vision offered by Schiller, Zhukovskii, and Tiutchev. At the moment of his greatest temptation, it is this vision that prevails.
In Notes from Underground (1864), the narrator characterizes the Russian Romantic in terms that are certainly applicable to Dmitrii: "Our Romantic is a broad person and the foremost rogue among all our rogues, I assure you of this . . . We have many 'broad natures,' who even in their final fall never lose their ideal . . . only among us can the most inveterate scoundrel be completely and even loftily honest in his soul, at the same time not ceasing in the least to be a scoundrel" (part 11, chapter 1). Dmitrii's view of human nature as a whole is very close to this view of the Russian Romantic: "Even more terrible is the person who already has the ideal of Sodom in his soul but does not deny the ideal of the Madonna either. . . Man is broad, even too broad, I would narrow him." The two lines of verse that Dmitrii himself composes and recites to Alesha and later to the civil servant Petr Perkhotin are an appeal to the nobler part of his own "broad nature": "Glory to the Highest in the world, / Glory to the Highest in me!" (book III, chapter 3; book VIII, chapter 5). These lines have an important counterpart in Russian poetry. They are a naive version of Fet's encomium to Schiller:
Your voice continually calls
To that which is human in man
And that which will not die in the immortal.16
Romantic reading can lead to foolish choices, to blindness and self-delusion, as in the cases of Tatiana and Emma Bovary. But in the morally desolate world of the Karamazovs, Dmitrii's naive, enthusiastic reading of
Russian Romantic poetry helps him to "narrow" his own broad nature to give "that which is human in man" precedence over insect lust.
In Andrei Belyi's modernist masterpiece Petersburg, Romanticism is mainly associated with the two major female characters, Anna Petrovna Ableukhova and Sofia Petrovna Likhutina. Anna Petrovna, like one of Turgenev's maidens, pours roulades of Chopin out into the Petersburg night in the days before she abandons her husband and son for an Italian singer. The narrator specifies that Anna Petrovna played Chopin, not Schumann. Thus he identifies her with the kind of Romantic piano music that borders on kitsch rather than Schumann's music, which Belyi so aptly called "the Romanticism of realism, tragic to the point of madness."17 The endearingly silly Sofia Petrovna's Romantic reading is of Pushkin; it is based not on Pushkin's texts but on Pushkin re-Romanticized by Tchaikovsky in his opera The Queen of Spades (1890). Sofia Petrovna mentally reproaches Nikolai Apollonovich for failing to be Hermann, the hero of Pushkin's story and Tchaikovsky's opera, and thus depriving her of the opportunity to be the heroine Liza (chapter 3). Nikolai Apollonovich is indeed unlike the dashing, Byronic hero of Tchaikovsky's opera, but in his vulgarity and backfiring ambition he is not very different from the petty bourgeois hero of Pushkin's story.
A less obvious and predictable instance of Romantic reading is associated with Nikolai Apollonovich's father, the cold and mechanical bureaucrat Apollon Apollonovich. Disturbed by the growing unrest among the masses in 1905 Petersburg and by the recent assassination of his colleague Viacheslav Konstantinovich Pleve, Minister of the Interior, Apollon Apollonovich begins to hear in his head a persistent refrain made up of several Pushkin poems, three in particular. To understand how Belyi uses the Pushkin subtexts in this episode it will help to review the poems themselves and their place in Pushkin's career. The earliest is "Chem chashche prazdnuet litsei" ("The more our Lycée celebrates," 1831), written on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the opening of the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée that Pushkin attended from 1811 to 1817. The poem is haunted by the recent deaths of several classmates, particularly Anton Delvig, one of Pushkin's closest poetic colleagues. The second poem (in order of composition, not of appearance in Petersburg) is a highly personal lyric, "Pora, moi drug, pora! Pokoia serdtse prosit" ("It's time, my dear, it's time! My heart asks for peace," 1834), addressed to Pushkin's wife at a time when he was trying desperately (and unsuccessfully) to obtain permission from the Tsar to retire from government service and devote himself to quiet family life and poetic labor in the country. The last poem is the last Lycée anniversary poem, "Byla pora: nash prazdnik molodoi" ("There was a time: our young
festival," 1836). This poem differs from the 1831 anniversary poem in its greater emphasis on Russian history than on personal ties; while still focused on mortality, it speaks of the passing of tsars and emperors rather than intimate friends. The poem is left unfinished; as soon as Pushkin turns from the exploits of Alexander I to those of his nemesis Nicholas I, he breaks off the poem in the middle of a line. According to witnesses at the October Lycée celebration, Pushkin was prevented by emotion from finishing his reading of the poem. He was to die in January of the following year.
Despite the fact that these three poems are so intimately tied to events in Pushkin's life, Apollon Apollonovich, like any good Romantic reader, manages to apply them to his own situation. In chapter 1, after glimpsing a portrait of Pleve, Apollon Apollonovich recalls a line from the 1836 Lycée poem: "And he is no more - and he has left Russia." Apollon Apollonovich immediately asks himself "Who is he?" In Pushkin's poem, "he" is Tsar Alexander I, under whose reign the Lycée was opened in 1811, on the eve of Napoleon's invasion of Russia. But Apollon Apollonovich, after first considering himself to be "he," settles confidently on Pleve (p. 36). The answer to the next question - "And he, Apollon Apollonovich?" - is somewhat more complicated. The question is followed by two lines from the 1831 Lycée poem: "And it seems to me that it's my turn, / My beloved Delvig is calling me." Apollon Apollonovich identifies himself with the lyric persona; in a situation in which terrorist acts and assassinations are multiplying, the phrase "it's my turn" is fraught with ominous significance for him. This idea leads naturally to the final lines of Pushkin's unfinished 1836 poem, "And new storm clouds have gathered over the earth / And their hurricane . . ." The context of these lines is left unclear in Pushkin's fragment, but for Apollon Apollonovich they clearly refer to the unrest of 1905.
Pushkin's lines resurface in chapter 2, in a section entitled "My beloved Delvig is calling me." This scene occurs at the exact moment that Nikolai Apollonovich is receiving the bomb that is meant to assassinate his father Apollon Apollonovich. Accordingly, the forebodings of death already associated with the name Delvig are intensified here. Apollon Apollono-vich's train of thought in this scene is subtly described. First the coldness of his offices reminds him of a time fifty years ago when he nearly froze to death while at his country estate:
At that hour of his solitary freezing it was as though someone's cold fingers, heartlessly poking their way into his breast, stiffly stroked his heart: an icy hand led him on; led by the icy hand he climbed up the steps of his career,
having ever before his eyes that same, fatal, unbelievable space; there, from there, - beckoned the icy hand; and boundlessness flew: the Russian Empire.
This reminds him of a conversation with Pleve in which Apollon Apollonovich called Russia an "icy plain"; the memory of Pleve again calls up the lines from Pushkin about Alexander I, followed by a more extensive fragment about Delvig, followed again by the lines about the "hurricane." The use of the name "Delvig" in this section is typical of the virtuosity of Belyi's intertextual play. At first glance it would seem that the figure of Delvig, an indolent, pleasure-loving littérateur and master of Russified classical meters, has little in common with the stiff, soulless bureaucratic world of Pleve and Ableukhov. But in Russian cultural history the name "Delvig" has numerous connections to the semantic fields of "coldness" and "death," the major themes of this section, (1) Delvig was the editor of the almanac Severnye tsvety (Northern Flowers), (2) Pushkin's 1829 riddle on Delvig's name begins, "Kto na snegakh vozrastil feokritovy nezhnye rozy?" ("Who managed to grow the tender roses of Theocritus in the snows?"). (3) In his Table-Talk Pushkin adduced an aphorism by Delvig that has become famous as a characterization of mystical verse: "Chem blizhe ? nebu, tern kholodnee" ("The closer to heaven, the colder"). (4) There is a paronomastic connection between the name Delvig and Belyi's repeated word "ledianaia" ("icy"). (5) Delvig died at 33, and was then remembered fondly and frequently by his numerous literary friends. In the letters and poems of the Pushkin circle, "going to embrace Delvig" becomes a euphemism for "dying."
Of course all of this has less to do with Apollon Apollonovich's consciousness than with the author's designs; it is not by chance that the author has partly taken over the task of quoting Pushkin, by making a line from the 1831 poem the heading of the section. In its approach to characterization Petersburg is not in fact a Romantic work, and interest in any individual character's psychology is not maintained for long before being subordinated to the complex symphony of motifs orchestrated by the author figure. By the time the Delvig poem next appears in chapter 7 it is just one more in a series of mechanically repeated refrains, issuing rhythmically from the mindlessly mumbling mouth of the ruined Apollon Apollonovich. The third Pushkin poem, "It's time, my dear, it's time! My heart asks for peace," undergoes a similar process. The first time it appears, in chapter 4, it serves to remind Apollon Apollonovich of a personal problem he has repressed. Pushkin's lyric persona speaks of plans to live with his partner vdvoem ("together as a couple"). Apollon Apollonovich is moved to figure out who could possibly be the other half of his own couple:
surely not his scapegrace son, or the common man of the Petersburg streets. This questioning leads him to remember his lost wife:
Apollon Apollonovich recalled that at one time he intended to live out his life with Anna Petrovna, to move to a little dacha in Finland after ending his government service, but, after all, you know: Anna Petrovna left - yes sir, she left! . . . Apollon Apollonovich grasped that fact that he had no life companion (up until this moment he somehow hadn't had time to remember).
Despite this moment of psychological insight, the next time the poem appears it has been appropriated - and rewritten - by the author and used as the epigraph to chapter 7. The word pora ("it's time") has been replaced by ustal ("I'm tired"), in a metaliterary allusion to the approaching end of the monumental and truly tiring (for author and reader) novel.
Apollon Apollonovich's end combines the motifs of the three poems: the "hurricane" of revolution has sent him into retirement, reunited with his life companion and awaiting death among the snows, where he sees only teni i teni ("shades and shades" or "shadows and shadows"), that recall the tolpa tenei rodnykh ("crowd of beloved shades"), in the midst of which Delvig dwells. But by this time the implications of Apollon Apollonovich's Romantic reading have been forgotten, submerged in the more grandiose schemes of a novel that is fundamentally uninterested in the individual personality.
In his novel Pushkin House, Andrei Bitov takes Romantic reading one step further: his hero is a literaturoved-romantik ("literary scholar-Romantic") whose article on Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tiutchev is retold in exhaustive detail by the narrator.18 Although Leva Odoevtsev is a professional scholar, his article on the "Prophet" poems of Pushkin and Lermontov and Bezumie ("Madness") by Tiutchev is really about himself, as the narrator repeatedly reminds us: "It is as fresh as ever because it is not about Pushkin, not about Lermontov, and especially not about Tiutchev, but about him. About Leva" (part 1). Indeed the story Leva tells about the three poets -the imperturbable genius Pushkin, the callow adolescent Lermontov, and the treacherous envier Tiutchev - has more to do with Leva's personal life as depicted in the novel than with literary-historical fact. Later Leva realizes that in this article he has been guilty of the same fault of which he accuses Lermontov: an excessive focus on his personal "I" (part 111).
But Leva's "I" also implies the "I" of the author figure, who presents Leva's article in his own voice, with ironic asides, corrections, and comments. The epigraph chosen for this section identifies the author with the scavenging narrator of Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time: "Recently I learned that Pechorin had died on his way back from Persia. This news
made me very glad; it gave me the right to publish these notes, and I took advantage of the opportunity to put my name on someone else's work. God grant that my readers not punish me for this innocent forgery!" (Appendix to part II ). As at least one Russian critic has pointed out, Leva's Romantic reading provides the author-figure with a mask to cover his own Romantic reading: "One might say that, making use of his Leva, A. Bitov enters into familiar contact with the great poets."19 Thus the author of Pushkin House joins the long Russian tradition that he himself identifies: the tradition of "one-sided personal relationships with Pushkin" (Appendix to part ?). His Romantic reading has to do not with personal experience, as Leva's does, but with his own artistic choices.
Although Bitov would probably reject the label "postmodernist," the intertextuality of Pushkin House is rather postmodernist than modernist, as I will explain below. Leva's current scholarly project is a grandiose one: defining the "I" of Pushkin, seen as a muteness, the epicenter of a typhoon, "where there is peace, the point from which the invulnerable genius looks out" (part III). For the postmodern writer, the pure and clear invulnerability of Pushkin's "I" is no longer attainable.20 Like Leva's imagined Tiutchev, the contemporary writer has fallen into a knowing disingenuousness that is paradoxically more self-betraying than Pushkin's candor:
[Tiutchev] is the first to hide something . . . and as a result he, the one who controls everything so well, does not express himself, but ends up being expressed . . . Only candor is elusive and invisible, it is poetry; lack of candor, even at its most artful, is visible, it is a stamp, craftsmanship's mark of Cain -and, by the way, this kind of craftsmanship is close and contemporary to us in spirit. (Appendix to part II)
The "mark of Cain" in Pushkin House is the thicket of quotations, both explicit and implicit, from pre-Revolutionary Russian literature that are used by the author to distance himself from the human dimension of Leva and his story.
Bitov's intertextuality is fundamentally different from Belyi's. Belyi the modernist is still at home in the tradition. He is free and unselfconscious in his quotations of myriad sources, from the most esoteric philosophical texts to popular songs. The postmodernist - especially Soviet - writer is alienated from the history of culture, which has been preserved and petrified by hegemonic forces. Culture is a museum, not a living presence. It is no accident that the climactic scene of Pushkin House involves the drunken smashing of the exhibit cases in the eponymous institution, the Soviet Union's most prestigious literary museum. When Belyi quotes, he ranges freely and widely, according to his own erudite whim; Bitov plods
predictably through the Soviet school syllabus, as the author openly admits (part II). (In this if in nothing else, Bitov is close to the avowedly postmodernist poet Dmitrii Prigov, whose literary allusions are not dense and obscure like Mandelstam's, but restricted to the range of texts that every Soviet schoolchild should know.)
There is a good excuse for the Soviet writer and reader to lack Belyi's erudition, to be poorly educated, to be unfamiliar with works not on the syllabus. In the Soviet context, reading (and quoting) uncanonized works involves considerable effort and risk. Thus the author-figure in Pushkin House is indulgent toward Leva for not knowing Iurii Tynianov's 192.9 article "Pushkin and Tiutchev," which Leva in many ways unknowingly repeats (Appendix to part 11). Can the reader be similarly indulgent toward Bitov for claiming never to have read Belyi's Petersburg?21Bitov, a master of irony and self-mockery, is surely alluding to himself as well as to Leva in his notes to Leva's article as published in the journal Voprosy literatury (Problems of Literature): "The author was also interested in that subtle difference between the 'first' and the 'second,' when the second, for himself, exists with the disinterestedness, the carelessness [literally, 'the lack of looking over his shoulder'] and the passion of the first" ("Tri 'proroka'," p. 166). To put it more bluntly, assuming a pose of willful ignorance can be the only way to free oneself to say one's own word.22
Bitov is the author of a Petersburg novel who claims not to have read Petersburg but who, like Belyi, places Pushkin's works at the center of his novel and ends it with a man contemplating a sphinx. This brings Bitov dangerously close to the "latest village accounts clerk to discover the integral calculus" whom he mocks in Voprosy literatury ("Tri 'proroka'," p. 166). Such feigned ignorance has multiple uses. It can not only empower the author to speak, but can invest his work with added glamor, provided his audience is even more ignorant than he. Bitov displays a sly awareness of this, in the amusing parable he tells about a showing to a supposedly sophisticated Soviet audience of Pasolini's film The Gospel According to Matthew. Half the audience reacts judiciously to the film, the other half is stunned and enraptured. It emerges that ignorance has played a major role in this discrepancy:
The ones who were unconditionally enraptured were the ones who had never read the Gospel, and those who already knew it had a more objective and severe attitude. A simple question-conclusion suggests itself - what produced the impression: the Gospel or the picture itself? The quotation or the film? The honest ones agreed, blushing, that it was the quotation; the dishonest ones agreed without blushing. Thus many of them had been stunned for the
first time by the Gospel, read to them from an interlinear translation by an interpreter sitting in the dark. (part II)
If we take Bitov's self-referential statements seriously, we may conclude that the multitude of obvious, well-worn quotations in Pushkin House are meant to hide the unacknowledged, repressed quotations from works not on the syllabus, the ones that lend their aura to Pushkin House as the Gospel did to Pasolini's film.
The act of looking back to one's predecessors is fraught with anxiety for any writer, but Pushkin House ends with a different anxiety: that of the writer looking forward to a day when his own words will be appropriated and repeated without attribution by a posterity that has forgotten their original source: "Even if the word has been uttered precisely and can survive its own muteness right up to the rebirth of the Phoenix of meaning, does that mean that people will seek it out in the dust of paper, that they will even begin to look for it in its former, let along its true, significance, and won't simply - utter it anew?" (Epilogue). Pushkin House ends here, not with the voice of the grandson looking over his shoulder at the great writers who have preceded him, but with the voice of the grandfather prophesying the inevitable corruption, misreading, even oblivion, into which his words must fall in the future. This is the ultimate identification with the "I" of Pushkin.
The evolution of the significance of Romantic reading from Dostoevskii through Belyi to Bitov reflects the evolution of the Russian novel from realism through modernism to postmodernism. Dostoevskii's focus is on the represented world of his characters and on refining his techniques of depicting their inner lives. Accordingly, Dmitrii Karamazov's Romantic reading has profound psychological significance: it fosters a self-knowledge that saves him from committing a soul-destroying crime. Belyi is only secondarily interested in Apollon Apollonovich's flashes of similar insight; the character's Romantic reading plays a subordinate role, as yet another strand in the motley texture of Belyi's modernist apocalypse. For Bitov, the metaliterary impulse has decisively taken precedence over the mimetic. The Romantic reading of the character Leva is of far less moment than that of his author-creator. Bitov uses the Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tiutchev that he and Leva have created for themselves as a means to artistic self-knowledge and self-revelation. As Friedrich Schlegel said at the dawn of Romanticism, "Many artists who only wanted to write yet another novel have by accident depicted themselves."
NOTES
i. There is some debate as to what Schlegel meant by the word "Roman," which now means "novel," but he certainly included under this rubric works of the type that evolved into the modern novel.
2. Monika Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), has provided an admirably sophisticated and comprehensive account of the role played by Romantic aesthetics and fashions in Pushkin's works. Lermontov awaits a similar study.
3. On Romantic Realism, see Donald Fänger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens and Gogol (University of Chicago Press, 1965). On Revolutionary Romanticism, see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981); C. Vaughan James, Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory (London: Macmillan, 1973); and Gleb Struve, Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin, 1917-1953 (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971).
4. The year 1830 probably points to the year 1930, the year of Maiakovskii's suicide and Bulgakov's telephone call from Stalin. See B. M. Gasparov, "Iz nabliudenii nad motivnoi strukturoi romana M. A. Bulgakova Master i Margarita," Slavica Hierosolymitana, 3 (1978), 198-251.
5. Where no translator is acknowledged, the translations are my own.
6. Compare Pasternak's early poem, "My sister life": "And the sun, going down, expresses its condolences to me."
7. See, for example, Robin Feuer Miller, The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel (New York: Twayne, 1992), pp. 19-26. See also Robert Louis Jackson, Dialogues with Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (Princeton University Press, 1981 ).
8. See the detailed discussion of this passage in Susan Amert, "The Reader's Responsibility in The Brothers Karamazov: Ophelia, Chermashnia, and the Palpable Obscure," in Elizabeth Cheresh Allen and Gary Saul Morson (eds.), Freedom and Responsibility in Russian Literature: Essays in Honor of Robert Louis Jackson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995).
9. M. lu. Lermontov, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, ed. E. E. Naidich, 2 vols. (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', 1989), vol. 2, p. 32. In the same passage Dostoevskii includes one more echo of Lermontov: "On i ot prirody byl razdrazhitelen" ("And he was irritable by nature," emphasis mine).
10. A. A. Fet, Sochineniia, ed. A. E. Tarkhov, 2 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1982), vol. 11, p. 156.
11. The poems Dmitrii quotes were first published in widely accessible journals like Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland) and Biblioteka dlia chteniia (Library for Reading), mainly in the early 1840s. Dostoevskii is careful to establish that Dmitrii quotes only poems that a person like him could reasonably be expected to have access to.
12. Richard Peace, Dostoevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels (Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 222-23.
13. F. I. Tiutchev, Lirika, ed. K. V. Pigarev, 2 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), vol. 11,
p. 131; two earlier lines are quoted by Dmitrii in book VIII, chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamazov.
14. In Dmitrii's flawed memory the line from Tiutchev has been contaminated by the words terpi ("be patient") and smiriaisia ("be humble"), which may come from a Pushkin poem, "Ottsy pustynniki i zheny neporochny" ("Father-hermits and chaste women," 1836). This poem is mentioned during Ivan's conversation with the Devil. There are many connections between Ivan's poetic quotations and Dmitrii's, which there is not room to discuss here. See Frederick T. Griffiths and Stanley J. Rabinowitz, Novel Epics: Gogol, Dostoevsky, and National Narrative (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), pp. 121-22, for a different interpretation of Dmitrii's reading of Schiller.
15. The Pushkin is a garbled quotation from Rustan and Liudmila (1820); the context does not appear to be significant. Dmitrii's utterance is metrically and phonetically shaped like a line (or perhaps two lines) of verse.
16. A. A. Fet, Stikhotvorenniia i poemy, ed. B. la. Bukhshtab (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', 1986), p. 441.
17. Andrei Belyi, "Vospominaniia ? Shteinere" ("Memoirs about Steiner"), manuscript cited in Andrei Belyi, Petersburg, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov (Kiev: Dnipro, 1990), p. 535. Page references to Petersburg are to this edition.
18. The formulation belongs to V. Turbin, in a survey of literary critics conducted by Voprosy literatury [Problems of Literature): "Nuzhny li v literaturovedenii gipotezy?," Voprosy literatury (1977), no. 2, 82-112; this passage is from p. 108. Unable to publish Pushkin House in its entirety in the Soviet Union, Bitov published fragments from it, including his hero's essay on poetry, "Tri 'proroka'" ("Three 'prophets'"; Andrei Bitov, "Tri 'proroka'," Voprosy literatury, (1976), no. 7, 145-74.) This strange hybrid of fiction and literary scholarship was published in a scholarly journal (the above-mentioned Voprosy literatury) and predictably provoked strong reactions from the critics who were asked to respond to the essay in the journal's pages.
19. S. Bocharov, in "Nuzhny li gipotezy," p. 85. Bocharov, perhaps the most brilliant Russian literary scholar alive today, praises the creative insight of Leva-Bitov's reading of Pushkin and Tiutchev.
20. Compare the impassioned remarks by Leva's grandfather: "Pushkin! How you fooled everyone! After you they all thought it was possible, since you could do it . . . But it was only you who could" (Epilogue).
21. See Ellen Chances, Andrei Bitov: The Ecology of Inspiration (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 236, 259; compare Priscilla Meyer, Introduction to Andrei Bitov, Life in Windy Weather: Short Stories (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1986), p. 7.
22. Bitov's narrator and hero of course underestimate the extent to which Pushkin himself "looked over his shoulder"; Pushkin's own richly intertextual works demonstrate that he did not by any means regard himself as "first." Let me note here that the essay "Three 'prophets' " displays a much subtler knowledge of the nineteenth-century literary tradition than the clichéd epigraphs in Pushkin House would suggest.
VICTOR TERRAS
The Realist tradition
Russian, like Western Realism, is best understood as a reaction against Romanticism, as an attempt, then, to reach out to topical mundane reality (Balzac's actualité), renouncing romantic fantasy or escape into an imaginary past and Sentimentalism's abstract discourses on virtue. Realism meant a concern with concrete Russian life, while Romanticism often pursued the exotic and Sentimentalism dealt with humanity in the abstract. In contrast to Romanticism's preoccupation with the extraordinary individual, Realism meant an interest in the concerns of ordinary men and women, in social problems and in the life of the lower classes. Also, Realism meant a faith in literature's calling to be involved in the affairs of real life.
The Russian realist novel, like the realist novel in the West, grew out of existing genres, while often using them as a foil. Gogol's Dead Souls (1842) is formally a picaresque novel. Dostoevskii's Poor Folk (1846) uses the sentimentalist form of the epistolary novel. His The Double (1846) is a "realized" version of a Gothic novel. Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1840) and Tolstoi's Cossacks (1863) "realize" the exotic novel made popular by Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii in the 1830s. Tolstoi's Anna Karenina (1877) came from the tradition of the family novel. Realism also had roots in satire, in the political pamphlet, and in the physiological sketch. Many of the Russian realists were also active as journalists. The role of the serialized roman-feuilleton in the development of the Russian realist novel was significant. Most of the great Russian novels appeared in serialized form, a circumstance that affected not only the novel's composition. The fact that the writing of the novel was still in progress while installments were appearing in print, eliciting critical response, could not fail to have an effect on its content.
The term "realism" (realiztn) was first used by the critic Pavel Annenkov in an essay published in The Contemporary (no. 1, 1849), and was a standard term by the 1860s. But "reality" {deistvitel'nost') was a key term even in the criticism of Nikolai Nadezhdin in the 1830s. His student
Vissarion Belinskii (1811-48) used the term poeziia deistvitel'nosti "poetry of reality") as he championed the realism of the Natural School of the 1830s and 1840s. The notion that literature should deal with real life was taken for granted ever since Belinskii.
The notion of "real life" depends on the beholder. The Christian mystic Dostoevskii no less than the radical materialist Dmitrii Pisarev (1840-68) claimed to be realists. Real life may be perceived as determined mainly by subjective (psychological) or by objective (social) phenomena. As early as 1846 the critic Valerian Maikov remarked that Gogol was a "social," Dostoevskii a "psychological" writer.1 But beyond the psychological and the social lay more fundamental questions: is reality determined by laws, historical or moral, and does history have a meaning, a telos, as was commonly assumed in the nineteenth century? With regard to Russia, Gogol was the first to ask these questions in the famous troika passage of Dead Souls. It remained an issue throughout the century and after. Questions regarding the direction of Russian history were asked with some urgency by all of the writers discussed here, save perhaps Pushkin.
The rift between traditional demands of form (structure, literary conventions, taboos) and empirical reality was a challenge to the realist. And in addition there was the question of the nature of fiction as such: is it at all possible to make it independent from traditional ballast? Is there any truth in Roland Barthes's contention that realist literature fosters the illusion that we perceive reality without the intervention of language, while the contrary is actually true? In Russia, Dostoevskii, for one, claimed that his more strictly "realist" contemporaries were in fact misrepresenting reality when they mechanically copied the language of ordinary life by "writing from the notebook."
The major Russian Realists, including even those who were politically at the far Left, like Mikhail Saltykov and Maksim Gorkii, were actively opposed to Naturalism, that is, to realist fiction not informed by an idea that explained life and served as a vehicle for changing it. The presence of a revelatory principle in the facts of real life is a central feature of Russian Realism. Hegelians, Slavophiles, Populists and Marxists all believed in such a principle, though they disagreed on its nature. Like many of their Western colleagues, Russian Realists were not content merely to describe the world, but aspired to understand and interpret it. They believed that a realist novelist could penetrate the phenomena of individual and social life and reach out for the essence of the human condition. Moreover, a realist's interpretation of social phenomena was assumed to be in step with history and to have prophetic power. Hence his work laid claim to moral value as it promoted the cause of progress.
Particular novelists and novels were challenged on every single one of these points by critics, who saw the essence of human life differently, who disbelieved in the writer's philosophy of history, and who either doubted that literature had much of a beneficial effect on society or denied that the work in question had any. Pisarev brushed off Dostoevskii's subtle psychological analysis of the murderer Raskolnikov's motive in Crime and Punishment (1866), claiming that poverty was the only real motive of the crime. Most critics disagreed with Tolstoi's philosophy of history in War and Peace (1865-69). The works of Dostoevskii and Leskov were denounced as reactionary and harmful by radical and liberal critics. Radical critics like Nikolai Chernyshevskii (1828-89) and Dmitrii Pisarev asserted that the social value of literature was negligible and depended entirely on its straightforwardly didactic quality.
Based on a conviction that the relationship between the world of fiction and that of real life is far more complex than realist novelists suspected, some interpretations of Russian realist novels could never have been contemplated by their authors. Freudian interpretations of novels by Tolstoi and Dostoevskii are a case in point.
The modernist Realism of Russian Left Art of the 1920s abandoned the mimetic position of the nineteenth century, as it made art an instrument of social and political change in a predefined direction. Socialist Realism did this in practice, while paying lip service to a Belinskian realist aesthetic.
The great Russian Realists were acutely aware of their novels as works of art. The novel had advanced to the level of art only in the 1830s, when the notion conceived by Schelling and Hegel, according to which the novel was "half art" or "emergent art" (Kunst im Werden), a new art form proper to a new age, gained acceptance in Russia. Gogol's Dead Souls featured a solemn assertion of the dignity of a realist novel as a "pearl of creation."
Even when the realist novel became the dominant genre of Russian literature, it continued to be, in a way, half art. Novels that were conceived as partisan political statements grew into and were eventually accepted as works of art. Such were The Devils (1872) by Dostoevskii, conceived by his own admission as a political pamphlet, and Anna Karenina (1877) by Tolstoi, conceived as a work with an explicit anti-nihilist tendency, which was toned down in the course of its progress, though still noticed by leftist critics. The question as to what extent a given novel was a work of art, or what made it one, was rarely asked by contemporaries. It has since become the main concern of sophisticated critics in Russia and abroad.
In its heyday, the raison d'être of the Russian realist novel was the discovery and propagation of social, political, or psychological truths. The great Realists perceived their works as pioneering studies of human nature
and of Russian society. Indeed, the Russian realist novel is renowned for its penetrating psychological and sociological observations. Critics responded in kind, either approving or rejecting the novelist's conception, but rarely doubting the artist's cognitive powers in principle. The worst a critic could do to a serious work was to reduce it to the status of make-believe entertainment. Some of Gogol's critics did it to Dead Souls, much to his distress.
A novel's particular discovery tended to be condensed in characters perceived as typical, though presented as individuals: the superfluous man, the new man (or woman) of the 1860s, the repentant nobleman. These types were understood to stand for tendencies in social life, judged to be positive or negative depending on the critic's ideological position. Gon-charov's Oblomov, for example, was a negative type to the radical Nikolai Dobroliubov, a positive type to Apollon Grigorev, a conservative pochvennik ("man of the soil"), with both critics accepting his validity as a type.
The realist novel is the most inclusive and most complex form of verbal art. Inside the "box" of a novel various forms of fiction and non-fiction may be packed, more or less integrated with the whole of the text. Russian, like Western novelists, took advantage of the open form of the novel to introduce into their texts digressive essays, diary pages, Platonic dialogues, novellas, legends, anecdotes, idylls, lyric and descriptive passages, and a variety of other material.
The novel's far-reaching freedoms are the cause of an inherent conflict between causal and extra-causal, as well as between paradigmatic and syntagmatic ordering of its elements. Realism a priori suggests a certain randomness in the organization of events reported, while the art of the novel asks for "a pattern in the rug." Readers are aware of a contract between themselves and the novelist, though some, and especially the greatest novelists, were inclined to violate this contract in matters of detail, such as psychological motivation, circumstantial verisimilitude, and a discernible plot line.
The realist novelist works under the assumption that his work presents a truthful image of objective reality, granted a certain amount of condensation, simplification, and generalization. But unlike the epic poet who remains impersonal and unidentified, the novelist makes his presence felt in a variety of ways and claims a certain authority over the world he creates. He may set up a narrator who is clearly not the implied author and who may or may not play a role in the narrative. He may speak in his own voice, commenting on his narrative in a more or less committed manner. He may straightforwardly, as Tolstoi in Childhood (1852), Adolescence
(1854) and Youth (1857), or ironically, as Dostoevskii in The Double, assume the voice and viewpoint of his hero. He may take a detached position, signalling that he is not a party to the passions played out in his work, as Turgenev does for the most part. He may distance himself from his subject matter intellectually, socially and morally, as Dmitrii Grigor-ovich (1822-99) and other writers dealing with peasant life usually do. He may let the reader know, in a variety of ways, direct or indirect, that his work, while committed to truth, is still a product of his imagination, a work of literature. Finally the writer may use several of these methods in the same novel, as Lermontov does in A Hero of Our Time and Leskov in Cathedral Folk.
Even the realist novelist is at times involved in an exercise of Romantic irony, that is, shifting his point of view from objective statement to self-conscious contemplation. Pushkin in Evgenii Onegin, Gogol in Dead Souls, Dostoevskii in The Brothers Karamazov create ironic narrators who, while a part of the world they describe, are also detached from it. Tolstoi the moralist's ironic view of society finds an extreme form in grotesquely estranged visions of social practices. Turgenev ironically juxtaposes what might or ought to have been to what was. There is also the ironic acquiescence of Aleksei Pisemskii (1821-81) in human frailty, as in An Old Man's Sin (1861), and the grimly sarcastic acceptance of Mikhail Saltykov (1826-89) °f the horrors of Russian life as inevitable necessity, as in The Golovlev family (1875-80).
The tension between the hard facts presented and the manner of their presentation caused some Russian novels to meet with interpretations that were are times diametrically opposed to one another and even to the author's intent. Oblomov, Fathers and Children and The Brothers Karamazov, to name but the most famous, are cases in point. The dialogic quality of all discourse, postulated by Mikhail Bakhtin, may reveal itself through irony, ambiguity, inner dialogue, introduction of "another voice" in the form of parody, quotations, literary echoes and allusions ("intertext") and various forms of connotation, repetition and emphasis ("subtext"). An intensification of the dialogic quality of the text causes its interpretation to become less certain. If the dialogic quality becomes dominant, as it tends to be in Dostoevskii, multiple interpretations are inevitable.
The dialogic quality of the novel represents only one of several dualities inherent in its structure. A dilemma that beset the realist novelist was the contradiction inherent in a pursuit of objective reality that was yet restrained by the strictures of literary convention. The question of determi-nacy versus indeterminacy is a key issue for the realist novel. Motivation (psychological, social, ideological) is its fulcrum, yet a certain amount of
randomness is asked for to create an illusion of real life. The realist novelist must steer a middle course between structured narrative and the indeterminacy of real life. Choosing the novel's limits in terms of an objective form such as biography facilitates this task. Yet realist novelists often choose an artificial structural scheme, such as a dramatic conflict (Dostoevskii's "novel-tragedies"), a journey (Dead Souls), or an hourglass pattern (Evgenii Onegin).
Boris Tomashevskii's distinction between fabula and siuzbet, story and discourse, is particularly important for the realist novel.2 This is true of many Western novels also, but the Russian realist novel was, for long stretches of time, almost the only forum of social and political dialogue, while in the West other outlets were available for civic thought. The great Russian realist novels are story, argument, allegory, entertainment, and a medium for incidental thought, comment, and observation all at once. The art of it is to allow all these elements to blend into a whole.
The Russian realist novel was very much a part of public life. The appearance of a major novel was a public event. The discussion of a novel invariably turned into a discussion of Russian society and its problems of the day. Novelistic characters like Evgenii Onegin, Chichikov, Oblomov, and Bazarov quickly became part of the Russian educated public's mythology. The realist roman à thèse was under the circumstances (censorship, serial publication in journals accessible to a wide readership, a literate and largely partisan audience) well suited to be a medium of public opinion. The nineteenth century believed in causally ordered biography and social history, both of which could be mirrored in a realist novel with a linear plot. When twentieth-century sensibilities moved away from this position, a different type of novel came into existence: Andrei Belyi's Petersburg (1913-14, 1916), Fedor Sologub's The Petty Demon (1907), Aleksei Remizov's The Clock (1908). However, the realist novel made a comeback after the Revolution. Socialist Realism maintained the standards of nineteenth-century Realism by official fiat, but even dissident novels tended to assume the familiar form of a realist novel, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, for example.
The following descriptions of some of the most important Russian novels do not adhere to a set scheme but merely summarize the most salient traits of each work with regard to the issues raised earlier. While all of these works have a legitimate claim to be realist novels, each has special traits that make a schematic presentation unproductive. Deviations from realist poetics, which vary from novel to novel, are pointed out. There is little doubt that all of the writers discussed here meant to express the truth of Russian life as they saw it. However, in each and every case there were
critics who sooner or later stated their disagreement with the author's vision. Some of the novels discussed here, Oblomov and Fathers and Children, for example, became the object of acrimonious critical debate.
Evgenii Onegin (1823-31, published in full in 1833) is a novel of contemporary manners set in St. Petersburg and Moscow upper-class society, and life in a provincial manor house. It describes a stable society. Its characters are ordinary, presumably typical members of the gentry, ranging from provincial landowners like the Larins to aristocrats of Petersburg high society. Their serfs appear on the fringes of the narrative, without any glossing over of the harsh facts of serfdom. We hear, in passing, that Onegin replaced corvée with rent and that his serfs blessed him for it. Mme. Larin cuffs her servants and "shaves heads," that is, decides who of her serfs will be sent away to serve in the military. Tatiana's heart-to-heart talk with her nurse reveals the gulf between popular and upper-class culture.
Evgenii Onegin is, as Belinskii put it, an encyclopedia of Russian life, if only the gentry's. We hear about a young gentleman's education, his readings, his daily routine in town and in the country. There are vivid descriptions of theater, ballet, balls and family gatherings, with no implied message other than that life in a provincial manor house has a certain vitality that Petersburg high society lacks. The notion that Evgenii Onegin was the first "superfluous man" in Russian literature was read into the text by Belinskii and soon became standard. Pisarev was more accurate when he said in his essay, "Pushkin and Belinskii" (1865), that Pushkin did not go beyond celebrating the life style of his class, though he did bring to literature such realia as beaver collars and beer mugs, where chlamyses and chalices had reigned before.
Psychological motivation is given sparingly, but is trenchant, rational and convincing. There are no intimations of hidden depths. Onegin chooses to fight a senseless duel with his friend Lenskii, a mere boy, because it is easier than finding a way to avoid it. Tatiana frankly reveals her - rational and mundane - reasons why she will not have an affair with Onegin, whom she still loves.
The events that make up the plot of Evgenii Onegin are indeterminate. Things just happen. The only concession to conventional narrative structure is found in the hourglass pattern of a love letter rebuffed, first from Tatiana to Onegin, then from Onegin to Tatiana. Open-ended as novels go, Evgenii Onegin has no real beginning or end. A mock "preface" is inserted late in the novel. Evgenii Onegin lacks any obvious message. It has no polemic edge. It does not mind telling the same old story: Mme. Larin's story is repeated in her daughter Tatiana. The dominant mood is one of graceful resignation.
The novel's composition is dominated by sophisticated play with Romantic irony. The author's relation to his text and to his characters is ambiguous and elusive throughout. Onegin is introduced not only as the novel's hero but also as the author's good friend. Tatiana is seen in the company of Prince Viazemskii, Pushkin's intimate friend, yet she is also introduced as Pushkin's muse. Thus, creations of the imagination enter real life - and vice versa, as Pushkin keeps deconstructing his fiction by sober realism. This extends to poetry itself. Lenskii is a bad Romantic poet. Producing the inept lines he wrote the night before his death makes them a realistic detail!
A shifting point of view, such as is found in Evgenii Onegin, is not uncommon in Russian realist novels, though it is a Romantic trait. So is the introduction of literary quotations and allusions, literary small-talk, and a pointed shift to the level of literature and away from real life. Like any other realist novels, Evgenii Onegin features many digressions: wordly wisdom, idyllic nature scenes, words of wit, lyric apostrophes, vignettes of Russian life, satirical sorties. Evgenii Onegin shares with some later novels (A Hero of Our Time, Oblomov, War and Peace) the circumstance that it was not composed as an integral whole. Parts of it were printed while the whole was still in progress.
Evgenii Onegin is almost entirely composed of analogously structured fourteen-line strophes, every one of which is a complete poem in itself. Thus the form of the novel is so far separated from its content that it does not conflict with the work's essential realism: the artful is displaced into form. Pushkin's novel in verse has in its content as much objective, unbiassed topical as well as universal truth as any Russian novel. It also contains much subjective truth about its author and his art.
Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time is the first Russian realist roman à thèse. The hero's name, Pechorin (from Pechora, a river in northern Russia), suggests that he is meant to be a successor to Onegin (from Onega, another northern river). He is set up as a member of a lost generation, a strong and capable man with no purpose in life - another version of Russian "superfluous man," as Belinskii was quick to point out. Belinskii, who had met Lermontov in person and recognized Pechorin in him, made him a rebel without a cause, for which there is little evidence in the text, though Lermontov, Pechorin's creator, certainly was. It was only Aleksandr Herzen in Who is to Blame? who six years later made it explicit that the Russian social order gave an educated nobleman nothing to live or work for.
A Hero of Our Time has a breath of real life mainly due to Lermontov's ability to give Pechorin's diary a personal tone. The reader senses that
Pechorin is Lermontov and may suspect that so is the hapless Grushnitskii. The novel has a faceless though personalized narrator, who hears the first episode of Pechorin's adventures from one Maksim Maksimych, a character who became proverbial for well-meaning mediocrity. After a brief encounter with Pechorin, the narrator finds himself in possession of the hero's diary. The reader thus becomes acquainted with Pechorin step by step.
The novel is open-ended: it has no beginning or end. All we have are a few disconnected episodes from the hero's life. This is in part due to the fact that the novel was put together rather than composed: some of the episodes had appeared in print as separate stories before the whole novel was published. A Hero of Our Time eschews Romantic irony. The pretense that the narrator, Pechorin, Maksim Maksimych, and its other characters are real individuals is sustained throughout. Yet the challenge to Pushkin, announced by the choice of the hero's name, signals literary intertextuality after all.
The social ambience of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls (1842) is a step below that of Evgenii Onegin: the same provincial landowners, but no aristocrats, instead of whom we are introduced to the provincial bureaucracy. Peasants, still at the fringes, do appear as distinct individuals in vignettes of dead souls, that is serfs, title to whom the rogue Chichikov acquires from their owners. Gogol makes it explicit that he wishes to deal with the prose of life. Like Pushkin, he introduces ample prosaic realia. Gogol's characters are ordinary people, who are made into types by grotesque exaggeration of their main traits, such as the avarice of the old miser Pliushkin. However, Gogol keeps his characters real by presenting specific memorable details, such as the bearlike Sobakevich's stepping on people's toes or the cheat and liar Nozdrev's having his luxuriant sideburns pulled when caught cheating at cards. Psychological motivation is straightforward and uncomplicated. We know that Gogol planned to rehabilitate Chichikov, but he was unable to provide his rogue hero with any traits that could make a moral regeneration plausible.
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