The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

96 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility (1811)- because the lachrymose suicide at the end is quite incidental. The story exists not in its events but in the tone given to those events by the narrator, a man of “sentiment.” Like Rousseau, this narrator insists on the basic goodness of human nature (Erast, we read, has “a decent mind and good heart, only he is weak and frivolous”); in this sort of world, there are no truly evil villains. The “writer of sentiment” believes in the virtuousness of spontaneous feelings, which connect us to one another more readily and influence us more profoundly than can words, ideas, or our sense of duty. The successful Sentimentalist text, whatever its central event, must unite the author, narrator, hero, and reader in a mesh of co-sympathy, co-experiencing, and co-remembering of that event.

In Western Europe, Sentimentalism, or Sensibility, had a somewhat different profile.13 Western novels - from Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Sir Charles Grandison (1754) to Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelleHelo¨ıse (1761) and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) - were by and large moralizing sagas set among the bourgeois class, or on the border between bourgeois and upper-class values, replete with concrete realistic detail. In Russia, there was not much middle class. The “realistic,” bourgeois, Sentimentalist novel of England and the continent was thus an unusable model for the pioneering Russian Sensibility. But the Russian peasant - largely unknown and thus available for idealization -represented a possible candidate for carrier of pure feelings. In this idyll, all individualizing traits disappear from bodies and words. Everyone speaks in the same emotionally heightened voice, peasant and nobleman alike. The time-space of idylls is severely constrained. Events unfold in a permanent present of emotional arousal or deflation. Liza, who makes a living by selling lilies-of-the-valley on Moscow street corners, is no recognizably Russian peasant and certainly no serf. Her family follows the biological conventions of folkloric and Romantic time, which deletes a generation: Liza is seventeen, but her mother is “in her sixties” - as if Russian women bore their first surviving children only in their late forties.

In the 1830s, Pushkin several times rewrote the Poor Liza plot, with varying degrees of affectionate irony. Dostoevsky, who knew his Karamzin thoroughly and loved all of it, gives us an urban “Poor Liza” as na¨ıve prostitute in his Notes from Underground, a saintly Lizaveta as the pawnbroker’s timid, hardworking half-sister (and co-murder victim) in Crime and Punishment, and an upper-class, sexually willing and sacrificial Liza in Demons. The plot was parodied and then reconstituted in sequential transpositions throughout the century. In Pushkin’s 1833 “Queen of Spades,” for example, the old Countess’s ward [poor] Liza tries, but fails, to seduce Germann, the engineer-officer who is stalking her - for he is really only after the secret of the three cards. Thus Pushkin’s