The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Heroes and their plots 55

Pushkin had been only thirteen when Moscow was occupied and burned, too young (by two years) for military service or exploits against the foe; in his various poems on Napoleon, the poet already saw the Frenchman more as a liberator and democrat than as a scourge. As the myth matured in the 1830s, however, it again darkened. Insignificant clerks in Gogol’s and later Dosto-evsky’s Petersburg tales went mad with Napoleonic delusions. In Dead Souls, Gogol evoked the Napoleon image as farce: when the townspeople groped for some alibi for this cipher-imposter Chichikov, one option was “Napoleon returned, in disguise.” Significantly, the “little Napoleons” who retained their sanity were motivated not by the honorable Romantic goals of pride, honor, egoism, empire, but rather by greed and paltry identity crises of their own making.

This “bourgeoisification” of the Napoleon myth began with Pushkin’s 1833 story “The Queen of Spades.” Germann, gambling hero of that tale whose dark ambitionsare compared toNapoleon’s, does not want military glory, a woman’s love, freedom from lowly birth; he wants a fortune. This mercantilereduction of the myth reached its culmination in Raskolnikov’s self-loathing reflections on the great Frenchman: Napoleon loses an army in Egypt and doesn’t look back, and here I crawl under a wretched pawnbroker’s bed, looking for trinkets! During the mid-1860s, while Crime and Punishment was being serialized, Tolstoy was recreating in his War and Peace the saga of the 1812 invasion (replete with its cardboard Napoleon) – and already Tolstoy was nervous that the wheel might be turning again, that the French Emperor was regaining his aura and would have to be debunked. In several decades, this proved true. The Symbolist generation admired Napoleon anew.

The Napoleonic hero had a cyclical trajectory in Russia, one tied to the mystique of the West and to the nightmare (and the nostalgia) of foreign invasion and heroic self-defense. In contrast, and somewhat paradoxically, the nihilist hero – who doubts and negates everything – was nourished by rumors of positive internal reform. The foundational text here, Turgenev’s Fathers and Children [Ottsy i deti: not, as the familiar translation has it, Fathers and Sons], appeared in 1862, one year after the enserfed Russian peasantry had been liberated by imperial decree. Turgenev’s hero is Evgeny Bazarov, the “New Man.” He is a skeptic, a materialist, a medical man and researcher who, in order to respect himself, “believes in nothing,” “respects nothing,” and “regards everything from a critical point of view.” In place of received belief, Bazarov puts utility: if a tool or an idea works, it is worthy of being affirmed. Only by applying a utilitarian standard could a rational human being escape the disillusionment of the Byronic hero and the delusions of Napoleonism. Although the world might still consider such a nihilistic hero “superfluous” – Bazarov