Consequences of Consciousness: Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy 9781503626775

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Consequences of Consciousness

Consequences of Consciousness TU1;genevy Dostoevsky) and Tolstoy

Donna Tussing Orwin

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STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 2007

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

© 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Orwin, Donna Tussing, 1947Consequences of consciousness : Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy I Donna Tussing Orwin. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-o-8047-5703-4 (cloth: alk. paper) r. Russian fiction-19th century-History and criticism. 2. Consciousness in literature. 3. Psychological fiction, Russian-History and criticism. 4· Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, r821-r88r-Criticism and interpretation. 5· Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich, r8r8-r883-Criticism and interpretation. 6. Tolstoy, Leo, graf, r828-r9ro-Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PG3098.3.079 2007 891.73 '309-dc22 2007026789 Typeset by Classic Typography in ro/12 Sabon

To Cliff

Chuzhaia dusha-potiomki. [Another man's soul is darkness.] -Russian proverb

Contents

Acknowledgments, xi Note on Documentation, xiii

Introduction,

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1. The Origins of Self-Consciousness as a National Trait of the Russian Literary Tradition, I2

2. Turgenev: Subjectivity in the Shadows, 34 3. Dostoevsky's Hidden Author, 46 4. Taming the Author: The Platonic and the Turgenevian Moments in Tolstoy's Fiction, 57 5. Romantic Longing in Turgenev, 76 6. Dostoevsky's Critique of Turgenev, 92 7. Reflection as a Tool for Understanding in Russian Psychological Prose, I I 3 8. Childhood in Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, I39 9. The Psychology of Evil in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, I 58 Conclusion, I8o Notes, I89 Selected Bibliography, Index, 229

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Acknowledgments

This project has been generously supported by two multiyear grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). A sabbatical year funded by the University of Toronto allowed me to write the bulk of the manuscript. I am also grateful to the Slavonic Library at Helsinki University, where I spent a fruitful month researching journals from the I 84os. One part of Chapter 4 in this book previously appeared in a chapter titled "Tolstoy's Antiphilosophical Philosophy in Anna Karenina," in Approaches to Teaching Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, edited by Liza Knapp and Amy Mandelker. An overlapping part of the same chapter appeared in Russian as "Vliianie zhanra Platonova dialoga v tvorchestve Tolstogo" (Russkaia literatura, I [February 2002]), and a third part, on Turgenev's influence on Tolstoy's "Morning of a Landowner," will be published in Russian in papers from a conference on Tolstoy and World Literature held at Iasnaia Poliana in summer 200 5. I regard both my teaching and my scholarship as a joint project with other scholars and teachers to refine our understanding of the Russian classics and bring them to the readers of our own day. As is clear from the long bibliography, I have benefited from the writings of previous scholars, and over the years I have learned from conversations with colleagues at the many conferences where I presented my findings. The inspiration for this project came originally from my teaching. I am indebted to my students, who stimulated my ideas and made me develop and refine them in response to their comments and questions. The book has been a long time in the writing, and I am very grateful to colleagues and friends who encouraged me to complete it; they include Andrew Donskov, the late Lidiia Dmitrievna Gromova-Opul'skaia, Christina Kramer, and Robin Feuer Miller. My Toronto colleagues Kenneth Lantz, Ralph Lindheim, and Sarah J. Young read the manuscript and commented on it; at a later stage, Caryl Emerson reviewed it for Stanford University Press and gave me valuable

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Acknowledgments

advice. Thanks also to the good counsel and keen eyes of copy editor Thomas Finnegan and production editor Mariana Raykov. Research assistant Arkadi Klioutchanski has taken an active part in the editing process, and Edith Klein has helped me with technical matters. As always, my husband, Clifford Orwin, has been my sternest critic and my greatest support. I dedicate the book to him.

Note on Documentation

I use a modified version of Library of Congress in transliteration from Cyrillic, and I follow University of Chicago style ( r 5th edition) in my system of references. The transliteration from Cyrillic of proper names is, as always, a problem. I use conventional English spelling for last names and places, and where necessary I supply the Library of Congress transliteration or alternative spellings for last names in the Selected Bibliography. It should be kept in mind that nineteenth-century Russia used the so-called Old Style (OS) Julian calendar, which was twelve days behind the New Style (NS) Gregorian calendar used in Western European countries at the time. Where two dates are provided for one event, they refer to these two time systems. On these occasions, the New Style (European) date is always in parentheses. All translations from the Russian, unless otherwise noted, are mine.

Consequences of Consciousness

Introduction "Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them." 1

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A few years ago, I discovered in the introduction to one of Oliver Sacks's books that his unique approach to the science of the brain was indebted to the work of Russian neuropsychologist Alexander R. Luria ( r 9021977).2 To follow the example of Luria, if a patient in Sacks's office mistook his wife for a hat, he took this bizarre misperception as a dysfunction of the brain that could help him understand the way this individual actually perceived the world. In a totalitarian Communist regime that valued the individual not at all, Luria worked with his neurologically impaired patients by discussing their injuries with them and taking their comments seriously. (In one case that he eventually published, for two decades he collaborated with one L. Zasetsky, who had been shot in the head in the Second World War and suffered a devastating brain injury, with consequences that Zasetsky himself set out to describe and study. 3 ) As a young man studying at Kazan University, Luria turned against the descriptive psychology of the nineteenth century because it was not scientific enough, but he was also wary of the reductionist thought of such dogmatic physiological psychologists as Vladimir M. Bekhterev (r8s7-1927) and Ivan P. Pavlov (r849-1936), "who did not allow the subjective in psychologydid not allow the psyche in psychology-and insisted on an objective, reflexological viewpoint. " 4 Luria's discovery of Freud and psychoanalysis helped him resolve this crisis, because Freud combined a biological perspective with "the legitimization of the subjective, in all its richness, as a proper subject of science." 5 Luria's first book manuscript, written in 1922 in Kazan and never published, was on psychoanalysis, and he angered

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Introduction

Pavlov with another book, The Nature of Human Conflicts (1928-29), because, Pavlov complained, Luria "was describing behaviour as a whole" rather than reducing it to its "elementary parts." With his "un-Pavlovian" and "anti-Soviet" methods, Luria was able to publish very little for the next two decades. Nonetheless, he applied his broader perspective to his clinical practice and research, with results that changed how he treated brain-related ailments, and he began to publish his results in the relatively freer atmosphere after World War 11. 6 He labeled his own approach "romantic science," which Sacks, encouraged by Luria in personal correspondence from 1973 to 1977, has introduced as a valuable corrective into Western neuropsychology. 7 Freud himself was influenced by nineteenth-century Russian literature, and especially the writings of Dostoevsky, about whom he wrote a famous and still controversial essay. Luria was of course aware of this connection. In his autobiography, where he discusses his early enthusiasm for Freud and the psychoanalytic circle that he formed in Kazan, he mentions as "interesting" the fact that a granddaughter of Dostoevsky's was his patient in the psychoanalytic clinic at Kazan University and that he "had filled whole notebooks with her 'free associations'" with the intention of " [using] these materials for the detection of 'the concrete reality of the flow of ideas'." 8 Luria also records how impressed he was as a youth by William James's books, especially The Varieties of Religious Experience (first published in 1902).9 James (1842-1910), whose father was a Swedenborgian, and who grew up among the New England Transcendentalists, was an earlier version of a romantic scientist who tried to keep the "psyche" in psychology. In 1896, James wrote a friend about his enthusiasm for War and Peace and Anna Karenina. During the past month I have only read Tolstoi's two great novels, which, strange to say, I have never attacked before. I don't like his fatalism and semi-pessimism, but for infallible veracity concerning human nature, and absolute simplicity of method, he makes all the other writers of novels and plays seem like children. 10

James praised Tolstoy as a "[witness] testifying to the worth of life as revealed to an emancipated sympathy." 11 By this he meant that Tolstoy's writing lends credence to the essential assumptions of the individual about himself. Tolstoy and James, the one in art and the other in science, defended human subjectivity against scientific methods that excluded it. Luria may have taken note of James's interest in Tolstoy. In any case, his attraction to James speaks to a possible connection between Luria's early mentors in romantic science and classic Russian psychological prose. 12 I was very struck by the evidence in Sacks's introductions and other writings of the indirect effect of Russian literature on Western science, especially because his story was a variation of my own. Although I hadn't

Introduction

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realized it at the time, as an American college student from the state of Maine I was attracted to Russian literature partly because of its resemblance to New England Transcendentalism, which locates access to the sacred in the inner life of each individual. Luria was not a transcendentalist, 13 and neither were Freud and James, but all three are linked to transcendentalism through their romantic science, a term that Luria borrowed from the German physiologist Max Verworn (1863-1921). 14 The first romantic scientists were influenced by German preromantics such as Herder (1744-1803), Novalis (1772-1801), and Goethe (1749-1832), and connected through them to the attempt in German Naturphilosophie to defend subjectivity from materialism. 15 American Transcendentalism, itself related to developments in homegrown American Puritanism, complicated and to some extent opposed the Classical Liberalism of the American founding and in the process greatly enriched American culture. 16 In Russia, where there was no tradition of liberalism, a version of transcendentalism that arose at the same time as in New England, in the 183os, defended the sanctity of the individual as never before in Russian culture. I begin a book of literary criticism from a personal perspective as a tribute to its subject: subjectivity and its validation in midnineteenth-century Russian psychological realism. By subjectivity I mean facts that Mr. Gradgrind (until he gets his comeuppance in Dickens's novel) would not accept as real: the inner life and perspective of each individual. Anyone who is reading this introduction most likely still has a passion for classic Russian psychological prose, and we might ask ourselves why this is still so. For Russians, the answer is first of all one of cultural identity; to understand themselves in their modern incarnation, and indeed to redefine themselves after the downfall of the Soviet regime, they must connect in new ways with founding writers whose works had immense political and social consequences for their country. (This applies to such masters as Tolstoy and Turgenev, whom the Soviets canonized, as well as authors whom they overlooked or shunned.) Non-Russians without this urgent national imperative are still drawn to Russian prose writers of the nineteenth century because of their contributions to modern psychology and its expression in art. What the Russian critic D. S. Mirsky wrote in the 1920s still obtains: "A sympathetic attitude to human beings, without distinction (not only of class but) of intrinsic moral significance, became a principal characteristic of Russian [realists]," and "what Europe accepted as their message to mankind when they were first revealed to the West." 17 This book looks at the ideas behind this message and how the Russian psychological realists dramatized them. Unearthed from the works of literature that they inspired, these ideas seem as relevant today as they did in the midnineteenth century.

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Introduction

Rather than attempting a cross-section of many writers in order to expose these ideas, I mostly concentrate on the three greatest prose writers of the time: Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. 18 I follow a paper trail of communications between them to parse out how each viewed the others and what use each made of the others in his art. These communications are occasionally direct, but they are generally indirect, or even in the form of hidden commentaries within fictional works, often, although not always, in early works in which the authors are still developing their distinctive voices. What links them is the questions that preoccupied them about the psyche, not their particular solutions, which often differed from one another. The triangulation yields a complex if not complete picture of a formative moment in Russian cultural history. It also provides new readings of the lesser known works of all three authors, and new insights into their masterpieces. With such a vast subject, my challenge has also been to say something significant about it that relies for its ultimate authority on individual texts. I am obviously interested in ideas, but in deference to my topic and also to the dynamics of any artistic text I develop the particularities of my ideas through close readings. This book evolved out of a series of graduate seminars, and I have tried to retain the balance of generalization, background, and close reading characteristic of them. I hope that readers (like my students) will participate actively in the many close readings in the book; the readings are intended as checks of the validity and usefulness of the ideas. At the same time, I do not expect all my readers to be experts in the field, and the ideas I treat are ones of general interest that should illuminate the texts and also allow readers to judge their usefulness for themselves. Also, in deference to readers who are not specialists, the book begins with a general chapter that sets the stage for the detailed analysis in later ones. Russian realism has usually been understood as a reaction to romanticism, although critics have identified a phenomenon that Donald Fanger named romantic realism. 19 Fanger does not consider the heightened psychologism of Russian realists among the symptoms of this romanticism, and Lidiia Ginzburg regards the interest of these authors in psychology as scientific and therefore realistic. Although Ginzburg is one of my inspirations for this book, and I agree with her that Russian realists treated the psyche analytically, science cannot explain their abiding respect for subjectivity, the celebration of which is usually understood as romantic. This respect is due to the German philosophical roots of modern Russian culture, which developed under the influence of Hegel (I no- I 8 3 I) and his many disciples. Russian writers, even those who rejected Hegelian rationalism for Schelling's "positive reality" of prerational emotion, framed their ideas within the structure of the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, anti-

Introduction

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thesis, and synthesis. 20 This was true of psychological realists, who built their works around juxtaposition of opposites, including most importantly the inner (subjective) and outer (objective) worlds. The interaction between these two rather than the romantic preference of the former over the latter was a central theme for the realist school in Russia, the more so because its greatest representatives did not treat subjectivity as simply a delusion. They considered it "real": the reality of subjectivity is a cardinal principle of all great works of Russian psychological realism. Why is this so? As Karl Lowith explains, Russian thinkers such as Ivan Kireevsky (I 8o6-I 8 56), not restrained like counterparts in the West by a backward drag exacted by centuries of dogmatic philosophy, directly confronted the gap in Hegelian thought between analytical reason and the "real" emotional material on which it supposedly operates and that therefore gives it legitimacy. At this particular moment in the development of nineteenth-century thought, according to Lowith, the "Slavs" understood and began to articulate this dynamic better than anyone else. 21 The emotional, prerational material to which Lowith refers is the stuff of subjectivity; it is a fleeting target that reason never catches and never stops pursuing, and it becomes the inescapable reality of Russian realism. In Chapter I, I examine how and why Russians took up the chase in the first place. Before they could analyze their own psychological "reality," Russians had to separate themselves from the realm of spontaneity within which it supposedly resided. I maintain in this book that the selfconsciousness that resulted and its consequences gave Russian psychological prose its distinctive shape as well as one of its principle themes. I confine myself to one explanation for this complex development, namely, its foreign origins. For most Europeans, Russian literature, with its unusual point of view, seemed to arrive from nowhere in the middle of the nineteenth century. In fact, the groundwork for this spectacular launch onto the world stage was under preparation for more than a century. Russians had been interested in French and German thought from early in the eighteenth century, and Freemasonry was important from the I76os until the I82os. Russians first appeared in relatively large numbers in the philosophical centers of Germany in the I83os, and then a generation later Russia leapt ahead of Europe in literature. This chapter traces how Russian prose began to describe the effects of foreign influence on the personality. Chapters 2, 3, and 4look at how the Russian authors developed narrative strategies to depict subjectivity without demeaning it. I begin with Turgenev, who so often articulates problems that the other two undertake to solve. Turgenev himself protects subjectivity by declining to analyze his characters, or even explore their inner life beyond a certain point; I discuss his reasons for this reticence and the consequences of it for his aesthetics.

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Introduction

By contrast, and to Turgenev's frequent dismay, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy both rummage in the dark crannies of the subject. Yet Turgenev's concerns notwithstanding, the other two are able to maintain respect for subjectivity as well as distance on it even as they pry and poke. Dostoevsky in particular is less intrusive than all the psychological details in his fiction would imply, but at the same time his author operates dextrously behind the scenes to guide the reader to certain conclusions unavailable to any one character in his texts. How he does this is the subject of Chapter 3. If Dostoevsky as author prefers to work behind the scenes, Tolstoy flaunts his presence in a way that is also misleading. Contrary to first impressions and even to his own rhetoric, Tolstoy too limited the role and power of the author's voice in his fiction. In Chapter 4 I discuss the development of his narrative techniques for doing so, first under the influence of Plato and his dialogues and then of Turgenev, starting in the latter case with the appearance, in I 8 52, of A Sportsman's Sketches. It is my contention that among the other challenges Turgenev's first book posed to Tolstoy was a bold realism that protected the complexity of human subjectivity, which Tolstoy could not as yet match in practice, although he had already embraced it in theory. The self as Russians conceived it is not an individualist one; this is the subject of Chapters 5 and 6. The one thing that Russians are not, says Russian thinker Nicholas Berdiaev (1874-1948), is bourgeois. 22 By this he means that they are neither rationalist in principle nor self-contained. They acquired the idea of individualism from the West, but none of them could simply embrace a Cartesian model of the soul according to which it is self-sufficient and the source of all meaning. No man can be an island in Russia, which, despite the popularity of Daniel Defoe's masterpiece Robinson Crusoe there, has produced no fantasy of independence comparable to it. Acknowledging the existence in their own culture of a vigorous and even anarchic willfulness, the Russian psychological realists were nonetheless leery of the individualism that Romanticism often valued, and even though they all adopted it in some form they exposed its dark side more thoroughly than writers from other traditions. They also tried to overcome its limitations in various ways. Even such fervent individualists as the political activist and essayist Alexander Herzen privileged communal life over one based on contracts among individuals. 23 Martin Malia claims that Herzen embraces early socialism because an "emphasis on the 'collective' was simply an insistence that all men have the right to become complete human beings," 24 but I will be arguing that Russian individualism by its very nature requires external support, which is why even Herzen became a communalist. Dostoevsky advocated both Orthodox Christianity and Russian nationalism as an antidote to what ailed the

Introduction

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modern Russian soul. Tolstoy eventually called for life organized according to general Kantian principles that honored individuals without privileging them. The Russian self is fundamentally sociable, not individualist, and the reasoning behind this stance provides a valuable corrective to contemporary attitudes. The self as it appeared in the I 84os in the works of Turgenev and Dostoevsky was not the ape man in Stanley Kubrick's film 2oor: A Space Odyssey (I968), who stands up and triumphantly throws a bone into the sky to indicate his newfound power. The Russian self in the person of Makar Devushkin of Dostoevsky's Poor Folk (I 846) feels alone and incomplete. Unlike Gogol's Akakii Akakievich ("The Overcoat," I842), of whom Makar is a descendant, he is more concerned with his dignity than with material needs, and unlike Akakii he is ashamed of his lowly status and even his inability to express himself. (He reads "The Overcoat" and indignantly takes it personally.) By making Makar self-conscious in this way, Dostoevsky makes him psychologically more complex and closer to the reader and narrator than other characters within the I 84os Russian school of Sentimental Naturalism of which Poor Folk is the finest product. Makar is more dignified than Akakii, but he is still pathetic; hence his pained identification with Gogol's character. Two years after the appearance of Dostoevsky's story, and probably influenced by it, Ivan Turgenev began to write his "Diary of a Superfluous Man" (published in I85o). The type of the superfluous man, a term coined by Turgenev to designate nineteenthcentury Russian gentry alienated from tradition and nature alike, remains relevant to readers today. Chulkaturin, the hero of "Diary of a Superfluous Man," represents modern man as he first appears in a Russian setting. Like an adolescent shaking himself loose from the dependency of childhood, he has a strong but negative identity; he defines himself by what he is not, and by what he does not have. Unlike a teenager, however, this Russian individual emerging in an essentially still premodern milieu does not have a peer group or social institutions to assist the transition to adulthood. He is alone but wants company; he is without dignity but desperately craves it; he has no family and no friends, so much so that he tells his story in a diary rather than letters, and we have no idea whom he thinks his readers might be. He lacks the solace of religion; aware of his mortality and in fact dying of tuberculosis as he writes, the superfluous man has no God and feels alienated from nature, which supports only the young and healthy. Chulkaturin's surname, related to the Russian word for "stockings," links him to Gogol's pathetic clerk Akakii Akakievich, whose last name, Bashmachkin, is derived from the word for "shoe," bashmak. But no longer a clerk (as Akakii Akakievich and Makar Devushkin were), Chulkaturin is

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Introduction

simply a minor official and a pathetic outsider. Although, as always with Turgenev, his social position is important, he is a loser not just because of it, but because of his character. He relates a "novel" of how he lost his girl to a rival-appropriately named Biz'myonkov, a comic name based on the English word "business"-in the same social class as himself but socially more adroit. While Chulkaturin first dithers and then foolishly indulges his irritability at the prince who is courting Liza and will subsequently abandon her, Biz'myonkov, in the same position as Chulkaturin at the beginning of the novel, lays low, plays his cards right, and comforts Liza on the rebound. Chulkaturin, by contrast, falls into all the traps that excessive self-consciousness lays for any sustained effort of the will. In this character and his kin in Turgenev's fiction, "the native hue of resolution is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought," as selfconsciousness unmans and makes cowards of them all. 25 Turgenev recognized Hamlet as an ancestor of his superfluous men; one of them who appears in Sportsman's Sketches is called Hamlet in the title of the story, and he wrote an influential article called "Hamlet and Don Quixote" (r86o). But he and his contemporaries attributed the psychological disease of excessive self-consciousness to what they called "reflection" (refleksiia). In Chapter 5, I discuss the philosophical origins of romantic longing in the "eros for wholeness" in the foundations of Modernity by Descartes (r596-r6so). "Reflection" is another and related consequence of Cartesian thought that characterizes the modern psyche for worse, but also, as we shall see, for better. Without it there could be no romantic longing or any self-consciousness, because human beings would be unable to contemplate their own thoughts and actions. As I argue in Chapter 7, this makes it an essential tool in the construction of psychological prose. The eighth chapter of the book examines childhood, a concern of Russian realism connected to the defense of both morality and subjectivity. Although an emphasis on childhood may not strike today's readers as unusual, in midnineteenth-century Russia it was practically unprecedented. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were indebted to Charles Dickens (r8r2r87o) and his portraits of children, and I discuss this; but they both also had their own reasons for the attention they paid to childhood. Both regarded it as a privileged and less corrupted stage of life. If, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (r7r2-r778) proclaimed most prominently in his Emile (r762), and in other works as well, human beings were born good and then corrupted by their upbringing, then we should be able to observe both natural goodness and its disappearance in children. This is what the authors of a young nation, Russia, set out to depict. The authors of Russian classical psychological prose differ from their twentieth-century descendants in that all of them believed human beings wanted to be good even when

Introduction

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they could not be so. In this respect, all of them are students of Rousseau; even Dostoevsky, who influenced Friedrich Nietzsche, nonetheless would not have followed Nietzsche beyond good and evil. But if they did not condone evil, the authors of Russian psychological prose did not deny its existence, and none of them, not even Tolstoy, blamed evil solely on society. It has a psychological origin, and this is the subject of Chapter 9, in which I compare the treatment of evil in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. As with the English and German romantics, it is related to the alienating effects of self-consciousness,26 which Dostoevsky explored more thoroughly than any previous writers. The parents of the newly minted modern Russian individual fretted greatly about his future. Seductive though modern freedom may be, there is a steep price to be paid for it in the sense of alienation and the fear of a lonely death that accompanies it. The acquisition of such truths comes through suffering; indeed, early Western readers often complained that Russian authors seem to compete among themselves to provide the gloomiest scenarios and most unhappy endingsP In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy summarized the denouement of the typical English novel: "The hero of the novel was already beginning to achieve his English happiness, a baronetcy and an estate .... " 28 Unlike a typical English novel as Tolstoy parodies it here, great Russian novels and stories replace material self-sufficiency with the need for meaning, or outside ballast, as the goal for which characters strive. At first, Western readers did not understand the Russian shift away from selfsufficiency-or a failure to achieve it-and therefore found Russian novels to be unstructured: loose baggy monsters, as Henry James called them. 29 Yet plotless though they may have seemed to their first Western readers, these monsters soon sprawled prominently on Western bookshelves. This is because they tapped into anxieties that happy endings help us forget only temporarily. We awake from such fantasies still anxious, whereas Russian novels such as Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov provide strange comfort by thoroughly airing our deeper insecurities. Their plots move us through events that upset a hero's self-confidence and then may replace it with something deeper, truer, and grounded in more than the entitlement that mere self-love makes us feel. An advance in self-understanding is one key to the enjoyment we feel from reading great Russian novels. Wild though they may seem, they are not mere romantic melodramas that please us by playing to our passions. If we are willing to follow the clues of the authors laid down in the fictional narrative (the siuzhet, in the helpful terminology of Russian formalism), we come away with a sense that we have a handle on our feelings and actions because we understand them better.

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Introduction

It is enough to compare the atmosphere of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (r875-1877) to that of a comparable masterpiece of European realism, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (r857), to appreciate the greater respect accorded subjectivity in the Russian novel, and also to begin to understand the consequences of this. In both novels, the eponymous heroine follows her subjective daimon wherever it leads her and perishes as a result. Both characters are loved by their creators and consequently by readers, yet only Anna rises to the level of tragic heroine, while Emma remains a victim of her surroundings and her own delusions. Flaubert's respect is reserved for true science, as represented by the great doctor who arrives too late to save Emma at the end of the novel but sizes up the situation at a glance. Tolstoy loves Anna as the repository of sincere feeling but also respects her as a free agent, and he therefore holds her accountable for her own demise. Not until the very end of her life does Emma appreciate Charles's devotion to her. (She never notices the adolescent love of Mr. Homais's nephew Justin.) Anna, by contrast, has many chances in the course of the novel to hearken to a moral voice that competes within her with other, louder ones determining her behavior, and she does not do so decisively. (She dithers from moral anxiety, leaving her husband but not asking him for a divorce, and longing for her son while cohabiting with Vronsky.) She can choose to rise above simple self-interest and self-love, and as she flings herself under the train she is still debating her options. Even as an emotive being, Anna differs from Emma. The essential love of life that wells up in her at the end is fundamentally moral, while Flaubert counts such love of life as amoral. So Tolstoy judges Anna more harshly than Flaubert does Emma, but in so doing the Russian author honors his heroine more than the French one does his. Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy all share this complex attitude toward subjectivity; it affects every aspect of Russian psychological realism. The self that Russian realists construct is made up of matter not visible under a microscope, and we confirm its existence only because we feel its motive power in ourselves. Contemporary European naturalist realism with its links to science tended by contrast to be reductive and therefore to undercut or distort the inner life it was describing. In Russian realism, objective distance is suspended to an unprecedented degree by the author; as a result the subject retains its original "subjective" appearance and complexity. Simply put, the irreducible facts that the Russian author analyzes are broader than those that were allowed by science because the author takes what subjects feel as seriously as what they think or do. Because human beings have direct access only to their own feelings, the prose we will be examining is ipso facto autobiographical to the extent that it depends on the author's ability to examine himself. The defense of subjectivity

Introduction

II

posed a unique challenge: both Russian authors and their readers had to resist, to some extent, the temptation to dissect what they found in the brave new world of the psyche. At the same time, they had to avoid selfserving sentimentality. The works of Russian realism had to be objectively true and yet remain sympathetic to subjectivity. Russian psychological realism helped lay the groundwork for what Luria first named "romantic science," which counts as "real" the facts of subjectivity as well as those derived from empirical observation. 30 This explains why such thinkers as William James in America and Sigmund Freud in Vienna acknowledged their debt to it. To answer the question posed earlier, this is why people still read Russian novels today. The Russian psychological novel has its roots in romanticism: like the Germans whom they emulated in this regard, the Russian realists interpolated analysis and theory into their novels but avoided systems. Rather than subordinating the insights of feelings to those of reason, Russians treated the two as complementaryY Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, with its complex representation of the hero, Pechorin, from many points of view, is the swallow that heralds the spring in this regard. As we shall learn in the chapters to come, the very shape of Russian psychological prose may mirror that of human subjectivity, which is the result of a combination of mind and feeling.

CHAPTER ONE

The Origins of Self-Consciousness as a National Trait of the Russian Literary Tradition Reflection is our strength and our weakness, our destruction and our salvation .... In Russian "to reflect" means "to ponder one's own feelings." 1 Man cannot live in internal discord, lacking the cornerstone of his moral being. 2

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Russian psychological prose emphasizes self-consciousness and its effects. This characteristic developed partly because Russians acquired their knowledge of modern individualism through foreign models. Raised in a society that privileged the communal over the individual, they could not completely internalize behavior that they admired and imitated, so they began to observe themselves from a distance, and ironically. First imitation of foreign models, and then the psychological effect of this behavior in turn became a well-known theme in Russian fiction. In this chapter, I follow it from Nikolai M. Karamzin (I766-I826} through Alexander S. Pushkin (I799-I837} and Mikhail lu. Lermontov (I8I4I84I) to Ivan S. Turgenev (I8I8-I883}, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky (I82II88I}, and LeoN. Tolstoy (I828-I9IO). At the end of the chapter, I discuss another crucial element for the development of Russian psychological prose, namely, the presence of transcendental thought in the I 84os and its consequences for the Russian definition of the self. According to Russians themselves, Tsar Peter the Great (who reigned from I 68 2 to I 72 5) set the whole process in motion. Peter wanted to modernize Russia's army and economy, but he recognized that to do so he had to change his people as well. It was Peter, so said critic Vissarion

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3

Belinsky {I8II-I848) in his review of Lermontov's Hero of Our Time {I84o), who made Russians self-conscious by cutting them off from the traditions of their forefathers. 3 Of course, the changes that we are talking about affected only a tiny fraction of the population; eventually this led to a gulf between the elites and the narod that only exacerbated problems of self-consciousness among educated people. Before Peter, Russia was an integrated society in which individuals knew their place. After Peter's revolution, it would require some kind of new polity to achieve unity, and people would have to think and act in order to achieve it. In his determination to modernize his country, Peter created two Russias out of one: side by side with the old ways, Peter's Russia was a social experiment hatched in the mind of one man and continued by his successors.4 It is significant that the French liberal philosopher Montesquieu (I 689-17 55) had high praise for Peter and that Catherine the Great (who reigned from I762 to I796) admired Montesquieu, an advocate for the institution of enlightened monarchy, the legitimacy of which depended as much on the reforms that it undertook as on religious and dynastic grounds. Meanwhile, the penchant for social engineering soon percolated down to the elites in society, and ambitious, civic-minded men in Russia took Peter as their model. The preference for radical, mandated change from above rather than evolution through institutions therefore eventually became part of modern Russian culture, with enormous consequences. Even if their goal was a return to Muscovy and the old ways, even if they believed in sacred rather than secular history and anticipated the Apocalypse, Russian activists would have to think their way back to these traditional ways of life. They now had choices to make, and this encouraged the development of irony and self-consciousness as national traits among the literate elites. European thinkers by and large admired Peter; he was a special favorite of Voltaire {I694-I778). But Jean Jacques Rousseau (I7I2-I778) warned in his Social Contract (I762) of the consequences of the cataclysmic changes introduced by the reforming tsar. He was especially concerned about Peter's insistence that his subjects become Europeans rather than modern Russians: Youth is not childhood. For nations as for men there is a time of youth, or maturity if you prefer, that must be awaited before subjecting them to laws. But the maturity of a people is not always easy to recognize, and if it is anticipated, the work is ruined. One people is capable of discipline at birth, another is not after ten centuries. The Russians will never be truly civilized because they were civilized too early. Peter had the genius of imitation. He did not have true genius, the kind that creates and makes everything from nothing. A few of the things he did were good; most were out of place. He saw that his people was barbarous; he did not see that

Chapter One it was not ripe for a political order. He wanted to make it cultured when it only needed to be made warlike. He wanted first to make Germans and Englishmen, whereas it was necessary to begin by making Russians. He prevented his subjects from ever becoming what they could be by convincing them that they were what they are not. It is like the way a French tutor molds his pupil to shine briefly during his childhood and thereafter never to amount to anything. The Russian Empire would like to subjugate Europe and will itself be subjugated. The Tartars, its subjects or its neighbors, will become its masters and ours. This revolution appears inevitable to me. All the kings of Europe are working together to hasten it. 5

The negative implications of Rousseau's warning were ignored for the century after Peter's reforms. 6 Instead, a struggle began over who would replace (or restore) the script that Peter had banned. Peter and his successors still ruled absolutely-in this respect they imitated their predecessors-and it was philosophy and then literature that introduced the Russian elites to Western ideas of politics and individual freedom. Through literature, these Russians moved in a few decades toward a modern sensibility that had developed over centuries in England and France.

KARAMZIN

Under late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conditions, modern Russian identity had to evolve one individual at a time, without support from official social or political institutions other than the press. This is why Freemasonry, with its doctrine of individual self-improvement, was so crucial. Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin was an example of such an individual. A descendant of a Caucasian prince named Kara-Murza-who converted to Christianity to serve the Muscovite tsar-he grew up in the mid Volga region in a provincial gentry environment that emphasized education and, even more important, public service without the sycophantish devotion to the tsars that was expected from the court nobility. As a young teenager in 1779, he moved from his family estate near Simbirsk to Moscow, where he continued his education. He was an extraordinary polyglot who quickly mastered three languages (German, French, and to a lesser extent English) and read widely in all of them. Starting in r 7 8 5, he spent four years in Moscow under the tutelage of prominent Freemasons, after which he embarked on a European journey as a continuation of his studies, but also as a subtle declaration of independence from his teachers.? Karamzin's first important work of prose was a result of this journey; his Letters of a Russian Traveler provided armchair travel to Europe for several generations of Russians. It still makes interesting reading for what it teaches us about an educated Russian mentality in the late-eighteenth

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century as well as for its descriptions of places and individuals. Karamzin traveled through Germany, Switzerland, France, and England and met such luminaries as Immanuel Kant and Herder. In Switzerland, he reverently visited sites associated with his idol Rousseau. Most important for our present purposes, the emphasis in the book is on the feelings of the young traveler; in this respect critics agree that Karamzin took Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy as his model. As a student of Rousseau, Karamzin understood that not only institutions but more importantly individuals had to be changed if Russia were truly to be modernized. 8 He would make his contribution to this modernization through prose fiction. Though he is little known by nonspecialists outside Russia, Karamzin is the true founder of Russian psychological prose. In 1792, before his Letters fully appeared and obviously as part of the same sentimental project, he published his story "Poor Liza." A young rake named Erast meets the beautiful peasant girl Liza. After a brief struggle to contain his passions, he succumbs to them and seduces her. Marriage is out of the question, so he eventually escapes the situation by joining the army. Rather than distinguishing himself on the battlefield, however, he loses his estate at cards and then marries a rich widow. Poor Liza drowns herself. The story was popular with readers from the lower classes as well as the upper. Iurii Lotman provides and analyzes an example of the reactions of a workman and a peasant to the story as overheard by A. F. Merzliakov, in 1799. 9 The conversation takes place near the pond where Liza supposedly met her end. The men change the story to assimilate it to traditional genres, and at the same time one can see those genres evolving under its influence. They perceive it as a "true story" (byl')-as opposed to made up "fiction" like a fairy tale (skazka)-but they also admire Karamzin's poetic treatment of landscape, which was not characteristic of traditional folk "realism." 10 The effect of the story on high culture was also extraordinary, making it first widely imitated and then satirized. Both Pushkin and Dostoevsky read "Poor Liza" as part of their Russian prose heritage, and like other great writers of later decades they weave mention of it into their works as a tribute to its effect on them. The female protagonist of Pushkin's "Queen of Spades" (r834) is called Liza; so is the heroine of Turgenev's "Diary of a Superfluous Man," who is abandoned by her prince; and so are heroines betrayed by men they love in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and The Demons. "Poor Liza" mentally changed readers. Although Karamzin addressed his readers as if they were "sentimental," they were not. His story helped make them sentimental, which was his intent. For one thing, the language of the story was much closer to spoken Russian than earlier eighteenth-century prose

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fiction, and this helped close the gap between language and feelings. The sentimental French flourishes of Karamzin's writings that make them seem rhetorical today struck his first readers as natural in comparison to the Church Slavonicisms that they were meant to replace. 11 In the words of Belinsky, from his influential series of articles on Pushkin written in the 184os, "Karamzin was the first in Russia to replace the dead language of books with the living one of society." 12 Secondly, the narrative stance of the story was as radical as its message; the narrator invites his reader to empathize with Liza "because peasant girls too can love!" Putting themselves in Liza's place, readers were to look at their own feelings and find them in another person with whom they would not ordinarily identify. This act of the imagination would not only encourage empathy in readers but also self-consciousness about their own feelings. (The preferred or implied reader for Karamzin was female.) Empathy requires us to objectify our feelings in order to assign them to another. In keeping with the dictates of sentimental subjectivism, Karamzin's narrator is himself more individualized, takes a personal attitude toward his subject, and speaks directly to an individual reader, not to readers in general. 13 In a communal society such as most of Russia remained in the eighteenth century, the secondary result of empathy for another individual was to strengthen a reader's sense of his or her own entitlements. Of course, what I am describing is an effect of sentimentalism in general, but Karamzin's audience did not know that. The empathic effect inherent in "Poor Liza" as sentimental worked on Russian readers with special power because it was communicated in their own language. While the twenty-one-year-old Merzliakov overhears the conversation between the common folk, he himself is listening to "every birch tree" and the "breezes" whispering about Liza's fate. It is not certain from the excerpt of his letter published by Lotman whether Merzliakov yet means this ironically, but we can be sure that he refers to the powerful effect of Karamzin's story on him either earlier or at the time of his recounting of this anecdote. By setting his tale in a concrete location outside Moscow, Karamzin planted the foreign seeds of sentimentalism in Russian soil, which henceforth is associated in the minds of the readers of "Poor Liza" with the new myths that Karamzin wants them to adopt. Karamzin might have borrowed this technique from Rousseau, whose novel julie, or the New Heloise (1762) was set in specific locations in Switzerland that Rousseau admirers reverently visited as shrines to the tragic love affair of Julie and St. Preux. The last frontier to be conquered in Russian modernization was the inner life of individuals, and literature played a significant role in achieving

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it. In addition to imitating European fashion and speaking foreign languages, young eighteenth-century Russians from the gentry class imitated characters in books translated from English, French, and German. Translations of foreign literature were so popular at the turn of the nineteenth century, for instance, that to make homegrown Russian works seem more like translations their authors laced them with foreign words for which perfectly good Russian equivalents existed. 14 Just as teenagers in late Soviet Russia would imagine themselves as Western rock stars, those of the late eighteenth century imitated Lovelace, Clarissa, or Werther. In this climate, "Poor Liza" was a sensation because it moved a standard European plot into a Russian setting and expressed it in the Russian language.

PUSHKIN

Russians regard Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin as their greatest writer. Although primarily a poet, his ultimate goal seems to have been to create Russian examples in all literary modes and genres. He wrote a novel in verse (Eugene Onegin, I823-183o), a novel in the manner of Walter Scott (The Captain's Daughter, I834-1836), a gothic tale ("The Queen of Spades," 1834), and The Tales of Belkin (1831). Each was tremendously influential on Russian prose, and each in its own way laid the groundwork for the emphasis on self-consciousness that is the theme of this book. The Tales of Belkin reveal the effects on Russians of the foreign literature they had now been reading for several decades. Of the five stories in the set, four have characters who imitate those in foreign books; indeed, Pushkin may provide the most sophisticated account of this phenomenon. 15 Here is what his narrator writes about the heroine of "The Snowstorm": Maria Gavrilovna had been brought up on French novels and consequently, was in love. The chosen object of her affections was a penurious army ensign, on leave in the village. It goes without saying that the young man was consumed with an equal passion, and that the parents of his beloved, noticing their mutual partiality, had forbidden their daughter to so much as think of him, and treated him worse than a retired assessor. Our lovers corresponded and saw one another every day in the pine spinney or by the old chapel. There they pledged eternal love, lamented their fate, and made various plans. Writing and conversing in this manner, they (as was only natural) came to the following conclusion: if we cannot breathe without one another, and the will of our cruel parents is standing in the way of our happiness, why cannot we disregard it? It goes without saying that this happy idea occurred first to the young man, and that it appealed enormously to Maria's romantic imagination. 16

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The ambitious young officer's imagination may be less "romantic" and more focused on money and status than Maria's. It is not he, however, who succeeds in snaring the girl and her fortune; he dies in the Napoleonic wars. Later in the story, Maria, courted by another young man, waits for him in the garden, "by the pond, under the willow; she was wearing a white dress and had a book in her hand, like a true heroine of a romantic novel." She is expecting a proposal, but she gets a speech from her suitor that begins this way: "I love you," said Burmin. "I love you passionately ... (Maria Gavrilovna blushed and lowered her head still further). "I have acted imprudently in indulging a delightful habit, the habit of seeing and hearing you every day.... " (Maria Gavrilovna remembered St. Preux's first letter [from Rousseau's Julie ou Ia Nouvelle Heloise]). "Now it is too late to resist my fate .... "

Both Maria Gavrilovna and the young man are role-playing even as they move through a comedy of errors that culminates in their marriage, at which point, we assume, they, like Maria's parents, drop literary pretences. Pushkin reveals how play-acting can be part of the process of real life and, in this case, the education of young people, who eventually outgrow the plots into which they temporarily insert themselves. In a dramatic rather than comic use of this same subject, Tatiana Larina, the heroine of Eugene Onegin, has a romantic literary imagination that gets her into serious trouble when Eugene, whom she takes for the hero of a novel (which one she is not sure), visits her estate. Tatiana's mother before her indulged in fantasies based on reading the English novelist Samuel Richardson, but escaped unscathed to a life of a provincial Russian gentry woman, during which she comes to have no regrets about her past or her marriage to Tatiana's prosaic father. Unlike her mother (and also perhaps the heroine of "The Snowstorm"), Tatiana does not find happiness or even the degree of contentment that her mother enjoyed. At first she falls in love with Eugene, but he rejects her; later, when she has become a society lady in Petersburg and the wife of an influential general, Eugene falls in love with her. She confesses that she still loves him, but she now rejects him for complex reasons that include both a sense of duty to her husband and society and a greater understanding of Eugene's faults. Tatiana's imitation of a romantic heroine is more than skin-deep: the novels that she reads change her in a way they did not change her mother. At the same time, Pushkin also supplies another explanation, a natural one, for what happens to Tatiana: "The time was right, she fell in love" (Para prishla, ana vliubilas'). What Pushkin is recording is the intensification and validation of Tatiana's natural personal desires through her reading of nov-

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els. The result of this literary process, paradoxically, is a "real" heroine whose story, so Lotman argues, does not fit any literary stereotypeY Despite Tatiana's central role in Pushkin's modern novel, Eugene Onegin could not be named after her. Appropriately for such a novel, the eponymous hero Onegin is all ego: first he doesn't want Tatiana, and then he does want her; aside from pride in its various aspects, such impulses seem to be his only motivation. Otherwise, as with Tatiana, we know him more for what he is not than what he is. 18 He has lost touch with the rhythms of nature that Tatiana loves and that make her fall in love, once and for all, with him. His reading and milieu may be partly responsible for thisalongside a few novels and Byron's poetry, Tatiana finds a portrait of the English poet and a bust of Napoleon in his study 19-but Pushkin has not set himself the task of explaining Eugene. We have no solid proof that his reading has deeply affected him at all. Shorn of the roles he has assumed, Eugene as modern man appears in Pushkin as an enigma. William Todd argues that Pushkin was not interested in depicting the consistent "private self" and our demand that he do so is anachronistic. Instead, says Todd, Onegin represents society man, the "honnete homme," who seems fragmentary from a postromantic or religious point of view because he has to be all things to all people. He has to assume different masks for different occasions, and in Pushkin's world this is perfectly appropriate. 20

LERMONTOV

At the end of the novel, Onegin fails to show the self-restraint of which the mature Tatiana is capable and that makes her a more admirable character than him. Although he does mull over his past in the last chapter, and at one point in the novel-poem he criticizes his own past actions-both the death of Lensky and his failure to marry Tatiana when she offers herself to himmost significantly for our subject Onegin does not study himself. Psychological observation in Eugene Onegin (and in the other prose works by Pushkin), as subtle as in any Russian novel, occurs mostly on the level of the narrator and author. As we shall see in Chapter 2, Pushkin is the model in this regard for Turgenev, who believed that overt psychological analysis on the part of the narrator was unartistic, and that only certain charactersself-conscious ones such as a Faust or a Hamlet-can be described by it without a distortion of their inner lives. It is Lermontov's Grigory Pechorin, in Russia's first psychological novel, who is also its first self-conscious hero. 21 According to Belinsky, "our age is primarily the age of reflection," 22 and Pechorin is a "Hero of Our Time"

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because he exemplifies this fact. Belinsky draws directly on Lermontov's text to prove his point. [Pechorin confessing to Doctor Werner in "Princess Mary," a chapter of Hero of Our Time] For a long time now I have lived not with my heart, but with my head. I weigh and sort my own passions and actions with stern curiosity but without empathy. There are two people in me: one lives in the full sense of the word, the other thinks and judges him; the first perhaps will say farewell to you and the world in an hour, but the other ... the other? ... 23 [Belinsky's commentary] In a state of reflection, a man falls apart into two men, one of whom lives, while the other observes him and judges him. 24

Belinsky provides a psychological genealogy for reflection, tracing it from Hamlet ("the poetic apotheosis of reflection") to Faust ("the poetic apotheosis of the reflection of our age") to Pushkin, who purportedly introduces the psychological principle of reflection into Russia in his r825 poem "Scene from Faust. " 25 Of this last poem, Belinsky writes: Pushkin's "Scene from Faust" is a lofty image of reflection as a disease of many individuals in our society. It takes the form of an apathetic cooling toward the good things of life as a result of the inability to submit oneself fully to them. The result is a dreary passivity in actions, an aversion to every deed, a lack of all interests in the soul, a vagueness of desires and aspirations, an unaccountable gloominess, a sickly dreaminess commensurate with an excess of inner life. 26

What Belinsky now recognizes as symptoms of reflection, earlier generations called such names as khandra (depression), ipokhondriia (hypochondria), mnitel'nost' (hypochondria), and somnenie (doubt)Y Domesticating this foreign import by linking it to earlier words (several of them also recognizably foreign, however, and related to the phenomenon of Byronism), Belinsky also provides a sociological-historical explanation for its appearance in Russia, where he claims that it has been rife since Peter the Great cut the nation off from its roots and traditions and thereby made Russians excessively self-conscious about their identity. However hyperbolic (and anachronistic) Belinsky's pronouncement may seem, it illustrates how Lermontov educated Russians about the extreme psychological effects of reflection and the romantic irony that it engenders. 28 The "disease" of self-consciousness became a common theme in Russian prose literature of the r 84os.

TURGENEV

Tatiana's mother gets over her early infatuation with the novels of Richardson, although she does not forbid Tatiana to read them. By the time the

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three major creators of Russian psychological prose-Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy-are publishing, parents are raising their children according to foreign models as they understand them. In Turgenev's A Nest of Gentryfolk ( r 8 59), for instance, the hero's father imitates an English gentleman: Ivan Petrovich returned to Russia a confirmed Anglomaniac. His short-cropped hair, his starched shirt, his long pea-green overcoat with multiple collars, his sour facial expression, his somehow simultaneously intense and indifferent manner, his habit of speaking through his teeth, his abrupt, wooden manner, his lack of a smile, his exclusively political or political-economic conversation, his passion for roast beef and port wine-everything about him radiated Great Britain, so to speak. 29

The father educates his son in what he takes to be an English manner. As the father ages, however, he sheds his fashionable English morning coat for a Russian bathrobe and in the end both in appearance and state of mind completely reverts to provincial gentry life. Turgenev's point is that the father never really was an Englishman at all. It was all just play acting by a man who remained a steppe landowner at heart. Meanwhile, the hero of the novel, Lavretsky, is changed by how his Anglophile father has educated him. 30 The Anglomaniac had played a poor joke on his son-the whimsical education had born its fruits. He'd submitted to his father unquestioningly for many long years. By the time he'd begun to see through his father, the damage had already been done-his habits were deeply rooted. He didn't know how to associate with people; at the age of twenty-three, with an unquenchable thirst for love in his shy heart, he still hadn't dared to look any woman in the face. Given his lucid, sound, but somewhat ponderous intellect, coupled with his tendencies toward stubbornness, contemplativeness, and indolence, he should have been thrown into the mainstream of life from his earliest years on, but instead he'd been kept in artificial seclusion. Now the magic circle had been broken, but he continued to remain inside it, wrapped up and imprisoned inside himself.

As a result of this miseducation, the nai've Lavretsky marries a captivating woman who betrays him with another man while they are living in Paris. In the brief period during which he believes his estranged wife has died, Lavretsky falls in love with a pious young woman whom he meets back home. No sooner has he declared his love, reciprocated by his Liza, than his wife shows up. Liza retires to a convent; Lavretsky, although he becomes a successful farmer who labors for his peasants as well as for himself, regards himself as "a solitary, homeless wanderer." He does not become a "Spartan" or an "Englishman" as his father had wished, but unlike the healthy young people described in Pushkin's Tales of Belkin, neither does he escape the consequences of his education.

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In addition to characters such as Lavretsky's father who play act, and Lavretsky himself, who is genuinely affected by his patchwork European education, Turgenev describes those who are affected by a charismatic figure advocating either Western or traditional ideas (Rudin, On the Eve, "Faust," "A Strange Story"). In "Faust," for instance, the narrator tells how he once courted a sheltered girl whose mother forbade them to marry. In the present time of the story, he meets the girl again, now married to a solid and prosaic landowner. When the narrator becomes friends with the couple and reads Goethe's Faust to the young wife, this awakens ancestral passions in her that the mother, now deceased, tried to suppress. The two fall in love, the young woman falls ill and dies, and the narrator concludes his story (in the form of letters to a friend) with the moral that it is better to live by duty than by love. What is significant in this particular story is the enormous effect of Goethe's great poem on the heroine. Romantic literature breaks down the walls so carefully constructed by the mother to protect her daughter. It's a Turgenevian variation on the developing theme of the effect of literature on personality in Russia.

DOSTOEVSKY

Rousseau's ominous prediction about the denaturalization of Russian identity bore fruit, at least in literature. The imitation of foreign models over a few generations led to a loss of a Russian identity rooted in the past without the assumption of a securely Russian modern one. This theme, broached in A Nest of Gentryfolk and other works by Turgenev, is thoroughly developed by Dostoevsky. One example among many in his oeuvre is the story of old Fyodor Karamazov's two marriages in The Brothers Karamazov. At the present time of the novel, I866, Fyodor's two wives are dead. Dmitrii, his son by the first marriage to Adelaida lvanovna, is twenty-eight, so her marriage to Fyodor would have taken place in I837, when romantic literature was all the rage. Adelaida is a romantic and especially a lover of fantasy-so much so that she lives life by the bookand her briefly described life is meant as a parody on the I83os and I84os. 31 First, in high romantic fashion, imitating a Sandian romantic heroine, she marries the totally unsuitable Fyodor; then subsequently, around I84I, now imitating the grittier idealists of the I84os, she runs away from him with a poor student-to die, I 84os realist style, in a garret. Fyodor's second marriage, in the early I 84os when Dmitrii is four, parodies the ideals of Dostoevsky's sentimental naturalist friends in the I84os. In this cynical version of marriage to a girl from the lower classes, the poor ward Sofya lvanovna is duped by a gentryman-sensualist (Fyodor), who, because

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in his own mind he has done her a favor, proceeds to trample with both feet on ordinary decencies in their marriage. Sofya lvanovna is also bookish, but her book is the Bible, so both of Fyodor's wives are defined by what they have read. They do not appear in person in the novel, of course, but their children do. Though products of a dysfunctional family, the Karamazov brothers are not often readers of the same books as their parents; nor have they found satisfactory roles based on duty, the way the hero of Turgenev's A Nest of Gentlefolk does. Instead they are all alienated modern men in search of a secure identity. In Dostoevsky, bad education through books or bad teachers can shape character, just as mountains can create their own climate. There arealready hints of this outcome in early works of Dostoevsky, but the first character psychologically damaged by reading is his Underground Man. In r875, more than ten years after Notes from Underground appeared and was barely noticed by his contemporaries, Dostoevsky proudly trumpets his creation of this tragic and original figure, who knows the good but cannot do it because he does not believe in "general laws. [For him] nothing is sacred. " 32 The Underground Man has lost the "cornerstone" of religious faith and cannot find it again in modern books. When Pushkin first began to report on the influence of these books, he represented characters as misled, though not psychologically distorted, by them. Eventually Maria Gavrilovna and her lover in "The Snowstorm" get together as young people have always done. The heroine in Turgenev's story "Faust" dies in part because of Goethe's poem, but it serves only to awaken dormant passions that she inherited from her Italian grandmother. By the end of A Nest of Gentryfolk, the hero fully understands his situation and has even found a place for himself in Russian life as a philanthropist and farmer. His fate is affected by his education, and he may feel rootless, but his character remains intact. Dostoevsky's Underground Man is changed more fundamentally than these characters. His reading of Western literature and philosophy has created a chasm between himself and the natural spontaneity to which he yearns to return but cannot. This happens not simply because of the content of what he reads but because of a change in his psyche due to the act of reading itself. The Underground Man suffers from heightened selfconsciousness. Dostoevsky blames this state on Western philosophy, but even for Dostoevsky the conduit of this philosophy into Russian culture is not thought but Western literature, prose and poetry alike. As readers exchanged old, well-worn, and hardly noticed Russian garments for new clothes of which they were intensely aware, and among which they had to choose, the process itself furthered self-consciousness. Never accepted as a natural extension or expression of the wearer, these

Chapter One new clothes remain costumes, with the result that the individual who puts them on does not really assume the identity associated with them. The mind, or as Russians would put it, the soul, becomes more analytical, more ironic not only toward traditional surroundings but also toward the self. Of course, writers in other cultures record such a process as well; in England, for instance, Anthony Trollope champions spontaneous old English ways against ironic modern ones. But in Russia, where change came so quickly and was so enormous, where from Peter onward it became the duty of an educated man to model himself after foreigners, writers perceived that the process of change itself, regardless of its content, was rearranging the psyche. Nothing in the psyche disappears entirely. The Underground Man still feels both love and hate, for instance, but he cannot act forcefully under the influence of either. As he puts it, the nineteenthcentury man has lost his character. By this he means that in this newly modern, bookish Russian, self-consciousness and analysis weaken all impulses so that the soul is influenced and shaped by the dialectic of consciousness itself. The consequences of this for the personality are apparent at the very beginning of Notes from Underground, in chapter I, part I. In the first part of the chapter, the hero proves that he is "wicked"; in the second he denies it. This introduces the dominant psychological feature of the Underground Man: his lack of personality, and his seesaw consciousness, in which each mood succeeds the previous one as its opposite and as a reaction to it. The Underground Man tells his readers that he is proud of this fact: he says that a nineteenth century man is obliged to be characterless. Why is he proud of it? Because it is an attribute of mind, and of all his parts he is proudest of his mind. The mind of the Underground Man grinds up any feeling that might rise in him and suggests its opposite, which in turn is subjected to the dialectic of the mind again. This dialectic structures the "anecdote" in the second part of the work. Out of loneliness and pride, the Underground Man gets himself invited to a farewell party for a man whom he despises, behaves abominably at the party, and then follows the others as they abandon him to visit a brothel. They have left when he arrives, so he purchases the services of a young prostitute, lures her to trust him, and invites her to visit his apartment. When she arrives, he breaks down, confesses his misery to her, and then, having done that, feels shame that turns into hatred toward her. They have sex again, and he throws money at her to take his revenge. As she is leaving, he undergoes another change of heart and is about to run after her, but he hesitates, because he realizes that if he did he would find himself hating her again. He swings helplessly from attraction to Liza to loathing for her, from a need for love and sympathy to a reaction to this through pride.

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Why does the Underground Man behave the way he does? As I have tried to suggest, the answer lies partly in the very process of Russian modernization. There was no gradual evolution toward a more individualist, less communalist ethos. The Russian elites were radicalized by Peter's call to abandon traditional Russia altogether. Imitating foreign models that he had seen or read about, the Russian could not totally assimilate them; he discarded old ways without really acquiring new ones. The extreme result of this process was the type of the Underground Man, who felt and acted like an outsider to his own society. This type, an atheist who believes only the evidence of his mind and senses, lives only for himself; his psychology depends on this basic principle. Of course he has social needs, but they do not include subordination to the group such as was sanctioned in traditional Russian society. The Underground Man pursues friendship, and even love but in the end asserts his freedom as more important than them. The acquisition of modernity through books rather than a gradual transformation of culture meant that Russians confronted modern dilemmas more starkly. "Poor Liza" is already proof of this: Erast is an ancestor of the Underground Man who first loves Liza, then betrays her, and then regrets his betrayal. Furthermore, as Gitta Hammarberg shows in her fascinating interpretation of this story, without approving of Erast's behavior the narrator sympathizes with and may in fact identify with him. Karamzin's little story is more complex than it seems, and closer to the modern ethos toward which Russians have ambivalent feelings. 33 In the first publication of Notes from Underground, the censor removed a reference to Christianity in part I, chapter 10, and Dostoevsky chose not to restore it in subsequent editions. The Underground Man is without grounding in anything higher than himself; this is Dostoevsky's attack on Western secular individualism. It is not clear from Notes from Underground how the Underground Man might resolve his dilemma, but he cannot return from bookishness to nature, or even to the premodern Russian way of life. Civilization is more important to Dostoevsky as a social reformer than nature, and it is based on ideas. The important thing for Dostoevsky becomes adaptation of the right ideas, and therefore an exchange of the wrong books for the right ones. Late in his career Dostoevsky explicitly recommends that one book-the Bible-replace all the others as the proper guide for mankind. 34 This is a return to the past, but a self-conscious one. Turgenev proposes no solution at all to the dilemma of modern man that he begins to define in his fiction, while Tolstoy takes a third position.

Chapter One TOLSTOY

As an autodidact from outside the Petersburg circuit, the young Tolstoy initially did not even pose the same questions as the other two. A Rousseauist who later confessed to wearing a medallion of the great philosopher instead of a cross during his late teens, Tolstoy attacked civilization (by which he meant modernity) from the point of view of nature, which he regarded as good. If Dostoevsky shows how books and ideas affect and change us, Tolstoy teaches us how nature lurks beneath the surface of everything we do and determines it. He often called books knizhki, using the pejorative Russian diminutive of kniga to indicate his disdain for them. To demonstrate the negative but powerful role of books in Tolstoy, let's turn again (as in the Introduction) to a famous scene in Anna Karenina. Returning by train to Petersburg after a successful visit to Moscow during which she has reconciled her brother and sister-in-law and smitten Count Vronsky, Anna is reading an English novel. Anna [... ] asked Annushka to bring out a little lamp, attached it to the armrest of her seat, and took a paper knife and an English novel from her handbag. At first she was unable to read ... [but then) ... Anna began to read and understand what she was reading .... Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was unpleasant for her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people's lives. She wanted too much to live herself. When she read about the heroine of the novel taking care of a sick man, she wanted to walk with inaudible steps around the sick man's room; when she read about a Member of Parliament making a speech, she wanted to make that speech; when she read about how Lady Mary rode to hounds, teasing her sister-in-law and surprising everyone with her courage, she wanted to do it herself. But there was nothing to do, and so, fingering the smooth knife with her small hands, she forced herself to read. The hero of the novel was already beginning to achieve his English happiness, a baronetcy, and an estate, and Anna wished to go with him to this estate, when suddenly she felt that he must be ashamed and that she was ashamed of the same thing. But what was he ashamed of? "What am I ashamed of?" she asked herself in offended astonishment. She put down the book and leaned back in the seat, clutching the paper-knife tightly in both hands. 35

We know that Tolstoy was reading Pushkin's prose just before he got the idea of writing Anna Karenina, and in this passage we see Anna behaving like Maria Gavrilovna in "The Snowstorm." She goes from being a reader of a novel to wanting to be the heroine of one that she writes herself. This reference to Anna as author of her own story is underlined by the fact that later on, after she has left her husband and is living with Vronsky and their baby girl, she begins to write children's books. Tolstoy also subtitles his

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novel "A Novel," thereby drawing attention to how Anna steps outside the epic cycle of life to fashion a novel around herself. The Russian word for novel is roman, which also means "romance," and Tolstoy intends the play on words: Anna's plot of the novel is generated by her desire for romantic love. As was the case with Maria Gavrilovna, things do not turn out for Anna as she expected them to in the bookish prototype, and in fact her affair with Vronsky leads to her death. The death occurs not at the very end of the novel, but at the end of book 7· In book 8, life goes on outside Anna's plot. The hero of the parallel plot of the novel, Konstantin Levin, overcomes a desire to commit suicide that is partly fueled by a modern loss of faith in the sanctity of life. The books of modern philosophy that he reads do not resolve his crisis. Anna Karenina is no villain, and in fact it is clear that Tolstoy loved her and put a great deal of himself as author into her. Anna pays with her life for her pursuit of personal fulfillment, and yet the fantasy of that individual fulfillment is what attracts readers to her and the novel in the first place. Unlike Anna, many of us will finish the novels we are reading rather than put them down to pursue an illicit love affair. Readers admire Anna for her inability to resist fulfilling her fantasies. Tolstoy's novel lets readers have their cake and eat it: while we congratulate ourselves on our moderation, we pity Anna's tragedy, and we vicariously enjoy her passion. Tolstoy pays tribute to Anna's charm by having Levin, a happily married man momentarily expecting the birth of his first child, visit her and come away enchanted. (Her reasons for flirting with him are complex and do not alleviate her crisis more than momentarily.) Among other things, this episode represents Tolstoy's concession to the irresistible-and naturalcharm of love stories, their heroines, and novels. When Anna decides to live her own novel, she departs from the common cycle of life that Tolstoy associates with epic. Epic includes heroes who die from acts of overweening pride, and Anna might be included among them. The difference between her situation and that of the epic warrior as portrayed in Tolstoy-Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in War and Peace would be the premier example-is that her goal is individual selffulfillment. Andrei, by contrast, wants to win the love of his people by risking his life for them. Tolstoy associates novels with the goal of individual self-fulfillment, and though the desire for it is natural it can lead to shame and death. It is important to recognize two things about the Tolstoyan path: he discovered it through those knizhki that he supposedly abhorred, especially through his reading of Rousseau; and in any case, as its source indicates, the turn to nature itself is modern. Tolstoy appears old-fashioned because he calls for a return to a mythical golden age in nature; yet the

Chapter One very placement of the sacred in nature is his modern substitution for dogmatic religion, in which he did not believe.

THE INDIVIDUAL AS GATEWAY TO THE SACRED

The case of Tolstoy, his didacticism openly and proudly flaunted, draws attention to an element in Russian psychological prose that often makes its modern readers uncomfortable. All three of the greatest authors of this school are moralists, and significantly, all are in some way transcendentalists. All privilege the soul as the gateway to absolute meaning; as we shall see, this applies even to Turgenev, although he is more a secular rationalist and less a mystic than the other two. The path to Russian transcendentalism begins at least as early as Karamzin, a highly moral "Kantian" Rousseauist, who believed that the soul was intrinsically good and even that "a bad person cannot be a good author" and "bad people don't even write novels." 36 Karamzin followed the Germans in preferring and emphasizing certain moral elements of Rousseau, especially his doctrine of the natural goodness of man. Hence his first visit on his travels abroad was to Immanuel Kant, who fortified him with edifying homilies. As a sentimentalist writer, Karamzin knew that evil existed, but his ideal was a retreat from the evils of an imperfect world to the perfect idyll of the soul. ("Poor Liza" indicates how difficult that ideal would be to achieve in practice.) This was his version of the Rousseauian Solitary Walker's sentiment de ['existence, in which "the individual seems to achieve perfection through the sense of a happiness untouched by doubt, of an innocence unblemished by sin." 37 Karamzinian solipsism was fundamentally moral; this fact affects the development of Russian psychological prose, which will carry on this tradition, and at the same time, like Karamzin himself, also seek to counter the adverse moral effects of solipsism, of which the greatest representatives of the school are all well aware. 38 The problem of these adverse effects deepens with romanticism, which departs from sentimentalism in a crucial way relevant to the status of subjectivity. In sentimentalism, the personality and subjectivity are universal; in this respect the movement is a part of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, now expanded to include the feelings and inner life as well as the mind and reason. The individual as depicted in Karamzin's fiction, whether a character or his individualized narrator, has no quirks, nothing that makes him uniquely different from others, whereas romanticism privileged the unique individual who by his nature had to be free from all constraints, even moral ones. Lord Byron, "a somber, skeptical poet of denial and profoundly at odds with the world, a fallen angel, as Goethe called him," 39

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was the conduit of this enormously powerful modern notion into Russia, where it mixed with native ideas of will (volia) and anarchy to create wild characters in both fiction and real life. The extreme effects of this phenomenon will emerge in Chapter 9, on evil. Lermontov is Russia's greatest romantic prose writer; Pechorin, his "hero of our time," is the homebred romantic hero who seduces and frightens the great writers of Russian psychological prose with his magnificent freedom and his cynicism. 40 The generation of the r84os, when Turgenev and Dostoevsky first published, all seek to tame Lermontovian romanticism without killing it; one might say that they want to domesticate it for Russian cultural consumption. Their primary means is through various forms of transcendentalism. The men of the r83os "especially valued Fichte's idea that the individual is rooted in the transcendental sphere; this doctrine made possible their emancipation from romantic subjectivism. " 41 For this reason among others, the philosophical appeal of transcendentalism remained strong in the r84os. In r842 a very respectful article on John Locke by K. A. Peterson in the Contemporary (Sovremennik) argued that it is not true, pace Locke, that there is no such thing as innate ideas. 42 The "innate ideas" that Peterson defends are metaphysical and moral; they link the human individual to the divine, and they provide knowledge of good and evil. Six years later, in r848, the Contemporary published an article by I. K. Babst on Leibniz, who, according to Babst, admired Locke but also insisted on the existence of innate ideas. 43 At this time, the journal was already under the control of the younger generation; the editors were poet N. A. Nekrasov and minor prose writer I. I. Panaev, and it was well launched as the voice of progressive opinion. Science too remained "romantic" and transcendental during this decade. Journals full of new scientific discoveries also continued to publish grand German philosophical explanations of nature. Alexander Humboldt's five-volume Kosmos, for instance, began to be translated in two journals as soon as it appeared in German. 44 In r848, N. Ya. Danilevsky reviewed Kosmos, which he presented as an artistic and Goethean attempt to describe the world both in its parts and as a harmonious whole. Danilevsky (r822-r88 5), a student of the natural sciences, a member of the radical Petrashevsky circle, and according to Dostoevsky a "raging Fourierist," was no conservative at the time. 45 Other Westernizing thinkers were also transcendentalists in the r 84os. One example is an unexpected reaction to the translation, in r84r, of Plato's dialogues, each with its own explanatory introduction, in two volumes. The translator, V. N. Karpov (r798-r867), who also wrote philosophical treatises, was a religious idealist philosopher from a clerical background and a professor at the Saint Petersburg Spiritual Academy. 46 He believed that consciousness (soznanie) was the basis of philosophy, and in

30

Chapter One

his formulation (a culturally significant emendation of Descartes' wellknown statement) "I am conscious [ia soznaiu]" is the first truth, and the subjective basis of philosophy. 47 For Karpov, consciousness is the gateway to absolute truth, without which philosophy could not exist. In r842, in Library for Reading (Biblioteka dlia chteniia), the most successful journal of the time, its publisher and editor, 0. I. Senkovsky (r8oor8s8), reviewed Karpov's translations at length. 48 He applauds the project in general but attacks Karpov's idealist view of Plato, quoting the latter to the effect that ideas are only "momentary guests on earth"; he then objects that "in an age of analysis and positivist knowledge, we would have hoped not to hear such a heresy against taste, against art, and against clarity of ideas. " 49 Senkovsky scorns German philosophy as murky and abstract and says that Plato is ill-served by German interpreters. Science has limited the role of philosophy once and for all to ethics, so he says; Plato (in the person of Socrates) already recognized this. Senkovsky prefers Socratic irony to Platonic idealism, the existence of which he even tries to deny. If the truths about which Socrates hints are obscure, Senkovsky intimates, Plato did not really believe that they could be understood. This reaction to Karpov's idealism is what we might expect from the skeptical and analytical point of view that Senkovsky represents. By contrast, the Contemporary, the journal edited by the elegiac poet P. A. Pletnyov (r79r-r86s), praises Karpov's project and his point of view. 5° Two other reviews, however, in the progressive Notes of the Fatherland (Otechestvennye zapiski), depart from the expected pattern. The reviewer in both cases is none other than the "Westernizer" Vissarion Belinsky, and his highly laudatory brief review of volume r is followed by a longer reviewessay of both volumes several months later. 5 1 In the first review, Belinsky praises Karpov's translations as a Europeanwide achievement, more accurate and therefore better than the French ones by Victor Cousin. 5 2 Like Senkovsky in the Library for Reading, he distinguishes Plato from Socrates; but unlike Senkovsky, he declares that he looks forward to the idealist elements of Plato's thought as they will be revealed in later translations. He concludes that "it takes one's breath away to think that you might soon be able to read in Russian the inspired and prophetic words of Plato about the incorporeal kingdom of ideas, about beauty, about the gods, about immortality.... " 53 In the later review of the second volume, which includes both the Apology and the Crito, Belinsky celebrates the heroism of Socrates and his willingness to die for truth, and he directly attacks Senkovsky's cynicism. Playing with Socrates' well-known adage that "he knows that he knows nothing," Belinsky writes that "to believe and not to know-this still has meaning for a human being; but to know and not to believe-this means absolutely nothing. Conscious belief and reli-

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gious knowledge-this is the source of living activity, without which life is worse than death. " 54 After a long quotation from the Crito, Belinsky declares of Socrates that "thought was his belief; with his painful death he confirms the justice of his own religious consciousness." 55 (The heroic and religious Socrates portrayed here may be a model for the virtuous "Socratic" deaths portrayed later in the decade in Turgenev's famous and influential sketch, from A Sportsman's Sketches, entitled "Death.") Belinsky depends on what he labels variously as "religious consciousness" and "religious belief" to morally ground the individual whom he is championing in Russian life. There is no mention in this review of Russian Orthodoxy, established religion of any kind, or even God; the personality itself is assumed to be moral and "religious." This assumption will be challenged by the writers to be discussed in the remainder of this book, but it is an essential beginning point for the development of Russian psychological prose. Whether or not they wholeheartedly believe in some transcendental truth, all of our writers keenly feel the necessity of it as a "cornerstone for their moral being." A second example of transcendentalist thought comes from the author of these last words (which also comprise one of the epigraphs to this chapter), Alexander I. Herzen (I8I2-I8?o), a member of the same generation as Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, and Russia's greatest memoirist and essayist. Like Belinsky, Herzen was a champion of individualism but also a moralist; hence he too was attracted to transcendental justifications of the individual. The example of Herzen clearly illustrates the tension between transcendentalism and the individualism so important for Russian psychological realism, and the way that a young Herzen tried to resolve it. In the I 84os, Herzen published two series of essays entitled Dilettantism in Science and Letters on the Study of Nature. 56 At this point he still looks forward to the solution to his "internal discord" at the end of history, when that cornerstone missing from his "moral being" will finally be restored. In Dilettantism in Science, while championing the "objectivity" of "realism" and criticizing the "dreaminess" (mechtatetnost') of subjectivist idealism, Herzen also defends the value and reality of the individual "personality" (lichnost'). He calls on the personality to sacrifice itself to the truths of nature and history, but, he claims, in so doing that same personality does not perish, instead emerging purified and closer to "truth" and reason than before. 57 Furthermore, thought is not everything; nor is science. Deeds are positive human acts, and Herzen quotes Goethe that "Man is not merely a thinking, but also an acting being." 58 These crucial early philosophical essays reveal the young Herzen not as the "pure pluralist" of his later years 59 but as a transcendentalist and romantic scientist whose mentor is Goethe, whom he quotes and mentions over and over

Chapter One again. As a Goethean, Herzen believed in "the reason behind everything that lives" 60 ; at this point nature still made sense to him, and he grounded the human personality in nature and reason. Therefore, in the eighth letter ("Realism") of Letters on the Study of Nature, he attacks the Lockean school for treating reason only as a faculty of the individual; the Lockeans have no understanding of "species thought" (rodovoe myshlenie) as it develops in history. 61 Herzen broke decisively with all forms of idealism only after the disillusionment of the European revolutions of 1848, which he witnessed. His subsequent belief in the "unlimited freedom" of the individual is philosophically paradoxical, because he also believes in the blind and overpowering forces of nature and history. 62 Only after r848 does he seems to reconcile himself to the position of "internal discord"-both free and not free-that, as we shall see, in one way or another is characteristic of all three of the Russian realists discussed in this book. Perhaps, like the Egyptians during the seven years of famine described in Exodus, during his lean years when he had given up on all external support for the individual, Herzen lived off the rich sustenance of the metaphysics of selfconsciousness produced in Russia in the r83os and r84os. In any case he and many other members of his generation, although wedded to "scientific accuracy," located the moral compass they needed within the consciousness of each individual. This moral compass was necessary to them as the one potential unifying element of a soul otherwise divided.

.

~

Rousseau's brilliant critique (quoted at the beginning of this chapter) of the reforms of Peter the Great failed to foresee the fruitfulness of the conflicted souls that Peter created. Peter destroyed spontaneity among the Russian upper classes, and they eventually became obsessed with regaining it. The result of this obsession was more self-consciousness, more of a sense of isolation from society and culture, more analysis and less spontaneity-all symptoms of modern individualism that in turn become the subjects of Russian psychological prose. Yet contrary to Rousseau's predictions, the naive young Russians who went to Europe to become Germans or Englishmen eventually forged their own modern national identity and a moral agenda in the nineteenth century. This was already true of Karamzin, who, as Lotman argues in his biography (aptly entitled The Making of Karamzin, [Sotvorenie Karamzina]), was inventing himself as he wrote his sentimental works. Both Karamzin's writings and his conduct were intended to provide a model of personal responsibility for society that Karamzin, with his Masonic education, believed to be essential for a successful transition to modernity. One could say that we no longer

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read Karamzin's works of fiction because they had their desired effect, and we no longer need them. In attempting to construct the man out of his writings, Lotman remarks on the differences between the sentimental image of Karamzin's "I" narrator and Karamzin himself, who in his mature years was of scholarly temperament and reserved. The creation of himself out of literary models had its effects even on Karamzin, who, if Lotman is right, was already a divided modern man. This may be one personal reason Karamzin eventually turned against the cult of sincerity that he had done so much to nurture in Russia. Overall, Karamzin mostly left the dark side of the modern personality to his descendants to explore, but one of his fictional works, "My Confession: A Letter to the Editor of this Journal" (r8o2), presents a hero who resembles Stavrogin from Dostoevsky's The Demons in his manipulation of spontaneity and cynical rejection of social norms. 63 Eugene Onegin, adept as he is at the "science of love," is a descendant of this character and yet still capable of falling in love himself. Lermontov's Pechorin is the first of this type to be self-conscious about his own spontaneous yet cynically detached personality. 64 The defense of subjectivity and the individual that followed in the r84os is accompanied by the presence, even in unexpected places, of a transcendental grounding of it. Although they quarreled among themselves about its content, the Russian realists would agree that, as Dostoevsky discerned (first in Notes from Underground), the modern Russian individual was simultaneously the most emotional and the most cynical of men. Russians were in a position to analyze their own subjectivity, and they proceeded to do so. When they wrote about subjectivity, however, they understood that they could not simply dissect it and analyze its parts. They would have to capture it live for readers, as a living butterfly fluttering from flower to flower and hard to pin down. The next three chapters explore how they accomplished this task.

CHAPTER TWO

Turgenev Subjectivity in the Shadows Reality is infinitely various when compared to the deductions of abstract thought, even those that are most subtle, and it will not tolerate rigid, hard-and-fast distinctions. Reality strives for diversification. 1

~ 0

Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy were all three artistic practitioners of what Alexander Luria called "romantic science." Like such preromantic scientists (and artists) as Schelling, Goethe, and Novalis, they understood that the linear techniques of inductive reason were inadequate to the human sciences because they undermine the reality of the self.2 One can reason away the freedom and moral agency of the soul, but it persists in manifesting itself to observers whose job is first and foremost to report on reality even if they do not understand what they see. For Turgenev, the most earthbound and in this sense most positivist of the trio, the fact is a fundamental premise of his poetics, this aspect of which is expressed most perfectly in A Sportsman's Sketches, published in I 8 52· Especially in this book, Turgenev reports on the interior life of his characters but does not analyze its contradictions and mysteries. Turgenev was pleased with the volume, but in a letter from I 8 52 to his friend, the critic Pavel Annenkov, more typically for him he dwelt on its shortcomings: I am glad that the book has come out; it seems to me that, to speak in the style of Russian letters, it will remain the mite that I have contributed to the treasure house of Russian literature. I myself reread Sketches recently. A lot came out pale, fragmentary, a lot is only noted, some of it is not right, oversalted or undercookedstill, certain notes are right in tune and not false, and these notes save the whole book. But the whole thing is still far from a perfect work of art, and one need only

Turgenev: Subjectivity in the Shadows

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read a real master, whose brush moves quickly and freely in his hand, to understand what tiny little men we all are. 3

The master whom Turgenev happened to have been reading at the time was Moliere {I622-I673), 4 in comparison to whom his own voice sounded to himself like "a grasshopper chirring." Although he does not explain exactly what makes Moliere superior, he seems to be complaining mostly about his own lack of control of his narrative. He (Turgenev) does not paint with the power, freedom, and consistency of a great master. If the insecure Turgenev was angling for compliments in his letter, he must have read Annenkov's reply with a succession of feelings familiar to those who have received an objectively useful but nonetheless painful assessment of their writing from a trusted friend. 5 Characterizing Turgenev's evaluation of A Sportsman's Sketches as "intelligent," Annenkov provides his own thorough explanation of what is wrong with it. It exudes an awesome "wild strength" in its depictions of the Russian peasant. Often, though, this strength ranges out of control, both in a narrative voice that calls too much attention to itself and in artistically untamed characters that are what Annenkov calls "originals." Annenkov diplomatically couches his criticism of A Sportsman's Sketches as advice about Turgenev's next project, a novel: I most definitely expect a novel from you with full control over all the characters and events and without self-satisfaction (that is, with your authorship), without the sudden appearance of originals whom you like too much, because originals are born and live without any special signs in heaven and excitement on earth, and, finally, [I also expect that] wretched little events, contradictions and absurdities of life won't call attention to themselves and titillate us with their ugliness as sometimes happens in the book, but instead will assume their normal place without suspecting that anyone would want to look at them. 6

We know from a subsequent letter from Annenkov that Turgenev accepted his friend's critique, and that he did set about writing novels that would somehow harness the raw power of A Sportsman's Sketches.? In any case, Annenkov was absolutely right that Turgenev could not have written another book like this first one. Its unique artistic appeal may reside, however, in the very qualities that both Annenkov and Turgenev criticized in I 8 52. The roughness of A Sportsman's Sketches, its raw feeling and its contradictions may have been what impressed the young Tolstoy as well as later readers. 8 These readers eventually included the very same Annenkov, by the way, who in the I87os urged Turgenev not to add new sketches to the book. The story "The End of Chertopkhanov" is good, he wrote, but it is not suitable for A Sportsman's Sketches.

Chapter Two Where is the freedom of composition, the abundance of lines, shades, and colors that make up the portraits in Notes? [Where is] the playfulness of the master ranging easily over his subject, and the mastery of remarks that say so much more than is written down? [In "The End of Chertopkhanov"] while the psychologist has come into his own, the writer, if he has not flagged, has taken his place to the side. His nook is still beautiful, but it is a nook .... The simplicity, restraint, sobriety, terseness of the real Notes is no longer attainable. 9 What in the early r8 sos seemed "undercooked" to Turgenev and "ugliness" (bezobrazie) to Annenkov now tantalizes Annenkov as subjective reality pregnant with meaning. Whereas before he criticized Turgenev's "originals" as not typical or worthy, he now admires them as complex "portraits" the mysteriousness of which is now perceived by him as positive. The narrative strategy of A Sportsman's Sketches, previously perceived by him as overly aggressive, now appears modest and honest in relation to its inexhaustible subject matter. By the r 87os, in other words, A Sportsman's Sketches had assumed its place in Russian literature as a Herodotean excursion into a human reality so rich that the inexplicability of its teeming life becomes a marker of its genre. As we explore in Chapter 7, Dostoevsky was certainly thinking of this book when he published his own "sketches" (zapiski) of prison life with its mix of documentary and fiction. What sorts of "absurdities" (neleposti) in A Sportsman's Sketches might have irked Annenkov in r8p? On the level of individual words, there are place names in the book that have meaning only because they come from real life. One such word is mech', from "Kas'ian iz krasivoi mechi." The title is most often translated into English as "Kasian from Beautiful Spring," but the term "Beautiful Spring" is simply a translator's rationalization of a place name the meaning of which we do not actually know. Krasivaia mech' is a tributary of the Don River that ran through the estate of Turgenev's mother. The word mech' is apparently unattested anywhere else in Russian: since it appears in the story only in oblique cases, the editors of the Academy Turgenev are not even sure whether the nominative form of the word is mech' or mecha. 10 Turgenev appears to have chosen this home for Kasian partly because of its natural beauty, but perhaps also because the name itself contributes to the aura of mystery surrounding the character. On the level of character, there are many incongruous details in A Sportsman's Sketches that do not conform to the cultural types that Turgenev was so famous for creating. The undercooked quality of the sketches in this regard is apparent in the very first one, "Khor and Kalinych." It is well known that Turgenev first compared the two characters to Goethe (Khor) and Schiller (Kalinych), and that he dropped this comparison in subsequent publications because it shocked his friends.U He may also have

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been willing to make the change because Khor and Kalinych do not in fact divide neatly into the respective Schillerian types of natural (or, in Schiller's terms, Goethean) and sentimental man; the sentimental and Schillerian Khor, for instance, is sociable, while the supposedly Goethean and natural Kalinych is more like a solitary romantic, although the opposite would be true according to Schiller's categories. Peasants based only on such categories would have been too abstract for Turgenev, who relied as much (or more) on his own experience of Russian reality as on literary models to create Khor and KalinychY In I 8 56, in a letter to Vasilii P. Botkin-the other friend besides Annenkov whose critical judgment Turgenev trusted most-he approvingly quotes a remark made by critic Johann Heinrich Merck to Goethe: "Your tendency, your steadfast direction is to give poetic form to the real, while others try to transform the so-called poetic, the imagined into the real, but nothing but stupidity can come from this." 13 The artist must start with empirical reality because he cannot conjure it up. While shaping reality into "types" according to categories supplied by the mind, Turgenev therefore avoided what he called "tendencies" (napravleniia) of the Westernizer or Slavophile variety. So, in describing an Ostrovsky play to Annenkov in I 8 53, he says that it is good but it has a "tendency," or an "inclination toward a tendency" (stremlenie k napravleniiu) such as Annenkov warns against. (The tendency in this case is Slavophilism.) Of the never-finished novel he himself is writing at the time ("Two Generations"), Turgenev says by contrast: "In my novel I have been trying to express as simply and truly as possible what I have seen and experienced myself without concerning myself with what teaching I might derive from it." 14 First and foremost, the artist reports on reality, and even if he creates types he cannot necessarily completely explain them. For this reason, a number of stories in A Sportsman's Sketches are structured around the failure of characters to act according to type, at least as the narrator initially understands it. Examples include "My Neighbor Radilov," "The Country Doctor," "The Lone Wolf," "Knock! Knock! Knock!" and others.

THE AUTHOR'S INTENTION IN 'A SPORTSMAN'S SKETCHES'

Because he was regarded by contemporaries as the best writer among the three, at least until the publication of War and Peace, Turgenev set standards in prose fiction that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy openly challenged and more or less secretly emulated. As the philosophically best trained of the three, he wrote sophisticated essays about literature that both younger

Chapter Two

writers read. One of them was his I 84 5 review of the translation of Goethe's Faust, part IY Among Turgenev's main points in this review is that "poets," even great ones, need not provide solutions to problems they raise. He claims that Goethe started Faust very early, even before The Sorrows of Young Werther, and that he had no conscious plan when he did so. 16 Part I of Faust "poured straight out of Goethe's soul," and as a result it is "permeated through and through with unconscious truth, unmediated unity." Only in part 2 did Goethe begin to think consciously about giving the work a shape. Turgenev goes on to suggest that it is Russians who can most appreciate this peculiarity of Faust, because as a young nation themselves they don't necessarily need resolution or systems. 17 Less than two years after he wrote this review, Turgenev published "Khor and Kalinych," which became the first story of his Sportsman's Sketches. These sketches have a political purpose and as such seem to propose a "solution" to a political and social problem. "Khor and Kalinych" and the stories that followed were part of a response to a call to action laid down by Vissarion Belinsky in his "Overview of Russian Literature in I847": Nature is the great model for art, while the greatest and most noble subject in nature is man. And is the mouzhik not a man? But what can be of interest in a crude uneducated man? What can? His soul, mind, heart, passions, tendencies: in a word, all the same things as in an educated man. 18

Turgenev wrote "Khor and Kalinych" as a contribution to the first issue of the journal Contemporary under the new editorship of Panaev and Nekrasov. It was so popular that Turgenev and his friends soon formed the idea of a whole book of such stories; six more came out in I847, another six in I848, and three in I849· The revolution of I848 in Europe, and the subsequent political crack-down by the government of Nikolai I, scuttled immediate implementation of that plan. A separate edition did not appear until I 8 52, but even then the Moscow censor who allowed its publication was fired. Like Faust as Turgenev describes it in his review, A Sportsman's Sketches was also begun without a plan. We know this because, although the idea for a book arose in I847, "Khor and Kalinych," unlike subsequent stories intended for the volume, was not numbered when it appeared in the Contemporary. From this, the editors of the Academy edition conclude that, when he published it, Turgenev had not yet conceived the idea of a collection of related sketchesY Furthermore, only one of the stories ("Two Landowners") was specifically written for the separate edition; none of the others was substantially rewritten for it. Turgenev later added three more stories in the early I87os ("The End of Chertopkhanov," "Knock!

Turgenev: Subjectivity in the Shadows

39

Knock! Knock!" and "The Living Relic"). We may conclude from this last fact that the shape or plan the book assumed in Turgenev's mind when he first published it was an open one to which stories could be added. Yet already in r 8 52, the book as a whole had some kind of shape for him, one requiring him to rearrange the chronological sequence of the stories and exclude "The Diary of a Superfluous Man" (r8so) but include "Hamlet of Shchigrov District" (r849). 20 In the review of Faust Turgenev characterized its creator as nothing but a poet. In this resides both Goethe's strength and his weakness; he cares for nothing but the human and this-worldly, and he rejects religion, whether dogmatic or philosophical. 21 A Sportsman's Sketches too is Goethean in its acceptance of everything human, but in the circumstances under which Turgenev wrote the book, acceptance in and of itself had an immediate moral and political purpose for Turgenev, namely, the abolition of serfdom in Russia. If, however, A Sportsman's Sketches survives as a work of art still read for pleasure and profit today, it is because it had a related but larger, more universal application than the immediate one for which Turgenev originally intended it. Like a Trollope novel, A Sportsman's Sketches provides an overall picture of Russian rural society as the fictional hunter narrator wanders around observing country life. At the same time, Turgenev's particular task requires that the expectations of his narrator, based as they are on social stereotypes, be continuously confounded. Put bluntly, in A Sportsman's Sketches nature trumps nurture every time, just as it does in the first story of the series, "Khor and Kalinych." The peasant heroes of this story cannot escape their social status, of course, but they can work within it to realize the goals of their particular personalities. Khor, for instance, does not want to buy his freedom from his silly gentry owner, because he thinks he does better as a serf than he would as a free man; nonetheless, within social strictures that he chooses not to challenge, he has succeeded in fulfilling himself and leading a life more dignified than that of his master. Again and again, Turgenev's narrator is surprised by the unexpected behavior of his "material," and some stories are shaped around his comeuppance as an observer and typographer. "My Neighbor Radilov," for instance, is a kind of mystery centered around the psychological dynamics in the Radilov household. The narrator, hunting partridge on the grounds of a run-down and seemingly uninhabited estate, almost shoots a girl, whereupon the landowner Radilov immediately appears to complain about the incident; the narrator apologizes and reluctantly accepts an invitation to dinner. As the two men enter Radilov's farmstead, the narrator sees a typical neglected yard and kitchen garden, and he takes Radilov

Chapter Two

for a "typical" steppe landowner like Polutykin, the owner of Khor and Kalinych. But Radilov confounds the narrator's expectations about him: looking at his own surroundings, Radilov articulates what the narrator is thinking-that he might not want to stay for dinner-and the narrator, disarmed, assures Radilov of the contrary. In the house, an atmosphere of sadness and decay prevails, and again the narrator interprets Radilov, a middle-aged, childless widower whose wife died tragically in childbirth, within the context of this atmosphere. Fyodor Mikheich, a former provincial bon vivant, now a pathetic aged hanger-on, lives with Radilov and sings for his supper. The narrator is disgusted by his performance, and Radilov, noticing this, tells Fyodor Mikheich to stop. Over the course of his visit, it dawns on the narrator that he cannot pigeonhole Radilov, who just isn't "typical"; this goes too for Radilov's quiet young sister-in-law, Olga, who is part of his household. The truth emerges only in light of subsequent events. On a later visit, the narrator learns that Olga and the widower Radilov have eloped, leaving Radilov's aged mother to weep away her final years. Social typicality is overthrown by the secret movement of the heart in an individual who is willing to defy convention, and even moral obligation, to submit to passion. On the one hand, this story revolves around the narrator, who perceives a problem: the atypical behavior of Radilov and the "unfathomable" behavior of Olga. In this sense it may be said to be investigative, "scientific," objective reporting. On the other hand, the purpose of the story, as of most of the Sportsman's Sketches, is to explore the character of an individual or individuals. Finally, it is important that the investigation produce results unexpected by the observer, who nonetheless remains true to his calling because he does not distort his findings. The narrator at first mistakenly interprets the characters as "socially" determined when in fact it is nature that defines them. The story has a related philosophical dimension. The Russian romantic poet Fyodor Tiutchev (I803-1873) wrote in a letter to his wife in 1852, after he had read the separate edition of Sportsman's Sketches, that in these stories Turgenev had combined "penetration of nature" and intimate knowledge of mankind. 22 Tiutchev might well have had in mind "My Neighbor Radilov," in which there turns out to be a connection between the nature scenery that opens the story and the plot as the narrator eventually unravels it. The opening passage needs to be revisited in light of the denouement. Although the narrator does not tell us so, the "young girl" whom he almost shot was Olga; we realize belatedly that Olga and Radilov had been together in the grove. The narrator first associates them wrongly with the milieu of steppe landowner, when in fact they both belong to

Turgenev: Subjectivity in the Shadows

nature, to the birds the narrator is hunting, who are outside human conventions and morality. The little episode at the beginning sets the plot in motion and is relevant to the interpretation of Olga and Radilov, because the young Turgenev, like his mentor Belinsky, adhered to the German romantic idea that at heart man is nature. In this story he plays on prejudices and expectations created in earlier stories, both in A Sportsman's Sketches and elsewhere, about landowner types; then he confounds those expectations by revealing the secret doings of the lovers. Turgenev's hunter narrator takes us through the process of his revelation, but he does not take us back to the beginning of the story to reinterpret it in the light of what we now know. He does not revisit Radilov's relations with the hanger-on, which also appear differently when we come to understand Radilov's state of mind. All of this we must do on our own, and once we do so we interpret the story in a way that no character, maybe not even the narrator, does. "My Neighbor Radilov" originally appeared in May r847 along with three other sketches. Two others had been published before it, in January and February of the same year. 23 In the first (r8 52) edition of A Sportsman's Sketches, it comes fifth, after "Khor and Kalinych," "Ermolai and the Miller's Wife," "Raspberry Water," and "The Country Doctor," in that order. Of these, the third and fourth originally appeared later than the other three. Although there is no smoking gun to prove this, it is possible that Turgenev moved "My Neighbor Radilov" from third to fifth place in order to strengthen his reader's expectations about the behavior of landowners that are confounded in the story. If this was his intention, then it would have been just as important to move "Pyotr Petrovich Karataev," chronologically the second story to appear, to eighteenth place in the r 8 52 edition. It tells the story of another landowner rebel who has a tragic affair with a serf girl from a neighboring estate. In Turgenev's final (r8p) arrangements of his sketches, in the first three the gentry class is presented as totally negative. Each of these first three stories, incidentally, depends on a subversion of expectations: in each of them, serfs are presented as more worthy than their masters. In the second three-"The Country Doctor," "My Neighbor Radilov," and "Ovsiannikov the Freeholder"-the gentry are rehabilitated, and also presented as humanly diverse. One can conclude from this evidence that, in addition to his political and social agenda, which he understood could be ephemeral, Turgenev had a more lasting artistic purpose in publishing his book as well. This was the Goethean "poetic" defense of the particular against the general, and the human personality against its absorption into categories (or, as contemporaries called them, "types"), whether natural or social, that totally define

Chapter Two it. Along with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Turgenev participated in the romantic revolt against rationalist schemes favored by the Enlightenment. [I]n a drive to generality, the system tends to neglect the particular and the unique. To evoke Blake's image, instead of being able to discern eternity in a grain of sand, the single grain is neglected for the sake of conceptualizing eternity. 24

Blake's image may remind us of Ivan Karamazov's refusal to accept immortality if it comes at the cost of one child's life. But Dostoevsky did not have to look outside Russian literature for such an attitude. In I 8 52 Turgenev had already produced a work, the intention of which was to protect and validate the particular and the individual. I have suggested that the need to do this has a common philosophical basis in modern Russian culture that stems from German philosophical thought. It is also a prerogative of art, as opposed to philosophy; the privileging in Russian culture of the particular and the subjective over the general and the objective gives art a special status in it. 25 Respect for subjectivity is the cornerstone of Russian realist prose. Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy all developed strategies to protect it, although Turgenev's solution to the problem was to keep subjectivity in the shadows, away from the prying eye of reason. By assuming the stance of an observer who never describes the inner life of his characters in detail or precisely, he avoids subjecting it to the distorting lens of inductive reason. What his figures actually feel and think can only be conjectured, not known with certainty, though that they feel and think deeply is indisputable. Turgenev intentionally created word pictures in which, in Henry James's cogent assessment in I878, "as we read, we are always looking and listening; and we seem, indeed, at moments, for want of a running thread of explanation, to see rather more than we understand." 26 In Turgenev's art, gesture and appearance trump what characters say in our interpretation of them27; they also trump the narrator's occasional explanations of their conduct. This does not mean that Turgenev banishes objectivity from his prose; on the contrary, he insists on it to a greater extent than either Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. By protecting subjectivity to the extent that he does, he is moving toward what he regards as the proper balance of subjective and objective, according to which the realm of the subjective is small and hidden, but immensely significant for each individual. In the interests of balance and harmony, Turgenev always resists excessive psychologizing, because he does not want to turn inner life into a "chemical process" rather than living feeling. 28 As early as I 8 52, Turgenev laid out his objections to excessive psychologizing in art in a review of Alexander Ostrovsky's play The Poor Bride (I8p). He republished this review in his collected works in I88o

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43

with a remark that he had been wrong to be so critical of what turned out to be a staple of the Russian theater, but that he still regarded some of his comments as "not without truth. " 29 Among them must have been his general observation that "the psychologist must disappear in the artist the way the skeleton disappears from view under the living and warm body, to which it provides sturdy but invisible support." 30 Open psychologizing slows down action in a drama, but also in drama "what is most valuable to us are those simple sudden movements in which the human soul sonorously reveals itself" (zvuchno vyskazyvaetsia). 31 So Turgenev's objections to psychological analysis as an artistic technique were substantive as well as formal: analysis kills spontaneity and therefore distorts the reality of subjectivity, which discloses itself in dress, in gestures, in settings, as well as in words and action. In Henry James's view, Turgenev's allegiance to objective truth makes him "a devoutly attentive observer, and the result of this temper is to make him take a view of the great spectacle of human life more general, more impartial, more unreservedly intelligent, than that of any novelist we know." 32 The same distant stance makes him prone to sarcasm, as James observes, and it also reflects his equation (which we discuss in Chapter 6) of the observing eye with the mind rather than with mind and feeling alike. When he turns that eye on the self in first-person narratives, they are selfcritical, gloomy, and pessimistic, because that is how the mind views the human situation in general. Dostoevsky regarded this stance as cowardly, and he made fun of it in Karmazinov's speech "Merci" in The Demons. 33 Dostoevsky to the contrary, however weak-willed Turgenev may have been as a man, as an author he was no coward. Turgenev was a stoic and at the very least an agnostic who therefore could not turn to the sacred for strength against the brute force of nature and circumstance. At the peak of his art, he projects a sober balance between the needs of the individual and his limitations within reality. His greatest work in this respect is Fathers and Children, and Eugene Bazarov its greatest character. Bazarov possesses the spontaneity of action and strength that Turgenev admired in human nature; like Turgenev the author, he also has a strong mind that tends toward sarcasm. Having been forced by circumstances in the course of the novel to step out of his role as an observer and submit to his own "simple sudden movements in which the human soul sonorously reveals itself," Bazarov eventually turns the light of reason on himself and his situation. Unlike the first-person narrators in such Turgenev stories as "Diary of a Superfluous Man" and "Ghosts," Bazarov does not lose his sense of perspective about his predicament. On his deathbed, he is able to declare his love for Odintsova, but also to joke at his own expense; he is not spiritually defeated by the outside forces that destroy him. This is Turgenev's

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model of the highest man, who remains true to the "I" of his mind even as he submits first to passion and then to death. Turgenev was critical of his two younger contemporaries because they employed too much psychological analysis in their fiction, thereby reducing subjects to objects. He complained about psychological nitpicking that, in his opinion, was unartistic and diluted the power of Tolstoy's prose even in his masterpiece War and Peace; he criticized the second half of Crime and Punishment for the same reason. 34 Yet Turgenev's own artistic method of depicting the inner life leaves out something essential for the defense of subjectivity, namely, the possibility and existence of freedom of choice during action. In Turgenev's texts, characters seem capable of freedom only in hindsight. The problem is clear from another of Turgenev's declarations of principle, this one from a letter to Konstantin Leontiev in r86o in which he counsels the young author to include less psychological data in his fiction: "The poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he must know and feel the roots of occurrences, but he presents only the occurrences themselves in their blooming and their fading." 35 Turgenev's method does not show the moment of decision itself, when the character struggles with choices precisely because he, unlike Dostoevsky as he "picks at" the behavior of his characters, does not depict the psychological process within which these choices take place. We see only the consequences of a choice already made (or, as in the case of Bazarov, of one not made, of a road not taken), and the text only provides us with determining reasons for it. Some of the reasons are internal and psychological, but we don't see the actual inner struggle in which the mind wrestles with alternatives; therefore psychological motivations seem as unfree as more external ones. The mind is free in Turgenev, but the mind only contemplates; it never determines action except in the service of passion. This is the humbling lesson that Bazarov learns in Turgenev's greatest novel: he too is a subject as well as a haughty objective scientist. As he contemplates the duel with Pavel Kirsanov, Bazarov realizes that he cannot wriggle out of it even though he despises his own reasons for fighting. 36 Therefore, despite Turgenev's stated intentions and with certain exceptions at the peak of his art such as the one just mentioned, readers may find Turgenev's psychological portraits too finished, too determined, with all knots tied and nothing left to the imagination to do; the self-imposed limitations of these portraits accounts for the sense of fatalism that they exude. By contrast, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy focus on moments of crisis during the psychological process when the inner landscape of the mind changes and characters make decisions that determine their actions. The ultimate reason for a particular choice, good or bad, remains mysterious to reader and character alike, but we see the involvement of the mind in the process and therefore hold the character accountable for his or her actions.

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The modern individual as portrayed by Turgenev is fundamentally split between object and subject, so that over and over again in Turgenev's fiction characters mournfully contemplate their own actions as if they were performed by another being. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, though they agree with Turgenev that reason and feeling can be at odds in the soul, endow their characters with freedom. They can only do so through psychological analysis and by allowing characters to analyze themselves, the very aspect of their fiction that Turgenev finds so unartistic. In the next two chapters, I discuss how this strategy for dealing with subjectivity affects the role of the author in their fiction.

CHAPTER THREE

Dostoevsky's Hidden Author The psychological etudes [of Dostoevsky] have that most mystic gleam generally characteristic of representations of deeply analysed reality. 1

~

•

In psychological realism, the world to be described is the internal one of others. One cannot do this from a simply objective point of view. Authors of psychological prose must check with themselves to make sure that they understand what the other is thinking and feeling; as they do this, they inject their own personality into each character whom they seek to understand, and whose point of view they want to render. Therefore, psychological realism by its very nature must be deeply autobiographical. 2 This necessity generates another one, seemingly opposed but in fact related, namely, the need for objectivity. Authors, as authors, must be present in their text, but distant from their characters and their predicaments. How Dostoevsky accomplishes this task is the subject of the present chapter. As a polished storyteller who positions himself outside his narratives, Turgenev makes frequent use of narrative frames and also interpolated stories; both Turgenev and his characters love incorporated narratives for the psychic security and control over reality that they confer. 3 This stance is often attributed to psychological weakness in Turgenev, who supposedly fears the chaos of reality and uses art to protect himself from it. Others, among them Elizabeth Cheresh Allen, praise him as "a self-assured literary master with a consistently recognizable style bespeaking adherence to a unified, remarkably stable aesthetic program. ''4 The strong-willed and passionate Dostoevsky also aimed for an "Apollonian" distance in his art 5; indeed, of the three writers we are examining, Dostoevsky most successfully hides his personal involvement in his texts. His criticism of Turgenev as a writer, to be aired in Chapter 6, targeted

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not the other writer's emotional aloofness from his narratives but rather his failure to achieve it. Dostoevsky admires Turgenev when he succeeds in truly distancing himself from his material, as he does in Fathers and Children, and despises him when he uses his art as a personal retreat from the chaos of reality, or to lament that chaos. Just as Turgenev announces his retreat by employing a narrative frame in his very first story, "Andrei Kolosov," so Dostoevsky uses another strategy to the same effect in his first work, Poor Folk, a novel of letters in which, as he writes his brother Mikhail, the author's "mug" is nowhere to be seen. 6 This does not mean that Dostoevsky cedes control of his narrative. On the contrary, like Turgenev he too is Apollonian in his oversight; this is all the more necessary because of the chaos of the world he is representing in his fiction. True, the seeming absence of Dostoevsky's author empowers his characters, but the author is active in subtle and notso-subtle ways even in Poor Folk. So when Dostoevsky proudly boasts to his brother that his author is absent from Poor Folk, it brings to mind the game, borrowed from Tristram Shandy, that Tolstoy loved to play with his children, in which he challenged them to not think of a white bear. As Dostoevsky wrote Poor Folk, the role of the author (and therefore the author himself) was very much present in his mind in its absence. The story is in the form of letters, with dates, exchanged between a middle-aged civil servant Makar Devushkin and Varvara Dobroselova, a young woman whom he has befriended. What contemporaries liked about Poor Folk was its transformation of the type of the Gogolian clerk from a mere object of pity to one, at times, of admiration. What they did not notice was Dostoevsky's new literary method, which soon led him in directions for which they were unprepared. This new method, practiced throughout Dostoevsky's career, remains a source of constant confusion for his readers, who are always taking things his characters say for Dostoevsky's own opinions. As Dostoevsky described his method to his brother: "They (Belinsky and the rest) find in me a new, original spirit, consisting in the fact that I work by means of analysis, not synthesis, that is, I go into the depths, and, investigating the atoms, I track down the whole, while Gogol takes up the whole directly. " 7 This method was less condescending to Dostoevsky's characters because rather than explaining them it allowed them to explain themselves. To this extent, Dostoevsky both practiced "sentimental naturalism," the goal of which was to describe "the insulted and the injured," and also corrected it. There is something else going on as well. The point of view of each atom is partially true, because it "comes from the heart," and partially false, because it is particular rather than general. This means that bits of truth, as they migrate from one character to another, take on different

Chapter Three

colorations and become more or less true. As a result of the inevitable subjective coloration of truth, characters can't understand each other. Very rarely-indeed almost never-does Dostoevsky depict truly harmonious relations among characters, and he never depicts two characters who see things exactly the same way. This is in keeping with Dostoevsky's understanding of the particularity of each individual, and also of romantic longing and its psychological consequences in each soul. Each individual is both unique and incomplete, senses his (or her) own incompleteness, and therefore needs the support and confirmation of others. For the very same reason, however, the polyphony in Dostoevsky's fiction is disharmonious, and characters more often clash than mingle harmoniously. Different needs (or voices) also war within characters; hence Makar Devushkin can be both sweet and (as his hopes for himself unravel) rebellious at the same time because of his neediness. He can also be unself-consciously predatory in his neediness and therefore frighten and disgust his beloved; Dostoevsky's friend Valerian Maikov admiringly perceived this. 8 By polyphony, the great Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin (r895-1975), who first applied the term to Dostoevsky's prose, meant the interaction within a literary text of separate voices, either within characters or among them, engaging in dialogue that does not, however, reach any conclusion or synthesis. This, in Bakhtin's conception, is the meaning that comprehends and colors all the ideologies competing in Dostoevsky's works; it also deprives the author-as a literary device-of ultimate authority in them: "Authorial discourse cannot encompass the hero and his word on all sides, cannot lock in and finalize him from without. " 9 In the West, Bakhtin's theory has often been interpreted in the light of relativist or postmodern criticism, but Bakhtin specifically says that polyphony is not to be confused with relativism: "It should be noted that both relativism and dogmatism exclude all argumentation, all authentic dialogue, by making it either unnecessary (relativism) or impossible (dogmatism). Polyphony as an artistic method lies in a completely different plane. " 10 So even though the status of authorial voice as a literary device is altered in a polyphonic text, authorial intention remains. According to Bakhtin, polyphony reflects Dostoevsky's belief that absolute truth is not a monolithic, "monologic" idea but an "event" that occurs at the point where a plurality of consciousnesses intersect. 11 Despite the occasional occurrence of such events, Dostoevsky's author, hidden though he may be, is still needed as a mediator for readers among differing voices. He and he alone is the analyst who determines what is true and what false in each character. This is already true in Poor Folk. Rather than agreeing with one another, Varvara and Makar chide and correct each other constantly. Their so-called dialogue is a love duel, in which

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each wants to do something for the other while urging the other not to sacrifice himself or herself. A responsive or dialectical relation develops, which I shall briefly illustrate. The first letter of the novel, from Makar, begins with his happiness that Varvara has "obeyed" him: "Yesterday I was happy, extremely happy, impossibly happy! At least once in your life, my stubborn girl, you did listen to me." 12 Makar imagines that she is always thinking of him, and that she is sending him signals by rearranging the curtain on her window. He imagines that she understands and responds to him (as he writes to her, "you understood so well what I wanted, what my heart yearned for" 13 ), but this turns out not to be true. In Varvara's response to Makar's first letter, she starts out by declaring that she is angry at him for spending so much money on her, and then she continues: "As for the curtain, I had no such thought, it must have caught when I moved the pots, that's all!" 14 Makar is the first of Dostoevsky's lonely Petersburg dreamers (of whom the Underground Man is the greatest exemplar) who, cut off from ordinary human society, constantly shape the world to suit themselves. Others do not necessarily cooperate in this endeavor. In her excellent book on Poor Folk, Valentina Vetlovskaia notes that the friendly quarrels of Makar and Varvara hint at a power struggle; Makar wants to control Varvara, to have someone who will obey him and who is even needier than he is. Meanwhile Makar's genuine love is a burden for Varvara, who does not want to be beholden to him. Makar replies the same day to Varvara's letter. He is crushed by her correction of him and backs down. She has gently teased him about his sentimental language-birds, weather, country, suitable to the genre of the sentimental novel in letters-and he, hypersensitive, now denies any romantic interest in her, although the intimate tone of his first letter presumes this. It cannot be comforting to the middle-aged lover that Varvara responds to his romantic overtures with friendly concern about his health and eyesight. The mood of Makar's first letter is sentimental and romantic. The mood of Varvara's is elegiac; at the end of her letter, she even quotes from Lermontov's famous poem that "It's tedious and sad" (I skuchno i grustno). The dynamic between the two friends established in their first two letters is familiar to veterans of unhappy love affairs, in which fundamentally different moods feed off each other. The whole novel can be read in this way, and at a crucial moment the tables turn and Varvara becomes Makar's benefactor. 15 If Makar misreads other people, not surprisingly he also misreads texts. He comments on two stories from a previous generation, Pushkin's "Stationmaster" (r83r) and Gogol's "The Overcoat" (r842); he loves the first, hates the second, and misunderstands both. As a reader of the Pushkin,

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Makar makes the same mistake that he makes in his relationship with Varvara. Enthusiastically identifying with stationmaster Samson Vyrin, he does not realize that Samson creates his own misfortune by confounding his self-interest with that of his daughter. Makar goes on to blame Gogol for describing government clerk Akakii Akakievich's pathetic habits rather than concealing them for the sake of propriety. Identifying with Akakii Akakievich, Makar finds the truth revealed by the author hurtful and rejects it. The irony is thick here, because the fates of Samson Vyrin and Akakii Akakievich in fact both foreshadow that of Makar. 16 Makar's criticism of "The Overcoat" echoes the epigraph to Poor Folk, taken from Prince V. F. Odoevsky's "The Living Corpse" (1844): Oh, these storytellers! They can't write anything useful, pleasant, soothing! They have to dig up all the dirt under the sun! They ought to be forbidden to write! Well, I mean to say! You read it and start thinking-and then all kinds of nonsense enters your head; really, they should be forbidden to write, simply forbidden altogether... Y

This outburst occurs in the final paragraph of Odoevsky's tale, when the first-person narrator wakes up to discover that what he has experienced as real in the earlier part of the story has been a terrible nightmare. In it he dies and then, as a "living corpse," finds out what others really think of him; he also discovers all the evil he has done in his life. Having awakened, the narrator disregards the lessons of his own dream, blaming it on indigestion caused by a rich meal, and on the author of a story that he read before going to bed. Instead of writing something "useful, pleasant, soothing," storytellers like the one who unsettles the "living corpse" "have to dig up all the dirt under the sun." The title of Poor Folk and its epigraph are the only direct authorial intrusions into Dostoevsky's novella. Both represent a point of view that contrasts sharply with that of the characters. Makar resists being labeled a poor man, the subject of someone else's pity, but the title declares him to be so. The epigraph furnishes a gloss on Makar's resistance to an objective description of his situation: like the narrator of "The Living Corpse," Makar stands in an adversarial relationship to objective truth. By providing these contrasts, Dostoevsky as author turns to us, his readers, to say that one bond between us at least must be a common desire for the truth, whatever that may be. Bakhtin sees Dostoevskian polyphony as a reaction to "idealistic philosophy," which moreover he identifies with "European rationalism" and especially the Enlightenment. 18 This is true, but also somewhat misleading. In fact, through his connection to Odoevsky, which he openly acknowledges in the epigraph to Poor Folk, Dostoevsky participates in the

Dostoevsky's Hidden Author European, especially the Schellingian, idealist reaction to systematizing and rationalist philosophy. Although a few critics note Dostoevsky's debt to Odoevsky, it has never been thoroughly exploredY I won't be righting that wrong in this chapter, but I hope to contribute to the discussion. We are used to thinking of Russia's romantic generation as having died young or having quit the literary scene, as in the tragic case of V. K. Kiukhelbeker (I797-I846), exiled for his role in the Decembrist revolt. Odoevsky, born in I 804, was an exception to this tendency, a living relic of romanticism and the Pushkinian period who remained active in Russian society and letters right up to his death in I869. He read Poor Folk before its publication in I846 in Peterburgskii sbornik (The Petersburg Miscellany, to which he also contributed a story called "Martingal"), and at his own request he met the author soon after. Dostoevsky frequented Odoevsky's Petersburg salon until his exile and felt close enough to him to write him from Siberia asking for help in getting permission to publish. The two probably met again in the early I86os, prior to Odoevsky's move from Petersburg to Moscow in I862. 20 Odoevsky published Russian Nights, his most ambitious work, in I844· Perceived as a product of its author's outdated romantic, Schellingian aesthetics, it was not favorably reviewed and in fact was not republished until I 9 I 3. (Belinsky's assessment of it as artistically unsuccessful was especially devastating; Odoevsky may have stopped writing fiction as a result. 21 ) There can be no doubt, however, that the young Dostoevsky read it, along with other stories by Odoevsky not included in it. If "Dostoevsky, in respect to his higher aesthetic, is a child of German romantic philosophy," 22 then surely Odoevsky is one of its important sources. Through Odoevsky's stories published in the later I83os, and especially through Russian Nights, Dostoevsky came into direct contact with an irrationalist philosophical idealism and aesthetics that he drew on for the rest of his life. Russian Nights is Odoevsky's grand attempt at a Russian romantic novel, and it is even possible that Dostoevsky had it in mind when he subtitled Poor Folk ''A Novel." In the "Second Night" of Russian Nights, Schelling is described by the character Faust, who plays the role of a modern Socrates in the novel's dialogues, as a Christopher Columbus "who disclosed to man an unknown part of his world, about which only some legendary tales had existedman's own soul!" 23 Dostoevsky was one of the hardy explorers opening up the new continent. These explorers would be poets, not philosophers, because in the Schellingian dispensation ultimate reality resides in feeling. Odoevsky's literary experiments would have been all the more available for imitation and parody to the insecure young writer because they were unsuccessful as literature.

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I would suggest that the seeming disappearance of the author's voice in Poor Folk was part of Dostoevsky's implementation of the Schellingian irrationalist idealism that he learned about from reading Odoevsky (and others as well). Like his close friend and fellow Schellingian Ivan Kireevsky, Odoevsky objected to the rationalist distinction between the knower and the object to be known. 24 As Faust goes on to explain it in the "Ninth Night," "the first act of knowledge" is the action of our soul when it turns on itself and becomes an object and an observer at the same time." 25 Ultimate truths can be known, or glimpsed, only through their symbolic representations in the feelings and dreams within the knower. Within a work of fiction, however, a knower might have subjective reasons to repress the insights of untainted "inner feeling"; they would then have to be conveyed to the reader in another way. On the other hand, a simply objective explanation by a narrator of these inner feelings is also bound to fail; some form of identification with the feelings must have taken place for the narrator to truly "know" them. "The Living Corpse" reflects this problem and one of Odoevsky's solutions to it. It is a first-person narration framed by a title and an epigraph at the beginning and a final paragraph, with a few words from a thirdperson narrator who explains that the "living corpse" has awakened. The first-person narrator rejects the insights conveyed by "inner feeling" in his dream and goes back to his unself-conscious waking life. The frame turns him into an object of satire for readers, who cannot sympathize with such gross inauthenticity and indeed may assure themselves that they would never be so unself-aware. In Poor Folk, by contrast, there is no such obvious distancing mechanism. For one thing, despite his rejection of "The Overcoat" in the letter of July 8, Makar later on acknowledges his own status as "poor." Significantly, when he confesses this on August I, he speaks of his own situation mostly in the third person. If, however, he rises at this point to a moment of objective self-awareness in which, as Kireevsky prescribed, he is both knower and object of knowledge, both before and after he slips back into a subjectivity that is by its very nature prerational and unspeakable. The effect toward which Dostoevsky is striving is to show us the whole man, mind and heart together. The limitations of Makar Devushkin's point of view emerge indirectly, in part from his misreadings of both Varvara and the stories that she has sent him. To grasp these misreadings, readers must enter in turn into the perspectives of the two main characters of the stories and also interpret the stories by Pushkin and Gogol correctly. The discrepancies that emerge as a result make readers think, without however simply distancing themselves from either of the characters. To put this in terms of Schellingian epistemology as explained by Faust in Rus-

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sian Nights, Dostoevsky's method allows a reader first to identify with a character and then, only within the context of this sympathetic identification, see the character as an object. For this identification to take place, the character must himself be conscious and capable of thought. So Makar has a more developed reason and consciousness, with all that this implies for the human personality. He is not objective about his situation, however, though his author is. When all is said and done, "The Living Corpse" is a didactic tale. It is not so easy to draw a lesson from Poor Folk. This "indefinability," which it shares with all successful Dostoevsky texts, is what led Bakhtin to describe them as polyphonic. At the same time-and Bakhtin might not have disagreed with this-there is a level, hidden but implicit in all Dostoevsky texts, on which the reader connects with the author through comparisons and contrasts. This would not happen, of course, if readers identified with any one character, but we do not. When we smile or shake our heads sadly at Makar's various misperceptions and nai:Vete, we are separating ourselves from him. The author also speaks directly to readers in various ways, through weather imagery, the passing of the seasons, and the dating of the letters. 26 Another example would be the set of images that run through the work, beginning with the first letter, of each individual as a bird. Most of these images appear in conventional figures of speech, or flowery imagery that lacks specific meaning for the letter writer-always Devushkin-because they are part of a sentimental style that he borrows from others. Makar also compares Varvara to a bird. 27 He uses bird imagery in his tender addresses to her, calling her his dove, and so on. At the same time, when Varvara talks about her life as a child near the great lake, she too speaks of birds, implicitly identifying with a wild seagull that she remembers flying over the lake. 28 So we have two images of birds that contradict one another. Varvara wants to be free as a bird. Makar sees her as a little bird to be protected, and when she suggests that she might get a job, he chides her for wanting to leave the nest; he pictures her as a little bird menaced by villains and birds of prey. 29 It is in the first letter, where he introduces the bird imagery, that Makar lets slip his own desire to be a bird of prey; this suggests to the reader the dangers of the relationship between himself and Varvara. Makar does not-cannot-notice the implications of his own prose, because he does not understand himself and the ferocity of his own needs. Patterns such as the one formed from bird imagery knit the various genres present in the novel into a new genre, the sentimental novel, of which Poor Folk is the most perfect example in Russian. 30 The same patterns represent indirect imposition on the novel, in the absence of the author's voice, of authorial intention. These are ways in which the author presents his findings

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indirectly and artistically to those readers who take the trouble to analyze his text. What we have in Poor Folk, then, is a novella that is an artistically much more successful version of what Odoevsky was trying to accomplish in Russian Nights. On the first narrative level of Russian Nights, many tales, from various origins, are told by a number of narrators and from different perspectives. They are uneven in quality, but a few of them are the most artistically successful features of the book. The tales are then discussed by five characters representing as many contemporary points of view, but these characters do not actually engage in an exchange of ideas. At one point toward the end of the book, Faust introduces a transcript of a short trial in which the court hears out characters from several tales and judges each of them as expressive of legitimate but one-sided perspectives. The level of the novel at which we are to judge the narrative-that is, the tales-is explicitly dramatized in this episode. In Dostoevsky's text, this level is left undramatized, but it is nonetheless present. The young Dostoevsky was an irrationalist in the Schellingian sense as we have described it, but he was not antithought. To know subjectivity, the poet (or scientist) must suspend judgment and identify with it as much as is possible, which is an impossible task for reason. But after one has the facts of human nature, one can-indeed one must-think about them, and this is what happens at the level of Poor Folk on which author and reader communicate through comparisons, similarities, and observation of patterns. The author does not speak in his own voice or draw any conclusions directly; here Dostoevsky's restraint stands in marked contrast to Odoevsky's practice. It is true that Odoevsky calls attention to himself only in a brief foreword, and in occasional footnotes. But there are too many openly analytical and didactic layers in the book, and whatever Odoevsky's intention his fictional narratives are too obviously subordinate to them for the novel to depict a world that supposedly resists explication by reason. 31 In Poor Folk, by contrast, the author tweaks the reader's reason but does not guide it; most important, the author does not alienate the reader from empathy for the characters by turning them explicitly into illustrations of moral and philosophical points. The novel does indeed, as Bakhtin claims, show the interaction of consciousnesses, but the author intended more than this. To grasp what his larger intention might have been, we must look at Poor Folk as an expression of romantic aesthetics. Taking to heart Odoevsky's diatribes within Russian Nights against systematic philosophy, Dostoevsky improves on Odoevsky's romantic novel by making sure that his readers actually imagine, through the unlikely vehicle of his main character, the realities of consciousness. The author in

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Dostoevsky's fiction does not lecture the reader. This rhetorical strategy represents the proper relationship between the knower and what is to be known; Dostoevsky may have learned of this relationship from Odoevsky, but he was much more successful than the latter in putting it to work in fiction. Makar becomes more and more conscious of his own incompleteness as a human being, and Poor Folk mirrors this. As with the Underground Man later on, Makar's consciousness is neither whole nor harmonious. In the religious historical terms that Dostoevsky favored, he is a transnational being, without the harmony that Dostoevsky equated with the highest beauty. Makar's search for inner coherence and his sense that he lacks it is expressed in his repeated lament that he does not have a literary style of his own. He is complaining about this as the novel ends. His consciousness is "an actual incompleteness striving towards a hypothetical unity." 32 His mistake is to believe that he can achieve unity or completeness through his relationship with Varvara. The author intervenes indirectly to indicate the impossibility of doing so. As Makar himself understands his tragic situation better (though never completely), he remarks that his prose style has improved. Makar suffers from romantic longing. Dostoevsky's ideal reader would identify with his vulnerability and his striving for love and would also accept, sadly, the author's subtle commentary on these. Tenderly, carefully, but unsentimentally, the author renders Makar as he is, a transitional being who cannot be ideally beautiful or whole, whether morally or ethically. 33 Reading Poor Folk, one is supposed to "start thinking" (zadumat'sia); unlike the first-person narrator of "The Living Corpse" (whose words these are, from the epigraph to Poor Folk), or Makar Devushkin, the ideal reader is in a position to keep thinking-with the author-to the bitter end. Perhaps one can never do this for oneself; in that case, self-understanding may come in thinking through the predicament of someone like Makar Devushkin and identifying with him. So the author is present behind the scenes in all of Dostoevsky's fiction, including such difficult works as The Adolescent, but even he does not pull all the strings. Poor Folk and other works by Dostoevsky are all riddled with gaps about the motives (and even the histories) of characters. Alternative techniques such as confession, used extensively by Dostoevsky for conveying information about the inner life, are limited because of their subjectivity. 34 Dostoevsky's novels typically supply an abundance of evidence but no ultimate certainty about characters. Dostoevsky is the most subjective of the Russian psychological realists because he most insists on the uniqueness of the individual personality. This means he cannot depend on general laws of human nature to allow

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him to fully penetrate the inner life of any other human being. 35 To create characters whose inner lives are even partially accessible, he must infuse them with a distillation of his own personal experience and personality. At the same time, because of the cleansing effects and requirements of reflection, and also to preserve the uniqueness of each character, his author must be hidden from the reader. We do not see Dostoevsky's mug in his texts, as he gleefully crowed to his brother about Poor Folk in r846, but the very problem of subjective bias on the part of individuals requires that he be omnipresent, not as mug but as heart and then mind. Ultimately it is his, the author's, consciousness that binds together the whole text and makes it, in the language of the time, "organic."

CHAPTER FOUR

Taming the Author The Platonic and the Tur;genevian Moments in Tolstols Fiction The goals of art are disproportionate (as mathematicians would say) with social goals. The goal of the artist is not to resolve a question indisputably, but to force people to love life in all its innumerable and inexhaustible manifestations. If I were told that I could write a novel in which I could indisputably establish the viewpoint that seemed correct to me on all social questions, I would not devote two hours of labour to such a novel; but if someone told me that what I write now will be read by today's children twenty years hence, and that then they would cry and laugh over it and come to love life, then I would devote my whole life and all my powers to it. 1

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In romanticism, the center of art is the poet. The authors of classical Russian realist prose, including Tolstoy, all shift focus away from the writer back to his primary task of mimesis. But the task of psychological prose, the description of subjectivity, requires the involvement of the writer in ways that we have been discussing in this book. This is true of Tolstoy, whose method even of describing the external world through the interaction of mind and sense perceptions aligns him with the English romantic poets, who "treat man as man-a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses." These words, so applicable to Tolstoy, were written by Coleridge in explanation of William Wordsworth's program in his great poem The Prelude. 2 Although he worked hard to develop his technique of vivid description built on references to perceptions by all the senses, and though in this way

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he tried to locate his reader, through imagination, in the world of his fiction, this was not enough for Tolstoy. He wanted to speak directly to his readers. Already in his second publication, "The Raid," he created a narrator who acts both as a scientific observer and a commentator whose highly rhetorical and emotional outburst ends chapter 6 of the story: Can it be claustrophobic for men to live in this great world under this immense starry sky? In the midst of such enchanting nature how can men harbor feelings of hatred, vengeance, and the passion for destroying their own kind? It would seem that all that is not good in the hearts of men ought to vanish upon contact with nature-this most direct expression of beauty and good. 3

If Dostoevsky's author lurks in the background of his texts and needs to be illuminated by criticism, in Tolstoy's fiction the voice of the author rings out loud and clear; in the famous case of the second Sevastopol sketch, this voice even equates itself with "Truth." It is not fair of Bakhtin, however, to cite "Three Deaths" (r859) as typical in this regard. 4 That early story, an example of what contemporary critic and poet Apollon Grigoriev (r822-r864) called Tolstoy's nihilist tendencies, is told from the point of view of nature rather than man; the death of the unprotesting tree is more harmonious and therefore higher than the deaths of the lady and the peasant. Since the tree lacks consciousness, it is appropriate that a third-person omnipotent narrator speak for it, and also that the three deaths described in the story are not related except through details of the plot and through the informing consciousness of this same narrator. By contrast, in a story from the same period, "Lucerne" (r857), monologic harmony dissolves, philosophically if not artistically. How this happens is significant. Prince Nekhliudov (who has a later incarnation as the hero of the novel Resurrection) has come to the rescue of an itinerant musician who plays for aristocratic tourists in the hotel where the prince is staying. When the musician passes around his hat after his performance, not one person puts any money in it, even though a crowd one hundred strong has gathered to listen. After his attempts to avenge the musician have failed, Nekhliudov declares that this whole episode "is more significant, more serious, and has a deeper meaning than those written up in newspapers and histories." The story then concludes with a tirade that eventually spins out of Nekhliudov's control. First the prince rants about the heartlessness of Western civilization; then he excoriates the (also Western and Enlightenment) need for "positive solutions" that are impossible to achieve "in this eternally moving, infinite ocean of good and evil, of facts, suppositions, and contradictions": If only man could learn not to judge and not to think so harshly and positively and not to provide answers to questions given to him only so that they would eter-

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nally remain questions! If only he would understand that every thought is both false and just! False in its one-sidedness given that man cannot embrace the whole truth, and just as an expression of one side of human strivings. They have made themselves divisions in this eternally moving, infinite, infinitely mixed chaos of good and evil, they have drawn imaginary lines across this sea, and they expect the sea itself to divide. As if there were not millions of other divisions from another point of view, on another plane. Hubris makes British lords count themselves higher than the Tyrolean musician when in fact "the Universal Spirit" calls upon humankind "to cling unconsciously to one another." Hubris causes human beings to invent ideologies and use them to conquer and oppress others in the name of "civilization." (Nekhliudov has in mind recent British attacks against the Chinese.) Then suddenly, as he dramatically depicts the "tired, hungry, [and] humiliated" musician making his way to sleep in "rotten straw," Nekhliudov hears the object of his pity contentedly playing and singing far away in the still night. Abashed, the prince now attacks his own hubris, which allowed him to believe that he could penetrate the soul of others to judge whether they were happy or virtuous. Only God can do this; the story ends with Nekhliudov's hope that his own righteous indignation has its place in the "eternal harmony" of God's creation. In this passage, he addresses first collective mankind (vy) and then himself and his own missteps (ty): He gazes mildly from his bright illimitable height and rejoices at the infinite harmony in which all of you [vy] move infinitely and in contradictory ways. In your pride, you [ty] thought you could tear yourself out of the laws of the general. No, you [ty] too in your petty, banal little anger at lackeys, you too answered the harmonious need of the eternal and the infinite.... Prince Nekhliudov advocates for an itinerant musician who has not asked for his help and is embarrassed by his preaching. At the end of the story, Nekhliudov realizes that he has used the musician for his own emotional needs, however lofty. More important from the point of view of Tolstoy as writer, Nekhliudov has not understood the little musician, or even the aristocrats whom he despises. In the passage just quoted, Nekhliudov distances himself from his own tendency to preach and lectures himself in the intimate second person as "thou" (ty). Tolstoy disliked "Lucerne" and disowned it in private correspondence almost from the moment he published it. This was surely in part because he recognized the contradiction between the intent of the closing diatribe and the didactic role it plays in the drama. The busybody prince recants, but even as he does so he goes on preaching. However inclined Tolstoy may have been to didacticism, from an early age he was self-conscious about its pitfalls. Years before he wrote "Lucerne,"

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he began to design a prose form that would allow him to combine commentary with drama not simply subordinated to it. An early model for such a form was Plato's dialogues, which he read while he was serving in the army in the Caucasus in the early I 8 sos. In the rest of this chapter, I discuss this Platonic moment in Tolstoy's development as a writer, and then a related Turgenevian one later on in the decade.

TOLSTOY'S DEBT TO PLATO

Boris Eikhenbaum has documented the young Tolstoy's preoccupation with striking a proper balance between what he called "detail" (melochnost') and "generalization" (generalizatsiia) in his June 4, 1852, diary.5 Embarking on his career, Tolstoy had plenty of content, or detail, at his disposal, all of it in some way autobiographical. What he needed was structure, generalization, to organize the detail and give it significance. Eikhenbaum treats this as strictly a technical problem for the young writer, but of course it was a substantive one as well, because the meaning of any text depends on the relation of form to content. As Tolstoy clarified his own ideas about art over the first twenty years of his career, he came to understand prose fiction, and its supreme genre of the novel, as the medium that would supersede all other, merely partial representations of life. Considerations of artistic style were subordinate to this intention; this fact makes Tolstoy a consummate modern realist in the Auerbachian definition of it as a mixture of styles. 6 Both War and Peace and Anna Karenina were to depict life as such, which called for a uniquely open artistic structure. Philosophical and moral generalizations, which Tolstoy believed to be real and essential parts of life, are included in these novels, but by no means do they exhaust their meaning. It is not that Tolstoy is a relativist, or even, in Isaiah Berlin's famous conception, a fox trying to be a hedgehog. 7 The whole is greater than the sum of the parts in Tolstoy's fiction because he knows that he knows only something, but he shows more than he understands. Even later works of such apparent didacticism as The Death of Ivan Ilych do not add up to a tidy synthesis or whole. The facts of human life and their dramatic expression come first, with explanations of them true as far as they go, but not exhaustively true. Tolstoy's art operates from the bottom up, from details to generalization, rather than the other way around. One of his early guides in creating this unique art was Plato, whom he first read in the translation of Victor Cousin. Plato was the only writer whose influence was so great that Tolstoy openly acknowledged it in his published fiction, first in "The Raid"

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and subsequently in both War and Peace and Anna Karenina. No other mentor, not even Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who in reality was even more influential on Tolstoy than Plato), is honored in this way. Less obvious than the many thematic connections to Plato in Tolstoy's oeuvre, and so far as I know wholly unremarked as of yet, is the debt that Tolstoy owes to the genre of the Platonic dialogue itself as a structural model. Plato was on Tolstoy's mind on June 4, I 8 52, as he recorded his struggles with detail and generalization. He was working at the time on an early version of "The Raid" that he called "a letter from the Caucasus." On May 22, for instance, the same day that he "worked on rewriting a letter," he "recounted Plato's symposium" to a fellow officer. On May 3 I, in a fragment "about bravery" that is the first surviving manuscript related to "The Raid," he attempted to formulate his own ideas on courage through an extended meditation on the Laches, Plato's dialogue devoted to the subject. 8 The finished story, the young author's second publication and the first derived from his military experience, has incorporated certain features of the Platonic dialogue, but has also transformed them in "Tolstoyan" ways. "The Raid" is told by an unnamed first-person narrator who witnesses an instance of a common military tactic of Russia's wars in the Caucasus, in which Russian troops would advance to destroy a village that was providing cover and supplies for insurgents, and then retreat. The narrator, as Tolstoy must have done when he arrived in the Caucasus, wonders what true courage on the battlefield might be, and at the beginning of the story, before the excursion, he discusses this subject in camp with the veteran Captain Khlopov. Like Tolstoy too, the narrator has been reading Plato; he relates a Platonic definition of courage to the captain, who responds with his own slightly different one. Later in the story, there is another implicit reference to Plato. On the battlefield during the most dangerous maneuver (the retreat), Captain Khlopov "was exactly the same as I always saw him": the captain shares this trait with Socrates, whose calmness during the retreat from Delion is described both by Laches and by Alcibiades in the Symposium. "In the midst of battle," according to Alcibiades, "he was making his way exactly as he does around town." 9 Captain Khlopov's behavior in battle establishes his credentials as a brave man who has earned the right to speak about courage; it is exactly in this light that Laches, himself a general, regards Socrates, whose conduct also demonstrates an element of courage-steadfastness-not present in the original Platonic definition cited by the narrator of "The Raid." According to Tolstoy's narrator, "Plato defines courage as the knowledge of what it is necessary and what it is not necessary to fear." In the Laches, it is the character Nicias who expresses the opinion that courage

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is a kind of knowledge. Laches has defined courage as strength or endurance. This definition proves inadequate, because without proper knowledge one cannot know where and how to apply such endurance. Laches fully agrees with Socrates that as a virtue courage cannot be simply an uninformed, impulsive response to a perceived danger. But despite Tolstoy's assertion in his May 3I, I85I, fragment "About Courage" that "Plato says" courage is knowledge, 10 the Laches does not in fact contain a clear statement of what exactly that knowledge might be. For one thing, it cannot be simply the knowledge of what is truly fearful, because such knowledge might cause cowardice as easily as courage. A reader of the Laches might reasonably conclude that a satisfactory definition of courage would somehow combine the perspectives of both Laches and Nicias, that true courage requires both strength of character and the wisdom to know when to apply it. Earlier in I 8 52, in a diary entry dated January 2 and also inspired by his reading of Plato, Tolstoy himself offers just such a definition: Plato says that virtue is made up of three qualities: justice, moderation, and courage. Justice, it seems to me, is moral moderation. To follow in the physical world the law "nothing excessive" would be moderation, and in the moral world it would be justice. The third quality of Plato is only the means of coming to grips with the law of nothing excessive-Strength.U

True courage requires the "knowledge" of "the law of nothing excessive" and the "strength" to come to terms with this. Here as elsewhere, significantly, Tolstoy agrees with Laches that the essence of courage is strength, an attribute of character rather than knowledge, an attribute of intellect. 12 Like Captain Khlopov, Laches would have been suspicious of the definition of courage as merely knowledge of the truly fearful. To incorporate the element of strength of character, Captain Khlopov amends the Platonic definition to say that the courageous man does his duty despite his fear, and Laches would no doubt have agreed that this was a necessary element of courage. Strength would be necessary to overcome fear for the sake of a higher feeling of duty. In the early fragment of May 3 I, "on courage," Tolstoy corrects Nicias precisely on this point. Not knowledge as such but only another, higher, and more intense feeling can overcome fear and make us courageous. The narrator of "The Raid" calls a variation of Nicias' definition of courage "Platonic," but he does not openly compare Captain Khlopov's courage to that of Socrates. Because of this, the dramatic action of "The Raid" seems to correct Plato by putting character ahead of intellect. In fact, the necessity of weighing both speech and action to fully understand things is very clear in the Laches, as it is in one of Tolstoy's favorite dia-

Taming the Author logues, the Symposium. There the character Pausanias' famous definition of the two kinds of love-a low one associated with the body and sexual passion and a high one associated with virtue and the soul-is tested in the course of other speeches and also by the dramatic situation. Pausanias wants to convince the handsome young Agathon, who is his beloved, that his love is of the higher kind. Disguising his snickers as hiccups, Aristophanes laughs at Pausanias' self-serving high-mindedness and deflates it later on with a myth about love as longing for the half of our bodies lost when the gods split us in two as punishment for our hubris. Socrates counters this comic view of love with an explanation, which he attributes to his wise mentor Diotima, of love as longing for the beautiful. Just as Aristophanes is about to speak again, the drunken Alcibiades bursts into the gathering and tells stories about Socrates that partly support and partly contradict the earlier speeches, including even the one by Socrates. We are left with the impression that, yes, there are two kinds of love, but it is difficult to define the higher one or even distinguish it completely from the lower one. My abbreviated summaries of the Laches and the Symposium do not do justice to them and are intended only to demonstrate that they are philosophical dramas, not tracts. Inasmuch as "The Raid" begins with a definition of courage that is partly confirmed but also corrected in the dramatic action that follows, it resembles a Platonic dialogue. It is the mixture of Socratic dialectic and poetic exposition that appealed to Tolstoy in the Platonic dialogue as a genre; in tribute to this form he created just such a philosophical drama within Anna Karenina. In the novel Plato is invoked on three occasions, which together help to constitute a philosophical subplot about Levin's search for the proper relation of the details of his life to its fundamental organizing moral principles. Plato first comes up in book r, during a restaurant dinner that is an allusion to the Symposium. Like the participants in Plato's banquet, Stiva Oblonsky and Levin discuss love, and Levin provides a definition of it drawn from the Symposium. Later, during his spiritual crisis that climaxes in book 8, Levin consults philosophic texts in a futile effort to find a justification for living. The "houses of cards" constructed from "artificial chains of thought" by various nonmaterialist philosophers, including Plato, all collapse because they do not directly engage "life," which is anterior to reason. When Levin does recover his belief in the possibility of a moral life a few pages later, however, it is because he hears of a virtuous peasant named Platon, who "lives for his soul. He remembers God." Coming at the beginning and end of the novel, functioning as they do within their subplot respectively as opening, crisis, and denouement, the three "Platonic" moments help bind it together on the level of thought.

Chapter Four

Within this subplot, the name of Plato is implicated in both the problem and its solution. At the restaurant, Levin makes two related claims about Plato. In the first place, he says that, according to Plato in the Symposium, there are two kinds of love. This statement is shown to be true and thus is one key to understanding the organization of the novel. 13 Just as "The Raid" is about courage, so Anna Karenina is about love in its two variants; the relationship between this philosophic statement about love and its dramatic exposition is that of a maxim to its illustrations, although, as we shall see, the match between the two is not perfect. The two kinds of love are spiritual and physical, corresponding to Tolstoy's dualism, which he attributed also to Plato. Plato's definition as Levin first states it does not, however, rank the kinds of love as morally better or worse; Levin immediately does this by designating the higher, spiritual love "platonic" and the lower, bodily one, "not platonic." In a slight but significant shift, Levin now associates Plato with a love of virtue and wholeness, both of which Levin highly values, but the relationship of which to reality is unclear. Levin admits to himself that his own past behavior does not harmonize with his stated preference for platonic love. This inconsistency creates a drama that would not exist if ideals and reality simply coincided, as Levin is temperamentally inclined to assume they should. Once he remembers his own misdemeanors, he twice says that he doesn't know what to think. Moral generalizations in which he wholeheartedly believes do not organize the details of his own life. Given the context, Levin's retreat must be read as a reference to Socrates' famous claim that awareness that we do not know everything is the beginning of wisdom. So the knot is tied in this episode, and the philosophical subplot is launched. It consists of a search for what, if anything, might make the life of an individual meaningful, that is, capable of the higher, disinterested love of others called agape in Christian thought. In the poetic narrative, none of the major characters fits exclusively into Levin's categories of high or low lover, platonic or unplatonic. The novel contains a veritable catalogue of examples and mixes of the two, and there is no sense that this catalogue is exhaustive. Therefore, if these categories organize and explain the content of the novel, they do so only to a certain extent. The love of Kitty and Levin is "more Platonic"; that of Vronsky and Anna "explicitly erotic." 14 Anna expresses the truth about the mixed character of reality when she says "I think ... if there are as many minds as there are men, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts." 15 Plato, as he is invoked by Levin in the restaurant, supplies a true definition of both what love is and also what it ought to be. What he does not explain is love in its particular manifestations. The philosophical search for meaning resumes in book 8, with Levin's crisis. The "Platonic" whole-

Taming the Author ness or purity for which he longs and with which he identifies in his original discussion about love with Stiva is not attainable; therefore no philosophic tract, not even a nonmaterialist one, can bridge the gap between general ideals and reality. Levin escapes his suicidal despair only when he realizes that what he seeks, though inaccessible to his intellect, is visible in a life well led. Plato is mentioned among those philosophers who fail Levin, but the other Plato comes to his rescue. This time he appears not as a thinker, who as such must labor within the limitations of the inherent laws governing the intellect and therefore knows that he knows nothing about ultimate truths but as a character whose actions bear witness to the moral capabilities of the human personality. Elsewhere in his writings, Tolstoy distinguishes Socrates, who is skeptical of reason as the basis of true knowledge, from Plato, whom he sometimes classifies with "professional" philosophers. Tolstoy already wrote approvingly in his 1847 diary of Socratic skepticism, defined as "the highest form of perfection of a man," that it is "to know that he knows nothing"16; in his diary in r8 52 he uses Socrates' maxim to correct Plato's overreliance on knowledge understood as reason. At the same time, Tolstoy does not always include Plato among the bad philosophersY As a writer himself, moreover, it would ultimately prove difficult for Tolstoy to separate a character, even one based on an historical figure, from the author of the dialogues in which he appears. The Plato-Socrates division may underlie the two mentions of Plato in book 8 of Anna Karenina. The second Platon who appears as a character in the novel represents the positive side of Plato as Tolstoy understood him, namely, his knowledge and love of the good, and it is this Platon who is "platonic" in the moral sense in which Levin uses the term back in the conversation in the restaurant in book r. Like Levin, Plato as Tolstoy understood him was able to know the good and act on it because he could rely on a moral instinct. In arevealing letter to Strakhov contemporary with Anna Karenina, Tolstoy placed Plato among the true philosophers because he "does not correct the original and simplest concepts of [his] listeners, but seek[s] out the meaning of life without decomposing into constituent parts those essences of which life is composed for every person. " 18 Along with selfishness, goodness (or "life for the soul") is one of the "essences" of human life from which true philosophy, rather than deconstructing them, should "seek out the meaning of life," as Levin does. The peasant Platon proves the existence of platonic love by demonstrating it in action: "'He won't skin a man. He lends to you, he lets you off. So he comes up short. He's a man, too."' 19 When Tolstoy says that Plato practices true philosophy, he means that Plato, like Tolstoy himself, starts philosophizing from the ground up. Rather than applying abstract

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categories to explain behavior, he arrives at those categories through the analysis of experience and constantly returns to that data to check the truth of his conclusions against it. 20 Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's exemplary novel not least in its author's implicit acknowledgment that it is descriptive or mimetic rather than philosophic and didactic. Life, not thought about life, comes first, and the relationship between the dramatic context that adequately captures life as it is and explanations of life supplied by characters or even an omniscient narrator reflect this crucial principle. Not bound to the principles of reason, art imitates life rather than merely analyzing it. It is both broader and deeper than rationalizing philosophy because less abstract. On principle, then, Tolstoy sets out to protect the contradictions and irrationality of human subjectivity from reason's dissecting eye; he learns to do this first of all from Plato. On the other hand, he does generalize and even appeal to reason, which he ultimately equates with practical morality. In this respect, he is more of a moralist and less a philosopher than Plato. The way Tolstoy introduces Stiva Oblonsky in Anna Karenina illustrates his Platonic method in action. Stiva lives at the level of the raw content that makes up existence, and he declines to think about it. He is the broadest, most expansive character in the book, a favorite with many readers. Starting with chapter I, paragraph 3, we see life through his eyes and body, and we like what we see. Stiva represents the "self-satisfaction" (samodovol'nost') that John Bayley intuits to be the central feeling in Tolstoy's world. 21 In his late philosophical tract On Life (I887), Tolstoy would agree with Bayley that the self-centered view of life taken by a Stiva is natural. The only problem is that, because it is natural for each individual to be self-centered, this leads to conflict. Therefore, when in chapter 4 of part I we abruptly exit Stiva's point of view and enter that of his aggrieved wife, it is a bit of a shock. Bayley exaggerates slightly when he claims that we meet Stiva entirely on his own terms. 22 From the beginning, a hint of irony wafts through the narrative. The narrator holds his sympathy back a little, although, as Bayley says, he is constantly forgiving of Stiva's foibles. The narrative moves from identification with the character through degrees of separation. At times, as at the end of chapter I, we have a kind of transcript of Stiva's inner thoughts and feelings: "No, she won't forgive me and can't forgive me! And the most terrible thing is that I'm the guilty one in it all, guilty and yet not guilty! That is the whole drama," he thought. "Oh, oh, oh!" he murmured with despair, recalling what were for him the most painful impressions of this quarrel.

Taming the Author

Here Stiva presents himself without mediation. The reader feels his discomfort, his repentance, and his certainty that what has happened is not his fault. At the same time, even here a bit of distance is interjected into the text just by virtue of the fact that the reader finds it funny and Stiva does not. While identifying with Stiva, readers put themselves at a slight distance from him and laugh indulgently, as they might in recalling their own such behavior. Stiva feels uncomfortable within a "drama" that, as he sees it, is not of his own making, and therefore he takes no responsibility for it. He is a comic rather than a tragic figure; in modern terms, he is a hapless victim of forces beyond his control. This merging of the narrator's perspective with Stiva's is in the first person. At one remove from it, we have a summary of Stiva's opinions that the narrator proffers without comment. One such summary occurs in the first paragraph of chapter 2, beginning with Stiva's justification of his illicit affairs-he is still young while his wife has grown old bearing children-leading up to his "vague notion" that his wife must be aware of the affairs and implicitly accepts them. For some reason, however, Dolly doesn't behave as he imagines she might, and the paragraph ends with Stiva's admission of this fact: "It turned out to be quite the opposite" [of what Stiva had thought]. Increasing the degree of separation between author and character, in chapter 3 the narrator moves away from Stiva to present him as a type, a certain kind of soft liberal whose politics serve his own interests. At this point, the narrator begins to pick up the threads of his previous transcript of Stiva's actions and thoughts, and to comment on them sarcastically. Stiva's political opinions are as self-serving and unself-reflective as everything else about him, but since politics concerns the relation of society to the individual, Stiva's self-absorption is more obviously defective. Here the narrator moves further away from Stiva and closer to the one-sentence first paragraph of the book ("All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way") which represents a complete separation from any individual character. In this sentence paragraph, the narrator comments analytically, or scientifically, on the narrative to follow without, however, morally judging it. Moral judgment is even further removed, to outside the text in the epigraph. As the narrator moves further away from the character and closer to the level of generalization in the first paragraph, the narration is ever more analytical. The narrator's humor as he separates himself from individual characters is not zany or absurd the way Gogol's can be; it is witty and ironic-attributes of the analytical mind. Where the narrative merges with a character's point of view, on the other hand, the rules of reason do not

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apply. With a sympathetic smile, the reader accepts Stiva's dilemma, his "drama," recognizing and forgiving Stiva's inability to choose the good of others over his own good even if his reason tells him to do so. As each of us knows from experience, within individual consciousness the rules of noncontradiction do not yet apply; what we want takes precedence over what makes sense. Tolstoy's opening sally in the novel is especially daring because he maneuvers the reader into identifying with Stiva while this character is behaving unjustly. Thus does the moralist concede the primacy of life over thought, content over attempts to generalize about it. In other equally compelling moments of self-absorption, however, characters behave in ways that neither the reader nor the narrator regards as morally wrong. Examples would be Dolly's visit to Anna at Vronsky's estate, Levin's celebration on the night before his formal proposal to Kitty, or Karenin's forgiveness of Anna. The fact is that every moment of genuine emotional significance in the novel, be it for good or for evil, is generated on that same level of irrational consciousness to which we are introduced first in Stiva. The standards, or ideals, inhere in the very raw material that they shape morally, and to this extent the Tolstoy of Anna Karenina is still a pantheist, as he was in War and Peace. To behave badly, even Stiva-so in tune with everything-has occasionally to ignore the voice of conscience; he is shown doing so in certain key episodes in the novel. (One of them is when he tries to convince Karenin to grant Anna a divorce.) 23 At other times Stiva's street smarts are just what is needed to advise other characters who have strayed from the common sense generated by natural self-interest. Hence he presides over the party at which Kitty and Levin finally become engaged, and he is careful to seat them together at the table to bring about the right and long-delayed result. Within his didactic art, Tolstoy gives Stiva the freedom to speak his mind and even defend himself. The reader also can side with Stiva. Eventually, through the process of irony, Tolstoy hopes to wean us away from this bedrock of irrational consciousness. His text is built on that bedrock, however, and only the reader's willingness to submit to a process of dialectic based on the laws of reason will lead eventually to the level of generalization necessary for moral rectitude as Tolstoy understands it. At any point, the reader can refuse to go along; many have done so. The amazing verisimilitude of Tolstoy's fiction depends at every level on its rootedness in the realities of individual consciousness. Tolstoy's Platonic art therefore resembles Dostoevsky's as we discussed it in Chapter 3: it too starts from the vantage point of the "atoms" rather than any ready-made synthesis. A Dostoevskian solution to the problem of authorial voice within such art-simply to banish the speeches of the

Taming the Author

author-was not available to Tolstoy. He became a writer in part from a need to connect directly and intimately with his reader. As he mentioned many times in his early diary and drafts of early works, he regarded his reader as a potential close friend. Although I understand that this is a convention of sentimentalist prose, I think that Tolstoy adopted it because it appealed to an irresistible hunger for intimacy with and influence on his reader. In this, Tolstoy resembles the later Gogol of Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (r847), whose megalomania Dostoevsky parodied in the character Foma Fomich Opiskin in The Village of Stepanchikovo (r8 59). 24 From his first work on, Tolstoy struggled with the problem of simultaneously revealing himself in his fiction as he wanted and needed to do, yet hiding himself so as to give it artistic credence. Dostoevsky, no doubt for personal reasons of his own, enjoyed hiding behind his characters. Nevertheless he too, as I have tried to show in the previous chapter, engages his reader in a relationship that is no less powerful for being hidden. The psychological differences between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in this regard may be as important as, or even more important than, their philosophical disagreements, which, because in fact they were educated by many of the same people, may owe more to temperament than to education.

TURGENEV SETS TOLSTOY FREE

When he first became a writer, Tolstoy learned from Plato how drama and the "real" was a necessary supplement to thought in the search for the truth. In the mid-r8sos, the young author underwent a period of apprenticeship to Turgenev that further helped him mediate between his inclination to teach and the freedom necessary for great art. On July 27, r853, Cadet L. N. Tolstoy confided in his diary that "I read S-S [Sportsman's Sketches]. It's difficult to write after it." Subsequently, when he was ready to publish "The Woodcutting" in r855, Tolstoy dedicated the story to Turgenev because "when I reread [it] I found a great deal of involuntary imitation in it of Turgenev's stories." 25 This dedicationthe only one in Tolstoy's long career as a writer-is a measure of the initial effect that A Sportsman's Sketches had on him. The excellent work of previous critics on this influence focuses primarily on Tolstoy's military tales in the early r8 sos. 26 Here I want to discuss the relevance of A Sportsman's Sketches to an understanding of Turgenev's influence on Tolstoy later in the decade, when the two men became friends. "The Morning of a Landowner" and The Cossacks, two works Turgenev especially liked, are products of this later Turgenevian moment in Tolstoy's development.

Chapter Four

As contemporaries observed, one of the similarities between Tolstoy's "Woodcutting" and A Sportsman's Sketches was its introduction, in chapter 2, of a typology of soldiersP Tolstoy's types are more psychological than social, and characters seem not always to act according to type. The "stern leader" Lance-Corporal Antonov, for instance, does not at first rush to help the fallen Private Velenchuk. Antonov's first response to Velenchuk's wounding is "anger," but it takes the prompting of the veteran Zhdanovwho does not receive a designation as a type-to get Antonov to work organizing first aid for his comrade. Thus, even though Tolstoy's narrator constructs a typology, he rejects typology as his fundamental method of characterization. 28 Before he read A Sportsman's Sketches in r 8 53, Tolstoy had already learned from Plato how drama and the "real" was a necessary supplement to analysis in the search for the truth. He was well aware of the tensions between his art and his didacticism. The Platonic dialogue provided a model of a mixed genre of narrative and discourse, while Turgenev helped free him from the tyranny of a single point of view, however morally admirable. It was not until Tolstoy actually met Turgenev in r8 55 that the older writer's preference for the real over the poetic or abstract had its own profound effect on the younger one. 29 The story of the rocky personal relations of the two men is well known. Turgenev dubbed Tolstoy "Troglodyte" for his bad manners and retrograde opinions, but at the same time he was enchanted by Tolstoy's strong character (so different from his own), unbroken by parents, peer pressure, or formal education. 30 In turn, although he tried to hide it, Tolstoy must have been both impressed and intimidated by Turgenev's sophistication and wished for an intimacy of which Turgenev was incapable. After smoking behind the scenes for a short while, the tensions between the two began to coalesce into flash points, one of which-Turgenev's purported insincerity and false liberalism-led eventually to an aborted duel in r86r. For his part, Turgenev considered Tolstoy to be too sincere in one important respect. He was too inclined to form strong opinions and defend them stubbornly. This moral certainty could affect and damage his art; Turgenev was especially appalled by "Lucerne," which in a letter to Botkin he called "a mixture of Rousseau, Thackeray, and the short version of the Orthodox Catechism." 31 Tolstoy's dogmatism became a standing joke in the circle of which he and Turgenev were members. In r856, Annenkov entertained Turgenev, who was abroad, with thumbnail sketches of their friends at their dinners together. In conversation Tolstoy displayed "his own arbitrary way of seeing things, to which he gave free rein." 32 To counter this tendency in Tolstoy, Turgenev urged him in a letter to embrace "freedom, spiritual freedom. " 33 Shortly after, in response to let-

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7I

ters that have not been preserved, he wrote Tolstoy to congratulate him on his progress: [You are] free, free from your own point of view and prejudice. It's just as pleasant to look left as right-there's more than one fish in the sea-there are "perspectives" everywhere (Botkin stole that word from me)-all you have to do is open your eyes wide. May God grant that your horizon broaden every day! The only people who value systems are those who can't get their hands on the whole truth and who want to catch it by the tail. A system is like the tail of the truth, but the truth is like a lizard: it leaves its tail in your hand and itself escapes. It knows that it will soon grow another one. This comparison is a bit bold, but the main thing is that your letters comfort me. 34 Turgenev does not say that Tolstoy should have no opinions, only that as an artist he should obey not what he believes beforehand but what he sees. Rather than wearing blinders in thrall to a preconceived idea, he must turn his head from side to side to take in as much of reality as he can. Tolstoy's reaction to this advice was not to become another Turgenev. He did not abandon his emphasis on morality, but he did become more self-conscious about, and suspicious of it. One of the first signs of a response to the gentle urgings ofTurgenev is "The Morning of a Landowner," which he prepared in fall I 8 56, a year after his arrival in Petersburg, and which came out in December. In it a young landowner, yet another Prince Nekhliudov, makes the morning rounds of his estate and tries to help various peasant serfs without much success. He returns to the house chastened, plays the pianoforte as he mulls over the morning, and finds himself wishing he could change places with the carter Ilya. This story is the only published result of the unfinished "Novel of a Russian Landowner," on which Tolstoy had been working intermittently since I 8 52, when he conceived of it as his "dogmatic" novel "with a [moral] goal." 35 Turgenev picked up on this "dogmatic" undertone and gave it his own, political spin. On Jan. I 3, I 8 57, he wrote a friend: The main moral impression of this tale (I'm not talking about the artistic one) is that while serfdom exists, there is no possibility of a convergence and understanding of the two sides, despite the most disinterested and honourable readiness for convergence. And this impression is good and true. 36 But Turgenev also praises the story for its "mastery of language, of narrative, and of characterization." He no doubt perceives that it contains psychological drama the relevance of which transcends the specific issue of serfdom. The implementation of the young reformer's plans is impossible not only because of the political obstacles but also because the peasants have their own dreams and are not willing to be helped in ways Nekhliudov thinks would be good for them. Nekhliudov learns this in the

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course of his rounds. A mother who seems otherwise reasonable defends her good-for-nothing son, for instance, and demands that Nekhliudov find another wife to replace the one who has committed suicide in her despair. A man living in a dilapidated hut refuses to move to new quarters out of loyalty to his ancestors and surroundings. As a fragment, "The Morning of a Landowner" discredits by its very form the author's original idea for a didactic novel. In place of the good deeds and virtue that would triumphantly conclude the prospective "Novel of a Russian Landowner," 37 Tolstoy ends "The Morning of a Landowner" with a lyrical coda. Nekhliudov plays the pianoforte and daydreams about his morning and his goals. Unable to reform his peasants, he empathizes with them in a poetic fantasy: art, which will teach tolerance and sympathy for the peasant, replaces practical reform as Tolstoy's goal as an author. In this respect, Nekhliudov is a stand-in for his young creator, whose ideas for the moral goals of art have changed. The final stage of this coda turns Nekhliudov's original plans on their head. Having started with the goal of improving the life of the peasants, Nekhliudov ends up wanting to be one of them. The story ends with his desire to live the life on the road of Ilya the carter. Turgenev's letter about Tolstoy's spiritual freedom is dated January 3, r 8 57, and his letter to Druzhinin praising "The Morning of a Landowner" was written on January r3. The two letters, so close in time, are related in language as well as in spirit. Turgenev prefaces the remarks just quoted by stating that "I have read his 'Morning of a Landowner' which I like very, very much for its sincerity and its almost total freedom of viewpoint-! say 'almost' because in the way he has set his task, there still lurks (perhaps unself-consciously) a certain prejudice." 38 The word that I have translated as "viewpoint" is vozzrenie, with its verbal root z/r, to see; the word "prejudice" is predubezhdenie, which literally means "prior conviction." As in his letter of January 3 to Tolstoy himself, Turgenev expects him to look clearly and without prejudice before he judges. 39 He makes this perfectly clear in the letter to Druzhinin through his use of the words vozzrenie and predubezhdenie. Tolstoy will never free himself from "prejudice" (predubezhdenie) to the extent necessary to please Turgenev; nor does he want to do so, but as Turgenev himself probably realized, in "The Morning of a Landowner" he is responding to Turgenev's criticism in his own way. Instead of Turgenev's emphasis on the unknowability of reality and especially of other people, Tolstoy focuses on the multiplicity and even irreconcilability of perspectives swarming in reality. The broad world of others and the challenges it poses to the self become the theme of the crowning work of his early period, The Cossacks (r863).

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The first reference to what became The Cossacks is a poem from April I853 ("Hey Mariana, leave off working" [Ei, Mar'iana, bros' rabotu]). Later in the same year, Tolstoy started a work he called "The Fugitive," about the rivalry between a Russian officer and a Cossack for the love of a Cossack woman named Marianka. He records this in his diary of August 28-3 I, just a month after reading A Sportsman's Sketches, and it may be that Turgenev's example in the Sketches inspired him to use the raw material of his own life with the Cossacks to create a work of fiction. In any case, this early draft of The Cossacks is very rare in Tolstoy's oeuvre in its direct incorporation into the text of a personal acquaintance of Tolstoy, the Cossack Epifan Sekhin, who is called Epishka in the first draft and Eroshka later on. 40 Tolstoy started with this draft when he returned to his "Caucasian novel" in I856; he then worked intensively on it through I 8 58. The final stage of writing began in r 86o. During the middle period of the creative history of The Cossacks, it grew in size and became multilayered in a way that Tolstoy himself recognized as something new in his art. He explained this new development and the dilemma it posed in a letter from Switzerland to Annenkov dated April 22 (May 4), I8 57· That serious thing that I once spoke about with you I've begun in four different tones. I've written about 3 publisher's sheets in each-and I've stopped; I don't know which to choose or how to merge them, or whether I shouldn't throw the whole thing out. The thing is that the subjective poetry of authenticity-an inquiring poetry-both has become a bit offensive to me and doesn't suit the task or the mood in which I find myself. I've set off into the infinite and firmly positive objective sphere and I've gone mad: in the first place because of the abundance of subjects or, better, sides of subjects which have presented themselves to me, and because of the variety of tones in which it is possible to display these subjects. It seems to me that a dim law is stirring in this chaos according to which I might be able to choose; but up to now this abundance and variety have added up to impotence.41

Up to the time of this letter, there are indeed four beginnings to the novel. (This includes the one from I853, which Tolstoy corrected in I856.) After the letter, in the second half of I 8 57, Tolstoy wrote two more. There is only one extant plan for the novel before the letter, and the four beginnings indeed relate to this single plan as different "tones" and "sides of subjects. " 42 They start variously from the points of view: of the officer arriving in the village; of the villagers as depicted by a third person narrator; or of villagers depicted within the "tone" of a "by/ina," the short form of folk epic. This last projected beginning Tolstoy refers to in his diary as his "poetic Cossack." Tolstoy's letter, and the drafts of The Cossacks to which it refers, are all written during the most intense period of his relation with Turgenev. 43

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They reflect a further development in the dynamic already apparent to Turgenev in "The Morning of a Landowner." Under pressure from Turgenev, Tolstoy temporarily abandons his "subjective" poetry based on psychological self-analysis and unabashed didacticism-as exemplified in "Youth," which is published in January I 8 57-and experiments with how to depict objective "reality," that is, the world of nature and other people. Then, in I 8 58, he writes an entire third redaction of part I in the form of letters from the officer. 44 Having turned away from subjectivity, he now reintegrates it into his work as another point of view. Like the others, it is limited, but it is also legitimate within his many-sided realist aesthetics. Only in the final stage of work on the novel, from I86o on, does Tolstoy succeed in pulling together the perspectives of the several beginnings into a whole. Further, it is only in I86o that he conceives of the beginning of the novel that starts from the main character Olenin's point of view and then abruptly, in chapter 4, switches to a point of view from which Olenin is totally excluded. 45 When Olenin reenters the novel, in chapter IO, readers may have almost forgotten him. In the final version of the novel, several narrative points of view are represented. It begins with a third-person narrative that moves from distant shots of Moscow's wintery streets to a focus on Olenin. This narrative sequence ends with two famous interior monologues, one of which depicts what we might call the inner landscape of Olenin's mind, the other the abrupt invasion of that interior landscape by reality as represented by the first appearance of the mountains of the Caucasus in the distance. Chapter 4 begins in the form of an ethnographic sketch and then continues as a third-person narrative about the life of the Cossacks. Eventually, in chapter IO, the Olenin stream joins and mingles with the Cossack one, but for readers the two streams never entirely blend. Unlike Olenin, they are always aware of an unbridgeable gulf between him and the Cossacks. Unlike him, readers follow the dynamics of the relation between Lukashka and Marianka, which create only a temporary opportunity for Olenin to woo her. Only at the end of the novel does Olenin achieve knowledge of his true situation in the village, to which the reader and author are privileged from the beginning of his stay there. At the same time, Tolstoy preserves two other narrative modes that represent Olenin's point of view. They are his diary entry (chapter 28) and his unsent letter (chapter 33). These two writings undercut each other, the first one calling for self-sacrifice, the second for happiness that involves the sacrifice of others. These first-person insertions are part of Tolstoy's description of Olenin's personality and dilemma as a civilized man. Unlike Eroshka and Lukashka, who also experience alternating impulses of generosity and self-centered desire, as a thinker Olenin must be self-

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conscious about this contradiction and, for the sake of a consistency unnecessary to the Cossacks, must even choose one need over the other. What is the effect of all these narrative stances? No one perspective can do justice to the complexity of life. Wisdom consists in recognizing the otherness of the world and of other people as well as the compelling reality of the inner life of each individual, and then somehow accommodating all these things. So even if Tolstoy's didactic hero Olenin feels that he must choose one path over the other, and even if the narrator of the work makes occasional didactic judgments, the author of the book remains above it all. The Cossacks, the least didactic work that Tolstoy ever published, is among other things the first and purest product of Tolstoy's exposure to Turgenev's realist aesthetics as expounded most perfectly in A Sportsman's Sketches. Throughout the r85os, Tolstoy struggled to find a mean between poetry and moral purpose. Occasionally, as we saw in "Lucerne," the struggle broke out into the open in his art, but mostly it went on behind the scenes. In the case of The Cossacks, his greatest early work, the attempt to do justice to all natural perspectives took up years of writing and rewriting. At the same time, Tolstoy's narrative drama never totally overwhelms his judgment about it. This didactic side of his art is not congenial to modern sensibilities, yet it remained and grew even more prominent in his later years. Critics such as the populist N. K. Mikhailovsky (r842-1904) or Isaiah Berlin see this as the push and pull of contradictory tendencies in Tolstoy's nature. In fact Tolstoy's overt didacticism is the glue that holds his texts together; his moral judgments are an essential part of the consciousness that shapes the text as a whole. The young lion may have been tamed by his encounters with writers more sophisticated than he was, but he could still roar.

CHAPTER FIVE

Romantic Longing in Turgenev For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent. 1

.

~

Having looked at how the author protects the subject of Russian psychological prose, I turn now to a description of the subject itself. In the passage from Anna Karenina quoted in Chapter r, Anna is returning in the midst of a blizzard by train from Moscow to Petersburg after allowing herself to encourage Count Vronsky to pursue her. Deep down she knows she has done so and is ashamed of it; her shame invades her reading of her novel as she suddenly feels that the novel's hero "must be ashamed and that she was ashamed of the same thing. " 2 So Anna turns from her escapist reading to face the chaos around and inside her. This is a model for what happens to readers when we take up a Russian novel, with its account of the inner life. This inner life is needy; no snug bungalow or mansion, nothing material can ultimately satisfy our longing for completeness and meaning. Such a longing, once we recognize it, makes us self-conscious, as Anna becomes during her reading. She is both ashamed of, and irresistibly drawn to, it and its consequences. The longing is romantic. It is a well-known paradox already mentioned in the Introduction that Russian psychological realism rests on certain romantic philosophic premises. Turgenev was at least partly responsible for putting romantic longing at the heart of it. Although his aestheticism mostly conceals this, his writings, fiction as well as nonfiction, are shaped by philosophic ideas acquired in the course of his broad humanist education. Turgenev began his career as a romantic poet. His first surviving poem, "Steno," written in r834 when he was sixteen years old, was an immature imitation of Byron's Manfred. Typically for an adolescent sensibility, the emphasis in it is on separation from others rather than self-analysis.

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The relentlessly somber Steno, rebellious to his very marrow, appears from two starkly different perspectives. To others, he seems supernaturally strong and charismatic, a god or a devil, while he himself feels tragically helpless in the face of a mechanistic nature that values neither him nor the shadowy beloved whose death seems to have caused his revolt against God. The poem lurches incongruously from Steno's self-pitying rants to earnest tributes by others to his strength. The denouement, unintentionally comic in its neatness, brings the two strands of the plot together. Steno commits suicide from despair, thereby unwittingly and in the nick of time depriving his main enemy (whose sister has killed herself because Steno does not love her) of the opportunity to kill him. This rings the bell on the top of the adolescent fantasy scale. Turgenev's Byronic posturing gives way to a more conciliatory relation to nature under the influence of the romantic idealist N. S. Stankevich (1813-1840), a Schellingian and Fichtean for whom Nature was a living organism rather than a Cartesian machine. In the draft of a letter written around the end of 1840 or the beginning of 1841 (but never sent) to the romantic author Bettina von Arnim (1795-1859), Turgenev embraced the Schellingian idea according to which man, by surrendering himself to nature, discovers his own essence in it and brings it to consciousness through the operations of reason. 3 His first published poem, "Evening. Meditation" (Vecher. Duma; 1838), expresses this Schellingian program. At dusk, nature, still and silent, nonetheless imparts a "mysterious lesson" to the poet through an "inner voice"-a "meditation"-that arises within him and speaks prophetically of the future. 4 The task of the romantic poet will be to articulate, inasmuch as this is possible, the wisdom inherent in voiceless nature. The twin title of the poem announces that it will be an exercise in Identitatsphilosophie, according to which eternal principles inscribed in nature parallel the laws of the human mind in mysterious ways. Turgenev never entirely renounced this romantic belief. He always regarded a longing to merge with the All as one of the noblest human traits. This longing comes into being because of the tragic limitations of each individual human existence. At the same time, it legitimizes the individual human soul by confirming a connection between it and metaphysical being. Certain modest and rare characters in Turgenev's prose feel this connection directly. Two examples, one premodern and one modern, would be Kasian in "Kasian from Beautiful Spring" (in A Sportsman's Sketches) and the eponymous hero Jakov Pasynkov, "one of the last romantics," who "entered the realm of the ideal without strain or stress." 5 Both of these characters are religious by temperament, although Kasian's beliefs have religious sectarian elements 6 and Jakov's derive from German philosophical principles. More often the connection is indirect, by which I mean

Chapter Five

that in Turgenev's fiction certain passions are infused with longing for the All. When Lavretsky loves Liza in A Nest of Gentryfolk; when Vladimir worships his father and Zina in "First Love," and the father falls in love with Zina; when Sofya, the heroine of "A Strange Story," attaches herself to the lumbering and vaguely menacing holy fool Vasilii and runs away from home; when Lezhnyov defends Rudin for his idealism, however flawed, at the end of Rudin; and when Insarov in On the Eve embraces the cause of his homeland, and Elena embraces it because she loves him, all these characters in their own way act from romantic longing. The idea of the Russian soul, as it takes shape in the r83os and then is demonstrated in Turgenev's fiction, is erotic: the individual feels incomplete and yearns for completion or wholeness in something outside the self. This quality of the Russian soul is partly an accident of history. Russians embraced modernity at the time that German followers of Rousseau such as Schelling and Kant were correcting earlier Enlightenment thought precisely as it ignored what Richard Velkley calls "the eros for wholeness" that modernity itself generates. 7 The problem as explained by Velkley is as follows. Modernity as founded by Descartes and other seventeenthcentury thinkers called for a new beginning led by philosophers in order to provide relief for long-suffering humankind. "Methodical doubt" is the method by which they do away with the certainties of religion and dogmatic philosophy and replace them with "genuine certainties that lie within the self or '1.'" In this new dispensation, nature is to be exploited for whatever material benefits it will yield, but it can no longer be seen as a benevolent order of which man is a part. For spiritual beliefs, we can now rely only on "materials found in our own consciousness." The implication is that human nature is radically individualistic. By nature we belong to no larger whole, only to ourselves, which we are driven to preserve. The essence of the modern turn to self is the emancipation from all metaphysics .... What is "first for us" (consciousness, "ideas," passions, and rights) [is] also what is "first in itself. " 8

As Velkley goes on to explain, this necessary condition for the modern project generates its own problems. Subsequent thinkers and even the founders of modern thought fretted about the lack of a teleological justification of freedom and reason, necessary to legitimate the human individual, although this did not deter them from their task of the mastery of nature. The ongoing concern with "wholeness," or a metaphysical justification for the ground of the modern project in the human mind, was fully expressed for the first time by Rousseau, and developed by his German followers. Mostly through the Germans, it had a fundamental impact in Russia in the r82os through the r84os, during which Rousseau

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and his various German followers were mentors of men who were shaping the modern Russian soul. 9 Russia's own historical and cultural situation also influenced its reception of German thought. The effects of the seventeenth-century revolution in thought that I have briefly explained developed organically and over time in France and England, and, though less so, in Germany as well. It came from abroad and relatively abruptly to Russia, where in the r82os religion was unreformed; even most of the elites still lived traditional lives. Russians tended to radicalize foreign philosophical principles because no indigenous bridging traditions had developed over time to counteract their extreme effects. 10 At the same time, they were attracted to those aspects of romantic philosophy that jibed with their traditions, which were irrationalist and communal rather than rationalist and individualist. Young Russians from this period soon became aware of what they were relinquishing in order to become modern individuals. Throwing off their rituals and traditions so abruptly, they shivered with metaphysical angst in a bare new landscape built on truths validated only by the categories of human reason. Understandably, many of them looked for ideas that would take the place of the Church or the autocracy (or somehow ground them anew) as a unifying and elevating force in their lives. Others embraced new ideas with religious fervor. The young Turgenev was typical. He grew up in a premodern environment that suppressed individuality and allowed the arbitrary exercise of power by a brutal few. His mother, an abused offspring of the Lutovinov clan of despotic steppe landowners, ruled her estates with an iron fist she did not hesitate to use on serfs, or even her sons. Coming from such a background, but exposed to Western ideas through travel and the excellent education provided for him by that same mother, Turgenev fervently embraced modern individualism as it presented itself to him first through Byron. But if at sixteen in Steno it was easy for him to throw in his lot with rebellion, just a short time later, among new friends in the Stankevich circle, he was ready to concede that harmony with nature and consequently wholeness for each individual might be possible within a modern philosophical framework. Though he soon had to abandon that hope, he always felt the need for metaphysical confirmation that had inspired it in the first place. Like other Russians, Turgenev was suspicious of philistines so comfortable in their skins that they no longer sensed the essential inadequacy of each individuallife. 11 Turgenev's attitude toward philosophy was ambiguous and is still not understood today.U As a student in Berlin, he studied metaphysics and was intrigued by what he referred to in a letter toT. M. Granovsky (r8r3r 8 55) as "die speculativen Freuden."

So

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Werder has reached the point of distinguishing Grund from Wesen-and I can say that I experienced at least /'avant gout of that which he calls die speculativen Freuden. You will not believe with what interest I listen to his lectures, how desperately I want to comprehend the aim, how sad and happy I am simultaneously when each time the ground, on which you think you are standing steadfastly, collapses underfoot-that has happened to me with Werden, Dasein, Wesen, etc. 13

Usually this letter is dismissed as proof of a direction that Turgenev soon abandoned, and his account of the life of the mind makes clear that Turgenev understood its danger for the goal of human wholeness. He could not immerse himself for long in the vertiginous and forever retreating joys of pure metaphysics, and to this extent he became antiphilosophical. 14 By the early r84os, he had read German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach's Philosophie und Christentum (r839), and under its influence he turned decisively away from abstract thought. 15 Yet the attraction to metaphysics in this letter is highly significant. Turgenev does not reject the importance of philosophy; in fact his art, though almost never referring to it, is the closest expression in Russian classical realism of the dynamics of modern Western thought as I have just outlined them. Far from being slices of life, his fictional works always have a philosophical dimension, mostly hidden, that runs through and even structures them. 16 We know, furthermore, that he thought particularly about the I of the human personality and the need to ground it in metaphysical truth. This was the subject of a joking letter that he wrote Aleksei and Aleksandr Bakunin on April 3, r 842, while preparing for an exam in philosophy at Petersburg University. The philosophers he was reading for the exam were all contributors to the idea of the modern self: Descartes (r596-r6so), Leibniz (r646-r7r6), Spinoza (r632-r677), Fichte (r762-r8r4), and Kant (r724-r8o4)Y All of them had to deal with the relation between this self and the universe that must support it and that it is supposed to understand. Turgenev's reading of these philosophers and others set the stage for his own lifelong preoccupation with forms of transcendentalism. True, in his art the eternal meaning of romantic other-worldliness (dvoemirie) is revealed only indirectly, in images of the particular things of this world. (Literature of this sort becomes the conduit for thought in Russia before "formal" philosophy begins with Vladimir Soloviev [r8s3-I9oo]. 18 ) Romantic longing in Turgenev's fiction is closely associated with passion, and especially sexual love. His characters yearn for wholeness through merging with nature or with others, but as is characteristic in romanticism such wholeness usually eludes them.

Romantic Longing in Turgenev

8r

THE PLACE OF MAN IN NATURE: 'A SPORTSMAN'S SKETCHES'

Turgenev is admired by his countrymen as the greatest literary portraitist of the middle Russian landscape; these landscapes express romantic longing for completion through nature. Turgenev loved nature partly for its self-sufficiency and harmony, attributes that human beings lack because of their neediness. At the same time, he held with the romantics that human beings at their core are nature, and the primary task of the poet is to reveal and celebrate this. 19 Individuals can participate fully in the harmony and wholeness of nature only under certain conditions, all portrayed in A Sportsman's Sketches. The first and simplest of them is through natural impulse, which is fundamentally self-centered and can be amoral. An example of a character who lives by impulse and thinks only about himself is Ermolai, the hunter's peasant guide. In the second sketch, "Ermolai and the Miller's Wife," Ermolai casually takes sexual advantage of a woman who is in a loveless marriage. The hunter narrator who overhears and reports their conversation to the reader does not condemn Ermolai for his predatory behavior. Though impressively solid, there is something subhuman about Ermolai's self-sufficiency and moral solitude. This is implicit in the narrative even if it is nowhere stated outright. Another relation to nature, more difficult, less spontaneous, and more profound than the first, requires a conscious acknowledgment of human frailty that Ermolai seems to ignore. At the other end of the spectrum from Ermolai is Lukeria, in "The Living Relic," who manages to find pleasure in life although she has been totally paralyzed in a freak accident. In between these two extremes, characters in A Sportsman's Sketches, peasants and gentry alike, struggle with the essential incompleteness and tragedy of human life. In response to it, more unusual peasants have generated a homegrown Russian mysticism as profound as the high German romantic kind. One such peasant mystic and idealist is Kasian, from the story "Kasian from Beautiful Spring." 20 This story is structured around a comparison between Kasian and the hunter narrator in which, in a reversal typical of Turgenev, Kasian plays the thinker and the hunter observer-who is constantly placed on the periphery of peasant and gentry life in the book-the man of action. This fact needs to be demonstrated through close textual analysis, because Turgenev's art, when successful, always shows and almost never tells. As in so many of the sketches, the opening scene of "Kasian from Beautiful Spring," seemingly coincidental, sets the stage for what follows. The

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hunter narrator rides in a cart with a stolid driver who tries to avoid a funeral cortege. The driver closes his eyes when he sees it and disparages the grief of the mourners. He rushes to prevent the cortege from crossing his path because, so folk superstition holds, meeting a corpse is bad luck that might precipitate your own death. As he does so, the axle of the cart overheats and breaks. Both this accident, and the trade of Martin the carpenter, the dead man, indicate the tragic situation of human life. All that we build to protect and enhance our lives is destined to be destroyed, along with the builders. The meeting with Kasian takes place during the interlude while the cart is disabled and the journey disrupted. Kasian himself lives outside the practical routines of life-its journey-as if he has chosen not to participate in ultimately futile attempts to preserve it. He has no regular job within the community, and he feels a mystical connection to nature that he believes makes it possible for him to set spells. Like Lukeria, his body is deformed, but he has a sweet singer's voice, "marvellously sweet, youthful, and almost feminine in its softness. " 21 Later on in the text there is one long paragraph that deepens our insight into what is happening on the philosophical level in this story. (I quote the preceding paragraph as well.) The heat ultimately forced us to enter the grove. I flung myself down under a tall bush, over which a shapely young maple gracefully stretched its delicate branches. Kasian sat down on the thick trunk of a fallen birch tree. I looked at him. The leaves faintly stirred overhead, and their slender greenish shadows swept softly to and fro across his frail body, muffled in a dark coat, and across his little face. He didn't raise his head. Bored by his silence, I lay on my back and began to admire the tranquil play of the tangled foliage against the background of the bright, distant sky. What a marvellously enjoyable occupation it is to lie on your back in the woods and gaze upward! You imagine that you are looking into a bottomless sea that stretches far and wide beneath you, that the trees aren't rising out of the earth but, like the roots of gigantic weeds, are descending, falling straight down into those glassy, limpid depths; one moment the leaves on the trees are as translucent as emeralds, the next they've condensed into golden, almost dark verdure. Somewhere far off, at the end of a slender twig, a single leaf hangs motionless against a blue patch of translucent sky, and beside it another one trembles like a fish on a line, as though it's moving of its own volition and isn't being disturbed by the wind. Round, white clouds calmly float into sight and calmly pass by like magical submerged islands; then suddenly, this whole ocean-this shining air, these branches and leaves steeped in sunlight, everything-begins to vibrate, quivering with fleeting brilliance, and a fresh, tremulous whisper arises like the tiny, ceaseless ripples of unexpectedly bestirred eddies. You don't move; you watch-and no words can describe what peace, what joy, what sweetness reigns in your heart. You watch-the deep, clear blue sky

Romantic Longing in Turgenev

brings a smile as innocent as it is to your lips; like the clouds moving across the sky-along with them, as it were-happy memories pass through your mind in a slow procession; it seems to you that your gaze goes deeper and deeper, and draws you yourself up with it into that peaceful, shining vastness, and you can't bear to tear yourself away from that height, that depth .... Here, in a repetition and amplification of the beginning of the sketch, the midday heat forces the two characters to cease their activities altogether. The difference between the opening episode and this one lies in the reactions of characters to the harshness of nature. The driver of the cart tried to avoid facing the ultimate manifestation of this harshness (death), while here the characters spontaneously submit to it by interrupting the hunt to rest. When Kasian enters the grove, he falls silent and lowers his head. His "silence" (bezmolvie) makes the narrator turn away from him to nature. The symbolism of the description is crucial. Kasian, sitting on a fallen birch log, fades into nature as the shadows of leaves play over him. Leaves representing dead souls is a metaphor that goes back to classical times. (Turgenev knew classical literature well; references to it occur often in his prose.) The narrator describes Kasian's body as "frail," tshchedushnoe; the Russian compound adjective contains the root "spirit" (dukh-), from which the noun for "soul," dusha, is also formed. For the reader, this underscores the classical comparison between leaves and souls. The narrator's reverie, carried out against this symbolic background, is strikingly subjective. It asserts the importance of his own life as if in reaction to the symbolism of mortality around him. The world, rearranged around him, and reinterpreted with him at its center, is literally upside down. The sky becomes an ocean beneath him so that he feels himself on top, while in fact he is looking up. The narrator joins nature, but on his terms, and they are true but limited. Nature is a great whole, though the pillars on which it rests are inaccessible to human beings and can only be intuited by them. In the midst of this seemingly modest little sketch, Turgenev demonstrates the profundity of the romantic poet, who through poetic intuition comprehends so much more than the philosopher. The narrator intuits the wholeness of life, as it is often represented in Turgenev's fiction, as an ocean, with water as a metaphor for life. Here the narrator floats securely on top. Elsewhere in Turgenev's prose, when love turns tragic or a character is rejected or dying, he may imagine himself at the bottom of the sea. 22 The leaf that "trembles like a fish on a line" is areminder in the text of the hunter's actual vulnerability within the ocean he surveys. But he in his repose is triumphant and communes with nature, drawn into it while remaining secure within his own identity. He represents one pole, the one in which each individual considers himself the center of the universe, of the human relation to nature as Turgenev described

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it in 1854 in a review of S. T. Aksakov's book Notes of a Rifle Hunter in Orenburg Province. 23 Meanwhile, if Kasian is silent while the narrator daydreams, this does not mean that he is merely a stage prop. We see him from an outside and even symbolic perspective, and at the same time the author informs us to some extent of his inner life. To appreciate Kasian's thoughts and point of view, we must turn to another scene, which comes just before the narrator's reverie in the grove. Here nature appears very different because the mood is so unlike when the two characters take their rest in the next scene. So we set off. The cleared land stretched across a verst or so. I must confess that I paid more attention to Kasian than to my dog. He'd been aptly nicknamed the Flea. His small, black, uncovered head (his hair was actually as good a covering as any cap) seemed to flash here and there among the bushes. He walked extraordinarily swiftly, and always seemed to be hopping up and down as he moved. He kept stooping over to pick one kind of herb or another, thrusting what he collected into his bosom while muttering to himself, and he kept looking at me and my dog with a strange, searching gaze. Among low bushes and in clearings, one often finds little gray birds that ceaselessly flit from tree to tree and whistle as they dart away; Kasian mimicked them, answering their calls. A young quail flew up from between his feet, chirping, and he chirped in imitation; a lark began to swoop down toward him, flapping its wings while singing melodiously, and Kasian joined in its song. He didn't speak to me at all. ... The weather was glorious, even more so than before, but the heat hadn't diminished. The high, thin clouds barely stirred in the clear sky. They were yellowish-white, like late spring snow, flat and drawn out like unfurled sails. Their fringed edges, as soft and fluffy as cotton, slowly but perceptibly changed every moment; they were melting, these clouds, and they didn't provide any shade. I strolled around the clearing with Kasian for a long while. Young plant shoots that still hadn't had time to grow more than a few feet high surrounded low, blackened stumps with their smooth, slender stems; spongy funguses with gray edges-the same ones that are used to make tinder-clung to these stumps; strawberry plants flung their rosy tendrils over them; mushrooms thronged around them in groups. One's feet kept getting caught and entangled in the long grass that had been parched by the scorching sun; one's eyes were dazzled on all sides by the bright metallic glitter of the reddish young leaves on the trees; variegated blue clusters of peas, golden buds of buttercups, and the half-purple, halfyellow blossoms of pansies were everywhere. In some places, near little-used paths on which wheel tracks were marked by streaks on the thin, bright grass, piles of wood were stacked, blackened by wind and rain, laid in yard lengths; they cast faint shadows in slanting oblongs. There was no other shade anywhere. A light breeze would come up, then subside again; suddenly it would blow straight into one's face and seem to become playful: everything would begin to rustle merrily, nodding and stirring, the supple tops of the ferns would bow down gracefully, and one would rejoice in it all. But then the breeze would die away again, and

Romantic Longing in Turgenev everything would become still once more. Only the grasshoppers would continue to chirp in chorus, and this incessant, sharp, dry sound was oppressive. It's a sound appropriate to the persistent heat of midday: it seems akin to the heat, as though summoned by it out of the scorched earth. Without having roused a single covey of game, we eventually reached another clearing. The aspen trees there had been felled quite recently, and lay stretched out mournfully on the ground, crushing the grass and undergrowth beneath them; on some, the leaves were still green, although already dead, and hung limply from the immobile branches; on others, they were crumpled and desiccated. Fresh, goldenwhite wood chips lay in heaps around the stumps, which were covered with bright droplets; a special, very pleasant, pungent odor arose from them. Farther away, closer to the grove, the dull blows of an axe rang out, and from time to time, as if bowing and spreading its arms wide, a leafy tree would fall to the ground slowly and majestically.... I didn't find a single bird for a long time. Finally, a corncrake flew out of a thick clump of young oak trees through the wormwood growing around it. I fired; it turned over in the air and fell. At the sound of the shot, Kasian quickly covered his eyes with his hand, and he didn't stir until I'd reloaded the gun and picked up the bird. When I'd moved farther on, he went up to the place where the wounded bird had fallen, bent down to the grass, on which some drops of blood were sprinkled, shook his head, and looked at me in dismay.... Afterward I heard him whisper, "A sin! ... Ah, yes, it's a sin!"

The narrator hunts, and as he does so the foliage seems to hold him back; the oppressive heat wears him down. On the level of the author, the mention of many particular plants, the names of which may be unfamiliar to readers, adds a mental dimension to the reader's sense of the denseness of this place. Within it, the hunter is striving, trying to expand at the expense of other creatures by killing them. In this way he asserts his life, his right to live, and also the fact of his life. It is noon, the peak time of the life spirit, of vitality, and the narrator acts within a world in which everything living strives to expand. Vines swarm over dead stumps as death is eaten up to feed new life. There is no shade, no place to rest. We know from a confession later in the story that Kasian is also intensely occupied during this hunt; he accompanied the narrator on it to cast a spell to keep game away. During the subsequent rest, while the narrator hunter daydreams in a manner expressive of his self-centered striving, Kasian broods about the death of the corncrake killed by the hunter. Kasian believes that he has secret and wordless communications with game, with whom he identifies. Throughout the text, Kasian is associated with prey rather than hunters. He is self-absorbed as game birds are, and like them, he is easily "startled." Hunting is associated with action and vitality, both because it is a search for food and because it is a way to challenge death and affirm life.

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(This fact deepens our understanding of Ermolai's activities as a hunter and a lover.) The dwarf with the frail body and no aptitude for work is aware of his mortality, and this constant awareness makes him stop striving to think. He does not give up on life-he has a little daughter whom he loves-but his activity is different from the hunter's. When conversation resumes during the rest, Kasian states his philosophy of life in the form of a maxim. Death doesn't go fast, but you can't run away from it; but all the same one mustn't help it along.

Smert' ne bezhit, da i ot nee ne ubezhish'; da pomogat' ei ne dolzhno.

Kasian's attitude is pragmatic. The hunter kills the corncrake after the two men come upon some trees that have been cut down. Their presence in the text is meant to remind us that we can't live without killing. If we don't acknowledge this, we fall into empty moralizing and miss the deeper issues that Turgenev is addressing. Kasian does not approve of the merchants felling trees for profit, of course, but wood is needed for axles, and Kasian has guided the hunter to this very spot to buy a new one. Even Kasian has a little cart; even his little relative picks mushrooms to eat. Though Kasian does not deny the necessity of killing for self-preservation, he condemns the shooting of the corncrake. In his maxim about how to deal with death, he uses "must" (dolzno), the modal auxiliary of obligation, and he makes his mandate a negative one. Morality for Kasian means not doing certain things-in this case, refraining from killing for sport. He accuses the hunter narrator of doing this, thereby becoming an accomplice of death. Like the hunter narrator, Kasian loves life. Coming from Beautiful Spring, a place named for the river that flows through it, he too is associated with water. But he is contrasted with the narrator as a contemplative with an active man. Both are poets, but of different kinds. The hunter hunts, and then dreams; his poetry is all imagery and no explanation. Kasian speaks and explains. His words flow out of him freely and spontaneously, in response to his knowledge of his own mortality. When he attacks hunting for sport, he speaks like a prophet. Overhearing Kasian sing to himself, the narrator remarks "He's making it up" (da on sochiniaet); the Russian verb translated as "making it up" refers specifically to creative speech. Kasian is a peasant example of the poet as nature; he takes the other, Slavophile position on nature that Turgenev relates in the review of Aksakov's book, that of man as part of nature. But no more than the hunter narrator does Kasian simply speak for nature; he is too passionate, too involved in the action. The role of poet as nature is left to the author alone, who "accepts nature as guide to aesthetics, as model for

Romantic Longing in Turgenev

art." 24 As Turgenev explained in a speech in r864, Shakespeare was his model in this regard: Like her [nature], he is simple and multilayered-all, so to speak, in the palm of the hand and endlessly deep, free to the point of annihilating all fetters, and constantly full of internal harmony and that unerring sense of inner law, logical necessity, which lies at the base of everything living. 25

Neither Kasian nor the hunter narrator are perfect poets like Shakespeare. It is typical of Turgenev that neither has the last word in the story. Instead, each gives voice to a different legitimate human attitude toward nature. The hunter speaks for the striving individual, while Kasian, with his diminished physical capacities, speaks for the one who endures but who also propagates life and, as a human individual, acts morally as well. 26 The story as a whole is meant to display the layers upon layers within nature as well as "logical necessity, which lies at the base of everything living." Within this necessity, human beings maneuver to find a place without losing their individual identities. As author, Turgenev contemplates these actions without himself participating in them. In differing ways, all three stances, including that of the author, express romantic longing for completion through nature.

TURGENEV'S FRAME STORY "ANDREI KOLOSOV" AS A MIRROR OF THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN LONGING

Despite the reassurances of Identiti:itsphilosophie, the down-to-earth Turgenev understood that the human need to be part of nature is not reciprocated.27 Nature is self-sufficient and indifferent to our longing to be included within it. But when we turn to seek fulfillment and completion in our fellow human beings, we have conflicting feelings about the very object of our neediness. This is the subject of Turgenev's first published story, "Andrei Kolosov" (r844); as we shall see, the problem of human longing shapes it both thematically and structurally. Plato's Symposium, a crucial text for the theme of romantic longing, provides two contrasting metaphors for eros, as a perfectly beautiful young man and an ugly beggar in rags. The first represents the object of love, the beloved; the second, the lover. These two opposing but related images are helpful in understanding the characters in "Andrei Kolosov." The eponymous hero Andrei is a beloved, not only of the hapless heroine Varya, whom he jilts, but also of the narrator, who worships him and gives him as an example of an "exceptional human being" in the conversation

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that opens the story. In the outside frame of the story, there is also a shadowy and hardly identified first-person narrator whose only function, so it seems, is to provide an external description of the second narrator and draw the reader's attention to him as a character within the story. Andrei is tall, handsome, well-built, with merry eyes and a charming smile. 28 He plays the role of Plato's image of the beloved in the text. The narrator, who feels "an inexpressible attraction" to Kolosov at first sight, is a lover; his physical appearance as "a small, pale little man" embodies his neediness.29 The narrator admires Andrei from a distance, while Andrei's sidekick, an "angel" with the appropriate surname Gavrilov (after the archangel Gabriel), serves him selflessly. Gavrilov helps Andrei in various ways as he courts the simple maiden Varya. When Gavrilov dies, the narrator takes over his role, but after Andrei drops Varya he courts her himself. To the narrator's surprise, Varya, who has been healing from the heartache inflicted by Andrei, accepts his eventual declaration of love. Instantaneously he cools toward her and eventually deserts her in a manner that he himself regards as more disgraceful than Andrei's decisive withdrawal at an earlier stage in his courtship of her. As the time approaches to tie the knot of his intentions by speaking to her boorish father, the narrator realizes that he does not love Varya after all. Rather than confessing this to Varya, he simply bails out and never sees her again. The narrator reports his own actions from the inside and Andrei's from outside. He holds himself accountable for his psychological weakness and lack of self-understanding. Readers have no way to know how Andrei views his own behavior, but there is no hint that he is self-critical. When the narrator tries to question Andrei's treatment of Varya, he justifies it as natural. Spring has given way to summer in his heart, and the blossoms on the tree under which he sits with Varenka have produced apples, which, so he tells the narrator, turn out to be sour. 30 Andrei is perfectly natural, perfectly sincere, and seemingly without inner moral conflicts. As such, he is a model for the narrator, who, as it turns out, is as self-centered as Andrei, but weaker and hypocritical. The virtue that Turgenev celebrates in Andrei is sincerity, not selfsacrificing morality. For this reason, despite their praise for its realism, the story made contemporaries queasy. When it reappeared in a collection of his work in r 8 56, Turgenev was called to account by friend and critic A. V. Druzhinin (r824-r864), whose review of the collection included a long discussion of "Andrei Kolosov." In a letter to Druzhinin commenting on the review, Turgenev agreed with him that Andrei was too selfish for a positive hero and promised not to celebrate such heroes in the future.31 He kept the promise only imperfectly, however. Such characters as the father in "First Love" and Bazarov in Fathers and Children are broken by fate, but they are still admirable in their willfulness.

Romantic Longing in Turgenev

As Turgenev would have known from his classical education, Andrei's name means manliness in Greek. In Russian, his last name, Kolosov, suggests a stalk of wheat (kolos). Andrei is a version of the harmonious naive man in the paradigm created by Friedrich von Schiller (1759-I8os) in Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795-96), which Turgenev knew well.32 Following the paradigm within this work, Andrei is an object of love and desire by the first-person narrator, who relates to him as the sentimental man does to nature. Andrei models the harmony and wholeness that the narrator lacks. In the course of his relations with Andrei and Varya, the narrator discovers what he calls "reality" (deistvitel'nost'), by which he means his own complex and, as he sees it, base (poshlyi) psychological make-up: he is more like the narrator Jean-Jacques in Rousseau's Confessions than Andrei. Recognizing this, he finds himself in the territory of psychological realism with its "strange mysteries": I recall that the terrible difference between the day before and this day struck me

too. For the first time it occurred to me then that there are mysteries lurking in human life-strange mysteries .... With childish incomprehension I gazed at this new, not fantastic, real world. 33

If the narrator did not really love Varya, why was he attracted to her in the first place? This is one of the mysteries that confront the reader in Turgenev's story. She is pretty in a simple way, of course, but that is not her real attraction for him. In the kind of "triangular desire" that Rene Girard describes in his famous critical study Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Varya becomes an object of desire for the narrator mostly because she attracted Andrei. All along, the narrator has been dueling with Andrei, whom he aspires to emulate and whose place he therefore wants to take. This psychological conundrum is one of the terrible "secrets" that the narrator discovers about himself and human nature as it really is. Andrei does not seem to the narrator to be part of the same "reality," because so far as we know his own psyche is uncomplicated, even transparent. He is an ideal for "real" people like the narrator, because he seems to be all ego and yet totally in sync with nature. Unlike the narrator, Andrei is not needy, or at least seems not to be. Thus the narrator notices that even when he was courting Varya, Andrei "did not lose his freedom. I suspect that in her absence he did not even think of her. He remained the same carefree, merry and happy fellow whom we had always known." 34 But Andrei is not God, and therefore the narrator cannot simply worship him; he envies as much as he loves him. According to Girard's paradigm, what the narrator really feels toward both Andrei and Varya is more a product of vanity than love. Naturally the narrator comes to regard this as base. Our impression of Andrei as "exceptional" depends on two things. Readers see him through the lens of the frame narrator's hero worship;

Chapter Five

and they also see him in youth, as a university student. Turgenev underlines the importance of this second factor in the epigraph to the story, which is from Byron (and in the original English). "Oh talk not to me of a name great in story! I The days of our youth are the days of our glory.... " 35 The suggestion is that Andrei's charm resides in his youthful exuberance and confidence rather than anything special about him that will persist beyond youth. For this reason, Andrei appears in the story only as a young man; the narrator does not know what happens to him in later life. If Andrei represents a certain stage of life rather than a truly exceptional individual, this is true of Varya as well, who represents childlike feminine innocence and charm, but nothing more: I liked her quiet smile. I liked her simple ringing little voice, her light and merry laugh, her attentive but not deep gazes. This child promised nothing, but you involuntarily admired her the way you do the sudden soft cry of an oriole in the evening, in a tall and dark birch grove. 36

In contrast to Varya, her father is vulgar and prosaic. Other characters include two perpetual students already in their thirties: the dreamy romantic Puzyritsin, whose name incorporates the Russian word for "bubble" (puzyr'), and the bitter rationalist Schitov ("to calculate," schitat'), who snickers at the narrator's entanglement with Andrei and Varya. Turgenev's types in the story are variations of the Schillerian naive and sentimental. The eponymous hero Andrei remains a mystery; contrary to first impressions the narrator, not Andrei, is the most highly developed character in the story, the one who approximates psychological complexity as Turgenev understood it even in his youth. He is the first example in Turgenev's prose fiction of an erotic man yearning to be whole. The types in the story may also represent parts of the psyche and their relation to one another. Turgenev uses a frame narrative so as to provide two separate spaces within which the two modes of action and reflection within the soul can be displayed and related to one anotherY The narrator tells his story rather than simply living it. He moves between the frame, in which characters narrate and deliberate, and the anecdote, in which he plays the part of an outsider. Andrei has no place in the frame except as the subject of narrative; in the narrator's perception he represents that natural spontaneous self-the naive-in each of us that retreats as we ourselves pursue it. In his one statement of principle, when he explains to the narrator why he has cooled toward Varya, Andrei speaks poetically rather than discursively, using an extended metaphor taken from nature. (He explains that he sat with Varya under a blooming apple tree in May, and the petals fell on them. Now the tree is no longer in flower, and the apples are sour.) Andrei cannot tell his own story, because by so doing he would

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bifurcate into subject and object, the divided self of modern man (and romanticism). He would seem more like Lermontov's Pechorin and less like a spontaneous, natural man. 38 The frame narrative subsequently becomes a favorite structure of Turgenev that expresses this cardinal theme in his work. The effect of romantic longing on Turgenev is specific to him alone; this becomes clear when we compare him in the next chapter to Dostoevsky in this regard. In The Russian Idea, first published in 1946, philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev scarcely mentions Turgenev and celebrates Dostoevsky as Russia's greatest writer; this is because Berdiaev's famous and influential book consolidates and transmits one version of the nineteenth-century Russian culture wars in which Turgenev took another, losing side. Dostoevsky (and Tolstoy) are passionate and even apocalyptical, although in differing ways. Turgenev is elegiac; the taste for this mood in literature seems to have been more typical of the nineteenth than the twentieth century. Like his younger contemporaries, Turgenev was a romantic in the sense elaborated in this chapter, though he focused more on longing than its fulfillment. In Schillerian terms, he understands himself as a sentimental poet yearning for natural harmony. He loves nature, and he is self-conscious, so he cannot be simply a part of nature; as such, and despite his differences from them, he is the model for his two younger contemporaries.

CHAPTER SIX

Dostoevsky's Critique ofTurgenev "Oh, I'm a realist now, Dmitri Fyodorovich. From this day on, after all that story in the monastery, which upset me so, I'm a complete realist, and want to throw myself into practical activity. I am cured. Enough! As Turgenev said.''~ He gives, at least, no meagre account of life, and he has done liberal justice to its infinite variety. This is his great merit; his great defect, roughly stated, is a tendency to the abuse of irony. 2

~

•

This chapter situates Turgenev and his romantic longing within Dostoevsky's point of view. To do Turgenev justice, we must remember that the two writers disagree about human nature in ways that render Dostoevsky's judgment of Turgenev irrelevant from the latter's perspective. As I argue, for Turgenev the I itself is fundamentally a construct of reason: when, as we must do, we act rather than contemplate, our personhood dissolves into will or passion that is not personal and not whole. For Turgenev, individual will is an illusion; therefore he saw no need to seek a metaphysical (Christian) justification of it as Dostoevsky soon did. Turgenev knows very well that completely rational behavior is impossible, and that a life made up only of contemplation is not humanly satisfactory. He is not claiming that reason is all we are; if that were so, we would not suffer from the romantic neediness discussed in the previous chapter. But he situates both our freedom and our humanity-the fundamental ground of modern thought and individuality-in our reason, not in will. Here is his fundamental difference from Dostoevsky, for whom freedom must inhere in the will if men are to be truly free as individuals.

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ROMANTIC LONGING AGAIN: DOSTOEVSKY AND "ANDREI KOLOSOV"

From the very beginning of his literary career, the self as Dostoevsky conceived it is needy in the same way as in Turgenev's understanding. The erotic nature of the Dostoevskian soul gives rise to the phenomenon of dialogism that Bakhtin discovered and documented. In Poor Folk (r846), Dostoevsky's own first publication on which he was working when he read "Andrei Kolosov," the hero, Makar Devushkin, blunders through a touching love for another maiden named Varvara (also Varya or Varenka). (The reader will recall that the female protagonist in "Andrei Kolosov" has the same name.) Before he met her, Makar was financially solvent but, as he tells her, not really alive. For Dostoevsky as for Turgenev, romantic longing is admirable. Unlike Gogol's Akakii Akakievich (in "The Overcoat"), Makar is noble because he craves love and self-affirmation, not just physical life. Makar Devushkin resembles the narrator of "Andrei Kolosov" in his vulnerability and status as lover. But who in Poor Folk is like the beloved Andrei Kolosov? Only the crass steppe landowner Bykov, whose very name, meaning "bull," indicates his brutishness, possesses the confidence of an Andrei without his gracefulness. (At the end of the novella, Varvara is about to marry Bykov, and Makar will be left alone again.) Nonetheless, Dostoevsky not only admired Turgenev's story but singled out Andrei in it for praise. In his only direct reference to the story, Dostoevsky recommends it to his brother Mikhail and remarks that Andrei resembles his creator, whom he, Dostoevsky, has just met: A few days ago the poet Turgenev returned from Paris (no doubt you have heard about this) and from the very first moment attached himself to me with such an attachment, such friendship, that Belinsky claims that Turgenev has fallen in love with me. But, brother, what a man he is! I've almost fallen in love with him myself. A poet, talented, an aristocrat, handsome, rich, intelligent, educated, 25 years old: has nature denied him a single thing? Finally, he has a fine, upright, wellschooled character. Read his story "Andrei Kolosov" in Notes of the Fatherland; he's portrayed himself there, although he didn't intend to. 3

It is clear from the context that Dostoevsky is comparing Turgenev to Andrei. In an ironic twist, it seems that the insecure young author felt the same (romantic) "inexpressible attraction" to Turgenev that Turgenev's narrator feels for Andrei. Dostoevsky's infatuation with the handsome aristocratic author, who (so it seemed to him initially) returned the compliment, is the beginning of a lifelong tangled personal relationship like those literary ones described by Rene Girard, in which love, hatred, and envy mingle.

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"Has nature denied him a single thing?": it is no accident that Dostoevsky points to nature as the source of Turgenev's excellence in his letter to his brother. In the r84os both Dostoevsky and Turgenev would have considered Andrei's manliness and his harmoniousness natural. By the time Dostoevsky wrote the letter to his brother (November r6, r845), he most certainly had also read Turgenev's review of the r844 translation by M. Vronchenko of Faust, part r, into Russian. The review appeared in the February r845 issue of Notes of the Fatherland, that is, six months later than "Andrei Kolosov," 4 and the two are related. In the review, Turgenev elaborates on the positive natural egotism portrayed in his story in the character of the eponymous hero but not explained there. Goethe's Faust, especially part r, is a masterpiece of romanticism, says Turgenev, and hence an "apotheosis of the self" (lichnost'). It is "a purely human, or, more accurately, a purely egotistical work" characteristic of a Germany emerging from the Middle Ages. For Faust, who looks only to himself for salvation, neither the human race nor society exists; this, according to Turgenev, is the most extreme expression of romanticism. 5 Faust's creator too, Goethe himself, also cared only for the human and this-worldly, according to Turgenev; he was indifferent to religion, whether dogmatic or philosophical. He was nothing but a poet, and this means that he was all earthly, all nature, and all ego. This image of Goethe as nature originates in Schiller's Naive and Sentimental Poetry, in which, as is well known, Goethe represented the naive poet and Schiller himself the sentimental one. According to Schiller, the naive poet or man is harmonious and natural, while the sentimental one longs for an unattainable lost harmony in nature. As Schiller explains, both naive and sentimental poets are "guardians of nature%: So long as man is pure-not, of course, crude-nature, he functions as an undivided sensuous unity and as a unifying whole. Sense and reason, passive and active faculties, are not separated in their activities, still less do they stand in conflict with one another. His perceptions are not the formless play of chance, his thoughts not the empty play of the faculty of representation; the former proceed out of the law of necessity, the latter out of actuality. Once man has passed into the state of civilization and art has laid her hand upon him, that sensuous harmony in him is withdrawn, and he can now express himself only as a moral unity, that is, as striving after unity. The correspondence between his feeling and thought which in his first condition actually took place, exists now only ideally; it is no longer within him, but outside of him, as an idea still to be realized, no longer as a fact in his life. If one now applies the notion of poetry, which is nothing but giving mankind its most complete possible expression, to both conditions, the result in the earlier state of natural simplicity is the completest possible imitation of actuality-at that stage man still functions with all his powers simultaneously as a harmonious unity and hence the whole of his nature is expressed completely in actuality, whereas now, in

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the state of civilization where that harmonious cooperation of his whole nature is only an idea, it is the elevation of actuality to the ideal, or, amounting to the same thing, the representation of the ideal, that makes for the poet. And these two are likewise the only possible modes in which poetic genius can express itself at all. They are, as one can see, extremely different from one another, but there is a higher concept under which both can be subsumed, and there should be no surprise if this concept should coincide with the idea of humanity.?

The young Turgenev and Dostoevsky both understand themselves as sentimental poets afflicted with romantic longing in the Schillerian sense. Both writers saw nature as an ideal for which their characters strove, although, as we shall see, they reconstruct the ideal somewhat differently. Dostoevsky too accepted reason and the reflection it spawns as essential and even morally necessary parts of human nature, but he advocated no retreat into nature from the psychological chaos caused by reflection, because none was possible. Human beings would have to advance, forward through psychic chaos toward a unity of personality. In his letter to his brother, Dostoevsky mistakenly identifies Turgenev as naive. Turgenev does yearn for the wholeness of nature. Andrei Kolosov, as Turgenev presents him and the narrator perceives him, seems to function "with all his powers simultaneously as a harmonious unity" and hence is an object of love and envy for the narrator. The connection between Schiller's description of the naive poet and the one in Turgenev's review of Faust is more explicit in the first (r844) publication of "Andrei Kolosov," in which the group in the frame part of the narrative sets out to discover a "man of genius" (genial'nyi chelovek) rather than an "exceptional" (neobyknovennyi) one. In the r84os the adjective for "genius" was used by the Belinsky circle to indicate a man close to nature (on the model of Nikolai Stankevich, who may be a prototype for Andrei Kolosov). When the story was republished in r856, "a man of genius" would have had connotations of romantic snobbery that Turgenev did not intend; although we can't be sure, this may be why he changed the adjective to "exceptional." 8 The change obscures the connection-obvious in r844-of Andrei to the romantic poet, who through his natural "genius" has a connection, though obscure, to a harmonious and whole transcendental reality that Turgenev at this time associated with the laws of nature. For Turgenev in "Andrei Kolosov," the perfect man must balance feeling and mind, heart and head. Dostoevsky did not believe this was possible. If no one in Poor Folk has the apparent equanimity of Andrei except for Bykov, this is because from the very beginning Dostoevsky depicts a world in which no adult human being could be as harmonious and natural as Andrei. Varenka, Makar's beloved, is herself unhappy and removed from the state of natural harmony that she remembers from her childhood. 9

Chapter Six

Dostoevsky's characters feel romantic longing, but he makes a conscious decision from his very first story to keep his ideals-what he calls a "synthesis" in a famous letter to his brother about his intentions in Poor Folk 10-out of his fiction. He will describe characters striving after ideals, not the ideal itself. In the character of Andrei Kolosov, Dostoevsky recognizes an ideal who, he thinks at the time, is like Turgenev himself. Dostoevsky was wrong to identify Turgenev with Andrei, of course; Turgenev resembles the narrator of his story as much as he does Andrei. In another way, however, Dostoevsky's judgment is correct, because Andrei represents what Turgenev, like his narrator, must have longed to be. Especially important in this regard is Andrei's freedom; he seems to have a godlike power to satisfy his needs without sacrificing it, as Turgenev and all other "ordinary" mortals must do. From the viewpoint of the realism of Turgenev's mature art, Andrei's perfect, godlike self-sufficiency seems more apparent than real, that is, dependent on the narrator (and therefore the reader's) lack of access to Andrei's inner life. If it is real, it may be more associated with his youth than with his particular personality. Even such characters as Turgenev's superfluous man or the narrator of his story "Enough" (r865) have moments when they are in harmony with nature and feel all powerful. We know that Turgenev understood individual personality as imperfect even at the time he wrote "Andrei Kolosov," because he says so in the review of Faust: The last word of everything earthly for Goethe (just as for Kant and Fichte) was the human I. And lo, this I, this cornerstone of everything that exists, does not find peace in itself, does not achieve either knowledge, or conviction, or even happiness, simple ordinary happinessY

Elsewhere, Turgenev explains that Goethe defends not humanity in general but "the individual, passionate, limited human being." This individual is afflicted with romantic longing; he strives because he is not whole. Yet Goethe (and his admirer Turgenev) celebrate him for his "uncrushable strength." He [Goethe] showed that within [the individual] there hides an uncrushable strength, that he can live without any external support and that despite all the irresolvability of his own doubts, despite all the poverty of his beliefs and convictions, the human being has the right and possibility to be happy and is not ashamed of his happiness. After all, Faust does not perish. 12

Goethe has a right to defend the individual I, no matter how flawed and incomplete it may be, because it is "immortal"; it survives all attempts by the intellect to destroy it. Those who talk about how insoluble doubts leave a terrible void behind in the soul have never sincerely and passionately committed to secret battle within themselves.

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[If they had], they would know that on the ruins of systems and theories there remains one thing indestructible and ineradicable. It is our human I, which is therefore immortal because even that "I" itself, even it cannot eradicate itself.... So be it then, let Faust remain unfinished. 13

The instinct of each being to preserve and fight for itself is both indomitable and natural; indeed, without it there would be no life. All of this unites Turgenev with the young Dostoevsky, who also sets out to defend the individual despite his irrationality and incompleteness. But there is another side to Turgenev's argument in the review of Faust that ultimately proves less congenial to Dostoevsky and suggests an incipient difference in the aesthetics of the two. According to Turgenev's definition the perfect poet must first of all feel mightily and only then objectify his feelings and reason about them. [Goethe] was gifted with all-encompassing contemplation; everything of the earth was reflected in his soul simply, lightly and truly. Within himself he combined the ability to be passionately and madly carried away with the gift of continuous selfobservation, an involuntary contemplation of his own passion. He combined an infinitely varied and receptive fantasy with common sense, true artistic tact, and a striving toward unity. 14

So feelings were essential for a poet (Dostoevsky would agree with this).

If there were only feelings and no reason, however, there would be no Archimedean point from which to view the world, and no stable I at all. In his review, Turgenev makes a special point of criticizing the translator Vronchenko for his prejudice both in his translation and in his summary of Faust, part 2, against attributes of reason. 15 Perhaps influenced by the very poet he is studying; as well as by his ever-present mentor Pushkin, perhaps because of his philosophical training, perhaps because of his own temperament, perhaps for all of these reasons, Turgenev stands up for reason and therefore even for the essential role in the human personality of a seemingly negative and omnipresent attribute of reason that he calls "reflection." Reflection [reflektsiia] is our strength and our weakness, our destruction and our salvation .... In Russian "to reflect" means "to ponder our own feelings" [razmyshliat' o sobstvennykh chuvstvakh ]. 16

All "living" people possess this attribute today, which makes them less purely emotional and more self-conscious. Turgenev argues that Faust is "reflective" in this way just as is Mephistopheles, and that Goethe spun both characters from his own personality: "the ecstatic outbursts, the passionate melancholy of the fantasizing scholar [Faust] flowed just as directly from the heart of the poet as did the pitiless sneer, the cold irony of Mephistopheles." (The difference between the two is that Mephistopheles

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is all reflection, all calculation.) As proof of this, Turgenev recounts an anecdote from Goethe's early life. He was traveling in Switzerland with two brothers, the German counts Christian and Friedrich Leopold Stolberg, one of whom was in love with a girl he couldn't wed, while Goethe himself was in love with another girl. At dinner, the young men celebrated their sweethearts, and the lover Stolberg proposed that they destroy the glasses from which they had drunk a toast to the girls; as Goethe tossed his glass out the window, he recounts that "it seemed to me that Merck was standing behind me and looking at me." This Merck, who committed suicide at age fifty-one, explains Turgenev, was Goethe's real-life model for Mephistopheles; Goethe was faithfully recording a moment of "reflection" in the midst of his youthful passion. 17 The ability to stand back even as he felt passionately was one secret of Goethe's greatness as a poet, of course; without it the I lacks conscious existence, human beings act only from impulse and desire, and great confessional writers such as the ones we are studying could not exist. In Chapter 7, I discuss the broader role that reflection plays in the creation of Russian psychological prose; for the present it is important to remark that Turgenev defends what seems to be the very source of the alienation in modern man that he abhors and seeks to counter. With this in mind, let us return to a line in his defense of the I in his article: "It is our human I, which is therefore immortal because even that "I" itself, even it cannot eradicate itself." 18 In this complex but precise way, Turgenev speaks of two I's, thereby revealing the split in the personality between its contents and the observing eye and yet identifying both as I. The psychological interference enabled by reason can be ugly, disharmonious, and disfiguring. As happens to Goethe even as he tosses his glass out the window after toasting his beloved, reason as reflection may distance us from our feelings even as they burn hot. Yet human beings by their very nature have reason, and without the distance afforded by reason we could never be independent of feeling and impulse, those most attractive enemies of moral freedom and judgment. Andrei Kolosov may court Varya the way Faust does his Gretchen and Goethe does his beloved, but Andrei's desire for her is secondary to his need for freedom, which, as Velkley explains in his essay (discussed in Chapter 5), is the sine qua non the modern individual needs to sustain a sense of self. Andrei is godlike in his seeming independence-the way Goethe was in Turgenev's conception-because ultimately he does not need Varya, the narrator, or anyone else. This independence is Turgenev's ideal, even if it is unattainable. Already in Turgenev's first story, love turns out to be less important than the freedom that Andrei seems to possess. Most of Turgenev's characters are incapable of Andrei's self-sufficiency and therefore his freedom;

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when they opt for pure freedom, as Odintsova does in Fathers and Children, for instance, it diminishes their capacity for life. Yet giving themselves to others in love that they are powerless to resist, they may also have to give up something essential to their happiness as individuals: either freedom or self-sufficiency. So intense is their longing for love that over and over again in Turgenev's fiction they pay this price for it; Bazarov does so in Fathers and Children, and this makes him nobler than Odintsova. Occasionally (but rarely), they achieve freedom and self-sufficiency through love; Elena does in On the Eve, for instance, as does the less self-sufficient Litvinov, who escapes the clutches of the demonic Irina in Smoke. At other times, characters such as Liza in A Nest of Gentryfolk achieve freedom through self-conscious sacrifice. In all cases, freedom, not such seemingly incompatible goals as love or duty, is the ideal, even if not necessarily the one that a particular character achieves or even consciously desires. Andrei Kolosov seems to have it all, both love and freedom; this is what both the young Turgenev and his slightly younger admirer Dostoevsky yearn for. In his mature writings, in which "reality" prevails, Turgenev does not claim that human beings can ever be fully self-sufficient and free. But "freedom" is necessary in order to satisfy romantic longing and give credence and independence to the human individual. I am explaining the philosophical reasoning behind Turgenev's "noncommunal ethics. " 19 His tragic sense of life arises from the dynamics of romantic longing as well as his particular interpretation of that phenomenon. The individual senses his own incompleteness and yearns to overcome it. His striving gives rise to passions and may also lead to resignation as he struggles to come to grips with a natural world that he admires for its harmony and laws; yet nothing in that world validates his own individual significance. The mind that alerts him to his own predicament is what makes him human; it is of course responsible for his striving to the extent it makes him aware of his own imperfection and therefore the need to overcome it. At the same time, the mind corresponds to the eternal laws of nature that it perceives, even if it does not know their source. Although it celebrates the law of nature and is itself built around order and harmony, Turgenev's art records the reality of chaos within the human psyche. But truth too is an imperative of reason, and Turgenev does not hide the truth of man's tragic situation. There is no contradiction here: the same faculty-the mind and imagination-that perceives the human tragedy and contributes to it by fueling passions to overcome it also allies itself with eternal harmonies for which human beings long. The character Andrei Kolosov is an early manifestation of Turgenev's love of freedom as the highest good; in his mature writings, he reserves full freedom for the author who oversees his complex narratives.

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In the essay on Faust, Turgenev refers to individuals as "atoms." It is precisely the word Dostoevsky uses in the letter to his brother dated February r, r846, to describe the individual self that is his subject in Poor Folk. 20 He agreed with Turgenev and Goethe that this self was limited, but worthy of the attention he was going to give it. Like many of Turgenev's characters, and even more than them, Dostoevsky's are deformed by their upbringing and circumstances; they cannot resist their own impulses although they may regret them subsequently. Even more than Turgenev, Dostoevsky saw individuals as fragile, incomplete, and susceptible to outside influences. His characters, like Turgenev's, experience intense longing for harmony and wholeness. (They express it historically; the perfectly harmonious state can be envisaged as either in the past or in the future.) They cannot retreat more than momentarily into the solitude and harmony of contemplation, and they can never, or almost never, be entirely themselves and disengaged from the world. Dostoevsky admired Andrei Kolosov's strength-just as he later did Bazarov's-as willful, irrational, and, as he later understood, necessary for such struggles; but ultimately he did not look to natural laws as the inspiration for human reason and spirituality. As he came to understand it better, Dostoevsky regarded Turgenev's withdrawal from a human world informed by psychic chaos as timid and self-centered. It was also self-deceptive, because Dostoevsky did not believe that any human being could be self-sustaining and whole.

TURGENEV'S DUAL ROLE IN 'THE DEMONS'

At the time Dostoevsky was writing Poor Folk, these disagreements with Turgenev had not arisen. Only later, in the novel The Demons (r87r), did Dostoevsky fully air them, while (as is not yet fully understood) paying measured tribute to Turgenev at the same time. We start with the disagreements, which stand center stage in the novel, and then go back stage to Dostoevsky's more nuanced account of Turgenev and his version of romantic longing. When Dostoevsky portrays Turgenev in the novel as the smug, selfcentered writer Karmazinov, the devastating caricature resonates parodically with the young Dostoevsky's mistaken identification of Turgenev with the self-assured Andrei Kolosov. Even before he himself had laid eyes on the novel, Turgenev, living in France, was informed by correspondents of Dostoevsky's attack. 21 The stunned victim parried his enemy's thrust in two contradictory ways. On the one hand, he pretended to care less about the wound than he must have; on the other, he condemned Dostoevsky in letters for his low blow. He repeated what he had already said about a quar-

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rel between himself and Dostoevsky in r867 in Baden-Baden. Dostoevsky had always disliked him, and only mental instability could explain his vicious and unprovoked attacks. In r87r Dostoevsky still owed money Turgenev had lent him before the quarrel in r867. 22 When Dostoevsky was finally able to repay him in r875, Turgenev jokingly wrote Annenkov that he disliked taking the money, because it deprived him of the sweet irony that the man who had so publicly insulted him was in his debt. 23 For a long time, readers sided mostly with Turgenev in this quarrel, and it was only in 1921 that a little book by lurii Nikol'skii came out that resolutely defended Dostoevsky. 24 Nikol'skii enumerates the substantive differences between the two men, both in their character and in their opinions. Dostoevsky described the quarrel in a letter to A. N. Maikov (August r6 [28], r867) in which he accused Turgenev of atheism, Russophobia, and Germanophilia and which, according to Turgenev in letters to his friends, Dostoevsky arranged with an archivist to have published in r89o as his "message to posterity." 25 Turgenev claimed not to have expressed any of the opinions attributed to him in Dostoevsky's letter; he said he was mostly silent in r 8 67 while Dostoevsky ranted against his novel Smoke. To counter what he described as slander generated by a sick mind, Turgenev sent his own letter to Annenkov with permission to pass it on to others. 26 In fact, all of Dostoevsky's charges were true at least to some extent, says Nikol'skii. Turgenev could not have believed in a personal God after the early r84os, when he read Feuerbach. He was sympathetic to the leading practitioner of higher criticism, David Friedrich Strauss (r8o8-r874), who denied the divinity of Jesus, and to Ernest Renan (r823-r892), whose biography of Jesus described him as a hero rather than a god. Later he read Schopenhauer (r788-r86o), whose works deepened his own pessimism and sense of alienation from nature. 27 Dostoevsky was a strong nationalist; Turgenev was more ambivalent and openly critical of Russia. He aired these opinions publicly in Smoke (r867). He also publicly proclaimed himself both a Germanophile and a Westernizer in the introduction to "Literary Memoirs," which he published in r869. 28 So, claims Nikol'skii, when Dostoevsky gave the odious Karmazinov all these opinions, he was not libeling Turgenev. In 1924, in an article dedicated to Nikol'skii's memory, A. S. Dolinin took on another of Turgenev's charges: that the very story Dostoevsky lampoons in Karmazinov's notorious speech "Merci" was one Dostoevsky had praised to the skies when he published it in his own journal Epokha. Dolinin agrees with Nikol'skii that other works by Turgenev besides his "Ghosts" [Prizraki] (r864) are parodied in the novel and in the speech of Karmazinov. 29 Dostoevsky was actually easy on "Ghosts," which he liked at first because he misread it. He originally took it as an attack, with which

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he agreed, on present-day society; and only after rereading it did he realize that it was a personal and subjective complaint. Smoke, which Dostoevsky hated, clarified for him the true nature of Turgenev's politics. Potugin, Turgenev's mouthpiece in the novel, debunked the Russian idea that Dostoevsky fervently embraced; as Dolinin argued, Karmazinov was intended as a development of Potugin just as Raskolnikov (in Crime and Punishment) had grown out of Bazarov. Despite all this, the wicked caricature of Turgenev in The Demons seems morally dubious. Dostoevsky would not be the first great writer to have indulged a personal vendetta in this way, and it is impossible to believe that he did not intend to injure Turgenev. At the same time, readers have noted that the portrait of Karmazinov is only one Turgenevian element in a novel so full of them that Nikol'skii dubbed it Dostoevsky's version of Fathers and Children. 3 Frank informs us that Dostoevsky enthusiastically endorsed an observation by A. Maikov that the characters in The Demons reminded him of "Turgenev's characters grown old." 31 The drafts adjudged by textologists to belong to The Demons reveal two things: that Dostoevsky assigned only the negative traits of Turgenev to Karmazinov, and that Karmazinov is not simply (and not even primarily) intended as a parody of Turgenev. Once this is understood, the reader is free to look elsewhere in the drafts and novel for Dostoevsky's full assessment of Turgenev and his art. Although Dostoevsky invests his dislike of Turgenev the man in Karmazinov and also gives him certain qualities that he dislikes in Turgenev's writing, elsewhere in the novel he indicates his debt to Turgenev. 32 Turgenev, as opposed to his caricature, hovers over the novel as a mentor and predecessor who raises a problem-the incompleteness and neediness of the human personality-that The Demons and indeed all of Dostoevsky's mature writings address in various ways. Furthermore, Dostoevsky does appreciate Turgenev's commitment as an author, at his best, to truth, no matter how uncomfortable it may be for his fictional characters and himself. To understand the extent and limits of the influence of Turgenev's response to romantic longing on Dostoevsky, we must first determine his exact relation to Karmazinov.

°

KARMAZINOV AND TURGENEV

Dostoevsky begins his drafts of The Demons with this declaration: "NB. It's all about the characters." 33 In notebooks that fill almost three hundred pages in volume I I of the Academy Dostoevsky, he sketches his characters, probes their limits, and pairs them off against one another. Kar-

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mazinov and Stepan Trofimovich are one such pair. The notebooks reveal that Karmazinov and Stepan Trofimovich were conjoined in the mind of their creator. Together they represent the generation of the I84os, the fathers to the sons of the I86os 34; furthermore, Karmazinov is more the spiritual father of Pyotr Verkhovensky than his biological father, Stepan Trofimovich, is. 35 Work on the novel seems to have begun at the end of I869. 36 Like many of the characters in the novel, Karmazinov receives his surname only late in its creative history. For a long time he is called simply the Great Writer (Velikii pisatel'), a character who is first mentioned in the same passage as one "Granovsky," the name by which Stepan Trofimovich is known until late in the drafts. The Great Writer first appears along with a Great Critic as being among the leading lights whom the princess (the prototype for Varvara Petrovna) is trying to snare for her salon in PetersburgY Neither the "Writer" nor the "Critic" is identified. Not once in the almost two dozen mentions of the Great Writer in subsequent drafts does he appear without Granovsky/Stepan Trofimovich nearby. The two are rivalrous and antagonistic; news of the arrival of the Great Writer "disconcerts" (bespokoit) Granovsky. 38 Karmazinov, who does not seem to fear Granovsky in the same way, resembles the protagonist Goliadkin's bete noir in Dostoevsky's earlier novella The Double from the I 84os. As in The Double, in the completed novel The Demons Stepan Trofimovich's eclipse is paralleled by and to some extent connected with his double Karmazinov's success. The parallels between Stepan Trofimovich and Karmazinov continue in the denouement. Both perform at the benefit. Karmazinov promises to leave after reading his farewell "Merci" and then simply disappears from the text. We may assume that, like certain aging pop singers today, he will be extending his farewell tour for some time outside the boundaries of the novel. Stepan Trofimovich, by contrast, astounds everyone, including the narrator, by actually leaving home and dying on the road. For once he has performed nobly in deed what he has blustered about in speech. Back in the drafts to the novel, it is striking that when the Great Writer is mentioned for the first time but not developed in any way, he is not associated specifically with Turgenev, whose name appears only among the men of the I 84os in whom Dostoevsky is interested: Age 55. Literary reminiscences. Belinsky, Granovsky, Herzen (A. and B. "Why bother talking to such an idiot?"). Turgenev and so on. 39

We can't be sure from the way these lines are written whether Dostoevsky includes Turgenev as an author or an object of literary reminiscences; probably he is both. We know for certain that Dostoevsky read Turgenev's

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reminiscences about Belinsky, because he cites them in the drafts of The Demons. 40 The Great Writer makes his appearance on the same page and section of the notebook as Turgenev (along with other public figures), but far from him on the page. After this first appearance, the Great Writer does not show up again until almost thirty pages later. At this later point, Prince A. B. (Stavrogin), who has entered the notebooks as "a passionate, proud, and disorderly person, " 41 has become more positive, even poetic, and therefore cannot be simply characterized as a nihilist. At the same time, Granovsky/Stepan Trofimovich has been moving toward the nihilist camp as Dostoevsky probes the moral weakness and lack of principle of this character. Dostoevsky makes a note to himself: Tomorrow sketch all the characters, that is, the Prince and the Ward [the prototype for Dasha]-a modest ideal and real, good people. Granovsky is not a real ideal, worn out, gone wrong, proud, a caricature. 42

Finally Granovsky falls to his nadir, and as he does, the Great Writer reappears. Granovsky finally agrees to be a nihilist and states: "I am a nihilist." He talks things over with Uspensky [the prototype for Liputin or Virginsky], because he's afraid of his son, he drives over to Uspensky's. There are rumors that Turgenev is a nihilist, and the princess is all the more dazzled. ? The arrival of the Great Writer. 43

The Great Writer comes on the scene at precisely the moment that Granovsky steps over a boundary line from which, however, he immediately withdraws-in the very next paragraph. They say to Granovsky: "Our generation was too literary. In our time an active (progressive) man could only be a writer or someone who followed literature. But the present generation is more active." "Gutter talk!" responds Granovsky.

So the Great Writer arrives in the text, and Dostoevsky affirms what he wrote about Granovsky in his very first appearance, that he "shuns nihilism and does not understand it." 44 The Great Writer will be Granovsky/ Stepan Trofimovich's double, who operates in the arena with which Stepan Trofimovich is associated but where he does not actually go. Over and over again in the drafts, the Great Writer calls himself a nihilist and curries favor with the prototype of Pyotr Verkhovensky, who is called the Student and Nechaev. 45 Only now, in this passage in which the Great Writer is developed for the first time, is he linked thematically with Turgenev who, like the Great Writer, is identified as a nihilist. "They" to whom Granovsky retorts "Gut-

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ter talk!" may include Turgenev himself, since he is mentioned in the text as a nihilist whom the princess would like to meet. It may be that only here did it occur to Dostoevsky to model the Great Writer specifically on Turgenev. Subsequently in the drafts, the Great Writer acquires all the traits-atheism, Russophobia, and Germanophilia-that Dostoevsky attributed to Turgenev in his letter to A. Maikov after the quarrel in r867. At the same time, the parallel and contrast with Granovsky/Stepan Trofimovich continues as well. The Great Writer/Karmazinov states more than once in the drafts that he is an atheist, while Granovsky/Stepan Trofimovich fudges on this point and even eventually declares his belief in God. 46 Though the Great Writer is a Russophobe and a Germanophile, in the drafts as in the novel Granovsky/Stepan Trofimovich is ambivalent here as wellY This ambivalence in and of itself is a personality trait of Stepan Trofimovich, one he shared with Turgenev the man. From the beginning, Dostoevsky conceived Granovsky/Stepan Trofimovich as characterized by "complete abstractness and unsteadiness in opinion and in feelings, which earlier [he had experienced as] suffering, but now had turned into second nature." 48 This quote ends with the comment (in parentheses) that "his son made fun of this need." Stepan Trofimovich's Rudin-like ambivalence is actually a virtue, inasmuch as it prevents him from swallowing the ideology of the nihilists. 49 In the drafts, Stepan Trofimovich accuses his son of too much emphasis on the mind and reason, and a concomitant lack of feeling. 5° Dostoevsky calls Stepan Trofimovich "sentimental" (chuvstvitel'nyi) and associates this trait with "the pathetic school of literature. " 51 But it is not true to say that the son has no feelings at all. He loves himself "terribly," "as a baby does." 52 This immature narcissism goes with the complete lack of empathy Stepan Trofimovich has in mind when he calls his son "unfeeling." It informs the son's political philosophy, according to which society must be built on the love of each human being exclusively for himself. 53 Stepan Trofimovich's often bathetic "sentimentality," by contrast, includes empathy. As for the Great Writer, in both the drafts and the novel he is comically self-centered; in this way as in others, he sides with the nihilists. The notebooks reveal that Dostoevsky indulges his spleen against Turgenev by identifying him with Karmazinov, but that Karmazinov's primary function in the novel is as the demonic double of Stepan Trofimovich and the men of the r 84os. Witty but no poet, Karmazinov is a caricature of Turgenev, not a faithful portrait of the writer whom Dostoevsky respected throughout his life. As Dostoevsky certainly knew, the real Turgenev was as ambivalent about as many things as Stepan Trofimovich. His talent as a writer centered on his ability to empathize with and therefore depict a

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large variety of types. Turgenev's insistence on artistic freedom also aligns him with Stepan Trofimovich, whose advocacy for literature and poetry only strengthens as the crisis deepens in the novel.

BAZAROV IN 'THE DEMONS'

Karmazinov could never have created Turgenev's most complex character, the hero of Fathers and Children, Evgenii Bazarov. Dostoevsky deeply admired Fathers and Children, and in Turgenev's opinion he was one of the few contemporaries who understood it. 54 The letter in which Dostoevsky critiqued the novel has been lost, but we know from subsequent comments that it focused on Bazarov. In Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, published in his journal Time (Vremia) in r863, Dostoevsky praised Bazarov as "restless and melancholic (the sign of a noble heart), despite all his nihilism." 55 In The Demons itself, however, Stepan Trofimovich criticizes Bazarov as "an unclear mix of Nozdryov [Gogol's trickster] and Byron." Nihilists are not gloomy like Bazarov, Stepan Trofimovich says to his son; "they cavort and squeal with joy, like puppies in the sun, they're happy, they're the victors! " 56 The explanation for this switch of perspective can be found in the drafts, where, like Stepan Trofimovich, Dostoevsky criticizes Turgenev for creating an implausible character. From the beginning he seems to have associated Bazarov with the Student/Nechaev, whom, a few lines earlier he defined as "simple, straightforward." 57 The men of the r84os, Turgenev first among them, were wrong about Bazarov because "he was put up on a pedestal" by them. 5 8 Dostoevsky is promoting the version of Bazarov put forth by D. I. Pisarev (r84o-r868) in r862 in a famous article. 59 This fiery young Rousseauist advocated replacement of civilized standards, which he regarded as merely conventional, with natural ones. He defended Bazarov against both the right and the left as a man who lived only for himself and for pleasure. Dostoevsky would have found Pisarev's model of Bazarov all the more congenial for his nihilists after he read Herzen's critique of it, published in r868. Herzen says that it does not matter whether Pisarev understood Turgenev's hero: "What is important is that he recognized himself and others like him in Bazarov and supplied what was lacking in the book." 60 The crucial pages in which Dostoevsky connects his student nihilist with Bazarov are strewn with mentions of Pisarev. 61 Dostoevsky's own strategy in his novel belies his criticism of Bazarov, however. True, he makes Pyotr Verkhovensky into Pisarev's version of Bazarov, and he corrects Pisarev's assertion that such a man could be ca-

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pable of self-sacrifice. But Pyotr is not the only descendant of Bazarov, and not even the most important. That would be Stavrogin, the prince whom, as Wasiolek observes, Dostoevsky himself did not understand and reworked endlessly in the drafts. 62 What is crucial about this character is that Dostoevsky does not simplify him the way Pisarev does Bazarov. At one point in the drafts, he compares him to Gogol's Nozdryov (in Dead Souls). NB. [On the one hand, he is] a frivolous man, who does nothing but play the game of life, an elegant Nozdryov, who plays an awful lot of tricks on people, some of them noble and some dirty; and it is he [the character whom Dostoevsky is developing] who then suddenly shoots himself; in between he listens to Golubov (once). Merely shallow and frivolous, but in the end he turns out to have been more profound than anyone else, and that's all there is to it. 63

Elsewhere, as Dostoevsky struggles to set the dimensions of his hero, he presents him differently. And so forth, each will have his epithet, but most important-about the Prince. Two or three main traits. And of course, he is no ideal, because he is envious, stubborn, proud and insistent, silent and sickly, that is, melancholy (tragic, many doubts). 64

This is the Byronic Stavrogin. In the end, because Dostoevsky does not ultimately choose one version of Stavrogin over the other, he makes his own character a mix of Nozdryov and Byron, just like Bazarov as characterized by Stepan Trofimovich. The Byronic branch grafted on to the Gogolian figure makes Stavrogin tragic. This distinguishes him from Karmazinov, with whom in the drafts Dostoevsky associates precisely a lack of tragedy. 65 Stavrogin cannot be a happy-go-lucky nihilist because he comes in part from Dostoevsky's master narrative, of which the incarnation closest to The Demons is the neverwritten "Life of a Great Sinner." The hero of this narrative, with whom Dostoevsky himself would have strongly identified, was to be a seeker after truth, especially the grounds for moral goodness. At the same time, he had to be intelligent and experience life to the hilt, including all the passions and temptations to which human beings are susceptible. In his earlier positive comments about Bazarov, already quoted, Dostoevsky recognized him as a kindred spirit in the quest of the "Great Sinner" even if Bazarov's ideology veils the truth about himself from him. The tragedy of such a character is, as Dostoevsky wrote a little later about the type of the Underground Man, that he knows the good but has lost faith in the possibility of achieving it. 66 In Dostoevsky's view, Stavrogin is a noble version of this type, and so is Bazarov.

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Chapter Six STRAKHOV'S ARTICLES ABOUT TURGENEV AS A SOURCE FOR 'THE DEMONS'

So Dostoevsky makes use of Turgenev's finest literary creation even as he reviles the man in The Demons. The final part of this account of Dostoevsky's complex treatment of Turgenev in the novel concerns a possible blueprint for it. I refer to Nikolai N. Strakhov's "Two Letters from N. Kositsa," which appeared in the journal Dawn (Zaria) in September and December, r869. 67 Strakhov's influence over Dostoevsky, though it is often cited, is still underestimated; we can be certain that Dostoevsky read the two "letters" closely. In r87r, referring to precisely the period in which they appeared, he wrote Strakhov. No, you can't do this, Nikolai Nikolaevich. You mustn't abandon your great task in this way. [Strakhov was considering a career switch from criticism to translation.] We don't have a single critic. You have been literally the only one. For two years, I have rejoiced that there was a journal [Dawn], the main speciality of which, compared to other journals, was literary criticism .... I have revelled in your articles, I am your passionate admirer and I am firmly convinced that besides me you have enough admirers and that in any case you must continue. 68

Strakhov's overall argument in his two letters may have helped Dostoevsky formulate his strategy toward the Turgenev question in The Demons. In the first one, entitled "For Turgenev," Strakhov claims that in Fathers and Children, and then even more so in Smoke, Turgenev thinks wrong but writes well. He is a poet in spite of himself. 69 The second letter ("For Turgenev Again") responds to a just-published essay by Turgenev entitled "Concerning Fathers and Children." 70 In this essay, Turgenev wrote that he was misunderstood in Fathers and Children, when in fact he agreed with Bazarov on everything except for his positions on art. In "For Turgenev Again," Strakhov takes on Turgenev the reader to prove that, pace Turgenev himself, in the novel Turgenev the author is not an advocate for Bazarov and nihilism. Turgenev lamented in his essay that he portrayed Bazarov too "objectively" and therefore not sympathetically enough. Strakhov retorts that as a poet, Turgenev loves all his heroes and sympathizes with them, even including such unattractive characters as Hamlet of Shchigrov district/ 1 Strakhov insists on the "liveliness and depth of this sympathy" but then argues that Turgenev has a freer relation to his characters: As happens with poets, he has the ability to rise up to the sphere of ideas and perspectives that stands higher than the level of his heros .... He gazes at the phe-

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nomena he is depicting from a certain poetic height from which they reveal themselves to him in their true light and in the dimensions appropriate to them. 72 Strakhov now goes on to show how, even in the very same essay about Fathers and Children in which Turgenev claimed to identify with Bazarov, he then backed away from this claim. Strakhov quotes from Turgenev's description in the essay of the pleasures of creative process, which, so Turgenev asserted, do not consist in the expression of the poet's preferences. In fact, Turgenev wrote, "to precisely and forcefully produce the truth, life as it really is, is the highest joy for a writer even if that truth does not accord with his own personal likings. " 73 In the same section of his essay, Turgenev confessed that "I wanted above all else to be sincere and truthful," and in a previous section he said that his main goal was to relate "honorably" (chestno) to the type he was describing. So, Strakhov concludes, "truth" (istina) and "life as it really is" (real'nost' zhizni) trump everything else for Turgenev as a poet. The artist, therefore, takes as his guide something incomprehensible and mysterious, independent of his own ideas and opinions, exceeding his reason, his personal notions, something absolute, not in need of any justifications. It is not utility, or pleasure, or patriotism, or society's opinion, and so forth and so on, but truth, the reverential penetration into how and by what means life reveals itself. This authority, broad and elusive to any but artistic sense, obviously frees the artist from all other authorities, and gives him full independence from them.74 Finally, Strakhov goes on to quote Turgenev, still in "Concerning Fathers and Children" and himself citing Pushkin as his authority, on the supreme importance of a "free mind" (svobodnyi um) for the poet: "Without freedom in the broadest sense-in relation to oneself, to one's own preconceived ideas and systems, even to one's own people, to one's own history-the true artist is unthinkable." 75 Strakhov now turns to Turgenev's justification of his "Slavophile" novel, A Nest of Gentryfolk. Despite his Westernizer opinions, Turgenev confessed, he wrote this novel because "in the given circumstance, as I understood it, life took just this form, and I wanted above all else to be sincere and truthful." 76 In Strakhov's reading of "Concerning Fathers and Children," Turgenev as a reader of his own works appears as a moral weakling and hypocrite who curries favor with the critics of his novel; but Strakhov defends him as a poet. This may have inspired Dostoevsky's two-pronged strategy in The Demons, in which he attacks Turgenev the man in Karmazinov while implicitly acknowledging and even drawing on the strengths of the poet elsewhere in the novel. Both sides of Turgenev were on display in "Concerning Fathers and Children." In it, Turgenev both kowtowed to trendy

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radical opinion and also, in the ways Strakhov brings out, defended his artistic freedom. In addition to everything else, "Concerning Fathers and Children" contained a bathetic farewell to literature such as the one that Karmazinov delivers in The Demons. Dostoevsky's debt to Strakhov's articles may not end here, however. Turgenev's most heartfelt complaint about Dostoevsky's caricature of him was that he made him an ally and even an advocate of Nechaev, that is, Pyotr Verkhovensky. Frank argues that this is "perfectly defensible" within "the symbolic myth of Dostoevsky's creation": Karmazinov is responsible for Peter Verkhovensky's prestige in society, just as Turgenev had been responsible for the prestige of Bazarov and his later offshoots in real life, and he acts as the young man's mentor and advocate. "When I came, I assured everyone," he tells Peter, "that you were a very intelligent man, and now I believe everyone is wild over you. " 77

For our purposes, Frank's translation of Karmazinov's comment leaves out an important detail in the scene. As Dostoevsky takes pains to point out in the drafts, Karmazinov is making a "nasty quip" that Pyotr, in his narcissism, doesn't pick up. The public is "out of its mind" (bez uma) over Pyotr because Karmazinov has assured them that he is "a very intelligent man" (chrezvychaino umnyi chelovek). Nechaev [that is, Verkhovensky] did not understand the nasty witticism in the words of the Great Writer. The Great Writer thinks to himself: "He not only did not understand my witticism, but it doesn't matter to him one bit that he didn't understand. " 78

Karmazinov, although he flatters Pyotr, does not embrace either him or his cause. Karmazinov is a skeptic and analyst. This is just how Strakhov in his two letters depicts Turgenev. And this time, Strakhov is speaking about Turgenev the writer, not the man: But while consumed by the desire to see his ideal in reality, at the same time the poet is full of pitiless analysis and the most penetrating skepticism. He is possessed to the highest degree by that demon, of which one critic has spoken in joking verses which, however, hint of serious thoughts: The demon of negation, the demon of doubt, The demon who rejects progress.79

The "free mind" that Strakhov and Dostoevsky admire in Turgenev is present in Karmazinov, in its lowest form as nasty wit but also in Karmazinov's more admirable ability to size up the crisis in Russia. Both talents are on display in his one extended speech in the final novel to Pyotr. 80 There is another character in the book who appreciates Karmazinov's analysis as reported to him by Pyotr, and that is Stavrogin.

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"You know what else Karmazinov says? [Pyotr reports.] That essentially our teaching is a denial of honor, and that it's easiest of all to carry the Russian man along with us by means of an open right to dishonor." "Excellent words! Golden words!" Stavrogin laughed. "He's put his finger on it. The right to dishonor-and everyone will come running to us, no one will stay there! Listen, Verkhovensky, you're not from the higher police, eh?" 81 What Karmazinov perceives, and Stavrogin appreciates, is the "freedom" of the Russian mind from moral constraints. Purely as an analyst, Turgenev's free mind carries him this far, but no farther. In yet another article that appeared in Dawn (February I8?I) and that Dostoevsky must also have read with interest, Strakhov attributes Turgenev's negativism to his education from Max Stirner (I 8o6-I 8 56) and others in the I 84os whom he calls "the real nihilists. " 82 In the drafts to the novel, there is a passage about Karmazinov's inherent conservatism that makes Strakhov's point about how a mind such as Turgenev's must eventually reject "progress" (by which Strakhov means pursuit of ideas for the improvement of society). It occurs under the (underlined) category of "Nechaev and Karmazinov," and since the character is called Karmazinov it was written late in the creative history of the novel. Kar[mazinov]: "There is no great guiding idea, there is only au jour le jour, it's always been so. We conservatives are more nihilists [than you are], it's always seemed that way to me. You have enthusiasm at least. You kill a coachmanthere's the enthusiasm of unsettled nerves . ... "I examined our conservatives in general, and here's the result. They only pretend that they believe in something and stand for something in Russia, but in reality we conservatives are worse than nihilists .... A good cook, an estate. I'm going to wrap up my estate and get out of here. When will it come?" (That is, the revolution. )83

The "enthusiasm" that fuels nihilism contradicts its devotion to rationalism, because enthusiasm has to be in the name of some ideal, and as such it is not purely rational. This is what Karmazinov means. Men like himself-conservative nihilists-are consistent: they truly believe in nothing but themselves and their self-interest, which should be the position of the radicals.

CONCLUSION

Of course Turgenev himself makes the same point about the enthusiasm of Arkadi and even Bazarov in Fathers and Children: real nihilists could not be public spirited. Unlike Karmazinov, moreover, Turgenev himself was not complacent, either in his life or in his writing. 84 Karmazinov has

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no trouble accepting the consequences of his thorough rationalism and atheism. Even more than Pyotr Verkhovensky, he is smugly content and therefore, as Stepan Trofimovich remarks about Pyotr in the drafts, incapable of development. 85 By contrast, Turgenev, as Strakhov presents him in his articles, is "consumed by the desire to see his ideal in reality." Strakhov does not deny Turgenev's own romantic longing for completeness by joining with something greater than himself. In Strakhov's view, however-and Dostoevsky would agree with him-Turgenev is condemned by his own excessively rationalist cast of mind to reject all ideals. In Nikol'skii's cogent formulation, Turgenev was concerned with freedom from dogma, while Strakhov and Dostoevsky cared about freedom of the will, which ultimately attaches itself to ideals. 86 The character in The Demons whom this Turgenev most resembles is Stavrogin. Like Stavrogin, the real Turgenev yearns for the good, or the ideal, but has no hope of achieving it. Like Stavrogin, he is possessed, again in Strakhov's terms, by the "demon" of analysis and negativity; in his best writings, his commitment to analysis is deep and sincere. Did Strakhov's metaphor from his review of Fathers and Children influence Dostoevsky in his choice of title for the novel? We can't know this for sure, of course, but the language itself makes the connection between Strakhov and Dostoevsky. One may conceive modern Russian culture, and within it the Russian understanding of the psyche, as the desire for wholeness and various attempts to achieve it. 87 Within the perspective of this project, Turgenev appeared a failure not only as a man but even as a writer because he could not embrace any idea of wholeness; this is just how Strakhov represents him in the three articles discussed here. Dostoevsky criticized Turgenev for not taking responsibility for the consequences of his own poetic insights; while Turgenev disowned them, as he seemed to do in "Concerning Fathers and Children," Dostoevsky, in such works as The Demons, adopted them and (as he saw it) developed them to their unbearable conclusions. Dostoevsky is both more modern (in his radical psychology of the godless man) and more traditional, even medieval (in his Christianity) than Turgenev. Turgenev resembles the ancient writers in his stoicism toward a godless universe; but this makes him modern too. In different ways, he and Dostoevsky are like the Roman god Janus, who faces both the future and the past.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Reflection as a Tool for Understanding in Russian Psychological Prose The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion. The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea. This progress you will see easily in that old English ballad Turpin Hero which begins in the first person and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. 1 Whether in a painting, or a story, or a musical composition, [a true artist] is visible. He is reflected involuntarily, even against his will, he expresses all his views, his character, and the level of his development. 2

~

•

Romantic longing is a byproduct of the Cartesian project. Having locating the source of all certain knowledge within the human mind, Rene Descartes (1596-r6so) disengaged that mind from both the external world of objects and the internal world of emotions. 3 In this chapter, we turn our attention to the mechanism-reflection-by which this is possible.

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Consciousness itself implies a degree of separation from the outside world and even from one's own actions and impulses; to the degree that they have been conscious, human beings have always reflected. The word reflection first acquired its modern philosophical meaning in the writings of the British philosopher John Locke (I632-I704), who defined it (in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding of I69o) as "that notice which the Mind takes of its own operations, and the manner of them, by reason whereof there come to be ideas of these operations in the understanding. " 4 The emphasis in philosophy on the separation of the "Mind" from its "operations" is an inevitable consequence of the Cartesian revolution, according to which the standards by which we judge and understand all things are located within us, rather than, as in the Scholasticism that it replaced, in some external source of metaphysical truth. "All things" must include ourselves; if obeying the injunction of the Delphic Oracle to "know thyself" is, according to Socrates, the first requirement of philosophy, then the mind must review and judge itself. The fundamental importance of self-reflection for philosophy has been recognized since ancient times, but Locke's invention of a philosophical term for it indicates the degree to which modern thought is antimetaphysical and focuses on the individual self. 5 The term reflection was used in a similar way by Baruch Spinoza (I632-I677) and Gottfried Leibniz (I648-I7I6). 6 Turgenev used the word in his review of Vronchenko's translation of Faust, part I, but it was not he who introduced the concept into Russian journalistic discourse.? As we saw in Chapter I, his mentor Vissarion Belinsky had already discussed it in I 840 in his influential article on the first edition of Lermontov's Hero of Our Time. 8 In his review, Belinsky specifically declines to elaborate on reflection as a philosophical principle (although he identifies it as such) and focuses instead on its function in psychology. All the earlier manifestations of reflection cited by Belinsky, including that in A Hero of Our Time, are negative because they interfere with expression of feeling and spontaneous thought and therefore cause suffering and disharmony. But Belinsky also highlights the positive role that reflection can play because it allows individuals to judge, and presumably correct, their own impulses and actions: This state [of reflection] is as inevitable as it is terrible. It is one of the very greatest moments of the Spirit. Life in its fullness consists in feeling, but feeling is still not the final step of Spirit beyond which It cannot develop. With only feeling, a person is a slave to his own sensations, the way an animal is slave to his instinct. The dignity of the immortal human spirit resides in its reasonableness, and the final, highest step of reasonableness is thought. Thought provides independence and freedom from one's own passions and dark sensations. When a person raises his hand in anger against his enemy, he follows the feeling that inspires him; while

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5

only reasonable thought about his human dignity and his human brotherhood with his enemy can restrain that feeling of anger and disable the hand ready to kill. But the transition from spontaneity to reasonable consciousness must be accomplished through a reflection which is more or less painful depending on the individual. If a person feels even the slightest kinship with mankind, and in any way feels himself to be a spirit within the Spirit, he cannot be alien to reflection. Exceptions include only completely practical people or trivial and worthless ones for whom life consists of apathetic dozing. 9

For Belinsky, the reflexive man was an "intermediate stage from unselfconscious immediacy in man to the fullness and harmony of rational existence."10 It is an easy transition from his Hegelian understanding of reflection as a mechanism for progress to Turgenev's identification of it, in his review of the Russian translation of Faust, as fundamental to the creative process. 11 Belinsky argued in his review of A Hero of Our Time that the structure of Lermontov's novel, which he described as frames within frames that do not add up to a unified whole, mirrors the reflexive personality of Pechorin and perhaps his creator as well. 12 The structure of "Andrei Kolosov," with its division between a framing contemplative (reflective) and inner active narrative space, already demonstrates how Turgenev took this lesson to heart from the beginning of his career as an author of psychological prose. Turgenev was not the only author of Russian psychological prose to exploit the potentialities for fiction of reflection, however; his junior contemporary Dostoevsky, perhaps inspired by him, did so as well. As we know, Dostoevsky admired Turgenev's review of Faust, in which Turgenev explains the role of reflection in the creative process as practiced by Goethe; no doubt Dostoevsky took note of this. He admired and absorbed Turgenev's essay "Hamlet and Don Quixote" (I86o), another variation in Turgenev's oeuvre on the theme of the reflective and the spontaneous man. 13 He may also have read Belinsky's article on A Hero of Our Time, which criticizes Lermontov's novel as artistically not as successful as Eugene Onegin because the author does not separate himself as much from Pechorin as Pushkin does from his eponymous hero. 14 In Notes from the House of the Dead, by so obviously mixing his own experiences as a political prisoner with his narrator Goryanchikov's very different personal tragedy, Dostoevsky makes the point to his readers that he is not his fictional narrator, from whom, moreover, he distances himself by adding the extra layer provided by his editor-narrator. According to Strakhov in his I883 memoirs, Dostoevsky was aware of his own duality, which he himself called "reflection." [Dostoevsky] was a particularly striking example of a special kind of duality: one in which a man may give himself over in a very lively way to certain thoughts and

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feelings, while at the same time preserving in his soul an unyielding and unshakeable point from which he observes himself, his thought and feelings. Dostoevsky himself would sometimes talk of this duality and call it reflection. As a result of this psychic makeup, a person always preserves the possibility of judging what fills his soul. Various feelings and moods are able to manifest themselves in the soul, but without fully possessing it. And from this deep spiritual center surges an energy that animates and transforms the whole activity and whole content of mind and creation. 15

If he did not know it already, Dostoevsky might have learned from Turgenev's review of Faust that the writer who wanted truly to understand and depict humanity could not do it through empirical observation alone. He would have to be capable of "reflection," by means of which he could both personally experience everything humanly possible and also reflect on it. This is the method by which Dostoevsky provides an accurate account of the inner life of his characters. It is precisely in this sense that, as Strakhov claims, all his characters are autobiographical: "Dostoevsky, who almost always created characters in his own image and likeness, is the most subjective of novelists." 16 In a passage about Herzen in his 1873 Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky explicitly drew the connection between reflection and the art of the writer: He [Herzen] was an artist, a thinker, a brilliant writer, a remarkably erudite man, a wit, a marvelous conversationalist (he spoke even better than he wrote), and was superbly self-reflective (reflektyor). Self-reflection (reflektsiia)-the ability to make of his own deepest feelings an object which he could set before him, pay it tribute and, in the next breath perhaps, ridicule it-was the thing he had developed to the highest degreeY Herzen emerges here as both vain and sharply self-critical-just the way Strakhov understood Dostoevsky to be. In the rest of this chapter, I discuss Dostoevsky's use of reflection both to create his emphatic fictional world and to shield it from the dangers of subjective bias. At the same time that he was developing his "most subjective" novels, he was learning to protect himself from the Dionysian extremes of his own characters, whom he had derived, at least in part, from himself. Like a doctor, he had to avoid getting too close to his patients, even though in his case they were blood relatives. My main text is the most openly autobiographical of Dostoevsky's fictions, Notes from the House of the Dead, which, I will show, contains a hidden commentary on the relation between autobiography and fiction.

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THE AUTHOR'S TWIN TASKS IN 'NOTES FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD'

Dostoevsky had two major ideas that he wanted to transmit in his fictionalized prison memoirs. 18 In the first place, he wanted to paint a sympathetic but not sentimentalized portrait of the convicts he had met in the Siberian prison camp where he spent four years in the early IS sos. He expressed this intention in an I86I review on an art exhibit, where he complained that a painting by V.I. Iakobi called "A Party of Convicts at a Halting Place" does not do justice to its subjects, who, no matter how heinous their crimes, are human: "So give us them as human beings if you are an artist; let phrenologists and prosecutors deal with them as photographs."19 In Notes from the House of the Dead, Dostoevsky aimed to depict convicts as human beings, and he succeeded with his contemporaries; Apollon Grigoriev, for instance, wrote that, like Poor Folk before it, Dostoevsky's new work overcame negative Gogolian aesthetics through compassion toward its subject. 20 Dostoevsky's second intention in the work was personal. In the I87os and I88os, Strakhov placed it in the later tradition of the Christian Dostoevsky and his spiritual regeneration through exposure in Siberian camps to "folk truth." Dostoevsky encouraged this reading in his I876 Diary of a Writer (February, chapter I, part 3), and his protege philosopher Vladimir Soloviev made similar arguments in his Three Speeches in Memory of Dostoevsky (Tri rechi v pamiat' Dostoevskogo), published in I884. 21 The review of the art exhibit reveals the interrelation between the two goals in Notes from the House of the Dead. The difference between a photograph and a work of art, so Dostoevsky explains there, depends on how an object is described in each. A photograph and an image in a mirror are still far from being works of art.... No, it is not photographic accuracy that we demand from an artist, not mechanical accuracy, but something else, larger, wider, and deeper. Precision and veracity are needed, they are necessary as basics, but they are not enough; precision and veracity are only the material from which a work of art is created; they are the tools of creation. In a mirror image one cannot see how the mirror views the object, or, to put it better, one can see that it does not view it, but reflects (otrazhaet) it passively, mechanically. A true artist cannot do this; whether in a painting, or a story, or a musical composition, he himself is visible. He is reflected (otrazitsia) involuntarily, even against his will, he expresses all his views, his character, and the level of his development .... An epic impartial calm does not and cannot exist in our time. If it did, it would only be among those who lack all development, or are frog like by nature and therefore incapable of empathy, or, finally, are insane. Since he

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cannot attribute any of these three dismal potentialities to an artist, a viewer has the right to demand from him that he see nature not the way a photographic apparatus does, but as a man. In the old days, they would have said that he must look with the eyes of the body, but, beyond that, spiritually, with the eyes of the soul.2 2

The narrator of Notes from the House of the Dead moves from fearful loathing of the folk when he first arrives at the camp to a different point of view by the time he departs 23 ; as he does so, he becomes able to look properly at his surroundings "with the eyes of the body ... [and] with the eyes of the soul." This transformation is the second, personal "idea" of the author in the work, but it is also the key to the public one of a sympathetic portrait of the convicts. After all, when Dostoevsky wrote this work just before the emancipation of the serfs, neither he nor any other well-meaning member of the gentry was in a position to transform a peasantry poisoned by class hatred into citizens of a new united Russia. Their task was to emancipate themselves from all the manifestations, even the subtle ones, of their own slave-owning mentality, which required them above all to see and accept the truth about themselves, their native land, and its other inhabitants. In the tradition of such books as Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches, Notes from the House of the Dead provides this truth to its readers and also depicts how its narrator arrived at and accepted it.

INTROSPECTIVE REALISM

The shape of the work reflects its twin tasks. It is a series of "notes" or "sketches" (zapiski) that allow Dostoevsky maximum flexibility to incorporate "reality" into his text, and at the same time it is an introspective memoir by a fictional narrator, who has a name and a brief history given in the introduction by a fictional editor. When Tolstoy, a great admirer of Notes from the House of the Dead, cites it in "A Few Words about the Book War and Peace" (r868) as an example of a mixed genre typical of Russian literature, he may be referring to the prominent role of the narrator in Dostoevsky's version of sketches. 24 For his part, Dostoevsky admired the "sketches" of both Tolstoy and Turgenev exceedingly, and he most definitely had them in mind when he wrote Notes from the House of the Dead. After he was released from prison in r 8 54, he read A Sportsman's Sketches and Turgenev's early stories "in one gulp," and they made an "intoxicating impression" on him. 25 In his r86r manifesto for "native soil conservatism" (pochvennichestvo ), he praised Tolstoy's war stories, themselves indebted to A Sportsman's Sketches. 26 Like Notes from the House of the Dead, the sketches of these predecessors depict both a

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milieu previously unknown to readers and the education of a narrator about that milieu. Sketches as practiced by all three authors include documentary elements. Most "real" among them-because language collected from reality, unlike recollected scenes or even characters of individuals, cannot be altered to suit the author's ideas-are dialect words and expressions, some of which the writers define in their own notes to their texts. There are such explications in Notes from the House of the Dead, but many words and expressions are also interpolated without comment into the text. In Siberia, Dostoevsky kept a notebook recording dialogue, scenes, and characters; he used more than 200 of the 5 22 entries in his bookY These entries stand on their own and cannot be simply reduced to any "poetic" purpose. 28 This also holds true for the many real characters and anecdotes, more than in any other of his fictional works, that Dostoevsky introduces into the text. In many cases he may change them to serve his poetic ideas, but much that is real is not entirely transformed, becoming partly illustrative of some larger principle and partly not. Dostoevsky underscores his respect for such real data in his text when his editor interrupts to announce that a certain criminal whom the narrator Goryanchikov had thought a patricide in part r turns out not to have been one after all. This fact remains known only to the editor and is never revealed to Goryanchikov. 29 At the same time, Dostoevsky does manipulate his data to have them conform to his poetic intentions, and indeed the interruption of the editor to inform us of the innocence of the patricide has an artistic purpose that we shall discuss shortly. For instance, the actual use to which Dostoevsky puts language from the Siberian notebook evolves in parallel with the narrator's discovery of the humanity of the convicts. The first chapter, entitled "The Dead House," contains a description of the prison, the prisoners, and their behavior, but almost no conversation between convicts. 30 A few general remarks in this chapter, consisting of sayings mostly collected in the notebook, are attributed to the collective, not to individuals. Recorded conversations taken from the notebook appear only in the second chapter, entitled "First Impressions," where the narrator reports how convicts traded insults; both their repartee and one of their fights come from the notebook.Jl In all, Dostoevsky uses nineteen notebook entries, mostly of conversation, to construct this little scene in the second chapter in the communal space outside the barracks. Scenes like this are "commonplace" in the prison, yet totally unimaginable to anyone who has not witnessed them. I've deliberately given an example here of the most commonplace conversations among the convicts. I couldn't have imagined in advance how it was possible to curse for fun, to find it amusing, a nice pastime, a pleasure. By the way, one mustn't

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forget vanity either. A master curser got respect. He was practically applauded as an actor would be. 32

The recorded speech fragments from the Siberian notebook are documentary facts that Dostoevsky used to imaginatively construct the inner lives of the people whom he met in the camps. We know from the Siberian notebook that Dostoevsky took his "commonplace conversations" from life; use of such documentary material assured the concreteness and particularity of characters whom Dostoevsky was also developing as types. As convicts distort word order and make up neologisms to express their feelings in a specific situation, they reveal their inner life without the intermediary of analysis, which by its very nature must be abstract and generalizing. The narrator's analysis builds from reality, which reveals unexpected first signs of the humanity of the convicts. Ugly as their first reported confrontations are, the convicts do battle with speech rather than teeth and claws; such a strategy is not available to animals. In chapter I, the narrator observed the outward appearance of a terrible conformity in camp life, not only an external one enforced by guards and dogs but also an internal one emanating from the convicts themselves, almost all of whom were slavishly obsessed with impressing others. "In general vanity and appearance trumped everything else." 33 In chapter 2, the appearance of conformity begins to crack as prisoners are observed struggling to assert their dignity. They do this with language that is very individual and does not conform to the rules of the Dead House. As Robert Louis Jackson explains Dostoevsky's Christian intention in describing the convicts to his readers, man is free even though the Dead House tries to destroy freedom in him: Dostoevsky ... sees in the convict's violent, irresponsible, and often capricious behavior an essential manifestation of an unquenchable will to freedom. But it is a will that is stimulated not by faith in a God-given meaningful universe, but by despair. 34

The repressed peasants and soldiers in the sketches of Turgenev and Tolstoy also find ways of asserting their freedom, and as they do so they too seem more like individuals and less like types. Yet both the setting of Notes from the House of the Dead and Dostoevsky's own personal preferences as an author make individual freedom and dignity its central theme; the lessons he drew from his sojourn in the Dead House were significant steps in the creation of his most original type, the Underground Man. 35 Like many of the convicts whom Dostoevsky met in the camps, the Underground Man is hateful, and Dostoevsky does nothing to sugarcoat this. Unlike a Makar Devushkin from Poor Folk or the dreamer in "White Nights," certain prisoners whom Dostoevsky met in prison were simply unimaginable for him before his experience there. Although Dostoevsky as a Christian Socialist

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may have expected a community of suffering as he set out for Siberia, he did not find one in the prison. His task as a writer, a witness, and a man was going to be much harder. Empathy without excuses for underground men, even pity, and at times compassion are crucial elements in Dostoevsky's mature art; as Jackson suggests, Notes from the House of the Dead tells the story of how Dostoevsky's narrator achieved that level of sympathetic understanding despite the fact that most of its objects hated him. The second poetic idea of the book (the education of the narrator) moves forward in tandem with the first one. (The second chapter, representing as it does an advance in the narrator's understanding, is also part of his story.) Like Dostoevsky's first poetic "idea," this one too is based on facts-Dostoevsky's own experiences-but as with the first one they are rearranged and even changed where necessary for his artistic purpose. In just one small example, Goryanchikov enters the camp in January as Dostoevsky did (in I85o), but unlike Dostoevsky, who was released after four years, Goryanchikov spends ten there. Dostoevsky retains the midwinter month of January as symbolic of the despair of the narrator as he begins his life as a convict but makes the sentence longer both to prolong the narrator's suffering and to give him more time to observe the convicts. Despite the declaration by the editor in his introduction that he is excerpting only two or three chapters of a larger manuscript, Goryanchikov's narrative does not read like a fragment; indeed, in the ninth chapter (of eleven) of part 2, he explains "it is possible for me to conclude my narrative at this point" because "I have tried [in the preceding chapters] to depict the whole of our prison and everything I experienced during my years in it as one vivid, graphic picture. " 36 Nor, as the narrator explains in this same passage, is the book simply a complete chronological account of his (let alone Dostoevsky's) experiences. If I were to write down in ordered sequence everything that happened, everything

I saw and experienced during those years, I would of course end up writing three or four times the number of chapters I have already written. In the end, such a description would become too monotonous. All the events would come out sounding the same. This would be particularly so if the reader had already managed, from the chapters I have written so far, to form an even slightly realistic impression of what life was like in the second category of penal servitude. 37 The narrator considers his task as a writer accomplished when the reader has managed to form such an impression. But in keeping with the two interlinked ideas of the book, he goes on to give other, personal reasons for concluding it: Moreover, as I write down these memories I am occasionally stricken with depression. In any case, it is hardly possible for me to remember everything. The

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years that followed [the first one] have somehow been erased from my memory. I am convinced that I have forgotten many of the things that happened. All that I remember is that all those years, each in essence so similar to the other, passed drearily and sluggishly. I remember those long tedious days as being monotonous as the dripping of water from the roof after rain. I remember that it was only a passionate desire for resurrection, for renewal, for a new life that strengthened my will to wait and hope. 38

In its entirety, the narrator's explanation for concluding his book is the final one of several metaliterary comments throughout it that explain its shape. Part r, chapter 2 begins with a statement that foreshadows the one just quoted from the penultimate chapter of the book: The first month and indeed the whole early phase of my life in prison come vividly to my mind's eye now. The years of prison that followed are much fainter in my memory. Some of them seem to have withdrawn completely into the background, mingling together, and leaving one undiluted impression of heaviness, monotony and suffocation. But everything I experienced in the first days of my penal servitude seems to me now as though it only happened yesterday. And this is the way it is bound to be.

Notes from the House of the Dead is a Bildungsroman, the structure of which depends in the first place on Dostoevsky's understanding of how all learning takes place. We pay more attention to the new; therefore the narrator remembers almost everything that happened to him at first in the prison camp, and almost nothing of what happened later. This rule of perception dictates the pacing of the book. Dostoevsky gives chapters 2, 3, and 4 the same title, "First Impressions"; he entitles chapters 5 and 6 "The First Month" and chapter seven "New Acquaintances." These six chapters together, ostensibly covering only a single month of the narrator's ten years in the camp, take up more than a quarter of his narrative. Part r, ending with the Christmas celebration and comprising well over half the narrative, ostensibly covers only the first year. Part 2 ranges over the rest of the narrator's imprisonment, but as we have already noted he repeats at the end that he has forgotten most of what happened later on in his sentence. Once he masters the routine of prison life he no longer pays attention to it, and he does not remember it. This emphasis on the narrator's first perceptions and observations in prison has a related artistic purpose as well. He must provide his readers with a "graphic picture" of the prison while not boring them with its monotony, about which he complains in both passages (the one just quoted and the one from part 2, chapter 9 ). The book is shaped by the narrator's emotional responses to his own situation. In the first chapter of part r, he begins with a contrast between

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the "jail" (ostrog) in which he will be confined and the "outside, distant, free sky" which represents the world he has left behind. Then at the end of the first paragraph he turns his back on the great world to face the "special corner that I am setting out to describe"; to understand the people who inhabit this corner, he must himself experience their claustrophobia. Although the narrator is in this "corner," in this first chapter of his memoirs he is not yet "of" it. Relating his own entrance into it, he emphasizes his ignorance about what lay ahead of him. At length a mustachioed NCO opened the door for me into this strange house in which I was to spend so many years, to endure sensations of which I could not have had even an approximate conception, had I not experienced them in reality. For example, I could never have conceived how terrible and agonizing it would be not once, not even for one minute of the ten years of my imprisonment, to be alone. 39

It is not some outside phenomenon that the narrator cannot imagine when he enters the Dead House, but his own experience there. In this first paragraph of his memoir, he assumes the pose of a guide for the reader; perhaps when he wrote it, Dostoevsky had in mind Tolstoy's famous description in his first Sevastopol sketch of the hospital with its wounded and dying soldiers. 40 It is as reluctant but fascinated tourists, outsiders, that readers spend the first night locked in the barracks with the narrator amidst "noise, uproar, laughter, swearing, the sound of chains, soot and fumes, shaven heads, branded faces, ragged clothes, all that is accursed and dishonoured." Upon seeing all this, as tourists we conclude along with the narrator: "Yes, man has great endurance! Man is a creature that can get used to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him." We do not yet know whether this means there is no limit to the distortions that circumstances may impose on human beings. It is significant that the unforgivable and incomprehensible crime cited in part r, chapter r-parricide that seemed to have no effect on the murderer-turns out in part 2 not to have occurred. Human beings can adjust to all circumstances, but it seems that human nature is not infinitely malleable; the task of the narrator is to find the human in the disfigured convicts who inhabit the Dead House. As the narrator's inner life evolves under the pressure of previously unimaginable "sensations," so do his perceptions of his fellow inmates. Up front in chapter r are "photographs" of the Dead House and its inhabitants with their "branded" faces and their terrible crimes. They seem alike in their appearance and their psychology: "At first glance, you could discern one single glaring characteristic that was common to all this strange family: even the strongest, most original personalities who dominated the others without trying, even they attempted to fit into the general tone of the place. " 41 But already in the first chapter the narrator reports observations

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that contradict this general rule. He relates how he would meet the most unsociable convicts walking by themselves and "think[ing] their own private thoughts": "I used to like to look at their sullen, branded faces and try to guess what they were thinking of." Then come the first anecdotes about convicts who seem to have "died" from loss of freedom and family. This occurs in the second paragraph, before (in the third) the narrator's description of his hellish first night in the barracks, in which he reacts only to his external impressions of the convicts. It is significant that this first sympathetic explanation of the plight of the convict grows out of the narrator's sense, expressed in paragraph I, of his own overwhelming and deadening loss. Empathy for the lot of the convicts depends on the narrator's assimilation through imagination of their inner life to his own. This means that to understand them even to the extent he does, he must have the same experiences and feeling as they do. He does not enter directly into the psyche of another, and in fact Dostoevsky does not believe this to be possible. The inability of one subject to wholly join with another is a rule of psychology that also governs the shape of the book and, as we shall see, helps to explain the peculiarities of its narrator. For the narrator to be a reliable witness, he must understand the point of view of the convicts; to do so, he must as much as possible become one himself. Part I of the book accordingly charts the transformation of the narrator's consciousness into that of a convict. Its final lines occur later at night after the play (chapter Io). Once again, as in chapter I, we are in the barracks, which now, however, seem to be peopled by suffering souls rather than demons. But now it was darkest night. I started and woke up for some reason. The old man was still sitting on the stove saying his prayers; he would remain there praying until daybreak. Aley was sleeping beside me. I recalled that even as he had fallen asleep he had been laughing still, discussing the show with his brothers, and I found myself looking involuntarily at his peaceful, childlike face. Piece by piece, I remembered everything: the day that had just been, the holidays, the whole month .... In terror, I raised my head and looked around me at my companions who were sleeping in the dim light of a six-to-a-pound prison candle. I looked at their wretched faces, their wretched beds, at all this utter misery and poverty. I scrutinized it, and it was as if I were trying to convince myself that all this was real, and not the continuation of some monstrous dream. But it was real: I could hear someone groaning; someone let his arm fall heavily, jangling his chains. Another man started and began to talk in his sleep, while the old man on the stove prayed for all "Orthodox Christians," and one could hear him quietly and evenly intoning: "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon us .... " "I'm not going to be here forever, after all-just for a few years!" I thought, and laid my head on my pillow once again. 42

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Much as the narrator might wish it otherwise, his present life is not a nightmare from which he can hope to awaken any time soon. After his release, as he writes his memoirs, the world of the prison recedes into dreams again: "This all happened long ago; it all seems to me like a dream now." 43

SEEING AND NOT SEEING WITH THE EYES OF THE SOUL

As we shall learn, there are limits to understanding other people even when we share their suffering. To the extent that he enters the point of view of the convicts, however, the narrator sees things invisible from outside it. He shares the life of the convicts, who, he observes already in chapter r, sleep poorly: Nearly all the convicts talked and raved in their sleep at night. Oaths, underworld slang, knives and axes figured most prominently in their ravings. "We're beaten men," they used to say, "we've had the insides beaten out of us, that's why we cry out at night." 44

The convicts also depend on sweet dreams of freedom (even if only temporary and within the prison) such as well up in the narrator at the very moment that he accepts the reality of his present situation. 45 This need for freedom is responsible for much of the self-destructive and bizarre behavior the narrator reports; he could not fathom it if he himself were not longing for freedom and dreaming of it night and day. Indeed, in the passage (in part 2, chapter 9) from which I have already quoted extensively, he informs us that only hope for a new life and the plans he made for the future kept him strong. 46 This passage occurs in the chapter entitled "An Escape," and it helps explain the inner compulsion that motivates some convicts, acting against all odds, to try to break out of prison. The passage also resonates with the second paragraph of part r, chapter r, in which the narrator watches surly convicts walking behind the barracks and thinking their "secret thoughts." Like them, he revels in his isolation; like them he counts the days until his release, and he plots his future. This is another example of how the narrator empathizes with his fellow convicts because he shares their situation, and perhaps their thoughts. It is easy for the narrator to understand how a frustrated love of freedom might cause a convict to attempt a breakout from prison, because he (the narrator) shares the love although he might express it differently. It is harder to excuse violence extending even to murder, and especially the lack of remorse that he observes in the convicts. Here we begin to reach

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the limits of understanding others, limits causing the narrator his most extreme suffering and isolation in the prison: I have already said that for a period of several years I saw among these people not the slightest trace of repentance, not one sign that their crime weighed heavily on their conscience, and that the majority of them consider themselves to be completely in the right. This is a factY

This assertion begins a long paragraph in part I, chapter I in which the term "point of view" is repeated three times. 48 In the first instance, the narrator remarks that, taking into account the "fact" of the convicts' lack of remorse, "it seems that the phenomenon of crime cannot be comprehended from points of view that are already given, and that its philosophy is rather more difficult than is commonly supposed." Then, having recited how society punishes criminals in ways that not only fail to rehabilitate but even seem to justify them in their own eyes, he writes that "it may be concluded from this point of view that right is on the side of the criminal." Nonetheless, he continues in the next sentence, "Leaving aside all points of view, everyone will agree that there are crimes which, ever since the world began, always and everywhere, under all legal systems, have been indisputably considered as crimes, and will be considered so for as long as man is man." The example that follows of such a crime is the parricide to which we have already alluded, the murder by a gentryman of his own father for financial gain. What strikes the narrator as simply incomprehensible in this crime is the gentryman's seeming lack of remorse. Jackson explores the political implications of the lack of remorse that Dostoevsky observed in his fellow convicts. He explains Dostoevsky's reversal on this point in the I 87os as politically motivated: if peasants did not hold themselves accountable for crimes committed against other classes, then the social rifts within Russian society were too deep to be healed, and Dostoevsky could not hope for a new, united nation. Jackson's analysis demonstrates the difference between Dostoevsky's artistic insights in Notes from the House of the Dead and his political and moral agenda in the I87os. 49 There is no doubt that, for reasons Jackson spells out, the earlier account is more pessimistic than the later one about the sense of moral responsibility among the peasants. If one looks at the two positions from another perspective, however, they are closer than Jackson maintains. There is a personal reason this particular question preoccupies Goryanchikov. He himself has committed an unpardonable crime: the murder of his wife from jealousy during the first year of their marriage. 5° Immediately afterward, he turned himself in to the police. Since Goryanchikov himself, like many though not all the gentry in the prison, has such a

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strong conscience, he cannot imagine an individual without it. A strong conscience may not prevent a crime, but it does generate remorse, which the narrator Goryanchikov feels so keenly for his own crime that after his release from prison he falls into a deep depression and dies "without even once calling a doctor to his side." 51 As an honest witness, Goryanchikov has to report that many peasant prisoners seemed to feel no remorse for their crimes. This lack of remorse can be explained sociologically in many cases. Where the victims of a crime were from the ruling classes, neither the perpetrator nor his fellow prisoners blame the criminal. 52 Jackson notes how often the narrator of Notes from the House of the Dead speaks of the convicts as children, and he attributes their apparent lack of bad conscience about their crimes partially to this childlikeness, which is another consequence of their social status as slaves. 53 Then there are human beings capable of monstrous crimes, such as the gratuitous slaughter of innocent children, simply because they enjoy bloodlust and the exercise of power over others even to the point of murdering them. Stories of the details of such crimes circulate the prison and everyone there accepts their authenticity; the prisoners are "literate" in this respect ("no one could surprise anyone here")Y The narrator observes furthermore that "only in prison have I heard stories of the most terrible, the most unnatural actions, the most monstrous slayings, told with the most irrepressible, the most childishly merry laughter."55 There is one odd exception to this pattern of enjoyment, which the narrator mentions a little earlier: I remember that once a brigand who was drunk (it was sometimes possible to get drunk in prison) began to describe how he had knifed to death a five-year-old boy, first enticing him with a toy, then taking him to an empty shed somewhere and murdering him. The whole barrack of convicts, who up till now had been laughing at his jokes, cried out as one man, and the brigand was compelled to be silent; the men had cried out not from indignation, but because you shouldn't [ne nado] talk about this kind of thing [pro eto ], because it was not done to talk about this kind of thing. 56

There is seemingly no limit to the cynicism of the brutalized and brutal convicts who make up the general prison population. This taboo (ne nado) against a personal account by an actual perpetrator of such a heinous crime (as opposed to gossip about such crimes) indicates that prisoners do not want to dwell publicly on its actual commission, but also that they are capable of imagining it. Whatever act human beings can imagine, they are also capable of committing; this explains the taboo against something both tempting and also strongly opposed by the human personality. Elsewhere, in part 2, chapter 3, the narrator warns that every person today has the seeds of an executioner in him.

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In the not so distant past there were certain gentlemen who obtained from the freedom to flog their victims something that was reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade and the Marquise de Brinvilliers. There was, I believe, something about this sensation that made the hearts of these gentlemen stop beating, something at once sweet and painful. There are people like tigers, who thirst for blood to lick. Whoever has once experienced this power, this unlimited mastery over the body, blood and spirit of another human being, his brother according to the law of Christ; whoever has experienced this control and this complete freedom to degrade, in the most humiliating fashion, another creature made in God's image, will involuntarily somehow lose power over his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit; it is able to, and does develop finally into a disease. I submit that habit may coarsen and stupefy the very best of men to the level of brutes. Blood and power make a man drunk: callous coarseness and depravity develop in him; the most abnormal phenomena become accessible, and in the end pleasurable to the mind and senses. The human being and the citizen perish forever in the tyrant, and a return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration becomes practically impossible for him .... The qualities of the executioner are found in embryonic form in almost every person today. But these bestial qualities do not develop to an equal degree in every individual. If in developing they overwhelm all of a person's other qualities, that person as a matter of course becomes a fearsome monster. 57

If, as Dostoevsky's narrator asserts, the Marquis de Sade advocated the behavior that ever after has born his name, according to Dostoevsky's version of history Jesus Christ introduced the "law" according to which every man is my brother. 5 8 The former legitimated pleasurable "sensations" of power exercised over others; the latter introduced moral laws that combat these sensations even if, as the preceding quotation suggests, they cannot always control them. Carefully concealed within this description of sadism as a social disease is an admission that its origins are to be found in certain natural "sensations" (oshchushcheniia). In certain brutish characters, of whom the convict Gazin is the prime example, there are no qualities in the soul to contradict evil sensations; with Gazin's deformed body and enormous head, this creature is cunning in the service of his sensations but lacks the attributes of higher reason that would make him alternately more evil (because he could plan his crimes more fiendishly) or more moral (because he would have a conscience). Except for his willful cruelty, Gazin seems subhuman. He is a kind of force of nature, and the fact that he is so easily distracted from killing the narrator and his friend is extremely significant (part I, chapter 3). His inner life, his consciousness, lacks any moral reflectiveness. Spontaneity distinguishes Gazin from more sophisticated sadists, many of whom are officers in the prison camp. True, rumor has it that Gazin loves to torture child victims, but we have no eyewitness confirmation of

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this; at the same time, there have been officers in the camp with established rituals for torturing. 59 As Dostoevsky presents it in this book, civilization does not necessarily generate evil in human beings, but it does allow evil to develop beyond its natural, unfocused state, from the Gazins-the Calibans-to the Marquis de Sades. It is significant that the latter come up not in the chapter on Gazin but only in part 2, chapter 3, where the narrator discusses the unlimited lust for power, and how it can poison society. In part I we learn that even in prison people have certain qualities by nature; they may be weak or strong, good or bad, with various combinations. As the narrator then argues in part 2, circumstances may encourage some qualities and discourage others. In prison, of course, people are mostly distorted by their environment, although some people-Gazin, for example-are just naturally evil, while others-the Daghestani Aley-are naturally good. 60 Sustained evil takes time to develop into a habit for individuals, and then for societies. It happens through the evolution of consciousness. Where does Goryanchikov himself stand in this paradigm? As a wife murderer, he himself has felt and acted on sensations that cause men to commit evil deeds; therefore he can imagine and report on them. This is the personal reason he does not doubt that such sensations exist. Perhaps Dostoevsky provided a fictional narrator in order to reassure government censors that he was not reporting directly on realities in the camps where he had been a prisoner. With the creation of Goryanchikov, however, he makes an artistic triumph out of political necessity. The narrator of Notes from the House of the Dead is not a consistently realized character; this is deliberate on Dostoevsky's part. 61 In places that are numerous and easily recognizable in the text, Dostoevsky reports on his own experience as a political prisoner; but Goryanchikov is present there as a man who can imagine the inner life of a criminal because he has been one himself. But self-knowledge can only take Goryanchikov so far in his quest to understand the criminal mind. He knows that one can murder because he has done so himself, and at the same time his equally natural experience of conscience has also taught him the power of remorse in the soul. The evidence of his own eyes and reported facts about others to the contrary, in commenting on the supposed parricide in part I, chapter 2, he therefore protests his own observations about lack of remorse in other convicts. Goryanchikov does not claim to have the absolute truth about the convict's sense of responsibility for his actions. He tells the reader what he has observed, but he also makes clear that ultimately he can only guess about matters of conscience in the mind of another person. In the passage we have been examining in part I, chapter I, the "fact" he advances is that he never "saw" any repentance in his fellow convicts, but even here heremarks, "Who can say that he has fathomed the depths of these lost hearts,

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and has read in them that which is hidden from the whole world?" He goes on to assert that "so long as man is man" one can make certain moral generalizations that defy any particular "point of view." Working from this generalization, Goryanchikov cannot accept the parricide's seeming lack of remorse as within the definition of crime: "It is a unique phenomenon; here there is some constitutional defect, some physical and moral abnormality which science has not been yet able to explain, not simply a question of crime." 62 Here the narrator relies for truth not on insight into the mind of the supposed parricide but on his own moral code, which he asserts is true for all. Even here, however, he does not claim that every parricide must feel remorse; he states only that one who did not would be a monster like Gazin and others whom he met in prison, who have nothing to teach us about the moral laws that are innate in all healthy human beings. 63 In another passage much later in the book, in part 2, chapter 7 ("The Complaint"), Goryanchikov clarifies his position about the possibility of generalizations about human nature. He has asserted that dreams of freedom in all their individual oddity constitute the "most characteristic feature" of the prison, and that every single prisoner in the camp shares the same goal of "freedom and release from prison. " 64 He then corrects himself. But now I see that I am trying to classify all the prisoners into categories; that, however, is not really possible. Reality is infinitely various when compared to the deductions of abstract thought, even those that are most subtle, and it will not tolerate rigid, hard-and-fast distinctions. Reality strives for diversification. We too had our own special form of life; even if it did not amount to much, it was ours none the less, and it was not merely some official existence but our own, inner, private life. 65

The word that McDuff translates here as "diversification" is razdroblenie, the noun root of which-drab-means small pieces. 66 It is a form of the same word that Dostoevsky uses in The Brothers Karamazov to describe how Alyosha feels as he leaves his father's house after Dmitrii has tried to kill the old man: His mind, too, was splintered [razdroblen] and scattered, as it were, while he himself felt at the same time that he was afraid to bring the scattered together and draw a general idea from all the tormenting contradictions he had lived through that day.G?

Diversification comes from the natural tendency in human beings to split away from general truths that unite them. It is one of the factors that give rise to romantic longing for a lost whole. As I argue later, ultimately it is this diversification, or splintering, and not simply the conditions of prison

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3I

life that accounts for the alienation of each from all others. Alienation is in fact a condition of human life. 68 Although all generalizations must be verified by empirical observation, no generalization can account for every occurrence in "reality." If we apply this rule to the passage about the parricide in part I, chapter I, we see that both possibilities raised by thenarrator could have been true. The parricide could have been a "unique phenomenon" not accounted for by the laws of ordinary human decency; or the narrator's instinct founded on his own strong awareness of those laws could have been accurate, in which case against all appearances the parricide would have to be not guilty of the crime for which he was condemned. The revelation from the editor that the parricide was in fact innocent comes at the beginning of part 2, chapter 7, and immediately precedes the narrator's declaration about the limitations on all generalizations as a tool for understanding reality. It is significant that Goryanchikov himself never learns about the innocence of the parricide; as an observer, he can never be sure about the inner life of others unless it is revealed in reality. Therefore, later in his memoirs, in the passage we are discussing, even as he works his way up to his broadest generalizations about the inner life of his fellow convicts he is careful to hedge with qualifying words the examples he provides for his deductions. In this passage he is discussing one convict who seems to have given up hope but relies on prayer to sustain him: The old man (I have mentioned him before) looked calm enough, but I supposed, because of several tell tale signs, that his inner state of mind was an atrocious one. The convict who went mad, the one who used to read the Bible and went for the Major with a brick, was probably another of those who had given up every last hope .... 69

Like Turgenev-and contrary to Turgenev's opinion of him-Dostoevsky does not assume that he can completely illuminate the inner life of others.70 Therefore, as the narrator says openly in part 2, chapter 7, no generalization that he makes in the book can be ironclad. This applies most definitely to his announcement that convicts feel no remorse for the crimes they have committed. They may or may not feel it; we cannot know for sure, and Dostoevsky might assert that they do feel it in the I873 passage in his Diary of a Writer cited by Jackson. Here we reach the outer limits of self-reflection as a tool for understanding others-and Dostoevsky respects that limit. Despite all his insight into the souls of others, the subjectivity of others therefore ultimately remains a mystery in his fiction.

Chapter Seven REFLECTION AND CONFESSION

At the same time as he renders the subjectivity of others, the psychological realist also reveals himself, if only indirectly, through his characters. Dostoevsky explores the motive of the secret confession and its reasons in Notes from the House of the Dead. We know that Goryanchikov is a murderer only because the editornarrator tells us so; nowhere in his memoirs, as the frame narrator provides them to us, does Goryanchikov himself ever mention this crucial fact. To read these memoirs one might assume, as Jackson does, that the narrator's deepest suffering arises from his-and Dostoevsky's-realization of the depth of the hatred and alienation most convicts feel toward him and his class. For Jackson, Notes from the House of the Dead is the result of the narrator's-ultimately Dostoevsky's-successful effort to overcome the bitterness and fear that this discovery caused in him. Unlike Dostoevsky's Underground Man, a creature of the moment unable to resist impulses, "Goryanchikov the memoirist (as opposed to the convict) has learned how to see [and as a result] he has overcome all the deeply hostile feelings that blinded him to the truth in his first encounters with the common convicts." 71 Goryanchikov accomplishes his exemplary moral self-overcoming through reflection, which allows him to distance himself from his "deeply hostile feelings." Jackson does point out traces in the memoir of Goryanchikov's personal suffering, but he attributes this to his loss of freedom and to "Dostoevsky's own profound anguish" about his anger and hatred during his time in prison. 72 These traces include the story of the wounded eagle with whose fear and desire for freedom both Goryanchikov and Dostoevsky must identify/3 But there is another, less uplifting story with which Goryanchikov also identifies. I refer to "Akulka's Husband," the only tale of the dozens in this book that has its own title and chapter. The chapter, a very short one, also includes Goryanchikov's account of how he happened to overhear it; this is one link that Dostoevsky makes between him and the story, in which the hero, Shishkov, murders his wife (as Goryanchikov had done) from sexual jealousy.74 Shishkov, the murderer and narrator of the story, also resembles Goryanchikov physically. Like Goryanchikov he is around thirty years old; the editor-narrator tells us in the introduction that when they met, Goryanchikov was "around thirty-five." And like him, Shishkov is small in stature and thin.75 Spiritually they are very different, however. Here is how the editor-narrator describes Goryanchikov. If you were talking to him he would look at you very fixedly and attentively, listening to your every word with austere politeness, as if he were thinking it over,

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as if by your question you had set him some problem or were trying to elicit some secret from him, and he would eventually reply clearly and briefly, but weighing each word of his reply so carefully that you would suddenly feel embarrassed and be glad when the interview was at an end .... Goryanchikov led a life of irreproachable morality ... he was terribly unsociable and hid from everybody, was extremely learned, read a great deal, but spoke very little, and ... in general it was rather hard to have any kind of conversation with him .... Such crimes [he had murdered his wife] are always regarded as misfortunes, and are looked upon with compassion. But in spite of all this, the strange man had stubbornly kept himself apart from everyone, appearing in public only to give lessons. 76

Here is Goryanchikov's description of Shishkov: He was short and thin; his eyes were restless, but sometimes expressed a sort of vacant reverie. Occasionally he would tell some story or other; he would start in a great fever of excitement, waving his arms about-and then he would suddenly break off or change the subject, get carried away by some new details and forget what it was he had begun with. He was always getting into quarrels, and he would never fail to reproach the other man for some wrong he imagined the other had done him. He would talk with emotion, almost in tears .... He played the balalaika quite well and enjoyed playing; on holidays he would even dance, and he danced well when he was made to by the men .... It was very easy to make him do anything .... It was not that he was particularly dutiful, but he enjoyed making friends and would do whatever he had to in order to win them.7 7

Goryanchikov and Shishkov are temperamentally opposites. Making the two of them similar physically, and putting the two of them together within his "tale" (rasskaz)-the genre indicator is the subtitle of "Akulka's Husband"-Dostoevsky forces his thoughtful reader to compare these two wife murderers. In structure, with its opening explanation, the story resembles one of Turgenev's frame narrations. It differs from them because Goryanchikov overhears Shishkov's confession rather than providing his own. Yet the structure itself suggests a deep commonality between the two characters, and so does Goryanchikov's behavior within the tale. Shishkov's chosen interlocutor, the "sullen pedant," "soulless rationalist," and "conceited idiot" Cherevin, is "indifferent" to his story. But Goryanchikov, Shishkov's accidental audience, makes an intense effort to hear it. At first he cannot make out what the men are saying, but he listens carefully until he begins to understand them. Surely his attentiveness increases as he realizes that Shishkov too has killed his wife in a jealous rage. We know from the introduction how thoughtfully Goryanchikov listens; as in Turgenev's frame narratives, he occupies the contemplative narrative space in the tale while Shishkov is the man of action, who confesses out of inner necessity in the same impulsive mood in which he does everything else. As a storyteller himself, Shishkov has to revisit his own past, but his moods of reverie, unlike

Chapter Seven

the thoughtfulness of Goryanchikov, are "vacant." Shishkov confesses to his murder without repenting of it. The only sign of his repentance is the confession itself, which he no doubt repeats convulsively at regular intervals; his present audience, the indifferent Cherevin, most certainly has not forced or teased it out of him. We know that Goryanchikov too has felt the need to confess. Interspersed with the manuscript from which the editor-narrator excerpts Notes from the House of the Dead, he discovers a "long short story" (povest') that he describes as "some strange, terrible reminiscences scribbled down in irregular, convulsive handwriting, as if following some convulsion. " 78 Surely this is Goryanchikov's confession of his murder, blurted out by him but not published by his editor. We may assume that "Akulka's Husband," safely distanced from Goryanchikov but part of his memoirs of prison life, takes the place in Goryanchikov's text of this private written confession. Once all of this becomes clear, we understand that the careful listener Goryanchikov stands in relation to Shishkov as the contemplative, reflective man does to his own impulsive past in Turgenev's frame narratives. Pure remorse is mostly mute; a confession that goes beyond a simple affirmation of guilt is always self-justifying because it explains how the wrongdoing came to be committed. Goryanchikov's own confession was marred to the point of incomprehensibility by his remorse for his crime; Shishkov is calmer, more self-justifying, and therefore clearer. We sense the latter's superficial sense of guilt, and also his lack of freedom, between the lines of his narrative. Goryanchikov stands in relation to Shishkov as Goryanchikov's conscience does to his own actions, which he committed, as did Shishkov, under the compulsion of passions he did not understand and that he afterwards condemned. Goryanchikov blames himself for his crime, and Shishkov does not. 79 Dostoevsky suggests this parallelism and also the kinship of Goryanchikov and Shishkov by making them physically similar and spiritually opposed. Confession is necessary in psychological realism because it allows subjects to speak for themselves. The problem, of course, is that a straightforward confession to a public audience is as much an act of self-justification as reflection. 80 Writers can confess all while hiding behind their text; this is what psychological realists do. Speaking through the voices of others, an author can tell a truth that he may have learned through self-examination without the special pleading that is characteristic of outright confession. Dostoevsky's masterful use of the mechanism of "reflection" would have made him especially careful to cleanse his works of subjectivity, and to put as great a distance as he could between himself as storyteller and his finished product. He demonstrates this necessity in Notes from the House of the Dead in the way in which Goryanchikov introduces his terrible

Reflection as a Tool in Russian Psychological Prose

r 35

crime into his narrative. In part r, chapter r, he states that each convict "had his own story to tell, vague and crushing as the hangover that follows a bout of heavy drinking." 81 The word for "story" that Dostoevsky uses is the same one-povest'-that the editor-narrator uses to name Goryanchikov's own "strange, terrible reminiscences." Instead of telling his own story, with "Akulka's Husband" Goryanchikov inserts someone else's, to which he ardently listened, having awakened in the middle of the night, as if it were his own nightmare. Like Dostoevsky, Goryanchikov is a writer; therefore Dostoevsky could use him to demonstrate elements of the creative process that he preferred not to discuss directly. Strakhov claims that Dostoevsky himself was not aware of the autobiographical origins of many of his characters; if he had been it might have hindered his creativity. But we know for a fact that Dostoevsky was thinking specifically about the writer's personal relation to his material at the time, because the narrator of The Insulted and the Injured, published in r86r (just after Notes from the House of the Dead), is a dying author. The original subtitle of the novel, later discarded, was "From the Notes of an Unsuccessful Writer. A Novel." 82 Making the personal element of this character explicit, Dostoevsky gave him his own past: Belinsky reads and praises the author's first book, which is recognizably Poor Folk. 83 In Notes from the House of the Dead, Goryanchikov's experience in the camps is like Dostoevsky's in that he comes to understand (and to a large extent identify with) his fellow prisoners. Unlike Goryanchikov, Dostoevsky did not commit a murder, but we can be sure that he experiences the feelings of malice that he imagined could lead to murder, and that he, like Goryanchikov, felt ashamed of it. No doubt the need to confess and to hide his person at the same time played a role in Dostoevsky's ferociously intense drive to create. One of the models for his confessional art was the Jean-Jacques Rousseau of Confessions, whom Belinsky compared to Dostoevsky in a letter toP. V. Annenkov (r8r2-r887) not long before he broke with his former protege: "[Having read the Confessions], I experienced the greatest repugnance for this gentleman. He so resembles Dostoevsky, who believes that all the human race envies and persecutes him." 84 On the one hand, Belinsky is talking about Rousseau the man here, and comparing him to Dostoevsky as a man; on the other, it is significant that his idea of Rousseau's personality comes from the latter's Confessions. Belinsky, like Dostoevsky and other Russian readers of the Confessions, assumes that Jean-Jacques, Rousseau's narrator in the work, is identical with its author. So that readers will not identify him with his first-person narrator-writers, Dostoevsky gives them other names or separates himself as author from them by means of a fictional editor.

Chapter Seven

Rousseau's founding example of the modern confession is indeed full of his own self-justifications and, especially in its later parts, his complaints against his contemporaries. In this respect, it is an unbalanced and even ugly work, but this does not mean that it is not a true depiction of the striving and anxiety of individual man. Perhaps, in its openness, Confessions is more honest than any work by Dostoevsky that imitates it. Rene Girard, in his brilliant and eccentric book on Dostoevsky, places Rousseau and Dostoevsky within the modern literary project that he calls "Romantic Manicheanism," in which the self after Descartes wants Divinity for itself and at the same time continues to crave the approval and confirmation of others. Literature is mobilized in the conflict of the Self and the Other, beginning to play its justificatory role which we still note in it in our time. Rousseau affirms that he will present himself armed with The Confessions before the supreme tribunal. The Book of Life is displaced by the book of his life. 85

Girard admires Dostoevsky because, unlike Rousseau in the opening of the Confessions, he resists the temptation to glorify himself, and we can be sure that Dostoevsky did indeed distinguish himself in this way from Rousseau. The critical writing on Dostoevsky and Rousseau has concentrated on the. difference between the two in this regard and therefore the ostensible moral superiority of the Russian author. An exception to this is Jacques Catteau, who recognizes the Rousseauist contribution to Dostoevsky's grand project, of which his individual works are but partial realizations: He adopted Rousseau's approach .... He returned to the hero's childhood to illuminate the mystery of man by beginning with the virgin page where his first letters are to be written, that is, where the possibilities are infinite. He envisaged the history of a life so that he could admit all kinds of different experiences and see the spiritual choices as they were made and prepared. 86

Dostoevsky's first impulse is confessional, which explains why, again in Catteau's words, he dreamt of a grand novel about one hero "of defined identity," who "passes through all the stages and contradictions of the human spirit. He was tempted by the idea of enclosing the whole of humanity in one man, and exposing this man to an orgy of universal experience."87 The "defined identity" of which Catteau writes is necessary for the separation of Dostoevsky from his hero. How, beginning from selfexamination, he achieved this separation over and over again is a key to his whole method. Therefore, in addition to the famous self-justificatory opening declaration of Confessions, there is another passage in that seminal work that the young Russian author would have read with awe and respect. I quote excerpts from it.

Reflection as a Tool in Russian Psychological Prose

I

37

Two almost incompatible things are joined in me without my being able to conceive how: a very ardent temperament, lively, impetuous passions, and ideas that are slow to be born, confused, and that never offer themselves until after the event. One would say that my heart and my mind do not belong to the same individual. Feeling comes to fill my soul quicker than lightning, but instead of enlightening me it sets me on fire and dazzles me. I feel everything and I see nothing. I am fiery but stupid: I need to be cool in order to think .... It is not only in conversation that I have this slowness in thinking joined with this liveliness in feeling; I have it even when I am alone and when I am working. My ideas arrange themselves in my head with the most incredible difficulty. They circulate there dumbly; they ferment there to the point of rousing me, heating me up, giving me palpitations, and in the midst of all this emotion I do not see anything clearly; I cannot write a single word, I have to wait. Insensibly this great motion subsides, this chaos sorts itself out; each thing comes to put itself in its place, but slowly and after a long and confused agitation. Have you ever seen the Opera in Italy? In the changes of scene in these large theaters, there reigns an unpleasant disorder, which lasts a rather long time: all the backdrops are mixed up together; from every direction there is a pushing and pulling which is painful to see; one believes that everything is going to turn upside down. Nevertheless little by little everything is arranged, nothing is lacking, and one is completely surprised to see a ravishing spectacle follow this long tumult. That maneuvering is almost the same as the one that goes on in my brain when I want to write. If I had known how first to wait and then to render in their beauty the things that depicted themselves there, few Authors would have surpassed me .... Not only does it give me pain to render ideas, it even gives me pain to receive them. I have studied men and I believe myself to be a rather good observer. Nevertheless I do not know how to see anything of what I am seeing; I see well only what I recall, and I have intelligence only in my memories. Out of everything that is said, everything that is done, everything that happens in my presence, I feel nothing, I penetrate nothing. The exterior sign is all that strikes me. But later everything comes back to me: I recall the place, the time, the tone, the look, the gesture, the circumstance; nothing escapes me. Thus based on what has been done or said I find what has been thought, and I am rarely mistaken. 88

Although he does not say so openly, Rousseau is describing how he came to write his confessions; through the process of reflection, painfully but gradually, he turned his sensations into thoughts and thence into an ordered text. With his own volatile temperament, Dostoevsky would have recognized himself in this description. Having read various self-justifying episodes in Confessions, however, he would have considered himself more adept at cleansing his prose of the subjective bias that he detects in JeanJacques. Like Alyosha Karamazov, who "[articulates] and [controls] his own alter ego in the hagiography of Zosima," Dostoevsky prefers to avoid the direct attention of his readers. 89 As a parody of Rousseau's Confessions, Notes from Underground is intended to establish that no direct confession can be sincerely penitent. 90 It is a point already made in The Insulted and

Chapter Seven the Injured by the villain Prince Valkovsky, who tells the narrator that no one could possibly confess the ugliest truths about himself to others, or for that matter even to himself. 91 Lydia Ginzburg is thinking of the Confessions when she writes that "one of Rousseau's principal discoveries was that of an unprecedented new relationship between the author's creative work and his personality, a relationship in which that personality came to define the author's work, to be perceived as the source of its identity. " 92 Eventually, and without any apparent direct connection, this type of prose leads to Belinsky's conception of "organic" art, in which such works as A Hero of Our Time reflect the personality of their creator. Dostoevsky is the most subjective of the Russian psychological realists because he most insists on the uniqueness of each individual personality. This means he cannot depend on general laws of human nature to allow him to fully penetrate the inner life of any other human being. He creates characters who are unpredictable and mysterious on the one hand, yet subject to general laws of psychology (at least in hindsight) on the other, when we are trying to understand their deeds and speeches. To make his characters at all comprehensible, he must infuse them with a distillation of his own personal experience and personality in ways that remain hidden from the reader. Despite his dislike of Rousseau for his perceived moral failings, Dostoevsky, like Turgenev and Tolstoy, follows his lead in creating a psychological prose that relies on self-reflection for insights into human consciousness, and also for the revelation of even its shameful secrets. In the final two chapters of this book, we further examine the dark side of human nature that makes true reflection and true confession so difficult.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Childhood in Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man. 1

~

•

It is no accident that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, founder of the cult of sincerity and advocate for subjectivity, was also, in his Emile, the first thinker to make childhood the subject of a philosophical book. If, as he claimed, human beings are naturally well intentioned, then all the evil that abounds in human life has to be accounted for as an aberration due either to bad education or to bad luck. Children themselves, as they come into the world, are innocent of vice. A crucial element of this innocence is a lack of self-consciousness, which, once acquired by whatever means, cannot easily be expelled from the human soul. As is clear from earlier chapters in this book, Rousseau was an important influence on all three of the authors who are its subjects. All three believe in the natural goodness of children. Even Turgenev has one major story, "First Love," in which the innocent adolescent hero witnesses but does not understand the love affair between his father and a neighbor with whom the boy himself is in love; Turgenev also describes the innocent psyches of children in the sportsman's sketch entitled "Bezhin Meadow." He pays relatively little attention to childhood, however; his early exploration of natural goodness (discussed in Chapter 5) focuses more on peasants and their relation to nature. On the other hand, so important was childhood for Dostoevsky and Tolstoy that one could plausibly argue that a dominant theme in their fiction is the transition from it to adulthood. 2 The purpose of this chapter is to compare the differences and similarities between these two in their understanding of childhood. As we shall see,

qo

Chapter Eight

moreover, Charles Dickens is a common denominator between them in their description of childhood. Tolstoy begins with a belief in natural goodness that he derives from Rousseau. We need only return to our natural selves, either consciously or by accident, to be good and happy at the same time. This is the position he adopts in an unpublished literary fragment in I8 51, the "History of Yesterday": that "goodness is always in our soul and the soul is goodness; while evil is implanted." "Strip the outer crust from a diamond and it will shine; discard the outside weaknesses and there will be virtue": this is how the budding author pictured the relation of virtue and vice. 3 Moreover, virtue is not simply self-sacrifice; it makes us happy ("Virtue gives happiness because happiness gives virtue"). Tolstoy's first publication in I 8 52 was the ground breaking and instantly acclaimed Childhood. It was followed, in I 8 54, by Adolescence and in I 8 57 by Youth. As the titles indicate, these three works form a trilogy whose subject is the development from childhood to adulthood; indeed, Childhood was intended originally as the first part of a long work called Four Epochs of Development. The following argument emerges from the trilogy. As long as we are children, conscience is not needed, and this is happiness. Innocence keeps children both happy and virtuous. In adolescence, as the passions and the ego develop, to curb them we need moral "convictions" (ubezhdeniia), or beliefs, which the hero of the trilogy, Nikolenka, loses one after another as he flexes his overambitious intellect (chapter I9, entitled "Adolescence"). Tolstoy is vague about the origins of these convictions; but Youth, which begins with moral resolutions inspired by springtime, suggests a connection between them and nature. In his greatest works, especially in War and Peace and to a lesser extent Anna Karenina, he tries to show in a concrete way how happiness, or personal fulfillment, and virtue might be connected by simply submitting ourselves to the rhythms of nature. Dostoevsky comes out of a related though different tradition. He too believes in the goodness of childhood, but he defines that goodness as something even higher than Tolstoy conceives it to be. On the other hand, only very young children in Dostoevsky are completely good and innocent; from an early age children are susceptible to corruption. Thus in book IO of The Brothers Karamazov the creepy Smerdyakov entices little Ilya Snegiryov to feed a piece of bread with a needle in it to a hungry stray dog. In the adult the good impulses and experiences of childhood remain an underground spring that, more or less often, depending on the individual and circumstances, bubbles to the surface. Perhaps because the goodness of early childhood is of a higher, and even unearthly, order, it rarely directs our actions. Dostoevsky's characters often see the good with-

Childhood in Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy out being able to do it. There is an unbridgeable gap between their good intentions and their naturally selfish desires. Dostoevsky may have been influenced by Herzen's Letters on the Study of Nature, which was published in I845-46 in Notes of the Fatherland. 4 Dostoevsky's own works were appearing at the same time in this journal, which he was therefore certainly reading. In I872, he recommended the letters as the best philosophy in Europe. In I 8 6 5, in notes penned at the bier of his dead wife Marya Dmitrievna, he referred to them while he declared the desire for virtue to be unnatural.5 In his Letters, Herzen praises Rousseau for his critique of the artificiality and injustice of society but rejects a return to nature. To go backward is unnatural, Herzen claims: The forms of the historical world are just as natural as the forms of the physical world! But you should realize that in nature itself-in this infinite present without remorse and hope-the living, as it develops, continuously rejects its past form, it exposes as unnatural that organism which yesterday was fully satisfactory. 6

Nature for Herzen is an "infinite present without remorse and hope." Morality takes shape within a history driven but not shaped by the continuous motion, or pure natural vitality, of humankind. Dostoevsky is not an atheist like Herzen, but he is philosophically oriented toward historical forms and the future; for him, too, nature is necessary but morally neutral. The young Tolstoy is oriented toward the past and nature, which teaches moderation and self-overcoming in the name of ethical harmony. Dostoevsky's works contain many memorable portraits of children, culminating in the creation, with The Brothers Karamazov, of a whole society of them. The novel before this last one, The Adolescent, is also a detailed exploration of adolescent psychology, especially the troubled relation of a son to his father. As a child psychologist, Tolstoy was both an inspiration and a rival to Dostoevsky. In exile in Siberia, Dostoevsky first noticed Tolstoy as the pseudonymous writer of Adolescence, which he read in the Contemporary in I 8 55. 7 Starting with his novel The Insulted and the Injured (I86I), Dostoevsky referred in print a number of times, directly or indirectly, to passages from Tolstoy's trilogy. In I869 he conceived the idea of a series of novels, the first of which, in obvious reference to Tolstoy's work, would be called Childhood. 8 The most important unrealized novel of the period, "The Life of a Great Sinner," which fed into the three major novels of the I87os (The Demons, The Adolescent, and The Brothers Karamazov), grew from this beginning. In his notes to "The Life of a Great Sinner," Dostoevsky explicitly contrasted its hero to Nikolenka Irteniev, the hero of Childhood and Adolescence. 9 As we shall see, he learned from Tolstoy's autobiographical trilogy and polemicized with it at the same time.

Chapter Eight CHILDHOOD IN EARLY DOSTOEVSKY

Dostoevsky first wrote about children in the I84os, that is, before Tolstoy began to publish. Like Tolstoy, he believed in the natural goodness of children.10 At the same time, children according to him are extraordinarily sensitive to stimuli, and this works for both good and ill in their education. His very first work, Poor Folk (I846), contains an encomium to childhood by the female protagonist Varvara. In "A Christmas Tree and a Wedding" (Elka i svad'ba; I848), a licentious older man covets a beautiful and innocent child heiress at a Christmas party and marries her a few years later. The unfinished but published novel Netochka Nezvanova (I849) recounts the unhappy childhood of a woman who will become a famous singer. "The Little Hero" (Malen'kii geroi, written I 849, published I 8 57) relates the first, unself-conscious passion of an eleven-year-old boy for a beautiful woman. To impress his damsel, he rides a wild horse that an older and more cautious beau declines to mount. When he happens upon the woman's tryst with her lover and then sees her drop a packet of letters, he finds a way to return the letters without directly confronting her. There is not a trace of selfish motivation in the boy's maneuvering. The "little hero" behaves with unthinking nobility. For this reason Dostoevsky characterized the story, which he wrote in the Petropavlovsky Fortress while awaiting trial for treason, as the product of "quiet, good, kind dreams." 11 What distinguishes the boy from adult lovers is the purity of his love, and hence his willingness to sacrifice himself for it. Netochka Nezvanova is also depicted as a pure soul who mistreats her mother only because of her "fantastical, exclusive love" for her stepfather. 12 Later she falls in love with Princess Katya, and again the origins of that love, whatever the course it subsequently takes, are seen as pure-in this case, love of Katya's physical and spiritual beauty. 13 Netochka finally conquers Katya when she unhesitatingly takes the blame-and subsequently the punishment-for a misdeed committed by her friend. In Dostoevsky's early portraits of children, there are no detailed accounts of childhood before the stirring of adolescence. Only scattered clues suggest how Dostoevsky may have conceived it then. (Later works, up to and including The Brothers Karamazov, offer a fuller picture.) Varvara in Poor Folk recollects an idyllic early childhood to which she contrasts her subsequent unhappy existence. 14 She remembers an enormous and still lake, "two steps" from the house, under an incline so steep that one would stare straight down into the water. A gull-like a single soul-wheels above the lake, dips into it, then "drowns" in the mistY In this early romantic image the lake and the imagery associated with it function as the

Childhood in Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy

I4 3

objective correlative to Dostoevsky's understanding of early childhood as the sleep of consciousness. Netochka Nezvanova retains only a few impressions, "as if in a dream," from before her ninth year. 16 When self-consciousness does awaken in her, "as from a deep sleep," it develops unnaturally quickly because of unhappy circumstancesY Her first detailed memory is of a fight between her parents. 18 In this quarrel and subsequently, she inexplicably adores her stepfather and takes his side, hating and fearing her mother. Netochka becomes the first in a long line of unhappy and unnaturally thoughtful children from dysfunctional families in Dostoevsky's fiction. Dostoevsky's immediate literary model both for childhood virtue and for these unhappy children was Charles Dickens, who in Oliver Twist (r838) and The Old Curiosity Shop (r84o) "put a child at the centre of a novel for adults," a practice "virtually unknown" at the time. 19 Dickens became immensely popular in Russia in the course of the r84os. Oliver Twist was published there in r84r. The Old Curiosity Shop came out in r 843 in the Library for Reading, and then partially in the Moscovite (Moskvitianin) in r847 in a fragment entitled "Nelly. A Tale by Charles Dickens." Dombey and Son, about the lonely childhood of a young girl unloved by her egotist father, was the novel sensation of r847-48, appearing simultaneously in two of the most popular journals (the Contemporary and Notes of the Fatherland). 20 No wonder critics have seen a resemblance between Florence and Paul Dombey and the children depicted in Netochka Nezvanova. 21 In his earliest works, Dickens emphasizes the innocence and goodwill even of abused children. 22 Oliver Twist, for instance, remains a good boy through all his afflictions. Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop is so saintly that many readers-especially literary critics-have hated her. In an open reference to Dickens and to this work, Dostoevsky bestowed the name Nelli on the orphaned child whom the narrator in The Insulted and the Injured rescues and takes to live with him. 23 Critics have used her example, compared to that of Little Nell, to claim Dostoevsky's superiority as a realist writer. Whether or not Dostoevsky improves or simply extends Dickens,24 in The Insulted and the Injured he does correct himself by creating a character who, more than his own Netochka Nezvanova and unlike her model, Florence Dombey, has been psychologically damaged by the evil inflicted on her. No matter how cruel her father is to her, Florence loves him steadfastly. No matter how her stepfather uses her and mistreats her mother, Netochka loves him, just as she subsequently loves Princess Katya, no matter how Katya tortures her. Little Nell has not one unvirtuous impulse, while Nelli Valkovsky struggles with several. She both obsessively loves Vanya (the narrator) and tries to escape this love as a potential source

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of dependence and suffering. Let it not be forgotten, however, that virtue does triumph in the end in Nelli, who, like Little Nell, sacrifices her life for Vanya and her new friends. She therefore represents Dostoevsky's tribute to Dickens as a fellow believer in both the existence of virtue and its vulnerability in an evil world. 25 However important Dickens's portraits of virtuous children may be, in fact he offered the young Dostoevsky a more nuanced depiction of childhood than is often recognized. 26 Like Dostoevsky, for one thing, he does occasionally portray ordinary healthy children, such as the schoolboys in The Old Curiosity Shop. Even Little Nell has had a happy childhood. In chapter r, she still is capable of a laugh that is "childlike and full of hilarity," and Kit, in jail in chapter 6r, nostalgically remembers happier times and mutual laughter before her grandfather's addiction to gambling ruins Nell's life. Nell responds to affliction by becoming a martyr to virtue, but no more than Dostoevsky does Dickens neglect the almost irresistible effect of outside evil on healthy souls. Oliver Twist, for instance, contains bad children, like Noah Claypole, the Artful Dodger (who is the same age as Oliver), and perhaps most notably Oliver's half-brother Edward Leeford (Monks), who "had, from an infant, repulsed [his father] with coldness and aversion" (chapter sr). When Oliver is returned to the society of criminals after Fagin has left him in miserable solitary confinement and gladly cleans the Dodger's boots; and when he laughs heartily at Fagin's stories of robberies he has committed, these scenes demonstrate Fagin's proven and hitherto invariably successful method of distilling the poison of vice into the souls of young boys. 27 Oliver emerges unscathed from Fagin's humiliations, while Arkadii Dolgorukii, in The Adolescent, is seen to change and grow twisted in the school where the headmaster sets out to crush him. But what about Sonya Marmeladova in Crime and Punishment, or Arkadii Dolgorukii's mother, also named Sonya? We know nothing about the childhood of these characters, though we learn from them that in Dostoevsky, as in Dickens, virtuous souls may escape the effects of vice altogether. Evil exists in the worlds created by both writers, but according to both, it seems, we are born innocent and only later corrupted. The two writers provide examples of pure and unexplained adult evil, while neither gives an unambiguous example of a child evil from birth. Blandois-Rigaud (from Little Dorrit) is evil through and through, but we know nothing of his background. In Oliver Twist's half-brother Monks, whose childhood is sketched, evil seems to be a perversion rather than a natural predisposition. His "rebellious disposition, vice, malice, and premature bad passions" stem from his mother's early teaching him to hate his father. Monks's evil is unnatural, sick, as indicated by the fits that wrack him.

Childhood in Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy

14 5

Jonas Chuzzlewit becomes a murderer under the tutelage of his father, who educates him to be perfectly selfish and then reaps the bitter harvest of this education when his son hurries him to his grave (Martin Chuzzlewit, r844). Steerforth in David Copperfield (1850) commits evil deeds because of an undisciplined will encouraged rather than harnessed by his mother. Here Dickens offers a fledgling psychological explanation of a Byronic hero. Like Katya in Netochka Nezvanova (which appeared before David Copperfield), Steerforth is spoiled rotten but intrinsically as beautiful as David conceives him to be. In Dostoevsky even Pyotr Verkhovensky (The Demons) and Smerdyakov (The Brothers Karamazov) are seen to have been born innocent, if not beautiful. The strong-willed Stavrogin was spoiled by his mother and received a corrupting education from Stepan Verkhovensky.

CHILDHOOD IN TOLSTOY

As Dombey and Son, with its story of an unloved and unhappy child, hovers in the background of Netochka Nezvanova, so David Copperfield, which was first published in Russia in the journal Moscovite (Moskvitianin) in 1849 and then concurrently in the Moscovite (again!), the Contemporary, and Notes of the Fatherland in r8 51,Z8 inspired and influenced Tolstoy as he was writing Childhood. 29 In a letter of October 25, r891, toM. M. Lederle, Tolstoy listed this novel as having had an "enormous" impact on him in his youth. 30 Dickens drew on his own life in David Copperfield to create an especially vivid account of the perceptions and fragmentary memories of a happy, healthy child. Following Dickens in this, Tolstoy created a model of Russian childhood for all subsequent Russian authors on the subjectY In addition, David Copperfield's autobiographical origins produced a more well-rounded character than any Dickens had so far conceived. David's greater psychological complexity made him a model for Tolstoy's Nikolenka Irteniev in Childhood, which combines "the individualizing detail of a Dickens or a Gogol with the psychological analysis of a Stendhal. " 32 Like David and Dostoevsky's Netochka Nezvanova, Tolstoy's hero Nikolenka Irteniev is no saint. He is naturally affectionate, but he would not sacrifice himself for others. Among the adults in the novel, only Maman and Natalya Savishna do so. Nikolenka remembers them as having given him unconditional love in childhood, but he is never shown emulating them. Tolstoy does not found the natural goodness of childhood on duty or self-sacrifice. Rather, Nikolenka exists within a natural flow of feelings, good and bad, no one of which takes permanent precedence over the rest. His goodness consists mostly in an absence of passions that might

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lead him to harm others, and in his sincerity. Whatever he feels, he feels absolutely. He has his bad moments, but they pass without serious consequences and are replaced by equally strong good ones. The central thematic chapter of the book, "Childhood," illustrates the conditions necessary for a happy childhood. The child sleeps and, awakened by his mother's caress, reacts with uncomplicated love. Along with "innocent merriment," this love is said to be the essence of childhood. The tension in later life between self-love and love of others is not felt here. Love of mother precedes love of God, Who in the child's first prayers is confounded with her. So long as Nikolenka can sustain that absolute faith in the benevolence of his parents (and, by extension, of God) toward him, so long as he does not feel separated from them, he remains in a state of absolute happiness. Childhood opens with an account of the end of this uncomplicated and happy stage of early childhood. Nikolenka is startled from sleep by his tutor, Karl Ivanych, who, swatting flies, accidentally lets one fall on the sleeping boy. Nikolenka's reaction to this chance event signals a momentous maturational change in the boy; hence the narrator's mention, seemingly coincidental, of his birthday and age at the time. Nikolenka unexpectedly takes umbrage at Karl Ivanych's act: "Of course I am only a small boy," I thought, "but still he ought not to disturb me. Why doesn't he go killing flies round Volodya's bed? There are heaps of them there. But no, Volodya is older than me: I am the youngest of all-that is why I am tormented. " 33

Nikolenka has awoken from the sleep of early childhood, and his first moment of consciousness is one of pride and anger; the self asserts itself visa-vis others. This movement is fatal to the sense of unity between the child and his mother. 34 It stimulates a related feeling of shame that presently causes Nikolenka to invent a dream about his mother's death to account for his tears to Karl Ivanych. The dynamic set in motion by Nikolenka's original impulse of self-assertion now generates a lie that clouds the transparency of his relationship with his tutor. Lies are unnatural, but there is nothing to suggest that Nikolenka's self-assertion is. Whether by natural or unnatural means, in the course of Tolstoy's first novel childhood does come to an end. There is plenty of innocent merriment and love, but mingled with them one after another passions sound warning bells. Along with Nikolenka's anger and his desire to be a big boy, there is incipient sensuality, expressed in the kiss he plants on Katya's bare shoulder (chapter 9) and again when he kisses her in the dark closet where the children spy on the holy fool Grisha (chapter r2). More ominous, and really in a different category from these natural sexual impulses,

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are the first urgings of amour propre, which appropriately appear only as Nikolenka leaves his mother for the city. (Simple vanity occurs earlier.) This feeling, a product of self-consciousness first identified by Tolstoy's philosophic mentor Jean-Jacques Rousseau, both extends and undermines natural self-love by making it dependent on the love that others feel for us. After a moment of pure grief, during which "I embraced her and, clinging to her, I cried and cried, thinking of nothing but my grief," on the open road Nikolenka continues to weep, "and the thought that my tears showed my sensitivity gave me satisfaction and comfort" (chapter q). In chapter 1, Nikolenka lies about his tears out of shame at his impulsive anger at Karl Ivanych. His behavior is duplicitous, complicated, but not yet false. Even in chapter 14 he genuinely feels grief while taking pleasure in displaying it. Only in the city, away from his mother, does he for the first time counterfeit a feeling in order to impress others. In his poem in honor of his grandmother's birthday, the demands of rhyme prompt him to say that he loves his grandmother more than his mother. Nikolai's vanity as an author takes precedence over his love of the truth-and even of his mother. This lie, which troubles Nikolenka, goes along with a new concern with his appearance: he conceals how uncomfortable he feels in his new city clothes because they make him look so grown up. The greatest threat to childhood is a growing self-consciousness that threatens sincerity and imposes a self-conscious pattern on the natural flow of sensations. This pattern develops from a new and unhealthy dependency on others who, unlike Nikolenka's mother as he perceives her, are totally separate from him and do not necessarily have his best interests at heart. Throughout Childhood Nikolenka gradually becomes more aware of his effect on others. Grieving at his mother's open coffin, he at one point experiences a loss of "the consciousness of my own existence" and "some kind of high, inexplicably pleasant and sad pleasure." Both before and after this, however, other feelings, amour propre chief among them, dilute his grief. First he desires to "show that I was more griefstricken than others"; and he worries "about the effect that I was having on others." A new ability to analyze himself creates a set of new selfcentered feelings, along with new pleasures. Knowing that he is bereaved, taking pleasure in this state, Nikolenka tries to intensify his "consciousness of unhappiness, and this egoistic feeling more than others stifled true sadness in me." Nikolenka actually is enjoying his own misfortune because of the pity he feels for himself and, more important, the pity that he imagines others feel for him. 35 Every time he makes himself the object of his own analysis, he sees himself as others see him and therefore involves himself in an action of imagination fueled by amour propre. In this way he gradually becomes alienated from his true feelings and addicted to

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guessing and manipulating the feelings of others. Even in Childhood, the stage is set for-indeed the curtain has already risen on-the adult drama of pride and vanity.

DOSTOEVSKY'S REACTION TO TOLSTOY'S 'CHILDHOOD'

Despite Tolstoy's use of sentimental rhetoric, his portrayal of childhood was both more realistic and more detailed than anything written before him in Russian literature. Dostoevsky certainly read it with intense interest and learned from it. It corresponds almost exactly with Myshkin's description in The Idiot of the behavior of the Swiss children. The village children too are not angels-they fight and cry as well as laugh-and they, like Nikolenka, slip easily from one mood to another. 36 Despite this correspondence, Dostoevsky also disagreed with the new writer on childhood, not only as is obvious or well documented but in less noticed ways as well. Dostoevsky rarely describes happy children like the young Nikolenka Irteniev. Such children, according to him, do not reflect contemporary reality. In the I87os, he contrasted his unhappy families with Tolstoy's happy ones, which were, according to Dostoevsky, relics of a more harmonious, but now irrelevant, gentry past. 37 The destructive impulses of Tolstoy's gentry children, safely contained in dreams and fantasies, were actualized in Dostoevsky's contemporary families, which did not provide unconditional love or security. 38 Passages such as Grandma's clucking to Prince Ivan Ivanovich over Papa's behavior in Childhood or the story of the Epifanovs in Youth are possible Dostoevskian situations that Tolstoy conceived but did not choose to foreground. 39 On the other hand, Tolstoy's realism in his depiction of children affected Dostoevsky's sentimentalism. It is after the appearance of Tolstoy's trilogy that Dostoevsky, cutting loose in The Insulted and the Injured from his Dickensian moorings, begins his more radical exploration of the damaged psyche of the abused child. This same novel also contains his first critique of childhood as Tolstoy portrayed it. In I 8 55, still in exile in Siberia, Dostoevsky read Adolescence in the journal Contemporary and was sufficiently struck by it to ask a correspondent the name of its pseudonymous author. 40 Half a year later he praises "L. T." (Tolstoy) in a letter to his literary correspondent A. N. Maikov. 41 The Adolescent (I 87 5) is among other things Dostoevsky's response to Tolstoy's "gentry" accounts (as he dubbed them) of childhood and adolescence; Dostoevsky explicitly mentions these accounts again in the I877 Diary of a Writer. 42

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The first reference in Dostoevsky's fiction to Tolstoy's trilogy occurs in r86r, in The Insulted and the Injured, where a character very much like Nikolenka plays a major role. The story is told retrospectively by a writer, Ivan Petrovich (or Vanya). Young Prince Alyosha Valkovsky is the lover of Vanya's beloved, Natasha. The families of the lovers are feuding, and Alyosha's father is plotting to marry his son to a rich heiress named Katya. The lovers are living together and planning to marry, but old Prince Valkovsky succeeds in scuttling these plans. In this he benefits from a thorough understanding of Alyosha's character, which is repeatedly described as childlike. The "two best virtues" of childhood, according to Tolstoy in Childhood, are "innocent merriment and a limitless need for love" ("nevinnaia veselost' i bespredel'naia potrebnost' liubvi"; chapter I 5). In The Insulted and the Injured, Alyosha is first described from hearsay by the narrator as "merry (veselyi) and ingenuous, with a soul that was open and capable of the noblest feelings, with a loving, just and grateful heart. " 43 After he has met Alyosha, the narrator Vanya is struck by his "ingenuous, completely childlike merriment" (veselost'). 44 Tolstoy praises children for their sincerity. The narrator of The Insulted and the Injured emphasizes Alyosha's frankness, his sincerity: "Even the very egoism in him was attractive, precisely because, perhaps, it was not hidden. Nothing in him was hidden." 45 Dostoevsky himself noticed the similarities between Alyosha and Nikolenka and drew attention to them by having Alyosha quote from Childhood and recommend Childhood and Adolescence to Natasha and the narrator. 46 Dostoevsky did not simply model Alyosha on Nikolenka. Alyosha is related to the man with the "good heart" first described in "Petersburg Chronicle" published in 1847 (in the St. Petersburg News [Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti]). This man follows his impulses without worrying about their effect on others. He is all sincerity. 47 As an example of such a man, Dostoevsky cites one Yulian Mastakovich, who is preparing in middle age to marry a seventeen-year-old girl but plans to keep his mistress, a widow who came to his office two years previously requesting help. Yulian Mastakovich is also the name of the slightly comic but menacing older man in "A Christmas Tree and A Wedding." In "Petersburg Chronicle," the type of the man with the naturally good but untutored heart replaces the romantic villain. 48 In The Insulted and the Injured, the villain is back, in the person of Prince Valkovsky. As a realist, in the r84os the young Dostoevsky wanted to supply a psychological explanation for evil, which was to be understood as immature narcissism combined with full-blown passions, but without any active natural desire to hurt another person. His experience in a Siberian prison camp may have changed Dostoevsky's mind about the possibility of pure evil. In any case, Prince Valkovsky, created after Siberia,

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is his first major example of a self-consciously evil villain, who loves perversity for its own sake and actively enjoys reducing others to the status of objects. The prince's son, Alyosha Valkovsky, is more like those earlier villains from the I 84os, an egotist rather than a sadist. He hurts others unintentionally, in pursuit of his own impulses. He is "Rousseau's homme de la nature, an innocent before the Fall, a heart innately good, beyond moral will and the morallaw." 49 Alyosha's relation to Rousseau may be indirect, through Karamzin's Erast (in "Poor Liza" or "The Sensitive and the Cold Man. Two characters"), but the connection with Rousseau relates Alyosha to Tolstoy's Nikolenka, another Rousseauian natural man. Within the (narrow) restrictions that Alyosha's egotism imposes on him, he not only deplores hurting others but actively wants to help them. The central action of the novel nevertheless revolves around his betraying one love for another. It is at this point, in what we may take to be a critique of Tolstoy's Rousseauianism, that Dostoevsky consciously links Alyosha to Nikolenka lrteniev. Alyosha suggests to the narrator, Ivan Petrovich (or Vanya), that they switch from the formal you (Vy) to the informal thou (ty). When Ivan Petrovich agrees, Alyosha is overjoyed. Thank God! In fact this had occurred to me a hundred times already. But I still for some reason didn't dare to speak to you [vam]. There, I am saying you now. And really it is very hard to say thou [ty]. This, it seems to me, is brought out very well somewhere in Tolstoy. Two people promise each other to say thou, but they simply can't do it, and they just avoid phrases that have pronouns in them. Oh, Natasha! Let's read Childhood and Adolescence together sometime; oh, how fine this is!5°

Alyosha sincerely loves Ivan Petrovich, from whom he has stolen Natasha, and he loves Natasha, whom he is going to leave for Katya. In Childhood the two characters who agree to use thou are Nikolenka and Sonya, who meet at a party. Nikolenka has just fallen in love with Sonya and therefore abandoned his first love, Seryozha lvin, for her. At the end of this episode (in "After the Mazurka"), Nikolenka muses about the pleasures of giving up an old love for a new one: For the first time in my life I betrayed a love, and for the first time I experienced the sweetness of this feeling. I was happy to exchange the worn out feeling of habitual attachment for a fresh feeling of love full of mystery and uncertainty. Above all, to fall out of love and to love at the same time means to love twice as strongly as before.

The same boy who sincerely loves first Seryozha and then Sonya loves himself more than anyone else, and he does not scruple to indulge in the pleasure of exchanging an old love for a new one. Nikolenka is sincerely attracted to Sonya, as he was to Seryozha; he follows the inclinations of his

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heart in giving up one for the other. Only the childish nature of the attachments masks the seriousness of the betrayal. Tolstoy as author may intend for his reader to pick up on the difference between this more selfish feeling and the unconditional love between mother and child, but his narrator, the older Nikolenka, does not comment on it. He is not ashamed of this behavior, as he is elsewhere of his insincerity. By undercutting Alyosha, Dostoevsky would seem to be questioning the idea of childish goodness, at least as it is depicted by Tolstoy. According to Dostoevsky's narrator, Alyosha is "weak, trusting and timid of heart; he has absolutely no will." 51 But children in Dostoevsky are not all like Alyosha in this regard. Katya, Natasha's successful rival, is strongwilled. Sounding like an analytical Tolstoyan narrator, Ivan Petrovich (Vanya) assigns her to the category of "thoughtful children [zadumyvaiushchikhsia detei], who are rather numerous in our families. " 52 The qualifying subordinate clause indicates that, like Netochka Nezvanova (and like Nelli, the only child in The Insulted and the Injured), under conditions peculiar to contemporary Russian society Katya has become "a naive bifurcation of child and reflecting woman." Katya's goodwill itself is not, however, simply a result of sad experience and early maturity. She possesses "a childlike and in the highest degree honest thirst for truth and justice, and an unshakable faith in her own yearnings." 53 In her strong will and her beauty, she resembles the Katya in Netochka Nezvanova, of whom the narrator says that "everything in her was beautiful. " 54 Like Alyosha, she is sincere, while her moral will lends this sincerity a dignity that he lacks. The strength of Katya's will is not tested in the novel. Unlike any of the other characters, she gets to keep her beloved. Were selfsacrifice necessary, Katya believes that she would proffer it, as in fact she does at the beginning of her relationship with Alyosha. If she did have to sacrifice herself, however, she would sacrifice the easy spontaneity of childhood as well and become more like Natasha. Even more ominously, Katya herself has already begun to doubt the disinterestedness of her motives in accepting Alyosha's love for her. In the past she has simply consulted her heart in order to do the right thing. This time she has to consult the narrator, and she confides that "my heart is not quite pure. If it were pure, I would know what to decide." 55 What keeps Katya childlike is a lack of experience and therefore of practical judgment: "This childlike quality of hers, her outstanding mind and at the same time a certain lack of sense-all this was somehow more akin to Alyosha. " 56 Old Prince Valkovsky, by contrast, has "sense" in abundance but has lost all goodwill, if indeed he ever had it. Sense-rassudokin Valkovsky leads him to operate as if he and those whom he manipulates act only out of calculated self-interest, without what he calls idealism. He

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claims, in the speech to the narrator that follows directly after Ivan Petrovich's meeting with Katya, that "at the base of all human virtues there lies the very deepest egoism," and even that there is a perverse pleasure in the suffering that victims of evil and oppression feel. 57 Katya differs from the prince in another way as well. The narrator comes away from three hours spent with her convinced that she "simply doesn't know the whole secret of the relations of a man and a woman"; that is, she is ignorant of the sex act. 58 Valkovsky, in the same conversation with the narrator after he leaves Katya, by contrast revels in a sensuality so depraved as to rival or even exceed that of the Marquis de Sade, whom he mentions. 59 As for Alyosha, no doubt encouraged by his father, he visits prostitutes while he is living with Natasha and even during the first blush of his love for Katya. 60 In "The Little Hero" Dostoevsky suggests that carnal knowledge is one thing that separates adolescence from childhood. The ladies at the dacha caress the boy and arouse new sensations in him that make him "ashamed of and even offended at ... my various childish privileges." He retreats to a hiding place as if to catch my breath and recollect what up until then, it seemed to me, I very well remembered and about which I now suddenly had forgotten, but without which, however, I couldn't in the meantime show myself and be in any way at all. 61

On the borderline between childhood and adolescence, the boy tries to retain a state of being, an innocence, that is slipping away from him while a new state is only forming. At issue in "The Little Hero" is the meaning of human relations and especially love. Children are freer than adults. Their natural dependence and innocent love of others are not challenged by physical passions such as those stirring in the boy, nor by their corollary, a more developed sense of self. As physical passions do awaken, they mix with the childish propensity for unselfish love. The little hero is in love without knowing it, and when he does realize it, his "first childhood ended with this moment." 62 In Netochka Nezvanova, Katya and Netochka are in a more developed stage of consciousness. They know that they are "in love," they kiss each other until their lips swell, but they have no knowledge of and therefore no conscious desire for physical consummation. At this transitional stage in their lives, their desire for one other intensifies while remaining platonic. Sexual innocence, or in the case of the two girls in Netochka Nezvanova still unself-conscious sexuality, is the key to their remaining childlike. 63 The sadistic element of adult relationships is entirely lacking in Netochka, and mostly benign even in the proud Princess Katya. No full-blown cycle of love and hate develops because Netochka, no matter how provoked, does nothing actively to incite Katya to hate her.

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Back in The Insulted and the Injured, by his own admission and in his conversation with the horrified narrator, Valkovsky self-consciously represents and exploits raw "self" (lichnost'), which he defines as ia sam, "just me," the extremes of which French writers such as Laclos (r74I-r8o3) emphasized. He brags openly about his womanizing and even his love of sexual perversions. One after another Dostoevsky subjects his sentimentally idealistic characters to a psychological reality akin to the evil prince's cynical perspective. So, for instance, the narrator knows that he is sacrificing Nelli's life to his love for Natasha by asking the dangerously ill child to tell her story to Natasha's father. Hearing the story, the father does reconcile with his daughter, but Nelli-who, knowing the risks to her health, has agreed to speak out of her passion for the narrator-dies. 64 As both Mochulsky and Frank observe, the narrator, who is Dostoevsky's portrait of himself as a youthful idealist, does not survive this revelation of the power of egoistic passion. He is dying as he writes his memoirs. 65 Of the other major characters in the novel, only the sexually pure Katya is seemingly never impressed by Valkovsky or influenced by his point of view; one wonders whether her invulnerability would survive her sexual initiation. Alyosha has a long way to go before he is like his father. He is still childlike because he is spontaneous and loving. Unlike Katya, however, he has left behind the sexual innocence of childhood. Alyosha is not simply a little child. He is an attractively childlike but rather depraved youth, a type that Dostoevsky later, in his r87o plans for the "Life of a Great Sinner," called "an offshoot, grown petty to the point of swinishness, of that noble house of a count depicted by Tolstoy in Childhood and Adolescence. »6 6 Without the positive will to do good, and with full-blown sexual passions, Alyosha's loving impulses cause more harm than good. He truly loves everyone-Natasha, the narrator Ivan Petrovich, the elder Ikhmenevs (Natasha's parents), Katya, his father-and he betrays or is betrayed by almost all of them. Take the amorphous loving nature of the child, add passion and a developing ego (in this case encouraged by an evil father), kindle the mix with a spark of lust, and the harmonious world of loving personalities natural in childhood ignites and blows up, leaving the distorted jumble of clashing personalities characteristic of the adult world in a Dostoevsky novel. In The Insulted and the Injured the suitability of childhood as a model for adult virtue is questioned. The various victims of Prince Valkovsky are said to be childish in their Schillerian idealism. The prince sneers at their unworldliness, and Dostoevsky seems to reject it as well. Valkovsky is even said to behave like a naughty child. He confesses his "childish caprices" to the narrator, how he loves to drop his mask and stick out his tongue at a "young Schiller. " 67 He justifies his own behavior as a "naive and ingenuous

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openness" 68 and tells the narrator that "I am more open than others and that's all there is to it.... I don't make a secret of what others hide even from themselves." 69 Perhaps in this way he is not so different from a Yulian Mastakovich (the Dostoevsky villain from the r84os) liberated from false shame and especially social convention. For both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, children embody natural human vitality, the "innocent merriment" of which Tolstoy speaks. Valkovsky brags about his phenomenal vitality and his rampant sensuality; these are the corrupt adult versions of the child's merriment and need for love. It is significant, of course, that all references to Valkovsky's childishness come from his lips and therefore express his self-indulgence toward his own viciousness. Although it is useful for a moment to regard him as a malevolent grown-up child, we know that Valkovsky is never really nai:ve and ingenuous like Alyosha. The difference between the two of them lies in the still genuine innocence of the one, incomprehensible now (and perhaps always) to the other. Dostoevsky's point would then seem to be that adults with their grown-up passions need more than a childish perspective for moral guidance. There would be no simple return after the development of the passions to the innocence of childhood. For all the prince's power in The Insulted and the Injured, however, Dostoevsky is not simply abandoning his earlier idealism or his love of childish innocence for cynical egotism. Mochulsky exaggerates when he claims that the novel ends with all Dostoevsky's Schillerian heroes slain and rational egotism triumphant/0 Valkovsky is repeatedly stymied by acts of love that he has not expected and cannot explain. He can understand Natasha's pride and her desire to dominate Alyosha. He can only undercut, but does not anticipate, Alyosha's unexpectedly deep attachment to Natasha.7 1 After Alyosha has left for the country with Katya, Valkovsky goes to Natasha fully confident that she will accept his sleazy offer of assistance and that her father will not take her back. 72 He turns out to be wrong on both counts, and Natasha's stubborn nobility leaves him grinding his teeth like the melodramatic villain he is. Seemingly at a confused halfway point between idealism and naturalism, Dostoevsky has actually taken a decisive step in The Insulted and the Injured toward the realistic idealism of his mature works. He later criticized the book as containing "many characters who are puppets and not human beings, walking books and not characters who have assumed artistic form"; but he insisted at the same time that it contained "half a hundred excellent pages." 73 Among them he must have included a moment of indecision in Natasha. Alyosha has not visited her in five days. Thoroughly understanding his psychology and aware of his romance with Katya, she sees everything that his father does. But while she is waiting for Alyosha,

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and before the confrontation with the prince and also the confirmation of her suspicions about Alyosha, she prepares a lavish supper for him in case her suspicions are unfounded. So she hopes and she does not know, while the scheming prince, standing on the low but solid ground of rational egotism, is sure of himself. Just as Natasha is able to defeat her own egotism for Alyosha's sake, so she hopes that he will sacrifice his love of Katya for her. Here Natasha steps out of type to reveal the spiritual struggle within her. Since she loves Alyosha, she believes in his goodness, which, in fact, Dostoevsky never denies. It is surely significant in this respect that two outstanding critics, Mochulsky and Frank, can take opposing stands on Alyosha. For Mochulsky, he is "the incarnated impotence of natural goodness," a "most fierce egotist"; while Frank sees him as a less spiritual predecessor of Prince Myshkin, Dostoevsky's most successful rendition of the simply good man.74 Lacking will, Alyosha cannot choose between loves, or indeed do anything but follow his present impulses; but contrary to his father's pure cynicism, those impulses include good as well as bad ones, and even good ones that may be in conflict with one another. Alyosha incarnates Dostoevsky's insight about children who, because of their extraordinary sensitivity to stimuli, may lack moral will even if they know that what they want to do is wrong. This mixture of motives is present in Natasha. In her love for Alyosha she acknowledges her beloved's unique individuality, confessing that "I couldn't look calmly at his face: not a single other person has ever had such an expression." Within the same stream of thought she declares that she wants this unique being exclusively for herself-that he will be mine, as soon as possible mine" -but that what she wants most of all for him is "that he will be immensely and eternally happy." 75 Her desire to own Alyosha is a root cause of evil-she wants to own what she loves-while her loving recognition of his separate and unique being and her sincere desire for his happiness is the basis of Dostoevskian ethics. The old prince asserts that Natasha relinquishes Alyosha to Katya entirely for reasons of pride.76 Natasha's confession to the narrator makes it clear that in fact her motives are mixed: she is proud, and does give up Alyosha partly out of pride, but she also truly loves him and will sacrifice herself for his happiness. Contrary to what we might expect, Dostoevsky more than Tolstoy seems to believe in the persistence into adult life of innocent, unselfish, and childlike love. The reason for this, I would suggest, is that for Dostoevsky childhood goodness is higher, purer, than any deemed humanly possible by Tolstoy. It represents the possibility of a nonegoistic human being which in adulthood persists along with the egotism that develops with reason and the passions. In Tolstoy even the smallest children, such as baby Nikolenka in the chapter "Childhood," are fundamentally egoistic.

Chapter Eight They love their parents as much as themselves only because they do not yet distinguish themselves from others. Tolstoy's humanism is founded on a Goethean acceptance of the limitations of physical existence, which in living beings includes a natural and unconquerable self-love. Hence Tolstoy is more sympathetic than Dostoevsky toward self-love and presents the demands of children for unconditional love as natural. 77 Dostoevsky conceived of little children as yet untainted by the laws of nature. In the words of Ivan Karamazov, "little children have not eaten anything and are not guilty of anything .... Children, while they are children, up to the age of seven, for example, are terribly remote from grown-up people, as if they were different beings, of a different nature." 78 Despite the powerful urges of selfish passion, even mixing with them in a contradictory stew of emotions, childlike unselfish love can persist to provide a virtuous alternative that is sensed if not chosen. Tolstoy may have had this struggle of good and evil in mind when he praised The Insulted and the Injured in a letter that he wrote Strakhov on the occasion of Dostoevsky's death: "The other day, before his death, I read through The Insulted and the Injured and I was moved." Tolstoy-who reported in this letter that he now realised Dostoevsky had been his best friend, "the very, very closest, the dearest, the man most necessary to me"-would have admired his fellow writer's seeming confidence in the existence of pure good in the soul, which Tolstoy often doubted.7 9 Tolstoy insists on a selfish motivation in all our actions, even (and especially) the good ones. This is true even for small children who are good simply because they have no evil desires. As with Dostoevsky, moreover, Tolstoy, from Childhood on, sees that childish innocence, once lost, cannot be regained. It is significant in this regard that the depiction of absolute childhood happiness and security in the chapter "Childhood" comes after the opening chapter of the novel, and plays off it. The movement toward happiness is backward, into a past that casts an idyllic shadow over later childhood and the present in which the narrator is writing. The very self-consciousness of the narrator that causes him to look longingly to a happy past makes a simple return to it impossible. But even if this obstacle did not exist, childhood in and of itself would not constitute a model for virtue based on self-sacrifice. Even in Childhood, the virtuous adults are portrayed not as childlike but as Christian. Still, in related works from the same period Tolstoy claims that a certain degree of virtue is natural, to be rediscovered in a natural conscience that civilized life can deaden. Reading the trilogy and Tolstoy's other works in the I 8 sos, Dostoevsky picks up on this difference between himself and Tolstoy. The brilliant diamond that Tolstoy (in "A History of Yesterday") claimed to be buried in the soul of civilized man needs work, according to Dostoevsky, in order to achieve its fulllus-

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ter. In the article in r847 in which he criticized the man with the good heart, Dostoevsky called for that man to "make an artistic production of himself ... to polish his treasure, his capital, his good heart into a precious, a genuine sparkling diamond." 80 Granted, human beings are goodnatured; granted, they may begin as innocent children; but their innocence cannot sustain them as adults. As he showed in The Insulted and the Injured, the good are at the mercy of the evil precisely because of the potential for evil-or egotism-in their own hearts. For Dostoevsky, therefore, Tolstoy's wedding of happiness and virtue in the childhood of Nikolenka Irteniev is psychologically self-indulgent. It is also theoretically dangerous, inasmuch as it impinges on the freedom necessary for morality. Dostoevsky's adolescents are therefore more tempestuous than Tolstoy's. The most expansive portrait of a young teenager in his oeuvre, Kolya Karasotkin in The Brothers Karamazov, is a mother's nightmare in this regard. He proves his courage by lying under a passing train; and he swaggers around town looking for trouble and finding it. His nai:Vete and impulses leave him open to bad and good influences; he is alternatively under the thumbs of the dreadful Rakitin and the angelic Alyosha Karamazov. He is all potential, and the rules that governed him in childhood no longer suffice to reign him in. The same holds true for Petya Rostov in War and Peace, however, and despite his mother's best efforts he perishes at full gallop in the intoxication of battle. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky read Dickens; like Dickens, both believe in the natural goodness of childhood. As we can see from their readings of Dickens, both learned more about the psychology of childhood in Dickens than is usually understood. 81 Over the course of their lives, each learns from the other of what childhood goodness consists. Both agree that a simple return to childish ways will not counter passions in adulthood, but they disagree, at least during Dostoevsky's lifetime, about how one might get them under control. Both believe in conscience. For Tolstoy, conscience represents the voice of reason in us, and he is old-fashioned enough to link it with nature. Dostoevsky also locates higher reason there, but after childhood human beings do not necessarily want to participate in nature. They rebel against its limiting strictures; the means by which they eventually return to it are supranatural in origin.

CHAPTER NINE

The Psychology of Evil in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky The study is very special, and to the English reader, who knows nought of Dostoievsky, and is touchingly ignorant of his own soul's dark places, may seem a nightmare of hallucinations, but in fact, within its narrow lines, it is illuminating in its pathological truth. 1

~ 0

Victorian readers, when they first encountered Russian psychological proseparticularly Dostoevsky-were shocked by its revelations about the dark side of human nature. The Russian word for crime, prestuplenie, is based on the verb prestupit', "to transgress"; in English the word evil is thought to be related to the root meaning up and over, and hence means something like "exceeding the measure" or "overstepping proper limits. " 2 Both languages thus document the existence of bad or evil impulses in human nature itself and also natural laws or barriers erected against these impulses. Of the three Russian masters whom we are studying, Turgenev, with his roster of dreadful, mostly female villains, depicts evil and its consequences without seeking to explain it psychologically. This gives such works as "The Dog" (1866) or "A Strange Story" (r87o) a ghostly atmosphere lacking in the other two authors. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, however, do analyze the psychological root of evil; furthermore, in their writings they engage in an intense though hidden discussion of it. Evil is often an unintended by-product of selfish passions; when this is the case, a deed may have evil consequences even though the perpetrator did not have evil intentions. Intentional evil is the active desire to harm others; like intentional goodness, it is not easily explicable, but no account of human psychology is complete without it. For Dostoevsky, who encountered real evil in the prison camp in Siberia where he was incarcerated for four years and wrote about it openly after

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that, it consists in the first place of a material existence unleavened by Christian love. From the beginning, however, it has a spiritual dimension as well. In The Insulted and the Injured (1861), discussed at length in the previous chapter, the dastardly Prince Valkovsky is preeminently a monster of pride who wants to dominate; his love of control for its own sake represents a perversion of mind (or reason) as well as body. One could say of such characters that their "brute selfishness" goes beyond the need to satiate their bodies at the expense of others, to a need to destroy and desecrate the humanity of others in order to affirm and expand their own. So at the end of Prince Valkovsky's conversation in the restaurant with narrator Ivan Petrovich, the prince agrees that he doesn't treat his interlocutor like a human being. 3 Sexual perversity such as that advocated by Prince Valkovsky involves possession and destruction of the personality as well as the body. Valkovsky does not explain why he loves evil, but neither in his case nor in others in Dostoevsky's oeuvre does it seem to be simply a social pathology. Instead, intentional and otherwise pointless evil seems to be one consequence of the incompleteness of the self and the neediness that results. Though not natural, it is nonetheless part of the human condition as such, and it distorts consciousness predictably. As we shall see, Tolstoy prefers to deny a passion for evil; but in at least one place, possibly under the influence of Dostoevsky, he hints at it. At the same time, Dostoevsky's understanding of the nature of evil may owe something to Tolstoy.

'ADOLESCENCE,' TOLSTOY'S WAR STORIES, AND 'NOTES FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD'

The dark thread that we will follow begins with a passage in chapter I4 of Tolstoy's Adolescence. It depicts murderous violence, though its status as evil is unclear. Nikolenka is on bad terms with his tutor, St. Jerome, and also feels isolated from his childhood sweetheart, Sonechka, who now seems to prefer his friend Seryozha to him. I have read somewhere that children from twelve to fourteen years of age-that is, in the transition stage from childhood to adolescence-are singularly inclined to arson and even murder. As I look back upon my boyhood and especially when I recall the state of mind I was in on that (for me) unfortunate day, I can quite appreciate the possibility of the most frightful crime being committed without object or intent to injure but just because-out of curiosity, or to satisfy an unconscious craving for action. There are moments when the future looks so black that one is afraid to let one's thoughts dwell on it, refuses to let one's mind function and tries to convince oneself that the future will not be, and the past has not been. At such moments, when thought does not judge beforehand every decision of the

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will, and the only incentives that remain in life are physical instincts, I can understand how a child, being particularly prone owing to lack of experience to fall into such a state, may without the least hesitation or fear, with a smile of curiosity deliberately set fire to his own house-and then fan the flames where his brothers, his father and his mother, all of whom he loves dearly, are sleeping. Under the influence of a similar absence of thought-almost an absent-mindedness-a peasant lad of seventeen, examining the blade of a newly-sharpened axe lying near the bench on which his old father lies face down asleep, suddenly swings the axe and with vacant curiosity watches the blood oozing under the bench from the severed neck. It is under the same influence-the same absence of thought, and the same instinctive curiosity-that a man finds a certain pleasure in standing on the very brink of a precipice and thinking, "What if I throw myself down?" Or raising a loaded pistol to his forehead says to himself, "Suppose I pull the trigger?" Or looks at some very distinguished personage whom everyone holds in servile respect and thinks: "What if I were to go up to him, take him by the nose and say: 'Now then, come along, my dear fellow'?" 4

Tolstoy attributes the impulse to kill a beloved family member to mere "curiosity" (liubopytstvo), but for that impulse to dominate the entire moral structure of the soul must have collapsed under some personal catastrophe that makes the future appear unbearably "black." Then the higher, moderating functions of the mind cease to operate and "physical instincts" take over unimpeded. These instincts are aggressive, amoral, and expansionist in nature; in their grip, the adolescent frees himself from all restraints-moral, familial, and even self-interested (he loses even the desire to preserve himself). The awakening of these instincts coincides with sexual maturation and must be linked to it. Therefore Tolstoy connects Nikolenka's fantasies to his beloved Sonechka's supposed betrayal. Furthermore, such instincts are strongest through puberty because the adolescent has no experience in controlling them. So two conditions are necessary for the adolescent to contemplate such terrible crimes: there must be great energy, and the loving milieu and moral "thought" by which it is normally controlled must be absent. Readers often skip over Nikolenka's musings about violence in Adolescence because it does not accord with their notions of the early Tolstoy. But Nikolenka's fantasy is Tolstoyan (or Rousseauian) in its odd insistence that the youthful murderers whom he conjures up love their victims and kill without any malice. This psychologically implausible assertion concurs with the young Tolstoy's belief in natural goodness (discussed in Chapter 8 ), according to which human vitality in and of itself is benign and therefore amoral rather than deliberately evil. Vitality (or its aggressive tendencies) is linked to sexual maturation, but in fact in Tolstoy's conception it is prior to sexual desire or the even more fundamental desire for self-preservation in the soul. As part of the great Rousseauian project of

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defining what it actually means to say that human individuals are animals with large brains (rather than immortal souls), Tolstoy imagined them as a combination of pure physical energy that he called by the morally neutral term "force" (sila), and mind (um) that directs this energy in various ways, moral and immoral. Like Rousseau, he believed that as animals men were not naturally inclined toward evil. This force plays a major role in the early war stories, where it is marshaled to protect the life of the soldier. Tolstoy used the word to mean "steadfastness" in a diary entry about Platonic courage when he was writing his first war story ("The Raid"). 5 Force understood as pure energy or vitality is also critical in the typology of soldiers found in chapter 2 of "The Woodcutting" ( r 8 55). There Tolstoy divides the soldiers into three types: the meek (pokornye), the commanders (nachal'stvuiushchie), and the desperate (otchaiannye). The Russian word for "desperate" is the etymological equivalent of the English one. 6 Here Tolstoy uses it in one of its traditional Russian meanings to connote a person, often a soldier, full of vitality and capable of reckless deeds without regard for his own safety. In Russian as in English, desperate acquired this special military meaning because etymologically it highlights a key ingredient of reckless courage, a loss of all hope that prompts an individual to abandon caution. This condition of reckless courage links it to the desperate state of mind described in chapter 14 of Adolescence. In the typology in "The Woodcutting," the meek, listed first, stand alone, with a period at the end of the line, while the commanders and the desperate, though on separate lines, are linked by the connecter "and." The meek are good in general, while the other two categories are divided into the morally good ("stern" commanders and the "merry" desperate), and the bad ("political" commanders and the "depraved" desperate). What links the commanders and the desperate is the force that may express itself in bad ways (in personal ambition and even crime) or in good ones (in merry vitality and defense of comrades). The bombardier Antonov, defined as a "stern leader," illustrates the relation between leaders and the desperate. Like the "desperate jokester" Chikin, who tells jokes and stories, Antonov, who sings and plays the balalaika, is a charismatic performer. It is said by others that he would long ago have been promoted were it not for his "character." (Especially when drunk, he is rowdy and picks fights.) When the enemy begins firing, Antonov gives voice to the common desire to fight back and leads the other soldiers in battle (chapters 5 and 8). At the same time, Antonov lacks something important; it is the seasoned veteran Zhdanov (not classified as a type) who organizes the evacuation of the mortally wounded soldier Velenchuk from the battlefield. Zhdanov approaches Velenchuk and lifts him "angrily" (chapter 8), while Antonov

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goes up to Velenchuk only after Zhdanov has done so. Zhdanov's courage is of a higher sort than Antonov's because he is more dutiful and can overcome the natural inclination to avoid a downed soldier so as not to lose one's courage. From The Insulted and the Injured on, Childhood and Adolescence were the Tolstoy works most often mentioned by Dostoevsky, who considered their main character, Nikolenka Irteniev, the archetypal gentry child and adolescent. Dostoevsky singled out as especially important Nikolenka's fantasies centered around his conflict with his tutor, St. Jerome.? It is significant that, despite Tolstoy's warning in Adolescence about the possibility of random violence, in his whole career he never actually depicts another crime committed out of mere "curiosity." But Dostoevsky does, in The Demons, when Stavrogin maneuvers little Matryosha into suicide just to see what will happen. Stavrogin does it not because of deliberate injustices done to him; he originally loses his moral compass as a result of his modern education by his tutor, Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky. Stepan Trofimovich encourages his young charge to objectify and think about every element, external and internal, of his environment. 8 The powers of analysis unleashed by this exercise suppress Stavrogin's God-given conscience and destroy moral teachings he has imbibed from tradition. The result is a monster of self-consciousness whose traits I analyze in detail later in this chapter. Dostoevsky was also a great admirer of Tolstoy's war stories, which he read in the mid-r8 50s after he left prison, and he referred to them in an important article published in r86r. 9 He pays subtle tribute to them, specifically to "The Woodcutting" in Notes from the House of the Dead, in which he refers, in quotation marks, to "commanders" (nachal'stvuiushchie) of a work gang in the prison, and then to "desperate" (otchaiannye) prisoners, to whom he devotes an entire chapter (8) in part r. 10 The connection between the military and prison milieus is an obvious one in midnineteenthcentury Russia. The convict Petrov was sent to prison for stabbing a colonel while serving in the army, but in any case the prisons themselves were organized around a military model, in which the official killed by the brigand Luka Kuzmich is a major.U Unspoken but implied in the narrative is the fact that all of Russia is like a vast army in which those in authority have absolute power over people who occasionally run amok in the desperate fashion that Dostoevsky describes. Dostoevsky develops the desperate type of convict in his own radical way. In the book there is a feisty prisoner named Antonov, perhaps a reference to Tolstoy's bombardier, who picks a fight in chapter 7, part r; but this bully backs off rather than battle the fearless Petrov. Petrov himself is a strong-willed desperado, mostly submissive but also "a most deter-

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mined, fearless man who would submit to no restraint." 12 The narrator agrees with his gentry friend M. that Petrov would "kill you, if the notion took him, just like that, kill you without batting an eyelid or feeling the slightest remorse." 13 Petrov befriends the narrator, seeking him out and looking after him for many years, but the narrator expects him to die violently. This "desperado" will wander restlessly about the prison until some idea or desire seizes him; he is not a leader in any violent cause, but men like him are "the chief executors of causes and are the first to engage in action." 14 Like Tolstoy's soldiers, he is a doer, not a thinker. Petrov is a man of iron will whose strength is both terrifying and impressive, but most of Dostoevsky's desperados are more ordinary: There is, for example, one type of murderer that is quite often encountered. He lives quietly and humbly, enduring the vicissitudes of fortune. He may be a peasant, a serf, an artisan or a soldier. Suddenly, without warning, something within him snaps; his endurance runs out and he plunges a knife into his enemy and oppressor. Something strange now begins to happen: the man seems to go temporarily berserk. He began by murdering his oppressor, his enemy; this, although criminal, is understandable; here there was a motive. But then he starts murdering people who are not his enemies, but just those who happen to cross his path, and he murders them for amusement, because of an insult or a look, for the sake of a string of beads, or simply, as a way of saying "out of the way, don't let me catch you, here I come!" It is as if the man were drunk, or in delirium. As if, having overshot some sacred limit within himself, he begins to exult in the feeling that there is no longer anything sacred in him; as though he felt an irresistible longing to overshoot all law and authority in one go, and to delight in the most unbridled and boundless freedom, to delight in the sinking sensation in his heart which is caused by his own apprehension of himself. He knows, too, that a dreadful punishment awaits him. This is all, perhaps, similar to that feeling that a man has when he looks down from a high tower into the depths below his feet, until he would be glad to throw himself downwards head first, so as to make an end of it all as soon as possible. And this can happen even in the case of the most submissive and hitherto unobtrusive men. There are even some who show off in this bemused state. The more downtrodden he was before, the more he is now seized by the urge to cut a dashing figure, to inspire terror. He delights in the terror he causes, loves the disgust he arouses in others. He affects a kind of desperation [otchaiannost'], and a "desperate" [otchaiannyi] man like this often longs for punishment, longs to be dealt with, because in the end his affected desperation [otchaiannost'] has become too much for him to bear. It is interesting to observe that for the most part this state of mind, this affectation is sustained right up to the scaffold, and is then switched off: as if this were some formal interval designated in advance with certain rules and regulations. Now the man suddenly resigns himself, withdraws into the background, becomes a limp rag .... Of course there is another kind of man in the prison, one who does not submit so easily. He preserves a certain swagger, a certain boastfulness .... But in the end he submits nonetheless. Only occasionally does he amuse

Chapter Nine himself by recounting his past bold exploits, the wild orgies he once had when he was a "desperate" man. 15

This passage recalls the one in chapter 14 of Adolescence in which Nikolenka contemplates murder or suicide by flinging himself into a precipice. If one compares Dostoevsky's desperados to Tolstoy's soldiers, Petrov is more like the bombardier Antonov, or the elder Kozel'tsov brother in the third Sevastopol tale ("Sevastopol in August"), while the ordinary desperado behaves like the cowardly Vlang in chapter 26 of "Sevastopol in August." When the enemy overruns the battery, this Vlang, of all people, seizes a flag and charges. Vlang's unexpected burst of courage occurs at a moment when he has lost all hope of saving himself; the word desperate is used three times in the paragraph describing his feat. Suddenly a piercing shout of desperation (otchaianiia), repeated by several voices, was heard to the left: "They're outflanking us! They're outflanking us!" .... For a second Volodya (the younger Kozel'tsov brother] stood frozen and could not believe his own eyes. When he came to himself and looked around, there were blue uniforms ahead of himself on the parapet and one of them, having climbed down, was sealing up a cannon. Around him, except for Melnikov, who had been killed by a bullet near him, and Vlang, who had grabbed a handspike in his hands and with a ferocious expression on his face and downcast eyes had flung himself forward, there was no one. "After me, Vladimir Semenych! After me! We're done for [propali]!" Vlang was shouting in a desperate [otchaiannyi] voice, waving the handspike at the French, who had approached from behind. The ferocious figure of the junker took them aback. He struck one of them, the first, on the head, the others paused involuntarily, and Vlang, continuing to look around and shouting desperately [otchaianno]: "After me, Vladimir Semenych! What are you standing there for! Run!", ran up to the trench where our infantry was lying and firing at the French. 16

For an oppressed peasantry, the convict jailed for a desperate type of crime is the equivalent of an Antonov or a Vlang who lashes out in anger or fear-the two are related, of course-during battle. In the situation that Dostoevsky is exploring, however, the enemy is not foreign but Russian, and the war-a debilitating civil one. According to Tolstoy, a soldier such as Antonov, when he fights and brawls, does so "not so much for his own enjoyment, but in support of the spirit of the troops, of whom he felt himself the representative." 17 Dostoevsky's desperados have turned against their own leaders; as we learn elsewhere in Notes from the House of the Dead, such criminals do not feel remorse for their crimes because they know that their own kind-their "troops"-forgive or even applaud them. 18 In chapter 17 of "Sevastopol in August," Tolstoy describes the horrific conditions under which any man might become a hero.

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Tomorrow or even right away, each of these people might merrily and proudly face death and die steadfastly and calmly; but there is only one joy in life under those conditions terrifying to even the coolest imagination, conditions of the absence of everything human and a hopelessness of escape from them: that joy is oblivion, the destruction of consciousness. At the bottom of the soul of each man lies that noble spark that will make a hero of him; but this spark grows tired of burning brightly. Let that fatal moment come, and the spark will burst into flame and illuminate great deeds.

Once again, as in "The Woodcutting," Tolstoy writes of "hopelessness" (beznadezhnost') as a key ingredient in the courage of desperate men. The use of this word reveals Tolstoy's awareness of the etymological meaning of desperate, and if this meaning did not occur to Dostoevsky before it is laid bare here. But in this place Tolstoy refers to another element crucial for desperate courage, namely, "oblivion, the destruction of consciousness," which again links the state of mind of the warrior to that of the disgraced Nikolenka in Adolescence. The man rushing courageously into battle does not do so under coercion but from a "joy" that consists in destruction of consciousness that comes about only under conditions of "hopelessness." Although Tolstoy does not bring this out in "Sevastopol in August," later, in War and Peace, he implicitly associates this joy with sexual pleasure and the death of consciousness in orgasm. Trapped in war, we fling ourselves joyfully into the arms of death; we abandon consciousness for the joys of pure vitality, which Tolstoy associates with a "spark" and fire. 19 Once again, Tolstoy's attentive reader Dostoevsky picks up these associations, and once again he applies them in Notes from the House of the Dead to another situation. 20 In "Sevastopol in August," Tolstoy reveals how a soldier might sacrifice his life; Dostoevsky shows how a convict, for the same reasons that motivate a soldier, might go on a spree during which he murders innocent people. That same vitality impelling the soldier into battle overwhelms the consciousness of the peasant or soldier as he rebels against his unjust master, and in the process he too experiences a kind of oblivion. Reviving somewhat as he continues his crime spree, his consciousness stands by as a kind of helpless observer; he wishes to be "dealt with, because in the end his affected desperation has become too much for him to bear." Following Tolstoy's lead, Dostoevsky associates this kind of desperado with fire; he names his primary example of such a man "Luchka," a diminutive of Luka (Luke) that also sounds like such words in Russian as luchina (a splinter used for kindling or to light a hut) or luch (a ray of light). Dostoevsky's desperado may be a weakling. The twenty-three-yearold Luchka, who has killed eight people and loves to brag about it, is a

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"young, thin little Ukrainian convict" "with a thin little face and a pointed nose." 21 When the narrator first hears Luchka's blood-curdling story, he erroneously considers him more dangerous and ferocious than Petrov. The other convicts are not similarly deceived; they hold Luchka "in very low esteem" and fear and admire Petrov. The "splinter" Luchka impudently flashes his little flame, while Petrov "was really well-behaved and even submissive. Passions lurked within him, and they were strong, virulent ones, but the hot coals were kept constantly strewn with ashes and smouldered away. " 22 This astonishing character represents the strength of the Russian peasant. As such he is the only individual mentioned by name in the paragraph in the final chapter of the book in which the narrator declares that in the prison he had met "the most gifted, the strongest of our people. " 23 In the final analysis, then, Dostoevsky, like Tolstoy, presents his desperados (at least the strong-willed ones) as positive. Like Tolstoy's Antonov, they may be all fire and no focus, all vitality and no ideas; it is up to men like Dostoevsky to provide the ideas that will rally and animate the Petrovs. It is significant that Kolya Krasotkin, the thirteen-year-old future leader in The Brothers Karamazov who Alyosha predicts will be both unhappy and fulfilled, is twice identified as a desperado (otchaiannyi). 24 Of course desperados may end badly, as the narrator predicts even the great-hearted Petrov will do. They may, like the adolescents in Nikolenka's fantasy, commit horrendous crimes. (Kolya Krasotkin flirts with criminality, by the way.) However bad its results, this vitality we are examining is not deliberately evil. But as is clear from the accounts of both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, it is amoral, and morality must come from elsewhere in the soul of the individual or in the society.

'RESURRECTION'

Tolstoy picked up the thread of the hidden conversation between himself and Dostoevsky in Notes from the House of the Dead, and he continued the dialogue in works of his old age. The connection is clearest in his novel about the prison system, Resurrection. Not surprisingly, he reread Notes from the House of the Dead in r899, while he was working on Resurrection.25 Like Dostoevsky's book, Tolstoy's novel combines a spiritual transformation of an individual with a description of parts of Russian society. (Prince Dmitrii Nekhliudov's transformation takes place in part r; then in parts 2 and 3 he moves through various milieus, which we see through his eyes.) As Nekhliudov prepares to depart in a prison convoy with Katiusha Maslova (whom he seduced and abandoned years ago), the third-person narrator presents a typology of the prison population that takes us back

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both to Tolstoy's own story "The Woodcutting" and to Dostoevsky's version of Tolstoy's typology in Notes from the House of the Dead. Of the five types the narrator enumerates, the second one-those who committed their crimes impulsively-comprises more than half of all convicts. The second category consisted of people convicted for acts committed in exceptional conditions such as anger, jealousy, drunkenness and so on, the kind of acts which all those who were judging and punishing them would themselves have committed under such circumstances. 26

These impulsive convicts are the equivalents of Dostoevsky's desperate ones (as well as of Tolstoy's own desperate soldiers). Under conditions of stress or injustice, they may produce murderers and thieves of the fifth type, of whom Nekhliudov concludes that "society is guiltier toward them than they toward society." The narrator gives two examples of this most extreme type: the recidivist thief and cynical clown Okhotin, "who up until age thirty had never met anyone of higher moral caliber than policemen"; and the handsome murderer Fyodorov, with an "attractive, passionate nature" that was never reined in or harnessed. Comparing both Fyodorov and Okhotin to abandoned and ruined plants, the narrator calls them "rich natures"; this is reminiscent of the famous declaration in Notes from the House of the Dead that "the most gifted and strongest" of the Russian people are in prison. Indeed, in a subtle underscoring of this connection, which would have been especially attractive to the later Tolstoy, the Schillerian robber Fyodorov may be named after Dostoevsky himself (Fyodor Mikhailovich). But most convicts of the second category are ordinary men whose crimes are accidental and unpremeditated. As Nekhliudov is accompanying Maslova and her fellow convicts to Siberia, he meets such a man, Makar Devkin, who for reasons that he himself cannot fathom attempted to murder a passing stranger and has landed in jail as a result. His crime was very strange. The crime, as he himself told Nekhliudov, was a deed not committed by him, Makar, but by him, the Unclean One. A passerby approached Makar's father and rented transportation for two roubles to take him to a village about forty versts away. Makar's father ordered him to drive the man. Makar hitched up the horse, got dressed, and started to drink tea with the passerby. Over tea the passerby explained that he was going to get married, and that he was carrying five hundred roubles that he had earned in Moscow. Hearing this, Makar went out into the yard and put an axe under the straw in the sleigh. "I myself don't know why I got the axe," he said. 'Get the axe,' he says, and I got it. We sat in the sleigh and got started. We're going along, nothing's happening. I'd even almost forgotten about the axe. We'd started to approach the village, there were 6 versts left. The road went uphill from the track to the highway. I climb down, I'm walking behind the sleigh, and he whispers: 'What can you be

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thinking? You'll come out on the road, there'll be people in the highway. And then the village. He'll carry off the money; if you're going to do it, now's the time, there's no time to waste.' I bent over the sleigh as if to adjust the straw, and that big axe just seemed to leap into my hand. He looked around. 'What are you doing?' says he. I swung the axe, I wanted to strike hard, but he, nimble fellow, leapt from the sleigh and grabbed me by the hands. 'What are you doing, you villain?' he says. He tumbled me into the snow, and I didn't try to fight, I gave myself up. He drove me straight to the police. They locked me up. There was a trial. People testified that I was a good man who'd never done anything bad so far as they knew. The landlords where I rented said the same. But there was no money to hire a lawyer," said Makar, "so they sentenced me to four years." 27

Makar Devkin is an obvious reference to Dostoevsky's Makar Devushkin,28 and Devkin's attempted murder also takes us back through the parricide in Notes from the House of the Dead to chapter 14 ("Eclipse") in Tolstoy's Adolescence and the peasant adolescent who murders his sleeping father with an axe "from a lack of thought and instinctual curiosity." In Resurrection, the same peasant murderer Makar Devkin, now a convict, risks his life to inform Nekhliudov of a plot by a hardened criminal in the convoy to change names and places with a first-time offender with a sentence much lighter than his. Within the moral system of the novel, Makar Devkin represents the naturally good but weak man capable of terrible deeds but also, in other circumstances and in another mood, of heroic ones. In naming his character after Makar Devushkin, Tolstoy quite properly sees the potential already lurking in Dostoevsky's early character to assert himself even in some criminal way. Makar Devushkin is a man, not a saint, and nothing human is foreign to him; thus does one Russian admirer of Goethe (Tolstoy) accurately penetrate and parse the art of another (Dostoevsky). Making this very point, the paragraph in Resurrection concludes this way: And now this very person, wanting to save a countryman, knowing that with his words he was risking his life, all the same gave Nekhliudov a prison secret, for which, the moment it was found out that he had done this, he would definitely have been strangled.

Makar is like Nekhliudov, of whom the narrator says that he has "two people" within him. One is spiritual and seeks good for himself only when it would be good for others as well, and another, the animal man, seeks good only for himself and for this good is willing to sacrifice the good of the whole world. 29 This maxim applies to all human beings. Moral freedom consists in choosing the spiritual impulses of the soul over the animal ones, and when we make the wrong choice, as Makar Devkin did when he attempted to

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murder the stranger, in hindsight it seems as though someone else, "the Unclean One," made us act in a way that we now reject as immoral. In the typology in part I of Resurrection, and throughout the novel, Tolstoy seems to blame society and its distorting effects for all the crimes for which people are incarcerated. This excuses even those criminals (type five) who include most of the murderers and brigands making their living by preying on others. But of course it does not explain Makar's crime, which he believes the Devil made him commit; nor does it fully account for Nekhliudov's seduction and abandonment of Katiusha Maslova. Whenever Nekhliudov acts wrongly, he hears the voice of conscience and rejects it; therefore he must blame himself for his actions, as he eventually does. Even under the influence of army life and his own urgent lust, his "spiritual voice" still tells him to leave his aunts' estate before he gives into temptation: In the depth of his soul he knew he should leave and there was no reason for him to stay at his aunts' place now, he knew that nothing good could come from staying, but it was so merry and pleasant that he didn't say this to himself, and he stayed on. 30

Here as elsewhere, the moral voice, what Tolstoy at the time he wrote the novel called "reasonable consciousness" (razumnoe soznanie), must "say this" to the individual. Because it gives us an alternative within the soul to mere selfish impulse, reasonable consciousness makes morality possible. In order for Nekhliudov to heed this voice, however, moral will must act. What Tolstoy does not clearly explain, here or elsewhere, is how an individual might choose the urging of reasonable consciousness over that of impulse. In his understanding, we are free in the past and the future, but not in the present; furthermore, free choices are by their very nature mysterious and unavailable to analysts, even those as insightful as Tolstoy. We make choices beforehand that allow us to avoid temptation that in the present moment may be irresistible, and we move to change our behavior because we regret past actions and do not want to repeat them.

EVIL IN 'THE KREUTZER SONATA'

Reasonable consciousness is a product of reflection in the soul. Among the educated classes to which Nekhliudov belongs, individuals who reject the hedonism and hypocrisy characteristic of modern life must self-consciously think their way back to a well-ordered soul. In the traditional peasant class to which Makar Devkin belongs, reasonable consciousness is part of a well-ordered traditional culture that its members have unself-consciously

Chapter Nine internalized. Makar Devkin distances himself from his own criminal intention by attributing it to an evil outside agent; but when he does this, he is choosing the "spiritual man" within himself just as Nekhliudov does in the course of his resurrection. In stories that Tolstoy wrote for the people mostly in the r88os and the r89os, devils commonly play the scapegoat, just as one does for Makar, thereby allowing individuals to cleanse themselves of sins which they know are morally wrongY This role is acknowledged in the traditional attribute "impure" or "unclean" (nechistyi) by which Makar names the demonic agent who supposedly prompted him to try to murder the passerby for his money. Neither Makar nor Prince Nekhliudov intends evil; all morally serious characters in Tolstoy's fiction, gentry as well as peasant, distance themselves from their own evil impulses. Thus the married gentry hero of his unfinished novella The Devil attributes his revived lust for his former mistress to "someone else" (kto-to). This story was written in r889, while Tolstoy was working on the final drafts of The Kreutzer Sonata. 32 If some readers find Nekhliudov's moral resurrection psychologically na!ve in comparison to the moral struggles and dilemmas of Dostoevsky's characters, no one could say the same of the hero of The Kreutzer Sonata, Pozdnyshev, who murdered his wife from jealousy of her relationship with the violinist Trukhachevsky, with whom she performs Beethoven's sonata. Although Pozdnyshev partially blames the corrupted society in which he lives for the murder, in hindsight he regrets his deed, which he now scrutinizes with a mixture of reasonable consciousness and shame. He committed his murder during a spiritual eclipse of the sort that Nikolenka suffers in Adolescence; as Pozdnyshev now travels through the countryside partly confessing and partly excusing himself, he has not yet emerged from his own dark night of the soul. In the buildup to the murder, moreover, Pozdnyshev confesses to the narrator that he felt a malicious hatred for his wife; this malice may be why he continued to invite Trukhachevsky to his home. It is possible that, without admitting it, Pozdnyshev leads his wife into a trap so that he can kill her. He does not say so because he does not know it, but he remarks on the "strange and fatal force [that] led me not to repulse him, not to keep him away, but on the contrary to invite him to the house." 33 Like the hero of The Devil, Pozdnyshev is somewhat self-conscious about his own passions. But in this case Tolstoy goes further, claiming that the character remains self-conscious even as he commits the murder. On the one hand, a "frenzy" possesses him that "has its own laws" akin to those of music; on the other, he looks on and even comments as his own act of murder unfolds. 34 The split in the narrator's psyche is reminiscent of Anna Karenina's running commentary on her final trip and suicide attempt, or of Dostoevsky's contention, in Notes from the House of the

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Dead, that the desperate criminal watches his own deeds with impotent

horror and a desire that someone else bring them to an end. (Tolstoy may have reread or looked at Notes from the House of the Dead in the early r89os as well, when it is mentioned in a draft of The Kreutzer Sonata. 35 } In all three of these cases the frenzied individual seems to be in the grip of passions that drive him but are not him; in all three, the individual is the self-conscious I that has some measure of distance and therefore freedom from destructive passion even if it cannot control it. The split between the contemplative and the active self at this crucial moment in The Kreutzer Sonata, and the utter helplessness of the former to affect the latter, also reflects the influence on Tolstoy of Schopenhauer. In Schopenhauer's thought, pure willing is so involuntary that it seems not to involve the subject, who lives only through consciousness: Unconscious existence possesses reality only for other beings in whose consciousness it appears: immediate reality is conditional upon individual consciousness. Thus the individual real existence of man lies first and foremost in his consciousness. But this is as such necessarily ideational, and thus conditioned by the intellect and by the sphere and substance of the intellect's activity. The degree of clarity of consciousness, and consequently of thought, can therefore be regarded as the degree of reality of existence. 36

In his later writings, Tolstoy agreed with Schopenhauer that the real life of each individual resides in reasonable consciousness, which moreover joins all individuals together. It is reasonable consciousness that helplessly contemplates Pozdnyshev's murderous rampage and later brings him, at least partly, to his senses: When people say they don't remember what they do in a fit of fury, it is rubbish. I remembered everything and did not for a moment lose consciousness of what I was doing. The more I raised the pressure of my fury, the more brightly consciousness burned in me, in the light of which I could not not see what I was doing. I knew what I was doing every second. I cannot say that I knew beforehand what I was going to do, but I knew what I was doing when I did it, and even perhaps a little before, as if to make repentance possible and to be able to tell myself that I could stop. I knew I was hitting below the ribs and that the dagger would enter. At the moment I did it, I knew I was doing an awful thing such as I had never done before, which would have terrible consequences. But that consciousness passed like a flash of lightning and the deed immediately followed the consciousness. I realized [soznavalsia] the action with extraordinary clarity. I felt, and remember, the momentary resistance of her corset and of something else, and then the plunging of the dagger into something soft. She seized the dagger with her hands, and cut them, but could not hold it back. For a long time afterwards, in prison where the moral change had taken place in me, I thought of that moment, recalled what I could of it, and considered it. I remembered that for an instant,

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only an instant, before the action I had a terrible consciousness that I was killing, had killed, a defenseless woman, my wife! I remember the horror of that consciousness and conclude from that, and even dimly remember, that having plunged the knife in I pulled it out immediately, trying to remedy what had been done and to stop it. I stood for a second motionless waiting to see what would happen, and whether it could be remedied. She jumped to her feet and screamed:-"Nurse! He has killed me."

This paragraph, the most horrific in this disturbing story, has a moral purpose: the continuous presence of reasonable consciousness establishes the culpability of the criminal, who recalls that at every second he knew what he was doing, and therefore that he could have repented and stopped himself. So if the "desperado" convict in Notes from the House of the Dead and Makar Devkin in Resurrection go temporarily berserk when they kill or try to kill, Tolstoy maintains that for all this they take, or will take, moral responsibility for their acts. Rational consciousness will reassert its authority and take the blame. This is also what presumably happens to Goryanchikov, Dostoevsky's wife-killing narrator in Notes from the House of the Dead. But what if the self-conscious I is itself corrupted and becomes an accomplice to impulses that it ought to combat? Already in Notes from the House of the Dead, Dostoevsky's narrator asserts that the greatest evil is self-conscious and calculating. The worst criminals within prison and outside it are sadists who love torture for its own sake. The pleasure they derive from it, though self-conscious rather than merely impulsive, is as enslaving as any other passion. There is a hint of this in Pozdnyshev's hatred of his wife in Kreutzer Sonata, but Tolstoy chooses not to develop it. Dostoevsky's most extensive exploration of this level of evil is in the originally excluded chapter of The Demons with the confession of Nikolai Stavrogin to the monk Tikhon.

THE HEART OF DARKNESS IN 'THE DEMONS'

Stavrogin's pleasure in committing criminal acts derives from a selfconsciousness that has gone over to the enemy and serves the criminal will to power. He is crafty with details and orchestrates his own feelings. 37 Like Pozdnyshev, throughout the crime he maintains complete self-consciousness, at one moment remarking that "I remember everything to the last minute."38 Despite his self-consciousness-it is a vital aspect of Dostoevsky's analysis-Stavrogin does not fully understand his own compulsion to commit evil. He wants to convince Tikhon that he is now free of all passion except the desire to speak the truth, but this is not true. He is not as much

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in control of himself as he would like to think, and therefore he is still in the grip of passions that might make him reoffend. The worst of them is a seemingly pointless malice that he does not confess to Tikhon but that expresses itself in the hatred he feels for most people. 39 Finally, he confesses to Tikhon that he suffers from hallucinations that suggest he feels guilty about the rape of Matryosha, even though he denies it more than once. Stavrogin wants Tikhon to believe he does not act from weakness; in this he differs from the Jean-Jacques Rousseau of the Confessions, whose weaker will he mentions during a digression early in his narrative. 40 The sequence of events leading to the rape of the prepubescent Matryosha and her subsequent suicide begins with Stavrogin's loss of his pen knife. Suspicion falls on Matryosha as the thief, and her mother, for twisted reasons of her own, beats her brutally without waiting for proof of her guilt. 41 Meanwhile, Stavrogin has spotted the knife on his bed but chooses not to announce it "so that she would be beaten." Although Stavrogin himself does not explicitly say so, the episode with the pen knife recalls the theft of a ribbon that the young Rousseau, working at the time as a servant in a gentry household, perpetrated and then blamed on another servant named Marion. Rousseau still regrets his deed, but he excuses it as an act of weakness and even goodness, because his original intentions toward Marion were kind. Indeed, as he remarks, he thought of blaming the girl because she was on his mind as the intended recipient of the ribbon. 42 By contrast, Stavrogin says that he raped and tormented Matryosha because he wanted to do precisely this, and he goes on to explain why. Stavrogin first tells Tikhon that he commits demeaning crimes because he enjoys his own "meanness" (podlost'), but he then corrects himself: "It was not meanness that I loved (here my reason was completely sound), but I liked the intoxication from the tormenting consciousness of my baseness (soznaniia nizosti)." 43 Elsewhere in the paragraph he repeats and expands on the fact that "consciousness" (soznanie) is essential to the pleasure he feels. His acts of baseness seem connected to a desire to control all feeling, no matter how powerful; he must never "forget himself," and he must always have the sense that he can stop what he is doing. In his advanced state of decadence, his pleasure, it seems, has come to consist in overcoming all feelings-even the most powerful, including fear and anger, both of which he mentions in his confession to Tikhon. To underscore the extent of his self-control, Stavrogin mentions in his digression how, in another act of self-mastery, he was able to conquer an entrenched habit of masturbation at age seventeen; he compares himself in this regard to Rousseau, who confesses that he continued the practice throughout his life.

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In his quest for ever-stronger sensations and pleasure of the sort we are describing, Stavrogin has already turned inward. The impulses that he wants to control include not only, and not mostly, those that the conscience should suppress, but precisely moral ones, which are the most powerful from the point of view of that same conscience. It is in pursuit of such refined and depraved pleasures that he has spent the time before his first visit to the town in debaucheries in Petersburg that result in his marriage to Maria Timofeevna Lebiadkina, and his rape of Matryosha. Stavrogin explains to Tikhon that he committed his crime against Matryosha out of boredom and impulse, but most especially from the pleasure of overcoming his own repulsion. In order to test his strength of will, "he has chosen the victim who most deserves pity and chosen her for that reason; he is trying to kill the very sentiment of pity within himself. " 44 In the process of seducing her, he feels pity (zhalost'), and as a result waves of fear wash over him in the aftermath of the rape. 45 At a crucial point in the text, when Matryosha suddenly flushes with shame and then kisses him, he explicitly associates his fear with his pity: "Her face expressed complete admiration. I almost got up and left-so unpleasant was it in such a tiny child-out of pity. But I overcame the sudden sensation of my fear and stayed. " 46 Everything that happens is centered around Stavrogin, with a kind of emotional flatness in his account of what he speculates Matryosha must have been feeling throughout her ordeal. His extreme narcissism does not, however, make Stavrogin as powerful and independent as he claims; elsewhere in the book the narrator provides another explanation for his behavior. Stavrogin is the final and decadent product of a culture of honor and courage that goes back to the famous Decembrist and duelist M. S. Lunin (r787-r845), of whom the narrator remarks that the greatest desire of such men is to overcome their own cowardiceY Lunin, as the narrator presents him, is already psychologically complex; not satisfied by simply defeating others, he is trying to conquer himself, specifically his greatest "passion," which is fear of death. But, the narrator continues, Stavrogin would have looked down on Lunin and called him "an eternally strutting coward" because Lunin has to feel fear of various kinds in order to overcome it, while in most encounters with others Stavrogin does not even feel fear. 48 In him, the dialectic of pride and honor has developed to the point where he no longer wants to fight duels, because to do so would mean that he wanted to prove himself to other men and was enslaved to them. Therefore, he will express his pride and his independence by intentionally behaving dishonorably. He represents Karmazinov's true nihilist, with his "right to dishonor. " 49 He does this when he visits the town in the midr86os and eventually causes a scandal-biting the governor's ear-that

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lands him in jail. 5° Scandalizing townsfolk only mildly amuses Stavrogin, however; he moves on to the crimes that he eventually confesses to Tikhon. The confession itself may be understood as intended to overcome shame, the most powerful emotion in the man of honor, and indeed Tikhon takes it that way. But Tikhon, not convinced that Stavrogin is truly beyond shame, tells him his confession is more laughable than terrible and predicts he will not be able to endure the ridicule of others. 51 His protestations to the contrary, Stavrogin still needs others to affirm his power and worth. His manipulation of Matryosha is the final episode in a quest for pleasure through power; the devotion of his "gang" (vataga) comes to bore him, as does even the theft he commits against the poor official in the time between the loss of the pen knife and the seduction of Matryosha. 52 The seduction is more pleasurable than the theft for two reasons: the crime itself is even more heinous, and the victim, with her "childish" and "quiet, extremely quiet" face, even more innocent. 53 Stavrogin's heart starts pounding when he hears her little song, which demonstrates how she lives her own innocent life independent of others54 ; it arouses him because it reveals that she is not thinking of him. He wants to corrupt and overwhelm this pure otherness, so her response to his caresses satisfies the fantasy of the rapist who imagines that his victim can be made to desire him. Of course this latter fact, to the extent that it is true, intensifies the self-hatred and remorse that leads Matryosha to suicide. "Most likely it seemed to her in the end that she had committed an unbelievable crime and was mortally guilty for it-that she had 'killed God."' 55 Stavrogin needs Matryosha, for both her resistance and her ultimate consent. Therefore, his protestations to the contrary, he still operates within the dialectic of pride and honor, although at extremes that no one before Dostoevsky had imagined. Stavrogin distinguishes himself from Rousseau as a man able to control even his physical need to masturbate, but Dostoevsky distinguishes him from Rousseau's concept of the individual in another way. Rousseau imagined that the greatest state of bliss for modern man would be the benign pleasures of the solitary walker in his Reveries, but Dostoevsky does not believe that such a state of independence is possible. Dostoevskian pride arises from an individual's comparison of himself with others; the individual's sense of his own incompleteness makes such a comparison inevitable. As Girard argues in his book on Dostoevsky, the only escape from the dialectic of pride understood this way is through imitation of Christ, whose worth is absolute and therefore does not inspire envy as well as admiration in the individual. 5 6 The atheist Stavrogin has not mastered his need for praise; his insistence on his self-sufficiency is contradicted by his own narrative. He is still enslaved to others, whose fear, respect, and even love he craves as an acknowledgment of his power over

Chapter Nine them. As Tikhon detects, rather than confessing a crime Stavrogin is bragging to him about his power over Matryosha. 57 He does not brag about his malice, however, yet the narrator says of him that he is possessed with an "anger" "even greater than Lermontov's." 58 The word that Pevear and Volokhonsky translate as "anger" is not the full-throated rage of gnev but the irritability and hatred of zloba, etymologically connected in Russian with zlo, or evil. To fully fathom Stavrogin's motivations in tormenting Matryosha, we need to understand his zloba. Stavrogin's own testimony to the contrary, where there is zloba there is malice, and thus a pleasure in hurting people that Lermontov's hero of our time, Pechorin, feels. This malice is the ultimate source of intentional evil committed for its own sake. In his quest for self-mastery, Stavrogin succeeds in controlling all his feelings, positive and negative, save one. Only zloba remains in a soul that has become almost all calculation; indeed the narrator stresses the closeness of Stavrogin's zloba to his analytical, crafty nature: it is "cold, calm, and if one may put it so, reasonable, and therefore the most repulsive and terrible that can be." 59 Like the zlost' (wickedness) that the Underground Man feels (and etymologically akin to it), it alone can withstand the process of self-reflection and "overpower everything, all my doubts, and, therefore, [can] completely successfully serve instead of a first cause precisely because it is not a cause. " 60 The zlost' of the Underground Man bespeaks a repressed pride that mostly expresses itself through masochism with occasional outbursts of sadistic pleasure, while Stavrogin's zloba is the poisonous residue of a great pride that animated him in the first place and has all but burnt itself out. The Underground Man speaks frankly about his zlost' (and zloba too); Stavrogin does not mention his. Nonetheless, Stavrogin seduces and tortures Matryosha with the Iago-like "pointless malice" of his double in the novel in this respect, Pyotr Verkhovensky. 61 All illusions about any higher ideal to which Stavrogin might aspire elsewhere are stripped away in his supposed confession to reveal a malignant egotism. As Dostoevsky understands it, this egotism is not simply animal but rather a primitive stage in the process of reflection generated by the power of reason in human beings. In their complete self-absorption, the reptile or the spider does not feel anger toward its intended prey, only inner stimulation. In his quest for self-definition that resists the destructive power of his reflection on it, the Underground Man complains in chapter 2 that he cannot even aspire to the insect sensuality of a spider, because the spider at least feels no remorse, while he feels shame after his monstrous deeds. He does not mention his malice. Even a man of reptilian or insectlike self-centeredness

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comes to feel it toward others because they inexplicably oppose him, and he is conscious of that. Like love and pride, malice is a purely human feeling unavailable to animals because it is a product of consciousness. Therefore in the account of the narrator in The Demons, the more self-conscious Russian Byronic characters become, the more anger and malice they feel. The greatest pleasure of such a type finally consists in the exercise of malice felt by the needy soul. When Stavrogin tortures Matryosha, he is taking revenge on her for her vitality, her innocence, and her indifference to him. His torture of her consists of a systematic and progressive takeover of her existence. (It is unsuccessful, incidentally, because Matryosha, unlike her seducer, truly repents of her sin. Although he wants to murder her soul, Stavrogin does not succeed in doing so.) The alienated man or the tyrannical one is irritated by the failure of the world to acknowledge his unconditional value, which, whatever he may say, he cannot assert without confirmation of it from others. Zloba or zlost' understood this way, as the Underground Man discerns, truly stands outside the dynamic of cause and effect that otherwise obsesses him; it is a kind of itch that he cannot scratch, a negative vibration of the soul that won't go away. It is the essence of Smerdyakov, the Karamazov brother who is a monster because he has only a shadow of a countervailing principle in his soul. The pointless malice of a Stavrogin or an Underground Man reflects the essential eroticism of the soul as depicted by Dostoevsky and his fellow masters of Russian psychological prose. In both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, an aura of sexual dysfunction or depravity accompanies the most egregious acts of evil. This is no accident. In Dostoevsky's works, rape has the same status as murder; there is no salvation for the perpetrator after it. Tolstoy has left us no psychological explanation of evil comparable to the one in Stavrogin's confession. But like Stavrogin, although for more usual reasons of sexual jealousy, Pozdnyshev comes to feel an uncontrollable malice toward his wife that, as in the case of Stavrogin, is connected to his need to control or even own her. "The instinct for power, acquisition, and sexual aggression," which Jackson defines as "the locus of pure evil" in Dostoevsky, 62 is a related expression of the fundamental insecurity of the individual. People need to be part of a larger human community; when they disengage themselves from it, either intentionally through pride, as in the case of Stavrogin, or through alienation, as in the case of the Underground Man, they become entrapped in the sadomasochistic cycle that Girard describes as typical of underground pride. 63 The evil man wants to control the entire world; hence Pyotr Verkhovensky's ultimate and apocalyptic goal is to establish a universal tyranny. 64

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Having read Stavrogin's confession and conversed with him, Tikhon laments that "a great idle force [is] being spent deliberately on abomination." Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy thrilled and terrified Victorian readers with their depictions of the force of human vitality, which could overwhelm reason and conscience even in a good man or woman. At the same time, however, Russians were more old-fashioned than some Western European writers in their insistence on moral qualms even in the most depraved individuals. Seen from the inside, all these individuals have "reasons" for their behavior and distance themselves from evil; all of them feel some form of shame. Although he in part excuses it in his confession, Pozdnyshev is ashamed of his murder of his wife and obsessively denounces it to strangers. His denials to the contrary, Stavrogin too is ashamed of his rape of Matryosha; the repeated appearance of her apparition to him suggests that. 65 Even Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov needs outside support for the crime of patricide, and as it dawns on him that Ivan Karamazov will not supply it, he feels the presence of "Providence" in the room. 66 Evil, like good, is a characteristic of the human mind, not of the body. In Tolstoy's Adolescence, the teenager's "curiosity" and "instincts" dominate him only when "the future looks so black that one is afraid to let one's thoughts dwell on it, refuses to let one's mind function and tries to convince oneself that the future will not be, and the past has not been." If he had only thought about the consequences, so Tolstoy implies, he would not have set fire to his hut or murdered his sleeping father. But why would he even contemplate commission of these deeds? The context of the "(for me) unfortunate day" during which everyone seems to have turned against him suggests that the fear and anger of an aggrieved self conjures up these fantasies in Nikolenka. Animals may feel fear and anger, but they cannot fantasize about these feelings; nor can they act on fantasies. Their feelings of lust or pride do not develop into evil passions precisely because they lack sufficient powers of reason-a sufficiently developed consciousness-to dwell on them in a past or a future. If evil impulses are natural, so are the good impulses of love and selfsacrifice. Indeed, as I have tried to demonstrate in this chapter, they derive psychologically from the same source. The neediness that leads to both good and evil arises originally from our fear of death and the annihilation of the self. Turgenev demonstrated this in the scene on the haystack in Fathers and Children, when Bazarov acknowledges his own mortality for the first time and snarls furiously at Arkadi as he does so.

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This is why the narrator begins Stavrogin's Russian Byronic ancestry with a man, the Decembrist Lunin, who feared death; although Stavrogin has proceeded farther along the dialectic of courage and pride evident in Lunin's behavior, he has not lost that fear. The connection of the dialectic of pride with fear of death also explains Stavrogin's obsession with time during the commission of his great crimes. 67 He demonstrates a purported self-control and freedom from the tyranny of events by his ability to stand back and record individual moments. Death itself-the end of time in each life-remains the fundamental fact of life that only human beings, of all animals, anticipate and that only Christianity, with its promise of eternal life, can really conquer. For Dostoevsky, Christianity solves the problem of the soul's fundamental incompleteness; those who believe in the soul's immortality do not feel the zloba characteristic of Dostoevsky's atheists, or at least they resist it.

Conclusion

.

~

Russians began to think about themselves as they strove to become a modern people. One of the most obvious consequences of such self-consciousness is the preeminence of psychological analysis as a tool for understanding human behavior. Turgenev worried about the effects of this approach on its subject. In writing about it in Tolstoy, for instance, he noted that a large dose of it is not appropriate for every character. And then there is that old trick he has of transmitting the wavering and vibration of one and the same feeling or position that he mercilessly places in the mouth and the consciousness of each of his heroes: I love, he'll say, but I really hate, and so on and so forth. Oh how these quasi-subtle reflections and thoughts and observations of one's own feelings weary and bore me to death! Tolstoy seems to know no other psychology or to ignore it if he does. 1

Tolstoy's method is suitable for the Olenins and Prince Andreis of his fiction, but not for less self-conscious personalities. 2 (This was something that Tolstoy himself acknowledged by avoiding direct psychological analysis in his later tales for the people.) By devoting so much overt attention to the inner life, a writer distorts its importance in the larger human community and the world. Turgenev could justifiably accuse Tolstoy, and most especially Dostoevsky, of distorting the truth about the human situation just because they give too much weight to human subjectivity. As a result, they helped grow individualism beyond the point where it fits comfortably into the broader world of human beings and nature. Turgenev might say it was literature that put individuals on the psychiatrist's couch complaining about the fact that nobody loves them. In fact, as all the great Russian writers demonstrate, nobody loves us as much as we do ourselves; this is an inescapable fact of life. But those egos have grown overweight partly because of their validation through psychology, which undermines traditional morality based on laws that limit free expression. Turgenev is

Conclusion

I8I

protesting against the psychologization of the world in which he, as a founding Russian realist, willy-nilly participates. He reminds us that authors may change the world as they purport to describe it; certainly he and his fellow Russian writers were doing so. The first effect of Russian psychological prose on world literature was to strengthen the authority of the individual voice of the subject. Even Tolstoy, although he chooses not to foreground it in his fiction, makes freedom without morality the essence of life for each individual; he writes in his diary in 1878: "Evil is an expression of freedom, a deviation from law. Freedom is life itself." 3 Meanwhile, the most popular Russian author of the twentieth century was Dostoevsky, who of the three great founders of Russian psychological realism fashions his fictional world most completely around the individual. Dostoevsky became the great hero of French Existentialism, for which he represented most honestly the world of man without God. As Joseph Frank realized, however, Existentialists misread Dostoevsky. 4 Of the three authors we have been studying in this book, Dostoevsky was also the most religious. It was this trait that Nietzsche, another admirer of Dostoevsky, found most exasperating in him. Having discovered the will to power smoldering in prisoners in Siberia, Dostoevsky returned to Christ instead of following Nietzsche's path to the self-determination of the Superman. The reason is that, unlike his German admirer, Dostoevsky did not wholly embrace the Dionysian reality that has so often been the point of view from which he is studied. The three writers discussed in this book have differing views of human nature, but all agree that the individual soul cannot stand on its own. All three are in agreement about its radical incompleteness and consequent neediness; for all of them, the Nietzschean will to power is not the fundamental fact of human nature but instead a response, the wrong one, to the natural condition of neediness. All three advocated for other, more humane responses, which Nietzsche rejected as either rationalist or Christian pipe dreams. 5 For Turgenev, romantic neediness is part of the tragic human condition that can be addressed but never completely ameliorated. At certain moments in life-most often when they are in love and feel that love to be reciprocated-individuals feel is if they are standing on top of the world, both a part of nature and fully themselves at the same time. But mostly we must accept our small role in nature or human society, and accept that we need it more than it needs us. Turgenev sees the purely human only in contemplative reason; we are at our highest when, using our reason, we accept our station in life and express it through art. In "The Singers," one of the best-known stories from A Sportsman's Sketches, Iasha the Turk squares off in a village tavern against a street vendor who sings toe-tapping virtuoso music that celebrates life. The sickly Iasha sings second, and the

Conclusion audience weeps to his music. Iasha celebrates individuality, which is sad and tragic, because in Turgenev's opinion there is no support for it in nature; the pitiless scenery that surrounds the tavern makes this point indirectly. Each person in Iasha's audience weeps for his or her own life, sad no matter how successful it might have been, because we all must grow old and die. Art speaks for subjectivity that need not defend only the reasonable, the useful, and the general. The close attention in "The Singers" to nicknames, to local slang, to peculiarities in language and behavior in the district emphasizes the particular and individual. When Nikolai Kirsanov plays the cello in his garden in Fathers and Children, he stands at a higher level than the nihilist critic Evgenii Bazarov, who listens scornfully, because Nikolai sings his life story and tells the mournful truth about it. When, at the end of the novel, Bazarov's parents mourn him in the cemetery, the little fence surrounding the grave guards the space, small in size and time, within which they have been able to impress their love and grief. Describing the flowers above the grave, the narrator is careful not to descend to simple pathetic fallacy by identifying them with Bazarov. Their "innocent eyes" precisely do not represent the "the passionate, sinful, rebellious heart" of Bazarov. (Perhaps the flagstones in the church yard, out of place "as if someone was pushing them up from underneath," are evidence of his continued presence, or at least a reminder of his vitality and its ultimate source in nature.) Meanwhile the narrator takes imagination to a higher level by simply singing the human condition, as Kirsanov does in the garden. Nature makes no promises to individuals; only its beauty and its harmony as expressed by the flowers are there to console us, if we are willing to be consoled. This is not enough for the likes of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. They both emphasize that part of the soul is divine and therefore capable at certain times of uniting the whole person. It is important to realize that the incompleteness of the soul is the precondition for the struggle for ideals in classic Russian literature that so captivates readers. Only base and incurably superficial characters such as Apollon, the servant of the Underground Man, or the Kuragins in War and Peace are completely satisfied with themselves in it. Dostoevsky is the most radical of the three in this regard, as in others. He looks down on Turgenev for his cowardice in the face of the iron necessity of nature, while he criticizes Tolstoy for the supposed complacency of such characters as Prince Andrei, who can find happiness if they finally submit to death and necessity. Yet the most radical writer is also the neediest; it was Dostoevsky, after all, who hoped for an eventual messianic transformation of human life. This was necessary because for Dostoevsky individualism itself was both natural and morally suspect. Evil too is natural inasmuch as it flows from the demands of an

Conclusion unchecked ego. This is the theme of his four great novels about murder and its causes: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. In the last of them, Dostoevsky actually proposes a traditional solution to the problem of evil, that of the elder as embodied in Father Zosima: An elder is one who takes your soul, your will into his soul and into his will. Having chosen an elder, you renounce your will and give it to him under total obedience and with total self-renunciation. A man who dooms himself to this trial, this terrible school of life, does so voluntarily, in the hope that after the long trial he will achieve self-conquest, self-mastery to such a degree that he will, finally, through a whole life's obedience, attain to perfect freedom-that is, freedom from himself-and avoid the lot of those who live their whole lives without finding themselves in themselves. 6

Dostoevsky returns here to the problem of Stavrogin's confession to Father Tikhon, suggesting that no one can escape what elsewhere he calls the "impulses" (oshchushcheniia) of evil.? To achieve "freedom" from these impulses, we must relinquish our will, at least temporarily, to a saintly person. But even a man as saintly as Zosima "stinks" when he dies; he too is human and a sinner. Therefore Alyosha, who has yielded his soul to his elder in a pure act of love, must return, on the orders of that very elder, to the dark secular world of the novel in search of salvation through some other means. Zosima remains Alyosha's model of the saintly man, as he is supposed to be for the reader too, but Alyosha must undergo a quest for his own goodness that will be the subject of the narrator's second (unwritten) novel about him. The complexity of this quest, and of the human personality as Dostoevsky conceived it, is expressed in the repetitions of the word self in the passage quoted. To purge ourselves of evil impulses, we must free ourselves from "ourselves" (sebia) so that we can find "ourselves" (sebia) in "ourselves" (sebe). Will the real human personality please stand up? However unified human beings may be in Dostoevsky's conception when they come from God, this convoluted formulation reveals how conflicted they are in reality. Consequently, I agree with Malcolm Jones in his recent meditation on Dostoevsky's religion: that it incorporates doubt into its very essence. 8 Back in Tolstoy's fictional world, Pozdnyshev's radical solution to human neediness resembles the sweet and childlike atheist Kirillov's (in The Demons) in that Pozdnyshev proposes to banish its causes rather than offer a solution to it. If only men and women loved each other in a brotherly way, without the sacrifices that romantic love demands, the world would be peaceful and harmonious. It would also come to an end within

Conclusion one generation, a denouement that Tolstoy, the embittered father of a large family, defended in an Afterword to his novella to his horrified contemporaries. If we assume Tolstoy knew that no such solution was about to occur, we are left with a struggle in human nature between good and evil that Tolstoy, in a letter to Strakhov written after Dostoevsky's death, characterized as the essence of his rival's personality and his prose. 9 Works such as The Devil, Kreutzer Sonata, and Resurrection make it clear that Tolstoy also struggled in this way. In the post-Nietzschean world in the late- twentieth and early-twentyfirst centuries, pure subjectivity has come to be associated with amorality or a relativist perspective that allows the subject to do what he or she wants, either good or bad. From our ironic vantage point, the moralism of the nineteenth century seems naive or bourgeois; this last term is most often used pejoratively, indicating that bourgeois "morality" is self-serving. Yet nineteenth-century Russian authors do well under our critical lens because they seem moral without naivete or hypocrisy. This applies even to Tolstoy, whom we forgive for his sermons ostensibly because of the way he shed his preacher's habit in his fiction; Isaiah Berlin's paradigm of the hedgehog and the fox can stand for all the ways in which modern critics try to cut Tolstoy's moralism out of his fictional world. As many would acknowledge, though, especially in the case of Tolstoy, this is impossible and not desirable anyway. Berlin held laudably moral reasons for his relativism; it was the redoubt from which he battled the monoliths of fascism and communism. This very fact, however, reveals the inapplicability of his approach transferred to today, with relativism having become an internal enemy in modern culture that saps our belief in the individualism that is the finest achievement of liberalism. Though still defending tolerance, English-speaking readers of the Russian classics find common ground with the great Russian authors precisely as moralists. In Dostoevsky's great political novel The Demons, we laugh at the townspeople, but the poisonous nihilism that Pyotr Verkhovensky spreads seems much more dangerous to us because we are closer to it than to the stuffy conformity of the "booboisie" in Hollywood movies. We are looking for moral guidance that reins in the excesses of individualism without destroying its benefits, and the Russian authors help provide such guidance. We may embrace Tolstoy's or Dostoevsky's solutions to the moral dilemmas that they pose, but this is not necessary in order to benefit from their fiction. Their assumption that both good and evil exist within the human personality, and their explanations for the fact, are part of a profound version of modern psychology that does not reduce human beings to their biological beginnings or the movements of their minds.

Conclusion We also accept the moralism of the masters of Russian psychological prose because of their honesty about the limits of their own knowledge. The major heroes ofTurgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy are emanations of their creators and also individuals whose essence is not available, whether to their authors or to themselves. When narrators try to explain characters by relying simply on analysis or their own self-understanding, they get things both right and wrong. This fact explains why Turgenev could write about Bazarov as if he were an historical figure rather than Turgenev's own creation. 10 Perhaps the most famous example of this principle at work in fiction occurs in the trial of Dmitri Karamazov in book r 2 of The Brothers Karamazov, when the two principal lawyers give differing accounts of Fyodor's murder. The Public Prosecutor Ippolit Kirillovich is crafty, but moral; therefore he incorrectly attributes craft to Dmitri, of whose guilt he is certain, and he correctly understands Smerdyakov's craftiness, but not his amorality; he falls into the trap set for him by the fiendish Smerdyakov because he assumes, wrongly, that Smerdyakov has a strong conscience. But lppolit also appreciates Dmitri's nobility, which mirrors his own, while the imaginative but amoral defense lawyer Fetyukovich is capable of parsing out Smerdyakov's plot but cannot understand Dmitri's inability to lie. He (like Ippolit) does not see that had Dmitri committed the crime, he would have confessed to doing so. As for Tolstoy, despite his reliance on an outspoken didactic narrator, he provides accounts of his main characters from so many points of view that they do not collectively add up to a package that an omniscient narrator can neatly dissect and explain. Narrative digressions and commentary in his works, however compelling, are not the last word on his dramas, leaving them and their characters alive and mysterious for generations of readers. By the midnineteenth century, Russians were writing novels that explained Europeans to themselves. Works such as Notes from Underground and Anna Karenina illuminated the human condition as seen from the point of view of modern individuals. In an irony that repeats itself throughout history, twentieth-century readers imitated the Underground Man or Anna Karenina as Russians once imitated characters in European novels. If the process continues in the twenty-first century, it will be because Russian novels are still revealing the consequences of consciousness in unexpected ways.

Reftrence Matter

Notes

INTRODUCTION

r. Mr. Gradgrind lays out the facts as a hard man sees them in the opening passage of Dickens's Hard Times (I854). 2. See Luria's introduction to Sack's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 3-7. Sacks dedicated another book, A Leg to Stand On (I984), to Luria. 3. See Luria, The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound. In another book, The Mind of a Mnemonist, Luria reports on his study, conducted over thirty years, of a man whose memory "had no distinct limits" (II). 4· Sacks, "Luria and 'Romantic Science'," I87. 5· Ibid., I88. 6. Ibid., I82. 7· Ibid. 8. Luria, The Stages of a Road Traveled. A Scientific Autobiography, II. 9· Ibid., I2-I3. Io. William James, letter to C. Renouvier, Aug. 4, I896; quoted in Perry, The Thought and Character of William james, I:709. II. Ibid., 2:273· I2. On James's reception in Russia, see Grossman and Rischin, William james in Russian Culture. I3. He stressed this in his private correspondence with Sacks. See "Luria and 'Romantic Science'," I9I. 14· Ibid., I82. I 5. Halliwell, Romantic Science and the Experience of Self, I9. I6. See such works by Stanley Cavell as The Senses of Walden or The New Yet Unapproachable America. I7. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, I70-7r. I8. In Chapter 4 I stray from the dialogue among the three authors to discuss one between Dostoevsky and the romantic novelist V. F. Odoevsky; Chapter 8 contains a discussion of Dickens. I9. See Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism. 20. In I 8 70, for instance, in making the case for the importance of Hegel in Russia, N. N. Strakhov (I828-I896) remarked that Hegelian dialectic was more

Notes to Pages 5-r4 important there than any specific idea of Hegel ("Literaturnaia deiatel'nost' Gertsena" [Herzen's Literary Activity] 58-59). See also Chizhevskii, Hegel in Russia, 239-243· Schelling's dates are 1775-1854· 2r. Lowith, 141. 22. Berdiaev, The Russian Idea, 41. 23. On Herzen's knightly individualism, see Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism. 24. Ibid., II2-II3. 25. The quote is from Hamlet, Act 3, Scene r. 26. See, for instance, Schelling in Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797): "Pure reflection therefore, is a spiritual sickness ... it is an evil" (quoted in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 219); but Schelling goes on to argue that this evil is a necessary step in the process of a return to unity. 27. Note William James's comments about Anna Karenina quoted in this Introduction. Tolstoy's "fatalism" and "semi-pessimism" and his "infallible veracity concerning human nature" are connected, of course. 28. The translation of Anna Karenina is by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. 29. In James's preface to The Tragic Muse, x. The Jamesian critic Percy Lubbock developed this point of view in a chapter on War and Peace in The Craft of Fiction (39-42), which was originally published in 1926. 30. Halliwell, 14-15. 3!· On German romanticism in this regard, see Engelhardt, "Romanticism in Germany." CHAPTER ONE

r. Turgenev, Complete Works (Tu-PSS), 1:244. 2. Opening page of Alexander Herzen's Dilettantism in Science (1843) in Gertsen (Herzen), Sobranie sochinenii (Herzen-PSS), 3:7. 3· Belinsky, Complete Works (B-PSS), 4:253. 4· Although Peter's style of rule and his reforms were controversial in his lifetime, they became the norm after his death, with his successors all legitimating themselves as Perrine reformers (Whittaker, Russian Monarchy, 77, 84, 102). 5· Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 71. 6. In 1836, P. Ya. Chaadaev (1794-1856) issued a pessimistic assessment of Russia, obviously influenced by Rousseau's critique, that caused Tsar Nikolai I to declare him insane and have him confined to his home for a year. Having defined Russians as being without a history or a culture, however, a year later Chaadaev then recanted in The Apology of a Madman. Now he argued that because it was so highly imitative and without historical baggage, Russia was in the position to understand all the ideas of nations before it, sift through them, and adopt the good ones in a synthesis. Russia stood at the end of the Hegelian historical dialectic and, according to a new messianism that after Chaadaev took various forms, was destined to spiritually rule Europe not by force but by consent.

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For trenchant accounts of Chaadaev's thought, see Lossky, History of Russian Philosophy, 47-sr; and Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, chapter 3· 7. I take all this from Lorman's biography, which also acknowledges that Karamzin went abroad with the approval of his teachers as the government began to persecute Freemasons and especially Karamzin's mentor N.l. Novikov. See Sotvorenie Karamzina (The Making of Karamzin) in Lorman's Karamzin, 39-42. 8. Zenkovsky (A History of Russian Philosophy I:125-26) stresses Karamzin's debt to Rousseau and quotes Karamzin as saying, "We love Rousseau because of his passionate love of man." 9· Lotman, "Ob odnom chitatel'skom vospriiatii 'Bednoi Lizy' N. M. Karamzina" (One Reader's Reception of 'Poor Liza' by N. M. Karamzin) in Karamzin, 6I762o. Merzliakov (I778-I83o) came from a modest merchant family and at the time of this anecdote was already associated with Moscow University (from I798), where he eventually became professor of Russian literature. He was a brilliant lecturer and influential teacher whose many students included Chaadaev and Lermontov. Io. Ibid., 6I8-2o. I I. On the extent and limits of Karamzin's crucial language reforms, see Vinogradov, History of the Russian Literary Language, I02-II r. I2. Belinsky, The Works of Alexander Pushkin, 59· 13· On this subject see, Hammarberg, From the Idyll to the Novel, 4-6, and passim. I4· Lotman, "Puti razvitiia russkoi prozy I8oo-I8Io-kh gg." (Paths of Development in Russian Prose from I8oo to I8Io), in Lotman, Karamzin, 350-51. I5. The fifth one, "The Undertaker," reflects the influence on its hero of popular gothic tales that may or may not be foreign in origin. It takes place in the Germanized milieu of Moscow tradesmen, but the hero himself is Russian. I6. Here and elsewhere, the translation is by Alan Myers. I7. Lotman, "Chelovek v pushkinskom romane v stikhakh" (The Human Being in Pushkin's Novel in Verse) in Pushkin, 452-53. I8. Todd, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin, 126. I9. Eugene Onegin, chapter 7, verses I9 and 22. 20. Todd, 33-37. 21. Ibid., 142, I6o-6r. 22. B-PSS, 4:254. 23. Quoted in B-PSS, 4:252. 24. B-PSS, 4:253. 25. B-PSS, 4:253-54. He leaves out Rousseau's Confessions, although Pechorin's statement sounds very like the one from Confessions that I quote in Chapter 7· 26. B-PSS, 4:254. 27. B-PSS, 4:253. Belinsky may be referring to Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. 28. For more on reflection, see Chapter 7· 29. The translation is by Constance Garnett as modified by Elizabeth Cheresh Allen from The Essential Turgenev. 30. Lavretsky has a Swiss tutor, a motif that Lotman traces back to Karamzin's "My Confession." See "Puti razvitiia russkoi prozy I8oo-I8Io-kh gg." (Paths of Development in Russian Prose from I8oo to I8Io) in Karamzin, 386.

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3 r. Note that the behavior of the characters actually slightly anticipates the literary trends that they represent. 32. D-PSS, 16:330. 33· See Hammarberg, 138-59. 34· See Perlina, Varieties of Poetic Utterance: Quotation in The Brothers Karamazov. 3 5. The translation is by Pevear and Volokhonsky. 36. Letter to A. V. Druzhinin, quoted in Hammarberg, 6, 159· 37· Poggioli, The Oaten Flute, 23. See Hammarberg (287), who, quoting Poggioli, makes this point and also confirms Karamzin's intimate familiarity with Rousseau's works. The relevant text in this case is the Reveries. 38. The labeling of sentimentalism as "solipsistic" comes from the Soviet scholar of the eighteenth century G. A. Gukovskii. See Hammarberg, 4-6. 39· Herzen, "Dilettantism in Russia," in Herzen-SS, 3=33· The translation is from Selected Philosophical Works. Note how even Herzen soft-pedals Byron's full effect by emphasizing his skepticism rather than his cynicism. 40. On this subject, see Powelstock's fine book, Becoming Mikhail Lermontov. 41. Zenkovsky, 1:243. 42. See his "Comments on Locke." Peterson (1811-1890), a Lutheran and the son of a civil servant, was a minor writer, publicist, translator, and author of children's stories. 43· See "Leibniz, A Biographical Sketch." Babst (1823-1881), a student of T. N. Granovsky, graduated from Moscow University in 1846 with a degree in philosophy and went on to a distinguished career as an historian, economist, and publicist. Peterson (34) also cites Leibniz's refutation of Locke on this issue. 44· See Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland), 1845, issues 10-11, and 1846, issues 1, 3, s; and Biblioteka dlia chteniia (Library for Reading), 1846, issues 1-8. Baron von Humboldt (1769-18 59), one of the founders of modern geography, had a Russian connection. He was sent in 1829 by Tsar Nikolai I to the Ural Mountains and Central Asia to report on mineral resources there. 4 5. Danilevsky is most famous for his late Slavophile work of romantic science Russia and Europe (1869), in which he proposed and described a positive Slavonic "type." For more about Danilevsky, see Russian Writers r8oo-I9I7. 46. The dialogues include (volume 1) the Protagoras, Euthydemus, and Laches, and (volume 2) the Charmides, Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito. This was the first publication of a lifelong and ultimately uncompleted project to translate all the dialogues. In 1863, a four-volume set of translations with introductions appeared. In addition to the earlier translations, this set included the Hippias Minor, Phaedo, Meno, Gorgias, First Alcibiades, Second Alcibiades, Republic, Phaedrus, Symposium, Lysias, Hippias Major, Menexenus, Ion, Lovers, and Hipparchus. 47· This information comes from the entry on Karpov in the famous nineteenthcentury Efron-Brockhaus Russian Encyclopedia. See also Kolubovskii, Material on the History of Philosophy in Russia from r855 to r888. 48. The review was unsigned, but the editors of Belinsky's Complete Works identify the author as Senkovsky (see B-PSS, 6:753). Senkovsky (18oo-1868), born

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in Poland as Julian-Jozef S