Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe 9781501757174

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IN RUSSIA AND EASTERN EUROPE

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NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS! OEKi\LB

© 2011 by Northern Illinois University Press

Published by the Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115

All Rights Reserved Design by Julia Fauci

Frontispiece is from the painting, Dusty Wind (2003, oil on canvas, 76 X 102 em, private collection) by Zoya Frolova, generously contributed by the artist.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Interpreting emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe I edited by Mark D. Steinberg and Valeria Sobol. p.

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Papers from a conference held at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in summer 2008. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87580-653-2 (clothbound: acid-free paper) l. Russia-Sociallife and customs-Congresses. 2. Europe, Eastern-Sociallife and

customs-Congresses. 3. Russia-Politics and government-Congresses. 4. Europe, Eastern-Politics and government-Congresses. 5. EmotionsSocial aspectsRussia-History-Congresses. 6. Emotions-Social aspects-Europe, EasternHistory-Congresses. 7. Emotions-Political aspects-Russia-History-Congresses. 8. Emotions-Political aspects-Europe, Eastern-History-Congresses. 9. Social change-Europe, Eastern-History-Congresses. 10. Social change-Europe, EasternHistory-Congresses. I. Steinberg, Mark D., 1953- II. Sobol, Valeria. DK32.I59 2011 152.4094 7-dc22 2011000920

Acknowledgments

vii

MARK D. STEINBERG AND VALERIA SOBOL-INTRODUCTION

3

1-ILYA VINITSKY "THE QUEEN OF LOFTY THOUGHTS"

The Cult of Melancholy in Russian Sentimentalism

18

2-ANDREI ZORIN-LEAVING YOUR FAMILY IN 1797

Two Identities of Mikhail Muravev

44

3-VICTORIA FREDE-RADICALS AND FEELINGS-The 1860s

62

4-ALEXANDRA OBERLANDER- SHAME AND MODERN

SUBJECTIVITIES-The Rape of Elizaveta Cheremnova

82

5-RONALD GRIGOR SUNY-THINKING ABOUT FEELINGS

Affective Dispositions and Emotional Ties in Imperial Russia and the Ottoman Empire 102 6-GLENNYS YOUNG-BOLSHEVIKS AND EMOTIONAL HERMENEUTICS

The Great Purges, Bukharin, and the February-March Plenum of 1937

128

7-POLLY JONES-BREAKING THE SILENCE-Iurii Bondarev's Quietness between the "Sincerity" and "Civic Emotion" of the Thaw 152 8-JUDITH PINTAR - EMPLACED AND DISPLACED - Theorizing the

Emotions of Space in the Former Yugoslavia

177

9-JACK R. FRIEDMAN-A GENEALOGY OF WORKING-CLASS ANGER

History, Emotions, and Political Economy in Romania's Jiu Valley

201

10-CAROL SILVERMAN-MUSIC, EMOTION, AND THE "OTHER" Balkan Roma and the Negotiation of Exoticism 224 11-SERGUEI ALEX. OUSHAKINE-EMOTIONAL BLUEPRINTS War Songs as an Affective Medium 248

Bibliography Contributors Index 285

277 281

This volume grew out of a conference organized by the editors in the summer of 2008 at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Participants were selected from a large number of proposals, indicating the vitality of this still relatively new field of study. This conference could not have taken place without the financial and organizational support of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center, which hosted the meeting as its annual Ralph and Ruth Fisher Forum. We thank the director and especially the hardworking staff of REEEC. Other centers, programs, and departments at the University of Illinois provided essential funding for the conference, including the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; the School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics; the Center for Advanced Studies; International Programs and Studies; the European Union Center; the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory; the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; the Department of History; and other units. At Northern Illinois University Press, Amy Farranto's commitment to this project has been of great value. Also at the Press we thank Susan Bean, Julia Fauci, Sara Hoerdeman, and Candace McNulty. On behalf of the authors and ourselves, we are grateful to the referees chosen by the Press, Louise McReynolds and Peter Stearns, whose many critical insights advanced and helped to unify this work. The cover image was generously contributed by the artist Zoya Frolova. Jane Hedges did heroic work helping us reconcile style and formatting variations to ready the manuscript for the Press. We are thankful to Kirsten Painter for her meticulous work on this book's index. Above all, we thank the contributors. It has been a pleasure and an intellectual inspiration to work with them. As participants at the Fisher Forum, they intensely engaged one another's work, often across quite expansive disciplinary, geographic, and chronological spaces. And they continued to do so during rounds of revisions. We also thank other participants at the conference, especially those whose papers did not find their way into the final volume. They too contributed much to the project as a whole. Not least, the editors are grateful to one another for intellectual partnership and a relative lack of panic or exasperation.

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MARK D. STEINBERG AND VALERIA SOBOL

Emotions have, in recent years, become the subject of a rising tide of study, interpretation, and theory. Since the late 1980s, conferences, articles, and books on this topic have proliferated, involving a very wide range of disciplines and eras and regions of the world. Many have spoken of a new "affective turn'' or "emotional turn" in the humanities and social sciences, suggesting a change comparable to the linguistic turn of the 1970s, in duding in the extent of interdisciplinary reach and methodological impact. 1 Scholars working on Russia, Eurasia, and eastern Europe have more recently begun to engage and contribute to the study of emotions, with a succession of workshops and conferences since 2003 and a few initial publications. 2 As part of this growing attention to emotion as an object of study and a category of analysis, this volume brings together, in dialogue with one another and with scholars working on other regions, new work by some of the leading scholars in Slavic and east European studies engaged in emotion research and interpretation. Unlike the few other publications on emotions concerning this important region of Europe's east, this book is unusually embracing in its reach across nations, across more than two centuries of time, and across disciplines and methodologies. The problem of how to interpret emotions is not new, of course. Inquiries into the nature and workings of the passions, feelings, emotions, moods, dispositions, and affects (different writers prefer different terms and often distinguish their meanings) have a very long history, as does attention to particular emotions, such as love, melancholy, or anger. But recent work has taken new directions, reflecting important theoretical and methodological trends within and across disciplines. At times, the range of approaches is dizzying. Contemporary theories of cognition, the body, subjectivity, subjection, power, self, language, performativity, culture, society, gender, and memory, in varied combinations and interpretations, have been tied into the study of emotions. But most consistent and significant about approaches since the mid -1980s has been a newly critical perspec-

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Interpreting Emotions

tive on the key epistemological question of how we know and interpret the world and how the people we study comprehend their lives. As Ronald Suny notes in his chapter, recent work has advanced well beyond both the vague and unfocused methodology in which emotions are viewed as so ubiquitous in human behavior that they explain nothing while being used to explain everything and the rigid and reductionist belief, which still has considerable weight in the social sciences, that all human action is based on "rational" calculation. Newer work, by contrast-though drawing on a tradition that, since at least Aristotle and, later, Descartes, Spinoza, and sensationalist philosophers, has stressed a deep interconnectedness between emotions and reason-views reason and emotion as complexly intertwined with one another and with physiology, culture, and history. In other words, rather than seeing emotions as a separate, private, and visceral sphere that occasionally seethes over into the world of consciousness, it is precisely the inseparable interrelationships of thinking and feeling, the body and society, and private self and public self that demand our attention. These perspectives also lead to deep exploration of the mutual relationships between emotions and society, emotions and politics, and emotions and historical change. These newer approaches are strongly evident in this volume. Though the first wave of social constructionists (mainly anthropologists working on emotion in the 1970s and 1980s) tended to efface the corporeal with arguments that emotions are entirely produced through socially organized forms of behavior and discourse and thus endlessly variant over time and place, 3 recent work has brought a more inclusive attention to both the body and culture. Scholars differ on the relative impact of physical and social factors. The dominant paradigms in medicine and neurobiology, of course, continue to emphasize the overwhelming force of the body. We also see a recent trend in literary and cultural studies, often attached to the term "affect theory;' that has reemphasized the bodily aspects, engagements, and manifestations of feeling. This work describes emotions as "intensity" or "excess;' which take place prior to or outside reason, deliberation, will, or cognition. Feelings, in this view, are always (to use the terminology of these arguments) corporeal, pre-personal, nonconscious, irreducible, nonassimilable, and un-narrativized. Sometimes, this work is radically materialist, determined to move away from the social constructionism that views everything as discourse. 4 The contributors to this book, like the majority of researchers in the social sciences and humanities, favor what might be called a neo-constructionist attention to emotions. The body is not absent-it participates in the construction of feeling and is affected by emotion-but neither is

STEINBERG AND SOBOL I Introduction

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it overwhelming in its determining force. In this book, bodily aspects of emotions, including changing ideas about the physiology of feeling, are examined especially in chapters by Victoria Frede on nineteenth -century Russian radicals, Alexandra Oberlander on the meanings of rape, and Carol Silverman on "Gypsy" performers. But the physical is never abstracted from social and cultural structures, processes, and experiences. Emotions are viewed as strongly relational and situated human practices, deeply imbedded in society, politics, culture, language, and place, though not reducible to any of these locations. Scholars have formulated and practiced this complex approach to emotions in different ways. In an influential collection of essays by anthropologists, based on fieldwork and theorizing in the late 1980s, Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine Lutz highlighted a recognition that "emotion discourse is only apparently about internal state;' for it is always already about "social life;' social "problems;' and especially power. And not merely as interpretation. Emotion discourse helps produce experience and constitute reality; it is "a form of social action that creates effects in the world:'s Among historians, Peter Stearns, William Reddy, and Barbara Rosenwein have most cogently (if variously) promoted the study of emotions as practices that both interpret and shape experience, that reflect but also alter the self, that vary and change across time and place, and that are shaped by, and shape in turn, a community's "emotional culture" -including its rules of emotional control and expression, as these are entwined with norms, habits, values, moral codes, and discourses, especially about self and society. 6 Literary scholars have been particularly attentive to the rhetoric and imagery of emotions, which is found to be intensely interpretative and signifying-not merely expressing the characters' inner world but pointing to complex processes and relationships in the social and cultural sphere. Along with a focus on the ways in which emotions are embedded in fiction, newer work explores the affective and bodily experiences of writing and reading. These studies tend to turn to other disciplines, engaging the history of science and religion, philosophy, neuroscience, and psychoanalysis, among others, in order to challenge a universalist view of emotions and to place fictional representations or intellectual conceptualizations of emotions in specific time periods and cultural contexts. 7 Some of the most recent work in the humanities, emerging from cultural studies and critical theory, has offered especially rich mixtures of all these elements. Sara Ahmed, for example, has written of a "sociality of emotion" that understands emotion as continually "moving;' "relational;' and ultimately "doing" things in ways that constitute both the psychic and the social. 8 That emotions

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Interpreting Emotions

are strongest and most active when self or society is most troubled, especially when individual freedom ("agency") is obstructed-a condition often seen in the Russian and east European histories explored in this book-is underscored in Sianne Ngai's terse definition of emotions as intense "interpretations of predicaments:' 9 Notwithstanding many differences of emphasis, the most interpretively useful approaches, shared by the authors in this collection, locate emotion at the knotted intersections of body, self, society, culture, and power, where emotions participate actively in the complex human work of perception, evaluation, interpretation, and judgment. Individual subjects are essential, but do not do their emotional work outside of the social. Thus, the focus of our attention is on what have been variously termed emotional regimes, emotional communities, emotional discourses and scripts, or the emotional habitus. And we examine emotions, not merely as expressions or reflections, but as doing things and having effects in the world. Not least, we inquire into these emotional environments and practices in order to rethink both particular times and places and how we approach human experience, thought, and feeling. The contributors to this volume work in literature, history, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and sociology. Individual chapters examine many different emotions and emotional states, including passion, desire, love, happiness, anger, hatred, mourning, melancholy, shame, guilt, fear, trauma, grief, and despair, especially as they are entwined with social, cultural, and political life. These emotions are studied as they are expressed in literature, letters, lyrics, essays, films, and other texts, but also in physical spaces, buildings, objects, rituals, sounds, and gestures. And they are viewed in an array of different time periods, national locations, and social situations. Social actors in this book range from educated elites to commoners, from men with power in their grasp to individuals largely excluded from structures of authority. They include writers of all sorts, sensitive aristocrats, committed revolutionaries, aggressive nationalists, political leaders, female victims of sexual violence, perpetrators and victims of Stalinist terror, citizens of Kosovo and Dubrovnik in the wake of war, workers in postsocialist Romania, Balkan Romani ("Gypsy") musicians, and veterans of the Afghan and Chechen wars. Alongside the living, we also feel the presence and influence of the dead. This diversity of disciplines, locations, and topics is essential to developing a multifaceted approach to interpreting emotions, and it reflects our insistence that emotions are not universal drives or instincts hardwired in the human body but relational, public, contextual, constituting, and moving-often in multiple and contradictory directions-and thus demand

STEINBERG AND SOBOL I Introduction

7

not laboratory research but the interpretive study of concrete times, places, and texts. Amid this variety, though, we would emphasize the common themes that link these chapters. Not least, these different studies share a theoretical focus on the interrelations of emotions with human conditions and experiences, especially difficult conditions, such as violence, suffering, loss, and death, which were all particularly intense in this region. No less, these chapters engage key analytical categories, especially empire, nation, ethnicity, religion, gender, class, everyday life, morality, and power (none of which, it bears adding, were in any way stable). The authors of these chapters understand that even the most inward emotions-shame, love, trauma-are inescapably entwined with public, social, and historical matters. Thus, you will find here much attention to the relations of self and society (including politics and economics); to feelings of belonging associated with ethnicity, religion, nation, class, and gender; to questions about sincerity and authenticity of feeling (emotions as moral and epistemological truth) but also evidence that emotion can be ritualized performance and structured according to forms, scripts, and norms; to the agonies of loss and trauma and the pursuit of healing; and to the mobilizing power of affection or hatred but also the drive to "manage" emotions so that order and power are not threatened. In a word, these papers explore emotional perception and expression not only as private, inward feeling but especially as a way of interpreting and judging a troubled world, acting in it, and perhaps changing it. The papers in this volume are arranged roughly in chronological order. But this is by no means the only way we might have ordered and linked these papers, or that you might read them. Chronological order usefully emphasizes the experiences, memories, and movements of time, especially as they are fixed as "history;' as critical to the formation of emotions. But we might have organized the chapters by country, or by the social background and experiences of the people studied, or, especially, by the interpretive themes explored. To be sure, many papers do not fit easily into any single national, social, or conceptual category. For that matter, many reach beyond demarcations of time, especially when memory is at work. But precisely because these chapters are arranged in temporal order, we want in this introduction to emphasize thematic patterns: the major concerns, arguments, and approaches that thread through these papers. Necessarily, our emphasis on salient themes oversimplifies the contributions of these complex and nuanced papers. It also reminds us of the central concern of each author: how we view emotions as an interpretive category and how specific histories of emotion recast our interpretations of culture, society, and politics in Russia and eastern Europe, in both the past and the present.

s

Interpreting Emotions EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION-FREEDOM, SELF, AUTHENTICITY

Notions of self and subjectivity are inevitably at the center of most emotional narratives. The modern era throughout Europe, Russia and eastern Europe included, experienced a rampant preoccupation with the inward self and its social significance in both private life and public discourse. The Europe-wide, but also widely varied, cultural movements of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Sentimentalism, and Romanticism played powerful roles in focusing Europeans' lasting attention on the individual, the personality, and the self-and not only in philosophy and the arts but also in science, social and economic organization, and political policy. Sentimentalism, in particular, focused on an individual's sensibilityunderstood in physiological, psychological, as well as moral terms-as the ultimate manifestation of our humanity and vitality, as well as a basis for cognition, sociability, and moral judgment. Romanticism developed this preoccupation with the inward and subjective self, and thus with instincts, passions, and feelings. This emotional self, and how it was construed, is at the center of attention in this volume, for it has been such a powerful presence in the history of the region. In particular, we have seen a great deal of effort to know the "authentic" inward self as distinct from the artificial, performative self of public existence; to explore inner states (often quite publicly); and to see emotional expression as a truer expression of self, even as closer to truth itself. Ilya Vinitsky, for example, in his chapter explores the centrality, indeed mythic elevation, of "melancholy" in Russian literature and culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, strongly influenced by the spirit of Sentimentalism. Vinitsky shows the complexity and contradictoriness of this mood: the multiplicity of feelings and thoughts it could embrace and especially the ambivalent status of melancholy as both a pleasure and a danger, and as both a genuinely sorrowful and pessimistic philosophical mood (expressing the inner self facing the external conditions of the world) and as an adopted, ritualized, and aestheticized system of performed feeling. In Andrei Zorin's chapter, a Russian nobleman, away from his family to attend the tsar's coronation in 1797, struggles to define the proper sentiments and values a man (and gender matters here) should feel in relation to public power and private life, both of which have a claim on his affections. This struggle, interestingly, is expressed in two parallel sets of letters addressed to his wife-indeed, in two different literary genres-which reflect two conflicting sets of values: those of a civil servant and of a Sentimentalist writer. Methodologically, Zorin, like Vinitsky, em-

STEINBERG AND SOBOL I Introduction

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phasizes the importance of existing emotional regimes-the repertoires of sentiment publicly available to individuals-as well as changing emotional standards (not least under the influence of European literature) and unresolved ambivalence, to the point of emotional pain, in the face of tension and uncertainty. Victoria Frede finds among Russian radicals in the 1860s a preoccupation with feeling and the self, surprisingly similar to that of the Romantic era, against which the radicals are typically defined. Frede, however, interprets their polemical stance vis-a-vis the Romanticism of the previous generation as not a repudiation of sentiment as such but a critique of an inauthentic and artificial manipulation of affect. The "sons" of the 1860s insisted that the sincere and authentic self, or "nature;' can be recovered only by removing the layers of social and cultural practices and conventions that deform the true self and natural feeling. On a much darker side, Alexandra Oberlander closely examines the power of shame to express the self. Shame is a complex emotion that reflects recognition of autonomous selfhood, a sense of its transgression or inadequacy, and feelings of unwanted self-exposure. Oberlander's account of a case of rape and suicide, and its semifictional echo, in late imperial Russia explores the role of shame, and its constructions in discourse, in fashioning the modern individual and subject, including a redefined female self. She examines an unstable but usable emotional narrative that shifted between liberal notions of the free and autonomous subject and traditional notions of honor and virtue; between changing and persistently rigid notions of gender and emotion; between self-assertion and self-annihilation. Glennys Young examines a no less complex and dark emotional history of a social catastrophe: the genesis and development of the Stalinist terror. Looking closely at the important Central Committee Plenum of 1937, Young identifies a ritualized obsession with uncovering individual feelings (not merely thoughts) as a presumed key to a person's most authentic beliefs and values, to their inward self-again pointing to an assumed theory of the mind and knowledge linking emotion with authenticity and truth, and the often bloody consequences of this belief and its interrogatory practices. Cultural value placed on emotional expression, in other words, was as likely to lead to sadness, anxiety, trauma, and death as to pleasure, selfrealization, and freedom. And these two faces were not separate or even opposite; each helped to shape and define the other. We see this strongly, for example, in Carol Silverman's discussion of Romani musicians in the Balkans, who often make use of others' stereotypes about "authentic" "Gypsy" passion and joy while conveying in their songs strong feelings of

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Interpreting Emotions

loss, abandonment, and despair. Indeed, we see these dialogues between the suffering self and self-realization repeatedly in the final chapters on postsocialism, where individuals in a variety of settings and conditions experience painful loss and trauma, physical and moral affliction, and damage to selves and identities, as well as new opportunities for self-expression and individual agency. EMOTIONAL CONTROL AND MANAGEMENT

Efforts to control, regulate, and manage emotions are closely linked to their expression. This is not simply a matter of anxieties, notably among authorities determined to protect the stability of social and political power, about the dangerous unpredictability of feeling, leading to efforts to manipulate and limit emotional expression, though it is that too. Rather, the drive for emotional control usually involves a more complex set of interactions that have much in common with Michel Foucault's arguments about a discursive formation (discursive practices governing knowledge in a particular culture that are entwined with power and discipline) or Pierre Bourdieu's habitus (internalized and durable "dispositions" involving structures of perception, thought, and action). These more structural cultural notions have been adapted to the phenomenology of emotion, for example, by William Reddy's idea of "emotional regimes;' which can be either constraining or enabling, and can be used, resisted, and overthrown (his metaphor of "navigation" involves both structures and agency) and Barbara Rosenwein's concept of "emotional communities:' which are more multiple and conflicting than Reddy's "regimes" and less tied to state formation. The evidence of shared structures of feeling can be seen throughout this book, as can the persistent tension between conditions nurturing emotional expression and conditions channeling, managing, and constraining expression. Chapters concerned with self-expression naturally also involve histories of working with, within, and sometimes against emotional formations. Young's analysis, in particular, highlights the importance of public and ritualized emotion management and exposes strategies by which, at the 1937 Plenum, party leaders managed, controlled, and eventually reinterpreted the emotions of the accused. Similarly, Polly Jones describes the tension in de-Stalinization between the political effort to unleash and mobilize emotions (especially anger against the perpetrators of terror) and the political effort to manage them to positive purpose: to release grief in order to bring cathartic relief, to limit stories and memories that might depress people or encourage helplessness and despair. Ideally, emotion

STEINBERG AND SOBOL I Introduction

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should be both "sincere" in expressing "authentic" experience and feeling and "civic-minded" in its usefulness as public expression. In fact, she shows, this controlling balance was often elusive and the post -Stalinist emotional community often marked by conflict and disorientation. The post-Communist era has had its own histories of suffering, often developing on top of memories of past troubles and traumas, inspiring new efforts at emotional control. Jack Friedman describes a history of attempts in postsocialist Romania to tame working-class anger. Under socialism, workers had been authorized to be angry at capitalist inequality and poverty; after socialism, social and economic anger was redirected, marginalized, or simply delegitimized as irrational and regressive. Veterans of the Afghan and Chechen wars also engaged in complex practices of emotionally remembering the past and navigating the present. Serguei Oushakine examines how these veterans found ways through song (often adapted songs from World War II) to allow their traumatic experiences, which were dismissed by the authorities and often forgotten by the public, to be both recognized and safely domesticated. As we can see, memory was a key element in many of these struggles with emotion, complicating further emotion's engagements and histories. MORALITY AND VALUES

It is impossible to separate notions of morality and ethics from the dynamics of emotional expression and control. Questions about what is "right;' "fair;' "virtuous;' and "just;' and what violates these norms, are entwined with pleasure, love, empathy, hope, shame, and anger. Around moral questions we can see the workings of what Sarah Ahmed has called the "cultural politics of emotion:' At the center of Zorin's chapter, for example, are changing values that stimulate emotional skepticism about public political life as a sphere of "vanity" and egoism, and thus a preference for the supposedly more authentic and virtuous sphere of private family life. Russian radicals in the 1860s, Frede shows, though claiming to be rationalists, built their social and political vision out of faith in sensation, reliance on the instincts and desires of the self, belief in the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain as the natural purpose of life, love for humanity, and disgust in the face of poverty and the suffering self. Emotion lay at the very core of the ethics and politics promoted by these radicals, who, as Frede reminds us, frequently referred to moral judgment as "feeling:' Moreover, sincerity and intensity of feeling (often internalized to become thought) was a crucial moral attribute through which "new people" defined themselves in opposition to previous generations. Oberlander shows how

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narratives of "moral conduct" were used to define selfhood, including in its inwardmost feelings. Likewise, the Bolshevik state, Young emphasizes, insistently pursued a moral ideal of the "new man" that would be created by public emotion work to alter individuals' everyday habits, feelings, and desires. Stalin's notorious division of his fellow party leaders into "us" versus "them" was strongly based on alleged emotional qualities. During the de-Stalinizing Thaw, Jones shows, released emotional memories of the terror were also expected to always possess moral clarity about good and evil. Friedman's study of working-class loss, suffering, and anger in postsocialist Romania shows how conceptions of rights and entitlements often emerge from historically and emotionally constructed models of moral right, which produce outrage at their violation and indeed nurture a sense of moral entitlement to anger itself in such conditions. Emotions, in these histories and experiences, have strong moral significance; and moral judgment is constructed of emotional elements. NATIONAL, ETHNIC, AND LOCAL BELONGING (LOVE) AND CONSTRUCTIONS OF OTHERNESS (FEAR AND HATRED)

Collective identification is in large measure an "affective tie;' as Suny argues in his chapter, involving feelings of love and pride that bind, as well as the distancing feelings of fear, resentment, and hatred of "others:' The relevance of this approach to understanding national, ethnic, and local belonging is clear, though it also requires care to avoid the old fallacy that reduces the nation and similar group identities to an unchanging, primordial feeling. Chapters in this volume that focus on the emotional aspects of collective identification examine various emotions in specific historical contexts, both synchronically and diachronically: they analyze particular group emotional ties or distancing strategies at certain moments in history but also reconstruct historical or imaginative traditions against which these emotional constructions should be interpreted. This combined theoretical and historical approach to emotions leads to more complex and nuanced explanations of some well-known conflicts in recent history, and, more generally, to a better understanding of how collective identification works. Suny shows how serious attention to both emotions and reasoninggoing beyond the overly simplified rational choice paradigm in the social sciences-can provide a richer account of how people identify with ethnicity, religion, and nation and how they define and exclude others. These are socially and historically constructed feelings of attachment and rejection, located in language and memory, requiring complex mixtures of empathy and difference. In a word, he argues, "a nation is an affective communitY:'

STEINBERG AND SOBOL I Introduction

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He applies this theoretical approach to the particular historical situations of two failing empires, tsarist Russia and Ottoman Turkey, making quite clear that what is essential are particular conditions and actions of emotional attachment and alienation, not any fixed universality of such feelings. In Russia, the weakness of affective national ties led to catastrophic failure of the imperial polity, while their intensity among the ruling Young Turk elite led to catastrophic violence against the Armenian "othd' In neither case could the ideal of a multinational "empire" win needed emotional allegiance when compared to the allure of "nation:' Judith Pintar draws our attention to the importance of place (and, through it, of the past) in forming collective emotional ties. Using the tragically relevant case of the former Yugoslavia-another failed empire, one might argue-in particular Kosovo and Dubrovnik, Pintar shows how local identities and loyalties are maintained by an emotional attachment to place, as well as to the histories that place embodies. A more nuanced and accurate explanation of recent bloody conflicts in this country, Pintar argues, requires that we take into account not only the traditional categories of ethnic, religious, and familial ties but also emotive factors, especially as these are rooted in place. Emotional ties prove to be decisive in people's notions of "home;' selfhood, and otherness-especially given the complexity of the region and its rapidly shifting patterns of identity during crises. Silverman's chapter explores the complex role emotions and emotional codes have played in constructing the otherness of the Balkan Roma. Conceptually, her chapter also highlights how emotions are linked to ethnicity and gender and how music and performance can embody and convey such emotional knowledge. Outsiders have viewed the Roma's emotionality in ambivalent terms: as evidence of the Gypsies' "wild;' "irrational;' and "uncivilized" nature (thus contributing to the negative image of the Roma and the resulting emotions of fear, distrust, and hatred) but also as a manifestation of their passion and sexuality. This construction of positive and negative features was often viewed in gendered terms: the barbaric Romani man and the sexual Romani woman, but also, in the stereotypical appreciation of "Gypsy" music, the wild male musician and the sensual female singer or dancer. Silverman argues that although the real range of emotions in their music reaches far beyond the stereotypes, Romani artists actively perform this image, which they cannot otherwise control, in order to benefit from the market for Gypsy music. The case of a contemporary Macedonian Romani female singer demonstrates how this "emotional" identity can be performed and turned into a saleable and negotiable commodity. Friedman's discussion of how Romanian workers' anger was perceived shows that similar strategies of othering through

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Interpreting Emotions

emotion can work "internally;' within the same ethnic community but across class lines. Workers' emotions were consistently interpreted, both by Communist ideologues and post -1989 Romanian intellectuals, as evidence of their essentially irrational, ignorant, regressive, and, in post -Communist rhetoric, "anti-European" nature, therefore inconsistent with the newly constructed "Western" Romanian identity. Emotions embodied in music and song are also central to Oushakine's account of how recent Russian war veterans create new solidarity and meaningfulness by appropriating existing forms-mainly rhetoric, imagery, and textual fragments from "the Great Patriotic War" -to fashion new rituals of collective remembering, which enable a community of shared loss, incorporate past suffering into the present, and affirm common values. A new "patriotism of despair" is created that aesthetically reconciles individuals with one another, with the past, and with their country. LOSS AND MOURNING, DESPAIR AND ANGER, TRAUMA AND HEALING

As can be seen, many of these papers explore darker emotions, especially loss, mourning, despair, outrage, hatred, and anger-perhaps not surprisingly given the historical and contemporary experiences of the region. Even positive emotions, such as faith in a cause or love of nation, are seen to have dark effects and consequences. Trauma is a key metaphor, even diagnosis, in many of these studies. This reflects the ubiquity of this notion in recent cultural studies, as well as the pervasiveness in modern times (a reason for trauma's greater presence in our analytical language) of intense personal suffering, often resulting from catastrophic violence and disruption, that overwhelms the ability to understand and cope, leading to feelings of helplessness and despair. But even when experiences are less catastrophic, or means of comfort and healing are found, we see the relevance and usefulness of psychological arguments about the centrality in human social experience of grief for what has been lost and efforts to mourn and thus move forward emotionally. Of course, feelings of loss and trauma-and the processes of mourning and healing-are often entwined with memory. Some of these narratives are mainly intimate and personal, though the social setting is certainly not absent. Cultural attempts to domesticate melancholy, Vinitsky shows, remained utopian-"the last comforting utopia of the Age of Reason" -while personal experience of melancholy posed real dangers of metaphysical disorientation, madness, and suicide. A man's mourning over being forced to leave the family hearth catalyzes the emotional struggle that Zorin explores. The bodily and psychic trauma

STEINBERG AND SOBOL I Introduction

15

of rape, as Oberlander reveals, stimulates considerations of the emotional and gendered self. In many stories, social and political catastrophes are at the center of feelings of loss and trauma. Jones describes efforts to manage traumatic memories of the Stalinist terror, especially through literature and film. This trauma, however, ultimately proved very difficult to contain: released emotional memories and stories were as likely to produce confusion, anxiety, frustrated anger, helplessness, despair, and pessimism as the desired catharsis, healing, and "quietness:' Likewise, Pintar's study of emplacement and displacement in the former Yugoslavia explores the relationship between space, loss, memory, and trauma. The scars of the civil war and other historic displacements in the region are yet to be healed, but Dubrovnik's remarkable resilience shows that a collective based on what Pintar defines as a "human, material, and emotional" unity, linked to a particular spatial entity, can find its own particular resources of healing and survival. The subjective experience of sudden downward mobility in Romania, which Friedman examines-though this was an experience shared by a very large number of citizens throughout the postsocialist world at least through the 1990s-was a painful experience of violation, loss, and anxiety. Facing similar experiences, made a great deal more traumatic by participation in the wars in Afghanistan or Chechnya, Oushakine's veterans find some measure of healing for their feelings of post-traumatic loss, uncertainty, and hopelessness in the collective: in their case, in collective song. By aestheticizing loss, domesticating trauma, appropriating familiar forms and meanings, ennobling suffering, and creating a new narrative of these wars-often quite critical of established authorities and narrativesthese veterans succeed, at least momentarily, in restoring lost community, national pride, and personal honor. As this brief overview of themes shows-and by no means have we pointed to every example in different chapters nor to every theme-the work of these authors is connected not only by the broad geographic region we study, but, more fundamentally, by common interpretive and methodological concerns. Our purpose is not only to bring together some of the best new work on emotions in Russia and eastern Europe, but also to insist on and explore the central importance of emotions-and the complexity of how emotions work-for interpreting the forces and experiences that shape us as both individuals and social beings. Focusing our analytic attention on emotion requires us to confront difficult questions of methodology and theory in the social sciences and humanities-not least, how people think, feel, and act as social and political beings, and how we know

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Interpreting Emotions

this-while we continue to question and deepen our understanding of this important and still troubled part of the world. This works both ways: the particular local stories, themes, and evidence explored here suggest ways to enrich the broader conceptualization of how emotions work and to approach the study of emotions in other places and times. In both respects, local and theoretical, this work is meant to stimulate questions-the essential tool of good research-as well as to suggest new answers. NOTES 1. Key works include Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. Levine, eds., Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (Cambridge, UK, 1984); Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, "Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards;' American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (October 1985): 813-36; Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, Anger: 1he Struggle for Emotional Control in America's History (Chicago, 1986); Catherine S. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds., Language and the Politics of Emotion (Cambridge, UK, 1990); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, 1996); William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, UK, 2001); Barbara Rosenwein, Anger's Past: 1he Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1998); Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals in Thought: 1he Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, UK, 2001); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, 2003); Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions (New York, 2004); Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2006); Daniel Gross, 1he Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's "Rhetoric" to Modern Brain Science (Chicago, 2007). See the Bibliography for a more extensive list of comparative and theoretical works that authors in this volume have found useful. 2. Workshops, panels, and conferences have included a workshop titled "History of Emotions in Russia" at the University of Chicago in 2003; a roundtable at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Boston in 2004, "Thinking about Feelings: Emotions in Russian/Soviet History and Culture"; a conference held in Moscow in 2008, "Emotsii v russkoi istorii i kul'ture"; the conference at the University of Illinois, also in 2008, organized by the editors of this book; and two conferences organized by Serguei Oushakine: "The Pain of Words: Narratives of Suffering in Slavic Cultures" in 2008 and "Totalitarian Laughter: Cultures of the Comic under Socialism'' in 2009. Key publications include Il'ia Vinitskii, Utekhi melankholii (Moscow, 1997); Mark Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred (Ithaca, 2002); Andrei Zorin, "Progulka verkhom v Moskve v avguste 1799 goda: Iz istorii emotsional'noi kul'tury;' Novae literaturnoe obozrenie no. 65 (2004): 170-84; Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Happiness and Toska: An Essay in the History of Emotions in Pre-War Soviet Russia;' Australian Journal of Politics and History 50, no. 3 (September 2004): 357-71; Ronald Grigor Suny, "Why We Hate You: The Passions of National Identity and Ethnic Violence" (February 1, 2004), Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies (http:/ /repositories.cdlib.org/iseees/bps/2004_01-suny); Maruska Svasek, ed., Postsocialism: Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe (New York, 2005); Arpad von Klimo and Malte Rolf, eds., Rausch und Dik-

STEINBERG AND SOBOL I Introduction

11

tatur: Inszenierung, Mobilisierung und Kontrolle in totalitiiren Systemen (Frankfurt/ Main, 2006); Valeria Sobol, "Nerves, Brain, or Heart? The Physiology of Emotions and the Mind-Body Problem in Russian Sentimentalism;' Russian Review 65, no. 1 (January 2006): 1-14; Glennys Young, "Emotions, Contentious Politics, and Empire: Some Thoughts about the Soviet Case;' Ab Imperio 2 (2007): 113-51; John Randolph, Ihe House in the Garden: Ihe Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Ithaca, 2007); Mark Steinberg, "Melancholy and Modernity: Emotions and Social Life in Russia between the Revolutions;' Journal of Social History 41, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 813-41; Jan Plamper, ed., "Emotional Turn? Feelings in Russian History and Culture;' special section of Slavic Review 68, no. 2 (Summer 2009); Valeria Sobol, Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination (Seattle, 2009); Serguei Oushakine and Elena Trubina, eds., Travma: Punkty (Moscow, 2009); Jan Plamper, Schamma Schahadat, and Marc Elie, eds., Rossiiskaia imperiia chuvstv: Podkhody k kul'turnoi istorii emotsii (Moscow, 2010). For additional publications, see the Bibliography. 3. Notably, Michelle Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life (Cambridge, UK, 1980); Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley, 1986); Catherine Lutz, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago, 1988). See also the discussion in Reddy, Ihe Navigation of Feeling, chapter 2. 4. The neuroscientist most influential among humanists has been Antonio Damasio, especially in his books Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, 1994) and The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York, 1999). For examples from cultural theory and literature, see, especially, Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, 2002); Jane Thrailkill, Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism (Cambridge, Mass., 2007); and Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley, eds., Ihe Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, 2007). 5. Lutz and Abu-Lughod, eds., Language and the Politics of Emotion, 16, 88, 12. 6. Stearns and Stearns, "Emotionology"; idem., Anger: Ihe Struggle for Emotional Control in America's History (Chicago, 1986); Peter Stearns, Jealousy: Ihe Evolution of an Emotion in American History (New York, 1989); idem., Battleground of Desire: Ihe Struggle for Self-Control in Modern America (New York, 1999); William Reddy, "Sentimentalism and Its Erasure: The Role of Emotions in the Era of the French Revolution;' Journal of Modern History 72, no. 1 (March 2000): 109-52; idem., The Navigation of Feeling; Barbara H. Rosenwein, "Worrying about Emotions in History;' American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (June 2002): 821-45; idem., Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. 7. For early examples see, Keith Opdahl, Emotion as Meaning: Ihe Literary Case for How We Imagine (Lewisburg, 2002); Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia, 2004); Thrailkill, Affecting Fictions; Masha Belenky, Ihe Anxiety of Dispossession: Jealousy in Nineteenth-Century French Culture (Lewisburg, 2008); Alexander M. Schlutz, Mind's World: Imagination and Subjectivity from Descartes to Romanticism (Seattle, 2009). For a reconstruction by a literary scholar of the rhetorical tradition of emotion in the West as indicative of societal power dynamics and social relationships more generally, see Gross, Ihe Secret History of Emotion. 8. Ahmed, Ihe Cultural Politics of Emotions, esp. 4-12. 9. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 3.

ILYA VINITSKY

"THE QUEEN OF LOFTY THOUGHTS" The Cult of Melancholy in Russian Sentimentalism We live in a sorrowful world. -N. M. Karamzin [Dedication to the Aglaia almanac, 1794]

Happy little corner of serenity, remote little village! Your peaceful bosom cradles my grieving soul amid the noise of autumn storms, the dear desert nourishes melancholy, the quiet waves of the gentle river calmly water Gothic Island. Amid the ill October weather, in the wildly thick gloom, in the gusting whirlwinds, welcomed by the glimmering of friendly Cynthia, with my dear Young, I wander, lost in thought, among my ancestral ruins. - Aleksandr Orlov, The Pleasures ofMelancholy

In the second half of the eighteenth century, melancholy became the reigning mood in Western poetry, prose, philosophy, and even in the private life of the educated elite. 1 It goes without saying that melancholy alone did not constitute the entire range of feelings in this era, but it was precisely melancholy that received the role of the ideal experience, the one that fulfilled, according to the major proponents of Sentimental values, humanity's true needs in the mortal world. Melancholic poetry became the expression of the protest against rationalist codes of morality and salon etiquette, which "bridled emotion with the demands of ritual decency and fantasy with encumbering literary forms;' 2 and the extolment of melancholy, as a devout, wise, comforting, humane, and pleasant

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condition, inherent in sensitive and gifted natures, bore an admittedly polemical nature in the early stages of Sentimentalism's affirmation. In fact, melancholy was conceived not as a purely psychological state, but rather as a cultural one, with its own branching system of interpretations, arguments, and myths, and numerous forms of expression, developed by multicentury tradition. 3 When a Sentimental person spoke of his melancholy, it not only meant that he was sad (after all, there were plenty of sad people in any era, not only the Sentimental period). His melancholy made him a cultural hero and granted his existence a certain cultural value. The authors of the Age of Melancholy did not simply write sad works about sad things (the sorrowful elegies of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poets are not melancholy in the strict definition of the word), they comprehended their own sorrow, and sorrow in general, as an aesthetic, philosophical, and even mystical problem. By the end of the eighteenth century, melancholy "became a literary school with its own developed, dogmatic rules and methods:' 4 To be sure, this development makes it much less attractive from the philosophical point of view (as it lacked the refined individualization and tragic halo which surrounded the divine melancholy of Renaissance scholars and poets), but still very interesting from the cultural historian's perspective. The reflective Melancholy, this "queen of lofty thoughts" of Homo sentimentalis, became, as A. N. Veselovskii observed, the muse of an important period in Russian cultural history lasting for almost three decades, from the late 1780s to the 1810s. 5 Using as a starting point Milton's "Il Penseroso;' which played a key role in Western Sentimental poetry, Russian authors developed, in numerous poetic and prosaic evocations of melancholy, a whole mythology of melancholy: the goddess, absent from the classical pantheon, received her own pedigree, a mythological "residence permit" ("the dweller of ruins, old cells and shadows where merriment does not abide"), and a canonical "portrait" (a modest and thoughtful nun or a quiet, innocent young woman). Different variations of melancholy's genealogy and family relations (the daughter of sorrow, the mother of dark solitude, the daughter of quiet solitude, the mother of innocent fantasies, the daughter of misfortune, the daughter of grief, the sister of despondency), as well as different variants of the "melancholy landscape" and the "portrait" of the goddess, allowed a given author to emphasize the particular shade of the melancholy state that was relevant to him. Unfortunately, the many works on Russian Sentimentalism sidestep melancholy. 6 Clearly, such a lack of attention to the issue comes not from its alienness to Russian literature, but from literary critics' persistent condescension toward the Russian melancholy school, which was represented, with rare exceptions (Nikolai Karamzin,

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Interpreting Emotions

Ivan Dmitriev, Petr Shalikov), by minor (sometimes minuscule) authors, such as Pavel L'vov, Petr Pobedonostsev, Anna Turchaninova, Karl Blank, Aleksandr Orlov, et tutti quanti, who published their literary lamentations in a number of Sentimental journals of the turn of the century. Indeed, Melancolie a la Russe was already an object of ridicule among its skeptical contemporaries: "She was born in England, spoiled in France, swelled up in Germany, and they shipped her out to us in such a sad state that you can't help but laugh:' 7 However, Sentimental melancholy holds a particular interest for the historian of emotions in Russian culture: it lay at the foundation of Russian Sentimentalism's emotional utopia, which tried to reconcile the soul and the body, man and nature, literature and life. In this article, I will try both to demonstrate how "divine melancholy" was seen and deployed by its Russian admirers and to define its place in Sentimental aesthetics, as well as the specific role that this mode played in "emotional navigation'' (William Reddy) and the formation of the Sentimental religion of the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 8 In doing so, I will consider the Russian Sentimental worldview as an enclosed text, with its own pragmatics and structure, and will not discuss here the history and peculiarities of Russian adaptations of the Western cult of melancholy, which is a separate and huge topic in itself. THE RUSSIAN MELANCHOLY SCHOOL

Literary critics often dubbed the Russian melancholy school of the 1780-181 Os as trendy, provincial, imitative, and false, and complained that, subjected to Sentimental interpretation, melancholy lost its original contradictory nature and depth, and became coquettish and monotonous. 9 These attitudes were all more or less justified, but only from an external point of view. Thus the provinciality of the melancholy trend is significant for Sentimental ideology, which, as we know, prefers the countryside (the natural) to the urban (the artificial), and the peripheral to the central. It is no accident that this tendency found such stable and fertile soil in Russia-the country with the most extensive provinces in the world. The hotbeds of sentimentality-which were scattered about the country and cultivated a melancholy love for nature, meditation, reading, modest scribbling and musical doodling-played an important role in the emotional emancipation of the Russian nobility, accustoming it to feel and express its experiences. 10 The "provincial" melancholy tradition had a significant impact on both Russian literature and art of the nineteenth century. It was from this nourishing environment that the Russian elegiac school emerged, repre-

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sented by the works ofVasilii Zhukovskii, Konstantin Batiushkov, Evgenii Baratynskii, and Aleksandr Pushkin. Pushkin's poetry of actuality and the Russian lyric prose of Ivan S. Turgenev are closely tied to this tradition. From here came the Sentimental humanism of Fedor Dostoevsky. Here, in the culture of the melancholy romance, are the sources of Mikhail Glinka's and Pyotr Tchaikovsky's music. Imitating the classics of melancholy (as the dictates of Sentimentalism demanded), Russian authors not only mastered new problems and topics, but also learned a new, more flexible poetic language and new forms of artistic expressiveness. It is instructive that already by the 1760s, more and more works on traditional melancholic themes were appearing in literature: solitude, the emptiness of worldly life, death and the mortality of all earthly things, and ill- fated love. But Russian literature could only become melancholy by assimilating and adapting the powerful and well-developed European melancholic tradition of the eighteenth century. The numerous translations (often of a single work) of the classics of the European melancholy schooF 1 bear witness not so much to the urge to transplant the entire tradition into Russian literature, but rather to the complex and at times tormenting attempt to join it, to experience it with one's own feelings and bring it in line with one's own understanding of life, to find one's "own" language to express this strong, new feeling-in other words, all this speaks to Russian literature's attempt at self-determination and self-perception in the European context. This was a rather long process: from translations and renderings adapting a classic work to Russian conditions, to imitations and variations carrying the topics of "their own'' contents into the canon, and finally, to the creation of autonomous, original works in the framework of the melancholy tradition. To paraphrase Pushkin, one might say that at the end of the eighteenth century, Russian literature stood before the difficult task of "becoming equal with the age in melancholy." Finally, the candid dilettantism of the majority of writers of the Russian melancholy school was also aesthetically justified. It is noteworthy that during the Sentimental epoch, there appeared not only the well-known literary type of the little person, but also the curious cultural phenomenon of the little writer-an enthusiast, not distinguished by particular talent, but sensitive and kind-hearted. The aesthetics of Sentimentalism, in a manner of speaking, gave a voice to such authors. "I, too, feel, and I, too, exist!" This, it seems, is the pathos of their many works. This was a naive desire of an ordinary, but sensitive, person to record his or her existence, to ennoble and exalt it. 12 The "little contemplator" (malen'kii umstvovatel', Prince Shalikov's happy expression) of the turn of the century is also interesting as a

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cultural type, expressing the "aesthetic climate" (D. S. Likhachev's term) of the period. His goodwill, thoughtful dreaminess, lofty manner of speech about "minor" everyday things, quiet domesticity, fear of history (especially strengthened after the Age of Terror in remote France), hidden rationalism, and na"ive belief in "holy melancholy" as a pacifying and all-embracing feeling, are very colorful and culturally significant. They characterize the psychological ethos of a particular group of Moscow and provincial gentry who translated the rights given to them by Peter III and Catherine the Great as the liberty for an independent, private life on their own estates, in the bosom of nature, and who elevated their quiet isolation and political escapism by praising their everyday activities, cultivating their parks in Sentimental fashion, and undertaking imaginative journeys to distant lands and ages described (and prescribed) in the canonical books of the Western melancholy school. 13 It stands to reason that, outside the constructs of the melancholy school, these qualities (being so hypertrophied and stereotypical) seemed contrived and risible. It is instructive that the literary mask of the melancholic nobleman held its place in the Russian satirical repertoire right up to the 1840s, from Shakhovskoi's Count Pronskii and Viazemskii's Vzdykhalov, to Yakovlev's Erast Chertopolokhov and, finally, Gogol's Manilov. TYPOLOGY OF MELANCHOLY

The melancholy of the Russian Sentimental contemplator can be defined as a more or less acute experience of his transience, whose comforting parallels he sees in the world surrounding him. This feeling is sad, because it inexorably pinpoints a person's fading, his bodily waning, and pleasant, because it is human, warm, his own, and, as the Russian saying goes, "one's own shirt is closer to the body." It would be more precise to define Sentimental melancholy not as sadness "proceeding from an irreparable loss:' but as pity for one's own self, which constantly experiences loss. 14 This pity can be "quiet:' "tender:" When, having freed himself from the yoke of heavy torments, The unfortunate will rest in his despondent soul, You lovingly offer him your hand, And, better than joy-unkind to the sorrowfulYou caress him and pour comfort into his breast ... 15 Or it can be tormenting, painfully cruel:

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23

And you torment yourself with anguish, While another is laid in the grave! Pour tears over your own self, Sob, sob, that you liveP 6

In the mortal, comfortless, cold world-"this valley of sufferings"pitying melancholy becomes the inescapable and only just relationship to life for the Homo sentimentalis. It is capable of consoling a person (usually an unhappy one) or, at least, of serving as a substitute for consolation. A sensitive person transfers pity for the self onto others as well: this is known as "pitying oneself through one's fellows:' In this way, an original "union of the unfortunate elect" formed-the "sons of MelancholY:' Pavel Lvov addresses "compassionate Melancholy;' the kind and beneficent "daughter oflove": "You reconcile man with his very self and teach him to empathize with his fellows:' 17 But in order to constantly "feel one's life;' 18 to "live in what is dear;' 19 the Sentimental melancholic needs constant assurance of his or her own pitiful state: in this view, the whole world consists of innumerable signs of mortality, by perusing which the melancholic experiences an inexplicable pleasure. This was known as "sticking to one's woe with a melancholic sweetness, feeding it with all the richness of one's wit:' 20 Under such a "witty gaze;' everything in the world became melancholy, everything, in a manner, became dynamic, strove in a uniform line past the thoughtful contemplator of mortality toward its boundary, death. The temporal aspect of the definition of melancholy-the idea of unceasing progress toward death, of waning-explains why such themes as changing Nature, History, and Human Life were developed particularly in the framework of eighteenthcentury melancholic literature. The melancholic view of the world-that new outlook belonging to turn-of-the-century man-detects the slightest changes in the object of contemplation within a perpetually dying time. The cemetery and the ruins-"spatial embodiments" (artifacts) of a past time (human and historical)-are central symbols of the melancholy period. Human imagination was believed to have the ability to resurrect the past that lay under a grave, but only in order to return, having "rewound the old film;' to the departure point (that is, to the finale)-the image of death. The melancholy of a sentimental person was characterized as virtuous and pious. Attempts were made to avoid the extremes for which this strong and potentially dangerous emotion had long been renowned and which were so feared in the Age of Reason, 21 and to iron out the contradictions, so to speak, to calm the experience, or balance it. Rousseau's natural religion, Epictetus's philosophy of death, Young's philosophy of tears, and the

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Interpreting Emotions

moral discourses of Florian and the German preacher Karl Sturm (whose books students of the Nobleman's Pension in Moscow studied at the turn of the century)-all this was refracted in the perception of the pious interpreters of melancholy, who strove to reconcile humankind with its sad fate in the world. A sensitive and pious person is thus intrinsically inclined to be melancholic. But how was the melancholic type itself understood, and was there any kind of unified concept of melancholy in this period? Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin called himself an "exceedingly strange melancholic:' He also referred to his friends, the elegant poet Ivan lvanovich Dmitriev and the serious Mason and writer Aleksei Mikhailovich Kutuzov, as melancholies. According to Karamzin, the German Sturmer Jakob Lenz was also a melancholic. Later, Karamzin would also declare the Romantic Konstantin Batiushkov a melancholic. And Karamzin called Vasilii Zhukovskii a melancholic. What do these people have in common? Was it only the fact that they were all creative natures, geniuses, exactly the type who possessed a melancholy temperament, according to the ideas of the Sentimental period? Did Karamzin mean to say that all these melancholies were identical? Clearly not. In fact, they are all brought together by a certain general mood, but they are divided into various types or degrees of that mood. One could be a melancholic in different ways. In fact, the melancholy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had a wide spectrum of shades, behind each of which stood its own literary tradition, a branch of the general melancholy: the so-called Youngian melancholy, "Ossianian joy of grief;' Thomas Gray's "white melancholy;' Rousseau's "tender sadness;' John Milton's creative thoughtfulness ("11 Penseroso"). In other words, the melancholic worldview of this period was polyvariant: a single phenomenon could be seen, experienced, comprehended, and expressed (in the corresponding genre forms) in different ways. The Age of Melancholy was in fact the age of melancholies. It is for this reason that the disputes regarding melancholy in Russian literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were so passionate and so intense. The explanation for this diversity lies in the change in mood, so strange at first glance, in the works of several writers of that time, which some try to interpret almost as a change in literary tendency. Thus, for example, Raisa, the heroine of Karamzin's 1791 ballad of the same name, throws herself from a rock face into an abyss during a fearful storm, while poor Liza, the heroine of the same author's famous story (1792), faithful to her beloved, ends her life, by all appearances, in quiet, pacific weather ("the sky is not falling; the earth is not shaking!" 22 ) in a deep and calm pond in the shadow of ancient oaks. Why is it that poor Liza could not drown herself in a storm? Why would the description of

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25

Raisa's terrible torments ("From her open white breast, I I Wounded by the branches of trees, I I Run streams of boiling blood I I Onto the green of the moist earth'' 23 ) be completely inconceivable in the touching story of the abandoned Liza? The answer is seemingly clear: the difference in vision and mood lies in the difference of the genres, the literary currents, that they represent: the stormy pre-Romantic ballad and the tranquil Sentimental story. Does this mean that in 1791, Karamzin -scholastically speakingwrote as a pre-Romantic, and exactly a year later, as a Sentimentalist? Of course not. A writer, presenting a single situation in different melancholic registers, remained within the bounds of a unified but polyvariant school. Such diversity allowed him to create a representation of earthly life with greater complexity, fullness, and internal tension. The diversity of individual interpretations of melancholy, in turn, is explained by the various religious and mystical concepts that lay behind the literary models, coexisting and struggling with one another. From the universal postulate of all the melancholic writers-"the world is sorrowful" -followed different conclusions. Here I delineate three fundamental types of Sentimental melancholies, dividing them by the character of their relationship to "this" world: the "dark;' the "tender;' and the "dreaming:' This classification is, naturally, conventional (it is scarcely possible to find a "purely dark" or "purely dreaming" melancholic in literature), but in my opinion, its value lies in establishing a sort of axis of the coordinates by which the people of the Sentimental period defined themselves. THE DARK MELANCHOLICS

This world is "a valley of sufferings and tears;' "this vale of Death;' "where darkness brooding o'er unfinished fates, with raven wing incumbent waits:' 24 People are born to die. "Earthly things" have no value. "Here" there is no joy. "This" world is a dungeon, and for the imprisoned, freedom is only "there;' beyond the bounds of life, "where faith is not needed, where hope has no place, where the eternal kingdom of holy love alone lies:' 25 This "dark" view of life, proclaimed by "the grim Young" and having more than a few followers among turn-of-the-century Russian authors, had its own religiousmystical roots, its own metaphysics. The Russian historian Vladimir N. Tukalevskii summarized the arguments of the gloomy mystics thus: "If the kingdom of God is in heaven, if earthly life is but a transition to the future, then bodily life must cast all its strength and spiritual eyes toward heaven and die. "26 In this approach to life, the center of "this" world becomes the graveyard, because all of the strivings of the dark melancholic are directed there. The border between the two worlds-the grave-was perceived as

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extraordinarily sensitive, since the impatient desire to cross it clashed with the fear of committing a terrible crime: suicide. The repulsion for the earthly world, "where deep troubles toss, loud sorrows howl, envenorn'd passions bite, ravenous calamities our vitals seize, and threat'ning Fate wide opens to devour;' 27 leads to the strange but understandable pleasure with which the dark melancholic, in his inflamed imagination, peruses "images of death;' which surround him and are sought out by him. "Noble affliction elevates us at the same time that it aggrieves us the most:' said Young, "while internal virtue eases our torment:'28 The rejection of decaying "earthly things;' in a manner of speaking, draws the dark melancholic closer to "the eternal": "What can comfort me now, if not immortality?" Therefore, the dark melancholies hardly considered themselves sullen, fantastical dreamers, or misanthropes: their "religion, by its undecayed nature ... fills even the life of today with peace and pleasure, raises and makes us undoubtful of the best amusement in this life, especially the last and most bitter, that is, death, and not only sweetens, but turns it into perfect joY:' 29 Joyful, ecstatic, high and heroic darkness-that is the nature of this "noble affliction:' Clearly this melancholy can be expressed only in a high stylistic register, in "high" genres. In fact, it was precisely a high melancholy theme, Death and Immortality, that resurrected the withering Classical ode. Moreover, this theme, equally important for all and for each (high melancholic democracy!) reformed the genre itself: personal experience was raised to universal proportions, was "animated;' while the "high form;' in its turn, is made intimate (the most striking example being Gavriil R. Derzhavin's "On the Death of Prince Meshcherskii;' 1779). The ode and the didactic poem (the poetic analogue of the religious sermon, which had from ancient times cultivated melancholy themes) emerged as the most appropriate forms for the expression of the "dark" view of "this province of ruins:' THE TENDER MELANCHOLieS

The tender melancholic looks at the world in an entirely different way. Decay is all around, but it nonetheless bears the mark of eternity, a "particle of Godliness:' It is as if every phenomenon of "this world" reaches out for the eternal, while everything "nestles together" in a great, sorrowful movement toward death. People are not prisoners in this "province of decay;' but rather wanderers, dreaming of rest and sensing that they draw nearer to it with every step. They dissolve, melt, so to speak, along the way, and therefore the boundary of the two worlds-the grave-does not terrify or summon them, but simply waits. Thus the thought of death, of unavoidable

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loss, of the impossibility of true happiness on earth carries a certain pleasant melancholy and sweetness: a delicate flower moves the tender melancholic because it will soon wilt, a pretty girl does the same because she is sick and will soon die, the fall is touching because winter will replace it, the evening because night is approaching, etc. Tenderness is melancholic gratitude to the Creator for a world moving and sympathetic to humanity. In this view of life within its present bounds, love of death and empathy for one's fellow are virtuous and pious: "If the kingdom of God is within us, then clearly we must order our lives in accordance with the ideal expressed in love toward people, aid to one's fellow and other Christian virtues, and then the body and earthly life are lawful and necessarY:' 30 This quiet, moving, diminutive-affectionate melancholy, allowing people to befriend death, calling forth tears of empathy and tenderness, was opposed to dark, restless melancholy. "It is a nefarious thought, that the graveyard is a place of stench, rot, and repulsion!" exclaimed K. Sturm, the author of Conversations with God in the Evening Hours. "The coffin of a just man is the sofa on which he rests ... the coffin is the cradle of immortality:' Contemplation of the signs of transience arouses in the advocate of tender melancholy a strong aesthetic feeling (a precursor of the future Sentimental aestheticism, which essentially freed itself from its religious-moralistic origins): "It is good to look at the tulips, it is good to see the army in training, but even better to see coffins and bones in graves [because] graves always become more beautiful, are always covered with pleasing greenery and moss:' Here is an extensive excerpt from the fourth part of Conversations, which wonderfully illustrates the views and artistic manner of the tender melancholic: Ah, if only I knew in what place I was destined to lie! I would plant a small linden or another such shade tree; I would sometimes water it with tears of tenderness; I would sit for a few minutes in its shadow until I took complete possession of the spot, I would carry flowers there and compare them with my faded body! In this little pleasure-garden, with time, the image of myself in the shell of death would come to me, and I would designate a place in this flower-bed for almost every incipiently decaying bone: here my head would lie, there my crossed arms, and so forth.

These tender daydreams are crowned with the pious thought of his future neighboring corpses, his "brothers in resurrection:' 31 This melancholy view of the world lies at the foundation of the Sentimental view per se. The genre that best expressed it was the idyll, which

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underwent a fundamental reconfiguring in the 1770s. Blissful Arcadia, quietly drifting into nonexistence, was the melancholy theme of many turn-of-the-century idylls. Descriptive poems, beginning with James Thomson's Seasons, along with landscape poems and Sentimental prose descriptions of strolls, captured various touching manifestations of quickly flowing life and merged, in a sense, into a unified hymn, the "Perpetrator of Uncountable Delights:' 32 Clearly, contemporaries were acutely aware of the opposition of the "dark" and "tender" views of the world: which of them was true? The following dialogue, presented in Karamzin's well-known poem "The Graveyard" (translated from Ludwig G. Kosegarten, 1792), is instructive: One voice It is frightful in the chill, dark grave! Here the winds howl, coffins shake, White bones rattle.

Another voice It is quiet in the grave, soft, restful. Here the winds howl, the sleepers are cool; The grasses and flowers grow. 33

THE DREAMING MELANCHOLieS

This world is sorrowful, cold, and cruel. But humanity has an imagination capable of embellishing, of warming its sorrowful life or even creating its own ideal world, where one can meet one's lost youth, perished lover, or old blissful times. "With a good imagination, one can be happy even in a gloomy dungeon;' wrote Georg Zimmermann. 34 The question of melancholy is, at its heart, a question of the attainment (attainability) of happiness: the dark and tender melancholies sought it in the next world, variously experiencing the border between worlds; the dreaming melancholies looked for it in humanity itself, in its imagination, in poetry. Fantasy contrasted with "real" life, but maintained close and often painful contact with it: the "castle in the clouds" about which the dreamers so loved to talk, was, it stands to reason, not durable, and doomed to destruction; any flight from the "sorrowful world" could not be for long, and return would be as much more painful for the dreamer as the fictive world had been livelier and more beautiful. Therefore, the dream signified not so much the dreamer's happiness as a substitute for it, and was always colored in melancholy tones. This substitute could be

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perceived as a momentary consolation (usually for an unhappy person): "However, there were no deserts, no wilds so far I I Where love, in my sorrowful dreams, II Would not come to speak with me"; 35 or as a poetic transfiguration of the boring and monotonous world: "With the captivating game of imagination I I We will warm the world with a ray of poetry I I And plant [the Vale of] Tempe on the snows"; 36 or as an attempt to hold beauty, at least for a moment, in this world. This view had its origins in the pre-Romantic philosophy of Rousseau: '"According to Rousseau, only that which does not really exist is beautiful: So what-if it is beautiful, like a light shadow, always running from us, we will take possession of it, at least in our imaginations:' 37 Finally, the substitute could be perceived as a poetic penetration behind a mysterious veil into a beautiful world, where humans, sadly, could not remain eternally: But we will go to the refuge of the menagerie, Where our eccentric, like a new Swedenborg, Listening to the commands of his little finger, Unwittingly felt ecstasy And, awake, saw before him Three delicate nymphs in clothing like snow, Like a descending airy path,He saw them run lightly over the grass. Of course, the dryads living here Or fays hold their circle-dance. Fly around the dream, the delight, In the guard of the trees, by the falling waters. Why restrain imagination's bounds? The world that we see each day is too small for us, We love visits to the unseen, We see the shadow of delectable dreams. 38 This final form of dreaming melancholy is rooted in the religious-mystical tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which foresaw an occult world of essences behind the external earthly shell: humankind eternally strives for this world and eternally loses it. Dreaming melancholy, perhaps, had the most dramatic consequences and was the most promising for turn-of-the-century poetry. Many verse hymns to Melancholy used the following invariant plot of the development of the melancholy experience, consisting of three stages. ( 1) The unfortunate, sensible hero finds himself in a melancholy place, where his imagination is roused:

30

Interpreting Emotions Here, surrounded by Nature From the vaulted cypress branches, From the storm of the distant world Under the sweet noise of light waters He finds calm and quiet; From the skies above him faintly winks The trembling, weak light of the moon ... . . . Here I seek to wait with delight For that good being. 39

(2) He forgets about the sad world surrounding him and is carried by a daydream into the friendly past, happy in his castle in the clouds: Oh! How satisfied I can be When close to the very fire From all vanities, free from cares I whirl, in vapors. 40

(3) But it is impossible to stay all the time in the imagined world-it is necessary to return; the castle in the clouds collapses, and the hero is immersed in yearning, now even more hopeless: Here a sigh escapes unbidden, And tears flow from my eyes; My dreaming is interrupted, And I am completely in your power! ... 41

In this three-part melancholic process lies the seed of the future Romantic belief in two worlds. The critical difference is that the Sentimental melancholic finds reconciliation with necessity ("' should live-and live in anguish!"), while the Romantic experiences a certain metaphysical affront, which often leads to despair or resentment and revolt. Stories of unfortunate dreamers are typical for turn-of-the-century Russian literature. And here the clearest example is, of course, Goethe's Werther, who played one of the most important roles in the Russian "Theater of Melancholy" of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The genre of elegy is closest to this dreaming view of the world. THE MENU OF MELANCHOLY

In her painstaking reading of Russian Sentimental prose, Gitta Hammarberg isolates three major principles of Sentimentalist worldview:

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"solipsism, sympathy, and pleasure:'42 In this company, I would argue, the pleasure principle plays a special role: it connects the Sentimental person with the surrounding world and with the Creator, the soul with the body, and private emotion with decency and faith. In keeping with the aesthetic concepts of the period described above, the Sentimental person derived the greatest pleasure from melancholy experiences. "Hours of sadness" could be pleasing, Aleksei Kutuzov argued as far back as 1781, for "I consider my sorrow to be proof that I should be happier than I am, although it also proves that I am unhappY:' 43 Whatever was said by those aesthetes who judge the human heart "not by their own sensations and not by experiences;' but proceeding from abstract rationalist systems, Kutuzov continued, such a mixed, contradictory experience is far more attractive and "newer" than a "simple" one. 44 Sadness, according to Kutuzov, comes in different forms, depending on its causes. And each of those forms can be pleasing. "Nature is so charitable that it commends all Phenomena that occur in the earthly world to our pleasure;' said Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, arguably the most popular interpreter of melancholy among Russian authors. "I take delight when the rain pours, when I see water flowing from the mossy walls of a crumbling castle or hear the roar of the winds, uniting with the rainfall. Night falls and I am lulled by this melancholy noise, I immerse myself in a sweet, deep dream:' "I don't know to which physical law the Philosophers could relate the feeling of melancholy;' Saint-Pierre continued (henceforth I use Pobedonostsev's translation), "I only know that it is the most pleasing food for my soul. Melancholy is a delectable feeling, Montaigne says. This, perhaps, comes from the fact that it satisfies two essential parts of our being: the body and the soul, the sensation of our poverty and the sensation of our supremacy:' In bad weather, people can enjoy their experiences, imagining that nature, like a kind friend, will take part in their sorrow; when it rains, they are satisfied, because they are warm in a "peaceful room'' and it is pleasing to sympathize with those who are presently "under the streams of water"; listening to the noise of the wind, they imagine "the endlessness of the boundless space;' contemplate the mysterious laws of nature, and are carried in their dreams to faraway lands. In a word, "when the soul journeys, but the body is at rest, quiet melancholy penetrates the heart of our delightful feeling:' "Harmony of soul and body;' according to Saint-Pierre, leads us to take more pleasure in "terrific phenomena of nature" (volcanoes, grand ruins, frightful storms) than in "pleasant scenes:' The harmonic combination of the "sensation of our urgently flowing existence" and of "the sensation of our immortality" lends an incomparable pleasure to the contemplation of graveyards and sepulchers. And just as there are various types of sepulchers, melancholy pleasure has a varying character. The graves of virtuous citizens "raise in us

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a mixed sensation of blissful immortality, the likelihood of which grows in proportion to the virtue of the person of whom they remind us:' The graves of great people produce in us "sincere admiration:' Sepulchers "containing objects of our love" shake "our whole nervous system with regret and sorrow:' A child's grave or a "young wife's grave" holds a particular aesthetic meaning for the Sentimental contemplator. "[T]he simpler [such graves] are, the more they lend energy to the feeling of melancholY:' 45 The most pleasing graves were those that were located in the bosom of nature, in fields and villages. Saint-Pierre contrasts them to "splendid graves and catafalques;' for in such places "melancholy ascends to the highest degree, crescendos together with the ancient yew-trees that shield the sepulchers ... blends with all the actions of nature-with the ascent of Aurora, with the burbling of a spring, with the blowing of the wind, with the setting of the sun, with the gloom of night:' 46 The melancholic found stormy landscapes, of the kind evoked by Ossian, especially pleasing, for they placed him in a uplifted mood (the Ossianian "joy of grief" was characterized as an elevated sensation, the sublime). This pedantic guidance for those who wished to experience melancholy offered an extensive assortment of pleasures, from quiet, tender limpness to sweet ecstasy summoned by "terrific images:' It is remarkable that Sentimental natures (I have in mind here aesthetes from the nobility) could experience all of this without leaving their own lands or even their homes. As a whole, the Russian version of sentimental melancholy was distinguished by a unique reassessment of the very institution of property: my soul experiences the pinnacle of melancholy pleasure in my "ancestral ruins;' among my books and various memorabilia, being served by my "paisans" (especially female ones). 47 This is none other than the emotional experience of the privileged estate, or, to be more precise, the most sensitive representatives of this estate (in this sense, the Sentimental "son of Mel ancholy" is the elite of the elite). The master of the village Nikol'skoe (which he renamed the Gothic Island) speaks to himself in a moment of sweet melancholy: "Rejoice, vigorous Philosopher! Eurus still exists; his breath is pleasing; the weathervane on my tower squeaks; and amid this harmony I sit at rest in my peaceful room under the open sky, before which lies my little garden in a patriarchal style:'48 Finally, the noble Homo sentimentalis, however far he lived from the centers of civilization, was suddenly revealed as the lord of a whole melancholy kingdom: his fantasy. One has only to imagine some enlightened landowner of modest means with a "tender soul" in order to understand what ecstasy he could experience in pushing apart the borders of his little reality and letting dreams carry him away to "foggy Albion'' or far-away

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Ausonia, repeating the "sweet names" of indigenous beauties, completely pulling away from the boundaries of earthly space into the cosmic distance-and doing all this, I repeat, without leaving his own lands. Melancholy awakened a desire to express oneself without delay, to pour out one's delight onto paper. "I am surprised at those people, who feel and remain silent: they are truly pitiful;' admits the author of The Pleasures of Melancholy. 49 "Melancholy, holy melancholy;' exclaimed Prince Shalikov, "she tunes the senses to the finest sensations; she opens the soul to the liveliest impressions-the memory of the past, the pleasure of the present, and the imagination of the future pour an inexplicable sweetness into the soul. Every thought, every feeling has then a sort of authentic pleasure, a sort of magical effect on the soul ... it is necessary to experience melancholy with one's heart to taste a heavenly pleasure in it:' 5° The Sentimental person's refined taste sought particular food, and the theme of the surprising sweetness of bitter experiences holds a notable place in the poetry of the time. Sentimental authors loved to recall Lucretius's words about sweet bitterness from the source of pleasures, Montaigne's observations about "delectable" melancholy, and the legendary Ossian's words regarding sweet sorrow. "Do we not often find greater pleasure in the mixing of sweetness and bitterness than in sweetness alone?" 51 asked Kutuzov. "In exactly the same manner, a pleasant motion, mixed with a sorrowful one, is often more pleasing to our heart than the pleasant one alone" (the better part of Christian F. Gellert's arguments was borrowed from the twentieth chapter of Montaigne's Essais, titled "We Are Incapable of Pure Pleasure"). "A cup of a bittersweet drink" and "an apple with a bitter note in its flavor" are examples of the gastronomical metaphors that were common in sensitive literature. Melancholy is inherent in the Sentimental person, for, as Karamzin said, "our soul loves to give itself over to such despondency, loves to feed it and, in its gloomy imaginations, finds itself attractive. "52 This melancholic narcissism, 53 an admission of the value of melancholy for its own sake, is a characteristic trait in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature (the period of aesthetic Sentimentalism, to useR. Neuhauser's term 54 ). Melancholization is perceived as an elegant and pleasing pursuit: one may engage in melancholy, immerse oneself in it, nurture it, give oneself over to it. This mentality is projected on the surrounding, objective world, and one would be hard-pressed to find something in a Sentimentalist's consciousness that could not be melancholy: autumns and springs, mornings and evenings are melancholy, as is the bubbling of a spring and the roar of a waterfall, a reed in the wind, there is even melancholic ... cabbage soup (in Ivan Martynov's ironic "Philo"). The works of writers of this school are

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thoroughly tautological: "The melancholy light of the moon multiplied the melancholy of the place and objects" (P. I. Shalikov). Like Shakespeare's melancholy Jacques, sensitive authors could "suck the melancholy" out of everything that surrounded them, "like a swallow sucks the insides from an egg:' Everything was expected to lead to and feed melancholy. The melancholy was poetic, and vice versa. Prince Fedor Sibirskii wrote in his poem "Melancholy": I want to engage in you, I want to share my sadness with you, I want to feed on you And ease my burden of grief. 55

Another prince-Petr Shalikov-wrote: I thought -and gave myself over To lively melancholy, Was coddled by her, fed on her, And my soul felt bliss. 56

"Grief became dear and nourishing to me! I I In her I see my friend;' 57 admitted another sensitive author. Another quote from Shalikov, this time addressing a pine (one of the

most melancholic trees, according to Saint-Pierre, and the northern equivalent of the cypress): 0 you! Who pour With your despondent form Sorrow into hearts and grant Heav'nly, empyreal nourishment to them. 58

Anna Turchaninova, one of a few female Sentimental melancholies, responding to "the disapproval of melancholy sensations;' exclaimed: No! Such thought offers me A castle in the clouds. In it my soul does not find Nourishment, inherent to itself. 59

Petr Pobedonostsev named his book The Fruits of Melancholy, Nourishing to a Sensitive Heart.

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Thus melancholy nourishes, and one can be nourished by her; this spiritual nourishment is defined as heavenly victuals, the food of the gods, divine nectar. Naturally, this nourishment is only for chosen souls who can appreciate its value. "Sweetness" and "holiness" merge into one in this idea. The normative, classifying aesthetic of the period developed a traditional selection of melancholy dishes-a sort of menu of melancholy (one that does not, however, boast a wide variety). -For breakfast, a morning walk in the bosom of nature, and morning reading. -For lunch, solitude in the office (secret place), and melancholy dreaming, seamlessly drifting into sleep. -For dinner, bidding farewell to the sun, an evening walk in a graveyard or out to some abandoned antique buildings, and, upon returning, reading by lamplight. Melancholy could be enjoyed not only at any time, but in any position. One could savor it lying (the couch is a favorite image of melancholy authors: Karamzin, L'vov, Pobedonostsev, and other writers translated the aforementioned fragment from Saint-Pierre, which tells the story of a certain Roman consul, "who, in ill weather, always made his bed under the full branches of a tree, in order to hear the fall of raindrops and fall asleep under their murmur"; according to Saint-Pierre, the source of melancholy pleasure lay in how "in bad times, the feeling of human poverty becomes pleasant for me;' and "I take joy in the fact that it is raining, but I am not wet; that a cold wind blows, but I am warm under a blanket" 60 ; however, the ideal bed for sensitive melancholies, toward which they constantly strove, was the coffin-the "sofa of the righteous" 61 ). One could also feed on melancholy while sitting-for example, by the fireplace (another beloved image of melancholy literature: poems and dithyrambs in prose were dedicated to it). Sitting in a large armchair, Iakov Galinkovskii's hero listens to the cracking of coals and "lets imagination carry him away" to far-away lands: "our thoughts take pleasure in flying between uninhabited countries and resting in the desert:' 62 Prince Shalikov, sitting in a chair and sipping coffee, dreams about godforsaken lands, where unfortunate slaves labor on sun-scorched plantations. "These wanderings of the imagination;' explained Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, "broaden my soul, lending it a majesty appropriate to its nature:' 63 One could also savor melancholy standing-for example, contemplating the sunset or the starry sky. "When, from the height of my balcony,

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I fix my eyes on your depths, beloved daughter of the night [that is, the moon-I. V.], I sense, in my soul, something charming, tame, thoughtful. My sensibility is awakened, my soul flies in the orbits of the planets between which you move;' wrote Galinkovskii. 64 Finally, the sweetness of melancholy is particularly palpable in motion, a fact attested to by the many sensible walks evoked by Milton, Thomson, Gray, Rousseau, and-in Russia-Karamzin. "Passing by stimulating objects, I feel a certain urge toward perfection:' said the author of Ihe Pleasures of Melancholy. 65 Indeed, travel could give the Sentimental melancholic the most elegant nourishment. However, the paradox lies in the fact that the melancholic authors, ostentatiously rejecting society life and "soulless sybaritism;' became their own brand of gourmets, nourishing their own fantasy with abstractly sorrowful sensations. Kutuzov himself foresaw this danger, saying that many found sadness pleasing because of their natural sloth, and that many melancholies "cry and complain simply out of sensuality, performing a service to themselves with their tears:' If, for Saint-Pierre and his Russian followers, melancholy was a pleasure before all else, then for the sorrowful Mason Kutuzov, it was predominantly suffering, which is sweet because it was salutary for a soul striving for the light. 66 The sensuality of the melancholies ultimately led to the deification of the most pleasing sensation, which, they believed, fulfilled humanity's true needs in this world. The calm, virtuous, comforting, and sweet melancholy of the turn-of-the-century "little thinker" easily became a substitute for a religious experience. In fact, even if the cult of melancholy was a fashion, then it was a sacralized fashion (melancholy was referred to as "a holy sensation") and bore all the marks of a (quasi)religious ritual. People offered literary prayers to holy Melancholy, bowed before her "images" (allegorical portraits and sculptural representations), built real shrines to her, where, withdrawing from earthly trifles, one could give oneself over to serious and virtuous thought: the numerous office-hiding places and temples with "altars to Melancholy" (Karamzin described such an altar in Rousseau's Ermenonville), melancholy grottoes, and even islands, dedicated to Thoughtfulness (Zadumchivost'-for example, in Ivan V. Lopukhin's estate of Savinskoe), secret melancholy huts (such as that in Princess Czartoryski's Pulawy), and gravestones. The Cult of Melancholy had its own holy books and prophets (Young, Rousseau, and later Goethe). Karamzin, in his Letters of a Russian Traveler-that Russian encyclopedia of the European melancholy tradition-told the story of a certain feeble-minded French missionary, who rendered Rousseau's essays into Arabic in the form of a catechism, beginning with the words '"Who is the true prophet?' 'Rousseau:" 67 Mel-

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ancholic saints and gloomy hermits appeared. Melancholy rituals included pilgrimages to places of sorrow, serious walks to cemeteries, and contemplation of ruins. The Sentimental landlord strove to surround himself fully with a melancholy setting appropriate to his convictions and artistic predilections, to create, in the midst of the large, cold world, a comfortable artificial microcosm with a high aesthetic and spiritual status. The melancholy literary school presented the canon (or cultural code) that the Sentimentalist followed in everyday life. Nor did the sensitive authors forget that melancholy, in and of itself, was a dangerous and seductive feeling. The ancient theme of the threat of melancholy was widespread in period literature. Writers as far back as Aristotle compared melancholy to wine, which was pleasant and healthy only in small doses, and dangerous if consumed excessively. Even the most ardent enthusiast of "sweet sadness" was familiar with "melancholy, poisoning the fruit of internally destructive torment, this infective boredom, the sworn enemy of human calm;' which "extinguished human abilities with a laugh:' 68 Those who loved to nourish melancholy ought to know that it, gradually gaining strength, could devour them. In the Russian adaptations of Milton's "11 Penseroso;' there are discourses on the dangers of melancholy, harking back to its companion antimelancholy poem, 'TAllegro;' conspicuous for their absence in the original (they were added by French Sentimentalist translators): However, humble Melancholy, there are in your dominion two kinds of adversaries, dangerous to me, aside from absent-mindedness, the false pleasure of the moment. By this I mean the tiresome rumbling of the restless heart and the lulling heaviness of inexplicable boredom. Favor me, constant goddess, save me from these horrors of the night. 69

Sensitive authors knew about "black melancholy" firsthand. Literary stories about melancholic madmen were confirmed by real-life experience. Black melancholy was closely associated with England, the motherland of the European melancholy tradition of the eighteenth century. In the article "Melancholy" from Notes of a Russian in England ( 1796) one may read: As is typical for any passion, [melancholy] has its delights, which blind human reason; for at first it seems sweet and quiet, drawing out pleasant tears and having its comforts; at that point it is mere thoughtfulness, loving solitude, and this pleasure seduces many. A thoughtful person, finding pleasure in tears and solitude, and even seeking them out, begins to love them too much .... His thoughtfulness, finding constant nourishment, little by little

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Interpreting Emotions grows stronger and loses its pleasure. Then a person becomes its prisoner. . . . Melancholy often ends in insanity.... And sometimes the unfortunate person, finding no consolation in anything, ends his own life.7°

The Sturmer Jakob Lenz, who went mad from melancholy (an episode described by Karamzin in The Letters of a Russian Traveler), the mystic Aleksei Kutuzov, who was destroyed by khondra, the suicide Mikhail Sushkov-these are model examples of the effects of destructive melancholy. "Black biliousness" was understood as an infectious disease, which spread epidemically. Its epicenter was considered to be the aforementioned England; it was precisely in Karamzin's English letters that discussions of the terrible consequences of bouts of melancholy are concentrated, along with discussions of the destructive relative of melancholy, spleen, and about gloomy Bedlam, filled with unfortunate melancholics. 71 Melancholy was referred to as a poison, a venom, an infection. Antidotes were sought, but as one author said, "the great discoveries, which we know by the name of enlightenment, can hardly be useful to us when black sadness darkens the horizon of our hopes:' 72 This fateful doom of unfortunate sufferers, and the admission that it was impossible to cure black melancholy, were an important, one might say proto-Romantic, motif of the sensitive literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The thought of death, of universal fading, and of the eternal cycle were truly capable of comforting and softening the sensitive person, but only as

long as these thoughts had an abstract, philosophical character concerning others ("it's raining, but I am dry") or everyone. However, as soon as they penetrated one's soul and became a personal experience-by circumstance, or because of the inherent predispositions of one's character-as soon as they broke the circle with which Homo sentimentalis tried to wall off his soul, to keep his peace and not admit the evil of destruction within it, then the foothold was lost, the world of the heart became "hell" -and there was neither salvation, nor the strength to throw off the "cross of melancholy:' With a "sadistic ecstasy;' melancholy destroyed a person and carried him into the "gloom of insensibilitY:' "And so;' wrote Karamzin in The Letters of a Russian Traveler regarding melancholy, "it is fitting to be exceedingly cautious from the beginning, and not let it gain strength:' 73 CONCLUSION

The Sentimental domestication of melancholy was, essentially, a rational compromise, an attempt to "bring soul and body into harmony": the melancholic sensation, having passed through the sieve of exquisite taste,

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was supposed to become pleasant, comforting, tenderly contemplative, and lingeringly sweet. As a result, Sentimentalist authors also translated the "horrors of melancholy" without difficulty into a single, arbitrary literary rank, turning it into another theme, pleasing in its own way. However, such a solution did not by any means satisfy everyone. The Mason Aleksei Kutuzov, who recognized the "sweetness" of any form of sadness in theory, in real life suffered from terrible fits of melancholy. The poet Andrei Turgenev said that he often found melancholy experiences annoying and unpleasant. 74 His brother Nikolai, having copied Karamzin's "Melancholy" into his diary, observed that one could say much more about the sensation, but the most important thing was not to call it a comfort-75 Unpleasant, un-sweet, un-comforting, but personal, inevitable, fateful melancholy rocked the seemingly solid foundations of the Sentimental-melancholic culture, the last comforting utopia of the Age of Reason. NOTES This essay was translated by Jordan Shedlock. 1. On the history of Sentimental and Romantic visions of melancholy in the West, see Ferdinand de la Bart, Shatobrian [Chateaubriand] i poetika mirovoi skorbi vo Frantsii v kontse XVIII i v nachale XIX stoletiia (Kiev, 1905); A.M. Reed, The Background of Gray's Elegy: A Study in the Taste of Melancholy Poetry, 1700-1751 (New York, 1962); E. Sickels, The Gloomy Egoist: Moods and Themes of Melancholy from Gray to Keats (New York, 1932); A. Williams, Prophetic Strain (Chicago, 1984); Gert Mattenklott, Melancholie in der Dramatik des Sturm und Drang (Konigstein, 1985); Hubertus Tellenbach, Schwermut, Wahn, und Fallsucht in der abendliindischen Dichtung (Hiirtgenwald, 1992); Ludwig Volker, Muse Melancholie, Therapeutikum Poesie (Munich, 1978). 2. A. N. Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii: Poeziia chuvstva i serdechnogo voobrazheniia (Petrograd, 1918), 28. 3. On the origins of the tradition, see the classic work of Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History ofNatural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (New York, 1964); and also Stanley Jackson's Melancholy and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven, 1986); Jennifer Radden, ed., The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (New York, 2000), 3-51. On the social and political implications of melancholy in western culture, see Wolf Lepenies's seminal Melancholie und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt/Main, 1969). 4. Bart, Shatobrian i poetika mirovoi skorbi, 112. On the regulatory nature of Sentimentalism, see William Reddy, "Sentimentalism and Its Erasure:' Journal of Modern History 72, no. 1 (March 2000): 109-52. 5. Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii, 32-33. 6. Neither P. A. Orlov in Russkii sentimentalizm (Moscow, 1977), nor N. D. Kochetkova in Literatura russkogo sentimentalizma: Esteticheskie i khudozhestvennye issledovaniia (St. Petersburg, 1994) focuses on Sentimental melancholy. There are occasional and valuable observations and remarks on the Russian "age of melancholy" in

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Interpreting Emotions

the works ofN. S. Tikhonravov, Veselovskii, V.I. Rezanov, A. N. Pypin, P. N. Sakulin, M. 0. Gershenzon, V. N. Toporov, Gitta Hammarberg, Andrei Zorin, and Thomas Newlin. D. S. Likhachev discusses the aesthetic meaning of melancholy in turn-ofthe-century Russian garden and park culture-which he views as a spatial model of the sensitive person's perception of the world-in the chapter "Melankholiia v sadakh romantizma'' from his Poeziia sadov (Moscow, 1991). Tamara Livanova touches on the important theme of melancholy and the music of the Sentimental and Romantic periods in her seminal Russkaia muzykal'naia kul'tura vosemnadtsatogo veka. Disputes about melancholy in Russian journals of the late eighteenth century are discussed in M. A. Arzumanova's old but still significant article "Russkii sentimentalizm v kritike 1790-kh" in Russkaia literatura XVIII veka: Epokha klassitsizma (Leningrad, 1964). In her article "Leksiko-semanticheskaia tema 'unynie-melankholiia-zadumchivost'zabvenie' v russkom iazyke i kul'ture vtoroi poloviny XVIII veka;' in Logicheskii analiz iazyka: Kul'turnye kontsepty (Moscow, 1991), E. L. Kalakutskaia offers an interesting and productive linguistic analysis of the evolution of the concept of "melancholy" in Russian linguistic consciousness of the second half of the eighteenth century. The genre expression of sweet melancholy ("mixed sensation'') is explored by V. E. Vatsuro in Lirika pushkinskoi pory: ''Elegicheskaia shkola" (Moscow, 1993). Mark D. Steinberg finds an interesting parallel between the early Romantic melancholy culture and the early twentieth century Russian society in "Melancholy and Modernity: Emotions and Social Life in Russia between the Revolutions;' Journal of Social History 41, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 813-41. 7. A. A. Shakhovskoi, Novyi Stern, Komedii: Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1961), 745. 8. Sentimental religion is discussed in Gitta Hammarberg's From the Idyll to the Novel: Karamzin's Sentimentalist Prose (Cambridge, UK, 1991), 73-74. 9. "Given the historical circumstances, we could hardly avoid imitation, but we imitated without experiencing that socio-psychic process that makes such influences viable. We weren't so sick in the mind that we needed to seek our salvation in emotion:' Veselovskii, V. A. Zhukovskii, 36. 10. Mary Wells Cavender, "'Kind Angel of the Soul and Heart': Domesticity and Family Correspondence among the Pre-Emancipation Russian Gentry;' Russian Review 61, no. 3 (July 2002): 391-408. 11. "Il Penseroso" (1645) by John Milton, The Seasons (1730) by James Thomson, Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742) by Edward Young, Meditations among the Tombs (1746) by James Hervey, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751) by Thomas Gray, The Works of Ossian by James Macpherson (1765), Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie, ou Ia nouvelle Heloise (1761), the hymns to melancholy ofJohn Ogilvie, Jean-Pierre Claris Florian, and Jacques Delille, Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Etudes de Ia nature (1784), and finally, Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774). On Russian translations and adaptations of western melancholy classics, see V. I. Rezanov, Iz razyskanii o sochineniiakh V. A. Zhukovskogo (St. Petersburg-Petrograd, 1906-1916), P.R. Zaborov, "Nochnye razmyshleniia Iunga v rannikh russkikh perevodakh;' in Russkaia literatura XVIII veka: Epokha klassitsizma (Moscow-Leningrad, 1964); Iu. M. Lotman, "Russo i russkaia kul'tura XVIII veka;' Epokha prosveshcheniia: Iz istorii mezhdunarodnykh sviazei russkoi literatury (Leningrad, 1967), 208-81; Iu. D. Levin, Ossian v russkoi literature (Leningrad, 1980), Iu. D. Levin, Vospriiatie angliiskoi literatury v Rossii (Leningrad, 1990), A. L. Zorin, "U istokov

VINITSKY I ''The Queen of Lofty Thoughts"

41

russkogo germanofil'stva (Andrei Turgenev i Druzheskoe literaturnoe obshchestvo);' Novye bezdelki (Moscow, 1996), 7-35. 12. On privacy rights in Russian Sentimental culture, see Andreas Schonle, "The Scare of the Self: Sentimentalism, Privacy, and Private Life in Russian Culture, 1780-1820;' Slavic Review 57, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 723-46. 13. On the impact of the famous decree of 1762 upon the legal and emotional consciousness of Russian nobility, see: Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia (New York, 1966), 97, Thomas Newlin, The Voice in the Garden: Andrei Bolotov and the Anxieties of Russian Pastoral, 1738-1833 (Evanston, 2001), 12-13. 14. V. A. Zhukovskii, "0 melankholii v zhizni i v poezii;' Estetika i kritika (Moscow, 1985), 342. On the emphasis on loss and the narcissist nature of melancholy, see Radden, The Nature of Melancholy, 44-47. 15. N. M. Karamzin, "Melankholiia: Iz Delilia;' Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii (Moscow, 1966), 260. 16. A. I. Turgenev, "Uma ty svetom ozaren .. :' Poety 1790-181 0-kh godov (Leningrad, 1971), 262. 17. Ibid. 18. F. G. Pokrovskii, "Vesna;' Uraniia, pt. 1 (Kaluga, 1804), 153. 19. Ibid. 20. [A.M. Kutuzov], "0 priiatnosti grusti: Iz Gellerta;' Moskovskoe ezhmesiachnoe izdanie, pt. 3 (Moscow, 1781), 145. 21. See Ilya Vinitsky, "A Cheerful Empress and Her Gloomy Critics: Catherine the Great and the Eighteenth-Century Melancholy Controversy;' Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture (Toronto, 2007), 25-45. 22. N. M. Karamzin, "Bednaia Liza;' Russkaia sentimental'naia povest' (Moscow, 1979), 105. 23. N. M. Karamzin, "Raisa: Starinnaia ballada;' Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii (Moscow, 1989), 102. 24. Young, Complaint, 124. 25. A. I. Turgenev, "Elegiia;' Poety 1790-1810-khgodov (Leningrad, 1971). 26. V. N. Tukalevskii, "Iz istorii filosofskikh napravlenii v russkom obshchestve XVIII veka;' Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 33, no. 10 (St. Petersburg, 1911): 50 (emphasis in original). 27. Young, Complaint, 29. 28. Ibid., 30. 29. Ibid., 41, 138. 30. Tukalevskii, "Iz istoriii filosofskikh napravlenii;' 50. 31. Karl Sturm, Besedy s Bogom v vechernie chasy, vol. 4 (Moscow, 1787 -1789), 290. 32. [Aleksandr Orlov], Utekhi melankholii (Moscow, 1802), 11. In my article "Nevinnoe tvoren'e" (Russkaia rech,' 1994, no. 2: 3-10), I argue that this humble booklet played an extremely curious role in Russian literature. In 1803, it fell into the hands of Admiral Aleksandr Shishkov, who used an excerpt to illustrate the Karamzinist style in literature, which he detested. The Karamzinists, in turn, saw the booklet as a model ("apotheosis") of literary stupidity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, D. S. Merezhkovskii drew attention to the book, stating that the work was then dearer to him than all the Chekhovs. In Merezhkovskii's novel about the Decembrists, Colonel Pestel' quotes entire fragments from this sentimental essay (apparently, the writer found this enthusiasm for the ultra-Sentimental tradition necessary to characterize

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Interpreting Emotions

Pestel' not only as an aesthetically backward person, but also as a "sentimental tiger"). As Thomas Newlin established (having corrected my mistake in the attribution of The Pleasures ... ), the author of this Sentimental essay was the Tula landowner Aleksandr Orlov, who was killed in late 1802 by his peasants (apparently for treating them unsentimentally). Thomas Newlin, "Rural Ruses: Illusion and Anxiety on the Russian Estate, 1775-1815;' Slavic Review 57, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 315-18. 33. Karamzin, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, 114. 34. G. Zimmermann, 0 Uedinenii, otnostitel'no k razumu i serdtsu. Translated by N. Annenskii, II (St. Petersburg, 1801), 28. 35. [G. R. Derzhavin], "Melankholiia;' Russkii vestnik, II1.7 (St. Petersburg, 1808): 92-93. 36. V. A. Zhukovskii, "Poslanie k Pleshcheievu;' Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 1 (Moscow, 1999), 181. 37. N. M. Karamzin, Sochineniia v 2-kh tomakh, 1: 99. 38. M. N. Murav'ev, Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1967), 201. 39. F. N. Glinka, "K Melankholii;' Aglaia, IV (Moscow, 1808), 3. 40. F. Sibirskii, "Melankholiia;' Ippokrena, pt. 4 (Moscow, 1800), 256. 41. Ibid. 42. Hammarberg, From the Idyll to the Novel, 74. 43. [Kutuzov], "0 priiatnosti grusti;' 145. 44. Ibid. 45. P. V. Pobedonostsev, Novyi Panteon, pt. 1 (Moscow, 1819), 96-101. 46. Ibid. 47. [Orlov], Utekhi melankholii, 1-2. As Mary Wells Cavender observes, "Centered on the estate, Russian domesticity included a focus on home life, intense emotional relationships between family members, and a contrast with the public world of state service and the excessive expenditure of life in the capitals:' Cavender, "'Kind Angel of the Soul and Heart;" 393. 48. Ibid., 31. 49. [Orlov], Utekhi melankholii, 8. 50. P. I. Shalikov, "Utrenniaia progulka;' Ippokrena, pt. 2 (Moscow, 1799), 325. 51. [Kutuzov], "0 priiatnosti grusti;' 148. 52. [N. M. Karamzin], "0 chuvstve melankholii;' in Karamzin, Sochineniia, 1:71. 53. See the "theological" explanation of sentimental narcissism in Hammarberg, From the Idyll to the Novel, 65. 54. R. Neuhauser, Toward the Romantic Age (London, 1971), 78. 55. Sibirskii, "Melankholiia;' 256. 56. P. I. Shalikov, "Moskva-reka;' Ippokrena, pt. 3 (Moscow, 1799), 400. 57. P. I. Shalikov, "Skorb~' Ippokrena, pt. 4, 40. 58. P. I. Shalikov, "Sosna;' Priiatnoe i poleznoe preprovozhdenie vremeni, pt. 13 (Moscow, 1797), 143. 59. A. Turchaninova, "Otvet na neodobrenie melankholicheskikh chuvstvovanii;' Priiatnoe i poleznoe preprovozhdenie vremeni, pt. 19 (Moscow, 1798), 16. 60. [Karamzin], "0 chuvstve melankholii;' 1:71. 61. Karl Sturm, Besedy s Bogom v vechernie chasy, pt. 4 (Moscow, 1789), 290. 62. Ia. Galinkovskii, Chasy zadumchivosti (Moscow, 1799), 22-23, 72. 63. "Udovol'stvie ot melankholii;' Novosti russkoi literatury, 12 (Moscow, 1804), 333. 64. Galinkovskii, Chasy zadumchivosti, 17-18.

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[Orlov], Utekhi melankholii, 21. [Kutuzov], "0 priiatnosti grusti;' 149-52. N. M. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika (Leningrad, 1987), 308. Ibid., 312. P. Iu. rvov, "Melankholiia: Iz Mil'tona;' Novosti, bk. 2 (Moscow, 1799), 153. [V. F. Malinovskii], "Rossiianin v Anglii;' Priiatnoe i poleznoe preprovozhdenie vremeni, no. 11 (1796): 101-5. 71. Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 341-43. 72. [Malinovskii], "Rossiianin v Anglii;' 105. 73. Ibid. 74. V. N. Toporov, "Dva dnevnika;' Vostok-Zapad, vol. 4 (Moscow, 1989), 124. 75. Arkhiv brat'ev Turgenevykh, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1911), 11. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

ANDREI ZORIN

LEAVING YOUR FAMILY IN 1797 Two Identities of Mikhail Murav'ev

Nearly four decades ago Clifford Geertz described emotions as "cultural artifacts:' arguing that "in man neither regnant fields nor mental sets can be formed with sufficient precision in the absence of guidance from symbolic models of emotion. In order to make up our minds we must know how to feel about things; and to know how we feel about things we need the public images of sentiment that only ritual, myth, and art can provide:' 1 This approach to the history of emotional culture has by now become more or less commonplace. However, the mechanism of interiorization of these "symbolic models of emotion" is not yet completely clear. At the same time the question of how the "public image of sentiment" can be transformed into an individual emotional experience remains basic for any case study. The concept of event coding, introduced by Dutch psychologists Nico Frijda and Batja Mesquita into their scheme of emotional processes, may serve as one heuristically useful conceptual tool for understanding the role of public images of sentiment in the formation of individual emotional responses. As these authors point out, emotional processes are elicited by the particular meaning associated with the event rather than by the nature of an event per se.... As cultures possess explicit verbal categories to identify classes of events with particular associated meanings and affective evaluations, a given event ... may be coded differently in various cultures. Different encodings may relate similar events to different concerns

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and thus, give rise to different emotions. In the process of coding an event the subject of emotion identifies it (not necessarily giving such identification a verbal shape) as danger, insult, seduction, shock etc.

The "coding" associated with the event suggests a corresponding "appraisal manifest in fear, anger, wonder etc:' 2 However, both the "event coding" and the "appraisal" are largely determined by the limited pool of patterns available to a given person that must be adjusted to specific experience. Needless to say, the event coding as well as the appraisal are defined by the limited pool of the "images of sentiment" available to an individual, a sort of emotional repertoire that he finds at his disposal. However, the level of convergence or coordination between the different elements of the given repertoire can differ within an extremely broad range. Rephrasing Frijda and Mesquita, one may say that the same event can be encoded differently not only in different cultures, but within an emotional world of a single individual. Not completely identical, widely different, and even sometimes mutually exclusive patterns that define his responses would generate overlapping and conflicting types of coding and appraisal. In a very cautious manner, it is possible to suggest that the more diversified, complex, and full of inner tensions is the emotional repertoire of a given individual, the more "individually specific and unique" his emotional experience will be. This chapter will try to trace the mechanism of transformation of such public images of sentiment into an individually felt emotion. Our specific case took place in late eighteenth-century Russia and reflected the process of appropriation of the European culture of Sensibility by the Russian educated elite. According to Frijda and Mesquita, both event coding and appraisal depend upon "regulative processes" organized in the first instance by cultural norms, prescriptions, and taboos. With the decline of the importance of institutionalized religion and its rituals in the lives of the educated eighteenth-century public, literature gradually became more and more responsible for providing infinite varieties of the public images of sentiment. It became a school of sensibility, structuring the regulative process that shaped the patterns of event coding. Readers were taught to react correctly to the set of the basic events that may occur in their lives: falling in love, losing their relatives, retiring to solitude, admiring the beauties of nature and art, and so on. The classical authors of the period played the role of a sort of tuning fork according to which the readers could tune up their hearts to determine whether they were feeling correctly and in unison. The shared reading of the same texts guaranteed the spread of unified emotional patterns across social and national borders.

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Each culturally significant part of everyday life had its own European classic that set the mode of emotional reaction and subsequent behavior. The European public learned how to fall in love while reading La Nouvelle Heloise and Werther, how to go to the countryside with Thomson and Rousseau, how to visit cemeteries with Young and Gray, how to escape from the world with Zimmerman. Undoubtedly this type of reading was by no means confined to Russia, but was typical for the European public at the time of the emerging cult of Sensibility. 3 But in Russia this type of relationship between literature and its audience was even more manifest as the role of literature as a manual of correct feelings was greatly strengthened by the efforts to appropriate the new Western type of culture. Significantly, Russian authors made no attempt to disguise their imitative strategies. On the contrary, they made all the borrowings explicit and declarative. The authority of famous foreign writers justified their own legitimacy as instructors of sensibility. Their ambition was to present themselves as the most competent readers of the authors they aspired to imitate. 4 We can observe here a whole chain of gradual stages of understanding and imitation. A Western author described the event coding appropriate for some archetypal situation. A Russian author, while doing the same, supported his description by reference to a model Western book where the reader could also find a correct way of feeling and acting. This enabled a reader not only to get a pattern of orientation amid the circumstances that might occur in his life, but also to learn a correct way of reading. However, in Russia the appropriation of emotional patterns of the European culture of Sensibility was dramatically complicated by the social structure of Russian elite. Most of its members were servicemen whose codes of behavior and codes of feelings were dictated by the duties of state service, with its moral and emotional requirements. Thus, it is unsurprising that these requirements clashed with new "images of sentiment" set by the great Western authors. Our illustrative case traces the story of a middle-aged Russian nobleman, a high-ranking serviceman and prominent Sentimentalist writer and thinker who had parted with his family in the late eighteenth century in order to secure a career promotion. His efforts to deal with his emotional experience were reflected in two sets of documents, one of which was briefly recovered in Paris before World War II, was partially published, and then disappeared again. The other one is kept in the central archive in Moscow and is as yet unknown to scholars. The analysis of the latter manuscript provides the possibility of reconstructing the former and offers an interesting insight into the value systems and emotional world of the educated Russian nobility at the turn of the century.

ZORIN I Leaving Your Fami~ in 1797 I

I

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I

In 1938, the Russian emigre writer Mikhail Osorgin published an article in the Parisian magazine Vremennik obshchestva druzei russkoi knigi about an eighteenth-century manuscript he happened to have discovered. It was a little book "in red morocco cloth'' with "Masonic signs" on the cover. It was titled "Moskovskii zhurnal" ("Moscow Journal") and contained "15 letters or diary entries:' The first letter was not numbered; the following ones had numbers from I to XIII; and the final letter had the title "Prodolzhenie poslednee, ili zakliuchenie" ("Final Continuation, or Conclusion"). 5 The letters bore dates between March 13 and May 3. Based on a mention in the text of the coronation of Emperor Pauli, Osorgin was able to establish the year of the manuscript -1797. He also managed to attribute it, judging from its contents, to the famous Russian Sentimental writer Mikhail Murav'ev. In his article, Osorgin included several quotations from the manuscript and two facsimiles of its pages. Unfortunately, these extracts constitute the only part of the text that has survived. Osorgin's Parisian archive and library were confiscated in 1940 by the Gestapo. 6 "It is clear that it is not a copy, but original letters in the form of a diary;' Osorgin stated in his article, adding that "the author writes nearly every day and sends his letters on mailing days, as one can see from the text:' 7 The authenticity of the document as well as the correctness of the attribution can arouse no doubts. Biographical data that Osorgin found in the manuscript fully confirm Murav'ev's authorship, and in the facsimiles included in the text of the article, one can recognize Murav'ev's handwriting. However, Osorgin's interpretation of "Moscow Journal" is in need of revision. The letters that "Moscow Journal" comprises were addressed to Murav'ev's wife, Ekaterina Fedorovna. Meanwhile, it turns out that the actual letters written by Murav'ev to his wife from March to early May 1797 were preserved and are now held in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii [GARF], fond 1153, opis' 1. delo 1). 8 The archival file consists of a bound copy containing thirty-five letters written by Murav'ev, half of them to his father, Nikita Artamonovich Murav'ev, and half to his wife Ekaterina. Thirty of these letters, fifteen to each correspondent, are written from Moscow. A decree of Catherine II from January 21, 1782, established two mailing days a week for correspondence between the two capitals. Letters from Moscow to St. Petersburg went out on Mondays and Thursdays. 9 Murav'ev arrived in Moscow in mid-March, 10 and sent his first letters on Monday, March 15. From then on he did not miss a single mailing day until May 4, when he left Moscow. On each mailing day he sent two letters, one for

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Interpreting Emotions

each of his addressees. It is worth noting that Murav'ev writes to his father in Russian and to his wife in French. From both the content of these letters and the marks made by Ekaterina Fedorovna, who noted on each letter the date when she received it, it is clear that the correspondence in GARF is the original one. At the same time, this collection is far from being identical to "Moscow Journal:' Not only is it written in a different language, not only is the binding completely different from Osorgin's description, but (what is more important) not a single sentence quoted in Osorgin's article has any match in the manuscript. Thus, the whole situation begins to look a bit strange. It is difficult to imagine that fifteen times, on the same days, Murav'ev wrote two entirely different sets of letters to his wife. It seems that this paradox can be explained only if we suggest that the epistolary structure of the "Moscow Journal" is a literary convention-that Osorgin had in his hands not "letters in the shape of a diarY:' but a literary diary in the shape of a sequence of letters. Murav'ev had a clear literary precedent for this writing practice. One of his favorite authors, Laurence Sterne, kept the same sort of double correspondence with his last love, Elizabeth Draper. He sent her regular letters by mail and at the same time wrote a special diary, "Journal to Eliza;' which was also designed for her reading. The "Journal" was sent to Mrs. Draper in installments. Sterne's actual letters to Mrs. Draper were published shortly after his death in 1773, 11 while "Journal to Eliza'' remained undiscovered until 1878. 12 Muravev, though, could have found information about the "Journal" in the letters, where it is mentioned several times. What is more, in 1779 one of Sterne's friends, William Combe, published forged correspondence between Sterne and Eliza (possibly written by himself) 13 that was generally regarded at that time as a part of their journals. This forgery acquired large popularity and was translated into French and Russian. 14 "The journal is as it should he-all but its contents;' wrote Sterne to Eliza in his letter of March 1767. "I began a new journal this morning; you shall see it; for if I live not till your return to England, I will leave it to you as a legacy;' he continued in the next. In one of the following letters he gave Eliza detailed instructions about the way to deal with his correspondence: My Letters may meet and greet you as you get out of your post -chaise, at Deal.-When you have got them all, put them, my dear, into some order. The first eight or nine, are numbered: but I wrote the rest without that direction to thee; but thou will find them out, by the day and hour, which, I hope I have generally prefixed to them. When they are got together, in chronological order, sew them together under a cover. 15

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We do not know whether Mrs. Draper actually followed these instructions, but Ekaterina Fedorovna Murav'eva followed them meticulously. Murav'ev's admiration for Sterne is well known and documented. He wrote an enthusiastic article about the English writer and was planning to give one of his autobiographical sketches the Sternian title "Idle Traveller:' 16 In the same manner he followed his favorite author in writing a travel journal for his wife and keeping it separate from his actual letters to her. The journal and the letters to Eliza belonged to the sphere that Lidiia Ginzburg called "intermediary (promezhutochnaia) literature;' 17 an illdefined zone between personal documents and literary texts. Characteristically, Sterne's forged correspondence with Eliza was published under the title "Letters supposed to have been written by Eliza and Yorick'' (the cautious clause "supposed to have been" was omitted in French and Russian translations). At the same time, the title of the first Russian translation of A Sentimental Journey was Puteshestvie Sternovo vo Frantsiiu i Italiiu pod imenem Iorika. 18 This intermediary status of Sterne's "Journal to Eliza'' is reflected in the confusion of many scholars with respect to the intentions of the author. Arthur H. Cash, the author of the definitive biography of Sterne, wrote about his puzzling reversal of a literary tradition: instead of passing off a fictional diary as a real one, Sterne seemed to be passing off a real diary as a"fiction. Obviously it is not a serious attempt at disguise, since he guaranteed its failure when he used the names "Draper" and "Yorick:' The very use of a literary tradition, however, has led a number of Sterneans into thinking that he wrote the Journal for publication. 19 Cash confessed that he initially also believed that Sterne intended to publish his "Journal" -a hypothesis he later refuted, but he still described "Journal to Eliza'' as a "public documenf' 20 It seems highly unlikely that Murav'ev could ever have considered publishing "Moscow Journal:' When he mentioned his "readers" (chitateli) in the plural, he probably just meant the members of his family who were supposed to constitute his immediate audience. Likewise, serving as a teacher of moral philosophy and Russian language, literature, and history to Grand Dukes Alexander and Constantine and their wives, Murav'ev wrote for his august pupils several samples of didactic prose, among which were two or three "collections of letters:' 21 At the same time he regarded "Moscow Journal" as a literary enterprise and even referred to it as a novel where the biographical author was playing the role of a main hero:

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Interpreting Emotions

HeqyBcTBMTeJibHO poMaH Moi1 CTaHOBMTOI o6nmpeH, BOT y:>K M )..leCJITaJI qaCTb J1 :>KeJiaHMe pa3BJ!3KJ1 O)..IJ1H J1HTepec, J! AyMaiO, KOTOpb!M OH BHyiiiaeT. CoqJ1HJ1TeJib, TaK KaK qJ1TaTeJIJ1, XOTeJI 6b! TIOCTaBJ1Tb B3afJiaBJ1J1: npO)..IOJI:>KeHJ1e nocJie)..IHee ... Ho B03BpaTMMCJI KrepoiO HaiiieMy. OH 3aHMMaJicJI o6biKHOBeHHhiM ynpa:>KHeHMeM qeTBepra, OTCYTCTBeHHhiM pa3roBopoM c KaTeHhKOIO. Unwittingly my novel grows too long, here is the tenth part and the impatience for the conclusion is, I believe, the only interest that it can arouse. The author, as his readers, would like to title it: the final continuation ... But let us return to our hero. He was engaged in his usual Thursday occupation-a conversation in absentia with Katen'ka. 22 In his journal Murav'ev was following a model established by Sterne and naturalized in the Russian literary tradition by Karamzin, in his Letters of a Russian Traveller. In the letters held in GARF, he even compared his journey with Karamzin's famous voyage: "Je m'amusois ces jours-ci alire le recit du Voyage duM. Karamzin, ouvrage charmant. Mais je desire ardement que mon Voyage puisse bientot finir:' (15 ob.) ("I have amused myself these days by reading the story of the Voyage of Mr. Karamzin, a charming work. But I desire passionately that my own Voyage should finish soon:') The emotional background of any sentimental letter is provided by the separation of the author from his loved ones. "I have parted from you, dear ones, parted! My heart is linked to you by the most tender feelings, yet all the time I become more distant from you, and shall continue to grow ever more distant;' says Karamzin in the first sentence of Letters of a Russian Traveller. 23 And Murav'ev himself wrote in "Moscow Journal" that "the art of letter-writing was invented by an absent lover" (iskusstvo pis'ma vydumano bylo otsutstvennym liubovnikom). 24 Both Sterne's and Murav'ev's journals were exercises in "the art of parting;' and, following Sterne's example, Murav'ev chose to communicate with his wife through two similar but not identical literary forms. Most likely he found out that neither of them could separately convey his emotional experience. Needless to say, the authors found themselves in entirely different situations. Sterne was addressing his last love, who was married to another man and whom, since he was himself also married and gravely ill, he did not expect to see again. On the contrary, Murav'ev wrote to his own wife whom he had left for just two months and who was at that time pregnant with their third child. Judging from a purely literary perspective, one can probably say that a total lack of personal drama behind the text greatly diminishes the potential of the author for creating an "emotional narrative:'

ZORIN I Leaving Your Fami~ in 1797

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3aBR3KY B cOqJI[Hemnt COCTaBJIRIOT HecqaCTJI[R, JI[JIJI[ KaKJI[e-HJI[6y,n;b rrpeIIRTCTBJI[R, KOJI[ ,D;OJI)KHO rrpeo,n;oJieTb, qT06bi ,ll;OCTJI[fHYTb CBOeii lleJIJI[. Me)l:(,n;y TeM R OIIJI[CbiBaJO rrpeneCTJI[ JIJ06BJI[, 6Jia)l:(eHCTBO cyrrpy)l:(eCTBa, He)I:(Hbie rrorreqeHJI[R po,n;JI[TeJibCKJI[e, BeqHbie pa,n;oCTJI[, 6ecrrpepbiBHbie HacJia)l:(,n;eHJI[R, KaKJI[e TYT MoryT 6hiTb 3aBR3KJI[? ... Ycrren JIJI[ R B cBoeM HaMepeHJI[JI[? He 3HaJO. Ho TOJihKO 3HaJO TO, qTo HecpaBHeHHO nerqe Jl[3o6pa)l:(eHJI[e HecqacThR He)l:(eJIJI[ rrpeneCTeii qJI[cTeiirnero 6Jia)l:(eHCTBa. The plot of any composition is constituted by misfortunes, by impediments, that one should overcome to reach his goal. Meanwhile, I am describing the charms oflove, the bliss of marriage, the tender cares of parents, the eternal joys, the uninterrupted pleasures, what sort of a plot can exist here? ... Did I succeed in my endeavor? I don't know. But I do know that it is much easier to describe misfortunes than the joys of pure bliss.

Thus wrote Russian author Ivan Georgievskii in the Preface to his novel Evgeniia, in which he described the uncontaminated happiness of family life. 25 One can probably suggest that he did not very much "succeed in his endeavor;' as both the writer and his novel remain completely obscure and have never enjoyed any success. Murav'ev's letters to his wife and the extracts from "Moscow Journal" quoted by Osorgin seem to show that his journal did have an "emotional narrative" that can be conjecturally reconstructed. Of course, unless the text of the journal were some day to be rediscovered, any reconstruction of this sort can only be hypothetical; but even an attempt at it allows us a glimpse into the inner world of one of the most colorful persons of the late Russian eighteenth century and into the highly specific cluster of cultural, literary, and social patterns that shaped his emotional experience.

••• Murav'ev left St. Petersburg for Moscow in order to attend the coronation ceremony of Paul I. Since the time of Peter the Great the Russian court had moved to the new capital, but the coronation ritual continued to take place in the Moscow Kremlin. Traditionally, this ritual served as an important symbolic representation of the new political and ideological direction. It was also significant as the day when royal favors were distributed among the members of the Russian elite. 26 Ranks, orders, and villages were awarded during coronation festivities on a scale that usually was not expected to be matched until the end of the reign. The expectations and anxieties of the members of the noble elite before Paul's coronation were especially heightened both by the generous but unstable

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Interpreting Emotions

character of the new emperor and by the tensions that existed between him and the associates of his late mother. Of course, royal grace was always unpredictable and never assured to anybody. While coronation day presented enormous opportunities for enrichment and promotion, in order to get onto the award lists one had to lobby hard, and above all make oneself visible. It is not completely clear to what extent it was necessary for Murav'ev to follow the court to Moscow, but there is no question that he needed to be present during the course of the festivities if he wanted to have any hope of receiving his share of favors. Murav'ev's first letters to Ekaterina Fedorovna show some ambiguity about his Moscow preoccupations. On the one hand, he wanted his wife to know that he held the interests of his family close to his heart, that he was talking to the necessary people, seeking their protection, and generally spending his time in a way beneficial to his career and prosperity. On the other hand, he describes himself as negligent and lazy in these pursuits and ready to accept defeat in advance: Je pourrois frequenter quantite de maisons; mais un reste de paresse, d'indifference et de timidite glace mes projets de la veille et me laisse ou je suis .... Je reviendrais toujours precepteur, toujours Brigadier, mais toujours votre ami, votre amant et je ne vous quitterai plus. (13) I would be able to make frequent visits to some houses, but a sort oflaziness, indifference and timidity freezes my projects in the beginning and leaves me where I am .... I'll return still a preceptor, still a Brigadier, but still your friend, your lover and I won't part with you any more.

A week before the date of the coronation Murav'ev finally managed to arrange a visit to Chancellor Bezborodko, arguably the second most influential person in the whole empire after the emperor. Bezborodko did say some encouraging words, but Murav'ev consciously downplayed the importance of the promises he received. He wanted his wife to be sure that he did not cherish any hopes and instructed her not to cherish them herself: J'avois done commence ... j'ai fait des visites. J'ai eu l'honneur de saluer l'Empereur qui passoit a cheval dans la rue Basmannoy. J'ai ete chez le compte Bezborodka que j'ai vu enfin. Je lui ai parle tant bien que mal. Il m'apparu promettre. Mais telle est !'influence demon etoile, que je n'ose pas me fier a ces fables lumeurs d'esperance et je Vous prie, rna tendre amie, ne point forger de chateaux en Espagne. Souffrez-moi que je suis. (16 ob.-17)

ZORIN I Leaving Your Fami~ in 1797

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I have started ... I've made some visits. I had the honor of greeting the Emperor who was riding a horse on Basmannaia street. I visited Count Bezborodko and finally saw him. I have talked to him with mixed success.

He seemed to me to be promising. But such is the influence of my star that I don't dare to take pride in these faint rays of hope and I pray you, my dear friend, not to build castles in the sand. Tolerate me the way I am.

Murav'ev had good reason to be cautious. Catherine II managed the education of her grandchildren herself and did not allow their parents the slightest interference in her pedagogical preoccupations. Thus, one could hardly expect from Paul much sympathy and gratitude to his sons' former tutor. However, Murav'ev's rhetorical strategy in a letter to his wife cannot be explained only by his understandable desire to lower her hopes in order to avoid too great a disappointment. His ambivalent attitude toward his career pursuits was also rooted in the conflict of values that governed his behavior and his emotional patterns. Murav'ev was a Russian nobleman in state service. As E. Marasinova has aptly formulated in her monograph on the psychology of Russian noble elite: "Rank, the most important corporate value, sanctioned by the highest authority, served not only as a visiting card of a serving nobleman and the indicator of his social respectability, but also as a sort of guarantee of his personal qualities .... Bureaucratic hierarchy coincided with the scale of moral evaluations:' 27 The interiorization of this value system made career failure emotionally unbearable for the Russian serving nobleman and rendered his whole life meaningless. Murav'ev spent more than twenty years in state service, and for twelve of them he was a tutor to members of the royal family, including Grand Duke Alexander who, with the accession of his father to the throne, became an immediate heir. Thus he might believe that he was entitled to a mention on the list of awardees. Failure to get there would discredit him and his service both in his own eyes and in the eyes of his peers. At the same time, Murav'ev was a Sentimental writer, an admirer of Gellert, Sterne, and Rousseau. These authors had taught him that the morals of any court and high society are always corrupt and should be rejected and replaced by the true values of nature and family love. As mentioned above, Murav'ev even wrote his own Sentimental prose specially for the attention of his royal pupils. Thus, his emotional response to his situation was shaped by two completely different patterns that generated completely divergent sets of event encodings and appraisals. Both are manifest in his reaction to the final announcement of the list of awards made April 5. Murav'ev was completely passed over by the torrent of graces and failed to get not only a promotion, but even a minor sign of distinction:

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Interpreting Emotions Je m'empresse de vous communiquer une bonne nouvelle, rna bonne amie. Votre pere a re