Konstantin Leontʹev: An Examination of His Major Fiction 9785020177543, 5020177547

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Henrietta Mondry Sally Thompson

Konstantin LEONT'EV An Examination of His Major Fiction

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Konstantin Leont’ev: An Examination of His Major Fiction. - M.: “Nanka”. Oriental Literature Publi­ shers, 1993. -109 pp. ISBN 5-02-017754-7 The book is a research of works by a prominent Russian writer and thinker of the 19th century Konstantin Leont’ev. In recent years his works have attracted the growing attention of scholars both in Russia and abroad. The study is divided into four parts, tracing chronologically the working out of Leont'ev’s ideas in his four works: Podlipki, In My own Land (V svoem kraiu), A Husband's Confession and The Egyp­ tian Dove (Egipetskii golub) which fj^m the jcernel of his oeuvre.

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Foreword At the present time in the former Soviet Union problems of literature may seem a little irrelevant to people facing legislative chaos, nationalist uprisings and an increased degree of economic hardship. Western materialism appears to have supplanted the concern with cultural identity which, arguably, kept the people spiritually alive during the calamitous events of their nation's history. Also it has been argued by critics such as Natal'ia Ivanova that this recent period, during which there has been greater freedom for writers to enter the political arena, has been detrimental to art. Glasnost' has eroded the hagiographic status of literature; writers are now politicians, and the criterion for publications of a work is its degree of politicisation - a return to socialist realist tenets under the guise of liberalism. Given such arguments, a book on a somewhat obscure Russian writer and thinker of the 19th-centuiy, such as Konstantin Leont'ev, may seem even more irrelevant; but Leont'ev's work reads prophetically at a time when one of the former Soviet union's burning concerns is that of national identity and the wisdom of increasing indebtedness to a West strengthening its influence with every new load of food aid. Leont'ev's name is no stranger to those debating whether Western culture can erode the fragile selfawareness of a battered Russia; the Western/Slavophile debate has never been more germaine than at the present time, and Leont'ev is justly credited with a unique insight into this polemic. In 1988 the following question was addressed to Leont'ev in Uteratumaia gazeta: 'We are in search. We are in great need . . . everyone asks a question, "What has been happening to us?" Let the thinker of the past explain to us'. Leont'ev's view of the historical process, a view based on his fascinating psychological insights, may indeed provide some explanation. An isolated, reactionary, disturbed and disturbing figure, Leont'ev produced works in which identity can be seen to be dependent on the collision of pleasure and of pain. Perhaps this ceaseless battle in the soul of his characters provides a 1-2 50

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useful comment both on the well-documented Russian ability to accept the iron rule, and on the present conflict between Western hedonism and Slavic, Dostoevskiian 'suffering'. Leont'ev's characters are young, idealistic men who long to drink the sweetness of life, but who never forget that the sweetness is all the more powerful when it contains a drop of bitterness. Leont'ev, more than any other Russian writer of the 19th century, plumbed the contradictory depths of the Russian soul in his fiction, and in his other writings developed political and religious theories based on the belief that the Russian is at his greatest during adversity. This is an unpopular, even a callous, doctrine to assert or admire; but this is the concern of Leont'ev's writing which has made it live up until today. The transliteration system used in this study, unless otherwise stated, is the Library of Congress one without diacritical markings. Chapters 2 and 3 are reworked versions of articles which appeared in Die Welt Der Sloven (XIV, 2,1990 and XV, 1 and 2,1991).

Introduction In his own lifetime the work of Konstantin Leont'ev (1831-1891) was known only to a small circle of readers, and to date Leont'ev remains one of the very few 19th century Russian writers who has not yet been thoroughly investigated by scholars and historians of Russian literature. Rozanov was the only one of Leont'ev's contemporaries to profess an unqualified belief in his talent,1devoting immense energies to the attempt to revive interest in Leont'ev's writings; the well-known Solov'ev article on Leont'ev commissioned for the Brockhaus Encyclopaedic Dictionary was written at Rozanov's specific request.2Rozanov placed Leont'ev alongside the great writers of the day, as did Ivan Turgenev, when, expressing a high opinion of his young contemporary's gifts, he put Leont'ev's name alongside Tolstoy's in his list of the most talented writers of the time. Rozanov wrote: Leont'ev is to be distinguished from Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as their morose and unacknowledged cousin, a cousin pure in heart and of great wisdom. But he is definitely in the same category.9 However, Leont'ev was not destined to become another Tolstoy, and today his name is only mentioned in conjunction with that writer, and with the other star of that century, Dostoevsky, when scholars turn their attention to the brilliant critical studies which Leont'ev made of their work. In 'Our new Christians, F.M Dostoevsky and Count L. Tolstoy7(1882), Leont'ev struck at theheart of Dostoevsky7s 'ros/ and, as he charged, heretical Christianity. In 'Analysis, style,

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V. Rozanov, K.N. Leont'ev. Pis'ma k Vasiliiu Rozanovu (London, 1981). Rozanov's commentary on Leont'ev's letters remains to this day one of the most interesting and accurate sources on Leont'ev's life and work. V. Solov'ev, 'K.N. Leont'ev' in Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopaedic Dictionary (St Petersburg, 1896), Vol. 17, p. 56. Rozanov, Pis'ma, p. 54.

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and the spirit of the times: the novels of Count Lev Tolstoy7 (1890, published 1911), Leont'ev showed himself not only to be a perceptive critic with an uncanny comprehension of Tolstoy's naturalism, but offered his own creed, his concept of life as beautiful when filled both with religion and aesthetics, as in the bygone times 'of Homer and Shakespeare' when 'the worldview that predominated was one which was religious-aristocratic ('reUgiozno-aristokiaticheskoe') and, consequently, more aesthetic than that of the present da/.4 It is to Leont'ev the thinker that attention has generally been directed; critics both in the West and in die Soviet Union have tended to ignore Leont'ev's literary work (which has not been reissued in the USSR since 1912, while in the West only The Egyptian Dove has been translated, and a collection of extracts from texts, essays and letters published). P. Gaidenko's article, published in 1974, dealt with Leont'ev the literary critic, giving considerable prominence to his loathing of the bourgeois West.9Bocharov's article, appearing three years later, commented on Leont'ev's aesthetics through his literary criticism, and Bocharov's introduction to the 1988-89 edition of Leont'ev's critique of Tolstoy stressed the affinity of Leont'ev's analysis to 20th-century literary theorists.6 In this century, the majority of scholarly works on Leont'ev have taken the form of reminiscences, collected in the 1911 edition Pamiati K N.Leont'eva. Although hardly fulfilling Father Fudel's prophesy that Leont'ev would one day be studied as the 'greatest Russian thinker',7 scholars, sifting amongst the many ideas which Solov'ev declared to be so diverse in character that no synthesis of Leont'ev's 4 5

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K.N. Leont'ev/Analiz, stil'i veianie', Voprosy Uteratury, (1988), No 12; (1989), No 1, p. 215. See P. Gaidenko,'Naperekoristoricheskomuprotsessu', Voprosy literaturv, (1974), No 5, p. 159-205. Gaidenko's comment on Leont'ev's work reads: "Leont'ev'snovels were unsuccessful, wererarely printed, and Leont'ev was finally forced to renounce the idea of earning his living as a writer." p.163. S. Bocharov, 'Esteticheskoe okhranenie v hteratumoi kritike', Kontekst, (1977), p. 142-193; see also Bocharov's Introduction to Leont'ev's 'Analiz, stil i veianie', Voprosy Uteratury, (1988), No 12. Father FudeT: "the time will come when Leont'ev will be studied as the greatest Russian thinker in termsof the originality of hiscolours",'Preface' to K.N. Leont'ev. Sobranie sochinenii, (v 4 tomakh), Vol.I (Analecta Slavica, 1975).

thought was possible, have devoted reasonable attention to Leonfev's ideas on historical progress, and to his aesthetics as they were revealed in spiritual struggle. Leont7ev, having begun as a military surgeon (participating in the Crimean war), then having embarked on a diplomatic career spent on Crete and in the Balkans during the years 1863-1873, later underwent a spiritual crisis in 1871 following a severe bout of malaria. This led to his stay at the Optina Pustyn monastery, then at Mt. Athos and a ten-year struggle to adopt a Christianity which ran so counter to his pagan aesthetidsm.8 Thus there have been several (usually fairly brief) critiques of Leont'ev's religious ideas, such as those by Ageev (1909), Zakrezhevskii (1916), Arsen'ev (1929), Miroliubov (1933)/ Florovskii (1937), Zaitsev (1948), and Schultze (1950). Brief studies of Leont'ev's historical ideas have appeared, such as Kozlovskii's treatment of Leont'ev's view on the Eastern question (1915), Preobrazhenskii's comparison of Leont'ev and Herzen (1922), and Hare's summary of Leont'ev's political ideas (1951). In the Soviet Union Leoni7ev's name started appearing in the Soviet press with Glasnosf. An article on Leont'ev by Bibikhin appeared in Literatumaia gazeta in 1988, which is a utilitarian study devoted to ascertaining the relevance of Leont'ev's political thought to the era of perestroika.9 To commemorate a centenary since Leont'ev's death, in November 1991 a number of articles appeared in the Russian press. Literatumaia Rossid10and Literatumaiagazetau devoted articles to Leont'ev, in which a brief description of his life and historical ideas was given. Voprosy Literatury*2published an article on the historyof relationshipsbetween

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See V.A. Kotel'nikov, 'Optina pustyn' i russkaia literatura', Russkaia Literatura, (1989), No 4, p. 3-27. V. Bibikhin, 'Konstantin Nikolaevich Leont'ev. Iz istoricheskoi russkoi fílosofskoi mysli', Literatumaia gazeta, 14 Apr., (1989). R. Bagdasarov, A. Vovchenko, 'Vozvrashchenie Leontieva', Literatumaia Rossia, (1991), No 47, p. 20-21. A. Sivak. 'Vsadnik Russkogo apokalipsisa. Otkrovenia isudy Konstantina Leontieva', Literatumaia gazeta, (1991), No 46, p. 15. N. Rabkina, 'Literatumye uroki (Turgenev i Leontiev-istoria vzaimootnoshenii)', Voprosy Literatury, April, (1991) p. 124-132.

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Leont'ev and Turgenev, while in DostoevskyfMaterialy i issledovania13 an artide devoted to Leont'ev's views on Dostoevsky's writing was published. Scholars concerned with Leont'ev's fiction have a particularly small base for reference. C.J. Brown commented in 1969on Leont7ev's masterful prose style; Rzhevskii's 1973 study of Leont'ev's Romanticism dealt with the texts, but in brief; Obolenskii's artide of the same year discussed Leont'ev's aesthetics rather than his prose.14 There are only five major studies of Leont7ev, none of which contains much detailed discussion of the texts. Nikolai Berdiaev's 1926 work focussed on Leont'ev as a Nietzschean thinker (Rozanov also saw Leont'ev as Nietzschean but as a 'monkish' variety of the breed), defining the'ruling impulses' of Leont'ev's life as 'aesthetic ecstasy7 and 'religious terror in the face of damnation'.19Ivan Kollogriwofs 1948 study is informative rather than analytical, although useful in its understanding of the centrality of the 'Gefuhrt gegen die Sterblichkeit7 to Leont'ev's worldview.1* These two studies were followed by Lukashevich's1967analysis of the writer's philosophical views in the context of a histoiy of ideas, a comprehensive work when dealing with Leont'ev's historical thoughts, but neglective of the literature and hampered by an overly psychological approach.17 In 1973 Ivanov published his study of this 'doomed writer', while the final work remains Ivask's 1974 rather Freudian approach to a writer whom he defined as a modern-day Narcissus.18

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N. Budanova, 'Dostoevsky i Leontiev', Dostoevsky,Materialy i issledovania, (1991), No 9, p. 199-222. C.J. Brown, ^lightlytotherightoftheCzar',NewRn>i/K:,l9April,(1969), p. 25-27. N. Rzhevskii, 'Leont'ev's Prickly Rose', Slavic Revieiv 35, (1976), p. 258-268. A. Obolenskii, 'Essai critique sur l'esthetique de K.N. Leont'ev', Canadian Slavonic Papers^ 5/ (1973), p. 540-555. N.A. Berdiaev, Konstantin Leont’ev; ocherk iz russkoireligioznoizhizni(Paris, 1926). I. von Kollogriwof, Von Hellas zum Monchtum (Regensburg, 1948). S. Lukashevich, Konstantin Leont'ev (1831-1891): A Study in Russian *Heroic Vitalism’ (New York, 1967). A. Ivanov, K. N. Leont'ev. Jl pensiero, I’uomo, il destino (Pisa, 1973); Iu. Ivask, Konstantin Leont'ev: Zhizn' i tvorchestvo (Frankfurt/Main, 1974).

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All these works appear concerned more with Leonfev's interest in depicting amoral young protagonists as evidence of the author's homosexuality and unconventional aesthetic creed, than with literary scholarship. Such works have contributed to the rather bizarre image of Leont'ev that scholarship now holds, and have added little to an understanding of his fiction and its intellectual and literary content The prevalent image of Leont'ev is one which WH. Auden expressed scornfully in an article in 1970: "Leont'ev seems to have been one of those persons who alternate between leading a dissolute life and weeping over their sins'.19It is firstly to redress this neglect of the literary texts that this present study is devoted, but this work does not only offer more information on, and analysis of, the major works of Leont'ev, concentrating on his four chief texts, Podliptd, In My Own Land, A Husband's Confession, and The Egyptian Dove. This study defines two other aims. The first concerns the inability thus far of scholars to find Leont'ev a place within the context of 19th-century literature. Commentators differ widely on the quality of his novels, ranging from Micky's verdict of mediocre to the praise of Brown, Ivask, Rzhevskii and Pokrovskii.20 Their general agreement that, on the one hand/ Leont'ev's work does not lend itself to classification and, on the other hand/ is in need of such classification, tends to support Rozanov's description of Leont'ev as an 'unrecognised phenomenon'. Rozanov himself, and t)thers after him, have tried to explain Leont'ev's world view by adducing a wide range of parallels with European figures. The names of such diverse figures as Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill and Carlyle have been proposed, but such names do not place Leont'ev within any literary tradition. Space in this

W.H. Auden, 'A Russian Aesthete', The Neiv Yorker, 4 April, (1970), p. 133-137. 20 See D. Mirsky, A History of Russian. Literature (London, 1958), p. 338-346. Saltykov-Shchedrin considered Leont'ev's work highly derivative: "Leont'ev's work cannot simply becalled a novel,but, if such an expression maybecoined,anovel-reader. At every step one encounters in it memories of Turgenev, of Count L. Tolstoy, Pisemskii et al", Sovremennik, 186. See also Iu. Ivask , Konstantin Leont'ev; N. Pokrovskii, 'K.N. Leont'ev', •Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' A. Cranata, t. XXVII, p. 35*39. 19

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study will be devoted not only to Leont'ev's polemics with other 19th-century writers, but to the attempt to place him within certain 19th-century trends, aligning him with the 'religious' writers Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and yet showing him in his sensual and even mystical strain to be a forerunner of Symbolist aesthetidsm. The critical confusion as to Leont'ev's place stems not only from the tendency to deal with his views on history rather than with his worldview as a whole and how it is expressed through literature, but also from the rather fascinating biography of the man. The curious events in the life of this homosexual and Don Juan who became a monk, the man with a soul complex and multifaceted to the point of contrariness have tended to favour approaches such as Ivask's and that of Rzhevskii, who places Leont'ev within that most narcissistic of traditions, that of Romanticism.21 This study hopes to extract and uncoil Leont'ev's ideas from the rich tapestry of his writings, and, showing how biographical concerns, literature and creed combine, thus to offer a more unified approach to Leont'ev. At the same time however this 'unified' approach defines a central schism at the heart of Leont'ev's work, which can be defined as a constant dialecticbetween Christianity and paganism. This idea has been hinted at in critical formulation of the concept of Leont'ev's 'aesthetic immoralism' or 'pagan aesthetics'. This is the conflict which sometimes tears his prose apart, yet which at other times imparts a deep and complex beauty to it, when the rich colours of Leont'ev merge and impart an aesthetic shade. Leont'ev himself once compared himself to a lilac flower, 'a mixture of rose and deep blue'.22 The essence of Grecian aesthetic thought, to Leont'ev synonymous with paganism, concerns the distinction between ethic and aesthetic, and whereas Socrates subordinated beauty to good, Plato yoked the two together, talking of spiritual beauty, and Aristotle made no

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Rzhevskii reduces the force of his argument somewhat by expressing doubt in the existence of the Romantic hero. Against the Current: Selection$ from the novels, essays, notes and letters of Konstantin Leont'ev (trans. G. Reavey with Introduction by G. Ivask) (New York, 1969).

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dear distinction. In monotheistic religions such as Judaism and Christianity the ethical and aesthetical categories have acquired an antithetical character. This dialectic between beauty and good is the keystone to Leont'ev's exploration, through his prose, of the conflict between paganism and Christianity, and it is to this dialectic that the study is devoted. The texts so long ignored as 'flat' adjuncts to 'intriguing and original' ideas can be seen to be a vital repository of Leont'ev's thoughts. The study is divided into four parts, tracing chronologically the working out of Leont'ev's ideas in the four works which form the kernel of his oeuvre. In the first major text Leont'ev published, Podlipki (1861), Leont'ev begins with one of the most powerful symbols which dominate his work - the symbol of Eden. The protagonist grows up in a beautiful, pagan Eden, the world of the estate Podlipki, where Greek characters and sentimental Russian Christians mingle and merge; but this is a world which is always haunted by the idea of a Fall The Christian concept of Eden is interestingly reinterpreted by Leont'ev in his attempt to create an earthly Eden in which man can replace God and aesthetic immoralism can replace orthodox religion. In Leont'ev's Eden, man lives in a state of vital tension, exulting in the discord between beauty and good which can tear lesser men apart. Ultimately, however, the freedom to pursue his aims eludes man, or proves too demanding for his fastidious soul (the theme of the superman constantly enters the text as the protagonist struggles to preserve his creed), and man realises that Eden is under the control of a God who exacts subservience and chastity. Leont'ev's God was aloof and wrathful, his presence felt in the text by a chilling absence and sense of the horror and mystery of death. In the novel In My Own land (Vsvoem kraiu) (1864) the protagonist again faces the problem of keeping his religious fears and his immoral belief in beauty together. Various sub-dialectics reflect the Christianity/paganism dilemma throughout the texts, such as the conflict between freedom and death, Eden and the Lapsarian world referred to in Podlipki. In InMyOumLand the'Bazarovian'character, Rudnev, a medical man and also a superfluous type, a Rudin, explores the problem through the traditional body/soul conflict. In 11

this text one finds polemics with Turgenev and Bazarov's nihilism, and with Chemyshevsky's theory of rational egoism. The latter polemic acquires the dimensions of a literary parody on Chemyshevsky no less transparent than Dostoevsky's famous one, The Crocodile. In the third chapter - dealing with A Husband's Confession, Leont'ev's most interesting prose work - an attempt is made to analyse the meaning of the formal antithesis between the Christian and pagan. This analysis draws on anthropological insights into the aspect of the novel that baffled its commentators most of all, namely the love triangle on which the novel centres. The geographical location of the novel, the Crimea, is considered within the framework of nineteenth-century Russian literature, while Leont'ev's interest in ethnography is placed against Levi-Strauss's theories of kinship. Finally, the study concludes with the examination of Leont'ev's unfinished work. The Egyptian Dooe (Egipetskii golub, 1881-1882), in which we again encounter the protagonist Ladnev from Podlipki, now a young diplomat The text is one of defeated yearning for a creed which cannot be fulfilled, but which inevitably gives way to a Christian humility and to death. The novel presents a renouncement of Panos in favour of Platonic Eros; the consciously unmaterialised love relationship between the heroine and Ladnev is encoded in the symbolism of the Egyptian dove. This is a double symbol, like so many of Leont'ev's central images; it is both a symbol of Romantic ecstasy as it pours out its tormented song, and a kenotic symbol, signifying the final flowering, not of the creed of the 'lilac flower', but of a creed of resignation and chastity, a symbol of 'skopchestvo' and of Christianity. This novel shows Leont'ev's later leanings towards asceticism, embodying Leont'ev's confession to Solov'ev that 'there was more to be gained from mystical sects like the skoptsy, than from one philosophical system of genius'. With The Egyptian Dooe, the writing career of this unique thinker comes to a close. This work shows the progression of the paganChristian dilemma, from its early poetic flowering in the worthy early novels of Leont'ev, to this final, dispirited outpouring of regret at his own failure to achieve happiness within the context of the religious-hedonistic conflict which he so loved.

Chapter One THE THREE AGES OF MAN: Paganism, Conflict, and Christian Resolution in Podlipki Leont'ev's first novel, Podlipki (1861), provides a fascinating example of the writer's early development of his thoughts on beauty into a far-reaching theory of aesthetic ethics, a theory which Mirsky labelled 'aesthetic immoraiism' and Berdiaev 'aesthetic Pantheism'1. Even at this early stage in his career, Leont'ev showed that his prose could act as a vivid medium through which his ideas, both religious and historical, could be examinee} in the context of the emotional life of the characters, their loves and losses. Despite the lack of critical interest in the work shown by major Leont'ev scholars (Berdiaev and Ivask omit reference to it, while Lukashevich adopts a biological approach to the work),3Podlipki provides some valuable insights into the Leont'evian dialectic between morality and beauty, apparent to most critics only in the succeeding work, In My Own Land. The question of moral conflict is the central dilemma of all Leont'ev's texts, but the structure of conflict to which the prose dings is not intended to express a simple opposition between good and evil. When Leont'ev's belief in man's need for conflict (a belief expressed most dearly in his writings on history) is taken into account, what emerges is the idea that Leont'ev saw conflict itself as the antithesis to two 'lesser' states. These were, the state in which harmony between paradoxical concepts is possible, and the state in which paradox has been renounced. The first is a Grecian, pagan

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D.S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature (London, 1958), p. 326-332. N. Berdiaev, Leontiev (Maine, 1968), p. 89. S. Lukashevich, Konstantin Leont’ev: A Study in "Heroic Vitalism * (New York, 1967). Iu. Ivask, 'Introduction' in Sobranie sochinenii K.N. Leont'eva (Wurzburg, 1975). 13

state of harmonious synthesis between the concepts of good and beauty, a state which develops into Leont'ev's favoured state of being, a condition of vital conflict. In this state the Grecian enjoyment of beauty, the Leont'evian 'naslazhdenie', frequently brings man into conflict with morality, a state in which a 'razlad nepreodolim' appears between beauty and ethics.3 The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the reader to Leont'ev's ideas on the conflict between morality and aesthetics via a discussion of the core of the concern itself; the linking of conflict to life, and of the absence of conflict to an overly simplistic (harmonious) or moribund existence.4 A second point in this chapter, and those which follow it, is to suggest that, for Leont'ev, enjoyment of conflict was not always an easy task. To embody the Leont'evian philosophy of conflict to the full, man had to be strong, and Leont'ev's work contains a thread of doubt as to the wisdom of advocating strength above all, a concern with the destructive consequences of egoism, as well as an understanding that man is never stronger than death. The Leont'evian state of conflict is always resolved when man begins, as death approaches, to fear for his soul and resigns liimself to the renunciation of his hedonism; when eschatological problems beset man, conflict is inevitably, and regrettably, renounced. In Podlipki, the hero, Ladnev, relishes conflict yet still yearns for the 'Grecian state' he knew as an innocent young boy on the family estate, Podlipki: a state of purity and chastity untroubled by the sexual conflict he later encounters and which troubles him with its hints of dark violence. Also, as he grows older, he turns from his vital enjoyment of the conflict between sex and sin to a troubled and bleak Christian state of resignation. Podlipki hints at a theme which this book will pursue: whether Leont'ev's ideas, which lead Solov'ev to call him 'wiser than Dostoevsky, more original than Herzen', and which Berdiaev defined as 'neither extensive nor complex', ideas

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See P. Gaidenko, 'Naperekor istoricheskomu protsessu'. Lukashevich defines the life = conflict equation in Leont'ev's work under the term 'heroic vitalism'. See also A. Obolenskii's 'Essai critique sur l'esthétique de K.N. Leont'ev', Canadian Slavonic Papas,15, (1973) p. 540555. 14

which although 'penetrating and fundamental, lacked richness and diversity'/ are ideas which should most correctly be interpreted as a valiant attempt at casting an image of man which neither the author himself, nor his characters/ could ever live up to. Podlipki is clearly in the Leonfevian genre of the 'novel of conflict'/ and the critic Rhzevskii has directed the reader's attention to what he defines as a Romantic conflict between idealism and harsh reality which is played out in the mind of the novel's protagonist a young man named Ladnev.6However/ although the idealism of Vladimir Ladnev, a Romantic figure who likens himself to Pushkin's Onegin (p. 2)7and who speaks forlornly of fusing 'dream and reality' (p. 66) indeed reflects the fundamental romantic dilemma/ Ladnev's disdain for what he terms 'stupid romanticism' suggests that his idealism is of a different kind. It is neo-classical in its origins; Ladnev, like his mentor Iurev, who is a 'Platonic dreamer' (p. 84), dreams of a world of perfect forms, beyond the dfeary finitude of existence. However and here the specifically Leont'evian interpretation of Grecian aesthetidsm comes in -Ladnev desires the happiness to be obtained from an understanding of the 'fascination' (prelest") of life (p. 174), and shows himself to be a seeker after 'vitality ('zhiznennost")/ desiring the sensual pleasure to be derived from experiencing the moment to the full (p. 174).8 Grecian life is not enough; it must be brought into conflict with Christian ideas. Thus the Leont'evian text is never purely a fond lookback to pagan times, but a text rooted in the beauty of the hedonistic moment a moment which however is fated to die. Ladnev's aesthetic philosophy is primarily described through the temporal motifs which occur in every Leont'evian text and which turn A Husband's Confession, for example, into an allegory of the Fall. Time is the central problem to the young hedonist driven

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V. Solov'ev, Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopaedic Dictionary; N. Berdiaev, Leont’ev, p.67. N. Rzhevskii, 'Leont'ev's Prickly Rose', Slavic Revteiv 35, (1976), p. 258-268. Quotations, unless otherwise stated, are taken in this study from Sobranie sochinenii K.N. Leont'eva (Wurzburg, 1975). Page references are hereafter given in parentheses after the quotation. See Father Ftorovskii, Puti russkogo bogosloviia (Paris, 1983), p. 302-304. 15

both to relish the moment and to fear its ending and knowing the necessity of embracing Christianity with its promise of salvation. Since time is a key concept in Ladnev's ideas, it is not surprising that Leont'ev organises his text according to various temporal divisions (in line with the Belinskiian ideas that form is the outward expression of the idea).9The conflict between morality and hedonism is explored through a description of Ladnev's progress from a state of paganism to one in which paganism and morality collide, and jthence to a state of rest and resignation. This tripartite division of the text, describing three periods in the hero's life, illustrates in microcosm Leont'ev's view on the triune nature of historical progression/0ideas which were to appear some ten years later in Vizantism i slavianstvo (1871-1872), a text which gained Leont'ev the title of 'reactionary'. According to Leont'ev's understanding of history, political states underwent an evolution­ ary process through three stages. The first stage of primary ('pervichnaia'), or primitive ('pervobytnaia') simplicity ('prostota') was distinguished by its rudimentary democracy and harmony, with few incidents of social conflict due to the non-stratification of society. This period would be followed by one which he called a period of flowering complexity. This period was not only historical, but aesthetic Leont'ev claimed that : We notice one and the same thing in the history of art; (a) a period of initial simplicity ...(b ) then a period of flowering complexity (period tsvetushchei slozhnosti): the Parthenon, the Temple of Diana, the Cathedrals of Rheims, Strasbourg, Milan, St Peter's. . . Shakespeare, Byron, Raphael, Michaelangelo. . .

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Leont'ev was, as he admitted, brought up on the liberal tradition of George Sand, Belinskii and Turgenev. His protagonist Ladnev is an admirer of Belinskii (p.91). See Leont'ev's ideas on form in 'Analiz, stil' i veianie' in Essays in Russian Literature (ed. S. Roberts) (Ohio, 1968), p. 240. The only detailed discussion of the narrative structure of any Leont'ev work has been E. Swoboda's 'Konstantin Leont'ev's ErzShlung: Egipetskii golub', Wiener Slawistische Jahrbuch, (1966), p. 83-100. 16

The period was also one of philosophical achievement the time of Socrates and Plato." Primarily, as Leont'ev saw it, this second sodohistorical period would be characterised by social conflict and inequality. Cementing his reputation as an arch conservative, an opposer of democratic movements, Leont'ev entered the battle then raging between the liberals and the revolutionary nationalists with his variation of ideas filtered through Danilevskii, whose Rossiia i Europa he had greatly admired.' Liberalism destroys', was Leont'ev's motto,12and he argued that social injustice concealed a 'profound and mysterioussocial truth', thevalueofwhichtranscendedany questions of compassion and liberalism. This truth was that the state's vitality derives precisely from social conflict. It is difficult in more liberal times to estimate the value of Leont'ev's ideas, but one thing which cannot be underestimated is his understanding of history as a collision of forces, a doctrine which is now accepted as fundamental to the Marxist interpretation of history. Leont'ev difliers from the liberal viewpoint in his belief in the desirability - rather than the liberal and Marxist understanding of the regrettable inevitability - of autocracy and repression. Chiefly in this chapter, however, we are concerned with the aesthetic aspect of this theory of collision. The 'inner complexity7 of a state, deriving from unequal and antagonistic groups, was laudable both politically (from the point of view of historical progress, for a complex state was a vital and healthy one), as well as aesthetically for its diversity. At the core of Leont'ev's aesthetics is the belief that 'the law of the beautiful is . . . diversity'. Going a step further, Leont'ev added to this statement, 'diversity in unity7,13 arguing that inner complexity should be contained within 'Form' which is the 'despotism of the inner idea', an idea 'pitiless and cruel'. These ideas were embodied by both an autocracy and a strong religion/church, both of which encourage conflict directed against their repression; Leont'ev was to argue that

11 12 13

K.N. Leont'ev, Sobrante sochinenii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1912-1914), chapter 6, 'Chto takoe protsess razvitiia?', p. 140-142. Sobrante sochinenii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1912-1914), chapter 7, p. 124. As quotedin I. Fudel', 'Kul'tumyi ideal K.N. Leont'eva', Russkoeobozrenie, (1895),No 1, p. 275.

religion was perfect for 'holding the masses in a steel glove'. Thus to Leont'ev the best state for man - politically, historically and aesthetically - was that state of 'so-called harmony which not only does not exdude antitheses and struggles, and suffering, but even demands them'. Man existed in a state of fear and violence caused by social conflict; religion would contain and soothe this fear, whilst yet encouraging conflict between strict morality and hedonism. This 'aesthetics of life' embraces the paradoxical position that man is most himself, most a free and unique personality, the more he is enslaved to autocracy and religion. For Leont'ev, as (albeit in a different way) for Dostoevsky, paradox was a fundamental state of man's being.14The similarities between the two writers are greater than might at first be thought; both, in their complex understanding of man, recognised two important prindples - those of inner conflict and of the desire both for kenosis and godmanhood. The period which followed this state of vital conflict and paradox would be one called 'second simplidty' ('vtoraia prostota', or 'vtorichnoe uproshchenie'), a time when the state would begin to wither under the influences of liberalism, 'rosy7 utopianism (of which Leont'ev accused Dostoevsky), and egalitarianism, all ideas which, in promising more freedom to the individual, destroyed that vital state of repression essential to his aesthetic state. Thus Leont'ev called for Byzantinism,15by which he meant autocracy in government and the antithesis of the idea of universal humanity, the basis of the western liberalism which Leont'ev so hated. Like Chaadaev, Leont'ev saw Russia to be in a dangerous state, but his condusions were radically opposed to Chaadaev's initial position. Thus to Leont'ev the desired state for man to be in was a condition of 'romantic disharmony composed of picturesque contrasts',16 a

14 Several critics have called Leont'ev a 'lover of paradoxes'. See D. Fanger, 'Introduction' to Leont'ev's 'Analiz, stil i veianie' (Brown, 1975), p. vii; R.V. Mikol'skii, 'K kharakteristike K.N. Leont'eva' in Pamiati Konstantina Nikolaevicha Leont'eva (St. Petersburg, 1911), p. 372. 15 See Berdiaev's useful definition of 'Byzantism', p. 164. 16 Iu. Ivask, 'Introduction' in Sobranie sochinenii K.N. Leont’eva (Wurzburg, 1975). 18

state distinguished by, as Leont'ev wrote in a letter to Rozanov on May 27,1891, 'visible variety and the sensed intensity of life'. This life was in open conflict with Christianity, which, like progress, 'kills off variety, kills off the aesthetics of life on earth, that is, life itself.17 Leont'ev's work has a particular intensity remarked on by Mirsky,18 and it is this state of intensity and conflict which Leont'ev describes in the bulk of Podlipki The text, unsurprisingly, has a tripartite form which, supported by a variety of hints and metaphors, corresponds to Leont'evas triune theory of historical development.

A State of Primal Innocence Part I of the text (sections 1-8) describes Ladnev's childhood on his aunt's estate, Podlipki, and his departure from the estate at the age of eleven. A state of innocence in which beauty and good are in harmony on the estate, described rather like a 'Grecian garden', is Ladnev's condition. Podlipki, where 'the grass itself has more meaning than in other places' (p. 114),is for the young Ladnev a place of great joy and innocence, a place which symbolises the Grecian harmony between beauty and good as well as being an Eden of untainted and instinctive morality. It is a place where 'nobody suffers - everything blooms and is green' (p. 74). Ladnev, entranced by a book on mythology provided by his governess, Madame Bonne, names the principal inhabitants of Podlipki according to their imagined likeness to figures from both the Roman and Greek pantheons. Many of the people who surround him are women, ruled over by Ladnev's aunt, Maria Nikolaevna Solntseva, whose name suggests the Apollonian sun which shines over this early, radiant period of Ladnev's life. Solntseva is Juno on this harmonious Olympus, Madame Bonne becomes, appropriately, Minerva. The men who inhabit Podlipki tend to be either feminine types, like Ladnev's cousin Sergei/ a most beautiful and artistically gifted person an Apollo; the role of Jupiter is filled rather

17 18

Pis'ma K.N Leont'eva k V. Rozanovu (London, 1981), p. 98. Mirsky, p. 330.

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19

inadequately by the house servant Egpr and a neighbour called Bek (p. 27-28). The theme of the strong man capable of wounding women by his cruel passion, a theme which enters the morality /hedonism dilemma later in the text, is an issue which the domination of the feminine skilfully avoids. At Podlipki, the young Ladnev develops an interesting concept of marriage, a theme which runs throughout this text and which is of course central to the main debate; can (and should) man find marriage the harmonious union between these two concepts of sex and morality? This theme will re-appear in all the later work as Leont'ev struggled and enjoyed the problems caused by his unconventional hedonism. At first Ladnev is influenced by the idea of the 'godlike fiance' propagated by the Podlipki priest Vasilii (p. 12), a person whom Ladnev later imagines in marriage with a 'priestess of love' ('zhritsa liubvi', p. 253). Podlipki is a 'charming world' ("prelestnyi krai') where 'simple girls and young and innocent men' dance around a pagan altar (p. 116), and if such a dance celebrates marriage, as the text suggests, then it is strangely innocent choice, says Leont'ev's protagonist, referring to the choice of partner, is 'based on naive attraction' ('na naivnom vlechenii/ p. 117). There are two stories told to the young Ladnev by his nurse on the theme of marriage. The first, 'Pravda i Krivda', deals with the conflict between two women, named Pravda and Krivda. Pravda is blinded by Krivda and left hanging in a pine tree; she is however found by a prince, who marries her.19This story is told by Ladnev7s first nurse, Alenushka, a woman of 'strong morality7 (p. 6), but it seems to suggest, not the triumph of truth, but the idea of marriage based on pity. The second story is told to Ladnev by another, unnamed, nurse and deals with Ivan-tsarevich, who marries a frog whom he strikes with an arrow and turns into a female magician (p. 8). This is a story suggestive not only of the wounding power of love, but of its ability to transform. These early stories suggest two conflicting ways in which Ladnev will develop his concept of

19

A. Afanasiev, Poelicheskie vozzrenia slavian na prirodu (Moscow, 1965), p. 173. 20

relationships. Seeing them as either based on pity, or on transcendence, ecstasy through pain, Ladnev will find himself faced with a central problem of choosing between his innate humanity (which, however his creator Leont'ev denied it, lies within his nature) and his aesthetic longing for pain plus pleasure. Leont'ev gives the reader an idea of the conflict which underlies the hero's willing throwing of himself into vital conflict; the question of pain caused to others - and pain was to Leont7ev unfortunately an 'ugly7 manifestation. At first, whilst Ladnev remains at Podlipki, marriage remains for him something idealised and unreal. When his cousin, Sergei, marries, he and his wife (Ol'ga - Venera) must leave Podlipki, having placed themselves beyond the parameters of its purity; they are "let out from the beneficent realm of Podlipki into the living world7(p. 29). Later Ladnev is to look back with longing at Podlipki, a Russian 'Greece7where he could find a lover 'without depravity7: My poor Greece, where are you? Where is that blissful comer where I could find a lover without reproach and without depravity, a selfless and passionate priestess of love? (p. 253)

The Tali' and the Conflict Ladnev7s own departure from Podlipki also suggests a 'fall7into a more sensual and depraved life, and the section devoted to his innocence comes to an end with a short transitional passage (sections 8-9) which describes Ladnev7s going out into the world and, in particular, his sexual awakening, when, as Lukashevich, using Jungjan terminology, suggests, a process of 'inviduation7 occurs.20 Ladnev enters the second stage of his life (sections 10-14, taking the reader to the end of Part I; Part II, and Part HI, sections 1-10) in

20

Lukashevich, p. 18.

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21

which he must deal with the conflict caused by his desire for both an ethical life and a life of pagan enjoyment. Ladnev is tom between women whom he surrounds with associations of purity, and those whom he senses will respond to his passion. As the text progresses it becomes dear that Ladnev divided his concept of woman into, in Rozanov's terms, 'the heavenly and the earthly Aphrodite',21 a dualism which presages the more famous division of woman into madonna /whore in the work of other 19th century writers, such as in Turgenev, in whose texts female characters tend to be either 'fallen' or starlike, or in the novels of Dostoevsky, whose infernal women are one aspect of the dichotomy, and, of course, in Tolstoy.22 Ladnev deddes he wants a woman who will be complex (he finds the simple and inelegant type of woman unappealing, p. 78), and who will contain in her character both the religious and the passionate; however it is not dear entirely whether she will be a harmonious, Solov'evian unity of religion and pure love with whom he desires a 'sinless marriage' ('bezgreshnaia zhenit'ba', p. 56), or a 'vital woman' in a state of conflict akin to his own, as Ladnev is still tom between his 'Gredan', idealistic belief in harmony and his more worldly relishing of conflict. When he states that she must be 'innocent and pure' and yet 'passionate as am I' (p. 78) and adds later that he values his own innocence not for the sake of innocence, but because he feels a chaste man might be worth more of 'something elegant' (p. 90), he admits his inclination towards the aesthetic rather than the moral. A few acts of kindness towards others, induding women, are referred to by Ladnev as acts which allow him to adopt an heroic, therefore aesthetically pleasing, pose ('goditsia v geroi romana', p. 137). Ladnev has many loves, but primarily he loves the saintly Pasha (p. 257) whom he nostalgically assoaates with Podlipki (p. 24), and the earthly Sofia Rzhevskaia. Sofia is his first love and, like the

21 22

Pis'ma k Rozanovu, p. 82. In the opinion of Saltykov-Shchedrin, Leont'ev's work was clearly Turgenevian. See Sovremennik 10, (1864). 22

heroine of Turgenev's Pervaia liubov, whose hero is also named Vladimir, will also betray and disillusion her youthful admirer.23 Initially described in sympathetic terms as a girl bullied by her mother whom Ladnev likens to 'Megera', a Fury (p. 58,144,147), Sofia is noted however for her strong qualities, her energy, her appetite, her mature figure, large hands, and taste for vivid dothing (p. 148,242). She is not alarmed by Ladners kissing of her shoulder, though perhaps her courage and sexuality are not as developed as Ladnev might hope; she is, for example, shown to be frightened by a rearing horse (perhaps a priapic symbol). The discussion of events prior to, and during his assodation with, Sofia takes the reader to Part n, section 10, in which Ladnev takes the conflict back to the estate Podlipki. He returns to find Pasha there, and must choose between his desire to seduce her and his wish that she should remain pure as his memory of the Gredan Podlipki in which love was untainted by sexuality. Here is the crux of the Leont'evian dilemma: can Ladnev continue to enjoy what he once refers to as 'edectic synthesis', or will what he terms rather incoherently 'the vital incarnation' be lost from the combination of 'the heat of inexperience with wisdom, ease with prudence, good with egoism, religion with saence' (p. 231)? The problem of recreating Eden according to conflict rather than harmony and renundation rests on whether Ladnev can make himself into a god-man - and live his creed within Eden as well as out of it. Pasha is throughout described in terms which emphasise her purity and innocence. In contrast to the dark Sofia, she is blonde and childlike - Ladnev speaks of enjoying (that word which so frequently crops up in his work, 'naslazhdenie') her 'adolescent body' (p. 354). He notes her pallor; this woman with her chaste kisses (p. 20) possesses a 'fresh pallor, that pallor which often prefaces full bloom' (p. 18). She is associated with the odour of almonds, traditionally representative of virginity (p. 17) and with her beauty and quietness

23

Turgenev's heroine is called Liudmila, not Sofia. There is however a Liudmila in Leont'ev's book, with whom Ladnev becomes romantically involved.

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(p. 24), infuses Ladnev with the 'most chaste langour and torment' (p. 19). She is meek and simple, like the women who dance around the altar in Ladnev7s concept of peasant/pagan marriage (p. 116). The emphasis on meekness adds a new factor to the problem of purity and hedonism, for it suggests that the woman is often a passive, suffering victim in the hero's enjoyment of this delicious conflict between sex and sin. The idea that diere must be a victor in the sexual conflict - for example, Ladnev is in a sense a victim of Sofia - enters the aesthetic equation and hinders Ladnev7s wish to bring Pasha to 'full bloom' and to the enjoyment of delicious sin. There are several female victims in the text; Katia, a serf at Podlipki, being the prime example. This wild, pagan girl (p. 43) is tamed by the women of Podlipki and becomes a kind, meek and chaste woman (p. 151,153-4) who however is still passionate enough to be sympathetic to her seducers. She tells Ladnev that although she does not wish to love him, she will 'eat his apple' (p. 164) hinting that she is in a state of vital conflict, willing to accept the apple from the forbidden tree of knowledge yet, at the same time, reluctant. Eventually she succumbs to Ladnev's cousin Modest, becomes pregnant, gives her child to a foundling hospital, and is herself abandoned in a rather tragic story. The author's interest in the woman as victim had great topicality, for, by the sixties, the role of woman had become a subject for literature in line with the 'George Sandism' which swept through Russia (characters in Pedlipki refer to this writer's work). In the work of women writers such as E. Gan, K.Pavlova, M. Zhukova, E. Tur and in the portraits of revolutionary women in Turgenev's texts, woman is redefined, no longer a helpless, soft creature but a person of action. This 'feminist' trend often took on a sexual dimension, as in Chemyshevsky's noted study of a love triangle in Chto delat’l, (1864), or of the encouragement of a woman's freedom to enter into extra-marital liaisons described in Druzhinin's Politi'ka Saks, for example, which later served Leont'ev as a model for A Husbands Confession. A conversation Ladnev has with Sofia about victimisation is revealing of Ladnev's difficulty with finding a place for pity in the hedonistic equation. While out walking with Sofia, Ladnev sees a 24

dead white cat its colour perhaps reminiscent of the pale Pasha (p. 146). In contrast to Pasha/who is noted for her kindness to stray cats, even one with only three legs, Sofia tells Ladnev that she 'hates' cats and anything else small - small dogs, mice (p. 146). Ladnev exclaims: I did not pity Sofia. . . I was never able to pity anything that I liked so strongly, (p. 147) Pity and aesthetic admiration are poles apart; and thus Ladnev is driven to pursue his seductions, his love of beauty and 'passionate sin' (p. 163), believing that he can find that 'illicit love' which is sweeter than lidt passion (p. 257). And yet, as he teeters on the brink of seducing Pasha, the memory of Katia's plight prevents him from following his aesthetic bent (p. 359). Ladnev has always striven against pitying Pasha; in an early scene in which Pasha complains of harsh treatment from Ol'ga, Ladnev states that he did not wish to pity her, because he did not wish to love her but make merry with her ('neliubif ee,a poveselifsia snei', p. 23). Ladnev's belief that life is beautiful and can be enjoyed to the fullest is a little dashed by the discovery that there exist unfortunates, orphans and the ugly and deformed, for whom life is never good (p. 115), just as he is sorely disillusioned when he meets Sergei (' Apollo') and his wife, a romantic couple whom he had idealised but whom he now finds living in cramped lodgings, beset with financial worries (p. 35). One interesting way Leont'ev has of describing this conflict between Christian morality, or chastity, and licentious passion, is by using tree symbolism, as he does in other works such as A Husband's Confession (which describes trees which symbolise life or death and 'Aspazia Lampridi' (which contains trees which represent wisdom or stupidity). In Podlipki, trees become illustrations of Ladnev's vital vacillation between purity and sexuality, for they carry assodations either of chastity, regret and fidelity, or of passion. Fir trees, traditionally Christian trees, 'eternally green and eternally gloomy' (p. 3), offer both salvation (eternal life) and the half-life of renunciation of hedonism; the willows are like weeping women, and Leont'ev also refers to a plant which is lilac with 'black tears', continuing this theme of sorrow and resignation. 25

Podlipki also possesses many of the Turgenevian 'lip/ (hence its name) with their associations of romance.24 Ladnev himself is at times represented by a tree of passion which is either a cherry tree or the poplar which stands outside his window. Reading Homer under a cherry-tree, Ladnev comes to a brief description of Achilles and Patrokles bedding their concubines (p. 77), and begins to think feverishly, 'what is spring for - spring and this flowering cherrytree?' He expresses a desire to meet a woman and love her under the cherry-tree; love her 'to a state of frenzy, madness and pain' (p. 78). The poplar is another tree which seems to induce an erotic mood, for Ladnev refers to it as 'driving him mad' (p. 121), and it reacts to passion just as Ladnev reacts; as Ladnev embraces Klasha, the poplar too becomes exited: at that minute the great silver birch suddenly shook and rustled like a live thing, and then fell silent, (p. 188) Ladnev renounces the excitable poplar for the birch, symbolic of flagellation, purification and Christian repentance, on the occasion when he beats himself with its branches in an attempt to eradicate his desire for Pasha, the priest's daughter (p. 257). A tree again enters into Ladnev's thoughts as he continues to pursue Pasha; he writes the girl a passionate letter in which he attempts to enter into Pasha's feelings on submission to his ardour. He uses the image of an owl lying dead at' the foot of an apple tree, with a grieving mother owl above the tree (p. 250). This reference specifically to an apple tree suggests Ladnev's understanding that tempting Pasha to partake of the forbidden fruit, to acquire sexual knowledge (it is quite apposite that she will therefore turn into the pagan owl, the bird of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom)25possibly will 'kill' her - or rather ruin her.

24 25

See Turgenev's 'Moi sosed Radilov' from Tjipiski Okhotnika in which the author gives a long disquisition on lime trees. Madame Bonne ('Minerva') isconnected to the apple tree; Ladnev describes her face as 'smorshchennoe kak iablQko' (p. 31).

26

The apple tree, like the poplar, is the tree of knowledge ('derevo poznaniia') to which the text refers on an occasion when it is Ladnev who is the seduced rather than the seducer. The hedonistic Teriaev, a Lapsarian Adam, makes advances to Ladnev, promising to 'treat him with the best forbidden fruit'. Teriaev claims lasciviously to possess: the tree of knowledge of good and evil, such that you might smack your lips over it for an entire month. (p. 170) Teriaev is not the only figure who 'educates' Ladnev and furthers the Lapsarian process. The teacher Iurev, an heretic, a 'Mephisto' (p. 212) with whom Ladnev begins a relationship which Lukashevich defines as homoerotic,26gains a strong hold over Ladnev's thoughts - Ladnev ceases to think, for himself (p. 212). Iurev encourages Ladnev to fill his head with Voltairean iconodasm and sdentific theories. Iurev, telling Ladnev that everything is relative ('vse uslovno' - an interesting parallel to Dostoevsky's famous 'vse dozvoleno'), wears down the hitter's belief in any kind of eternal values and attempts to turn him, like himself, into an heretic, like Count Korovaev, whose unpleasant death due to his 'Voltairean renunciation of religious belief is recounted by Ladnev's aunt in her religious exhortations to her nephew (p. 33-34). Despite the encouragement of Iurev and the blandishments of Teriaev, however, Ladnev remains in a state of vital conflict, a condition which is again depicted symbolically through tree imagery. The lime is a tree of romance, but is also the tree of Bauds, whose marriage to Philemon stands as an example of eternal fidelity. She was at death turned into a lime, its branches and roots entwined with the tree of her husband Philemon. In Podlipki the oak tree to which Ladnev pays particular attention is an oak split in half ('razodrannyi popolam', p. 10), suggestive of the male dilemma

26

Lukashevich sees Iurev as a literary representation of Leont'ev's beloved friend Grigorievskii, p. 18 - 20. 27

which Ladnev explores, but curiously, not an image of health similar to the 'golden tree of life' (p. 207) to which Ladnev refers later. The conflict appears not vital, but life-draining, suggesting Leont'ev's deeper conflict in his approach to conflict itself.

The Resolution of Conflict Part of Ladnev7s problem with the incompatible yoking of pity and hedonism is the trouble he has with his own identity. Not only does the novel contain two images of woman, the meekand the passionate, but two images of Ladnev's ideal man. One is the pliant ('ustupchivyi') man, Christian and humble, the other is the superman or Napoleon figure who fascinated Leont'ev as well as Dostoevsky.27 In his attempt to define the nature of man, Leont'ev entered the debate begun by Pushkin and Lermontov, a debate given a title by Turgenev in his portrait of Chulkaturin in Dnevnik lishrtego cheloveka (1850).2* The idea that the Russian could be either a man of thought or of action (but was not usually both), that he was either a Hamlet or a Don Quixote,29was taken up by Leont'ev. The conflict between which image of man is more acceptable to Ladnev is depicted in the character of Apollo, Sergei, to whom Ladnev also affixes a warlike label, that of 'Mars', god of war. Sergei however shows he has little martial spirit, and soon the title of Mars goes to Ladnev's unde, an army officer with many battlescars and decorations. At one point Ladnev claims that 'kindness is more pleasing than vileness . . . experience, force, pallor, suffering' (p. 192), yet he secretly desires to be strong, offering images of men who are not only innocent but young and strong, and who are hunters (p. 116-117), with an ability, *ne suspects, to make sexual conquests, these Ivan-tsareviehes with arrows of passion. Ladnev vacillates,

27 28 29

Leont'ev's interest in Napoleon first became apparent in 'Noch na pchel'nitse', (1857). Lukashevich quotes Leont'ev on the effect Turgenev's Dnevnik had on him, p. 21. Ladnev is, in fact, referred to as Sancho Panza, p. 187.

desiring to be like the 'ustupchivyi' Nikolaiev, whom he describes as an ideal man in possession of the 'philosopher's stone' (p. 99), and yet wishing to emulate his half-brother Nikolaiev, a warlike type and Nikolaiev's 'opposite', despite the similarity in name (p. 121). Leont'ev shows his interest in the topical theory of the 'egoistical man' whom we find both in Chernyshevsky and in Herzen. Leont'ev was to developa theoryof what he called'transcendental egoism' (influenced, one may argue, by the famous idea of 'enlightened self-interest'), an interesting form of iciigjous belief but was always aware of die abuse to which egoism and power could be put When his unde, 'Mars', strikes the servant Terentii with sufficient force to leave the imprint of his signet ring on the man's mouth, scenes in which peasants are beaten, or in which Nikolai's dogs are set onto a mongrel, repel Ladnev (p. 197,171), at whose 'gumanizm' Nikolai sneers as he eggp his dogs on to IdOL One may ask just how much of a liberal is Ladnev, and how revealing is he erf Leont'ev's inability to follow the creed of conflict, tyranny, self-interest and reactionary values that he preached? The Podlipki burial mound ('kurgan'), memorial to old battles and scenes of violence, has been something to which Ladnev long could not accustom himself (p. 10). How dose do pity and the realisation that acts of cruelty are 'unaesthetic' come together? fc the'victory of reason and heart over vileness and atrodty' to which Ladnev refers an expression of Christian pity, or of aesthetics* or both—in which case, where is the conflict?90 There is another problem which hinders Ladnev in the pursuit of his vital conflict between morality and hedonism; not only pity for his victims, but self-pity deriving from a fear of has own mortality. Ladnev, perhaps remembering his mentor Iurev's strangely dour comment that'high happinessisdose to the grave'(p. 228), wonders whether passionate living of life to its fullest does not exhaust life and usher in death. When Ladnev lists those whom he considers to be exceptional men, such as Napoleon, Goethe and Schiller, he refers to

30 Pis'ma k Rozanova, p. 103. 29

the fact that their lives did not have happy endings, hinting at a thought he does not care to formulate more precisely; that the victory - the triumph over a woman which the strong man enjoys as a test of his will - leads to death. Ladnev wonders at one stage, when his relationship with Sofia looks promising, whether she has not killed him with love, exclaiming poetically that after 'inhaling the sweet air of love', a man might crumble into dust like an old corpse' (p. 230). Ultimately the third age of man ends with renunciation. The vitality of the conflict in Leont'ev's prose must come at last to deep loneliness for the hero on an estate which is neither the Grecian paradise of his childhood, nor the place of his hedonistic leanings, but a place shrouded in winter: barren, bleak and near-death; and suggestive in its whiteness of the Christian purity that the Leont'evian hero must embrace in his third age. Ladnev visits the grave of his parents and discovers a maple, abundant in its foliage and its blooms, a 'luxuriant' tree, and for a moment thinks of pursuing his hedonism to its blooming limit; but then wonders whether he should rather remain in a state of isolation (p. 254), and indeed this is the condition he ultimately remains in. He renounces both the Grecian past and the state in which Greece and Christianity were in conflict, stating that one must ultimately, 'renounce everything Greece, and life itself (p. 254). Death, more so than pity, finally proves too strong for Leont'evian aesthetics, for vitality and conflict. Ultimately, the three stages of man which Leont'ev depicts in Podlipki reflect not vital growth ending in resolution, but an ongoing problem with the concept of conflict itself, and its ability to maintain itself in the face of pity and of pressure towards resolution.

30

Chapter Two IN MY OWN LAND As a Political Pamphlet of the Sixties K. Leont'ev's novel In My Oum land (V svoem kraiu) (1864), as well as the rest of his novels from the cyde 'From the Russian life', have not yet received thorough attention from the scholars of Russian literature. Considered to be autobiographical, as all of Leont'ev's novels, this novel is noted for the dual structure employed in the antithetical disposition of the two main characters of Milkeev and Rudnev, or Leont'ev's alter egos, who are the respective bearers of Leont'ev's famous prindple of aesthetic immoralism on the one hand and sdentific determinism on the other. Milkeev makes numerous monologues of an anti-utilitarian and anti-ethical nature, where he proclaims beauty to be superior to ethics, and justifies the existence of evil as a Manichean condition of human existence. Rudnev, his somewhat Bazarovan ' counterpart in the novel, is a doctor (as Leont'ev himself was), and makes, in turn, numerous pronouncements on the human condition, which are based on the parallelism between the biological and sodal sdences. Both protagonists' views were later expressed by Leont'ev in his writings on the philosophy of history, where his tripartite process of 'primeval simplidty', 'complex flowering' and 'resimplification' were substantiated by the birth, life and death of a human organism. The scant attention it has received is connected to the historical context of the time of its appearance, the 1860's. Commentators' opinions range from praise of its originality (Moser, 1964), to the verdict of banality (Gaidenko, 1974). At the time of its appearance, some of Leont'ev's contemporaries, such as Saltykov-Shchedrin, attacked the novel (in Sovremennik, 1864), claiming that the genre of this work is not a novel but an anthology ('a khrestomatiia') of the Russian literature of the time; 31

Saltykov identifies shadows of Pisemskii, Turgenev, and other contemporary writers 'on every page'. Leont'ev, according to Saltykov-Shchedrin, 'uses an old recipe for the poisonous mixture', which consists of 'saTno deistvuiushchikh sredstv g. Turgeneva, i tarakannych otrav g. Grigorovicha, i gnilostno zarazhoraiych pripasov g. Pisemskogo'. Needless to say, Leont'ev did not forget this criticism, and a few decades later he described Soom mnnXs manner of polemics as 'krovavaia svistopliaska' and Saltykov's own intimidating style as 'poistine genial'naia branchKvost'. What Saltykov took to be 'imitative qualities' erf the novel in the year of its appearance, 20th century commentators put into their historical context and such thoughts are viewed as Leont'ev's intellectual response to the popular ideas of the time. Apart from Lukashevich (1967), for whom the novel is important in so far as it demonstrates Leont'ev's hidden homosexuality, the historical polemical qualities of the novel have been noticed by almost all its modem day commentators. For Soviet critic Gaidenko (1974), this 'slabyi roman' is important in so far as it demonstrates Leont'ev's eariy Kberal sympathies towards the Chemyshevsky camp. He laments Leont'ev's drifting from the sympathies of his youth towards hard conservatism. In the most recent Soviet work {BihiUiin, 1989), In My Own land is interpreted as an example of intellectual tolerance towards 'alien ideas', demonstrated in the novel by its altruistic protagonist Rudnev vis-a-vis Milkeev's 'aesthetic immoraKsm'. The novel's Western commentators also emphasise its polemical qualities vis-a-vis the ideas of the 1860's. Charles Moser (1964) views In My Own Land as an anti-radical novel, in which its main protago­ nist, Milkeev/voices thoughtswhich are contradictory toeverything the radicals were sayingatthattime'(p. 163). Moser makes a point of quoting tiie following statement made by Milkeev, which he views as polemics against the Chemyshevsky-Pisarev camp: And what is this mere physiological existence of ours anyway? It isn't worth a dime! A single magnificent, century old tree is dearer than a score of persons with 32

no individualism; and I wouldn't cut it down in order to buy peasants medicine for cholera, (p. 164) If anti-Pisarevan polemics, which transpire from Milkeev's utterings, allowed Moser to speak of the anti-radical qualities of In My Own Land, then the caricature-like qualities of the charactertype Bogoiavlenskii, the third most important male protagonist in the novel, allowed Rzhevskii (1976) to speak of him as an 'obvious caricature of the Feuerbach-inspired radicals of the Russian left' (p. 264). Rzhevskii also notices traits of the concrete polemics against Chemyshevsky's newly appeared What is to be done? in some of Rudnev's sophisticated moral searchings (p. 264). Bogoiavlenskii's historical contextuality is also noticed by Ivask (1974), for whom 'seminarist Bogoiavlenskii predstavliaet Bazarovshchinu 60-kh godov, dukh otritsaniia, dukh razrusheniia', 'po svoim vzgliadam on blizok 'Sovremenniku' Chemyshevskogo i Dobroliubova' (p. 92). Ivask unfortunately refuses to see a caricature in the character Bogoiavlenskii, substantiating his views by the fact that Leont'ev made an intellectual out of Bogoiavlenskii: Vse zhe Bogoiavlenskii ne karikatura na nigilista, kak vo mnogikh romanakh Pisemskogo ill Leskova. V ume emu Leont'ev ne otkazyvaet. (p. 92) Bearing in mind Yurii Tynianov's' teachings on literary parody, what Ivask took as proof of the absence of a caricature on Chemyshevsky in the seminarian Bogoiavlenskii, could serve as proof for its presence. According to Tynianov it is often precisely the manifestation of respect, or at least a pretence for it, towards the victim or the target of the literary parody, which betrays signs of literary parody and caricature in the works of Russian 19th century literature. In his 'Dostoevsky i Gogol. K teorii parodii', Tynianov makes a distinction between 'stilizatsiia' and 'literatumaia parodiia', ascribing the qualities of 'the second plane' of the work of literature to the latter. This plane exists only if the reader is

familiar with what person, character, event, is submitted to the process of parody. It is possible to read a comedy without viewing it as a parody on a tragedy. However, if, as in the Frogs by Aristophanes, there are obvious elements of a parody on Euripidean tragedy, we can regard it as a parody on tragedy. This second plane can be open only to an erudite reader and can be closed to a less infearned one. It can also sometimes demand a specialised knowledge, as in the famous case of Pushkin's Domik v Kolomne;* which without Pushkin's archives would remain an 'unrecognised parody'. Kozma Prutkov's parodies also fell into this category. Tynianov's theory of 'literary evolution', applied to the history of 19th century Russian literature, is linked to his theory of literary parody in the form of 'the second plane' of a literary work. Tynianov, as is well known, rejected a straight line ('priamaia liniia') dependance between the junior and the elder representatives of a literary branch. For him the history of 19th century Russian literature was a struggle ('bor'ba') in which the writers who were considered 'preemniki' were in feet giving a correction ('popravku'), and were in a constant struggle with the elder branch. This struggle could acquire a form of literary parody, or a second plane of the work, in which the victim's personal traits of character, style of writing and ideological affinities were ridiculed. This however did not mean that the parodier was not heavily indebted with regard to the artistic devices, choice of plot structure and even metaphysical or psychological insights of the work of the parodied. To prove the ambivalence of the relationship of parodier to parodied, Tynianov chose as illustration the example of the complex place Gogol occupied in Dostoevskiian writing. Dostoevsky was heavily indebted to Gogol's writing from his early work, such as Poor Folk and The Double, up to The Brothers Karamazov. Gogol's style, plot structure and his metaphysical insights into the destructive power of sex,

1

M.L. Gasparov, V.M. Smirin, 'Evgenii Onegin i Domik v Kolomne: Parodiia u Pushkina', in Tynianovskii Sbomik, (Riga, 1986). 34

the Madonna-Sodom dichotomy, are amongst the things which Dostoevsky borrowed from Gogol and stylised in his work. This heavy indebtedness to Gogol's writing, however, did not restrain Dostoevsky from leaving to posterity the image of Gogol as a Russian Tartuffe in the figure of Foma Opiskin in Selo Stepanchikovo, in whose character he caricatured both Gogol's personal traits of character (a 'prizhival'shchik'), and his personal style of writing ('Selected Passages from my Correspondence with Friends'). At this point we might recall that Leont'ev's 'respectful' treatment of Bogoiavlenskii was considered by scholars to be an argument against seeing Bogoiavlenskii as a literary parody on a radical of the Sovremetihik camp, because of Leont'ev's 'granting his protagonist high intellectual abilities' and not reducing him to the level of the absurd. Such an understanding of literary parody is, in principle, a contradiction to both Tynianov's teachings and the facts which the 19th century texts supply us with. When we deal with the bipolar concepts of the 'preemstvennost" and 'bor'ba' as the two equally important components of the literary parody, and if we look at the discovered literary parodies, then we learn that in each of these numerous literary parodies on Chemyshevsky the element of 'preemstvennost" is present. Tolstoy's utilitarianism, which he shared with Chemyshevsky and arguably owed to him (Papemo, 1988), did not stop him from creating the literary parody on Chemyshevsky in Zarazhonnoe semeistvo (1863-1864) (Eikhenbaum, 1931, p. 211-216), but it also did not allow him to make an intellectual imbecile out of Chemyshevsky (Moser, 1964). This safety mechanism of avoiding the reduction of the parodied to utter intellectual failure is also known to acquire the shape of 'crocodile tears', as is the case with Dostoevsky's famous parody on Chemyshevsky in Krokodil (Epokha, Feb., 1865). When reproached by contemporaries {Gcios, 1865) for his harsh and inhuman treatment of Chemyshevsky, and for caricaturing his personal relations with his wife, Dostoevsky not only claimed to feel compassion towards his deadly opponent of many years standing, but also left a high acclaim of Chemyshevsky's 3-2 50

35

intellectual and moral standing in his 'Diary of a writer'. (See "Diary of a writer', (1873), 'Nechto lichnoe', VoL 21, p. 28). If this element of the ambiguity 'preemstvennost' - bor'ba' is absent, the result is Nabokov's Dar, in which Chemyshevsky receives an intellectual reduction ad absurdum. His economic, psychological and aesthetical views are discredited, the element of 'preemstvennost" is absent Nabokov did not create a literary parody but remained, as he admits, 'on the very edge of the parody' (Dar, (1952), p. 225).2 In the case of Chemyshevsky and Leont'ev, as in the Chemyshevsky-Dostoevsky case, Leont'ev in 'Moia Uteratumaia sud'ba' (1874-1875) not only claimed a high respect for the Chemyshevsky of the period of 'Ocherki Gogolevskogo perioda' (1855-1856), but more notably spoke of the early, aesthetically inclined Chemyshevsky as 'a man of the forties', whom he deeply respected: la pomniu odnazhdy chital stat'iu Chemyshevskogo 'Kritika Gogolevskogo perioda'. Chemyshevsky togda ne razvernul vpolne svoego revoliutsionnogo otritsatel'nogo znameni; on byl v to vremia eshcho estetik 40-kh godov; molodoi, nachinaiushchiyx) tizhe ochen' khoroshii pisatel'. (p. 71) Praise for Chemyshevsky as a 'good writer' is followed by a, for our investigation, rather significant confession. Leont'ev stresses Chemyshevsky's prophecy of the appearance of a 'new Gogol' amongst a new generation of writers. Needless to say, like Dostoevsky some twenty years before him, Leont'ev visualised himself as this 'new Gogol': Pomniu . . . v odnom meste bylo u nego skazano, budto i pri vsem velikom znachenii Gogolia net nikakogp somneniia/chto u nas budut so vremenem pisateli bolee genial'nye/liem on. . . Ia togda pomniu polozhil knigt^zadumalsia o tonyni ia li budu odin iz tekh budushchikh pisatelei. . . (p. 71) 2

All quotations from Dar are from V. Nabokov, Dar (Ardis, 1975). 36

Remarkable here is an historical recurrence of a situation where a young writer draws inspiration from the idea of becoming the 'new Gogol' of Russian literature. Like the young Dostoevsky, who in the mid 1840's drew his first phenomenal success after producing Poor Folk (1846) - the work in which he both imitated Gogol and entered into an open polemic with him - Leont'ev, too, places his hopes on producing a 'best seller', which would bring him immediate fame, greater than the fame of Gogol. Like the Dostoevsky of Poor Folk, he knew very well the demands and fashions of the literary market of the early sixties - a market, needless to say, which was governed by the tastes of the 'new people' ('novye liudi'): Chemyshevsky and Dobroliubov. And like Dostoevsky, who worked his way into the literary world from creating a caricature on Gogol in the figure of Foma Opiskin in The Village Stepanchikovo and its inhabitants (1859), Leont'ev too came up with a novel (1864) in which he imitated, polemidsed, and caricatured both 'the new people' and their creator. In In My Own Land (which succeeded Podlipki, the novel, the very title of which signifies the polemics of an aristocrat, bom under 'lip/, against the derogative term 'podlipovets', introduced by the 'Shestidesiatniki'), Leont'ev polemidses with 'novye liudi' by introducing a group of his own counterparts to them - Rudin, notably, a medical doctor who operates on frogs and contains a Rakhmetovan ascetic strain; Milkeev, an aristocrat, who can compete with Rakhmetov's physical quality of Nikitushka Lomov; Bogoiavlenskii, an open caricature on Chemyshevsky as the author of Chto delat'l (1862-1863); and the women characters, each of whom in one way or another contains elements of historic and literary polemics with Chemyshevsky's heroines. And, as often happens in the case of literary parody, the grotesque caricaturisation of the personal traits of character, of appearance, of mannerisms, are ridiculed at the same time, and together with, the writer's aesthetical, ethic, and philosophical views. From the 'open' ('raskxytye') literary parodies on Chemyshevsky we know that his contemporaries were keen on ridiculing his 'squeaky voice', his eternal 'glasses', and even the extravagant behaviour of his scandalously unfaithful wife and her 'gips/ appearance.

In the Leont'evian case/ unlike all the 'open' parodies on Chemyshevsky by Tolstoy, Leskov, Dostoevsky/ Turgenev and Grigorovich/ who all came to literature some two decades earlier and, by then/ had said their 'new word'/ Chemyshevsky played a role similar to that played by Gogol in Dostoevsky's career/ where 'preemstvennost" and 'bor'ba' were synonymous; where, by saying 'a new word'/ or by 'becoming a new Gogol meant to become 'a new Chemyshevsky'. Not only were Chemyshevsky and Dobroliubov the 'vlastiteli dum' of the young generation/ but their personal fates (the early death of Dobroliubov and the martyrdom of Chemyshevsky) confirmed their thoughts and ideas by 'deeds'. So, Leont'ev's confession of his literary sympathies towards the 'young Chemyshevsky7, if taken in the Tynianovian light of literary evolution/ indicates the presence of 'literatumaia preemstvennost'"/ which, to Tynianov, 'est prezhde vsego bor'ba, razrusheniie starogo tselogo i novaya stroika starykh elementov7 (p. 6). Keeping in mind that we are dealing with 'novye liudi' as both a new historical and literary type in this case, we realise that in V svoem kraiu we might encounter both elements of historical and literary parody on Chemyshevsky as 'osobyi' and 'novyi chelovek'. ThuS/ 'types'3(as in the case of Dostoevsky-Gogol polemics-parody) are at the centre of the literary struggle/ 'preemstvennost" in this novel. Types are at stake as both the goal of artistic creation ('a new Gogol should create a new type') and as a target of caricature ('old types' should be destroyed and re-structured into a new version). Tynianov ascribes particular significance to 'kontrastnost", which he qualifies as one 'mechanising device' ('mekhaniziruiushchii priem', p. 21-23) of making a literary parody. Contrast in the creation

3

Like Dostoevsky, who felt competitive towards Gogol's types and criticised them for 'lifelessness', Leont'ev too regarded 'type' building as the most crurial and difficult task of a novelist. In his early attempts at literary criticism, devoted to the analysis of Turgenev's On the Eve (1866), in Pis'mo pi ovinlsiala, popovodu povesli Turgeneva Nakanune, Leont'ev accuses Turgenev of violating the norms of good taste in creating 'khodul'nye' types. Turgenev, in turn, in 1861, critidsed Leont'evian characters for being 'contrived and lifeless'. In his famous letter he praised Leont'ev's talent as a literary critic and also suggested he turn to folklore writing. 38

of 'types' in Dostoevsky's novel is the way in which he parodies Gogolian types, which he considered to be artificial, lacking 'tones' ('ottenki') and being 'not interesting' and 'not realistic'. Leont'ev, who, as we will demonstrate, parodied Chemyshevsky in the figure of a seminarian with literary inspirations, Aleksei Semionovich Bogoiavlenskii, also brought into the novel as his types two sharply contrasting protagonists Milkeev and Rudnev -both of whom contain elements of polemics with Chernyshevskiian types (RakhmetoV, Lopukhov and Kirsanov) from Chto delat'7 These elements of literary polemics serve as indicators for the presence of literary parody in the novel on the creator of the types, against which the polemics are led. If 'novye liudi' and 'osobyi chelovek' were Chemyshevsky's 'new word' in creating 'types', then Leont'ev in In My Own Land gives us as his counterparts to Chemyshevsky's types, Milkeev and Rudnev. Each of these protagonists are meant to be 'a hew word' or a 'new type', and subsequently each of them contains something of the 'old', 'known' elements of Chemyshevsky's types, which become incorporated into the 'new type' in a form of parodied elements. This latter Tynianov identifies as a 'sut' parodii': Sut' parodii - v mekhanizatsii priema, eta mekhanizatsiia oshchutima, konechno, tol'ko v tom sluchae, esli izvesten priem, kotoryi mekhaniziruetsia,. takim obrazom parodiia osushchestvliaet dvoinuiu zadachu: 1) mekhanizatsiiu opredelennogo priema; 2) organizatsiiu novogo materiala, pri chom etim rtovym ' materialom i budet mekhanizirovannyi staryi priem. (p. 23)

-

t

Taking for the parodying device ('priem'), in this part of our investigation, the creation of a new type on the basis of elements of the parodied old, known type, let us look for the 'mechanised' elements of the 'old type'. Since 'old types' in our investigation are 'novye liudi' and 'osobyi chelovek', let us trace elements of this typology in the Rudnev-Milkeev double protagonist scheme. 3-4 50

39

It is commonly agreed amongst the novel's commentators that Milkeev in the novel is a bearer of Leont'ev's 'aesthetical immoralism' (Mirsky, 1926), i.e. his views on beauty as a different domain from ethical and moral categories. This openly polemical anti-utilitarian aesthetical view in itself can be regarded as polemical to Chemyshevsky's utilitarian and materialist aesthetics (Moser, 1964). However, apart from the idea that Milkeev stands for in the novel, he bears common features with the 'osobyi chelovek' - Rakhmetov. In addition to their aristocratic background, they share the 'Nikitushka Lomov' motif. Milkeev's 'ogromnyi rosf, stressed on a few occasions in the novel, acquires through the novel the symbolic significance attached to the teachings of 'symbolic anthropology' of Caras and Gall. Anthropological typology, we might recall, played a significant part in Lopukhov's observations of Vera Pavlovna's physique, as well as in Kirsanov's symbolic reading of the link between Vera Pavlovna's power ('sila') and the width of her chest (p. 374).4 In Irt My Own Land there are two heroes who share 'ogromnyi rost' ('Nikitushka Lomov' syndrome). Together with the aristocrat Milkeev, m-me Novosilskaia, the landlady of the estate where Milkeev serves as a teacher to her children, is also marked by an 'ogromnyi rest'. The symbolic reading of her name is dictated by numerous references in the text to her 'ogromnyi rost7, 'krupnyi nos', features which Milkeev and Novosilskaia have in common,5 (cf. Rakhmetov's 'figura', 'profile', 'karlik' and 'gigant', p. 333,335, 331, in Chto delat'?). These descriptions, in the form of observations, come from the plebian counterpart of 'novye liudi' in the novel - Dr. Rudnev, who shares with Lopukhov and Kirsanov not only the medical profession, but also the passion to operate on frogs. Rudnev is a disciple of the French social anthropologists Carus and Gall, so popular in Russia at the time.

4 5

All quotations from Chto delat"? are from N.G. Chemyshevsky,CMo delate, (Khud. Lit., Leningrad, 1967) All quotations from V svoem kraiu are from Sobrantia Sochtnenii K. Leont ’exxi, (Analecta Slavica, Vol. 1,1975). 40

If Chemyshevsky brings into the novel the name of Claude Bernard (cf. Kirsanov mentions his name at least 'raz na den" (p. 8 7 ,174> 179), then Leont'ev persistently speaks of the craneological and phrenological teachings of Cams and Gall. The dry anatomic physiology of Claude Bernard (1813-1878) is juxtaposed with the somewhat mystical scientism of the phrenologist and symbolic anthropologist-craneologist Carus's 'On the Symbolism of Human Appearance' is brought into the novel not only in order to decipher the symbolism of Leont'ev's 'osobye liudi', Milkeev and Novosilskaia, but also as a sign of polemics against the materialism of 'novye liudi'.6 The 'osobye liudi' motif is built not only on the 'Nikitushka Lomov' ..motif but also on the ascesa trait. Although 'oba briunety', which according to Chemyshevsky means a sensual, non-Russian type7, which would exdude them from the category of 'osobye', a 'rank lower than the merely 'novye' liudi', Milkeev and Novosilskaia are both physically asexual in the novel. The provocatively ambiguous relationship (the mistress and the governor of the estate) is created to stress the un-ordinariness and non-banality of the two heroes. Novoalskaia's constant complaint of physical impotence, her describing herself as 'razvalina', her confessing to Milkeev of a story of her sexual incompitability with her bon-vivant husbandin-exile, are matched by Milkeev's inability to fell in love with any of the numerous young female characters with which In My Own Land, as well as all of Leont'evian early novels, abound. 'The harem' in its turn flirts, dances with and chats to Milkeev but, as if seeing his 'osobennost", they prefer to fall in love with, and get married to, less 'osobye liudi'. And indeed we know from Chto delatl that it takes the 'osobyi chelovek' Rakhmetov to withstand sexual pressure and to elevate

6 7

On the popularity of Carus amongst Russian writers of the time, see D.J. Rice, 'Dostoevsky and the Healing Art, (1986). On the physiology of the 'Non-Russian type', see I. Papemo, Chemyshevsky and the age o f realism. A study of the semiotics ofbehawour, (1988), p. 128.

the seductress to the level of 'osobennost" by the example of personal martyrdom. Rudnev in the novel is tested by Leont'ev for the 'rank' of 'osobennyi chelovek'. Like 'pustynniki' in various 'Zhitiia sviatykh', or like Father Sergius in Tolstoy's post-Kreutzer Sonata tale, or like Rakhmetov in Chto delat' ?, all of whom fight the power of the flesh by abusing their bodies by burning an organ, or by wearing 'verigi', or by sleeping on needles, the second of the novel's protagonists, Doctor Rudnev, too, intends to lead a life of total a&cetidsm. But the plebeian sdentist Rudnev is not chosen by Leont'ev to be his new type of 'osobennyi chelovek', and is therefore reduced by the author to becoming his answer to the type 'novyi chelovek'. This reduction 'in rank' is achieved through his inability to live up to the set ideal. This chosen but failed idéal is presented in the life of the 'Pustynnik' Saint Martinian, who is introduced into the novel in ai form of 'pritcha'. Rudnev chooses the ascetic life of 'Pustynnik' Martinian as a model of perfection, and the story Of this martyr is remarkably similar to the 'eroticheskii epizod' in Rakhmetov's life. We might recall that Rakhmetov (in a horse acddent, when he was able to demonstrate his enormous physical power by stopping the running horse) saves the life of a young 19-year-old widow who, under the influence of Rakhmetov's 'plamemye rechi' and his Nikitushka Lomov physique, falls in love with him. She described her vision of Rakhmetov in a peculiarly 'beatific' way: 'la vizhu vo sne ego, okruzhennogo siianiem'. And indeed, the 'halo' surrounding Rakhmetov turns out to be of an exaltant nature, since he rejected the love of a young widow, as 'takie liudi kak ia . . . ne dolzhny liubit' (p. 308). The widow undergoes a conversion; she too becomes an 'osobennyi chelovek', and thus joins the ranks of the ascetic 'otshelniki': 'V ee zhizni dolzhen byl proizoiti perelom; po vsei veroiatnosti, ona i sama sdelalasi*osobennym chelovekom' (p. 309), the narrator informs us. Hagiographie connotations of the story find an echo in a real 'Zhitie sviatykh' which constitutes the favourite reading on the estate of Dr. Rudnev's unde, who subscribes to the religiqus periodical Pamiatnik Very. 'Pravednik' Martinian, a 'pustynnik' in the desert near Caesaria in Palestine, was tempted by 'vozhdelenie' fcçr 'Kovamaia soblaznitel'nitsa', who under the disguise of a lost pilgrim walked in 42

the darkness of night into the 'pustynnik's' cave. She changed her clothes from 'rubishche' into a 'nariadnoe piafe', and tried to seduce Martynian. The 'pustynnik', in order to suppress 'vozhdelenie', started a fire, and threw himself into the burning flames. The young woman was so shattered by the devotion and determination of this 'khranitel' nevinnosti', that she herself followed the example of Martinian and threw her temptress dress into the flames and became a 'pustynnitsa' who devoted her life to Martinian's course, i.e. the suppression of the voice of the flesh. In the course of the novel Rudnev, who has chosen as his ideal the ascetic life that could be matched only by 'osobyi chelovek', succumbs to the 'ordinary', 'normal' demands of nature, which leads him to a marriage with a 'normal'naia' Liubasha, whose very name carries symbolic connotations of both 'liubaia' and 'liubov". His ordinariness is embodied in the final state of affairs, according to which, as Rudnev's uncle puts it: 'M artinian Martinianom, a Liubasha Liubashei. . . natura svoio potrebovala' (p. 529). Rudnev thus is reduced from the status of 'osobennyi chelovek' to 'novyi', since he chooses the Kirsanovan rather than the Rakhmetovan model of behaviour. Kirsanov's erotic episode with the prostitute with the 'bol'naia grud", Kriukova, in Chto delat'7 (p. 232-242) serves as a counter-model to the Rakhmetovwidow ascetic episode, and puts in turn the 'novye liudi' code of behaviour into á more relaxed vein than 'osobye Uudi'. Leont'ev's creation of his 'new types' is his attempt to say a 'new word' and to become a 'new Gogol',and is clearly built on the 'bor'ba' and 'preemstvennost" pattern with the typology of the new character type offered by 'vlastitel' dum' of the mid 1850's and early 186&s Chemyshevsky. As far as the presence in the novel of Gogol and his characters are concerned, there is only one instance of literary allusion, an attempt to ridicule Liubasha by making her respond to Milkeev's learned conversation in the following way: Kto éto takoe Chichikov? Ne zdeshnii? . . . G old' politsmeisterom kazhetsia v Peterburge byl. Odna moia znakomaia vyshla za ego dal'nego rodstvennika. (p. 424) 43

And indeed, Gogol/ to whom Leont'ev refers in his Moia Uteratumaia sud'ba in the passage devoted to Chemyshevsky/ was no longer a 'vlastitel dum' in the mid-sixties, and therefore/ as Tynianov teaches, should not constitute a subject for literary polemics and parody for Leont'ev. He could be simply ridiculed/ brought into the text (p. 424/ 576) as an historical entity/ just as Granovsky and Kudriavtsev (p. 298) are brought into the text (p. 298) as teachers at St. Petersburg University. Chemyshevsky and his heroes, on the contrary/ did constitute a target of polemics and parody for a young, ambitious writer who was struggling to say his "new word'. We have demonstrated so far how 'bor'ba' and 'preemstvennost" are reflected in the form of polemics in the character types of Rudin and Milkeev in V svoem kraiu vis-a-vis 'novye liudi' and 'osobennyi chelovek' typology.8 We can now turn to the figure of Bogoiavlenskii, and trace in this character elements of a literary parody on the creator of these types, N. G. Chemyshevsky. In 'raskrytye' parodies/ Chemyshevsky's personal traits of character, his 'seminarianism'/ his 'squeaky v«iee'/ his 'bad skin'/ his 'eyeglasses' (cf. 'pisklivyi gplos' in Mochulskii, p. 218; Nabokov, p. 279) have acquired the status of indicators/ of personal attributes, of permanent epithets used as a mechanising device of ridiculing and creating a caricature on the famous revolutionary-democrat. The frivolous behaviour of Olga Sokratovna has also played the role of a code-indicator (the 'khoroshen'kaia zhena' immediately flirts with the German entrepreneur after her husband is swallowed by the crocodile/ i.e. was imprisoned in the 'nedra' of Siberia) of a continuing satellite for the presence of the caricature of her unfortunate husband (Nabokov even makes her a mistress of 'vliubchivyi' Dobroliubov (p. 291)).

8

It is significant that like 'novye liudi' and 'osobyi chelovek' Lopukhov, Kirsanov and Rakhmetov, who are 21 and 22 years old, Milkeev and Rudnev are 23 and 24 years old in the novel. Age, it is known, was important to distinguish them significantly from 'Lishnie liudi' like Rudin (34), and Beltov who was 'over forty'.

44

And indeed Bogoiavlenskii in the novel, a 'seminarist' with literary inspirations, wears eyeglasses, flushes permanently, and lives through the love relationship with Varia, who, in tum, like Olga Sokratovna (cf. 'tsyganovaten'kaia baryshnia' with 'chemye priadi' and 'smugloi ruchkoi' (Nab. p. 256)) or Vera Pavlovna is of a 'nerusskii tip'. Her physical portrait bears all the indications of Chemyshevsky's ideal female heroine, Vera Pavlovna, who was referred to as a 'tsyganka' (p. 42), a 'gruzinka' (p. 50), a 'iuzhnyi tip' (p. 84), 'kavkazskii ili Malorosskii tip' (p. 85). Varia is described as a 'kalmychka', 'stroinaia briunetka let dvadtsati chetyrekh s Kalmytskkni glazami' (p. 449). She sings in a strong contralto (p. 456), with a passionate expression on her face, which makes her 'chemye kak ugol'ki glaza' (p. 452) shine even stronger. Bogoiavlenskii establishes a 'teacher-pupil' relationship with her, supplying her with Belinskii's writing, discussing Belinskii's analysis of the Tatiana-Onegin relationship with her, and, although Varia is comfortably living on her own estate, proposes marriage in order to save her from the 'pogreb' where the whole year round is 'sredniaia temperatura' (p. 483) (cf. 'podval' in Chto delat'7). Not only is he referred to by the narrator as a 'seminarist', he also calls himself one - 'seminarist i kham' (p. 485) - taking a' certain pride in it, the way Chemyshevsky did in real life (cf. Dostoevsky: 'Chemyshevsky govorit, chto on seminarist', Dostoevsky, Vol. 20, p. 155). And when the narrator calls him an 'odnostoronnii zholchevik' (p. 451), the mask is finally taken off Bogoiavlenskii and we see the historical figure of Chemyshevsky in front of us.9 And indeed, both 'odnostoronnii' and 'zholchevik' were used by Chemyshevsky's contemporaries (Dostoevsky, Hertzen, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Druzhinin, Grigorovich) as personal epithets of Chemyshevsky (cf. Dostoevsky, Vol. 20, p. 353).

9

'Krivaia ulybka' (p. 320) are incorporated by Grigorovich in the portrait of Chemushin in 'Shkola gostepriimstva', see Dor, p. 280. 'Energichnyi kham' (p. 426) is another epithet Bogoiavlenskii receives which corresponds to one of the first descriptions of Chemyshevsky's appearances by his contemporaries after Chemyshevsky made a public speech at Dobroliubov's funeral (1861). 45

Dostoevsky brings 'seminarist' and 'odnostoronnost" together in his 'Zapisnye knizhki' of 1860 - 1862: ' Chernyshevskomy govoriat, chto on seminarist. Seminaristy privnosiat v nashu literaturu osobennoe otritsanie, slishkom polnoe, vrazhdebnoe, slishkom rezkoe - potomu slishkom ogranichennoe' (Vol. 20, p. 155), and even composes a little poem devoted to Chemyshevsky: Vy zhelchevik Vy smeshno raznuzdannyi I razvemulis'. (ibid) In his 1860 artide 'Lishnie liudi i zhelcheviki',10 Hertzen calls Chernyshevsky a 'zhelchevik', and uses almost the same 'slishkom' (as Dostoevsky) in his characterisation of 'zhelchevik': Zhelcheviki slishkom ugriumy, slishkom deistvuiut na nervy . . . Pervoe, chto nas poraziloyikh legkost, s kotoroi oni otchaivalis vo vsem, zlaia radost' ikh otritsaniia i strashnaia besposhchadnost'. (Dostoevsky, Vol. 20, p. 353) Turgenev in his letter to Druzhinin (11 November, 1856) referred to Chemyshevsky as someone with 'rasstroennaia pechen" and 'razJitaia zhelch" (Turgenev, Pis'ma, Vol. 3, p. 28-30). It is not only the personal characteristics of Chemyshevsky and his female satellites (Olga Sokratovna and her purified replica Vera Pavlovna) with which Bogoiavlenskii and Varia are loaded which indicate traits of literary parody. Historic prototypicality is intertwined with the literary, and many of Bogoiavlenskii's utterings are akin to the views of the narrator in Chto delatl, or even the views of the author of the Master's thesis 'Esteticheskie otnosheniia iskusstva k deistvitel'nosti'. Chemyshevsky's vocabulary is parodied as well as his 'old Testamental' style, bringing elements of what Tynianov calls 'slovesnaia parodiia' into the text:

10

For Ogarev, however, 'zhelchnost” and 'bol'naia pechen" remain in 1860 • 1862 still an attribute of 'Lishnii chelovek'. Cf. 'Moia Ispoved" in N.P. Ogarev, Izbrannoe, Vol. 2, p. 400. 46

Chto takoe Surrogat, vy mne skazhite . . . Kak vy liubite takie slova upotrebliat'. . . Eto ia v seminarli, v seminarii privyk k knizhnosti. . . Skholastika!. . . Vot vam eshcho. . . opiat ne poniali. . . (p. 478) Additionally, Bogoiavlenskii advocates anti-Hegelian views Kostry . . . kak drugaia sfera, drugoi mir, kak zvezdy. Ha-ha-ha! Ne pravda li? Ili vy priderzhivaetes' mneniia Gegelia, chto 'Zvezdy pryshchi na litse neba', chto vyshe cheloveka net sozdaniia vo vselennoi? (p. 322) He professes 'razumnyi egoizm' on a number of occasions : Tol'ko dobra - to net v sushchnosti, a vsio egoizm; ved' i vy dlia menia sdelaete dlia togo, chtoby risovat'sia pered samim soboi. (p. 322) or Ne otkazhite moemu udovol'stviiu vam otplatit' uslugoi za uslugu. Ved k takomu razschitannomu obmenu ne dolzhen li pridti ves' mir? (p. 361)

11

In his M aster's thesis 'Esteticheskie otnosheniia iskusstva k deistvitel'nosti', Chernyshevsky polemicised with Hegel without mentioning his name. In the third edition of his 'O tnosheniia', Chernyshevsky for the first time admits in the Preface that he applied Feurbachian ideas against Hegel, but used the name of Fisher instead of Hegel because Fisher was allowed by the censors, and Hegel was not. In his Preface to the third edition, we find: " Avtor byl znakom s russkimi izlozheniiami sistemy Gegelia, ochen' ne polnymi. . . V podlinnike Gegel ponravilsia emu gorazdo meh'she, nezheli ozhidal on po russkim izlozheniiam... Russkie posledovateli Gegelia izlagali ego sistemu v levogegel'ianskom dukhe. V podlinnike Gegel' okazalsia gorazdo bolee pohozh na filosofov XVII veka". N.G. Chernyshevsky, Izbrannye sochineniia, (Khud. Lit., Moscow-Leningrad; 1950, p. 469) . 47

In Bogoiavlenskii's dislike of simple people, of Russian peasants,12one recognises Chemyshevsky-Dobroliubov's arrogant attitude towards 'narod', for which they were sharply criticised both by Slavophiles and 'pochvenniki'. It is remarks like 'Net, eshcho ei dolgo ne prosnutsia,. . . Rossii!' (p. 321) or 'Sem'ia eta merzkaia, kak pochti vse nashi russkiie sem'ii' (p. 360) which made contemporaries like Dostoevsky remark: "On (Dobroliubov) malo uvazhal narod: on videl v nem odno dumoe i malo veril v ego sily/ (Dostoevsky, Vol. 20, p. 58). At the time, the 'algebraic' logics of Bogoiavlenskii astonishingly repeats Kirsanov's obsession with statistics: Net, Bogoiavlenskii, seminarist i kham, - skazal on sebe, ves' sodragaias" i krasneia - ty budesh poistine kham i gad, esli iz-za odnoi lichnoi udachi zabudesh statistiku voznagrazhdeniia, kotoraia pravit prirodoi vezde ugol padeniia raven uglu otrazheniia, i neravenstvo polozhenii delaet ugol padeniia raven uglu otrazheniia, i neravenstvo polozhenii delaet kolebaniie shchast'ia i goria slishkom neravnym. . . (p. 483) Compare also this parody on the demagogic sdentifidsm within Kirsanov's a id e : Bud' chesten, to est' rashchetliv, pomni summu, pomni, chto ona bol'she svoei chasti... chem kazhdoe otdeVnoe tvoio stremlenie, predpochitai zhe, ee vygody vygodam otdel'nogo tvoego stremleniia. (Chto delat' ? p. 261) 12

Leont'ev was not only idealising the gentry, 'the military and the army , as occupations of the aristocracy, but was also in his aestheticism of a high opinion of the Russian peasants. Not only did they appeal to him for their handsome and healthy look, for their colourful clothes, but as he confessed, still in 1861, he viewed them as .being capable of saving Russia from 'the Western egalitarianism' and the 'impersonal uniformity of the democratic ideal'. (S. Lukashevich, ibid, p. 57.) 48

Statistics, we might recall, allowed Kirsanov to draw far-reaching scientific conclusions on the physical superiority of women over men, which in turn becomes one of the powerful arguments in the debates over the emancipation of women in Chto delatl. Vera Pavlovna's 'Silnaia grad" (p. 374) and 'shirokaia grad" (p. 84) both attract Lopukhov's attention at the time of his 'rational courtship' of the heroine; the same goes for Kirsanov's, at the peak of Vera Pavlovna's emancipation, during her years as a student of medidne. Anatomic and physiological investigations demonstrated not only the physical but also the intellectual superiority of women, who 'edva li ne ottesnit muzhchinu na vtoroi plan v umstvennoi zhizni' (p. 368). This motif of the superiority of women found an echo in Leont'ev's novel. In the T>elo' venture or the school for peasant children which Bogoiavlenskii inspired Varia to open, it was proved that girl pupils were more capable than boys. This experiment allows Varia to confirm Bogoiavlenskii's teachings on the mental superiority of women: Pravdu govorit Alexei Semionovich Bogoiavlenskii, chto zhenshchiny sposobnee vashego brata. (p. 518) As a true representative of rational egotism, Bogoiavlenskii rejects sexual jealousy, and Varia, who has had a passionate affair in the past, is reassured that her past does not hinder his decision to marry her since he, unlike some 'dvorianchik gniloi' (p. 483), is above jealousy, defined by him as 'vydumka muzhchin dlia sobstvennoi gastronomii i egoizma' (p. 484). It is here, on the question of the physical and mental superiority of women, and the solution to the woman's question being marriage to rescue her from 'podval', where the previously caricaturish quality starts to acquire dimensions of literaiy parody. When 'conversion to his religion' is almost over, when the plans are made, 'sdelat' iz Vari likhuiu grazhdanku i pomoshchnitsu sebe, uvezti ee potom v Peterburg . . . zhena budet pylkaia i umnaia, moloden'kaia i otvazhnaia, uchenaia i igrivaia' (p. 484), Varia engages in an antipattem behaviour of what was up till now 'a Vera Pavlovna typology'. Varia, notably a woman with a weak chest, chooses passion 4-50

49

instead of a 'rational' existence with Bogoiavlenskii (unlike Kriukova, who abstains from 'zhit" with Kirsanov in order to prolong her life), and returns to her ex-lover Likhachev in an act similar to suicide (on a frosty spring night she, underdressed, leaves the ball where she danced and smoked 'razgoriachonnaia'). Tostaromu' she spends 'khot' odnu nochen'ku' with Likhachev, knowing that this night is going to destroy her health. She rejects Bogoiavlenskii the following morning, and dies a few months later from consumption. Polemical qualities concerning the 'krepkaia' versus 'slabaia grad" motif, as far as the woman heroine typology is concerned, are extended into what baffled at least one of the novel's commentators - Ivask (1974). Here we have in mind Leont'ev's decision to have Milkeev choose Bogoiavlenskii as his companion to join Garibaldi's troops in their struggle for independence. Leont'ev's 'osobyi chelovek' Milkeev chooses a seminarian to accompany him on his aesthetic mission; to accomplish heroic deeds or to find heroic death, he chooses Italy rather than to go to Hertzegovina to join the liberation struggle of the Slavs against the Turks.13It seems that at this point Tynianov's teachings on literary parody, which include a dual model of the 'bor'ba-preemstvennost" element in the relationship 'parodier-parodied', help to shed light on obscure pages in the history of Russian literature and to open a riddle of one of the most unlikely fictional alliances - that of Bogoiavlenskii and Milkeev in the relationship of 'parodierparodied'. And indeed, if we consider Bogoiavlenskii to be just a caricature on Chemyshevsky, then the complex elements of literary parody remain overlooked, and our understanding of Vsvoem kraiu simplified. It becomes another anti-nihilist novel (Moser, 1964). If, however, we also look for elements of attraction, dependence, 13

In 1801-1862 Hertzegovina lost its short lived (1857-1859) independence from Turkey. One of the novel's senior characters suggests to Milkeev that he join the Balkan Slavs in their struggle against the Sultan. Milkeev rejects this idea as it does not inspire his poetic heroism. It is quite remarkable that already in 1864, before Leont'ev chose a diplomatic career and was assigned to Asia Minor, he did not harbour 'brotherly' sentiments towards the Balkan Slavs. His passion for Turks, which later allowed Rozanov to nickname him as a 'Turetskii Igumen', is well known. 50

or 'preemstvennost" of the parodier Leont'ev towards the paro­ died Chemyshevsky, then the whole structure of the MilkeevRudnev-Bogoiavlenskii characters is clarified in a complex de­ pendence, which elevates Leont'ev's long neglected novel to a higher level of appreciation. Additionally, this reading opens com­ mon ground between a proponent of sodal radicalism, utilitarian aesthetics and materialism, the very epitome of the extreme left— Chemyshevsky; and an advocate of political ultra-con­ servatism, of ascetic Christianity based on the fear of God, the very epitome of the extreme right in Russian intellectual thought — Leont'ev. A physician by education and profession at the time when the novel was written, a thinker who based his philosophy of history on the application of the laws of the biological sciences, who designed his 'triunite' theory of history on the pattern of the birth, life, illness and death of a human organism, could not possibly help sympathising with Chemyshevsky's 'novye liudi', all of whom were representatives of the medical profession. But if Chemyshevsky and his heroes were advocating changes in 'sreda' which were to lead to changes in 'natura', then Leont'ev and his counterparts of 'novye liudi', Milkeev and Rudnev, were propagating the principle of scientific determinism, according to which the 'despotism form/ does not permit 'razlitie idei' and 'olivke ne dano byt' dubom'. The teachings of the craneologists, phrenologists and early anthropologists were based on the same scientific determinism, according to which 'forma' dictated 'soderzhanie'.14Chemyshevsky's physiologists and anatomists, who operated on the basis of experiments and statistical analysis, were driven by the desire to change 'natura' for the better. Leont'ev's weakness for the mystical and eschatological, which

14

The formalism of Leont'ev's analysis of literaiy texts is well known. His Analiz, stil' i veianie. O romanakh gr. L.N. Tolstogo is regarded as one of the earliest examples of the formal method orliterary criticism. Cf. B. Eikhenbaum, 1927; V. Shklovskii, 1928; Donald Fanger in his introduction to Analiz 1968, and Sergei Bocharov in his introduction to Analiz, (1989), in Voprosy literatury, 12.

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demonstrated itself in his adherence to the teachings of Caras, also explains the 'bor'ba-preemstvennost" process as the second point of similarity-difference with Chemyshevsky, namely in the concept of egotism. Leont'ev's views on 'transcendental egotism', which he advocated in an esdiatological search for private individual salvation, were connected with his 'dark' Christianity, based on the fear of God Although Leont'ev ascribed enormous significance to egotism, and considered it to be a positive force in human life, the point of similarity with Chemyshevsky's 'rational egotism' did not go further than the 'ego' element. The crucial difference lies in the 'domain', or 'territory', of application of the principle of egotism. If the aim of Chemyshevsky's 'egotism' was of a 'collective nature' to improve communication between the people, and to make an Eden out of this world, then Leont'ev's egotism had personal salvation as its aim and its 'territory7was the after-life, the 'nebesnyi Jerusalim'. The latter, he was convinced, was never promised to take place on this earth, unlike the teachings of the 'pink Christianity' of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, whose idiosyncratic eschatology contradicts all the teachings of 'otsy tserkvi'. At the point of the most obvious ideological differences, Chemyshevsky7s utilitarianism and materialism could not possibly coexist with Leont'evian aesthetidsm as a governing force in the history of mankind (ethical categories could not be explained by aesthetical categories and vice versa) - in this paradoxically lies the explanation for the riddle of the unlikely liaison inV svoerrt kraiu. Milkeev's aesthetic search for the heroic brings him to the 'energichnyi kham' (p. 429) Bogoiavlenskii, who, though for the wrong ideals, is capable of demonstrating enormous energy in destroying the old, vulgar and unheroic, in order to bring about something more aesthetically appealing. Leont'ev, like Rozanov15 15

It is precisely Chemyshevsky's titanic energy which lies at the centre of Rozanov's laments on the 'wasteful' treatment of Chemyshevsky by the government: *Ne ispol'zovat' takuiu kipuchuiu energiiu, kak u Chemyshevskogo, dlia gosudarstvennoeostroitel'stva -byloprestupleniem, granicnashchimszlodeianiiem .. .*or''Kakimobrazov,chuvstvuiav grudi takoizapasenergii,bylo.. .* quoted from V. Erofeev'Rozanov protivGcgolia' in Voprosy literatury, 2, (1987;, p. 161. 52

and Nabokov (p. 293), was prepared to pay his due to Chemyshevsky just for this peculiarity of his character - his almost maniacal energy. In the epithet 'energichnyi', as well as in the Milkeev-Bogoiavlenskii liaison itself, lies that element of literary parody, which permits Tynianov to speak not only of 'bor'ba' of ideological opponents, but also of 'preemstvennost". But on the 'energichnost" motif, however, Leont'ev's reconciliation with the Chemyshevsky-Bogoiavlenskii character stops. The trip to Italy to join Garibaldi is destined not to materialise. Chemyshevsky used the Garibaldi revolt and Italy for conspiratorial censorship purposes. Thus, in Sovremenntk, he used to make a refrain out of 'la ob Italii ob Italii govoriu' (cf. Nabokov, p. 295), and Dostoevsky polemidsed with Chemyshevsky's statement made by him in Sovremennik (October, 1860), 'according to which the French will not rise against Garibaldi'16 (Dostoevsky, Vol. 20, p. 155,352). Although Bogoiavlenskii was invited by Milkeev to accompany him on his Italian journey, as it became the canon in the literary parody, the parodied is not granted an heroic end. And indeed, Bogoiavlenskii is not allowed to ever join Garibaldi or to visit Italy. Leont'ev's aesthetic feeling would find his presence in Italy offensive, as one of the characters comments: Nasha gubemskaia seminariia i Neapol; Kardinal Antonelli i Aleksandr Semenovich Bogoiavlenskii;. . . Chert znaet chto - Bogoiavlenskii v ochkakh nad kraterom Vezuviia. (p. 523) Not only the aesthetically motivated antithetical disposition 'Seminariia - Neapol', 'gubemskii' town - Italy, 'ochki' - 'Vezuvii', which consists of emblematic signifiers of the known literary

16

In 1861 Dostoevsky used the figure of Garibaldi and Italy in a parodying sense, like Gogol used Ferdinand and Spain in The Diary of a Madman. In Tetersburgskie snovideniia' a modest 'chinovnik' with a grumbling wife and six children at home, suddenly proclaimed himself-to be Garibaldi.

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parodies on Chemyshevsky in 1864, are brought together at the end of the novel to reinforce the effect of the ridiculous. Ideological polemics play as important a part in this parody on Chemyshevsky as aesthetic polemics. If in real life Chemyshevsky, through his imprisonment/ public execution and exile was granted hagiographic treatment which reinforced his 'heroic' image of a martyr/ then in the novel Leont'ev turns this motif inside out. It is MilkeeV/ Leont'ev's 'osobyi chelovek'/ who is captured oh the border and put into prison/ thus given an heroic biography.17 Bogoiavlenskii/ on the other hand, never made it even to the border. Instead, he met in Petersburg a rich and bossy 'kupchikha', married her, and became a literator. It is rumoured that his wife even beats him from time to time. He justifies his choice in marriage by the principles of 'vygoda', akin to rational egotism, since 'pri uzhasnom sostoianii obshchestva nado byt' obespechennym, chtoby prinosit' pol'zu liudiam'. He writes articles in which 'griaz" and 'bran" become aims in themselves. 'Terpet' ne mogu seminaristov' - concludes one of his readers. Leont'ev, remaining true to the principles of literary parody in his choice for an anti-heroic,18 or 'inside out' treatment of Chemyshevsky's life in Bogoiavlenskii/ could also have had an additional polemical purpose in mind. After all/ in Bogoiavlenskii's case he chose the end/ which was juxtaposed to Turgenev's meek decision to grant Rudin an 'heroic death at the barricades'.19

17

18 19

At the time of Chemyshevsky's imprisonment at the Alexeev Reveline his neighbour in the adjacent ceil was someone called Beideman, imprisoned for joining Garibaldi's troop. See P. Shchegolev Istoriko-literaturnyi arkhiv. AleKseevskti Ravelin (Moscow, 1989), p. 85-170. Lidiia Ginsburg, in The Human Document and the Formation of Character, notes that Chemyshevsky became offended by a caricature on Bakunin in Rudin, and w rote:caricatu re as if a lion was fit for car i c at u r e ( p . 212). To what extent Leont'ev was familiar with the avengeful impulse of literary parody can be illustrated by the fact that some thirty years after Turgenev told him the rumour about Dostoevsky's obsession with the success of his The Poor Folk, which Turgenev was spreading among Grigorovich, Panaev, and Annenkov, he still remembered it. Thus, Mochul skii notes that in 1888Leont'ev retold the story of how Turgenev, at the time of Dostoevskysimorisonment and exile, gossiped about the poor prisoner. (Mochulskii, p. 5z.) 54

If Turgenev, in his literary parody on Bakunin, chose a compromise with the radicals, then Leont'ev, who criticised Nakanune for sacrificing 'khudozhestvennaia pravda' for tendentiousness, deritualised the hagiographie biography of his ideological opponent from the radical camp. However, he could not foresee that unlike Bakunin, who became in Strakhov's witty joke 'Rudin not killed on the barricades', Chemyshevsky's hagiography will be able to withstand publication of the novel, which ridicules Chemyshevsky even more harshly than his own novel does. Here of course we have in mind Nabokovs Dar. 20Remarkable in the ideological domain of polemics, however, remains his decision to make a 'literator prizhival'shchik' type out of Chemyshevsky, a decision, we might recall, which Dostoevsky took in creating a 'hanger-on' out of Gogol in Foma Opiskin, out of Turgenev in Karamazinov, and out of Granovsky and Botkin in Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky. Both Dostoevsky and Leont'ev understood that it was more financially gratifying for a Russian publicist to belong to the 'opposition', or as Leonfev's devoted pupil Rozanov put it: 'Kto skazal, chto v Rossii ne vygodno byf obüchitelem?'.

20

It is remarkable that under Glasnosl' with the announcement of the planned publication of Nabokov's Dar, an article defending Chemyshevsky appeared. Thus, Iu. Tunimanov authored an article in which he claimed that Nabokov parodied not the real historical Chemyshevsky, but the mythologised image. See Iu. Tunimanov 'Neiubileinye razmysnleniia - k 160 - letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia N.G. Chemyshevskogo' in Literaturnoe obozrenie, 8, (1988).

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Chapter Three A HUSBAND'S CONFESSION Pagan aesthetics versus Christian ethics A Husband's Confession (1866), Leont'ev's best work, has suffered from the kind of prurient criticism Leont'ev attracts. Mirsky considers the story of interest inasmuch as it reflects the theory of 'aesthetic immoraHsm',1 similar to Kollogriwofs definition of the text as 'sinnlich' or sensual 'vom Teufel eingegeben'.2 Ivask and Lukashevich propose an analysis with connotations of the psychoanalytical school, prompting them to dub Leont'ev himself, as well as the hero of his story, 'Freudian types'.3 Rzhevskii endeavours to classify the hero of A Husband's Confession as a representative of Romanticism with the inherently Romantic longing to live a life free of conventional morality.4 Thompson views the

1

2 3

4

"This strange immoralistic pathos is best of all seen in A Husband's Confession, in which a middle-aged husband encourages the misconduct of his young wife. . . because he wants her to live a full and beautiful life of passion, ecstasy and suffering." (p. 340). D. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature (London, 1958), p. 338-346. I. von Kollogriwof, Von Hellas zum Mb’nchtum (Regensburg, 1948). "The superhero is an old man who voluntarily, even with secret delight, gives up his young wife to a Greek boy. It is hard to decide who is more in love with theboy, the husband or the wife! Here the husband is the magic mirror reflecting the image of a handsome youth who is also his alter ego." Iu. Ivask. Preface to Sobranie Sochinenii K. Leont'eva (Analecta Slavica, Vol. II, Jal - reprint, 1975). S. Lukashevich, K. Leont'ev (1831 -1891): A Study in Russian "Heroic Vitalism ". "He can accept an unconventional moral situation and permit his wife, who is much younger than he, to take a lover closer to her own age. He cannot however separate himself emotionally from her, or from her lover, for whom he feels deep affection, and indeed, he does not want to. When they drown in a storm, he commits suicide." N. Rzhevskii, 'Leont'ev's Prickly Rose', Slavic Review 2, June, (1976), p. 266. 57

nameless hero as the serpent in the Garden of Eden.5 And indeed, everything in this novel, starting from the confusing, if not paradoxical, love triangle between the old husband, his young and virginal wife and her passionate Greek lover, ending with the deaths of the three protagonists (two of whom drown in the Mediterranean as a result of a shipwreck, while the husband on hearing the news of their deaths commits suicide) - has a somewhat pagan and demonic flavour. The 'demonic' and 'immoral', the central concepts emphasised by the above commentators, are further reinforced by Leont'ev's own remorseful comments, written some twenty years later, on the novel. In his 'Where to find my literary work after my death?' (1882), Leont'ev forbade posthumous publication of the novel: But I would have asked that it not be printed in that form: a sin! sacrilege! Precisely because it is written well and with real feeling.6 He further puts into an antithesis such concepts as the church, ethics and faith on one hand and the pagan, debaucherous and diabolical on the other: A Husband's Confession. A work amoral, sensual, pagan, diabolical to the highest degree, subtly debauched, containing nothing Christian, but boldly and well written, with the sincere feeling of a profoundly depraved heart. If I had managed to append an epilogue to the story, in which I would at least have explained the matter - not from the standpoint of pure ethics, which even now, for all the sincerity of my faith, I have

5 6

S. Thompson, 'Ambiguous Temporo-Spatial Images Depictive of the Naslazhdenie ili Padenie Debate in K.N. Leont'ev's Jspoved*Muzha , Slavica Gandensia, Vol. 16, (1989), p. 109 -120. All quotations from Tspoved' Muzha', in Sobranie sochinenii K. Leont'eva, Analecta Slavica, Vol. II (Wurzburg, 1975), are offered here in translation by Christopher English. 58

little respect for, but from the standpoint of the church, it might just have been tolerable. This chapter makes an attempt to analyse the meaning of the forinal antithesis between the Christian and pagan in A Husband's Confession. The analysis will be conducted drawing on anthropological insights into the aspect that baffled the novel's commentators most of all, namely the significance of the love triangle. The geographical location of the novel, the Crimea, will be considered within the cultural framework of nineteenth century Russian literature, while Leont'ev's interest in ethnography will be put against Lévi-Strauss's theories of kinship. In terms of the central theme, that of the conflict between Christianity and paganism, it is significant that Leont'ev should set his story in the Crimea. In Russian literature the Crimea is associated with two main themes: the motif of Hellenic culture with its characteristic aesthetidsm and cult of the body beautiful, synthesised in the image of the god Apollo^ and the motif of the 'superfluous man'. Both themes were widely explored in Russian Romantic writing. The superfluous man of the Romantic period selects the Crimea as the place of his Romantic refuge from the vanities and ennui of the world, from the intolerable tedium of the landowner's life, the Crimea being a region free from Russian serfdom. The Crimean peninsula, beyond which the Russian hinterland looms, which lies so dose to the last resting place of Ovid, in which the remains of Roman-Hellenic dvilisation coexist with Islam, the religion which stimulated a revival of Greek philosophical thought in Europe, this small region constitutes an entire theme in Russian literature, reaching through almost a century of change, from the poetry of Pushkin to the Hellenic Crimean verses of Mandel'shtam. We should note here that both themes are inextricably associated with the archetypal figure of the superfluous man, with Petr Chaadaev,7 whose philosophy is based on our central antithesis: Hellenic paganism vs Western Christianity. Chaadaev's 'Second', 'Third'

7

P.Ia. Chaadaev, Philosophical Letters (Ann Arbor, 1978). 59

and 'Fourth' 'Philosophical Letters' are devoted to a critique of Hellenic philosophy and aesthetic thought, to which Chaadaev gives a new evaluation in its influence on the development of the modem European nations. In this Chaadaev acts as an impassioned proponent of the notion of ethical divinity, which in his opinion is the manifestation of highest reason. The ethical properties of man's divine nature, revealed to mankind by Christianity, are placed by Chaadaev in strict opposition to the aesthetic orientation to the worldly, sensual well-being of Hellenic pagan civilisation. Chaadaev attributes to Hellenic paganism the veiy same properties which Leont'ev ascribes to pagan aesthetics8in his literary will. Chaadaev writes: 'I believe that an entire age of glory, the glory of Greece, would be almost completely extinguished, I believe that the day will come when moral thought will pause with nothing less than sacred sorrow before this land of errors, whence the genius of deceit has propagated temptation and falsehood for so many centuries through all the earth, and then it will no longer be possible for the pure soul of some Fenelon to revel voluptuously in sybaritic flights of fancy, bom out of the most hideous depravity into which humankind and the mightiest of minds have ever lapsed'. To Chaadaev Hellenism is 'depraved, mendacious, stained with blood', and its pernicious role is attributable to its influence on the 'illusion and self-deception of the material being in man', and this in turn leads to the constant struggle with Christian society, animated with spiritual interests directed towards the achievement of mankind's mystical destiny. If there is any connection between Chaadaev's conception of the Hellenic pagan world and his philosophy of history, on the one hand, and the Leont'evian antithesis, on the other, in which the 8

N. Ulianov in his essay'Basmannyi filosof (mysli oChaadaeve)' (1957) gives a controversial interpretation ofmisinterpretationsof Chaadaev's views both

by his contemporaries and in the 20th century. Ulianov condiders him to be a totalitarian reactionary, whose love for Islam and Hellenic and Roman culture is explained by his ‘Idiocratic’, ‘ex­ pansionist’ ‘sectarian Christianity’. In the comparison between Chaadaev and Leont’ev, it is Chaadaev who is presented as a true reactionary. N.I.Ulianov, ‘Basmannyi filosof (mysli o Chaadaeve)’ in Voprosy filo so fii 8, (1990), p. 74-90. 60

ethical essence of Christianity is contrasted with the aesthetidsm of the ancient world (and it is here that Hellenism links up with the Crimean theme), then it is certainly worth noting that the other Crimean theme we have identified, the theme of the "superfluous man" is also associated with none other than Chaadaev. We need do no more than mention the generally accepted fact that the Romantic hero of Pushkin's poetry and of Lermontov's poetry and prose, usually classified as the prototype of the superfluous man, is connected in the history of the first half of nineteenth century Russian literature with the figure of Chaadaev. It should be pointed out, however, to what extent the Romantic theme of the superfluous man is simultaneously associated with the theme of the Crimea and the archetype of the superfluous man - Chaadaev. Thus, for example, Pushkin addresses to Chaadaev a poem from his southern exile, in which the idea of the flight of the superfluous man from society, the motifs of classical antiquity and die Ovidian motif of exile all find synthesis: V strane, gde ia zabyl trevogi preznikh let, /Gde prakh Ovidiev pustynnyi moi sosed, /Gde slava dlia menia predmet zaboty maloi, /Tebia ne dostaiot dushe moei ustaloi. . . Or Mandel'shtam, in his cycle of Crimean-Hellenic poems,9written at almost the same time as his artide on Chaadaev (1915), develops the motif of the flight of his Russian hero from 'murky monastic' Russia to pagan Tauris, where the golden colour of the Apollonian Crimean sands dominates: la cherez ovidy stepnye tianulsia v kamenistyi Krym, / Gde obiyvaetsia Rossiia nad morem chemym i glukhim.

9

On Mandel'shtam and Chaadaev, see: leva Vitins, 'Mandel'shtam's Farewell to Marina Tsvetaeva: Ne veria voskresen'ia chudu' in Slaoic Revieiu, Vol. 46, No 2, (1987). 61

Leont'ev, moving within the context of the Crimean theriie (with its associated motif of Hellenism), as developed by the Russian Romantics, selects his hero from the Pleiad of early superfluous men. Preserving a single setting throughout A Husband's Confession, the confined space of the Crimea, the author deliberately strips from his hero the dialectic of the past. Leont'ev compensates for the relative insubstantiality of his story (which covers a mere 65 printed pages) - a consequence of the author's conscious rejection of the 'dialectics of the soul', which he sees as belonging more properly to the novel - by employing the device of poetic stylisation of his hero's monologues. Using the images of Russian Romantic poetry, with which his speech abounds, Leont'ev succeeds in transforming the hero of A Husband's Confession into a variant of the superfluous man. We can illustrate this with an example from the text. 'Thank God, I am not poor!' begins the first diary entry: A sea breeze is blowing in my garden, my cypresses nearby are mournful and lifeless, but beautiful amidst the other greenery. Ships are moving slowly across the sea towards the desolate shores of the Sea of Azov . . . The sails gleam white in the distance. Since morning I have been watching them. They emerge to view from behind the last cliffs of the landmass: but by lunchtime they are already hiddenbehind the small cape, on which there is such an abundance of young oaks and where I like to walk alone in the evening. What do I wish for? I am content. No one will take from me my cypresses, my house, entwined with vines. . . yes, I am content. Here Leont'ev achieves his stylistic effect not only with poetic images connected with the theme of flight from the meaningless vanity of life, the theme of the unrecognised and lonely genius: 'the desolate shore' and the solitary genius of Petr, the Sea of Azov and 'Poltava', 'a solitary sail gleams white' and the restless hero in search of repose; but also by revealing the semantics of his stylised images through a combination of an eclectic and associative set of symbols with his own, entirely original, symbols of inherently 62

homogeneous images. Thus we have the symbolism of the Oak, with connotations of a metaphysical half-waking state, reminiscent of Lermontov - a half-life, or that state of rest possessed by Leont'ev's hero (in contrast to Lermontov's, who dreams of felling asleep beneath the Oak), and this is developed by Leont'ev in conjunction with the symbolism of the lifeless cypress as the hero's attainment of that longed-for stage of total and absolute oblivion. The cypress as a symbol of death occurs here, furthermore, in the context of a base structure we have already identified: the theme of the Crimea as the melting pot of Hellenic and Islamic Tartaro-Turldsh culture, in which the Oak is the tree of Dionysus, the Vine that of Bacchus and the Cypress the tree of death in Turkish culture.10 Let us trace how the symbolism we have identified is interwoven into the structure of this stoiy, which rests on the antithesis of pagan Hellenism and Christianity. Leont'ev's hero is enraptured by the peace he finds in the Crimea, where the Tartars are his kind neighbours, they are 'honest> they have always been free men', and the hero has no intention of enlightening them, having himself escaped from 'the fetters of enlightenment'. The hero fully admits his own peculiarity and quite happily comes to terms with such abnormality which, in his opinion, is akin to that of Socrates or Abraham, who were 'rightly considered mad by their fellows'. One of the hero's favourite pastimes is to gaze at the world through the painted windows of his office. Tne panes of glass have the following colours: 'ordinary white', yellow, red, lilac and dark blue. He expresses his doubts about the 'realit/ of portrayal

10

This interpretation of the symbolism of trees would seem justified, since Leont'ev nimself has recourse to this device in, for example, his story 'Aspazia Lampridi' (1871), in which we read: "God even made the trees unequal. There are stupid trees and there are clever trees. The olive, signor, is a stupid tree... The vine is quite a different matter: that is a cunning and clever tree." We have quoted a remark by Leont'ev about tTees, in which he sees the substantiation of the law of determinism in the natural sciences in the natural life of trees; he elevates this law to the level of a principle of history. 63

through the white glass, which should show the surrounding scene in its ordinary, 'real form'. Thus he writes: 'through the yellow glass everything is jollier, the greenery of the garden bathed in such fantastic sunlight and so gilded, you feel so merry it hurts, you want to shout out loud! Through the red - all is ominous and gleaming like the glow of a great fire, like the first act of file universal end. It is hard to say in which of the two, dark blue or lilac, everything seems more terrible and more dead: garden, sea and cliffs, all is extinguished and benumbed'. It occurs to us that the hero's play on colours will be logically explained through the antithesis of paganism vs Christian morality, which lies at the heart of the conflict in A Husband's Confession. The hero's favourite colour is yellow, the colour of Apollo, symbolic of the aesthetic cult of earthly and physical beauty of Hellenic art and thinking; red is the colour of the apocalypse, and as we leam from the hero himself, the colour of the first stage in Christian eschatology, connected therefore with the Day of Judgement. The colours lilac and blue, into which in nature the red ray refracts, give a sense of delineation, of that mortal division to which the world of 'subtly depraved, diabolical' pagan antiquity will be subjected at the Day of Judgement, that world from which the hero can only be saved by following the path of ascetic Christian morality. It comes as no surprise that our hero, who indulges in this chromatic pastime, should not be fated to enjoy for long that state of peace imparted to him by the Lermontovesque young oaks. The Dionysian Oak and the death-dealing Cypress are destined to introduce the theme of the Bacchic Vine into the life of the hero in a most unexpected fashion, with the arrival of a letter from Russia. The hero's impoverished cousin writes to him to ask whether she may open a school for children on the territory of the family estate in the Crimea, and in this manner get back on her own feet. The hero decides to send her money, attributing this act of mercy to his love of 'women who have ruined their own affairs through love'. The 64

cousin had been married to a handsome Italian, who was a hopeless rake and bon-viveur and finally met a sorry end in a duel in the Caucasus. She arrives with her daughter, and the two women-folk are invited by the hero to make their home on his estate. The daughter, who is destined to play the role of the hero's WifeDaughter, bears, as he tells us, "the splendid Russian name Liza". We get two descriptions of the heroine's appearance: (By the mother): Just see what strong, hairy arms she has, what a thick voice! How she gallops on horseback and hurls herself straight into the sea like a stone. (By the hero): Liza takes the place of songs and piano recitals. I even like the way the outer comers of her eyes incline downwards, making her eyes deep and sombre. She has a beautiful, fine nose and an elongated face. But those sombre eyes - wonderful! As we can see, by introducing this young heroine into the narrative Leont'ev is only further extending the motif of the pagan/Christian antithesis. Thus the Liza-Amazon figure and the Liza-Byzantine Madonna, which Leont'ev develops in the portrait of his heroine, are suggested by the associations of her name, one she shares with two famous heroines of Russian literature: Poor Liza and Liza Kalitina. The pagan end of the first and the monastic end of the second suggest two parallels as to the fate of our heroine, to whom Leont'ev has given a dual role in the system of relationships. The hero, accordingly, is to inhabit that same place. The plane of incompatible qualities in which Liza is destined to move suggests the following roles for her. Liza as wife of her husband, and Liza as daughtei- to that same husband-father. The hero, subsequently, will move in the same plane of Euclidean space in which the incompatible parallelism of his roles as Father and Husband is doomed by force of the predetermined formal logic of Euclidean thought selected by Leont'ev's hero. Liza becomes the Wife of the hero in accordance with the shared resolve of her dying mother and the hero. For entirely pragmatic reasons, prompted by his "weary heart", the hero offers Liza a life 5-50

65

that is well provided for and sheltered from the idle gossipof the world. The motif of Liza's own betrothal is worth investigating. Liza's mother was prepared to marry liza off to one of two young men who had courted her daughter. Her two potential fiancés were a westernised Crimean Greek of bourgeois aspect and a young Russian with an enthusiasm for botany. They are both rejected: the Greek is deemed unsuitable for Liza by the hero as too lacking in originality and too affected, while the young Russian does not suit the mother, who instinctively senses the emotional potential of her daughter, inherited from her Italian father and from her mother, who, in her own phrase 'plucked roses without fear of getting pricked'. The hero, who loves Liza like a father and tutor', experiences a great commotion of feelings, even jealousy, to which he is loath to admit. 'What a strange role!' he exdaims. 'A father? But a father would only compare Alesha and Marinaki, A and B. But I find there is a C between them, and this C is me/ The formula proposed by Leont'ev's hero is interesting for two reasons: firstly, for its structure, with a positive and negative pole and a third, unknown point, and secondly, for the way it operates within the structure of the motif of the heroine's betrothal. In conversation with Liza the hero himself mentions how the mother fears rumours to the effect that 'she has sold you to me', as he puts i t As we know, social relations in pagan societies are based on the principal of the exchange of women, who are granted to 'approved' spouses and, as social anthropology attests,11 women are divided into two categories: 'permitted women' and 'prohibited women'. Daughter, Mother and Sister belong to the category of 'taboo women'. The confusion the hero suffers when trying to define his own relationship with Liza is connected, as we have seen, with the structure 'prohibited and permitted women'. The hero's role as Liza's father places him on that pole of the antithesis where Liza is classified as a 'prohibited woman'. Although the hero voluntarily chooses the role of Father, he still

11

See, forinsfance, E. Leech, Social Anthropology (Fontana, 1982).

seeks Liza's hand in marriage/ but remains secure in his chosen rede by convincing her that it is impossible for her to fall in love with him. In this context the marriage he proposes is in feet based on a system of relationships in which Liza remains taboo to him : My dear Liza!.. .you did not know, my child, that your friend would have to recoil in honor from his own sacrilegious rights! Renouncing these 'sacrilegious rights' the hero reserves the option of remaining somewhere on the Christian side of the Christianity/paganism antithesis, in which motifs of incest are played on, by Leont'ev, by making his hero play on the various possibilities of defining the extent of his kinship to Liza. In anthropological terms, Liza is 'a permitted woman' for the hero, she is the daughter of his sister - cousin, a relationship most popular, as Lévi-Strauss12 shows, for choosinga wife in primitive societies. However, the hero moves her into the category of prohibited women. By relegating Liza to the category of 'prohibited women', the hero retains the right to offer her hand in marriage at some later date to a 'real Hero'. According to the Husband-Father's plan this real Hero must come intoLiza's life in order to enable her to experience the force of real passion and to live life to the fulL In the process, the hero makes the fetal mistake of failing to consider the version in which Liza also becomes a taboo woman for the new hero. In the process, in her role as WifeDaughter, Liza is to remain in the world as a virgin nun until the arrival of the new Hero, whereupon the power of physical passion will impel her along the path of the pagan cult of earthly pleasure. This course of action will condemn her to an end belonging, in Schultze's apt phrase, to the 'tradition of the drowning women' in

12

C. Lévi-Strauss in Trista Tropiqucs states that in primitive societies marriages to a niece, a sister's daughter, are most preferable. - , C. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Atheneum, 196^, p. 355. - .

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Russian literature.13 Here too the pagan vs Christian structure can be seen, which earlier we had observed in Liza's name: Poor Liza, drowning in the pagan waters of the Hellenic element and Liza Kalidna - the virgin nun, or the Byzantine madonna. After Liza's marriage and the death of her mother, the hero's life­ style remains unchanged while the heroine becomes an Amazon, galloping about on horseback and visiting Tartar villages. But the hero remains in that same inner world, symbolised by the Oak, the Cypresses and the variegated panes of glass, which he entered two years before: As before 1 am wont to sit for long hours alone on the sand, gazing at the green and crimson grass . . . All around I hear the song of longevity and peace. How is it possible to think here of death? Despite the introduction of new, life-giving colours - green and crimson - the thought of death still remains possible. Death is near at hand, in the 'myrrh pathway' which leads to the grave of Liza's mother, in a graveyard 'which is grown all about with clipped myrrh bushes', and 'in the midst of the graveyard stands an immense, old oak, and beneath the oak a bench'. Death is also present in the Crimean war, which suddenly flares up and whose proximity so fascinates Liza and worries the hero, who is anxious lest he lose his peace and tranquillity. Death is also to be seen in the colour of Liza's raiments, which the hero selects for hen 'the white, cashmere burnous and the little white hat', or 'the white tarlatan, the wide black velvet and the pale pink daisies'. Death is also sensed in Liza's beloved pet, the 'little black cat' given to her by the hero (and an immigrant from the story 'Old-World Land-owners', by the writer Gogol, so repugnant to Leont'ev's hero). The war brings into the world of Ai-Burun the new Hero, who is destined to take his place in the triangular love conflict. 13 S. Schultze. 'The tradition of the drowning woman in the background of Anna Karenina', in Russian Language Journal, XXXVI, (.1982), 123/124. 68

It comes as no surprise to find that the New Hero is a Greek from the Ionion Islands, of good family, with good pronunciation of the Greek tongue. He is handsome and colourful, young and 'carries a pistol in the red sash' with which his tunic is tied. The Greek comes accompanied by a Frenchman, who watches that he does not stray from his Orthodox sympathies to the side of the Russians. 'How splendid is this Greek!' muses the hero, setting the Frenchman and the Greek in that contrastive opposition which Leont'ev so favours - 'the dashing Frenchman with his pointed moustaches travels with him almost deliberately, as if to make him seem all the more handsome'. With the Frenchman 'everything is banal, dry, worn out', while the Greek has 'such ingenuousness, such sincerity, such ardent youth'. The Greek cuts a fine figure with his 'flashing blue eyes', full of 'the thirst for life and pleasure'. The young greek god is, of course, tinged with shades of gold: 'Still earlier I had praised his looks to Bertrand, particularly the pale gold hue of his face, so meek, and cunning, and ga/. The golden-tanned Apollo is particularly striking in his Albanian costume, which he dons so readily to demonstrate his beauty, like a young Narcissus. But why should the costume be Albanian? Could it be because the colours which make up the Albanian national costume14 happen to be the same as those of the windows of the hero's office and those surrounding the hero on his solitary walks? He entered clad in a starched, gleaming white fustanella, crimson embroidered boots with little tassles on their upturned toes, a wide golden sash, stuffed with weapons, a deep blue tunic adorned with fine gold designs, a tall red fez worn at a jaunty tilt, a mass of pale blue tassles cascading from the shoulders over the chest! 14

Rozanov praised Leont'ev's knowledge of the ethnography of the Balcan region, as well as the stylistic achievements of his novels from the cycle 'TheLifeof Christians in Turkey', V. Rozanov,'Commentaries' toKonstantin leonl'ev.Pis'ma k Vasiliiu Rozanovu.

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Remembering how strict a formalist Leont'ev is, and that there is nothing accidental in A Husband's Confession, we may safely assume that the Greek's Albanian costume is not only a variation on the theme of colour symbolism, but also carries religious and nationalist connotations. Leont'ev, dubbed the Turkish Hegumen' by Rozanov, felt strongjy drawn to Islam and the Koran, as in fact did his contemporaries Chaadaev and Dostoevsky. But while Chaadaev was attracted to the proselytism of Islam and Dostoevsky had a personal interest in the medical and mystical history of Mohammed's epilepsy,15Leont'ev was drawn to Islam by its Manichean tolerance of the coexistence of good and evil as entirely self-evident polar principles of existence. Leont'ev also gives poetic expression to Islamic polygamy, which he extolled repeatedly in his stories 'From the Life of Christians in Turkey' and it was this that earned him the nickname 'Turkish Hegumen' from Rozanov.16In the event it is the young Greek who proves suitable for Liza's favours, since he is thebearer of polygamous morality - i.e., the Albanian costume. The Apollo in Albanian dress arrives on the Crimean scene like Jason in Colchis, subjecting himself to the wrath of Poseidon. As he describes i t : A storm arose and we were tossed on the Black Sea for six days. I did not lose heart: the masts snapped, the rudder failed, the captain beat his head against the wall, but I just kept on eating, drinking and laughing. The young Jason (or Manoli Mavrogeni, as the Greek is called) has deliberately been reduced by Leont'ev in comparison to the true tragic heroes of Greek myth, and this can be attributed to the specific nature of the hero's development in the peripeteia of the ancient . Greek love story. The hero grows through his adventures, through the misfortunes that are visited on him by fate, he matures through his exposure to all sorts of blandishment and temptation, which he

15 J. Rice, Dostoaxky and the Heating Art (Ardis, 1965). 16 Pis'ma. 70

resolutely rejects, and only at the end of all these peripeteia does he reach the level of the tragic hero.17The frivolous hero of A Husband's Confession has to become a tragic hero by way of a romantic adventure in which the role of the tragic heroine will be taken by Liza. The Hero-Husband sees that the two young people are destined for each other and he rails against fate for placing him, and not the young Greek, in Liza's path: How handsome they both are! They would have been created for each other, worthy of each other, if only fate had joined them together instead of sending me into Liza's life! o

But then, as if suddenly recalling his second function, that of the Hero-Father, he continues his pronouncement about the error of fate by expatiating on Liza's appearance: On her head she wore the very same white kerchief which she had worn when she walked with me in the oak grove that evening when we decided we would wed. We might recall how, in the oak grove, the Hero-Husband proposed his dual-structure marriage to Liza, in which liza was forbidden to fall in love with him. At the same time the hero renounced his 'sacrilegious rights'. Liza's white kerchief and her preserved virginity enable her to take the place of a worthy heroine for the young Greek, taking the role specifically prepared for her in the plot of the Hellenic love story, a plot in which the

17

In A- Heiserman, The Novel before the Novel (University of Chicago Press, 1977), p 143: "In mankind the process of a painful maturation of erotic knowledge through the discordant evils of aggression, animalism, infanticide... and over this process presides not onlyErosbut the god-man Dionysus, whose ecstasy of fulfilled knowledge is achieved through, and culminates in, purification and catharsis."

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Aphrodisian virginity of the young lovers is a sine qua non. Indeed, fate, against which the Hero-Husband has railed, loses no time in exercising its omnipotent rights, and the young people duly fall in love. In her rich contralto, Liza sings the Greek song which the young Greek has taught her, one which is so characteristic of the story's main antithesis: 'You are my angel! In your hands you wield a sword/ Which will sever my head'. The apocalyptic imagery is combined here with the world of romantic passion: 'What a wondrous union of passion and harsh, mysterious impressions!' marvels the Hero-Husband as he listens to the song and he resolves to let the young Liza 'drink her fill from the cup of passion'. The diary entries record the Hero-Husband's conversations with Liza and the young Greek, from which it can be seen how the Greek is tormented with jealousy and refuses to believe that Liza's relationship with the Hero-Husband is that of daughter to father. The Hero-Husband is himself utterly confused in his endeavours to define his degree of kinship to Liza. He lists the following possible roles: brother, older friend, father, tutor.18 The kaleidoscope of structural roles merely increases the Greek's mistrust. It is in this way that the error of judgement admitted by the Hero-Husband in selecting the Greek as the true New Hero for Liza, as someone capable of receiving Liza in the capacity of a 'permitted woman', now takes its toll. The young Greek, despite his Albanian costume and all its symbolic associations, operates within a moral system in which Liza is perceived as taboo. The Hero-Husband tries to persuade him that the situation is;quite normal: 'As for me, I tried with all my might to convince him to

18. In Lévi-Strauss we read: "Abaitara was absolutely set on having his two year old fiancle, for although he was himself thirty to thirty-five already, he saw in her a wife after hi sown heart:.. .The tender feelings which he cherished forthebaby girl were mingled with innocent erotic daydreams of what was to happen, m years to come, with a fatherly feeling of responsibility towards the little creature, and with the affectionate camaraderie of an elder brother who had belatedly acquired a baby sister." ibid, p. 352. 72

forget about me ais a husband, and to see in me only her older, devoted friend'. In truth, it is extremely important to the HeroHusband that the Greek should perceive his relationship with I,iza in a structure in which the Hero-Husband acts as Liza's brother, or father. If we acdept that in the Wife-Husband relationship structure Liza is a taboo woman to the Greek, while in the Daughter-Father or Sister-Brother structure she is taboo to the hero-narrator, but a 'permitted woman' for the Greek, then the planned scenario with its two possible denouements becomes dear. If Liza grows tired of her tempestuous life with the Greek, and she returns 'weary and pacified' to the narrator, she will take her position in the Wife-Husband structure. If, on the other hand, she is content, with the young Greek, then she will remain taboo for the hero-narrator since she will be confined to the DaughterFather, or Sister-Brother structure, while remaining a 'permitted woman' to the Greek. In both situations the child of Liza and the Greek will become a lawful heir of the Hero-Husband, who, we might recall, starts his first entry in his diary with the statement 'Thank God I'm not poor', and who marries Liza to save her from poverty and to find an heir for his estate. We should note, too, that happy relations between male members of primitive sodeties are based on the exchange of 'permitted women'. It is now understandable how the Hero-Husband can hand Liza over to the young Greek and by the same token be offering him his own friendship.19 This system of relationships between the Hero-Husband and the Greek strikes us as more convindng than the system with homosexual connotations proposed by Ivask (1974) and Lukashevich (1967) on which Rzhevskii understandably casts doubt (1976). It is well known that as an historian Leont'ev had an interest in the life of 19

Lévi-Strauss, in Tristes Tropiques, quotes the following passage from Yves d'Evreux: "If any one among them wants something belonging to one of the others, he tells him so, quite openly, and unless this thing asked for is very dear indeed toit$owner,thatiftheônewhoaskshasamanghisown possessions . somethingthat theçiverwouldlike tohave,he will give, in his turn, all that he is asked for.” ibid, p. 354. 73

primitive societies, and this supports the present hypothesis. There can be no doubt but that Leont'ev, as Ivask suggests, borrows features of the Nardssusimage in creating his portrait of the young Greek, but he does so deliberately, as a stylistic device /employing a motif which belongs to an entire chain of stylised motifs (such as allusions to the superfluous man/ the Crimea, Hellenic culture connected with the Chaadaev archetype in the synthesis of all these themes) within the pagan/Christian antithesis. There are three instances in the text of the story where we see the Hero-Husband reflecting on the possibility of withdrawal to a monastery, in order to leave his estate to the young lovers, and these passages affirm the existence of an elegant antithesis in the plot of the story, in which the antique world's frivolous cult of beauty is opposed to the ascetic world of Christianity. The red hue of redemption accompanies the image of the monastery: There is a monastery far from here, in the mountains: it has no more than seven or eight monks, who work themselves in the gardens; the red cliffs above which its cross can be seen are called by the Tartars Kyzyl-Tash (Red-Stone, EM ). Perhaps I should conceal myself there? Let them first live in the transports of total bliss, and then quietly, like honest and loving spouses. The Hero-Husband does not, however, succeed in his plan, since the young lovers at this point enter the arena of romantic agony and peripeteia, canonised in the andent Greek romance as erotika yxdbemata, where erotika and tkanatos form the essence of the dramatic conflict. The Hero-Husband is fated to end his days in inner torment with a ravaged heart, and this drives him to suidde. By introducing the peripeteia of the andent Greek novel, Leonfev brings about a corresponding change to the compositional genre of the Diary-Cbniession, which now becomes the genre of the epistolary novel. From now on we leam of the fate of the characters through letters dispatched from towns on the Italian peninsula and the dty of Alexandria, which has an archetypal assodation with the Alexandrian romance. While we leam of the heroine's sufferings from the descriptions in the letters she sends, the sufferings of the 74

Hero-Husband are conveyed to us by the complex technique of temporal inversion, which Leont'ev applies to the Diary genre. Thus the hero's spiritual states are illustrated by the chronological disorder of his entries, by the confused sequence, in which the hero not only loses count of the days (the entry for the 15th of the month actually precedes that for the 10th) but even of the years (his entry recording the new calendar year is delayed by a matter of weeks). The latter aberration could also bear witness to the hero's own state of mind, impaired by the sufferings he has endured. After reading Liza's last letter, sent from Alexandria, and full of complaints about the young Greek's infidelity and unruly behaviour, the hero starts to await her return so anxiously that he loses his sense of time. Liza decides to break the fatal circle, which Leont'ev has most probably associated with the fate of her mother, whose husband, as we may recall, was a handsome Italian debauchee. It is dear that by making Italian the language of intercourse between the young lovers, Leont'ev is alluding to the theme of hereditary determinism operating in nature, whose laws he has elevated from the plane of the exact sciences to that of philosophy. As he awaits Liza's arrival, the Hero-Husband writes to a merchant friend who is on business in Alexandria, and receives a reply from him in which he learns that Liza and the young Greek have perished in a shipwreck on their way from Alexandria. Thus, the archetypal shipwreck of the ancient Greek romance closes the circle of eros and thanatos,* love and death, which resolves the sufferings of the lovers in the cyanic waters of the briny deep. The Hero-Husband takes his own life. When his body is discovered it is observed that the barrel of the pistol was directed at the heart. The heirs, on perusing the Diary, reach the verdict that the hero was insane. Thus the ending of A Husband's Confession, with the Hellenized denouement resolving the fate of die young lovers and the sinful

20

On the Alexandrian love stay in A. Heiserman we find: "We shall possess each other after death and none shall trouble us: death is an attractive refuse for erotic suffering. It is in fact a condition of life where vows of fidelity may be kept free of all temptations.* 75

suicide of the hero, tormented by the incompatible contradictions of reason and feeling, with the Chaadaevesque verdict of insanity pronounced by the philistine heirs, presents a logical conclusion to all the themes we have traced of the pagan/Christian antithesis, constituting the essence of the conflict in the plot of A Husband's Confession. The blue depths of the sea bring death to Liza, now reft of her white monastic virginity, and a Dionysian ending to the golden­ haired Apollonian Hellene. The suicide of the hero, perceived as a mortal sin in Christianity, places him among those fearfully awaiting the blood-red apocalypse of the Day of Judgement, among those who have incarnadined with blood their frail human heart. At this juncture we should consider the relationship in which this, Leont'ev's finest story, stands to Russian literature of the nineteenth century. We might recall how the scholars who addressed themselves to Leont'ev's work are unanimous in their refusal to allocate to Leont'ev a place in the mainstream of Russian literature of his own period. We believe that, by now, we have succeeded in finding and defining considerable connecting threads and bonds between Leont'ev and the main tradition of Russian literature: the theme of the superfluous man, 'the sick son of a sick age' as the hero ofA Husband's Confession terms himself; the theme of exile - of flight from Russian serfdom; the theme of the Crimea, interwoven with Hellenic and Turkish cultures and stylised on the base of archetypal images from Russian Romantic poetry. By synthesising the Chaadaev theme with that of the superfluous man Leont'ev's story acquires a position of dependence on Russian pre-Romantirism, on Griboedov's play Woe from Wit, in which Chatskii can be seen as the first superfluous man modelled on the historical prototype Chaadaev.21Leont'ev's development of the theme of Poor Liza in the figure of his young heroine, discussed above, is also connected with Russian pre-

21

Iu. Tynianov has shown that Chaadaev is the historical prototype for Chatskii in Griboedov's play Woe from Wit. See Iu. Tynianov, Pushkin and his Contemporaries (Moscow, 1969). On the question of Chaadaev as a prototype in Russian literature see also H. Mondry, 'On another historical and literary prototype for Versilov', ifi Dostoevsky Studies, Vt»l. 6, (1985). 76

Romanticism. Leont'ev is linked to Karamzin, however, not only by the tradition of 'drowning women' in Russian literature, but also by certain stylistic features of A Husband's Confession (Leont'ev openly uses Karamzin's rhetorical apostrophe: 'O Liza! Where are you? O Liza, my daughter, my delight, beloved one! Liza, my Liza! O my treasure!'), as well as the rhyming prose of the great sentimentalist, (and it was the euphony and femininity of precisely this Karamzinesque prose that provoked constant attacks from the members of Beseda). By virtue of its genre, a mixture of the epistolary novel and diary, A Husband's Confession also belongs historically to the first half of the nineteenth century. Turgenev's Chronicle o f a Russian and his Dimies, Karamzin's Notes of a Russian Traveller, Iakushkin's Notes, Viazemskii's Notebooks, Lermontov's Pechorin's Journal, Chaadaev's Philosophical Letters are just some in a long list of works written at a period in Russian literature when Alfred de Musset's Confessions d'un Enfant du Siecle and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions had not yet been parodied in the manner we find in Dostoevsky's writing.“ As evidence of the extent to which Leont'ev's choice of a genre belonging to this distinct age of Russian literature was a conscious one, we can adduce the strictly formalist proclivities of Leont'ev's aesthetics.23 'Form is the despotism of the inner* idea, which prevents the matter from running away with itself, writes Le^ntey, rephrasing the laws of natural science with application to the principles of his own aesthetics, 'an olive tree dares not become an oak any more than an oak dares become a palm, and so forth; from the seed they are

22

23

See R. Feuer-Miller, 'Rousseau and Dostoevsky: The Morality of Confession Reconsidered', in Western Philosophical Systems in Russian Literature, Ed. A. Mlikotin (University of Southern California Press, 1979), or H. Mondry, 'Intimation of Rousseau or another literary parody in The Possessed*, in Slavic Symposium 1984, (Ed. Irene MasingDelic) (University of the Witwatersrand, 1984). Leont'ev ascribed great importance to the question of selecting the tight form to convey a particular idea: "For me it is also important how it is said, and even by whom, whether by the author himself, or by a person of that time, of that science and faith." 77

destined to have flowers and fruits of one kind and not another'. Leont'ev's choice of a genre which antedates his own period, when the novel experienced its first great floweringin Russian literature (we might recall that A Husband's Confession was published in the journal Notes o fthe Fatherland (Otechestvennye Zapiski) in 1867, should be seen as a demonstrative rejection by the author of the coquettishly liberal posture oíTurgeneV s Fathers and Sons, o f Saltykov-Shchedrin's'truly brilliant cantankerousness', of the 'psychological eaves-dropping' of Tolstoy's War and Peace, of the anguished cries of Dostoevsky's 'underground man', and of everything which, at one point, the hero of A Husband's Confession deplores as the 'stench of Gogol's old dothes'. The idea behind this story is one that'does not run away with itself, one that opposes the paganism of the ancient world, so beloved by Leont'ev, to Christian asceticism, so terrible to him with its Day of Judgement, that he even secretly took the tonsure. It is only natural, therefore, that Leont'ev should turn to a genrebelonging to that period of Russian literature when poets and writers regarded themselves as acolytes of the muses and Apollo. The Apollonian Golden Age of Russian literature also knew dis-harmonious heroes, however, heroes whose lives were cut short by a Dionysian end. The duel which claimed the lives of'the sick sons of a sick age'is consdously rejected by Leont'ev's hero, who by the same token rescues himself from a denouement which had become the object of parody by the time the story was written. The hero of Leont'ev's story had to be devated by his creator to that level of true tragedy where, in the conflict between reason and feeling, there is only one heroic solution: death as a consdously chosen means of attaining the status of a truly tragic character. From the point of view of its chronology A Husband's Confession belongs to the age of escape into a past era, to the pre-Gogol period of Russian literature, when return was tantamount to retreat from the period of history which Leont'ev called the period of 'syncretic simplification' of ideas, signified as the period of inertia that sets in before clinical death. In order to avoid the pat 'happy ending' of bourgeois literature, Leont'ev merely takes one step back in history, and his choice rests on a genre whose form is most adequate to the content the author wishes to embody. Leonfev's superfluous man .

is, however, given new complications by the historical dialectic of Russian ideas reflected in the Russian literature of Leont'ev's day. The philosophical searchings of the hero of A Husband's Confession which set the Apollonian childhood of mankind in direct conflict with Christian ethics, also find their reflection in the writings of Chaadaev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. The moral philosophy expounded in Chaadaev's history is constructed, as we have seen, on the dichotomy between ‘'the world of falsehood' and' the world of truth'in which the world of falsehood is the tendency to worship 'impure beaut/, extolled by Homer and all the art of antiquity, which 'weakens die poser of reason', while the world of truth is the world controlled by the ideal of spiritual beauty, as interpreted through the ethical concepts of Christianity. The theme of the Golden Age is accorded a place of some significance in Dostoevsky7s work, in which pictures of Arcadia, based on motifs from Claude Lorraine's pictureAds and Galathea, provide an itinerant plot, migrating from Versilov's dream in A Raw Youth to that of Stavrogin in The Possessed, and in which both characters are bearers of that same 'subtly depraved' morality about which Leont'ev writes in his literary testament. Furthermore, Dostoevsky scholars have repeatedly demonstrated how, in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky employs a plot development structure borrowed directly from Greek tragedy,34where the concepts of suffering in Greek myth are opposed to the conception of expiatory suffering in Christian eschatological thought. Tolstoy's stories The Kreutzer Sonata, The Devil and Father Sergius are all constructed on the dichotomy between the asceticism of the Gospel according to Matthew and the power of man's 'diabolical' sensory drive.25 In his tract What is A rtl Tolstoy utterly

24

25

See, for instance, S. Cassedy, 'The formal problem of the epilogue in Crime and Punishment: the logic of tragic and Christian structures', in Dostoevsky Studies, Vol. 3, (1982), and R. Cox , Between Earth and Heaven: Shakespeare, Dostoevesky and the Meaning of Christian Tragedy (New York, 1968). On the 'spirit-flesh' dichotomy in Tolstoy, see H. Mondry, 'One or two Resurrections in Leo Tolstoy's writing?', in Die Welt der Slaven, XXXIII,!, (1988), p. 169-183. 79

demolishes the principle of aesthetidsm in art and adopts positions of moral utilitarianism in art. Tolstoy bases his views on a detailed analysis of the aesthetic thought of the ancient Greeks, drawn from the works of Aristotle, Socrates and Plato, which Tolstoy subjects to a rigorous critique, proceeding in this from the contrary position of the principle of good in Christian ethics. In the context of all the above, Leont'ev's 'superfluous man' in A Husband's Confession can be seen as a qualitatively new hero in terms of his thematic and stylistic development in the history of nineteenth century Russian literature. Leont'ev's superfluous man is given dramatic form by two distinct structures: the structure of Christian tragedy and the structure of Ancient Greek tragedy, the former being in a relationship of rudimentary dependence on the latter. The difference between these two forms of dramatising suffering - the ancient Greek and the Christian - is a familiar phenomenon of nineteenth century history, and it is dear that when Rozanov describes Leont'ev as 'a true Nietzsche', while 'that Nietzsche that the Germans have is not a genuine one, he has a frailty of the heart', he is displaying a profound understanding of the essence of Leont'ev's thought. The end chosen by the hero of A Husband's Confession, as well as the end met by the young heroes, places in conflict not only .the tragedy of the andent Greek world view and the tragedy of the Christian apocalyptic view, it also leaves unresolved the concept of atonement by suffering that we find in Christian eschatology. While the death of the young couple is Hellenized through the archetypal device of the shipwreck, the hero's act of suidde, coming after a life with a dual structure, spent trying to reconcile the aesthetidsm of the andents and the asceticism of Christianity, leaves him in a highly ambivalent situation vis-a-vis the 'first act of the universal end'. Yet it is this very ambivalence which places Leont'ev in the typological framework of Russian literature of his day, in which the 'accursed questions of Russian boys' about 'whether there is a God and immortality' are explored in the theosophical debates of Dostoevsky's and Tolstoy's novels. In this way, despite Leont'ev's constious and deliberate aspiration to retreat into the themes and genres of^early nineteenth century 80

Russian literature, A Husband's Confession has an equivalent semantic dependence on the Apollonian Golden Age of Russian, literature and the literature of the late nineteenth century, with its red-tinged, Apocalyptic soul-searching.

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Chapter Four THE EGYPTIAN DOVE The hero's swan song At one point in his tale, the narrator of The Egyptian Dove (1881), Ladnev, breaks off to ask whether there is any purpose in continuing his stoiy. This a question which the reader of this work, surely Leont'ev's least artistical text, would be inclined to answer in the negative. The text is unfinished; and one may argue that the two hundred or so pages of text which we have are not only incomplete, but are prelim inaryThey prepare the reader for a romantic episode which never occurs, and in this work Leont'ev shows his growing inability to continue the pagan fervour of previous texts, an increasing tiredness and restraint. This comes out clearly in the behaviour and attitudes of Leont'ev's alter ego, the narrator, Ladnev, who appears to have lost much of his belief in the pagan ideas fundamental to the creed of the Leont'evian 'immoral hero'. The Egyptian Dove is a text which was intended to be about love, which is in fact about impotence; the impotence of man in the face of those problems which hamper the aesthetic expression of his passion. From this point of view, the text is particularly fascinating in its depiction of Leont'ev's attempt to work out his difficulties with his philosophy of aesthetic immoralism. As in Leont'ev's first long work, Podlipki, the hero is Vladimir Ladnev, a man now somewhat older and less assured of his ability to live in a state of vital conflict. It is surely no accident that Leont'ev reca|ls the veiy beginnings of his artistic career in this, his last major work of fiction; for the text is witness to Leont'ev's awareness that a period of his life -h is career as a writer of fiction-was coming to an

1

See Griftsov, Ivask and Fillipov for comment on the unfinished nature of this text

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end. Gone is the lyrical fervour of the glowing prose of Leont'ev's work of the 60s and 70s. The first Ladnev, the dreaming and rather effete student who reappeared in the character Milkeev and later in the husband of A Husband's Confession, has become worn out, cynical. Ladnev the second (in The Egyptian Dove) asks: 'who will read me, if I write such a long tale of love?/(p. 354) - a thought which would have been inconceivable to the Ladnev of Podlipki. For Leont'ev's hero the problem of sex and sin finally becomes untransmutable into beautiful prose, revealing the tarnish at the heart of the philosophy of aesthetic immoralism. The Solov'evian vision of Godmanhood - that perfect eternal harmony often discovered through Sophia, the universal feminine - was unattainable to a writer such as Leont'ev with his belief in the superman and in the here and now with all its vital conflicts. And yet perhaps this Solov'evian vision was seductive in its promise of release from the torments of the aesthetic dilemma. Leont'ev's text can be compared with Belyi's later symbolist work, also influenced by Solov'evian ideas, and a text which, like Leont'ev's The Egyptian Dove, also ends not with a triumphant Solov'evian resolution of sex and rationality, Christianity and paganism, but with failure and defeat. Leont'ev's Ladnev the second is an early Dar'ialskii driven by the pagan music of the dove (just as Dar'ialskii is attracted by a sect named the Doves). Both heroes admire the Grecian in life; Dar'ialskii for example: Dreamt that in the depth of his native people was an older antiquity than was native to the people and had not yet been outlived - Andent Greece. In Orthodoxy and precisely in the outmoded Concepts of the Orthodox peasant (in his opinion, a pagan) he saw the new torch of the Greek coming into the world.2 The Symbolist love for Ancient Greece, most clearly seen in the work of the poet Viacheslav Ivanov, was a love which Leont'ev's

2

A. Belyi, Serebrianyi golub (Moscow, 1988), p. 101. 84

aesthetidsm had already foretold and relished. In The Egyptian Dove this love for Greece is linked to Egypt and its ancient mysteries;3 the magic East symbolised by the dove of the title and by the novel's setting of Constantinople, comes into conflict with the West and with Christian morality in Leont'ev's typical treatment of the Solov'evian East-West theme. The central question which Leont'ev poses in The Egyptian Dove (and indeed, throughout his work) is one which Belyi later addressed: is man strong enough to bear the burden of a divided woiid? For Belyi's Dar'ialskii, the conflict proves too strong, and death is the result. For Leont'ev's Ladnev, the conflict is also too great, even for a 'super-geroi'.4 The conflicts fundamental to the hero-state of 'vitalism' eventually reduce the hero to humility and acceptance of the Christian virtue of self-abnegation in this tired text which describes 'an impotent and aimless striving'.9 Finally the hero shows the fullness of his doubt in his creed of 'aesthetic immoralism', doubt hinted at in earlier texts. The Egyptian Dove is Leont'ev's swan song, but a half-hearted one as he writes on a theme which no longer consoles, nor invigorates. It is interesting to compare The Egyptian Dove not only to Belyi's text, but to the Nietzschean ideas in currency at the time of Leont'ev's writing, ideas which were to culminate in Also sprach Zarathustra, published some years after Leont'ev's The Egyptian Dove. Leont'ev's concept of the vital 'second stage' of man and of history, has certain echoes of Nietzsche's belief in the importance of being, as opposed to the importance of ends. For Nietzsche the belief in the here and now led to the rejection of historical causality and to the famous statement that God was dead. For Leont'ev the here and now was influenced by the presence of God, and man's fear of God. Yet for both Nietzsche and Leont'ev, belief in man's will to power was at the core of their ideas; but for the aesthete,

3 4 5

Belyi's novel was also influenced by Egyptian mysteries. See V.A. Alexandrov, Andrei Belyi (Harvard, 1985); and Andrei Belyi, Spirit of Socialism, (ed. J. Malmstad, ComeH,1987). Ivask's phrase (see p. 121). Lukashevich, p. 181.

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unlike the German philosopher, such a character trait was not always attractive.6 This belief is expressed in the character of Ladnev, and the duality within him between the daring hero he would like to be, and the meek man he is in real life. The split between the world of the aesthetic dreamer and the world of activity is pronounced in this text, but now, instead of retreating into the world of Podlipki, the hero can only retreat into his dreams. The majority of the action takes place in the eyes of the Constantin society, in a text which deals with the public persona of the hero more than with his private, lyrical world. Ladnev is a social being bound by social restraints, and although his problem in consummating his passion with the lady he loves is of course a moral one, it is primarily a social one. Thus instead of a love story the reader is treated to a description of the petty intrigues of Adrianople consular life, and to a discussion of the 'Balkan question', one of the engrossing political topics of the time in which the novel is set. Russia's interest in the Balkans, and her determination to increase her influence in the area, had been a cause of the Crimean war of 1853-1855, a war which had ended in defeat for Russia, and enforced shelving of her plans for the Balkans until the 1870's. Encouraged to no small extent by Ignat'ev (the Russian consular representative in Constantinople from 1864-1877 and the man who sent Leont'ev to Adrianople in 1864), revolts by Slav nationalities such as the Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Seibs and Montenegrins had begun to break out, giving Russia the excuse to declare war on Turkey in 1877. In response to the growing panslavism which had developed from the 1840 Slavophile movement, and which envisaged a Slav federation to be formed under Russia's aegis once the Slav nations were free of foreign rule, Russia proclaimed her desire to liberate the Balkans, and although she won the war in short order, the international community ensured that the Balkan states were not so much freed as dispersed - Austria-Hungary getting Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria being split, the southern

6

F. Nietzsche, Also Sftrach Zarathustra (London, 1962). 86

part going back to the Turks, and Bessarabia to Russia, while Serbia and Montenegro became independent.7 This is the background to the "Slav question' or 'Balkan question' which is frequently discussed in Leont'ev's text, and on which he, having served in the consular section in the Balkans and in Crete during the period 1863-1873, was certainly competent to discuss. However it is not the political issue which is of paramount importance, but the conflict of religions in the Balkans. His protagonist, Ladnev, for example, when he takes in and hides the young Bulgarian deserter Veliko, is influenced not by political considerations but by the fact that Veliko has reverted from the Uniate faith to Orthodoxy. Catholicism, Uniatism, Mohammedanism and Orthodoxy were involved during the "nineteenth century in the struggle for influence in the Balkans, a struggle which Leont'ev discusses with particular reference to Adrianople , where Ladnev is based. It is of course not so much the conflict of religions which interests Leont'ev, but religion per se, and religion as it affects his romantic life, which is hampered by moral conventions. Ladnev's romantic life centres round an object of passion, a married woman called Masha Antoniadi. In a conversation Ladnev has with Masha about Eastern life, he replies to the question, what does he not like about the East, with the laconic phrase 'I really don't like the Christian family one finds in the East' (p. 312), a comment which arouses Masha'5 surprise and her support for what she calls 'the chastity of family morality'. Behind Ladnev's laconic and rather insulting remark lies the usual Leont'evian thought; he believes that the Christian family shows the 'coldness of our co-religionists in respect of love'. In other words, it is the lack of 'romanticism' shown by Orthodox families living in the East - which to Leont'ev, and to Ladnev, is the home of the beautiful and the romantic - which irritates our narrator (p. 309).

7.

Leont'ev's 'panslavism' was, as with all of Leont'ev's beliefs, rather unique. He disliked the cause of Slav nationalism, seeing it as based on liberalism.

6-4 50

87

Ladnev endorses the, by now familiar, concept of immoral aesthetidsm, telling his reader that in Masha he finds, for example, something 'elegantly immoral': In Masha Antoniadi there was what I needed. In herethere was something which tormented me; something elegantly depraved, something fine and restrainedly immoral, something caustic yet fragrant, kind and sly, sweet and vain in a word, something which made me sigh deeply, (p. 323) The phrase 'elegantly depraved' ('iziashchno-rastlevaiushchii') echoes Ladnev's earlier use of the words 'rastlenie' and 'iziashchestvo' when discussing Pompeii Ladnev advances the following theory to explain why, as he puts it, 'shameless descriptions of Pompeiians' do not induce a feeling of scandal in the reader. Ladnev prepares us for a statement on the 'fleshly aesthetic': The comparative chastity and elegance of ancient hedonism comes from the fact that it was, as it were, illuminated by the tays of the strong religious conception, which was then ruling Graeco-Roman life, and therefore the most shameless descriptions were untouched by that cynical humour and that foul coarseness with which people of our time approach similar matters (and particularly wild are the French) despite Christianity. . . The depravity of the ancient world is, as it were, directed by the noble demons of Milton and Lermontov; whereas today's depravity is directed by a loathsome Mephistopheles. In terms of morality, this is probably better, as there are minds and hearts which, turning away from filth and cynicism, gently submit to the fine charm of the fleshly aesthetic.(p. 297) This is Ladnev in the typical strain of the Leont'evian hero, singing of the 'idealisation of the elegant flesh' (p. 309) and of the 'poetry of life'/telling us that 'poetry - is truth invested in flesh' (p. 309). In the latter statement he makes a dear connection between 88

truth and beauty in line with the Keatsian equation. When Ladnev speaks of poetry he means beauty, beauty appreciated chiefly through passion, through the ability to hear the 'music of passionate feelings' (p. 310). The' Egyptian bird', from which the text takes its tide, is an image of this passion, for it sings a 'brilliant aria of passionate love' (p. 310) which cannot be heard by those who live only according tc Christian morality. To Ladnev, in the Christian state there are 'only two extremes: either the cold morality of habit and fear, or secret, coarse and dishonourable depravity7(p. 311). In the courtyard of Ladnev's house in Adrianople there is a peach tree, one of those 'passionate trees' like the chary, apple and poplar trees in Podltpki. From the peach tree the dove calls Ladnev to passion with its sudden cry, which is filled with conflict-with agonisinglove and with ailingjoy: There was a large peach tree. It grew right by the very window of my small apartment, and frequently a dove would coo. I was told that this was no ordinary dove, but an Egyptian one. I remember in any case that the dove was not bluish like ordinary doves, but was of a colour more similar to a turtle-dove, its coo was also different, meek, . rich and with a particular sudden cry, which seemed to me to be filled with tormented love and a joy that was almost painful. The sun would rise in the mornings on that side of the house where the peach tree grew under my window, and where my dove mourned and was joyful. . . (p. 276) This image, presented to the reader at the novel's very beginning, is a perfect symbol of vital conflict: Egyptian and eastern, yet in appearance like a turtle-dove, a Christian symbol, and even an image of extreme religious self-abnegation, being an image used by the skoptsy sect of flagellants. The bird combines vitally in itself both sensuality and pain, encapsulating the nature of Leont'ev's 'second state' of flowering complexity. Ladnev frequently refers to vital paradoxes, such as the 'tortures of love' and love's 'painful joY (p. 276, 563), using also the image of the 'rose with thorns' (p. 380)

when discussing his hero Ladnev's longing for a state of ecstasy balanced on the edge of suffering, for conflict and collision, in which can be found 'drama, and poetry, and romance, and music, and picturesqueness, with so many great and inspired moments' (p. 310).* However, as the novel progresses, Ladnev's pleasure in the bird begins to diminish; he states that it calls him to love 'in vain': I woke at dawn and when I woke, the sun again lit up the dty and my courtyard, and the ceiling of my room, wild with white roses. In the Persian tree under the window...my torturer, the bright Egyptian dove, cried and moaned, calling me in vain to the Ufe of the heart, to the sweet and enthusiastic torments of mutual love. (p. 350-351) What is it that goes wrong? Why does the hero's ability to sustain the state of tormenting, yet vital, love fail? Ladnev at one point refers to Anna Karenina and Vronskii as two figures who experience the state of vital conflict; the reader understands that Ladnev admires Vronskii's defiance of sodal convention.9 Gin Ladnev, however, play the part of the proud and dashing Vronskii? Over the depravity of ancient times ruled a 'noble' demon, whose evil perhaps consisted precisely of the fault of Milton's Satan-namely, pride. Are Leont'ev's characters sufficiently proud? Masha has vanity rather than pride as a major characteristic. Ladnev rather likes this trait, telling us of his admiration for the 'little weakness of her vanity' (p. 374). Masha's vanity and her love of beauty has a cruel side - she tells her daughter, for example, that she is not abeautiful child, like her mother-but this is no impediment to Ladnev's admiration. And yet neither he nor Masha appear able to flaunt their proud vanity in the face of society.

8 9

See Rzhevskii's discussion of the symbol of the thorny rose. Leont'ev indicated his admiration for the character of Vronskii in 'Analiz, stir i veianie'. 90

Ladnev's honour, one of the sources of his pride and strength, is rather ironically to blame for this inability on his part. He remains aloof from Masha due to his comprehension of the social as well as moral disgrace that would accrue if the relationship were to be consummated. The proud hero appears self-conscious, influenced by his environment. Whereas in the previous works studied, environment has been handled more positively, in terms of the concept of creating an earthly Eden on the estates of Podlipki and Ai-Burun, in this text there is no Eden, nor is there likely to be. Social position, and its precariousness, is a strong concern with Masha, who, when the reader first encounters her, is on the fringes of society, not yet accepted into the stifling and gossipridden fashionable circle of Constantinople which Leont'ev describes rather well. Ladnev's first chivalrous actions on behalf of his innamorata are directed towards smoothing her path in society - a paradoxical action both courtly and conventional. The fact that Masha is vulnerable in her desire to please and be accepted leads Ladnev not to exercise his strength in seduction, despite the fact that he immediately notices her 'cunning eyes', suggestive of a proclivity towards deceit, but to help and safeguard her. Ladnev feels pity for Masha - a feeling discussed before in this work, and described as a source of the superman's problems in fulfilling his role: Masha Antoniadi was lovely.. .big eyes, dark, caressing, cunning...but her face was a little narrow. . . But I liked some deficiencies in a woman; it always seemed to me that the woman herself felt these faults, that she desperately wanted to please... I felt this and it attracted me to her because I pitied her. (p. 226-227) The way in which Ladnev goes about ensuring that Masha is accepted into society involves not daring action, but self-humiliation; Leont'ev for the first time makes his hero act like a mouse rather than a man. Ladnev, in order to make the point that society ladies with influence can do much harm to others if they do not temper their influence with generosity, pretends to be terribly afraid of one 91

r

of the leading ladies of Constantinople society, "Madame M ' who, he states, 'fills him with holy tenor'. Making ladies such as Madame M reflect on their (perhaps unwitting) cruelty to those of lower social rank than themselves, Ladnev achieves his aim, which is to persuade Madame M., and another lady of rank, Madame N., to agree to visit Masha and approve her entry into society. Ladnev nobly sacrifices himself for the social advancement of a woman he barely knows, but whom he admires excessively. Nobility, and humble behaviour - for Madame M., in recompense for her agreement to help Masha, makes Ladnev sit in the comer like a guilty schoolboy - appear in rather odd and uneasy combination for the first time in the Leont'evian hero, a man who states that he does not wish to be a 'weak Turgenevian hero' (p. 436) but who seems indeed to be one. Ladnev, cowering before Madame M., behaves rather like the husband in A Husband's Confession, who abdicates his status as a 'man', or husband, so that his wife Liza may find happiness with the young Mavrogeni. Ladnev, like the husband of the earlier text, also has a young, handsome man in his own household, not a Greek this time like Mavrogeni, but a Bulgarian by the name of Veliko who embodies 'bodily courage' (p, 349). His name carries connotations of power and might, and perhaps reflects Ladnev's own growing impotence, which arises not however out of age (as the husband's did), but out of-social caution. The Leont'evian hero now appears to have the soul of a petty clerk rather than that of a passionate aesthete, and Ladnev is depicted as touchy, smallminded, prone to depression and to saying thé wrong thing; moreover he is poor and has to borrow money in order to dress decently. An episode from Ladnev's life which would increase our sense of his heroic status, an episode in which Ladnev demonstrates his sense of honour in a rather more appealing way than in his dealings with Madame M , is glossed over with some speed. Ladnev is removed to the consular division in Adrianople after an incident involving a French diplomat This incidentis an exact parallel of the episode in Leont'ev's own life, when he struck the diplomat Derché with a whip, calling him a 'triste European', after the latter had made derogatory comments about Russia. Leont'ev was as a result 92

of this incident sent from Crete to Adrianople in 1864. Ladnev, his hero, attracts admiration from colleagues and from society for his bold defence of Russia's name, yet such accolades are brief and soon forgotten; soon Ladnev's honour is devoted to ensuring that Masha's reputation is not sullied, and he dashes about urging her to 'keep her ears pricked', meaning *be careful'. The Egyptian Dove appears not to be set in the seventies, but in the sixties,wthe time of Leont'ev's • consular activity, as we can guess when we read the date 1879 in the text; this is the year in which Ladnev begins his memoirs about events which happened at least ten years ago. This question of the chronological setting to the text is of significance when we consider whether Russia had any honour during the sixties, after the defeat of Sebastopol in 1855; political humiliation may reflect on the hero's own problems with maintaining a proud demeanour. Ladnev is rarely a dashing defender of his nation, but chiefly a derk absorbed in consular work. Although he argues that such work leaves him 'freedom of will' (p. 328) (just as Leont'ev himself argued in his 'Reminiscences of Thrace') it is dear that this is a rather idealistic viewpoint, for Ladnev has to submit to being ordered to leave Constantinople and Masha. His superior, the Russian consul in Constantinople, Bogatyrev, can and does exercise his authority over Ladnev to the extent that he insults the latter's feelings for Masha, and Bogatyrev even commands Ladnev to persuade Masha's husband to accept a job offered by the English vice-consul in a subsidiary plot dealing with diplomatic machinations.10It is not the romantic hero, but the political and circumspect Ladnev whom we consistently encounter, a man delighting in scoring petty points over his political opponents, in search of triumphs which are parodies of the triumph towards which he initially directs his energies namely, the seduction of Masha. A petty rebuke delivered to an illbred politician is counted by Ladnev as a 'victor/. He speaks of 'my victories, my successes' (p. 434) - victories which he does admit are

10

See Ivask, p. 116, on the real-life people who appear under pseudonyms in The Egyptian Dove. The English consul, Villarton, was in real life J.E. Blunt, with whose wife Leont'ev used to read poetry. 93

'trifling and empty* (p. 435) when compared to the 'conquering' of Masha (p. 322). The concept of victory is a constant refrain in the text. Ladnev finds himself thinking about a garland - either a garland wom by a girl in a pagan rite (p. 381), or a victor's crown. Ladnev talks of himself weaving a victory wreath from the flowers of the cherry tree, a tree which he uses to symbolisejviasha, whose vanity is like that of the cherry, which blossoms even when there is no-one to see it-'fo r itself (p. 329). The text's mood is not one of victory, however, but of defeat. Masha, the object of Ladnev's passion, remain^ a chaste madonna, worshipped from afar, and Ladnev turns to an aesthetic enjoyment of a kind different to the fleshly or pagan. He begins to worship the beauty of the church, which he states attracted him with its rich rituals, vestments and singing, among other things (p. 375). Ladnev at first argues that his religious and moral code is one which is not Orthodox - 'I had a moral criterion - it was mine, my own,' but soon moves towards a more traditional state of religious acceptance. At first his moral code developed as the result of 'passionate fantasy, confirmed and fostered by pride' (p. 435); this is the 'code of my own pride, the system of my arbitrary ('proizvol'ny') morality, which may at times be noble, but is rarely immoral' (p. 375).11 Ladnev at first dislikes conventional religion for its kenotic emphasis, its belief in self-abnegation necessary before man can be rewarded by salvation, which is the 'celestial wreath' given to man when he has triumphed, paradoxically, over his own self. Ladnev argues that he will find his own wreaths: My concept of the relationship of the afterlife to life on earth was vague, and when deciding my moral life, how little I took into account 'celestial wreaths'. The wreath of self-love which I myself awarded myself,

11

See Pis’ma k Rozanovu for comment by Leont'ev on his theory of 'transcendental egoism' in religion. 94

when I found myself worthy, was enough; it was more dear to me than paradise, about which I, unfortunate one/ could not then think; and inner self-destruction or people's malicious mockery were more terrifying to me than the wrath of God. (p. 375) Again we find the problem of the superman and the victor's garland, and the inevitable conflict between a self-awarded victory, and a triumph awarded by society, or by God, is apparent in Ladnev's statement given above. In his own Eden-state on earth, the superman makes himself into God, and awards the victor's crown to himself. Yet the crown is a thing which will soon wither, for the superman is not in charge of time. The word 'unfortunate' ('neschastnyi') appears in the above quotation, and this word belongs to a third Ladnev whom we find in the text There is not only the dashing hero, who surfaces briefly, or the petty consular figure; there is a third Ladnev, the man narrating his past to the reader from a world-weary distance, a man tired and hardly amused by his own previous attempts to live up to the aesthetic creed. As we leam from the very first page of the text, this Ladnev is a man who has changed completely from his earlier self and who has aged into sadness (p. 275). Sadness is not a new emotion for the reader to comprehend, for pain and pleasure are always mixed in Leont'ev's philosophy; but this sadness is not vital, even pleasurable, but is filled with apathy and resignation. At one point in the text the narrative breaks off completely and the reader is told that Ladnev had stopped writing due to 'some kind of doubt, some kind of painful feeling, like repentance or disappointment' (p. 435). At this point two pages from Ladnev's diary are interpolated, dated 15 December and 15 February, 1879. These pages describe the strong contrast between this tired Ladnev and the earlier, more vital, Ladnev; again, the symbol of the Egyptian dove is used: Then, when my poor dove cooed on the Persian branch, I had so many wishes, I so loved life at that time. Even my sufferings were pleasing to me. . . 95

But now? Now I only want one thing - oblivion, peace. But what peace? Every superfluous sound, every extraneous movement is hateful to me. Even the most sincere friends cannot give me that which a man needs in order to be merry; bodily strength, love for life's battle, love of honour, health, and belief in some kind of near and attractive future, (p. 457) Thus the hero, after his infatuation with Masha, has come to an end. We are not told about the ending of their affair; and the suggestion is that it ended with a whimper rather than a bang, for they parted "without heat, without quarrels, without repentance, without any dash of that poison, which usually lingers at the bottom of the fragrant vessel of rapturous love' (p. 457). The stress on negation (the repetition of the word 'bez') gives the impression that Ladnev and Masha have failed to reach that height of passion and of conflict so admired by the seeker after vitalism. Ladnev is now in a state in which his own emotion is that of indifference. Society -and perhaps that greater enemy, time - has plucked the wreath away and left the would-be victor with nothing. The theme of death enters the text at several points. Standing in a church, Ladnev tells us that "in die quietude of misery before death" he has a deep sense of die transience of earthly desires: I wanted to look for something personal, important, different, special, something which only I needed and to which I could raise up a special, impassioned and personal prayer. I sought but did not find. I saw so much sorrow and sin from the fulfilment of not only the most passionate, but even the most innocent and selfless of our desires, that I now understand that there is no point in seeking. . . when the deacon began to preach of a Christian ending to our life. . . I suddenly experienced the desire to bow deeply, and bending my forehead to the floor, I thought: of course; this, and only this, is what I must desire. 96

This paragraph sums up the superman's progress, his thoughts, with a simplicity and beauty of expression which vindicates Leont'ev's at times rather flowery prose. It is a deeply moving summation of the problem of the superman, whose desires, after delicious conflict, end with ugly sorrow and sin. The superman finally states that there is no point in seeking; his philosophy of desire gives way to Christian humility, and he bows to the inevitable. The Egyptian dove is silent; and the poetry of life is heard no more.

7-50

BIBLIOGRAPHY PRIMARY LITERATURE FICTION 'Blagpdamost", Moskovskie vedomosti, (1854), No 6-10 (unsigned). 'Leto na khutore', Moskovskie vedomosti, (1855), No 5. 'Noch na pchelnike', Moskovskie vedomosti, (1857), No 146. 'Sutki v aule Biuk-Dorte', Otechestvennye zapiski, (1858), No 8. Podlipki, Otechestvennye zapiski, (1861), No 9-11. V svoem kraiu, Otechestvennye zapiski, (1864), No 5-7. Ispoved’ muzha (pod zag. Ai-Burun), Otechestvennye zapiski, (1867), No 7. 'Khrizo', Russkii vestnik, (1867), No 7. Tembe', Russkii vestnik, (1867), No 9; (Leipzig, 1870). 'Khamid i Manoli', Zaria, (1869), No 11. Talikar Kostaki', Russkii vestnik, (1870), No 9. 'Aspaziia Lampridi', Russkii vestnik, (1871), No 6-9. Iz zhizni khristian v Turtsii, (v 3 tomakh) (Moscow, 1876), a collection of 6 stories - the 5 given above, plus 'Kapitan Ilia'. Odissei Polikhroniades, Russkii vestnik, (1875), No 6-8; (1876), No 1-3; (1877), No 8,10-12; (1878), No 7-1Q, %

'Ditia dushi', Russkii vestnik, (1876), No 6-7. 'Sfakiot', Russkii vestnik, (1876), No 6-7.

^

’Egipetskii golub’, Russkii vestnik, (1881), No 8-10; (1882), No 1. 'lades', Nwa, (1885), No 26; (with 'Ditia dushi', New York, 1954). 98

/Dve izbrannitsy' (neokon), Rossia, (1885), No 1,3-10. Sdbranie sochinenii, (v 9 tomakh) (Moscow, 1912-1914). Sobranie sochinenii (v 4 tomakh) (Analecta Slavica, 1975). Sobranie sochinettii K.N. Leont'eva (Wurzburg, 1975).

WORK ON HISTORICAL, SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS QUESTIONS: TRAVEL SKETCHES AND WORKS OF LITERARY CRITICISM AND REVIEW T o povodu rasskaza Marka-Vovchka', Otechestvennye zapiski, (1861), N oW l. 'Gramotnost i narodnost', Zaria, (1870), No 11-12. 'Panslavism i greki', Russkii vcstnik, (1873), No 2 (pod psev. N. Konstantinov). "Panslavism na Afone', Russkii vestnik, (1873), No 4 (pod psev. N. Konstantinov). Vizantizm i slavianstvo, Chteniiavobshchestveistoriii drevnosti rossijsJakh, (1875), No 3; (Moscow, 1876). 'Khram i tserkov", Grazhdanin, (1878), No 10-12. 'Russkie, greki i iugo-slaviane', Russkii vestnik, (1879), No 3,5,9. 'Moi vospominaniia o Fraku', Russkii vestnik, (1879), No 3,6,9. 'Pis'ma otshel'nika', Vostok, (1879), No 7-8. 'Otets Kliment7, Russkii vestnik, (1979), No 11-12 (Warsaw, 1880); (Moscow, 1882). 'Nashi novye khristiane', Varshavskii dnevnik, (1880), No 162,169, 173; (Moscow, 1882). 'G. Katkov i egp vragi na prazdnike Pushkina", Varshavskii dnevnik, (1880), No 150,155.

'Chem i kak liberalizm nash vreden?", Varshavskii dnevnik, (1880), No 46,59. "Kak nado ponimat' sblizhenie s narodom?", Varshavskii dnevnik, (1880), No 93,107; (Moscow, 1881). Rasskaz smolenskogo diakona o nashestvii 1812 goda", Russkii arkhiv, (1881), No 6. 'Moi priezd v Tulchu', St P. vedomosti, (1883), No 325,326. "Pol'skaia emigratala na rdzhnemDunae', StP. Vedomosti, (1883), N o 332,345,348. Vostok, Rossiia i slavianstvo, (Moscow, 1885-1886). "Rasskaz mod materi ob imperatritse Marii Fedorovne", Grazhdanin, (1887), No 6-7; Russkii uestnik, (1891), No 4-5. "Sdacha Kerchi v 1855 godu', Sovremennyie izvestiia, (1887), No 54, 60,66,70,78,101,103. "Plemennaia politika, kak orudie vsemimoi ievol"utsii", Grazhdanin, (1888), No 256,258,261-2,265,269,272,275,279. "Dva grafia: Aleksei Vronskii i Lev Tolstoi', Grazhdanin, (1888), No 15, 19,24,28,33,37,40. "Vladimir Solov'ev protiv Danilevskogo", Grazhdanin, (1888), No 99, 102,105,107,112,115,120,128,137,140,147,152. "Moi dela s Turgenevym", Russkii vestnik, 188, No 2-3, Stranitsy vospaminanii (ed. P. Guber, Petrograd, 1922). "Dobrye vesti", Grazhdanin, (1890), No 81,83,87,95. "Analiz, stil" i veianie", Russkii vestnik, (1890), No 6-8; (Moscow, 1911); (Brown University Slavic Reprints, 1965); Voprosy literatim/, (1988), No 12, (1989), N oi. "Nad mogiloi Pazukhina", Grazhdanin, (1891), No 64-7. 'Slavianofil'stvo teorii i slavianofil'stvo zhizni', Grazhdanin, (1891), No 99-100. 100

'Dostoevskii o russkom dvorianstve', Grazhdanirt, (1891), No 204-6. 'Gde razyskat' moi sochinenija posle mod smerti?//Russkoe dbozrenie, (1894), No 8. 'Moe obrashchenie i zhizn' na sviatoi Afonskoi gore', Russkii vestnik, (1900), No 9. Otshel'nichestvo, monastyr' i mir - ikh sushchnost' i vzaimnaia sviaz' (Posad, 1913); Bogoslovskii vestnik, (1912), No 3. 'Neskol'ko vospominanii i mysld o pokoinom Ap. Grigorieve', Russkaia mysV, (1915), No 9. Moia literatummasud'ba, Uteratumoe nasledstvo (Moscow, 1935); (New York, 1965).

LETTERS 'Pis'ma provintsiala k L Turgenevu', Otechestvennye zapiski, (1860), No 5. 'Pis'ma o vostochnykh delakh', Grazhdanin, (1882), No 83,85,89,91; (1883), No 2,5,7,16,19-20,22-3. 'Pis'ma K.N. Leont'eva k S. Vasilevu', Russkoe dbozrenie, (1893), No 1. 'Pis'ma K.N. Leont'eva k A.A. Fetu', Russkoe dbozrenie, (1893), No 4. 'Pis'ma K.N. Leont'eva k arkhimandritu L.Kavelinu', Russkoe dboareme, (1893), No 9. 'Pis'ma o starchestve', Russkoe dbozrenie, (1894), No 10. 'Pis'ma K.N. Leonfeva k K.A. Gubastovu', Russkoe dbozrenie, (1894), No 9,11; (1895), No 11-12; (1896), No 1-3,11-12; (1897), No 1,3,5-7. 'Pis'ma ICN. Leont'eva k L Fudeliu', Russkoe dbozrenie, (1895), No 1. 'Pis'ma K. N. Leonfeva k V.A. Roi', Russkoe dbozrenie, (1898), No 1.

'ICN. Leont7eva o V. Solov'eve i estetike zhizni' (pis'ma k L Fudeliu) (Moscow, 1912). 7-3 50

101

"Pis'ma o vere, molitve, o nemoshchakh dukhovenstva i o samom sebe', Bogoslovskii vestnik, (1914), No 2. Pamiati KN. Leont'eva i pis'ma ¡CN. Leont'eva k A Aleksandrovu , (Posad, 1915). "Pis'ma K.N. Leonteva k G. Zamoraevu', Russkaia mysl", (1916), No 3. Pis'ma k Vasiliu Rozanovu (London, 1981).

TRANSLATIONS "The Average European as an Ideal and Instrument of Universal Destruction" (bans.W. Shafer, G. Kline) in Russian Philosophy, Vol. II, (Quadrangle Books, 1965). The Egyptian Dove (trans. G. Reavy) (New York, 1969). "The Novels of Count Leo Tolstoy: Analysis, Style, Atmosphere" in Essays in Russian Literature (ed. S.E. Roberts) (Ohio, 1966). Against the Current; Selectionsfrom the novels, essays, notes and letters c f Konstantin Leont'ev (trans.G. Reavy, with introduction by G. Ivask) (New York, 1969).

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Bocharov, S., '"Esteticheskoe okhranenie" v literatumoi kritike', Kontekst, (1977), p. 142-193. Brown, C.J., "Slightly to the Right of the Czar", New Republic, 19 April, (1969), p. 25-27. Budanova, N., 'Dostoevskii i Leontiev7, Dostoevskii. M aterialy i issledovania, No 9, (1991), p. 199-222. Bulgakov, S., Tikhk dumy, (Moscow, 1918). Durylin, S., 'Commentary', in K.N. Leont'ev, Maia literatumaia sud'ba (Moscow, 1953). Fillipov, B., "Strastnoe pis'mo s nevemym adresom', Mosty, (1%2), No 9-10. Fillipov, B., 'Predislovie', in ICN. Leont'ev, Egipetskii golu bD itia dushi (New York, 1954). Florovskii, G., D ie Sackgassen der Romantik', Orient und Occident, 4, (1930), 14-27. Florovskii, G., Puti russkogo bogoslomia (Paris, 1937). Frank, S., 'Mirosozertsanie Konstantina Leont'eva', Kriticheskoe obozrenie, (1909), No 11, p. 79-85. Frank, S., 'Konstantin Leontjew - ein russischer Nietzsche', Hochland, (1928-1929), No 26. Fudel, I., 'Kul'tumyi ideal K.N. Leont'eva', Russkoe obozrenie, (1895), No 1. Fudel, I., 'Preface', to KN. Leont'ev. Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1912-1914); reprinted, 1.1, (Analecta Slavica, 1975). Fudel, I., 'K.N. Leont'ev i V. Solov'ev v ikh vzaimnykh otnosheniiakh', Russkaia myst, (1917), No 11-12. Gaidenko, P., 'Naperekor istoricheskomu protsessu', Voprosy literatury, (1974), No 5, p. 159-205. Gasparini, E., Le previsioni di K. Leont'ev (Nfilano-Venezia, 1947, 1957). 104

Griftsov, B., 'SudT>a Leont'eva', Russkaia myst, (1913), No 1-2,4. Hare, R., Pioneers o f Russian Social Thought (London, 1951)* Ianov, A., 'Slavophiles and Konstantin Leont'ev7, Soviet Studies in Philosophy, (1970). Iazykov, D., 'Spisok sodiinenii K.N. Leont'eva' (bibEografna), Russkoe obozrenie, (1894), No 11. Ivanov, A., KN. Leont'ev (il pensiero, Vuomo, ü destino) (Pisa, 1973). Ivask, Iu., '"PodlipkT K. Leont'eva', Novyi zhumal, (1955), Vol 40. Ivask, Iu., 'Konstantin Leont'ev's Fiction', American Slavic and East European Review 20, December, (1961), No. 4, p. 622-629. Ivask, Iu., 'Konstantin Leont'ev', Vazrazhdenie, (1961), No 118; (1962), No 121,124-131; (1963), No 133-5,137-141; (1964), No 146-151. Ivask, Iu., Konstantin Leont'ev: Zhizn i tvorchestvo (Frankfurt/Mainz, 1974). Kartsov, Iu., Sem let m blizhnem vostoke (St. Petersburg, 1906), p. 5, 13,78. Kiprian, E., Iz neizdannykh pisem KN. Leont'eva (Paris, 1959). Kollogriwof, L, Von Hellas zum Mönchtum (Regensburg, 1948). Kolyshko, L, 'K.N. Leont'ev o voine i voennykh', in M alenkie mysli (St. Petersburg, 1900). Konopliantsev, A., 'Leont'ev, Konstantin Nikolaevich', Russkii biograficheskii slovar', t. X., p. 229-249. Kötel'nikov, V.A., 'Optina pustyn i russkaia literatura', Russkaia literatura, (1989), No 4, p. 3-27. Kozlovskii, L., 'Mechty o Tsar'grade: Dostoveskii i Leont'ev', Golos minuvshego, (1915), No 2,11. Lukashevich, S., Konstantin Leont'ev (1831-91): A Study in Russian mHeroic Vitalism " (New York, 1967). 105

Masaryk, T., The Spirit of Russia (London, 1991), Vol. n, p. 207-220. Meshcheriakov, N., 'Predislovie - u istokov sovremennoi reaktsii', in K.N. Leont'ev, Moia literatumaia sud'ba (Moscow, 1935). Mikhailovskii, N.K., 'Zapiski sovremennika', Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, t. V , (1908). Miliaev, N., 'Iz vospominanii o Konstantine Nikolaeviche Leont'eve', Russkoe obozrenie, (1898), No 1. Miliukov, P., 'Samorazlozhenie slavianofil'stva', Voprosy filoscfii i psikhologii, (1893), No 5. Miroliubov, A.N., Religioznoe mirosozertsanie KN. Leont'eva (Harbin, 1933). Mirsky, D., A History ofRussianUterature (London, 1958), p. 338-346. Monas, S., "A Meditation', Journal of Modem History, September, (1970). Mondry, H., "Another literary parody on Chemyshevsky in K. Leontiev's In my own land, Die Welt Der Sloven>XXXV, 2, (1990)r p. 255-275. Mondry, H., 'A Husband's Confession: towards the typology of Leontiev's writing', Die Welt der Sloven, XXXVI, 1, (1991), p. 347-364. Obolenskii, A., 'Essai critique sur l'esthetique de K.N. Leont'ev', Canadian Slavonic Papers,15, (1973), p. 540-555. Pamiati K.N. Leont'eva, (sb. statei Aleksandrova, Gubastova, Kartsova, Konopliantseva i dr) (St. Petersburg, 1911) Pogozhev, E.N., K.N. Leont'ev (Vospominaniia) (Moscow, 1900). Pokrovskii, M.N., "KN. Leont'ev', EntsHdopedicheskiisbvarA. Granola, t. XXVH, p. 35-39. Preobrazhenskii, P.F., "Aleksandr Gertsen i Konstantin Leont"ev7, Pechat' i revoliutsiia, (1922), No 4. Rabkina, N., "Literatumye uroki (Turgenev i Leontiev-istoria vzaimootnoshenii), Voprosy Uteratury, April, (1991), p. 124-132. 106

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Trubetskoi, S., 'Protivorechiia nashei kul'tur/, Vestnik Evropy, (1894), No 8. Turgenev, I., 'Pis'ma kK N . Leont'evu', Russkaia myst, (1886), No 12. Zaitsev, K., K poztmniiu pravoslaviia (Shanghai, 1948), p. 103-157. Zakhrezhevskii, A., 'Odinokii myslitef, Khristianskaia myst, (1916), No 4-5. Zakhrezhevskii, A., Odinokii pisatel'(Kiev, 1916). Zalber, L., Konstantin Leont'ev o progresse (Peking, 1921). Zenlcovskii, V., A History o f Russian Philosophy (New York, 1953), t I., ch. 15. Zenkovskii, V., Russian Thinkers and Europe (Ann Arbor, 1953), ch. 6.

Contents Foreword

........................................................... 3

Introduction.................. ..... .................................. 5 Chapter One ...i..~... ............................................ 13 The Three Ages of Man: Paganism, Conflict, and Christian Resolution in Podlipki Chapter Two.............. ....... .................................... 31 In My Own Land As a Political Pamphlet of the Sixties —

Chapter Three....................... ................................ 57 A Husband's Confession Pagan aesthetics versus Christian ethics —

Chapter Four............................. ............................83 The Egyptian Dove The hero's swan song —

Bibliography...... .................................................... 98 Primary Literature..................................................98 Secondary Literature......................................... 103

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3 0000 050 669 716 ^ Henrietta Mondry Sally Thompson »•

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Konstantin LEONT'EV Henrietta Mondry is the head of Department of Russian Studies at the Witwatersrand University in Iohannesburg and the author of three books on ideological tendencies in Soviet li­ terary studies and on national rela­ tions. She is also an author of articles on Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Konstan­ tin Leont’ev, Andrei Bitov, as well as on national questions in the current literary process of the CIS. Her Ph.D. thesis has been devoted to the study of perception of Dostoyev­ sky’s works by Soviet scholars of the 1970s-1980s. Sally Thompson is a lecturer at the Russian Department of Trinity Col­ lege in Dublin. Her specialty is mo­ dern Soviet and Russian literature. Her Ph.D. thesis has been devoted to the prose of Yuri Trifonov. She is al­ so the author of articles on Konstan•*- —

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