Turgenev and Russian Culture : Essays to Honour Richard Peace [1 ed.] 9789401205863, 9789042023994

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Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics Volume XLIX

Edited by

J.J. van Baak R. Grübel A.G.F. van Holk W.G. Weststeijn

Turgenev and Russian Culture Essays to Honour Richard Peace

Edited by Joe Andrew, Derek Offord and Robert Reid

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

Frontispiece: “I hereby give permission for the photograph of Richard Peace which I supplied to Professor Derek Offord of the Department of Russian Studies at the University of Bristol to be used by Rodopi in the book ‘Turgenev and Russian Culture: Essays to Honour Richard Peace’.” Signed by Virginia Peace, wife of Richard Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2399-4 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in the Netherlands

Contents DEREK OFFORD Richard Peace: An Appreciation

1

JOE ANDREW Introduction: Turgenev and Russian Culture

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JOE ANDREW Death and the Maiden: Narrative, Space, Gender and Identity in Asia

27

MICHAEL BASKER ‘The Poetry of Moscow Existence’: An Analysis of N.M. Iazykov’s Spring Night

53

A.D.P. BRIGGS Did Carmen really come from Russia (with a little help from Turgenev)?

83

LEON BURNETT Turgenev and the Sphinx

103

BORIS CHRISTA A ‘Buttoned-up’ Hero of His Time: Turgenev’s Use of the Language of Vestimentary Markers in Rudin

127

RUTH COATES Mystical Union in the Philosophy of Vladimir Solovev

135

NEIL CORNWELL First Loves and Last Rites: from Ivan Turgenev to John Banville

157

ERIC DE HAARD The Uses of Poetry in Turgenev’s Prose: A Quiet Spot

175

ROS DIXON ‘The avant-garde, you know, can easily become the rearguard. All it takes is a change of direction.’ Anatolii Efros’ Production of A Month in the Country: A Dialogue with Stanislavskii.

193

CHARLES ELLIS Tolstoi: Great Men and the Mathematical Mechanics of History

205

CYNTHIA MARSH Post-War British Month(s) in the Country

221

DEREK OFFORD Worshipping the Golden Calf: the Intelligentsia’s Conception of the Bourgeois World in the Age of Nicholas

237

RICHARD PEACE The Dark Side of Turgenev

259

ROBERT PORTER The Paradoxes of Parody: Notes on the Art of Mikhail Zoshchenko and Evgenii Popov

267

MICHAEL PURSGLOVE Dulcis fumus patriae: Tiutchev, Turgenev and Smoke

285

ROBERT REID A Hunter’s Sketches: A Peircean Perspective

301

ALEXANDRA SMITH Nostalgic Visions and Mnemonic Figures: Tsvetaeva’s Allusions to Ivan Turgenev’s Goethian Outlook

333

CLAIRE WHITEHEAD Ivan Turgenev’s Phantoms: The Spectre of Hesitation

347

Richard Peace’s Publications: Compiled by Derek Offord

363

Richard Peace: An Appreciation Derek Offord Richard Peace, to whom this volume of essays by fellow-scholars and former colleagues and students is respectfully and affectionately dedicated, belongs to the generation of post-war Slavists who laid the foundations for a broad corpus of British scholarship in classical Russian culture and who also firmly established the discipline of Russian studies in schools of modern languages in British universities. Richard was born on 22 February 1933 in Burley-in-Wharfedale, a few miles north-west of Leeds, to Herman and Dorothy Peace. After passing the 11-plus examination that pupils sat in those days he attended Ilkley Grammar School. He did not have the opportunity to study Russian at school but started to teach himself the language from books and gramophone records and obtained a School Certificate for the subject, with a high mark, in 1951. Then, in 1953-4, during his period of National Service, he was sent on the Russian course mounted by the Joint Services School for Linguists at Cambridge. In 1954, he went on to study French and Russian at Keble College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1957. He remained in Oxford for a further two years as a postgraduate, working towards a B. Litt. (the award is now renamed as an M. Litt.), which he gained in 1962 for a dissertation on Pomialovskii, entitled ‘N. G. Pomyalovsky, A Literary, Biographical and Social Study’. (The dissertation, unfortunately, has never yielded a publication but one may surmise that it helped to prepare the ground for Richard’s magnum opus on Dostoevskii.) In the same year, 1962, he also took his M.A. In 1960 Richard married Virginia, whom he had met while they were both working at a summer language school for overseas students near Aldeburgh in Suffolk. Then, in 1963, after a period teaching French and Russian at a secondary school in Middlesbrough, he was appointed to the first lectureship in Russian at the University of Bristol, where the late Professor Henry Gifford was establishing the teaching of the subject under the aegis of the Department of English, of which he was Head (and in which Virginia herself studied as a mature student). Here Richard soon began to produce important works of scholarship in what was to become his main academic field, classical Russian literature. His first substantial publication, a dense article of 1967 on the place of the story Taman in Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time, still seems fresh. There followed within a few years what perhaps remains Richard’s most widely-known work, his monograph, published by Cambridge University Press in 1971, on Dostoevskii’s four major novels (Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov). Meanwhile the discipline that Richard was responsible for developing at Bristol was strengthened by the appointment of two further lecturers with linguistic and literary interests and a Russian native-

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Turgenev and Russian Culture: Essays to Honour Richard Peace

speaker who conducted oral language classes. By 1968 it was therefore possible to offer a single-honours programme in Russian studies, as well as Russian within various joint degree programmes. Further momentum was given to the enterprise in 1974 by the relocation of the subdepartment, as it still was, in a newly-created School of Modern Languages with five constituents (the others being French, German, Hispanic Studies, and Italian). It was also in this first Bristolian period that Richard and Virginia’s children were all born: Henry Richard in 1964, Mary Virginia in 1967, and Catherine Elizabeth in 1969. Colleagues from this stage of Richard’s career remember him as a congenial companion with a taste for good beer and a host who provided excellent curries and melba toast. Despite the progress made in provision of Russian at Bristol under Richard’s leadership, there seemed little prospect that the University would establish a Chair in the subject and raise the unit to full departmental status in the near future. Richard, who was by now a Senior Lecturer, therefore decided to take up the offer of a Chair at the University of Hull and thus in 1975 he returned to his native Yorkshire. Very soon after making this move Richard and Virginia found their lives touched by personal tragedy: in September 1975 their son Henry died after falling, on a family picnic, while climbing rocks near Flamborough Head. Profoundly though this loss must have affected him, Richard succeeded during his stay in Hull, which was to last for nine years, in building on the professional achievements of his first period in Bristol. He completed two more major monographs. First there was his book on Gogol, published by Cambridge University Press in 1981, a work of similar scale and ambition to his earlier monograph on Dostoevskii. Then, just two years later, Yale University Press published his study of Chekhov’s four best-known plays (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard). At the same time Richard took on a major managerial role, serving from 1982 to 1984 as Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Hull. His standing among British Slavists was recognized by his election in 1977, for a three-year term (subsequently extended by a year), as President of his national association (known at that time as The British Universities’ Association of Slavists [BUAS]). His presidency fell at a difficult juncture, for he found himself having to defend the subject against those who wished to see the ‘rationalization’ of provision of it in British universities. Later, in 1983-4 he served as President of the Association of Teachers of Russian. (He had been a founder member of the Association and the first editor of its journal.) He also contributed greatly during his period at Hull to the promotion of contacts between British and Soviet higher educational institutions, serving for several years as Chairman of the committee of university Slavists that oversaw the programme of student exchange for which provision was at that time

Richard Peace: An Appreciation

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made in the biennial Anglo-Soviet cultural agreements. In this capacity he visited British undergraduates on placements in Leningrad, Minsk, Moscow and Voronezh. He also served on the annual boards organized by the British Council to select postgraduate students for placements in the Soviet Union. In 1984 Richard returned to Bristol to take up the Chair of Russian that the university had at last resolved to establish there. This post was associated with headship of the Department of Russian Studies, as the unit had now become, a role that Richard continued conscientiously to play right up until his retirement in 1994. It was during this second period at Bristol that Richard completed his fourth and fifth book-length studies of classical Russian authors, his examination of Goncharov’s novel Oblomov, published in the Birmingham Slavonic Monographs series in 1991 and his critical commentary on Dostoevskii’s Notes from Underground, published by Bristol Classical Press in 1993. He was also now able to oversee the expansion of his department to a complement of six full-time researchactive members of staff, supported by four language-teaching staff. Again he played a full role in broader faculty affairs, serving as Chair of the School of Modern Languages from 1988 to 1991. Again, too, he helped to promote educational exchange with the Soviet Union, supporting the establishment, in 1985, of a direct link which provided for symmetrical student exchange between Bristol and a foreign-languages institute in Piatigorsk in the Caucasus. (The link was of course rich in associations for students of classical Russian literature.) It was possible also for Richard and Virginia to see more of Henry Gifford, by this time retired but still living in Bristol, and Henry’s wife Rosamond, for both of whom Richard and Virginia had an enduring fondness. Following his retirement at the age of 61 Richard returned to Yorkshire, where, with a truly Russian attachment to native place, he acquired a house on the River Wharfe a mere three miles downstream from the town in which he grew up and six from the town in which he went to school. He has, however, maintained a close link with the University of Bristol, of which he is now Emeritus Professor. He has remained very active professionally, continuing to publish and to attend and deliver papers at conferences and symposia, in Britain and abroad, and serving since 1995 as Vice-President of the International Dostoevskii Society. The most substantial outcome of his scholarly activity in retirement is his book-length online study of Turgenev, completed in 2002, in which he surveys A Sportsman’s Sketches, Rudin, A Nest of Gentlefolk, On the Eve, Fathers and Children, Smoke, Spring Torrents, and Virgin Soil. Richard has also continued to indulge his passion for angling (always a fruitful point of contact with Russian colleagues), both in the River Wharfe (on whose banks the garden of his house stands) and in the Arctic rivers of the Kola Peninsula, which has been opened up to

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Turgenev and Russian Culture: Essays to Honour Richard Peace

foreign visitors in post-Soviet times. He and Virginia are now grandparents too, to Leo Henry, born in 2000, and Zola Catherine, born in 2006. The scholarly interests that Richard has pursued in the course of his career have been varied, and he has taught undergraduates in several areas beyond those on which he has published extensively. Towards the end of his second period at Bristol, for example, he helped to establish, and shared teaching on, a popular final-year course on eighteenth-century Russian literature. He has also offered courses, or parts of courses, on twentieth-century authors, particularly Gorkii. He has had a deep and abiding interest in Russian thought, and indeed in many of his writings has explored the relationship between major works of imaginative literature and the ideas that preoccupied Russian thinkers at the time when those works were created. However, it is above all in the field of classical Russian literature that his interest has been focused, especially in the prose fiction of its nineteenth-century golden age. His corpus of work within that field consists of six monographs and some 45 chapters in books and articles in refereed journals, as well as introductions and other scholarly apparatus in various editions or translated editions (of Griboedov’s Woe from Wit, two cycles of tales by Gogol, and Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment), an edited collection of scholarly essays on Crime and Punishment, entries in reference works, other varia, and book reviews. The range of this corpus is wide, embracing, for example, Goncharov, Leskov, Apollon Maikov, Ostrovskii, and Turgenev as well as the three authors - Gogol, Dostoevskii, and Chekhov - to whom he has devoted the greater part of his attention over the years. (A list of Richard’s publications, covering his career up until the end of July 2007, and no doubt not quite comprehensive, since it has been compiled without Richard’s knowledge, is provided at the end of this volume.) Richard’s scholarship is characterized by close textual analysis, supported by felicitous translation of the passages that he quotes. Richard pays meticulous attention to the precise meaning and nuances of the words his authors use, including the associations that are suggested to a Russian-speaker by the names (forenames and patronymics as well as surnames) that they give their characters. He peels away many levels of meaning in a text, revealing its hidden complexity, including paradoxes within it. He does not treat the literary text as an elastic thing whose meaning may vary hugely over time or legitimately have quite different significance for every individual reader. Nor has Richard ever been attracted by the Bakhtinian approach, which over the last three decades has gained many champions among English-speaking Slavists and which has of course been notably applied to Dostoevskii; indeed he explicitly takes issue with this approach in an article of 1993. Perhaps his engagement with the literary and intellectual context of the works that he

Richard Peace: An Appreciation

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examines (as exemplified in his article of 1978 on the subject of such Russian concepts as volia and svoboda) brings him closer to a historicist approach than to any other. Richard’s typical approach to a literary text is heralded in the sub-title of his monograph on Gogol, with its reference to the place of Gogol’s writings in the Russian literary tradition. Here he explores the question of how a writer so apparently uninterested in psychological analysis and so prone to create characters shorn of human qualities could have exerted such exceptional influence on a literature remarkable for its depth of human understanding and compassion. Again, in his discussion of Oblomov he not only draws an interesting distinction between conceptions of character as static and developing, alluding in the process to the contrast between finished and incomplete actions that is embedded in the structure of the Russian verbal system, with its differentiation of perfective and imperfective forms. He also relates these conceptions of character to the broad question of the destiny of a backward nation on the periphery of European civilization at a moment in its history when factions in the intelligentsia were anxiously debating the degree to which age-old forms of life should be disturbed by the need for dynamic modernization. His wide-ranging examination of Turgenev’s fiction is similarly informed both by sensitivity to the author’s insights into character, on the one hand, and by an understanding of the contemporary issues with which Turgenev is concerned, from the role of the nobility to the nature and destiny of the nation, on the other. Richard’s approach to the Russian canon pays dividends even when applied to Chekhov the dramatist, whom he places in a literary tradition more concerned with character, psychology, and ideas than with plot. Under Richard’s scrutiny Chekhov’s plays, for all the timelessness of the human situations that they present and innovative as they are from the dramatic point of view, fit comfortably into this tradition. For these plays too can be better understood when seen in the context of a culture imbued with Oblomovism or when the allusions to other works of literature that they contain, as well as their symbols, stage instructions, and dramatic technique, are closely examined. Nowhere is Richard’s characteristic approach to a literary text more rewarding, though, than when applied to Dostoevskii. Indeed it would seem to be no accident that Dostoevskii is the writer to whom Richard has devoted the most sustained attention, in almost twenty articles or chapters in books and an edited casebook on Crime and Punishment as well as in his monographs of 1971 on the major novels and 1993 on Notes from Underground. For no works of Russian literature yield greater opportunities than does Dostoevskii’s fiction to explore psychological complexity and the balances of power in human relationships, to probe levels of meaning, and to bring to light contemporary debate about aesthetic, moral, social, and political matters.

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Turgenev and Russian Culture: Essays to Honour Richard Peace

At any rate Richard’s approach to a text is nowhere better exemplified than in these studies of Dostoevskii’s fiction, which remain fresh, readable, compelling, and always illuminating to scholars and undergraduates alike, as indicated by their periodic republication or translation. Thus over the course of a distinguished academic career spanning some 40 years Richard has established an international reputation as a specialist in the field of classical Russian literature, above all, perhaps, as a specialist on Dostoevskii. It is fitting to wonder, though, before concluding this appreciation, whether the scholarship on which Richard’s reputation rests does not form part of a larger vision that makes it more than some academic equivalent of art for art’s sake. For one thing, Richard’s writing may reflect a belief that literary scholarship provides a counterforce to the entrepreneurial or more generally utilitarian currents that have so deeply affected British universities during the decades in which the bulk of Richard’s professional life has been lived. (He did his best, in the 1970s and 1980s and in various capacities, to resist these currents or to mitigate their effects.) Equally his writing reflects a conviction that it is crucially important that the rich foreign culture that he examines should be better understood in his own country, and more deeply respected here, than it often has been. Like all British scholarship in the Russian field, if only it is conducted with integrity, Richard’s writings may serve as a riposte of a sort to commentators and a wider public who too often have recourse to banal stereotypes which, at best, hinder mutual understanding of peoples or, at worst, foster intolerance and enmity. Finally, the contribution that Richard has made to the search for understanding of a European culture notable for its otherness from our own consists not merely in his corpus of scholarship, significant as that corpus is. Another aspect of it is the support that he gave to educational and cultural contact between Britain and the USSR during the period of the Cold War, one phase or another of which coloured the greater part first of his formative personal and educational experience and then of his professional experience. Yet another is the effort that he made over many years, through assumption of leadership at local and national level, to maintain the presence of his often embattled discipline and to consolidate its position within the British higher educational system. For this championing of our subject, and also for his congenial companionship, as well as for his impressive corpus of scholarship, all Richard’s colleagues warmly thank him.

Introduction: Turgenev and Russian Culture Joe Andrew In our day and age Turgenev’s books are hardly read any more. Dall’Aglio1 But humane and sensitive though he is, an accomplished artist, the conscience it might be argued of a whole generation, Turgenev does not speak urgently to the present day. Gifford2 Is it too much to hope that we may be about to be cheered by a new surge of effort to restore Turgenev to his rightful place among the stars of Russian and world literature? Seeley3 As these three epigraphs suggest, Turgenev may be said to represent something of a problem for the contemporary student of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Put simply, one is obliged to ask whether, a century and a quarter since he died, he is still relevant or of interest to the modern sensibility. This is an issue to which I shall return, but, firstly, I think we also need to consider the wider project of the present volume, and ask whether this might also be part of a more general problem, whether, that is, to paraphrase Pushkin, ‘nineteenthcentury literature has gone out of fashion now’. A couple of examples might help illustrate this suggestion. Two years ago I was asked to edit a collection of papers on nineteenth-century Russian literature arising from the latest quinquennial conference of ICCEES (The International Council for Central and East European Studies), held in Berlin in 2005. However, although well over 1,000 papers were presented at this event, we were unable to find enough papers to compile even a slim volume of papers, and the project collapsed. Similarly, I took part in a two-person panel on nineteenth-century Russian literature at BASEES (the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies) in spring 2007 and this was the only panel on this period of literature at the Annual Conference! Now, this may be merely anecdotal evidence, but surveying the conference and publishing scenes more broadly it would definitely seem to be the case that the study of Russian literature from the nineteenth century faces something like a crisis. Against this background, it is therefore a great pleasure to introduce the present volume of papers, all but one of which concern themselves with the literature and thought from that period, arguably the ‘jewel in the crown’ of Russian culture. No less pleasing is the opportunity it allows us of celebrating the work of

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Turgenev and Russian Culture: Essays to Honour Richard Peace

Richard Peace, for long the British doyen and champion of Russian nineteenth-century literary culture. In fact, Richard’s own work on Turgenev also illustrates the problems I have just outlined. His most recent book-length project, The Novels of Turgenev: Symbols and Emblems, appeared in 2002, not as a book, but on-line.4 Richard himself sees this as part of a wider problem, in two regards. Firstly, his experience suggests that even major academic publishing houses no longer publish studies on one author, but are more interested in works involving more than one writer.5 Secondly, from Richard Freeborn’s seminal work on Turgenev in 1960 to the present, there have been ten book-length studies of Turgenev’s life and work in English (if we include Schapiro’s biography). Richard Peace’s monograph was the first for ten years, and there have been none since.6 Against this background, then, it is to be hoped that the present volume will begin to restore the study of Turgenev and Russian literature, especially of the nineteenth century, to their proper places. These are the problems: let us now examine the state of Turgenev studies, before looking at the other aspects of Russian culture addressed in this volume. When we look at Turgenev’s status during and immediately after his life, his present apparent decline is even more surprising. Although Turgenev, in 1856, may have considered himself as merely a writer of the mezhdutsarstvie between Gogol and a future great writer,7 others saw things differently. Seeley, for example, suggests that between the death of Gogol and the rise of Tolstoi and Dostoevskii in the mid-1860s, Turgenev was regarded as the leading living Russian writer; by the 1870s his reputation had spread throughout the European literary world and even to England and America.8 As Allen observes, in his own day he was seen as the equal of, or perhaps even superior to Tolstoi and Dostoevskii.9 This acclamation took on more specific forms towards the end of his life, and, especially, upon his death. Thus, when he was awarded an honorary degree at Oxford in 1879 he was the first novelist to be so honoured, and he was particularly pleased to be acclaimed as a ‘champion of freedom’.10 At the Gare de l’Est as his body was about to be transported back to Russia, where he would be buried near his mentor, Belinskii, Ernest Renan declared: ‘No other man has been so much the incarnation of a whole race. A world lived in him, spoke through his lips.’11 Elsewhere in his eulogy he claimed: Before he was born he had lived for thousands of years; infinite successions of reveries had amassed themselves in the depths of his heart. No man has been as much as he an incarnation of a whole race: generations of ancestors, lost in the sleep of centuries, speechless, came through him to life.12

Introduction

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Such extravagant eulogies may seem rather exaggerated to us today, but even the more restrained and moderate Henry James famously claimed that ‘Turgeneff is in a peculiar degree what I may call the novelist’s novelist’,13 while also noting that ‘We know of several excellent critics who to the question, Who is the first novelist of the day? would reply, without hesitation, Ivan Turgénieff.’14 According to Patrick Waddington ‘All cultured Europe and America mourned his untimely passing. The British press was full of tributes and obituaries’15, while Thomas Mann said that Fathers and Sons would be one of his six desert island books.16 Few students or readers of Russian literature in the twenty-first century would be inclined to go as far as James or Mann, to say nothing of Renan. One reason for this is that, sooner or later, most writers on Turgenev have compared him with Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, and often to his disadvantage. Gifford’s approach is typical: ‘Compared with Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, as in the end he must be, Turgenev obviously lacked their greatness. [...] Readers today are more conscious of his shortcomings.’17 Others, though, strive to turn his apparent shortcomings into advantages. Seeley, for example, argues that Turgenev is so much more ‘reasonable’ than his illustrious contemporaries.18 Indeed, he continues, Turgenev is a superb psychologist, hardly, if at all, inferior in this to Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, although many readers fail to recognize the fact.19 Isaiah Berlin also sees merit in an apparent deficiency when he contends that because he was not anxious to bind his vision upon the reader, to preach, to convert, he proved a better prophet than the two self-centred, angry literary giants with whom he is usually compared, and discerned the birth of social issues which have grown world-wide since his day.20 Seeley would seem to concur with this argument that Turgenev is perhaps actually more relevant today, in asking whether Turgenev’s ‘reasonable’ view of the human condition is not now more ‘modern’ than Tolstoi’s ‘archaism’ and Dostoevskii’s ‘apocalypticism’.21 Let us, then, follow Berlin and Seeley to assess what would appear to be Turgenev’s reputation today and ask whether the views represented by my epigraphs, especially the first two, are fully representative. Let us begin with two apt summations of images associated with this writer, and of what Turgenev seems to represent. Leonard Schapiro speaks of ‘the familiar picture of Turgenev: weak, uncommitted politically and unhappy about it, critical of the radicals but an admirer of their courage and honesty, humane and unpompous [...] a man whose fascination both for Russians and non-Russians time does not seem to diminish.’22 In turn, Jane Costlow seeks to go beyond ‘certain foregone conclusions about his work’, those of the ‘superfluous man, the clash of

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Turgenev and Russian Culture: Essays to Honour Richard Peace

love and duty, the emergence of the “new man” [...] Turgenev [as] the eulogist of the landed gentry, the singer of virginal love, the aging pessimist.’23 Whether these ‘foregone conclusions’ still dominate debates is one of the questions the present volume will seek to address. It would seem, actually, that part of the ‘Turgenev problem’ that emerges from a review of the writing about him stems from one of his greatest strengths, his realism. Allen, for example, argues that the high praise for his objectivity leads to the view that he had nothing of his own to say, that is, he merely described what he saw: she notes that the ‘relative lack of popular and critical attention accorded to Turgenev’s works during the late twentieth century’ is traceable to the view of him as too much the realist; in other words, he might be dismissed as a writer too closely tied to his own epoch.24 If, on the other hand, he is too highly praised as a stylist this leads to ‘the myth that there is little within to explore, that Turgenev is in essence an aesthete who pursues art purely for its own sake and who is not to be compared in psychological insight to the greatness of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy.’25 The ‘problem of realism’ may also though be viewed from a different perspective. Marina Ledkovsky, for example, argues that, in her view at least, it is significant that Turgenev’s ‘realistic’ works have become out-dated, because ‘the true measure of Turgenev’s achievement, [...] rests in his concern with the eternal themes of individual existence in an impersonal universe’.26 Equally, she rejects the opinion that Turgenev has allegedly lost relevance as many of the problems that face the contemporary world are discussed in his writing: indeed, she suggests that ‘his work [...] has acquired an extraordinary topicality today’.27 It should perhaps come as no surprise that Turgenev should be amenable to such divergent views in the sense that interpretation, and understanding of his œuvre is very much an ongoing project. KaganKans sums this up: ‘Much has been written on Turgenev. Yet a reassessment of the whole body of his fiction, with particular attention to his short stories and novellas, is necessary.’28 Part of our project is to provide such a reassessment of the work, as well as of Russian literary culture more broadly. With these goals in mind, let us turn to contemporary views of the nature and purpose of Turgenev’s work. As already noted, there are a number of set images associated with Turgenev’s work (Costlow’s ‘foregone conclusions’), though perhaps no more than with the work of any major artist. Anyone who has ever taught or studied Turgenev will be familiar with the strong heroine alongside the weak hero, or the superfluous man. Nature is indifferent, and happiness is impossible, especially happiness in love. Yet, looking at his work as a whole, his output is far more diverse than these commonplaces suggest, as will become clearer in the course of this volume. Seeley, in fact, has spoken of the ‘protean nature of his art’.29

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Equally, we have already touched upon the ‘realism problem’, and we need now to examine this more thoroughly. We can perhaps talk about the dichotomous nature of his work, of the balance between the realist and the poet, and in this regard, we should not forget that his first published work was the narrative poem, Parasha. Much of his early work was poetic, and he was to return to the poetic in his final work. In a sense, the title Poems in Prose captures the very essence of his artistic world. Nevertheless, Turgenev’s lasting reputation to the present day is that of the realist, and this applies to Soviet as well as Western criticism.30 Yet, his realism is not straightforward. Turgenev himself noted in 1847 that ‘Art is not daguerreotype’,31 while Ledkovsky, in her study of the ‘other’ Turgenev, has gone so far as to call him a ‘NonRealist’.32 In the end, debates about whether Turgenev is ultimately a realist, in whatever sense we use that much misused term, may not take us terribly far. After all, virtually all readers of his work would surely agree with Costlow that his novels do not really present us with ‘impartial portraits’.33 On the other hand, however, Turgenev certainly possessed the Keatsian ‘negative capability’ of giving sympathetic portraits of those of whom he may well have disapproved in life. Ultimately, perhaps, the question at the centre of any discussion of the nature of Turgenev’s realism, or his art more generally, comes down to this: does he express a view, is he a critic of society? Opinions may differ on this question, but what seems beyond doubt is the fact that he measures his characters against specific moral standards, as Allen amongst others has noted.34 He is clearly not merely a profound psychologist, but also a writer in whose works one may detect a clear moral code. For some, this code ultimately derives from his training in philosophy, for, as Kagan-Kans has noted, he had much more philosophical training than either Tolstoi or Dostoevskii,35 even if they now enjoy much more vaunted reputations as ‘philosophers’. Should we perhaps, therefore, consider him first and foremost a philosophical writer? Kagan-Kans sums up this approach to his art very clearly: Turgenev grappled with the existential questions which have haunted mankind since time immemorial. Why do we exist? What is the purpose and reason of our all-too-brief stay in this world? Why do we suffer? Is happiness, whether achieved through love or work, possible to man, or is it illusory?36 Turgenev’s own comments seem to reinforce the validity of this approach, when he noted that his concern was with the ‘living truth of the human physiognomy ... I don’t believe in any absolutes or systems, I love freedom above all else ... All that is human is dear to me’.37 While it is perhaps dangerous (and not very postmodernist!) to talk of universal

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or timeless themes, it remains the case that, in this area, Turgenev’s work remains as alive and relevant today as it was in the nineteenth century. Allen conveys this point well in noting that his work expresses ‘a subtle vision of effective means to master the diverse, often threatening, exigencies of everyday actuality, not only as it was known in Turgenev’s times but as modern, secular human beings find it.’38 Let us now move to a consideration of what might be thought to be the purpose of Turgenev’s art. Before doing this, however, let us remind ourselves of the key points of one of the most significant relationships in his life, that with ‘furious’ Vissarion Belinskii, the ‘Savonarola of his generation’,39 who was, of course, instrumental in shaping Turgenev’s literary direction. Indeed, most writers on Turgenev acknowledge his great indebtedness to the leading literary critic of his day. Seeley, for example, talks of the ‘centrality’ of Turgenev’s meeting with Belinskii for our understanding of him (they became close friends in 1843, around the time of the publication of Parasha). Belinskii, Seeley continues, has the credit of transforming Turgenev into a writer who saw ‘literature as his life’s work’.40 Turgenev was with Belinskii in Salzbrunn in 1847 when he wrote The Bailiff, arguably the most savagely critical of A Sportsman’s Sketches. Although Belinskii was to die the following year in 1848, his ‘invisible presence seemed to haunt Turgenev for the rest of his life.’41 Thus it was that Turgenev dedicated his most important work, Fathers and Children, to the memory of Belinskii, whom he also mentioned in his Pushkin speech, more than 30 years after the critic’s untimely death.42 What, though, was the influence of Belinskii; what was the purpose of Turgenev’s art? We should also recall that Turgenev’s conception of the author’s role was shaped by his early interest in German Romantic philosophy.43 Although he was certainly influenced by Belinskii’s moral purpose, Turgenev equally shied away from being a tendentious, still less programmatic writer. For almost all his artistic career he was adamant that the first duty of the artist was to present the truth as he saw it as faithfully as possible. Like his great mentor, Pushkin, Turgenev endeavoured to see the world, and to depict it, ‘with a Shakespearean gaze’. Turgenev gave the clearest statement of his views in 1880 in his Foreword to the Novels. Quoting Shakespeare he argues that he has attempted ‘to depict honestly and impartially ... “the body and pressure of time”, and the rapidly changing face of cultured Russians’.44 As Costlow points out, these words, whether or not written as a post-factum self-justification, ‘have served for many readers - both Turgenev’s contemporaries and our own - as at once sufficient and definitive of Turgenev’s aesthetic and accomplishment.’45 Yet, depicting things ‘honestly and impartially’ (even if Turgenev had succeeded in so doing) does not, of course, equate to writing in a moral vacuum, as we have already seen. Woodward, for example, speaks of Turgenev writing

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Fathers and Children as the ‘type of novel which he devised for the purpose of subjecting his characters to a test not only of their social worth, but also of their human worth.’46 Allen in particular has addressed this dimension of Turgenev, as the subtitle of her work (‘secular salvation’) suggests. For this critic, the key values of the Turgenevan self are consciousness, rationality, union of intellect and emotion, and creativity. She goes on to argue that Turgenev was ‘a consistently demanding moralist who expected the individual to pursue his brand of secular salvation, autonomously and alone’. Furthermore, the moralism she detects is there not merely to assist the reader to evaluate the characters, but to assist readers in their own journey. For her, Turgenev’s goal was no less than ‘the guidance of the reader toward the development of the best possible self, which Turgenev defines as the one most capable of enduring the trials of life with equanimity, of surviving setbacks with dignity and integrity.’47 Indeed, in echoing Allen, we can see Turgenev to have been as much a moralist as Tolstoi or Dostoevskii, albeit in this ‘secular’ fashion. In this regard, Allen shares the long-standing consensus that Turgenev was deeply pessimistic about even the possibility of human happiness. For him, as later for Freud, the goal of life was not to maximize pleasure but to minimize pain, based on the idea that ‘life is too hard for us’.48 Love is brief and deadly, a ‘slow poison’ as Vladimir’s father terms a woman’s love in First Love. That said, there is little actual friendship in Turgenev’s work either; families are often fractured and communities notable by their absence. Perhaps even more than Dostoevskii, Turgenev was painfully aware of the power of the irrational within humanity. To quote Allen again, Turgenev was ‘acutely sensitive, then, to the variety and strength of the forces marshalled against the self the forces of nature, society and irrationality’.49 In this threatening environment, then, the only form of redemption is self-redemption, or ‘secular salvation’, a ‘faith in redemption, not by the grace of a divine being, but by the rational and creative powers of a human being.’50 Costlow has also developed a similar view of Turgenev’s core philosophy, and one that speaks of a little more optimism! She notes his ‘larger project: the knowledge of self necessary to both individuals and nations if they are to succeed in the living of a free life.’51 Seeley, in turn, strikes a balance between the optimistic and pessimistic poles, and catches well the poetry and tragedy of homo turgeneviensis: ‘Within the frame of two-faced nature Turgenev’s personages live their little day - or wrestle with the problem of how to live - or try to live but fail.’52 Ultimately, each reader of Turgenev will form his or her own Turgenev. To be sure, we will struggle to find much cheer in his work, but there is certainly stoical courage and a determination to fight, even if, for almost all, the struggle will be futile.

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A central paradox of Turgenev, however, is that for all his personal pessimism, he remained committed to change in Russia throughout his entire adult life (even if, in typical Turgenevan mode, he spent much of his life outside the country for which he entertained deeply ambivalent feelings). Virtually all readers of Turgenev would agree with Costlow when she contends that ‘all of his novels are concerned with the fate of Russia, with the realization of justice in a homeland he both loved and hated.’53 As she later argues, especially as his four major novels were all written during Russia’s brief window of liberalism - between the death of Nicholas I and 1861 - they ‘were with justice read as being intimately concerned with the course Russia was taking, and might take.’54 Berlin makes a very similar point: ‘Like virtually every major Russian writer of his time, he was, all his life, profoundly and painfully concerned with his country’s condition and destiny.’55 Indeed so, as we turn from our review of current thinking on Turgenev, it is important to bear Berlin’s summation in mind. One of the huge ‘draws’ of Russian literature, and not just of the nineteenth century, is its engagement with the ‘accursed questions’, its ability to deal with the most fundamental issues which faced (and still face) the nation, and humanity in general. In this sense, Turgenev, while being unique in his thinking and achievement, is very much part of the national pattern. We should take these points with us as we now turn to a consideration of the papers in the present volume, and what they have to say about Turgenev, as well as Russian culture more broadly. I begin with those papers which offer the broadest account of Turgenev’s work, and will then consider those which deal with specific works, before moving on to those which deal with Turgenev and Russian and other cultures, before concluding my discussion with an examination of those which deal more broadly with Russian culture. Within this programme it is a pleasure that the first paper to consider is that by the honorand of this volume, Richard Peace. In ‘The Dark Side of Turgenev’, Richard Peace sets out to address one of the central paradoxes of Turgenev the man and his work. Although he is often thought ‘the most western of Russian writers’, without Dostoevskii’s pathology or Tolstoi’s fixation with death, both his life and work exhibited some distinctly dark features. He succeeded in quarreling with just about everyone, and, of course, his personal life remained troubled and unfulfilled. The same paradoxicality applies equally to his work. While his ‘lyrical evocation of nature’ marks him off from Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, Peace argues, ‘even here, all is perhaps not quite what it seems,’ as ‘something threatening often lurks under the apparently calm face of nature.’ Peace concludes and seals his argument as follows:

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It is, perhaps, Bersenev in On the Eve who puts the matter at its clearest: ‘Nature does not always hint to us of love […] she also threatens us. She reminds us of terrible … yes, inaccessible mysteries. Is it not she who must swallow us up? Is she not continually doing so? There is both life and death within her, and death speaks just as loud in her as life.’ Leon Burnett’s ‘Turgenev and the Sphinx’ also seeks to explore a general concept in Turgenev and considers the theme in works from very different genres and periods, especially A Journey in the Woodland, Fathers and Children, and the prose-poem The Sphinx (from Senilia of 1882). Burnett accepts that, even if the Sphinx is not central to Turgenev’s thinking, a consideration of this image illuminates three of his major concerns, namely ‘the aura of the mysterious, the image of woman, and the definition of Russia’. In his detailed discussion of the three works, Burnett advances the proposition that Turgenev was following the tendency of the day of, somewhat arbitrarily, using quite disparate material from different ancient sources to create a composite ‘sphinx-complex’. Even within Russian culture, of course, Turgenev was far from alone in using this ancient image to illuminate contemporary concerns, and Burnett’s paper both begins and ends with telling comparisons with Tiutchev and Blok, to the latter of which, in Burnett’s view, Turgenev is much closer in his deployment of the sphinx-complex. We now turn to a group of five essays, those by Reid, de Haard, Christa, Andrew and Whitehead, which seek to illuminate individual works by Turgenev, from a variety of perspectives. In ‘A Hunter’s Sketches: A Peircean Perspective’ Reid offers another of his trademark investigations of Russian literature through the prism of philosophy. Reid begins by noting that there is no real critical consensus around interpretations of Turgenev’s first major work. While some critics follow the ‘standard’ interpretation that the unifying principle is the political theme (the evils of serfdom), such a reading is rejected by others. Some see a structural or aesthetic principle, though these approaches are equally refuted. Reid does not set out to offer a total reading of the cycle, but, rather, he ‘attempts to use Peirce’s categorical concepts to illuminate particular features of the stories, both individually and collectively.’ In keeping with the conference at which this and many others of the present papers were read, the Neo-Formalist Circle, Reid seeks especially to use Peirce to illuminate the Formalist categories of theme, character, fabula and siuzhet. In applying Peirce to these concepts, Reid concludes by advancing as key elements in the Sketches beauty, the individual human character, and, above all, ‘the wholeness which the collection seeks to evoke - Turgenev’s Russia.’ Eric de Haard also develops one of his key research themes, the use of verse forms in prose works in his ‘The Uses of Poetry in

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Turgenev’s Prose: A Quiet Spot’.56 Turgenev, de Haard opens by arguing, follows previous conventions in including verse extracts in his prose works. In his case, the poetry is taken from the most diverse of sources, Pushkin or Shakespeare, from eighteenth-century poetry, to folk songs, romances and silly rhymes. The inserted poetry may serve many purposes, including illustrating themes and character, and its use in the prose text may even affect the plot development. Turgenev, an accomplished poet himself, of course, used poetry in prose throughout his creative life, including works as diverse as Iakov Pasynkov, Punin and Baburin and his last novel, Virgin Soil. The paper included here considers in detail one of Turgenev’s less prominent stories, A Quiet Spot from 1854, which contains a multitude of verses, both ‘high’ and ‘low’. De Haard contends that ‘more than in any other tale or novel, Turgenev exploits the semantic potential of verse’, and on a variety of levels. The ‘conflicting heterogeneity’ which de Haard detects in Turgenev’s use of verse forms in this work ‘can be correlated with two components in Turgenev’s poetics’, each of which receives a variety of formulations. De Haard concludes by suggesting that ‘A Quiet Spot is a story in which the contrasts between these two strands are more jarring than in Turgenev’s later works, in particular, the novels.’ Boris Christa’s ‘A “Buttoned-up” Hero of his Time: Turgenev’s Use of the Language of Vestimentary Markers in Rudin’ is the third piece to develop one of the current research interests of the given author.57 Christa notes that images of clothing and attire (‘vestimentary markers’), while less studied than nature descriptions, for example, feature very prominently in Turgenev’s writing. Like any other device they fulfil a variety of functions, including characterization, as well as the communication of social information. In Christa’s main focus, Rudin, the earliest of his major novels, Turgenev was still developing his technique: in this novel Christa finds 181 markers, a figure which had risen to 283 six years later in Fathers and Sons. As Christa observes, ‘there is no evidence that Turgenev had the least theoretical understanding of semiotic communication in literature, but at the pragmatic level he was a master in its use’, and he finds a variety of applications for these markers in Turgenev’s work. After a detailed analysis of the device Christa concludes that it ‘plays a particularly substantial role in relation to the main hero. The vestimentary markers which Turgenev uses to portray Rudin at various stages of his development communicate to the reader most convincingly the nature of this flawed and tragic hero.’ Joe Andrew’s ‘“Death and the Maiden”: Narrative, Space, Gender and Identity in Asia’ looks at character and gender and how they are played out through the use of setting and narrative, and comes to the view that, although Asia appears to be the narrative focus, the presentation of her emphasizes her irrationality. As against this, the male

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characters are presented as the ‘norm’ of reasonableness and, above all, as men of honour who feel free to dispose of Asia as they see fit. Their five handshakes punctuate the text as clear signs that, in the patriarchal world which Asia has illuminated so brilliantly, men control the discourse and power. They are the norm, while women are powerless and voiceless, and their desire will be suppressed. Asia may not die in the main story, but the maiden is dead in the narrator’s imagination. But this also shows that Asia deconstructs the patriarchal world, as masculine honour and control of the woman’s desire and her destiny have clearly brought no happiness to the man either. Claire Whitehead’s ‘Ivan Turgenev’s Phantoms: The Spectre of Hesitation’ is the fifth paper in this volume to deal with just an individual work by Turgenev. In the overall scheme of Turgenevan criticism, Whitehead begins, Phantoms enjoys a relatively modest reputation. Turgenev himself, especially in the aftermath of the Fathers and Children, furore lacked confidence in the work. It was not well received at the time, but today by no means all critics share the view that the story is a failure. The events of the story produce what Turgenev labelled ‘a series of pictures linked together in a relatively superficial manner’, and it is these ‘pictures’ which have attracted most attention, and most previous interpretation. In her own analysis of the work, Whitehead clearly demonstrates that ‘Turgenev had mastered many of the narrative and syntactic devices which are key to the creation of an effective “fantastic” story.’ Echoing the work of his predecessors, such as Pushkin, Zagoskin and Odoevskii, Turgenev ensures that, ultimately, the figure of Ellis and the adventures of the narrator cannot definitively be interpreted as natural or supernatural. Strenuously countering earlier views that the work is a failure, Whitehead concludes by arguing that ‘Phantoms remains a notable landmark in the history of the genre of the fantastic. It displays a range to Turgenev’s talent as a writer which is often ignored and makes clear both how he was influenced by his generic predecessors in the fantastic and how he might have inspired those who came after him.’ A further five of the papers, those by Pursglove, Smith, Dixon, Marsh and Cornwell offer analyses of Turgenev in comparative contexts, both Russian, British and Anglo-Irish. Michael Pursglove, like Burnett, links Turgenev with his contemporary and quondam friend, Tiutchev. In his ‘Dulcis fumus patriae: Tiutchev, Turgenev and Smoke’ Pursglove begins by tracing the publication history of Turgenev’s fifth and perhaps least regarded novel, while also commenting on the somewhat surprising title for the work, given that its meaning does not really become apparent until chapter 26. This most symbolic title of all Turgenev’s novels has led to a variety of interpretations, and Pursglove suggests that it may ‘symbolize the unstable and ephemeral nature of revolutionary stirrings in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. The smoke can also be seen as

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a symbol of the chaotic nature of life in general.’ The reaction to the novel was generally negative, and Pursglove’s essay is primarily concerned with the view of Tiutchev, whose ‘displeasure with Smoke was more concerned with content than symbol.’ Other negative reactions are also considered by Pursglove, especially those from Dostoevskii, Herzen, Pisarev and Shelgunov, although such well known names as Annenkov, Lavrov, Nikitenko, Pleshcheev and Gleb Uspenskii defended him, while Strakhov went so far as to describe the novel as ‘excellent, first-class, on a par with anything Turgenev has written’. Moderate as ever, in 1880 Turgenev provided a very accurate assessment of the reaction: Although Smoke had a fairly significant success, it nevertheless gave rise to a great deal of antipathy against me. I was particularly strongly reproached for a lack of patriotism, for insulting my native land and so on. It turned out that I had given offence equally, although from different standpoints to both the left wing and the right wing of our reading public. For all their ideological differences, Turgenev lamented the passing of Tiutchev in 1873. With Alexandra Smith’s ‘Nostalgic Visions and Mnemonic Figures: Tsvetaeva’s Allusions to Ivan Turgenev’s Goethian Outlook’ we follow Turgenev’s influence and legacy into the twentieth century. Smith seeks to compare and contrast the way that, ‘just as Turgenev’s prose poems lament the past in anticipation of death, Tsvetaeva’s autobiographical writing of the 1930s presents her as an impassionate flâneur who wishes to immortalize in the impressionistic Turgenevan manner some moments of the past.’ Tsvetaeva both refers to and quotes from Turgenev in her 1933 autobiographical story House at Old Pimen. In this nostalgic story Tsvetaeva sought to commemorate Russian aristocratic culture, as well as to lament pre-1917 revolutionary-minded youth, which she portrays in a way that is clearly inspired by Turgenev’s The Threshold. Two essays, by Dixon and Marsh, deal with productions of Turgenev’s most famous dramatic work, A Month in the Country, in Russia and in Britain respectively. Dixon’s ‘Anatolii Efros’ production of A Month in the Country: A Dialogue with Stanislavskii’ opens by reminding the reader of Anatolii Efros’ radically challenging 1960s productions of The Seagull and Three Sisters, which created critical uproar and were banned. In 1977, when Efros turned to Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, it seemed that Efros now sought to move from polemic to dialogue with his illustrious predecessor, Stanislavskii. Five years later, in 1982, Efros directed both A Month in the Country (as Natasha) and The Cherry Orchard in Japan. By setting The Cherry

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Orchard in a graveyard he demonstrated that the destruction of the orchard was already fact. Equally, in his version of A Month in the Country Natalia Petrovna’s world is completely destroyed; thereby, by implication, as Dixon argues, ‘hopes for a new future, effectively Efros’ present, were shown to have been an illusion.’ In other words, Dixon concludes, ‘in 1977 Efros drew his production and his dialogue with Stanislavskii to a close by echoing those sentiments and issuing a stark reminder of the effects in his own day of that loss.’ Cynthia Marsh continues discussion of the play in her ‘Post-war British Month(s) in the Country’. As Marsh indicates, Turgenev has been a presence on the British stage over the last six decades primarily through productions of A Month in the Country as well as an adaptation of Fathers and Children. The paper here is part of her ongoing research project which is devoted to the study of Russian theatre in the British repertoire in the period 1945-2005. In surveying reviews of this Turgenev play Marsh comes to the view that ‘the British stereotypical concept of the nineteenth-century Russian country estate as a locus for languorous boredom needs revision.’ This view fails to take account of Turgenev’s use of irony, or of the comedy which anticipates that of Chekhov. That said, Marsh’s ultimate conclusion is that we should not be too hasty in discerning Chekhovian elements in his predecessors: ‘Perhaps, above all, we need to learn to distinguish our Turgenev particularly from our Chekhov, and not to seek the Chekhovian in most other nineteenth-century Russian dramatists.’ Neil Cornwell continues the theme of ‘Turgenev abroad’ by comparing various accounts of first love and other matters in his ‘First Loves and Last Rites: From Ivan Turgenev to John Banville’. As he notes, it should come as no surprise that ‘first love’ is a commonplace in world culture, and he reminds us of such antecedents as Daphnis and Chloë, and Dante and Beatrice. Cornwell’s primary object in his discussion of works by Turgenev and others is comparative: he seeks to investigate the ‘first love’ phenomenon in Turgenev, before then investigating ‘what a succession of subsequent writers have done perhaps even with the examples of Turgenev, and / or of each other, just partly in mind.’ Cornwell considers Turgenev’s work itself, before turning to Beckett, Nabokov, Ian McEwan and John Banville, discussing ‘last rites’ as well as first love. As Cornwell notes, ‘many of the motifs and ingredients assembled across those works would appear to have been juggled and elaborated by the later writers here under discussion.’ In some cases the influence of Turgenev is apparent, while with others, such as Banville, it is yet to be confirmed, even if it seems highly likely. Tony Briggs extends our discussions of Turgenev’s impact on non-Russian culture in his fascinating discussion of the origins of the plot of Bizet’s Carmen in his ‘Did Carmen really come from Russia (with a little help from Turgenev)?’ The central argument that Briggs

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develops is that Pushkin’s Gypsies should be regarded as the ultimate source for the plot of Bizet’s most famous and popular opera, the libretto of which is generally thought to be much superior to that of his other operas. For Briggs the key questions to be confronted are: when did Mérimée begin learning Russian, and when did he first become acquainted with Pushkin’s work; was he familiar with The Gypsies, if only indirectly? In an intriguing forensic journey Briggs is able to make a very plausible case for claiming that Russia was the true source of Bizet’s most famous opera; it was the details that came from elsewhere. Moreover, Turgenev may well have been instrumental in this case of cultural transmission, in that Bizet was a close friend of Pauline Viardot, as well as of Turgenev, who, in turn, was, of course, ‘the strongest supporter Pushkin ever had outside Russia.’ Briggs concludes his account with the challenging question: ‘How long will it be before we can find a producer bold enough to place the following legend on the title page of his programme: “CARMEN: an Opera in Four Acts by Georges Bizet, Libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, after works by Prosper Mérimée and Alexander Pushkin?”’ The final group of five papers develop the broader themes of Russian literary culture, and, like those pertaining to Turgenev proper, primarily relate to the nineteenth century, although they, too, cross over into the twentieth. Michael Basker’s ‘“The Poetry of Moscow Existence”: An Analysis of N.M. Iazykov’s Spring Night’ offers a close textual study of Spring Night, by way of illustrating some much broader cultural and ideological questions. In his own age Iazykov was both widely praised and roundly criticized. However, he is no longer avidly read, nor regarded as especially controversial. Basker seeks to investigate the qualities that attracted readers and critics in the 1830s, by focusing on the example of a single poem which can be regarded as at least implicitly programmatic. In the end, though, Iazykov’s poetry of Moscow existence failed to engender a substantial body of accompanying poetry. Ill-health played its part in Iazykov’s rapid decline in productivity after 1831, but he also became increasingly concerned with the articulation of ‘ideas’, in the socially engaged sense used by Polevoi or Belinskii, ideas which, Basker argues, descended ‘into a Slavophilism more extreme and xenophobic than Kireevskii’s, in which the messianic, ideologically explicit image of the poet-prophet eclipsed that of the poet-dreamer with his gypsy Muse.’ Derek Offord continues our exploration of cultural and ideological debates in the period which shaped Turgenev’s thinking in his ‘Worshipping the Golden Calf: the Intelligentsia’s Conception of the Bourgeois World in the Age of Nicholas’. Offord begins his argument with reference to the list of qualities Herzen and Annenkov adduced in their recollections of the ‘remarkable decade’. In the words of Isaiah

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Berlin, ‘never in their lives had they again found anywhere a society so civilized and gay and free, so enlightened, spontaneous, and agreeable, so sincere, so intelligent, so gifted and attractive in every way’. Offord notes that other attributes could easily be added to this list, but his main concern in the present piece is to investigate ‘a trait that has been less remarked upon. It is the tendency of the intelligentsia to invest itself with an aura of what might most accurately be called “unmercenariness” (ɛɟɫɤɨɪɵɫɬɢɟ).’ This will form the central aim of his paper which is ‘to examine the early stages of the attempt by members of the Russian intelligentsia to represent themselves as belonging, by virtue of their unmercenariness, to a culture that was a polar opposite of the culture of their nation’s major Western competitors (that is to say, principally France and England).’ After a thorough exploration of the key figures and debates of the period, Offord concludes that, at the birth of the intelligentsia, a general concept of disinterested service replaced honour as the chief form of symbolic capital among Russian thinkers. The intelligent, that is, ‘came to regard disapproval of the Western bourgeois world not only as an important part of discourse about Russian national identity but also as a touchstone of a civilized outlook, an aspect of his own personal identity.’ Charles Ellis takes us on to the heart of the ‘Turgenev period’ with his investigation of Tolstoi, and in particular, War and Peace, in his ‘Tolstoi: Great Men and the Mathematical Mechanics of History ’. As Ellis observes, Tolstoi makes frequent use (in the historical essays) of models and metaphors drawn from mathematics. Ellis’ project is to examine how effective and illuminating they are. For Ellis the central problem for Tolstoi may be summarized as follows: ‘in view of the immense quantity and diversity of the data that make up the raw material for historical writing, how, if at all, is the writer of history to set about identifying any systematic forces at work within history, any laws of history?’ For Ellis, and perhaps for all us, these are very important questions which he illuminates and extends to other figures both real and fictitious, including Napoleon, Raskolnikov, and the perpetrators of 9/11. Ellis concludes: ‘Tolstoi still speaks with a clarity that might encourage us to participate in the particular bit of history we accidentally inhabit in a way that is cut down to human size, more modest and less in thrall to any strident airy philosophical abstractions.’ Moving beyond Turgenev’s lifetime and into the fin de siècle period we come to Ruth Coates’ ‘Mystical Union in the Philosophy of Vladimir Solovev’. She begins with the bold and illuminating claim: ‘The union of God and man is, in a sense, Solovev’s only theme, and to write about it could be construed as an exercise in synecdoche.’ Despite this ironic disclaimer, Coates then proceeds to investigate precisely this union, considering three primary contexts: Platonic philosophy, Greek patristic theology, and esoteric thought systems of the gnostic type.

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Coates argues that in the first, ‘philosophical’, phase, Solovev explored a concept of mystical union as intellectual contemplation that is Platonist; in the second, ‘theocratic’, phase, the Eastern Christian concept of deification shaped his thinking, whilst in the final, ‘theurgic’, phase, Solovev was dominated by an essentially gnostic sensibility. Coates contends that, while Solovev may have intended his philosophy of allunity - ɜɫɟɟɞɢɧɫɬɜɨ - to represent a synthesis of the religious truths found in all traditions, by failing to work consistently within any one tradition, he compromises them all, and this is especially true of the theological tradition of his native Orthodoxy. Indeed, Coates comes to the view that ‘From a Christian (Orthodox) theological point of view, especially in his latter years, Solovev crosses the line between synergy partnership with God in his redemptive work - and the wrong kind of mystical union: identification with the divinity.’ Robert Porter’s ‘The Paradoxes of Parody: Notes on the Art of Mikhail Zoshchenko and Evgenii Popov’ brings us right up to date, by taking us definitively into Russian culture of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. As Porter observes, towards and immediately after the end of the Soviet period, parody became one of the key forms of discourse. This, Porter continues, should not surprise us, as ‘public life under Brezhnev had, at least in the eyes of many intellectuals, itself become a parody’. But there were also more literary reasons at the back of the parodic urge and this is what he investigates in the work of Zoshchenko and Evgenii Popov. His study leads him to find several paradoxes in the use of parody. Firstly, we may find actual affection and admiration; secondly, parody is ultimately timeless; and thirdly, while parody may depend on a familiarity on the part of the reader with the realia of the context, the most successful parodies will take on a life of their own. Parody may also be timeless. As Porter notes, and this takes us back to the main period studied in the present volume, ‘today’s problems are frighteningly similar to those faced by Turgenev’s, Dostoevskii’s and Chekhov’s characters.’ We began this Introduction by wondering whether Turgenev is read any more, whether he can still speak ‘urgently’ to us, and whether, more generally, nineteenth-century literature is going out of fashion. As Porter suggests, Russian fiction of the late twentieth century shares concerns which would have been recognized by Turgenev and others of his age, and, ipso facto, what animated that work is most certainly of interest and relevance in the twenty-first century. It is to be hoped, therefore, that the essays in this volume, devoted to Turgenev and others, and in honour of Richard Peace, will leave no-one wondering as to the validity of the study of literary culture.

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NOTES 1. Quoted in Frank F. Seeley, Turgenev, a Reading of His Fiction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 1. This quotation is taken from A. Dall’Aglio, ‘“Andrei Kolosov”, opera di maturità’, Annali del’Istituto Universitario Orientale (sezione slava), Naples, 1969, p. 167. 2. See Henry Gifford, ‘Turgenev’ in John Fennell, ed., Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature. Studies of Ten Russian Writers, Faber and Faber, London, 1973, pp. 143-64 (164). 3. Seeley, p. 32. 4. See The Novels of Turgenev: Symbols and Emblems, electronic publication, 2002, at http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~rurap/novelsof.htm 5. Remarks taken from a personal communication. 6. The works in question are, in chronological order of first publication, Richard Freeborn, Turgenev: the Novelist’s Novelist, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1960; Marina Ledkovsky, The Other Turgenev: From Romanticism to Symbolism, Jal-verlag, Würzburg, 1973; Eva Kagan-Kans, Hamlet and Don Quixote: Turgenev’s Ambivalent Vision, Mouton, The Hague, Paris, 1975; Victor Ripp, Turgenev’s Russia From ‘Notes of A Hunter’ to ‘Fathers and Sons’, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1980; Patrick Waddington, Turgenev and England, Macmillan, London and Basingstoke, 1980; Leonard Schapiro: Turgenev. His Life and Times, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1982; Jane T. Costlow, Worlds Within Worlds. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1990; Frank F. Seeley, Turgenev. A Reading of His Fiction, Cambridge University Press, 1991; Elizabeth Cheresh Allen, Beyond Realism. Turgenev’s Poetics of Secular Salvation, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1992. 7. See Ripp, p. 78. 8. See Seeley, p. 31. 9. Allen, p. 2. 10. See Isaiah Berlin, ‘Fathers and Children’ in Russian Thinkers, edited by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly, with an Introduction by Aileen Kelly, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1978, pp. 261-305 (267). 11. Quoted in Allen, p. 2. 12. Quoted in Henry James, ‘Ivan Turgenev’ in Leon Edel, ed., Henry James. Literary Criticism, The Library of America, New York, 1984, pp. 968-1033. 13. Ibid., p. 1029. 14. Ibid., p. 968.

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15. Waddington, p. 290. 16. See James Woodward, Turgenev’s ‘Fathers and Sons’, Critical Studies in Russian Literature, Bristol Classical Press, London, 1996, p. v. 17. Gifford, p. 163. 18. Seeley, p. 3. 19. Ibid., p. 4. 20. Berlin, p. 263. Richard Peace, op. cit., also compares Turgenev with his contemporary ‘giants’, albeit in different terms: ‘It is customary to see two lines of development in Russian literature: that initiated by Gogol, which leads to the Natural School and to writers like Dostoevsky; and the line stemming from Pushkin which was further developed by Tolstoy and even by Turgenev himself. Yet Turgenev has a claim to be considered an initiator in his own right.’ 21. Seeley, p. 333. 22. Schapiro, p. xi. 23. Costlow, p. 138. 24. See Allen, p. 14. 25. Ibid., pp. 3-4. 26. See Ledkovsky, p. 137. 27. Ibid., p. 9. 28. See Kagan-Kans, p. 7. 29. Seeley, p. 1. 30. For a discussion of this point, see Allen, pp. 13 ff. She also makes the point, pp. 36 ff., that Turgenev is not, in fact, a classic Realist. 31. Quoted in Ripp, p. 48. 32. Ledkovsky, p. 17. 33. Costlow, p. 3. 34. See Allen, p. 62. 35. See Kagan-Kans, p. 7.

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36. Ibid., p. 142. In turn, Ripp, p. 108, has noted the great sadness of his endings. 37. Quoted in Seeley, p. 2. 38. Allen, p. 218. 39. Berlin’s phrase, p. 266. 40. Seeley, pp. 6 and 12. 41. Berlin, p. 267. Berlin continues: ‘Whenever from weakness, or love of ease, or craving for a quiet life, or sheer amiability of character, Turgenev felt tempted to abandon the struggle for individual liberty or common decency and to come to terms with the enemy, it may well have been the stern and moving image of Belinsky that, like an icon, at all times stood in his way and called him back to the sacred task.’ While Berlin’s remarks are avowedly speculative, they do seem to encapsulate the immense influence the radical critic had on the ‘softer’, and more liberal writer. 42. See Gifford, p. 144. 43. See Ripp, p. 31. 44. For this point and a more general discussion of Turgenev’s artistic vision see Joe Andrew, Writers and Society in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century, Macmillan, Houndmills, 1982, pp. 10-11 and 13. 45. See Costlow, p. 3. 46. See Woodward, p, vi. 47. See Allen, pp. 51, 52, 68 and 69. 48. Ibid., p. 55. 49. Ibid., p. 61. There was certainly a strong autobiographical underpinning for this melancholy world-view: Pauline Viardot declared him‘the saddest of men’ (quoted in Seeley, p. 30.) 50. Allen, p. 4. 51. Costlow, p. 9. 52. Seeley, p. 331. 53. Costlow, p. 9. 54. Ibid., p. 138.

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55. Berlin, p. 263. Turgenev himself saw things much in these terms. In 1877 he noted: ‘I think that the direction of my path in literature was defined by that milieu of serfdom, in which I spent all my youth, and which roused the strongest hatred in me’. (Quoted in Peace, op. cit.). 56. See, for example, Eric de Haard, ‘Verse Insertions and Prosimetrum in Pushkin’s Works’ in Two Hundred Years of Pushkin, III, Pushkin’s Legacy, Robert Reid and Joe Andrew, eds, Rodopi, Amsterdam-New York, 2004, pp. 73-88. 57. See, for example, see Boris Christa, ‘Costume and Communication in The Cherry Orchard’, Essays in Poetics, XXX, 2005, pp. 53-9.

Death and the Maiden: Narrative, Space, Gender and Identity in Asia Joe Andrew

The charm of Asya, the girl and the story, is in their enigmatic quality. As actress, the heroine confronts the narrator and following him, the reader with a series of riddles ... The plot consists almost wholly of a gradual answering of these riddles[.]1 Preamble Thus begins one of the most substantial studies of Turgenev’s Asia to date. As O’Toole makes very plain throughout his excellent discussion of the tale, identity is a key element for our understanding of the heroine in particular, and of the work more generally. More broadly, O’Toole goes on to suggest that, as is often the case in Turgenev, ‘the focus is on character rather than on event’.2 The purpose of the present paper is to attempt to take on the work of O’Toole (and others), to investigate the apparent riddle incarnate that is Asia. Following O’Toole, I too will want to say a great deal about character, especially that of the eponymous heroine. In my reading, however, ‘event’ (or plot) will also be important, as will the spatiotemporal elements of the work, as suggested by my title. Indeed, I begin with a discussion of the setting of the story, before examining in turn the character of the narrator / ‘hero’, N.N., issues of narrative, male / female relationships, images of women, the character and roles of the ‘enigmatic’ Asia, before concluding with what I see as the central organizing principle of the work, the relationships between men, especially that between N.N. and the heroine’s half-brother, Gagin. Setting The semiotic function of space is increasingly being recognized as having considerable importance for our understanding of the ‘meaning’ of fiction.3 Equally, from a feminist perspective, this recognition is seen to have specific resonances at particular epochs and within particular works. In other words, an examination of the constraints, and opportunities, afforded by certain spaces, or chronotopes, helps to illuminate the ways in which women were ‘determined’ to certain destinies at given moments. Let us begin with some general considerations of the semiotics of space. In his ground-breaking essay on the subject, ‘The Forms of

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Time and the Chronotopos in the Novel’,4 Mikhail Bakhtin sees the chronotope as central to the whole semiotic organization of the text: ‘They are the organizational centers of the basic plot events of the novel. The knots of the plot are tied and untied in the chronotopos. We may say without reservation that they have a basic plot-forming significance’.5 In other words, it is in the chronotope that the plot is developed and advanced, and this seems to me to be the case for Asia. Moreover, Bakhtin goes on to argue, one of the chronotopes is comprehensive or dominant, and this too is true for the present work. Indeed, when we look at the opening of the story, Turgenev (or rather his narrator, N.N.) seems almost deliberately to emphasize the interconnections of the spatial amd temporal co-ordinates, almost as if he is announcing that the work will be organized on chrontopic principles, avant la lettre. The first six lines contain two time expressions (‘I was then about 25’; ‘affairs of long passed years’), as well as three spatial indicators: ‘I had just broken free and had gone abroad’; ‘to look at God’s world’ (71).6 After some rather typically vacuous general reflections about himself and about life, this ‘cliché-monger’7 drags himself back to the narrative a little later, and again stresses the intersection of time and place: ‘And so, about 25 years ago I was living in the small German town of Z., on the left bank of the Rhine’ (72). As with the other key Turgenevan povesti which deal with a middle-aged man recounting his tale of love found and lost, First Love and Spring Torrents, Turgenev creates the chronotope of ‘far away and long ago’, to emphasize the theme of nostalgic, erotic reverie.8 The opening pages of Asia witness another key use of chronotopic organization. N.N. (or more likely this time, Turgenev, as it were, overwriting him) seeks to convey the intensity of sensory impression conveyed by a scene experienced all those years before. The first of these occurs as he strives to sum up his wonderment at the summer scene in Z.: The cock on the high Gothic bell-tower gleamed a pale gold; the wavelets on the black gloss of the river were suffused with the same gold ... the vines mysteriously poked their curly tendrils from behind stone walls; ... the limes smelled so sweetly that one’s breast breathed more and more deeply (72-3). This single sentence in fact runs on for 14 lines as time seems to condense in this place to give a heightened reality, and all the senses are appealed to: the reader is invited to see, to hear, to smell. The same effect is created throughout chapter two, first as N.N. espies the Gagins’ house on top of the hill above the vineyard, and, especially, as the three of them sit outside long into the night: ‘We chatted for a couple of hours. The daylight had long since been extinguished, and the evening, at first fiery,

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then clear and crimson, then pale and blurred, quietly melted and flowed into night, while our conversation continued, peaceful and gentle, like the air around us’ (76). This intense lyricism is not simply for poetic effect, however. Firstly, the narrative creates a clear and explicit link between the experienced outer scene with the inner sensations of the characters (or at least N.N.), to the extent that there seems to be no separation between the man and his milieu. Towards the end of this wondrous first evening of N.N.’s relationship with Gagin and Asia, he crosses the Rhine, and looks back: As if in farewell the sounds of the old Lanner waltz drifted towards me. Gagin was right: I felt that all the strings of my heart trembled in response to these ingratiating refrains. I set off for home across the darkened fields, slowly breathing in the fragrant air, and returned to my room melting with the sweet languor of imprecise and endless expectations (ibid.). This fusion between man and nature leads on to the second point made by this sense of heightened reality, of condensed time in these descriptions. Implicitly at least, in meeting the Gagins, and entering their enchanted world, N.N. has entered the timeless space of the idyll, a version of the eternal bliss of Eden. Similarly, it should be noted that virtually all of the these opening scenes, and most of the key scenes later on, before the climactic tryst chez Frau Louise, take place outside, again reinforcing the Edenic topos. As already noted, the first evening at the Gagins’ house is spent outside. The next day Gagin and N.N. discuss their vague plans sitting outside N.N.’s house, in a ‘little garden’ (79) - a diminished Eden, perhaps. Later that day all three visit the ruins of the mediaeval castle, while Gagin will recount the tale of Asia’s traumatic childhood when the two men are sitting on a bench overlooking the Rhine. N.N.’s first proper conversation with Asia will also take place in the ‘lap of nature’, as they stroll through the vineyard below the house. Turgenev adds another layer of symbolism to these evocations of the primaeval idyll in the gardens of Eden. As O’Toole has noted: ‘the nearby ferry across the Rhine is, as it were, the gateway from N.N.’s real world in Z. to the enchanted kingdom where Asya and her brother are staying’.9 Certainly, the opening description of their ‘little white house’ (76) on top of the hill above the vineyard does indeed suggest a fairy-tale castle (and this precise location and image of the house are reiterated several times), while the magical, fantastic elements of the scene are made more explicit when night falls. As the moon shines down on the Rhine ‘even the wine in our glasses gleamed with a mysterious glow’ (78). The dying lanterns lit by the students give the trees a ‘fantastic appearance’ (ibid.).

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As the narrative turns to its dark denouement, however, the delightful fairy-tale house is replaced by images from a much more sinister kind of supernatural tradition. Contrasted with the idyllic enchantment of the little white house on top of the hill is the eerie dwelling of the witch-like Frau Louise, buried in the dark, narrow lanes down in Z.10 The motif of ‘descent into the underworld’ is suggested as they make their way from the Gagins’ house to find Asia who is visiting the old German woman: ‘We went down into the town and, turning into a crooked little lane, stopped in front of the house’ (84). The description of the house which then follows is almost parodic in its evocation of the mood of the brothers Grimm: its upper floors jutting out more than the lower, its thick columns and roof ‘in the shape of a beak’ all make the house resemble a ‘hunchbacked bird’ (ibid.). This evocation of the Gothick tradition intensifies as the story races towards its fateful conclusion. Asia daringly asks for an assignation with N.N., and suggests the chapel near the ruins. This doom-laden venue is then replaced by the tryst chez Frau Louise: this will be the first significant encounter that does not take place out of doors. Turgenev goes further by manipulating reality. Although the meeting takes place at about 5.30 on a July afternoon, as N.N approaches the house we read: ‘The evening shadows were already suffusing the air, and the narrow strip of sky above the dark street turned crimson with the glow of sunset’ (111).11 Once N.N. gets inside, the contrastive switch away from Edenic nature is even more marked. He notes: ‘I crossed the threshold and found myself in complete darkness’ (ibid.). That N.N. should commence the most climactic scene of his narrative with this precise formulation is in itself significant as, if there is a dominant chronotope in Asia, then it is that of the ‘threshold’, as we may now discuss. The Threshold For Bakhtin, this is the chronotope of ‘crisis and of a turning point in life’.12 He finds it to be of especial significance in Dostoevskii. Bakhtin goes on to remark that, in the writer most frequently associated with his work, the chronotope of the threshold, and the related chronotopes ‘of the staircase, lobby and corridor’, as well as those which are an extension of them, such as the street and square, are ‘places where events take place determining entire human lives - crises, falls, resurrections, rebirths, revelations, decisions’. Bakhtin further suggests that the quality of time in this chronotope is ‘an instant’.13 In other words, these are places where snap decisions take place which will change the entire future destiny of the character concerned. Much of this may be applied to Asia, with the proviso that, as N.N. is a quintessentially ‘Hamletic’

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personality (a point to which I shall return) he signally fails to make the snap decisions required of him. Much of N.N.’s plot is structured around and by threshold moments. He first encounters Gagin and Asia on the street, one of the homologies of the threshold for Bakhtin. That this will be a potentially ‘determining’ moment where decisions affecting whole lives might be taken is reinforced by the use of ‘suddenly’ (‘ɜɞɪɭɝ’) as N.N. hears Gagin’s voice, and begins to form the relationships that will, indeed, change the direction of his life. With them he crosses the Rhine, as he will so many times later on, and the river is certainly imaged as a threshold (or ‘gateway’ to use O’Toole’s term) between two worlds, two ways of being. That the river is used in this way, to evoke ancient symbolism is also underlined by the introduction of the Charon-like boatman who ferries N.N. to and fro.14 It is therefore deeply significant that, after real intimacy begins between N.N. and Asia, during their ecstatic ‘winged’ waltzing at the end of chapter nine, N.N. asks the boatman to let the ferry float down the river rather than taking him straight across. Furthermore, this very short chapter ends with N.N. still floating on downstream, suggesting that, when given the opportunity to really come to terms with the new Asia he has evoked, he fails this test, and does not cross the threshold to a new life. Equally, Turgenev underscores his use of the threshold as a structuring device by having N.N. first symbolically cross the boundary at the opening of chapter 15 (‘At the appointed hour I crossed the Rhine’, [109]), before making the symbolism explicit in the already quoted ‘I crossed the threshold’ (111). Part of the topology of the threshold in Asia is the heroine herself. On the very first night, as Gagin accompanies N.N. down to the ferry, Asia rushes past them, and then ‘We found Asia by the bank’ (78 my italics). The next day they all visit the picturesque ruins, and once more Asia has rushed on ahead, and she is to be found on a jutting-out piece of wall ‘above a precipice’ (80).15 In some sense this is where Asia is throughout the tale, and this is also what she comes to represent for N.N. Repeatedly, Turgenev reminds the reader that Asia is a character on the edge, at the limen of N.N.’s experience. Thus it is again deeply expressive, and surely no accident that immediately after Gagin has told N.N. of Asia’s past, when the two men return to the Gagins’ house, ‘Asia met us on the very threshold of the house’ (97 - my italics). And, at the fateful tryst Asia, as so often throughout the narrative, is sitting ‘by the window’ (111). As we know, N.N. may cross the threshold in a literal sense to come to this rendez-vous - indeed, he does so twice - but he is not able to do so in the symbolic sense. Why this is so we may now examine through a consideration of his character and what he represents.

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N.N. It has to be said that, from Chernyshevskii’s devastating trashing of N.N. (and of his creator, and the generation of liberals Turgenev was said to represent) in his 1858 review, ‘The Russian Man at a Rendez-Vous’, N.N. has had a rather poor press. More recently, admittedly, he has been seen merely, and more accurately, as a perhaps extreme representative of the ‘superfluous man’, of the Russian hero who fails the test of love. Sander Brouwer, for example, referring specifically to Chernyshevskii’s review, has argued that: we observe the impossibility for the male protagonist, often the carrier of imported values, to engage in some practical activity, to develop into a useful member of society or further the interest of his native culture in the widest sense, along with his failure to marry the young woman, who, as a rule, is a representative of that native culture.16 In this context we should begin the present discussion by saying that N.N.’s account of his romantic fling in the summer of around 1838 has to be adjudged a complete failure, in the sense that perhaps his primary objective in committing it to paper for his audience to read was to justify his behaviour, and to show himself as a fine fellow. (Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of studying Asia is to attempt to discern the ‘reality’ beneath N.N. self-important ‘spinning’ of it.) From the opening lines every word sees N.N. seeking to present himself in a particular light. Each word in its tone, register and suggestiveness seeks to re-create his youthful persona as a free spirit who had gone abroad simply to experience life to the full. The whole story, therefore, is actually based around his lack of self-knowledge, the almost complete absence of insight, whether into himself, or, perhaps even more crucially, the people he meets. The opening of the second paragraph provides a good example of the way N.N. seeks to show himself: ‘I was travelling without any aim, without plans; I stopped wherever I pleased, and moved on as soon as I felt the desire to see new faces’ (71). That he is not at all this kind of liberated, independent being soon becomes apparent, especially in his inability to countenance an honest relationship with Asia, or, in the end, Gagin. More particularly, and especially in the opening chapters, our hero strives to don the clothes of the ‘sentimental traveller’, a kind of Sternean ‘man of feeling’. Thus, the intense descriptions of Z. and of the sights and sounds of the student festival quoted above emphasize the sensory, even sensual dimension of his experiences. At the same time, however, what really emerges is his self-obsession and his self-

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importance. We see this first of all in what will be a leitmotif of the opening chapters, his (alleged) affair of the heart with a German widow. He introduces this motif in the following pompous terms: ‘I had just been wounded in the heart by a certain young widow I had encountered while taking the waters’ (72). Similarly, the day after he had first met Gagin, we read that ‘I entrusted to him the secret of my unhappy love’ (79). All his early dealings with Asia are shot through with his pomposity, congratulating her for reading, but disapproving of her choice. This trait returns with a vengeance at the doom-laden tryst where he seeks to maintain his composure by addressing her, ludicrously, as ‘Anna Nikolaevna’ (111). His personality also, of course, informs and infects the way he tells his story. This is not merely about his being a ‘cliché-monger’. The reader of Asia, in fact, has a real problem because of the way N.N. seems to perceive the world, and to interpret it for us. That is, he thinks in stereotypes, and tends to present Asia in particular in this way, which has serious consequences for our understanding of her. We see this tendency on a number of occasions, and in different ways. On only the second day of their acquaintance, when he notes Asia behaving, apparently, differently from before, he notes sagely ‘She obviously (ɹɜɧɨ) wanted to play a new role in front of me’ (83). In fact, we the readers cannot know whether this is true or not. It is equally plausible that this is simply a reflection of N.N.’s mind-set, which sees reality largely in relation to himself.17 As he lies in bed at the end of this day he reflects: ‘She is made just like the little Raphael Galatea in the Farnesino’ (85). As we shall see in our subsequent discussion of Asia she is bedevilled and weighed down by the large number of symbols and images attached to her by N.N. As O’Toole puts it ‘she is always having roles thrust upon her. The reader’s perception of Asya is constantly being framed by some social or literary role’.18 And it is, of course, N.N. who is ‘guilty’ of this narratological overdetermination. Moreover, he seems to have reconstructed his story as, precisely, a narrative, remarking towards the end: ‘Had I really wanted such a denouement (ɪɚɡɜɹɡɤɚ)?’ (115 - my italics). Then when he learns that Asia and Gagin have fled he tells us ‘It was impossible to accept this blow, to come to terms with such a denouement’ (118). It is, in fact, this ‘denouement’ which especially sees N.N. unmasked as a coward and a ‘Hamlet’. When offered the chance to find meaning, and to become the hero of his own story, he baulks, because, as he asks himself, how could he possibly ‘marry a seventeen-year-old girl with her kind of character’ (109), and one who, moreover, ‘frightened’ (110) him? In this sense, Chernyshevskii was surely right in castigating N.N. for his pusillanimous behaviour at the ‘rendez-vous’,19 during which he actually blames Asia for the mess they find themselves in, and then becomes abusive and aggressive when she meekly protests. Furthermore, after he has forced her to flee in floods of tears he then

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decides he does love her, only to discover that, to his bitter regret, he has lost her forever. In this sense, N.N. is the quintessential Hamlet of Turgenev’s fictional world. Indeed, his very un-namedness makes him a representative type.20 Perhaps his principal problem, however, is not his cowardice or his Hamletic vacillation (to love or not to love). As we see, from beginning to end N.N. shares with the early Dostoevskian hero (perhaps paradoxically in view of the real-life relationship between the two writers) an intense solipsism, whereby he views all others’ behaviours and relationships in terms of himself. (And it is for this reason as well that he is such an unreliable narrator.) As he says himself near the beginning ‘I sought solitude’ (72), and he speaks more truly than he realizes, as, like Dostoevskii’s Dreamer in White Nights, he is trapped in a terrible solipsism both in the present of the story, and in the frame of the latter-day recollection of the events.21 This is reflected in his very style of narration. For example, in the first 38 lines of the story there are 25 instances of the first-person pronoun. So too towards the end, as he descends into self-pity at the (self-inflicted) loss of Asia: in the penultimate paragraph of the penultimate chapter, there are 16 further instances of the first person pronoun in a mere 20 lines. The whole of the last chapter, especially the final paragraph, are little more than a self-pitying lament for his lost youth, from the vantagepoint of his lonely middle-age. In this regard, Asia as a whole is structured on very similar lines to White Nights. As O’Toole wittily suggests ‘If the question posed by the beginning is ‘Asya?’, by the end it has become ‘A ya’ (‘And I’).22 Thus it is that N.N. begins his tale by seeking to show what a fine fellow he is, but by the end has, even if inadvertently, wrecked his own reputation. Equally, if he is a failure ‘as a man’, then this is also true narratologically, as we may now see from a consideration of plot issues. Plot Structures As in other ways, Asia is deceptively simple. It appears to be a single plot based on very traditional lines, and one that is seemingly repeated over and over again throughout Turgenev’s oeuvre. In fact, however, there are many different ways to explore the narrative lines of this work. As our epigraph notes: ‘The plot consists almost wholly of a gradual answering of ... riddles’. This may be something of an overstatement, but, certainly, the enigma that is Asia is a central driver of the story-line, as is the apparently ambiguous status of Gagin’s and Asia’s relationship. Accordingly, it is significant that Gagin’s story about Asia’s past, which seemingly resolves the riddle of her peculiar behaviour, comes exactly halfway through. As N.N. observes after hearing this story ‘all had become clear to me’ (98).

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As O’Toole also suggests: ‘At the most abstract actantial level the story appears to be a quest, with N.N. as Seeker, Asya as the sought Object, and Gagin as Mediator’. (He then goes on to identify at least 11 homologies for this basic schema.)23 This plot type is apparent from the very first page. As we have already noted, N.N. characterizes his younger self as someone who has left home, and is then constantly on the move without plans or specific aims: clearly he is looking for something, however inchoate his goal may be. Another side of his quest also emerges early on. He informs the reader that it is precisely people that he seeks out (rather than places), and that ‘I examined them [people] with a kind of joyous, insatiable curiosity’ (72 - my italics). This insatiability is soon directed to his pursuit of Asia, first to ‘unlock’ the riddle of her existence, but then also to possess her. It could be said that the implied audience that listens to N.N.’s story (and the reader) is also invited to join this erotic quest. In this sense Asia is a descendant of works like Bela and, ultimately, Poor Liza. The reader may begin reading such works thinking that, like Jane Eyre, perhaps, they are stories of the lives of the eponymous heroines. In one sense Liza, Bela, and Asia are their biographies. A rather more accurate paradigm, however, is to see these three young women (and they are all, of course, young) not as subjects, but as objects. The implied male reader of all these works reads them in his quest also to possess ‘the female character ... full of enigmatic, mysterious, enticing beauty’,24 in parallel to the hero’s quest so to do. (Of course, in this regard, as well, N.N., unlike Pechorin, will fail to be a hero, by failing in his quest for the heroine.) Turning now to the actual narrative structure we find that it fits the classical, five-part model of exposition-complication-peripeteiadenouement-resolution quite well, although not exactly. In a certain sense, in fact, we may regard Asia as three stories in one. Stage One concerns ‘Asia the enigma’. This comes to the end, roughly speaking at the end of chapter eight, wherein Gagin tells N.N. of Asia’s past. Stage Two could be summarized as ‘the love-lorn heroine’, or the development of the relationship between Asia and N.N., which comes to an abrupt end in chapter 16, when Asia flees from Frau Louise’s house. (This phase of the story is the one that most closely resembles that of Poor Liza, inasmuch as both deal with the gullible heroine taking the tokens of love from the feckless hero too seriously). The final stage concerns N.N.’s anguish and his futile pursuit (a second, even more doomed quest) of Asia to Cologne and London. In more structural terms the story begins with a prologue, of N.N. giving the reader a brief account of what has brought him to Germany. The transition to the exposition is clearly marked by the phrase ‘One evening’ (73), and a switch in aspect from iterative imperfectives to perfectives. The exposition and complication are fused in the process of N.N. getting to know Gagin and Asia, and culminates in the first

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peripeteia, the as always crucial chapter eight, which, as we recall, ends at the halfway mark of the story. Thus it is that the episode of two men discussing and disposing of the destiny of the young woman lies at the very heart of the narrative, a structural summation of one of the key aspects of the story. The first turning point then hinges on this discussion, whereby N.N. learns the secret of the riddle, and, ipso facto, is given the go-ahead to begin his pursuit of the erotic object. That it is a crucial turning-point is, as it were, ‘announced’, with N.N. remarking ‘I felt light at heart after Gagin’s story’ (97). (We might note again N.N.’s use of language here. ‘Story’ [‘ɪɚɫɫɤɚɡ’] once more points to his tendency to try to reconstruct his own life as a dramatic narrative, of which he is the not very worthy hero. It also implies, however, that all he tells us may or may not be true!) That all has changed as a result of this ‘story’ is marked by several new events. Having previously felt free to pass judgement on Asia’s allegedly strange behaviour, he now declares that ‘I began to feel very sorry for her’ (98). For the first time they go walking together, and for the very first time they have a ‘proper’ conversation, and, therefore, the reader for the very first time has from the title character more than a few phrases and strange gestures. Things in fact develop very rapidly, as their walk leads to an increasingly intimate discussion, which, in turn, leads to their running back to Asia’s little white house to dance an also increasingly intimate waltz (the tango of its day), to the accompaniment of Gagin’s guitar. This too leads to what is, in effect, a second peripeteia: ‘Something soft and feminine / womanly [ɠɟɧɫɤɨɟ] suddenly emerged through her girlishly [ɞɟɜɢɱɟɫɤɢ] severe profile’ (101). In not very coded language the narrative here tells us that the heroine has crossed a threshold (‘suddenly’), and is no longer a ‘girl’, but a woman, or as Thomas Hardy was to put it, ‘maiden no more’.25 This change is also ‘announced’, as, the following day, N.N. reflects that ‘I felt that only since yesterday had I come to know her’ (102 - my italics). As already noted, the second story (‘the love-lorn heroine’) is now underway, and this reaches its climactic peripeteia in the tryst scene, which is also the main peripeteia of the whole story. The changes after this are, of course, very dramatic, and are even marked graphically, by having four very short chapters in three pages. This change in pace perhaps also suggests that all focus will be on action: the time for sentimental conversations and descriptions is over. We have now reached the denouement (‘ɪɚɡɜɹɡɤɚ’), one which N.N. cannot accept. In some senses then, the story is structured as a classical tragedy with tension building to a climax, after which is then dissipated. In other senses, however, Asia is not a tragic story. Neither the hero nor heroine dies, for example - not within the main time frame, at least.26 Moreover, almost from the very beginning, there are clear hints that the love affair between N.N. and Asia is not going to work out. As soon as he begins

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his tale, and repeatedly thereafter, the narrator tells us of his unhappy love affair with the widow. The tone is immediately set: love between a man and a woman does not lead to happiness. There are many equally gloomy harbingers which suggest the tale will not end happily - the ‘pierced’ Madonna, which is also mentioned several times in the course of the tale, betokens female suffering while the Lorelei also talks of love leading to tragedy (indeed death) for the female. As regards Asia herself we are told by the authoritative Gagin that love will end badly for her: in the course of his biography of her he remarks: ‘So far she has not grown fond of anyone, but there’ll be trouble [ɛɟɞɚ] if she does come to love someone’ (97). As we see, there are many ways to interrogate the various plotlines in Asia. Ultimately, however, the one that is perhaps the most productive and illuminating is that suggested by Iurii Lotman. In an article first published in 1973, ‘The Origins of Plot in the Light of Typology’, he establishes the following typology for one of the most universal of plot models: The elementary sequence of events in myth may be reduced to the chain: entry into enclosed space - exit from it ... Inasmuch as enclosed space may be interpreted as ‘cave’, ‘grave’, ‘house’, ‘woman’ (and correspondingly may be allotted the features of darkness, warmth, dampness) entry into it on various levels may be interpreted as ‘death’, ‘conception’, ‘return home’ and so on; moreover all these acts are thought of as mutually identical. Following death-conception, resurrection-rebirth are connected to the fact that birth is thought of not as an act of the appearance of a new personality which did not exist before, but rather as the renewal of one that already existed.27 Later in this same piece Lotman moves on to refine these definitions to even more elementary units, in regarding ‘death - sexual relations rebirth’ as ‘the most archaic mythological complex’.28 Asia conforms very closely to this ‘archaic’ typology. The opening lines lay down the basic trajectory for the ‘hero’. He leaves enclosed space for open space (‘I had only just broken free’ [71]), and then re-enters enclosed space again at the spa town. Here he engages in ‘sexual relations’ with the widow, but this proves to be unsuccessful, and so he is not reborn. This initial incident is paradigmatic, and sets the pattern for his abortive relationship with Asia, which will also lead to his not being successful sexually, and hence not being reborn. As Brouwer has it, he is the ‘bridegroom who does not come’. The story constantly repeats the pattern laid down by this paradigm, in that N.N. repeatedly crosses the Rhine to enter the

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‘enchanted kingdom’ in which Asia lives, and leaves it at the end of the day. The most intense form of this Lotmanian paradigm is, though, not on top of the hill in the little white house, but in the climactic scene at Frau Louise’s, where, indeed, other aspects of Lotman’s typology emerge even more clearly. As we know, by narrative sleight of hand, Turgenev has his hero enter the Stygian gloom of the ‘complete darkness’ of the house, which suggests both the ‘cave’ and ‘grave’29 of Lotman’s typology. The tiny room in which Asia awaits him repeats this image in an even more intensified form. It is here that he embraces her, but pulls out of this clinch when he recalls his promise to Gagin. Almost in so many words, then, Turgenev takes his would-be hero to the very moment of rebirth, only for him to withdraw at the crucial moment. As Asia tells him in her valedictory note, she could have been his, if only he had said a single word ... but N.N. fails the ‘test of love’ like virtually all Turgenevan heroes. In more typological terms he enters enclosed space, he dies, but does not have sexual relations, and so is not reborn. From first to last then, from the perfidious widow to willing Asia, N.N. fails in his relationships with women, and that was to be the story of his whole life, as we see from his lonely middle age at the end of the story. These failures are, though, merely part of a wider, fairly disastrous set of relationships between men and women conducted under the bitter aegis of patriarchy, as we may now see. Male / Female Relationships Let us first recall three important points, all illustrated by N.N.’s ‘relationship’ with the widow at the spa. From the story’s prologue the pattern of love leading to unhappiness, and female treachery, is set. Equally, we increasingly come to doubt whether any relationship ever ‘really’ existed between them, and this leads us to question many of the details of N.N.’s later narrative. More simply, how much of this story is simply male fantasy? Leaving these speculations aside, and giving N.N. some credence, we turn to the actual evidence of the narrative. From beginning to end Asia depicts a world of male domination and suppression of women. Thus, when N.N. first meets them (and, indeed, for much of the first half of the story), Gagin speaks for Asia - and, of course, it is he rather than she who speaks her life-story. When Asia ‘misbehaves’ by scrambling over the ruins, first Gagin wags his finger at her, then N.N. reproaches her for not taking enough care. Moreover, both men feel that it is quite in order to interpret her to each other. Both men also patronize her, Gagin treating his own sister as little more than a servant, N.N. calling her a ‘young girl’ (ɞɟɜɨɱɤɚ), both on more than one occasion. When she shows pleasure he notes that she ‘shrugged her shoulders, as children often do’ (98 - my emphasis). It might also be said that the

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whole narrative patronizes Asia. Following Poor Liza, Tatiana, Princess Mary and many others, Asia is shown to be gullible enough to fall in love with the first half-decent man she meets. Moreover, mimicking Tatiana, she shamelessly breaches decorum by writing to someone she hardly knows, suggesting a secret meeting, and, of course, shows herself very willing to give herself to this virtual stranger! More broadly, Asia does deal either openly or codedly with various aspects of erotic and sexual love. Again, following Lermontov’s novel, in particular, N.N. clearly finds female suffering arousing. It is, after all, after he has heard of her unconventional background that he begins to feel sorry for her - and only then does he really begin to find her attractive. This quasi-sadistic trait becomes more apparent in the tryst scene. When he encounters her in the darkened room she is in a state of near collapse, ‘like a frightened bird. She was breathing rapidly and was shaking all over’ (111). He takes her hand which is, of course ‘cold’. An awkward silence follows, and he continues: ‘I looked at her; there was something touchingly-helpless in her timid immobility ... My heart melted within me ... ’ (112 - my italics). When she willingly submits to his embraces, whispering ‘Yours ...’ he becomes visibly aroused. When he begins to regret having lost her, it is her voluntary offer of her virginity that he especially regrets. Again, the language is only thinly veiled: ‘ She was so close, she had come to me ... in complete innocence of her heart and feelings ... she had brought me her untouched youth’ (116 - my italics). As we may see, then, Asia’s fate is largely beyond her own control. When she does try to decide her own destiny she is brutally betrayed, by both her ‘lover’ and her brother. This is part of a more generally patriarchal depiction of women, as we may now see. Images of Women Apart from the title itself, the first image of women in the story is the German widow. As already discussed, she and her ‘relationship’ with the narrator establish several patterns which recur throughout. His invocation of her actually establishes another recurring leitmotif. From beginning to end the text is littered with allusions to other women, whether ‘real’ within the context of the story (such as Frau Louise), or symbolic, such as the Madonna or the Lorelei. Whether ‘real’ or allegorical, however, they emanate from the same misogynistic mind-set, as they all denote either female treachery and danger, or female suffering - and sometimes both! The widow is mentioned in the prologue, where we are told that she had ‘cruelly wounded’ (72) our hero. He tells us how he likes to wander around gazing at the broad majestic Rhine, dreaming of his ‘perfidious widow’ (73). At the end of the first day of his acquaintance with the Gagins, as he falls asleep, he realizes that the whole evening had

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passed without his once thinking of ‘my cruel beauty’, that is, La Belle Dame Sans Merci! While this leitmotif may be said to be motivated by N.N.’s story, and certainly by his psychology, much of the other imagery is seemingly more random and arbitrary, although, I would argue, actually very much part of a pattern. Thus, as he strolls around Z. on the June evening on which he will meet his new friends, he tells us that along its narrow streets, you might encounter ‘pretty fair-haired German girls’ (‘ɩɪɟɯɨɪɨɲɟɧɶɤɢɟ ɛɟɥɨɤɭɪɵɟ ɧɟɦɨɱɤɢ’ 72 - my italics). We should note here the use of the diminutives, not so much to be affectionate, perhaps, but to render these ‘girls’ more appealing. That this appeal is surely of a sexual nature soon emerges, when he tells us that some of these ‘girls’ would still be walking the streets late at night, a time he too liked to frequent these streets. Again, the suggestion is only very thinly coded. Soon another seemingly random note is added to the background melody. He notes that the man of sentiment would be so moved by the wonders of the natural world he would encounter in this environment, that the word ‘Gretchen’ would involuntarily escape his lips. As Nedzvetskii notes, Gretchen was ‘the unhappy and insane Margarita, the beloved of Goethe’s Faust [who] was for Turgenev’s contemporaries the most vivid symbol of a tragic love and life’.30 Female suffering is returned to almost immediately by another allegorical presence with which Asia will become intimately associated. N.N. loves to sit on a bench above the Rhine. By this bench is a ‘small statue of the Madonna with an almost childish face and with a red heart on her breast, pierced with swords’ (73).31 The association with Asia becomes more evident as it is on this very bench that Gagin tells N.N. her story, while it is mentioned for the last time as N.N. leaves in pursuit of the fleeing couple. Asia is also linked, even more explicitly, with another tragic female figure, the Lorelei, who, according to the legend, lured sailors to their death before committing suicide herself once she had fallen in love. Asia tells the narrator that she likes this ‘fairy-tale’ which she had learned from Frau Louise. That Asia might also have a watery death is also suggested by N.N.’s identification of her with Raphael’s Galatea, a water-nymph.32 The link between love and female suffering is further reinforced towards the end of the story. As N.N. has some time to kill after Asia has switched the venue for their rendez-vous, he calls in at a tavern, where he is served by the tear-stained Hannchen, weeping because her fiancé has gone for a soldier. Hannchen too is espied as N.N is leaving ... The widow, the German girls, Gretchen, the Madonna, Galatea, Hannchen and (we must assume), the Lorelei, all have one thing in common: like Asia they are young, and like Asia they are associated with suffering. With the obvious exception of the Madonna they are all

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closely linked with erotic fantasy. In Asia there are two women who are not young and sexual, but both emerge from another corner of the misogynistic mind. Frau Louise and the booth-keeper at the ruins are old and, ipso facto (virtually!), they are witches. The first of these two old women is, like Hannchen, a seemingly chance presence in the story, but is definitely part of the mosaic being created. Her glasses remind us of Grimm’s Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, while the implied short-sightedness may be conflated with symbolic blindness, an emblem of Baba Yaga, to move to the Russian folkloric tradition.33 If ‘witch’ is only implicit here, it is virtually explicit with the figure the booth-keeper prefigures, Frau Louise.34 When we first encounter her we read of her ‘toothless and semi-blind face’ (84), while Asia later tells N.N. that she has a ‘black cat with yellow eyes’ (99). Her physical attributes when she opens the door to her house for the tryst verge on the parodic: we are told of her ‘bony hand’, her ‘wrinkled face’, her ‘sickeningly cunning smile’, and ‘fallen-in cheeks’ (111). Given that she is the gate-keeper of Asia’s happiness, it is even less unexpected that her encounter with the hero will shortly end in disaster for all concerned. In our discussions so far, much has been said about Asia from a variety of angles. Let us now turn to a more direct consideration of this ‘completely Russian girl’ (85). Asia Asia is the first word of this work. As we have already seen, however, this does not mean that this will be her story; rather she will be the object of desire, of N.N., of the implied audience, and of the reader. The very form of her name, the very intimate (and unusual) diminutive form of Anna, suggests affection, but, ultimately, she will come to represent female desire as such, desire which patriarchy seeks to control, with only partial success. O’Toole notes that ‘The reader’s perception of Asya is constantly being framed by some social or literary role’,35 and we have already seen how these (Lorelei, the Madonna, and so on) operate in the text. To a certain extent, Asia is deliberately rendered an image, turned into art itself. As Costlow comments: ‘The loss of the beloved at the novella’s end transforms her into permanence’.36 The very first image we have of Asia is, indeed, highly pictorial. First N.N. gives a very brief description of Gagin who ‘was holding the arm of a girl of moderate height, wearing a straw hat which covered the entire upper half of her face’ (74). That this picture of Asia half hides her true appearance sets the ‘agenda’ for the whole story. After a brief conversation, the narrator offers a fuller description of Asia, the very precise detail of which is again very painterly:

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The girl ... seemed to me at first glance very good-looking. There was something particularly her own in the cast of her dark-skinned round face, with its small fine nose, almost childish little cheeks, and black, radiant eyes. She was gracefully built, but somehow not fully developed (75). Not only is this a pictorial image in its attention to detail; we note as well the frank appraisal of her physical attributes, as well as the infantilization of the young woman. When they go to the Gagins’ house we have the first of many images of Asia by a window, or in a doorway. This ‘framing-device’ again emphasizes the suggestion that, in some senses, Asia starts and ends as merely an image. If Asia is mere image, or even not so much a character, but a collection of projections of male fantasy (or ‘refractions of N.N.’s vision of her’, as O’Toole has it),37 what are the particular images, or roles attached to Asia by the three men who have created her identity, Gagin and N.N. as narrators, as well as their creator, Turgenev? The first point to be made is that psychological and other attributes given to Asia are extremely diverse, and some are mutually contradictory - another aspect of her portrayal that suggests she is more image / fantasy than a ‘real character’. Initially, and, indeed, for most of the first half of the story which bears her name, Asia is virtually mute. Thus, when they first meet and introduce themselves, Gagin speaks for Asia. When he suggests they go home, Asia silently nods. Although a few of her remarks are recorded, they amount to little, and only when Gagin has told N.N. her story does she, as it were, cease to be a mute statue, and come alive and start talking. As noted earlier, both N.N. and Gagin patronize Asia, and the near mutism ascribed to her can be seen as part of this tendency. So too is their depiction of her as a child. We have just seen this in N.N.’s description of her (‘childish little cheeks’), and, again, both men not infrequently ascribe her ‘strange’ behaviour to the fact that she is no more than an infant. When N.N., for example, notes that Asia ‘obviously wanted to play a new role’, Gagin looks at him, and shrugs his shoulders, as if to say: ‘She’s a child; be lenient’ (83). As we saw before, he calls her a ‘young girl’ on more than one occasion, even though she is 17. More than anything, however, the two men are clearly unable to understand this young woman, and ascribe to her a whole cluster of motifs which mark her off as utterly strange. She is changeable, unpredictable, unstable, even insane, and unknowable; untamed, like a wild animal. As Simone de Beauvoir puts it in a more general context, she is ‘The Other - she is passivity confronting activity, diversity that destroys unity, matter as opposed to form, disorder against order’.38 Asia, that is, follows a long line of women, going back to the Old

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Testament and other ancient cultures, down through to the present day, who are on the edge of culture, allied to nature and the irrational. Once again these attributes are especially marked in the first half of the story, before Asia’s behaviour is ‘clarified’ by Gagin’s narrative. There are a great number of instances where we see Asia scrambling ‘like a goat’ over ruins (81), or dashing about without rhyme or reason; laughing for no apparent reason; donning a series of different ‘vestimentary markers’39 to acquire new roles, almost as if she’s playing at dressing-up. Just as Gagin dismisses her as a child, so too, again more than once, he deems her ‘mad’ (ibid., 91 and 107), while N.N. says she has the ‘most changeable face I have ever seen’ (82), while later he calls her a ‘chameleon’ (87) - both an animal and unpredictable! When Gagin had first met her (when she was already ten years old!), she ‘was wild, nimble, and silent, like a little wild animal’ (92). Seven years later, both N.N. and Gagin - and therefore the reader - have much the same impression of her. Clearly, then, Asia represents something ‘other’ to these two men, both of whom present themselves to each other, and to the reader as sensible and reasonable. They are the norm, she is the aberration; they are civilized, she is wild; they represent reason, she is the irrational. They are men. She is a woman (or, more often, a girl).40 (And these binaries could no doubt be extended much further). On this level of analysis, Asia can be read as a fascinating investigation of femininity and masculinity - or, rather, femininity as viewed from the male point of view. Equally, the story also deals quite profoundly with issues of sexuality, as we touched upon earlier, in our discussion of relationships between men and women. Let us explore this a little further as we follow the trajectory whereby Asia is portrayed first as a virgin, who then becomes maiden no more - at least in N.N.’s fantasy life. There are, in fact, a number of ways in which Asia is portrayed as meek, and submissive, or as the ‘type’ of virginal heroine, again especially in the first half of the story. Thus, when Asia is behaving strangely at the ruins, her brother Gagin rebukes her and she immediately reacts in a way which over-determines her as the submissive, ultrafeminine heroine: ‘It was as if she were suddenly ashamed, she lowered her long lashes and meekly came and sat by us, as if she were guilty (82 my italics). This role immediately intensifies: ‘Here face went completely pale ... [she had] a sad expression ... She went completely quiet’ (ibid. my italics). This ‘ultra-feminine’ / ‘virginal’ behaviour and iconography intensify after Gagin has ‘briefed’ N.N. about Asia. Given what we later learn about the sharing of confidences between brother and sister, we may perhaps presume that Asia knows about this ‘briefing’. Indeed, the change from one set of descriptors to another is both immediate and ‘announced’, suggesting that Asia does indeed know what the two men have been talking about: ‘Asia met us on

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the very threshold of the house; I again expected laughter; but she came out to meet us all pale, silent, looking down’ (97 - my italics). Once the relationship with N.N. develops Asia begins to display a whole series of ‘symptoms’ of the love-lorn heroine, in which she has been anticipated by Liza, Tatiana, Bela, Mary and many, many others. When N.N. sees her the day after their waltz, she immediately blushes, and looks sad: she hasn’t slept all night. The next day she appears before him in what is virtually a comic parody of the suffering, virginal heroine, tormented by her feelings: she has a headache, and comes down ‘with a bandaged forehead, pale, thin, her eyes almost closed’ (106). This iconography of suffering intensifies yet further. Gagin tells N.N. that he had been called to her in the middle of the night to find her feverish, sobbing, her teeth literally chattering. And we have already seen the even worse state of physical collapse she has reached when she meets N.N. at Frau Louise’s house. Thus, we may see that the depiction of Asia within the text has her as a mute child, a wild untamed, irrational being, and now a timid, suffering ultra-feminine, ‘virginal’ heroine, destroyed by love. Intimately connected to these last motifs are Asia the sexualized heroine. We see this especially on two occasions, both involving physical contact with the ‘hero’. Firstly, as we saw earlier, she becomes ‘maiden no more’ during the waltz with N.N., as something ‘feminine / womanly [ɠɟɧɫɤɨɟ] suddenly emerged through her girlishly [ɞɟɜɢɱɟɫɤɢ] severe profile’(101). In accord with the text’s general tendency to treat her as, and to turn her into an image, N.N. evokes her appearance during the waltz precisely as an intensely recalled, erotic image: ‘For a long time afterwards my hand felt the touch of her tender waist, for a long time I could hear her quickened breathing close to me, for a long time I could see her dark, still, almost closed eyes in her pale but animated face, framed by her playful curls’ (ibid.). This is erotic, verging on the masturbatory. Equally, when they next embrace, as we already know, the virginal Asia willingly whispers ‘yours’, and is described in a similar, almost breathless manner by our narrator. And these erotic details are then recalled by N.N. as he dashes around trying to find her by the banks of the Rhine: ‘the memory of this pale face, those moist and timid eyes, her loosened hair on her bent neck, the light touch of her head against my chest - these memories burned me’ (115). Sadly for N.N. he has, as we know, missed his chance to truly and fully possess Asia, and all he has left now, and 20 years later are his memories, and his image of her. That Asia is such a paradoxical figure may be ascribed to a number of factors. In a literary context she may be seen as a product of the limited imagination of N.N. (and his creator?) who is able to see her only as a series of images / stereotypes. That she herself is confused, and cannot remember who she is, as it were, can be ascribed to her peculiar background, where, because of the patriarchal context in which she was

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reared,41 she was uncertain of her parentage until a relatively late age, didn’t even meet her brother until she was ten, and didn’t even know him to be her brother until she was 14! These confused familial relationships were, moreover, compounded by the fact that she was educated in completely different ways at different ages. (Asia herself bewails her faulty education.) Furthermore, even in the present of the story, Gagin is not averse to still treating her as a servant from time to time. In terms of the wider meaning of Asia, however, what she represents can be seen to have a deeper, and perhaps more interesting interpretation. We recall how she and Gagin are first encountered. As N.N. wanders the evening streets, wondering whether to join the throngs of merry-makers, suddenly he hears: ‘Asia, have you had enough?’ (‘ɞɨɜɨɥɶɧɨ ɬɟɛɟ’ - 74). To which she replies ‘Let’s wait a bit’, that is, she hasn’t had enough yet. This interchange could be said to sum up the whole story. As we saw earlier, Asia represents the wild, untamed, even untamable irrational. To these factors, may be now added female desire, which, in this exchange is not yet satisfied. In the male imagination female desire can be seen as threatening, precisely because it seems it cannot be satisfied. Also, in this exchange we see Gagin, now the representative of his father in Asia’s life, and of the Father more generally, seeking to limit the female’s desire. Moreover, as we have also seen, the whole story dramatizes the way in which the two men, Gagin and N.N. seek not so much to understand Asia, as to control and contain her, whether by telling each other stories about her, or, in the end, literally taking her away. Asia, then, amongst many other things, dramatizes in its eponymous heroine female desire that cannot be satisfied, and, because of this, the male characters seek to contain and control her / it. One of the most surprising things about Asia, given all the harbingers and foreboding attached to her and to the story-line more generally, is that she doesn’t commit suicide, or die in some other ‘tragic’ way. This, though, is not entirely true. Yes, she does escape from Z. with her brother, and on to Cologne and London, to who knows what uncertain fate. Yet, we should also remember the brief epilogue, in which, 20 years later, N.N. remembers and tries to resurrect all he has lost. In so doing he tells us that he keeps the geranium she had thrown to him all those years ago. The geranium ‘still emits a faint aroma, but the hand which gave it to me, the hand which I only once came to press to my lips, has long since, perhaps, been rotting in the grave ...’ (121). And so, in the end, narrative expectations are fulfilled, and the maiden does die, and, ipso facto, so too does female desire. In this sense, finally, the forces of patriarchy are able to suppress wild, untamable female desire. If Asia may be read as the struggle between patriarchy and female desire, then more generally the tale may be seen as an exploration, and, perhaps, privileging of patriarchal relations. In simpler

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terms, it can be argued that the primary relationship is not, actually, between N.N. and Asia, but between N.N. and Gagin. It is with a consideration of this that I conclude. Male / Male Relationships As in so many other regards, the prologue sets the ‘agenda’ for the way N.N. relates to Gagin. Here a key element in his relationship with the widow is the triangular aspect of it. The fact that she abandons him for a ‘red-cheeked’ Bavarian seems to arouse N.N.’s interest further. Soon, he meets Gagin and Asia. As we have seen, N.N.’s depiction of Asia is pictorial and evocative. His depiction of Gagin, however, is much more straightforward, and unabashedly admiring. Having said that he usually tried to avoid fellow Russians abroad, he confesses that ‘I liked Gagin immediately’ (75). He adds that Gagin had the face that anyone would like to look at, as it seemed to warm or stroke you, being ‘soft, caressing, with large soft eyes and soft curly hair’ (75). As O’Toole notes, ‘there are overtones of homosexuality’ in this and other descriptions of Gagin.42 Indeed so, and especially in the first half of the story, the two men do form a very close, intimate bond, and one which will ultimately be more important than N.N.’s amour with Asia, or perhaps even than Gagin’s allegiance to his own sister. Thus, the very next day, Gagin visits N.N. who is still in bed, and serenades him with a romance by Pushkin, in which the first-person singular figure has a Don Juan persona. N.N.’s appraisal of Gagin’s boyish charms is again frankly appreciative: ‘With his curly shining hair, his open neck and pink cheeks he was as fresh as the morning’ (79). Over the course of this day (still less than 24 hours since they met) N.N. notes, ‘the more I got to know him, the more strongly I became attached to him’ (83). He can see his weaknesses, ‘but it was impossible not to love him’ (84). As Asia says, perhaps intuitively, as she goes off to visit Frau Louise ‘ you’ll be better off just the two of you’ (83). Whether this is actually a homosexual relationship is impossible to say, and is perhaps not the point. What is the point is the way that the two men come together, as it were, to exchange confidences, information, and to control both the discourse they transmit to each other (and to the reader), and all within this discourse, including, of course, Asia. Let us see how this works. From the very first visit by Gagin to N.N. their relationship is depicted as one in which each man feels at ease in the presence of the other, and can share confidences and secrets. At this first meeting, for example, N.N. tells Gagin of his unhappy love affair (in which Gagin is actually not very interested). They spend four hours together that day, during which their relationship is cemented, and the next day they go off walking and lie in the grass side by side and engage in the kind of

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discussion of art and society, and other lofty matters so beloved of young Russians at the time, especially in works by Turgenev. Soon, though, this established bond takes on another dimension when Gagin entrusts N.N. with the story of Asia’s young life. This is the central chapter in the story. It is therefore of significance that this central episode is precisely the one in which it is the two men sharing information, and thereby disposing of the power that control of the discourse brings. In this sense the chapter is a microcosm of the whole. It purports to be about Asia, but, in reality, is about the relationship developing between N.N. and Gagin. Similarly, as the climax approaches, Gagin and N.N. again come together to discuss what should be done about Asia, and share with each other all the most intimate things they know about her. In other words, Asia privileges the malemale relationship. This is about control of the discourse, and, in turn, this, in effect, leads to the two men conspiring with each other to decide what is best for Asia. A further example of this is after the terrible night when Gagin found his sister in a state of hysterics. For him the obvious thing to do was to go to see N.N. to decide what they should do, rather than discussing with Asia what she wants. During this second long exchange between the two men the discussions verge on the unseemly, with Gagin acting as a cross between a go-between and matchmaker for his sister and N.N. The two men decide that N.N. can’t really marry Asia, for reasons we already know. That their shared position, and sense of values take precedence over everything else becomes especially apparent, to almost comical effect, when N.N. remembers Gagin just as he’s embracing Asia, and decides to go no further. Friendship between two ‘rational men’ (107) is the primary relationship, the norm. Moreover, N.N.’s duty to Gagin is more important than his feelings for her, or hers for him. As he says to her at the critical moment: ‘I was obliged to tell him everything’ (112 - my italics). Before the two friends decide what to do with desperate Asia, Gagin remarks that he is only telling N.N. these intimate details because ‘you are an honourable man’ (108). Above all else, then, it is men’s sense of shared honour and duty which must take precedence over love, or over female desire. One gesture, which recurs at all the critical moments, symbolizes the bond between the two men. This is the traditional sign of masculine honour, namely, the handshake.43 The very first evening they are together, as Gagin bids N.N. farewell, we read ‘I shook his hand’ (78). This is, of course, merely a bit of everyday reality, but in retrospect can be seen as the first marker of their ‘pact’. The gesture becomes more emphatic as Gagin’s tale of Asia’s life is concluded, and N.N. ‘firmly squeezed his hand’ (97), as if shaking on a deal. Similarly, when Gagin arrives at night to discuss what is to be done with the now hysterical Asia, before saying anything, ‘he grasped me by

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the hand and firmly pressed it’ (107). Once more they confirm to each other that they can trust each other. Having decided how best to control Asia, yet again Gagin ‘squeezed my hand’ (109). Though they do not know it, this will be the last time they are together. But this is not to be their last handshake, because in his valedictory note, Gagin, having explained what is to be done, wished N.N. happiness, and ‘pressed my hand’ (118). Thus, on the first occasion they meet, and at the two crucial discussions which will resolve Asia’s destiny, and then again at their parting, Gagin and N.N. share not so much physical intimacy, but a sense of mutual trust: it is as if they say to each other ‘I trust you and you can trust me, because we are both men of honour’. These five handshakes punctuate the text as clear signs that, in the patriarchal world which Asia has illuminated so brilliantly, men control the discourse and power. They are the norm, while women are powerless and voiceless, and their desire will be suppressed. Asia may not die in the main story, but the maiden is dead in the narrator’s imagination. But this also shows that Asia brilliantly deconstructs the patriarchal world, as masculine honour and control of the woman’s desire and her destiny have clearly brought no happiness to the man either.

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NOTES 1. L. Michael O’Toole, Structure, Style and Interpretation in the Russian Short Story, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1982, p. 147 (his italics). 2. Ibid. 3. For further discussion of this, see Joe Andrew, Narrative, Space and Gender in Russian Fiction, 1846-1903, Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2007, especially ‘Introduction’, pp. 1-21. 4. M.M. Bakhtin, ‘The Forms of Time and the Chronotopos in the Novel. From the Greek Novel to Modern Fiction’, PTL. A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature, 3, 1978, pp. 493-528. 5. Ibid., p. 521. 6. All references will be to Asia in I.S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati tomakh. Sochineniia v piatnadtsati tomakh, M.P. Alekseev et al., eds, Nauka, Moscow-Leningrad, 1961-8, VII, 1964, pp. 71-121. All translations are by the present author; as here, page numbers of quotations will be given after the quotation in the main text. 7. O’Toole’s phrase, p. 150. 8. Costlow makes the same point, albeit with different emphases: ‘“Asya” ... is a work explicitly about loss and memory: in a narrative turn that Turgenev will repeat almost obsessively, the hero loses his beloved through failure of nerve, and is condemned to possess her only in memory’. See Jane Costlow, Worlds within Worlds. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, p. 85. 9. O’Toole, p. 151, my italics. 10. This contrast of up / down accords well with the binary distinction drawn by Iurii Lotman. In one of his earlier, more rigorously structuralist works, Lotman sees semiotic space organized in binary terms along the positive / negative axis of ɜɟɪɯ (above; up[wards]) / ɧɢɡ (below; down[wards]). These concepts are self-evidently central to human culture. This applies a fortiori when we consider the subdivisions Lotman allocates to the bipolar series. As subsets of ‘above’ Lotman lists ‘far away’, ‘spacious’, ‘movement’, ‘metamorphosis’, ‘freedom’, ‘information’, ‘thought (culture)’, ‘creativity (the creation of new forms)’, ‘harmony’. In reverse, ‘below’ may be represented by ‘near’, ‘confined’, ‘immobility’, ‘slavery’, ‘absence of creativity (fossilized forms)’, ‘absence of harmony’. See Iurii Lotman, Struktura khudozhestvennogo teksta, Izdatel’stvo Iskusstvo, Moscow, 1970, p. 275. 11. Tolstoi was to do something very similar in Family Happiness the following year. Masha and Sergei declare their love for each other at the Feast of the Assumption, 15 August, and get married two weeks later, that is at the end of August. Because Tolstoi wants to emphasize the anti-Romantic nature of the wedding, he surrounds the occasion with a number of reminders of death, including Masha awakening on her wedding day to see yellowing leaves, paths strewn with dead leaves and even frost damage! In other words, the author has, seemingly, pushed the season on by a month or two for ‘poetic’

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effect, just as Turgenev manipulates the clock for a similar ‘pathetic fallacy’ in Asia. (A number of critics have discussed the rather ambiguous relationship between Family Happiness and Asia and other works by Turgenev. See, for example, John Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel, Chatto & Windus, London, 1966, p. 289, and, especially, B. M. Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoi, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich, 1968 [originally Leningard 1928/31], p. 361. Although it does seem most likely that Tolstoi modelled at least some of the lyricism of his work on Turgenev, his own view of his older contemporary’s povest’ was characteristically brutally dismissive: ‘Asia is garbage (ɞɪɹɧɶ)’: Diary entry for 19 January, 1858, quoted ibid.) 12. Bakhtin, p. 520, italics in original. 13. Ibid., my italics. 14. O’Toole, p. 155, sees the river in similar terms. As in other cultures, Russian literature had long used rivers in this kind of symbolic way. For example, Marc Schreurs, in discussing Babel’s use of the river Zbruch at the opening of Red Cavalry, draws attention to Babel’s indebtedness to Slovo o Polku Igoreve, in which the river Donets ‘is also the borderline between light and darkness, good and evil, heaven and hell, God and the devil’. See Marc Schreurs, Procedures of Montage in Isaak Babel’s ‘Red Cavalry’, Rodopi, Amsterdam-Atlanta, 1989, p. 104. 15. The use of the ‘precipice / abyss’ as an extreme form of the chronotope of the threshold was also to be borrowed by Tolstoi for Family Happiness where the concept is used both literally (in the ruins at Baden-Baden) and metaphorically. 16. Sander Brouwer, ‘The Bridegroom Who Did Not Come: Social and Amorous Unproductivity from Pushkin to the Silver Age’ in Joe Andrew and Robert Reid, eds, Two Hundred Years of Pushkin. Volume I, ‘“Pushkin’s Secret”: Russian Writers Reread and Rewrite Pushkin, Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2003, pp. 49-65 (54). See also Ellen Rutten, ‘Unattainable Bride Russia. Engendering Nation, State and Intelligentsia in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature’, PhD thesis, Groningen, 2005, especially pp. 36-9. 17. As we may see from the epigraph to this article (‘actress’) N.N.’s presentation of reality has been taken at face value in the critical literature. Whether we are really entitled to do this is, as I suggest, open to question. Indeed, O’Toole himself makes a similar point: ‘If the narrative is to be controlled by such a cliché-monger, the reader may well say to himself [sic!], what credence can we give to his interpretation of events and characters’ (150). Indeed so: at times this reader at least wondered whether any of his story ‘actually’ happened! 18. Loc. cit. 19. Not everyone agrees with Chernyshevskii on this point: ‘It was not indeed so very reprehensible in a young man to have hesitated before taking the responsibility of a wife with such a difficult psychological background’ is Schapiro’s view. See Leonard Schapiro, Turgenev. His Life and Times, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1982, pp. 142-3. 20. As O’Toole, following Friedland, notes, it was precisely at this period that Turgenev was working on his ‘Hamlet and Don Quixote’ essay: see p. 149.

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21. For a discussion of this theme in this work, see Andrew, pp. 43-62. 22. O’Toole, p. 154. 23. Ibid., pp. 153-4. 24. This is the phrase of Vladimir Fisher in his ‘Story and Novel in Turgenev’s Work’ in David A. Lowe, ed., Critical Essays on Ivan Turgenev, G. K. Hall and Co., Boston, Mass., 1989, pp. 43-63 (52). (This article is excerpted and translated by David A. Lowe from I. N. Rozanov and Iu. M. Sokolov, eds, Tvorchestvo Turgeneva, Raduga, Moscow, 1920, pp. 3-39.) 25. ‘Maiden no more’ is the title of ‘Phase Two’ (that is, Part Two) of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbevilles, the section which follows Tess’ ‘fall’: see Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbevilles, Penguin, London, 1994, pp. 93-128. 26. Fisher notes, p. 53, that there is little tragedic in Turgenev, or rather, what is tragic, is that ‘the most terrible thing in life is that there is nothing terrible’. 27. Iu. M. Lotman, ‘Proiskhozhdenie siuzheta v tipologicheskom osveshchenii’ in Izbrannye stat’i v trekh tomakh, Aleksandra, Tallinn, 1992, vol. I, pp. 224-42 (230). The translation and italics are mine. An English version may be found as ‘The Origins of Plot in the Light of Typology’ in Poetics Today, 1979, I, 1-2, pp. 161-84. 28. Ibid., p. 234. 29. The metaphor of the ‘dark room’ standing for ‘grave’ is also detected by V. A. Nedzvetskii in his ‘Liubov’-krest-dolg: O povesti Turgeneva “Asia”’, Izvestiia Akademii nauk. Seriia literatury i iazyka, DLII, 2, 1996, pp. 17-26 (24). 30. Ibid., p. 23. 31. O’Toole, p. 150, also notes the link between this statue and Asia: ‘Already we have presaged for us Asya’s purity, femininity, childish innocence, sadness and potential martyrdom’. The statue has a rather different connotation for Costlow, who sees it, p. 85, as ‘the sole constant of the narrative’. 32. O’Toole also discusses these associations, pp. 150-1. 33. See Y. K. Shcheglov, ‘Some Themes and Archetypes in Babel’s Red Cavalry’, Slavic Review, LIII, 3, 1994, pp. 653-71. 34. For another discussion of these connotations, see O’Toole, pp. 151 and 155. 35. O’Toole, p. 150. 36. Costlow, p. 85. 37. O’Toole, p. 153.

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38. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Penguin, London, 1972, p. 104. 39. For a discussion of this concept (as in ‘dress maketh the man’), see Boris Christa, ‘Costume and Communication in The Cherry Orchard’, Essays in Poetics, XXX, 2005, pp. 53-9. As Christa (p. 53) notes: ‘Next to speech, the language of clothes is the most important medium of communication between human beings’. 40. O’Toole, pp. 153-4, points to a similar series of oppositions, though to make a different point. 41. That Asia’s background is explicitly a tale of patriarchy is laid bare by Gagin’s narration. Although he has told N.N. that he will tell him Asia’s ‘story’, this story begins with the words ‘My Father’ (90). It should be noted that this was a not uncommon phenomenon at this time. The stories of both Netochka Nezvanova and Varvara Dobroselova in Poor Folk both begin with mentions of the father. Netochka begins, ‘I do not remember my father’, while Varvara’s interpolated story begins with a note of how old she was when her father died. For discussions of these two works, see my Narrative and Desire in Russian Literature, 1822-1849: The Feminine and the Masculine, Macmillan, London, 1993, pp. 214-26 and ‘The Seduction of the Daughter: Sexuality in the Early Dostoevsky & the Case of Ȼɟɞɧɵɟ Ʌɸɞɢ [Poor Folk]’ in Joe Andrew and Robert Reid, eds, Neo-Formalist Papers, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1998, pp. 123-41 (127). 42. O’Toole, p. 151. Conrad also notes O’Toole’s comments before adding that ‘curiously, he does not develop this idea further’. Conrad’s whole article is a fascinating discussion of sexual ambivalence in this story. While there is much to be said about the possible homosexual bond between Gagin and N.N., such discussions must remain speculative. In any event, as I argue in the main text, this relationship is less important than the way the two men unite to control the discourse, to control Asia, and, therefore, to control female sexuality. See Joseph L. Conrad, ‘Turgenev’s “Asja”: Ambiguous Ambivalence’, Slavic and East European Journal, XXX, 2, 1986, pp. 215-29. 43. Conrad, p. 229, n. 9, also discusses the frequency of the handshakes, but sees it more as a sign of the close physical bond between the two men.

‘The Poetry of Moscow Existence’: An Analysis of N.M. Iazykov’s Spring Night Michael Basker

By the time Nikolai Iazykov’s first book of verse appeared in April 1833, a decade had gone by since Anton Delvig had foretold for the Dorpat student a glorious path, to the ‘Parnassian heights’ and ‘sweet-singing Muse’s crown’.1 Pushkin had soon declared little less, in private and in print;2 and one of Iazykov’s earliest addressees, A.N. Ochkin, could begin an unsigned review of the 1833 collection with a reflection on Iazykov’s ‘enviable lot’: ‘His poems are printed for the first time as a separate edition; yet who does not know Iazykov? Take any young person who has read anything, begin reciting some lines by Iazykov, and he will almost certainly complete the rest’.3 The edition attracted a corresponding critical interest, and even brought into focus an ‘argument about Iazykov’ which assumed a wider importance in ‘determining lines of demarcation’ in the ideological controversies of the 1830s, and again in the 1840s.4 The negative view was articulated by Ksenofont Polevoi, who recognized Iazykov’s ‘gift’, but found in his verse a ‘one-sidedness and a certain coldness of feeling; little poetic individuality … no deep, farranging ideas, but … a language and expression that are truly poetic’.5 Comparable but more uncompromising charges of coldness and lack of intellectual content beneath the sparkle and sonority of a fine rhetorical exterior were later brought by Belinskii, most notably in a scathing attack of 1845 evidently occasioned by Iazykov’s Slavophile verse epistles.6 The poet’s staunchest defender was Ivan Kireevskii, who in a lengthy review of the 1833 edition, articulated as an implicit rejoinder to Polevoi, discerned a quality of thought that acquired ‘self-standing, philosophical’ interest, an ‘aspiration to expansiveness of soul’ and an internal unity to which all was subordinate: ‘Precisely because the dominant ideal of Iazykov’s poetry is a festival of the heart, expanse of soul and life (‘ɩɪɚɡɞɧɢɤ ɫɟɪɞɰɚ, ɩɪɨɫɬɨɪ ɞɭɲɢ ɢ ɠɢɡɧɢ’), therefore the dominant feeling in his poetry is a certain electrically-charged ecstasy, and the dominant tone of his verse is a certain sonorous solemnity’.7 Such sentiments, too, were widely echoed - most famously by Iazykov’s companion abroad in the 1840s, Nikolai Gogol: ‘Of the poets of Pushkin’s time, Iazykov stood out above all. With the appearance of his first poems a new lyre was heard by all, a revelry and riotousness of energy (‘ɪɚɡɝɭɥ ɢ ɛɭɣɫɬɜɨ ɫɢɥ’), a dashingness in each and every expression, a light (‘ɫɜɟɬ’) of young ecstasy and a language which, in

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power, perfection and strict subordination to its master, had previously nowhere been seen’.8 Iazykov is no longer avidly read, nor, excepting perhaps his output of the 1840s,9 regarded as especially controversial. The present article looks again at some of the qualities that might have attracted the attention of readers and critics in the 1830s, by focusing on the example of a single poem which can be regarded as at least implicitly programmatic. Iazykov’s Spring Night (ȼɟɫɟɧɧɹɹ ɧɨɱɶ) depicts the poetpersona’s room in a nocturnal city-scape, as the setting for a reverie that fuses the erotic and the poetic in evoking the image of a gypsy-muse: ȼɟɫɟɧɧɹɹ ɧɨɱɶ

5

ȼ ɩɪɨɡɪɚɱɧɨɣ ɦɝɥɟ ɛɟɡɦɨɥɜɫɬɜɭɟɬ ɫɬɨɥɢɰɚ; Ʌɢɲɶ ɢɡɪɟɞɤɚ ɧɚ ɲɭɦ ɢ ɝɥɚɫ ɧɨɱɧɨɣ Ɉɬɤɥɢɤɧɟɬɫɹ ɞɪɟɦɚɜɲɢɣ ɱɚɫɨɜɨɣ, ɂɥɶ ɬɨɩɧɟɬ ɤɨɧɶ, ɢ ɛɵɫɬɪɨ ɤɨɥɟɫɧɢɰɚ ɉɪɨɞɪɟɛɟɠɢɬ ɩɨ ɡɜɨɧɤɨɣ ɦɨɫɬɨɜɨɣ.

10

Ʉɚɤ ɹ ɥɸɛɥɸ ɩɪɢɸɬ ɦɨɣ ɨɞɢɧɨɤɢɣ! Ʉɚɤ ɡɞɟɫɶ ɦɢɥɚ ɜɟɫɟɧɧɹɹ ɥɭɧɚ: ɋɪɟɛɪɢɫɬɵɦɢ ɭɡɨɪɚɦɢ ɨɧɚ Ɋɚɫɫɵɩɚɥɚɫɶ ɧɚ ɩɨɥ ɟɝɨ ɲɢɪɨɤɢɣ ȼɨ ɜɟɫɶ ɨɛɴɟɦ ɬɪɟɯɪɚɦɧɨɝɨ ɨɤɧɚ!

15

ɋɟɣ ɥɭɧɧɵɣ ɫɜɟɬ, ɬɚɢɧɫɬɜɟɧɧɵɣ ɢ ɧɟɠɧɵɣ, ɋɟɣ ɩɨɥɭɦɪɚɤ, ɥɟɥɟɸɳɢɣ ɦɟɱɬɵ, ɂɫɩɨɥɧɟɧɵ ɫɨɛɥɚɡɧɨɜ . . . Ƚɞɟ ɠɟ ɬɵ, Ʉɚɤ ɩɨɰɟɥɭɣ ɧɚɫɢɥɶɧɵɣ ɢ ɦɹɬɟɠɧɵɣ Ɋɚɡɝɭɥɶɧɚɹ ɢ ɱɭɞɨ ɤɪɚɫɨɬɵ?

20

ȼɨ ɦɧɟ ɞɭɲɚ ɬɪɟɩɟɳɟɬ ɢ ɩɵɥɚɟɬ, Ʉɨɝɞɚ, ɤ ɬɟɛɟ ɫɤɥɨɧɹɹɫɶ ɝɨɥɨɜɨɣ, ə ɫɥɭɲɚɸ, ɤɚɤ ɞɢɜɧɵɣ ɝɨɥɨɫ ɬɜɨɣ, Ɍɨɦɢɬɟɥɶɧɵɣ - ɠɭɪɱɢɬ ɢ ɡɚɦɢɪɚɟɬ, Ʉɚɤ ɨɧ ɤɢɩɢɬ - ɜɟɫɟɥɵɣ ɢ ɠɢɜɨɣ!

25

ɂɥɢ ɤɨɝɞɚ ɬɜɨɢ ɪɨɞɧɵɟ ɡɜɭɤɢ Ɍɟɛɹ ɡɨɜɭɬ - ɢ, ɛɭɣɧɚɹ, ɥɟɬɢɲɶ, Ʉɪɭɬɢɲɶ ɝɥɚɜɨɣ, ɫɜɟɪɤɚɟɲɶ ɢ ɞɪɨɠɢɲɶ, ɂ ɩɪɵɝɚɟɲɶ, ɢ ɜɫɤɢɞɵɜɚɟɲɶ ɪɭɤɢ, ɂ ɬɨɩɚɟɲɶ, ɢ ɫɜɢɳɟɲɶ, ɢ ɜɢɡɠɢɲɶ! ɉɪɢɞɢ! Ɍɟɛɹ ɭɥɵɛɤɨɣ ɡɚɞɭɲɟɜɧɨɣ, Ɉɛɴɹɬɶɹɦɢ ɜɨɫɬɨɪɝɚ ɜɫɬɪɟɱɭ ɹ,

‘The Poetry of Moscow Existence’

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ɀɟɥɚɧɧɚɹ ɢ ɞɨɛɪɚɹ ɦɨɹ, Ɇɨɣ ɥɭɱɲɢɣ ɫɨɧ, ɦɨɣ ɚɧɝɟɥ ɫɥɚɞɤɨɩɟɜɧɵɣ, ɉɨɷɡɢɹ ɦɨɫɤɨɜɫɤɨɝɨ ɠɢɬɶɹ!

35

ɉɪɢɞɢ, ɭɬɟɲɶ ɦɨɟ ɭɟɞɢɧɟɧɶɟ, ɋɱɚɫɬɥɢɜɨɸ ɪɭɤɨɣ ɛɥɚɝɨɫɥɨɜɢ Ɍɪɭɞɵ ɢ ɞɧɢ ɝɪɹɞɭɳɢɟ ɦɨɢ ɇɚ ɫɜɟɬɥɨɟ, ɫɜɹɬɨɟ ɜɞɨɯɧɨɜɟɧɶɟ, ɇɚ ɩɪɚɡɞɧɢɤɢ ɢ ɲɚɥɨɫɬɢ ɥɸɛɜɢ!10 Spring Night

5

The capital is silent in half-transparent haze, Only occasionally a dozing watchman Will respond to noise and voice of night, Will a horse stamp, and a carriage rapidly Rattle by on resonant highway.

10

How I love my lonely refuge! How dear the spring moon here; With silvery patterns, she Scatters across its wide floor, Across the full expanse of three-framed window!

15

This moonlight, mysterious and tender, This semi-gloom, cradling dreams, Are full of temptations ... Where are you, Violent and tempestuous as a kiss, Rake-like, and miracle of beauty?

20

My soul trembles and flames within, When, bowing my head toward you, I hear your wondrous voice, Languid - babbling and falling, Seething - joyful and alive!

25

Or when your native sounds Call you - and, turbulent, you fly, Twist your head, sparkle and quiver, And leap, and fling your arms, And stamp, and whistle, and whoop! Come! With heartfelt smile, Embraces of ecstasy I’ll meet you, My desired and good one,

55

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30

My best dream, my sweet-singing angel, Poetry of Moscow existence!

35

Come, console my solitude, Bless with lucky hand My future works and days, For bright, sacred inspiration, For festivals and mischievousness of love!

The poem seems at first sight to correspond with remarkable exactitude to Kireevskii’s and Gogol’s characterizations of Iazykov’s work: not least in that some of its key lexemes - ‘ɡɜɨɧɤɢɣ’, ‘ɲɢɪɨɤɢɣ’ (= ɩɪɨɫɬɨɪ), ‘ɪɚɡɝɭɥɶɧɚɹ’, ‘ɛɭɣɧɚɹ’, ‘ɜɨɫɬɨɪɝ’, ‘ɩɪɚɡɞɧɢɤɢ’ - are closely reflected in their evaluations. A ‘predilection for favourite words’ was, however, a pronounced feature of Iazykov’s verse,11 and detailed analysis would confirm that the critics’ responses adopted some prominently recurrent elements of his poetic vocabulary. Spring Night was in that sense representative, rather than unique. More distinctively, the poem belongs to a period when Iazykov was seeking to cast off his reputation as the author of student drinking songs and determine a fresh artistic direction. One of the most categorical of his numerous statements of intent came in a letter of 11 November 1831 to his constant adviser and effective literary agent in St Petersburg, V.D. Komovskii: ‘From 1 January 1832’, Iazykov declared, ‘my muse is to transform completely: I will cross from the tavern directly to the church!! It’s time to remember God as well!’12 Spring Night illumines a phase in this transition. And if Kireevskii’s characterization of Iazykov might almost have been written with Spring Night in mind, Spring Night, as we shall see, apparently incorporates elements of Kireevskii’s views into the poetic model it elaborates. We must begin, however, with a brief discussion of the poem’s compositional circumstance, and will return to its resonance with the contemporary literary context after dealing also with versification and ‘intrinsic’ content. Compositional Background Spring Night is dated 25 March 1831. It was written in Moscow, where Iazykov had lived uninterruptedly since his return from Dorpat in spring 1829, lodging with the Elagin-Kireevskiis - relatives of his close student friend A.P. Peterson - in their home near Krasnye vorota. (For some of this time, from January to November 1830, Ivan Kireevskii had been away in Europe; his brother Petr returned via Vienna the same month.)13 Some ten days before Spring Night was written, Iazykov finally left the Kireevskiis for a flat of his own: ‘on the bank of the Moscow River,

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where there are the most ravishing views ... of Tiufelov wood or the district around the Simonov Monastery’. His main aim, he declared, was to ‘isolate himself (ɭɟɞɢɧɢɬɶɫɹ; cf. line 31) and write poetry’.14 Spring Night, with its celebration of the poet’s ‘solitary refuge’ (line 6), might be considered something of a flat-warming piece. Iazykov’s poem appeared in the 1833 edition with a dedication (subsequently removed) ‘To Tatiana Dmitrievna’: ‘the primadonna of the local gypsy troupe’, as Iazykov had explained to A.N. Vulf in 1832 with a cryptic reference to ‘the most recent history of [my] heart - in all the variety of its free affections’.15 Yet though Iazykov also addressed to ‘gypsy Tania’ the poems ‘Blessed who was able on the couch of night’ (‘Ȼɥɚɠɟɧ, ɤɬɨ ɦɨɝ ɧɚ ɥɨɠɟ ɧɨɱɢ’) and The Ring (ɉɟɪɫɬɟɧɶ),16 it seems probable that his real-life connection with her was ephemeral and somewhat insubstantial. Tatiana Dmitrievna Demianova willingly recalled some forty years later that she had been on intimate terms with Pushkin, but that she had met Iazykov only once, when he was brought to her by P.V. Nashchokin on the night of Pushkin’s wedding (18 February 1831). Iazykov was in a drunken state (there had also been heavy drinking at Pushkin’s ‘bachelor dinner’ the night before), at once tearfully declared himself in love, and insisted on taking from her a favourite ring. She managed to retrieve it by proxy only some time later, through the intercession of Pushkin and others.17 All three of Iazykov’s ‘Tatiana Dmitrievna’ poems were written in the space of just two days, some five weeks after their brief encounter (the other two are dated 26 March 1831, the day after Spring Night). We can only speculate whether this sudden bout of inspiration was prompted by reluctant consent eventually to return the ring; it seems clear enough, however, that, as frequently in Iazykov, the three-poem cycle ‘departs considerably from the real biographical fact’ in which it is grounded.18 The ring was returned, yet the poem about it tells the ‘talisman’-like tale of a keepsake lastingly cherished, the hallowed memento of a single, burning, unforgettable kiss. By contrast, ‘Blessed who was able ...’ maintains, despite the overt eroticism of its opening, that the greater blessing lies in dispassionate forgetfulness of ‘the fire of stormy ecstasies’. Spring Night, in other words, plainly belongs to a sequence concerned less with factual veracity or confessional consistency than with the task of poetic re-fashioning of experience; less with reality than with poetic statement and, arguably, poetic creation. Whatever the nature of Iazykov’s erotic relationship to Tatiana Dmitrievna, it is at least evident that her image had powerfully evocative ideological connotations for those of his circle. This emerges from a letter which Petr Kireevskii addressed to Iazykov on 10 January 1832: Two weeks ago I finally heard for the first time (at the Sverbeevs) the gypsy choir in which Tatiana Dmitrievna is

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primadonna, and must admit that I have heard little like it. Except for Melgunov and Chaadaev (whom I don’t consider Russian), there can hardly be a Russian who could hear them with indifference. There is something in their singing that must be incomprehensible to a foreigner and will therefore displease, but perhaps that is for the best.19 The same correspondent - who had been collaborating closely with Iazykov in the interim on the collection of Russian folksongs - was inclined moreover to view the gypsy-woman in figurative terms that associated her emblematically with the very character of Iazykov’s verse. ‘Although I knew almost all the poems before’, he wrote in 1833: the effect your book produces is ... entirely new and improbable, like the brows of Tatiana Dmitrievna. I read the poems every morning, and they set me up for the whole day, like another man prayer or a glass of vodka. And it is no wonder: your poems have both one thing and the other ... A kind of holy tavern and church, with a table in the name of Apollo and Bacchus ...20 As the most metapoetic of Iazykov’s three poems to Tatiana Dmitrievna, Spring Night might be held in this light to assume a particular, representative significance. Versification and Stylistic Structure Limitations of space preclude a thorough formal analysis of Spring Night. The present section will therefore concentrate on summarized data and a few salient formal features, under the headings of metre and rhythm, sound texture, and poetic syntax. Metre, Rhythm, Stanza The poem consists of seven five-line stanzas of iambic pentameter, rhyming FmmFm. Both measure and stanzaic form are unusual for Iazykov, and their combination virtually unique;21 their usage is however in keeping with the more general shift to stanzaic compositions which marked his conscious striving for new direction from 1829.22 In Iazykov, formal distinctiveness often seems allied to poetic significance. Iazykov employs the constant caesura after the fourth syllable which was obligatory in the iambic pentameter until the 1810s, but increasingly felt thereafter to ‘curb the freedom of poetic syntax’. By the early 1830s the iambic pentameter without caesura was the norm.23 Despite Iazykov’s reputation for unconstraint and youthful energy of expression, his modest metrical-stanzaic experimentation thus bears a

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conservative character. He also, however, modulates his caesura to considerable expressive effect. This is achieved, for instance, by shifting the logical syntactic break to follow the second rather than fourth syllable, after ‘ɉɪɢɞɢ!’ in lines 26 and 31, and again in line 32. Other strategies will be noted below. Rhythmically, the poem displays the alternating pattern of strong and weak ictuses typical of the iambic pentameter: strong stressing of the first, third and (constant) fifth ictuses, weaker stressing of the second and, particularly, the fourth. As is usual with the caesura, Iazykov’s third ictus is stressed almost as constantly as the fifth (the weak stressing of the possessive adjective ɦɨɺ in line 31 is the only partial exception). In other respects his treatment is more distinctive. Percentage stressing per ictus in Spring Night is 72: 54: 100: 14: 100, as against a norm for the caesural form at this period of 86: 75: 95: 39: 100.24 The significantly lower percentage stressing of the second and fourth ictus suggests accentuation of the pentameter’s inherent, wave-like rhythm - and the impression is strengthened by Iazykov’s use of the variant with stress on ictuses one, three and five (Taranovski’s ‘variant IX’ of the iambic pentameter) in as many as 12 of the poem’s 35 lines (34%, or double the mean for this period of 16%). This unusually emphatic ‘alternating’ rhythmic inertia is further sustained by the notable absence from the poem of even a single five-stress line, where the period norm is 20%, or one line in five.25 A high incidence of dactylic word-boundaries - no less than 25 in the poem’s 35 lines - subtly reinforces the rhythmic inertia and ensures relative lightness of overall stressing.26 Although such observations are suggestive of careful formal control, it is inevitably more difficult to determine the resultant effect. It could equally be maintained, for instance, that the dominant lilting rise and fall lends itself to the evocation of reverie, or that the lightness of rhythm, indicated by the absence of full-stressed lines, models the dynamism of the ‘flying’, spectral gypsy muse. Less semantically elusive exploitation of rhythmic organization might, however, be discerned in each of Iazykov’s five lines stressed on the fourth ictus. In two cases, disruption of the established pattern marks a dramatic shift in apprehension of the female persona (lines 13 and 27: ‘ɂɫɩɨɥɧɟɧɵ ɫɨɛɥɚɡɧɨɜ . . . Ƚɞɟ ɠɟ ɬɵ’; ‘Ɉɛɴɹɬɶɹɦɢ ɜɨɫɬɨɪɝɚ ɜɫɬɪɟɱɭ ɹ’). Each of the other three instances makes explicit reference to sound precisely at the ‘unexpected’ fourth-ictus stress: Ʌɢɲɶ ɢɡɪɟɞɤɚ ɧɚ ɲɭɦ ɢ ɝɥɚɫ ɧɨɱɧɨɣ (line 2); ə ɫɥɭɲɚɸ, ɤɚɤ ɞɢɜɧɵɣ ɝɨɥɨɫ ɬɜɨɣ (line18; significantly, the poem’s mid-point); ɂɥɢ ɤɨɝɞɚ ɬɜɨɢ ɪɨɞɧɵɟ ɡɜɭɤɢ (line 21).

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The fourth-ictus stress seems autometadescriptive of an auditory theme, the centrality of which will be confirmed below. Sound Texture I.M. Semenko has maintained that sound repetition ‘did not play a particularly important role in Iazykov’s system. Iazykov sought a general, major and effective tonality for the whole; unlike Zhukovskii and Batiushkov, he did not match one sound to the next’.27 Certainly, Spring Night provides little of the extravagant alliteration that its subject matter - and the poet’s reputation - might lead one to expect.28 There is, however, clear and sustained orchestration of individual lines and pairs of lines (for example, the liquids which evoke the moon in lines 6-7; /s/ /r/ /a/ /p/ in lines 8 and 9; /t/ /b/ in line 22; emphasis of stressed /i/ in lines 19-25). Further examples will be mentioned below. Subtler evidence of Iazykov’s control of sound structure includes the cluster of no less than 23 consonants which contribute to the ‘sonorous solemnity’ of the opening line (‘ȼ ɩɪɨɡɪɚɱɧɨɣ ɦɝɥɟ ɛɟɡɦɨɥɜɫɬɜɭɟɬ ɫɬɨɥɢɰɚ’). ‘Consonantism’ remains pronounced throughout the first stanza (e.g. 16 consonants in line 5), whereas a ‘lighter’, vocalic element is prominent later, culminating in line 27 (‘ɀɟɥɚɧɧɚɹ ɢ ɞɨɛɪɚɹ ɦɨɹ’; see also lines 22, 32). A comparably thorough technical assurance is apparent from consideration of stressed vowel tonality. The two introductory stanzas exhibit overall negative tonality, arguably suited to their reflective mood (-1 and -4, according to the methodology proposed by Lawrence G. Jones).29 With the evocation of the female figure in stanza three, there is a shift to positive tonality (+4, especially emphatic by contrast to the previous stanza). Positive tonality is thereafter maintained throughout, reaching its apogee in the final stanza (+3, +3, +1, +7). Again it is tempting to discern a semantic correlation: a progression if not quite to ‘electrically-charged ecstasy’, then at least toward a resoundingly positive conclusion. Curiously, there is less evidence of consistent attention to the more visible feature of rhyme. The opening stanza displays considerable rhyming ingenuity: alongside ɫɬɨɥɢɰɚ / ɤɨɥɟɫɧɢɰɚ (the first syllable of the latter echoing the faintly onomatopoeic ‘ɬɨɩɧɟɬ ɤɨɧɶ’ before the caesura), there is quite intricate horizontal enrichment in the masculine triplet ɧɨɱɧɨɣ / ɱɚɫɨɜɨɣ / ɡɜɨɧɤɨɣ ɦɨɫɬɨɜɨɣ. Stanza six, too, offers the mildly neologistic rhyme of ɡɚɞɭɲɟɜɧɨɣ / ɫɥɚɞɤɨɩɟɜɧɨɣ, and a compound, somewhat irregular open masculine sequence: ɜɫɬɪɟɱɭ ɹ / ɦɨɹ / ɠɢɬɶɹ. For the rest, however, Iazykov seems content to employ banal morphological (adjectival, verbal) rhymes, or such thoroughly clichéd groupings as ɨɧɚ / ɥɭɧɚ or ɦɟɱɬɵ / ɬɵ / ɤɪɚɫɨɬɵ (albeit with occasional enrichment: ɝɨɥɨɜɨɣ / ɝɨɥɨɫ ɬɜɨɣ). The effect, to the modern

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reader at least, is of slight imbalance, of aesthetic unevenness or incongruity. Such treatment of rhyme might simply be dismissed, as both characteristic of Iazykov and further evidence of a backward-looking conservativism. Intriguingly, however, a potentially comparable ‘imbalance’ obtains on the lexical level, where Slavonicisms (‘ɝɥɚɫ’, ‘ɛɟɡɦɨɥɜɫɬɜɨɜɚɬɶ’, ‘ɤɨɥɟɫɧɢɰɚ’ [presumably in preference to the foreign ‘ɤɚɪɟɬɚ’], ‘ɫɟɣ’, etc.) are combined with the unpoetic (‘ɲɭɦ’) and colloquial (‘ɩɪɨɞɪɟɛɟɠɚɬɶ’, ‘ɜɫɤɢɞɵɜɚɬɶ’, ‘ɜɢɡɠɚɬɶ’). This, too, will be explored below. Poetic Syntax Fundamental to Iazykov’s ‘truly poetic expression’ in this poem was his patterning of ‘poetic syntax’.30 Spring Night abounds in the ‘parallel syntactic structures, rhetorical questions, exclamations and invocations’ which, together with the ‘periodic sentence’, have been taken as the hallmark of Iazykov’s style.31 Once the scene is set in the first stanza, the exclamatory-rhetorical mode becomes dominant. Iazykov builds in stanza 2 from the one-line exclamation of line 6 to a four-line exclamation in lines 7-10, while from the middle of stanza 3 onwards, the entire poem takes the form of a single, extended, passionate invocation. Parallelism is most obvious in frequent anaphora - for instance in the first two lines of stanzas 2 and 3 or the last lines of stanza 7, or in the ‘ɉɪɢɞɢ!’ that introduces stanzas 6 and 7. (In the first three instances, incidentally, the caesura serves to accentuate symmetries; a further, striking illustration of this recurrent technique is line 29, with possessive + adjective + noun: possessive + noun + adjective either side of the caesura.) Very frequently, at least from stanza 3 onwards, parallelism extends also to syntax and grammatical form. The combination in lines 19-20 of adjective + dash + (appositive) verbconjunction-verb: verbal construction + dash + (appositive) adjectiveconjunction-adjective: Ɍɨɦɢɬɟɥɶɧɵɣ - ɠɭɪɱɢɬ ɢ ɡɚɦɢɪɚɟɬ, Ʉɚɤ ɨɧ ɤɢɩɢɬ - ɜɟɫɟɥɵɣ ɢ ɠɢɜɨɣ! is typical of the complex symmetries that can be discerned over virtually every segment of text. Repeatedly, too, significant parts of speech occur in pairs or longer sequences. This is true not only of epithets (‘ɧɚɫɢɥɶɧɵɣ ɢ ɦɹɬɟɠɧɵɣ’, ‘ɪɚɡɝɭɥɶɧɚɹ ɢ ɱɭɞɨ’, ‘ɠɟɥɚɧɧɚɹ ɢ ɞɨɛɪɚɹ’, ‘ɫɜɟɬɥɨɟ - ɫɜɹɬɨɟ’), but also of nouns (‘ɲɭɦ ɢ ɝɥɚɫ’, ‘ɬɪɭɞɵ ɢ ɞɧɢ’, ‘ɭɥɵɛɤɨɣ ... ɨɛɴɹɬɶɹɦɢ’), verbs (‘ɬɪɟɩɟɳɟɬ ɢ ɩɵɥɚɟɬ’, ‘ɠɭɪɱɢɬ ɢ ɡɚɦɢɪɚɟɬ’) and clauses (cf. ‘ɢɥɢ’ in lines 4 and 21). The culmination is the extended chain of nine second-person imperfective verbs in 3 ½ lines of stanza 5.32

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Iazykov’s intricate rhetorical patterning perhaps again looks back to the devices of the eighteenth-century ode,33 but it is deployed here to lyrical purpose. Overwhelmingly, that is, his parallelisms serve to intensify emotional effect through accumulation of near synonyms, not to increase semantic precision through juxtaposition of analytically discrete concepts. It is not difficult to connect this ‘poetics of synonymy’ with the critical consensus as to Iazykov’s power of language and ‘riotousness of energy’; even, in the cumulative sweep of its repetitive intensity, with ‘aspiration to expansiveness of soul’. Yet this same ‘super-abundance of feeling and energy’,34 predicated on concentrated reiteration, might equally well prompt association with Polevoi’s lack of ‘far-ranging ideas’. We now turn accordingly to a stanza-by-stanza description of the more salient features of the poem’s thematic development. ‘Intrinsic’ Reading As Richard Peace has noted, ‘The [poem’s] opening line suggests a certain visual ambiguity: the gloom (mgla) is transparent, and this ambiguity is carried on at an auditory level. The city bezmolvstvuet and yet there are very evocative sounds - the noise and voices to which a sleepy watchman responds, horses’ hooves, a quickly moving carriage’.35 Indeed, the translation into the auditory of the visual - and that which is barely seen, or visualized in imagination only - is a basic trope of this poem on poetic inspiration, while evocation of the ‘sounds of silence’ might be considered a speciality of Iazykov’s.36 Here the image of the ‘capital’ that strictly speaking is not (any hint of a Petersburgian setting is finally dispelled in line 30),37 distanced through mist and three-framed window, is so entirely constructed through sound that it is in truth scarcely visualized at all. (Furthermore, any expectation of fuller description of the city in the stanzas to follow is thwarted.) What there is is both ‘ɲɭɦ’ (the horse and carriage) and ‘ɝɥɚɫ’ (the sentry’s echoing challenge), while each of the stanza’s four verbs is auditory, from absence of sound (‘ɛɟɡɦɨɥɜɫɬɜɭɟɬ’), through echo (‘ɨɬɤɥɢɤɧɟɬɫɹ’), to the more onomatopoeic ‘ɬɨɩɧɟɬ ɤɨɧɶ’ and ‘ɩɪɨɞɪɟɛɟɠɢɬ’. The polysyllabic ‘ɩɪɨɡɪɚɱɧɨɣ’ at the start of the first line might possibly resonate with the polysyllabic ‘ɩɪɨɞɪɟɛɟɠɢɬ’ at the start of the last, indicating a transition from the barely visible not just to the audible but to a spatial dynamic, while the final adjective (‘ɡɜɨɧɤɨɣ’) reinforces the sensory impression. In a minor key, the stanza introduces the theme of sleep / dream (‘ɞɪɟɦɚɜɲɢɣ’). In addition to the tensions between absence of sound in the declarative opening statement and its rendition as noise and voice, and between static (line 3) and dynamic (lines 4 and 5), it is possible, too, to discern the first signs of an opposition between ‘high’ and ‘low’, in the stylistic collocation of ‘ɝɥɚɫ’

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and ‘ɲɭɦ’ or of poetic ‘ɤɨɥɟɫɧɢɰɚ’ with humdrum, concretizing adverb and unpoetic noun (‘ɦɨɫɬɨɜɚɹ’). The second stanza opens with a dramatic disjuncture, in a double shift from external to internal: impersonal presentation gives way to emotive and intensely personal (cf. ‘ɨɞɢɧɨɤɢɣ’) exclamation, and the city outside to the room within. The interiorization is so complete that the city-scape seems forgotten, with the result that the first stanza is liable to seem oddly discontinuous with the remainder. Delight in selfsufficient solitude - which however will finally be undercut by the appeal for consolation (‘ɭɬɟɲɶ ɦɨɟ ɭɟɞɢɧɟɧɶɟ’) - is effectively conveyed by the single sentimentalist poeticism ‘ɦɢɥɚ’, and the description is now visual. The spring moon weaves silvery patterns (it could be speculated that these, possibly interwoven with the external sounds and silence of stanza 1, provide the quasi-hypnotic background from which the subsequent reverie proceeds). Once again, moreover, there is a mingling of poeticisms - pertaining to the moon - with the prosaic: the unpoetic ‘floor’ which the light spills across. Paradoxically, moreover, the motif of spatial expanse, adumbrated at the end of stanza 1, is now intensified in the interior setting: there is ‘width’ and all-encompassing ‘volume’, and the large, ‘triple-framed’ window is physically solid, unencumbered by any obvious abstraction of symbolic association. The hypnotic potential of the moonlight’s silvered pattern is subtly accentuated in the first lines of stanza 3 by the wave-like patterning of rhythm, sound and syntax described above (in addition to alliteration on /s/, /l/, /m/, /p/, there is internal rhyme of /ei/ in line 12). Less obviously, the lines present a fresh ambiguity. The moon is both light (line 11) and semi-dark (‘ɩɨɥɭɦɪɚɤ’, line 12, echoing the ‘gloom’ of line 1), and this double perspective is the prelude to a more troubling ambivalence: despite the seemingly self-contained security of stanza 2, the lunar reverie is now replete with temptations (‘ɫɨɛɥɚɡɧ’ is a recurrent lexeme in Iazykov;38 the totalizing intensification of ‘ɢɫɩɨɥɧɟɧɵ’ is no less characteristic). And if, both logically and phonologically, these ‘ɫɨɛɥɚɡɧɵ’ emerge with unobtrusive smoothness from the preceding lines, the second half of the stanza proceeds instead through a series of strident semantic shocks. These are heralded by the suspension points and strong syntactic-semantic break within the third line, indicating the (fourth-ictus!) shift from introspective reflection to passionate invocation of a second person. The basic simile for the absent female - ‘ɤɚɤ ɩɨɰɟɥɭɣ’ - is in itself sufficiently conventionalized as to seem more ethereal than erotic: a kiss is physical, but disembodiedly intangible and ephemeral. The two post-positioned epithets, however, produce the most powerful of several unexpected twists in the poem’s lyric development, seeming to exemplify that ‘novelty and frequent daring of expressions’39 which, from the outset, critics readily associated with Iazykov’s poetic strength. The adjectives render the kiss concretely physical, and the

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unexpected violence of their erotic charge is heightened by the context of rhyme: ‘ɧɚɫɢɥɶɧɵɣ ɢ ɦɹɬɟɠɧɵɣ’ is paired with the preceding ‘ɬɚɢɧɫɬɜɟɧɧɵɣ ɢ ɧɟɠɧɵɣ’. A further syntactic and semantic shock follows, when the two masculine nominative adjectives are succeeded, with no intervening punctuation, by the feminine nominative adjective ‘ɪɚɡɝɭɥɶɧɚɹ’. ‘Ɋɚɡɝɭɥ’ - revelry, riotousness of energy, even dissipation - was a quality readily, even routinely associated with Iazykov’s verse, both by the poet himself and, as intimated above, many of his contemporaries.40 Its attribution to the feminine figure is thus a first implicit indication of her own ambiguous nature, as abstract muse as well as (or instead of) real physical being. But the feminine adjective which in one respect may have signalled an objectivized distancing of the writing from the poet’s biographical self (the student reveller of old), was of course also, and far more immediately, another ‘unexpected’ concretization of feminine sensuality. Startling enough in itself - a quality or pattern of behaviour conventionally acceptable in a nineteenth-century male poet was scarcely so when attributed to a female companion - it was doubly marked in the dissonance of its combination with ‘ɱɭɞɨ ɤɪɚɫɨɬɵ’. This poetically charged invocation must be re-considered below. The next two stanzas proceed according to the pattern already established. There is in the first place a continuing, sustained ambivalence between the concretely physical and the spiritual, or what might more appropriately be termed the disembodied: this is elaborated in conjunction with an inextricably complete fusion of the erotic and the aesthetic. After the physicality of the kiss, stanza 4 opens with the ‘soul’. Yet its dynamic ardour, conveyed by two ‘physical’ verbs (‘ɬɪɟɩɟɳɟɬ’, ‘ɩɵɥɚɟɬ’), contrasts strikingly with the apparent quietude of the masculine persona’s static bodily gesture (‘ɫɤɥɨɧɹɹɫɶ ɝɨɥɨɜɨɣ’: there is here a possible a biographical echo of Iazykov’s one drunken encounter with Tatiana Dmitrievna).41 A comparable, concentrated intensity, at the boundary between sensual and spiritual, is also conveyed by the reversion to the auditory in what is only the second of the poem’s three first-person verbs (‘ɫɥɭɲɚɸ’), positioned, as was noted above, at the mid-point of both stanza and poem. It is now the voice that stands metonymically for the feminine figure of the imagination: again, that is, a phenomenon that is simultaneously physical yet intangible (disembodied), the quality of which (‘ɞɢɜɧɵɣ’) serves equally to evoke real singer (metonym) and poetic muse (metaphor for the poetic creative process?). The eventual removal of the poem’s dedication, incidentally, led here to an evident gain in suggestivity, ensuring the fine balance of this double identity between now unspecified woman and inspirational muse.42 Not surprisingly, in either capacity her ‘voice’ (like the reputation of Iazykov’s verse it represents) is distinguished by expansiveness of range. It modulates from languor to liveliness, its broad

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spectrum intimated by the semantic interplay between parallel forms described above. Juxtapositions such as ‘ɠɭɪɱɢɬ’ - ‘ɤɢɩɢɬ’, ‘ɬɨɦɢɬɟɥɶɧɵɣ’ - ‘ɜɟɫɟɥɵɣ’, perhaps imply antinomies that might not ordinarily arise, and there is a subtle morphological contrast, too, between ‘dying’ down (‘ɡɚɦɢɪɚɟɬ’) and the ‘liveliness’ (‘ɠɢɜɨɣ’) with which the stanza ends.43 Stanza 5, with its glut of nine second-person verbs and a concentration of no less than 18 stressed and unstressed /i/s, marks the transition of gypsy repertoire from song to dance. Even this stanza, however, begins and ends with sound. It is sound which inspires the dance (‘ɡɨɜɭɬ ... ɡɜɭɤɢ’), and though the middle lines describe dynamic motion, the three verbs of the last line are each auditory. The last five verbs, moreover, are all notably ‘unpoetic’,44 thus pointing a fresh contrast of ‘high’ and ‘low’: of the flight and ethereal lightness traditionally associated with dance (or the muse?), and raucous gypsy performance. At the same time, the use of ‘ɬɨɩɚɬɶ’ and ‘ɜɢɡɠɚɬɶ’ in line 25 perhaps echoes the verbs ‘ɬɨɩɧɭɬɶ’, ‘ɩɪɨɞɪɟɛɟɠɚɬɶ’ that conclude stanza 1, with the subliminal implication that the poetic vision is linked to, and perhaps inspired by, the city-scape of the opening. By the same token, the use of ‘ɫɜɟɪɤɚɬɶ’ (line 23) - of glimmering light to convey motion - might conceivably point back to the moonlit pattern of stanza 2, with the same implication of inspiration proceeding from the poetpersona’s initial sensory receptivity. At the extreme of metaphorical abstraction, the transition here from sound to movement (or movement and sound) might suggest an analogous progression from sound to metre and measure in the mysterious (quasi-erotic?) process by which inspirational impulse crystallizes into poetic ‘flesh’.45 More obviously, the stanza’s single adjective - ‘ɛɭɣɧɚɹ’ - not only resonates with ‘ɦɹɬɟɠɧɵɣ’ (line 14) and the striking adjectival chain of stanza 3 (‘ɧɚɫɢɥɶɧɵɣ ... Ɋɚɡɝɭɥɶɧɚɹ’), but points to another quality often taken as the epitome of Iazykov’s verse. Gogol, it will be recalled, was to write of his ‘ɪɚɡɝɭɥ ɢ ɛɭɣɫɬɜɨ ɫɢɥ’ a ‘revelry and riotousness of energy’ of which the gypsy dancer perhaps, in the spirit of Petr Kireevskii’s observations on Apollo and Bacchus, more Maenad than muse in the frenzy and discord of her performance - might seem the perfect embodiment. Yet Gogol wrote also of the strict subordination of Iazykov’s language to its ‘master’ (ɝɨɫɩɨɞɢɧ). Here, however, the masculine poet-persona seems himself subordinate: passive, static, receptive. In so far as the erotic reverie is a metaphor for the creative act, the inspirational impetus is feminized, but dynamic, ‘masterfully’ (‘ɧɚɫɢɥɶɧɵɣ [sic!] ɢ ɦɹɬɟɠɧɵɣ ...’) assertive, ungovernable. Perhaps consistently with this, the ‘ɪɨɞɧɵɟ ɡɜɭɤɢ’ (native sounds) which ‘call’ to the unnamed female addressee are paradoxically alien. The literal reference is to her un-Russian, gypsy tongue; figuratively, there may be the proto-symbolist implication that she is

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animated by some mysterious ‘other’ realm, to which the poet himself has no independent access.46 Whatever its figurative connotations, the ‘spring night’ reverie is also at this point at its most immediately and concretely physical. The single word of invocation (‘ɉɪɢɞɢ!’) which begins stanza 6 breaks the spell, serving in part as a reminder that the addressee is after all not present. This might perhaps shift the focus toward the absence of the ‘real’ woman (the improbability of the real Tatiana Dmitrievna calling unbidden on the nobleman-poet is hardly relevant!), for any finished poem that calls upon the muse is liable to involve the paradox of its own production: her inspirational presence has already been felt. The poet’s anticipated welcome is both spiritualized (‘ɭɥɵɛɤɚ ɡɚɞɭɲɟɜɧɚɹ’) and expansively, ecstatically physical (‘ɨɛɴɹɬɶɹɦɢ ɜɨɫɬɨɪɝɚ’); yet although the poem’s third and final first-person verb appears here, his role remains passively receptive: to invoke, wait upon her whim, and react in greeting. From here, however, the stanza develops through two more instances of Iazykov’s ‘poetics of the unexpected’. Most striking and substantial is the shift in line 28 from the erotic and aesthetic (cf. ‘ɀɟɥɚɧɧɚɹ’) to the ethical (‘ɞɨɛɪɚɹ’). The intentionality of the latter is immediately confirmed: Ɇɨɣ ɥɭɱɲɢɣ ɫɨɧ, ɦɨɣ ɚɧɝɟɥ ɫɥɚɞɤɨɩɟɜɧɵɣ The absent persona has become angelic. The neologistic epithet ‘ɫɥɚɞɤɨɩɟɜɧɵɣ’ is consistent with the preceding ‘ɞɢɜɧɵɣ ɝɨɥɨɫ’, but this seems far removed from the screams and whoops of the dance, or the moonlit ‘temptations’ which have set the dominant tone from at least the third stanza. The poet, moreover, is now as it were taking active possession of his inspiration (cf. ‘ɦɨɹ’, ‘ɦɨɣ’, ‘ɦɨɣ’; lines 28-9). Despite the preceding oppositions of active and passive, ‘she’ is now subsumed into his creative dream: the reverie passes into the poetcreator’s control. A second and perhaps secondary jolt is occasioned by the final epithet of the stanza: ‘ɉɨɷɡɢɹ ɦɨɫɤɨɜɫɤɨɝɨ ɠɢɬɶɹ’. The city (hitherto identified only as ‘ɫɬɨɥɢɰɚ’) - and even the subsequent, interior space of the room - have given way over the previous stanzas to imaginative space, while the alien ‘native sounds’ which beckon the woman might suggest a further remove from specific place. The introduction of a ‘domesticized’ location thus comes as some surprise, even though the implication that the reverie proceeds from the physical environment is, as has been noted, imperceptibly incorporated into stanza 5. The combination of ‘poetry’ itself with prosaic reality (Moscow existence) is of course consistent with many of the contrarieties that have gone before, but the epithet’s fuller implication is that the female figure not

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merely proceeds from, but is emblematic of the environment which the poem has otherwise barely objectivized. The seventh and final stanza begins by unobtrusively deepening the ethical, even quasi-religious evaluation of the angelic gypsytemptress, who is able to sanction that which is ‘bright’ and ‘sacred’ (line 34). Her presence is conjured specifically to ‘console’ the poet’s solitude (metaphorically, as has been seen, their coming together is the condition for the completion of the creative act), and he asks her to bless with her ‘lucky hand’ (an echo of the gypsy, after all?) his ‘works and days’. The latter formula could be taken to entail the already familiar juxtaposition of the poetic (cf. ‘spring night’) with the (uncreative-prosaic) ordinariness of day. In all probability, however, the ‘days’ of the conventional formula already carried connotations less of ordinary existence than of ‘creative biography’, and the last two lines bring a final, mildly unexpected disaggregation less of poetic and prosaic than of poetic inspiration (line 34) and the erotic (line 35). The ‘festivals’ which may bring to mind Kirevskii’s definition of Iazykov’s poetry as ‘ɩɪɚɡɞɧɢɤ ɫɟɪɞɰɚ’ - had for Iazykov possible nationalistic as well as religious overtones,47 but here seem to connote above all the carefree leisure of the idealized poetic existence. ‘ɒɚɥɨɫɬɶ / ɲɚɥɭɧ’ is a recurrent trope of the amorous-anthological, quasi-anacreontic poetry of the period. It had indeed described Iazykov himself (‘Ʉɚɤ ɬɵ ɲɚɥɢɲɶ, ɢ ɤɚɤ ɬɵ ɦɢɥ’) in one of Pushkin’s poems to him, and passed as Iazykov’s own description of L.S. Pushkin (‘ɒɚɥɭɧ, ɡɚɦɟɱɟɧɧɵɣ ɬɨɛɨɣ’) in the other - in anticipation of the reunion of all three with Delvig in an idyllicized version of ‘rural’ Mikhailovskoe where they would fondly recollect their ‘dissipated’ youth (‘ɞɚɪɵ ... ɧɚɲɟɣ ɸɧɨɫɬɢ ɪɚɡɝɭɥɶɧɨɣ’).48 Curiously, then, the ending of Spring Night turns away from ‘Moscow existence’, to an abstract, conventionalized poetic realm. There, moreover, in keeping with this closing separation of ‘inspiration’ and ‘love’, the implicit female presence might be construed as the frivolous adornment of the hedonistic-creative male, devoid of the compelling inspirational force of the consoling, benedictory gypsymuse.49 Literary Context As the poem’s closure serves to emphasize, Spring Night - like most Russian lyric poetry of the period - is largely composed of a series of conventional motifs (lexical, phraseological, thematic). This may recall Polevoi’s observation that Iazykov offers ‘little poetic individuality’; but it implies too that ‘poetic individuality’ should be sought - if at all - in the particular combination of such motifs, viewed in the context of contemporary norms.

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It is an immediate indication of Iazykov’s attunement to poetic context that in ‘ɞɭɲɚ’ and ‘ɥɸɛɨɜɶ’ he incorporates the first and third most frequent of all nouns in the lyric poetry of the period; in ‘ɦɢɥɵɣ’, ‘ɫɥɚɞɤɢɣ’ (‘ɫɥɚɞɤɨɩɟɜɧɵɣ’), ‘ɫɜɹɬɨɣ’ and ‘ɫɜɟɬɥɵɣ’ - four out of the six most frequent adjectives.50 Yet even the relative ingenuity of his opening rhyme (ɫɬɨɥɢɰɚ / ɤɨɥɟɫɧɢɰɚ) is scarcely less representative. The placing of ɤɨɥɟɫɧɢɰɚ in rhyming position was evidently a feature of the age: Pushkin, for instance, had rhymed ɤɨɥɟɫɧɢɰɟ / ɛɚɝɪɹɧɢɰɟ in the opening lines of To Licinius (Ʌɢɰɢɧɢɸ, 1815), and ɰɚɪɢɰɚ / ɤɨɥɟɫɧɢɰɚ in Proserpine (ɉɪɨɡɟɪɩɢɧɚ, 1824). He had been preceded by Zhukovskii (ɤɨɥɟɫɧɢɰɚ / ɫɬɚɧɢɰɚ: Dreams [Ɇɟɱɬɵ, 1812]). Further permutations were offered immediately before Iazykov’s poem both by V.G. Tepliakov in one of his Thracian Elegies (Ɏɪɚɤɢɣɫɤɢɟ ɷɥɟɝɢɢ, rhyming ɝɪɨɛɧɢɰɵ / ɤɨɥɟɫɧɢɰɵ [1829]), and by S.P. Shevyrev (ɤɪɭɝɥɨɥɢɰɟɣ / ɤɨɥɟɫɧɢɰɟɣ; For the Album [ȼ ɚɥɶɛɨɦ ..., 1830]).51 Plainly more substantive is Iazykov’s contextual engagement with the genre of ‘night thoughts’ which, as Richard Peace has pointed out, had its immediate roots in the eighteenth century: here ‘not so much … Edward Young, [but] nearer … to Thomas Gray and “the knell of parting day, which leaves the world to darkness and to me”’.52 The formula ‘Ʌɢɲɶ ɢɡɪɟɞɤɚ’ at the beginning of line 2 may indeed establish a specific provenance from Gray’s Elegy, via the second stanza of Zhukovskii’s 1802 translation: ȼ ɬɭɦɚɧɧɨɦ ɫɭɦɪɚɤɟ ɨɤɪɟɫɬɧɨɫɬɶ ɢɫɱɟɡɚɟɬ ... ɉɨɜɫɸɞɭ ɬɢɲɢɧɚ; ɩɨɜɫɸɞɭ ɦɟɪɬɜɵɣ ɫɨɧ; Ʌɢɲɶ ɢɡɪɟɞɤɚ, ɠɭɠɠɚ, ɜɟɱɟɪɧɢɣ ɠɭɤ ɦɟɥɶɤɚɟɬ ... [my emphasis]53 In the foggy twilight the surroundings disappear ... Everywhere is silence; everywhere dead slumber; Only occasionally, droning, the evening beetle flits ... Zhukovskii later offered up the same locution in a similar context in his Gray-inspired Slavianka (ɋɥɚɜɹɧɤɚ; 1815): ȼɫɟ ɫɩɢɬ ... ɥɢɲɶ ɢɡɪɟɞɤɚ ɜ ɞɚɥɟɤɨɣ ɬɶɦɟ ɩɪɨɦɱɢɬɫɹ ɇɟɜɧɹɬɧɵɣ ɝɥɚɫ ... [my emphasis]54 All sleeps ... only occasionally in the distant dark An indistinct voice rushes past Iazykov’s usage perhaps also recalls Batiushkov’s evocation of the sounds (voice and echo: cf. Iazykov’s ‘ɨɬɤɥɢɤɧɟɬɫɹ’) that punctuate the silence (‘ɛɟɡɦɨɥɜɢɟ’) of another faintly misty moonlit night in the

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opening stanza of his seminal elegy Upon the Ruins of a Castle in Sweden (ɇɚ ɪɚɡɜɚɥɢɧɚɯ ɡɚɦɤɚ ɜ ɒɜɟɰɢɢ, 1814): Ɂɚɞɭɦɱɢɜɨ ɥɭɧɚ ɫɤɜɨɡɶ ɬɨɧɤɢɣ ɩɚɪ ɝɥɹɞɢɬ ... ɂ ɜɫɺ ɜ ɝɥɭɛɨɤɨɦ ɫɧɟ ɩɨɦɨɪɢɟ ɤɪɭɝɨɦ, Ʌɢɲɶ ɢɡɪɟɞɤɚ ɪɵɛɚɪɶ ɤ ɬɨɜɚɪɢɳɚɦ ɜɡɵɜɚɟɬ Ʌɢɲɶ ɷɯɨ ɝɥɚɫ ɟɝɨ ɩɪɨɬɹɠɧɨ ɩɨɜɬɨɪɹɟɬ ȼ ɛɟɡɦɨɥɜɢɢ ɧɨɱɧɨɦ [my emphasis]55 The moon looks pensively through fine vapour And the whole seaboard around is in deep slumber Only occasionally a fisherman calls to his comrades Only the echo protractedly repeats his voice In nocturnal silence. Other collocations of Iazykov’s also have their counterparts. His memorable opening phrase ‘ȼ ɩɪɨɡɪɚɱɧɨɣ ɦɝɥɟ’ had been used by V.I. Tumanskii (‘ȼ ɩɪɨɡɪɚɱɧɨɣ ɦɝɥɟ ɛɟɡɡɜɟɡɞɧɨɣ ɧɨɳɢ / ɋɨ ɦɧɨɣ ɝɭɥɹɥɢ ɜɵ ɢ ɩɟɧɢɟɦ ɫɜɨɢɦ / Ȼɟɡɦɨɥɜɧɵ ɩɨɬɪɹɫɚɥɢ ɪɨɳɢ’; [Ɇɭɡɵ; 1822]);56 even the bipartite formula ‘ɲɭɦ ɢ ɝɥɚɫ’ might recall the ‘ɲɭɦ ɢ ɡɜɨɧ’ of Pushkin’s Prophet, written at the time of the two poets’ closest association in 1826 and part of a continuing poetic exchange between them.57 Of particular significance, therefore, is Iazykov’s divergence from the tradition with which he so demonstratively aligned his poem. This emerges, for instance, from comparison to one of the most recent and important elaborations of specifically urban ‘night thoughts’, Pushkin’s Recollection (ȼɨɫɩɨɦɢɧɚɧɢɟ) of 1828: Ʉɨɝɞɚ ɞɥɹ ɫɦɟɪɬɧɨɝɨ ɭɦɨɥɤɧɟɬ ɲɭɦɧɵɣ ɞɟɧɶ ɂ ɧɚ ɧɟɦɵɟ ɫɬɨɝɧɵ ɝɪɚɞɚ ɉɨɥɭɩɪɨɡɪɚɱɧɚɹ ɧɚɥɹɠɟɬ ɧɨɱɢ ɬɟɧɶ ... When for mortal man the noisy day falls quiet And on the mute city squares The semi-transparent shade of night descends ... In Pushkin - as also in Zhukovskii or in Batiushkov’s elegy - the same ‘semi-transparent’ nocturnal gloom is the typical backdrop to melancholic retrospection and a taking stock of past deeds; undertones of mortality (‘ɞɥɹ ɫɦɟɪɬɧɨɝɨ’) against a sense of time’s march (‘ɱɚɫɵ ɬɨɦɢɬɟɥɶɧɨɝɨ ɛɞɟɧɶɹ’) are the almost inevitable accompaniment.58 In marked contrast, Iazykov, alone with his thoughts, eschews overt retrospection. He notably fails to develop the temporal connotation etymologically inherent in his introduction of the ‘watchman’ - perhaps another standard feature of the genre (cf. Glinka’s bitter post-1825 re-

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articulation: ‘ɇɟ ɫɥɵɲɧɨ ɲɭɦɭ ɝɨɪɨɞɫɤɨɝɨ / ȼ ɡɚɧɟɜɫɤɢɯ ɛɚɲɧɹɯ ɬɢɲɢɧɚ! / ɂ ɧɚ ɲɬɵɤɟ ɭ ɱɚɫɨɜɨɝɨ / Ƚɨɪɢɬ ɩɨɥɧɨɱɧɚɹ ɥɭɧɚ!’)59 - and proceeds instead to evoke a moment (or duration) essentially out of time (hence the shock of reversion to a specific location in line 30). In place of conscience-stricken review of the past, the poem closes in optimistic orientation to the future: whereas ‘sleep, the reward of daily toil’ (‘ɞɧɟɜɧɵɯ ɬɪɭɞɨɜ ɧɚɝɪɚɞɚ’) eludes Pushkin’s persona, Iazykov invites a blessing for his ‘future works and days’ (‘ɬɪɭɞɵ ɢ ɞɧɢ ɝɪɹɞɭɳɢɟ’). This studied divergence from Russian (or Petersburgian) poetry’s European model is confirmed, moreover, by the anaphoric invocation of the woman (‘ɉɪɢɞɢ!’). This too was a poetic commonplace, with precedents in each of the major poets of the period; but the most recent and pertinent was provided once more by Pushkin, in Conjuration (Ɂɚɤɥɢɧɚɧɢɟ; 1830): ‘əɜɢɫɶ, ɜɨɡɥɸɛɥɟɧɧɚɹ ɬɟɧɶ, / ... / ɉɪɢɞɢ, ɤɚɤ ɞɚɥɶɧɚɹ ɡɜɟɡɞɚ, / Ʉɚɤ ɥɟɝɤɢɣ ɡɜɭɤ ɢɥɶ ɞɭɧɨɜɟɧɶɟ, / ... / Ɂɨɜɭ ɬɟɛɹ ...’).60 Pushkin draws on Byron at the close of The Giaour to address the shade of the dead;61 Iazykov’s Moscow gypsy was vigorously alive. Almost as thoroughly as the moon in stanza 2, Iazykov’s portrayal of the female figure at the core of his poem is also grounded in the contemporary literary context. There is for instance a considerable body of poetry devoted to depiction of song. Notable is Venevitinov’s exquisite Elegy (ɗɥɟɝɢɹ) of 1826 or 1827, beginning: ȼɨɥɲɟɛɧɢɰɚ! Ʉɚɤ ɫɥɚɞɤɨ ɩɟɥɚ ɬɵ ɉɪɨ ɞɢɜɧɭɸ ɫɬɪɚɧɭ ɨɱɚɪɨɜɚɧɶɹ, ɉɪɨ ɠɚɪɤɭɸ ɨɬɱɢɡɧɭ ɤɪɚɫɨɬɵ! ... [my emphasis] Sorceress, how sweetly you sang Of the wondrous country of enchantment, Of the balmy homeland of beauty! ... Venevitinov’s ‘divine’ (cf. ‘ɞɢɜɧɵɣ’) enchantress, with eyes that have absorbed the ‘colour of the heavens’, incongruously ignites a poisoned flame of passion that seethes (‘ɡɚɤɢɩɢɬ’) tormentingly (‘ɬɨɦɢɬɟɥɶɧɵɣ’), ‘joylessly’ within the hearer.62 The rhyme of ɦɹɬɟɠɧɵɣ / ɧɟɠɧɨɣ is among subsequent lexical parallels to Iazykov. Dance is depicted more frequently still: not merely in the glitter and decorum of the ballroom, but in its many varieties, with appropriate rhythmic and linguistic resources and several attempted poetic tours de force.63 A signal example is the ostensibly ‘unpoetic’ verbal chain even in Batiushkov’s Joy (Ɋɚɞɨɫɬɶ; 1807-14): Ɍɨɥɩɚɦɢ ɫɛɢɪɚɣɬɟɫɹ, Ɋɭɤɚɦɢ ɫɩɥɟɬɚɣɬɟɫɹ, ɂ, ɪɚɞɨɫɬɧɨ ɬɨɩɚɹ,

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ɋɤɚɱɢɬɟ ɢ ɩɪɵɝɚɣɬɟ! [my emphasis]64 Gather in crowds, Entwine your arms And, joyfully stamping Gallop and leap! There is, accordingly, no shortage either of description of frenzied female dancers. The Maenad or Bacchante is a recurrent figure in the anthological poetry of Pushkin and others.65 An indicative variation are two slightly later poems with a direct connection to Iazykov: Baratynskii’s To Iazykov (əɡɵɤɨɜɭ) from the end of 1831, where the addressee’s ‘young muse’ is adorned in the ‘garb of a maenad’ (‘ɧɚɪɹɞ ɦɟɧɚɞɵ’), and Tepliakov’s Maenad (Ɇɟɧɚɞɚ) of 1836, which takes four lines from Iazykov (‘Ɍɵ ɜɫɹ ɦɢɥɚ, ɬɵ ɜɫɹ ɩɪɟɤɪɚɫɧɚ ...’) as epigraph.66 The gypsy-woman, too, had her place in the poetic repertoire. Pushkin apart, S.P. Shevyrev provided a significant precedent in Gypsy Dance (ɐɵɝɚɧɫɤɚɹ ɩɥɹɫɤɚ, 1828), a short lyric which characterized its protagonist by the simile of a kiss (‘Ʉɚɤ ɩɨɰɟɥɭɣ ɝɨɪɹɱɚ ɫɥɚɞɨɫɬɪɚɫɬɧɚ’), and made extensive use of anaphora and an accumulation of finite verbs to represent her performance (‘ɫɬɨɥɛɨɦ ɜɡɜɢɜɚɟɬ ɩɪɚɯ, / Ȼɟɠɢɬ, ɩɨɟɬ, ɤɚɤ ɞɢɤɚɹ ɜɚɤɯɚɧɤɚ / ... / Ɉɧɚ ɥɟɬɢɬ ... / Ɉɧɚ ɞɪɨɠɢɬ ... / ɂ ɩɵɲɟɬ ɜɡɨɪ ... / ɂ ɞɵɲɢɬ ɝɪɭɞɶ ...’).67 While V.G. Benediktov’s somewhat later Moscow Gypsies (Ɇɨɫɤɨɜɫɤɢɟ ɰɵɝɚɧɵ, 1842) constituted a summative compendium of the verbal devices used to evoke gypsy performance,68 a more complex case was ‘Angel Sara’ (‘Ⱥɧɝɟɥ ɋɚɪɚ’), the dark heroine of Baratynskii’s The Concubine (ɇɚɥɨɠɧɢɰɚ, 1829-31). Sara, too, would sing alien-tongued ‘ɪɨɞɧɵɟ ɩɟɫɧɢ’ to her lover Eletskii - a ‘ɲɚɥɭɧ’ whose dissipated existence is first conveyed as ‘ɩɪɚɡɞɧɢɤ ɦɨɥɨɞɟɰɤɨɣ’ and ‘ɛɭɣɧɵɣ ɪɚɡɝɭɥ’. The close kinship of this ‘gypsy-angel’ with Iazykov’s is emphatically manifest from lines such as the following: Ʉɨɝɞɚ ɫ ɰɵɝɚɧɤɨɣ ɦɨɥɨɞɨɸ ɋɭɞɶɛɚ ȿɥɟɰɤɨɝɨ ɫɜɟɥɚ, ɋɜɨɟɣ ɪɚɡɝɭɥɶɧɨɸ ɞɭɲɨɸ Ɉɧɚ ɦɢɥɚ ɟɦɭ ɛɵɥɚ. [my emphasis]69 When Fate joined Eletskii With the young gypsy girl, Her rakish soul Made her dear to him.

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For the most part, however, the gypsy and bacchante - like the beauty at the ball - were portrayed through specific conventions within their own lyric ‘sphere’ (in this case, usually spatially and temporally indeterminate). Iazykov’s further departure from the norm - his ‘poetic individuality’ - lay most obviously in his development of the persistent juxtapositions of ‘low’ and ‘high’ referred to above to combine the gypsy theme (‘ɪɚɡɝɭɥɶɧɚɹ’) with the normally discrete realm of the loftily ‘poetic’, signalled most obviously by ‘ɱɭɞɨ ɤɪɚɫɨɬɵ’. The latter phrase was used playfully by Pushkin in O. Masson (1819) and with rich semantic implications as Mephistopheles’ epithet for Gretchen in Scene from Faust (ɋɰɟɧɚ ɢɡ Ɏɚɭɫɬɚ, 1825),70 but a notable precedent was Zhukovskii’s ‘ɱɭɞɨ ɤɪɚɫɵ’.71 This and such cognate poeticisms as ‘Ƚɟɧɢɣ ɱɢɫɬɨɣ ɤɪɚɫɨɬɵ’ - which famously migrated from Zhukovskii’s Lalla Ruk (Ʌɚɥɥɚ Ɋɭɤ, 1821) and ‘I used to meet the youthful Muse’ (‘ə Ɇɭɡɭ ɸɧɭɸ, ɛɵɜɚɥɨ’, 1824) to Pushkin’s ‘I remember a wonderful moment’ (‘ə ɩɨɦɧɸ ɱɭɞɧɨɟ ɦɝɧɨɜɟɧɶɟ’, 1825)72 - were particularly evocative of the spiritualized, evanescent vision which was a central expression of Zhukovskii’s idealism, exemplified in such poems as Slavianka (1815), Lalla Ruk, The Manifestation of Poetry in the Form of Lalla Ruk (əɜɥɟɧɢɟ ɩɨɷɡɢɢ ɜ ɜɢɞɟ Ʌɚɥɥɚ Ɋɭɤ; 1821), Spectre (ɉɪɢɜɢɞɟɧɢɟ, 1823), or Mysterious Visitor (Ɍɚɢɧɫɬɜɟɧɧɵɣ ɩɨɫɟɬɢɬɟɥɶ, 1824).73 Iazykov’s close juxtaposition of ‘ɫɜɟɬɥɨɟ’ and ‘ɫɜɹɬɨɟ’ is especially redolent of the latter.74 Pushkin’s poem set a different precedent (for Iazykov as for Venevitinov) in rhyming both ɬɵ / ɤɪɚɫɨɬɵ / ɦɟɱɬɵ and ɦɹɬɟɠɧɵɣ / ɧɟɠɧɵɣ; but there, in conformity with the ‘poetic’ idiom Iazykov declines, ɦɹɬɟɠɧɨɫɬɶ is an attribute not of the ‘spirit of beauty’, but of the period of her absence. Consistently with his ‘unmelancholic’ city-scape, Iazykov’s particular collocation of ‘ɪɚɡɝɭɥ’ and ‘ɱɭɞɨ’ avoids the ‘joyless’ tension that results from the subversion of the ideal by the sensual in Venevitinov’s innovatively ‘psychological’ elegy. But despite his ‘ɫɜɟɬɥɨɟ’ - ‘ɫɜɹɬɨɟ’, nor is there the abandonment of ‘tavern’ for ‘church’ of which Iazykov himself wrote to Komovskii. Instead, the opposites are thoroughly and exuberantly merged into something closely akin to Petr Kireevskii’s ‘holy tavern and feast in the name of Apollo and Bacchus’, and Spring Night ends with a positive gesture of ethical affirmation. Inspiration, that which is inspired or aesthetically inspiring, is inherently ‘good’, ‘bright’, ‘holy’. The inspirational impulse is erotic, but the outwardly immoral, treated with Iazykov’s controlled poetic power, proves deeply moral. Ideological Resonance The contemporary polemical force of this position is demonstrated by Ivan Kireevskii’s review of Iazykov’s 1833 Poems:

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When Anacreon hymns wine and beauties, I see in him a merry voluptuary; when Derzhavin praises libidinousness, I see in him a moment of moral weakness; but ... in Iazykov I see neither weakness nor actual voluptuousness ... for where there is genuine ecstasy, and music, and inspiration ... let others seek out the base and salacious ... There is no artist who feels a more sacred reverence for beauty and inspiration ... accusations of immorality seem to us so bizarre as to be comic.75 This defence, which runs to several paragraphs, is directly pertinent to Spring Night, but it reflects a broader, continuing polemic, in which Baratynskii’s previously mentioned Concubine had been the main focus. Noting the charges of indecency levelled against ‘Ruslan, Onegin, The Gypsies, Nulin, Eda, The Ball’, Baratynskii sought to anticipate the critics by publishing his new poem with a substantial preface on the ‘morality’ (ɧɪɚɜɫɬɜɟɧɧɨɫɬɶ) of literature. (In effect, this consisted in truthfully portraying the whole of life, ‘bright’ and ‘dark’.)76 The detail of the ensuing debate, in which Baratynskii was actively supported by Kireevskii,77 is of less importance here than that he had written his provocatively entitled narrative - later re-published as The Gypsy-Girl (ɐɵɝɚɧɤɚ, 1835) - in such close proximity to the Kireevskii household that it was dedicated to the brothers’ stepfather A.A. Elagin. Iazykov, resident there, followed the work-in-progress with admiration, and on 18 March 1831, shortly before its publication and exactly one week before Spring Night, expressed a particular fascination with the polemical preface and its likely impact.78 Given also Kireevskii’s opinion that, despite The Concubine’s merits, ‘the ... dimensions of the narrative (ɩɨɷɦɚ) run counter to the possibility of free outpouring of the soul’,79 it seems probable that Spring Night was prompted not solely by the memory of ‘gypsy Tania’ or the return of her ring. It was Iazykov’s conscious endeavour to exemplify in lyric, without the restrictions on ‘full expression of poetic thought’ imposed by the exigencies of narrative plot,80 the issue of the ethical quality of genuine inspiration brought to the fore by Baratynskii’s gypsy narrative. If the kinship with ‘Angel Sara’ was therefore no coincidence, there are other ways too in which the lyric presentation of Spring Night might be taken to embody the thinking of Iazykov’s immediate intellectual circle. The young Kireevskii had formulated a quasidialectical conception of Russian literary development: from a Karamzinian epoch, informed by ‘French philanthropism’, to a Zhukovskian period, informed by ‘German idealism’, which by 1829, for all its value, had lost its impetus. This created a hiatus; and yet: the development of the national spirit could not halt. As thought calls forth sound so the people seek a poet. They need a soul-

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mate (‘ɧɚɩɟɪɫɧɢɤ’), able to discern their inner life and to keep a diary in ecstatic songs of the development of its dominant direction’ (my emphasis).81 Spring Night engages with perhaps the two most distinctive elements of Zhukovskii’s well-worn literary legacy - ‘night thoughts’ and the ‘miracle of beauty’ - in order to offer instead something distinctively and vigorously allied to the ‘national spirit’: an ‘ecstatic song’ (as Iazykov emphasized through lexical choices that his critics were to echo) which, as lyrical reverie, is a ‘diary’ of the poet’s own ‘inner life’. And of course the gypsy girl he envisages in his ‘Moscow’ flat - despite, or perhaps because, of the paradox noted by Petr Kireevskii that the ‘native sounds’ which call her forth are inaccessible to any foreigner - is emblematic in her ‘ɪɚɡɝɭɥ’ and ‘ɫɜɹɬɨɫɬɶ’, the range and expressivity of her seductive performance, of now familiar concepts of the breadth of the (Russian) soul. This ‘soulmate of the poet’,82 whose qualifying epithets include ‘mysterious’, ‘tender’, ‘heartfelt’ and is simultaneously capable of encompassing high and low, tavern and church, is ‘Russian’ as well as ‘moral’; and the very process of reverie through which she is depicted might of itself exemplify Kireevskii’s concept of the foundation of the Russian character. ‘The ability to forget oneself in surrounding objects and the current moment’, he had maintained, ‘... serves as the basis of all the virtues and shortcomings of the Russian people; it is the source of boldness, carefreeness, the indomitability of momentary desires ...’(my emphasis).83 Kireevskii was of course not alone in advocating a ‘national’ antidote to European Romanticism (Kiukhelbeker, for one, had done so in conjunction with the topical issue of ‘morality’ at the conclusion of his influential polemic against the elegy).84 Yet his particular, dialectical conception prompted him also to argue that the path forward from the retrospection and abstraction of the ‘Zhukovskian period’ lay in combining ‘national spirit’ with the ‘embodiment (ɜɨɩɥɨɳɟɧɢɟ) of poetry in reality’.85 Baratynskii, once again, was thus commended in 1831 for giving ‘breadth’ to his ‘heart’ not by inventing some ‘nonexistent world of sorceresses, apparitions and animal magnetism’, but by ‘discovering the possibility of poetry in reality itself’.86 Pushkin, too, had been much preoccupied with the correlation of ‘poetry’ to ‘prosaic’ in his recent work on the concluding chapters of Onegin. For Iazykov, however, it was precisely the potential to discover ‘poetry in reality’ that was paramount; and Kireevskii affords one final gloss on his auditory poem about poetry’s creation. Like wine, he suggested, Iazykov’s verse can make us see life double: ‘one life appears to us constricting, petty, everyday; the other - festive, poetic, expansive. The former oppresses the soul; the latter liberates and elevates it, filling it with ecstasy’. There is a chasm between, but Iazykov provides a bridge from one to the other,

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by, for example, ‘thoughts of poetry and ... those moments of unaccountable riotous joy, when the sounds of one’s own heart stifle the voice of the surrounding world ...’ (my emphasis). At best, this depiction of a reality transformed makes him a ‘model poet not for Russia alone’, the ‘inner character’ of whose verse is ‘not simply a body into which soul has been breathed, but a soul which has assumed the appearance of a body’.87 The spiritual and physical are inextricably intertwined; and Kireevskii’s perilously imprecise formulation finds a further close parallel in the interplay between spiritual and sensual in the middle stanzas of Spring Night, its motif of ‘disembodiment’ and broader consideration of the physical substantiality of reverie and inspiration. Although the question of who influenced whom during the personal interaction of poet and critic-thinker must remain unresolved, it is by now unsurprising that Iazykov’s apparent departure from Moscow reality to poets’ idyll in the last stanza seems in direct conformity with another of Kireevskii’s notions, that in ‘present reality’ are concealed ‘the seeds of a desired future’ (or ‘better reality’).88 Even the poem’s title is relevant in this last respect. Although Kireevskii had argued that the European-Zhukovskian strand of Russian literature had run its course, he repeatedly asserted that Russian literature itself was still in its ‘first spring’; that ‘each flower presages a new fruit and reveals a new development’.89 Spring Night is hence an apt choice, for a poem that charts the process of its own Russian inspiration and which thereby, despite Polevoi’s accusation that Iazykov lacked ‘deep, far-ranging ideas’, offers more than just ‘a language and expression that are truly poetic’. Although it articulates no clear-cut message, it reflects a keen engagement with contemporary literature, in precise accord with the spirit of an ideological milieu of growing significance. The gypsy woman whose image is woven from the ‘auditory’ Moscow setting, the skilfully crafted poetry which ecstatically ‘embodies’ her and which she, as Muse, herself metaphorically embodies, seem inextricably fused in a single, forward-looking, programmatic formulation of a ‘poetics of Moscow existence’. For readers of the early 1830s, this might have seemed refreshingly fruitful. In the end, however, Iazykov’s poetry of Moscow existence came to little. Like some other poems on the Muse, Spring Night mapped out a programme that might have been, but engendered no substantial body of accompanying poetry. Certainly, ill-health played its part in Iazykov’s rapid decline in productivity after 1831. Paradoxically, he also became increasingly concerned with the express articulation of ‘ideas’, in the socially engaged sense obviously intended by Polevoi or Belinskii. He would, after all, abandon ‘tavern’ for ‘Church’, deepening the ‘national’ strain of Spring Night into a Slavophilism more extreme and xenophobic than Kireevskii’s, in which the messianic, ideologically

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explicit image of the poet-prophet eclipsed that of the poet-dreamer with his gypsy Muse.

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NOTES 1. A.A. Del’vig, ‘Mladoi pevets, dorogoiu prekrasnoi’ (1822), in his Sochineniia, Khudozhestvennaia literatura, Leningrad, 1984, p. 49. 2. See the letters to Del’vig of 16 November 1823 and to P.A. Viazemskii of 9 November 1826 in A.S. Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, Khudozhestvennaia literatura, Moscow, 1974-8, IX, pp. 75, 229; and the two poems ‘Izdrevle sladostnyi soiuz’(1824), and ‘Iazykov, kto tebe vnushil’ (1826): ibid., I, pp. 227-8; II, p. 76. 3. N.Ochkin, ‘Stikhotvoreniia N. Iazykova. SPb. 1833’, Severnaia pchela, 1833, p. 74; repr. in N.M. Iazykov, Stikhotvoreniia, Akademiia nauk, St Petersburg, 1858, Pt. 1, p. xli. 4. M.K. Azadovskii, ‘N.M. Iazykov’, in N.M. Iazykov, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, in 3 vols, ed. M.K. Azadovskii, Academia, Moscow-Leningrad, 1934, p. 14. 5. ‘Stikhotvoreniia N. Iazykova. SPb. 1833’, Moskovskii telegraf, 1833, 4; repr. in Iazykov, Stikhotvoreniia, Pt. 1, pp. xiv-xxi. 6. ‘Russkaia literatura v 1844 godu’, in V.G. Belinskii, Sobranie sochinenii, OGIZ, Moscow, 1948, II, pp. 667-79. 7. ‘O stikhotvoreniiakh g. Iazykova’, Teleskop, 3-4, 1834; repr. in I.V. Kireevskii, Izbrannye stat’i, Sovremennik, Moscow, 1984, pp. 112, 114. 8. N.V. Gogol’, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 14 vols, Akademiia nauk SSSR, Leningrad, 1938-52, VIII, p. 387. 9. For a recent account of this phase see A.M. Peskov, ‘Sviataia Rus’ i nemetskaia nekhrist’ Nikolaia Iazykova’, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, XVI, 1995, pp. 71-80. 10. N.M. Iazykov, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, ed. K.K. Bukhmeier, Biblioteka poeta, bol’shaia seriia, 2nd ed., Sovetskii pisatel’, Leningrad, 1964, pp. 298-9. 11. See I.M. Semenko, ‘Iazykov’, in her Poety pushkinskoi pory, Khudozhestvennaia literatura, Moscow, 1970, p. 199. 12. ‘Iz neizdannoi perepiski N.M. Iazykova. 1. N.M. Iazykov i V.D. Komovskii. Perepiska 1831-1833 gg.’, publ. M. Azadovskii, Literaturnoe nasledstvo, XIX-XXI, Moscow, 1935, p. 51. For others of Iazykov’s statements on change of poetic direction in 1830-2 see ibid., p. 52. 13. Avdot’ia Petrovna Kireevskaia (Iushkova), mother of I.V. and P.V. Kirevskii, married A.A. Elagin in 1817, five years after the death of her first husband. On the household and whereabouts of the sons in 1829-31, see N. Lazareva, ‘Zhizneopisanie Ivana Vasil’evicha Kireevskogo’, in I.V. Kireevskii, Razum na puti k istine, Pravilo very, Moscow, 2002, pp. xii, xxviii-xxxi.

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14. Letter to A.M. Iazykov of 11 March 1831, in N.M. Iazykov, Sochineniia, ed. A.A. Karpov, Khudozhestvennaia literatura, Leningrad, 1982, pp. 340-1. 15. Letter of 30 March 1832, quoted in Iazykov, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, 1964, p. 645. 16. Iazykov, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, 1964, pp. 299-300. 17. T.D. Dem’ianova, ‘O Pushkine i Iazykove’, in A.S. Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov v dvukh tomakh, Khudozhestvennaia literatura, Moscow, 1974, II, pp. 213-4. On Pushkin’s stag night see T.J. Binyon, Pushkin: A Biography, HarperCollins, London, 2002, pp. 355-6. 18. See. Azadovskii, ‘N.M. Iazykov’, p. 24. 19. Quoted by Azadovskii in Iazykov, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, 1934, p. 808. 20. ‘Iz neizdannoi perepiski N.M. Iazykova’, p. 33. 21. There are only five other instances of five-line stanzas in Iazykov’s oeuvre: ‘Pesn’ Baiana’ from Uslad; Pesnia (‘Ia zhdu tebia, kogda vechernei mgloiu’); Proshchal’naia pesnia; Pamiati A.D. Markova; and Elegiia (‘Mne l’ pozabyt’ ogon’ i zhivost’) (Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, 1964, pp. 109, 272, 272-3, 280-1, 285). The last three share the rhyme-scheme of Spring Night; only Proshchal’naia pesnia is also composed throughout in iambic pentameter. 22. See Ian K. Lilly, ‘The Stanzaic Forms of N.M. Jazykov’ in Thomas Eekman and Dean S. Worth, eds, Russian Poetics, Slavica, Columbus Ohio, 1983, pp. 230-1. 23. M.L. Gasparov, Ocherki istorii russkogo stikha, Nauka, Moscow, 1984, pp. 139-40. 24. See B.P. Scherr, Russian Poetry: Meter, Rhythm, and Rhyme, University of California, Berkeley, 1986, p. 56, Table 6. 25. Ibid., pp. 54-5, 58, Table 7. 26. There is also one hyperdactylic boundary (‘vskidyvaesh’’) in the ‘dance’ stanza. Overall stress fulfilment for the caesural iambic pentameter was 79% (ibid., p. 56, Table 6); in Spring Night it is only 68%. 27. Semenko, pp. 214-5. 28. Compare Iazykov’s near-Khlebnikovian evocation of song and dance in ‘A.N. Vul’fu’ (1833): ‘... I pesni plamennykh pevits, / I pliaski plamennykh pliasavits! / Poklon vam, prezhnie moi ... / Pliashite, poite, protsvetaite ...’ etc. (Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, 1964, pp. 333-4). 29. ‘Tonality Structure in Russian Verse’, International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics, IX, 1965, pp. 125-51.

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30. The term is borrowed from Scherr, p. 259. 31. Benjamin Dees, ‘Yazykov’s Lyrical Poetry’, Russian Literarature Triquarterly, X, 1974, p. 318. 32. On the string of verbs as a ‘precise indicator of poetic individuality’ in Iazykov, see ibid., pp. 318-9. 33. K.K. Bukhmeier, ‘N.M. Iazykov’, in Iazykov, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, 1964, p. 17; B.S. Meilakh, ‘“Derzhavinskoe” v poeticheskoi sisteme N.M. Iazykova’, in Rol’ i znachenie literatury XVIII veka v istorii russkoi kul’tury (no editor), Nauka, MoscowLeningrad, 1966, p. 355. 34. Cf. ‘Kakoi izbytok chuvstv i sil’ in Pushkin’s 1826 poem to Iazykov (Pushkin, II, p. 76). 35. Unpublished contribution to analysis of Spring Night at BASEES 19th-Century Studies Conference, Bristol, 8 July 2003. 36. See A.A. Karpov, ‘Sud’ba Nikolaia Iazykova’, in Iazykov, Sochineniia, pp. 11-12. 37. The use of ‘stolitsa’ in reference to Moscow was of course not always polemically marked. See, for instance, Baratynskii’s usage in Bal (E.A. Baratynskii, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, Sovetskii pisatel’, Leningrad, 1989, p. 265; compare also p. 277). 38. See Semenko, pp. 199-200. 39. K.F. von der Borg, review of Stikhotvoreniia, 1833, Dorpater Jahrbücher für Literatur, Statistik und Kunst, 1833; repr. Iazykov, Stikhotvoreniia, 1858, Pt. 1, p. xxiii, and cited approvingly by Kireevskii, Izbrannye stat’i, p. 110. 40. See from 1831 alone Iazykov’s reference to ‘razgul’nyi moi venok, / I mladosti zanoschivaia sila, / I plamennykh vostorgov kipiatok’ (Vospominanie ob A.A. Voekovoi: Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, 1964, pp. 312) or Baratynskii’s declaration ‘Ia liubliu vostorg udalyi, / Razgul’nyi zhar tvoikh stikhov’ (‘Iazykov, buistva molodogo’: op. cit., p. 161). 41. See Dem’ianova, p. 213, and Iazykov’s Persten’: ‘... Kak na tvoi sklonias’ kolena, / Glava pokoilas’ moia’ (Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, 1964, p. 300). 42. The dedication was absent from the second, 1844 collection of Iazykov’s verse; it re-appeared in the posthumous, 1858 Stikhotvoreniia. 43. For comparable figurative usages of ‘zhivoi’ at this period see V.V. Vinogradov, Iazyk Pushkina: Pushkin i istoriia russkogo literaturnogo iazyka, Academia, MoscowLeningrad, 1935, p. 252. 44. For contemporary usage of ‘vizzhat’’and ‘prygat’’ see ibid., pp. 220, 413, 409.

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45. Such different poets as Belyi, Mandel’shtam and Akhmatova would later all explicitly maintain that poetry originates in awareness of sound. 46. There is another, obvious ‘Silver Age’ connection between Iazykov’s poem and the gypsy imagery of Blok’s Second and Third volumes; see also Gumilev’s ‘U tsygan’. 47. See the letter to A.M. Iazykov of spring 1826, in Azadovskii, ‘N.M. Iazykov’, p. 43. 48. See Pushkin, II, p. 76; I, pp. 227-8. 49. See, for example, the ‘podrugi shalunov’ of Pushkin’s Krivtsovu (1817): ibid., I, p. 50. 50. See the tables in Zsuzsanna Bjørn Andersen, ‘The Concept of “Lyric Disorder”’, in Barry P. Scherr and Dean S. Worth, eds, Russian Verse Theory: Proceedings of the 1987 Conference at UCLA, Slavica, Columbus Ohio, pp. 20-1. 51. See Pushkin, I, pp. 15, 224; V.A Zhukovskii, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, GIKhL, Moscow-Leningrad, 1959-60, I, pp. 147-8; Poety 1820-1830-x godov, Sovetskii pisatel’, Leningrad, 1961, pp. 221, 376. 52. Peace, op. cit. 53. Zhukovskii, I, p. 29. 54. Ibid., p. 264. 55. K.N. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, Academia, Moscow-Leningrad, 1934, p. 57. 56. Poety 1820-1830-x godov, p. 175. 57. Pushkin, II, p. 82. On the poetic dialogue, concluded in 1831 by Iazykov’s ‘Poetu’ (Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, 1964, pp. 323-4), see Pamela Davidson, ‘The Validation of the Writer’s Prophetic Status in the Russian Literary Tradition: From Pushkin and Iazykov through Gogol to Dostoevsky’, Slavic Review, XLII, 2003, pp. 517-9. 58. Pushkin, II, p. 137. 59. F.N. Glinka, Stikhotvoreniia, Sovetskii pisatel’, Leningrad, 1964, p. 155. In some versions the poem is entitled Pesn’ uznika. 60. Pushkin, II, p. 245. Other examples include Batiushkov’s Mechta (1806; op. cit., pp. 102-3), or Pushkin’s Vyzdorovlenie (1818; I, pp. 57-8); Zhukovskii’s Mal’vina (1808; I, pp. 80-1) is comparably lugubrious. 61. On the Byronic precedent see A.Akhmatova, Sochineniia, III, YMCA-Press, Paris, 1983, p. 317. 62. D.V. Venevitinov, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, Sovetskii pisatel’, Leningrad, 1960, p. 104.

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63. For a substantial array of examples see A.B. Pen’kovskii, Nina: Kul’turnyi mif zolotogo veka russkoi literatury v lingvisticheskom osveshchenii, Indrik, Moscow, 2003, pp. 42-4; see also William Mills Todd III, ‘“The Russian Terpsichore’s Soul-Filled Flight”: Dance Themes in Eugene Onegin’, in David M. Bethea, ed., Puškin Today, Indiana U.P., Bloomington, 1993, pp. 13-30. 64. Batiushkov, p. 142. Cf. also the rhythmic parallel to Iazykov’s ‘I topaesh’, i svishchesh’, i vizzhish’!’ in Pushkin’s parodic treatment of the theme of ‘song’: ‘V lesakh, vo mrake nochi prazdnoi, / Vesny pevets raznoobraznyi / Urchit i svishchet i gremit’ (Solovei i kukushka [1825; II, p. 66]). 65. In Baratynskii’s Bal, for instance, with the additional frisson of vampirism: Baratynskii, p. 251. 66. Ibid., p. 162; Poety 1820-1830-x godov, pp. 240-2. Baratynskii goes on to state that, behind appearances, this ‘soulmate’ (‘napersnitsa dushi’) of the poet is in truth ‘high born’ and loftily majestic. 67. Poety 1820-1830-x godov, p. 358. 68. V.G. Benediktov, Stikhotvoreniia, Sovetskii pisatel’, Leningrad, 1983, pp. 222-3. See also E.P. Rostopchina’s Tsyganskii tabor, one of her Detskie stikhotvoreniia, which includes a description of Tatiana Demianova’s performance (‘O kak ona mila! ... Kak chudnym vyrazheniem / Volnuet, trogaet i nravitsia ona! ...’). The poem was written five months after Iazykov’s, in August 1831, and first published in 1840 (Evdokiia Rostopchina, Stikhotvoreniia. Proza. Pis’ma, Sovetskaia Rossiia, Moscow, 1986, pp. 42-3). 69. Baratynskii, pp. 275, 276, 288. 70. ‘Ol’ga, krestnitsa Kipridy, / Ol’ga, chudo krasoty …’: I, p. 73; ‘Ne ia l’ tebe svoim staran’em / Dostavil chudo krasoty?’: ibid., II, p. 45. 71. ‘Ty videl i Zaru - blazhenny chasy! / Sokrovishche serdtsa i chudo krasy’ (Pesn’ araba nad mogiloiu konia, 1810): Zhukovskii, I, p. 104. 72. Zhukovskii, I, pp. 360, 367; Pushkin, II, pp. 23-4. The connection is noted by, for example, B. Tomashevskii, Pushkin: Kniga vtoraia, Materialy k monografii (1824-1837), Akademiia nauk, Moscow-Leningrad, 1960, pp. 78-9. 73. Zhukovskii, I, pp. 260-5, 359-60, 361-2, 365-6, 368-9. Zhukovskii himself used the phrase ‘chudo krasoty’ (‘Budesh’ chudo krasoty, / Budesh’ vsem na radost’ ty / Blagonravna i tikha’) in Spiashchaia tsarevna (1831; ibid., III, p. 171). It was also used by Iazykov (‘Otchaian’e podrug i chudo krasoty!’) in the elegy ‘Ty voskhititel’na ...’ (1829; Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, 1964, p. 277). 74. Cf. ‘Il’ v tebe sama sviataia / Zdes’ Poeziia byla? / ... / I poniatno govorilo [Predchuvstvie] / O nebesnom, o sviatom? / Chasto v zhizni tak byvalo: / Kto-to svetlyi k nam letit’: I, p. 369. 75. Kireevskii, Izbrannye stat’i, pp. 111-12.

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76. The full text is in Baratynskii, pp. 326-32. Geir Khetso [Kjetsaa] neatly summarizes Baratynskii’s lengthy argument by quoting his 1839 poem ‘Blagosloven sviatoe vozvestivshii!’: ‘... Dve oblasti - siianiia i t’my - / Issledovat’ ravno stremimsia my ...’ (G. Khetso, Evgenii Baratynskii: Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, Universitetsforlaget, Oslo, 1973, p. 396). 77. In addition to a lengthy, polemically edged review of Nalozhnitsa in ‘Obozrenie russkoi literatury za 1831 god’ (Izbrannye stat’i, p. 87-92), Kireevskii published Baratynskii’s riposte to the critics (‘Antikritika’) in Evropeets (1832, 2; repr.: E.A. Boratynskii, Razuma velikolepnyi pir, Sovremennik, Moscow, 1981, pp. 121-30. See also Baratynskii’s attendant correspondence with Kireevskii: ibid., pp. 118-9, 130-9). 78. ‘Iz neizdannoi perepiski N.M. Iazykova’, p. 40 and note; see also p. 44. 79. Kireevskii, Izbrannye stat’i, p. 92. 80. Ibid. It should be added that Kireevskii regarded Sara as ‘probably the best thing in the whole poema’. 81. Ibid., p. 44. The discussion of the development of Russian literature is from ‘Obozrenie russkoi slovesnosti 1829 goda’ (ibid., pp. 40-61). 82. Cf. ‘Napersnitsa dushi tvoei’ in Baratynskii’s second poem to Iazykov (Stikhotvoreniia, p. 162). 83. ‘Nechto o kharaktere poezii Pushkina’ (1828), ibid., p. 38. For some thoughtprovoking reflections on the paradoxical connection of the gypsy theme with Russianness and notions of narod in the consciousness of (alienated) Russian intellectuals from Pushkin to Lotman, see A. Etkind, Khlyst: Sekty, literatura i revoliutsiia, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Moscow, 1998, pp. 164-5. 84. ‘It is not enough ... to assimilate the treasures of foreign tribes: may a truly Russian poetry be created for the glory of Russia; and may holy Russia not only in the civil, but in the moral world be the first power of the universe!’ (V.K. Kiukhel’beker, ‘O napravlenii nashei poezii, osobenno liricheskoi, v poslednee desiatiletie’, in Russkie esteticheskie traktaty pervoi tret’i XIX veka, Iskusstvo, Moscow, 1974, II, p. 575). 85. Izbrannye stat’i, p. 44. 86. Ibid., p. 89. 87. Ibid., pp. 114-5. 88. Ibid., p. 44. 89. Ibid., p. 81. See also p. 109.

Did Carmen really come from Russia (with a little help from Turgenev)? A.D.P. Briggs

As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note. Georges Bizet1 I am convinced that in about ten years Carmen will have become the most popular opera in the world. Petr Ilich Chaikovskii (1889)2 A Disputed Claim In the summer of 2006 a book review in the Times Literary Supplement contained the following passing remark hidden away between brackets: ‘(The free-loving Zemfira and her death at Aleko’s jealous hands provided a direct source for Prosper Mérimée’s and Georges Bizet’s Carmen)’.3 The reference is, of course, to the two main characters in Pushkin’s narrative poem The Gypsies, which he wrote in 1824, and published in 1827. Although the claim is demonstrably true, you still cannot expect to make it without inviting opposition. On this occasion the objection was not long delayed. A reader wrote in to say that this claim was a canard often trotted out by academics; it was untrue, and one reason was that Mérimée began to study Russian only in 1848, having already written his story Carmen in 1845. A short correspondence ensued, but the subject has now gone back to sleep. Nothing has been cleared up. If anything, the story has become rather more complicated. Referring to The Gypsies, the correspondent informs us that ‘To see it as a direct source for his Spanish tale has tempted many critics.’4 This is to suggest that only one thing matters: the line of provenance goes from the Pushkin poem straight to the French-Spanish tale and thence to the opera libretto - which is by no means what has been claimed. And in any case, who are the ‘many’ critics? Very few people have written about this subject, and no-one in much detail. Several ideas need to be tested. How much Russian did Mérimée know, and when did he learn it? How well did he know Pushkin’s work? Could he have absorbed something from The Gypsies that affected his

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tale? If so, or if not, could the librettists have done something similar, with or without him, in relation to the opera? Fortunately, there is plenty of evidence to comb through, and definitive answers to at least some of these questions are obtainable. This is an area in which the stakes are high. Are we not talking of Russia’s most important writer, and the world’s most famous opera? (And beyond that, incidentally, we may find connections with an even greater composer than Georges Bizet.) It is time to establish once and for all whether or not the reviewer’s claim has any substance. Lines from Russia The most obvious thing anyone could say about the opera Carmen is that it is all Spanish and French. The setting is in Spain: it would not be complete without clicking castanets, Seville oranges, Spanish (or Latin American) dances, guitars, manzanilla, and, of course, all the bullfighting. Escamillo’s toreador song must be one of the half-dozen most popular tunes in the world. What could be more characteristically Spanish than all of this? As one pair of commentators puts it, ‘Say ‘seductive Spanish gypsy and we think of Carmen; say “Toreador” and we think of Escamillo’s swaggering tune. Bizet’s opera has come to have an almost proverbial status.’5 Conversely, what could be more French than the group of four men responsible for the words and music: Georges Bizet, the composer; the librettists, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy; and Prosper Mérimée who wrote the story Carmen on which the opera was based? And yet, this apparent West-European monopoly of the world’s best-known opera is not as complete as it may seem. The least that can be said is that a small number of lines appearing in the libretto are translations into French prose of certain verses written by Alexander Pushkin, verses which never appeared in any intermediary source, such as Mérimée’s story. The most that can be said is that a great deal of this opera, including its main thematic content, derives from that writer; more especially, the two main characters, Carmen herself and Don José, are traceable back beyond Mérimée’s story to two Pushkinian prototypes, Zemfira and Aleko in The Gypsies. Despite some strong clues we shall never be one hundred per cent certain who did the borrowing, why they did it or when they did it, and this whole story, once begun, soon wraps itself up in all sorts of complications. So let us begin with something solid and certain. Towards the end of the first act of the opera, in the ninth scene, Don José and two soldiers bring Carmen before their superior officer, Zuniga, and report on what they have seen in the tobacco factory. Zuniga then turns to Carmen and asks what she has to say for herself. Her response is magnificent in its impudence. Not only does she refuse to answer, she

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walks up to him provocatively, and sings her defiance and insolence straight in his face. Worse than that, at first she doesn’t even sing any words but taunts him with a meaningless ‘Tra la la la la la la’, which she will later repeat several times. The words, when they do emerge, are most interesting: ‘Coupe-moi, brûle-moi! ...’, she sings. ‘Stab me or burn me, I'll tell you nothing. I can stand anything, fire, the blade and heaven itself.’ At first this part of Carmen’s song seems to be addressed to her interrogator, but it soon turns out that she is actually singing a taunting but more generalized song about love extinguished and transferred elsewhere. She continues (with many another ‘Tra la la la la la la’), ‘I keep my secret and I keep it well. I love another man and I’ll die saying that I love him.’ This, as it happens, is an exact prediction, perhaps almost an invocation, of the final outcome of the opera. Pushkin’s Gypsies The interesting point here is that several of these lines occur word for word in a narrative poem entitled The Gypsies which was written in 1824 by Alexander Pushkin and published three years later. This tells the story of Zemfira, a gypsy woman who one day out in the wilds comes across Aleko, a young man who has run away from Russian society partly because he is disillusioned with it and partly because he has committed some unspecified crime for which he is being pursued by the authorities. He joins the gypsy band and partners her for two years, during which he becomes accustomed to gypsy life, and she bears him a child. Zemfira, however, becomes increasingly restless. She cannot be contained by the alien concept of fidelity which Aleko now wishes to force upon her. For her, freedom is everything. She takes a lover, Aleko finds out, and stabs both of them to death before giving himself up to the gypsies. This narrative poem, with its twelve separate scenes, extensive dialogue, interpolated songs and even stage directions, reads much like a playlet, or indeed a libretto. Most of the characters are given to singing, and one of the songs, addressed by Zemfira to Aleko, contains the extracts transcribed into the libretto of Carmen. Particularly striking are the phrases ‘Coupe-moi, brûle-moi,’ which come straight from Pushkin’s ‘Ɋɟɠɶ ɦɟɧɹ, ɠɝɢ ɦɟɧɹ’; and part of the song ‘ɋɬɚɪɵɣ ɦɭɠ, ɝɪɨɡɧɵɣ ɦɭɠ ...’, which is itself an adaptation of a Moldavian gypsy song part of which goes ‘arde-ma, fried-ma …’6 How did this material get into the opera? The answer to this is more complex than one might think. These particular words cannot have been taken from Mérimée’s story, because they do not appear in it. Where they do appear is in a French translation of the Pushkin poem done by Mérimée himself and published in 1852. Under the title of Les Bohémiens, this prose version appeared subsequently as an independent

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piece alongside his story Carmen in collections of his works. It was certainly available to the librettists, who worked on the book during 1874-75. It looks as if they used, in addition to their own imagination, both the story of Carmen and the text of Les Bohémiens. Let us not forget, incidentally, that when speaking of librettists we must consider not only Meilhac and Halévy, but also Georges Bizet himself. It was his idea in 1872 to create an opera out of Mérimée’s story, and, although he left the book to the experienced and prolific librettists whom he knew so well (one of them being his brother-in-law), he could not resist getting personally involved with their work at all times and especially when the project was nearing the rehearsal stage. The Libretto What they saw as a routine chore, Bizet tackled like a labour of love. One critic suggests that his involvement may have been considerable: ‘the composer had a hand in the libretto - perhaps a much larger hand than we know for certain.’7 Another commentator, Lesley A. Wright, reminds us that Bizet, ‘had suggested the subject ... to his librettists …, and worked closely with them to create (and even contribute to) the libretto,’8 while a third, Nicholas John, emphasizes that the librettists’ published text ‘differs considerably from what Bizet set to music’; sometimes their versions were so unsatisfactory that he ‘ferociously altered and rejected them.’9 Much of the libretto is probably his rather than theirs. We have no means of telling which of the three hit on the notion of incorporating bits of translated Pushkin, but one of them must have done, and Bizet himself seems the most likely candidate. All three of them, by the way, knew the Russian community in Paris very closely; Bizet and Halévy lived almost next-door to Ivan Turgenev and his beloved Pauline Viardot, herself a renowned opera soprano, now longretired. They would have had a deep sympathy for Russian culture and would know much about Pushkin. As it happens, Bizet spent two months in the summer of 1874 close to Turgenev and Viardot at Bougival, just outside Paris, and this was when he completed the first orchestration of the full score of Carmen. As to the libretto itself, it is a fine piece of work, recognized by one critic as ‘one of the five or six perfect examples of its kind’10 and described by another as ‘one of the best texts ever written.’11 This kind of comment is now commonplace, though the participation of Bizet himself has not always been acknowledged.12 However, let us return to the opera and take matters a little further. We have not yet finished with the Zemfira-Aleko confrontation in Pushkin’s poem. As she sings her insulting song he grumbles away, telling her that he doesn’t want to hear it. Zuniga does more or less the same in relation to Carmen. But, in the poem, as the song progresses and takes on its full meaning Aleko is roused to an angry response. He tells

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her to shut up; he has heard enough - in Mérimée’s words, ‘Tais-toi, Zemfira! J’en ai entendu assez.’ Zemfira provokes him further. At first she had said that the song wasn’t about him; she was singing to herself: ‘Je chante la chanson pour moi’. Now she revels in proclaiming that she is singing for him: ‘Fâche-toi si tu veux ... Oui, je chante la chanson pour toi ...’ Some of these exchanges (which, again, are absent from Mérimée’s story though they do appear in his translation from Pushkin) are taken up in the tenth scene of the opera, both before and after the next major piece, Carmen’s famous seguidilla aria, ‘Près des ramparts de Seville ...’, which is itself a celebration of feminine inconstancy referring to the need for freedom, a string of admirers and a new lover. (All of this is pure Zemfira, not part of Mérimée’s story.) Since this material is now directed no longer at Zuniga but pointedly at Don José, it is he who tells her, tetchily, to shut up: ‘Tais-toi, je t’avais dit de ne pas me parler’, to which Carmen replies, ‘Je ne te parle pas ... je chante pour moi-même ...’, after which she carries on her teasing and taunting. These fine details are important. They show beyond doubt that some whole lines were taken not from Carmen (the story) but from Les Bohémiens (the translation from Pushkin). They also suggest, more significantly, that the Zemfira-Aleko relationship was prominent in the minds of the librettists (or one of them at least) throughout two major scenes at the end of act one of the opera. On this we can build, tentatively at least. A careful scrutiny of the opera is called for, but in this context we shall pay no attention to the Micaëla story, which owes nothing to Mérimée or Pushkin, nor to Escamillo, for much the same reason. In any case, these two artificial creatures belong to a different style and genre. As an American professor puts it: Bizet’s Carmen changed the traditions of the French lyrical stage by blurring the distinctions between operatic genres. For example, Micaëla and Escamillo, whose roles were invented by Meilhac and Halévy, are stock characters in the Opéra Comique tradition - as are Carmen’s companions - but the impossible love story between [Carmen and José] is a tragedy that belongs to Grand Opera.13 Martin Cooper takes this a little further: When the librettists invented the characters of Micaëla ... and further developed Escamillo, they were, in fact, continuing a tradition of the Opéra Comique ... Both Micaëla and Escamillo are given music that is conventional - in fact very reminiscent of Gounod - compared with the rest of the opera.14

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Nelly Furman goes on to demonstrate eloquently how, in this story of romantic passion, the incompatible protagonists never sing of love in unison; even their voices - lower mezzo (rather than high soprano) and lyrical tenor - are mismatched. By contrast, Micaëla blends with José in a traditional duet (‘Ma mère, je la vois!’), which emphasizes both their ordinariness and the unconventional nature of the relationship between Carmen and José. Other critics are less kind. Harold C. Schonberg tells us bluntly that, ‘The opera does not have a perfect libretto - Micaëla is dragged in, and her contribution to the opera is entirely unconvincing.’15 These two characters apart, our scrutiny will reveal all sorts of details which have a curiously Pushkinian resonance. Take, for instance, the sensational ending to the opera. Escamillo is absent, of course, just over the horizon killing his bulls, though he is in close enough proximity for Don José to refer to him and recognize that he is Carmen’s new lover. In Les Bohémiens Aleko comes on the two lovers and asks the young man where he is going (‘Où vas-tu?’), before striking him dead with a dagger. Zemfira’s reaction is one of defiance; she exclaims that she does not fear Aleko and scorns all his threats. Her dying words, as she too is struck down, are ‘I die loving him’ (‘Je meurs en l’aimant’), an exact repetition of what she has said earlier in her insolent song. Aleko, who could easily have made his escape, chooses to stay on and give himself up. All of these circumstances are repeated in the opera. José bars Carmen’s way and asks, ‘Où vas-tu?’, to which she shows nothing but defiance. Having only just told José that she has no fear of him, now she seals her own fate by exclaiming, ‘I love him, I love him, and in the face of death itself, I shall repeat that I love him.’ (‘Je l’aime, je l’aime, et devant la mort même je répéterai que je l’aime.’) In her case, too, this is the fulfilment of what her earlier song has predicted. After she has been stabbed to death, José, like Aleko before him, makes no effort to escape but offers himself up for arrest (‘Vous pouvez m’arrêter ... C’est moi qui l’ai tuée.’) This important scene, in general terms and in most of its specific details, stands much nearer to Pushkin than to Mérimée. In the story of Carmen the ending is told in the first person and at some length; to the air of inevitability is added an agonizing sense of calculation. The murder takes place in a remote gorge, and after it José buries the body, performs certain ceremonies and then rides a good distance to give himself up. This diffusion of energy, typical of the story, does not occur in Pushkin or Bizet, where everything is depicted objectively and it all happens in one place, during a sudden and rapid confrontation.

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Pushkin, Bizet and the Birds Another famous moment in the opera may well owe something to Les Bohémiens. When Carmen makes her entry in act one, she does so in some style, singing a sensuous Cuban habañera which is said to have been rewritten a dozen times in rehearsal to get the tone exactly right and please the leading lady, Célestine Galli-Marié.16 The (now) well-known melody comes from another composer, Sebastian Yradier, but the original words, involving a love duet and promise of marriage, have no relevance to the Carmen story. So Bizet himself wrote all the words of the new song, and they seem to recall Pushkin. There is a good deal of bird imagery in Les Bohémiens, and ‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle ...’ (‘Love is a wilful bird ...’) may perhaps derive from a song in section three of Pushkin’s poem, ‘God’s little bird knows neither care nor labour ...’ (‘ɉɬɢɱɤɚ Ȼɨɠɢɹ ɧɟ ɡɧɚɟɬ / ɇɢ ɡɚɛɨɬɵ ɧɢ ɬɪɭɞɚ ...’). Love is like a wild bird, Carmen sings, giving us a nicely blurred image comprised of herself, love and the wilful little bird which flaps its wings and darts away just when you think you have caught it. This is, of course, also the free-wheeling spirit of Zemfira, though, curiously, it is Aleko who is characterized by Pushkin in terms of bird behaviour. Once accepted by the gypsies, he becomes like a little bird who lives a carefree life and, whenever he feels like it, shakes his feathers and flies off somewhere else. These metaphors seem to be closely related and some of the language of Carmen’s aria hovers around Pushkin. For instance, when she sings, ‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle ... Il n’a jamais, jamais connu de loi’ (words that are repeated at the very end of act one) she seems to conflate the opening words of the Pushkin song in their French version, ‘L’oiselet du bon Dieu ne connaît ni souci ni travail’ with the old gypsy’s words from the end of Les Bohémiens, ‘Nous sommes des sauvages qui n’avons pas de loi’. Earlier he has said to Aleko, ‘La jeunesse n’est-elle plus volontaire que l’oiseau? Quelle force arrêterait l’amour?’ The correspondences between these two songs are perhaps too tenuous for us to think in terms of irrefutable evidence, but the hand of Pushkin does seem to have given Bizet his sense of direction at a significant moment in the opera, and we know of no other source than Gypsies that might have so strongly suggested bird imagery. Who was Sobolevskii? And so there are many traces of Pushkin in this opera, some of them clear and direct, others oblique and perhaps tenuous. This is still not the whole story. What about the possibility that Pushkin’s poem had some kind of determining effect on Mérimée’s tale in the first place? This seems likely. Mérimée revered the Russian language and especially Pushkin, whom he would go on to translate and characterize in a long

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article.17 Intoxicated by the poem Gypsies, he persistently described it as Pushkin’s masterpiece despite having read Evgenii Onegin and The Bronze Horseman. The references to these works, and others, including Boris Godunov and The Queen of Spades, were made in a letter of 1849 to a Russian friend, Sergei Sobolevskii. They give the lie to any idea that Mérimée was just beginning to learn Russian at about this time; no-one can read Onegin (inter alia) from cover to cover without having done many months, probably years, of sustained work on the language. The name of Sobolevskii needs bringing forward. He is a key figure in this story. Sergei Alexandrovich Sobolevskii (1803-70), bibliophile, businessman and traveller, provides an early and intimate link between Alexander Pushkin and Prosper Mérimée that deserves the closest attention.18 If anyone can validate the direct connection between Pushkin, the poem and the opera, Sobolevskii is the man. He was one of Pushkin’s closest personal friends going right back to childhood. Pushkin recognized him affectionately as a bon viveur and rough diamond by calling him Falstaff one day and Caliban the next. Sobolevskii’s first major service to the poet was to help prepare his first serious work, Ruslan and Liudmila, for the press; this was one of several similar favours conducted over many years. He was a constant companion and adviser, close enough to have steered his friend away from trouble on several occasions, and to have negotiated his way out of more than one duel. There is a strong possibility that he alone could have sorted out charge and counter-charge and talked his way through the dreadful circumstances that led to a duel with d’Anthès and Pushkin’s death in 1837 - but, alas, he was abroad at the critical time. Count V.A. Sollogub, writing about Pushkin’s duel, said, ‘I am firmly convinced that S.A. Sobolevskii, had he been in St Petersburg at that time, would have been the only person who, because of his influence on Pushkin, could have restrained him.’19 He remained a close friend throughout the poet’s life, one of the few people whom Pushkin knew, loved and really trusted. For instance, it was in Sobolevskii’s flat that the first reading of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov took place in September 1826, and Sobolevskii took him in after Pushkin’s house arrest at Mikhailovskoe during 1824-25. The first contact between Pushkin and Mérimée went from west to east, and was personally conducted by Sobolevskii. In 1827 Mérimée published anonymously a small collection of what purported to be Slavonic songs translated into French prose under the title La Guzla, ou choix de poésies illyriques recueillies dans la Dalmatie, la Bosnie, la Croatie, et l’Herzégovine. This was clever pastiche rather than discovery and translation, but it was so well done (based on years of research into South-Slavonic folklore20) that everybody was taken in, including literary figures as accomplished as Pushkin, Belinskii and Mickiewicz, when it was taken to Russia in 1833 (or possibly sent there as early as 1828). Pushkin was enchanted by Mérimée’s work, and paid him the

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compliment of ‘retranslating’ the songs back into his own Slavonic language, Russian (1834), even adding a couple more of his own. For all their dubious provenance these poems are still highly regarded, and their apparent authenticity comes from their having been through the hands of two men of artistic talent who knew their subject. As soon as Mérimée discovered that he had inadvertently deceived the Russian poet, in January 1835, he wrote to apologize, saying he was ‘both proud and ashamed’ of having taken him in.21 One French biographer puts the position nicely by saying, ‘It was Pushkin, in fact, who “took in” Mérimée, by transforming his parodies into poems.’22 For our present purposes it is particularly significant that Pushkin presented Sobolevskii with a special, personal parchment edition of his narrative poem, The Gypsies, in May 1827 as a token of gratitude for Sobolevskii’s role in bringing this work to publication. Within months Sobolevskii had departed for western Europe, where he stayed for nearly five years, befriending many literary figures, including Mérimée, whom he lost no time in convincing of Pushkin’s genius. The two Pushkin works uppermost in his mind at that time were Evgenii Onegin (which was coming out in chapters) and Gypsies, both of which became the favourite pieces of Mérimée, who persisted in regarding them as Pushkin’s two masterpieces, similar in value. In a letter to Sobolevskii of 1849 he gives the palm to the latter work: ‘When all’s said and done it seems to me that Gypsies is his masterpiece.’23 This idea never left him. Twenty years later he could still write: ‘In my opinion Les Bohémiens is the most faithful epitome of Pushkin’s manner and genius. The simplicity of the story-line, the skilful selection of detail, the sobriety of his execution. It is impossible to give an idea in French of the conciseness of these lines.’24 It is true that Prosper Mérimée’s obsession with Russian literature really begins a year or two after the writing of Carmen in 1845, but by 1849 he was able to publish his first translation from Pushkin, the prose tale which would one day itself form the basis of a famous opera, The Queen of Spades. In point of fact, Mérimée’s first introduction to the language and the literature of the Russians goes right back to 1831, when he first met Sobolevskii,25 and his interest was rekindled by several months of this man’s company in 1837. The correspondence between the two of them was the subject of a lengthy study published in Russia in 1928;26 this book includes a photocopy of a letter written in good, if lessthan-perfect, Russian by Prosper Mérimée as early as 1839. This proves beyond doubt that he had a good grip on the language several years before he wrote the story Carmen. His learning of Russian also coincided with his detailed study of gypsy life. It seems certain that these two preoccupations came together in his enthusiastic reading of Pushkin’s Gypsies. As to the story Carmen, the germ of that goes back fifteen years before its publication to 1830, when Mérimée’s friend the Countess de

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Montijo told him about a real event concerning a dashing young man from Málaga who had murdered his lover. She was not a gypsy; that touch was added in by Mérimée as a direct consequence of his fascination for the gypsy people. At a superficial reading his tale may not bring Pushkin immediately to mind. His hero and heroine are crude and melodramatic characters; José is a multiple murderer, Carmen is coarse, violent, thieving and promiscuous. On the other hand, the basic story, when stripped of its exaggerations and excessive derring-do, is that of Gypsies. A gypsy girl is stabbed to death by a jealous non-gypsy who loves her passionately, refuses to share her with a rival, or indeed anyone else, and fails to impose upon her the standards of constancy which are alien to her wilful character. He himself is no paragon, having had to flee from the law. Pushkin’s poem should be seen as a more important antecedent to this story than any other source which has been identified, including the often-quoted Manon Lescaut.27 Back to Pushkin One thing is sure. When the librettists went to work on Mérimée’s story they did more than merely simplify it and add extra material (including Micaëla); they actually reshaped it along lines much closer to Pushkin and Gypsies. The strange fact is that the Carmen and Don José whom we know from the opera are nearer to Zemfira and Aleko than to their ostensible originals in Mérimée 's story. They are determined largely by Alexander Pushkin. And this is not all. There are three major themes in the opera and they too are Pushkin’s more than anyone else’s. These are the power of human passion and its close links with violence and tragedy; the heroine’s repeated assertions of the need for freedom; and the ineluctable force of malevolent destiny which, once invoked or recognized, always claims its own. Now, it may be said that these three preoccupations are there already in Mérimée’s story; and so they are - but only to a limited extent. There is simply no emphasis on them, especially the last two. Take, for example, the concept of freedom. The word ‘free’ or ‘freedom’ occurs only three times in the story, three times in 20,000 words (22,000 if you include chapter four, which was added on later) - and one of those is rather casual. In both Pushkin’s Gypsies (just under 3,000 words) and Mérimée’s translation Les Bohémiens (just over 3,000) there are more than a dozen, they are emphatic and they occur in strategically important places. Thus they build up into an idea (something lacking in the story) which becomes an obsession and a major theme. Even this incidence understates the preoccupation with freedom. For instance, Carmen’s famous habañera aria, which we have already mentioned, is all about being as free as a bird, and the English translations tend to make this explicit. Gustav Kobbé as early as 1919 translated the opening lines as

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‘Love is a gypsy boy, ’tis true, / He ever was and ever will be free …’28, and in modern times Nell and John Moody pursue the same concept with, ‘love’s a bird that will live in freedom ...’29 Yet the actual word is not used at this point in the libretto, and so does not contribute to the total number of references. Mina Curtis puts a sharp point on this: ‘This motivating passion for liberty is the element Bizet contributed to the characterization of Carmen. In Mérimée’s story no emphasis is placed on her need for freedom ...’30 In the case of Gypsies freedom, passion and fate are so prominently displayed and frequently mentioned as to risk spoiling the story through over-emphasis. (All three of them ‘liberté’, ‘passions’ and ‘l’inexorable destin’ appear in the last fifty words of Les Bohémiens, and, to take only one other example, the words ‘libre’, ‘l’aveugle destin’ and ‘quelles passions’ appear in very close proximity in the tiny third section of the poem). The fact is that Mérimée’s diffuse story has as its first aim full-blooded entertainment; it is all action, colour, incident. The poem and the opera, while not exactly short of dramatic events and characters, are more concentrated. In them the themes and vital issues present themselves with greater clarity and intensity. An example of this may be seen at the end of the second act of Carmen in which the closing words actually rhyme ‘volonté’ with ‘liberté’, the exact equivalents of two Russian words used repeatedly in Gypsies, ‘ɜɨɥɹ’ and ‘ɫɜɨɛɨɞɚ’,which mean ‘will’ and ‘freedom’. This ending is not just a vague or generalized concept built up into a rousing terminal ensemble, such as we sometimes get in Mozart’s operas and in many others; nor is it a specific desire to be free from imprisonment, the like of which occurs naturally in, for example, Fidelio (Prisoners’ Chorus at the end of act one) or Nabucco (Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves). This is a repetition of what Carmen has said several times before, a summation of all that she stands for and an assertion of the principle for which she will ultimately be prepared to die. Whereas Les Bohémiens is also characterized by such concentration of meaning (and on the very same subject), the story of Carmen cannot match the opera or the poem in these terms. The Theme of Fate Act three of the opera begins with an unequivocal statement of the theme of Destiny; the opening words are ‘Ecoute, compagnon, écoute, La Fortune est là-bas ...’ This striking theme is fully expressed and upheld by the music. It accounts for the most powerful sections of the score, and in performance it carries enormous impact. As Schonberg puts it, ‘When the great inspiration of the opera, the Fate theme, is heard in the orchestra, stark and threatening, it takes a most blasé listener not to feel his adrenalin surge.’31 Another measure of the power engendered by

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Bizet’s depiction of Fate can be taken from the behaviour of Petr Chaikovskii, one of his most fervent admirers, at a critical point in his life in 1876. Despite his homosexuality, he made the disastrous decision to marry a young woman, Antonina Miliukova, who was threatening suicide if he did not do so. His main motivation came probably from a desire to quell rumours and gain respectability, and also to avoid behaving like Evgenii Onegin in Pushkin’s novel in verse, whose rejection of Tatiana he despised. But there is no doubt that he also felt that destiny was moving him in that direction. Edward Garden explains: One of the reasons he gave for his decision to marry was ... that Fate had decreed his meeting with the girl. ‘No man can escape his destiny,’ he wrote, ‘What will be, will be.’ This typically Russian fatalism was brought to a head in Tchaikovsky’s case ... by his morbidly intense reaction to Carmen …32 Garden has already described the Russian composer’s reaction to Carmen in Paris: Tchaikovsky’s ‘unhealthy passion’ for this opera - as Modest [his brother] called it - had only been increased by the tragic death of the composer soon after its lukewarm initial reception. He was electrified by Célestine Galli-Marié’s interpretation of the title-role, combining as it did uncontrolled passion and an element of mystic fatalism. This whole atmosphere ... was to enter into his own compositions more and more. Those feelings, hitherto relatively latent in him, were almost brutally stimulated by Carmen.33 It was the ending of the opera which affected him most deeply. In a letter to his patroness he wrote: ‘What a wonderful subject for an opera! I can’t play the last scene without tears … a terrible tragedy and the death of the two principals, who through fate - fatum - reach at length a climax and their own miserable end.’34 This is not the place for a detailed study of the impact made by Carmen on Chaikovskii, who watched the opera in Paris (20 January 1876) less than a year after its first performance, and considered this experience, as his brother recalled, ‘one of the most powerful musical impressions of his entire life.’35 But it seems relevant to cast a quick eye over the results of this devastating encounter. Carmen seems to have inspired the great Russian composer with the idea of incorporating in his music, and repeating, what David Brown refers to as ‘a Fate contour’,36 a theme borrowed from Bizet (perhaps with a dash of Wagner), in many of his subsequent works.37 The experts have listed them for us; they include, inter alia, Tatiana’s famous aria in Evgenii Onegin, passages in

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the fourth, fifth and sixth symphonies, the second piano concerto, several songs, and various moments in The Queen of Spades. The idea was with the composer to the very end. Warrack puts this poignantly: It seems particularly fitting that this outline should overshadow the closing bars of ‘Again, as before, alone’, the last of Tchaikovsky’s Six Romances on texts by Rathaus, Op. 73, and the last composition of importance that he ever completed.38 The plangent descending notes of this beautiful but unhappy theme will be familiar to anyone with even a passing familiarity with this composer’s best works. And yet little of the fate theme derives from the desultory cardplaying and occasional remarks of the Mérimée story. Where does it come from? Its origins are clearly discernible in Pushkin, most noticeably perhaps in the concluding words of Les Bohémiens: ‘Partout les passions, partout l’inexorable destin,’ which may well have stayed in Chaikovskii’s mind. He would have known them by heart in Pushkin’s original Russian: ‘ɂ ɜɫɸɞɭ ɫɬɪɚɫɬɢ ɪɨɤɨɜɵɟ, / ɂ ɨɬ ɫɭɞɟɛ ɡɚɳɢɬɵ ɧɟɬ’. Passion, passion everywhere, and there’s no defence against fate. Finally, the question of realism is also worth a moment’s thought. This opera is sometimes described as one of the foundation stones of the late-nineteenth-century realistic tradition. As Edward J. Dent puts it, ‘Carmen … is a historic landmark, for it was the first step towards naturalistic opera in the style which came to be called verismo in later generations.’39 That accolade would have been unbestowable if the story, and particularly the leading characters, had not been softened by being taken back beyond Mérimée to Alexander Pushkin. Finale Let us now rehearse the likely sequence of events which led eventually to the libretto of the opera, and from there to an experience that would change the life of one of Russia’s greatest composers. The first occurrence gets us off to a promising start, though its authenticity cannot be totally relied upon. The story of what may have happened to Alexander Pushkin in 1823 is told by Janko Lavrin: The Gipsies may even have some bearing on one of his own adventures in the same Bessarabian plain which serves as a background for the poem. According to one account heard from a witness and printed in ... The Years Gone By (1908) by a certain Z.K.Railli-Arboret ...[,] Pushkin himself was in love with a gipsy-girl and lived for a while with the gipsies ... ‘The camp was headed by an ... old man [who] had a beautiful daughter

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called Zemphira ... Pushkin was so struck by her beauty that he stopped [with them] for several days. He actually settled in her father’s tent. Zemphira and he roamed about for days, and but for Zemphira’s sympathy for a young gipsy the idyll would have continued. It was jealousy that brought it to a sudden end. One morning Pushkin awoke in the tent to find that he was alone; she had run away ... Later it transpired that Zemphira had been murdered by the enamoured gipsy.’40 Whether this biographical detail is true or not - although not intrinsically implausible, not out of character, the incident was recorded a long time after the event - Pushkin wrote his tense and terrible storypoem, Gypsies, a few months later. As it happens, this is certainly a selfreferential work. ‘Aleko’ is a variant of the poet’s own forename, and one critic, reminding us of that, also comments that the hero of the poem is ‘not devoid of some autobiographical features.’41 It is an intriguing thought that an obscure Moldavian gypsy girl whose life ended in sordid violence may have been the prototype for one of the best-known women in world culture, typically described as ‘one of the most colourful characters in all opera.’42 This possibility is worth contemplating, though our present argument does not actually depend on whether the events and characters described by Pushkin in 1824 are to some extent real or wholly imagined. A year or two later, more than a thousand miles to the west, Prosper Mérimée, already well versed in Slavonic ethnography and folklore, became interested in Russian culture and started learning the language. His fascination was boosted in 1837 and by the end of the decade he had a significant knowledge of Russian. The work on which he cut his teeth is likely to have been Gypsies; this would account for his lifelong interest in this poem and his overvaluation of it. It seems probable that he took this work, strongly recommended to him by Sobolevskii, as his first ‘set text’ and worked his way through it, looking up and learning every word. This sounds mechanical and uninspiring, but the exercise has its parallel in the way that a student of our time studies a set book line by line in class for an A level examination, and acquires in the process a detailed knowledge and deep affection for that work, both of which become so ineradicable as to last a lifetime. (Most people can recall something like this; for me, it was King Lear, which I can still quote at some length fifty years later.) Mérimée wrote Carmen in 1845, basing it on a real-life event in Spain, but also probably on Pushkin’s poem, and with some further inventions of his own. In 1852 he published his own prose version of the poem, which subsequently appeared along with Carmen in the same volume. In 1872 Georges Bizet set his librettists to work on the story and one of the writers involved - probably the composer himself - decided to

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use both the story and the translated poem. This resulted in a substantial reversion to Pushkin as far as the two main characters and three main themes were concerned. The process also left behind a good number of concrete textual clues which prove beyond doubt that the translated poem was being used. From Melodrama to Masterpiece This is a subject that raises some small clouds of conjecture, but shining through them are bold shafts of light that cannot be ignored. Everything centres around an intriguing mystery. To put it plainly, Mérimée’s Carmen is a tale of melodramatic incident and character, a mediocre achievement that would be resting in oblivion if it had not been plucked out of obscurity by the three Frenchmen who decided to turn it into an opera. It is not improved, in fact it is further entrammelled, by the addition of a didactic extra (fourth) chapter supplied by the author in 1847. As one English translator puts it, The 1847 version of Carmen reads like a tale to which a covering letter from the author to his publisher has inadvertently been appended ... Chapter IV seems merely inept. The information it gives on Gypsy women’s attitudes to superstition and to marriage contradicts, rather than confirms, Carmen’s traits.43 Even without this unwanted addition, however, the tale has little enough to recommend it. Mina Curtis asks a pointed question: ‘Without the addition of Bizet’s music would the original Carmen have found many readers outside France?’44 Similarly, the author of a book with a selfexplanatory title, Literature as Opera, defining his strategy, tells us why Carmen is not included: I hesitated to devote full chapters to works that, however important in operatic history, are not based upon literary sources that are either masterpieces ... or archetypes. ... Mérimée’s Carmen story is certainly a minor work; the author himself referred to it as a ‘petite drôlerie’ when it first appeared.45 Few people would defend the literary quality of this story. And yet, as we have seen, there is universal agreement that the libretto produced from it is one of the best ever penned. And it is much closer to Pushkin than to Mérimée. Here is a typical description of Gypsies that points straight to the libretto, having little in common with the story: ‘In fact, the economy of scenes, the compactness of the work, the predominance of the dramatic, make this work a miniature tragedy of

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overwhelming power.’46 Something similar applies to the character of the heroine. Mérimée’s Carmen is not much admired in literary terms; she is seen as an overpainted creature of melodrama. Curtis again: The Carmen of Mérimée was an adulteress, a wanton, a thief, a witch and a devil who valued riches as much as she valued her freedom. In the time-span of months used by Mérimée for his story Carmen’s evil ways were counterbalanced by her powers of enchantment. Transferred into the more restricted time-limits of the theatre, she would have appeared as an unmitigated and unconvincing monster, had her character not been simplified and deepened.47 But she did get this treatment, and has emerged as a magnificent operatic creation. She did not have to be created anew by the composer; all he had to do was go back to the dynamic but unmelodramatic figure created by Pushkin. Because he did so, the heroine of his opera can be taken as real, and accepted as serious. Schonberg speaks for many when he says, accusing Nietszche of misunderstanding the opera: Nietzsche underestimated Carmen. It is a far deeper work than his rather condescending remarks would indicate, and its last act has something of the terror and inevitability of the last act of Don Giovanni. Carmen in a way is a female Don Giovanni. She would rather die than be false to herself, and that makes her an authentically great figure.48 So what happened in the gap that yawns between a negligible story and a first-rate libretto presenting a magnificent heroine who dominates the most popular opera ever to see the stage? And who wrought the change? To take the latter question first, it is impossible to imagine that the workaday librettists, Ludovic Halévy and / or Henri Meilhac, suddenly discovered divine inspiration and produced a masterpiece of their art the like of which they had never approached before and would never repeat. In any case, Halévy is on record as saying, just before the première on 3 March 1875, ‘the thing had little importance for Meilhac and me.’ They had done their usual run-of-the-mill job, and that was that. This leaves only one candidate: Georges Bizet himself. He supplied not only the outstanding music that still thrills audiences all over the world, but also the exquisite libretto on which it is based, or, at least, those parts of it that separate a bad tale from a brilliant opera. His greatest achievement was to have rewritten the female lead, who becomes, in his hands, a plausible, fascinating tragic heroine. And, moreover, a young

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woman of passion, freedom and tragic destiny who seems in so many ways remarkably like Pushkin’s Zemfira. Why would Bizet have wanted to do this? How could he have been persuaded to take such an interest in a Russian writer who had died four decades before, and would never be widely understood outside his homeland because of the subtlety and acoustic richness of his poetry? This is a rhetorical question to which we know the answer. He was a very close friend of Pauline Viardot, one of the finest sopranos of her age,49 and her intimate admirer, Ivan Turgenev, whose warm relationships with everyone on the cultural scene in Paris made him virtually an honorary Frenchman. He was also the strongest supporter Pushkin ever had outside Russia, eager to describe the poet’s qualities to anyone prepared to lend an ear. It is known that Bizet, without ever learning the language in the admirable way of Prosper Mérimée, did become an ardent Russophile. Turgenev must have discussed Pushkin with Bizet, as we know he did with Mérimée, whom he cajoled into writing a long and warm appreciation of the Russian poet (1868).50 And, as we have seen, there were good reasons for Mérimée not only to appreciate Gypsies and know it closely, but even to overvalue it. The intensity of the feelings shared between so many of these famous Russians and Frenchmen cannot be overstated. Pushkin, Sobolevskii and Mérimée, then Mérimée, Turgenev, Pauline and Louis Viardot, Bizet, the two librettists, and every French writer of the time you can name, these people respected, adored, encouraged and continually inspired each other in a complex series of loving relationships that brought together many of Europe’s sharpest minds and best literary talents. When Mérimée was appointed an honorary member in absentia of the Society of Lovers of the Russian Word in 1862 he was symbolically cementing a close and numerous international community of literary geniuses almost without parallel in the history of European culture. It should come as no surprise to learn that something unusually creative, though hitherto inadequately acknowledged, may have emerged from this rich fellowship. The Final Question Some small parts of this story and argument may seem speculative, but not much, and what there is does not affect the main issue. There is a strong case for claiming that Russia was the true source of Bizet’s most famous opera; it was the details that came from elsewhere. Now for the interesting question. How long will it be before we can find a producer bold enough to place the following legend on the title page of his programme: ‘CARMEN: an Opera in Four Acts by Georges Bizet, Libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, after works by Prosper Mérimée and Alexander Pushkin?

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NOTES 1. Letter to Edmond Goncourt, October, 1866. Cited under ‘Bizet’ in Derek Watson, compiler, Dictionary of Musical Quotations, Wordsworth Reference, Wordsworth Editions Ltd, Ware, Hertfordshire, 1991, p. 122. 2. Quoted in Catherine Drinker Bowen and Barbara Von Meck, Beloved Friend: the Story of Tchaikovsky and Nadejda von Meck, Hutchinson, London, 1937, p. 412. 3. Review by Rachel Polonsky of Chester Dunning, The Uncensored ‘Boris Godunov’ and Antony Wood, translator, The Gypsies and Other Narrative Poems by Alexander Pushkin, Times Literary Supplement, 30 June 2006, p. 7. 4. Letter from Peter Cogman in Times Literary Supplement, 21 July 2006. 5. Arthur Jacobs and Stanley Sadie, Opera: a Modern Guide, David and Charles, Newton Abbot, 1971, p. 306. 6. See Nabokov’s commentary in Eugene Onegin, Bollingen Foundation, New York, 1964, III, p. 156. 7. Winton Dean, Carmen, London, Folio Society, 1949, p. 85. 8. Lesley A. Wright, A Musical Commentary, in Carmen, Opera Guide, John Calder, London, Riverside Press, New York, 1982, p. 19. 9. Nicholas John, Introduction to Carmen, Opera Guide, Calder, London, 1982, p. 8. 10. Mina Curtis, Bizet and His World, Secker & Warburg, London, 1959, p. 398. Details of the relationships between Bizet and the Russian community in Paris are taken from this work; pp. 254, 367 and passim. 11. Nicholas John, p. 7. 12. See, for instance, Herbert Weinstock, Tchaikovsky, Cassell, London, 1946, p. 165, where the author lavishes praise on the libretto but mentions only Meilhac and Halévy. Weinstock is wrong about both of his composers; Bizet and Chaikovskii were much more active as their own librettists than he appears to know. 13. Nelly Furman, ‘Carmen’ in The St James Opera Encyclopedia, Visible Ink Press, Detroit, 2001, p. 136. 14. Martin Cooper, Carmen, Opera Guide, Calder, London, 1982, p. 16. 15. Harold C. Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers, Davis-Poynter, London, 1970, p. 320. 16. See Wright, pp. 23-4.

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17. ‘Alexandre Poushkine’, in Z.E. Kirnoze, ed., Mérimée - Pushkin. Raduga, Moscow, 1987, pp. 397-418. 18. See, inter alia, L.A. Chereiskii, Pushkin i ego okruzhenie, Nauka, Leningrad, 1988, pp. 407-8; T.J. Binyon, Pushkin: a Biography, HarperCollins, London, 2002, p. 65; Elaine Feinstein, Pushkin, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1998, p. 151. 19. Chereiskii, p. 408. 20. See A.S. Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii, Khudozhestvennaia literatura, Moscow, 1959, II, pp. 740-1. 21. This letter was written by Mérimée and sent to Sobolevskii from Paris on 18 January 1835. Pushkin included most of it in his preface to the first edition of Pesni zapadnykh slavian. See Chereiskii, p. 260, and Mérimée - Pushkin, p.132, where the letter is quoted in French. 22. Henri Troyat, Pushkin, translated from the French by Nancy Amphoux, Allen and Unwin, London, 1974, p. 453. 23. Translated by the present author from the French in Mérimée -Pushkin, p. 422. 24. Ibid, pp. 408-9. 25. We have clear evidence of this in a letter of 15 November 1856, written in French, in which Mérimée congratulates Sobolevskii on the twenty-fifth anniversary of their first meeting: see ibid., pp. 424-5. 26. A.K. Vinogradov, Mérimée v pis’makh k Sobolevskomu, Moscow, 1928. 27. See, inter alia, Michel Rabaud, ‘Carmen’- a Tragedy of Love, Sun and Death’ in Carmen, Opera Guide, p. 39, and Letter to the Editor from Mr Peter Cogman, Times Literary Supplement, 20 July 2006 under the heading ‘Pushkin and Mérimée’. 28. Gustav Kobbé, The Complete Opera Book, G.P. Putnam and Sons, New York, 1919, p. 589. 29. In Carmen, Opera Guide, Calder, London, 1982, p. 66. 30. Curtis, p. 407. 31. Schonberg, p. 320. 32. Edward Garden, Tchaikovsky, Dent, London, 1973, p. 75. 33. Ibid, p. 66. 34. Quoted in Bowen and von Meck, p. 412.

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35. See John Warrack, Tchaikovsky, Penguin Books, London, 1989, p. 77. 36. David Brown, Tchaikovsky: a Biographical and Critical Study, The Years of Fame (1878-1893), Gollancz, London, 1992, IV, p. 432. 37. For more on the subject of Chaikovskii’s imitations of Bizet melodies, see Henry Zajaczkowski, Tchaikovsky’s Musical Style, UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, 1987, p. 229, footnote 3. 38. Warrack, loc. cit. 39. Edward J. Dent, Opera, Penguin Books, London, 1953, p. 102. 40. Janko Lavrin, Pushkin and Russian Literature, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1947, p. 94. 41. B. Tomashevskii, Pushkin, Khudozhestvennaia literatura, Moscow, 1990, II, p. 219. 42. David Ewen, Encyclopedia of the Opera, Hill and Wang, New York, 1955, p. 76. 43. Nicholas Jotcham, translator, in his Introduction to Prosper Mérimée: Carmen, and Other Stories, Oxford World Classics, Oxford, 1989, p. xviii. 44. Curtis, p. 397. 45. Gary Schmidgall, Literature as Opera, Oxford University Press, New York, 1977, pp. 24-5. 46. Peter Henry, A.S. Pushkin, Gypsies, Bradda Books, London, 1962, p. xxiii. 47. Curtis, p. 398. 48. Schonberg, loc. cit. 49. It is interesting to note that among more than twenty composers who have set to music Pushkin’s lines ‘Staryi muzh, groznyi muzh ...’ (from Gypsies) two names stand out, those of Pauline Viardot and Petr Ilich Chaikovskii. See N.G. Vinokur and R.A. Kagan, Pushkin v muzyke, Sovetskii kompozitor, Moscow, 1974, p. 243. 50. See note 17 above.

Turgenev and the Sphinx Leon Burnett

ɉɪɢɪɨɞɚ - ɫɮɢɧɤɫ. Fedor Tiutchev Ɋɨɫɫɢɹ - ɋɮɢɧɤɫ. Aleksandr Blok In the history of the engagement of Russian poets with the symbol of the sphinx, two statements, separated by almost half a century, stand out. The first is Fedor Tiutchev’s announcement in a short, epigrammatic lyric of 1869 that ‘Nature is a sphinx’; the second is Aleksandr Blok’s declaration in The Scythians (ɋɤɢɮɵ), a poem of 1918 composed under altered political circumstances, that ‘Russia is a Sphinx’. Different as they are in form, structure and intent, the two poems share a common feature: each associates ɫɮɢɧɤɫ with ɡɚɝɚɞɤɚ. The association between the sphinx, regarded as a destructive force, and the riddle or enigma, although it has become commonplace in the Western world as well as in Russia, is one that this article will interrogate in order to contend that both these words - ɫɮɢɧɤɫ and ɡɚɝɚɞɤɚ - are interestingly ambivalent. The article will focus on three of Turgenev’s published works, but, first of all, some brief comments are offered on the two seminal utterances that have been identified. In August 1869, Tiutchev nailed his colours to the mast when he opened a four-line poem with the proclamation that ‘Nature is a sphinx’. He presents a sphinx who destroys man by putting him to the trial of answering her riddle, when, quite possibly, as he suggests, from time immemorial, she has had no riddle at all to her name. ɉɪɢɪɨɞɚ - ɫɮɢɧɤɫ. ɂ ɬɟɦ ɨɧɚ ɜɟɪɧɟɣ ɋɜɨɢɦ ɢɫɤɭɫɨɦ ɝɭɛɢɬ ɱɟɥɨɜɟɤɚ, ɑɬɨ, ɦɨɠɟɬ ɫɬɚɬɶɫɹ, ɧɢɤɚɤɨɣ ɨɬ ɜɟɤɚ Ɂɚɝɚɞɤɢ ɧɟɬ ɢ ɧɟ ɛɵɥɨ ɭ ɧɟɣ. Nature is a sphinx. And all the surer Destroys man with her trial, In that, perchance, from time immemorial No riddle is or ever was hers.1

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This is a revisionary statement and an example of what we might regard as a de-mythologizing tendency, provided that we also recognize that it re-mythologizes. It questions the existence of the sphinx’s riddle, but at the same time it attributes to nature a destructive, sphinx-like power. The verb ɝɭɛɢɬɶ (to destroy) occurs both here and in Blok’s mythopoetic representation of the sphinx. As with all good epigrams, a characteristic twist is encountered in the last line of Tiutchev’s poem: despite nature’s hostile intentions, she lacks, in all probability, the weapon of ɡɚɝɚɞɤa. On the slender evidence of the poem’s four lines, it seems that we are dealing with the analogy of a Theban sphinx in that nature seeks to destroy man with a test or trial. Accordingly, I am inclined to translate ‘ɡɚɝɚɞɤɢ’ in the last line as ‘riddle’ rather than ‘enigma’, although the Russian word may be said to hold the two meanings in balance. In Blok’s poem, The Scythians, dated 30 January 1918, the poet declares defiantly to Western Europe that Sphinx-Russia ‘gazes, gazes, gazes at you / With hatred and with love!’: Ɉ, ɫɬɚɪɵɣ ɦɢɪ! ɉɨɤɚ ɬɵ ɧɟ ɩɨɝɢɛ, ɉɨɤɚ ɬɨɦɢɲɶɫɹ ɦɭɤɨɣ ɫɥɚɞɤɨɣ, Ɉɫɬɚɧɨɜɢɫɶ, ɩɪɟɦɭɞɪɵɣ, ɤɚɤ ɗɞɢɩ, ɉɪɟɞ ɋɮɢɧɤɫɨɦ ɫ ɞɪɟɜɧɟɸ ɡɚɝɚɞɤɨɣ! Ɋɨɫɫɢɹ - ɋɮɢɧɤɫ. Ʌɢɤɭɹ ɢ ɫɤɨɪɛɹ, ɂ ɨɛɥɢɜɚɹɫɶ ɱɟɪɧɨɣ ɤɪɨɜɶɸ, Ɉɧɚ ɝɥɹɞɢɬ, ɝɥɹɞɢɬ, ɝɥɹɞɢɬ ɜ ɬɟɛɹ ɂ ɫ ɧɟɧɚɜɢɫɬɶɸ, ɢ ɫ ɥɸɛɨɜɶɸ! ... Ⱦɚ, ɬɚɤ ɥɸɛɢɬɶ, ɤɚɤ ɥɸɛɢɬ ɧɚɲɚ ɤɪɨɜɶ, ɇɢɤɬɨ ɢɡ ɜɚɫ ɞɚɜɧɨ ɧɟ ɥɸɛɢɬ! Ɂɚɛɵɥɢ ɜɵ, ɱɬɨ ɜ ɦɢɪɟ ɟɫɬɶ ɥɸɛɨɜɶ, Ʉɨɬɨɪɚɹ ɢ ɠɠɟɬ, ɢ ɝɭɛɢɬ!2 O, old world! While you still survive, While you still suffer your sweet torture, Come to a halt, sage as Oedipus, Before the ancient riddle of the Sphinx! Russia is a Sphinx. Rejoicing, grieving, And drenched in black blood, It gazes, gazes, gazes at you, With hatred and with love! ... It has been ages since you’ve loved As our blood still loves! You have forgotten that there is a love That can destroy and burn!3

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The apocalyptic challenge to the ‘old world’ of the West is a menacing one: the fixed look of the female hybrid is directed at an occidental Oedipus and an insidious threat, despite the repeated mention of love, is clearly to be perceived behind that gaze. The Sphinx’s ‘ancient riddle’ stands, as it were, between the victim and the execution of the threat. As with Tiutchev, Blok touches upon the temporality of the sphinx and her riddle in his representation. The former’s ‘ɨɬ ɜɟɤɚ’ (‘from time immemorial’) is matched by the latter’s ‘ɫ ɞɪɟɜɧɟɸ ɡɚɝɚɞɤɨɣ’ (‘ancient riddle’), which rhymes, ironically, with ‘ɦɭɤɨɣ ɫɥɚɞɤɨɣ’ (‘sweet torture’). In itself, there is nothing remarkable in the employment of the classical story of Oedipus and the Sphinx as a mythological correlate to a contemporary situation, or the solution of the riddle as the peripeteia. After all, the legend had been doing the rounds ever since Sophocles’ composition of Oedipus Rex had tied the reading of the sphinx to its Theban symbolism in the fifth century BCE. What is worth noting, however, is the application of this mythologeme to a particular nation Russia - and the identification of that nation not with the human enquirer but instead with the monstrous oppressor. To regard one’s own country as the Sphinx requires a certain adjustment of mind.4 Between the spring of 1847 and the summer of 1850, Turgenev spent three years in France, postponing his return to Russia for the sake of the culture and the company that his second homeland afforded him. Shortly before his departure, he wrote a letter, in French, to Pauline Viardot, in which he informed her: Russia will be waiting - that immense and sombre figure, motionless and veiled [voilée] like the sphinx of Oedipus. She will swallow me up later. I seem to see her huge, expressionless look fix itself on me with gloomy attention, as befits eyes of stone. Stay calm, sphinx, I shall return to you and you will be able to devour me at leisure if I fail to solve the riddle! Leave me in peace for a little while longer! I shall return to your steppes! ...5 More in harmony with Tiutchev in time and temperament, Turgenev is closer to Blok in his identification of the sphinx and her attentive gaze with Russia. A clue as to how this shared perception of Russia as a sphinx may have come about is to be found in the final two words of the The Scythians, with its closing reference to Russia’s ‘ɜɚɪɜɚɪɫɤɚɹ ɥɢɪɚ’ (‘barbaric lyre’). The lyre is the musical instrument that gives its name to the lyric, the poetic genre par excellence, but, in Blok’s carefully chosen epithet, it is placed in the hands of the barbarian, the cultural outsider, the other. The barbarian lacks a proper language, as the discordant duplication of the first syllable of the word indicates. Russia, in Blok’s character, is envisaged as a land of poetry without poetry, a

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state of paradox, or, to return to the substance of the myth, a riddle, which the bystander, the Greek, that is to say the European, Oedipus must solve in order to survive. Such a task, by implication, also faces Turgenev, when he informs Viardot that the sphinx will ‘devour me at leisure if I fail to solve the riddle’ (‘si je ne devine pas l’énigme’). Turgenev, according to his own self-dramatization, is, like Oedipus, about to encounter the sphinx in his native land on his return, as a stranger, from his adopted country. The complex nature of the relationship between Turgenev and Russia suggested in this parallel is underscored when we recall that the Goncourt brothers referred to Turgenev in their journal as ‘l’aimable barbare’ - ‘the gentle barbarian’6 in an oxymoron comparable to that of Blok’s ‘barbaric lyre’. The symbol of the sphinx, as the letter to Viardot shows, is bound up with Turgenev’s literary and political definition of Russia at an early period in his creative output. At this stage, as in the allusions of Tiutchev and Blok, the sphinx is represented as destructive and female, and she is associated with the mythic account of Oedipus. Late in life, in December 1878, Turgenev returned to the story of Oedipus and the Sphinx in a brief composition entitled The Sphinx (ɋɮɢɧɤɫ).7 In this prose-poem, changes have taken place to the original version. The sphinx, now located in some vast desert, is identified as Egyptian and, typically for early pharaonic times, is represented as male. The gaze is no longer as watchful or as threatening - the long eyes, beneath the double arch of the high brows, are described as half-dreamy, halfattentive - and the question on his lips is barely audible: we are informed that words are being uttered, but it is only Oedipus who is able to comprehend the mute speech. To put Turgenev’s treatment of the topos of the sphinx into context, it should be noted that it was not uncommon in nineteenthcentury allusions to the sphinx to encounter a creature in which a degree of flexibility as to the attribution of provenance and identity was permitted, allowing an author to make reference simultaneously to the Greek myth of Oedipus (and his task of solving the riddle) and to recent finds in Egyptology (such as the decipherment of hieroglyphic inscriptions).8 This syncretic approach corresponded to ways in which the sphinx came to be perceived generally following the Napoleonic venture into Egypt in 1798-99 and the subsequent scholarly work of Denon, Champollion and others. As a result of the Egyptian influence, the scale of the representation changed (as the sphinx increased significantly in stature); the identification of gender grew less rigid (as the threat offered by a female hybrid monster was tempered by the custodial function of a male guardian of the dead); and riddle fused with hieroglyph to instil a deeper sense of mystery and impenetrability.9 Even the fact that there were two Thebes, one in Greece and one in Egypt, assisted in the process of amalgamation. While the mythological

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association with Oedipus - and the concomitant focus on answering the riddle correctly - persisted, an Oriental motif of concealment entered into the formation of the sphinx-complex, shifting the thematic emphasis from ‘autodidactic intelligence’10 and the overcoming of malevolent forces to that of hiddenness and enigma. An essential difference between the cultural amenities of Greece and Egypt in the ancient world is encapsulated in the stark contrast between two inscriptions known to the nineteenth century: the gnomic aphorism located over the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi ‘know thyself’ - and the engraving on the base of the statue of Isis at Saïs: ‘I am everything, that is, that has been, and that will be. No mortal man has lifted my veil.’ The injunction to self-knowledge in the former is indicative of a culture predisposed to inquiry and revelation; the declaration of omneity that lays emphasis upon the masking of identity in the latter points to a civilization steeped in concealment and inscrutability. Schiller (in his essay ‘Of the Sublime’) wrote of the Egyptian inscription: ‘Everything that is veiled, everything mysterious, contributes to the terrible, and is therefore capable of sublimity’.11 Something of that sense of the sublime was conveyed in P.D. Uspenskii’s report of his feelings as he stood before the Sphinx at Gizeh, outside Cairo, when he wrote: ‘I touched the mystery but could neither define nor formulate it.’ (‘ə ɩɪɢɤɨɫɧɭɥɫɹ ɤ ɬɚɣɧɟ, ɧɨ ɧɟ ɫɦɨɝ ɧɢ ɨɩɪɟɞɟɥɢɬɶ, ɧɢ ɫɮɨɪɦɭɥɢɪɨɜɚɬɶ ɟɟ.’)12 Eternity! This word flashed into my consciousness and went through me with a sort of cold shudder. All ideas about time, about things, about life, were becoming confused. I felt that in these moments, in which I stood before the Sphinx, it lived through all events and happenings of thousands of years - and that on the other hand centuries passed for it like moments. How this could be I did not understand. But I felt that my consciousness grasped the shadow of the exalted fantasy or clairvoyance of the artists who had created the Sphinx. I touched the mystery but could neither define nor formulate it.13 Uspenskii, who implicitly acknowledged his debt to Turgenev, in adopting as his own starting point for the description of the Sphinx the distinctive epithet, yellowish-grey,14 with which the latter’s prose-poem had commenced, proceeds to develop a trope of ineffability in keeping with the Symbolist taste for transcendence then in vogue.15 His hyperbolic prose account moves abruptly from the distant past (‘the Sphinx is older than historical Egypt, older than her gods, older than the pyramids’) to the immediate present (‘The face of the Sphinx strikes one with wonder at the first glance. To begin with, it is quite a modern face. With the exception of the head ornament there is nothing of “ancient

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history” about it’). This transformation, which proceeds from an encounter with the sphinx in the Egyptian desert to a recognition of a ‘modern face’ despite its antique ‘head ornament’, takes its cue from Turgenev’s prose-poem. In Turgenev, the transition is more dramatic and is directed towards a different end. He recognizes in the figure of the ancient and mysterious sphinx the Russian narod (represented metonymically by the little peasant of Iaroslav and Riazan): Stay, but I know those features ... in them there is nothing Egyptian. White, low brow, prominent cheek-bones, nose short and straight, handsome mouth and white teeth, soft moustache and curly beard, and those wide-set, not large eyes ... and on the head the cap of hair parted down the middle ... But it is thou, Karp, Sidor, Semyon, peasant of Yaroslav, of Ryazan, my countryman, flesh and blood, Russian! Art thou, too, among the sphinxes?16 ‘Art thou, too,’ he asks his newly recognized compatriot, ‘among the sphinxes?’ The figure thus addressed, however, turns out to be as silent and enigmatic as an Egyptian sphinx, and Turgenev concludes by regretting the absence of an effective Oedipus: ‘Alas! It’s not enough to don the peasant bonnet to become thy Oedipus, oh Sphinx of all the Russias!’ The ‘peasant bonnet’ translates the Russian murmolka, ‘an ancient form of head-dress mentioned in popular songs and stories’17 made from fur or velvet, and a vestimentary marker for the Slavophile camp in the ideological debate that took place in the middle of the nineteenth century.18 In Turgenev’s prose-poem, then, Russia, as epitomized in the face of one of the nation’s autochthonous inhabitants, resists, as Uspenskii was later to say of the Egyptian sphinx, both definition and formulation. Riddle has become enigma. There is a further, and highly significant, dimension to Turgenev’s symbolization of the sphinx that we have barely touched upon or, rather, that we have by-passed in moving directly from the letter of 1850 to the prose-poem of 1878, and that is the artistic and, as commentators sometimes suggest, biographical identification of the fabulous creature with woman. For evidence of this we need to turn to Turgenev’s fiction, where, once again, as we shall see, Oedipus (or his surrogate) proves incapable of interpreting the enigma that confronts him. We shall consider two works that belong to Turgenev’s transitional decade, that is to say the period between 1856 and 1865, namely, the short story, A Journey in the Woodland (ɉɨɟɡɞɤɚ ɜ ɉɨɥɟɫɶɟ, 1857) and the novel Fathers and Children of 1862. Faust of 1856 marks the introduction of the genre of ‘mysterious tales’ into Turgenev’s opus. The short narrative that immediately followed Faust, and his only new work to be published in the year

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1857,19 bore the alliterative title ɉɨɟɡɞɤɚ ɜ ɉɨɥɟɫɶɟ. Turgenev had visited the province of Kaluga for a hunting trip in 1856, and he uses this location as the setting of his tale. The Russian title has been translated into English in various ways. Sander Brouwer, who emphasizes the importance of Poles’e in his reading of the tale, has proposed keeping a reference to the specific location by translating it as A Journey into Poles’e.20 Preferring to accentuate the archetypal aspect of the setting, I shall refer to it as A Journey in the Woodland.21 The title promises a sylvan interlude, or possibly a hunting adventure, and the storyteller is, in fact, a ‘hunter-narrator’, who would have been familiar to the readers of Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter, but from the very first lines it is the haunting biotope of the woodlands that holds the reader’s interest. The ‘transitional’ state of mind to which Turgenev referred in a letter that he wrote in November 1856 to Tolstoy22 is reflected not only in the ambiguities that exist within the narrative, but also in the uncertainties attendant upon publication of the story. Turgenev is known to have planned A Journey in the Woodland as a supplementary item to the original series of Notes of a Hunter (and it was, in fact, published as such in the first volume of the 1860 edition of his collected works), but, in its final form, it was ‘alien to the artistic system’23 of the hunting sketches, and in later re-publications it appeared independently of the earlier series. Shifts in alignment outside the actual text were matched by alterations within. As was the case with Rudin, Turgenev changed the ending when reprinting it for the 1860 edition of his works.24 Whatever nuances may have been introduced by the additions that were made at the end of the story, its fundamental ambiguity was present from the outset in the symbolic image of the Woodland (Poles’e). The marked contrast between the descriptive accounts of the Woodland as it appears in the first and second paragraphs, respectively, sets up a narrative opposition that is to continue throughout the story. In the first paragraph, the description of the Woodland is given in the present tense, and the narrator, identified anonymously as a ‘spectator’ (‘ɡɪɢɬɟɥɶ’), occupies a peripheral position: ȼɢɞ ɨɝɪɨɦɧɨɝɨ, ɜɟɫɶ ɧɟɛɨɫɤɥɨɧ ɨɛɧɢɦɚɸɳɟɝɨ ɛɨɪɚ, ɜɢɞ ‘ɉɨɥɟɫɶɹ’ ɧɚɩɨɦɢɧɚɟɬ ɜɢɞ ɦɨɪɹ. ɂ ɜɩɟɱɚɬɥɟɧɢɹ ɢɦ ɜɨɡɛɭɠɞɚɸɬɫɹ ɬɟ ɠɟ; ɬɚ ɠɟ ɩɟɪɜɨɛɵɬɧɚɹ, ɧɟɬɪɨɧɭɬɚɹ ɫɢɥɚ ɪɚɫɫɬɢɥɚɟɬɫɹ ɲɢɪɨɤɨ ɢ ɞɟɪɠɚɜɧɨ ɩɟɪɟɞ ɥɢɰɨɦ ɡɪɢɬɟɥɹ.25 The sight of the vast pinewood, embracing the whole horizon, the sight of the ‘Forest,’ recalls the sight of the ocean. And the sensations it arouses are the same; the same primaeval untouched force lies outstretched in its breadth and majesty before the eyes of the spectator.26

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The opening word, ‘ɜɢɞ’ (‘view’, ‘sight’), occurs three times in the first sentence, and signals the accentuation of the visual in a narrative process that is to establish the primacy of an unchanging and impersonal Nature over the transitory life of man. Nature has the power to reduce man to a cipher, to instil in the human heart ‘a consciousness of our insignificance’ (‘ɫɨɡɧɚɧɢɟ ɧɚɲɟɣ ɧɢɱɬɨɠɧɨɫɬɢ’). It is a force that Turgenev associates with the mythological figure of Isis. The first paragraph consists of six short sentences, none of them more than three-and-a-half lines in length, and a long, final sentence. I quote this last sentence in full: Ɍɪɭɞɧɨ ɱɟɥɨɜɟɤɭ, ɫɭɳɟɫɬɜɭ ɟɞɢɧɨɝɨ ɞɧɹ, ɜɱɟɪɚ ɪɨɠɞɟɧɧɨɦɭ ɢ ɭɠɟ ɫɟɝɨɞɧɹ ɨɛɪɟɱɟɧɧɨɦɭ ɫɦɟɪɬɢ, - ɬɪɭɞɧɨ ɟɦɭ ɜɵɧɨɫɢɬɶ ɯɨɥɨɞɧɵɣ, ɛɟɡɭɱɚɫɬɧɨ ɭɫɬɪɟɦɥɟɧɧɵɣ ɧɚ ɧɟɝɨ ɜɡɝɥɹɞ ɜɟɱɧɨɣ ɂɡɢɞɵ; ɧɟ ɨɞɧɢ ɞɟɪɡɨɫɬɧɵɟ ɧɚɞɟɠɞɵ ɢ ɦɟɱɬɚɧɶɹ ɦɨɥɨɞɨɫɬɢ ɫɦɢɪɹɸɬɫɹ ɢ ɝɚɫɧɭɬ ɜ ɧɟɦ, ɨɯɜɚɱɟɧɧɵɟ ɥɟɞɹɧɵɦ ɞɵɯɚɧɢɟɦ ɫɬɢɯɢɢ; ɧɟɬ - ɜɫɹ ɞɭɲɚ ɟɝɨ ɧɢɤɧɟɬ ɢ ɡɚɦɢɪɚɟɬ; ɨɧ ɱɭɜɫɬɜɭɟɬ, ɱɬɨ ɩɨɫɥɟɞɧɢɣ ɢɡ ɟɝɨ ɛɪɚɬɢɣ ɦɨɠɟɬ ɢɫɱɟɡɧɭɬɶ ɫ ɥɢɰɚ ɡɟɦɥɢ ɢ ɧɢ ɨɞɧɚ ɢɝɥɚ ɧɟ ɞɪɨɝɧɟɬ ɧɚ ɷɬɢɯ ɜɟɬɜɹɯ; ɨɧ ɱɭɜɫɬɜɭɟɬ ɫɜɨɟ ɨɞɢɧɨɱɟɫɬɜɨ, ɫɜɨɸ ɫɥɚɛɨɫɬɶ, ɫɜɨɸ ɫɥɭɱɚɣɧɨɫɬɶ - ɢ ɫ ɬɨɪɨɩɥɢɜɵɦ, ɬɚɣɧɵɦ ɢɫɩɭɝɨɦ ɨɛɪɚɳɚɟɬɫɹ ɨɧ ɤ ɦɟɥɤɢɦ ɡɚɛɨɬɚɦ ɢ ɬɪɭɞɚɦ ɠɢɡɧɢ; ɟɦɭ ɥɟɝɱɟ ɜ ɷɬɨɦ ɦɢɪɟ, ɢɦ ɫɚɦɢɦ ɫɨɡɞɚɧɧɨɦ, ɡɞɟɫɶ ɨɧ ɞɨɦɚ, ɡɞɟɫɶ ɨɧ ɫɦɟɟɬ ɟɳɟ ɜɟɪɢɬɶ ɜ ɫɜɨɟ ɡɧɚɱɟɧɶɟ ɢ ɜ ɫɜɨɸ ɫɢɥɭ.27 It is hard for man, the creature of a day, born yesterday, and doomed to death on the morrow, it is hard for him to bear the cold gaze of the eternal Isis, fixed without sympathy upon him: not only the daring hopes and dreams of youth are humbled and quenched within him, enfolded by the icy breath of the elements; no - his whole soul sinks down and swoons within him; he feels that the last of his kind may vanish off the face of the earth - and not one needle will quiver on those twigs; he feels his isolation, his feebleness, his fortuitousness; - and in hurried, secret panic, he turns to the petty cares and labours of life; he is more at ease in that world he has himself created; there he is at home, there he dares yet believe in his own importance and in his own power.28 Isis possesses a configurative function in Turgenev’s works, akin to that of the Sphinx. Isaiah Berlin, in an essay on Fathers and Children, alludes to this, when he states that, in the end, Bazarov ‘is crushed by heartless nature, by what the author calls the cold-eyed goddess Isis, who does not care for good or evil, for art or beauty, still less for man, the creature of

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an hour ... he struggles to assert himself; but nature is indifferent; she obeys her own inexorable laws.’29 Berlin, in his account of nature’s indifference, a motif that Turgenev takes up from Pushkin, is closer to Turgenev’s text than Jane Costlow, who claims that the story ‘opens with a vision of nature as hostile, inhuman’ and concludes that it is ‘because nature is alien that we must learn restraint - or we become agents of that very alien power that would destroy us all.’30 To return to Berlin’s account, one may add the textual note that Turgenev employs the same verbal participle, ‘ɨɛɪɟɱɟɧɧɵɣ’ (‘doomed’, ‘destined’), in the opening paragraph of A Journey in the Woodland to define the human condition - ‘a creature of a single day, born yesterday and today already doomed to die’ - and in a well-known letter to Sluchevskii, where he describes Bazarov, as a figure ‘doomed to perish’ (‘ɨɛɪɟɱɟɧɧɚɹ ɧɚ ɩɨɝɢɛɟɥɶ’), because he stood on the threshold of the future.31 It was this fatalistic view of man as an ephemeral being that inclined Turgenev to a mood of resigned acceptance in his own life, and which he reflected in his work by confronting his heroes with the choice: submit or die. The same metaphysical system appertains in the realist novels as in the so-called ‘mysterious tales’, even if the perspective is different. In A Journey in the Woodland, the indifference of nature impresses upon the narrator a sense of his own insignificance. Turgenev defines three aspects of this insignificance in an ascending scale of negative values: solitude, weakness and fortuitousness (ɨɞɢɧɨɱɟɫɬɜɨ, ɫɥɚɛɨɫɬɶ, ɫɥɭɱɚɣɧɨɫɬɶ). Man alone may achieve much, man enfeebled may achieve something, but ‘fortuitous’, or accidental, man loses all human value.32 It is the ‘secret fear’ that man is no more important than flies and midges, as Turgenev states elsewhere, which makes the narrator of A Journey in the Woodland turn for solace to the trivial world of human artefacts, where he finds peace in place of panic, even if this peace is a stagnant and self-deceiving tranquillity. The description, in the second paragraph, shifts to the past tense as the ‘fortuitous’ spectator comes to occupy the centre of the narrative space. Bright colours replace the bleak vista afforded by a monotonous eternity, and the narrator assumes a stance that harks back in ironic allusion to Pushkin’s celebrated image, in The Bronze Horseman, of Peter the Great, deep in thought, on the bank of the Neva: ȼɨɬ ɤɚɤɢɟ ɦɵɫɥɢ ɩɪɢɯɨɞɢɥɢ ɦɧɟ ɧɚ ɭɦ ɧɟɫɤɨɥɶɤɨ ɥɟɬ ɬɨɦɭ ɧɚɡɚɞ, ɤɨɝɞɚ, ɫɬɨɹ ɧɚ ɤɪɵɥɶɰɟ ɩɨɫɬɨɹɥɨɝɨ ɞɜɨɪɢɤɚ, ɩɨɫɬɪɨɟɧɧɨɝɨ ɧɚ ɛɟɪɟɝɭ ɛɨɥɨɬɢɫɬɨɣ ɪɟɱɤɢ Ɋɟɫɟɬɵ, ɭɜɢɞɚɥ ɹ ɜɩɟɪɜɵɟ ɉɨɥɟɫɶɟ.33

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Such were the ideas that came into my mind, some years ago, when, standing on the steps of a little inn on the bank of the marshy little river Ressetta, I first gazed upon the forest.34 Peter’s mighty city built out of marshlands ‘on the bank of the deserted waves’ (‘ɇɚ ɛɟɪɟɝɭ ɩɭɫɬɵɧɧɵɯ ɜɨɥɧ’) is reduced here to the diminutive status of a little inn ‘on the bank of a swampy river’ (‘ɧɚ ɛɟɪɟɝɭ ɛɨɥɨɬɢɫɬɨɣ ɪɟɱɤɢ’). There is no hero to conquer the ‘primaeval, untouched force’ of nature in Turgenev’s world. All man may do is parcel off a small area, to include a tavern and the ‘beaten track’ (‘ɬɨɪɧɚɹ ɞɨɪɨɝɚ’) at the edge of the forest, and leave the ‘eternal’ Woodland to the dominion of Isis. As the narrator reports, there hangs over everything a ‘delicate, dim mist, the eternal mist of the Woodland’ (‘ɬɨɧɤɢɣ, ɬɭɫɤɥɵɣ ɬɭɦɚɧ, ɜɟɱɧɵɣ ɬɭɦɚɧ ɉɨɥɟɫɶɹ’). Man may hunt there, as he does in the subsequent narrative, but, as a hunter, he will always be haunted by the recognition of his own impotence. In A Journey in the Woodland, Isis is a numinous, female presence. Brouwer has made a cogent case for the significance of the story’s setting in Poles’e, ‘known’, in his words, ‘as a region in which archaic folklore traditions have been preserved’. In his analysis of the story, he quotes N.I. Tolstoi’s comment: ‘The Poles’e is one of the most archaic Slavic ethno-cultural zones, a kind of reserve where the Slavic historical past and ancient Slavic customs still survive’.35 What, then, can we deduce from Turgenev’s choice of a deity who has no direct connection either with the nation’s folklore or with Slavic mythology to serve in the liminal capacity of introducing a tale that is so firmly situated in a Russian forest? Although Isis was originally an Egyptian goddess, her cult in antiquity came to extend over much of the Roman Empire. Like the Sphinx, she acquired different attributes as she moved from Africa to Europe. If we consider her development historically, it is clear that the single most significant alteration in the representation of Isis as a mytho-religious figure occurred through her separation from Osiris. In the fundamental myth of Isis, the link with her brother and husband is an indissoluble one. In this affiliation, she is symbolic of the traditional forces of nature: receptive, abundant, practical. According to Plutarch, in his essay ‘On Isis and Osiris’ (‘De Iside et Osiride’), she is ‘the female principle of Nature ... the gentle nurse and the allreceptive’.36 When she took on significance in her own right, that is to say, independently of Osiris, she became ‘mistress of the house of life’,37 the centre of a cult, reminiscent of the Eleusinian mysteries, in which she was venerated as the divinity of nurture and protection. It is this Isis that we encounter in Apuleius’ romance, Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass. Although Turgenev, in adopting Isis as the tutelary spirit of the woods, had several options open to him, he chose to make her, if not hostile, at least indifferent to man.38

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Brouwer makes a single reference to Isis in his reading of A Journey in the Poles’e. He contrasts the Virgin Mary, whom he smuggles into the story, with the ‘far less compassionate goddess, the “eternal Isis”’.39 In fact, typologically, they occupy the same mythological space. Frazer, in his chapter on Isis in The Golden Bough, writes of the resemblance between ‘the serene figure of Isis with her spiritual calm, her gracious promise of immortality’ in Roman times and the Mother of God as she appears in ‘the pomps and ceremonies of Catholicism’, concluding: ‘The resemblance need not be purely accidental. Ancient Egypt may have contributed its share to the gorgeous symbolism of the Catholic Church as well as to the pale abstractions of her theology.’40 In A Journey in the Woodland, however, the ‘serene figure ... with her spiritual calm’ becomes the ‘eternal Isis’ whose ‘cold gaze’ is ‘fixed without sympathy upon [man]’. Neither the protective Isis nor her companion Osiris has any place in this configuration. Nor is it likely that so erudite a reader as Turgenev would have confused her with Oriental goddesses such as Ishtar and Astarte, whose ‘bloody and licentious rites’, as Frazer remarked, ‘only shocked and repelled’.41 The dispassionate ‘cold gaze’ with which she observes man, when taken together with her Graeco-Egyptian lineage, suggests rather that she is an alter-ego for the Sphinx who, in 1850, had fixed her ‘huge, expressionless look’ on the recalcitrant Russian ‘with gloomy attention, as befits eyes of stone’. These ‘eyes of stone’ are a feature of an Egyptian sphinx, but the look is European … or, as in Turgenev’s case, Russian.42 In his prose-poem, Turgenev drew upon a contemporary stereotype of the Sphinx, but adapted it explicitly to the physiognomy of the Russian peasant. He undertakes something similar in his depiction of Isis. He transfers the deity at Saïs, at the base of whose statue the words ‘I am everything, that is, that has been, and that will be. No mortal man has lifted my veil’ were engraved, to the Kaluga province of Russia, and shrouds her fittingly in ‘the eternal mist of the Woodland’ (‘ɜɟɱɧɵɣ ɬɭɦɚɧ ɉɨɥɟɫɶɹ’). The sense of kinship between the sphinx in the letter to Viardot and Isis in A Journey in the Woodland is reinforced by an unusual detail in the earlier account: Turgenev refers to the sphinx as ‘veiled’. Russia is represented as an ‘immense and sombre figure, motionless and veiled [voilée] like the sphinx of Oedipus.’ Nowhere in the literature of ancient Greece is the sphinx described as ‘veiled’. This is a characteristic of the Europeanized Isis. The acquired habitat of Isis is the forest, whereas formerly the Sphinx, with whom I am associating her in Turgenev’s mythopoeia, had occupied the deserts of Egypt or the mountains of Greece. Impenetrability, not sublimity, is the keynote for Turgenev. The narrator turns away from Isis in A Journey in the Woodland, unable to deny her ‘otherness’. The short story is introduced with a reference to Isis, but, remarkably, she is not mentioned again in the narrative. The opening

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paragraph is self-contained, a haunting presence on the periphery of the tale. Its frame-like status is marked by the opening comment of the firstperson speaker as he makes his entrance into the story at the commencement of the second paragraph: ‘Such were the ideas that came into my mind, some years ago’. The first paragraph ends with the programmatic observation that man ‘is more at ease in that world he has himself created; there he is at home, there he dares yet believe in his own importance and in his own power’.43 Isis, in effect, serves as a marker of man’s insignificance, a theme in Turgenev’s writing that Costlow stresses throughout Worlds Within Worlds.44 The world governed by laws and morals that man has himself created is the definitive setting of all of Turgenev’s novels and it stands in contrast to the supernatural territory that one encounters in several of his ‘mysterious tales’. It is to that world of social manners, as it is laid out in Fathers and Children, I now turn. My interest is not in the central story of the dynastic and internecine struggles of Russia in the midnineteenth century epitomized in Turgenev’s delicate and realistic portrayal of life in the provinces, but rather in the cameo that is offered of the past life and love of Pavel Petrovich, in chapter seven of the novel. Like the Isis paragraph, it both belongs to and is set apart from the main narrative. The main action of the novel is interrupted at the end of the sixth chapter, when one of the representatives of the generation of the ‘children’, Arkadii Kirsanov, announces to his nihilistic companion, Evgenii Bazarov, that he will tell him the story of his uncle’s life. Chapter seven contains that story. It concerns the amorous relationship between the self-confident, ironic dandy, Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov, and Princess R., an eccentric woman of society, who was married to ‘a wellbred and respectable, albeit somewhat stupid, husband’ and who had acquired a reputation for being a ‘frivolous coquette’. Yet this was merely society’s verdict, based upon casual observation. Her character, as disclosed to the reader of the novel, is shown to be more complex than that: She had the reputation of being a frivolous coquette, she abandoned herself eagerly to every sort of pleasure, danced till she dropped, roared with laughter and jested with the young men whom she used to receive before dinner in a dimly-lit drawingroom, but at night she wept and prayed, finding no peace in anything, and would often pace her room till dawn, wringing her hands in anguish, or sit, pale and cold, over a psalter. The coming of day transformed her into a lady of fashion again, driving out to pay her calls, laughing, chatting, and literally flinging herself into any activity that might afford her the slightest distraction.45

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Turgenev’s presentation is subtle, operating as it does on several levels. Princess R. is seen superficially by society as pleasure-seeking and flirtatious during the day, while it is revealed to the reader that she is a tormented and guilt-ridden woman at night, but what Turgenev does not make at all clear is whether, and how intimately, Arkadii (and, hence, Bazarov) are privy to this hidden side of her character. Chapter six ends in a manner that suggests Arkadii is about to relate his version of the past encounter between his uncle and the strange woman, but the actual account contains details, such as the wringing of hands in anguish and the sitting over the psalter, that can be known only to Princess R. herself ... and an omniscient narrator. In fact, when examined more closely, the conclusion of the sixth chapter is ambiguous in what it says about the narrative voice to follow: ‘And Arkadii related to him the story of his uncle. The reader will find it in the following chapter.’ (‘ɂ Ⱥɪɤɚɞɢɣ ɪɚɫɫɤɚɡɚɥ ɟɦɭ ɢɫɬɨɪɢɸ ɫɜɨɟɝɨ ɞɹɞɢ. ɑɢɬɚɬɟɥɶ ɧɚɣɞɟɬ ɟɟ ɜ ɫɥɟɞɭɸɳɟɣ ɝɥɚɜɟ.’)46 What the reader finds in chapter seven, from the very first sentence, is not Arkadii’s story, not Pavel Petrovich’s story as it might have filtered out to the family, but what, despite the absence of a definite article in the Russian language, might be designated as the story, an inset history of an episode in Pavel Petrovich’s life, written in a style that belongs unmistakeably to the third-person narrator of the rest of the novel. The effect of this mode of presentation is one of withdrawal at the very moment of revelation. We, as readers, immediately sense we are being offered a narrative version that, as it were, runs parallel to the exchange between Arkadii and Bazarov, a translation, at most, of the fictional account. The action of the inset (and parallel) narrative takes place from 1834 to 1848, well before the present time of the main events, which begin, as we are told in the very first sentence of the novel, on 20 May 1859. It affords Turgenev the opportunity of introducing, in a selfcontained episode, a variation on his favourite theme of disappointed love, which serves to fill in, or rather to fill out, the biography of a secondary character. The story establishes the fact that different people within the same generation respond to loss in different ways. Arkadii’s mother dies shortly before Princess R., but his father, Nikolai Petrovich, refuses to dwell exclusively on past memories. Instead, he begins a new life with the peasant girl, Fenichka. We are told that it was harder for Pavel Petrovich than for another man: ‘in losing his past he lost everything he had’. After the death of the princess, Pavel Petrovich tried not to think of her. In this determination, he is again contrasted with his brother: ‘Nikolai could look back on a well-spent life and had a son growing up under his eyes; whereas Pavel, the lonely bachelor, was just entering on that indefinite twilight period of regrets that are akin to hopes, and hopes which are akin to regrets, when youth is over and old age has not yet come.’47

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Towards the end of the chapter, following an ellipsis, we rejoin the two young men and share in their reactions: ‘“So you see, Yevgeny,” observed Arkady, as he finished his story, “how unfair you were about my uncle.”’ Bazarov’s response is to remark in a characteristically curt manner: ‘I must say that a fellow who has staked his whole life on the one card of a woman’s love, and when that card fails, turns sour and lets himself go till he’s fit for nothing, is not a man, is not a male creature.’48 Yet Pavel Petrovich’s story foreshadows events in the life of Bazarov, who, despite his dismissive words at the end of the seventh chapter, is himself later to be captivated by an equally unpredictable woman. By this means Turgenev addresses the generational motif implicit in the novel’s title in order to contend that the passage of time may bring with it ideological change - the nihilist temperament superseding the romantic - but that it will not eradicate the perennial preoccupation of the human heart. Irene Masing-Delic has explored the thematic link between the ardent pursuits of these two male creatures,49 and I shall consider what she has had to offer, but first I want to add a few more words about the sphinx-like object of Pavel Petrovich’s attraction. Princess R., whom ‘no one would have called ... a beauty’, was distinguished by the extraordinary quality of her eyes, which, in the description offered of her face, are contrasted with her tongue which lisped ‘the most fatuous nonsense’. Her eyes were ‘small and grey, but the expression in them, which was swift and penetrating, [was] carefree to the point of audacity and thoughtful to the verge of melancholy: an enigmatic expression’.50 Pavel Petrovich meets her at a ball and makes a conquest of her, but ‘even when she surrendered herself without reserve, something always seemed to remain that was hidden and unattainable, beyond the power of human penetration’.51 The narrator comments: What resided in that soul - only God knows! She seemed to be in the grip of mysterious forces, unknown even to herself, which played with her at will, her limited intelligence being unable to cope with their caprices.52 The account that the reader is given of Princess R. falls into the familiar category of the femme fatale of the nineteenth century and, as such, it need not detain us. It is Pavel Petrovich’s response, however, which is unusual: he gives her a ring with a sphinx engraved on the stone. As a gift, it is unique, to the best of my knowledge, in the annals of nineteenth-century fiction: ‘What is this?’ she asked. ‘A sphinx?’ ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘and that sphinx is - you.’

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‘Me?’ she asked, and slowly raised her enigmatic eyes to him. ‘Do you know, that is very flattering?’ she added with a meaningless smile, while her eyes still kept the same strange look.53 The strange look is accompanied by a meaningless smile. This is not the only occasion in the narrative that we are told of the enigmatic glance of the mysterious woman, nor is it the first time that her intelligence is called into question. The only words she utters in the chapter are those just quoted. The substance of this short exchange lends credence to earlier reports that her tongue was given to ‘lisping the most fatuous nonsense’ and that she ‘did not utter one single sensible word’ on the evening that Pavel Petrovitch met her, when he danced a mazurka with her and fell passionately in love. What kind of sphinx is this? What riddle is she capable of asking? What danger does she present? These questions are inappropriate, for Turgenev’s reference is no longer to the Theban sphinx that confronted Oedipus and threatened to devour him. The Greek sphinx with its riddles has been displaced by an enigmatic creature whose ‘baffling, almost vacant, but fascinating image’, we are told, ‘had bitten too deeply into [Pavel Petrovich’s] soul’.54 Before long, Princess R. tires of Pavel Petrovich and to avoid him she travels abroad. He follows her, spending four years on foreign soil ‘now chasing after her, now trying to lose sight of her’. A passionate rapprochement occurs in Baden, only for her to abandon him again within the month. He returns to Russia and attempts to pick up his old life again, but he was ‘like a man with a poisoned system’ and ‘undertook nothing new’. Ten years pass, ‘drab, fruitless years’. ‘Nowhere’, we are informed in words that convey unmistakeably the urbane and aphoristic tone of Turgenev’s omniscient narrator, ‘does time fly as it does in Russia; in prison, they say, it flies even faster’. Then, one day, Pavel Petrovich learns that Princess R. has died abroad - in Paris in a condition ‘bordering on insanity’. The story of this episode in his life concludes with the following comment: A few weeks later he received a package on which his name was written: it contained the ring which he had given to the princess. She had scratched lines in the shape of a cross over the sphinx and sent him a message that the solution of the enigma was the cross.55 The invitation here, of course, is to construe an allegory based upon an opposition between the sphinx and the cross in which the latter is considered a remedy for the former. Since Princess R. had been told by Pavel Petrovich that he regarded her, because of her enigmatic ways, as a sphinx, it is reasonable to assume that the woman who had formerly

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wept and prayed at night, sitting pale and chill over a psalter, wished to indicate that she had found her salvation in the renunciation of worldly vanities. If, in the past, her ‘whole behaviour was a maze of inconsistencies’, then it would seem that, after a lengthy struggle, she had overcome her indecision and learned the same lesson as other characters in Turgenev’s fiction had done: submit or die. We should, however, be wary of accepting at face value so clear-cut an allegory from a character known in her life for inanities, and who had died distraught in her mind. We might also consider the compounding of a visual rebus the cross over the sphinx - with an accompanying explanation as indicative of a certain lack of finesse in resolving problematic issues. The return of the ring would have been message enough: it was hardly necessary to spell it out as well.56 All the same, this was the solution that Princess R. found. And what of Pavel Petrovich? Was it open to him to choose between the sphinx and the cross? In Turgenev’s earlier references to Isis and the sphinx, the male response to the enigmatic glance of the female was either to retreat or to acknowledge impotence in face of an implacable destiny. There is every reason to regard these as the two options available to Pavel Petrovich, and not only to him, but also to Bazarov, in his subsequent encounter with Madame Odintsova. Masing-Delic has discussed the relevance of the sphinx symbolism to the main plot of Fathers and Children. Linking the two love stories, the minor and the major, she argues that there is a creative and even a mythopoetic element in Bazarov’s psyche that leads him to construct around Odintsova a myth in which she appears as the ‘goddess of indifferent nature’.57 In an imaginative reading of the novel, Bazarov, the scientist, is seen as a demiurge (Prometheus), who meets Odintsova, the goddess of the temple of nature, whose exceptional beauty and indifference (to him, as to others) arouses in him a passion by which he is transformed. The following analysis lies at the core of this reading: Bazarov is finally defeated when he realizes that Odintsova is a woman without passions and a sphinx without riddles. At the beginning of their acquaintance Bazarov is like Oedipus in front of the sphinx. He attempts to solve the riddle of his sphinx just as once Pavel Petrovich attempted to solve the secret of his sphinx, Princess R., but he soon realizes that his sphinx, as distinct from Princess R., possesses no riddle of any kind. Odintsova is transparent. She is hiding nothing. ... She doesn’t brood over the riddles of existence, like Princess R., and nothing torments her, although she also bemoans her fate.58 Bazarov is likened to Oedipus, who stands before the sphinx, attempting to solve her riddle, as Pavel Petrovich had done before him. The prototype here is the Theban sphinx, but what is also to be found in this

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exposition is an extension of the Greek iconography to incorporate the Isis motif of concealment, in which riddle is equated with secret, or, rather, the absence of a riddle with the absence of a secret, which was later to provide the theme and inspiration for Oscar Wilde’s short story, The Sphinx Without a Secret. It is this shift that allows Masing-Delic to argue that Odinstsova is transparent. Otherwise there is no good reason to make a correlation between a sphinx who poses riddles and the dispassionate goddess-like woman who ‘hides nothing’. The point here is not so much that Odintsova is unlike the Theban sphinx, a creature that was, amongst other things, a fearful hybrid, as that she is unlike Turgenev’s interpretation of a veiled Isis (modelled on the image of the Egyptian sphinx that appears in other works of nineteenth-century European literature). Turgenev’s earlier representation of Isis as ‘indifferent’ Nature demonstrates his awareness of the Egyptian contamination of the Theban sphinx topos.59 One consequence of this, as Masing-Delic observes, is that Bazarov has no riddle to solve.60 If ‘the full and final answer’ to the sphinx’s riddle in its original, ancient Greek version, was not merely ‘man’, but additionally ‘Oedipus’, as indeed Thomas de Quincey had given himself credit for being the first to realize in November 1849,61 then the absence of a riddle would have the effect of transferring attention to the role of the sphinx. Implicit in this shift is the acknowledgement that the sphinx no longer poses riddles; she is the riddle ... or, rather, the enigma. Masing-Delic takes Tiutchev’s statement that ‘Nature is a sphinx’ as her epigraph, and quotes its conclusion in support of her argument that Odintsova is a ‘sphinx without riddles’. Turgenev’s novel was published in 1862, well before Tiutchev’s poem, so, at the very most, we should look to the lyric for a confirmation of a particular reading of Odintsova’s character, rather than consider it as an influence on Turgenev. It is not entirely obvious, however, that Turgenev’s image of the sphinx is consistent with Tiutchev’s presentation. As long as discussion is confined to the Russian ɡɚɝɚɞɤɚ, the disparity between riddle (as in the Greek myth) and enigma (as in the retrospective assimilation of the Egyptian cult) is obscured, but once the word is placed under the magnifying lens of translation, when a choice has to be made, the slippage becomes apparent. How, then, is one to translate ɡɚɝɚɞɤɚ? This is the crux of the matter. There is nothing enigmatic about the Theban sphinx. Enigma is associated with the Egyptian element, which Turgenev identifies in A Journey in the Woodland through the introduction, at the outset, of a veiled and mysterious Isis. Elsewhere in his writing, the image of the sphinx stands as the incarnation of an enigma. The distinction between a riddle, which by definition has a solution, and an enigma, which does not, for once a solution is found it ceases to be an enigma, is a clear one in English. This is not the case in

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Russian, where the word ɡɚɝɚɞɤɚ does double duty. This engenders an ambiguity, an aporia: should we be more disposed towards reading into the symbolism of the sphinx an aspect of Greek intelligence or Egyptian impenetrability? In Russian, the congruence of ‘ɡɚɝɚɞɤɚ’ (‘riddle, enigma’) and ‘ɪɚɡɝɚɞɤɚ’ (solution’), with their shared root, predisposes one to a belief that a solution is available, whereas, etymologically, in English, nothing binds an enigma to a solution. We have no description of the ring that Pavel Petrovich gave to Princess R. and, thus, no way of knowing whether the creature engraved on it took the form of a Greek sphinx, female and interrogative, crouching or perched on a column, as she appears to Oedipus in nineteenth-century paintings as well as on vases of the Hellenic period, or recumbent and wingless in the Egyptian style, exemplified by two statues, originally carved during the reign of Amenhotep III some 3,500 years ago, which, since 1834, have adorned the St Petersburg Embankment next to the Academy of Fine Arts.62 Although not a dominant image in Turgenev’s writing, the sphinx takes on the function of a mythological correlate in which the author’s preoccupation with three distinct concerns - the aura of the mysterious, the image of woman and the definition of Russia - coalesce. In examining three set pieces belonging to three different genres - the opening paragraph of A Journey in the Woodland, chapter seven of Fathers and Children, and the prose-poem The Sphinx (from Senilia, 1882) - it has been argued that Turgenev followed a nineteenth-century European convention in taking material arbitrarily from Greece and Egypt to create a composite, or syncretic, sphinx-complex that drew especially upon two distinct sources, namely the riddle of Oedipus and the enigma of Isis, to form a symbolic nexus. To make this symbolic nexus tally with the programmatic announcement of his contemporary, Tiutchev, later in the same decade, that nature is a sphinx, a sphinx with no riddle to her name, is instructive, but inconclusive. We may be better advised to look ahead half a century and align Turgenev’s farsighted vision of Russia as a sphinx with that of Blok. It may, however, be safest of all to suspend judgment altogether, for, as Turgenev informed Pauline Viardot in 1850, ‘La Russie attendra’ - ‘Russia will wait’. .

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NOTES 1. F.I. Tiutchev, Lirika, Nauka, Moscow, 1966, I, p. 220. Unless otherwise stated, translations in this article are mine. 2. Alexander Blok, Selected Poems, intr. and ed. Avril Pyman, Pergamon, Oxford, 1972, pp. 183-4. For a discussion of the image of the Sphinx as a ‘manifestation of Blok’s sculptural myth’, see Adrian Wanner, ‘Aleksandr Blok’s Sculptural Myth’, Slavic and East European Journal, XL, 1996, pp. 236-50. In addition to ‘Skify’, Wanner (pp. 2445) lists the following poems by Blok in which the image of the sphinx appears: ‘Sfinks’, ‘Vozmezdie’, and his last poem, ‘Pushkinskomu domu’. 3. From the Ends to the Beginning: A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse, www.russianpoetry.net (http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/texts/scythians_blok.html, accessed 27/8/2007). 4. The Sphinx stands in contrast to the positive heroines more frequently identified with Russia in the literature of the period that extends from Turgenev to Blok. See Ellen Rutten, Unattainable Bride Russia: Engendering Nation, State and Intelligentsia in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (doctoral thesis, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 2005), for a discussion of a recurrent plot in Russian literature which ‘features a heroine who symbolically merges with Russia or the Russian people’ and who is ‘opposed to a westernized hero who serves as the prototype of the nineteenth-century “alienated intelligent”’ (p. 36). 5. For the original, see I.S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos’mi tomakh. Pis’ma v trinadtsati tomakh: Pis’ma, Moscow-Leningrad, Izd. Akademii nauk, 1961, I (1831-1850), pp. 382-3. The letter is dated 16 May 1850. 6. V.S. Pritchett adapted the phrase from the Goncourt journal for the title of his biography of Turgenev, The Gentle Barbarian, Chatto & Windus, London, 1977. 7. For the original, see I.S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinennii i pisem v dvadtsati vos’mi tomakh. Sochineniia v piatnadtsati tomakh, Nauka, Moscow-Leningrad, 1967, XIII, pp. 181-2. 8. As a student Turgenev attended Osip Senkovskii’s lectures at the University of St Petersburg and he would have been familiar with his tale, The Scientific Journey to Bear Mountain (ɍɱɟɧɨɟ ɩɭɬɟɲɟɫɬɜɢɟ ɧɚ Ɇɟɞɜɟɠɢɣ ɨɫɬɪɨɜ, 1833), in which Baron Brambeus and Dr Spurtzmann visit a cave known as the Room of Drawings on Bear Island in Siberia and find what they believe to be Egyptian hieroglyphs preserved from a diluvian period long ago. The greater part of the absurd narrative is taken up with a translation of these symbols ‘according to Champollion’s method’ (p. 128). In the end, the Baron discovers that the apparently ‘glyphic’ inscriptions have been produced by ‘the crystallization of a stalagmite’ (ibid.). In other words, there are no hieroglyphs to interpret. See Osip Senkovsky, The Fantastic Journeys of Baron Brambeus (Ɏɚɧɬɚɫɬɢɱɟɫɤɢɟ ɩɭɬɟɲɟɫɬɜɢɹ ɛɚɪɨɧɚ Ȼɪɚɦɛɟɭɫɚ); trans. Louis Pedrotti, Peter Lang, New York, 1993, pp. 41-130.

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9. An indication of the prominence in the middle of the nineteenth century of the motif of Egyptian mystery may be gauged by the choice that George Eliot made for the opening sentence of the first chapter of her novel, Adam Bede (1859): ‘With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer farreaching visions of the past’. 10. The expression is taken from Jean-Joseph Goux, Oedipus, Philosopher, trans. Catherine Porter, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1993, p. 18. 11. Michael Wachtel, ‘The Veil of Isis as a Paradigm for Russian Symbolist Mythopoesis’, in The European Foundations of Russian Modernism, E. Mellen, Lewiston, NY, 1991, Peter Barta, ed., pp. 25–50, traces the development of the ‘veil of Isis’ topos in German romanticism, mainly as it appears in Schiller and Jean Paul Richter, in the writing of Russian Symbolists. Wachtel does not mention Turgenev. 12. P.D. Uspenskii, Novaia model’ vselennoi; perevod N.V. von Boka, Saint Petersburg, Izd. Chernysheva, 1993, Chapter 9, Section 3.Quoted from http://psylib.org.ua/books/uspen02/txt09.htm (accessed 27/8/2007). 13. P.D. Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe: Principles of the Psychological Method in Its Application to Problems of Science, Religion and Art, trans. from the Russian by R. R. Merton, under the supervision of the author, Knopf, New York, 1931. Quoted, with correction, from Jacob Needleman, A Sense of the Cosmos, Chapter 1, Part 7, http://www.rawpaint.com/library/jneedleman/jnch1g.html (accessed 27/8/2007). 14. Turgenev had commenced: ‘Yellowish-grey [Izzhelta-seryi] sand, soft at the top, hard, grating below . . . sand without end, wherever one looks.’ The translation is by Constance Garnett and Roger Rees in Ivan Turgenev, Poems in Prose in Russian and English, ed. from the original MS. with Introduction by André Mazon, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1951, p. 151. (The Russian original is on p. 150.) Uspenskii begins with the Russian compound epithet ‘Zheltovato-seryi’. 15. Uspenskii dates the section on the Sphinx to 1908-1914: see the website referred to in note 12 above. 16. Poems in Prose in Russian and English, p. 151. Turgenev had already identified the sphinx with the Russian people in a reference to the ‘danse macabre’ (of opposing political factions), an image that was later to attract Blok. Slavophiles and Westernizers, radicals and conservatives, Turgenev wrote, ‘whirl before one’s eyes like figures in a danse macabre, while below them, in the dark background of the picture, lurks a sphinx the Russian people’. See Aileen Kelly, ‘The Sphinx of Russia’ (a review of Serge Schmemann’s Echoes of a Native Land: Two Centuries of a Russian Village) in New York Review of Books, XLV, 15, 1998, p. 8. 17. Charles Salomon, in a note to the poem, in Poems in Prose in Russian and English, p. 218. 18. The Westernizer’s counterpart was the ‘broad bolivar’ that Onegin dons before he ‘goes strolling unconfined’ along the St Petersburg boulevard in stanza fifteen of chapter one of Evgenii Onegin. Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, trans. from the Russian, with a Commentary, by Vladimir Nabokov in Four Volumes, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1964, I, p. 101. Nabokov has a note on the bolivar in

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volume two of his translation (p. 68). 19. Although started in 1853, Faust was not completed until 1857. It was first published in Biblioteka dlia chteniia, 10, 1857. 20. ‘[T]he capital used by Turgenev himself in the story and in the manuscript title ... makes it clear that the concrete geographical region is meant.’ Sander Brouwer, Character in the Short Prose of Ivan Sergeeviþ Turgenev, Rodopi, Amsterdam / Atlanta, 1996, p. 143, n. 3. Constance Garnett, whose translation is adopted here, gives Turgenev’s tale the title A Tour in the Forest. 21. Compare the title of Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887), where the novel is set in a location that may be viewed as both geographical and archetypal. The same dual perspective applies to Turgenev’s work. 22. ‘I am a writer of a transitional time, and I am fit only for people who are in a transitional state’. Letter, from Paris, to L.N. Tolstoy, 28/16 November 1856. For the original, see I.S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos’mi tomakh. Pis’ma v trinadtsati tomakh: Pis’ma, Izd. Akademii nauk, Moscow-Leningrad, 1961, III (1856-1859), p. 43 (hereafter PSSP P III). 23. I.S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos’mi tomakh. Sochineniia, Nauka, Moscow-Leningrad, 1964, VII, p. 418 (hereafter PSSP VII:). 24. The altered ending of A Journey in the Woodland appeared first in a French translation (which the author had made in 1858 in collaboration with Louis Viardot). See note to Turgenev’s letter, dated 16 October 1857, to Louis Viardot in PSSP P III, pp. 527-8. 25. PSSP VII, p. 51. 26. Ivan Turgenev, The Novels, trans. from the Russian by Constance Garnett, Heinemann, London, 1920, XIII, The Diary of a Superfluous Man Etc., p. 101 (hereafter Garnett). 27. PSSP VII, pp. 51-2. 28. Garnett, p. 102. 29. Isaiah Berlin, ‘Fathers and Children’, in Russian Thinkers, Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly, eds, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1979, p. 280. 30. Jane T. Costlow, Worlds within Worlds: The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990, p. 108 (her emphasis). Later, Costlow modifies this position, distinguishing between A Journey in the Woodland, where the forest ‘is alien but benign’, and a later, but allied work, Enough (Dovol’no), where nature ‘is violently destructive - but they are one in their elemental indifference’ (p. 109). Berlin, p. 302, also notes the similarity between the two tales.

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31. For the original, see I.S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos’mi tomakh. Pis’ma v trinadtsati tomakh, Izd. Akademii nauk, Moscow-Leningrad, 1962, IV (1860-1862), p. 381 (hereafter PSSP P IV). This perspective, which sees man as ‘a creature of a single day’, is implicit in the riddle of the sphinx as articulated in Apollodorus and later writers. 32. Turgenev wrote, in a letter to Countess Lambert (12 November / 31 October, 1860), that ‘in art there is no fortuitousness and no ugliness’ (‘v khudozhestve sluchainostei i bezobraziia net’.) See PSSP P IV, p. 150. 33. PSSP VII, p. 52. The opening lines of the Introduction to Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman have Peter the Great standing ‘On the bank of the deserted waves’, deep in contemplation and gazing out into the distance. 34. Garnett, p. 102. 35. Brouwer, p. 145. 36. Plutarch, Moralia, with an English translation by Frank Cole Babbitt, William Heinemann, London, 1962, V, p. 129. 37. See the entry under ‘Isis’ in The Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion, ed. Simon Price and Emily Kearns, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, p. 287. 38. Turgenev employs Isis as a ‘poetic image of personified nature’. The name of Isis occurs in this sense in mythological reference works of the nineteenth century as well as in European and Russian poetry. See, for example, poems by K.N. Batiushkov, ‘Stranstvovatel’ i domosed’ (1815) and Ia. P. Polonskii, ‘Pered zakrytoy kartinoy’ (1850s), alluding to the statue of Isis at Memphis. This note is based on information given in PSSP VII, p. 419. 39. Brouwer, p. 168. I say ‘smuggles’, since Mary, who is not mentioned in Turgenev’s text, is introduced through her association with ‘heavenly fire’, which itself is an association introduced (‘One is tempted to compare this mysterious fire ...’, p. 167) in conjunction with a discussion of the motif of the ‘overground fire’ (‘pozemnyi pozhar’). Compare Costlow (p. 19): the fire in the forest ‘is not destructive but restorative, because it moves along the surface’. 40. Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Abridged Edition, Macmillan, London, 1967, p. 505. 41. Ibid., p. 504. 42. Accounts of visitors to the Sphinx at Gizeh, including Uspenskii’s, often observe how the stone figure gazes into the distance. 43. Garnett’s translation of the repeated ‘zdes’’ as ‘there’ (rather than ‘here’) obscures the sense of retreat and relocation in the Russian text. 44. See, for example, Costlow, pp. 15-17, 20, 46, 71, and 100.

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45. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, Rosemary Edmonds, trans., with the Romanes Lecture ‘Fathers and Children’ by Isaiah Berlin, Penguin, London, 1975, p. 100 (hereafter Fathers and Sons). 46. I.S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos’mi tomakh. Sochineniia, Moscow-Leningrad, Izd. Nauka, 1964, VIII, p. 221 (hereafter PSSP VIII). My translation. 47. Fathers and Sons, p. 103. 48. Ibid., p. 105. 49. Irene Masing-Delic, ‘Bazarov pered sfinksom’, Revue des Etudes slaves, LVII, 1985, pp. 369-84. 50. Fathers and Sons, pp. 100-1. 51. Ibid., p. 101. 52. Loc. cit. 53. Ibid., pp. 101-2. 54. Ibid., p. 102. 55. Ibid. p. 103. 56. Edmonds, in her translation ‘sent him a message that the solution of the enigma was the cross’, takes the liberty of re-introducing the idea of the enigma at this point. In the Russian, Princess R. had merely wanted Pavel Petrovich to be told that the cross was the solution (razgadka). Once there is a solution (and a dissolution), there is no need to revert to the idea of enigma. 57. Masing-Delic, p. 371. In contrast, Costlow, pp. 122-36, reads the encounter between Odintsova and Bazarov, prefigured in the enigmatic story of Princess R. and Pavel Petrovich, as a reprise of the destructive myth of Diana and Actaeon told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. 58. Ibid., p. 375. My translation. 59. Masing-Delic points out that Bazarov wishes to ‘decipher’ death. It is, of course, hieroglyphs, rather than riddles, which are deciphered. 60. Nor, I would contend, had Pavel Petrovich. 61. ‘The Sphinx’s Riddle’ (1850), in The Works of Thomas de Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop et al., Pickering & Chatto, London, 2000-2003, XVII, ed. Edmund Baxter, 2001, pp. 14-22.

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62. See V.V. Nesterov, L’vy steregut gorod, Iskusstvo-SPB, St Petersburg, 2002, pp. 254-62.

A ‘Buttoned-up’ Hero of His Time: Turgenev’s Use of the Language of Vestimentary Markers in Rudin Boris Christa

Turgenev’s use of lyrical descriptions of the Russian countryside as a medium of sub-textual communication with the reader has been well documented by the critics. Much less attention has been accorded to his use for the same purpose of images of clothing and attire. Such semiotic signs, known as vestimentary markers, figure very prominently in Turgenev’s writing. He deploys them not only as a helpful device in the process of characterization, but to transmit a wealth of social information and to document graphically and sub-textually how his characters are changing. Like spoken language, clothes make statements - some weak, some powerful.1 On analysis, the vestimentary makers that carry these messages are found to fall into two categories - the synchronic and the diachronic. Synchronic vestimentary markers are, as the name implies, timeless and absolute. They define items of attire in terms such as old or new, simple or richly ornamented, clean or dirty. They can be understood readily and independently of time and place. Diachronic vestimentary markers are more complex. They yield their meaning on a binary basis by reference to a dress-code operative at a given period and location. Compliance with this dress-code carries a message and so does noncompliance. For example, in our own time, if at a given social occasion the dress-code demands that men should wear ties, then any defaulter makes a statement. The decoding of such vestimentary signals clearly depends on an understanding of the underlying dress-codes. As these vary in response to many factors, such as taste, fashion, location or availability of materials, the understanding of the vestimentary language of the past is not always an easy matter. In Rudin, the earliest of his major novels, Turgenev is still developing his technique in the use of vestimentary markers. Altogether, we find there are 181 of them. By way of comparison, in Fathers and Children, written six years later, there are 283 in all, an increase of over 50%.2 There is no evidence that Turgenev had the least theoretical understanding of semiotic communication in literature, but at the pragmatic level he was a master in its use. Not only did he know that clothes make statements, but he knew that people are assessed by others on the basis of their vestimentary markers. This becomes quite explicit early in Rudin, when Turgenev describes the initial impact made by his hero: ‘Nobody had expected to find him remarkable ... His clothes were so mediocre’ (VI, p. 264).3 This level of awareness of the communicative effect of clothes pervades the whole novel and, in pursuit of his artistic

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aims, Turgenev exploits it to the full. On the one hand, he aspired to parade before his reader the intellectual and social leaders of successive generations of young Russians; on the other hand he wanted to recreate the ‘body and pressure’ of time - in other words to place his characters in their social and historical context. In both these enterprises he relies very heavily on diachronic vestimentary markers. Born into the upper echelons of the Russian nobility, with wealth and status to match, Turgenev was well versed in the dress-codes prevalent in Russian society of his time. They varied in different social and geographical environments ranging from the refined standards of the upper aristocracy of cosmopolitan St Petersburg, through to the rough and ready ways of the peasantry. At whatever level, by the use of vestimentary markers indicative of acceptance or rejection of given norms, Turgenev, could readily communicate with his contemporary audience. By relating sub-consciously the descriptions of the characters to the prevailing dress-codes, the readers were informed on matters such as financial position, tastes, outlook and much else besides. In their compliance, or non-compliance, the characters reveal themselves. For the modem reader, far less aware of the dress codes of the time, these diachronic vestimentary signifiers are generally more demanding than the synchronic, but they are rarely so obscure that the meaning is totally lost. A major function of diachronic vestimentary markers is to signal social status. A case in point, in our novel, is that of Madame Lasunskaia, Rudin’s hostess. Turgenev, master of subtle communication that he is, never directly describes her house or details her wealth, but everything can be deduced from her vestimentary markers. For instance, although she is living in the country, she dresses formally for dinner every day. When displeased, she sniffs her perfumed handkerchief. To receive Rudin in her sitting room for an intimate lunch, she puts on: ‘a simple elegant dress à la Madame Recamier’ (VI, p. 271). To the initiated, this latter vestimentary marker presumably communicates some telling nuance regarding Lasunskaia’s tastes, but even when this special meaning is lost, it still spells refinement and wealth. Moreover, as is usual with Turgenev, the image of the master or mistress is supported by the vestimentary markers of the servant.4 In this case, Lasunskaia’s butler wears black tails, white tie and white waistcoat and looks like George Canning (VI, p. 275). All these vestimentary signals define Lasunskaia’s social status very clearly and unequivocally. The vestimentary markers displayed by Lipina, the secondary heroine of the novel, are similarly indicative of high social status, but Turgenev deftly defines her as being less cosmopolitan and socially pretentious. She enters the novel wearing a light dress, a round straw hat and carrying a parasol. Her apparently casual white, muslin dress, in fact, makes a strong statement. It is redolent of Poor Liza and the era of sensibility, when fashionable ladies followed the example of Marie

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Antoinette and discarded their ornate outfits in favour of simple muslin dresses that allowed them to feel themselves as Arcadian shepherdesses close to nature. While thus dressed unpretentiously herself, Lipina’s social standing is affirmed by the vestimentary markers of the servant, who follows in her wake. He is dressed up as a Cossack. In nineteenthcentury Russia, such Cossack page-boys were a status-symbol that was highly prized in aristocratic families from the Romanovs down. Much more equivocal regarding social status are the messages emitted by the diachronic vestimentary markers of Lasunskaia’s courtier and companion Pandalevskii. Although he is in the country, he wears a light frock-coat with a light cravat. He has a stiff, white collar and silkembroidered braces. In the fob-pocket of his waistcoat he carries a small gold watch with an inlaid lid. He wears a lightweight grey hat and always sports a swagger-cane. All this might add up to the vestimentary image of an aristocratic dandy with high social status, but there are additional subtle touches that inform us otherwise. We are told that Pandalevskii’s nails are ‘painstakingly trimmed into triangles’(VI, p. 250). This foppish detail gives a strong hint that he has overstepped the mark. Turgenev clearly considers that a true Russian nobleman at ease in the country would not go to these lengths to assert his status. Even more revealing is the information that Pandalevskii’s clothes are not only spotlessly clean and that he is forever brushing dust from the sleeve of his jacket, but that he ‘wears his clothes far too long’(VI, p. 242) - in other words, that his wardrobe is very limited and well-worn. With this message, Pandalevskii’s pretensions to high, social status collapse. The vestimentary sub-text has told us that we are dealing with an impecunious sycophant. While Pandalevskii is desperate to bolster his social standing by complying meticulously with the dress-codes of the upper crust, Basistov, the tutor of Lasunskaia’s sons, has no such ambitions. Presumably himself still a student, and an intellectual in the making, we are told pointedly that he doesn’t care what he wears and is too lazy to get a haircut. His failure to observe the niceties of the dress-code signal his lowly status and he is treated accordingly. Although Basistov is his most ardent fan, even Rudin treats him in a very off-hand manner. Of particular interest are the vestimentary markers which Turgenev uses to characterize and define Lezhnev. He is a very positive character, who makes it his trade-mark to dress badly. Turgenev’s portrait of him is acute and sympathetic. His down-market clothes betray a kind of inverted snobbery. Unlike the social climber Pandalevskii, he is shown as being so secure in his status as a wealthy Russian nobleman, that he feels free to spurn the conventions. Lezhnev wears an old overcoat of grey Kolomianka, a kind of Russian homespun material.5 It is always covered in dust. Lipina, who eventually marries him, describes the garment as ‘some sort of a linen bag’(VI, p. 242). His hair is unruly and his cap is at the back of his head.

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He tells Lasunskaia that he can’t attend her salon, because he doesn’t own a decent dress-suit or white gloves. In fact, his style of dressing is closer to that of his peasants than that of the urban gentry. Turgenev has evidently chosen Lezhnev’s vestimentary markers to identify him as a dyed-in-the-wool Slavophile. Such ideological labelling is an important aspect of the author’s intention to depict not only the social fabric, but the intellectual climate of the time. The clash between the Westerners and the Slavophiles was the major ideological issue of the period. It is one which, beginning in Petrine days, has always had a marked vestimentary aspect. In Russian literature, hirsute Slavophiles wearing ethnic garments routinely clash with clean-shaven Westerners in cosmopolitan, fashionable clothes. It is surprising that Turgenev, himself a Westerner, appears to be more approving of ethnic clothes, such as those worn by Lezhnev, than of the stylish get-up of Pandalevskii. Full of implicit criticism too are Turgenev’s descriptions of the vestimentary markers of his central hero, Rudin, a Westerner whose biggest problem is defined by Lezhnev as his total lack of understanding of the real Russia. As Rudin enters the novel he is, indeed, wearing a very cosmopolitan outfit. It is, however, nondescript to the extent that, as we have noted, its mediocrity gives rise to comment and the mundane initial impression created by his clothes is only gradually dispelled by his fervour and verbal brilliance. In building up Rudin as an inspiring figure in the opening phase of the novel, Turgenev relies almost entirely on dialogue and argument. He never substantiates this initial, positive image by affirmative actions or even any flattering descriptions of the appearance of his hero. Indeed this magnetic Rudin, dynamic thinker and leader, proves to be a very ephemeral figure. But while the build-up of Rudin’s image lacks credibility, Turgenev’s destruction of it is totally convincing. It is done gradually and subtly, but relentlessly, with vestimentary semiotic signs figuring prominently in his arsenal of narratological devices deployed for the purpose. Particularly effective in the depiction of Rudin’s downfall are the synchronic markers. They document with devastating clarity the failure of his ambitions to blaze a trail towards a new utopian social order. Vestimentary statements, preparing for an impending denouement, occur quite soon after Rudin has been introduced. We learn not only that his suit is well-worn and commonplace, but that it is: ‘tight as though he had outgrown it’(VI, p. 258). This is a feature which subtly, but distinctly signals the misfit. It is a memorable image that blends uneasily with the build-up of Rudin as a charismatic figure and potential ‘hero of his time’. Following in the footsteps of predecessors such as the immaculate Onegin, beautifully dressed ‘like a London dandy’, or the dashing Pechorin in his Caucasian officer’s uniform, Rudin hardly cuts a very inspiring figure. What damns him is not his lack of elegance, but

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that he is so utterly nondescript. He is equally unprepossessing also by comparison with later contenders for the position of being a generational role-model such as Bazarov, the robust hero of Fathers and Children, who shows much greater independence and contempt for conventional dress-codes. He arrives at the Kirsanov estate, for example, in a loose fitting ‘balakhon’, a kind of light overall worn by peasants (VIII, p. 208). His style of dressing is deliberately programmatic and provocative. It enrages the conservative Pavel Kirsanov, the dandified representative of the generation of the fathers. Insarov, the inspirational hero of On the Eve, is similarly unconventional. His main concern is function and when outside he wears a most unusual peaked cap with ear-flaps (VIII, p. 56). In Rudin’s style of dressing there is nothing that could be interpreted as signalling any nascent counter-culture or even mildly antiestablishment protest. We are told that in his university days he did grow his hair very long, but even this timeless marker of youthful rebellion, in his case, was more an expression of romantic inclinations. Certainly, when he reminisces about his student days he mentions social gatherings and serenades, but nothing about any political activities. Rudin’s long hair, however, remains a permanent feature. It becomes a trade-mark, as in the case of Bakunin, the anarchist, who served Turgenev as a model. But Rudin does not sport the wild, unkempt hair of the firebrand revolutionary. His are the flowing locks of the salon philosopher. It is symptomatic of Rudin’s innate conservatism that even at the end of his life he retains this long hair typical of the geriatric hippie. It has become part of his persona. It functions as an identifier in the novel, similar to the black wig of Natalia’s French governess or the wildly ruffled hair of the sharp-tongued Pigasov. Undoubtedly Rudin’s most eloquent, repeated and emphasized vestimentary marker is his outgrown, over-tight jacket. Before speaking, he always buttons this up, ‘as if it were a sacred rite’ (VI, p. 318).The wearing of outgrown garments is typical of teenage boys and this feature of his dress perfectly communicates Rudin’s immaturity. His development has been arrested at the undergraduate stage. He has all the passion and intensity of the late teenager, but totally lacks the experience and competence to turn any of his idealistic plans into reality. Tightly buttoned-up jackets, moreover, are a very loaded semiotic sign in Turgenev’s vestimentary language. Elsewhere, he uses it to characterize the attitude of provincial bureaucrats. It signifies acceptance of the status quo, humility and servility. Of all the many expressive vestimentary markers of the novel it is the most symbolic and memorable and it provides the key for understanding Rudin. The main theme in the latter part of the novel is the decline of Rudin. Turgenev again chooses vestimentary language to bring this home to the reader. It is heralded by a profound change that occurs in the hero. By the end of the novel he is so different that Lezhnev barely recognizes him. The template for his portrait seems to shift from one literary

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prototype to another. As evidenced in his much-quoted article of 1860, Turgenev was acutely mindful of the archetypal significance of Hamlet and Don Quixote. Rudin vacillates between the two and their very different vestimentary aspects. In his article, Turgenev defines the Hamlet-type as a well-dressed man ‘who captivates everybody with his black velvet clothes and a feather in his cap’(VIII, p. 177). This picture evidently had some influence on the original conception of Rudin. As a student we are told that he wore ‘high boots with spurs and a hussar jacket with bands’(VI, p. 268), - an image that endows him with a residual romantic aura. When he arrives at the Lasunskii estate, however, all the panache has gone out of his costume, although he still strives to conform to aristocratic dress-codes and certainly retains all the idealism and indecisiveness of the Hamlet-type. A major change of direction then takes place as in bitter resignation he takes his leave. He now tells Basistov that he finds inspiration in the break with society made by Don Quixote and talks passionately about emulating him in pursuing a quest for true freedom. In terms of vestimentary language, Turgenev characterized the Don Quixote-type ‘as making do with the shabbiest of clothes’(VIII, p. 174). Rudin’s adoption of the quixotic life-style and his progressive decline to the end of the novel, indeed are communicated graphically in ever more negative vestimentary markers. When we catch sight of Rudin again, two years after his failed romance with Natalia, he is sitting bent in a ramshackle cart, with the brim of a forage cap pulled over his eyes and wearing an old cape covered in dust. He is being driven along a remote country road by an old, grey-haired peasant clad in an armiak which is full of holes. Several more years later, when Lezhnev meets Rudin by chance, we are confronted by a restless nomad well beyond his prime, wearing a velveteen frockcoat with bronze buttons that is old and worn and has holes at the elbows. Not only is this rather theatrical garment threadbare, but there are no signs of any clean linen. This is a terrible indictment in Turgenev’s vestimentary language, which fully justifies the narrator’s verdict that ‘Rudin has clearly gone to seed’ (VI, p. 353). This is admitted by Rudin himself when he acknowledges the fatal role which philosophizing has played in his life. But he now claims finally to know the difference between fine words and real deeds. This newfound insight he formulates in vestimentary language when he tells Lezhnev that reality are his white hairs, his wrinkles and the holes at the elbows of his jacket (VI, p. 365). Rudin’s final curtain is particularly expressive in terms of semiotic signs. The setting is Paris on 26 June 1848. The insurrection of the Commune has already been quelled, when in true quixotic fashion Rudin leaps onto the barricade. In one hand he has a red flag, in the other a sabre, which is completely blunt. He is wearing his old frock-coat. He has wrapped a red scarf around his waist. On his head with its tousled

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locks incongruously sits a straw hat. As he waves his useless weapon, a bullet goes straight through his heart. In summary, it can safely be asserted that the deployment of vestimentary markers for literary communication forms an important element in Turgenev’s narrative technique. It has a significant function both in the delineation of the characters and in the sub-textual exposition of the story-line. In the novel Rudin, it plays a particularly substantial role in relation to the main hero. The vestimentary markers which Turgenev uses to portray Rudin at various stages of his development communicate to the reader most convincingly the nature of this flawed and tragic hero.

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NOTES 1. See, for example, Alison Lurie, The Language of Clothes, Heinemann, London, 1981. 2. Boris Christa, ‘Vestimentary Markers in Turgenev’s Ottsy i deti (Fathers and Sons)’, New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 1983, pp 21-36. 3. All references to Turgenev’s work contained in brackets in the text are to volume and page numbers in: I.S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Izdatel’estvo “Nauka”, Moscow-Leningrad, 1960-68: all translations are by the present author. 4. See Christa, p. 23. 5. See P.M. Kirsanova, Kostium v russkoi khudozhestvennoi kul’ture 18 – pervoi poloviny 20 vv., Nauchnoe Izdatel’stvo “Bol’shaia rossiiskaia entsiklopediia”, Moscow, 1995, p.136.

Mystical Union in the Philosophy of Vladimir Solovev Ruth Coates

The union of God and man is, in a sense, Solovev’s only theme, and to write about it could be construed as an exercise in synecdoche. What else is divine humanity - ɛɨɝɨɱɟɥɨɜɟɱɟɫɬɜɨ - than mystical union? Yet, given that mystical union does represent the key to Solovev’s work, there should be every reason to reflect on the philosopher’s understanding of the concept, the sources from which he derives it, and the direction its evolution takes as his career unfolds. Over the course of this article I shall be considering three primary contexts: Platonic philosophy, Greek patristic theology, and esoteric thought systems of the gnostic type. These contexts were simultaneously present to Solovev from the very beginning, but assume greater or lesser prominence at different phases of his intellectual life. I shall argue that in the first, ‘philosophical’, phase, Solovev explores a concept of mystical union as intellectual contemplation that is Platonist (indeed, closer to Plato than to his followers); that in the second, ‘theocratic’, phase, the Eastern Christian concept of deification shapes his thought, whilst in the final, ‘theurgic’, phase, Solovev is dominated by an essentially gnostic sensibility. Solovev intended his philosophy of all-unity - ɜɫɟɟɞɢɧɫɬɜɨ - to represent a great synthesis of the religious truths that, he believed, could be found in all traditions: he wished to provide the intellectual framework for the perfect religion of the future. But by failing to work consistently within any one tradition, he compromises them all, and this is especially true of the theological tradition of his native Orthodoxy. I shall start with Solovev’s theory of knowledge of ultimate reality from the works of his ‘philosophical period’, concentrating in particular on Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge (Ɏɢɥɨɫɨɮɫɤɢɟ ɧɚɱɚɥɚ ɰɟɥɶɧɨɝɨ ɡɧɚɧɢɹ, 1877) and Lectures on Divine Humanity (ɑɬɟɧɢɹ ɨ ɛɨɝɨɱɟɥɨɜɟɱɟɫɬɜɟ, 1878). It can be expected that such a theory will be interdependent on his understanding of what that ultimate reality comprises. In Lectures Solovev concedes that there can be no logical proof of the existence of God. Logic can indicate why God is likely to exist, but one can be persuaded of it only by faith (III, 32-3).1 However, once the act of faith has been performed, we can rely on the ‘inner data of religious experience’ and the organizing ability of our reason to arrive at knowledge of God. Thus: ‘That God is, we believe, but what God is, we experience and try to know’ (III, 35). Solovev’s understanding of revelation is at least in part God’s making these ‘inner data’ available to consciousness (III, 35). In this picture, then, there are two kinds of knowledge of God - experiential and ‘rational’.

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In Philosophical Principles Solovev appears to make an equivalent distinction by availing himself of the two Russian terms for ‘mysticism’: ɦɢɫɬɢɤɚ and ɦɢɫɬɢɰɢɡɦ, designating the former as ‘the direct, unmediated relationship of our spirit to the transcendent world’, and the latter as ‘the reflection of our reason on that relationship’ (I, 263). Ɇɢɫɬɢɱɟɫɤɚɹ ɮɢɥɨɫɨɮɢɹ (mystical philosophy) is used as a synonym for ɦɢɫɬɢɰɢɡɦ. Ɇɢɫɬɢɱɟɫɤɨɟ ɡɧɚɧɢɟ (mystical knowledge) pertains to this mystical philosophy. Most of the time, Solovev refrains from using the term ‘knowledge’ for direct apperception of divine reality. For him, ‘knowledge’ is associated with abstract reasoning, to which he assigns an important, but secondary, role. The primary role, the one associated with ɦɢɫɬɢɤɚ as mystical experience proper, is played by intuition (Russian: ɭɦɫɬɜɟɧɧɨɟ ɫɨɡɟɪɰɚɧɢɟ; German: intellektuelle Anschauung). Intuition is deemed to be ‘the primordial form of true knowledge, a form that is clearly distinguished from sense perception and experience, as well as from rational, or abstract, thinking’ (III, 65). Any philosophy that privileges intuition is for Solovev a mystical philosophy. Intuition is the appropriate form for Solovev’s positive philosophy of ‘integral knowledge’, since it alone allows the mind access to the divine sphere, upon the existence of which that philosophy is predicated. Thus, within the bounds of philosophy, God is apprehended directly through intuition. This is an essentially Platonic mysticism, a mysticism of the intellect.2 The concept of ɭɦɫɬɜɟɧɧɨɟ ɫɨɡɟɪɰɚɧɢɟ literally, intellectual contemplation - taken from German Idealist philosophy,3 does the work of the Greek nous and theoria. As Andrew Louth explains, the usual translation of nous as ‘mind’ or ‘intellect’ distorts the original meaning of the term: ‘Our words suggest our reasoning, our thinking; nous, noesis, etc. suggest an almost intuitive grasp of reality’.4 In Platonic philosophy, what is practised is the contemplation - theoria - of transcendent reality. This term too has now become appropiated to abstract reasoning, but to the Greeks it meant ‘union with, participation in, the objects of true knowledge’.5 Solovev is very precise on the point that theory as we now understand it, as abstract reasoning, is inadequate for the comprehension of the positive content of specific entities; it can only generalize, which is essentially impoverishing: ‘abstract thinking, deprived of its proper content, must serve either as an abbreviation of sense perception or as an anticipation of intellectual intuition, insofar as the general concepts forming it can be affirmed either as schemata of phenomena or as shadows of ideas’ (III, 66-7). Intuition, by contrast, provides objective knowledge of metaphysical realities: ‘ideal contemplation is not a subjective process but an actual relation to the realm of ideal entities or an interaction with them. Consequently, the results of this intuition are not products of a subjective, arbitrary creation, not inventions and fantasies, but actual

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revelations of a superhuman reality, received by humankind in one form or another’ (III, 98n.). Solovev’s metaphysics is correspondingly Platonist: ‘The ideal cosmos forms the fundamental content and the fundamental truth of Greek philosophy’s central system, Platonism’ (III, 49). Solovev uses the term ‘ideas’ in Plato’s sense, as the eternal realities that exist beyond the sensible world of change and illusion. The fourth ‘Lecture’ is devoted to defending, and expanding upon, the Platonic conception. Solovev maintains that every phenomenon in this world is but a representation, which logically presupposes the real existence of the entity that represents it. He calls these entities ‘atoms’, which are not material, but rather elementary ‘forces’ akin to the monads of Leibniz. These act upon other ‘forces’ and are acted upon by them, in which process they become self-aware. The entities act in a determinate manner, commensurate with their particular qualities, which constitute their ‘idea’. They are arranged in groups, each of which has its centre in a higher entity. The highest entity of all embraces all the others and is designated ‘absolute goodness, or more precisely, absolute love’ (III, 57). The ideal cosmos is divine. For Solovev, God, if he is absolute, must be at the same time everything and nothing. He must be free of all being, yet contain all being in himself. The ideal cosmos constitutes ‘the positive content of the divine principle’ (III, 48-9), the ‘all’ of God. Later, and elsewhere, Solovev tries to integrate this Platonist conception with the Judaeo-Christian conception of a personal God (already indicated in his designation of the highest Form as love, above), plus a dialectic of the Trinity taken from Philo and Schelling, and a doctrine of Sophia as the divine content of the Word. Nevertheless, these do not replace, but supplement, his core notion of the ideal cosmos. In Platonism, the ability of the philosopher to achieve contemplation of the Ideas is predicated upon the assumption that the soul enjoys an essential ‘kinship’, in Greek syngeneia, with them. The soul is held to be eternal and therefore divine, to pre-exist its entrapment in the body, by virtue of which it has forgotten its true nature. Contemplation is therefore understood as a homecoming of the soul.6 We find many statements of this idea in Solovev. As early as The Crisis of Western Philosophy. (Against the Positivists) (Ʉɪɢɡɢɫ ɡɚɩɚɞɧɨɣ ɮɢɥɨɫɨɮɢɢ. [ɉɪɨɬɢɜ ɩɨɡɢɬɢɜɢɫɬɨɜ], 1874) he posits a kinship between the human spirit (ɞɭɯ) and the all-one spirit (ɜɫɟɟɞɢɧɵɣ ɞɭɯ) that is essential metaphysical reality as the prerequisite for the possibility of any real cognition of the latter (I, 141). In Philosophical Principles he asserts ‘that man is himself the highest revelation of that which truly exists (ɢɫɬɢɧɧɨ-ɫɭɳɟɟ), that all the roots of his own being lie in the transcendent sphere’ (I, 339). But the clearest statement of this doctrine is made in the eighth ‘Lecture’:

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As natural beings, as phenomena, human beings exist only between physical birth and physical death. We can admit that they exist after physical death only if we acknowledge that they are not merely beings that live in the natural world, are not just phenomena, but are also eternal, intelligible essences. But in this case it is logically necessary to acknowledge that a human being exists not only after death, but also before birth, because an intelligible essence, by its very concept, is not subject to the form of time, which is only a phenomenal form. (III, 128) Solovev’s commitment to the kinship of the soul with the divine sets him outside orthodox Christianity, which since the Council of Nicea of 325 has asserted the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing). This concept is alien to Hellenic philosophy and marks a fundamental divide between Platonic and Christian mysticism. Christianity asserts the creaturely nature of the soul. Consequently, direct knowledge of the divine is possible only through grace; intellectual discipline alone cannot guarantee it. Whereas in Platonic thought contemplation of the divine equates to the divinization of the soul (more accurately, the realization of the soul’s divinity), in orthodox Christianity, it is the Incarnation that makes divinization possible, and contemplation becomes an act of the already divinized soul. Moreover, after Nicea the knowability of God becomes much more problematic, and theologians of contemplation begin to write of the darkness into which the soul must enter in order to ‘know’ God in a way that surpasses knowledge.7 It is not an accident that there is nothing in Solovev that is akin to the divine darkness. Solovev’s is a cataphatic, not an apophatic mysticism. This is very clear from his discussion of the knowability of the absolute in Philosophical Principles. Here he acknowledges the fact that, as an unconditional unity, the absolute is not of the order of being and therefore cannot constitute the content of cognition, but is unfazed by this, both on the grounds that knowledge of being is equivalent to knowledge of the absolute in the same way we know the subject through the predicate (I, 336), and on the grounds that the absolute unity ‘also comprises our own inner essence’ (I, 336), that is, on the basis of the kinship of the soul with the divine. In Plato, the ultimate aim of the intellectual quest is known variously as the Good, Beauty, the One, or the Limit. The soul ascends to the Good in a gradual process, incorporating the stages of awakening (to the illusoriness of the phenomenal world), detachment from false reality, and attachment to true reality.8 This involves both moral and intellectual purification. The aim of moral purification is to detach the soul from the body and achieve the tranquillity necessary for contemplation.9 The aim of intellectual purification, or dialectic, is ‘to accustom the soul to contemplation’ by learning to abstract the mind from the senses and concentrate on the principles of things (8-9). The

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Good in Plato transcends the realm of Forms: it ‘is not simply the most truly real, but the source itself of all true reality’.10 Hence it cannot be known in the same way as the Forms; the soul can touch it, or be united with it, in a sudden revelation which Louth describes as ecstasy.11 Thus we have a picture of discipline yielding knowledge and preparing the way for a glimpse of the ineffable. Plotinus, the leading exponent of Neo-Platonism, refines this picture in his hierarchy of emanations from the One, consisting of the realm of nous (Plato’s realm of the Forms; intuitive knowledge), closest to the One, the more distant realm of psyche (sense perception and discursive knowledge), and, on the periphery, the visible world.12 He also brings to it the notion that ascent to the One in contemplation is a movement not upwards, but inwards, ‘a process of withdrawal into oneself’: ‘As the soul ascends to the One, it enters more and more deeply into itself: to find the One is to find itself’.13 As in Plato himself, there is a qualitative difference between intuitive knowledge of the Forms by the soul whose natural environment the realm of nous is, and ‘knowledge’ of the One as of something wholly other, achievable only in ecstasy.14 The subject and the stated aim of Solovev’s philosophy, which, in Philosophical Principles, he refers to interchangeably as ‘integral knowledge’ and ‘free theosophy’, are Platonic. Its subject is ‘that which truly exists in its objective expression’ (I, 309), that is to say, the ideal cosmos, and its aim, which transcends the love of knowledge for its own sake, is to meet the human need for ‘complete and absolute life’ (I, 310), by facilitating a person’s liberation from external things, for ‘a person can be really free only in inner union with that which truly is, that is to say, in true religion’ (I, 310-11). There are neo-Platonic echoes in Solovev’s use of the metaphor of centre and periphery, when he claims that the ‘present eccentric or peripheral condition of humanity’ impedes a person’s ability to contemplate the more ‘profound’ and ‘universal’ ideas, which are also the most ‘central’ (I, 319). In addition, Solovev, like Plotinus, understands God to lie within, where he must also be sought. This is clear from his description of mystical phenomena as ones in which ‘we sense ourselves to be determined by an essential reality (ɫɭɳɟɫɬɜɟɧɧɨɫɬɶ) which is other than us but not external to us, rather, so to speak, still more internal, more profound and central than are we ourselves’ (I, 312-13). One passage in Lectures in particular lays great emphasis on the inward quest for God, and is also unique, I believe, in bringing out the necessity for intellectual discipline on this quest and the achievement of impassivity as a pre-condition for contact with the divine: We can gain a certain knowledge about [the absolute subject] when - abstracting ourselves from all the manifested, alreadyformed content of our external and internal life, from all impressions, feelings, thoughts, and desires - we gather all our

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forces in a single focus of immediate spiritual being, which contains in its positive power all the acts of our spirit and defines the entire circumference of our life. When we plunge into those mute and motionless depths in which the muddy stream of our actuality has its source, being careful not to violate its purity and peace, we come into inward contact, in this source of our own spiritual life, with the source of the universal life. We come to know God essentially, as the first principle, or the substance of all. We come to know God the Father (III, 87).15 Less straightforwardly Platonic is Solovev’s employment of the concepts of ecstasy and union. For Solovev, ecstasy is not a qualitatively different state of consciousness from intellectual contemplation, as it is for Plato and Plotinus, but is rather identical with it. Thus, in Philosophical Principles he holds that intuition is not the usual condition of a person and does not depend upon the will, but is the result of the inner action upon him or her of the ideal essences (I, 320). If we accept Solovev’s understanding of the ideal cosmos as the plenitude of the divinity, this looks very like grace, although, tellingly, grace is not a term in Solovev’s vocabulary. Rather, he calls it ‘inspiration’, and designates it the ‘active cause’ of integral knowledge. Inspiration ‘leads us out of our usual natural centre and lifts us into a higher sphere, thus producing ecstasy’ (I, 321). This contradicts the emphasis on intellectual discipline necessarily involving the will - in the passage from Lectures quoted above. A parallel conflation can be observed in his treatment of mystical union, which for Solovev occurs not with that which exists beyond the Forms, but with the ideal cosmos itself. Thus in the following passage intellectual contemplation, the participatory knowledge of theoria, is equated to union: In the light of ideal contemplation, we do not feel and do not assert ourselves in our separateness. Here, the tormenting fire of our individual will dies down, and we are conscious of our essential unity with everything else. But such an ideal state is only momentary in us. Apart from these bright moments, our ideal unity with everything else appears to us as illusory, inessential. We recognise only our own separate, particular I as actual reality’ (III, 130).16 I think it would be a mistake to regard these departures from Platonism as evidence of a Christianized philosophical consciousness. I have already pointed out that Solovev does not take up the chance to bring grace into the mystical equation, and have argued above that the extreme transcendence of God presents no agonizing dilemma for him. Rather, they are connected to the importance Solovev ascribes to the aesthetic function in his vision of an integrated human culture. In Philosophical

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Principles Solovev builds a hierarchy of human culture, in which it is not the sphere of knowledge (as in Platonism), but the sphere of creativity that occupies the highest place. It is important to note that creativity is here connected to the feeling function: feeling is to creativity as thought is to knowledge. Moreover, ɦɢɫɬɢɤɚ, or mystical experience, is assigned not to philosophy or even theology, in fact not to the sphere of knowledge at all, but to the highest rank in the sphere of creativity, making it the head of the corner of Solovev’s entire system. In defending this assignation, Solovev maintains that mystical experience, like art, is founded on affect, rather than cognition or volition, that its instrument is the imagination, rather than reflection, and that it presupposes a state of ecstatic inspiration, rather than a tranquil consciousness (I, 263). All of these points contradict the Platonic view of knowledge of the divine presented by him elsewhere. The following passage from Lectures is particularly striking for its blend of Platonic mysticism and aesthetic romanticism: Obviously, the actuality of this divine world, which is necessarily infinitely richer than our visible world, can be fully accessible only to one who actually belongs to that world. But since our natural world also is necessarily closely connected with this divine world …, and since there is not and cannot be any impassable gulf between them, the individual rays and glimmerings of the divine world must penetrate into our actual word, constituting all the ideal content, all the beauty and truth, that we find in it. And human beings, as belonging to both worlds, can and must establish contact with the divine world by an act of intellectual intuition. While remaining in the world of struggle and dark anxiety, human beings can and must enter into communion with the clear forms of the kingdom of glory and eternal beauty. This positive, though incomplete, knowledge of, or penetration into, the actuality of the divine world is especially characteristic of poetic creation. All true poets must necessarily penetrate into ‘the fatherland of flame and word’ to find there the archetypes of their own creations and that inner illumination that is called inspiration, through which we may find, even in the actuality of nature, sounds and colors that will embody those ideal types (III, 117-18). Clearly, the role attributed to the poet here is at odds with Platonism’s view of the artist as inferior to the philosopher, and of art as the mere imitation of the phenomenal world that is itself an imitation of transcendent reality: an imitation of an imitation. The problem is that the doctrine of contemplation that Solovev presents to us as a philosopher (that is, when working within the sphere of knowledge according to his system) is inevitably modified under the

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influence of his wider conception of human culture and the ultimate purpose of human existence. Solovev ultimately wants to go beyond philosophy (even his ‘integral knowledge’, or ‘free theosophy’), to a grand synthesis of this with ‘integral theurgy’, or ‘free creativity’ and ‘integral theocracy’, or ‘free society’ (I, 289). Human culture is fragmented and must be healed by the reconciliation of all opposites, including and primarily the split between the material and the ideal cosmos. Humanity and the universe it inhabits must be deified, reunited with the divinity. This would not be achieved by philosophical contemplation, but required action. Philosophical mysticism must be abandoned. It is likely that confrontation with this fact was instrumental in Solovev’s leaving the academic life to pursue first his theocratic, and then his theurgic ideal. Possibly it is also the reason why he abandoned Philosophical Principles and chose to work its main principles into the publicly delivered Lectures on Divine Humanity instead. It has often been remarked that Lectures is a transitional work. And indeed, for the first time here Solovev transgresses the boundaries of philosophy, even the most speculative philosophy of the Schellingian kind, and launches into myth, the most elaborate neo-gnostic myth of the fall and restoration of the cosmos. (The transition occurs in Lectures Seven and Eight.) According to this myth, the ideal cosmos - God’s selfexpression as ‘All’ - splits in two when its passive principle, or content, personified as ‘Sophia’ or the ‘world soul’, or ‘ideal humanity’, seeks autonomy from the active principle, the Logos, and falls away from the divinity. As a result of her fall, the material universe comes into being in an already corrupt, or fragmented state. As the universe evolves over the millennia, eventually producing humanity, and thus, history, the Logos progressively reconciles the world soul (now bound up with the material universe) to himself in a kind of sequence of unions, or theophanies, bringing order out of chaos, and thereby spiritualizing matter, for the goal of the process is ‘the deification (theosis) of all that exists’ (III, 145). With the evolution of humanity, and the onset of history, the process becomes ‘conscious and free’: religious consciousness develops to the point where the Logos can be incarnated in the human Jesus, and Christianity is born. Christ’s Incarnation, life, and death purify humanity’s material nature and allow for its deification through humanity’s active participation. In Lectures Solovev appropriates the term ‘theosis’ for the first time, thereby signalling a shift from an intellectualist, broadly Platonic doctrine of contemplation of the divine to a new conception of mystical union as the spiritualization of matter, or deification. Theosis is the metaphor for mystical union that the Christian East has made its own. Its history is long and complex. In his recent magisterial study of the doctrine, Norman Russell attributes the first formal definition of theosis to the sixth century, to Dionysius the Areopagite: ‘Deification is the attaining of likeness to God and union with him so far as is possible’.17

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Russell charts the evolution of the term ‘from its birth as a metaphor to its maturity as a spiritual doctrine’ in the writings of the Christian Fathers up to the seventh century and Maximus the Confessor. In its metaphorical usage, he distinguishes between two basic approaches, the ethical and the realistic: The ethical approach takes deification to be the attainment of likeness to God through ascetic and philosophical endeavour, believers reproducing some of the divine attributes in their own lives by imitation. Behind this use of the metaphor lies the model of homoiosis, or attaining likeness to God. The realistic approach assumes that human beings are in some sense transformed by deification. Behind the latter use lies the model of methexis, or participation, in God.18 Within the realistic approach, Russell identifies two aspects: the ontological and the dynamic: ‘The ontological aspect is concerned with human nature’s transformation in principle by the Incarnation, the dynamic with the individual’s appropriation of this deified humanity through the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist’.19 I believe no-one has yet undertaken a comprehensive study of Solovev’s intellectual relationship to the Fathers.20 Certainly I have not, and I venture here only the broadest generalization: in the terms of Russell’s framework, in Solovev the realistic approach predominates over the ethical,21 whereas he combines the ontological aspect of this approach with his own version of the dynamic. As we shall see, though Solovev does have a dynamic conception of deification, the vehicle for this is not sacramental even in his theocratic phase. As Russell points out, the realistic approach is dependent on a substantialist doctrine of the Incarnation and therefore cannot be accommodated by unadulterated Platonism.22 Thus, in his application of the term theosis to the incarnation of the Logos and the spiritualization of matter Solovev writes as a Christian from within the tradition of the Greek Fathers, signalling his roots in Eastern Christianity. At the same time, however, Solovev interprets deification in a characteristically idiosyncratic way that at times stretches the parameters set by the Fathers, and at times transgresses them altogether. Typically, he makes the barest of allusions to the patristic context, and does not attempt a scholarly advance on the theological consensus, but disingenuously creates his religion of divine humanity anew, as it were, single-handedly. The ambition is to synthesize the religions of the ages into a great new religion for the future; the integrity of given religious traditions is disregarded in principle. Yet the result is sooner syncretistic, and consequently resists a coherent interpretation of the role of deification. For example, the doctrine is incorporated into an account of creation and fall that borrows from Christian Platonism,23 Valentinian gnosis,24 and the Kabbala.25 Insofar as the account is Platonist (the fall of

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immortal human minds - in Solovev conceived as ideal humanity under the name of Sophia - into matter) it comes into contradiction with Solovev’s ontological-realist understanding of deification as the transformation of natural humanity in principle in the Incarnation: in the Origenist speculation, the Incarnation ‘is not really central, but simply a preliminary stage’ in the ascent of the soul to God.26 Insofar as it is gnostic / kabbalistic (the introduction of Sophia into the second Person of the Trinity), it takes Solovev away from the Fathers altogether. Quite apart from his failure, in Lectures, to account for how Sophia exists simultaneously in her eternal, pristine form of ideal humanity and as the fallen world soul,27 by making her the fundamental subject of deification Solovev is led to extend the term to the pre-human era, and after that to the pre-Christian era, as he imagines the entire cosmological process as the progressive deification of matter through the action of the Logos. This also has the consequence, from an orthodox Christian point of view, of detracting from the unique achievement of the Incarnation, which Solovev himself says is ‘strictly speaking … not miraculous, that is, it is not alien to the general order of being’: ‘[the Word’s] personal incarnation in an individual human being is only the final link in a long series of other incarnations, physical and historical’ (III, 165). Gustafson sees Solovev’s principal departure from the patristic understanding of deification as consisting in his rejection in principle of the vocation of the monk-contemplative in favour of an extreme activist approach, and rightly links this to his parallel insistence on the universal scope of deification: ‘What distinguishes Soloviev’s doctrine of salvation from the patristic tradition of Eastern Christianity is his application of the idea of deification not to the individual monk contemplating in the monastery but to all human beings living in the world community’.28 Whilst it is not true that the doctrine is associated by the Fathers exclusively with the contemplative life (in particular this would be to disregard the ecclesial - sacramental and liturgical - dimension of deification), it is indeed the case that its primary context in the Byzantine and post-Byzantine eras was monastic, and this is especially true of Russian Orthodoxy. Russell points out that with Symeon the New Theologian (10th to 11th centuries) and Gregory Palamas (14th century) the emphasis settled on the experiential side of deification.29 Palamas’ achievement was successfully theologically to justify, against reasoned opposition, the centuries-old claims of the contemplatives known as hesychasts to experience bodily transfiguration through the divine light as the fruit of their ascetic labours. He did this by drawing on an already established distinction between the unknowable essence of God and the divine energies, in which a person may participate by grace.30 Hesychasm entered Russia in the 14th century through Sergii of Radonezh, and was revived in the 18th century, the century that also produced St Seraphim of Sarov. In Solovev’s time Russian monasticism

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was undergoing a hesychastic revival, of which we know he was well aware.31 Solovev’s aversion to the monastic heritage of his native Church is well-known. He appears to have been indifferent to the experiential aspect of deification; his entry on mysticism for the Brockhaus-Efron encyclopaedia both shows that he knew about it and indicates that he understood hesychastic practice imperfectly as ‘a special psycho-physical method for the production of ecstatic states’ (X, 245). The essenceenergies distinction cannot have concerned him since, as we have seen, Solovev never embraced creatio ex nihilo and therefore did not have to grapple with the implications of the radical transcendence of God that led to the apophatic tradition. As a very young man he was scornful of mediaeval monasticism on the grounds of its supposedly anti-rational approach to Christianity, and rejected the monastic calling for himself on the grounds of the inappropriateness of its supposed passivism to the needs of contemporary society: ‘At one time monasticism had its lofty purpose, but now the time has come not to escape from the world, but to go into the world in order to transform it’.32 At the other end of his career, in his lecture of 1891, ‘On the Collapse of the Mediaeval World Conception’ (‘Ɉɛ ɭɩɚɞɤɟ ɫɪɟɞɧɟɜɟɤɨɜɨɝɨ ɦɢɪɨɫɨɡɟɪɰɚɧɢɹ’), Solovev criticizes the monks of the Christian East for failing to address the salvation of the whole of society and for preserving Christianity in its pure form only for the desert (VI, 389-90). The single main consequence of Solovev’s rejection of the vita contemplativa (contemplative life) for his conception of deification is the nigh on complete absence from it of any notion of ascetic discipline, the sense that the barriers to participation in God (which Solovev often acknowledges under the term ‘egoism’) cannot be surmounted without personal holiness achieved over a lifetime of moral struggle in constant prayer. In the absence of an ethical approach to deification, precisely how humans are to pursue it as a goal is not clearly stated in Lectures. In Lectures, the quest of the individual for personal holiness is obscured for a number of reasons. First, the Fall, as we have seen, is not attributed to an individual human being (the Biblical Adam) but to the ideal human collective, or ‘organism’, personified as Sophia, with the consequence that individual responsibility for evil is diminished. Second, evil is not seen as a metaphysical principle leading to corruption, but as the state of corruption itself, thus eliminating or obscuring the role of personal temptation in the pursuit of the moral life. Third, egoism for Solovev is synonymous with the state of fragmentation of the material universe, and therefore stands for more than the sinfulness of the individual. Fourth, it is not the individual person who seeks salvation / deification, but the world soul (Sophia), expressing herself through the individual, thus minimizing the importance of personal salvation. Fifth, as we have seen, deification is seen as a universal process of which the appearance of humankind is only a stage, albeit a very important one.

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Sixth, the fulfilment of the regeneration of humanity made possible in principle by the work of Christ is in Solovev seen entirely as the task of the Church conceived as a collective. In his reading, at the end of Lectures, it is the Church that collectively falls subject to the temptations which Christ overcame in person: In Christ, as a single person, the moral feat of victory over the temptations of the evil principle was pre-eminently an inner deed, a subjective psychological process. But in the aggregate of humankind, it is an objective historical process, and the objects of temptation, which in the psychological process are only representations, in the historical process receive an objective actuality (III, 172). The closing paragraph of Lectures is remarkable for the uncompromising way in which it pursues the ideal of collective human activism to its ultimate conclusion, handing the role of God over to humanity: ‘If the overshadowing of the human Mother by the active power of God produced the incarnation of Divinity in humanity, the fructification of the divine mother (the Church) by the active human principle must produce a free deification of humankind’ (III, 180). This reads like an adaptation of the famous ‘exchange formula’ of the Fathers that encapsulates the doctrine of deification: ‘God became man so that man might become god’. Before the Christian era, Solovev continues, humanity was the passive recipient of divine action, but now ‘human reason is the active and formative principle’; humankind ‘is capable of uniting with the divine by its own initiative, of assimilating it’. Finally, ‘the result is the man-god, that is, man who has received Divinity’ (III, 180). There is a certain irony in the fact that Solovev employs a term - man-god - that elsewhere in Russian thought connotes atheism as the ultimate blasphemy, for here Solovev borders on such blasphemy by seemingly overlooking the role of grace in the regeneration of humankind subsequent to the Incarnation. Solovev envisages the deification of humanity after Christ as the continual growth and perfection of Christ’s deified body, the Church. The ecclesial dimension of deification is well established in the realistic strand of the Greek patristic tradition, which stresses in particular the central role played by the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. According to this tradition, worked out by the Alexandrian Fathers and perfected by Maximus the Confessor, ‘[t]he believer can participate in the deified flesh of Christ - the Lord’s exalted humanity - through baptism, the Eucharist, and the moral life. Such participation leads to deification, not as a private mystical experience but as a transformation effected within the ecclesial body’.33 However, Solovev is relatively uninterested in the sacramental life of the Church (and in Lectures does not even mention it). Only in The Spiritual Foundations of Life

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(Ⱦɭɯɨɜɧɵɟ ɨɫɧɨɜɵ ɠɢɡɧɢ, 1882-4), a work intended as a religious and moral guide,34 does he address the role of the sacraments, but even here he devotes only three pages to the subject (III, 398-400). It is telling that both in his brief introduction to the sacraments and in the exposition of the function of baptism and the Eucharist Solovev lays emphasis on the overcoming of isolation brought about by sin and reconnection with the ‘universal divine body’ rather than on the deification of the individual worshipper: [the] sacraments, whilst they are enacted in a particular instance on a single person, in accordance with their purpose never rest on the transitory human phenomenon, on the separate existence of each person, on that false situation of isolation and separation in which natural man finds himself; rather their goal is precisely to take a person out of this false situation and in reality, spiritually and physically, to connect him with everyone else and thereby to restore the universality of true life in God (III, 398).35 This emphasis is commensurate with Solovev’s individual, extratraditional interpretation of dynamic participation in God as the active pursuit of ecclesial growth and unity. In Solovev’s work of the 1880s deification is assimilated to the attainment of his ‘free theocracy’, and the concluding passages of Lectures lay clear foundations for this: This manifestation, this glorious liberty of the children of God, which all creation awaits with hope, is the complete realization of the free, divine-human union in humankind as a whole, in all the spheres of human life and activity. All these spheres must be brought into harmonious divine-human unity, entering into that free theocracy in which the Universal Church will reach the full measure of Christ’s stature (III, 172). In the works that follow Lectures, Solovev’s theocratic mysticism becomes hardened into a campaign to reunite the Catholic and Orthodox churches. As Berdiaev argues in his perceptive essay ‘The Problem of East and West in the Religious Consciousness of Vl. Solovev’ (‘ɉɪɨɛɥɟɦɚ ȼɨɫɬɨɤɚ ɢ Ɂɚɩɚɞɚ ɜ ɪɟɥɢɝɢɨɡɧɨɦ ɫɨɡɧɚɧɢɢ ȼɥ. ɋɨɥɨɜɶɟɜɚ’, 1911), Solovev overlooks the primary need for the mutual understanding of and respect for the mystical core of the two confessions in his misguided quest for an external, almost political union pursued through ‘formal uniae, agreements and accords, mutual concessions or mutual claims’.36 Berdiaev maintains that ‘Solovev poorly understood and little valued the ascetic mysticism of the East’:37 ‘he didn’t understand that in the Orthodox East, in the life of the saints, the work of God was being carried out in special mystical experience, from which would come the transfiguration of the world’,38 seeing instead only the

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conservatism of the Orthodox Church and its slavish relationship to the State. He also argues that what attracted Solovev to the Catholic West was its activism, the Church as militant, and that he was uninterested in Catholic mysticism. Nevertheless, I would suggest that the key features of Catholic mysticism as Berdiaev sets them out do in fact accord quite closely with Solovev’s personal mystical inclinations and experience, certainly rather better than does the doctrine of deification that, as we have seen, he harnesses for his philosophy of divine humanity. Berdiaev stresses the element of longing for God in the Catholic sensibility, as for an unattainable and distant object: ‘Catholic mysticism is sensual, in it one finds inflammation and intoxication with passions, an agonizing sweetness, a state of being overcome’.39 It is this that accounts for the cultural dynamism of the Catholic West, for it is ‘a creative, dynamic lovesickness’: ‘It is possible that the great mission of the Catholic West consisted in the revelation of the mystical truth of being in love as a creative force’.40 The theosis of the East, on the other hand, stresses Christ as an indwelling subject, deifying the believer from within. Berdiaev sees this more as a contented marriage than Catholicism’s stormy love affair, stressing that Orthodox mysticism is not sensual. As for creativity, in the Eastern conception, the saint himself is a work of art.41 Anyone who is familiar with Solovev the poet will be struck by the resonance between Berdiaev’s association of erotic longing with creativity and Solovev’s poetic love affair with his tantalizing muse, the divine Sophia. His research into the divine feminine in gnostic, kabbalistic and theosophical systems (conducted in the British Museum in 1875), his mediumistic communication with Sophia through automatic writing, and his visions of her (again in 1875) are well documented.42 These led, on the one hand, to the myth of Sophia elaborated in Lectures, and, on the other, to a series of poems about her and addressed to her, culminating in Three Meetings (Ɍɪɢ ɫɜɢɞɚɧɢɹ, 1898), in which Solovev narrates his visions, calling them in a note ‘the most significant thing that has yet happened to me in my life’ (XII, 86). Though a full investigation of the subject requires another essay, it is clear that in Solovev’s personal relationship with Sophia we are dealing with a mysticism of quite a different nature to the mysticism or mysticisms that are being worked out simultaneously in his thought.43 Undoubtedly Solovev’s powerful experience as poet-mystic-lover accounts to a large extent for his assigning mysticism to the creative and feeling functions in Philosophical Principles, and for those passages in Lectures, discussed above, that privilege the artist over the philosopher when it comes to access to the divine sphere. Nevertheless these works do not make the association between feeling and eros or between art and theurgy. This is an emphasis that will emerge in the last decade of Solovev’s career, with the onset of disillusionment in the theocratic project. At this period a second major shift in Solovev’s conception of mystical union occurs, this

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time from a doctrine of deification grounded in Eastern Christian theology to one based on the erotic union of opposites (conjunctio oppositorum) and grounded in esotericism. The Meaning of Love (ɋɦɵɫɥ ɥɸɛɜɢ, 1892-4) is the work in which this vision is most clearly set out. The Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky’s judgement of it is germane: ‘This represented a dreadful occult plan for the unity of humanity with God through heterosexual love’.44 Indeed, here Solovev rewrites the ending of his cosmology as divine-human process, replacing the Church as the object of humanity’s deifying activity with the lover. Solovev dissociates erotic love from the reproductive process: now biological evolution has been perfected, the higher function of love must be pursued. This consists in ‘the justification and salvation of individuality through the sacrifice of egoism’ (VII, 16).45 Egoism lies at the root of the isolation of persons from each other, which leads to death. Only love can overcome this, by restoring a lost whole, and it must be erotic (heterosexual) love, because it is the reconciliation of opposites that heals the world. The healing is conceived as deification: a couple’s (ideal) love for each other bestows mutual immortality. Finally, in a manner not clearly spelt out by Solovev, what he calls the ‘syzygetic’ (‘paired’ or ‘yoked’) relationship must be extended to society and to nature to achieve the regeneration of the entire cosmos. The origins of this erotic theurgy lie in Solovev’s study of esoteric literature in the British Museum and his own eroticized relationship to his main subject of interest - the divine feminine. His allusion, in The Meaning of Love, to the Pauline analogy of conjugal relations with the relationship between Christ and his Church (VII, 41) masks the greater importance to him of the relationship of the Logos to Sophia, which in Lectures he elaborates through speculative logic within a Trinitarian framework, but which is ultimately informed by similar pairings of the male-active and female-passive principles in the gnostic systems and in kabbala.46 Briefly, both of these conceive the divinity as a series of emanations from the unknowable divine source. In both, the emanations are paired in gendered opposites. In Valentinian gnosis the feminine emanation Sophia falls out of the divine pleroma (‘fullness’ the constellation of emanations) and is redeemed by the emanation Logos-Christos, who descends into matter to rescue her, becoming her consort.47 In kabbala, the feminine emanation Shekhinah (Earth) becomes separated from her lover Tiferet (Heaven) and is exiled.48 It is the task of humanity to reunite the two. One way it can do this is through marriage: ‘For the kabbalist, sexual relations on Friday night are one way for the male mystic to unite with Shekhinah’.49 We have seen how, in Lectures, the deification of the cosmos is achieved through a series of couplings of the Logos with the world soul / fallen Sophia, culminating in the Incarnation, and how the initiative then passes to humanity in its relationship with the Church (the body of Christ and therefore, for

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Solovev, another manifestation of Sophia). By The Meaning of Love, the male plays ‘Logos’ to the female’s ‘Sophia’,50 actually deifying her by incarnating the divine feminine in her: ‘In sexual love, truly understood and truly realized, this Divine essence receives the means for its definitive, ultimate incarnation in the individual life of a human, the means of the most profound and at the same time the most external and real-perceptible union with it’ (VII, 46). Curiously, at the end of his life Solovev writes an essay in which he appears deliberately to track back over old ground and re-explore the interface between Platonic intellectual contemplation, the mysticism of the Orthodox ascetic, and the theurgy of eros, to reach a final and startling conclusion. The essay is ‘The Life Drama of Plato’ (‘ɀɢɡɧɟɧɧɚɹ ɞɪɚɦɚ ɉɥɚɬɨɧɚ’, 1898). Its central argument is that in mid-career Plato fatally missed an opportunity to overcome the gulf between the illusory and corrupt material world and the real and pure world of Forms of his ‘pessimistic Idealism’ by developing the mediatory role of Eros, explored by Plato in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, to its logical conclusion. In Solovev’s reading, an actual experience of love prompted Plato to posit Eros as a demonic power between gods and mortals whose priestly role consisted in building a bridge between the two. The key point for Solovev is that Eros is not presented as an intellectual-contemplative force, but as a creative and birth-giving one with the potential, if directed aright, to ‘give birth in beauty’ (IX, 228). He believes that, had Plato developed this idea, he would inevitably have arrived at the conclusion that Eros has the power to deify matter (IX, 228-30). Of all the Greek terms for love, Solovev supposes, Plato chose eros precisely because its love-object is the body (IX, 229). Plato’s failure is deemed to be not only intellectual (the failure to follow an idea through), but also moral: he baulked at realizing his ideal in his own erotic practice, and left it within the bounds of theory (IX, 231). Thus in this essay Solovev again rejects a mysticism of intellectual contemplation on the grounds of its indifference to the fate of matter, in favour of active engagement, but this time the activity is artistic rather than political, and the object of transformation is the body of the beloved rather than the social body. The theocratic stage is passed over. What, then, has become of the Eastern Christian context for the interpretation of mystical union? The evidence of the essay points to a final rejection of this context, at least insofar as Orthodox asceticism is concerned.51 Solovev comes next to a polemical analysis of a hierarchy of five ways in which the power of Eros may potentially be used. The first three, culminating in marriage, are based on sexual relations and therefore deemed merely natural. The focus of Solovev’s discussion is on the fourth and fifth, ‘higher’ ways, and its purpose is to demonstrate once and for all the superiority of erotic theurgy to monastic asceticism. ‘Truly, asceticism cannot be the highest path of love for humankind’, declares Solovev: ‘Its

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goal is to protect the power of divine Eros in a person from misappropriation by rebellious material chaos, to protect that power in purity and isolation’ (IX, 233-4) - but, he asks, to what purpose? Solovev wishes to see the ascetic path as limited to the taming of the passions, and, therefore, as sterile. He uses a Church-sanctioned doctrine, according to which the greater calling and destiny of humans ultimately places them above the angels, against monasticism, arguing that by naming itself the angelic order it concedes the inferiority of its calling. He even directs the doctrine of deification itself against the monks, arguing that the goal of union with God contradicts their self-styled angelic state (IX, 233). Rather, the fifth path of love is the ‘perfect and final’ one, the locus of the true divine-human process. In an entirely heterodox recasting of the theology of Genesis 1: 27, Solovev declares: The everlasting God created man according to His image and likeness: male and female, He created them. Therefore, the Divine image and likeness, that which must be restored, relates not to half of a person, not to their sex, but to the whole person, that is, to the positive union of the male and female principles true androgynism - without the external confusion of forms, which would be ugliness, and without the inner separation of personality and life, which would be imperfection and the beginning of death. (IX, 234) Extremely daring here is the application of the formula ‘without confusion or separation’, worked out by the Council of Chalcedon of 451 to settle disputes around the relationship of the divine and human natures in Christ, to heterosexual love. It reveals once more the connection, discussed above, between Solovev’s late theurgic mysticism and his conception of Christ as the union of Logos and Sophia. Solovev almost certainly did not consider himself to have transgressed any sacrosanct theological boundary in elaborating this, his latest and last interpretation of deification. Yet it is difficult to escape the conclusion that he did. By 1898 Solovev was openly stating that ‘the most important, central moment’ in a person’s life is ‘when Eros makes his home in him’ (IX, 231). These words cannot be interpreted as referring to the moment of conversion, in which the believer becomes inflamed with the love of God. This is not the love of the (feminine) soul for Christ that, through the centuries, and after the Patristic era especially in the West, has been conceptualized by drawing on the Platonic terminology of eros.52 That tradition informs Berdiaev’s characterization of the Catholic mystical sensibility described above, and leads him to ascribe to it a certain ‘femininity’.53 In Solovev, by contrast, the identification of the mystic is with Christ, seeking union with Sophia: the gender roles are reversed. Moreover, Solovev’s own love affair with Sophia causes him to approach a reversal also of Christian soteriology,

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whereby the human seeks the redemption of the divine. From a Christian (Orthodox) theological point of view, especially in his latter years, Solovev crosses the line between synergy - partnership with God in his redemptive work - and the wrong kind of mystical union: identification with the divinity.

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NOTES 1. References to Solovev are to volume and page number of Sobranie sochinenii V. S. Solov’eva, S.M. Solov’ev and E.L. Radlov, eds, Brussels reprint, 1966. For Lectures on Divine Humanity I have used the revised English translation of Peter Zouboff found in Vladimir Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, Boris Jakim, revised and ed., Lindisfarne Press, Hudson, NY, 1995. 2. Of course, taken as a whole Solovev’s is a Christianized Platonism. However, there is no noticeable Christian influence in his doctrine of intuition of ideas as set out in Philosophical Principles and the early chapters of Lectures. 3. Solovev takes the term ‘intellektuelle Anschauung’ from Schelling, who invented it to convey the spirit’s awareness of its identity with nature. Solovev redirects it to the apprehension of metaphysical reality, and thus Platonizes it. For a detailed scholarly discussion, see George Martin, Mystische und religiöse Erfahrung im Denken Vladimir Solov’evs, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 1988, pp. 92-6. 4. Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press, New York, 2007, p. xiv. 5. Ibid., p. 3. 6. Ibid., pp. 2-3. 7. Louth, p. 79. 8. Ibid., p. 6. 9. Ibid., p. 8. 10. Ibid., p. 12. 11. Ibid., p. 13. 12. Ibid., pp. 36-9. 13. Ibid., p. 39. 14. Ibid., p. 46. 15. There is no sense here of a qualitative difference between ideal contemplation of the content of God - the ideal cosmos - and ecstatic union with the unmanifested and therefore unknowable God as first principle. This passage is an extreme expression of Solovev’s optimism with regard to the accessibility of the divine. 16. It should be clear that the ‘everything else’ of this quotation is the ideal cosmos, the ‘All’ of God. This passage does not represent a lapse into nature mysticism.

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17. Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, p. 1. 18. Ibid., p. 2. 19. Ibid., pp. 2-3. 20. There are two valuable articles on aspects of the relationship by Richard F. Gustafson: ‘Solov’ev’s Doctrine of Original Sin’, in Elizabeth Cheresh Allen and Gary Saul Morson, eds, Freedom and Responsibility in Russian Literature. Essays in Honor of Robert Louis Jackson, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, ILL, 1995, pp. 17080, and ‘Soloviev’s Doctrine of Salvation’, in Judith Deutsch Kornblatt and Richard F. Gustafson, eds, Russian Religious Thought, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1996, pp. 31-48. 21. Russell argues (p. 9) that the realistic approach is especially characteristic of the Alexandrian tradition, which accords with Solovev’s clear admiration for Philo and Origen. 22. Russell, pp. 14-15. 23. Gustafson describes the Origen connection in ‘Solov’ev’s Doctrine of Salvation’, p. 33. 24. See Maria Carlson, ‘Gnostic Elements in Soloviev’s Cosmogony’, in Kornblatt and Gustafson, pp. 49-67 (56-7). Samuel Cioran also discusses the parallels in Vladimir Solov’ev and the Knighthood of the Divine Sophia, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario, 1977, pp. 17-21. 25. See Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, ‘Solov’ev’s Androgynous Sophia and the Jewish Kabbalah’, Slavic Review, L, 3, 1991, pp. 487-96, and her ‘Russian Religious Thought and the Jewish Kabbala’, in Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ed., The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1997, pp. 75-98. 26. Louth, p. 64. 27. Carlson (pp. 58-9) attributes this to the influence of the ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ Sophias (Agia Sophia and Sophia Prouneikos) of Valentinian gnosticism. 28. Gustafson, ‘Soloviev’s Doctrine of Salvation’, p. 40. 29. Russell, p. 13. 30. For an account of Palamas’ relationship to hesychasm, see John Meyendorff, St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, SVSP, Crestwood, NY, 1974. For a history of the doctrine of divine (uncreated) light, see Vladimir Lossky, The Vision of God, SVSP, Crestwood, NY, 1983. 31. For example, from his visit to Optina Pustyn with Dostoevskii in 1878. See Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881, Princeton and Oxford, 2002, pp. 384-86, for an account of the trip.

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32. Sobranie sochinenii V.S. Solov’eva: Pis’ma i prilozhenie, E.L. Radlov, ed., Zhizn’ s Bogom, Brussels, 1970, vol. 3, p. 89. 33. Russell, p. 205. 34. S.M. Solov’ev, Zhizn’ i tvorcheskaia evoliutsiia Vladimira Solov’eva, Zhizn’ s Bogom, Brussels, 1977, p. 231. 35. In his discussion of this passage Gustafson focusses on the role of the sacraments in sanctifying nature (‘Soloviev’s Doctrine of Salvation’, pp. 43-4). This second emphasis of Solovev’s, it must be noted, also bypasses the individual worshipper. 36. N. Berdiaev, ‘Problema Vostoka i Zapada v religioznom soznanii Vl. Solov’eva’ in B. Averin and D. Bazanova, eds, Kniga o Vladimire Solov’eve, Sovetskii pisatel’, Moscow, 1991, pp. 355-73 (362). 37. Ibid., p. 364. 38. Ibid., p. 365. 39. Loc. cit. 40. Ibid., p. 366. 41. Ibid., p. 367. 42. For example, by S.M. Solov’ev, op. cit. 43. Edith Clowes addresses the linguistic interface between Solovev’s philosophy and his poetry, which is, of course, not quite the same as that between his philosophy and his actual mystical experience: Edith W. Clowes, ‘The Limits of Discourse: Solov’ev’s Language of Syzygy and the Project of Thinking Total Unity’, Slavic Review, LV, 3, 1996, pp. 552-66. See also Fairy von Lilienfeld’s inconclusive ‘Sophia - die Weisheit Gottes: über die Visionen des Wladimir Solowjew als Grundlage seiner “Sophiologie”’, Una Sancta, Sonderdruck, Kyrios-Verlag, Freising, 1984, pp. 113-30. 44. Georges Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology: Part II, translated by Robert Nichols, Buechervertriebsanstalt, Belmont, MA, 1987, p. 245. 45. I have used the revised English translation of Jane Marshall found in Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love, Thomas R. Beyer, Jr., ed., Lindisfarne Press, Hudson, NY, 1985. 46. It can be hard to disentangle Solovev’s influences. He received Gnostic ideas not only directly but also through Schelling (via Böhme), on whom he relies so heavily for his philosophical methodology. See Piama Gaidenko’s excellent ‘Gnosticheskie motivy v ucheniiakh Shellinga i Vl. Solov’eva’, in Sergei Bocharov and Aleksandr Parnis, eds, Vittorio. Mezhdunarodnyi nauchnyi sbornik, posviashchennyi 75-letiiu Vittorio Strady, Tri kvadrata, Moscow, 2005, pp. 68-92. 47. Carlson, pp. 56-7.

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48. Kornblatt, ‘Russian Religious Thought and the Jewish Kabbala’, p.80. 49. Ibid., p. 85. 50. Edith Clowes (p. 561) regrets the fact that ‘promised mutuality and dialogue blend into hierarchy and polarity as Solov’ev resorts uncritically … to traditional biblical images of male and female for metaphors of total-unity’. She is right about the gender hierarchy, though I would locate the source in Solovev’s esoteric influences rather than the Bible. Kornblatt comments on the patriarchal nature of the mysticism of both kabbala and Solovev: ‘Solov’ev’s Androgynous Sophia’, p. 490n. 51. In my reading of this essay I find myself in disagreement with Kornblatt’s argument that, inspired by the Taboric light (emblem of the deifiying divine energies), Solovev effects the ‘transformation of Eros into Orthodox dogma’ (Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, ‘The Transfiguration of Plato in the Erotic Philosophy of Vladimir Solov’ev’, Religion and Literature, XXIV, 2, 1992, pp. 35-50 [38]). Solovev was not sympathetic to the Palamite defence of hesychasm or to the monastic revival that it inspired, so I am not persuaded that this is the source of his imagery of light. I think it rather the case that Solovev synthesizes both Plato’s demon Eros and Orthodoxy’s doctrine of deification into a theurgy that has more in common with esotericism (gnosis, even alchemy) than anything else. 52. See Louth, op. cit., for a history of this reception of Plato up to Denys the Areopagite. For a polemical indictment of the appropriation of eros in Christian mysticism, see Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, SPCK, London, 1932. 53. Berdiaev, p. 365.

First Loves and Last Rites: from Ivan Turgenev to John Banville Neil Cornwell

First love is the only love. Ivan Turgenev The motif of ‘first love’, it goes without saying, is widespread in world literature; this has obviously been so from classical myth and literature onwards: the ancient proto-novel Daphnis and Chloe, supposedly by Longos, is a prime case in point. Dante and Beatrice loom in the Renaissance period. ‘Last rites’ frequently follow not so very far behind (one only has to think of Shakespeare’s heroines, Juliet and Ophelia; although Pushkin’s Tatiana, among others, offers an alternative outcome; neither, though, should his Lenskii be forgotten). ‘Rites of passage’ is, of course, another related phenomenon - one which may be borne in mind, but will not be discussed as such here. At the twenty-first century end of things, in Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004), the protagonist, supposedly some kind of amnesiac, advances through his childhood years - deluged in history and popular culture - in order to recover the image of his first love, who had died as a teenager. The present paper seeks to elucidate the ‘first love’ phenomenon within certain works by Ivan Turgenev (not in itself an impossibly difficult task, given the presence within the oeuvre of a povest entitled First Love). It then seeks to investigate what a succession of subsequent writers have done - perhaps even with the examples of Turgenev, and / or of each other, just partly in mind. Turgenev That Turgenev’s First Love should be a starting point should now require, of itself, no explanation. Sidelong glances will also be thrown towards Asia, and slightly more detailed attention paid to Spring Torrents (or The Torrents of Spring). No doubt further Turgenev works could be seen as relevant, but these three short novels, particularly when considered together, it will be argued, may be assumed to have paradigmatic qualities, seemingly almost in anticipation of some of the considerably later works subsequently to be discussed. That these works are commonly said to have certain autobiographical qualities (indeed the Oedipal First Love has been called ‘the only purely autobiographical story that Turgenev ever wrote’1) is not

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here of primary concern (although the autobiographical will arise again in the case of Nabokov). What is of greater moment is the narratorial device of the mature, now middle-aged, protagonist looking back (regretfully or concernedly) at the key emotional events of much younger years. In the case of First Love, the account has been written down, in order to be read aloud.2 In that of Spring Torrents, the narrative technique employed is technically third person, but the point of view is almost exclusively that of the ‘reflector character’, Sanin - operating in that same mode of introspective retrospection. According to Richard Peace, the plot of this work ‘is driven by memory’, indeed taking the form of ‘a prolonged “flashback”’.3 In First Love, Vladimir (Volodia, or ‘Monsieur Voldemar’, as he is dubbed, at the age of 16, by his paramour) plunges into initial amatory throes (unfulfilled) with the 21-year-old Zinaida, who is secretly, as it eventually emerges, engaging in her own first love affair - with Vladimir’s father, Petr Vasilevich (aged 42). ‘Not exactly usual’ (144)4 is the narrator’s opening characterization of this version of first love. In Asia the eponymous heroine (at 17) thinks she is in love with her halfbrother, but then falls for the narrator (N.N., aged 25). N.N. (having recently experienced his own ‘first love’ in the shape of a ‘young widow’) lamentably fails to return her feeling (or at least to return it unambiguously enough and in time - and happiness, we are told, ‘only has a present time’ [139]). Asia goes missing - at first alone and temporarily; but then with her brother and (as far as N.N. is concerned) permanently. Point of view here, of course, is not Asia’s but the narrator’s. In First Love, too, Zinaida is seen only through Volodia’s eyes, and ‘often literally so’:5 the gaze is liable to be of paramount importance in these works. In Spring Torrents the reflector-protagonist Sanin (aged 22 or 23) shares the first-love experience with the 19-yearold Gemma, only swiftly to renounce it for an infatuation with the married femme fatale, Maria Nikolaevna (herself also a mere 22). ‘Last rites’ are invoked by the death of Vladimir’s father (of a stroke) and, a few years later, of Zinaida (in childbirth). Asia thinks about dying (and is taken with the ultimate fate of Lorelei). Maria Nikolaevna ‘died years ago’, Sanin ‘now’ reports (173). ‘First love’, we are told in Spring Torrents, ‘exactly like a revolution … sends its ecstatic greetings to the future, whatever it may hold - death or a new life, no matter’ (100). The stories are beset with family relations (as the case may be: parental-child, inter-parental, sibling). Suitors, tutors, servants, class factors, supposed friends and animals (the latter either literally or figuratively) populate these novellas. Literary and musical allusions, paintings and art references are brought in; games are played and theatricality, in one sense or another, can be of the essence: Michael O’Toole considers the roles Asia plays, as self-declared ‘actress’.6 There

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are hints and indeed instances of sado-masochism and near-incest; nothing, by modern standards, can be over-explicit in Turgenev, but First Love, at least, was called into question for its ‘immorality’. O’Toole, in a modern vein, reads erotic landscape imagery into Asia (noting too ‘overtones’ of incest and homosexuality),7 while Joe Andrew detects ‘overt fetishism and quasi-masturbatory fantasies’.8 The open-ended ‘frame’, or ‘open Rahmenerzaehlung’, as Zweers terms it,9 of First Love throws up two alternative forms of the phenomenon. An unproblematic marital relationship is one; in the other (which may potentially be of greater interest), we are told by another guest: ‘Strictly speaking, I fell in love for the first and last time at the age of six - with my nurse’ (144). Maria Nikolaevna’s first love, as she relates in Spring Torrents, occurred when, at the age of 12, she fixed on ‘a young lay brother in the Don monastery in Moscow’; she also had a drowned (sibling) brother (149). A window, a garden and a fountain (‘the quiet splashing of the water’: 184) assume a certain importance in First Love. The watery motif had earlier been expanded in Asia, in the form of Lorelei, a ferryman, and the Rhine; while boat and sea imagery assume if anything greater metaphorical significance still in Spring Torrents - not forgetting, of course, the title (this water imagery is traced in some detail by Peace). ‘Life’s ocean’, ‘a small unsteady boat’ and ‘shapeless monsters’ of the seabed establish a system of water images in that work (deriving, it is thought, from Schopenhauer).10 This recurs at key moments, producing invocations of ‘flying headlong into the depths of the ocean’ (99), and Sanin’s ‘tidal wave’ of ‘self-contempt’ (168). First love is also a haunting experience. Vladimir, ending his story, says ‘goodbye to the fugitive and momentary ghost of my first love’, echoing ‘the vision of a woman’s love’ evoked at the beginning (in Freeborn’s translation, 202 and 146; or ‘the image of a woman’s love’, in Reeve’s version: 167 - in fact the original has ‘ɩɪɢɡɪɚɤ’ on both occasions). This leads him to recall being ‘drawn irresistibly’, shortly after learning of Zinaida’s death, to be present at the death of ‘a poor old woman who lived … in the same house’ (202). First love leads, literally enough here, to last rites. Nabokov From Turgenev, we move on to two ‘First Love’ works written at much the same time, the best part of a century later, without any knowledge of each other, though - certainly in one case, if not both - with Turgenev by no means out of mind.11 For this clearer Turgenevan reason, we shall take the slightly later of these two works first. Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘First Love’ appeared under that title in his collection Nabokov’s Dozen: Thirteen Stories in 1958. Dated (in that printing, which had minor revisions) ‘Boston, 1948’ and written in English, it had first been published as ‘Colette’ that year in The New

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Yorker (July 31, 1948). Ostensibly presented thus as a ‘story’, it was reprinted as ‘Chapter Seven’ of his autobiography Conclusive Evidence in 1951. With revisions, it appeared too in the Russian version of that work, Ⱦɪɭɝɢɟ ɛɟɪɟɝɚ, in 1954; and again finally revised in that ‘autobiography revisited’, as Speak, Memory was subtitled, in 1967. The story / autobiography presentation of this work immediately chimes with Turgenev’s First Love (while reversing, apparently, Turgenev’s process of autobiography into story). The matching title would appear to have been chosen by its author for the Nabokov’s Dozen collection and is to be found again only in ‘story’ reprints (Nabokov’s Congeries, of 1968, within his lifetime; and the posthumous Collected Stories, edited by Dmitri Nabokov, of 1995). If the change of title to ‘First Love’ would seem to point, for the benefit at least of Nabokov’s anglophone readership, to Turgenev’s First Love (known in English translation under its familiar title from 1884), one might expect to find at least a nod towards the Turgenev work within Nabokov’s text. Aged ten at the time (mid-way between Turgenev’s posited six-year-old who falls for his nurse and his real age, of 14, at the time of the events inspiring First Love), the reminiscing Nabokov (or his narrator, family names not being given in the ‘story’ version of his tale) observes on Colette the ‘bruise on her delicate, downy forearm’, which ‘gave rise to awful conjectures’ (Nabokov’s Dozen, 49). Their tender years notwithstanding, he does receive in Biarritz a kiss from his inamorata and, somewhat after the style of the duel initiated by Sanin in Spring Torrents, he did ‘have a successful fist fight with a red-haired boy who had been rude to her’ (loc. cit.). However, the ‘fountain choked with dead leaves’ (51), around which Colette taps her hoop later in Paris (conceivably evoking the fountain, but deprived of its splashing water, of Turgenev’s First Love) is mysteriously changed in the Russian text to a ‘pool’ (ɛɚɫɫɟɣɧ). However, the ‘passion for Cleopatra’, added to the English Speak, Memory version (in reality a brimstone butterfly: 115; 118), can only help recall Zinaida’s fantasies in First Love. First loves, of course, abound elsewhere in Nabokov. Within Speak, Memory we find the more mature teenage relationship with Tamara (rendered in fictional form in his first novel, Mary [Ɇɚɲɟɧɶɤɚ]). Novelistically, we may think first and foremost of Humbert Humbert’s supreme amorous experience, his early romance with Annabel Leigh - at the age of 13, dubbed those ‘intelligent European preadolescents’. Humbert never gets over this: ‘that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since’ (Annotated Lolita, 12; 15), leading to the abusive re-creations of the experience at the expense of Dolores Haze. Secondly, we may think of the first summer’s trysting of Ada and Van Veen. We will not here go into the ‘last rites’ pertaining in these examples, except just to mention the fates of Annabel, and of Dolores Haze - and eventually, or so we are led to believe, of Humbert himself

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(at the age of the father in First Love). We will, though, say nothing of the eventual demise of the geriatric lovers in Ada. Nabokov regarded Turgenev as somewhat less than a writer of the very first rank, one possessing, in Russian terms (like, in his view, Chekhov), ‘talánt, talent, not genius’ (Strong Opinions, 146). Turgenev, he asserted, ‘is not a great writer, though a pleasant one’; however, his works did include ‘quite remarkable’ stories ‘or nouvelles’: First Love being one deserving ‘particular mention’ (Lectures on Russian Literature, 68) - which, beyond that passing comment, overtly at least, it doesn’t appear to receive. Beckett Before Nabokov wrote his ‘Colette’ version of first love, late in 1946, another bilingual writer, Samuel Beckett, wrote his - as one of his first extended works in French - Premier amour (first published in Paris only in 1970, and then in the author’s English translation, as First Love, in 1973). Beckett’s reading of Turgenev may have to remain a matter for conjecture, although his interest in Russian writers, and especially his knowledge of Dostoevskii, is well known. Nevertheless, in his study of the absurd in Daniil Kharms and Beckett, Tokarev12 notes Beckett’s reversal of ‘devices characteristic of the love story’ employed in Turgenev’s novella bearing the same name. Furthermore, Beckett’s story is also autobiographically based - and this was apparently the important factor in its long-delayed publication, Beckett had said, until ‘the woman in question was dead at last’, and thus ‘could no longer be pained by it’.13 The first-person form of his French novellas is ‘unprecedented in the canon of Beckett’s prose fiction’ and these narratives ‘come to us as “spoken” utterances’14 - in this last point, somewhat, one might venture, in the manner of Turgenev’s First Love. Furthermore, Beckett’s anonymous narrator-protagonist associates his own ‘love’ and ‘marriage’, at the beginning and at the end, with the death of his father (64; 85).15 In its own idiosyncratic way, Beckett’s First Love ‘may thus be read as an abbreviated bildungsroman’.16 Stylistically, of course, notwithstanding a ‘quasi-coherent plot’, Beckett represents a new departure, with his ‘rhetorical questions, direct address to the reader, and occasional shifts into the present tense’.17 The unnamed narrator, aided by a visit to his father’s grave, calculates his age at the time of this episode as ‘about twenty-five’ (64). ‘I have no bone to pick with graveyards’, he vouchsafes as he digresses on the smell of corpses (loc. cit.). He is reminiscing from a considerably more advanced vantage point, ‘not long till curtain down’ ( 71), and an attitude not far removed from that displayed in the geriatric amours recounted within Beckett’s subsequent novelistic trilogy (in Malone Dies, in particular). His lover, with whom he holds reluctant trysts for

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some time on a canal-bank bench, before she accommodates him within her mini-bordello, is not exactly romantically depicted. Of when she has undressed for the first time, he sourly remarks: ‘It was then I noticed the squint’ (79). The neighbouring room would broadcast ‘much groan and giggle’ (82). Nevertheless, the narrator was deemed responsible for his hostess’s pregnancy; however, he reports: ‘What finished me was the birth’ (84). Thereupon he left - though the cries therefrom for him would never cease. Could this ever have been ‘love’? Beckett’s narrator describes and defines it in his own inimitable manner: It was in this byre, littered with dry and hollow cowclaps subsiding with a sigh at the poke of my finger, that for the first time in my life, and I would not hesitate to say the last if I had not to husband my cyanide, I had to contend with a feeling which gradually assumed, to my dismay, the dread name of love (73).

‘I could have done with other loves perhaps’, he concludes: ‘But there it is, either you love or you don’t’ (85).18 If Beckett’s First Love is to be read as a grotesque and defamiliarized parody of an autobiographical episode, it can also be read, by us at least, as containing elements grotesquely parodic of Turgenev’s First Love. The remaining three works in Beckett’s quartet of French novellas consist of elaborations from what may be presumed to be the same narrator - in a tone revelling in the joys of geriatricity, or indeed the stage beyond. Of particular note, in the present context, is the boat, water, sea (and, one might infer, drowning) imagery of what logically would seem the last of these narratives, The End (La Fin).19

McEwan In 1975 Ian McEwan published his first book, a collection entitled First Love, Last Rites. The memoirs of a range of more, or less, unsavoury narrators, these stories include a dubiously ignorant mutual seduction between a 14-year-old boy and his ten-year-old sister, resulting in what ‘may have been one of the most desolate couplings known to copulating mankind’ (‘Homemade’: 24). We also meet a narrator who contrives to effect the disappearance of his wife into another dimension (‘Solid geometry’). There is a drowning episode by accident, narrated by a boy aged 12 (‘Last day of summer’); plus a confession (from one of McEwan’s particularly defective, or retarded, narrators) of events that led to his murder of a nine-year-old girl, by means of canal drowning (‘Butterflies’). Love and death are of the essence. In the title story (in fact the penultimate in the collection), the ‘first love’ is a relationship of uneven intensity between a couple aged 17 or 18; the ‘last rites’ apply to

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a pregnant mother rat which seems somehow to appear as a result of a summer of human love-making. The final story, ‘Disguises’, treats a dubious cross-dressing relationship between a ten-year-old boy and his theatrical aunt, and his incipient first love with a new girl at school complicated by a fancy-dress party and alcoholic intake.20 In 2001 McEwan published what may arguably be his best novel, Atonement (filmed 2007). In the context of the narratives so far considered, Atonement (admittedly, a much longer work in the first place) may be seen, in particular in its first half, ‘Part One’, as a substantial (re)working of, and a juggling with, many of the motifs, images and narrative devices encountered above. Part One of Atonement recounts in detail the events of a hot summer’s day in 1935, ending in a false accusation - an apparently deliberate mis-identification, stemming from mis-observation (or misreading) and prejudice - made by a budding novelist, the 13-year-old Briony Tallis, against her sister’s nascent first love. This disastrous turn of events evolves from a combination of factors. These include: Briony’s intuition of writing as ‘a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination’ (157); her sudden intimation of the end of childhood; and - perhaps most importantly - the day’s concatenation of chance events (including the final and most trivial, yet crucial, knocking shut of a French window: 162), personality clashes, and partly glimpsed scenes. The visual is at least as important as the rumination thereupon. One key and mysterious chance observation she is tempted to see ‘as a tableau mounted for her alone’: a ‘drowning scene’, as it first appears, but ‘how easy it was to get everything wrong, completely wrong’ (39). Ostensibly a third-person narrative, part one of Atonement oscillates in point of view between five reflector characters: Briony herself (in almost half of the 14 chapters), but also Cecilia (her sister), Emily (their mother), her cousin Lola (subsequently to be victim in the glimpsed assault) and Robbie (ultimately to be Briony’s victim). At the same time, the retrospective quality of the narrative is occasionally revealed: ‘Six decades later she would describe ...’ (41); ‘In the years to come he would often think back to this time, when ...’ (90). There befalls a ravaging impact on the lives of all concerned, followed through the second half of Atonement; most immediately, though, Robbie (earlier dubbed ‘a maniac’ - which had been ‘Lola’s word’: 119; 158) is arrested and convicted, and this on a charge of raping Lola. In part two, jumping forward to 1940, Robbie - now released from prison into army service in war-torn Northern France - has been passed the reflector baton. That same summer, Briony - now a trainee nurse in London (following in her sister’s nursing footsteps, but having unexpectedly foregone Cecilia’s example of first taking a Cambridge English degree) - resumes the reflector-character role in part three. In this part, clarification seems to come as to what had really happened in 1935.

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Briony has, however, written on this a novella of ‘evasions’ (rejected by a prominent literary magazine), and entitled Two Figures by a Fountain, harking back to that vital act of witnessing, with ‘its air of ugly threat’ even then ‘a story shot through with real life’ (113). Part three, however, concluding the ‘novel proper’, proves to be initialled and dated ‘BT’, ‘London 1999’, announcing (though ostensibly from 1940) the requirement (at that point acknowledged) for ‘a new draft, an atonement’ (349). And indeed, as the epilogue, itself duly headed ‘London, 1999’, purports to make clear, the three parts of this novel comprise the new or rather what is to be the final - draft, from almost 60 years later, of this work issuing from the well-known novelist, Briony Tallis. Yet still, Briony admits even now to elements of ‘convenient distortion’ - the condensing of three hospital working experiences into one being ‘the least of my offences against veracity’ (356). Publication (and consequently our reading) presupposes the death of Briony herself (already in 1999 suffering from advancing dementia) and of the other surviving principals. By this time: ‘No one will care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel’ (371). After 59 (or rather 64) years of writing and rumination, the novelist has presumed God-like powers. The recounted resumption of happiness by the lovers, it is now strongly hinted, probably never occurred - there really being ‘No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists’ (ibid.). Scratches ‘down Marshall’s face’ mysteriously enter the reminiscence in part three (324) - a thing which, surely, would have raised questions, back in 1935, had such in fact been in evidence. Eschewing ‘the bleakest realism’, Briony herself remains to the end ‘as much of a fantasy as the lovers who shared a bed in Balham’ (371) - the ‘fantasist’ she had started as, with her children’s play, The Trials of Arabella, which had started everything off in 1935. There are three first loves in Atonement. In order of narrative presentation, siuzhet or recapitulation, we have first the principal lovers, Cecilia and Robbie, both falling in love in 1935 as inexperienced 23year-olds. Three summers before that, aged ten, Briony had herself plunged into a ‘schoolgirlish passion’ for Robbie, forcing him to save her from drowning in the estate’s artificial lake (231-3) - an event likely enough to have had a bearing on her attitude to the Cecilia-Robbie interaction springing up in1935.21 Thirdly, we learn in part three, the assaulted victim, 15-year-old cousin Lola, must have ‘saved herself from humiliation by falling in love, or persuading herself she had’ and then having the ‘luck’ (if such it may be called), in 1940 ‘to marry her rapist’ - the rising chocolate manufacturer Paul Marshall (324). A window, a garden and a fountain, for a start, may remind us now of Turgenev. We have an estate complete with artificial lake and its island temple, in which - ugly nouveau-riche rebuilding (with pretentious

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adopted family names) and many other intruding class issues apart there is ample space for children to go missing and for other apparently dubious or mischievous outdoor activities. Inevitably last rites abound in individual cases and more generally (or both, with Dunkirk and the Blitz), and finally, deducible through the logic of the novel’s narrative structure, in the case of the ultimate author and her original cohorts in ‘criminal conspiracy’ (370). Banville John Banville’s The Sea (2005) sees a reversion to our traditional narrative format of an older man (this one in his early sixties) looking back: but this time on two interspersed levels. The first is to a traumatic childhood August of some 50 years earlier. The second deals with the illness and death of his wife, over the last year (‘the plague year’: Sea, 24). A summer episode of precocious childhood, together with the overall time-frame, may immediately remind us of Atonement - and it may therefore occasion surprise to learn that Banville had not read McEwan’s novel at the time of composing The Sea. It may be less of a surprise, though, that Banville, notwithstanding his distaste for the more recent novel Saturday (2005), regards McEwan as ‘a very, very good writer’.22 Furthermore, once he did read Atonement, he ‘was bowled over by the first half of it’, as ‘a superb piece of English pastoral’ and ‘a masterpiece of writing, beautifully written’.23 The Sea may well stand as Banville’s own masterpiece of writing, poetically written. By the end of Atonement the novelist Briony Tallis emerges as the ultimate nominally authorial narrator, embodied in the text as main protagonist. The art-historian Max Morden is, throughout The Sea, the supposedly authorial, or quasi-autobiographical, first-person narrator; and, like Briony, he is fully capable of misreading and mis-observing a lot of what had occurred. By the end, although much is explained or rectified (the acute reader being aided by ‘numerous sly references I have sprinkled’: Sea, 142), by no means everything is known or understood. Max’s ‘mythic past’ (57) is never totally revealed: we do not even know what his original first name was, never mind such possibly vital particulars as ‘the word I could not catch’ (242). In crucial detail, we may at times concur with the sentiment: ‘so much for Memory’s prodigious memory’ (161). We find in Banville’s novel not the English pastoral of McEwan’s Atonement (reminiscent of a number of ancestors named in the text, as well as, in more recent times, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia), nor the Russo-European settings employed by Turgenev. We find instead a somewhat reduced form of the Irish novel’s ‘big house’ (here ‘the Cedars’), relocated as a modestly up-market seaside holiday home of the 1950s, surviving half a century later as a slightly seedier ‘lodging house’.

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We do find, though, yet further variations on the theme of first love, and a double dose of last rites - be they harrowing, and / or mysteriously dramatic. Max, from his own straitened family holiday at the age of ‘[s]ay eleven’, manages to insinuate himself into the alluring - ‘Olympian’ even - world of the Grace family, at the Cedars. The (by 1950s standards) apparently free-wheeling Grace parents (Carlo and Connie) have twin children of Max’s age (Chloe and Myles), accompanied by Rose (aged 19 or 20) - a person who once ‘would have been called a governess’ (225). The web-toed and mute ‘godling’ Myles may be taken as a silenced version of the Miles of The Turn of the Screw.24 Classical, mythological, biblical and folkloric systems of imagery surround the Graces (headed by Carlo, depicted as a hirsute Pan figure) and their antics. Max falls in love first with Connie Grace. However, ‘Love as we call it, has a fickle tendency to transfer itself, by a heartless, sideways shift’ (163-4), and he duly transfers his incipient erotic affections to Chloe. The peripeteia in what we might call the Gracelands narrative, however, comes when Max mis-overhears a confession made by Rose to Connie of her love for Carlo, and passes his ‘discovery’ on to Chloe. This - seemingly inexplicably (or, at least, uncomprehendingly to Max) and somehow drastically - upsets the dynamics in the relations among the four younger members of the sextet. The key to this situation and its devastating outcome seems to be Rose - although, even half a century later, having aged into ‘Miss Vavasour’ (now Max’s landlady, she ‘comes with’ the Cedars: 219) she sheds only limited, though important, further light. Her own first love was not for Carlo (‘You didn’t think that, did you?’: 262), but for Connie. She also had some sort of an intensely volatile bond with Chloe. ‘RV loves CG’ is the triply ambiguous slogan chalked up by Myles (235). In consequence of this, it would seem, Chloe, having been admonished by Rose in a flaming row, not quite heard by Max after Rose had caught the pair at sexual play, wades into the sea in telepathic unison with her brother - swimming so far out, never to return. The sea is where Chloe perishes; and the sea is the element into which Max feels himself walking as Anna dies. ‘All this in the historic present’, Banville writes (248) - not quite in (but at the same time indeed in) the present context. Once again we are very much concerned both with family relations and class implications; we have servants (of a sort) and suitors (Max’s daughter Claire, at a third and very much a subsidiary narrative level, becomes engaged to a ‘chinless inamorato’ named Jerome: 258). Imagery of theatricality is again to the fore: the shape of the dunes ‘lent a suggestion of the proscenium’ (26); ‘the continuous rehearsal which is my life, with its so many misreadings, its slips and fluffs’ may yet lead to ‘the real drama’, with ‘a dramatic leap into the thick of the action’,

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whatever may take place ‘onstage’ (184-5) - and this time in Wagnerian mode. Allusions to art and music add iconic qualities in colour and sound: a ‘salt-bleached triptych’ (223), ‘a series of vivid tableaux’ (125), ‘a sort of cameo’ (243) - from Chopin, to Van Gogh, Bonnard and (the invented figure) Vaublin, among many others. ‘Scenes’ are witnessed, paintings evoked and mirrors stared into; examples of near last rite distress are photographed (by the dying Anna), as the gaze is ever important; and everyone seems to be (like Chloe in an early key scene, ‘watching me watching the others’ [29]). The Sea, naturally enough, does not exactly lack water imagery. We encounter wrecks (both literal and metaphorical), unsteady boats, strange tides and hints of sea monsters; and a kiss can call up ‘fountains, gushing geysers, the lot’ (141). ‘What a little vessel of sadness we are, sailing in this muffled silence through the autumn dark’ (72). Not least striking is the phenomenon of drowning, called here ‘the gentlest death’ a ‘well-known fact’ (255). At the end of the first part, ‘the glass before me’ transports Max’s mind ‘to some far shore, real or imagined’, where ‘the sea’s deeps’, ‘little waves’, ‘some ancient catastrophe, the sack of Troy, perhaps, or the sinking of Atlantis’, ‘the black ship in the distance’ and ‘your siren’s song’ are all evoked (132). Ever present too is the concept of haunting. The whole novel (or the rest of Max’s life) is haunted by these childhood events, the recollected trauma of which is only exacerbated by the loss of Anna. The ‘aura of the uncanny’ is elicited early on, in its (Freudian) sense as ‘revenant’ (10). Recalling the picture-house afternoon ‘with Chloe in the dark’, Max is ‘there and not there, myself and revenant’ (98). At dinner at the Cedars (in Miss Vavasour’s ‘present’), he is a ‘big dark indistinct shape, like the shape that no one at the séance sees until the daguerreotype is developed’, adding: ‘I think I am becoming my own ghost’ (193-4). ‘Why have you not come back to haunt me?’, he demands of the now dead Anna (or, for that matter, of Chloe) - ‘I would have a ghost’ (247-8). The nearest thing to an actual revenant in The Sea, or perhaps a grotesque parody of one, is Rose Vavasour’s long-standing friend (erstwhile ‘partner’ and benefactress - ‘daughter of the hyphenated gentry that she is’: 204), ‘Bun’, probably now owner of the Cedars, who turns up for an awkward Sunday lunch. She is ‘an enormous person, of indeterminate age’ - ‘as unmissable as the late Queen of Tonga’ (201), her ‘tiny sweet face … the fossil remains of the girl that she once was, long ago’ (202). She has not, seemingly, appeared before in the book (or in Max’s life), yet her presence conjures up for Max ‘another Sunday lunch at the Cedars, half a century before’ (207) - and therefore Chloe, and then Anna, together with Max’s mother: ‘the figures of the far past come back at the end, wanting their due’ (209). Bun’s sporty car is ‘parked on the gravel inside the gate’ - recalling thus the Graces’ car

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(albeit red, rather than black: 213; cf. 6; but ‘is a rose red in the dark?’: 217) with its whiff of exhaust smoke (214; cf. 10). Max’s stream of consciousness leads on to Bonnard’s ‘final bathroom paintings … of the septuagenarian Marthe’, depicted ‘as the teenager he had thought she was when he first met her’ (218), while Miss Vavasour, following the brief conversation in which her connection with Bun (really ‘Vivienne’) is explicated, plays Schumann’s Kinderszenen. Conclusion Beckett and Nabokov have long been acknowledged as writers whose work had a major impact on Banville. Stylistically, as we traverse the shifting sands of Banville’s prose, we may note touches of the Nabokovian particularly, in this novel, the memory evocations may recall those of Speak, Memory, and even more precisely those of ‘Chapter Seven’ (‘Colette’, or ‘First Love’). Beckett’s First Love seems also to have received a nod, with the death of Max’s mother, ‘sitting on a bench by the canal’ and a sociable tramp ‘not noticing she was dead’ (Sea, 211). Returning to our starting point, the first love stories of Turgenev, we can certainly note that many of the motifs and ingredients assembled across those works would appear to have been juggled and elaborated by the later writers here under discussion. Richard Peace (in the ‘Introduction’ to his The Novels of Turgenev) draws attention to the phenomenon of ‘impossible love’ in Turgenev, and to its link to ‘the theme of implacable nature’. All of this could appear particularly applicable in the cases of the authors of the two more recent longer novels. While Banville’s reading of Turgenev may yet need to be confirmed, it seems highly likely (any similarities adduced here apart) that Turgenev would have figured among those whom Banville has termed ‘the mighty Russians’.25 One might think that Turgenev may well be known to a writer who expresses specific appreciation of Pushkin’s feelings for autumn (Sea, 40) and who once wrote a novella which he called ‘The Possessed’.26 One might also be tempted to consider further the motif of swimming, occurring (like so much of the water imagery here traced) in Spring Torrents (151) and recurring of course so markedly in Banville (for example, The Sea, 135-6), in the light of its sexual use (in relation to Dostoevskii and his much younger wife, still perhaps in the throes of her first love) in Leonid Tsypkin’s novel Summer in Baden-Baden (1981; translated 1987).27 This may be particularly so, perhaps, in the light of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, when we are reminded that ‘the medieval Dutch expression for lovemaking was “swimming in the bath of Venus”’.28

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources John Banville, The Sea, Picador, London, 2005 Samuel Beckett, ‘First Love’, in his First Love and Other Novellas, edited by Gerry Dukes, Penguin, London, 2000, pp. 64-85; and in his The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, edited by S.E. Gontarski, Grove Press, New York, 1995, pp. 25-45 (written in French as Premier amour in 1946 and first published 1970; Beckett’s English translation first published 1973) Ian McEwan, ‘First Love, Last Rites’, in his First Love, Last Rites, Picador, London, 1980, pp. 88-99 (first published 1975) ---------------2001)

Atonement, Vintage, London, 2002 (first published

Vladimir Nabokov, ‘First Love’, in Nabokov’s Dozen: Thirteen Stories, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1984, pp. 43-51; reprinted in his Collected Stories, Penguin, London, 1997, pp. 604-11 (first published as ‘Colette’, The New Yorker, 31 July 1948; also reprinted as chapter seven of his Conclusive Evidence, 1951; and, with revisions, of Speak, Memory, 1967; and of the Russian version, Drugie berega, 1954) The Annotated Lolita, edited by Alfred Appel, Jr., Penguin, London, 1995 Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, Penguin, London, 1971 Strong Opinions, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1974 Lectures on Russian Literature, edited by Fredson Bowers, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982 Ivan Turgenev, ‘Pervaia liubov’’, in I.S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadstati tomakh, Sochineniia, vol. 9, Izdatel’stvo “Nauka”, Moscow-Leningrad, 1965, pp. 7-76 ----------------- Asia/Asya, edited by F.G. Gregory; Introduction by Joe Andrew, Bristol Classical Press, London, 1992

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----------------- ‘Veshnie vody’, in I.S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadstati tomakh, Sochineniia, vol. 11, Izdatel’stvo “Nauka”, Moscow-Leningrad, 1965, pp. 7-156 ----------------- Five Short Novels by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Franklin Reeve, Bantam Books, New York, 1961 (First Love, pp. 165-224; Spring Torrents, pp. 297-420) ----------------- Spring Torrents, translated by Leonard Schapiro, Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth, 1980 ----------------- First Love and Other Stories, translated by Richard Freeborn, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999 (Asya, pp. 100-43; First Love, pp. 144-202) Secondary sources Andrew, Joe, Women in Russian Literature, 1780-1863, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1988, pp. 113-22 (on Asya); 122-35 (on First Love) Bair, Deirdre, Samuel Beckett: A Biography, Picador, London, 1980 Chernov, Nikolai, ‘Ivan Turgenev’s Story “First Love” and its Actual Sources’, Soviet Literature, 1975, 10, pp. 61-72 (translated by Peter Mann, from ‘Povest’ I.S. Turgeneva “Pervaia liubov’” i ee real’nye istochniki’, Voprosy literatury, 1973, 9, pp. 225-41) Cohn, Ruby, A Beckett Canon, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2001 Imhof, Rüdiger, John Banville: A Critical Introduction, Wolfhound Press, Dublin, 1989 Malone, Maggie, ‘Dipping a Toe in John Banville’s The Sea’, The Literary Magazine, 1, 2005: http://www.litencyc.com/ theliterarymagazine/banville O’Toole, L. Michael, Structure, Style and Interpretation in the Russian Short Story, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1982, pp. 147-60 (on Asya) Peace, Richard, The Novels of Turgenev: Symbols and Emblems, 2002: http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~rurap/novelsof.htm

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Schapiro, Leonard, ‘Critical Essay – Spring Torrents: Its Place and significance in the Life and works of Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev’, in Spring Torrents, translated by Leonard Schapiro, Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth, 1980, pp. 183-239 Tokarev, D.V., Kurs na khudshee: Absurd kak kategoriia teksta u Daniila Kharmsa i Semiuelia Bekketa, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Moscow, 2002 Zweers, A.F., ‘First Love. Ivan Turgenev’s Description of Dawning Loves’, in Signs of Friendship. To Honour A.G.F. van Holk, edited by J.J. van Baak, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1984, pp. 569-89

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NOTES 1. See Leonard Schapiro, ‘Critical Essay - Spring Torrents: Its Place and significance in the Life and works of Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev’, in Spring Torrents, translated by Leonard Schapiro, Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth, 1980, pp. 183-239 (189); for details, see Nikolai Chernov, ‘Ivan Turgenev’s Story “First Love” and its Actual Sources’, Soviet Literature, 1975, X, pp. 61-72 (translated by Peter Mann, from ‘Povest’ I.S. Turgeneva “Pervaia liubov’” i ee real’nye istochniki’, Voprosy literatury, 1973, IX, pp. 225-41) 2. The open frame, and the manuscript status of the account (although in this case the writer and the speaker are one and the same person) may be seen to anticipate Henry James’s ghost-story framing device in The Turn of the Screw (1898), which features a female narrator (the unnamed governess) looking back; and indeed James thought highly of First Love. 3. See Richard Peace, The Novels of Turgenev: Symbols and Emblems, 2002: http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~rurap/novelsof.htm 4. See Bibliography for publication details of this and other artistic work: all page numbers will be given in the main text. 5. See Joe Andrew, Women in Russian Literature, 1780-1863, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1988, p. 127. 6. See L. Michael O’Toole, Structure, Style and Interpretation in the Russian Short Story, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1982, pp. 147-60 (147). 7. Ibid., p. 151. 8. See Andrew, p. 127. 9. See A.F. Zweers, ‘First Love. Ivan Turgenev’s Description of Dawning Loves’, in Signs of Friendship. To Honour A.G.F. van Holk, J.J. van Baak, ed., Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1984, pp. 569-89 (572). 10. See Spring Torrents, p. 177 n.3. 11. Isaak Babel also wrote a story called Pervaia liubov’ (1925), in which the (autobiographical) narrator recalls his voyeuristic attachment, as a ten-year-old, to a married woman, in circumstances overtaken by the Odessa pogroms. 12. See D.V. Tokarev, Kurs na khudshee: Absurd kak kategoriia teksta u Daniila Kharmsa i Semiuelia Bekketa, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Moscow, 2002, p. 51. 13. See Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography, Picador, London, 1980, p. 515. 14. See Gerry Dukes in Samuel Beckett, First Love and Other Novellas, Gerry Dukes, ed., Penguin, London, 2000, p. 1-2.

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15. See Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2001, p. 147. 16. Ibid., p. 144. 17. Loc. cit. 18. A dramatization of Beckett’s First Love (directed by Walter Asmus, who had worked on the script with Beckett) was produced for the first time at the Reading centenary celebrations (in March 2006), and then at the Sydney Arts Festival. 19. The four novellas are printed in what would appear to be their logical (or chronological) order by Gontarski in The Complete Short Prose. However, Dukes (in the Penguin edition) prints them in the order in which the English versions were published. 20. For a fuller summary of the stories in this collection, see Kiernan Ryan, Ian McEwan (Writers and Their Work), Northcote House, Plymouth, 1994, pp. 6-12. 21. A markedly different form of (first ?) love occurs in McEwan’s previous novel but one, Enduring Love (1997), which, with its ambiguous title, treats the (homoerotic and religious) obsessions of a supposed sufferer from de Clérambault’s syndrome. 22. ‘14th Time Lucky’, The Guardian, G2, October 12, 2005, pp. 8-10 (10). 23. ‘The Long-Awaited, Long-Promised, Just Plain Long John Banville Interview - Part 1’, The Elegant Variation: A Literary Weblog, http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2005/09/the_longawaited.html 24. See Maggie Malone, ‘Dipping a Toe in John Banville’s The Sea’; there may also be, she hints, a genuflexion to the ghost story within Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996). The rhetorical question, ‘Is a rose red in the dark?’ (Sea, 217), would support this suggestion. 25. See Rüdiger Imhof, John Banville: A Critical Introduction, Wolfhound Press, Dublin, 1989, pp. 35 and 178 n. 22. 26. Included in the volume entitled Long Lankin (Secker & Warburg, London, 1970), this chapter was dropped from the revised edition (The Gallery Press, Dublin, 1984). The Penguin (1992) edition of William Trevor’s novel Reading Turgenev (included with My House in Umbria, in the dual volume, entitled Two Lives) bears an endorsement from Banville (extracted from his review in The New York Review of Books: ‘Relics’, September 26, 1991, pp. 29-30). Reading Turgenev, once again, is a tale of tragically unrealized first love, in which the protagonist, Mary Louise, ‘leaves this world and moves into a Russia of the mind’ (Banville, 30). There is no indication given here as to Banville’s own reading of Turgenev; neither is there any apparent allusion in Reading Turgenev to Turgenev’s First Love. 27. Leonid Tsypkin, Summer in Baden-Baden: A Novel (Leto v Badene), translated by Roger and Angela Keys, Introduction by Susan Sontag. New Directions, New York, 2003.

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28. Peter S. Beagle, The Garden of Earthly Delights, Pan Books, London, 1982: quoted by Liana Ashenden, ‘Ada and Bosch’, in Gerard de Vries and D. Barton Johnson, Nabokov and the Art of Painting, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2006, p. 148.

The Uses of Poetry in Turgenev’s Prose: A Quiet Spot Eric de Haard

Like many of his predecessors, Turgenev makes abundant use of verse in his stories and novels, by inserting quotations and by references to poetic texts, which are sometimes made by the narrator or, usually, the characters. To some extent Turgenev, as an accomplished poet, could insert his own verse; however, mostly we find all kinds of verse, from widely divergent spheres, ranging from the most prestigious poetic traditions, Pushkin or Shakespeare, from eighteenth-century poetry, to folk songs, romances and silly rhymes.1 In general, verse as inserted quotation or as literary-cultural reference functions on all levels and may have a bearing on all possible aspects of the immediate narrative (prose) context and the text as a whole. It may function as pure embellishment or ornament, as a poetic cameo in a larger prosaic setting. But usually it will have significance for the evocation of a historical period, of a socio-cultural milieu or for individual characterization. The inserted poetry often symbolically reflects important thematic aspects of the narrative text. Moreover, characters may refer to, or read out poetry and thereby influence the course of events, as the verses acquire a plot function.2 To mention just a few of Turgenev’s works in which poetry (referred to or quoted) plays an important role, I would include the following: Iakov Pasynkov, where it serves to characterize both the hero as a passionate lover of poetry and the Romantic epoch as a whole; Punin and Baburin, in which the hero Punin is depicted as a very special and original kind of ‘poet’, with his compulsive rhyming and archaic taste, which makes him reject Pushkin as too modern. In Turgenev’s last novel, Virgin Soil, the hero Nezhdanov is torn between being a poet and a social activist, which he is unable to reconcile, with tragic consequences. Here we find that poetry and being a poet plays a role in the course of events. However, the significance for the plot of verse inserts and poetic references may be even stronger, as is witnessed regularly in Turgenev’s tales and novels, and even later in his Poems in Prose (ɋɬɢɯɨɬɜɨɪɟɧɢɹ ɜ ɩɪɨɡɟ), for instance, Two Quatrains (Ⱦɜɚ ɱɟɬɜɟɪɨɫɬɢɲɢɹ). In a number of his narratives, in addition to conveying the importance of poetry for his characters and the Russian society in the periods that are depicted (1830s-1870s), verses are used by characters as a means to impress, to seduce, to persuade, as (literally) ‘enchantment’ in the tradition of the siren’s song. In terms of speech act theory, Turgenev demonstrates their perlocutionary force and employs them in the construction of plot. To mention some examples: in the 1856 story Faust the hero arouses the heroine’s deepest feelings by reading

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(selectively) Goethe’s poetry. In view of the denouement, we may even speak of the abuse of poetry, depending on our interpretation and evaluation of the hero’s behaviour and intentions and the (un-)reliability of his narrative.3 In a different, but comparable way poetry is used by Zinaida in First Love in the games she plays with her admirers. Turgenev throughout his creative life was fascinated by this potential of verse (and song) as is testified by some of his last stories: Song of Triumphant Love (ɉɟɫɧɶ ɬɨɪɠɟɫɬɜɭɸɳɟɣ ɥɸɛɜɢ) and Klara Milich, in which a Ceylonese song (in a translation from Italian) and Tatiana’s letter from Evgenii Onegin, respectively, serve as a means of seduction, or at least, of making an impression on the desired person. In this paper I would like to discuss one of Turgenev’s less prominent stories, A Quiet Spot (Ɂɚɬɢɲɶɟ) from 1854, which contains a multitude of verses, in the form of high and low poetry, songs, which are quoted or mentioned by an equally varied range of characters.4 The story’s title deserves special discussion. ‘Ɂɚɬɢɲɶɟ’ has been translated into English as ‘A Quiet Spot’, or alternatively as ‘A Backwater’.5 The former retains the original positive or at least neutral seme of ‘ɬɢɯɢɣ’ ‘still’, ‘quiet’. The latter implies a shift towards the negative notions of stagnation and backwardness. Both have validity: it cannot be denied that, to a degree, in the story ‘backwardness’ is depicted. But the semantics of the title - and thus the choice of an adequate translation - is complicated by its occurrence in the text and how it is used by characters with differing connotations: The location (this particular neigbourhood) is given a positive value by the landowner Ipatov, who first uses the word in his talk with the Petersburg-dweller Astakhov: ‘ȼɟɞɶ ɡɞɟɫɶ ɭ ɧɚɫ ɩɨ ɩɪɨɫɬɨɬɟ. Ɂɞɟɫɶ ɭ ɧɚɫ, ɨɫɦɟɥɸɫɶ ɬɚɤ ɜɵɪɚɡɢɬɶɫɹ, ɧɟ ɬɨ ɱɬɨɛɵ ɡɚɯɨɥɭɫɬɶɟ, ɚ ɡɚɬɢɲɶɟ, ɩɪɚɜɨ, ɡɚɬɢɲɶɟ, ɭɟɞɢɧɟɧɧɵɣ ɭɝɨɥɨɤ - ɜɨɬ ɱɬɨ!’ (388) (‘We live quite simply here. What we have here, I dare say, is not just the middle of nowhere, but a quiet spot, yes, a quiet spot, a secluded little corner, that’s what it is’ (689) - italics mine; translation amended - EdH). Here Ipatov makes some subtle distinctions, denying the backwardness of the place, emphasizing the positive aspects. Later the meaning of ‘ɡɚɬɢɲɶɟ’ is expanded: at the ball at Akilin’s estate it includes the whole neighbourhood, and Ipatov seems more defensive in his praise: ‘Ⱥ ɩɪɢɡɧɚɣɬɟɫɶ-ɤɚ, ɞɚɪɨɦ ɱɬɨ ɭ ɧɚɫ, ɬɚɤ ɫɤɚɡɚɬɶ, ɡɚɬɢɲɶɟ, ɜɟɞɶ ɧɟɞɭɪɧɨ ɭ ɧɚɫ, ɚɫɶ?’ (427) (‘... you must surely admit that for our quiet little spot, so to speak, it isn’t at all bad, is it?’: 728). Astakhov, however, who has just been challenged to a duel, thinks to himself: ‘ɏɨɪɨɲɨ, ɤ ɱɟɪɬɭ, ɡɚɬɢɲɶɟ’ (427), (‘there’s a fine quiet spot for you, the devil take it!’: 729); translation amended - EdH), which adds an ironic twist to the title’s semantics. This irony is repeated later, when Astakhov leaves the neighbourhood for his main estate: ‘ɉɪɨɳɚɣ, ɡɚɬɢɲɶɟ, - ɦɨɥɜɢɥ ɨɧ ɫ ɭɫɦɟɲɤɨɣ’ (439) (‘“Good-by, quiet little spot!” he said with a wry smile’: 739). Thus from an objective-authorial point

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of view the title becomes ambiguous - in more than one respect, since the ‘quiet’ is disturbed by a most dramatic event.6 This ambiguity, to my mind, is best preserved in the translation ‘A Quiet Spot’. Actually, the countryside has its redeeming features, as Turgenev’s narrator gives extensive lyrical depictions of nature and the pleasant summer garden, though these are followed in the final part by the gloomy and ominous descriptions of the estate in autumn. These quite positive descriptions, if not entirely idyllic, would favour a more positive view of the title ‘Ɂɚɬɢɲɶɟ’.7 Interestingly, for the story’s first translation into French Turgenev himself avoided the problem, calling it ‘L’Antchar’ (‘The Upas’), as he chose to highlight the pivotal role of this particular verse insertion in the story, which will be discussed below.8 The ambiguity of the title reflects a basic characteristic of the whole story. It fits in with the heterogeneity, indefiniteness, and indirection, that pervade it on all levels. These may account for its relative lack of popularity. Actually, it has been criticized for the ‘looseness’ (‘ɪɵɯɥɨɫɬɶ’) of its composition, for lacking a central focus, for being unclear - a complaint voiced by Turgenev’s contemporary Annenkov who was dissatisfied with the vagueness of the characters, and with the author’s leaving ‘too much for the readers to guess’,9 a criticism that has been echoed in various ways by later readers and critics. Another testimony to this ‘lack of structuring’ is the reaction of the critic Almazov in 1854: After reading Mr. Turgenev’s story (which, as a matter of fact, contains splendid details) one is left in an uncertain bewilderment, one does not know what the idea of the work is, one does not even know what the main event is, that is reported in it. … Actually, one cannot blame the author for the lack of order of the whole of his story. He is faithful to the general direction of Russian contemporary belles lettres … At present all writers are busy with types.10 Similar criticism has been reiterated in recent times.11 Generally speaking, A Quiet Spot has remained on the margins of Turgenev’s oeuvre; it was not included in Soviet-period anthologies or selected works, which is not surprising in view of its lack of socialideological interest. Neither has it fared much better abroad.12 In contrast to this relative neglect and lack of appreciation stand the opinions of two remarkable figures: D.S. Mirsky’s praise is the highest imaginable: In [A Quiet Spot] the purely Turgenevian, tragic, poetic, and rural atmosphere reaches its maximum of concentration, and the richness of suggestion that conditions the characters surpasses all he ever wrote. It transcends mere fiction and rises into

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poetry, not by the beauty of the single words and parts, but by sheer force of suggestion and saturated significance.13 It was rated very highly by Lev Tolstoi, who in a letter to V.V. Arseneva of 19 November 1856, recommended it especially, together with Turgenev’s Two Friends (Ⱦɜɚ ɩɪɢɹɬɟɥɹ) and Andrei Kolosov.14 Many years later he used it as a motif in Resurrection, when Nekhliudov gives ‘Dostoevskii and Turgenev’ to read to Katia Maslova and it is said that ‘she liked Turgenev’s A Quiet Spot best’.15 Indeed, if one imposes the norms of a well-made story, with a clear plot, clear-cut main and secondary characters, consistent tone, mood and point of view, then A Quiet Spot suffers from a certain incoherence, a large and diffuse variety of characters, most of whom lack importance or attractiveness. There are sudden shifts from the tragic and serious to the satirical-comical depictions of rather trite characters and scenes, large chunks of dialogue or monologues by unimportant figures, which take up as much or more space than the characters one would expect Turgenev to focus on more clearly. As characters are casually introduced and temporarily dropped, the reader is left in uncertainty about what or who the main interest of the story is going to be. Accordingly, readers of Turgenev often differ in their focus, singling out either Veretev, regarded as the main hero, as another exemplar of superfluous man, naturally comparing him with similar Turgenev heroes, or Maria Pavlovna, the tragic heroine of the story, who certainly ranks high on a list of remarkably original female characters created by Turgenev.16 However, from a modern perspective this ‘loose’ construction, the lack of hierarchy and clear focus in the story’s composition may also be considered a virtue, and we could say that Turgenev employed such a disjointed manner ahead of his time, developing in most of his novels and later stories a more conventionally ‘hierarchical’ and focused structure. On the thematic level, its cast of characters, their relations and the settings anticipate Turgenev’s ‘provincial’ novels and later tales. If we consider A Quiet Spot in view of his earlier writings, we easily discern many of the strands from Turgenev’s pre-novel period, as we find a mixture of elements from A Sportsman’s Sketches, especially those that depict landowners’ everyday life (ɛɵɬ), mainly with a comical-satirical streak, that also calls to mind a story like Petushkov of 1847. (In the story peasants play no role at all, which diminished many readers’ ideological-political interest.) The above-mentioned lyrical descriptions of garden and nature in different seasons can also be found in the Sketches. Veretev is a superfluous man, though not of the ideological type and completely different from Chulkaturin in Diary of a Superfluous Man of 1849-50. Yet another component is the love story, both of a serious, even tragical nature, and of the more light-hearted

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kind, as the flirtatious sparring between Astakhov and Nadezhda Vereteva reflects Turgenev’s skills as a dramatist, which we know from A Month in the Country of 1850. Another important factor in this structural ‘looseness’ is the narrative form: the story is told by an omniscient narrator - whose omniscience, however, is highly selective, as for a large part of the narrative he assumes the point of view of the character Vladimir Sergeevich Astakhov. But the narrator does not restrict himself to the scope of this character, he also provides authorial information about the inner life of others (however, no information that would fully elucidate uncertainties, in particular with regard to the enigmatic Maria Pavlovna, but also Veretev and his sister). He relates events that fall far outside the scope of Astakhov’s perception and knowledge, for example, the dialogue between brother and sister Veretev, the scene with Veretev and Maria Pavlovna in chapter four, and the dialogue between Veretev and Stelchinskii, narrated retrospectively. Besides, Turgenev’s narrator several times freely gives mostly facetious and ironical comments on various characters (including Astakhov himself) and human matters in general.17 Thus the narrative style is quite varied as well, ranging from an amused-ironical, via a neutral, to a lyrical tone - the last in the landscape descriptions. Since Turgenev chooses Astakhov as the primary carrier of point of view we might expect him to be the story’s main character. However, he is introduced with so much irony that he hardly becomes the hero (in the true sense of the word), being depicted as rather limited, slightly pompous, and unimaginative. Almost satirically, he is shown as a modern ‘practical’, and ‘positive’ young man, a dzhentlmen, who efficiently manages his estates, intends to marry a rich woman, who preferably will also have good connections in higher circles. Nevertheless Turgenev seemed eager to depict this average ‘New Russian’, as much as any of the other characters and their fate.18 Turgenev also makes it clear that, with the exception of the amiable Ipatov, most other characters are none too impressed by him. There is only a hint that Vereteva might be interested in him, but this may be tactics in order to do her brother a favour and keep Astakhov away from Maria Pavlovna (one of the uncertainties a reader who desires clarity is left with). Thus, attention shifts easily to other characters with Astakhov only functioning as a prism, but his role becomes more important as the story develops: he is invited by his neighbour Ipatov to his estate, Ipatovka, where Astakhov meets, apart from some comically and rather extensively depicted neighbours, the widower Ipatov’s sister-in-law Maria Pavlovna, the neighbour Nadezhda Alekseevna Vereteva, and at a following visit the latter’s brother Petr Alekseevich Veretev. Astakhov is more or less equally interested in both women, who are friends, but opposed as strongly contrasting characters. Both are attractive, Maria

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Pavlovna is serious and taciturn, Nadezhda Alekseevna seems capricious, lively, and light-hearted. Later Veretev is introduced, a retired lieutenant of the guards (696; 395) - an index of the Veretevs belonging to the higher nobility. His vividly depicted forte is that he is a very good singer, actor, and impersonator. It is first intimated, then confirmed (in chapter four, especially inserted by Turgenev for the second publication in 1856) that Maria Pavlovna and Veretev have a love affair, the true nature or details of which are never quite disclosed, not even in this special chapter, but are only intimated, by means of poetry, as will be discussed below. In the second half of the story, Astakhov seems to get more involved with Nadezhda Alekseevna; however, as noted above, it is suggested that this is merely to keep Astakhov away from Maria Pavlovna. He dances the mazurka with Nadezhda Alekseevna at a ball given by another neighbour, Akilin. This seems to lead to a traditional complication, as he is challenged to a duel by her admirer, the young man Stelchinskii, to whom she had earlier promised the mazurka. This plot development is aborted, however, as it is diffused by Veretev, who prevents the duel which would only compromise his sister. Astakhov leaves for his own main estate. After three months he returns to the guberniia capital and is informed by a local gossip about what has happened in the meantime. Nadezhda Alekseevna has already married Stelchinskii and Veretev has disappeared. Fate (a fire) then forces him to go to his second estate, and he decides to visit once more nearby Ipatovka where Maria Pavlovna is reported to be still living.19 Astakhov then witnesses the only major event in the story, the tragic suicide of Maria Pavlovna, who drowns herself in the pond.20 At last, it becomes clear that she had been hopelessly in love with Veretev, whom (as phrased in a letter from Ipatov to Nadezhda Alekseevna) she could not ‘cease to love’ (747; ‘ɪɚɡɥɸɛɢɬɶ’, 447), neither could she bear their parting. By then we definitely do know about at least one important factor in their uneven pairing: Veretev’s alcoholism. Thus the tragedy of this particular mismatch seems to constitute the climax of A Quiet Spot. However, in the final part of the story (the end of chapter six and all of chapter seven) - in fact one long epilogue - Turgenev detracts attention from the tragic fate of Maria Pavlovna, and shifts to quite another style and mood, as he rather facetiously informs us that Stelchinskii and Nadezhda Alekseevna live in Italy - which suddenly widens the narrative space of the story. However, they already lead separate lives, she has a host of admirers. We are plunged deeper into insignificance as we are informed that she visits the Grotto del Cane near Naples and that her favourite companion is a certain Mr. Popelen, a French painter, about whom we learn the meaningless detail that he is quite skinny, though he eats a lot. It is telling that Turgenev transplants this figure from his earlier comedy A Night in Sorrento (1852). In the

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final chapter the world of the story suddenly widens once more, away from the basic space of the title. We again meet Astakhov, eight years later, on the Nevskii Prospekt, married to the kind of woman he had been looking for, which is depicted with strong irony. The description of his wife, his mother-in-law, and an acquaintance, in this particular setting, could come straight from a traditional Petersburg physiological sketch of the more humorous type. Astakhov here runs into Veretev, who has gone to the dogs now. The story ends with a contrast between these two men and their spheres of life, which, in the final analysis, are equally gloomy. The final sentence seems to have been especially chosen in order to finish completely out of focus, with the least significant - the pettiest, not to say silliest - of details: Astakhov with his family is accompanied by ‘a short, black-haired lackey in pea-green boots and with a large cockade in his hat’ (751; 451). Thus the single really tragic event and the only truly tragic character, rather than taking a privileged place in a structural hierarchy (e.g., being treated as a climax, rather than as a passing incident) seem to be eclipsed by a context of secondary figures and extras, as large portions of the narrative are devoted to neighbours’ portraits, interiors, comic scenes and characters such as the repetitive Egor Kapitonych and Ivan Ilich, whose taciturn presence functions as a running gag. However, one of the most striking features of A Quiet Spot is that this heterogeneous set of characters and settings, variety of mood and style, this mixture of the tragic-serious and the amusing-satirical, are matched by the amount and variety of verse that figures in the story. These range from the loftiest to the lowliest, seemingly without any regard for hierarchy. As the reader is introduced into the world of A Quiet Spot we are first confronted with an epigram by the local poet Bodriakov which is inserted and quoted in the text. ‘Of course, he’s not a Pushkin, but sometimes his thrusts are so keen that he might be a Petersburg poet’ (684), as Ipatov recommends him. This characterizes provincial cultural life (reminiscent of Pushkin’s Goriukhino), which is reinforced by the next insertion: The neighbour Ivan Ilich (with the nickname ‘Adaptable Soul’ [‘ɋɤɥɚɞɧɚɹ ɞɭɲɚ’]) sings an old romance every morning (the first line, then two lines are quoted: ‘Once a baron in the country / Lived with rustic simplicity’: 686; ‘ȼ ɞɟɪɟɜɧɟ ɧɟɤɨɝɞɚ ɛɚɪɨɧ / ɀɢɥ ɫ ɞɟɪɟɜɟɧɫɤɨɣ ɩɪɨɫɬɨɬɨɸ’: 384). Then at Astakhov’s first visit to Ipatovka the capricious Nadezhda Alekseevna urges Maria Pavlovna to sing something. She then performs two Ukrainian folk songs, which she does very well, and she is admired and praised by everybody. Astakhov is impressed as well. The two songs are ‘Peasant, sow the corn’ and ‘In the oak wood’ (699; ‘ɏɥɨɩɟɰ ɫɟɟ ɠɢɬɨ’, ‘Ƚɨɦɢɧ-ɝɨɦɢɧ ɩɨ ɞɢɛɪɨɜɢ’: 398). The importance

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of the song ‘Peasant, sow the corn’ is emphasized by repetition. At the end of chapter three, as Veretev leaves he sings loudly the lines (416) ‘Peasant sow the rye, the little wife is a poppy’ (717; ‘ɏɥɨɩɟɰ ɫɟɟ ɠɢɬɨ, ɠɢɧɤɚ ɤɚɠɟ ɦɚɤ’: 416). It must have been sung in this company regularly, because Veretev was absent during Maria Pavlovna’s performance. In the published version Turgenev deleted from an earlier variant a question from Astakhov to Nadezhda Alekseevna, which would have had great anticipatory significance, perhaps too much to Turgenev’s liking: ‘But permit me to ask you - you have chosen those pieces, why in one is it described how a wife fools her husband, and in the other how a Cossack drowns himself only in order not to get married.’ ‘Well, so what?’ she said, looking straight into his eyes. ‘ Nothing, but it seemed a strange choice to me.’ ‘We did not make those songs, but the people, and you, you learned gentlemen, have decided that the voice of the people is the voice of God.’ ‘Well, why ’.21 Apart from reflecting central motifs in the story (unhappy love, suicide by drowning), the authenticity of this particular instance of ‘verses’ was made explicit in this earlier variant. Then the most important verse in the story, a work of the highest poetry is introduced: Pushkin’s The Upas (also The Upas-Tree; Ⱥɧɱɚɪ). This austere and penetrating poem also serves as an index of a realistic phenomenon of Russian culture. Even a practical-‘positive’, not to say philistine figure like Astakhov knows a few poems from Pushkin by heart. But its significance will prove to be much larger.22 The poem is introduced by means of a slightly contrived twist in the general conversation. Nadezhda Alekseevna, who does the talking for and about Maria Pavlovna, reveals: ‘[Maria Pavlovna] does not like poetry. She considers that it is all made up, all untrue, and she does not like that’. After Astakhov’s protest ‘What else are authors for?’ Nadezhda Alekseevna teases him: ‘You should not like poetry either’. Astakhov then formulates his idea of poetry: ‘On the contrary, I like good poems, when they are really good and melodious, and - how can I put it, present ideas, thought ...’ (703; 402). Only later in the evening when Nadezhda Alekseevna has left, Astakhov approaches Maria Pavlovna on the subject and she confirms that she does not like verse, not even Pushkin’s.23 Then once more someone else speaks for the taciturn Maria Pavlovna, now Ipatov remarks ‘that she disliked not only poems, but also sugar, in fact, she could not stand anything sweet’. As Astakhov replies, ‘There are verses that are not sweet’, Maria Pavlovna asks ‘For instance?’ Astakhov has to think hard, he knows few poems by heart. ‘Why, of course,’ he exclaims, ‘do you know Pushkin’s “Upas”? No? Now, that is a poem that you simply couldn’t call sweet’. Upon her request Astakhov reads it out. She asks him to read it again and to write it down, which he does (705-6; 402-3).

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This scene, full of tension and suggestion (since Astakhov seems not uninterested in Maria Pavlovna), ends anticlimactically, as Ipatov is allowed to take over and asks the even more comical Ivan Ilich what he thinks about the poem. Astakhov stays for the night and there is more comic distraction, as another guest, Egor Kapitonych, in the next room has an endless talk with his servant and then starts snoring, which is described at great length (706-7; 407). That this prevents Astakhov from falling asleep, however, is essential for the plot, as he gets up and from his window sees Maria Pavlovna in the moonlight as she says two lines from The Upas (‘But with commanding glance a lord / His servant to the Upas sent ...’; 708; 407). He thinks to himself: ‘Well! So these little verses have had some effect!’ (708, translation amended - EdH; ‘Ʉɚɤɨɜɨ! ... ɫɬɚɥɨ ɛɵɬɶ, ɩɨɞɟɣɫɬɜɨɜɚɥɢ ɫɬɢɲɤɢ’; 407).24 Thus it is intimated that Astakhov’s reading of Pushkin’s Upas has a certain impact on the heroine and the events in the story. However, as opposed, for example, to the narrator-hero of Faust, Astakhov is an unlikely medium, who inadvertently will play an important role in the dramatic central event in the story, as he recites Pushkin’s poem. Astakhov goes home next morning but in the afternoon returns to Ipatovka. Once more the company is engaged in singing, now with Veretev, who makes his first appearance in the story, at the centre, as the leader-soloist who determines the choice (709; 408). Veretev shows his talent as a singer, though the narrator somewhat ironically informs us that he imitates the popular Moscow gypsy Ilia. Now the songs are popular Russian songs, of which the following are mentioned: ‘The sun is setting’ (‘ɋɨɥɧɰɟ ɧɚ ɡɚɤɚɬɟ’), ‘Floating down the Mother Volga’ (‘ȼɧɢɡ ɩɨ ɦɚɬɭɲɤɟ ɩɨ ȼɨɥɝɟ’), ‘Ah, my home porch, my dear home porch’ (710-11; ‘Ⱥɯ, ɜɵ ɫɟɧɢ, ɦɨɢ ɫɟɧɢ’; 409). Like Maria Pavlovna in the previous chapter, Veretev is an excellent performer. After the singing, Pushkin’s Upas surfaces again as subject of discussion when Astakhov confronts Maria Pavlovna with her nocturnal declamation of the poem. Astakhov then recites part of the poem. Nadezhda Alekseevna asks what kind of ‘upas’ they are talking about, vaguely remembering that it has something to do with a poisonous tree, and rather tritely associates it with the beautiful flowers of the datura (thornapple). Apparently she is curious why her friend (and, possibly, future sister-inlaw) should have appreciated these verses so much. Then Astakhov reads the poem once more. To Veretev’s taste (who has stayed out of the conversation) his declamation is too bombastic, it should be read with greater simplicity, since ‘the thing speaks for itself’ (715; 415). This repetition and subsequent comments intensify the significance of Pushkin’s poem. Then in a separate paragraph at the end of chapter three the narrator abandons Astakhov’s perspective for the first time and reports a dialogue between brother and sister in which they discuss their respective amorous matters. Here once more Turgenev demonstrates his

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mastery of facetious, suggestive dialogue. As Nadezhda Alekseevna teases Veretev, he reacts in ‘theatrical’ terms, quoting (in adulterated form) verses from the end of act one of Griboedov’s Woe from Wit: ‘What a commission, O Creator / To be a grown-up sister’s brother’ (716; ‘ɑɬɨ ɡɚ ɤɨɦɢɫɫɢɹ, ɫɨɡɞɚɬɟɥɶ / Ȼɵɬɶ ... ɛɪɚɬɨɦ ɜɵɪɨɫɲɟɣ ɫɟɫɬɪɵ!’: 416). At this point we also learn what is wrong with Veretev, of whom so far we may have had quite a favourable impression. His light-hearted sister strikes a serious tone and confronts him with his drinking problem, which he does not really deny. However, the full functional load of Pushkin’s poem becomes apparent in the inserted chapter four, which was added for the second publication of 1856 by Turgenev, one may surmise, in order to give more substance and some clarity to the relationship between Maria Pavlovna and Veretev. They meet at dawn in a secluded spot in the forest. In this chapter we also receive confirmation of Veretev’s alcohol problem, though he tries to deny it this time: ‘I am not a drunkard at all’ (720; 419). Probably connected with this is something that he does admit: ‘[I don’t do] anything with myself’ (718; 417). This confirms his status as superfluous man - or should we say ‘good-for-nothing’. (Actually, the final and explicit judgement of this character will be passed in the epilogue by the authorial narrator: ‘nothing ever comes from the Veretevs’ [750; ‘ɂɡ ȼɟɪɟɬɶɟɜɵɯ ɧɢɤɨɝɞɚ ɧɢɱɟɝɨ ɧɟ ɜɵɯɨɞɢɬ’: 450].) As concerns Maria Pavlovna, it now becomes obvious that she is in love with him and he knows it: ‘I simply am not worthy of your affection’ (718; 417). It also transpires that marriage is already an issue: ‘when we are married and go abroad’ (720; 420). At this secret rendez-vous communication once more is conducted by means of poetry. Again Pushkin’s works are employed, now by Veretev but, in keeping with his character, this is quite a different Pushkin from the creator of The Upas. If we think of two poles in Pushkin’s oeuvre, then at one extreme - of seriousness, of utmost austerity are such poems as The Prophet and The Upas, at the other - of light-heartedness and frivolity, there is the character of Laura from The Stone Guest.25 Actually, Veretev asks Maria Pavlovna if she has read Pushkin’s ‘Don Zhuan’ (as he calls it), then appropriates Laura’s argument against Don Carlos’ morose warning that she will grow old and lose her beauty. As a rebuttal of Maria Pavlovna’s reproach that he takes nothing seriously and ‘will joke his life away’ (719; ‘ɩɪɨɲɭɬɢɬ ɠɢɡɧɶ’: 418), Veretev attempts to persuade her to enjoy the moment, quoting (not quite literally) Laura’s words in favour of a philosophy of ‘carpe diem’: ‘There may be rain and cold in Paris now, but here the night of lemons and laurel is scented’ (ibid.). Turgenev here inverts Pushkin’s roles, as in this case the man is trying to convince the woman. At first sight it seems that here Pushkin’s text is used in a way which anticipates Faust: as a means of seduction or, at least, a rather more intense form of amorous pursuit.

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In this scene Veretev then turns to ingenious flattery, once more using Pushkin’s poetry. This time it is the poem ‘Who knows the land’ (1828; ‘Ʉɬɨ ɡɧɚɟɬ ɤɪɚɣ ...’),26 an interesting piece with respect to genre. It begins with a rather lofty 13 lines on Italy, then changes into a eulogy of female beauty, comparing the beauties of a certain ‘Liudmila’, who later appears to be a ‘Mariia’ (the prototype was Maria MusinaPushkina), who is compared to a number of (Italian) works of art representing female figures and outshines them all. One of these is the Venus dei Medici (the ‘Florentine Venus’ [‘ɮɥɨɪɟɧɬɢɧɫɤɚɹ Ʉɢɩɪɢɞɚ’]), whom Veretev high-handedly substitutes by the Venus of Milo, as Veretev promises Maria Pavlovna to take her to Paris, when they are married. He quotes four lines, in which he casts her in the role of Pushkin’s Russian beauty: ‘Stand you with a serious eye (‘ɫ ɜɚɠɧɨɫɬɶɸ ɨɱɟɣ’) / Before Milo’s Cypria? / Two there are, and at your sight / The marble seems to lose its might’ (721; 421). Veretev then goes on to praise her, especially for being so natural, proud and taciturn and for not reading books and not liking verse (421; 722). After this piece of flattery by exploiting Pushkin’s madrigal, The Upas resurfaces as Maria Pavlovna responds: ‘But would you like me to speak some poetry to you? … the poetry that Petersburg gentleman read yesterday evening’. Veretev asks her: ‘“The Upas” again? ... So it was true, you did recite it in the garden last night? It suits you well. But do you really like it so much?’ (722; translation amended - EdH). It is very suggestive that Veretev remarks: ‘It suits you well’ (‘Ɉɧ ɤ ɜɚɦ ɢɞɟɬ’: 421). He may be an alcoholic, but he is quite perceptive and lays bare the essential import of Pushkin’s poem. She then reads the poem as ‘she slowly raised her eyes to heaven: she did not want to meet his gaze’ (722; 421) until she comes to the lines quoted in the text: ‘And the wretched slave expired at the feet / Of the invincible lord …’ (722; ‘ɂ ɭɦɟɪ ɛɟɞɧɵɣ ɪɚɛ ɭ ɧɨɝ / ɇɟɩɨɛɟɞɢɦɨɝɨ ɜɥɚɞɵɤɢ ... - ’: 421). The next moment: ‘her voice quivered, her immobile, haughty brows were raised naively, like a girl’s, and her eyes rested on him with involuntary devotion’ (722). At this point the essential meaning of The Upas for Maria Pavlovna, which had been only suggested so far, becomes obvious, though not fully explicit. But intentionally or not (we already know that he is a great actor), Veretev is quick to ignore, or rather invert, the essence of their situation as it is reflected in Pushkin’s poem - the master / slave relationship: ‘He suddenly flung himself at her feet and embraced her knees. “I am thy slave,” he exclaimed. “I am at thy feet, thou art my lord, my divinity” ... ’ (italics in the Russian original – EdH). However, after this distortion he does not stop short of finishing his sentence by addressing Maria Pavlovna as ‘my divinity, my wideeyed Hera, my Medea …’ (722; 421).27 Actually, this is the third time Maria Pavlovna is compared to classical heroines. This occurred first in the words of the authorial narrator (who here abandons Astakhov’s point

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of view) - via a hypothetical classical poet who would have compared her to Ceres or Juno (691; 390). The second time it is Nadezhda Alekseevna who would like to see her cast as Cleopatra and Phedra (or Phèdre) in the amateur theatre the Veretevs intend to organize in the neighbourhood (697; 396).28 In view of later events this anticipates the motif of a woman’s suicide. Now Veretev echoes these earlier references. However, all this detracts from the truth embodied in The Upas: it is Maria Pavlovna who is the slave. This is confirmed in the final sentence of this chapter: ‘She tried to thrust him away, but her hands came to rest on his thick curls, and, with a smile of embarrassment, she let her head fall on her breast ...’ (722; 422). Here the scene (and chapter four) ends. However, the ellipsis at the end of the final sentence raises some questions. Are we to interpret these ellipsis points - as often in love scenes - as a suggestion that what follows implies a degree of intimacy that cannot be described? In any case, it is noteworthy that for the 1858 French translation of A Quiet Spot (L’Anchar; 1858), Turgenev wrote a short continuation in which Maria Pavlovna frees herself from Veretev’s embrace and runs away, thus disambiguating the outcome of this rendezvous.29 As the great significance of The Upas - for the character and for the story - has been revealed, it does not recur in the story, at least not in explicit form. But certainly the poem is evoked in the final part of the story, in chapter six, when three months have passed and Astakhov again stays at Ipatov’s estate. He remembers Maria Pavlovna’s appearance at night in the garden when she read Pushkin’s poem, and now again sees ‘something white glimmering over the ground’, ascribing this to his imagination. It turns out to be Maria Pavlovna who is on her way to drown herself in the pond (744; 443-4). Here the earlier symbolic motifs of water (the pond, earlier described in detail) and drowning (the classical-literary heroines) are concretized in this tragic event. Actually, the master / slave motif from The Upas is certainly the primary but not the only symbolic correspondence between embedded and embedding text. The ‘poison’ (‘ɹɞ’) may be seen as reflected in the poisoned (or poisonous) relationship between Maria Pavlovna and Veretev. The ‘desert’ (‘ɩɭɫɬɵɧɹ’) echoes the story’s location and title (‘ɡɚɬɢɲɶɟ’). The lonely tree (‘ɞɟɪɟɜɨ’) reflects the isolation of Maria Pavlovna (though she is the poisoned one rather than the poisoner). Throughout the story, trees of various kinds are repeatedly mentioned and play an important role in Turgenev’s trademark landscape and garden descriptions. The main contrast is between the lush green of summer, for example, ‘the heavy shadow of the trees’ (695; 393), the young trees surrounding the meadow where Veretev and Maria Pavlovna meet (717; 416) and the bare trees in autumn with their branches scratching the window, evoking desolation (742, 743; 442, 443). The branches (‘ɜɟɬɜɢ’) are also an echo of Pushkin’s Upas.

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In the final analysis, it would be an overstatement to consider the unwitting and entirely accidental reading by Astakhov as a cause in the unfolding of dramatic events; nevertheless it may be interpreted at least as a catalyst, an involuntary suggestion which makes Maria Pavlovna realize the true, one-sided state of affairs. However, since her inner life is a closed book to the reader, it remains only to be guessed if, or to what extent, the insignificant Astakhov’s return to Ipatovka brings her to her act of despair. However, the verses discussed so far - with Pushkin’s The Upas at the centre - do not exhaust the whole range of verse in A Quiet Spot. After the introduction of Pushkin’s poetry and the authentic Ukrainian folksongs more songs are introduced. However, by their nature they serve as trivializing counterbalance, which is once more in agreement with the ‘loose’ structure of the text and the shifts in mood and atmosphere. At the drunken party following the ball at Akilin’s it is Veretev who does the singing once more (736; 436), but now in negative contrast with the company singing earlier at Ipatovka. At the same party the comical Ivan Ilich (‘Adaptable Soul’), whom Turgenev uses as a running gag, once more sings his only song ‘Once a baron in the country’ (738; 438), then he surprises everyone by starting to sing ‘Krambambuli’ (an eighteenth-century German student song, which became popular in a Russian version by Iazykov from the 1820s). Two lines are quoted,30 but he sings so badly that they interrupt his singing. Finally, as if to show the pervasive role of songs and verse in any society - though again not of the most prestigious kind - Turgenev tells us about Nadezhda Alekseevna’s favourite admirer, the already mentioned Monsieur Popelen, that he sings ‘the latest ballads in a piping voice’ (747; ‘ɪɨɦɚɧɫɵ’: 447). Thus, more than in any other tale or novel, Turgenev exploits the semantic potential of verse, on the level of realistic depiction (the ubiquity of verse and / or song in all reaches of Russian life and abroad), on the level of individual characterization, as a means to impress, convince, flatter or seduce - its significance for plot development and the fate of characters. In A Quiet Spot the repertoire of verse - epigrams, authentic Russian and Ukrainian songs, provincial rhymes, student songs, popular romances and Pushkin’s both light and sublime poetry with both comical and tragic effects, is homologous with the story’s ‘modern’ non-hierarchical composition. To a certain extent this conflicting heterogeneity can be correlated with two components in Turgenev’s poetics, as formulated by Chudakov: ‘the unusual coexistence of everyday concrete scenes with strong emotional subjective tension’.31 Chudakov here reformulates what was seen by earlier readers as a basic feature of Turgenev’s oeuvre: ‘the poetic element from Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s time and realis[m] of form’ (Apollon Grigorev); ‘the conjunction of a tense, extremely sensitive and

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touchy idealism and scenes from reality’ (N. Strakhov); ‘the combination of idealistic symbolism with elements from real life’ (S.I. Rodzevich).32 A Quiet Spot is a story in which the contrasts between these two strands are more jarring than in Turgenev’s later works, in particular, the novels.

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NOTES 1. Here I include songs, which is disputable, since their role and effect are - to simplify things - based half on melody, half on words. What matters here is that there is a quote of, or reference to, the lyrics, to the song-as-text. I use ‘verse’ as the more general term, as distinct from ‘poetry’, which implies higher esteem, especially in Russia. 2. For a discussion of the various aspects of verse inserts in a prose context see: Tamara Sil’man, Zametki o lirike, Sovetskii pisatel’, Leningrad 1977, chapter 8; Eric de Haard, ‘Verse Insertions and Prosimetrum in Pushkin’s Works’, in Two Hundred Years of Pushkin, III, Pushkin’s Legacy, Robert Reid and Joe Andrew, eds, Rodopi, AmsterdamNew York, 2004, pp. 73-88. 3. Such a negative view of the hero-narrator Pavel Aleksandrovich is expressed quite well in Peter I. Barta, ‘Superfluous Woman and the Perils of Reading “Faust”’, Irish Slavonic Studies, XIV, 1993, pp. 21-36. 4. Quotations are from: I.S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, Nauka, Moscow, 1980, IV, pp. 380-451, further indicated in the text by page number. References to the Commentary are also from this edition and volume. Earlier variants are quoted from Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos’mi tomakh, Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, Moscow-Leningrad, 1963, VI, pp. 412-60; further references to variants will be indicated by PSS, VI, and page number. 5. Translations of A Quiet Spot are from The Borzoi Turgenev, translated from the Russian by Harry Stevens, Alfred Knopf, New York, 1955, pp. 681-751, indicated in the text by page number, preceding the page number of the Russian text, which is provided in some cases. It is noteworthy that this translation chooses ‘A Quiet Spot’, but gives ‘The Backwater’, in parentheses, as well. In some cases translations have been amended for reasons of accuracy. All other translations are my own. 6. As noted by Schapiro: ‘Part of the symbolism in the story lies in the title - the quiet country spot in which nothing seems to happen, but which in fact is the scene of a passionate human conflict, culminating in tragedy’: Leonard Schapiro, Turgenev. His Life and Times, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1968, p. 117. 7. Nierle observes that these descriptions are only partly, or weakly linked with the plot: Michael Nierle, Die Naturschilderung und ihre Funktionen in Versdichtung und Prosa von I.S. Turgenev, Verlag Gehlen, Bad Homburg-Berlin-Zürich, 1969, pp. 157-9. 8. Quoted from the Commentary in Turgenev, IV, p. 637. For more on this French translation see below. 9. Quoted ibid., p. 636. 10. Quoted from Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva I.S. Turgeneva (1818-1858), sost. N.S. Nikitina, Nauka, St Petersburg, 1995, p. 276. 11. See Peter Brang, I.S. Turgenev. Sein Leben und sein Werk, Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, 1977, pp. 124-6; and Frank Friedeberg Seeley, Turgenev. A Reading of his Fiction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 140-2. See also Schapiro, pp. 117-8.

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12. In this regard, it is significant that, as far as I have been able to ascertain, a Dutch translation has never been made, one of the very rare exceptions in Turgenev’s oeuvre. 13. D.S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, Vintage Books, New York, 1958, p. 202. 14. L.N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Iubileinoe izdanie), Goslitizdat, MoscowLeningrad, 1928-1960, LX, p. 120. 15. No doubt, Tolstoi saw a parallel between the reading character and the text read, as it anticipates the theme of the seduced and abandoned girl (Tolstoi, XXXII, p. 46). This parallel is confirmed by an earlier variant of Resurrection, in which Maslova, even more concretely, echoes the theme of suicide by drowning (‘ … saying that she could do nothing but drown herself’: Tolstoi, XXXIII, p. 57). 16. Predictably, for the bulk of Soviet-period criticism this is the focus of interest, with a few exceptions, for example, G.B. Kurliandskaia: see note 22 below. Veretev is also the main interest for Leonard Schapiro, who calls him ‘the hero of the story’ and states that Turgenev’s ‘sympathies lie … with the failure Veret’ev’, explaining his ‘flippancy and lack of responsibility … as the direct result of social and political conditions’: Schapiro, pp.117-18. In her remarks on A Quiet Spot, Elizabeth Cheresh Allen mainly devotes attention to the figure and fate of Maria Pavlovna, especially in the framework of a discussion of suicide in Turgenev’s works: Elizabeth Cheresh Allen, Beyond Realism. Turgenev’s Poetics of Secular Salvation, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1992, pp. 58, 59, 77, 83-4, 101, 102, 120, 215. Peter Brang treats the characters with more or less equal attention, Brang, pp.124-5; see also Seeley, pp. 140-2. Eva KaganKans devotes roughly as much attention to Veretev (in her chapter ‘The Hero as Failure’) as to Maria Pavlovna (in her chapter ‘Turgenev’s “Women in Love”’): Eva Kagan-Kans, Hamlet and Don Quixote: Turgenev’s Ambivalent Vision, Mouton, The Hague-Paris, 1975. 17. For an excellent discussion of Turgenev’s narrative technique see A.P. Chudakov, ‘O poetike Turgeneva-prozaika (Povestvovanie - predmetnyi mir - siuzhet)’, I.S. Turgenev v sovremennom mire, Otv. red. S.E. Shatalov, Nauka, Moscow, 1987, pp. 24066. In Chudakov’s terms, this is a characteristic instance of Turgenev’s ‘subjectiveauthorial’ narration (see especially p. 242). 18. At least on one reader he did make an impression, but not a favourable one: Chernyshevskii called him a ‘heartless scoundrel’ (‘ɛɟɡɞɭɲɧɵɣ ɩɨɞɥɟɰ’; quoted from the Commentary in Turgenev, p. 641). 19. The time interval was two months in an earlier variant (Pss, VI, p. 446). The month added by Turgenev, ‘three months and more passed’ (739; 439), takes the story from summer to autumn, with a concomitant contrast in mood, in analogy with the shift from seemingly easy and pleasant life to the tragic events. However, this period seems too short to warrant the tone of the dialogue with Mr. Flich in the club (see, for instance, a question like: ‘Is the old man Ipatov still living there?’). The character Flich (‘the old gossip’: ibid.) is introduced by Turgenev without much motivation other than functioning as secondary narrative device. The conversation suggests a much longer period of time has elapsed.

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20. This recalls, of course, Karamzin’s poor Liza, seduced and abandoned by her lover, but also Turgenev’s earlier Mumu, as was noted by a correspondent of Turgenev at the time, E.A. Ladyzhenskaia. To a letter from autumn 1854 she adds in a P.S.: ‘It comes to my mind, that you like very much to drown your heroines; you drowned Maria Pavlovna, you drowned Mumu, don’t drown me, please, and answer me soon’, quoted from ‘Pis’ma k I.S. Turgenevu i pis’ma o nem’, Turgenevskii sbornik. Materialy k polnomu sobraniiu sochinenii i pisem I.S. Turgeneva, II, Nauka, Moscow-Leningrad, 1966, p. 358. 21. Turgenev, Pss, VI, p. 426. I have been unable to find the text of ‘Khlopets see zhito’ and only a possibly incomplete variant of ‘Gomin-gomin po dibrovi’, on: http://pisni.org.ua/sview_p.php, which does not contain the motif of drowning. 22. In his essay from 1910 The Life of Verse (ɀɢɡɧɶ ɫɬɢɯɚ), Nikolai Gumilev drew attention to Turgenev’s use of The Upas as an example of the power of poetry: ‘Beautiful poems, like living beings, enter into our lives. Sometimes they teach us, sometimes they call us, sometimes they bless us; among them there are guardian angels, wise leaders, tempting demons and dear friends. Under their influence people love, fight and die. In many respects they are the highest judges, like the totems of North-American tribes. An example is Turgenev’s A Quiet Spot in which the poem The Upas precipitates the outcome of a typically Russian painful love’. In N. Gumilev, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, Izd. Victor Kamkin, Washington, IV, 1968, pp. 163-4. G.B. Kurliandskaia notes that Turgenev ‘depicts the awakening of the female soul under the influence of poetry - the influence of Pushkin’s Upas on Maria Pavlovna in the story A Quiet Spot and the mental change in Vera in the story Faust’: see G.B. Kurliandskaia, I.S.Turgenev i russkaia literatura, Prosveshchenie, Moscow, 1980, p. 37. Schapiro formulates it quite well: ‘There is a slight suggestion that Maria’s impulsive suicide (regretted at the last moment, as Turgenev with great subtlety suggests) was not unconnected with the awakening which Vladimir Sergeevich [Astakhov] evokes in her by reading to her Pushkin’s “Anchar” on his first visit’. However, his following statement ‘The awakening of wild passion by a poem would be more fully developed in “Faust”, which was written two and a half years later’ (p. 117), certainly holds true for Faust, but not for A Quiet Spot, in which the woman’s passion has already ‘been awakened’ by Veretev, not by a particular poem. N.N. Mostovskaia makes a number of good points concerning the meaning of The Upas and Turgenev’s choice of fragments from the poem. ‘At first sight this is merely the reading-matter of the heroes … In essence, Pushkin’s text plays a role in authorial characterization, it symbolizes the tragic situation, and is, as it were, the culmination of the development of the plot … [It] became an emotional-psychological clue to the inner awakening and awareness of the heroine’s fate’. See N.N. Mostovskaia, ‘“Pushkinskoe” v tvorchestve Turgeneva’, Russkaia literatura, 1997, XXXVI, 1, pp. 28-37, here pp. 34-5. Mostovskaia, p. 35, also points to the fact that Astakhov reads the poem ‘completely accidentally’. References to Anchar, not occurring in the story, are from: A.S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, Nauka, Leningrad, 1977, III, pp. 79-81. 23. She certainly does make a clear distinction between ‘song’ (‘pesnia’) and ‘verse’ (‘stikhi’). 24. Turgenev has made Astakhov’s reaction even more banal by changing ‘stikhi’ (‘verses’) into ‘stishki’ (‘little verses’). See Pss, VI, p. 431. 25. Mostovskaia notes: ‘Another concept of life [Epicureanism] is revealed by turning to another Pushkin text, more precisely, a paraphrase of the nocturnal rendez-vous of Laura and Don Carlos in The Stone Guest’: Mostovskaia, p. 34.

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26. A.S. Pushkin, III, pp. 53-4. 27. It should be noted that here Veretev switches from the polite form of address ‘vy’, maintained throughout the previous dialogue, to the intimate ‘ty’. 28. Again, in accordance with the constructional heterogeneity outlined above, Turgenev has Ipatov compare her to Bobelina (Bouboulina), the heroine in the struggle for Greek independence, a heroic figure, but definitely not a classical one (691; 390). (In a note the translator modifies this reference by ‘perhaps’; however, there is no doubt that this is the Bobelina referred to.) 29. Commentary in Turgenev, IV, p. 638. 30. Commentary in Turgenev, IV, p. 645. The German original (1745) is by Chr.F. Wedekind. 31. Chudakov, p. 255. 32. Quoted from Chudakov, pp. 254-5.

‘The avant-garde, you know, can easily become the rearguard. All it takes is a change of direction.’ Anatolii Efros’ Production of A Month in the Country: A Dialogue with Stanislavskii. Ros Dixon

Anatolii Efros’ productions in 1966 and 1967 of The Seagull and Three Sisters were daring assertions of artistic independence. Urging his cast to take an unsympathetic, judgmental view of their characters, and to play at aggressive speed, against stark symbolic settings, he rejected the measured pace, tender moods, visual beauty, and gentility traditionally associated with interpretations of Chekhov. The productions were condemned for their incisive commentary on contemporary Soviet society but also interpreted as deliberate attacks on the aesthetics of the Moscow Art Theatre, and as wilfully anti-Stanislavskian. They created critical uproar and were banned. A decade later, in 1977, when Efros turned to Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, he was familiar with Stanislavskii’s production at the MAT in 1909. He read and made frequent reference to his predecessor’s commentary on the work in My Life in Art (Ɇɨɹ ɠɢɡɧɶ ɜ ɢɫɤɭɫɫɬɜɟ), and also to an analysis of the MAT production published in 1976, by the theatre historian Inna Soloveva.1 Efros’ production was in no sense an attempt to resurrect Stanislavskii’s, but his interpretation was in some ways indebted to the practices of the MAT. It was almost as if Efros, who a decade previously had conducted ardent polemics, was instead now engaged in a dialogue with his predecessor. Although ostensibly a love story, A Month in the Country was written against the backdrop of the later years of the reign of the aggressively reactionary Nicholas I (1825-55), and (as Soviet critics in particular have emphasized) reflects contemporary developments in Russia. Produced at a time of upheaval, which saw the often violent suppression of revolutionary activity, it depicts the gentry, represented by Natalia Petrovna, Rakitin and Islaev, as an increasingly isolated social group whose existence is threatened by fundamental change. This threat is symbolically represented by an outsider of lower class, the poor student Beliaev. But, although Natalia Petrovna falls for the tutor, she does not leave; instead she loses both her new love and the persistent Rakitin and remains with Islaev. The threat that Beliaev poses to her, and to the world she represents, is thus averted. By contrast, in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, first performed in 1904 (some 55 years after Turgenev’s work was written and shortly before the 1905 Revolution), the actual destruction of the gentry class is

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symbolized in the axing of the orchard by Lopakhin, another outsider and the son of a peasant. Chekhov always vigorously denied that any of his work was influenced by Turgenev, but in this was disingenuous.2 The demise of the gentry depicted in his work had undoubtedly been presaged in A Month in the Country. Indeed, it may be imagined that the world of Islaev’s estate is in essence that of the impecunious Ranevskaia, but is shown at a time when the auction has been forestalled and its owners given a temporary stay of execution. This perception of Turgenev’s play as a prologue to The Cherry Orchard was perhaps first most clearly established by Stanislavskii. Arguably, a root cause of disagreement between Stanislavskii and Chekhov about The Cherry Orchard had been one of perspective. Chekhov had seen the events in his play with a sense of historical distance and a certain comic irony. Stanislavskii, by contrast, had mourned the loss of the cultured way of life symbolized by the destruction of the orchard, and in 1909 when turning to A Month in the Country, five years after his work with Chekhov, he felt, if anything, even more personally and strongly a desire to preserve it. Indeed, as Marianna Stroeva has observed, the principal motivating concept of his production was the destruction of what he described as the ‘epic quiet and subtle aestheticism of life on [Russian] estates’ when it came in contact with ‘a breath of fresh air’ and ‘drew close to Nature itself’.3 For him the central conflict in the play was therefore between what we might term nature and nurture: the absolute necessity for Natalia Petrovna to stem the tide of natural and spontaneous sexual impulses induced within her by Beliaev, in order to prevent the destruction of the cultured world she represents. The director found his own metaphor to describe this opposition between wild natural impulses and an ordered, civilized society. In My Life in Art he suggested that Natalia Petrovna was to be seen as a woman who had spent her life enclosed in a luxurious sitting-room, separated from nature and constrained by a ‘corset’ of society’s conventions. He likened her situation, and those of Islaev and Rakitin, to that of hot-house flowers protected from the natural world by the glass of a conservatory.4 He perceived the action as circular: once the threat of destruction was averted, it returned to its starting point; Natalia Petrovna was to be immured once more in her glass-house. He viewed this as a restoration of social order, a triumph of duty over desire, which in turn would ensure the continuation of a refined and cultured life-style, with its moral values intact. Turgenev’s heroine is 29, but in his notes Stanislavskii frequently referred to Natalia Petrovna as younger, suggesting instead that she was 18 or 19.5 Her youth, inexperience and naivety, manifest in her inability to comprehend or control her new-found emotions, for him were part of her charm. But these very traits also threatened to cause her downfall, and he also therefore viewed her negatively as a ‘weak

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woman’ in need of schooling by Rakitin. She was not to be ruled by passion or to follow the dictates of her misguided heart. Instead, although she erred, she was ultimately to be governed by her sense of honour and duty - the codes of behaviour in which she had been educated. To borrow his own metaphor, the ‘corset’ she wore was therefore not a restrictive garment but her coat of armour. For Stanislavskii, however, the real saviour of standards, and therefore the representative of his whole ‘ruling idea’, was Rakitin.6 His own performance in that role won him unanimous acclaim and came to be seen as one of his greatest triumphs. Rejected by Natalia Petrovna, to whom he cannot express his love, and fully aware of the feelings aroused in her by Beliaev, Rakitin undoubtedly suffers a private torment. In Turgenev’s script he gives vent to the trauma, humiliation and indignity of his position in monologues unheard by the other characters. In Stanislavskii’s portrayal this repression of emotion was also apparent, as Nikolai Efros recalled, in his economy of gesture and use of the very slightest vocal modulations. Such a style of performance, that critic maintained, was right for Rakitin, an aesthete, elegant in all things, in both word and feeling, beautifully world-weary and condescendingly scornful of life.7 Clearly this suggestion of scarcely perceptible, suppressed emotions was fundamental to Stanislavskii’s conception. He saw Rakitin as a man motivated by a sense of duty and bound by codes of honour so deeply ingrained, according to Soloveva, that they were part of his very being; so deeply indeed that he interpreted the role, without the slightest hint of irony, in the spirit of a chivalrous knight of old.8 His performance won him high praise for the subtlety and apparent authenticity with which he conveyed inner emotions. However, as Marianna Stroeva suggested, he also turned Rakitin into a symbolic figure, in whom the spiritual values of the past were celebrated and preserved.9 This sense of celebration and preservation was emphasized too in the production’s strikingly beautiful and graceful sets, designed by a member of the World of Art group, Mstislav Dobuzhinskii. Those for the first and final acts, which in keeping with Turgenev’s directions were identical, were conceived in the so-called Empire style of the 1840s, a period characterized by symmetry and balance, qualities which were emphasized throughout. They depicted an elegant semi-circular drawingroom; its walls were painted in a delicate dove-grey, with a dark blue flower-patterned cornice, topped by a white stucco ceiling, in the centre of which hung a gilded chandelier. The stage was covered by highlypolished parquet flooring with a rose pattern in its centre. An arched window in the back wall revealed a view of the estate, but this, rather than depicting an unruly countryside, was in the style of the planned symmetry of the parks of St Petersburg.10 Objects, furniture and pictures to the left of this window were a mirror image of those on its right, and

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the V-shaped sitting-room for act three had a similar sense of balance. Such symmetrical features were meant to symbolize the equilibrium and harmony of an idealized vision of the past. But as Soloveva observed, this symmetry, together with the use of semi-circular walls, which reduced the depth of the stage, evoked in addition a feeling of containment.11 The effect was the opposite of that created in many of Stanislavskii’s previous productions, in which the diagonal lines of the walls had extended off-stage to suggest that life continued beyond the sight-lines. Instead the audience were presented with a clearly-defined playing area, as though the characters’ lives were confined to this space alone. This feeling of confinement, however, was not only a feature of the setting. It was also in accord with the actors’ style of performance.12 Stanislavskii’s A Month in the Country came at a time when he was exploring new ideas of acting that would give rise to his famous ‘system’. His focus was shifting away from an emphasis on the externals of a production towards greater concern for an inner, psychological authenticity. The play was eminently suited to his purpose, he maintained, because Turgenev had woven the ‘lace-work of the psychology of love’ with such delicacy and mastery that it demanded a particularly subtle approach.13 He believed, furthermore, that revealing the spiritual and emotional essence of the characters’ inner worlds could not be achieved by the established conventions of gesture and movement, and therefore proposed an almost static mise-en-scène. The actors were to stay seated, almost motionless, for long periods, using what he described as ‘unseen rays of creative will and emotion’, ‘psychological pauses’, eye movements and barely perceptible changes of intonation to convey the characters’ feelings.14 When A Month in the Country opened on 9 December there was almost unanimous critical acclaim for the subtlety and refinement of the actors’ interpretations, with the highest approbation reserved for Stanislavskii’s refined and delicate playing of Rakitin. In My Life in Art, he interpreted this as a ringing endorsement of his new approach.15 Although the first acclaimed and successful production had been at the Aleksandrinskii in January 1879, Stanislavskii’s interpretation did much to establish Turgenev as a dramatist of real standing, and marked a significant development in the history of the MAT. Moreover, his perception that Rakitin was the play’s true protagonist came to be seen as entirely appropriate, not to say the ‘correct’ interpretation for several decades. Indeed by the mid-1970s, although the work was rarely performed, the role of Natalia Petrovna was viewed in serious critical studies as a secondary one.16 Efros, characteristically, broke with this established idea: in 1977 he created what Anatolii Smelianskii described as a ‘concerto for violin and orchestra’, by making her the centre of

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attention,17 a decision that restored the more obvious dramatic focus of Turgenev’s play. He also viewed Natalia Petrovna very differently from Stanislavskii. For Efros it was of central importance that she was a mature woman who, having squandered her youth by marrying a man she did not love, and on the threshold of her thirties is afraid not so much that her life has passed but that it was never lived. She is haunted, moreover, by thoughts of her frightening, controlling dead father and feels under constant watch by the ever-present Rakitin.18 Efros, therefore, saw her love for Beliaev and a desire to relive her life as a revolt against her sense of imprisonment, a bid for liberation from both her past and her present.19 Thus for him the principal conflict was not between nature and nurture, but centred on feelings of entrapment and freedom. Freedom, at least in Natalia Petrovna’s eyes, was personified in Beliaev, but also represented symbolically by his kite, a huge paper creation with a ten-foot-long tail. According to Turgenev’s script its flying occurs only once off stage, at the end of act two, but in Efros’ production, performed as graceful ballet encircling the stage, it became a recurring motif. But such a perception of the student as a representative of freedom was Natalia Petrovna’s alone. It accorded neither with his view of himself nor the image of Beliaev that Efros presented to the spectators. Whereas in 1909 Richard Boleslavskii had been romantic and heroic, in 1977 Oleg Dal played Beliaev as childish and free-spirited, very much in keeping with Rakitin’s view that he is ‘a student like any other’. Mikhail Kozakov’s Rakitin was also very different from more traditional interpretations. He had little of Stanislavskii’s knightly nobility. According to V. Potemkin, with his greying temples he looked older than his 30 years and was played as a man who had seen much, whose sense of duty hung heavily upon him, and who seemed, though he lacked the cynicism of Dr Shpigelskii, to be almost tired of life.20 This accorded with Efros’ view that Rakitin, like Natalia Petrovna, felt that he too might soon have to give ground to the young.21 Stanislavskii had likened the effect of Beliaev on Natalia Petrovna to a passing storm after which the calm of normal life would ensue. But for Efros the turmoil wreaked on her was total - like the impact of an earthquake. He used this image to describe the slow building of tension that would underlie the tempo of his production, and which charted Natalia Petrovna’s vacillating moods, passionate outbursts, and ultimate heart-rending despair.22 As Efros himself argued, this perception of the play as one of fervent emotional turmoil was completely at odds with Stanislavskii’s description of it as ‘a delicate canvas of love which Turgenev wove with such mastery’.23 And he rejected too the idea of containment that had characterized the MAT production, declaring:

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Is Turgenev really that restrained? We have this strange notion about the classics, about Chekhov for example, or about Turgenev. We lace them into tight corsets. But they are full of fire - often raging fires. A Month in the Country was banned by the censors, and now we often view it as though through distilled water. 24 But, although Efros reacted strongly against traditional interpretations, his production had a subtle, poetic quality not seen in his previous work. In the way he evoked the atmosphere of the era, and in his concern for the inner emotional lives of the characters, he was indebted in some ways to the practices of the MAT. The action was accompanied throughout by excerpts from Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony and played with such frequency that the whole production seemed to have been scored and the performances choreographed.25 This created an overall sense of harmony, and at magical moments evoked a subtle tranquillity, so that although there was little in Efros’ setting to suggest the period of the play, the mood that prevailed throughout had something in common with Stanislavskii’s ‘epic quiet of the Russian estates’. In his productions of Chekhov Efros had urged his actors to inject aggression into their performances and to reveal raw emotions, forcing to the surface what might have been seen as sub-text and making it the substance of the work. In 1977 his overall tone was gentler: especially in the first two acts (although this was consistent with his wish to suggest the gradual build-up of an earthquake) feelings were kept in check with the emotional sub-text submerged in a way that was usually seen as more characteristic of Stanislavskii’s earliest productions. Nevertheless, instead of Stanislavskii’s restricted spaces and constrained movement, Efros provided his actors with an open playing area, and their physical expression was assisted in no small degree by the kinetic set designed by his son, Dmitrii Krymov. In contrast to Stanislavskii’s idea of a glass-house protected from the world, Efros’ production was played entirely outdoors, as though the characters lived not apart from nature but within it, an effect enhanced by the costumes, most of which were in similar styles and hues and blended with the background. At the MAT Dobuzhinskii had used subdued colours in the outdoor scenes, in acts two and four, to create an autumnal mood, and thus to symbolize the gentry’s slow decline.26 Krymov, by contrast, using a backdrop of browns, ambers and yellows created the effect of golden sunlight filtering through the foliage of branches in a wood, generating the atmosphere of the torpid heat of summer.27 The stage floor, washed in blue light, was bare, and could be entered from several points. For Potemkin, setting the work in the open, at a point where all the characters

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converged, created the sense that the action took place at a crossroads.28 This was in keeping with the director’s idea that the characters have reached a point of irrevocable change in their lives. Dobuzhinskii had created four separate sets, but Efros ignored Turgenev’s directions for changes and performed the play on just one. This allowed the action to flow freely from one act to the next, and succeeded in translating many of the work’s central themes into a single scenic metaphor. A two-tiered, circular structure was placed centre-stage. It looked like a gazebo or bandstand, and was made of metal shaped into a filigree-like fretwork, incorporating flowers and interlacing curves. Its delicately woven metal was intended perhaps as a reference to Natalia Petrovna’s lines in act one: ‘Have you seen how they make lace? In stifling rooms, without moving from their places … Lace is a beautiful thing but a drink of fresh water on a hot day is far better.’29 In these lines the heroine is clearly rejecting a man-made object of beauty in favour of a natural phenomenon. Similarly, although Krymov’s set was elegant and beautifully constructed, it was artificial and thus out of place in its natural setting. Being made of iron, moreover, it also had a cruel, harsh appearance and when Natalia Petrovna paced within it the metal columns and curves resembled prison bars, providing a visual metaphor of her feelings of entrapment.30 A long, curved, high-backed bench set on a thin metal track running all around the inner edge of the structure, when pushed by the actors revolved through 360º, while the inner floor remained still, turning the entire structure into a fairground carousel, gently whirling around the actors standing within. This contributed to the moments of merriment, and added a further, magical dimension to the gliding and soaring music that accompanied its movements. A pair of small, wheeled coaches, each about four feet in height, were set either side of the stage. Their shafts held no horses, but their high-backed, roofed seats were large enough for the actors to sit in, and the coaches were periodically pulled back and forth into the action. In the coach stage-left sat a model coachman, dressed in a dark coat, white scarf and little top hat. He carried a whip, which Natalia Petrovna at one point took from his hand and idly and playfully whirled. In keeping with the fairground theme, the coachman’s face had the bulbous red nose and exaggerated cheeks of a traditional Petrushka puppet. A sense of carnival fun was also a feature of Lev Bronevoi’s performance as Dr Shpigelskii. His opening speech, about a woman who loves two men at once, may have something in common with the patter of fairground performers outside a balagan, who, to attract an audience, provide a synopsis of the drama to be performed within. Shpigelskii’s role has elements of the grotesque of the Commedia dell’ Arte: like a dottore of that tradition, he engineers a match between a pretty young girl and an old, dull-witted pantalone, Bolshintsov.31 A cynic and a

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clown, he has an exaggeratedly theatrical manner and is a renowned raconteur. As Smelkov remarked, Bronevoi clearly enjoyed the part, playing it like a number in a variety show.32 He exhibited, however, a gleeful cruelty in his treatment of the benighted Bolshintsov, played by K. Glazunov. The latter’s diminutive stature and gangly appearance made for a farcical contrast with a portly Bronevoi, who succeeded therefore, in Potemkin’s view, in being at once comic and frightening.33 In truth in the midst of Efros’ playful and elegant carnival something darker, tragic, and destructive could be felt to be brewing. Indeed, if Stanislavskii’s final setting can be seen to have symbolized resolution, the restoration of calm after a raging storm, the earthquake that gathered in intensity under Efros’ carousel-cum-summer-house was to produce at his conclusion a very different effect. Following Beliaev’s exit, the departing actors addressed their final lines to each other but also to the audience, as if as both performers and characters they were bidding farewell at once to the real spectators and to the tragi-comic spectacle in which they had just played. The actors’ exits signalled the end of all illusion: both Natalia Petrovna’s and that of the drama itself. Contrary to Turgenev’s directions, Natalia Petrovna (Olga Iakovleva) was left alone on stage. As the music built into a roaring crescendo, she, clapping her hands over her ears to block out its sound, span and cavorted as though in agony. In a frenzy of nearmadness, half-falling, half-running, she picked up Beliaev’s abandoned kite. Pressing it to her sobbing face, she moved downstage front. Stagehands appeared with tools and hammers and began to dismantle the set, like workers when a fair is leaving town. As the twisted metal shapes piled up, in Smelianskii’s account, the blows of the hammers sounded like axes in a cherry orchard, as the bewitching circle of Turgenev’s estate was broken and scattered by the wind of history. The crowbars and mallets brought Efros’ production back to the twentieth century with a crashing jolt, to a cacophony of sounds and music like trains in a head-on collision.34 At the front of the stage Iakovleva was approached by one of the stage-hands, who took her kite. She clutched at its tail, which was then pulled through her fingers for its entire length, until she saw, looking down, that her hands held only air. In the closing moments, trapped in her tragic present and bereft of all hope, Natalia Petrovna stood on the same threshold as at the beginning, as though reflecting on her own words in act three: ‘We often cannot understand our past … so how can we possibly answer for the future!!’35 Natalia Petrovna’s future is unknown, but for Efros, with historical hindsight, there was little doubt that it too would end in grief. He, like Stanislavskii, saw A Month in the Country as a prelude to The Cherry Orchard, and in his notes linked Natalia Petrovna’s illusory dreams with the fate of Ranevskaia, whose new life in Paris, as her

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daughter makes clear, is one of misery, in smoky, dismal lodgings in the company of strangers.36 In 1982 Efros directed both A Month in the Country (as Natasha) and The Cherry Orchard in Japan, and rehearsed them back-to-back on the same stage: Turgenev in the morning and Chekhov in the evenings. He found the process intriguing, and remarked: When you see those two plays one after the other, you are both delighted and at the same time horrified. Delighted by their artistic perfection, their greatness. And horrified by a sense of the catastrophic speed at which time moves. 37 Efros set The Cherry Orchard in a graveyard, demonstrating from the outset that the destruction of the orchard was not so much inevitable, as an established fact. This controversial production was interpreted by many as a reflection of the loss of spirituality and culture in Soviet Russia38. Similarly in A Month in the Country Natalia Petrovna’s world was completely destroyed, and her hopes for a new future, effectively Efros’ present, were shown to have been an illusion. In 1909 in the face of radical change in his contemporary world, Stanislavskii’s A Month in the Country had been seen as a plea to guard against the loss of a valued culture and lifestyle. In 1977 Efros drew his production and his dialogue with Stanislavskii to a close by echoing those sentiments and issuing a stark reminder of the effects in his own day of that loss.

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NOTES 1. Inna Solov’eva, ‘Mesiats v derevne’, Teatr, VI, 1976, pp. 101-11. 2. A.D.P. Briggs, ‘Writers and Repertoires, 1800-1850’ in Robert Leach and Victor Borovsky, eds, A History of Russian Theatre, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 86-103 (102-3). It is possible to suggest that Chekhov denied the influence of Turgenev because he intended to parody his predecessor’s work. 3. M. Stroeva, Rezhisserskie iskaniia Stanislavskogo 1898-1917, Nauka, Moscow, 1973, p. 246. Stroeva is quoting Stanislavskii. 4. Konstantin Stanislavskii, ‘Mesiats v derevne’ in Moia zhizn’ v iskusstve, Iskusstvo, Moscow, 1972, pp. 368-74 (368). 5. Solov’eva, note, p. 106. 6. In the process of rehearsal, Stanislavskii broke the elements of the actors’ performances and the production into more readily manageable parts, but suggested that these separate elements should ultimately be melded together and follow a specific pathway. In this manner the performance should move in the direction of a ‘ruling idea’, the concept that underlay the actors’ interpretations, and the production as a whole. For further details, see D. Magashack, ‘Stanislavsky’ in Eric Bentley, ed., The Theory of the Modern Stage, Penguin, London, 1968, pp. 266-9. 7. N. Efros, ‘Turgenev v khudozhestvennom teatre’, Rech’, 12 December, 1909; see. I. Vinogradskaia, Zhizn’i tvorchestvo K. S. Stanislavskogo, VTO, Moscow, 1971, II, p. 215. 8. Solov’eva, pp. 103, 109. 9. Stroeva, p. 252. 10. Leonid Grossman, Teatr Turgeneva, Brokgaus-Efron, St Petersburg, 1924, p. 153. 11. Solov’eva, p. 104. 12. Mstislav Dobuzhinskii, in Vinogradskaia, p. 186. 13. Stanislavskii, p. 368. 14. Loc. cit. Stanislavskii distinguished between a logical pause that shaped the written text and so made it intelligible, and a ‘psychological pause’, which added life to thoughts, as an eloquent silence capable of transmitting the performer’s emotions to an audience. See Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, Constantin Stanislavski: An Actor’s Handbook, Methuen London, 1990. p. 106. Stanislavskii described these unseen rays of communication in terms of ‘ray-emission’ and ‘ray-absorption’. He argued that whereas under normal circumstances these rays were invisible, in moments of heightened emotion or stress they became more clearly defined and perceptible, both to those emitting them and to those absorbing them. This enabled actors therefore to communicate with each other, as well as conveying their inner thoughts to their audiences: see Magarshack, pp. 257-9.

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15. Stanislavskii, p. 130. 16. N. Lordkipanidze, ‘Mesiats v derevne’, Vecherniaia Moskva, 10 October, 1977, p.3. 17. A. Smelianskii, Nashi sobesedniki: russkaia klassicheskaia dramaturgiia na stsene sovetskogo teatra 70-kh godov, Nauka, Moscow, 1977, p. 142. This is also the title of an article on the production by the same critic. See A. Smelianskii, ‘Kontsert dlia skripki s orkestrom’, Teatr, XI, 1978, pp. 42-8. 18. A. Efros, Professiia: rezhisser, Panas, Moscow, 1993, p. 51. 19. Ibid., p. 336. 20. V. Potemkin, ‘Mesiats v dome, gde razbivaiutsia serdtsa’, Vechernii Leningrad, 17 December, 1977, p. 3. 21. A. Efros, pp. 336-7. 22. Ibid., pp. 337-78. 23. Ibid., p. 50. 24. Ibid., pp. 55-6 (His emphasis). Turgenev wrote the play in Paris between 1848 and 1850. First called The Student (ɋɬɭɞɟɧɬ) and then Two Women (Ⱦɜɟ ɠɟɧɳɢɧɵ), it was intended for publication in The Contemporary, but ran into trouble with the censors who demanded changes on both moral and political grounds. The love of a married woman for a man other than her spouse was deemed an unsuitable subject for the Russian stage. Accordingly, Natalia Petrovna was to be turned into a widow and her husband Islaev eliminated. Similarly, several sections from Dr Shpigelskii’s monologues in which he referred to the poverty of his childhood and his hatred of his benefactor, together with passages that expressed his contemptuous and hypocritical attitude towards the gentry, were also to be expunged. Renamed A Month in the Country, the play first appeared in print, with the cuts demanded and some other minor changes, in The Contemporary in 1855, and was later included in an edition of Turgenev’s collected works published in 1869. This edition retained all but one of the censor’s cuts. A complete, authoritative edition of the play, with the passages restored, was not published until 1962. 25. Given that Mozart wrote this symphony in August 1788, some 67 years before Turgenev’s play was first published, it is not my intention to imply that the music per se created a sense of period, but rather that certain of its qualities evoked a similar mood to that manifest in Stanislavskii’s production. 26. Dobuzhinskii took some artistic licence here. Russian autumns tend to be very short and there is little in the script to suggest that the play is set in autumn. On the contrary it appears to be late summer. This is indicated in the following: in act one we learn that Beliaev has taken a vacation post, and it can therefore be assumed that he intends to return to Moscow for the autumn semester; in act two Katia is picking raspberries (a summer fruit); and in this act she, Natalia Petrovna and Rakitin all mention that it is a very hot day.

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27. Mikhail Kozakov, ‘I teatr - eto vsego lish’ samopoznanie’ in Anatolii Smelianskii and Ol’ga Egoshina, eds, Rezhisserskii teatr, Moskovskii khudozhestvennyi teatr, Moscow, 1999, pp. 207-24 (221). 28. Potemkin, p. 3. 29. Ivan Turgenev, Mesiats v derevne, act one, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem: stseny i komedii 1849-1852, Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk, Moscow-Leningrad, 1962, III, p. 46. 30. V. Komissarzhevskii, ‘“Zhenit’ba”’ in Teatr kotoryi liubliu, VTO, Moscow, 1981, pp. 99-104 (104). 31. Nick Worrall, Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Turgenev, Macmillan, London and Basingstoke, 1982, p. 178. 32. Iu. Smelkov, ‘I zhizn’, i slezy, i liubov’’, Moskovskii komsomolets, 14 October, 1977, p. 3. 33. Potemkin, p. 3. 34. Smelianskii, Nashi, pp. 146-7. 35. Turgenev, Mesiats v derevne, act three, p. 94. 36. A. Efros, p. 197. 37. A. Efros, Prodolzhenie teatral’nogo romana, Panas, Moscow, 1993, p. 423. 38. Efros first staged The Cherry Orchard at the Taganka theatre in Moscow in 1975 and the controversy surrounding his interpretation dated from this time.

Tolstoi: Great Men and the Mathematical Mechanics of History Charles Ellis

Introduction: The Use of Mathematical and Scientific Language in Non-scientific Writing In the historical essays that punctuate the narrative of War and Peace1 in the narrative itself and in the epilogues to the work - Tolstoi makes frequent use of models and metaphors drawn from mathematics, particularly from mechanical science. This enquiry examines some of the more conspicuous of these with a view to assessing how effective and illuminating they are, beginning with a brief discussion on a theoretical level about how the use of mathematical and scientific language in nonscientific writing is to be evaluated. Aside from their applicability to the examples from Tolstoi’s writing considered in this essay, the observations that follow do have a wider general validity, and a validity that is not universally honoured by some who introduce the language of mathematics into literary debate.2 First, and it does no harm to state the obvious from time to time, the mathematics in a metaphor have to be right. It is incumbent upon the writer who makes an appeal to mathematics or science to understand what he’s talking about. Following this, and again to state the obvious, the metaphor must also be informative; that is, it must have a genuine correspondence with, and also clarify whatever it is that it seeks to represent; in particular, for a mathematical model to be useful, it must be formulated in fewer or simpler terms than the facts, events or processes it purports to describe. One further commonplace: the reader must be careful not, or at least not without the utmost circumspection, to extend a metaphor beyond the limits of the applicability its author intends for it. Indeed, why confine strictures such as these to the application of scientific metaphor to literary commentary? Have these not simply been special cases of the more general stricture that what is said must make clear good sense and be expressed clearly and from a position of informed competence? So much for ground rules. There now arises a more general problem facing the writer of history, which is this: in view of the immense quantity and diversity of the data that make up the raw material for historical writing, how, if at all, is the writer of history to set about identifying any systematic forces at work within history, any laws of history?

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Strategies of Historical Writing For it to be possible to write a manageable account of history, a writer might consider one or other of two broad strategies. The first of these is one that seeks to reduce the quantity of data to be examined, to be selective of the significant facts and to disregard the rest; the second is one that seeks to reduce the diversity, to attempt in some way to aggregate or homogenize the facts under a limited number of categories. Both of these strategies Tolstoi considers in his account of the Napoleonic campaigns of 1805 to 1812. To the first category of inquiry belong those historians of the 1812 campaign and of Napoleon’s career at large with whom Tolstoi takes explicit issue in War and Peace, and often with no small measure of contempt. Their approach is to extract from the mass of historical data a small subset of those that constitute what they consider to be the significant facts, and which they consider to be sufficient to explain all that matters in the historical process at large. These turn out to be facts concerning a small number of prominent individuals, or ‘great men’ who are generally political and military leaders, and whom these historians see as directing by their will the course of history. The second strategy, that of reducing the diversity of historical phenomena in order to make the data more manageable, more systematizable, follows from the triumphant success of the natural sciences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the natural sciences, the apparent diversity of physical phenomena can be dramatically reduced into a small number of categories - mass, motion, energy ... - in terms of which a limited number of physical laws can be formulated to account for a very wide range of physical events, and a number of writers in Russia and elsewhere assumed that the methodology of the natural sciences could be extended into the field of the social sciences, which here includes history. Consequently they assumed that from the diverse phenomena of human history could be distilled laws of history in terms of a likewise limited number of categories. It is to the first of these strategies, the ‘great men’ view of history, that Tolstoi directs his principal onslaught on the conventional historians of the Napoleonic campaigns. Great Men I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.3 How, Tolstoi asks, can an event so contrary to human reason, the campaign of 1812, in which millions of people perpetrated all kinds of

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unimaginable atrocities, ever have taken place? What were its causes? The historians, ‘in their simple-minded certitude’ (667), he says, tell us that the events of 1812 can be explained in terms of diplomatic and political circumstances involving a small number of prominent individuals, and the personal characteristics of those individuals. This approach, he goes on to say, is scarcely any advance on the approach of ancient writers such as Homer, who underwrite their ‘great men’ view of history in terms of the deities who promote or frustrate the actions of great men, or heroes (1317). The Argive and Trojan poor bloody infantry who are slaughtered in their hundreds before Troy serve only as ciphers who confirm the significance of a choice band of warring heroes, whereas to Tolstoi the foot soldiers do matter. More than that, they constitute the bulk of the material of history. The real question of history, he insists, is what kind of force it is that moves nations (1321). He is seeking a force that moves not just great men, but nations, and this is a question that in Tolstoi’s view the chroniclers of events in political and diplomatic circles and in military high commands do not consider. They content themselves with a concept of power (ɜɥɚɫɬɶ) whereby decisions from on high are converted into mass movements and leave it at that. But they fail to investigate this concept of power, to ask themselves how it is that these decisions are converted, and it is in this that the crux of Tolstoi’s real question lies: What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the collective will of the people transferred to a single person. On what terms is the will of the masses transferred to a single person? On condition that he expresses the will of the whole people. In other words, power is power. Which is to say that power is a word with a meaning we cannot understand (1334). In their selectivity over what are to be considered the essential facts, the historians do not consider what Tolstoi insists to be the real question. It is to him inconceivable that events so momentous as those of 1812 could have proceeded from causes so trifling as the machinations of politicians and diplomats, and in support of this he invokes an ostensibly scientific principle of ‘commensurate force’(‘ɪaɜɧɚɹ ɫɢɥɚ’)4 to demonstrate that the events of 1812 are not accounted for, or at least not sufficiently accounted for in the conventional historical accounts. This principle of commensurate force is enounced in terms of a straightforward appeal to Newtonian mechanics: For component forces to equate with a composite or resultant force, the sum of the components must equal the resultant. This condition is never observed by general writers, and this is why

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they can explain resultant forces only by making allowances for some deficiency in the contributory forces and also an extra, unexplained force affecting the resultant (1322). He subsequently gives this abstract formulation a more concrete form where he considers the various kinds of explanation that might be offered to account for the motion of a railway engine. This passage ends as follows: The only concept capable of explaining the movement of the engine is the concept of a force that equates to the movement observed [i.e. the Maudes’ ‘commensurate force’ ].The only concept capable of explaining the movements of nations is the concept of a force that equates to the entire movement of the nations. Yet we see all manner of forces pressed into the service of this concept by all manner of historians, and they still do not equate to the movement observed. Some use it to identify a force arising spontaneously in heroes, just as the peasant sees the devil in the engine (1325-6). Now it is all very well for Tolstoi to chastise his fellow historical writers for failing to consider this ‘other unexplained force’, this ‘devil in the engine’, but it remains incumbent upon him to attempt to find such a force, and perhaps he does go some way towards achieving this through the simile by which he portrays the chain of events that leads from negotiations at staff headquarters to the defeat at Austerlitz in 1805: The intense activity that had begun that morning in the Emperor’s headquarters and then stimulated all the ensuing activity was like the first turn of the centre wheel in a great tower-clock. [...] Military movement is like the movement of a clock: an impetus, once given, leads inexorably to a particular result while the untouched working parts wait in silent stilless for the action to reach them. [...] In a clock the complex action of countless different wheels works its way out in the even, leisurely movement of hands measuring time; in a similar way the complex action of humanity in those 160,000 Russians and French - all their passions, longings, regrets, humiliation and suffering, their rushings of pride, fear, and enthusiasm - only worked its way out in defeat at the battle of Austerlitz, known as the battle of the three Emperors - the slow tick-tock of the age-old hands on the clock-face of human history (273-4).

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Tolstoi’s simile here is lengthy, if not indeed laboured, but by very virtue of this it serves to illustrate the complexity and inexorability of the process that connects the initial impulse to the recorded outcome, the event recorded by conventional history, in this case the outcome of the battle of Austerlitz as represented by the movement of the hands on the dial, where the initial movement of the centre wheel and the resultant movement of the hands are all that the conventional historian has invited us to observe. Tolstoi instead insists that we look at the clock from the back rather than from the front,5 since it is only from there that we can observe the myriad components of the mechanism that correspond to the proper subject matter of historical enquiry, to a proper appreciation of the historical process, of the movement of nations. Tolstoi has here used the simile to illustrate the interconnectedness, the inevitability, of historical events, but at first sight at the apparent cost of conceding that it is the motion of the first wheel, the decision of a potentate, that sets the whole mechanism in motion. Is he hereby making an appeal to the kind of great men model that elsewhere he seeks to discredit? Not necessarily, since one might here make on Tolstoi’s behalf the mild but telling observations first that it was not Napoleon, Alexander or anyone else that designed the mechanism in the first place, and second that neither is any such person necessarily to be supposed to be in any position to comprehend or direct its workings: When it comes to events in history, so-called great men are nothing but labels attached to events; like real labels, they have the least possible connection with events themselves. Every action they perform, which they take to be selfdetermined and independent, is in an historical sense quite the opposite; it is interconnected with the whole course of history, and predetermined from eternity (671). Here it can only be supposed that the movement of the centre wheel in the tower-clock metaphor, the one that bears a label such as ‘Napoleon’ or ‘Alexander’, has itself been occasioned by a prior motion of a similar mechanism, one predetermined from eternity. Is this not just the sort of thing to be expected from the principle of commensurate force? That is, that the principle of commensurate force will require that for all of the forwards connections and influences the Napoleon-or-Alexander wheel has in the system, there is a corresponding number of backwards connections, or backwards dependencies such as make an emperor, in Tolstoi’s words, a slave of history (670).

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The Mathematical Mechanics of History So, in support of his contention that historical events are not usefully to be considered as being driven by great men, Tolstoi has introduced into the debate the notion of history as an inevitable mechanistic process, as a deterministic process. How comfortable, though, is Tolstoi with this notion? Quite comfortable, it might seem, on the evidence of how he here describes in terms of Newtonian mechanics the collision of the opposing armies at Borodino: At Borodino the armies come together. Neither is destroyed, but immediately after the conflict the Russian army pulls back; this is inevitable, just as a billiard-ball automatically recoils when hit by another ball travelling faster towards it. And just as inevitably, even though the ball of the invading army has discharged its energy in the collision, there is just enough left for it to go trundling on a small distance further (914). Again, this is how he describes the advance of the Napoleonic army upon Moscow: ‘Meanwhile, the very morning after the battle, the French army moved against the Russians, carried along by its own impetus, now accelerating in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from its goal’ (915). These clearly are direct and explicit appeals to Newtonian mechanics, in the first instance to the principle of the conservation of momentum, and in the second to that of the Inverse Square Law concerning gravitational attraction.6 Granted, there are problems in even measuring quantities such as the speed or acceleration with which armies advance or retreat, and it would be fanciful to suppose that the movements Tolstoi describes accord to Newton’s laws of motion with absolute mathematical precision but then again it would be unhelpfully pedantic to condemn him on account of his mathematical metaphors being in this strict sense overspecified. Such quibbles can reasonably be left to one side since it is not the mathematical precision of the laws of motion to which Tolstoi wishes to draw our attention; it is rather, as with the clock tower simile, to the inexorability of the laws that govern the motion of matter and likewise, it may well be, of the movement of nations. In particular, it is to the fact that no man, however supposedly great, can act to subvert the operation of either. With mathematical and scientific illustrations such as these Tolstoi has demonstrated how great men theories of history are in principle incomplete, in that they pay insufficient regard to the principle of commensurate force; and unsatisfactory, in that they do not recognize how the great man is in equal measure acted upon and acting.

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Even if it were to be supposed, contrary to the tower-clock metaphor, that great men were to be considered other than as the slaves of history, and were it to be supposed that history be a mechanistic process, which the metaphor does apparently assert, a large question remains. Can any mathematical model of the historical process be identified by great men who would seek to use it reliably and in good time to connect their own actions and orders with their intended outcomes? Tolstoi, with particular reference to the circumstances of the battlefield, calls into doubt the identifiability and timely usability of any mathematical formula that could describe or predict the course of historical events. Mathematics at Staff HQ and the Mathematics of the Battlefield A minimal requirement for military commanders at Staff HQ must first be that they have to hand a reasonably complete, accurate and up to date understanding of the current state of affairs they are dealing with; and then that given such knowledge, they are in a position to use it in order to formulate and effect the execution of appropriate military strategies. Through the person of Andrei Bolkonskii, though, Tolstoi dismisses any such possibilities in short order: Prince Andrey stood back amazed at what they were all saying. Ideas which he had long held and often thought about during his military service - that there was no such thing as a science of warfare, and never could be [...] struck him now as entirely true and self-evident.‘What kind of theory and science can there be when conditions and circumstances are indeterminate and can never be defined [...]What kind of science can there be when, as in all practical matters, nothing can be defined, and everything depends on an incalculable range of conditions which come together significantly at a moment that no one can know in advance?’ (711) So muses Bolkonskii with a not uncharacteristically sardonic detachment upon the proceedings of a council of war among Russian and Allied commanders as the French army advances upon Moscow in 1812. The council degenerates into a literal Babel of commanders from several countries and their interpreters as they dispute their various versions of the correct science of warfare. Disenchanted by all of this, Bolkonskii opts out of service at staff HQ: ‘Next day at the review the Tsar asked Prince Andrey where he wished to serve, and Bolkonsky wrote himself off for ever in court circles by opting for army service when he could have requested a post in attendance on the Tsar’s person’ (712). Bolkonskii is of course to be mortally wounded at Borodino. ***

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One illustration might suffice here of how the reality of the battlefield confirms Bolkonskii’s ‘incalculable range of conditions [...]’ that renders military science unattainable: this is the episode in which Nikolai Rostov conducts his attack on a band of French dragoons in the skirmish at Ostrovna shortly before Borodino: Rostov couldn’t have said how or why he did it. It was like hunting;7 he did what he did without thinking or weighing things up. [...] He knew the [French dragoons] couldn’t withstand a charge, and he also knew that this was their moment, and it wouldn’t come again if he missed it (722). The success or failure of Rostov’s action owes nothing to the lecture hall of the military academy or to the timetables of the strategists; it depends instead on the instinctive, split-second judgment of someone who is actually taking part in the event at the time. To Nikolai Rostov, the question of success or failure is not to be represented by any wellbehaved function,8 calculable in advance, such as the strategists would pretend to be able to identify; it depends instead upon his own immediate, instinctive recognition, informed by his experience as a hunter, of that one particular, never-to-be-repeated ‘do it now’ moment. And it is this, Tolstoi insists, that is the level at which the events of battle in particular, and historical events in general, must be examined: ‘Only by adopting an infinitely small unit for observation, the differential in history otherwise known as human homogeneity, and perfecting the art of integration (the adding up of infinitesimals) can we have any hope of determining the laws of history’ (912). Now even if Nikolai’s success / failure function and all other such ‘infinitesimals of history’ Tolstoi describes, were to have been nice, continuous, well-behaved functions, the exercise of aggregating, or integrating9 them into an overall ‘function of history’ would be daunting enough, but not, for the sake of argument (but only for the sake of argument), as yet in principle impossible. The difficulty, however, is more severe than that, now that Tolstoi has told us that Nikolai’s function is neither continuous, nor wellbehaved, nor calculable in advance. And here is a function that has to be aggregated with a multitude of other potentially equally ill-behaved functions that to Tolstoi are the only possibly realistic way of representing in mathematical terms the raw material of history. In sum, then, the writing of history has become for Tolstoi the problem of aggregating, or, metaphorically in the terms of the calculus, integrating, a myriad of intractable functions such as Nikolai’s. To Tolstoi, events turn not according to any predetermined timetable; instead they depend critically upon the particularities of the person and the moment in a way that the theoreticians neither recognize nor can hope to predict. Neither does this apply only to military events, as for

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instance where Tolstoi describes how the medical specialists are confounded by the particular case of Natasha Rostova as she suffers her depression and breakdown after her aborted elopement with Anatole Kuragin (645-50). Generalization is just not possible; individual cases are individual cases, and as such need evaluating individually. The equation of history is not so conveniently aggregable as military strategists, medicine men, management consultants or any other systematizers will have us believe as they solemnly and extravagantly invoice us for their services. What Then Remains of the Mathematics of History? Tolstoi has not denied that there is a mathematics of history, but has instead demonstrated that any mathematical model, and in particular any predictive model, is of necessity going to be unattainable. In so doing, he has upheld his rejection of the great men view of history, first by showing that the apparently free actions of great men are no less historically inevitable than are those of anybody else; and then by showing that, even if the actions of great men were to be regarded as free, there is no predictive model of history conceivably available to them by which they can reliably connect in advance their possible actions with their desired consequences. This is the sort of thing that the commentator Gary Saul Morson is getting at where he says that Tolstoi’s historical determinism is ‘an entirely empty truth’.10 Since such historical determinism is so ‘empty’ it might be tempting to suppose that Tolstoi is not altogether at ease with the implications of any more robust and informative historical determinism; but then has he not still forced himself to throw out any kind of free will baby along with the great men bathwater? Maybe not: are the two notions necessarily as mutually exclusive as at first sight they appear to be? Is it possible for Tolstoi’s discussion of history to be interpreted in such a way that need commit him to relinquish neither the free will nor the deterministic view of history? Free Will and Necessity Free will is a quality we can ascribe to the actors in history at the moment at which it is taking place, here and now; Nikolai Rostov at the hunt and in his skirmish with that company of French dragoons, and likewise his sister Natasha at the ball and in her elopement with Kuragin. That is, history as it is enacted from the inside outwards by people who are just getting on with things as they happen rather than trying to intellectualize or analyze the procedure in any wider context. It is no doubt with this sort of thing in mind that Tolstoi celebrates in Nikolai the ‘ordinary man’s common sense’ (534) and Natasha, a character to whom

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Tolstoi is also clearly sympathetic, is scarcely presented as being any intellectual colossus either. Indeed, this inside-outwards, intuitive response to events is so often in Tolstoi’s writing embodied in the actions and insights not only of the intellectually unpretentious Nikolai and Natasha, but also in those of peasants, children, and even animals.11 From this, the inside-outwards perspective, the perspective of Tolstoi the historical novelist, perhaps history is most usefully to be viewed as a collection of disparate acts of individual free will; but looking from the outside inwards, from the viewpoint of Tolstoi the historical essayist, the detached observer with the benefit of hindsight in time, and of distance in space, can begin to recognize the interconnectedness and inevitability of the events under examination. Free will and determinism turn out not so much to be opposed and mutually exclusive assumptions about the nature of history; they turn out more to be the terms appropriate to the perspective from which history is being written, as Tolstoi clearly indicates here: Instead of first defining the actual concepts of freedom and necessity and then arranging living phenomena according to these definitions, history has to define the concepts of free will and necessity in among the vast multiplicity of relevant phenomena that are always dependent on free will and the laws of necessity (1346). This is quite splendid. Concepts such as free will and necessity must be our servants, not our masters. The categories of free will and determinism do not have to be made to correspond to anything identifiable out here in the real world of historical events. They should instead be kept in their proper place below stairs to do duty as terms representing these two complementary strategies, or perspectives, of historical writing. Tolstoi the historical essayist discusses how one should set about trying to understand and record the events and processes of which human history consists, but of course the greater part of War and Peace is given over to the voice of Tolstoi the historical novelist, and it is in his complementary, novelistic, narrative voice that he makes good what he has identified as the inevitable deficiencies in any conventional historical account. When the two perspectives are considered together, Tolstoi’s objection to the great men view can be cast in terms such as these: the mistake these great men make is that they want it both ways; that while they are participating in history from the inside outwards (the narrator’s perspective), as does Nikolai, they imagine themselves at the same time to be spectating upon history from the outside inwards (the essayist’s perspective), from a point of view such even as that of Tolstoi himself, the omniscient narrator, observer and historical commentator.

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Thus far Tolstoi has disposed of the great men view on a theoretical level, largely by means of the quasi-scientific principle of commensurate force, but his appeal to that principle does not necessarily stop there. Great Men and Commensurate Force Revisited The principle of commensurate force apparently provides that the effectiveness of great men in history cannot be supposed to be any greater than that of the lowliest unsung foot-soldier: Strange as it may seem [...] that the slaughter of eighty thousand men at Borodino was not the result of Napoleon’s will (even though he gave the order for battle to commence and other orders for it to continue), and he only thought he was ordering it to happen - strange as this proposition may seem, the same human dignity which tells me that each one of us is neither more nor less of a man than the great Napoleon forces us towards this kind of solution to the problem, and historical research provides abundant justification for it (871). Here he has introduced into the debate a clearly moral dimension. It is ‘human dignity’ also that compels him to acknowledge the principle of commensurate force. However, not everybody shares Tolstoi’s insight. A squadron of Polish Uhlans - light cavalry - in Napoleon’s army is on its way east towards Moscow in 1812. Its commanding officer is anxious to demonstrate to the Emperor their particular enthusiasm to invade enemy territory by attempting at the first possible moment a hazardous crossing of the river Niemen. Regardless of the fact that there is a safely fordable crossing nearby they plunge headlong into the river at the senseless cost of many lives. To this venture Tolstoi reports Napoleon, ‘the little man in the grey coat’, as being variously indifferent, unaware or straightforwardly irritated, and certainly in no way moved or impressed by the foolhardy zeal of his clearly expendable troops (672-4). This unedifying episode suggests that the image of the emperor does in fact confer upon him a status that his actual performance in the conduct of events does not, or, crucially for Tolstoi, should not warrant. Perceptions of Napoleon’s greatness may well have informed the recklessness of these Uhlans and will no doubt elsewhere have informed acts of more purposeful heroism in his name, but it need not be supposed that Napoleon himself is in any way responsible for such perceptions. He has instead become their focus, or their creature, in a way that Abraham Lincoln might well have recognized. Does this episode, as Tolstoi has been insisting all along, say more than that not only after the event, but

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also in the course of the event itself, the great emperor, or the little man in the grey coat, is himself but a label in history? Cutting Napoleon Down to Size Lavrushka is nobody’s fool. Tolstoi describes an incident (787-9) reported by the French Napoleonic historian Thiers concerning how a certain Cossack out foraging for chickens has been taken prisoner by French cavalry and brought before the Emperor himself. Since Napoleon is quite modestly attired at the time, his captive is not aware that he is in so august a presence and is more outspoken in conversation with him than he might otherwise have been. Napoleon, so the story goes, plays along with this. However, the Cossack’s hitherto self-assured demeanour changes dramatically when he is eventually told who it is that he has been talking to all this time: ‘All his loquacity was suddenly stemmed and replaced by a simple-minded and reverent silence. Napoleon gave him a reward and ordered him to be set free [...]’ (789). Whatever may have been any basis in fact of the incident Thiers relates, it is clear to Tolstoi that Thiers has presented it in order to proclaim Napoleon’s modesty, good-natured condescension, magnanimity and awe-inspiring greatness. Tolstoi adopts, adapts and subverts this account of Thiers, portraying the Cossack captive, whom he names Lavrushka and identifies as the orderly of Nikolai Rostov, as drunk, cunning, arch and insolent. Lavrushka recognizes Napoleon immediately and simply strings him along in their conversation, enjoying himself immensely in so doing. It is no doubt to be supposed here that had not Napoleon had so inflated an opinion of himself, he would better have recognized Lavrushka for what he was. Tolstoi, with no obligation to maintain any claim to historical veracity (he has hardly been surreptitious in associating Lavrushka with the unequivocally fictional Nikolai), can simply rework the outline facts of Thiers’ account in his own fictional setting and give them an alternative import, and here he makes a telling point at the expense of Thiers, the conventional historian and hagiographer of Napoleon. The facts do not necessarily speak for themselves.12 At the same time, Tolstoi has shown himself humbled before his own creation Lavrushka who, unlike his authorial creator, can live for the moment and get on with the proper business of a Cossack peasant, which is that of getting drunk, rustling livestock and spinning preposterous yarns (however few of his messmates he may have taken in with his account of his adventure, he has certainly taken in one or both of Thiers and Tolstoi). Perhaps more importantly, Lavrushka is not prey to the Uhlans’ perceptions of the iconic status of Napoleon:

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He knew full well that this was Napoleon, and he was no more intimidated by Napoleon than by that Rostov or the sergeantmajor with his whip, because there was nothing that either of them, sergeant-major or Napoleon, could have taken away from him (788). The principle of commensurate force comes as second nature to Lavrushka and he thereby has Napoleon cut down to size. And will Lavrushka himself care about being the subject of an historiographical tug-of-war between the likes of Thiers and Tolstoi? Of course he won’t. He will simply get on with things with that straightforward peasant mentality that Tolstoi celebrates copiously but can only wistfully observe from a distance. But where Napoleon truly feels himself to be cut down to size is when he surveys the carnage at Borodino. Here at last he is confronted with his own humanity, or at least with what is left of it: ‘For one brief moment personal, human feelings won out over the artificial apology for a life that he had been leading for such a long time. He gave himself up to the agony and death he had seen on the battlefield’ (905). And now in further confirmation of Tolstoi’s thesis that great men are the creatures not the instigators of history, Napoleon is asked by an adjutant whether or not he is to authorize another barrage of murderous fire upon the Russian ranks, and this is how Tolstoi describes what happens: ‘They want more! ...’ Napoleon croaked hoarsely, with a scowl. ‘Give them more.’ As things stood, without any orders from him, what he wanted done was being done, and he carried on issuing instructions simply because he thought it was expected of him. And back he went once again into his old world of artificiality with its fantasies of greatness, and again (like a horse on a treadmill that thinks it’s doing something for itself) he humbly resumed the cruel, unhappy, burdensome, inhuman role that was his destiny (905). The scene before him is not epic and glorious in the way that the traditional historians would have it be. It is instead sordid and revolting, as the great emperor himself is at last compelled to recognize. It differs not in kind but only in scale from the aftermath some 50 years later of the grubby delusions entertained in Napoleon’s image by that deranged student in that squalid bedsit in Dostoevskii’s St Petersburg. So for Napoleon, so for Raskolnikov, and so for the rest of us. Tolstoi’s objection to the the notion of there being ‘great men’ in history is only partially secured by his appeal to the quasi-scientific principle of

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commensurate force. His objection, though, is reinforced by the moral argument he advances, which is effectively that commensurate force is a principle that should hold but doesn’t always, and that it is up to us not to follow the Polish Uhlans but instead to follow Lavrushka’s example. It is up to us to make sure that the principle of commensurate force does hold in order that the pretensions to grandeur of the likes of Napoleon remain the bragadoccio of the corporals’ mess that they properly are. This is perhaps the greater force of Tolstoi’s insight. There is no person or personality, real or imaginary, in whose name anyone should be prepared to attempt unnecessarily hazardous river crossings on horseback, cleave the skull of a St Petersburg pawnbroker or even shunt a Boeing 767 into an office block. Any possible shortcomings in his evaluation of the historical process notwithstanding, Tolstoi still speaks with a clarity that might encourage us to participate in the particular bit of history we accidentally inhabit in a way that is cut down to human size, more modest and less in thrall to any strident airy philosophical abstractions.

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NOTES 1. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, translated by A.D.P. Briggs, Penguin Red Classics, London, 2006. Quotations from this translation are identified by page numbers in brackets. 2. See for instance Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science, Profile, London, 1998, in which the American professor of physics Alan Sokal eloquently and decisively exposes the charlatanry of much of what these days is peddled as scientific metaphor in post-modern literary criticism, in which the uncritical, unwary or uninformed reader is deceived into supposing that an otherwise threadbare or meaningless discourse is underwritten by a precise mathematical rigour. 3. From a personal letter of 4 April 1864 by Abraham Lincoln. See Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, VII, Rutgers University Press, Springfield, ILL., 1953, p. 281. 4. ‘Commensurate force’: this is the term used in the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation, OUP, 1983. The Briggs translation avoids this quasi-technical term but the Maudes’ term is used here for the sake of brevity and convenience. 5. This is not altogether relevant, but then again perhaps not altogether irrelevant, but the computer scientist and celebrated code-breaker Alan Turing would ask interviewees for posts at GCHQ in Cheltenham, ‘which way round do the hands on a clock turn?’ ‘Clockwise’, they would tend to say. ‘Not if you’re the clock, they don’t’, he would point out. Tolstoi could well have applauded this on Turing’s part. It would at least be nice to think so. 6. Tolstoi also invokes the inverse square law as he describes Nikolai Rostov’s hesitant journey back home to Otradnoe (535). 7. See the memorable hunt scene: 539-56. 8. By ‘well-behaved’ here is meant that the mathematical function of battlefield events the relationship through time between orders given and their battlefield outcomes - that the strategists assume is such that any small discrepancies in system inputs (e.g. imperfect information or imperfect timing) will lead to no more than small discrepancies in system outputs, i.e. battlefield outcomes. In particular here, such a model does not allow, nor can possibly cater for the sharp discontinuity represented by the ‘do it now’ moment that confronts Nikolai. 9. Bearing in mind the strictures outlined in section one above, Tolstoi’s use of the metaphor of integration, rather than one of a broader but vaguer notion of aggregation, is something of an overspecification in that the mathematics it invokes go beyond, or at least do not obviously remain within, the confines of the material under consideration. Still, the metaphor of the integral calculus stands and is valuable in that it throws into sharp focus Tolstoi’s insistence that history can only properly be appreciated at the atomic, the infinitesimal, the ‘Nikolai-function’ level of disaggregation. For a broader discussion of this issue, see Jeff Love, The Overcoming of History in ‘War and Peace’, Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2004, chapter two, especially p.76.

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10. G.S. Morson, Hidden in Plain View, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1987, p. 92. 11. See for instance the native savvy of the peasant convict Plato Karataev (e.g. 107981) or of the Cossack Lavrushka (see below); how the infant Petia Rostov intuits that his sister Natasha has fallen in love with ‘that fat man with the glasses’ (i.e. Pierre Bezukhov: 249); and the awareness of Tsar Alexander’s horse before the engagement at Austerlitz (296), and how readily Plato Karataev’s dog insinuates itself into the company of a new owner after Karataev’s execution (1184-5). 12. On the question of story-telling as a whole in Tolstoi’s work see W. Gareth Jones, A Man Speaking to Men: The Narratives of ‘War and Peace’ in Harold Bloom, ed., Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Chelsea House Publishers, New York and Philadelphia, 1988.

Post-War British Month(s) in the Country Cynthia Marsh In the last 60 years Turgenev has maintained a presence on the British stage through his play A Month in the Country and an adaptation of his novel, Fathers and Children. This discussion of his play in English performance is based in a research project on which I am currently engaged devoted to the study of Russian theatre in the British repertoire 1945-2005.1 What is the reception of this play in Britain and what does it indicate about Russian theatre’s post-war participation in the British repertoire? Firstly, two points should be made: one a qualification about Turgenev, the other a rationale for this approach to his work. Turgenev’s drama occupies a relatively small place in the total body of his work and, possibly, in the international interest in him as a writer. This view prevails despite the fact that he composed a number of plays, and these were among his first literary enterprises. However, his drama seems to have left an indelible trace in his prose writing. The second point is about the work of British Slavists who all have much in common as ambassadors for Russian culture and whose work has been enormously enriched by Richard Peace.2 However, I should like to raise a general question: do we give sufficient consideration to the fact that for the most part we write in English on Russian literary matters presumably for an English-speaking audience? In the light of this question, aspects of this project about translation and transfer between cultures will be pertinent to a broad spectrum of Slavist scholarship, not simply to those Slavists interested in Russian theatre abroad. In ways perhaps that printed prose is not, drama, as a performative art, is open to interpretation, reception and discussion in a very public manner. Such open discussion in its turn raises comment which is equally pertinent to the reception of Turgenev’s stories and novels. The concept of translated theatre seems to present itself as an easy option. However, even a cursory examination soon demonstrates the deceptiveness of this enticing simplicity. Quickly the subject becomes like dynamite. Theoretical areas such as translation controversy, transcultural complexity, national identity, ethnicity, the history of the relations between Britain and Russia and, not least, theories of influence, perception and reception - are quickly on the agenda. An initial quest in the broad project was to discover why in British minds Russia is pictured as an endless forest of birch trees with the odd opening containing an aristocratic country estate where the inhabitants drink endless tea (admittedly in strange glasses), wear flowing skirts and lace decorated blouses or white linen jackets (the kind beloved of country vicars a generation or three ago) and mull (endlessly) over the future of Russia

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and their own mortality. It is a myth which has had a formative influence on British perceptions of Russian culture. The period about which he wrote and the gentry of whom he wrote have made Turgenev implicitly germane to this perception. As far as translation controversy is concerned, a first complicating factor derives from our position as host culture: English as the target language carries a multitude of implications within itself. These days the word England is almost a political statement as opposed to Britain and in this post-colonial world the English language has fragmented into many different variants. For the majority of us our target language is British English. The English of England is now too narrow, but it was its standards which have probably influenced the way we have viewed Russian theatre since the Second World War. And even British English as a term already carries many variants within itself. Jatinder Verma is founder and artistic director of Tara Arts, a company dedicated to the development and exploration of British Asian theatre with a notable production of Gogol’s The Government Inspector to its credit. A defining feature of Tara Arts productions is their use of texts from the scripted theatre of cultures other than the domestic British. Verma called his approach ‘Binglish’, a gloss on the term Singlish for Singaporean English. He uses this term to capture the ambivalence of Asian and black life in modern Britain which is regarded as ‘not quite English’, but at the same time striving to ‘be English’.3 His theatre in this respect is a challenge to the unthinking conventions of the British English stage. I wonder if we should develop a term ‘Tringlish’ to accommodate an English translated from other cultures. As this entire project on Russian theatre in the British repertoire shows, translated English raises many issues and one of its aims is to alert practitioners and spectators alike to its distinctive properties. Along with the transfer of the text into the target language go the other implications of translation. For example, not so long ago it was accepted that translation is an act of betrayal and diminution of worth; a recent film has made the notion ‘lost in translation’ into a catchphrase. But as theorists of translation, such as Susan Bassnett, have begun to point out, translation offers many gains: translation can ensure survival, and in its best aspects can become a form of new writing offering a mode of ‘transcreation’.4 Equally, though, the post-colonial experience has taught us that translation can act as a form of censorship, as a means of containment and assertion of supremacy of the host culture. This censorship may be as anodyne as the situation where only works congenial to the host culture are translated, or as explosive as the deliberate rewriting of uncongenial works. These are uncomfortable issues. While they can be dismissed as appropriate only to the postcolonial situation, there are a number of echoes to be found in the selective way the British stage has assimilated its Russian counterpart.

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Yet others see that translators quickly become adapters. This last word has had an ambivalent career. Claims were made for recognition of the literal translator, often discounted in theatre credits, as opposed to the ‘adapter’. Often in recent years this latter role has been taken by a writer or playwright, already well known in the theatre. Such adaptors have been vilified for claiming ground that is not strictly their own, while Stephen Mulrine, a well known translator of Russian theatre, was taken aback to discover that the BBC’s standard contract, for example, paid adapters a higher fee than it did translators.5 However, there are several ways of regarding this issue. Theatre is a performance art and writing a play for performance requires professional skills that are not within the remit of many translators. Theatre has to be a commercial enterprise and if a successful dramatist with a ‘name’ can not only provide a skilful play but also attract an audience then that must be welcomed. Much is made of the place occupied by the adapter’s name on the published script. For example, Brian Friel added ‘After Turgenev’ as a subtitle to his version of A Month in the Country.6 Firstly, this subtitle can be seen as a kind of negotiated settlement from Friel’s point of view: it puts his version as a self-standing text in dialogue with Turgenev’s. It indicates that Friel is speaking through his version to some degree. Secondly, others thought this self-assertion the height of vulgarity and that all the credit should go to Turgenev. However, it can also be seen as an act of humility: Friel acknowledges the source of his work so as to enhance awareness of what is his own original contribution. It is at this point that the threshold as to whether the adaptation is or is not an original piece of work is reached. Transferring a product, in our case a play script for performance, from one culture to another engages an extremely complex process. Patrice Pavis famously took the model of the hourglass to represent this process of transfer.7 The multilayering in both bowls of the hourglass shows the multiplicity of considerations and the number of practitioners involved. Pavis repeatedly uses the metaphor ‘to flow’ in relation to the sand (standing for the dramatic text) passing between the two bowls of the hourglass. Rather than ‘flow’, in my view such a process of transfer between cultures is one of upheaval and distortion. While we consciously mirror the original text in the transfer from one culture to another, the process of assimilation into a host culture is often an uncomfortable, makeshift affair, exhibiting slippage and appropriation to the host culture’s concerns. This process is referred to as acculturation: it occurs whenever two cultures come into contact with one another, indicating the malleability and volatility of culture, which we too often take for an established and unchangeable entity, bound by tradition and history. There seems to be a desirability, in this process of acculturation, for the resulting translated and adapted text to be devoid of hostility and threat on the one hand, and to promote unity and acceptance on the other. It

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implies the abandonment of alien aspects of the source culture, and the aspiration openly to adopt the target culture.8 Other figures also participate in the process of adaptation and acculturation, and these are all those who have a role in creating the performance in the host culture, the directors, designers, technicians, performers and ultimately, of course, the audience. Notably very few, if any, of these participants will have knowledge of the source language, and at best only a ‘received’ knowledge of the source culture. These are the intermediaries who contribute to the multi-layeredness and complexity of the transition process. Sirkku Aaltonen takes a more extreme view. She argues that translation is mostly a self-serving exercise in which cultures make use of the ‘foreign’ to mirror their own concerns, and that far from achieving intercultural harmony, the ‘other’ or the alien is perceived as a threat, is undermined or even removed. Acculturation is also the key here, but for a different purpose. In other words, translation practices consciously adapt the foreign to the sociocultural discourse and needs of the host culture.9 So a key question to ask of any play (or indeed a novel) is what happens in the transition from a source (Russian) culture to host (British) culture. There is no doubt British culture already has an ingrained view of Russia and Russian culture. Geographically one of our near neighbours, Russia is alluring in its strangeness, seemingly European but tangibly different. Russia’s national identity has long been formed for the British. In Renaissance England, references in Shakespeare imply Russians were barbarians and inhabited a land of endless night;10 they were anthropomorphized into bears. These are all clichés we have never quite lost. And here arise problems of ethnicity and cultural difference. This issue in modern theatre and in modern theory has mostly been tackled across vastly different cultural divides. The meeting of cultures is viewed from a global perspective and processes such as appropriation, colonization, conflict and acculturation between vastly different cultural entities are more obviously present for examination. However, from this global perspective Britain and Russia have a lot in common: their common European experience, for example. This proximity, though, has rarely been demonstrated in their historical relationship whether considered separately or intertwined. Suddenly we are contemplating modern Russian and British history and political relations. Influence, reception and perception operate in complicated ways. Analysis of the influence of one writer upon another is a minefield: intertextuality has demonstrated the shallowness of some of the judgements that have been made, and yet this is one of the main ways in which stereotypes about Russian theatre in Britain have been formed. Chekhov is the Russian standard for the British stage: he elicits the most reference in review material of translated Russian performance. Equally,

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reception and perception are rarely excavated for the complexity they seem to mask. For example, the last two centuries of Russian theatre are received in very different ways. There is nostalgia and respect for the nineteenth century; a sceptical almost unwilling acceptance of twentiethcentury experimentation muddied by the conformity perceived at the heart of socialist realism. These perceptions, however, do not attach only to theatre. Reception of theatre is driven by a hierarchical perception of Russian cultural manifestations, which probably places novels at the top of the scale along with music, and then closely followed by theatre and opera, with ballet and then poetry coming some way behind. So perception of nineteenth-century Russian theatre in Britain is imprinted with its view of Chekhov and driven by the British / English love affair with the Russian novel, as our discussion of Turgenev will show. The twentieth century is inevitably politicized, and the experimentation of the first three decades seen as an irrevocable loss that has still to be recaptured. Reception is coloured by the dissident novelists and exiled composers, and poetry is given a higher accolade even than theatre. A further explanation for the relatively low ranking of twentieth-century theatre relates to the public nature of the medium and the excessively strict controls that were placed upon it and its practitioners in the Soviet period, undoubtedly affecting creativity and international significance. So into this web of complexity we shall try to ‘place’ Turgenev as dramatist performed in Britain. The period 1945-2005 was identified largely because data is more readily available than in the first half of the century, and 60 years provides a good spread of time for sufficient variation to be revealed. One of the main goals of the survey is to analyze Russian writers other than Chekhov, partly because Chekhov’s presence has already been extensively covered, and partly because his influence has been apparently all-pervading.11 As well as demonstrating how significant a role writers other than Chekhov have played, stripping down to its bare essentials the extensive review material on Russian theatre helps to identify the prevailing view of Chekhov. Analysis of the nineteenth-century writers represented on our stage threw up some startling and not so startling data. The dominant figure, and this we might expect, is Gogol with 52 or so productions to his credit (compare at least 250 for Chekhov). As I write, the database is still being worked on. It cannot ever be a full survey as not all theatre productions are recorded, and there are difficult areas of distinction among professional, semi-professional and amateur. But there is sufficient material for strong indices to have begun to emerge. The second figure in the list may surprise us since he is not a dramatist at all. Dostoevskii has at least 35 productions to his credit, and then third comes Turgenev with about 32, followed by Ostrovskii and Tolstoi on level pegging at around 20. This ‘league table’ makes clear the significance of Turgenev’s contribution.

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There are some qualifications on these figures: Gogol’s 52 represents 38 productions of The Government Inspector, and two of Marriage and the rest (12) are adaptations of his prose; the figure for Turgenev is 27 productions of A Month in the Country, one of A Provincial Gentlewoman (ɉɪɨɜɢɧɰɢɚɥɤɚ) and two of A Poor Gentleman (ɇɚɯɥɟɛɧɢɤ - re-titled to Fortune’s Fool) and two productions of the same adaptation of his novel Fathers and Children.12 The 35 productions ascribed to Dostoevskii are, of course, not plays but adaptations from his novels and stories. So Gogol and Turgenev head the list as dramatists (38 and 27 respectively) with Dostoevskii outscoring Turgenev and nearly Gogol. There are obviously a number of implications for the perception of Russian culture as a whole here, but space is at a premium and the focus of my attention must now be Turgenev. Clearly, A Month in the Country forged Turgenev’s stage reputation, and probably generated the adaptation of Fathers and Children by Brian Friel (the only novel by Turgenev to have been staged). So Turgenev’s stage presence rests on just three items, and principally on A Month in the Country. In the above hierarchy of artistic forms, it is probably arguable that Turgenev’s reputation as prose writer forged his reputation and created the interest in the play. It is notable that a different public has accessed Turgenev’s play through ballet: the version of A Month in the Country, set to the music of Chopin and choreographed by Sir Frederick Ashton, has become a staple of the British dance repertoire. Absence of both Russian choreography and Russian music is significant, given the perceived power of both these arts in Russia. Somehow the play lent itself to nonRussian music (Chopin) and to English dance technique as opposed to Russian sources. This appropriation may indicate some characteristics of the British / English perception of Turgenev as writer. Theatre reviews are not the best of materials on which to make judgements. However, they contain in a focussed and often magnified form the weaknesses of any literary critical material: cultural prejudice, political bias (often determined by the newspaper or journal in which the review is published) which together raise the issues of nationalism, transcultural complexity and ethnicity referred to earlier. There is obsession with particular issues, such as translation and national style; and the date of the review is crucial as opinion is affected by the state of Russo-British relations of the day. It is also worth noting the small number of critics who write the reviews (being a theatre critic can it, seems, encourage longevity!) and they are frequently male. The fact that theatre critics rarely know Russian, or indeed much about Russian culture, is not the drawback it may first appear. In fact, for the purposes of the survey this lack is often a strong point: reviewers are barometers of general British perception; sometimes, on the other hand, they create perceptions, recycling myths and reinforcing stereotypes. It is also

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frequently important to date a review and locate it historically within the theatrical preoccupations of the time. A survey of the review material on A Month on the Country foregrounds the following points: British views of Russians; British views on nineteenth-century Russians; Turgenev and Chekhov; lack of awareness of irony and of the importance of the piece as a play as opposed to a novel; reinterpretations in the light of changing RussoBritish relations and, finally, translation issues. Turgenev is a representative figure of the nineteenth century without hitting either of the statistical extremes in our survey nor by being present more because of his prose works than his plays. In the case of A Month in the Country, the review material is produced by and large by 12 of the 28 productions; other productions were sparsely reviewed or the review material is not traceable. In the 1940s, the British / English national perception of Russian plays in general was as ‘gloomy’ and was probably tainted by the ‘ideological’ impact of Soviet theatre.13 When the Michel St Denis production of A Month in the Country came in 1949, reviewers found it ‘poor Turgenev’,14 according, that is, to their pre-conceived notion of Turgenev. There was wistful reference to a pre-war production of the Emlyn Williams’ version,15 reflecting perhaps a general nostalgia of the period for other aspects of pre-war Britain and pre-Soviet Russia. The central role in A Month in the Country, Natalia Petrovna, has occasionally been used as a vehicle for a star performer. It has attracted actresses as varied as Ingrid Bergman (1965), Dorothy Tutin (1974/5), Prunella Scales (1979) and Helen Mirren (1994), of whom Bergman and Mirren created the greatest sensations, but interestingly assessment of them is polarized. Bergman was commented upon for being ‘statuesquely beautiful and glacially controlled’,16 while Mirren found sex and passion in Natalia Petrovna.17 Some reviewers found Natalia Petrovna a perfect role for Bergman, inappropriately seeing her Scandinavian ‘glaciality’ (another national myth?) as a good match for these ‘melancholy ineffectual Russians’18 but disliked her struggling with her accented English!19 There is also a sense here, under the impact of the Cold War, that the blame for Russia’s perceived contemporary troubles should be laid on the effete Russian gentry of a preceding era. By 1994 we were viewing a different Russia and could therefore perhaps find a different Turgenev. Sheridan Morley thought the company, and especially Mirren, had got it ‘dead right at last’,20 while another reviewer found the play a ‘warning on the dangers of sexual passion’.21 Our view of the Russians was evidently changing, both culturally and politically, in no small way also reflecting the immense sea change in British attitudes to women and sex in the same period. Turgenev is rarely compared with anyone other than Chekhov, indicating perhaps the hold that Chekhov has on our imagination of what

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Russian theatre is. A selection of these comparisons is as follows: ‘A Month in the Country is the one that isn’t by Chekhov’;22 ‘it’s the best Chekhov play that Chekhov never wrote’;23 Turgenev ‘anticipates Chekhov’ [!];24 ‘influenced Chekhov’;25 ‘predates Chekhov’;26 A Month in the Country is a ‘flawed test run for Chekhov’;27 ‘a Chekhovian play’ [!];28 ‘diluted Chekhov’;29 ‘Chekhovian in style’;30 ‘proto-Chekhovian’;31 it had ‘pre-echoes of the Chekhovian’.32 However, these comments seem to me to indicate, if anything, misunderstanding of Chekhov. Chekhov spends a great deal of time ironizing Turgenev, beginning with his unflattering portrait of him in his mischievously named Trigorin of The Seagull. Critics report at length on the ‘ennui’,33 ‘languor’,34 ‘torpor’35 of life on the country estate as viewed in translated Russian theatre, and are even surprised when a production does not match their expectation, so engrained has the myth become. The following view from 1981 is preglasnost, still moulded by Cold War perceptions of Russia as inhospitable and whose past has somehow been lost: ‘As cold as the wind blowing off the Russian steppes, the National Theatre’s sparse gaunt production of A Month in the Country does not easily conjure up Turgenev’s hothouse atmosphere of the nineteenth century or the summer in which it is set’.36 It takes the more astute critic to point out that these are in fact nineteenth-century Russians on holiday, though in A Month in the Country the holiday implications of the title seem deliberately ambivalent. Islaev, the husband appears to be working hard, while Natalia Petrovna, the wife, has still to organize the household and the education of her ward and her son, employing and overseeing a tutor to occupy them. So whose holiday ‘month in the country’ is it? It could be the student Beliaev’s: but he is employed as tutor and hardly on holiday. Nor is he aristocratic. The obligatory doctor, noted by several critics as common to Turgenev and Chekhov,37 seems also to be at leisure, or in Turgenev’s A Month in the Country (and in Chekhov’s Seagull and Three Sisters), is he not retired? Surely, this is a deserved leisure. So the stereotype of permanently bored, leisured and aristocratic Russians on their estates seems to have little foundation, though the idea is repeated endlessly. Along with this notion of leisure go false conceptions of the grandeur of these estates. Only in the most recent productions has a sense of the dilapidation of the Russian countryside been perceived, perhaps stimulated by the new awareness of the material decay of Russian economic life in the 1990s. The 1994 production provoked comment on the ‘peeling verandah’ in the set by Haydn Griffin.38 And by the 1998 RSC production there is a reference to the ‘tottering tarnished gentry’.39 The point is that many of these estates were difficult to maintain, not least because of their distance from the hubs of civilization, but also due to the comparative poverty of the owners

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inhabiting the stagnant economy in the heyday of the Russian gentry. Whether they became the ‘caged confines’40 and ‘inescapable environments’41 of British perception, is a debatable question. This ‘tottering tarnished gentry’ often had nowhere else to go. If it was not appreciated in the immediate post-war ‘gloom’ ridden perceptions of Russian culture, the comedy of A Month in the Country was later generally welcomed with delighted surprise. The imposition of the British English languorous Chekhov on to Turgenev meant that the comedy (as from time to time in Chekhov plays) was not always perceived. And one or two critics noted the British lack of attention to the ironies of style in the architecture of Turgenev’s form. The ending of A Month in the Country, for example, plays a melody on the theme of precipitate departure and escape (so much for caged environments): the departure of Beliaev is mirrored in the rapid escape of other characters such as Rakitin, or by contrasting pairing in marriage: Lizaveta and the Doctor, and the unfortunate Vera.42 There are only one or two comments on the nature of A Month in the Country as performance. One indicates an understanding of how dangerous Turgenev’s play must have seemed to mid-nineteenth-century Russia, where political views were being aired in the public forum of a theatre,43 but that sense of risk is largely lost on British audiences. The other is a reference to the performative texture of the piece as a whole: ‘there is [sic] in fact two plays. An inner one acted out among the characters and an outer one addressed to the audience in confidential monologue’.44 Better awareness of these aspects could well bring new interpretations of A Month in the Country. Translation is a key issue for Turgenev, perhaps even more so than for some of the other nineteenth-century writers. Is this because he is better known to us as a prose writer, whose style is elegant, eloquent and precise? He was already established as a short story writer before his success at home and abroad as a prose writer, admired for the clarity of his language and the structure of his novels. He set new standards for playwriting by transposing, in contrast to Gogol, the language of the educated gentry class to the stage. Five main translators of Turgenev’s play stand out in this period. Chronologically, they are: Constance Garnett, Emlyn Williams, Isaiah Berlin, Richard Freeborn and Brian Friel.45 Among this group are both translators and adapters, professional translators and professional dramatists, and Slavist scholars. What is clear is that their responsibility is enormous, though it is not always generally recognized as such in the British theatre. Garnett, a prolific translator of Russian literature, whose translation was used in the 1949 production, is unfavourably compared with Williams for her ‘stilted’ version which left ‘the audience in occasional doubt as to what reaction is expected of it’.46 I suspect, though, this sentiment is also a reflection of theatrical thinking at that time that there was only somehow one

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interpretation to be reached. It may also reflect the skills required when translating for the stage as opposed to those for the printed page (to be read rather than performed). Emlyn Williams is a dramatist rather than a translator but no literal translator was credited in his version. In 1965 Bergman dominated the reviews of the production at the Yvonne Arnaud theatre, also the new theatre’s opening night. Her delivery of Williams’ translation seemed ‘hesitant’47 and she ‘clothes herself in the rhythms of English speech, but some effort is inevitably discernible’,48 and was too ‘embarrassed by the foreign language to be capable of any subtlety whatever’,49 perhaps leaving the impact of Williams’ adaptation in the shade. Isaiah Berlin was a well known Slavist scholar. His translation was commissioned for the 1981 production at the National Theatre: it was praised on the one hand as ‘concise’ and ‘transmitting the elegance of the hothouse’50 and, on another, was also ‘unobtrusive, natural’,51 perhaps underscoring his particular view of the languorous Russians in the play, whose empty lives and unrequited love conformed to the existing stereotype. To other ears, Berlin ‘conveyed the nuances of class antagonisms I had not noticed so heavily emphasized before’, though this reviewer also found the translation ‘precise and rather formal’.52 The two latest versions, a translation by the Slavist scholar Richard Freeborn and an adaptation by Brian Friel (no literal translator credited), seem to have been landmarks in presenting a different Turgenev. Freeborn caught the contrasts of country life, its ‘country listlessness and raving outbursts’53 and ‘twists the more melodramatic elements for comic effect while maintaining the undercurrent of tragedy. We end up with a play which is poignant and bitter - but extremely funny’.54 Due to the quality of the translation, were we at last being given an opportunity to understand some of the complexity of this play? Here it is clear that, for the comedy of contrasts to emerge, the translation was crucial. Moreover, the socially relevant and indicative role of the doctor was perceived for the first time in this production: The most overt social criticism comes in a remarkable outburst from the doctor, who reveals his cynicism and envy at the end of his brutally matter-of-fact wooing of Lizaveta. The mask of geniality and concern slips to uncover anger at his poor childhood and the rich ladies he must attend.55 Despite its controversy, Friel’s version broached some of the deeper significance not only of this text but of the whole business of translocation, making audiences aware, as was indicated earlier, of the mechanics of the translation of a play into English. In Friel’s version the idiom is Irish. Those reviewers who managed to swallow their indignation at Friel’s colonization to the Irish of this play saw that Friel

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had liberated the play from the prevailing English view of its Russianness. Many hated the modernity of the translation, rejecting phrases like ‘for Christ’s sake’ or ‘who the hell does he think he is’.56 As also suggested above Friel had the humility, some say the vulgarity, to write ‘After Turgenev’ on the cover of the programme. One reviewer, Susannah Clapp, saw that Friel was pointing up exactly the absurdity of the British English view of Turgenev’s Russia and wrote perceptively: ‘This is the Russia of the theatrical mind, a place which is so pleasant to look at - its lightness dappled with shades as if touched by the branches of a metaphysical silver birch - that can make frustration and desperation look like graceful melancholy’.57 In this quotation the influence of translation theory can be felt. In this post-colonial age the original work, the source text, is not sacred and can be transcreated as well as translated. Furthermore it is tacitly agreed that each nation should question the cultural picture it has formed of other nations, and the opinions it inscribes into texts in their acculturation to the host culture. Perhaps we should reassert ‘gained’, rather than ‘lost’, in translation? But Clapp has also offered one answer to the question posed at the beginning of this study and to another concerning the prominence of stereotype in the formation of British views of nineteenth-century Russians. The birch trees, and estates peopled by characters costumed in the subfuscian dress of nineteenthcentury English aristocracy is an illusion fostered by the theatre. Its danger is that it turns to dismissible languor or ennui the genuine despair of the people who inhabit this locus, whether created by Turgenev, Chekhov or any nineteenth-century Russian writer. So a survey of reviews of this Turgenev play indicates that the British stereotypical concept of the nineteenth-century Russian country estate as a locus for languorous boredom needs revision. We fail to notice the irony, are surprised by the comedy, do not appreciate that these are some Russians on holiday amidst the continuing hard work of the estate holders both male and female. We continue to regard languorous leisure as the dominant component of nineteenth-century Russian life. We seem mostly to deny the sex and passion potential (is that a British English attitude too?). There is here, too, a paradox of nostalgia and blame: mid-twentieth- century Russia was hostile to Britain both because of its culture and of its status as enemy in the Cold War. Although we may have a strong nostalgia for these delightfully hot summers on a Russian landed estate there is an uneasy feeling that some of Russia’s contemporary problems may well have originated there too. Turgenev may have ‘pre-echoed’ (whatever that means) Chekhov in many ways, but such blame may well explain the irritation that Chekhov’s personages still inflict some 40 years on from Turgenev. Perhaps, above all, we need to learn to distinguish our Turgenev

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particularly from our Chekhov, and not to seek the Chekhovian in most other nineteenth-century Russian dramatists.

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NOTES 1. Due to be published, as Translated Russian Theatre in Post-War Britain, Edwin Mellen, 2008-9. The book presents an analysis of the reception of translated theatre and contains an index of productions. 2. I am particularly grateful to Richard Peace for his study of Chekhov’s plays (Chekhov: A Study of the Four Major Plays, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1983) which has remained a bible of reference for me and generations of students. 3. Jatinder Verma, ‘The Challenge of Binglish: Analysing Multi-Cultural Productions’in Patrick Campbell, ed., Analysing Performance, Manchester University Press, 1996, pp. 193-202 (194). His composite term - ‘Binglish’ - also reminds of ‘Bollywood’, the colloquial name for the massive Indian film industry dedicated to turning out hundreds of films annually in a popular Asian style with all the glamour of an erstwhile Hollywood. 4. I first came across this term in Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira, ‘Liberating Calibans. Readings of Antropofagia and Haroldo de Campos’ Poetics of Transcreation’, in Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, eds, Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, Routledge, London, 1999, pp. 95-113. 5. Stephen Mulrine, ‘“A Man with Connections”. Adapting Gelman’s, Naedine so vsemi for Radio’, in David Johnston, ed., Stages of Translation, Absolute Classics, Bristol, 1996, p. 127. 6. Brian Friel, A Month in the Country: After Turgenev, Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Ireland, 1992. 7. Patrice Pavis, ‘Problems of Translation for the Stage: Interculturalism and Post Modern Theatre’, translated by L. Kruger, in H. Scolnicov and P. Holland, eds, The Play out of Context: Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, pp. 25-44. This was republished in an edited and expanded version along with an extended chapter on translation for the theatre in his Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, Routledge, London, 1992, pp. 1-23 and pp. 136-59 respectively. The diagram is on p. 4. 8. For example see Sirkku Aaltonen, Acculturation of the Other. Irish Milieux in Finnish Drama Translation, Joensuu University Press, Joensuu, 1996. 9. Sirkku Aaltonen, Time-Sharing on Stage, Topics in Translation 17, Metalingual Matters Ltd, Clevedon, 2000, p. 1 and passim. 10. See, for example: ‘This will last out a night in Russia, / When nights are longest there’ (Measure for Measure, II, 1, 144). 11. Much of the ground work has been done by Patrick Miles. See his Chekhov on the British Stage 1909-1987, Sam & Sam, Cambridge, 1987; Patrick Miles, ed. and transl., Chekhov on the British Stage, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993.

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12. Brian Friel, Fathers and Sons. A Play by Brian Friel after the Novel by Ivan Turgenev, Faber and Faber, London, 1987. It was premièred at the National Theatre, directed by Michael Rudman, in July 1987; and revived in 1992 by students at RADA as a course production. 13. T.C. Worsley, ‘A Month in the Country’, The New Statesman and Nation, 31 December, 1949 (London Theatre Museum [hereafter LTM], press cutting). 14. Harold Hobson, ‘Costume and Cosmetics’, The Sunday Times, 11 December, 1949, LTM, press cutting. 15. W.A. Darlington, ‘Subtle Acting’, The Daily Telegraph, 1 December, 1949, LTM, press cutting. 16. Milton D Shulman, ‘A Triumphant Occasion - and a Play to Match’, The Evening Standard, 2 June, 1965, LTM, press cutting. 17. Nicholas de Jongh, The Evening Standard, 30 March, 1994, quoted in Theatre Record, 26 March-8 April, 1994, p. 371. 18. Punch, 16 June, 1965, LTM, press cutting. 19. Comments in The Sunday Express, 6 June, 1965; and The Sunday Times, 6 June, 1965, LTM, press cuttings. 20. Sheridan Morley, The Spectator, 9 April, 1994, quoted in London Theatre Record, 26 March - 8 April, 1994, p. 370. 21. Nicholas de Jongh, The Evening Standard, 30 March, 1994, ibid., p. 371. 22. Sheridan Morley, The Spectator, 9 April, 1994, ibid., p. 370. 23. Harold Hobson, The Sunday Times, 6 June, 1965, LTM, press cutting. 24. James Fenton, ‘Turgenev: a Passion for Reality’, The Sunday Times, 11 February, 1981 (National Theatre [NT] archive, press cutting). 25. Martin Esslin, ‘First Nights: A Month in the Country’, Plays and Players, 13, January, 1966, p. 44, LTM, press cuttings. 26. Steve Grant, Time out, quoted in London Theatre Record, 12-25 February, 1981, p. 78. 27. Robert Cushman, The Observer, quoted in London Theatre Record, 12-25 February, 1981, p. 81. 28. Peter Jenkins, The Spectator, quoted in London Theatre Record, 12- 25 February, 1981, p. 82.

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29. Michael Billington, The Guardian, 30 March, 1994, quoted in Theatre Record, 26 March - 8 April, 1994, p. 369. 30. Neil Smith, What’s On, 6 September 1994, quoted in Theatre Record, 26 March-8 April, 1994, p. 372. 31. Benedict Nightingale, The Times, 31 March, 1994, quoted in Theatre Record, 26 March-8 April, 1994, p. 373. 32. Patrick Carnegy, The Spectator, 2 January, 1999, quoted in Theatre Record, 23 April-6 May, 1999, p. 569. 33. Felix Barker, The Evening Standard, 6 June, 1965, LTM, press cutting; Martin Esslin, ‘First Nights: A Month in the Country’, Plays and Players, 13, January, 1966, p. 44; Benedict Nightingale, The Times, 31 March, 1994, quoted in Theatre Record, 28 March-8 April, p. 373; Michael Billington, The Guardian, 30 March, 1994, ibid., p. 369. 34. Nicholas de Jongh, ‘A Month in the Country’, The Guardian, 20 April, 1979, (Bristol Old Vic Theatre Archive); Sheridan Morley, The Spectator, 9 April, 1994, quoted in London Theatre Record, 26 March-8 April, 1994, p. 370. 35. Nicholas de Jongh, ‘A Month in the Country’, The Guardian, 20 April, 1979, Bristol Old Vic Theatre Archive. 36. Michael Smith, The Daily Express, quoted in London Theatre Record, 12-25 February, 1981, p. 82. 37. Benedict Nightingale, The Times, 31 March, 1994, quoted in Theatre Record, 28 March-8 April,1994, p. 373; Steve Grant, Time out, quoted in London Theatre Record, 12-25 February 1981, p. 78. 38. Michael Coveney, The Observer, 3 April, 1994, quoted in Theatre Record, 26 March-8 April, 1994, p. 370. 39. Nicholas de Jongh, The Evening Standard, 16 December,1998, quoted in Theatre Record, 3-31 December, 1998, p.1700. 40. Milton Shulman, ‘Love’s labour’, The Evening Standard, 21 November, 1975, LTM, press cutting. 41. Irving Wardle, ‘A Month in the Country’, The Times, 21 November, 1975, LTM, press cutting. 42. John Elsom, The Listener, quoted in London Theatre Record, 12-25 February, 1981,

p. 82.

43. Robert Hewison, The Sunday Times, 3 April, 1994, quoted in London Theatre Record, 26 March-8 April, 1994, p. 372.

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44. Michael Coveney, The Financial Times, quoted in London Theatre Record, 12-25 February, 1981, p. 83. 45. Garnett: Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev. Three Plays: A Month in the Country, A Provincial Lady, A Poor Gentleman, translated by Constance Garnett, Cassell & Co, London, 1934; Williams: Ivan Turgenev. A Month in the Country: A Comedy, adapted into English by Emlyn Williams, Heinemann, London, 1943; Friel: A Month in the Country:After Turgenev (see note 4); Berlin: Ivan Turgenev: A Month in the Country: a Comedy in Five Acts, translated and introduced by Isaiah Berlin, Hogarth, London, 1981 and Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1983; Freeborn: Ivan Turgenev: A Month in the Country, translated and edited by Richard Freeborn, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991. 46. W. A. Darlington, ‘Subtle Acting’, The Daily Telegraph, 1 December, 1949, LTM, press cutting. 47. MT, The Sunday Express, 6 June, 1965, LTM, press cutting. 48. The Sunday Times, 6 June, 1965, LTM, press cutting. 49. Martin Esslin, ‘First Nights …’, Plays and Players, p. 44. 50. Irving Wardle, ‘Turgenev with All the Discomforts’, The Times, 21 February, 1981, LTM, press cutting. 51. Michael Billington, The Guardian, quoted in London Theatre Record, 12-25 February, 1981, p. 80. 52. Milton Shulman, The New [Evening] Standard, quoted in London Theatre Record, 12-25 February, 1981, pp. 79-80. 53. Michael Coveney, The Observer, 3 April 1994, quoted in London Theatre Record, 26 March-8 April, 1994, p. 370. 54. Louise Doughty, The Mail on Sunday, 10 April 1994 quoted in London Theatre Record, 26 March -8 April, 1994, p. 371. 55. Robert Hewison, The Sunday Times, 3 April, 1994, quoted in London Theatre Record, 26 March-8 April, 1994, p.372. Also noted by Neil Smith, What’s On, 6 September, 1994, quoted in London Theatre Record, ibid., p. 373. 56. John Gross, The Sunday Telegraph, 20 December, 1998, quoted in London Theatre Record, 3-31 December, 1998, p. 1703. 57. Susannah Clapp, The Observer, 20 December, 1998, quoted in London Theatre Record, 3-31 December, 1998, p. 1702.

Worshipping the Golden Calf: the Intelligentsia’s Conception of the Bourgeois World in the Age of Nicholas Derek Offord

At the end of his essay on ‘the birth of the Russian intelligentsia’ Isaiah Berlin alludes to the fond recollections of Annenkov and Herzen to the literary and intellectual circles of the ‘remarkable decade’, which lasted roughly from 1838 to 1848.1 Both these memoirists felt in later years, Berlin writes, ‘that never in their lives had they again found anywhere a society so civilized and gay and free, so enlightened, spontaneous, and agreeable, so sincere, so intelligent, so gifted and attractive in every way’.2 Nor is it difficult to extend the list of qualities that Berlin, following Annenkov and Herzen, attributes to the intelligentsia in its formative phase. Undeniably the members of this grouping possessed breadth of culture. They explored the human condition with depth and humanity. They engaged with ideas in a serious and passionate way. They concerned themselves with social justice. They strove to maintain intellectual and moral independence in an autocratic society, which lacked freedom of speech or representative institutions and where the whim of the sovereign was the source of law. They exhibited an integrity that comes of the fact, in such a society, that the expression of ideas that run counter to official dogma may incur punishment, ranging from mild official disfavour to internal exile in harsh conditions. To this conventional list of the intelligentsia’s attributes (which are illuminated in the admiring essays written by Berlin himself, especially on Herzen, whom he heroized) there should be added, I shall argue here, a trait that has been less remarked upon. It is the tendency of the intelligentsia to invest itself with an aura of what might most accurately be called ‘unmercenariness’ (‘ɛɟɫɤɨɪɵɫɬɢɟ’).3 I mean by this term the antithesis of ‘mercenariness’ (‘ɤɨɪɵɫɬɶ’), if we take mercenariness to be an attribute of people who work ‘merely for the sake of monetary or other reward’, or whose conduct ‘has the love of lucre for its motive’, or who are ‘actuated by considerations of self-interest’.4 It is characteristic of the process by which the Russian intelligentsia formulated its own identity and more generally the identity of the Russian people, or narod, that its perception of itself and the people was brought into focus by reference to a defect, mercenariness, of which both intelligentsia and narod were thought to be free. This negative self-knowledge was gained through observation of the most powerful Western nations against which the Russian cultural elite began to measure their own nation, following Russia’s imperial

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expansion in the eighteenth century and her eventual military success in the Napoleonic Wars. The unmercenariness of the Russian character, as the intelligentsia regarded it, was thought to be reflected in a set of moral values and attitudes, a heightened aesthetic sensibility, and even a spiritual disposition that Western peoples on the whole did not share. Unlike Westerners, Russians as a rule were not avaricious or even covetous. They took a casual approach to the acquisition and expenditure of money. They had a sense of superiority over peoples who allegedly prized money or devoted their lives to accumulating it. They exhibited an expansiveness that could be expressed - if a member of the Russian intelligentsia possessed relative wealth, as did, of course, many of its representatives who were of noble origin - in hospitality and in gifts or ostensible loans that the lender did not expect the borrower to repay. Since unmercenariness implied repudiation of the desire for personal gain, it could also be associated with condemnation of any self-interested conduct, or egoism. At a deeper level it might generate a feeling that enjoyment of the material world was shallow, demeaning, reprehensible, or even sinful. However, the concept of unmercenariness was by no means located entirely in the more or less ethical, aesthetic, or spiritual spheres, although it partly belonged in all of these. For the aversion to money in the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia was yoked to a set of antipathies towards the economic, social, and political phenomena that Russians associated with the Western world. Typically the intelligent as the individual member of the intelligentsia came to be known in the second half of the nineteenth century - expressed distaste for all of the following phenomena or people which his reading (and, to a lesser degree, his travels) taught him to detect in the West: capitalism as a mode of production; those who derived income and power from their possession of capital, such as industrialists, property-owners, and moneylenders; the financial institutions and their representatives (banks and bankers, stock-exchanges and stock-brokers) on which the development of European capitalism in the first half of the nineteenth century depended; the political economists who studied the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth; the bourgeoisie, the class that was then becoming dominant in the capitalist world; and liberalism, the political credo of that class. It will be useful when considering the aura of unmercenariness in which the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia clothed itself to invoke the concept of symbolic capital that has been formulated by the French anthropologist, Pierre Bourdieu. In addition to economic capital (material resources) and cultural capital (by which Bourdieu means education, knowledge, expertise) there is the value that accrues to a person, Bourdieu contends, from the standing that he or she has achieved, from ‘making a name for oneself, a name that is known and

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recognized’. This ‘symbolic’ capital may derive from the establishment of a reputation for originality, or from independence from received or official values or cultural orthodoxy. It can only be earned if the enterprise by means of which it is accumulated is perceived as disinterested and sincere. The impression must therefore be sustained ‘that investments will not be recouped unless they are (or seem to be) operating at a loss, in the manner of a gift, which cannot assure itself of the most precious countergift, “recognition”, unless it sees itself as without return’.5 In general the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia prized symbolic capital more highly, I think, than capital of a material sort (so much more highly, in fact, that the incentive eventually to convert symbolic capital into economic capital, which Bourdieu observes with reference to the Western society that he examines,6 may have been relatively weak among them). The intelligent accumulated this symbolic capital, to use Bourdieu’s terms, through disavowal of the ‘economy’, renunciation of temporal profit, the consecration of disinterestedness, even a certain asceticism. It is my aim in this paper to examine the early stages of the attempt by members of the Russian intelligentsia to represent themselves as belonging, by virtue of their unmercenariness, to a culture that was a polar opposite of the culture of their nation’s major Western competitors (that is to say, principally France and England). I shall begin by providing a few examples of the rejection of commercialism by Russian poets and by conservative nationalist thinkers in the age of Nicholas I (ruled 1825-55). My central concern, though, will be to show that Belinskii and Herzen, the most influential figures in the formative phase of the development of the intelligentsia, endorsed the conservative nationalist critique of bourgeois society, even though they belonged to a group which occupied a position that was in some respects diametrically opposite to that occupied by the conservative nationalists. In conclusion I shall briefly consider the possible socio-economic reasons for the strength and pervasiveness of this critique of the bourgeois world and shall speculate on the purpose that it may have served within the intelligentsia itself. Anti-mercantilism in Poetic and Nationalist Circles In the eighteenth century, when a section of the nobility that had been nourished by the European Enlightenment was laying the foundations for a modern secular culture in Russia, prejudice against wealth and moneymaking was not yet pronounced in the educated class. This was an age, after all, when the Empress herself (whose favour writers sought) asserted in her Instruction (Nakaz) that ‘great Advantages accrue to the State’ from the existence of a third estate ‘founded upon Virtue and Industry, and productive of them’.7 The Englishman William Coxe, who

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travelled in Russia in the 1770s, observed a ‘rising spirit of commerce’ there.8 The dramatist Fonvizin - a nobleman who himself revealed an entrepreneurial streak by trading in foreign paintings - has Starodum, the exemplar of virtue in his comedy The Minor (ɇɟɞɨɪɨɫɥɶ), make a fortune in Siberia through some unspecified form of entrepreneurship.9 Karamzin too - or at least the narrator in his Letters of a Russian Traveller (ɉɢɫɶɦɚ ɪɭɫɫɤɨɝɨ ɩɭɬɟɲɟɫɬɜɟɧɧɢɤɚ) - embraces commerce, which ‘nourishes activity in the world and conveys from one part of the world to another useful inventions of the human mind, new ideas and new ways of making life agreeable’. This narrator even celebrates the invention of money, which he thinks brings many benefits, and muses that a piece of gold, or rather a piece of paper sent from Moscow to London, acts ‘like a magic talisman’, endowing him with power over people and things.10 In any event there were forms of symbolic capital by which eighteenth-century Russian noblemen set more store than unmercenariness. Chief among these, the highest form of symbolic capital, was honour, which guided the conduct of the Western nobleman, whom the Russian nobleman was now coming more closely to resemble as a result of the reforms of Peter the Great (sole ruler 1696-1725) and Catherine II (ruled 1762-96).11 And yet even in the age of Catherine, beneath cautious approval of enterprise and the urge for profit, there already ran a powerful undertow. It was not merely that many noblemen harboured a distaste for industrial and commercial activity (and in this respect the Russian nobility was essentially no different from other European nobilities). More importantly, teachings of Western origin that bred indifference to wealth were gaining a hold in Russia. Or at least these teachings were placing on educated noblemen (the forerunners of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia, as Marc Raeff has argued12) a moral obligation to disavow wealth. For eighteenth-century Russian writers were deeply affected by Stoicism in its imperial Roman form, with which they became acquainted through Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. Stoicism taught them that the virtuous man seeking peace of mind attached little importance to material possessions, and it encouraged them to equate nobility with frugality. Kantemir set a tone in his first satire, in which he lamented the contemporary thirst for wealth and expressed nostalgia for a supposedly simpler bygone golden age.13 For Fonvizin’s Starodum the rich man is he who is noble by virtue of his moral qualities rather than his material possessions (or lineage). A nobleman of this stamp counts his money not in order to store it in a trunk but to enable himself to help those in need.14 Prince Shcherbatov, in his jaundiced screed about the corruption of morals in Russia, deplored the desire for luxury that had been stimulated by the recent cultural Westernization of the nobility, and the inhabitants of an ideal community that he imagined in a utopian tract, of which he was also the author, lived austerely.15

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The value of the virtue of unmercenariness which Stoicism had helped to establish in Russia in the late eighteenth century was increased in the early nineteenth century by European Romanticism, which deeply affected the Russian educated elite. Romanticism fuelled a cultural revolt against the urbanized society that was developing in the West in the wake of the industrial revolution and the Napoleonic Wars and against the supposedly mercenary ethos of the bourgeois who was shaping that society. It privileged a pure world of the imagination over mundane material concerns, the inspiration of the artist over the utilitarianism of the industrialist, property-owner or financier, and poetry in the broadest sense of the word over the vulgar prose of everyday life with which commercial activity was associated. This collision of economic and cultural currents in the postNapoleonic period is dramatized by Pushkin in his poem of 1824, A Conversation between a Book-Seller and a Poet (Ɋɚɡɝɨɜɨɪ ɤɧɢɝɨɩɪɨɞɚɜɰɚ ɫ ɩɨɷɬɨɦ). Pushkin has his book-seller offer the poet advice that he considers indispensable in the modern ‘iron age’. There is no freedom without money, the book-seller argues: Gold, gold, gold is what we need: / Pile it right up! / I foresee your objection; / But I know you gentlemen: / Your creation is dear to you, / So long as imagination bubbles and seethes / On the flame of labour; / [But] it will grow cold, and then / Your work will have gone cold on you as well. / Allow me simply to tell you that / Inspiration does not sell, / But you can sell a manuscript ...16 Pushkin’s juxtaposition of the book-seller’s hunger for marketable cultural products, on the one hand, and the poet’s exaltation of works of art created for a purely aesthetic purpose, on the other, perfectly illustrates Bourdieu’s model of the ‘antagonistic coexistence of two modes of [cultural] production and circulation’. At one pole, the pole at which the book-seller stands, there is, according to Bourdieu’s model, ‘the “economic” logic of the literary and artistic industries which, since they make the trade in cultural goods just another trade, confer priority on distribution, on immediate and temporary success’. (This is the same pole that will be occupied in the course of the nineteenth century by Russia’s literary entrepreneurs, the journal owners such as Kraevskii, Katkov, and Suvorin, whom men of letters were prone to slander.) At the other pole, at which Pushkin’s poet stands, and after him the typical Russian intelligent, there is ‘the anti-“economic” economy of pure art’, which is ‘founded on the obligatory recognition of the values of disinterestedness and on the denegation of the “economy” (of the “commercial”) and of “economic” profit (in the short term)’.17 At this pole, in the world of art, the economic world is turned upside down.

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Writers cannot acquire money in it, or any other symbol of worldly success, without compromising themselves. They thus have an interest, as Bourdieu mischievously puts it, in disinterestedness.18 The distaste for the utilitarian commercial world that Pushkin expressed in his Conversation between a Book-Seller and a Poet, and sensitivity to the predicament of the artist in that world, are commonplace among Pushkin’s contemporaries. For example, Baratynskii, a distinguished member of the constellation of poets around Pushkin, similarly bemoaned the dedication of people in his day to ‘industrial concerns’ and the deleterious effect of those concerns on aesthetic and spiritual values. ‘The age proceeds along its iron path’, he lamented in a poem of 1835; ‘there is cupidity in people’s hearts, and with every passing hour people’s dreams are taken up more clearly and shamelessly with the mundane and the useful’.19 The anti-mercantilist mood was expressed with particular force by Odoevskii in his Russian Nights (Ɋɭɫɫɤɢɟ ɧɨɱɢ, 1844), a work of prose fiction combining elements of the Platonic dialogue with the collection of oriental tales.20 In the tale A City without Name (Ƚɨɪɨɞ ɛɟɡ ɢɦɟɧɢ), which occurs during the fifth night of story-telling in Odoevskii’s cycle, Odoevskii’s narrator encounters the survivor of a remote community of utopian settlers who had ruinously subscribed to Bentham’s utilitarianism. Driven by selfinterest and the thirst for profit, the community which the survivor describes had come to be dominated by merchants who questioned the usefulness of philosophers, poets, and men of learning and drove out of the city ‘everyone in whom there was the slightest spark of divine flame’: All big enterprises which were of no immediate profit, or the purpose of which was not clear to the limited, selfish view of the merchants, vanished. Political insight, wise foresight, attempts to improve manners and customs, everything that was not immediately directed to commercial aims - in a word, whatever could not bring any profit - was called dreams. Financial feudalism triumphed … Ambitious plans, which could have increased trade activity in the future, but were at present dissipating the merchant-administrators’ profits, were called prejudice. Deceit, forgery, intentional bankruptcies, total disdain of human dignity, idolatry of gold, satisfaction of the crudest bodily needs became an obvious, permissible, and indispensable matter.21 The cultural movement that went under the name of ‘Romanticism’ in Russia, of which Odoevskii’s Russian Nights are a swan-song, thus provided a forthright critique of the rational, utilitarian outlook associated with the technological and economic revolution that was

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taking place in the early-nineteenth-century European world. At the same time it cultivated an interest in what was distinctive about individual peoples, particularly the more backward or oppressed European peoples who were now striving for nationhood. That is to say, the Russian cultural elite in the age of Nicholas, by and large, did not merely like to believe, together with Odoevskii’s alter ego in his Russian Nights, that the possessor of a positive, dry mind, dedicated to the study of economics, might find ‘something at the end of his syllogisms that escaped numbers and equations ... and could be understood only by instinct of the heart’.22 The elite also wished to conduct an enquiry (of an intuitive rather than a scientific sort, of course, in which the voice of the artist enjoyed the greatest authority) into the nature of the Russian people and their historical destiny, with the aim of defining the elusive quality of narodnost’, or nationality. This element of Romanticism, the quest for self-knowledge, national as well as personal, was inextricably connected with its anti-mercantilist element. In fact anti-mercantilism became a defining characteristic of the identity that Russians began to fashion for themselves. It was regarded as a distinctive virtue that would enable Russians to steer clear of the Westerner’s dystopian civilization and to build a new world which the economically more successful Westerner would come to envy. The anti-mercantilist thread in Russian nationalism may be traced back at least as far as the ‘Lovers of Wisdom’ (‘Ʌɸɛɨɦɭɞɪɵ’), that is to say, the Society of Philosophy that was founded in 1823, and of which Odoevskii was president until it was disbanded following the Decembrist Revolt of 1825. Anti-mercantilism, for example, is conspicuous in the thought of Pogodin (also one of the Lovers of Wisdom in his youth), who considered an obsession with money ‘the alpha and omega’ of the French and English societies that he observed during an exhaustive touristic journey to the West in 1839. Money was the goal, Pogodin thought, towards which all the effort, inventiveness, and eloquence that the Frenchman or Englishman could muster were directed. This worship of the golden calf deflected Westerners from proper spiritual concerns and made them, like the biblical Martha, ‘careful and troubled about many things’.23 The Slavophiles took a similar view. Ivan Kireevskii - yet another of the Lovers of Wisdom identified mercenariness and unmercenariness as one pair in a set of opposed concepts with the aid of which the character of the Russian people could be defined in a contrastive way. According to Kireevskii the Westerner, having been spiritually impoverished by the subordination of faith to reason and logic and by the loss of spiritual wholeness, ‘sought to relieve the burden of his internal shortcomings by developing material wealth’:

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luxury was not a contradiction but the logical consequence of the fragmented aspirations of man and society; it may be said to have been inherent in the West’s artificial civilization ... People did not give in to it as to a weakness, but rather were proud of it, as of an enviable privilege. In the Middle Ages the common folk gazed with respect at the outward glitter which surrounded a person of consequence, and in their minds this external glitter merged piously with the idea of a man’s inner worth.24 The Russian, on the other hand, venerated the rags of the holy fool rather than the gold brocade of the courtier and endeavoured to avoid the burden of material needs by raising his spirit above them. Had the science of political economy existed [in the Middle Ages], there can be no doubt that the Russian would have found it incomprehensible. He would have been unable to reconcile the existence of a separate science of wealth with his comprehensive view of life. He would not have understood that people could be deliberately aroused to greater awareness of their material needs merely in order that they might intensify their efforts to produce goods. He knew that the formation of wealth is a secondary factor in a country’s life and should, therefore, not merely be closely connected with other, higher factors, but be entirely subordinate to them.25 Kireevskii imagined a community, in a fragment of 1838 entitled The Island (Ɉɫɬɪɨɜ), in which a personality of this sort, nourished by the Orthodox religious tradition and rejecting the institution of private landholding, could flourish. In Kireevskii’s sheltered utopia - a polar opposite of Odoevskii’s dystopian city without a name, it would seem land would be held in common, no money would be in circulation, and luxury would be unknown.26 Belinskii ‘Westernism’, the set of ideas to which it is conventional to contrast midnineteenth-century Russian Slavophilism, was itself a species of nationalism. Admittedly the so-called Westernizers scathingly criticized the Slavophiles’ romanticization of the pre-Petrine Russian past, their idealization of Orthodoxy, and their conception of the national character as pious and yielding. And yet Belinskii and Herzen, who are usually identified as the outstanding representatives of Westernism, were no less patriotic than the Slavophiles, as Herzen famously acknowledged when he spoke of both groups sharing the same heart.27 Most importantly, for my purposes here, Belinskii and Herzen too professed an aversion to

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wealth, strongly disapproved of those who crave, create, accumulate, and respect it, and placed these antipathies at the heart of their conception of Russian identity. No Slavophile could have taken exception, for example, when Belinskii complained that the ‘mercantile spirit’ had become too pervasive in the modern age and that people now bowed too low to the ‘golden calf’,28 or when he idealized the poet as a being driven by an insatiable thirst for life rather than by an ‘animal [sic] craving for money’.29 Belinskii’s revulsion at the mercenary ethos which he believed had come to prevail in the West and at the class responsible for the spread of it was expressed with particular force in an essay of 1844 on a recent work by the French novelist Eugène Sue, The Mysteries of Paris (Les Mystères de Paris, 1842-3). Sue’s treatment of the wretched life of the Parisian lower classes furnished Belinskii with material with which to condemn an egoistic society that used money as its main yardstick for the measurement of success. The bourgeois, as Belinskii depicts him here, is a bloated, self-satisfied gentleman with the head of an ass and the body of a bull. He has enriched himself at the expense of the poor, who are condemned to ignorance and poverty and therefore to vice and punishment. The bourgeoisie, Belinskii contends, have exploited the revolutionary events of July 1830, which had led to the establishment of the ‘July Monarchy’ of Louis-Philippe, for their own ends. Having incited the French workers to rise up against the restored Bourbon regime, they had emerged from their dens after the battle and clambered over the corpses of the insurrectionists to positions of power from which they then excluded their poorer brethren by means of an electoral property qualification. In law the worker might be equal to the capitalist, but in fact he was at the capitalist’s mercy, for it was the capitalist who gave him employment and determined his wages, taking 99% of the proceeds of the worker’s labour for himself. As a proprietor the bourgeois viewed a worker in the same way that an American planter viewed his negro slave: he could not make a worker work for him by force, it is true, but he could starve him to death. His favourite rule was ‘every man … for himself’. He observed the civil law but paid no attention to ‘the laws of humanity and morality’.30 Belinskii also gave vent to his feelings about capitalist accumulation and the bourgeois entrepreneur in his private correspondence, especially in a letter of December 1847 to his close confidant, the more moderate ‘Westernizer’ Botkin.31 In this voluminous and revealing letter Belinskii made his own contribution to the debate that was stirred up among the Westernizers by Herzen’s attack on bourgeois France in his Letters from the Avenue Marigny (ɉɢɫɶɦɚ ɢɡ avenue Marigny), which Herzen wrote in the months following his arrival in Paris in March 1847 (and to which I return below). The ‘sovereignty of capital’, Belinskii tells Botkin, has ‘covered France in

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eternal shame’ and has ‘given rise to an orgy of industry’. Belinskii aligns himself with those members of the French political opposition who see the bourgeoisie as ‘a syphilitic wound on the body of France’. The capitalist or tradesman is in Belinskii’s eyes a man without patriotism or any elevated sensibility, ‘a being who is by nature squalid, rotten, low, and contemptible, for he has served Plutus [the Greek god of wealth]’. The object of the tradesman’s life is profit. He has no interests that do not relate to his pocket. Nor does he have any human feeling. He is incapable of love or compassion. He works children to death, crushes the proletarian with fear of starvation, strips beggars of such rags as they have, and assesses the merits of war and peace solely by reckoning the extent to which his investments rise or fall as a result of them.32 As for the bourgeois virtues of assiduity and thrift, Belinskii does respect them, he insists.33 And yet the claim is hardly convincing, for Belinskii immediately tells Botkin that he dislikes people, such as the Germans, who display these virtues. In fact there are only two nations whom he does like, Belinskii confides to Botkin, namely the French and the Russians. This is because both the French and the Russians will labour the whole week, Belinskii believes, so that on the rest day they may squander everything that they have earned. There is something especially virtuous, even poetic, in Belinskii eyes, in spending the day of rest in this way: to work not merely to have the means to live but also to enjoy it means to understand life in a human way, not in a German way. You will say that the Russian’s enjoyment consists in getting drunk as a pig [sic] and falling around all day without one’s hind legs. True, but all this shows is his civil position and level of education; his nature remains [the same] nature, owing to which a pharisaical English celebration of days of rest is quite out of the question in Russia.34 Not that Belinskii is one of those people, he protests, who take it as axiomatic that the bourgeoisie is an evil that must be eradicated. He concedes that industry brings great benefit to society, as well as many ills. He even grudgingly accepts that capitalists should have their share of influence in public affairs and that states without a middle class are doomed to insignificance. And yet Belinskii’s protestations are again unconvincing, for he considers it disastrous for a nation when this ‘outcast breed’ assumes leadership. Nations would do better to replace the bourgeoisie as a governing class, he rages, ‘with an idle, profligate riff-raff covered in rags; you would be more likely to find patriotism there, and a sense of national worth and a desire for the common welfare’.35 The tirade is laced with racism and vilification of both an ideological opponent and the publisher with whom he had recently

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quarrelled. The ‘tradesman’, Belinskii froths, ‘is a Jew [exemplified by the banker Rothschild36], an Armenian, a Greek, Pogodin, Kraevskii’. Nor can Belinskii resist a further anti-Semitic barb in conclusion: it is not coincidental, he writes, that ‘all the nations of the world, both Western and oriental, both Christian and Moslem, have united in hatred and contempt of the Jewish tribe’, for ‘the Jew is not a human being’ but ‘a tradesman par excellence’.37 The antipathy to the capitalist world that Belinskii had come to feel by the end of his life no doubt had roots in his own ascetic nature and intensely moral cast of mind. After all, no writings exemplified better than his the ‘philosophy of moral indignation’ that Leonard Schapiro identifies as one of the characteristic features of Russian nineteenth-century radical thought.38 And yet this antipathy must also have been reinforced by the characters, situations, and topoi of the fiction which shaped Belinskii’s perceptions to an unusual degree and which he took to be a reliable source for diagnoses of the condition of society and for sermons on human conduct. By the 1840s, it is true, he had begun to rebel against the cultural influences, of mainly German origin, which had moulded his and other Russians’ perceptions of bourgeois civilization in the 1830s and to which Russian conservative nationalists were still attached. However, the mainly French influences that supplanted the German ones - the prose fiction of Balzac, Sue, and George Sand and the writings of utopian socialists such as Saint-Simon, Fourier, Cabet, Pierre Leroux, and Louis Blanc - served in fact to reinforce Belinskii’s existing prejudice against the contemporary bourgeois world, while also imparting to it a more overtly socio-political tinge. It was from such literary sources, rather than from first-hand experience of the West, that Belinskii, like Dostoevskii too,39 would have formed his view of Western mercenariness, as exemplified by Balzac’s bankers, usurers, entrepreneurs, property-letters, and kept women, whose every relationship was shaped by financial considerations.40 Herzen The work to which Belinskii is responding in his diatribe of December 1847 to Botkin, Herzen’s Letters from the Avenue Marigny, contains further loci classici in which the embryonic intelligentsia’s aversion to mercenariness is expressed. Castigating French society in the closing days of the July Monarchy, Herzen characterizes the French bourgeoisie - and more generally the French people as a whole, of which Herzen thinks the bourgeoisie is representative - as egoistic, ‘greedy’, ‘possessive’,41 and preoccupied exclusively with economic questions. This class has transformed the state, the judicial system and the army into instruments for the protection of private property. Its morality is based on arithmetic and financial power. The political economists who serve

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it through their enquiry into the ‘laws of the increase of wealth’ treat human beings as a ‘productive force, an organic machine’, society as a ‘factory’, and the state as a ‘market-place’. Even the art forms that the bourgeoisie most enjoys - the melodrama and the vaudeville - sanction the pursuit of material gain and sentimentalize it, so that the bourgeois may shed a tear and leave the theatre touched ‘by the heroism of the office and the poetry of the shop-counter’.42 Herzen’s professed abhorrence of the bourgeoisie goes together in his Letters from France and Italy (ɉɢɫɶɦɚ ɢɡ Ɏɪɚɧɰɢɢ ɢ ɂɬɚɥɢɢ, of which the Letters from the Avenue Marigny eventually formed the first part) with an attack on the liberalism through which the bourgeoisie expressed its political interests. Liberals - exemplified by such statesmen as Lamartine and Thiers - are for Herzen vacuous, unprincipled orators. They try to reconcile all points of view but in the final analysis they suppress the hungry working class and restore a political order that Herzen continues to vilify, notwithstanding the extension of suffrage in the Second Republic.43 Herzen’s denunciation of the bourgeoisie is inextricably linked with his formulation of what he himself called ‘Russian socialism’. He outlined this doctrine in a series of articles written in the years when he was working on the cycle of ‘letters’ that eventually became the Letters from France and Italy. In these articles he argued that the collectivist instincts of the Russian peasant provided an indigenous basis for the development of socialism and would spare Russia the misery of capitalist economics and bourgeois society that Herzen thought he observed in the old world in which he was settling.44 Whereas the Frenchman marked the boundaries of his land with walls topped with broken glass - a spectacle that pained Herzen’s Slavonic soul45 - the Russian peasant was happily indifferent to private property. The land that yielded the peasants’ livelihood was shared in their commune, or obshchina, and the money that the workers earned was shared in their cooperative association, or artel. The peasants also showed a pleasing refusal to enter into the contractual agreements necessitated by private ownership: since their relations are conducted on the basis of good faith, Herzen contends, the peasants ‘never draw up written contracts among themselves’.46 Herzen’s juxtaposition of the mercenary, and moribund, ‘old world’ and a new world in which the unmercenary Russian people would emerge as a fresh, vital force was central to his social and political thought from the late 1840s. At the same time the quality of unmercenariness that he attributed to Russians as a people was also central to his image of himself as a free-thinking member of the intelligentsia. In both his published writings and his private correspondence Herzen took pains to present himself as standing above the vulgar craving for personal enrichment exhibited by the Western bourgeois as Herzen, like the Slavophiles and Belinskii, characterized him. The golden calf was one of those idols that the autonomous

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individual who took moral responsibility for his actions - a type of which Herzen clearly believes himself to be the exemplar - would refuse to worship.47 Again, trying in a letter of 1849 to justify the speculation in which he was currently engaged through James de Rothschild, Herzen explained to the man who was overseeing his financial affairs in Russia that he was motivated not so much by any desire to enrich himself as by the altruistic thought that with greater resources one could sometimes stretch out a hand to friends in need.48 He adopted a particularly selfjustificatory tone in his autobiography, My Past and Thoughts (Ȼɵɥɨɟ ɢ ɞɭɦɵ), when he broached the unavoidable (because well-known) subject of his long relationship with Rothschild, whom he had depicted in his earlier Letters from France and Italy as emblematic of the loathsome bourgeoisie.49 He also made a point, when he came in this work to describe his purchase of a property in Paris, of showing that he disdained the legal formalities, such as documents and witnesses, with which commercial transactions are surrounded. Unlike the Parisian bankers and notaries with whom he came into contact (but like the Russian peasants as he had portrayed them), Herzen took pride in his preference for the informal guarantee of the word of honour, which is supposedly all that is required in the economy that operates on the basis of good faith.50 *** Thus resorting to numerous generalizations about Western civilization (its alleged rationalism, materialism, commercialism, utilitarianism) and with the aid of various topoi (the ‘iron age’, the golden calf, the fat bourgeois, and the acquisitive banker, personified by the Jewish Rothschilds), mid-nineteenth-century Russian writers and thinkers characterized the Westerner as corrupted by mercenariness. They were repeatedly offended by the apparent pre-eminence of economic matters in the Westerner’s life, by inequalities of wealth, by the visibility of private property, by the exploitation of people for financial gain, and by the consecration of profit as a motivation for human activity. It was not as if these phenomena were not to be found in Russia, of course, although they were perhaps at their most conspicuous in the Western city, especially in London and in what Balzac described as ‘the immense turmoil of contending people, ambitions, and enterprises that makes Paris both a heaven and an inferno’.51 And yet the Russian, at least in his imagined pristine state, tended to emerge from mid-nineteenth-century Russian thought and literature, by contrast, as uninterested in acquisition of material possessions, accumulation of capital, property-ownership, and profit-making. This distinction, between the mercenary Westerner and the unmercenary Russian, continued to hold good in the minds of Russian writers and thinkers at both ends of the political spectrum after the Crimean War (1853-6), despite the fact that the intelligentsia was by

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then no longer dominated by men of noble origin who did not need to work for a living. It is pronounced, for example, in Dostoevskii’s nativesoil conservatism (ɩɨɱɜɟɧɧɢɱɟɫɬɜɨ)52 and in what came to be known as populism (ɧɚɪɨɞɧɢɱɟɫɬɜɨ), a socialist doctrine inspired precisely by the concern to ensure that Russia did not undergo a capitalist stage of development and resting on a belief in the supposedly instinctive aversion of the Russian people to materialistic individualism. To the possible cultural explanations that I have already offered for the emergence and vigour of this Russian antipathy to the bourgeois West (the enthusiastic reception of Stoicism, Romanticism, and nationalism) we might add the revival of Orthodox piety on the conservative wing of the intelligentsia and the persistent Manicheanism on its radical wing. However, there are also possible socio-economic explanations for the phenomenon. Firstly, in criticizing Western economic life Russian writers and thinkers were expressing anxiety about changes that were likely soon to take place when the old semi-feudal order broke down in their own backward country and new economic relations began to develop there. For, like Western critics of the bourgeois world, such as Carlyle and Marx, they understood that humans’ sense of purpose and their relationships with one another, as well as the physical and mental landscape, could be profoundly affected by industrial development, the movement of population and the growth of cities, the expansion of a monetary economy, the extension of wage labour, the utilitarian calculus, and the proliferation of contractual agreements as opposed to informal understandings. Their critique of capitalism differed from that of their Western mentors, though, in that it had a pre-emptive quality. That is to say, whereas the Western response to capitalism addressed existing economic and social problems and arguably had the practical effect over time of alleviating some of the ills that capitalism caused, the Russian rejection of the bourgeois world was an outraged moral response to something that had been observed through the lens of Western writers but had not as yet properly come into being in Russia, where serfdom still survived and wealth tended to be measured in terms of the number of serfs a landowner owned. This fact (or perception, if it is argued that a vibrant entrepreneurial tradition and a bourgeoisie of a sort did already exist in nineteenth-century Russia53) may have helped to lend the Russian critique of the bourgeois world a particularly urgent, idealistic, even messianic character. Secondly, not only did the intelligentsia enjoy little or no political influence in the autocratic state, because it was by definition an oppositional force; it also had little or no stake in the economic development of the country, because it was a socially déraciné group bound together by moral rather than economic interests. Belinskii

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himself noted this characteristic of the society in which he moved. ‘Pecuniary interests, trade, shares’, he wrote in 1846, are also links, but they are external, and therefore not vital, not organic links, though necessary and useful. People are internally bound together by common moral interests, similarity of views and equality of education, combined with a mutual regard for each other’s human dignity.54 As a result of its preoccupation with moral matters and its isolation from the industrial and commercial life of the nation, the Russian intelligentsia tended to speak out against new economic forces and values of the sort that were transforming the Western world, rather than to champion them. Only grudgingly, if at all, would the most influential Russian writers and thinkers acknowledge the positive effects of the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie in Western Europe. More often they highlighted its negative effects, deploring, as we have seen, ‘financial feudalism’, the ‘orgy of industry’, or the worship of the golden calf, disparaging the value of steady application and thrift, and even poeticizing profligacy. Instead it was the lower classes of society, whose economic interests ran counter to those of the bourgeoisie, that the intelligentsia championed, and then again on primarily moral grounds. The pervasiveness of the anti-mercantilist mood in the Russian intelligentsia, finally, prompts us to consider whether repudiation of the bourgeois world, while having understandable cultural and socioeconomic causes, did not also serve some deeper, psychological purpose within the intelligentsia itself. It may be, for instance, that in rejecting the bourgeois world writers were hallowing informal, idyllic social relations of the sort that obtained within their own circles, which memoirists such as Annenkov and Herzen so fondly remembered. More importantly, unmercenariness might be seen as a means by which an educated elite with dwindling financial resources and scant opportunities for satisfying professional employment outside the apparatus of a state that they despised could win standing among their peers. Indeed one might go further and suggest, with Bourdieu’s insistence on the inter-convertibility of economic and symbolic capital in mind,55 that the whole set of values, attitudes and perceptions implied by disavowal of mercenariness helped to ensure a readership, and therefore employment, at a time when cultural and intellectual activity was being transformed in Russia from a nobleman’s pastime to professional labour. At any rate, as the cultural and intellectual elite turned into an intelligentsia, so unmercenariness, and a more general concept of disinterested service in which unmercenariness was embedded, replaced honour as the chief form of symbolic capital among Russian writers and thinkers. Inspired in particular by Belinskii and Herzen, who played a leading role in forming

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opinion in the age of Nicholas, the intelligent came to regard disapproval of the Western bourgeois world not only as an important part of discourse about Russian national identity but also as a touchstone of a civilized outlook, an aspect of his own personal identity.

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NOTES 1. The phrase ‘remarkable decade’ (zamechetal’noe desiatiletie) - also sometimes translated as ‘extraordinary decade’ or ‘marvellous decade’ - is the title of Annenkov’s memoirs: see P.V. Annenkov, Literaturnye vospominaniia, Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, Moscow, 1960. The memoirs of Herzen to which reference is being made eventually appeared under the title Byloe i dumy: see A.I. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, Moscow, 1954-65, (hereafter Herzen, SS) VIII-XI. 2. Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly, eds, Hogarth Press, London, 1978, p. 135. 3. The Russian word beskorystie more strongly implies lack of interest in pecuniary advantage than the English word that is usually used to translate it, ‘disinterestedness’. 4. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989, IX, p. 618. The definition of koryst’ in the Russian dictionary of the Academy of Sciences is ‘vygoda, pribyl’, material’naia pol’za’, i.e. ‘interest’, ‘profit’, ‘material benefit’ (Slovar’ sovremennogo russkogo literaturnogo iazyka, Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, Moscow and Leningrad, 1950-65, V, p. 1486). Beskorystie is defined there as ‘absence of pursuit of interest [vygoda], profit [nazhiva]’ (ibid., I, p. 404). 5. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1996, p. 148. 6. Ibid., p. 255. 7. Catherine the Great’s Instruction (Nakaz) to the Legislative Commission, 1767 in Russia under Catherine the Great, Paul Dukes,ed., Oriental Research Partners, Newtonville, MA, 1977, II, p. 92. 8. See Peter Putnam, ed., Seven Britons in Imperial Russia, 1698-1812, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1952, p. 264. 9. See act one, scene seven and act three, scene two in D.I. Fonvizin’s play Nedorosl’, which was first staged in 1782. 10. N.M. Karamzin, Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika, Iu.M. Lotman, N.A. Marchenko, and B.A. Uspenskii, eds, Nauka, Leningrad, 1984, pp. 336, 355. Translation of this and later works are by the present author, unless otherwise stated. 11. See, for example, my article ‘Denis Fonvizin and the Concept of Nobility: An Eighteenth-century Russian Echo of a Western Debate’, European History Quarterly, XXXV, 1, 2005, pp. 9-38. In Karamzin’s case, or at least in the case of the narrator of his Letters of a Russian Traveller, it is a heightened aesthetic and emotional sensibility that he is most anxious to display. 12. Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York, 1966.

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13. Antiokh Kantemir, ‘Na khuliashchikh ucheniia: k umu svoemu’, in Sobranie stikhotvorenii, Sovetskii pisatel’, Leningrad, 1956, p. 61. 14. Fonvizin, Nedorosl’, act four, scene two. 15. Prince M.M. Shcherbatov, On the Corruption of Morals in Russia, ed. and translated with an introduction and notes by A. Lentin, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1969. On Shcherbatov’s Journey to the Land of Ophir see Lentin’s introduction, pp. 759. 16. Razgovor knigoprodavtsa s poetom, in A.S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, Leningrad, 1937-49, II, pp. 324-30. The quotation is from pp. 329-30. 17. Bourdieu, p. 142. 18. Ibid., p. 21. 19. See the poem Poslednii poet in E.A. Baratynskii, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, Sovetskii pisatel’, Leningrad, 1957, p. 173. See also Benjamin Dees, E.A. Baratynsky, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1972, pp. 100, 104, and D.S. Blagoi, ed., Istoriia russkoi literatury, Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, Moscow and Leningrad, 1958-64, II, p. 472, who notes the similarly negative view of the bourgeois world held by Tiutchev. 20. Although not published in their totality until 1844 most of the fictional components of the Russian Nights had been conceived and written over the previous decade and a half. The work therefore more properly reflects the cultural atmosphere of the 1830s than the mid-1840s. 21. I have used the translation in Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevskii, Russian Nights, translated by Olga Koshansky-Oleinikov and Ralph E. Matlaw, with an introduction by Ralph E. Matlaw and an afterword by Neil Cornwell, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, ILL, 1997, pp. 110-11. 22. Ibid., p. 71. 23. M.P. Pogodin, God v chuzhikh kraiakh, 1839: Dorozhnyi dnevnik, Universitetskaia tipografiia, Moscow, 1844, III, pp. 5-6, 95-6, 195. The biblical reference is to 10 Luke 41. 24. I.S. Kireevskii, ‘O kharaktere prosveshcheniia Evropy i o ego otnoshenii k prosveshcheniiu Rossii’, in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, M. Gershenzon, ed., Moscow, 1911 (hereafter Kireevskii, PSS), II, pp. 174-222. The quotation is from p. 214. I have quoted from the translation by Marc Raeff, ed., Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology, Humanities Press and Harvester Press, New Jersey and Sussex, 1966, p. 202. 25. Kireevskii, ‘O kharaktere’, PSS, II, pp. 214-15; Raeff, pp. 202-3. 26. Kireevskii, Ostrov, PSS, II, p. 177. 27. Herzen, Byloe i dumy, SS, IX, p. 133.

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28. V.G. Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Moscow, 1953-9 (hereafter Belinskii, PSS), VI, pp. 469-70. 29. Belinskii, ‘Stikhotvoreniia Lermontova’, PSS, IV, p. 495. 30. Belinskii, ‘Parizhskie tayny’, PSS, VIII, pp. 167-86, especially 168-73. 31. Botkin was the only prominent Westernizer of the 1840s to defend the bourgeoisie with any vigour. Despite some ritual protestations about the repellent morality of the class, he argued in his Letters on Spain that no nation could succeed in the modern world without a thriving industry and commerce. This attitude was reflected in his emphasis on the success of the English in the sphere of ‘political economy’, a term that was synonymous with capitalism in the age of Nicholas (see V.P. Botkin, Pis’ma ob Ispanii, B.F. Egorov and A. Zvigil’skii, eds, Izdatel’stvo Nauka, Leningrad, 1976, pp. 75-80, 101-3). It also found expression in the relatively favourable picture of English life that he painted slightly later, in two sketches on a visit that he made to London in 1859 (see ‘Dve nedeli v Londone’ and ‘Priiuty dlia bezdomnykh nishchikh v Londone’, in Botkin, Sochineniia, Izdanie zhurnala ‘Panteon literatury’, St Petersburg, 1890-3, I, pp. 284-318 and 319-38 respectively). But then Botkin was himself a bourgeois: he came from a family of tea merchants and continued to take part in the family business while being an active, central member of the circle of Westernizers in the 1840s and 1850s. 32. Belinskii, PSS, XII, pp. 449-50. 33. Belinskii also accepts that the bourgeoisie is not a chance phenomenon that has just sprung up like a mushroom, but something which has its past and a brilliant history and has rendered great services. He accepts that the term bourgeois is an elastic one (ibid., p. 448). 34. Ibid., p. 451. 35. Ibid., p. 452. 36. It is Baron James de Rothschild, who presided over the Paris branch of the house in the mid-nineteenth century, whom Belinskii has in mind. 37. Belinskii, PSS, XII, pp. 450, 452. Belinskii’s Jew is a stock literary character with a lineage going back to Shakespeare’s Shylock and Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. He reappears, with obvious similarities to James de Rothschild, as the German-Jewish millionaire financier Baron de Nucingen in Balzac’s Cousin Bette, where the Jews in general, in the opinion of M. Crevel, have an age-old instinct ‘for gold and jewels, for the Golden Calf’ (Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1965, p. 22). 38. Leonard Schapiro, ‘The Pre-Revolutionary Intelligentsia’ in The Russian Intelligentsia, Richard Pipes, ed., Columbia University Press, New York, 1961, p. 27. The other typical feature of the radical intelligentsia that Schapiro identified was faith that Russia could progress by some separate path to a higher state than Europe had achieved, without the intermediate European stage of bourgeois capitalism (ibid., p. 28). Herzen and the Populists subscribed to this belief (see also section three and the concluding section of this paper).

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39. See Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1976, p. 107. 40. Belinskii visited Paris for the first time in the summer of 1847, and then only briefly and in the company of other Russians. 41. The term that Herzen uses here, ‘stiazhaiushchaia’, brings to mind the so-called Possessors (stiazhateli), those fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Russian churchmen who favoured monastic land-owning and the accumulation of material possessions by the Church. The Possessors were opposed by the Non-Possessors, or Trans-Volga Hermits, who represented a more ascetic monastic tradition. 42. Herzen, Pis’ma iz Frantsii i Italii, SS, V, pp. 34-5, 60-7. 43. Ibid., pp. 94-5, 135, 150, 160-1, 167-8, 171-2. 44. Herzen, ‘La Russie’, SS, VI, p. 168; and ‘La Russie et le vieux monde’, SS, XII, p. 152. 45. Herzen, Pis’ma iz Frantsii i Italii, SS, V, p. 74. 46. Herzen, ‘La Russie’, SS, VI, p. 173; and, ‘Le peuple Russe et le socialisme’, SS, VII, pp. 286-7. 47. Herzen, ‘Novye variatsii na starye temy’, SS, II, p. 93. 48. Herzen, SS, XXIII, pp. 118, 126 49. Herzen, Byloe i dumy, SS, X, pp. 132-4. 50. Ibid., pp. 134-5. On Herzen’s prudent financial practice, speculation, money-lending, and property-letting, which stand in stark contrast to his professions of unmercenariness, see my article ‘Alexander Herzen and James de Rothschild’, Toronto Slavic Quarterly, XIX, Winter 2007, where Herzen’s correspondence with Rothschild is also published for the first time. 51. Balzac, Cousin Bette, p. 41. 52. See, for example, the last three chapters of his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863) and his novel The Gambler (1866), in F.M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, Nauka, Leningrad, 1972-90, V, pp. 46-98 and 208-318 respectively, especially pp. 74-98 and 225-6. 53. On the question of the ‘missing bourgeoisie’ see, for example, Elise Kimerling Wirstschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia, Northern Illinois University Press, Dekalb, 1997, pp. 62-3, 71-4, 79, and 96-9. 54. Belinskii, ‘Mysli i zametki o russkoi literature’, PSS, IX, p. 436. I have used a slightly adapted form of a passage from the English version of this article in Belinskii, Selected Philosophical Essays, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1956, p. 362.

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55. Bourdieu, Outline of A Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977, p. 177 (pp. 171-83 in this book are devoted specifically to the concept of symbolic capital).

The Dark Side of Turgenev Richard Peace

Turgenev is often considered the most western of Russian writers; not exhibiting the tormented psychology of Dostoevskii, or obsessed by death like Tolstoi. To westerners he seemed liberal and easy-going. Flaubert called Turgenev ‘a soft pear’.1 Yet the smiling face he presented to western Europe was different from that seen by his fellow countrymen. Turgenev was challenged to a duel by both Tolstoi and Goncharov, and it was rumoured that Pushkin’s sons intended to beat him up.2 He had a blazing row with Dostoevskii, quarrelled with, among other writers, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Herzen, Nekrasov, Chernyshevskii, Dobroliubov, as well his life-long friend Fet. He quarrelled with his own uncle, with whom as a younger man he had been very close. Why, one must ask, were his personal relations so difficult? His childhood must certainly have been disturbed. His parents lived separate lives. His mother, who had the money, ruled the estate like an empress, despotically ordering the lives of her serfs. His father, who died young, had the breeding, but was weak and more concerned with his extramarital affairs. Turgenev records in his brief autobiography that at the age of four he very nearly fell into the bear pit at Berne (XV, 206), and as a young man he experienced the terror of a fire at sea. All these earlier experiences, it may be argued, influenced his writing. But one relationship, above all, is refracted throughout his work - his enigmatic relationship to the opera singer Pauline Viardot, in whose wake he set up house around Europe, as though a member of her family along with her husband and children. A constant thread running through his novels is the need for a ‘nest’. However dissimilar the two writers may seem on the surface, there are nevertheless Dostoevskian elements in Turgenev’s writing. Viktor Vinogradov has pointed to the influence of Poor Folk on Turgenev’s early style,3 and he sees such influence on speech patterns in Turgenev’s story of 1848 Petushkov ($+-7# ).4 Yet what seems more remarkable is the fact that Turgenev actually anticipates the darker side of his contemporary’s writing by some 16 to 17 years.5 Dostoevskii’s Notes from Underground appeared in 1864/5 - a confessional narrative of a perverse, self-loathing individual, who skulks away from others, and behaves much as Turgenev’s hero of The Hamlet of the Shchigrovskii District, a story published in 1848 as part of Sketches from a Hunter’s Album. In a phrase that could be that of the underground man, Turgenev’s Hamlet describes himself as ‘oppressed by introspection’ (IV, 279). Like the underground man he enjoys

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suffering: ‘I knew the poisonous raptures of cold despair; I experienced how sweet it was, for a whole day, idly lying on my bed, to curse the day and the hour of my birth’ (IV, 295), and just as the underground man imposes himself on former schoolmates, to suffer further humiliation, so the Hamlet drags himself round the houses of his neighbours: ‘As though drunk with contempt for myself, I submitted myself on purpose to all sorts of petty humiliations’ (IV, 295). In both cases the author-figure attempts to explain this type as a product of a certain stage in Russia’s cultural development, and like Notes from Underground Turgenev’s story has a pronounced polemical element. Even closer to Notes from Underground is Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man. It is the self-revelation of a figure finding refuge in his sense of superfluity much as Dostoevskii’s hero skulks in his ‘underground’. The superfluous man, too, is prey to his thought processes, as he informs us on the very first page of his diary: ‘It seems I am given up to speculation: it is a bad sign’ (V, 178); he too derives pleasure from suffering, and in this seeks the backing of literature. He speaks of the ‘delight’ ‘which Lermontov had in mind, when he said that it was joyful and painful to disturb the sores of old wounds’ (V,197). When he is banned from the house of the girl he loves, Liza (the name Dostoevskii would choose for his underground man’s undoing), Turgenev’s hero comments: ‘Only then did I realize, after being driven out of the Ozhogins’ house, only then did I finally realize how much pleasure a man might draw from the contemplation of his own misfortune’ (V, 219). Later, when he learns that Liza herself has been jilted by his rival, his emotions are mixed: ‘Amidst my grief, it was as though I was pleased about something … I would on no account own up to this, if I were not writing for myself’ (V, 221). This notion that he is writing only for himself, for his own pleasure (V,185), is a deception that he shares with Dostoevskii’s hero.6 Like the underground man he claims that he is not writing for readers: ‘As I am not composing short novels for well-disposed readers, but simply writing for my own pleasure, then there is therefore no reason at all for me to resort to the usual tricks of the gentlemen of literature’ (V, 202). Dostoevskii’s hero constantly seeks to explain his behaviour by reference to literature. We also see this in the ‘superfluous man’s citing of Lermontov to justify his own masochistic tendencies. The underground man is made aware of the literary nature of his attitude to Liza, when she responds that his words are ‘as though from a book’7 - a realization shared by the superfluous man in relation to his Liza: ‘Farewell, Liza! I wrote down these two words and very nearly laughed. The exclamation seemed to me to be bookish. It is as though I am concocting a sentimental novelette, or am finishing a desperate letter’ (V, 23). Such an acknowledgement is similar to that of the underground man

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in his dealings with his Liza: ‘I knew I was speaking in a strained manufactured way, even bookishly, but, in a word, I could not do otherwise than “as though from a book”’.8 Another element of Turgenev’s writing, linking him to Dostoevskii’s dark portrayal of human psychology, is the figure of the infernal woman. The enigmatic femme fatale is a persona constantly featuring in his writing, be it the mysterious Asia of the short novel of that name, Varvara Pavlovna in A Nest of Gentlefolk, or Odintsova in Fathers and Children. The autobiographical resonance of such figures is perhaps plain, given Turgenev’s own relationship with Pauline Viardot. Closer to Dostoevskii’s infernal women, however, are such tormenting temptresses as those embodied in the wayward Irina of Smoke, the cynical destroyer of young love, Maria Nikolaevna, of Spring Torrents, and perhaps above all, in Zinaida, the heroine of First Love, whose plot Turgenev openly acknowledges to be autobiographical, based on his own experiences in the summer of 1833. The beautiful young heroine, Princess Zinaida, seems capable only of a sado-masochistic relationship with her many admirers. One of these, Lushin, she forces to undergo the pain of having a pin stuck deep into his arm, a torture which she carries out ‘with particular Schadenfreude and pleasure’. Volodia, the narrator (who is undoubtedly the teenage Turgenev himself) feels that Zinaida is merely playing with him like a cat with a mouse (IX, 35). He is commanded to show his love for her by jumping down from a high wall. The fall knocks him out, but he comes round to find Zinaida kissing him passionately. On another occasion she twists his hair, pulling out locks. The other side of such sadistic acts is masochism. Zinaida acknowledges that she only feels contempt for admirers such as Lushin, confessing later that she needs a lover ‘who himself might break me’. Lushin becomes wise to the situation, commenting: ‘But I, fool that I was, thought that she was a coquette! It is obvious she finds pleasure in sacrificing herself - for some people’ (IX, 50). Volodia recalls these words, when he learns the bitter truth that Zinaida is really in love with his own father: ‘But what was she hoping for? How could she not fear ruining her whole future? Yes, I thought, so that is love, so that is passion, that is devotion’ (IX, 66). Nevertheless he only comprehends the full meaning of Lushin’s words, when he witnesses his father striking Zinaida with a whip, as an undoubted prelude to love-making (IX,70). Volodia himself uses a telling image to describe his own relationship to Zinaida: ‘Like a beetle tied by a foot I constantly circled round the beloved wing of the house’ (ɮɥɢɝɟɥɺɤ i.e. Zinaida’s apartments: IX, 35). Given the autobiographical nature of First Love, this sado-masochistic image of the beetle tied by its foot could well apply to Turgenev himself in his attitude towards Zinaida’s prototype, Princess Shakhovskaia, and may do much to explain his later obsessive

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attachment to Pauline Viardot, round whose beloved abodes he also circled ‘like a beetle tied by the foot’. The immorality of the story was felt to be such that for the French translation an ending was tacked on (either by Louis Viardot or even by Turgenev himself [IX, 374]) 9 in an attempt to explain such barbaric Russian behaviour to a polite French society - a society which, one should note, had produced the Marquis de Sade. Even in the original Russian version Turgenev himself felt the need in some measure to soften his account, but significantly only in regard to what may have been interpreted as cynicism in the treatment of death. When Volodia later learns of the death of Zinaida, he is unmoved, appearing to distance his emotions through a quotation from Pushkin’s 1826 poem to Amalia Riznich (‘ɉɨɞ ɧɟɛɨɦ ɝɨɥɭɛɵɦ ɫɬɪɚɧɵ ɫɜɨɟɣ ɪɨɞɧɨɣ’):‘ɂɡ ɪɚɜɧɨɞɭɲɧɵɯ ɭɫɬ ɹ ɫɥɵɲɚɥ ɫɦɟɪɬɢ ɜɟɫɬɶ, / ɂ ɪɚɜɧɨɞɭɲɧɨ ɟɣ ɜɧɢɦɚɥ ɹ’ (‘I heard the news of death from unconcerned lips, / And listened to it with indifference’). In order to dispel the idea that Volodia even as a young man ‘remained deaf to the sad voice calling [him], reaching [him] from beyond the grave’ (IX, 75), Turgenev, as he confesses in a letter to Fet (IX, 466), shows his hero reacting to the death of an old woman, whose fate is otherwise completely unconnected to the plot. So a story about the dark force of love, ends on an apparently unrelated note - the dark force of death. This is a moment which moves away from Dostoevskian psychology towards the obsessions of Tolstoi. In his satirical portrait of Turgenev, as Karmazinov in The Devils, Dostoevskii had mocked what he saw as his contemporary’s self-indulgent feelings in the face of death as expressed in The Execution of Tropmann (ɄɚɡɧɶɌɪɨɩɦɚɧɚ: XIV,14771). The witnessing of a public execution had deeply shocked Tolstoi as well as Turgenev: Dostoevskii, however, had undergone the experience at first hand.10 Although Tolstoi treats death in a different way, it is nevertheless an obsession which both writers share. Tolstoi’s approach is more direct and analytical, whereas for Turgenev autobiographical experience of such fears expresses itself in his art in more metaphorical and symbolic form. In childhood, as we have already seen, he had been saved at the last moment from falling into a bear pit, and the closeness to death in the form of some terrifying beast is given expression in the short story The Dog ((#). The animal in question is undoubtedly a mad dog, but it is described as a ‘huge, ginger beast’, and its mode of attack seems clearly bear-like, as the narrator, Porfirii Kapitonych recounts: ‘I did not manage to draw breath, before this monster had jumped on to the porch, had raised itself on its hind legs, and went straight at me on to my chest’ (IX, 133). It is not death, but a near-death experience which seems to recast in dreamlike terms the terror of the young child.

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Later, as a young man, Turgenev had experienced the terror of death at sea, when the boat on which he was travelling through the Baltic caught fire, and he had reacted in such panic and concern for his own safety (at the expense of others - it was claimed) that his behaviour was the gossip of St Petersburg, and would be mocked by such writers as Dostoevskii.11 In Turgenev’s novels water often assumes an ominous role. In chapter twenty of A Nest of Gentlefolk Lavretskii appears to have reached his lowest point, and feels that he has ‘fallen to the bottom of a river’ (VII, 189-90). On the Eve is a novel permeated with the symbolism of water and boats. It is with water and a lake (the incident in which he throws the insolent German into the water) that Insarov emerges as the hero, but it is in the dying city of water and boats - gondolas (‘Venice is dying, Venice has been deserted’ [VIII, 151]) - that Insarov himself dies. It is here, too, that Elena is aware of maritime omens: a white seagull which suddenly drops behind a dark boat (VIII, 157-8). It is in Venice that she has her strange dream of her own father perishing in a boat capsized by a whirlwind (VIII, 162). The novel ends with the suggestion that Elena herself may have perished at sea. The Execution of Tropmann, so reviled by Dostoevskii, is more subtle than its detractor might have suspected. By the deft use of political references Turgenev suggests his account as an echo of the terror following the French Revolution, with threatening implications not only for a whole class, but for Turgenev himself. He and his fellow ‘gentlemen’ are cloistered all night in the prison with the victim, whilst outside are the guillotine and a Parisian mob baying for blood - a threatening, elemental roar, which, heard from inside, Turgenev describes in water imagery as the noise of ocean breakers (XIV, 155). Even a calm sea is haunted by what may lie beneath it, as the hero in the opening chapter of Spring Torrents makes clear: He did not imagine the sea of life covered by stormy waves, as the poets describe it. No, he thought of this sea as imperturbably smooth, motionless and transparent down to its dark floor; he himself was sitting in a small, unsteady boat, but down there on this dark muddy bottom ugly monsters could just be made out, in the form of enormous fish: all life’s ills, disease, grief, madness, poverty, blindness … He watched, and suddenly one of the monsters came out of the gloom, rose ever higher and higher, becoming all the time more distinct, all the more revolting, as it became clearer … Another minute, and the boat would capsize on its back! But then, once more it appeared to grow dimmer, it was moving away, dropping down to the bottom - and it lay there, only just moving its tail … but the appointed day would come and it would capsize the boat (XI, 8).

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Before his own death Turgenev’s dreams were tormented by menacing sea creatures,12 and it is at this late period in his life that his treatment of death enters an area where Tolstoi would never go - the supernatural. The opening and the end of the earlier story The Dog had already placed the plot within a suggested supernatural framework, but it is with later stories such as The Song of Triumphant Love (ɉɟɫɧɶ ɬɨɪɠɟɫɬɜɭɸɳɟɣ ɥɸɛɜɢ) and Klara Milich (Ʉɥɚɪɚ Ɇɢɥɢɱ) with its subtitle After Death (ɉɨɫɥɟ ɫɦɟɪɬɢ) that we see Turgenev plunging uncompromisingly into the fantastic. There is, however, one important aspect of Turgenev’s writing which appears to mark him off quite clearly from his contemporaries Dostoevskii and Tolstoi - his lyrical evocation of nature. Yet even here, all is perhaps not quite what it seems. The story Death in Sketches not only has a very Tolstoian title, but seems to look forward to Tolstoi’s own story of 1859 Three Deaths (Ɍɪɢ ɫɦɟɪɬɢ), which recounts the last hours of a noblewoman, a peasant and a tree. Turgenev’s story encompasses four deaths (a peasant, a miller, a student and a noblewoman: IV, 212-24), but it begins with a heightened lyrical description of the Chaplygino forest of the narrator’s childhood. The forest has now been completely ravaged by unrelenting frosts, and it is this devastation of nature which forms the background for the first death and the narrator’s recollections of other deaths. For Turgenev, something threatening often lurks under the apparently calm face of nature. We have already seen this in the water imagery at the opening of Spring Torrents. Earlier in Rudin such dark notes may be observed in the natural setting of the Avdiukhin Pond, the scene of that decisive encounter between Natalia and Rudin. Yet in Turgenev’s world, nature, if not always threatening, is at the very least indifferent to man and his dying. This is how nature is portrayed in A Tour in the Forest ($#  %#)?): ‘From the depths of age-old forests, from the immortal bosom of water, there arises the same voice: “I have no concern for you”, nature says to man, “I rule, and just you busy yourself with how to avoid dying”’ (VII, 51). It is, perhaps, Bersenev in On the Eve who puts the matter at its clearest: ‘Nature does not always hint to us of love […] she also threatens us. She reminds us of terrible … yes, inaccessible mysteries. Is it not she who must swallow us up? Is she not continually doing so? There is both life and death within her, and death speaks just as loud in her as life’ (VIII, 13).

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NOTES 1. Leonard Schapiro, Turgenev His Life and Times, Oxford University Press, Oxford, Toronto, Melbourne, 1978, p.235. 2. The cause was apparently the way in which Turgenev had edited the love letters of Pushkin to his future wife. I.S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v dvatdsati vos’mi tomakh, Nauka, Moscow-Leningrad, 1961-1968 (Sochineniia), XV, p.352. Hereafter references in brackets in the text will be to volume and page of this edition. Translations are my own. 3. See: N.F. Budianov, Dostoevskii i Turgenev: tvorcheskii dialog, Nauka, Leningrad, 1987, p.4. 4. See editorial note to story in V, p. 575. 5. See also R. Peace, Dostoevskii’s ‘Notes from Underground’, Bristol Classical Press, Critical Studies in Russian Literature, Duckworth, London, 1993, pp.70-1. 6. See: F.M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, Nauka, Leningrad, 1972-1990,V, p.122. Subsequent quotation is from this edition. 7. Ibid., V, p.159. 8. Ibid., p.162. 9. I am indebted to Sander Brouwer for pointing out that the existence of an autograph of this ending strongly suggests Turgenev himself to be its author, though Louis Viardot may still have been its instigator. 10. Dostoevskii expresses his reaction to Turgenev’s work in a letter to Strakhov of 11 (23) June 1870: Dostoevskii, XXIX, 1, pp.127-9. 11. In The Devils. Dostoevskii, X, p. 70. 12. Before his own death Turgenev was apparently tormented by dreams of sea monsters. See: Turgenev’s Spring Torrents, trans. Leonard Schapiro, (with notes and a critical essay), Eyre Methuen, London, 1972, p.180. See also: Robert Dessaix, Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev, Scribner, London, 2005, p.124.

The Paradoxes of Parody: Notes on the Art of Mikhail Zoshchenko and Evgenii Popov Robert Porter

One of the most salient features of the literature that came ‘on stream’ (by which we mean was, sometimes belatedly, published legally in Russia) in the late 1980s and 1990s as the Soviet Union unravelled was its parodic function. Viacheslav Petsukh’s New Moscow Philosophy (ɇɨɜɚɹ ɦɨɫɤɨɜɫɤɚɹ ɮɢɥɨɫɨɮɢɹ) of 1989 was a re-working of Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment. Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s The New Robinsons (ɇɨɜɵɟ Ɋɨɛɢɧɡɨɧɵ) of the same year portrays a family living out a parody of Daniel Defoe’s classic. Igor Iarkevich’s narrative of 1991 Solzhenitsyn - or a Voice from Underground (ɋɨɥɠɟɧɢɰɵɧ ɢɥɢ ɝɨɥɨɫ ɢɡ ɩɨɞɩɨɥɶɹ) recalls at a stroke in its very title Dostoevskii, Blok, Siniavskii and Solzhenitsyn himself. Evgenii Popov’s On the Eve of on the Eve (ɇɚɤɚɧɭɧɟ ɧɚɤɚɧɭɧɟ) of 1993 is a transparent re-working and updating of Turgenev’s On the Eve. It is hardly surprising that parody should appear so prevalent since, as I have written elsewhere,1 public life under Brezhnev had, at least in the eyes of many intellectuals, itself become a parody: a gerontocracy claiming to be the only true custodians of the future; a oneparty state preaching freedom, democracy and peaceful co-existence while invading Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan; a government claiming scientific principles while presiding over an economy that was becoming increasingly ramshackle; an ailing Marxist General Secretary who came to rely on a faith healer. However, there are more literary reasons at the back of the parodic urge and these I intend to explore with specific reference to Mikhail Zoshchenko and Evgenii Popov. The word ‘parody’ comes from the Greek parodeia, meaning literally ‘a song sung alongside another’.2 It is well established that parody differs from many of the other terms in English associated with comic imitation: burlesque, skit, lampoon, mock-epic and the like. To quote The Encyclopaedia Britannica: Differing from burlesque by the depth of its technical penetration and from travesty, which treats dignified subjects in a trivial manner, true parody mercilessly exposes all the tricks of manner and thought of its victim yet cannot be written without an almost loving appreciation of the work that it ridicules.3

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These remarks should be taken in the context of Julia Kristeva’s formulation of ‘intertextuality’, the idea that a text depends for its effect on reference to other texts, that a given text is a bundle of quotations from preceding texts; a text is ‘an absorption and transformation of another’.4 Of course, parody cuts across all eras and cultures - it began with the ancient Greeks and we have a splendid contemporary example in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, which won the Orange Prize for fiction in 2006. This novel, set largely on an American campus at the present time, is an affectionate re-working of E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End. If Forster’s novel charts the crumbling of English social structures and attitudes before the First World War and examines the eternal interplay of material circumstances and aesthetic aspirations, Smith plots generational, racial and academic rivalry. In various interviews Popov has been fairly unhelpful about which authors have influenced him most. In 1990 he listed Gogol, Dostoevskii, Leskov, Boccaccio, Sterne, Joyce, Platonov, Zoshchenko and Aksenov, adding that he did not like thinking about it seriously.5 At the end of his first novel The Soul of a Patriot (Ⱦɭɲɚ ɩɚɬɪɢɨɬɚ) there is a Gargantuan list of people to whom he proposes a toast, indeed all the individuals mentioned in the book (with the exception of Stalin) - in the typescript of the novel Zoshchenko figured twice. The author assured me this was an oversight - yet could it have been more significant? The critic Sergei Borovikov asserts that Popov is ‘ɚ national writer in our country and if he isn’t a writer of the magnitude that we’re used to when we speak of a national writer, then that is just to do with the epoch’.6 Borovikov adds that in the Soviet epoch Zoshchenko was the national writer and after him Shukshin. In personal correspondence Popov tells me that there is a reference to him on the internet by an unknown critic, saying he is a mixture of Zoshchenko and Dostoevskii. Popov also tells me that at school in 1961 he told his teacher that he did not want to know of or respond to the ‘idiotic’ decree of 1946 attacking the journals Leningrad and Znamia - which had been, of course, an attack on Zoshchenko and Akhmatova. Popov was told by one editor, when his work was rejected, that he wrote ‘in the manner of Zoshchenko’ and that one Zoshchenko was enough for them. However, further in this personal correspondence, Popov admits to influences other than Zoshchenko (Leskov, Kharms, Platonov), but the Zoshchenko connection would seem to be the strongest. On a superficial level we can note that each writer is a master of the short, comic narrative - even Popov’s novels are in fact highly episodic, presenting us with a plethora of loosely connected plots. A more substantial parallel resides in the fact that Zoshchenko and Popov signpost respectively the beginning and end of the Soviet era. Zoshchenko’s dialogues trumpet the anomalies, discords and freedoms of the New Economic Policy, while Popov’s narratives taken as whole -

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in effect what in Soviet times would have been called his ‘creative path’ - echo the lives of the little man in the age of stagnation and chart the transition to perestroika and the second - current - New Economic Policy. And if parody is essentially affectionate, marked by ‘almost loving appreciation’, then both authors qualify as parodists of the first water. Linda Hart Scatton has charted the rich motifs of literary parody in Zoshchenko’s longer - and less widely read - works, notably the Sentimental Stories (ɋɟɧɬɢɦɚɧɬɚɥɶɧɵɟ ɩɨɜɟɫɬɢ). She also points out that as early as 1919 he produced a parody of Blok, using the guise of an uncouth poet, one Vovka Chuchelovo.7 In June 1922 he published his Friendly Parodies (Ⱦɪɭɠɟɫɤɢɟ ɩɚɪɨɞɢɢ), which mimicked in an affectionate manner, among others, his fellow Serapions. In part, these early parodies were an attempt to establish his independence. The later parodies, as embodied in the Sentimental Stories, show us the author mocking some of the chief characteristics of nineteenth-century literature: the little man, the superfluous man, perhaps the ‘accursed questions’ (‘Who is to blame?’ and ‘What is to be done?’). Scatton argues convincingly that Zoshchenko’s mocking of what he called ‘Karamzin language’ was as much an attempt to ridicule those early Soviet writers who sought to address the great themes but who lacked the necessary talent: I parody the present-day intellectual writer, who perhaps, does not, but ought to exist these days, if he were to fulfil the social command not of the publishing house but of that milieu and of that community which has been brought to the forefront ...8 One might note that of all the Sentimental Stories only the last, The Sixth Tale of Belkin (ɒɟɫɬɚɹ ɩɨɜɟɫɬɶ Ȼɟɥɤɢɧɚ), instantly displays its roots and this was a story written as a ‘command of the publishing house’, for the centenary of Pushkin’s death. I suggest that in Zoshchenko’s more popular short stories there is a different kind of parody at work, namely an affectionate parody of the speech registers, values and psychology of the little man he routinely encountered in the real world. By contrast, in the case of Popov, one feels that, along with a good many contemporary colleagues, the author, in his deployment of parody, is rescuing Russian literature from the ideologists who kidnapped it for 74 years. Popov, along with Voinovich, Petsukh, Venedikt Erofeev, Viktor Erofeev, Tolstaia, Petrushevskaia to name just a few, is restoring Russian literature to its rightful owners, the Russian reading public. The nineteenth-century legacy has proved strong enough to withstand any amount of mimicry. Regarding more recent authors, especially those still living (notably Solzhenitsyn), the apparent irreverence directed at them should be taken as a sign of their strength.

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The butt of Zoshchenko’s parody is the spoken language of a Russia battered by years of war and revolution and now returning to something like normality. However, this is still a Russia caught between high aspiration and everyday reality, between ɛɥɚɠɟɧɫɬɜɨ and ɛɵɬ. Zoshchenko is a representative not just of the oral but the aural tradition in literature. In catching the cadences of everyday speech and turning them into art, liberating and emancipating common speech, he makes a gesture to James Joyce at the other end of Europe and to Bohumil Hrabal in the centre of Europe. It has become a truism to identify skaz as the key feature of Zoshchenko’s writing and yet there have been lengthy discussions as to how it operates and indeed what is really is. Bakhtin identifies the term as the use of ‘another person’s language’. However, the crucial question is how it determines the relationship between the narrator, the various characters within a given narrative and the author at the back of all these elements. Jeremy Hicks has provided a pretty near definitive analysis of skaz in Zoshchenko,9 emphasizing its ambivalent nature and eclipsing the routine view of Zoshchenko as ‘satirist’. Like Scatton, he sees a unity in Zoshchenko’s oeuvre and insists on Bakhtin’s opinion that skaz is alternately ‘parodic’ or ‘stylized’. Indeed, Hicks goes further and suggests that at times skaz can be simultaneously parodic and stylized: ‘The Russian critic fails to envisage cases where the author has an ambivalent relation, where he is both in and out of sympathy with the narrator or where his sympathies shift’.10 Aleksandr Voronskii had noted back in 1922 that ‘Zoshchenko doesn’t stay in one place’,11 but I would not interpret this merely (as Scatton does) as Zoshchenko ‘evolving’, but also as the fact that it is not straightforward to pin down his loyalties, visà-vis his characters, his narrator or even the Soviet establishment. Put simply: in The Aristocrat (Ⱥɪɢɫɬɨɤɪɚɬɤɚ) can we be sure that the female protagonist is really an aristocrat just because she wears a hat and has a gold tooth? Can the narrator-hero Grigorii Kosonosov be blamed for trying hard to entertain her (with a trip to the theatre and a visit to the buffet) in the manner to which he thinks she is accustomed and can Soviet aspirations be faulted for trying to create a class-less society when we witness the friction generated, as one individual tries to behave as a newly emancipated proletarian while another has been (apparently) obliged to come down in the world?12 And what of Zoshchenko’s relationship to himself? Why his predilection for pseudonyms? We recall that he used ‘Gavrila’ most frequently, but others included: ‘M.M.Z.’, ‘ɡɚɫɥɭɠɟɧɧɵɣ ɞɟɹɬɟɥɶ’ (‘honoured creative figure’), ‘Gavrilych’, ‘M. Kopliannikov-Zuev’, ‘ɩɪɢɜɚɬ-ɞɨɰɟɧɬ’(‘untenured university lecturer’), ‘M.M. Prishchemikhin’ and ‘Kolenkorov’. These go beyond the time-honoured practice of an invented narrator like Ivan Petrovich Belkin or Zoshchenko’s own Nazar Ilich, gospodin Sinebriukhov. The usual and

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mundane explanations for using literary pseudonyms include: 1) trying to avoid retribution for what one has written - but this rarely seems to work for long (and certainly did not work in the case of Iulii Daniel and Andrei Siniavskii) or 2) trying to appeal to a wider readership by disguising gender or ethnic origins - this seems to be a safer bet. Joanne Kathleen Rowling’s initial coyness about her gender worked like magic. Perhaps a more intriguing reason for the tendency towards pseudonyms, sometimes multiple pseudonyms, among some writers is threefold: 1) it involves an exercise in self-parody (in part, the better to pre-empt parodic attacks from hostile quarters?); 2) it denotes the writer’s desire to assert and explore the identity of the creative mind as it strives to mystify and manipulate the reader, following alternative creative paths; and 3) it is simply an insistence on one’s right to a creative existence. Milan Kundera, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, tells us how he was proscribed after 1968, but by posing as a famous astrologist and publishing horoscopes he could reassert his existence, ‘the existence of a man erased from history, literary reference books, even the telephone directory, a corpse brought back to life’.13 Popov, no less than Zoshchenko, refuses to stand in one place and delights in multiple personae. In Popov’s first novel The Soul of a Patriot, the narrator is at pains to distinguish between himself and another ‘Evgenii Anatolevich Popov’. In several stories we encounter one ‘Fetisov’, sometimes a buffoon of a writer, sometimes an ordinary white-collar worker. In his most recent works there are further literary personae and I will return to them in a moment. One of the trickiest tasks for the reader of Popov’s fiction is to gauge the tone of the narrator’s voice at any given moment. I would add that this makes the task of the translator all the more difficult. Is the narrator serious or is he joking? Is he being cruel or insensitive, or is he deliberately debunking the pompous moralizing of Socialist Realist hacks? And how many of Popov’s stories end with the beginning of a new story, almost in a mockery of Dostoevskii’s promise of a new story at the end of Crime and Punishment? Stories that promise more stories, narrators behind other narrators, a style that shifts constantly or works simultaneously on various levels - these are the elements that make up Popov’s fiction. The various alter egos that Popov offers us testify to his continuing exploration of his own identity and to the fact that a literary text is much more than its creator. Let us examine in some detail his recent book (2006) The Beggars’ Opera: Stories about the Incomprehensible, Conversations, Incidents (Ɉɩɟɪɚ ɧɢɳɢɯ: Ɋɚɫɫɤɚɡɵ ɨ ɧɟɩɨɧɹɬɧɨɦ, Ȼɟɫɟɞɵ, ɋɥɭɱɚɢ). The three parts represent three different genres (fiction, conversations and journalism) and yet the work has an aesthetic coherence, if we bear in mind our foregoing comments on parody, skaz and fictionalized narrators. Vasilii Aksenov’s Foreword puts it more colourfully, saying that this ‘opera’ recalls Brecht, and is in

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three acts.14 In the final piece ‘Moscow, The Beggars’ Opera, or The Incident at Metro Station “B”’, the author himself reminds us of John Gay’s work and wonders whether this ‘still topical tragi-comedy’ could possibly be revived on the Moscow stage in the form of a musical.15 The very first story in the book is entitled Virtual Reality (ȼɢɪɬɭɚɥɶɧɚɹ ɪɟɚɥɶɧɨɫɬɶ) and immediately presents us with a literary alter ego: The writer Gdov bought a newspaper. The writer Gdov read a story in the newspaper: ‘By the end of the second millennium since the birth of Christ, Holy Russia, transformed by the tsar, the Bolsheviks, the communists, the democrats and technological progress, flourished! And just look, this country will step into the Internet just like stepping in shit and it’ll never get out of it,’ so thought the famous set designer, let’s call him V.B’.16 V.B. is Vladimir Boer and was born ‘in the city of K., which stands on the great Siberian river E., which flows into the Arctic Ocean’. So frequently is this phrase repeated throughout Popov’s oeuvre that we can be forgiven for thinking that Boer is a version of Popov. Boer is at a reception. Also in the city of K. there was an engineer, whom, we are told we will call ‘Filip’.17 So we have a narrative leading into another narrative leading on to a third narrative (possibly) and the entanglement is as difficult to escape from as will be Russia’s from the entrapment created by the Internet. Such is the deployment of inverted commas and points de suspension that it is very difficult to tell who is relating what. Nonetheless, there is a simple story at the heart of this text: Filip visits a neighbour Sinev, a former member of the security services, and sells him for 300 roubles a secret invention, a machine for making money. When the machine breaks down, Sinev goes to the police complaining that he has been defrauded. Both he and Filip end up in jail. Boer tells this story to the writer Gdov. Then a wind howls through the reception at which Boer is present, blowing open windows and doors and sending everything flying ‘just like at the end of A. Wajda’s film Man of Marble’ and ‘we all found ourselves in virtual reality forever’.18 The closing paragraph, set out separately from the preceding one, reads: What remarkable stories they write in the newspapers these days, gentlemen! And by the way, what an interesting time we are living in, comrades! When labour and capital are racing along distractedly, neither knowing where, while art, as always, finds itself ahead of progress’, said the writer Gdov loudly and chucked the newspaper in the bin.19

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In his fiction Popov has occasionally dropped facetious remarks about postmodernism and if one of the movement’s chief traits is intertextual parody, then it is only natural that it too should be parodied. Virtual Reality is one of Popov’s densest parodic exercises. The opening of the newspaper story that Gdov reads takes us from Sviataia Rus to the Internet, from the communist era to the new Russia, with coinages like pepsi and displei, in a few sentences. At the reception described we have ‘none other than some sort of postmodernist, hired for nothing, just for the grub, the booze and the fame’.20 His public performance is a Popovian tour de force of double-treble self-mockery: ɂ ɜ ɷɬɨ ɱɭɞɧɨɟ ɦɝɧɨɜɟɧɶɟ, Ʉɨɝɞɚ ɹɜɢɬɶɫɹ ɛɭɞɟɲɶ ɬɵ, ə ɱɭɜɫɬɜɭɸ ɧɨɱɧɨɟ ɠɠɟɧɢɟ, Ʉɚɤ ɝɟɧɢɣ ɱɢɫɬɨɣ ɤɪɚɫɨɬɵ. Ʉɨɢɦ, ɫɨɛɫɬɜɟɧɧɨ, ɹ ɢ ɹɜɥɹɸɫɶ, Ɉɬɱɟɝɨ ɢ ɫɪɚɬɶ ɫ ɜɚɦɢ ɧɚ ɨɞɧɨɦ ɝɟɤɬɚɪɟ ɧɟ ɫɨɛɢɪɚɸɫɶ. Ʉɚɤ ɝɨɜɨɪɢɥ Ⱦɟɪɪɢɞɚ: ɂ ɧɚ ɯɢɬɪɭɸ ɝɚɣɤɭ ɧɚɣɞɟɬɫɹ ɭɡɞɚ. Ⱥ ɟɦɭ ɨɬɜɟɱɚɥ Ɋɨɥɚɧ Ȼɚɪɬ: Ⱦɢɫɤɭɪɫ ɟɫɬɶ ɫɢɦɭɥɶɬɚɧɧɵɣ ɬɚɥɚɧɬ. ɒɢɪɨɤɚ ɫɬɪɚɧɚ ɪɨɞɧɚɹ, ɬɚɤ ɫɤɚɡɚɬɶ. Ⱦɹɞɹ Ɏɟɞɨɪ ɧɟ ɜɟɥɟɥ ɟɟ ɫɭɠɚɬɶ.21 (And in that wondrous instant When you’ll appear to me, I feel the night-time burning, Like genius of pure beauty. Which, in actual fact, I am too And that’s why I have no intention Of shitting in the same patch as you. As Derrida said: For a tricky nut you’ll always find a spanner. And the answer he got from Roland Barthes Was: Discourse is a simultaneous art. Vast is the homeland, as they say. Old Uncle Fedor didn’t order us to have it any other way.) Then we are told that the audience was about to get excited but the poet mingled with the audience and anyway the audience was not really in the mood for him, ‘the public has no business with poets any more, the public only has business with business’.22

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The poem takes us on a slightly dislocated trip through Pushkin, to whom the poet likens himself, on to Derrida and Barthes, thence to the Soviet film Circus (director G. Aleksandrov) of 1936, with the stupendously popular song ɉɟɫɧɹ ɨ ɪɨɞɢɧɟ (Song of the Homeland lyrics by V.E. Lebedev-Kumach and music by E.O. Dunaevskii) and finishes with a reference to Dostoevskii. Yet for the contemporary Russian reader there are perhaps further resonances: in personal correspondence I am informed that in his student days Popov had his own obscene conclusion to the Pushkin lyric, which was welcomed by those in the audience who had had experience of the ‘calculating, predatory and flighty Muscovite girls’. What I believe most Western Slavists would take to be an allusion to the Soviet song, the author tells me is in fact a mockery of postmodernism and a light parodying of D.A. Prigov. But it goes further: the Soviet song is probably best known now because of its usage in the Russian film of Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle - it is performed over the camp radio for the zeks. ‘Alas,’ Popov tells me, ‘the ungrateful Soviet people’ have re-worked the last lines (‘ɑɟɥɨɜɟɤ ɩɪɨɯɨɞɢɬ, ɤɚɤ ɯɨɡɹɢɧ, ɧɟɨɛɴɹɬɧɨɣ ɪɨɞɢɧɨɣ ɫɜɨɟɣ’ [‘Man strides like a master through his immense homeland’]), so they become: Ɉɬ Ɇɨɫɤɜɵ ɞɨ ɫɚɦɵɯ ɨɤɪɚɢɧ ɋ ɸɠɧɵɯ ɝɨɪ ɞɨ ɫɟɜɟɪɧɵɯ ɦɨɪɟɣ ɑɟɥɨɜɟɤ ɩɪɨɯɨɞɢɬ, ɤɚɤ ɯɨɡɹɢɧ, ȿɫɥɢ ɨɧ, ɤɨɧɟɱɧɨ, ɧɟ ɟɜɪɟɣ. (From Moscow to the farthest ways From mountains south to the north seas too, Man strides, master of all he surveys, If, of course, he ain’t a Jew.) The rather vulgar line ‘I don’t intend to shit in the same hectare as you’ refers to the practice in the Russian countryside, and especially on geological expeditions, of squatting on one’s haunches, smoking and chatting with a friend while performing bodily functions and then cleaning oneself with a Soviet newspaper (again, details courtesy of Evgenii Popov). Popov goes on to tell me that there is a scene in Finnegan’s Wake where an English soldier in the Crimea War takes offence when a Russian general performs this ritual and shoots the hapless Russian. There is also an urban folk poem, which goes: ɏɨɪɨɲɨ ɜ ɞɟɪɟɜɧɟ ɥɟɬɨɦ. ɉɪɢɫɬɚɟɬ ɝɨɜɧɨ ɤ ɲɬɢɛɥɟɬɚɦ. ɀɨɩɨɣ ɧɸɯɚɟɲɶ ɰɜɟɬɵ. Ɉ Ɋɨɫɫɢɹ! ɗɬɨ ɬɵ!

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(It’s nice in the countryside in summer, When you’re up to your ankles in shit. You can smell the flowers with your arsehole. Oh Russia, you’re really it!) This, in its turn, is a re-working of the epigraph to the second Chapter of Evgenii Onegin (O rus! ... Ɉ Ɋɭɫɶ!), which Pushkin, delighting in a bilingual pun, takes from Horace. The ‘Uncle Fedor’ line is a reaction to the famous phrase Dostoevskii puts into the mouth of Dmitrii Karamazov: ‘Man is wide, too wide, I would narrow him’ - near the end of book three, chapter three of The Brothers Karamazov.23 However, Diadia Fedor is also a character in the cartoon film Three from Prostokvashino (Ɍɪɨɟ ɢɡ ɉɪɨɫɬɨɤɜɚɲɢɧɨ). When the director of the film, Eduard Uspenskii, read Popov’s story he thought it was a reference to his own work and was disappointed that he had been upstaged by Dostoevskii. So intertextuality can be unintentional or intuitive and can depend on the reader as well as the writer. Lastly (?), the line ‘ɇɚ ɯɢɬɪɭɸ ɝɚɣɤɭ ɧɚɣɞɟɬɫɹ ɭɡɞɚ’ is a rephrasing of the obscene proverb ‘ɇɚ ɯɢɬɪɭɸ ɠɨɩɭ ɢ ɯɭɣ ɫ ɜɢɧɬɨɦ’ (‘For a tricky arse you need a corkscrew [threaded] prick’). The poet and his poem are then promptly ignored. Could the implication of the whole text of Virtual Reality be that the postmodernist preoccupation with intertextuality and self-reference ultimately becomes an irrelevant game whose rules are understood by just a few initiates? The story’s conclusion asserts that art is always ahead of progress. Could this also include the notion that the serious writer is also ahead of any current critical fad? If a few lines of poetry in the book are laden with intertextuality, the volume as a whole offers us more. One can define three types of parody in the book: 1) the obvious literary parody, evident in the poem discussed above; such parody is also at the core of another story in the volume The Sky in Diamonds (ɇɟɛɨ ɜ ɚɥɦɚɡɚɯ), a quote from the closing lines of Uncle Vania; 2) discreet parody, which might amount to themes and variations on an easily identified parody (also evidenced in the poem); and 3) real life, presented as a parody of what normality should be. Popov’s Beggar’s Opera moves from fiction to dialogues involving, to various degrees, fiction writers, and in its last part is journalism. Here our author might be construed as simply exposing the shortcomings in post-Soviet life. However, it might be better understood as a continuation of the notion that life has become parody. The author tells us in his conversation with Nikita Struve that he is fed up with the parodying: for him it has become just comic downgrading by young, unenlightened minds of the images of a sinister time.24 He notes that the awful ‘new’ national anthem, with the old tune but new words, is a compromise which yet encapsulates double standards. It would appear that nothing

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has changed and he recalls the unofficial drunken versions of the Soviet anthem from the 1970s: ‘ɋɨɸɡ ɧɟɪɭɲɢɦɵɣ ɪɟɫɩɭɛɥɢɤ ɝɨɥɨɞɧɵɯ’ (‘Indestructible Union of Hungry Republics’) or ‘ɋɨɸɡ ɧɟɪɭɲɢɦɵɣ, ɯɨɥɨɞɧɵɣ ɢ ɜɲɢɜɵɣ’ (‘Indestructible Union, Freezing and Lice-Ridden’). The implication from Popov seems to be that it is easy, pointless and even misleading to make light of Stalinism now that it is long past - real parody, however, tells a truth of sorts and requires courage. In the second story in Part 1, No Joking (Ȼɟɡ ɯɨɯɦ) the venue is a café called ‘Café’; the chief characters are Gdov (again) and one unemployed individual Khabarov. Gdov considers Khabarov more a ‘character’ (ɩɟɪɫɨɧɚɠ) than actually a person (ɩɟɪɫɨɧɚ) and: these are not one and the same thing as you can easily assure yourself through the example of this story of mine, which concerns people who, perhaps have never existed in this country of ours, or IN LIFE they were quite different from the way they are depicted before your very eyes by me, the author, but who also in his turn is more likely than not just a character, nothing more.25 There are at least two examples in this story of life as a parody of what we assume to be life, one linguistic, one factual: the author lights on the Odessa expression (which features in other Popov stories) ‘TWO BIG DIFFERENCES, as the whole country under reconstruction keeps repeating these days, aping the citizens of Odessa’.26 I first came across this quaint and somewhat illogical phrase, reminiscent of some IrishEnglish phraseology, in The Soul of a Patriot. Could it be that Popov’s writing has promoted it into the mainstream vernacular, just as Zoshchenko’s dialogues, based on everyday speech but embroidered by his linguistic genius, contributed to the daily speech of the educated, as they (thanks largely to Zoshchenko?) argue over the genitive plural of ɤɨɱɟɪɝɚ or use circumlocutions like ɯɪɟɧ? Are Popov’s refrains (like ‘the City of K. on the river E.’) - with all their connotations of mock epic and their debunking of the moral values on display in Village Prose becoming part and parcel of everyday Russian speech, as certain passages in The Master and Margarita or Moscow-Petushki have? The second example of life becoming a parody of life concerns someone who was once the world’s favourite athlete. In the 1972 Olympics Olga Korbut, aged 17, won three gold medals and one silver medal for gymnastics and thus did much to enhance the image of the sport worldwide, as well as present to the world a face of charm and warmth. She was a useful propaganda weapon in the era of the Cold War. She was the brightest feature of an Olympiad scarred by the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by Arab terrorists. How does she feature

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in Popov’s story? Gdov’s and Khabarov’s discussions about their past sexual activities give way to a TV news broadcast referring to 9/11, Berezovskii, Chechnia, CIA, KGB, FSB, Iran or Iraq (‘Sod knows which’ [‘ɯɪɟɧ ɪɚɡɛɟɪɟɲɶ’])27 and: Olga Korbut, one time gymnast and now an American, according to information, stole some goods from a grocery store, and then the sheriff went round to her house, which she hadn’t finished paying for yet, and there was nothing there at all, no furniture, just packets of forged dollar bills strewn here and there, while her husband, who had been a singer with the group ‘My Youth is Belorussia’, was now, according to information, also on the run.28 In many ways, in alluding obliquely to the darker aspect behind the Korbut myth, Popov is employing a technique which resembles that of ostranenie (making it strange). The reader is forced constantly to reassess his / her own perceptions, is frequently embarrassed, as are the characters in the text. One might well surmise that the writer too is persistently required to re-assess himself as his text proceeds. This brings us back to Kristeva. In an interview in 198529 she readily acknowledged her debt to Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism but argued that her formulation - intertextuality - represented a development. A textual segment was not merely an intersection of two voices, but rather an intersection of several voices involving phonic, syntactic and semantic participation.30 The subject of the utterance, precisely because of the intertextuality, is not an individual, not an identity.31 Thus we are led on, in Kristeva’s view, to a psychoanalytic exercise concerning the creator of the text, the one who places himself / herself at the intersection of the plurality of the participating texts, as they operate on the syntactic, semantic and phonic levels. Consequently, identity can be reduced to nothing and then reconstituted, possibly as a plurality of characters or fragments of character or ideology. All that Kristeva has to say in this regard is readily applicable to Zoshchenko’s and Popov’s fiction and bears directly on the examples I have been discussing. Kristeva then argues that much contemporary literature, for her, amounts to ‘continuous lay analysis’ and a ‘ “working-out” of the self’, as well as ‘a defence and consolidation of the self in its relation to its experience of crisis’;32 she links much contemporary literature to the current widespread manifestation of depression, though current society is one of action rather than contemplation and ‘those who are sad, or terribly boring, who move at a slow pace or do not speak, cannot be objects of fascination’.33 She argues that some earlier periods confronted depression as it arose after, for example, the religious crisis at the end of the Middle Ages or after the eighteenth century’s Age of Reason.

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It is at this point that I part company with Kristeva - if I understand her correctly. Parody / intertextuality is as old as human expression. The serpent and the forbidden fruit were the immediate mockery of Adam’s and Eve’s innocent paradise: grace and disgrace became instantaneously locked in perpetual dialogue. While cultures go through periods when, of course, they may exhibit more self-assurance than self-irony and doubt (the Elizabethan Age? The Victorian Age?), the elements of any culture which future generations will return to will usually involve universal ambiguities. The creator who ‘doesn’t stand in one place’ may well be depressed, as Zoshchenko increasingly was. Indeed, the incidence of clinical depression is notoriously high among comedians. Yet the ‘working out of the self’ that the shifting comic voice indulges in may provide salvation. The ‘blurb’ to Popov’s The Beggar’s Opera describes him as ‘the jolliest anarchist of contemporary Russian literature’. In 2004 Popov published a book entitled The Bald-Headed Boy (ɉɥɟɲɢɜɵɣ ɦɚɥɶɱɢɤ). In the main it consists of previously published short stories, but the author’s Preface, postscripts to each story and the volume’s four supplements offer an exegesis for the volume’s title, provide a raison d’être for this ostensible literary recycling and illustrate the indestructibility of parody - after all, parody is the most difficult weapon to defend yourself against. The Bald-Headed Boy represents a manuscript that Popov submitted for publication in Krasnoiarsk and in Moscow in 1970 and which was promptly rejected. This we learn from the Preface, which in the main is, yet again, an autobiographical note. Characteristically, the author does not blame anyone for the rejection - the time was just not right. Quite simply, citizens, SUCH WAS THE TIME, and those who were guilty were not just the communists or Vanka and Manka or some Lazar Pafnutych from the Writers’ Union, but all of us, without exception, including the author of these lines.[...] And if the whole of this totalitarian abomination repeats itself some time, then once again we will have only ourselves to blame, we who have remained just the fools we were before.34 The quality of the stories is attested by the fact that they remain as fresh and relevant now in the twenty-first century as when they were composed in the late 1960s and the meticulous dating of each piece is of interest to the literary scholar perhaps but seems of little interest to the literary critic. Some 30 years ago in a television programme the writer D.M. Thomas likened Russian literature to a train, in which all the writers could pass along the corridor and communicate with one another. In

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Thomas’ view, Western literature, by contrast, was like a motorway, with all the writers speeding along in their individual cars, paying scant attention to one another. In the title story of the volume, The BaldHeaded Boy, Popov takes a trip from his own train compartment to perhaps just the very next carriage and towards the front of the train. Unbeknownst to his wife, the narrator-hero of this story mixes up a stomach-turning cocktail of cheap wine, cognac, vodka and beer, calculating the monetary deposits on the empty bottles to acquire the further ingredients. His wife discovers him in a drunken stupor and there follow tears and kisses and the warmth of a woman’s body. And afterwards we lay there, we were tired. We needed only each other. But the world was not at ease. There people were coughing, sneezing, squeaking doors and boots, finishing watching a film, gossiping, praying, telling lies. And nobody knew that through the midnight sky there flew a naked baldheaded boy. His name was Cupid. He was drunk. He swung in the air and dropped his golden arrows. They fell to earth, straight and at angles, like rain.35 The postscript tells us that we should not accuse the author of stealing the recipe for The Bald-Headed Boy from Venedikt Erofeev, since this story was written five years before Moscow-Petushki and: It was just that at that time all this stuff was just hanging in the air and God charged Venedikt with the job of condensing such a rarefied expanse into a concentration of brilliant prose which will live for centuries and has already outlived one.36 Let us stay with the image of the train. In Anna Karenina and Doctor Zhivago the train stands for a destructive and terrifying future, a phenomenon that will modernize Russia yet may annihilate individuals, while taking the whole country on an unknown journey. At the same time, it would be hard to deny the reality of the historical impact that the train had in Russia. Count Sergei Witte’s industrialization programme, with the building of the trans-Siberian railway as its centrepiece, came almost exactly midway between the time frames of Tolstoi’s and Pasternak’s epics. The train journeys in Popov are often short, localized and unfinished. Like everything Popov writes, they are a parody of the epic impulse. The Denial of the Waistcoat (Ɉɬɪɢɰɚɧɢɟ ɠɢɥɟɬɚ) sees the hero tested in serious debate with a very young, self-proclaimed author, who challenges him over Zola, Nathalie Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, Sartre and Camus. On jumping from the train after being unable to find his ticket, he comes to reject his waistcoat, that symbol of respectability and social standing, only later to find the ticket tucked in its watch

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pocket. The postscript to Pork Kebabs (ɋɜɢɧɵɟ ɲɚɲɥɵɱɤɢ) locates the story on the branch line to Dmitrov, outside Moscow, where the author once lived. Veniamin Kaverin can be forgiven for assuming that Evgenii Popov and not Venedikt Erofeev, was the real author of MoscowPetushki. And Erofeev can be forgiven for not being best pleased when he heard a report of that assumption. We should note the parallel with Zoshchenko. Trains do not figure largely in his work, but when they do, they tend to frustrate human endeavour rather than facilitate it. In The Passenger (ɉɚɫɫɚɠɢɪ) of 1926, the hero is persuaded to take the train to Moscow purely for recreational reasons. He suffers hunger, pins and needles in his foot and finally a bump on the head when he falls from the luggage rack, having persuaded an old woman to remove her basket from there. She upbraids him for denting her basket with his head during the fall. In The Westinghouse Brake (Ɍɨɪɦɨɡ ȼɟɫɬɢɧɝɚɭɡɚ) of the same year the drunken passenger, in altercation with another traveller, who wants him thrown off the train, pulls the communication cord. The train doesn’t stop, but at least the hero sobers up. The Journey to the Town of Toptsy (ɉɨɟɡɞɤɚ ɜ ɝɨɪɨɞ Ɍɨɩɰɵ) was written in 1935. The hero goes to extraordinary lengths (official permissions, bribes) to get his wife a ticket to go and visit a sick relative, only to discover that he can just buy a ticket from the ticket office. The cashier even dreams of the day when he can offer free gifts with the tickets - fresh flowers for the ladies, a razor or a pair of trousers for the men. The hero’s wife makes her trip, but writes a furious letter to her husband for booking her on a slow train for milkmaids. In contrast to Zoshchenko’s depictions of the railways, trains in later twentieth-century Russian fiction are a springboard for the imagination, for fantasizing and conversation, mental, not geographical, exploration. They liberate rather than frustrate. In this connection, we recall Evtushenko’s poem The City of ‘Yes’ and the City of ‘No’ (Ƚɨɪɨɞ ‘Ⱦɚ’ ɢ ɝɨɪɨɞ ‘ɇɟɬ’), where he likens himself to a train constantly dashing to and fro between East and West and is happy never to settle. So in conclusion, what are the paradoxes of parody? Firstly, there is affection and admiration for the object of the mockery. Secondly, while so much parody depends on a topical frame of reference, parody is ultimately timeless (a young boy can have the bald head of an old man). Thirdly, while the full force of parody depends on a familiarity on the part of the reader with the realia of the social / historical context or in the case of purely literary parody, the piece of literature being parodied, the most successful parodies will take on a life of their own. I submit that Zoshchenko is just as popular today as he was in the 1920s. Fourthly, parody of the classics can highlight their enduring relevance: today’s problems are frighteningly similar to those faced by Turgenev’s, Dostoevskii’s and Chekhov’s characters. Fifthly, parody frequently involves self-parody - On the Eve of on the Eve features three

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postmodernist writers, Popov, Viktor Erofeev and Prigov, all drunk and unruly. Finally, while Kristreva’s intertextuality in its broadest manifestation may be linked with depression and identity crisis, parody the most readily identifiable component of intertextuality - retains the twin qualities of satire and comedy. Satire is essentially optimistic, seeking to fix on and exaggerate the short-fallings in life the better to eradicate them. Comedy, broader and more mercurial than satire, continues to identify the essential absurdity of humankind, by turns celebrating it and despairing of it. As Popov - or one of his alter egos in a voice that might be at once unaffected, ironic, mocking or selfparodying - says: ‘Earthly life is of itself a miracle, a win in the world’s lottery, while its quality is just a sub-plot in the human tragi-comedy, just ask the dead about this when you meet them’.37

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NOTES 1. Robert Porter, ‘Russia’ in John Sturrock, ed., The Oxford Guide to Contemporary World Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1997, pp. 331-9 (330). 2. See Encyclopaedia Britannica, nineteenth edition, Micropaedia, VII, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago and London, 1982, p. 768. 3. Loc. cit. 4. J.A.Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, fourth edition, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1999, p. 424. 5. Quoted in Robert Porter, Russia’s Alternative Prose, Berg Publishers, Oxford and Providence, 1994, p. 92. 6. Sergei Borovikov, ‘Evg. Popov kak russkii natsional’nyi pisatel’’, in Evgenii Popov Pleshivyi mal’chik, Greita/Greater, Moscow, 2004, pp. 256-60 (256-7). 7. Linda Hart Scatton, Mikhail Zoshchenko:Evolution of a Writer, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p. 24. 8. Quoted in Scatton, p. 85. 9. Jeremy Hicks, Mikhail Zoshchenko and the Poetics of ‘Skaz’, Astra Press, Nottingham, 2000. 10. Ibid. p. 52. 11. Quoted in Scatton, p. 70. 12. See M. Zoshchenko, Izbrannoe v dvukh tomakh, I, Khudozhestvennaia literatura, Leningrad, 1978, pp. 85-8, passim. 13. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim, Faber and Faber, London and Boston, p. 60. 14. Evgenii Popov, Opera nishchikh: Rasskazy o neponiatnom, Besedy, Sluchai, Vagrius, Moscow, 2006, p. 6. 15. Ibid., p. 347. 16. Ibid., p.13. 17. Ibid., p. 14. 18. Ibid., p. 23.

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19. Loc. cit. 20. Ibid., p. 16. 21. Ibid., p. 19. 22. Loc. cit. 23. F.M. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh, ed. L.P. Grossman et al., Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, Moscow, 1958, IX, p. 138. 24. Popov, p. 252. 25. Ibid., p. 33. 26. Ibid., p. 36. 27.27. Ibid., p. 42. 28. Ibid., pp. 42-3 29. Julia Kristeva, ‘Intertextuality and Literary Interpretation’ in Julia Kristeva: Interviews, ed. Ros Mitchell Guberman, Columbia University Press, New York / Chichester,1996, pp. 188-203. 30. Ibid., p. 189. 31. Ibid., p. 190. 32. Ibid., pp. 194-5. 33. Ibid., p. 195. 34. Popov, pp. 9-10. 35. Ibid., p. 50. 36. Ibid., p. 51. 37. Ibid., p. 6.

Dulcis fumus patriae: Tiutchev, Turgenev and Smoke Michael Pursglove

On 18 November 1865, in Baden-Baden, Ivan Turgenev began work on his fifth novel, Smoke which was set among the expatriate Russian community of the German spa town. On 29 January 1867 he wrote to Botkin that he had completed the novel. In March the manuscript was handed over to Mikhail Katkov, editor of the journal The Russian Herald (Ɋɭɫɫɤɢɣ ɜɟɫɬɧɢɤ), who unsuccessfully demanded various changes, and in mid-April the work was published. On 5 May Vasilii Botkin wrote to Turgenev: Smoke is still being read, and no opinion of it has yet been formed. Yesterday I was at Tiutchev’s house, - he’s just read it and is very displeased. Whilst acknowledging the skill with which the main character is drawn, he complains bitterly about the moral mood which imbues the story, and at the absence of all national sentiment.1 The title of the novel is perhaps unexpected, deriving largely from two passages in chapter 26. In the first, the smoke is, initially, that of the train taking Litvinov away from Baden: He sat alone in the carriage: no-one disturbed him. Smoke, smoke, - he repeated several times; and suddenly everything appeared as smoke to him; everything, his own life, Russian life - everything human and, especially, everything Russian. Everything is smoke and steam, he thought; everything seems to be constantly changing […]. Smoke, he whispered, smoke. He remembered the heated quarrels, the discussions, the shouting at Gubarev’s, at the houses of other people, high and low, progressive and reactionary, old and young [...] Litvinov again repeated his previous words: smoke, smoke, smoke! In Heidelberg, he thought, there are now over a hundred students; they are all studying chemistry, physics, physiology and don’t want to hear about anything else … But five or six years will pass and there won’t be fifteen students attending the courses of these same celebrated professors … The wind will change, the smoke will blow the other way. Smoke … smoke … smoke.2 By way of validating Litvinov’s thoughts, Turgenev appends a footnote giving the precise number of Russian students at Heidelberg for

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the summer semester 1866 (13) and for the winter semester (12). The smoke then may be taken to represent ephemeral, fashionable trends. This is not, however, an image which runs as any kind of leitmotif in the text. There are some earlier references: to ‘tobacco smoke’ (chapter six) which makes Litvinov’s head ache and which he associates with the uncongenial company he has encountered in Baden-Baden.3 In chapter ten it is the mixture of ‘expensive’ cigar smoke and the ‘most remarkable’ patchouli which constitutes ‘a kind of genuinely noble and Guards smell’ which characterizes the young generals with whom Litvinov attends a picnic.4 In chapter 15 a gathering chez Irina is as noisy as those chez Gubarev, but is distinguished only by the better dressed guests and the absence of beer and tobacco smoke.5 In chapter 17 Litvinov imagines himself already leaving Baden in a … ‘smoky railway carriage’.6 In chapter 23 the literal smoke has become a metaphor: Litvinov writes to Irina of undertakings which have turned to ‘dust and ashes’ or, as the Russian has it, ‘smoke and ashes’.7 Turgenev’s symbol has been variously interpreted. It is not industrial smoke, the ‘black unparliamentary smoke’ of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Milton (from North and South, 1855)8 or Charles Dickens’ Coketown (from Hard Times, 1854) but may symbolize the unstable and ephemeral nature of revolutionary stirrings in Russia in the midnineteenth century. The smoke can also be seen as a symbol of the chaotic nature of life in general. However, the strongest clue to its interpretation is to be found in the epilogue to the novel, which is set in Petersburg and tells of two unnamed society ladies who are discussing the qualities of Irina Ratmirova. In a mixture of French and Russian they conclude that Irina lacks faith and has an ‘embittered mind’ (‘ɨɡɥɨɛɥɟɧɧɵɣ ɭɦ’). In what is the last use of the word smoke (ɞɵɦ) in the novel, the voice of one of the ladies is described as ‘evaporating like incense smoke’. (‘ɢɫɩɚɪɹɟɬɫɹ, ɤɚɤ ɤɚɞɢɥɶɧɵɣ ɞɵɦ’).9 This associates the noun with the artificial world in which Irina lives, and with the disruptive, destructive, erotic passion which she arouses. Whichever interpretation one favours, the multiple meanings which Turgenev appears to place on the symbol may account for what is, in this writer’s view, its rather unsatisfactory nature. Tiutchev’s displeasure with Smoke was more concerned with content than symbol. It soon manifested itself in two publications. In May 1867 the liberal Notes of the Fatherland (Ɉɬɟɱɟɫɬɜɟɧɧɵɟ ɡɚɩɢɫɤɢ)10 published a poem by Tiutchev with the same title:

Dulcis fumus patriae: Tiutchev, Turgenev and Smoke

Ⱦɵɦ Ɂɞɟɫɶ ɧɟɤɨɝɞɚ, ɦɨɝɭɱɢɣ ɢ ɩɪɟɤɪɚɫɧɵɣ, ɒɭɦɟɥ ɢ ɡɟɥɟɧɟɥ ɜɨɥɲɟɛɧɵɣ ɥɟɫ,ɇɟ ɥɟɫ, ɚ ɰɟɥɵɣ ɦɢɪ ɪɚɡɧɨɨɛɪɚɡɧɵɣ, ɂɫɩɨɥɧɟɧɧɵɣ ɜɢɞɟɧɢɣ ɢ ɱɭɞɟɫ. Ʌɭɱɢ ɫɤɜɨɡɢɥɢ, ɬɪɟɩɟɬɚɥɢ ɬɟɧɢ; ɇɟ ɭɦɨɥɤɚɥ ɜ ɞɟɪɟɜɶɹɯ ɩɬɢɱɢɣ ɝɚɦ; Ɇɟɥɶɤɚɥɢ ɜ ɱɚɳɟ ɛɵɫɬɪɵɟ ɨɥɟɧɢ, ɂ ɥɨɜɱɢɣ ɪɨɝ ɜɡɵɜɚɥ ɩɨ ɜɪɟɦɟɧɚɦ. ɇɚ ɩɟɪɟɤɪɟɫɬɤɚɯ, ɫ ɪɟɱɶɸ ɢ ɩɪɢɜɟɬɨɦ, ɇɚɜɫɬɪɟɱɭ ɧɚɦ, ɢɡ ɩɨɥɭɬɶɦɵ ɥɟɫɧɨɣ, Ɉɛɜɟɹɧɧɵɣ ɤɚɤɢɦ-ɬɨ ɱɭɞɧɵɦ ɫɜɟɬɨɦ, Ɂɧɚɤɨɦɵɯ ɥɢɰ ɫɥɟɬɚɥɫɹ ɰɟɥɵɣ ɪɨɣ. Ʉɚɤɚɹ ɠɢɡɧɶ, ɤɚɤɨɟ ɨɛɚɹɧɶɟ, Ʉɚɤɨɣ ɞɥɹ ɱɭɜɫɬɜ ɪɨɫɤɨɲɧɵɣ ɫɜɟɬɥɵɣ ɩɢɪ! ɇɚɦ ɱɭɞɢɥɢɫɶ ɧɟɡɞɟɲɧɢɟ ɫɨɡɞɚɧɶɹ, ɇɨ ɛɥɢɡɨɤ ɛɵɥ ɧɚɦ ɷɬɨɬ ɞɢɜɧɵɣ ɦɢɪ. ɂ ɜɨɬ ɨɩɹɬɶ ɤ ɬɚɢɧɫɬɜɟɧɧɨɦɭ ɥɟɫɭ Ɇɵ ɫ ɩɪɟɠɧɟɸ ɥɸɛɨɜɶɸ ɩɨɞɨɲɥɢ. ɇɨ ɝɞɟ ɠɟ ɨɧ? Ʉɬɨ ɨɩɭɫɬɢɥ ɡɚɜɟɫɭ, ɋɩɭɫɬɢɥ ɟɟ ɨɬ ɧɟɛɚ ɞɨ ɡɟɦɥɢ? ɑɬɨ ɷɬɨ? ɉɪɢɡɪɚɤ, ɱɚɪɵ ɥɢ ɤɚɤɢɟ? Ƚɞɟ ɦɵ? ɂ ɜɟɪɢɬɶ ɥɢ ɝɥɚɡɚɦ ɫɜɨɢɦ? Ɂɞɟɫɶ ɞɵɦ ɨɞɢɧ, ɤɚɤ ɩɹɬɚɹ ɫɬɢɯɢɹ, Ⱦɵɦ - ɛɟɡɨɬɪɚɞɧɵɣ, ɛɟɫɤɨɧɟɱɧɵɣ ɞɵɦ! Ʉɨɣ-ɝɞɟ ɧɚɫɤɜɨɡɶ ɬɨɪɱɚɬ ɩɨ ɨɛɧɚɠɟɧɧɵɦ ɉɨɠɚɪɢɳɚɦ ɭɪɨɞɥɢɜɵɟ ɩɧɢ, ɂ ɛɟɝɚɸɬ ɩɨ ɫɭɱɶɹɦ ɨɛɨɠɟɧɧɵɦ ɋ ɡɥɨɜɟɳɢɦ ɬɪɟɫɤɨɦ ɛɟɥɵɟ ɨɝɧɢ ... ɇɟɬ, ɷɬɨ ɫɨɧ! ɇɟɬ, ɜɟɬɟɪɨɤ ɩɨɜɟɟɬ ɂ ɞɵɦɧɵɣ ɩɪɢɡɪɚɤ ɭɧɟɫɟɬ ɫ ɫɨɛɨɣ ... ɂ ɜɨɬ ɨɩɹɬɶ ɧɚɲ ɥɟɫ ɡɚɡɟɥɟɧɟɟɬ, ȼɫɟ ɬɨɬ ɠɟ ɥɟɫ, ɜɨɥɲɟɛɧɵɣ ɢ ɪɨɞɧɨɣ.

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Smoke Here once upon a time there resonated A mighty forest, green and magical, A forest and a whole world variegated, A place of visions, full of miracles. The rays of sunshine made a dappled shade; Incessant was the chatter of the birds; Swift-footed deer were glimpsed throughout the glade, And betimes the huntsman’s horn was heard. And at the crossroads words of welcome, talk; By some strange wondrous light transformed, To greet us, from the forest’s semi-dark, A crowd of well-known personages swarmed. How blissful life, how great the exaltation, How bright the sensuous feast before us here; We dreamed we saw another world’s creations, But this strange world for us was ever near. Again into the forest weird, uncertain, With former love our footsteps have drawn nigh. But where is it? Who has let fall the curtain, A curtain stretching earthwards from the sky? What have we here? A spell? a revenant? And where are we? Can we trust what we see? There’s nothing here but smoke, fifth element, Remorseless smoke, smoke to infinity. The monstrous twisted stumps of trees project Through all the burning wastes stripped bare by force, Along the boughs of blackened trees fire-wrecked, White flames with baleful cracking run their course. A breeze will rise - this all a dream has been The smoky spectre will be blown away, And then the forest will again be green, And magic, Russian forest ever stay.11 The following month the newspaper The Voice (Ƚɨɥɨɫ) for 22 June, referring to Turgenev’s novel as a ‘lamentable’ phenomenon of Russian literature, printed the following anonymous epigram:

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‘ɂ ɞɵɦ ɨɬɟɱɟɫɬɜɚ ɧɚɦ ɫɥɚɞɨɤ ɢ ɩɪɢɹɬɟɧ!’Ɍɚɤ ɩɨɷɬɢɱɟɫɤɢ ɜɟɤ ɩɪɨɲɥɵɣ ɝɨɜɨɪɢɬ. Ⱥ ɜ ɧɚɲ - ɢ ɫɚɦ ɬɚɥɚɧɬ ɜɫɟ ɢɳɟɬ ɜ ɫɨɥɧɰɟ ɩɹɬɟɧ, ɂ ɫɦɪɚɞɧɵɦ ɞɵɦɨɦ ɨɧ ɨɬɟɱɟɫɬɜɨ ɤɨɩɬɢɬ! (‘The smoke from Russian hearths affords us sweet delight!’ Thus they in yesteryear poetically spoke. But in our age they seek the radiant sun to blight, And Russia to besmirch in clouds of stinking smoke.)12 These two responses to Smoke constitute only the second occasion on which Tiutchev had reacted to a work by Turgenev. The first occasion was in 1852, the year in which Notes of a Huntsman appeared as a separate volume. Writing in French to his wife on 10 December 1852, Tiutchev asks her to give his warmest regards to Turgenev and says that in Notes of a Huntsman: there is so much life and a remarkable strength of talent. Rarely have two elements which are difficult to combine been united to such a degree and in such equilibrium: sympathy for mankind and artistic feeling. On the other hand, no less remarkable is the combination of the most intimate reality of human life and a heartfelt understanding of Nature in all its poetry.13 Whether the two men had met before this is difficult to establish. They both came from the same area of Russia, the Orel province, and both belonged to the same class of society, the landowning aristocracy, but there was a difference of fifteen years in their ages. Both men spent time in Western Europe whenever they could and both men, in 1852, were involved in long-term relationships with women who were not their wives - Turgenev with Pauline Viardot and Tiutchev with Elena Deniseva. Despite these similarities, however, their political views could scarcely have been more different. Turgenev was the archetypal liberal and ‘man of the forties’, Tiutchev the lifelong conservative monarchist and Panslavist. Turgenev returned Tiutchev’s compliment, saying of him: ‘There is no argument about Tiutchev; whoever has no feeling for him thereby proves that he has no feeling for poetry’.14 The following year Turgenev grouped Tiutchev with those poets who ‘have a special view of Nature, especially a sense of its beauty. They catch many of its nuances, many of its often almost imperceptible details’.15 So taken was Turgenev with Tiutchev’s nature poems that one critic detects the influence of Tiutchev in a number of Turgenev’s own nature descriptions, ranging from Diary of a Superfluous Man to three of the Notes of a Huntsman: A Meeting, The Singers and Bezhin Meadow, to the

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short stories The Backwater (Ɂɚɬɢɲɶɟ), Faust, Journey into the Woods (ɉɨɟɡɞɤɚ ɜ ɩɨɥɟɫɶɟ) and First Love. Only in the case of one of these stories - Faust - is there hard evidence, in the form of a quotation of the third quatrain of Tiutchev’s ‘Day turns to evening …’ (‘Ⱦɟɧɶ ɜɟɱɟɪɟɟɬ …’).16 Writing in 1876, Apollon Grigorev commented on Tiutchev’s influence on the landscapes of both Turgenev and Tolstoi but there is clearly room for further investigation of this subject.17 A starting point might be Turgenev’s pithy comment that ‘Mr Tiutchev’s shortest poems are almost always his most successful’.18 The same maxim is, in the view of many, equally applicable to Turgenev’s prose. In 1854 Turgenev became the editor of the first edition of Tiutchev’s poetry. The fact is not as unlikely as might first appear. Turgenev and Tiutchev had become close friends in late 1853 and apparently spent whole evenings together. This may have had something to do with the fact that Turgenev, at the age of 35, was a highly eligible bachelor and Tiutchev had three marriageable daughters. Turgenev was given the difficult task of persuading Tiutchev to publish some of his more recent work. The job of editing the poems was first given to the writer N.V. Sushkov, husband of Tiutchev’s sister, who, although he made a start, never completed the work. Turgenev evidently had more success and was able to announce success when, in February 1854, he wrote: ‘I … have persuaded F.N. (sic) Tiutchev to put out a collection of his poetry’.19 The poems which formed this first collection of Tiutchev’s work, 110 in number, had already appeared in the March and May numbers of The Contemporary (ɋɨɜɪɟɦɟɧɧɢɤ), the liberal journal edited by Nekrasov and Panaev. In April The Contemporary published Turgenev’s article ‘A few words about the poetry of F.I. Tiutchev’ (‘ɇɟɫɤɨɥɶɤɨ ɫɥɨɜ ɨ ɫɬɢɯɨɬɜɨɪɟɧɢɹɯ Ɏ.ɂ.Ɍɸɬɱɟɜɚ’). This was reprinted as the preface to the book, which also appeared in May. Apart from some criticism of Tiutchev’s archaisms and non-lyric poems, this five-page article is couched in glowing terms, and ends thus: We cannot but heartily rejoice at the bringing together of the poems hitherto scattered individually, of one of the most remarkable of our poets who has, as it were, been bequeathed to us through the welcome and approbation accorded him by Pushkin - F.I. Tiutchev… Tiutchev belongs to the previous generation and stands much higher than his Apollonian confrères ... Tiutchev can say of himself that he has created language which, to use the expression of one poet, is destined never to die.20 It is clear that these were not empty words. Turgenev’s letters in the years after 1854, particularly those to Afanasii Fet, are full of

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quotations and laudatory references to Tiutchev. Among his favourite poems was ‘O Lord, send down thy comfort’ (‘ɉɨɲɥɢ, ɝɨɫɩɨɞɶ, ɫɜɨɸ ɨɬɪɚɞɭ’), which is the only poem mentioned by name in Turgenev’s introductory article to the 1854 book, which also included the poem. Turgenev also thought highly of ‘These poor villages’ (‘ɗɬɢ ɛɟɞɧɵɟ ɫɟɥɟɧɢɹ’), which was not published until 1857. The two men remained close friends. In November 1855 Lev Tolstoi was introduced to Tiutchev, and thereby to Tiutchev’s poetry, at a gathering hosted by Turgenev. Ten years later, returning to Russia from Nice, Tiutchev read his ‘O South, O Nice’ (‘Ɉ ɷɬɨɬ ɸɝ, ɨ ɷɬɚ ɇɢɰɰɚ’) to Fet and Turgenev. However, the appearance of Smoke sowed the seeds of discord between the two friends. It is not entirely clear which of Tiutchev’s two responses to Smoke was written first. Instinct suggests that the four-line epigram preceded the longer poem. Neither poem could have been written before 22 April 1867 when, according to Botkin, Tiutchev finished reading the novel. The epigram was published in The Voice on 22 June. The choice of newspaper is interesting. The Voice had been founded in 1863 by A.A. Kraevskii, the founder, editor and publisher of the liberal journal Notes of the Fatherland. Having passed on his editorial duties to an acting editor, Stepan Dudyshkin, in 1860, Kraevskii was, in 1867, in the process of handing over the journal to Nikolai Nekrasov. Meanwhile The Voice became, in its 20 years of existence, not only a vehicle for the sort of liberal views which had characterized Notes of the Fatherland, but also for a variety of other viewpoints. Kraevskii became known as an opportunistic, unprincipled journalist and The Voice as ‘liberal, ultraconservative and anti-Russian’.21 Given this eclectic attitude, it is not entirely surprising that The Voice had no qualms about attacking a work from one of the most quintessential of all Russian liberals, Ivan Turgenev. A sense of betrayal, perhaps, can be felt in the words which preface Tiutchev’s quatrain. After describing the novel as a ‘lamentable’ phenomenon of Russian literature, the paper continues: ‘These are the impromptu verses with which one of our veteran poets has reacted to the debate surrounding Mr Turgenev’s novel’.22 The verses were printed anonymously and the ‘veteran poet’ was at first thought to be Viazemskii, who was famous for his epigrams. The poem consists of four iambic hexameters, rhyming abab, with alternating feminine and masculine rhymes. This is not a form used very frequently by Tiutchev. ‘His splendid day has disappeared in the West’ (‘ɉɪɟɤɪɚɫɧɵɣ ɞɟɧɶ ɟɝɨ ɧɚ Ɂɚɩɚɞɟ ɢɫɱɟɡ’), written in 1857 in honour of the fifth anniversary of Zhukovskii’s death, is probably the most important of the only three examples.23 The first line is, of course, a quotation from that most quoted of all Russian works, Griboedov’s Woe from Wit , the full text of which had been published only relatively recently, in 1861. The line comes in act

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one, scene seven, the first scene in which Chatskii appears. He is complaining that, having returned to Moscow, he is doomed to see all the same things and the same people which bored him before. Notwithstanding all this, he is glad to be back because ‘even the smoke’ is sweet and pleasant.24 Smoke, here, is intended to denote the humblest possible marker of Russia. In using this image Griboedov was adapting a phrase which already had a long and complex history. Among Russian writers, Derzhavin, Batiushkov, Narezhnyi and Viazemskii had used variants of the phrase, which appears to have its roots in Homer’s Odyssey. Ovid, too, used a version of the phrase, which occurs as a Latin proverb ‘Dulcis fumus patriae’.25 A variant of this, ‘Et fumus patriae dulcis’, was used, unattributed, as the epigraph to the journal The Russian Museum (Ɋɨɫɫɢɣɫɤɢɣ ɦɭɡɟɭɦ) between 1792 and 1794.26 How much of this back history of the quotation was known to Tiutchev must be a matter of conjecture. His classical education, supervised by S.E. Raich, may well have acquainted him with any or all of these references. If the word ‘ɜɟɤ’ is taken to mean ‘century’, an argument could be made for Derzhavin’s The Harp (Ⱥɪɮɚ), written in 1798 as the source. The last line of this poem reads ‘Ɉɬɟɱɟɫɬɜɚ ɢ ɞɵɦ ɧɚɦ ɫɥɚɞɨɤ ɢ ɩɪɢɹɬɟɧ’(‘Even the smoke of the fatherland is sweet and dear to us’). It is far more likely, however, that Tiutchev intended the word, which he emphasizes by making it part of a spondee in an iambic line, to mean ‘age’. From Tiutchev’s standpoint in 1867, Griboedov’s play belonged to an earlier age. It is possible, indeed probable, that Griboedov’s immediate source was Derzhavin’s poem. He was well aware that it was a quotation, as evidenced by the italics in which it was printed. Tiutchev, too, clearly marks the words as a quotation and reinforces this by using the same rhyme as Griboedov (ɩɹɬɟɧ / ɩɪɢɹɬɟɧ). It is reasonable to assume that Tiutchev intends to use a patriotic reference to smoke to offset what he regards as Turgenev’s unpatriotic use of the same image. Epigrams are, by their very nature, shorthand, simplified comments. Mordancy is everything; accuracy is at a premium. Tiutchev chooses to ignore the fact that the line is put into the mouth of a character, Chatskii, whom Dobroliubov identified as the first of the ‘superfluous men’, whose every utterance is questionable and whose reliability is suspect.27 He does, however, concede, in the third line of the poem, which translates literally as ‘But in our age even talent itself seeks blemishes in the sun’ that Turgenev has talent, and does so in a perfectly realized iambic line, frequently the medium of emphasis in Russian verse. The final line repeats the word ɨɬɟɱɟɫɬɜɨ, which Turgenev’s novel has, in Tiutchev’s view, besmirched. The longer of the two responses to Smoke, a poem which bears the same title as Turgenev’s novel, appeared first, in May 1867, in Kraevskii’s Notes of the Fatherland. It subsequently appeared in the 1868 edition of Tiutchev’s work with the date ‘May 1867’. However,

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another manuscript of the poem bears the date 25 April. If this is correct, this would make the poem an almost instantaneous reaction to the novel, which, as we have mentioned, Tiutchev finished reading on 22 April. The poem, written in iambic pentameters, consists of eight stanzas, rhyming abab, with alternating feminine and masculine rhymes. This form appears to be unique in Tiutchev’s oeuvre. The poem can readily be divided into three parts. The first, consisting of the first four stanzas, paints an idyllic sylvan scene, full of magic (ɜɨɥɲɟɛɧɵɣ; ɜɢɞɟɧɢɹ; ɱɭɞɟɫɚ; ɱɭɞɧɵɣ; ɞɢɜɧɵɣ; ɱɭɞɢɥɢɫɶ; ɨɛɚɹɧɶɟ), light (ɥɭɱɢ; ɫɜɟɬ; ɫɜɟɬɥɵɣ;) and noise (ɲɭɦɟɥ; ɧɟɭɦɨɥɤɚɥ; ɩɬɢɱɢɣ ɝɚɦ). The initial spondee focuses attention on the word ɡɞɟɫɶ (here). The scene described is ‘here’, ‘of this world’, ‘in Russia’, or, as Tiutchev puts it in the fourth quatrain, ‘for us ... ever near’. This contrasts with the ɧɟɡɞɟɲɧɢɟ (literally: ‘not here’) creations of the dream. The verbs are active (ɲɭɦɟɥ; ɡɟɥɟɧɟɥ; ɫɤɜɨɡɢɥɢ; ɬɪɟɩɟɬɚɥɢ; ɦɟɥɶɤɚɥɢ; ɜɡɵɜɚɥ; ɫɥɟɬɚɥɢɫɶ; ɱɭɞɢɥɢɫɶ). Even the grammatically negative phrase ‘ɧɟ ɭɦɨɥɤɚɥ’ (literally ‘did not fall silent’) is positive in sense. The two past participle passives, unlike the same grammatical form in stanza seven, also have positive meanings: ‘filled with visions and wonders’ (ɂɫɩɨɥɧɟɧɧɵɣ ɜɢɞɟɧɢɣ ɢ ɱɭɞɟɫ) and ‘Bathed in a kind of wonderful light’ (Ɉɛɜɟɹɧɧɵɣ ɤɚɤɢɦ-ɬɨ ɱɭɞɧɵɦ ɫɜɟɬɨɦ), a phrase employing, in its participle, one of Tiutchev’s favourite words. This past participle is then ‘activized’ in the final stanza where the cognate active verb ɩɨɜɟɟɬ (blow away) is employed to describe the action of the breeze in dispersing the smoke. Three times in the first four quatrains Tiutchev uses the fully realized iambic line, bereft of the usual pyrrhic feet, to emphasize key themes. In the final line of the third stanza he emphasizes the fact that the forest is populated by people whom we know and recognize (ɡɧɚɤɨɦɵɯ ɥɢɰ: known personages), a reference to the realistic portraits of both landowners and peasants which made Notes of a Huntsman, and its author, famous, and which evoked Tiutchev’s admiration. In stanza four the two fully realized lines (lines two and four) stress the brightness, the sumptuousness, the wonder of the emotional feast provided by Turgenev. Then, in stanzas five and six, a forest fire covers the scene in smoke and the vocabulary is one of smoke (three references within two lines) and fire (ɩɨɠɚɪɢɳɚ). Confidence gives way to anxious questions. Shock at the lowering of the curtain seems to be suggested by the repetition of two closely related verbs (ɨɩɭɫɬɢɥ; ɫɩɭɫɬɢɥ) and the word ɤɚɤɨɣ changes its meaning from emphatic to interrogative. In these stanzas the only colour is white. The trees of stanza two have become grotesque stumps and charred branches and the active verbs of the first four stanzas have been replaced by past passive participles. The rhyming of the two participles emphasizes the fact that this is a scene which, far from creating the positive emotions of the first four stanzas, is one on which grievous damage has been inflicted. Some of Tiutchev’s ire seems to

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derive not so much from ideological differences with Turgenev as from a sense of betrayal, a sense that Turgenev has committed treachery. This is reflected in the final stanza, where the smoke is dispersed and the colour and magic of the forest re-established. The last word of the poem is one of Tiutchev’s favourite adjectives and one of the most emotive in the Russian language, ɪɨɞɧɨɣ (literally ‘native’, although the sense is often ‘Russian’). The forest is green, magical, noisy and, above all, Russian. The surface meaning of the poem is sufficiently clear as to require only minimal explanation. There may, however, be a subtext, which relates to the 1854 edition of Tiutchev’s poetry, edited by Turgenev. The poem Smoke, despite its unusual (for Tiutchev) combination of metre and length, is unmistakeably Tiutchevian. The movement of the poem, from dream to reality, is reminiscent of one of Tiutchev’s most famous poems Dream at Sea (ɋɨɧ ɧɚ ɦɨɪɟ)28 and a number of key words are common to both poems: ɫɨɧ (dream / sleep), ɡɟɥɟɧɟɬɶ (to be / turn green), ɜɨɥɲɟɛɧɵɣ (magic) , ɦɢɪ (world) , ɥɭɱɢ (rays) , ɜɢɞɟɧɢɹ (visions).29 Dream at Sea is also notable, in the versions published in 1833 and in 1836, for its departures from the amphibrachic metre. At line three, by dint of omitting an initial unstressed syllable, Tiutchev turns the line into a dactylic line (‘Ⱦɜɟ ɛɟɫɩɪɟɞɟɥɶɧɨɫɬɢ ɛɵɥɢ ɜɨ ɦɧɟ’[‘Two infinities were within me’]). In four other lines, by adding an extra unstressed syllable, Tiutchev turns amphibrachics into anapaests: line five: ‘ȼɤɪɭɝ ɦɟɧɹ, ɤɚɤ ɤɢɦɜɚɥɵ, ɡɜɭɱɚɥɢ ɫɤɚɥɵ’ (‘Around me, like cymbals, the cliffs resounded’); line six: ‘Ɉɤɥɢɤɚɥɢɫɹ ɜɟɬɪɵ ɢ ɩɟɥɢ ɜɚɥɵ’ (‘The winds called out to each other and the waves sang’); line eight: ‘ɇɨ ɧɚɞ ɯɚɨɫɨɦ ɡɜɭɤɨɜ ɧɨɫɢɥɫɹ ɦɨɣ ɫɨɧ’ (‘But my dream was borne along above the chaos of sounds’); line 19 ‘ɇɨ ɜɫɟ ɝɪɟɡɵ ɧɚɫɤɜɨɡɶ, ɤɚɤ ɜɨɥɲɟɛɧɢɤɚ ɜɨɣ’ (‘But through all these dreams, like the howl of a magician’).30 When, however, the poem was republished in 1854, first in The Contemporary and then in book form, these ‘irregularities’ had been ‘corrected’. At line three an initial ‘ɢ’ (‘and’) was added, at line five ‘ɜɤɪɭɝ ɦɟɧɹ’ (‘around me’) was replaced by ‘ɤɪɭɝɨɦ’ (‘all around’), line six was made to begin with the words ‘ɂ ɜɟɬɪɵ ɫɜɢɫɬɚɥɢ’ (‘And the winds whistled’); at line eight the initial ‘ɧɨ’ (‘but’) was deleted and at line 19 the initial ‘ɇɨ ɜɫɟ’(‘But all these’) was replaced by ‘ɋɤɜɨɡɶ’ (‘Through’). These changes can all be found in the so-called ‘Sushkov-Turgenev list’ of 1852, drawn up by N.V. Sushkov, in preparation for the edition of the poet’s works which failed to materialize.31 Who precisely was responsible for the changes - Sushkov, Turgenev, Nekrasov or even Panaev - is impossible to ascertain.32 The point is that they were retained in both the journal and book editions of 1854, both edited by Turgenev. Tiutchev’s Smoke, by contrast with Dream at Sea, has, apart from the initial spondee, only one metrical ‘irregularity’, but it occurs at what is perhaps the key line of the poem,

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line 24. Here, using a device common to writers of iambic verse in any language, the first iambic foot is reversed to produce a trochee. The effect of this is to highlight the most important word in the poem: ɞɵɦ (smoke). The emphasis is reinforced by the chiasmic structure of the line (echoing the chiasmus in the first line of the second stanza), and by the alliterative juxtaposition of two similarly formed adjectives. The first of these, ɛɟɡɨɬɪɚɞɧɵɣ (remorseless; literally ‘without comfort’) is reminiscent of ‘ɉɨɲɥɢ, ɝɨɫɩɨɞɶ, ɫɜɨɸ ɨɬɪɚɞɭ’(‘O Lord, send down Thy comfort’), which, as mentioned above, was one of Turgenev’s favourite poems. Is Tiutchev here suggesting that while comfort is divine in origin, Turgenev’s novel is essentially godless and brings no comfort? Tiutchev was famously said to be utterly unconcerned about the publication of his poems, but his lack of concern perhaps needs closer attention. There are, in fact, a number of reasons why, in 1853-4 he should have taken little interest in the minutiae of Turgenev’s editorship. He was not a professional writer and tended to choose such friends as he had, such as Prince Petr Viazemskii, because of their elevated social class rather than their poetic ability. Furthermore his affair with Deniseva was causing upheavals in his personal life, in addition to which he was extremely shaken by the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853. This was the year when Orthodox Russians marked the 400th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople, the event which led to Moscow’s becoming the ‘Third Rome’. When Turkish troops, allied with French and British troops, attacked the Crimea, Tiutchev felt the affront both professionally, as a career diplomat, and personally, as a conservative monarchist. So deep was his shock at this turn of events that he even lost faith in the Tsar, Nicholas I, who he felt had grossly mismanaged the war. His lack of interest in Turgenev’s edition may therefore be more apparent than real and it is not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility that his silence masked resentment at the heavy-handed editing of his verse. At any rate he now seems to have taken the opportunity to make the point that metrics were a matter for the poet rather than for the editor.33 There is another curious feature of Smoke. The image of smoke had been used by Tiutchev in at least five of the 110 poems in Turgenev’s 1854 edition. Two of the poems date from 1830: ‘As above the burning ash’ (‘Ʉɚɤ ɧɚɞ ɝɨɪɹɱɟɸ ɡɨɥɨɣ’) continues in its second line ‘Ⱦɵɦɢɬɫɹ ɫɜɢɬɨɤ ɢ ɫɝɨɪɚɟɬ’ (‘As above the burning embers / A sheaf of papers smokes and burns’),34 while Tranquility (ɍɫɩɨɤɨɟɧɢɟ) refers to the ‘grey smoke’ (‘ɫɢɡɵɣ ɞɵɦ’) on the leaves of an oak tree felled by lightning.35 Two further poems are dated 1848 or 1849 and were written originally in the album of Tiutchev’s daughter Maria. In both poems the theme is the transience of human life. The first, ‘Like a smoky column gleams on high’ (‘Ʉɚɤ ɞɵɦɧɵɣ ɫɬɨɥɛ ɫɜɟɬɥɟɟɬ ɜ ɜɵɲɢɧɟ’) contrasts the smoky column rising high in the moonlight with the vanishing shade at its foot. While the smoke - the poem ends with the word ɞɵɦɚ - is

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more visible, the shade is more akin to human life.36 In the second poem, To a Russian Woman (Ɋɭɫɫɤɨɣ ɠɟɧɳɢɧɟ) life is likened to a ‘cloud of smoke’ (‘ɨɛɥɚɤ ɞɵɦɚ’) which, in the autumnal mist, becomes invisible against the foggy sky (ɧɚ ɧɟɛɟ ... ɬɭɦɚɧɧɨɦ).37 In the fifth poem, First Leaf (ɉɟɪɜɵɣ ɥɢɫɬ), a typical Tiutchev Nature poem, the young leaves on the birches are described as being ‘semi-transparent as smoke’.38 It comes therefore as no surprise that Tiutchev should have seized on the title of Turgenev’s novel and used it in his riposte. There is also the interesting possibility that the reverse is true - that Turgenev, having edited Tiutchev’s poetry, borrowed the smoke image from Tiutchev. A number of other poems, written after 1854 but before the appearance of the novel also include smoke imagery. ‘On the way back’ (‘ɇɚ ɜɨɡɜɪɚɬɧɨɦ ɩɭɬɢ’) includes the phrase ‘Under the smoky canopy’ (‘ɉɨɞ ɞɵɦɱɚɬɵɦ ɧɚɜɟɫɨɦ’),39 while the poem To N.I. Krol (ɇ.ɂ. Ʉɪɨɥɸ) includes the line ‘The fading day was smoky’ (‘Ⱦɟɧɶ ɩɨɬɭɯɚɸɳɢɣ ɞɵɦɢɥɫɹ’).40 Given the somewhat unconvincing and unprepared nature of Turgenev’s image, a borrowing from Tiutchev seems at least a possibility. Tiutchev was not alone in criticizing Turgenev’s Smoke. He did so from a conservative, monarchist standpoint as also, broadly speaking, did Dostoevskii, who was reported as saying that the book ought to be burned by the public executioner.41 From the other end of the political spectrum Herzen, Pisarev and Shelgunov assailed the new novel. Turgenev, not for the first time in his career , found himself caught in the crossfire from the two extremes. He was not, however, without his supporters, of equally varied political hue, Annenkov, Lavrov, Nikitenko, Pleshcheev and Gleb Uspenskii among them. Strakhov went so far as to describe the novel as ‘excellent, first-class, on a par with anything Turgenev has written’.42 In November 1867 the novel appeared in book form and a French translation, edited by Prosper Mérimée, was completed. Curiously Turgenev was dissatisfied with the French title (Fumée) chosen by his translator, A.P. Golitsyn, and unavailingly suggested a number of possible alternatives.43 It is difficult to see why, if Ⱦɵɦ was judged satisfactory, Fumée was not, unless it be that Turgenev himself was uneasy with the original Russian title. The following year a pirated, and extremely poor, English translation, based on the French version, appeared in London.44 In 1880, looking back on the events of 1867, Turgenev wrote: Although Smoke had a fairly significant success, it nevertheless gave rise to a great deal of antipathy against me. I was particularly strongly reproached for a lack of patriotism, for insulting my native land and so on. It turned out that I had given offence equally, although from different standpoints to both the left wing and the right wing of our reading public.45

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Tiutchev’s criticism, however, does not appear to have caused any lasting damage to the relationship between Turgenev and Tiutchev. When Tiutchev died in 1873, Turgenev wrote to Polonskii: ‘One bright and sensitive mind less, one good man less’ and to Afanasii Fet: ‘I’m deeply sorry about Tiutchev. He was kind and clever, clever as the day is long. Fedor Ivanovich, forgive me. Farewell’.46

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NOTES 1. Quoted in F.I. Tiutchev: Lirika, K.V. Pigarev, ed., Nauka, Moscow, 1965, II, pp. 38990 (hereafter Lirika). This, and all other translations in this article, with the exception of that contained in n. 25, are my own. 2. I.S. Turgenev, Dym; Nov'’, Khudozhestvennaia literature, Moscow, 1970, pp. 162, 163-4 (hereafter Dym). 3. Dym, p. 37 4. Ibid., p. 55. 5. Ibid., p. 98. 6. Ibid., p. 108. 7. Ibid., p. 147. 8. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, London, Penguin Books, 1995, p. 62. 9. Dym, p. 174. 10. Otechestvennye zapiski, CLXXII, 1, pp. 181-2. 11. This translation, and that of the Golos epigram, are my own and attempt to reflect both the metre and the rhyme scheme of the originals. No attempt has been made, however, to imitate the alternating feminine and masculine rhymes of the original. 12. K.V. Pigarev in Lirika, II, p. 190. The first line might be literally translated as ‘Even the smoke of the fatherland is sweet and pleasant to us’. 13. Quoted in ibid., p. 390. 14. Quoted in V. Afanas’ev and P. Bogolepov, eds, Tropa k Turgenevu, Detskaia literatura, Moscow, 1983, p. 209. 15. Loc. cit. 16. I.S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 28 tomakh, Nauka, Moscow and Leningrad, 1960-6, VII, 1964, p. 33. 17. See B.Ia. Bukhshtab, ‘F.I. Tiutchev’, in F.I. Tiutchev, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, Sovetskii pisatel’, Leningrad, 1957, p. 50. 18. ‘Neskol’ko slov o stikhotvoreniiakh F. I. Tiutcheva’, in I.S. Turgenev, Sobranie sochinenii v 12 tomakh , GIKhL, Moscow, 1956, XI, p. 166. 19. V. Afanas’ev and P. Bogolepov, loc. cit.

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20. ‘Neskol’ko slov o stikhotvoreniiakh F. I. Tiutcheva,’ in I.S. Turgenev, Sobranie sochinenii v 12 tomakh , p. 163. 21. This comment originally appeared in the journal Niva (XXXIV, 1889, pp. 858-9). It is quoted in the entry on A.A. Kraevskii in P.A. Nikolaev, ed., Russkie pisateli 18001917: biograficheskii slovar’, Moscow, 1989 - , III, 1994, p. 126. 22. K.V. Pigarev in Lirika, II, p. 391. 23. The others are ‘Drugu moemu Ia. P. Polonskomu’ (1865) and a piece of juvenilia ‘Puskai ot zavisti serdtsa zoilov noiut’ (1818). 24. A.S. Griboedov, Izbrannoe, Khudozhestvennaia literatura, Moscow, 1978, p. 39. 25. The quotation is from the third poem of Book 1 (‘Rufino’) and reads (lines 33-6): ‘Non dubia est Ithaci prudentia, sed tamen optat / Fumum de patriis posse videre focis./ Nescio qua natale solum dulcedine cunctos / Ducit et inmemores non sinit esse sui’. A.S. Kline’s translation (www.tonycline.co.uk) reads: ‘No-one doubts Ulysses’ worldly wisdom, but even he prayed / That he might see the smoke of his ancestral hearth again. / Our native soil draws all of us, by I know not / What sweetness, and never allows us to forget’. 26. See N.S. Ashukin and M.G. Ashukina, Krylatye slova, second edition, Khudozhestvennaia literatura, Moscow, 1960, pp. 242-3. 27. And whose very name is taken by some commentators to be a reference if not to smoke then to something equally insubstantial, ‘fumes’ (ɑɚɞ). His name is sometimes spelled ‘Chadskii’ in the earliest (1823) extant manuscript of the play. 28. There is a crucial difference between the two poems. In Ⱦɵɦ the reality, the awakening from the dream, is welcome, whereas in ɋɨɧ ɧɚ ɦɨɪɟ the awakening proves to be a disappointment and the dream to be more ‘real’ than reality. 29. To these may be added two near equivalents: ɜɟɬɟɪɨɤ / ɜɟɬɪɵ and ɩɬɢɱɢɣ ɝɚɦ / ɩɬɢɰ. 30. The version of Son na more published in 1833 and 1836 can be found in Lirika, I, p. 51. The amended 1854 version can be found in the same volume, pp. 238-9. 31. Sushkov’s revision of the poem can be found in ibid., pp. 238-9. Turgenev’s version can be found in F.I. Tiutchev, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, K.V. Pigarev, ed., Sovetskii pisatel', seriia ‘Biblioteka poeta’, second edition, Leningrad, 1957, p. 322. There are differences between the two versions, but the changes noted in this article are common to both. 32. K.V. Pigarev, editor of the two-volume Lirika, very tentatively identifies eight ‘corrections’, none of them metrical, as being by Turgenev’s hand alone.

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33. See K.V. Pigarev, ‘Poeticheskoe nasledie Tiutcheva’ in Lirika, I, pp. 273-314 and V.N. Kasatkina, ‘Esteticheskoe osvoenie poezii F.I. Tiutcheva’, in N.V. Os’makov et al., eds, Vremia i sud’by russkikh pisatelei, Nauka, Moscow, 1981, pp. 95-145. On Tiutchev’s liaison with Denis’eva see G.V. Chagin, O ty, posledniaia liubov’: zhenshchiny v zhizni i poezii F.I. Tiutcheva, Lenizdat, St Petersburg, 1996. 34. Lirika, I, p. 47. 35. Not to be confused with an 1858 poem with the same title. 36. Lirika, I, p. 114. 37. Lirika, I, p. 115. 38. Lirika, I, p. 134. 39. Lirika, I, p. 178. 40. Lirika, I, p. 190. 41. The consequences of this conflict are outlined in R.A. Peace, Dostoevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1971, pp. 159-62. 42. Quoted in V. Afanas’ev and P. Bogolepov, p. 54. 43. I.S. Turgenev, I.S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 28 tomakh, Nauka, Moscow and Leningrad, 1960-6, VI, Pis’ma, p. 422. 44. Patrick Waddington, Ivan Turgenev and Britain, Berg, Oxford, 1995, pp. 17-21. 45. V. Afanas’ev and P. Bogolepov, p. 54. 46. Ibid., p. 212.

A Hunter’s Sketches: A Peircean Perspective Robert Reid

Critical views on A Hunter’s Sketches (HS) are remarkably disparate. Some stress the socio-political perspective; some reject it entirely. Some detect a structural principle in the corpus of stories; others deny it. There is no agreement either as to the aesthetics or ideology which underlie the structure of individual stories. The present study in no way claims to offer either a synthesis of competing critical views or an overarching interpretation of the collection. Rather it attempts to use Peirce’s categorical concepts to illuminate particular features of the stories, both individually and collectively. In particular Peircean ideas have something to tell us about the familiar formalist distinctions of theme, characterization, fabula and siuzhet. In this sense what is being offered here is a Peircean formalism which, while specifically relevant to HS, has the potential for wider critical application. My study is in three parts: 1) a survey of critical views on HS; 2) a review of Peirce’s principal ideas and their applicability to literary criticism; 3) a specific application of these ideas to HS. Critical Background It is useful to begin a discussion of the critical background of HS with an allusion to what is probably still the ‘default’ view of the work as a whole, well summed up by the editors of HS for volume IV of Turgenev’s Complete Works of 1963: [HS] contains an answer to the central problem of the epoch in which it was written. It was created at a time in Russia when, to use Lenin’s words, ‘all social questions came down to the struggle with serfdom’. HS is the writer’s artistic verdict on serfdom and on those aspects of Russian reality which had been formed by the enduring existence of that institution.1 The same source also adds that HS presents ‘a broad poetic canvas of the life of the people of Russia under serfdom’ (494), in this continuing the tradition of Radishchev, Pushkin and Gogol, but with innovations in technique which justified Belinskii’s assertion that ‘[Turgenev] approached the people from an angle never taken before’ (494). The second of these views, is, of course, not as contentious as the first. It is one thing to claim that HS deals with Russia and its people from the innovative perspective of an itinerant hunter and another to insist that the whole collection was written as a deliberate attack on the

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institution of serfdom. Apart from the fact that it suited Soviet scholarship to sustain such a view, the objections to it are fairly obvious. The critiques of serfdom are of uneven intensity and, as Freeborn points out, there is a pronounced tendency to drift away from the cutting edge of the topic after 1848, in favour of portraits of individual landowners and predicaments which treat serfdom only inferentially.2 Moreover, as Grossman observes, Turgenev himself appears to have been gradually shoe-horned into accepting the general view that there was a political animus behind HS:3 in practice his ‘Hannibal’s oath’ against serfdom was poorly adhered to in his frequent absences from Russia and his preoccupations were cultural and philosophical rather than political. We have also the fact that Turgenev drifted into the Sketches, almost by accident, at a point at which he had almost decided to abandon literature; even the name of the collection was not his own invention.4 The logic of such views is that any overall coherence that can be attributed to the collection must be artistic rather than political; Grossman’s conclusion, at least, is that, if there is a political theme in HS, it is there because it suited Turgenev’s art; indeed, given his crisis in confidence as a writer in the 1840s the project had the potential to ‘save the artist in him’.5 Although this is a compelling view in many ways and puts Turgenev the artist, rather than his politics, at the centre of discussion, it does not dispose of the durable notion that most of the stories, though not all, contain a criticism of serfdom, whether the writer intended it or not. Indeed, in terms of the Marxist approach which dominated Russian literary criticism for most of the last century, authorial intention is of far less significance than the socio-political location of the author. Thus Turgenev’s own lack of political vigour may translate itself into the disengagement of his hunter protagonist, but this very disengagement is a clearly definable political position in the context of serfdom. In an interesting study of accounts of the use of HS in literacy initiatives in the 1880s, G.N. Ishchuk reports that it was precisely those stories, or parts of stories, which most clearly dealt with serfdom and its abuses that found favour with peasant readers and listeners. Faced with ‘lyrical asides’ and ‘poetical descriptions’ their attention quickly waned empirical evidence, perhaps, of the central importance of the subject of ‘serfdom’, at least for one constituency of readers.6 However, my aim here is not to defend this traditional ‘political’ approach to HS, but simply to argue that it should not be too readily dismissed as a critical method. It is of interest, too, because, whatever its faults, it seeks to locate a basic ‘theme’ which subordinates all other areas of literary structure. In this way, it is of interest to the Formalist and, as we shall see, of relevance to a Peircean perspective on HS. That HS represents ‘a broad poetic canvas of the life of the people of Russia under serfdom’ is a proposition that has, in various forms, found general support among modern critics. This was essentially

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the approach which Eikhenbaum took to the work: serfdom is one aspect of the portrayal of the people but not the defining one and not the reason for the work’s enduring popularity.7 For Turgenev ‘the Russian peasant ... is a genuine Russian being who has preserved his distinctiveness’8 and, according to Eikhenbaum, Turgenev is interested in defining ‘the Russian character in general’.9 For Eikhenbaum, the centrality of character in HS is achieved at the expense of plot and ‘there is no need for strict order, for a definite structure or development’.10 It is the same centrality of character and the same random peregrination, says Eikhenbaum, that we find in Dead Souls.11 Despite this initial emphasis on the work’s lack of form, Eikhenbaum in due course introduces a number of structurating patterns: on the level of character ‘the main characters ... are designed to carry through ... the initial opposition of Khor and Kalinych, as the two bases of the Russian spirit’.12 On the level of structure: ‘every tale is a kind of picture with a headpiece and a colophon ... Landscape usually serves as the headpiece’ while the colophon conveys the concluding mood of the narrator.13 Notwithstanding this recognizably formalist structure of prologue and epilogue, Eikhenbaum insists that ‘there are no events at all, but in return the personal tone of the narrator is constantly maintained’.14 Finally, he divides narration into three categories which ‘define the structure of the sketches’: ‘The author [1] either narrates himself or [2] transmits conversation heard by him, or [3] he reproduces the tale of another character’.15 As Eikhenbaum points out, these are also three different methods of characterization.16 We can sum up Eikhenbaum’s views as follows: 1) the theme of HS is Russia, rather than serfdom; 2) Turgenev is interested in character rather than plot; 3) while there is no discernable structure to the corpus as a whole there is a recurrent structural system at work in the individual stories; 4) this structure is determined by the following: the presence of prologic and epilogic stages; a binary psychological division of character; the relation of the author to the narrative information (direct; overheard; recounted). To some extent subsequent critical appraisals of HS can be located within the parameters set out by Eikhenbaum. His notion that serfdom is not self-evidently the basic theme of the collection is widely met with.17 On the other side of the argument, however, we find Thomas Hoisington asserting that ‘one message seems to be present in almost every sketch, namely, that Russian peasants are oppressed thanks to the institution of serfdom’, a claim which is difficult to defend, in my view, although, as well as this ‘level of propaganda’ Hoisington also concedes ‘a symbolic level’.18 Freeborn also recognizes the presence of the serfdom theme, noting the influence on Turgenev of Belinskii for whom ‘serfdom was an injustice’ which ‘Russian literature had therefore to expose’19 but, equally, ‘several of the sketches which are set among the landowning classes ... have nothing substantially important to tell us

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about the problem of serfdom’.20 Frequently the serfdom theme ‘lies below the surface’ and is often communicated merely by aristocratic indifference to the peasant.21 However, where serfdom is claimed not to be the theme there is little unanimity as to what is. Eikhenbaum’s thematic preference for Russia is to some extent critically unavoidable because the Hamlet / Quixote dichotomy evoked by such stories as Khor and Kalinych and Hamlet of the Shchigrovskii District is presented in the collection, and elsewhere by Turgenev, as a peculiarly Russian psychological issue. Forest and Steppe also confirms such an approach, partly because of the strong flavour of Gogol’s troika-ism and yet, as Hoisington asks: ‘Is he talking about Russia - there is remarkably little ... to identify the setting?’22 It is striking that many thematic components in HS prove on close scrutiny to be sophisticated ɩɪɢɟɦɵ, artistic schematizations, as much as reflections of a notional ‘Russian reality’. Grossman argues that HS are ‘profoundly literary’ in nature and it is this which determines the thematics: ‘the meaning of serfdom for Turgenev’ was thus ‘purely compositional’. If Grossman’s contention is correct HS should be approached more formalistically than even Eikhenbaum had envisaged.23 Indeed, for this writer at least, the most interesting area of critical response to HS lies in the area of structure. Where Eikhenbaum detected no overarching structure to the whole collection, other than the recurrence of features in individual stories, subsequent criticism proves less tentative. Hoisington proposes a division of the stories into two sets of 12 (with Forest and Steppe as epilogue), the first peasant-oriented, the second landowner-oriented.24 In each set of 12 there is a ‘high point, apogee or crux’ - Lgov in the first, Hamlet in the second - marked by the prominence of bird symbolism which links the violence of hunting and the natural world with human oppression. Durkin argues that HS selfevidently presents itself as a pastoral in the classical tradition and is structured accordingly. With Khor and Kalinych and Forest and Steppe acting as pastoral prologue and epilogue, the collection divides into three parts: Khor and Kalinych to Bezhin Lea; Bezhin Lea to The Singers; The Singers to Forest and Steppe. The role of Bezhin Lea and The Singers is to reinforce the pastoral motif which runs throughout the collection.25 For many critics, however, it is characterization which imparts structural integrity to HS. For Brouwer, the replication of the Hamlet / Quixote binary, enunciated in Khor and Kalinych, in a variety of forms throughout HS provides a unifying force.26 Somewhat similarly Smirniw sees Schiller’s distinction between idealists and realists as a crucial influence on HS, and thus the overarching division in the collection is between those realists who accept the social status quo with all its shortcomings and cruelty and those idealists who seek harmony with nature and are disjointed from society and structured labour.27 For Masing-Delic characters resolve themselves into three categories - ‘a

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fatalistic race of myth-makers’ (mainly women and peasants); the ‘paralyzed philosophers’ (the intelligentsia); and a third category of unreflecting ‘dead souls’ who make social and political life work for good or ill.28 The question of the structural coherence of the whole corpus of stories is clearly problematical. It is probably the case that the strongest argument for their organic unity must rest on structural recurrences such as those listed above and on the omnipresence of Petr Petrovich, the hunter-narrator, indeed, of hunting as a pursuit. On the other hand, Petr Petrovich is no Pechorin - quite the contrary - his own psychological identity remains poorly delineated. One critic even argues that his presence militates against any unifying principle: Pomerantsev detects a recurrent narrative pattern involving a time-scale determined entirely by the coming and going of the narrator, ‘with no requirement [for us] to know the prehistory of events nor anything of events which might take place after the story’s conclusion’. This justifies our approaching each sketch in isolation from the rest - particularly true, he thinks, in the case of Bezhin Lea and The Singers.29 Yet even such an atomistic view has meta-structural implications: for the hunter nevertheless has to be the kind of narrator who can walk away from the incidents he has witnessed; to this extent his gun and game bag serve a similar purpose to Pechorin’s military travel pass at the end of Taman. Critics have certainly not been deterred from generalizing about the techniques used in individual stories. A widely held view is that the Sketches are weak in narrative or not narrative at all. Grossman argues that this was a general creative weakness in Turgenev: the beauty of the Sketches was that they allowed him to write despite this shortcoming. In time Turgenev perfects his narrative technique through his novels; thus when he returns to HS with The End of Chertopkhanov, we can immediately detect the presence of a consummate narrative technique absent in the earlier sketches.30 For Silbajoris narrative is not present because the creative principle of HS is poetic. We do not find ‘as in a standard prose narrative ... a series of events, subject to the sequential logic of cause and effect. As in poetry’ we have ‘a pattern of image association of great potential complexity’.31 The use of enclosed or highly circumscribed spatial settings supposedly facilitates the emergence of the poetic. Brouwer associates the absence of events with stories which are primarily concerned with character.32 Nevertheless there is a recurrent structural pattern: ‘the hunter finds himself in a particular place, meets someone by chance, converses and leaves’.33 Ripp notes that while nature description sometimes frames a story as prologue and epilogue, the mere placement of the latter in the wake of a tragic or moving revelation, is sufficient to alter its emotional impact on the reader, even if there is nothing in the content of the natural description to account for this - an example of textual montage, perhaps, and

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something we will return to in our consideration of the role of natural description and hunting in the stories.34 How true is it, then, that, for the most part, what we have in this collection are not stories in the true sense - narratives - because they lack events? Silbajoris’ reading of Ermolai and The Miller’s Wife is a case in point: Read as a simple narrative sequence, the story seems strangely incoherent. There is no particular need to start it with the description of the evening hunt for woodcocks; the information about Ermolai and his dog could just as well have been placed in any other story in which Ermolai and the hunter are seen together. Zverkov’s comments about Arina, while they do fill in the background, are made accidentally, outside of any causal links with the story line.35 Silbajoris finds an alternative system of coherence in the recurrence in the story of violent motifs of victimization: shooting; Ermolai’s treatment of his dog; of his wife; the way he kills wounded birds; the cruel treatment of Arina.36 Yet to dismiss plot or the narrative principle more generally in these stories is perhaps unwise. If the presence of plot is signaled by the presence of fabula and siuzhet, then many of the sketches must be rich in it. The fabula of Ermolai and The Miller’s Wife is impressive in its temporal scope: Arina is spotted by Zverkov’s wife on a visit to the Zverkovs’ estate and grows up in her service as a chamber maid; during this period she has occasionally encountered Ermolai the hunter on her visits to the country with her mistress; she asks permission to marry Petrushka the lackey, is refused and exiled; is pardoned and returns to service but is made pregnant by Petrushka and sent away for good; Zverkov meets the narrator and tells him about Arina; Arina meets and marries a miller who buys her freedom; the narrator meets Ermolai and takes him on as his gillie; on a particular hunting expedition Ermolai and the narrator encounter Arina at her husband’s mill. What is in fact remarkable about this work is not its lack of ‘story’ but the extreme artistic ingenuity which is required to coil up its elements into the tiny narrative space allowed by the setting. What we encounter is an extreme form of siuzhet, characterized by exclusive emphasis on the now of narration which requires the temporally remote elements - Arina’s history; Ermolai’s past - to be drawn in mnemonically by the narrator. It would be wrong to deny the Sketches narrative identity simply on the grounds that the narrative components are not supplied to the reader in strictly chronological order. What can we conclude from this consideration of the thematic and structural properties of HS? Firstly that it is difficult to isolate a

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theme which does not omit other strong thematic contenders. Secondly that ‘theme’, in the sense of a work’s being ‘about’ a concrete subject or topic, collides problematically with the aesthetic programme of the writer which centres upon particular character generalizations, structural preferences and attitudes to the social and natural world. Even so, there are obvious recurring topoi: the natural world as presented by the hunter; serfs and landowners, presented severally or interacting in a landscape marked by their presence; the consistent I / eye of the narrator (to borrow Freeborn’s excellent pun)37 which is omnipresent, if sometimes closed. There is an impressionistic quality to these key recurrences: their presence is indistinct when viewed from a more general perspective. This irresolvabilty of themes, characters, personalities and events seems to me an important feature of HS. It distinguishes them from the rest of Turgenev’s work and certainly from that of his contemporaries, notably Tolstoi. Nevertheless it is possible to find ways of talking about the woolly and the irreducible and it is here, I would contend, that Peirce’s views - particularly his theory of firstness, secondness and thirdness - can be of some use. Peirce and Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness Peirce’s predilection for triadic thinking is well known: not only did he argue that ‘logical terms are either monads, dyads or ... triads’38 but he also maintained that there are three modes of being: ‘... the being of qualitative possibility, the being of actual fact, and the being of law that will govern facts in the future’.39 These modes were termed respectively firstness, secondness and thirdness. For Peirce this threefold categorization held good in the phenomenal world, the semiotic world and the logical world. He also extended it to the world of art. Firstness applies to phenomena just as they are. However, as soon as they are analyzed, recognized or otherwise engaged with by the onlooker they cease to be firstnesses. In logical terms firstness is equivalent to a pure predicate term40 - Peirce suggests ‘red[ness]’ unapplied to any subject. As such it is indeed a category of ‘mere maybes and logical possibilities’,41 existent but not impinging on our consciousness in its pure form. We must logically accept that firstness exists but we cannot engage with it epistemologically - that with which we can engage is not firstness. We can however engage with firstness via unanalyzed feeling or sense.42 As for secondness: ‘[w]e are continually bumping up against hard fact. We expected one thing, or passively took it for granted, and had the image of it in our minds, but experience forces that idea into the background, and compels us to think quite differently’.43 To this extent secondness implies ‘inevitable assaults on rationality’ by new and unforeseen phenomena.44 This secondness, it might be added, the

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property of the world as we experience it, has striking affinities with the world as experienced by l’homme de la nature et de la verité according to the hero of Dostoevskii’s Notes from Underground.45 Secondness ‘is predominant in the ideas of causation and of statical force. For cause and effect are two ...’.46 Importantly in this connection, cause and effect, taken together, represent two aspects of a ‘dyad’ one of which is ‘fundamental, real and primary [the cause], while the other is merely derivative, formal and secondary [the effect]’.47 The juxtaposition of ego with non-ego is also secondness.48 The real is secondness because it imposes itself on us.49 In logical terms secondness is the subject term in a proposition: it is not free standing, but is supplemented or completed by the predication. Thirdness typically implies the intervention of an observer or of an intellectual judgement. Thus the observation or interpretation of an act involves thirdness if it implies an understanding of the act’s significance. Again, in logical terms it is the propositional force of the relationship between subject and predicate which introduces thirdness, the relationship, in other words, between subject and predicate. Intellectual activity - comprehension, prediction, recollection - is thus classified in Peircean terms as ‘third’ activity. Peirce links thirdness to secondness by likening it to the law of gravity in relation to a stone falling to earth: the action itself is pure secondness - ‘purely the affair of the stone and the earth at the time’ because ‘when a stone falls ... the law of gravity does not act to make it fall’.50 Interestingly Peirce also illustrates this relationship via the figures of judge, sheriff and criminal: the sheriff arresting a criminal - taken in itself is an instance of secondness, of ‘brute action’, but more widely it is the law which sanctions and explains the action.51 Equally because of its grounding in laws, rules and habits, thirdness is the category of predictability.52 More generally, thirdness occurs wherever some extra ingredient (like intention) intervenes in the stark interaction of secondness.53 This can be a simple objective ingredient C, given by A to B, or something more intangible such as the secret motive in the interaction between two people. But, as Peirce points out, the simplest act of giving has to be more than A putting away C and B taking up C. Thirdness only emerges in a concept of giving which is separate from the discrete acts of secondness.54 Peirce quotes other instances of thirdness in relation to the other two categories: The beginning is first, the end second and the middle third. The end is second, the means third. The thread of life is a third; the fate that snips it its second. A fork in the road is a third, it supposes three ways; a straight road, considered merely as a connection between two places is second, but so far as it implies passing through intermediate places it is third. Position is first,

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velocity or the relation of two successive positions second, acceleration or the relation of three successive positions third.55 These examples evoke very well the extraordinary spread of application of Peirce’s concepts, as well, I think as a strong metaphorical flavour. Peirce’s three categories are logically linked in important ways. It is, for instance, possible to imagine one basic idea - e.g. redness without imagining another (blueness). It is impossible, however, to consider the category of secondness without reference to firstness, and thirdness without reference to both of these. This logical law Peirce calls prescission and it means that, while we can consider firstness in isolation, we cannot approach either secondness or thirdness without reference to the category (or categories) ‘above’.56 Before proceeding to a consideration of how Peirce’s firstness, secondness and thirdness can be applied to literary criticism, and to HS in particular, I shall provide further detail on the three categories and their interaction with specific reference to Peircean scholarship. Because Peirce applied his triadic schema ‘throughout the entire range of his writings’ one can attempt to summarize its applications in such areas as psychology, science and phenomenology.57 Carl Vaught, for instance, offers the following which I tabulate below: Firstness feeling quality possibility

Secondness will fact existence

Thirdness knowledge law representation58

Each of the three categories also has a dominant or defining mental operation: abduction, deduction and induction.59 Abduction, relating as it does to firstness, is ‘an act of insight’, rather than logic, a mental operation ‘in the form of feelings, which constitutes the building blocks of thought processes’.60 Deduction and induction might be thought to relate unproblematically to secondness and thirdness respectively, although there is some argument among Peirce scholars about the order of attribution.61 We can also add a semiotic dimension to the table above: icon (first); index (second); symbol (third). It is this area of Peirce’s thought which has direct aesthetic relevance. Iconic representation provides a simulacrum of the object of perception and is thus the underlying impulse of the artist; the index is the causal sign of its object (as smoke for fire) and is thus essential to empirical and practical endeavour; the symbol, which is the unique product of human attribution, is associated with the philosopher and theorist.62 It is obvious, too, that abduction, as defined above, is very close to what we would define as ‘artistic

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inspiration’ and that deduction and induction have self-evident application to the practical and scientific world. The same Peircean schema can be applied to ‘systems’ in the widest sense, including forms of social and political organization.63 Firstness dominates a system in the embryo stage where there is more potentiality than actuality; secondness applies in the middle stage as it struggles to assert stability against opposing forces; the final senescent stage is dominated by endogenously generated rules, laws and restrictions which maintain internal consistency at the expense of adaptation and change. The same is true of ontogenetic growth, with firstness, secondness and thirdness corresponding to childhood, adolescence and adulthood, in turn inviting an equation of these stages with the categories of artist, man of action, and philosopher.64 The Literary Critical Potential of Peircean Ideas It seems to me that Peirce’s ideas have literary critical potential at a number of levels. One is clearly that, though Peirce locates the artist in the category of firstness, alongside abductive (inspirational) thought process and iconic representation of reality, the artist himself or herself, in confronting the objective world, is at liberty to stress firstness, secondness, thirdness, or all three. Albert Levi, for instance, states that ‘the ultimate characteristic of any painting or sculpture, any work of literature or of the drama is that its threefold function is the presentation of qualities, the delineation of movements and the expression of meanings’.65 Accordingly he investigates three poets - Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot - in terms of the dominance in their work of each of the Peircean categories. But one can with equal profit apply Peirce’s ideas to other textual areas. The determination of a work’s theme, for instance, is largely a matter of prescission towards an ultimate firstness. On the one hand there is a reluctance to conclude that a work is ‘about nothing’; on the other the critic may be unable to formulate the theme in a way which does not allow of exceptions or fragment into a list of sub-themes. On the other hand, ideologically inspired literary criticism - Marxist criticism for instance - may find it comparatively easy to formulate an overarching theme, a point we will return to later. In the area of structure one may find that Peircean concepts have something to say about works, like HS and A Hero of Our Time, which exhibit a problematical structural integrity, inasmuch as the tension between the whole and its parts can be viewed in terms of competing ‘firstnesses’: specifically, are the component stories to be regarded as texts in their own right or merely as parts of an organic whole, a role which emphasizes their ‘secondness’? Meanwhile the very critical arguments which seek to arbitrate between these competing claims

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exhibit a Peircean thirdness in their search for coherence and adequacy of explanation. The more recognizable formal areas of textual analysis, characterization, setting and plot can each be illuminated by a Peircean approach. A Peircean reading of character will revolve in large measure around whether and under what terms we can speak about the firstness of a given character. As an ‘I’ we lay claim to Peircean firstness but are constantly confronted by the Other which demands our secondness. Firstness in fictional characters depends on the illusion of autonomy, through mystery and enigma, whereas secondness asserts itself when characters are shown as conditioned, explicable, deprived of autonomy etc. We might say, for instance, that Onegin remains a firstness for Tatiana until she manages to integrate him into the wider system of tastes and influences which explain him and to which he is thus secondary. The reader, by contrast, will have grasped this secondness early on in the work. In the course of a work, then, a character can pass from firstness to secondness - from uniqueness to conditionality; equally, of course, the opposite can happen: a character apparently totally conditioned by his or her environment, utterly typical of it, secondary in the full sense of the word, can suddenly prove his or her firstness after all, cease to be acted upon and begin to act, changing from object to subject. Such is the case in Gogol’s Overcoat. In this case, too, the narrative voice is, initially at least, the voice of thirdness, capable of characterizing the protagonist according to cast-iron sociological laws, laws which, however, have to be put aside, albeit temporarily, when the autonomous character of the protagonist emerges. Characters who are shown, or shown up, in their secondness, do not necessarily thereby illuminate the firstness which has made them second. But Peirce’s prescission demands that where we find secondness we must acknowledge the reality of firstness. The conditions which create the secondness of one of Gogol’s characters is never fully articulated: it remains vague and is always larger and more complex than the proximate definition - the civil service, the government, Russia. Nevertheless, one must posit a shared acceptance of the existence of this firstness by writer and reader. Thirdness is the work of making sense of the relationship between the secondness of the character and the conditioning firstness. The attribution of the three categories to three universal types - 1) artists; 2) practical people; 3) philosophers / scientists - also has relevance to literary characterization. Into the first category fall intuitive types whose mental processes are dominated by abduction - spontaneous emotional reaction - rather than the pragmatic deduction which distinguishes the second category. The third category, characterized by a synthesizing and theoretical approach to the world, may in some literary contexts be subsumed into the authorial voice. It may be argued that this level of the

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Peircean model is conditioned by psycho-social distinctions which, having their origin in the age of Romanticism, exerted a wide-ranging cultural influence not only on literature, but also on philosophy and psychology. Certainly the juxtaposition of and interaction between types 1 and 2 is fundamental to many nineteenth-century literary texts, HS included. Peirce’s model would seem to be compatible with Formalist approaches to plot structure. A prologic stage of generalization and potentiality corresponds to Peircean firstness. Event, tension and conflict characterize secondness, while epilogue, so often the locus of reflection and overview, conforms to Peirce’s definition of thirdness. However, these correlations may alter in the interests of artistic impact: Tolstoi’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, for instance, opens with a prologue grounded in secondness - a ‘brute’ fact, to use Peirce’s phrase - moreover one derived from the irrefutable firstness of man’s ‘mortality’. Mortality as a firstness is a presence throughout the scene, but remains ungrasped and unacknowledged by those present at the protagonist’s funeral, who are concerned with the secondness of Ivan Ilyich - the contrast between his deadness and their keen awareness of being alive. More problematical is the compatibility of firstness and secondness with fabula and siuzhet. One might argue that the critical process of inferring a fabula is a making sense par excellence and therefore a thirdness: the firstness is thus the work as we experience it in reading and the fabula is simply a set of components - parts of a whole, seconds. Equally, one might argue, for the author the fabula is a firstness since it is a prior condition for the production of the siuzhet. More in keeping with Peirce’s abductive view of the artist’s role would be that the virtual existence of the work before its embodiment in text transcends both fabula and siuzhet and is, for that very reason, a firstness, undifferentiated and potential rather than real. Setting is also amenable to a Peircean approach and, superficially at least, might seem to associate itself with firstness. Short stories, in particular, frequently display unity of setting, the text offering no clue to what, if anything, lies beyond a circumscribed location which thus becomes the unique universe of action for the characters. The setting in Chekhov’s Ward 6 aspires to firstness as a kind of general representation of the human predicament; equally, however, it is a setting embedded in a wider setting, in a small town, in a province, in Russia viewed from which perspective it is an instance of secondness. Even so, instances abound, in both prose and poetry, of setting, particularly natural setting, presented to the reader as a kind of existential default position - nature as a self-evident good, a firstness immune to relativization which is the case, arguably, in HS.

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A Hunter’s Sketches Thematic Considerations What, then, is the theme of HS, what is the underlying firstness? A Marxist reading of the work is capable of producing such a firstness, if only because, as a theory, Marxism is capable of positing a primal condition or nexus of conditions which accounts for reality as we experience it. The weakness of such a position in Peircean terms is that anything which can be so precisely defined is by definition not a firstness, but a thirdness. And so, if HS is about serfdom understood as a system brought about by contradictions in the means of production, this is merely a judgement about the theme rather than the theme itself. Eikhenbaum is sure that HS is not about the Emancipation, nor about serfdom generally. As to what it is about: A general picture of rural Russia with its enigmatic people preserving a wisdom very much its own, a people now businesslike and thrifty, now carefree and dreamy, Russia with its enigmatic spaces and the sounds of its forests - all this together woven into a single, indivisible fabric, comprises the content of The Sportsman’s Sketches.66 This is both a statement of theme and a statement of content, each function subverting the other. As a statement of content it is of course, highly schematic; as a statement of theme it is tautological because, in effect, it is stating that the work’s theme is its content. Yet it clearly is a statement of theme because it is telling us what HS is about. However, this woolliness seems to me to be more of a virtue than a shortcoming. The main thrust of Eikhenbaum’s approach to HS is that it is not simply about serfdom, but about Russia. This is a Peircean prescission: if it is about a secondary phenomenon, then it must also be about a primary phenomenon. The thematics revolve around the proposition ‘serfdom, therefore Russia’ rather than the proposition ‘either serfdom or Russia’. We are also dealing here with a familiar logical phenomenon: by increasing the denotation one decreases the connotation. The wider a work’s thematic scope is claimed to be, the less specificity we can attribute to that theme. It is not surprising, then, that Eikhenbaum uses the adjective ‘enigmatic’ twice. It is also important to bear in mind that Eikhenbaum does not dismiss the thematic presence of serfdom: it remains an important aspect of that wider firstness which Eikhenbaum is effectively emphasizing. This enigmatic firstness of Russia is not a definable entity. It is simply the primal condition from which all action in HS springs. Eikhenbaum gives us scope to infer that we are dealing with a

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phenomenon which is simultaneously geographical, biological, economic, political, sociological, religious and psychological. It is something of which we are intuitively rather than intellectually aware in our reading, as befits a Peircean firstness. Moreover since secondness must constantly refer and defer to firstness, firstness itself constantly impinges on our consciousness via our prescissions from secondness to firstness. As noted above the relationship of secondness to firstness is essentially that of subject to predicate. Subjects which share a common predicate need have no predicative relation one to another. This is also true of instances of secondness: the feudal phenomena in HS - the cruelties and exploitation - are instances of secondness, but so too are quite noble patterns of thought, aesthetic feeling, love of nature and, indeed, nature itself. They relate organically to a common overarching thematic firstness but not to one another. Thus a Peircean approach to HS would have us establish theme as an ultimate predication which can be named - Russia - but which defies absolute resolution into definitional categories. The Narrator On the structural level it is obvious that the persona of the hunter himself, present in every story, is the principal unifying force. However diverse the structures of the individual stories, this remains a constant ingredient. The question arises, then, whether the narrator emerges as a character in his own right or remains transparently a device. His firstness or autonomy is guaranteed primarily by his unique position of authority. Since the Sketches use a largely realist technique the reader is not invited, for the most part, to question or doubt the authority of the narrator. In this the motivation of hunting itself is crucial: ‘One of the main advantages of hunting, my dear readers, is that it forces you to ceaselessly wander from place to place ...’ (186); ‘Who but a hunter has experienced the delight of wandering through the bushes at dawn?’(383). Thus hunting is an adequate explanation for the presence of the narrator in the majority of settings in the collection. At the same time hunting does not really tell us who the narrator is. There are in fact a surprising number of other hunters in the collection: Polutykin in Khor and Kalinych and Kalinych himself who is Polutykin’s gillie; Ermolai, of course, who often, but not always acts as the narrator’s gillie; Ovsiannikov would have liked to have hunted if social conditions had been different; the peasant Vladimir in Lgov is the ‘local hunter’ (‘ɡɞɟɲɧɢɣ ɨɯɨɬɧɢɤ’); Karataev hunted on his estate; Chertopkhanov is a flamboyant hunter. Hunting thus transcends social class, at least as a pursuit - this is not to say that there are not abundant social connotations to the contexts in which it is pursued. The narrator, for instance, does not disguise the fact that he is an aristocrat and one, moreover, who has

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leisure time for hunting, indeed ‘one without occupation’ (‘ɱɟɥɨɜɟɤ ɧɟɡɚɧɹɬɵɣ’ [186]). However, the narrator’s aristocratic status does not implicate him in the relativism which engulfs the rest of his class in HS: the worst of them are very bad indeed (Zverkov from Ermolai and the Miller’s Wife; Penochkin in The Bailiff; Mardarii Apollonych in Two Landowners); the best of them, like the young squire in Death, Karataev, Radilov and Polutykin in Khor and Kalinych are flawed or of limited vision. All of these, are, however, embedded within a detailed and specific social situation which marks them as essentially secondary characters: they are recognizable aristocratic types, and if they strive for authenticity or firstness - like Hamlet or Chertopkhanov - they must do it against the grain of the aristocratic conventions which bear down on them. That the narrator must also have such a real aristocratic context, we admit logically; but what this context is we can hardly say. This contrasts very much with the fact that frequently in the Sketches he is identified as, or identifies himself as an aristocrat or landowner. In Khor and Kalinych, for instance, there is the following exchange with Khor near the conclusion of the story: ‘Do you have your own estate?’ ‘I do.’ ‘Is it far from here?’ ‘About a hundred versts.’ ‘And tell me, sir, do you live on your estate?’ ‘I do.’ ‘But I bet you’d rather be out enjoying yourself with your gun?’ ‘Yes, I’ve got to admit it.’ ‘You’re doing the right thing, sir. Shoot blackcock as much as you like but be sure to change your bailiff often’ (20). Is the narrator’s hunting a preoccupation which interferes with the good running of his estate? Is he, like his neighbour Radilov, an obsessive, ‘constantly occupied by a single thought or passion ... permeated throughout, saturated by a single feeling ...’ (57)? We have to conclude not. From his magisterial position of peripatetic outsider, observing and moving on, the hunter aristocrat is able to generalize about classes of people without showing himself to be one of them: ‘The more I observed Radilov, the more it seemed to me that he belonged to that category of people’ (57). Apart from this, though, the narrating persona, an aristocrat himself, frequently distances himself from the less attractive members of his class. The story of Arina, for instance, in Ermolai and the Miller’s Wife is known to the narrator because he knew her former owner, Zverkov, in St Petersburg: ‘I happened to become acquainted with Mr Zverkov’ (29); the story itself was told to him when they were

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‘somehow’ sharing a carriage (‘Ɋɚɡ ɤɚɤ-ɬɨ ɩɪɢɲɥɨɫɶ ɦɧɟ ɟɯɚɬɶ ɜɦɟɫɬɟ ɫ ɧɢɦ’ [29]). After recollecting Zverkov’s story the narrator remarks that ‘the reader will probably now understand why I looked at Arina with sympathy’ (31). This distancing is particularly emphasized in The Bailiff. Early in his description of the urbane and hospitable Penochkin, the narrator confesses his reluctance to visit him (‘somehow you don’t look forward to visiting him’ [134]), a sentiment spelled out in greater detail somewhat later: ‘Despite all this, I, for my part, am pretty reluctant to visit him, and if it weren’t for the blackcock and partridge, I’d have probably broken off my acquaintanceship with him’ (135). These are general, prologic remarks relating to the narrator’s attitude to Penochkin. In what might be defined as the specific prologue of the story the narrator again underlines the same point but in a specifically ad hominem form (143): ‘Despite my antipathy towards Arkadii Pavlich, I once had to spend a night at his place’ (136). This reluctance infects the plot too. The narrator tries to leave early the next morning but Penochkin delays him with an English breakfast at which he witnesses his host ordering punishment for a servant who has failed to warm the wine. The narrator attempts to leave on his hunting expedition but Penochkin insists that he first accompany him to a village he owns nearby: ‘There was nothing for it. Instead of nine in the morning we set off at two’ (138). The cumulative effect of these instances is to suggest that the narrator, like the enlightened reader, has certain standards of expectation of landowners, qualms about certain forms of practice. Are his own practices enlightened and beyond reproach? We do not know, but despite the many flawed instances which he offers us, we are willing to believe that there can be ideal practice - a firstness - which the narrator suggests to us by his nuanced attitudes while never giving us enough evidence to judge whether he embodies the relevant virtues or not. If there are negatives to this positive image they are never allowed to coalesce into a focused critique of the narrator’s attitudes and life-style. We might, for instance, argue that his behaviour in The Bailiff is the same form of social acquiescence found in characters elsewhere in the Sketches such as Hamlet or Nedopiushkin. But against this we have the primacy of hunting to which the specific social conditions remain secondary. As long as hunting and society remain two distinct experiential systems for the hunter without shared causal links, the narrator cannot easily be implicated in the events he witnesses. More problematical in this respect is the story Two Landowners where the motif of reluctance is more or less non-existent. The landowners in question are introduced simply as ‘two more landowners, on whose estates I’ve often hunted, most loyal and honourable people, held in high respect in several districts’ (176). The description of both landowners is generalized and ironic and relies on the stark contrasts between their life-styles. The second half of the story relates a visit by

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the narrator to the second of the two landowners - Stegunov - ‘who lives completely in the old style’ (180). Here the narrator witnesses a young priest being plied with vodka and, from a distance, the butler being flogged for a misdemeanour. Though he points out to Stegunov that his serfs live in atrocious conditions, he seems to accept the latter’s excuse that he can do nothing because the master is the master and the peasant is the peasant - an unanswerable argument. Equally, though we infer that he was taken aback by the flogging of the butler, he has no reply to Stegunov: ‘You think I’m an evil man, do you? Is that why you’re staring at me? I’m wicked, is that why you’re staring at me like that? Love them but don’t spare the rod [‘Ʌɸɛɚɣ ɞɚ ɧɚɤɚɡɭɟɬ’]. You know it makes sense’ (184). The departing narrator’s reflection is less critical than ironic: ‘Well that’s old-style Rus for you’(185), a phrase which suggests that Stegunov is intended as an ironic commentary on Slavophilism.67 It is perhaps therefore arguable, reading The Bailiff against Two Landowners, that we should add a specifically westernized tinge to the narrator’s outlook and explain his greater antipathy to Penochkin in terms of the latter’s apostasy from Western ideas. However, even if this is so, it is not a line of thought systematically developed in HT and does not greatly improve the lack of focus in the portrayal of the narrator, his background and outlook. Occasionally some greater detail is supplied in unexpected ways. Ovsiannikov, for instance, remembers the narrator’s grandfather: ‘Well, to take an example. You’re a landowner, the same sort of landowner as your late granddad, but you’ll never have the sort of power he had! And you’re not the same sort of person either’ (63-4). Ovsiannikov recalls his father being dispossessed of a plot of land by the narrator’s grandfather. When Ovsiannikov’s father attempted litigation, he was flogged by the narrator’s grandfather in sight of his son. ‘So [the land] has remained in your possession’. ‘I didn’t know what to say to Ovsiannikov’, confides the narrator, ‘and couldn’t bring myself to look him in the face’ (64). The further discussion, however, remains cordial. In the context of Ovsiannikov’s wider recollections about the past, this incident takes its place as just one example among many. There is no suggestion that it is a bone of contention between the two men. Equally, though, there is no suggestion that the narrator plans to give the land back. To do this would be a step too far, a personal intervention in the feudal nexus. In The Loner he ‘rushes to the peasant’s aid’(174) when the latter seems to be in danger, but this act is hardly class specific. Another noteworthy example is provided in Living Relic where Ermolai and the narrator take shelter from the rain at a ‘farm belonging to my mother, the very existence of which, I admit, I hadn’t suspected up till then’(353). The lateness of this story (it was added to HS in 1874) may make it a special case; it is strongly autobiographical, identifying Lukeria as a serf from Spasskoe. At the very least, though, it suggests a certain detachment on

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the narrator’s part from matters which might have been expected to have come within his purview. Ultimately, the narrator’s narrative authority relies on the sustainable firstness of his character. Immune from all but the most impressionistic contextualization, his basic sympathies and antipathies always emerge at moments of moral crisis and he thus provides an ethical compass for the reader. What gives him the right to do so, however, is not clear; indeed it his very lack of definition which allows him to have a moral voice. Hunting If the narrator’s aristocratic identity is a firstness in HS what of hunting? After all it is a component in the work’s title. I would argue that ultimately both the notions of hunter and hunting are shown to be secondary rather than primary elements in HS - on the first level in terms of characterization and on the second in terms of setting. Firstly it is important to bear in mind that there are three stories in the collection in which the narrator is not identified as a hunter at all. These are Farmer Ovsiannikov, Tatiana Borisovna and Her Nephew and The End of Chertopkhanov. Even within stories where the hunter identity of the narrator is made explicit, there are a large number in which it plays a negligible role after the opening lines. Into this category fall The District Doctor where we learn only that the narrator was taken ill returning from a hunting trip and Two Landowners and Hamlet of the Shchigrovskii District where there is the briefest introductory mention of hunting as the motivation for the narrator’s presence at specific country houses. The majority of others, while featuring longer reflections on or descriptions of hunting contexts in the opening sections, follow the same pattern of a transition to a theme unrelated to hunting, culminating in some cases in a reversion to the hunting theme in the concluding lines. It is easier, in fact, to list those stories in which hunting takes a more prominent role. These are Ermolai and the Miller’s Wife, Lgov, Kasian of the Beautiful Lands, the two Chertopkhanov stories, Living Relic and Forest and Steppe. In the first of these works the characterization of Ermolai is so bound up with the theme of hunting that the narrator dwells upon the subject, including his impressions of Ermolai, at some length. Importantly, too, it is because Ermolai and the narrator are hunters that they are not allowed to spend the night inside the mill, lest they set fire to it, a rare example of the stereotyping of hunters in HS. Lgov is the only story in which the vicissitudes of hunting emerge to dominate most of the plot. It is the first of several stories which strip hunting of its romantic mystique. Ducks are the quarry, ‘not a particularly alluring prospect for a real hunter’ (80); the idea to hunt them is Ermolai’s not the narrator’s - the master allows himself to be

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carried along by his man. The story is essentially comic: the boat which is being used to hunt the duck sinks and the entire hunting party is left standing waist-deep in water. They are rescued only thanks to Ermolai’s resourcefulness - he leads them out of the reeds and salvages the dead ducks from the water. This reinforces a trend in Ermolai’s character since his introduction in Ermolai and the Miller’s Wife: at times Ermolai’s skill, resourcefulness and commonsense show the hunter narrator up: in My Neighbour Radilov he fires at woodcock in a neglected orchard and nearly hits a young girl: ‘Why’re you shooting here?’ shouts Ermolai, ‘A landowner lives here’ (53). The narrator’s ignorance is all the more surprising since, as the title suggests, the estate is close to his own. In a reworking of the Radilov introduction Ermolai correctly predicts the presence of grouse on the Chertopkhanov estate; the hunter narrator shoots at them and is immediately reprimanded by the owner. Soon afterwards Ermolai shoots a hare which is escaping from Chertopkhanov’s hounds and receives Chertopkhanov’s thanks. Thus Ermolai’s presence serves to subtly subvert the hunter narrator’s proficiency, without, however, subverting the project of hunting itself an important distinction. Both Kasian and Lukeria (in Living Relic) subvert the hunter in a different way. Kasian’s objections to shooting birds would probably find resonance with many people today: the hunter is shooting not for food but for pleasure; there is a difference between shooting wild birds and killing domestic ones which have been bred for meat. The hunter narrator’s defence that game birds can be eaten is weakened by the fact that he has only managed to shoot a corncrake, certainly not a bird capable of supplying a substantial meal. Lukeria’s swallows were, she supposes, shot by a local hunter: ‘What wicked men you hunters are’- to which the narrator replies ‘I don’t shoot swallows’ (358). This is a far cry from the narrator’s observation in Khor and Kalinych that ‘Polutykin was a passionate hunter and consequently an excellent man’ (8). Forest and Steppe is, of course, a reassertion of the wholesome virtues of hunting and its identification with a love of nature. Even with such an epilogue, however, the doubts cast about the hunter-narrator, both in terms of his competence and the morality of his pursuit are significant. And they address themselves, it should be pointed out, ad hominem: not to Ermolai and the other peasant hunters in the work, not to the natural ambience in which hunting takes place (of which more later) but to the narrator himself. Ultimately his hunting is, quite simply, a device to get him out and about, but, as embodied in him, it is not an end in itself, not a firstness, but indeed very much a convention of his class, practised by ‘good men’, as the narrator sees it. As a hunter he may sleep in barns, peasant huts, and by herders’ bonfires, but only as an aristocratic hunter can he also sleep in the houses of landowners and aristocrats. In this way, ultimately it is an aristocratic I which gives structural coherence to HS

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as a collection, albeit one which grants itself extraordinary scope of vision through the hunting device. Setting As I have suggested, it is important to distinguish ‘hunting’ and ‘hunters’ more generally from the persona of the ‘hunter / narrator’. The hunting setting is of course a distinct structural area, to some extent immune to the subversions outlined above. Even so there would appear to be a central problematic: how can one be both a lover of nature and a person who kills nature’s creatures? Paradoxically the answer which emerges from HS is that only the hunter is in a position to truly appreciate nature because only the hunter is exposed to it for long periods of time: ‘Who but a hunter has experienced the delight of wandering through the bushes at dawn?’(383). Moreover at the beginning of Forest and Steppe, the valedictory paean to hunting, the narrator at last addresses precisely this paradox, which in one form or another has haunted a number of the stories: ‘Hunting with a gun and a dog is a wonderful thing in itself, für sich, as they used to say in the old days; but, say you’re not a born hunter; you’re still a lover of nature; in which case you can’t help but envy us hunters’ (382). The philosophical flavour of this statement is of some significance. A pursuit ‘für sich’ needs no justification - it is a firstness, it gives delight and it is natural to indulge in it. To that extent, from the hunter’s standpoint, objections such as Kasian’s are mere thirdnesses, invitations to legislate about something which is so fundamental as to require no justification. It is the ‘man the hunter argument’. Sander Brouwer provides an excellent analysis of the anthropological dimensions of this subject with reference to the ideas of Ortega y Gasset.68 Suffice it to say here that the hunter’s view suggests that hunting is man’s authentic role in the natural world. It is because of hunting that he is alive to nature and thus the hunter alone does not need to justify his relationship with nature - his is the fundamental relationship. The long description at the beginning of Ermolai and the Miller’s Wife is a particularly good example of an appreciation of natural beauty accompanying the exhilaration of the hunt. Full of the most meticulously observed natural detail, it also has a clear temporal structure, since the details observed are affected by and respond to the gradual onset of night. It begins with the air ‘fresh and clear; the birds ... chattering and chirruping; the young grass ... lit by a heartening emerald glow’ and draws to a close with ‘the first trill of the nightingale’ (21). But it is impossible to divorce the suspense of this description from emotions of the hunter waiting in the deepening shadow: ‘your heart is heavy with expectation, and suddenly - only hunters will understand what I’m saying - suddenly the deep silence is broken by a strange

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croaking and hissing’ (21). It is the woodcock, not the nightingale which draws this passage to a close, the game rather than the song bird. However, if Ermolai and the Miller’s Wife establishes the principle that a hunter can be peculiarly alert to the beauties of nature, elsewhere there are a number of examples where hunting no longer motivates the description in any significant way. Paradoxically Forest and Steppe which purports to ‘say a few words about hunting’ (382) is the principal repository of such passages, as the wandering hunter slowly meanders through an idyllic day. The description of the forest ‘in late autumn when the snipe fly in’ (386) is a kind of reprise of the woodcock passage just quoted (the cognate species of the birds intensifying the parallel). Once again ‘a strange unease grips your soul’ (386) but now it is of a different kind: a sort of welling up of the mnemonic subconscious: ‘The faces of loved ones, living and dead, present themselves to the mind; long dormant impressions awake unexpectedly; the imagination hovers and takes wing ...’(386). This is an essentially aesthetic response similar to that which evokes the image of the seagull in The Singers. At any rate it is a far cry from the tense expectation of the hunters in Ermolai and the Miller’s Wife. Bezhin Meadow also supplies passages of nature description which are only motivated by the pursuit of hunting in the most peripheral way. Of particular interest is a passage in Kasian of the Beautiful Lands. The hunting, such as it is, has taken place and what the author experiences when lying down in the forest is of a purely aesthetic nature. What makes this episode unique is that the description is inverted, since the narrator describes what he sees lying on his back looking into the sky through the forest canopy. This inversion means that ‘You seem to be looking into a bottomless sea ... the trees do not rise from the ground but ... are falling away into waves clear as glass’ (124). The clouds are ‘like magical underwater islands’ and when the wind blows ‘a fresh, tremulous murmur arises’ which is like ‘the soft and boundless plashing of a suddenly breaking swell’ (124). The emotional effect of such contemplation is strongly emphasized: ‘it is an extraordinarily pleasant occupation’; ‘it is impossible to express in words the joyous sweetness and calm you feel in your heart’(124). As in Forest and Steppe the experience releases a ‘slow succession of recollections’ and ‘your gaze moves ever further on, drawing you after it into that bright and peaceful vastness (ɛɟɡɞɧɚ)’ and ‘you find it impossible to tear yourself away from this height, this depth’(124). The experience described is undoubtedly an aesthetic one. The trajectory of the whole passage is from the contemplation of the constituent beauties of the natural scene, through an organic perception of the whole as a kind of seascape and onward still to the contemplation of a single whole - ‘a bright and peaceful vastness’, a sublime vision which transcends mere direction: ‘this height, this depth’. This exemplifies the Peircean process of prescission whereby we

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are led logically through the categories of thirdness and secondness to the firstness in which they are grounded but which defies description or definition. More precisely, a Peircean analysis of this passage would see nature itself, the concrete details of the forest, as the secondness, the vision of the forest as a sea - the percipient’s own complex mental creation - as the thirdness and the final vision of infinity as the firstness. If we were to accept the logic of this interpretation we would conclude that it is not nature which is a firstness but rather the beauty which lies beyond it - an essentially Platonic view. In this context beauty is a ‘für sich’ and the description of nature a means of achieving it. Moreover it is not the only means, for we also find beauty emerging as a firstness through sublime music (The Singers) and from certain kinds of social encounter (Meeting; Bezhin Meadow). However, there are also reasons to doubt this conclusion. In Kasian of the Beautiful Lands the narrator is interrupted, before he can conclude his musings, by Kasian who asks him why he has shot the corncrake. In so doing he reintroduces the ‘brute fact’ of the real world, to use Peirce’s phrase, in which hunting is, supposedly, a fundamental part of man’s role in nature, and also challenges it. And it is appropriate for the challenge to take place precisely here, for how indeed can shooting be integrated into the sublime vision which the hunter has just been enjoying? The inversion of the picture is of considerable relevance too: from a particular point of view - lying on one’s back - the world looks startlingly different, and certainly different from that presented to a hunter standing or walking. Similarly unusual points of view are not rare in HS - Lukeria in Living Relic provides an example, as do the boys in Bezhin Meadow and the dying Aleksandra Andreevna in District Doctor. We can perceive a clear relationship between ‘point of view’ in these cases and the apparent firstnesses which emerge clearly from the stories: religion; superstition; love. And inasmuch as they are contextualized in this way they cease to be firstnesses and are rather symptoms of a broader condition in which these groups and individuals find themselves. One may object that the hunter’s capricious inverted vision is a ‘one-off’ and has little in common with the perspectives of Lukeria, Alexandra Andreevna and others in HS. But it is not without antecedent in the collection. Reminiscing about Count Orlov, Ovsiannikov recalls that he used to keep first-rate tumbler pigeons. He’d go out into the courtyard, sit in an armchair and order the pigeons to be flown; and all around on the roofs, there were men with rifles to shoot at hawks. They’d place a big silver dish filled with water at the Prince’s feet; and he’d watch the pigeons reflected in the water (66).

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The resonances between this passage and the hunter’s experience are significant. Orlov is an aristocrat used to satisfying his whims; there is nothing natural in what he is doing, quite the contrary: tumblers are a genetic freak and simulate the loss of control of a shot bird. The pigeons are protected while the hawk is shot; it is easier to watch the birds fly reflected in a dish than to look up in the sky. Interpreted in this way, the embedded story of Count Orlov provides a satirical counterpoint to the narrator’s ‘vision’ in Kasian of the Beautiful Lands. Nature retains its firstness in HS because it is presented as a discrete domain and the location of natural description in the stories so often serves to demarcate it from the human, cultural realm. But it would be wrong to identify it with either beauty or the fundamental concept of man the hunter; rather it remains the indefinable medium in which both beauty and venery are experienced. Character My Peircean reading of character in HS starts from particular axioms. To take a strict approach: if, as we suggested earlier, Russia in the broadest sense of its conceivable connotations is the firstness in HS, then all the characters without exception exhibit secondness, in that, however their spiritual and material circumstances may differ, they are all conditioned by this Russian firstness. For this reason the firstness I apply to character is bound to be of a relative sort - ‘degenerate’ to use Peirce’s term. However, if we understand human firstness in the way described above as an individual’s sense of his or her autonomy, an end für sich - then we do indeed have a benchmark for investigating character in HS according to Peircean principles. This sense of autonomy and more particularly a striving to protect it against secondary forces - regnant cultural norms, the feudal status quo, social prejudice - transcends class affiliation, although, as we shall see, the social context is vital to the way in which autonomy is perceived and protected. Because HS are so clearly grounded in character, it is also the case that the plot is commonly a working through of these issues of autonomy. Characters who exhibit firstness abound in HS. Ermolai is a prime example. He is a serf whose owner allows him complete freedom of movement on condition that he occasionally supplies game for the manorial table. He is not paid, however, and has to subsist on what he earns from hunting. As we have suggested above Ermolai is an excellent hunter, a better one, we may assume, than the aristocrats who occasionally employ him as a gillie. At the same time the narrator seeks to persuade us that he is still part of the feudal nexus: Ermolai never feeds his dog and his master gives him ‘no powder and shot, following precisely the same principle as Ermolai himself in not feeding [it]’ (234). This principle seems also to extend to Ermolai’s treatment of his

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wretched and poverty-stricken wife. Despite this, however, Ermolai’s basic autonomy is largely undented. Those who immediately surround him - his dog, his wife and the hunter himself - defer to him in specific ways: as master in the first two instances and as skilled hunter in the third. His brief conversation with Arina in Ermolai and the Miller’s Wife is enigmatic in the extreme and one cannot conclude from it whether he simply wishes to seduce Arina or whether he feels genuine sympathy for her - perhaps a mixture of both. His motives here and his character in general thus defy resolution and cannot be easily reduced to type. Arina is enigmatic in her own right: the complex architecture of the story so arranges it that she becomes an object of emotional interest for a total of five people, the entire dramatis personae, six if we include the narrator who looks at her ‘with sympathy’ (31). Four of these characters - those responsible for her current fate - are reduced by the siuzhet to mere secondariness; thus Arina, ailing and with a past which most strongly emphasizes the brutality and oppression of patriarchal serfdom, retains an indefinable resilience, a sense of self which allows her to deal gracefully and firmly with Ermolai’s overtures: ‘You’d do better to wake up your master Ermolai Petrovich; see the potatoes are ready’ (28). To this extent she too, for all the victimization she has suffered, exhibits a firstness of character which counterpoints that of Ermolai. Among peasants who exhibit the same sort of firstness are Pavlusha from Bezhin Meadow, Kasian from Kasian of the Beautiful Lands and Lukeria from Living Relics. In each case the uniqueness of the character is clearly marked in the story: ‘I could not help admiring Pavlusha ... His ordinary-looking face ... shone with dashing boldness courageousness and firm resolution’(104); ‘A strange man he is, a sort of holy man, you’d be hard put to find such a strange one as him’ (132); ‘In front of me there lay a live human being, but what kind of human being was it? ... not only was the face not ugly, it even had a kind of beauty, but beauty of a rare and terrible kind’ (354). The firstness of these characters lies in their resistance to the socially homogenizing forces around them or in their defiance of what might seem to be ineluctable social and natural law. Pavlusha exercises commonsense in the midst of superstition; Kasian maintains his pantheism and pacifism against the general social grain; Lukeria is wise, inspired and full of life, although reduced by illness to a living corpse. It would be simplistic, however, to assume that in HS social isolation is automatically accompanied by independence of mind or moral resilience. Stepushka in Raspberry Water is also a social outcast, living at the barest level of subsistence, but the situation is not of his making and, far from being empowered by it, he is reduced to a state of virtual incommunicability. The forester in Loner is physically isolated in his forest hut, but has a fanatical loyalty towards his employer and acts with unhesitating severity against trespassers. He is as much an agent of

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the aristocracy as the eponymous bailiff or the employees of The Office. However, what is important in The Loner is the hero’s miraculous transcendence of his all-engulfing secondness in an unprecedented act of mercy towards one of his victims. Again, the transition to firstness is clearly marked by the narrator: ‘Well, Loner ... you’ve amazed me! I see now you’re an excellent chap’ (175). Alongside characters who exhibit or achieve firstness are a host of others who display secondary characteristics or who fail to sustain their firstness. In this the weight of the feudal structure, past or present, plays an important role. In Raspberry Water the departure of the landowners in the wake of a fire has left their gardener and his wife surrealistically marooned with a crested drake and a Tyrolean cow that gives no milk. The wretched Stepushka sponges as much as he can from these already impoverished individuals thus completing a chain of cause and effect which hopelessly traps all involved. Tuman, the butler, is equally wholly determined by his past service with another aristocrat, but his reminiscences are self-affirming and nostalgic. Nevertheless in his attachment to the past he has no more autonomy than Stepushka with whom he sits fishing. The Office offers a more contemporary vision of secondariness. Those who work in it are under the thumb of the Chief Cashier, but he in turn is answerable to the caprices of the female landowner, who is never seen, but is a constant presence, subverting the system by arbitrarily changing the jobs of those in her power. This particular form of attack on the individual identity of serfs is shown particularly vividly in Lgov where the fisherman who takes the narrator and Ermolai hunting had previously been a coachman, a cook, an official and an actor (93). His mistress had simply said ‘It’s not right for you to be a coachman: you can be my fisherman and shave your beard off’ (85). However, there is no inevitable causal connection between the feudal presence and lack of individual autonomy. Both Khor and Kalinych are presented as characters in their own right, reflecting on and accepting their own social conditions - in a manner very different from the characters in Raspberry Water. At the same time neither of them wishes to sever the bond of serfdom. Morgach in The Singers regained his mistress’ favour after an initial misdemeanour and eventually gained his freedom and became her bailiff, yet he is not shown as a particularly admirable or independently minded individual. More interesting in this respect is the odnodvorets Ovsiannikov who is admired and respected by other odnodvortsy and the local aristocracy.69 Yet his apparent autonomy and independence of views owes more to his unique social status as an odnodvorets than to his personality and indeed his survival owes most to astute social vigilance: ‘... the lower your station the stricter you’ve got to behave or you’ll end up in the dirt’ (68). A sense of society seems to be what most distinguishes the social attitude of the landowners from those of peasants and the rest in

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HS. This is because, on the whole, peasants are encountered by the narrator either individually or in small numbers, facilitating their presentation as either types or one-offs. By contrast virtually all the aristocrats in HS have a keen social awareness and thus the dialectic between firstness and secondness typically takes place in the context of a confrontation with the social milieu. Superficial and unattractive landowners such as Penochkin and Khvalynskii are shown interacting unproblematically with their neighbours, whereas those who arouse our sympathy in some way - Radilov, Karataev, Hamlet and Chertopkhanov all run the risk of scandal or social condemnation. The Hamlet / Quixote dichotomy makes itself felt in the way that the social confrontation is manifested. Faced with the need to assert their autonomy in social conditions, characters either take the necessary leap of courage or merely contemplate it and reconcile themselves to reality. Those who accomplish an assertion of autonomy are presented as worthy of our interest or admiration: Radilov refuses to talk to the hunter about the usual social and agricultural topics which dominate provincial conversation and intrigues him by his apparent goodwill and satisfaction with his fate. Something highly attractive is ‘hidden’ in him (58). Radilov’s secret is that he is in love with his sister-in-law with whom he eventually elopes, precipitating a local scandal. By contrast Karataev’s abduction of his serf sweetheart is doomed to failure because he tries to compromise with the status quo, keeping her on his estate and not making a decisive break. Hamlet and Chertopkhanov represent two psychological extremes in this social environment. Chertopkhanov shows admirable bravery in rescuing the hapless Nedopiushkin from a crowd of bullying snobs, and a Jew from the hands of a peasant mob. At the same time he conducts a slow war of attrition with his social milieu which he ultimately loses. Superficially, at least, his heroics are suggestive of firstness: they seem to be acts of pure humanity and courage. At the same time, though, like Quixote, Chertopkhanov is also acting out of an inherited sense of his own feudal heritage, his aristocratism, and to this extent he is every bit as bound in to the firstness of Russian history and culture as the landowners elsewhere in the story. His dying words are significant: ‘The hereditary aristocrat Pantalei Chertopkhanov is dying. Who can prevent him? He owes no-one anything and asks for nothing ...’(351). Here is an interesting cocktail of self-sufficiency and affiliation - of firstness and secondness. For Chertopkhanov’s inseparable companion, Nedopiushkin, there is no doubt about the firstness of Chertopkhanov: ‘he was amazed at him to the point of disbelief, to the point of spiritual exhaustion, and he regarded him as an exceptional man’; he looked the Governor straight in the eyes ‘just like Jesus Christ’ (309). This is the most fulsome assertion of a character’s firstness anywhere in HS but it is also made by

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a character who is the epitome of secondness, who has, all his life, sought a master to command him and, as a result, has frequently been degraded to the status of buffoon or clown. Interestingly, too, the hunter’s initial interest in Chertopkhanov and Nedopiushkin is as a dyad: ‘These two gentlemen aroused my keen curiosity. What was capable of uniting two such different human beings in the bonds of unbreakable friendship’? (300). As it turns out the two illustrate very well Peirce’s characterization of the components of the dyad: one of which is ‘fundamental, real and primary’, and the other ‘merely derivative, formal and secondary’.70 Nedopiushkin accesses firstness via his idolization of Chertopkhanov, while for Chertopkhanov Nedopiushkin provides constant confirmation of his firstness. The relationship is thus symbiotic, but though apparently founded on friendship, it is still one based on domination and subordination. Chertopkhanov’s romantic sense of self is also sustained in a different way by his gypsy mistress and Cossack mount. As he is gradually deprived of all three of these psychological supports he enters an irreversible decline. The weakness of his Quixotic firstness lies in its essential lack of self-sufficiency, in its constant requirement of an adequate other against which self-identity can be confirmed or asserted. Hamlet of the Shchigrovskii District offers the key psychological analysis of firstness and secondness in the collection. His discourse discusses these concepts under the terms ‘ɨɪɢɝɢɧɚɥɶɧɨɫɬɶ’ (‘originality’) and ‘ɩɨɞɪɚɠɚɧɢɟ’ (‘imitation’). Hamlet is acutely aware of the paradoxes of the search for firstness - for ‘something which is yours, something special and unique to you’ (280). In particular, he complains, cultural education, while promising to develop the personality, simply exposes it to pre-existing ideas. While society is persuaded that such an education confers originality on its possessor, the honest man knows otherwise. Education, in fact, drives out innate originality. At the same time, deliberation about originality is proof that you do not possess it - it is a thirdness rather than an unreflecting firstness. Hamlet realizes that an original person, faced with social and marital disillusionment, would have ‘perhaps shrugged his shoulders, heaved a couple of sighs and then settled down to live life in his own way’ (292). Such a person would have retained his inner autonomy, paradoxically by accepting the limitations of the situation. By refusing to accept his ordinariness Hamlet exposes himself constantly to a host of social humiliations - such as the patronizing attitude of the local policeman - which the Quixotic Chertopkhanov would quickly have disposed of in a physical manner. At the same time Hamlet’s own bitter reflections on the limitations of existential autonomy lend him an authenticity and clarity of vision denied to most other characters in HS; to that extent he transcends mere secondness to attain a position of philosophical thirdness.

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How does one recognize what is authentic in nature and in life? How can one prevent oneself mistaking conditional for absolute truths? The reader of the Sketches is constantly surprised by the way in which individual stories critique, undercut, or surpass the insights offered by earlier stories in the collection: the hunter has true insight into nature; the hunter is a destroyer of nature; peasants are sensitive human beings; peasants can be reduced to mute beggary; the past is backward and feudal; the past is preferable to the confusion of the present; the social classes have little in common; all social classes can unite in the pleasure of beauty. Ultimately the Sketches conclude in ambivalence since they lack narrative closure - there are more potential encounters to be had, more unique insights in other hunting contexts or for other hunters. Nevertheless HS do seem to insist that we must acknowledge value when we encounter it and that this acknowledgment is independent of our rational wills or social prejudices. Thus in The Singers we are shown first the good song and then the better. One could argue that logically a third singer might have bettered Iakov’s song and so ad infinitum. But the description of the scene suggests otherwise. The listeners are moved by the first singer, but moved to tears by the second. We are not meant to suppose that there is a third and further stage. The singer has enabled his listeners to access beauty in its full and immediate form, by abduction, in Peircean terms, the mark of aesthetic experience, where deduction and induction mark the forms of empirical and logical experience. It is felt, not analyzed, but it is also an ultimate stage, a firstness, beyond which one does not go. Beauty is such a firstness in HS, but so is the individual human character, as is the wholeness which the collection seeks to evoke - Turgenev’s Russia.

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NOTES 1. I.S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos’mi tomakh, VI, Zapiski okhotnika 1847-1874, S.A. Makashin and Iu. G. Oksman, eds, Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, Moscow-Leningrad, 1963, p. 494. Hereafter Pss: all quotations from Zapiski okhotnika are taken from this edition and referenced by page numbers in the text. All translations from Russian are my own unless otherwise stated. 2. Richard Freeborn, Turgenev: The Novelist’s Novelist, Oxford University Press, London, 1960, pp. 30-1. 3. Leonid Grossman, ‘Turgenev’s Early Genre’ in David A. Lowe, ed., Critical Essays on Ivan Turgenev, C.G. Hall and Co., Boston, 1989, pp. 63-79 (68). Translated by David Lowe from Grossman’s ‘Etiudy o Turgeneve’, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, III, Sovremennye problemy, Moscow, 1928, pp. 38-63. 4. See Grossman, p. 64: it was, in fact, Panaev’s invention. 5. Ibid., p. 65. 6. G.N. Ishchuk, ‘Zapiski okhotnika I.S. Turgeneva v narodnom vospriiatii’, Filologicheskie nauki, III, 153, 1986, pp. 72-4 (73). 7. Boris Eikhenbaum, ‘The Sportsman’s Sketches: An Introductory Essay’, CanadianAmerican Slavic Studies, XVII, 1, 1983, pp. 7-12. Translated by Sona and Thomas Hoisington from ‘Vstupitel’nyi ocherk’ in Zapiski okhotnika, Petrograd, 1918, pp. iii-viii. (No publisher given.) 8. Ibid., p. 8. 9. Ibid., p. 9. 10. Loc. cit. 11. Loc. cit. 12. Ibid., p. 12. 13. Ibid., p. 11. 14. Loc. cit. 15. Loc. cit. (My interpolations.) 16. Loc. cit. 17. See, for instance, Sander Brouwer, Character in the Short Prose of Ivan Sergeeviþ Turgenev, Rodopi, Amsterdam-Atlanta, 1996, p. 90; Grossman, op. cit., Victor Ripp, ‘Ideology in Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter: The First Three Sketches’, Slavic Review, XXXVIII, 1979, pp. 75-88; Walter Smirniw, ‘A Gallery of Idealists and Realists’, in

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David A. Lowe, ed., Critical Essays on Ivan Turgenev, C.G. Hall and Co., Boston, 1989, pp. 73-9. 18. Thomas H. Hoisington, ‘The Enigmatic Hunter of Turgenev’s Zapiski okhotnika’, Russian Literature, XII, 1997, pp. 47-64 (50). 19. Freeborn, p. 28. 20. Ibid., p. 29. 21. Richard, Freeborn, ‘The Hunter’s Eye in Zapiski okhotnika’, New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 2, 1976, pp. 1-9 (8 and 4). 22. Hoisington, p. 56. 23. Grossman, pp. 65 and 68. 24. Hoisington, pp. 52 ff. 25. Andrew R. Durkin, ‘The Generic Context of Rural Prose: Turgenev and the Pastoral Tradition’ in Robert A. Maguire and Alan Timberlake, eds, American Contributions to the Eleventh International Congress of Slavists, Bratislava, August-September, 1993, Slavica, Columbus, 1993, pp. 43-50. 26. Brouwer, pp. 76-7. 27. See Smirniw. The viability of this dichotomy is open to question: how, for instance does Lukeria from Living Relic fit into it? 28. Irene Masing-Delic, ‘Philosophy, Myth and Art in Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter’, The Russian Review, L, 1991, pp. 437-450 (445). 29. Il’ia Pomerantsev, ‘Vremia v rasskaze I.S. Turgeneva Bezhin lug’, Zapiski russkoi akademicheskoi gruppy v SSHA, XXVIII, 3, 1996-7, pp. 337-88 (384-5). 30. Grossman, pp. 68-9. Even so, The End of Chertopkhanov is not an ideal example of sophisticated plot structure: the hero’s adventures are a series of picaresque incidents strung together to accord with his Quixotic persona. 31. Rimvaydas Silbajoris, ‘Images and Structures in Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Notebook’, Slavic and East European Journal, XXVIII, 2, 1984, pp. 180-91 (181). However, Silbajoris’ approach is limited by the fact that it discounts stories like The Office which ‘seem ideologically oriented to the point where the poetic element plays a decidedly secondary role’ (182). 32. Sander Brauer [Brouwer], Zapiski okhotnika kak khudozhestvennoe tseloe’, Studia Slavica Hungarica, XLIV, 1999, pp. 273-90 (280). 33. Ibid., p. 278.

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34. Victor Ripp, Turgenev’s Russia: From Notes of a Hunter to Fathers and Sons, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1980, pp. 58-9. 35. Silbajoris, p. 183. 36. Ibid., p. 184. 37. Freeborn, ‘The Hunter’s Eye ...’, loc. cit. 38. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, eds, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, I: Principles of Philosophy, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1960, p. 146. Hereafter Collected Papers. 39. Justus Buchler, ed., The Philosophy of Peirce: Selected Writings, Routlege and Kegan Paul, London, 1940 (reprinted 1950), p. 75. Hereafter The Philosophy of Peirce. 40. On this see Søren Brier, ‘Cyber-Semiotics: On Autopoeisis, Code Duality and Sign Games in Bio-Semiotics’, Cybernetics and Human Knowing, III, 1, 1995, pp. 1-12 (8). . Accessed 13/07/2006 12.21. 41. Stanley Harrison, ‘The Unwilling Dead’, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, XLVI, 1972, pp. 199-208 (200). 42. Collected Papers, p. 152. 43. Ibid., p. 162. 44. Vincent M. Colapietro, ‘Immediacy, Opposition, and Mediation: Peirce on Irreducible Aspects of the Communicative Process’ in Lenore Langsdorf and Andrew R. Smith, eds, Recovering Pragmatism’s Voice: The Classical Tradition, Rorty, and the Philosophy of Communication, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1995, pp. 23-48 (43). 45. See F.M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, V.G. Bazanov et al., eds, V, Nauka, Leningrad, 1973, p. 104. 46. Loc. cit. 47. Ibid., p. 164. My interpolations. 48. Ibid., p. 163 49. Loc. cit. 50. Philip P. Wiener, ed., Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings, Dover Publications, New York, 1958, p.385. Hereafter Selected Writings. 51. Loc. cit. 52. On this see Harrison, p. 201.

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53. See Richard Rorty, Philosophical Review, LXX, 1961, pp. 197-223 (201). 54. Ibid., p. 388. 55. Collected Papers, p. 170. 56. On prescission see The Philosophy of Peirce, p. 97. 57. Carl G. Vaught, ‘Semiotics and the Problem of Analogy: A Critique of Peirce’s Theory of Categories’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, XXII, 1986, pp. 311-26 (311). 58. Loc. cit. 59. On this see Robin Melrose, ‘The Seduction of Abduction: Peirce’s Theory of Signs and Indeterminacy in Language’, Journal of Pragmatics, XXIII, 1995, pp. 493-507. 60. Ibid., p. 498. 61. See Wim Staat, ‘On Abduction, Deduction, Induction and the Categories’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, XXIX, 2, 1993, pp. 225-37. 62. On Peirce’s ‘three types of men’ see Matthew Fairbanks, ‘C.S. Peirce and Positivism’, Modern Schoolman, XLI, 1964, pp. 323-8 (334); also Carl R. Hausman, ‘Charles Peirce’s Categories’ in Michael Gorman and Jonathan J. Sanford, eds, Categories: Historical and Systematic Essays, Catholic University of America Press, Washington D.C., 2004, pp. 97-117 (108). 63. See Stanley Salthe, ‘A Peircean Semiotic Interpretation of Development’, Ludus Vitalis, III, 4, 1995, pp. 15-28 (20). 64. See Hausman, p. 109. 65. Albert William Levi, Literature, Philosophy and the Imagination, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and London, 1969, p. 143 (italics in the original). 66. Eikhenbaum, p. 8. 67. On this see commentary on this story: PSS, p. 569. 68. Brouwer, 1996, pp. 81 ff. 69. The odnodvortsy were descended from the minor gentry and retained some gentry privileges, such as the ability to own serfs. Their economic condition, however, was often little better than that of the peasants. See D.N. Ushakov, Tolkovyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka, II, Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo inostrannykh i natsional’nykh slovarei, Moscow, 1938, p. 764. 70. See note 44.

Nostalgic Visions and Mnemonic Figures: Tsvetaeva’s Allusions to Ivan Turgenev’s Goethian Outlook Alexandra Smith

In his analysis of Ivan Turgenev’s prose poems published in Russia in 1882, Adrian Wanner maintains that they echo Charles Baudelaire’s Little Poems in Prose (Petits poèmes en prose). Wanner’s analysis implies that Turgenev’s purpose in his development of the tradition of the French prose poem is to create a new dynamic aesthetic of surprise, by presenting incidents of everyday life as objects of poetic discourse, and by replacing the lyric voice with the voice of the ironically detached flâneur. According to Fritz Nies’ study, the emergence of the genre of the prose poem in the second half of the nineteenth century testifies to the crisis of lyric poetry and to the novelization of poetry in a prosaic age, when traditional notions of the lyric had become destabilized.1 Yet in Wanner’s opinion, contrary to developments in France, Turgenev’s invention did not enter modernist poetry’s mainstream, and it ‘looks at first sight like a rather anaemic plant struggling to survive in an inhospitable environment’.2 Partly this might be due to the absence of a publication in Turgenev’s lifetime of his prose poems in a book format bringing together all the poems. 50 of them were published in 1882 as a cycle of poems titled Senilia (ɋɬɚɪɱɟɫɤɨɟ) but other poems appeared in Paris only in 1930. In one of his letters Turgenev characterized his minimalist prose as the expression of the last deep sighs of an old man3 and shied away from any generic definition of it, but his prose miniatures were defined as verse poems by their first publisher M.M. Stasiulevich who described them as fragments and ephemeral notes (‘Ɉɬɪɵɜɤɢ, ɦɢɦɨɥɟɬɧɵɟ ɡɚɦɟɬɤɢ’).4 Turgenev accepted Stasiulevich’s title and definition of the cycle of prose poems, aware that such a title echoed that of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Senilia cycle of philosophical fragments published in Germany in 1864.5 Several scholars have claimed that Turgenev’s cycle contains polemical engagement with Schopenhauer that is neither inferior to, nor imitative of, Schopenhauer’s works.6 The reception of Turgenev’s prose poems as one cycle also might have been obscured by the scandalous reputation of one of the poems which overshadowed various critical responses to the other texts. Thus Turgenev’s prose poem of 1878 The Threshold (ɉɨɪɨɝ) has a history of its own. Never published during Turgenev’s lifetime for censorship reasons, its ‘samizdat’ version was illegally circulated in Russia in the 1880s-90s and was well known to many writers and revolutionaries. It holds special significance for Russian revolutionary culture and for the development of the literary tradition that aestheticizes

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acts of violence and the lives of terrorists.7 As will be demonstrated below, Turgenev’s representation in The Threshold of a young revolutionary girl as martyr appealed to Marina Tsvetaeva, too: both because of its identification of heroic traits with femininity and because of its juxtaposition of word and deed in the style of the Symbolist vision of life as creative process. More importantly, in the first half of the twentieth century The Threshold was interpreted as a collective portrait of the Russian revolutionary movement in modern times. For example, Semen Vengerov, a prominent Pushkin scholar, in his article accompanying the poem’s first legal publication in 1905 in the journal Russian Wealth (Ɋɭɫɫɤɨɟ ɛɨɝɚɬɫɬɜɨ), characterized it as insightfully depicting the 1870s generation: Here [he] ingeniously captured and expressed the fundamental feature of the movement - the type of religious ecstasy that prompted people, in the flower of youth, to push away the cup of life’s pleasures in order to follow the path of immense suffering and deprivation of everything that is near and dear.8 The revolutionary appeal of several of the prose poems notwithstanding, it is useful to note that Turgenev’s prose poems above all encapsulate the important philosophical tenets of his work. They meditate on the themes of death, the ephemerality of life, wasted youth, melancholy and modernity. In addition they dwell on the combined theme of guilt and moral duty that evokes the Kantian outlook in which a person’s actions purposely to overcome his / her inclinations should be viewed as an ethical achievement. Yet, as Eva Kagan-Kans suggests, Turgenev’s writings were often inspired by Goethe’s ideas and imagery to the extent that ‘one can speak perhaps of the Goethian version of renunciation’ which is contrasted in Turgenev’s writings with its Schopenhauerian interpretation.9 Kagan-Kans outlines Turgenev’s Goethian outlook as follows: One man’s life experience has confirmed the sad truth that man is not the creator of his own happiness and his fate, there is nothing left but to make a conscious abdication of all claims to private joy and pursue a supra-personal goal - one’s moral duty. The man who has reached this conclusion is duty-bound to reject every vestige of egoistical, individual ambition.10 Although Kagan-Kans describes affinities between Turgenev’s philosophical beliefs and those of modern existential thinkers, she stresses that Turgenev was unable to outline any affirmative vision of life due to his impressionistic worldview and style. Kagan-Kans explains:

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The role of fate in Turgenev’s works, which in some ways conveniently eliminates the burden of individual responsibility by directing the burden of guilt onto some obscure and malevolent power, ultimately denies man the dignity of selfdetermination. Thus, it is impossible to fit Turgenev’s belief in the value of faith or love into an existentialist framework of engagement.11 Kagan-Kans’ valuable observations on Turgenev’s worldview and its literary manifestations provide an important framework for the discussion of the reception of Turgenev’s works by Russian modernists. As will be demonstrated below, the presence of Turgenev’s Goethian outlook informs several of Tsvetaeva’s poems of the 1920s and strikingly manifests itself in her autobiographical writings of the 1930s. This might be due to Tsvetaeva sharing with Turgenev a strong love for German literature, emphasized on many occasions by her special bond with Goethe.12 Turgenev’s interpretation of Goethe’s works and philosophical views laid the foundation for the development of some important modernist aesthetic principles related to the expression of a subjective worldview and modern melancholy. Turgenev did like to present himself as a person poisoned by the corrosive power of irony, and he admired his friend Granovskii for maintaining a child-like, innocent personality immune to the ironic vision of life;13 yet Turgenev, like the German philosophers, was concerned to restore the human being in its totality. Turgenev’s interpretation of Faust and Mephistopheles as both aspects of Goethe insists on the unity of consciousness: ‘The ardent impetuousness and the passionate longing of the dreamer-scholar have evolved as spontaneously from the poet’s heart and are as dear and close to him, as Mephistopheles’ ruthless sneers and cold irony’.14 Arguably, Turgenev’s vision of Hamlet discussed in his essay of 1857-9 ‘Hamlet and Don Quixote’ served as a model for Tsvetaeva’s cycle of poems, which render the image of Hamlet into the twentieth-century superfluous hero whose sterile intellectual reflection underlines the fragmented world of modern man. Thus Tsvetaeva’s 1923 poems Ophelia to Hamlet (Ɉɮɟɥɢɹ Ƚɚɦɥɟɬɭ)15 and Ophelia in Defence of the Queen (Ɉɮɟɥɢɹ - ɜ ɡɚɳɢɬɭ ɤɨɪɨɥɟɜɵ)16 echo the belief of Goethe and Turgenev that feeling without thought is as unacceptable as reasoning without emotion, since both sides of human nature are necessary for the restoration of human wholeness. Tsvetaeva’s Ophelia is endowed with a powerful voice that challenges Hamlet’s vision of world order in a highly emotional and engaging manner. Tsvetaeva in Ophelia to Hamlet defends the notion of madness as a creative force of life that enables memory to re-enact past events and restore them to life:

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You, male virgin! Mysogynist! You Favoured the whimsical non-life … Did you think At least once about the object of loss when Something was removed in the flowerbed of madness … Was it roses? ... But this is - be quiet! - Future reality! We pick up roses, but new ones grow instead of them. Did You betray roses at least once? Roses of those Who were in love? - Did some of them really vanish? 17 The image of roses included by Tsvetaeva in the above passages juxtaposes the notions of martrydom and sacrifice that stems from selfless love. Her vision of Hamlet is imbued with the symbolic imagery and denunciation of the negative aspects of one-sided reason we find in Turgenev’s essays which present Mephistopheles and Hamlet as products of Voltaire’s age. The unnatural dualism and irrevocable atomization of the human personality which characterizes the modern world is highlighted in Tsvetaeva’s portrayal of a pale Hamlet whose every cell is almost bloodless and lifeless: ‘In the halo of disillusionment and knowledge, / Pale through and through, up to the last atom’.18 Turgenev’s comments on the nihilistic outlook of modern man juxtapose Faust and Mephistopheles as personalities infected with destructive impulse and nihilism. Turgenev’s description of Faust appears to inform Tsvetaeva’s interpretation of Hamlet’s self-reflexive and self-centred character, who is unable to transgress the limitations of his thought. Turgenev thus underpins the existence of an inner devil in Faust that prevents him from embracing life in all its contradictions: There is nothing cheerful about Mephistopheles … But is Faust himself, being a child of the not-so-healthy Middle Ages, capable of standing firmly on his feet, especially because he displays all the signs of deterioration? Didn’t he try to escape the suffocating monastic cell to which he was confined by his fruitless and self-centred passion for unattainable lofty ideas in order to free himself? Didn’t he long for a real, rationally organized world which he could not attain because he was a dreamer who yearned for it and hoped to become healthier through socializing not with living people but with the rays of moonlight?19 Kagan-Kans’ insightful analysis of Turgenev’s philosophical tenets suggests that Turgenev also saw himself as a modern man whose inner Mephistopheles prevented his achievement of a sense of wholeness subordinated to a pantheistic vision of life. Kagan-Kans also points out that Turgenev, unlike most of his contemporaries, was preoccupied not

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with the ideal of perfect society ‘but, rather, with that of the perfect man’, and that Turgenev’s close friend Stankevich represented ‘the ideal of the integrated harmonious being’.20 Turgenev admired Stankevich’s belief in truth, nobility, dedication to the aesthetic Ideal, and commitment to altruistic service of the cause of enlightenment and humanity. Yet Kagan-Kans valuably observes that, unlike Schopenahauer, Pascal and Leopardi (whose short poems in prose have affinities with Turgenev’s minimalist prose), Turgenev does not accept the recurrence of desires: ‘Ceaselessly, he describes the one yearning, the single, brief moment and then a long life of expiation and emptiness’.21 As Kagan-Kans notes, Turgenev’s search for the harmonious ethical personality coincides with Goethe’s notion of a refined personal culture.22 In light of this observation, it becomes easier to see why Turgenev wrote about Faust so passionately. Turgenev’s portrayal of Faust emphasizes the self-centred and egotistical nature which he observed in himself and in many of his contemporaries: ‘Faust is an egoist; a theoretical egoist, who is in love with himself; he is an enlightened egoist and a dreamer. He didn’t set himself the goal of conquering science, his aim was to control, with the help of science, his own self, and obtain his peace of mind and happiness’.23 The fragmented personality of modern man is also vividly depicted in Turgenev’s prose poems, especially in his 1879 poems ‘When I am alone … A double’ (‘Ʉɨɝɞɚ ɹ ɨɞɢɧ ... ɞɜɨɣɧɢɤ’) and ‘I got up in the night’ (‘ə ɜɫɬɚɥ ɧɨɱɶɸ ...’). In these poems the narrator presents himself as a lonely person who has a surreal vision of his double self or of his past life that comes to haunt him, a reminder of the irrevocable loss of happiness. These poems echo Turgenev’s stories Klara Milich, Faust and Phantoms (ɉɪɢɡɪɚɤɢ) which refer to a mysterious force or a ghost which personifies the individual’s superego that lives a full life after its visible death. For example, the concluding lines of the poem ‘When I am alone’ suggest the existence of a gap between the past and present selves, and meditate on the ephemerality of the material world. Yet they reinstate Turgenev’s belief in the transcendence of physical limitations of the world: ‘Both you, my brother, and I feel unhappy during this cold silence of loneliness. / But you just wait … / When I die, we will become one: / my past self and my present self will merge with each other / enabling us to fly away for ever into the realm of shades that do not come back’.24 These texts highlight the presence of binary oppositions in Turgenev’s prose poems. Bearing in mind Walter Koschmal’s remark that binary oppositions - such as ‘life-death’, ‘young-old’, ‘rich-poor’ - play a crucial role in Turgenev’s prose poems, we could suggest approaching them as an allegorical interpretation of human existence: contrasting philosophical statements weave polarities into one unifying narrative in order to highlight the paradoxical multiplicity of meanings embedded in the Russian language itself. This is discussed in the last of the cycle of

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50 poems published in 1882 titled The Russian Language (Ɋɭɫɫɤɢɣ ɹɡɵɤ). Paradoxically, Turgenev’s poem implies that the Russian language saves him from despair when he contemplates Russia’s social life in the 1880s and enables him to believe that such a great, allpowerful, truthful and free language could rescue the nation from total destruction, thanks to its enormous creative potential. The poem appears to anticipate Bakhtin’s ideas on the discursive unity of literary and nonliterary forms and sheds light on the experimental nature of the genre. It seems that Turgenev’s prose poems were written with the view to bringing into the open his concerns about various manifestations of heteroglossia and about the relationship between literary genres and nonliterary material. Indeed, they can be viewed as a locus of heteroglossia that exemplifies such a manifestation of the dialogical genre that tests the boundaries of novelistic discourse. Jonathan Monroe in A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre argues that the prose poem presents a kind of struggle within literature and reflects on various tensions present in social life. As Monroe puts it: The prose poem is that place within literature where social antagonisms of gender and class achieve generic expression, where aesthetic conflicts between and among literary genres manifest themselves concisely and concretely as a displacement, projection, and symbolic reenactment of more broadly based social struggles.25 Echoes of Turgenev’s prose poems are easily detected in the many poems and essays by Tsvetaeva that centre on the notion of re-enactment of social struggles and displacement. Tsvetaeva uses Turgenev’s ideas about modern man as a framework for her own meditation on the effects of positivist thinking and of technological advancement on the psychology of a modern man saturated with artificially created images and models imposed by social discursive practices. In the poem ‘Ophelia in Defence of the Queen’ Tsvetaeva articulates the nature of modern tragedy in Turgenevan terms as the loss of the ideal of the integrated personality, one needing reinstatement as part of new ethical thought. Tsvetaeva’s image of Ophelia is endowed with the voice of inner consciousness awaiting awakening in modern man, a voice challenging his Kantian abstract reasoning: Prince Hamlet! It’s time to stop criticizing The Queen’s sexual self. It’s not up to virgins To judge passion. Phaedra’s sin is much more burdensome. People still immortalize her in songs.

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And they will continue to do so. As for you Whose self represents a mixture of chalk and rot, Then I suggest you should talk to skeletons. It’s none of your reason’s business to judge the inflamed passion.26 Tsvetaeva’s Ophelia acts as a mouthpiece for the author’s vision of romantic love that clashes with mediocre existence and conformity. Tsvetaeva seems to share with Turgenev her belief that glorification of passion, love and commitment to the Ideal is a valuable principle of life and art. As Kagan-Kans observes, Turgenev re-enacted the life of some of his characters who, for example like Vera in the story Faust, feel the urge to break with the routine of mediocre existence: ‘The choice which Turgenev presents is between a life of bourgeois bliss (poshlost) or that of tasting momentary ecstasy. His choice, without any doubt, is that of a brief and solitary flight followed by a catastrophe, rather than the slow, peaceful and prolonged life of mediocrity’.27 Furthermore Tsvetaeva, by stating at the end of the poem that Ophelia is an immortal passion of Hamlet, suggests that Hamlet suppresses his ability to respond to emotions thereby depriving himself from seeking wholeness and organic unity with nature. It seems that Tsvetaeva’s 1920s poems depicting Hamlet challenge Turgenev’s portrayal of modern male romantic heroes as passive individuals who are subjected to the greater power of fate. Indeed, most of his male protagonists, including Insarov and Bazarov, die as victims of a whim of fate or chance. Turgenev in The Song of Triumphant Love (ɉɟɫɧɶ ɬɨɪɠɟɫɬɜɭɸɳɟɣ ɥɸɛɜɢ), one of his last works, presents a merciless and cruel image of fate that laughs at the individual illusions of self-determination embodied by the marble statue of a satyr. It would not be far fetched to suggest also Tsvetaeva’s indebtedness to Innokentii Annenskii’s interpretation of Turgenev’s worldview as manifested in his essay ‘Dying Turgenev. Klara Milich’ (‘ɍɦɢɪɚɸɳɢɣ Ɍɭɪɝɟɧɟɜ. Ʉɥɚɪɚ Ɇɢɥɢɱ’) included in the 1906 collection of essays The Book of Reflections (Ʉɧɢɝɚ ɨɬɪɚɠɟɧɢɣ). The situation described in Tsvetaeva’s cycle of poems on Hamlet and Ophelia - in which Ophelia tempts Hamlet after her death and claims to be his true passion - strongly resembles Turgenev’s story which, in Annenskii’s rendering, is invested with strong symbolist overtones that reinforce the importance of the theme of otherworldliness to the creative imagination of modernist authors. The concluding paragraph of Annenskii’s article sheds light on the existence in Klara Milich - at least in embryo form of the sharp awareness of the vision of otherworldliness interwoven into everyday existence that stems from modern man’s sceptical resignation to the notion of life’s ephemerality. Annenskii writes about the keen sensation of physical suffering that permeates Turgenev’s story and

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comments on the embedded theme of the impossibility of love in the vein of Symbolist thinking: And then Katia Milovidova dies. And, having ceased to be part of the living and having turned into a ghost, into a possibility, she at long last conquers Arbatov’s heart. But this heart was made of wax and it soon melted away. It was afraid of any manifestations of the sublime in mundane life and it is not surprising that it could not survive an encounter with the sublime expressed as idea and as power … And once again Beauty leaves people unmaterialized and unloved.28 Annenskii’s interpretation of Turgenev’s story suggests the presence in it of the poetic touch. Clearly, Annenskii sees Turgenev as a poet wishing to make audible and tangible those dimensions of the real that cannot be heard as much in everyday life, and to imagine new realities that have not existed before. Tsvetaeva applies Annenskii’s Turgenevan notion of the disappearance of the sublime from the modern world to Shakespeare’s tragedy, in order to present Hamlet and Ophelia as representatives of a positivist and intuitivist worldview that require reconciliation. Their dialogue symbolically represents the modern crisis of the lyric. But, unlike Annenskii, Tsvetaeva favours such acts of aesthetic seeing that enable the portrayal of her characters as living subjects and the representation of their thought and speech as dialogical becoming. Both Tsvetaeva’s Hamlet and Ophelia are in need of embodiment. Tsvetaeva’s neo-Kantian and overwhelming sense of the physical actuality of being stands conspicuously close to the category of being which Bakhtin discussed in his works Toward a Philosophy of the Act (Ʉ ɮɢɥɨɫɨɮɢɢ ɩɨɫɬɭɩɤɚ)29 and ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’(‘Ⱥɜɬɨɪ ɢ ɝɟɪɨɣ ɜ ɷɫɬɟɬɢɱɟɫɤɨɣ ɞɟɹɬɟɥɶɧɨɫɬɢ’).30 Bakhtin posits the schism between the historical world, the world of life and the abstract world of theoretical concepts and culture. As Alastair Renfrew explains: While ‘life and culture’, the mutable and immutable, the real and the theoretical, do not constitute distinct ontological levels, the latter series is accessible only from the ‘location’ of the former: the ‘real’ world is not preferred to the ‘theoretical’ but the difference between them, Bakhtin argues, is self-evident […], and the former must always be the point of embarkation in pursuit of the latter.31 Tsvetaeva’s poems on Hamlet epitomize the same idea of the interrelationship between literary and non-literary forms of speech and map the possibilities of expression of the ephemeral moments of life as living

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words. The title of her 1931 essay on Voloshin ‘The Living about the Living’ (‘ɀɢɜɨɟ ɨ ɠɢɜɨɦ’)32 articulates her attempt to immortalize the fleeting moments of the past even more powerfully. Turgenev’s words ‘it is not happiness but human dignity that is the main purpose of life’33 appeared to be on Tsvetaeva’s mind in the 1930s when she devoted much time to writing autobiographical stories and essays on poets and poetry. Tolstoi’s assessment of Turgenev’s career, expressed in his letter to Aleksandr Pypin on 10 January 1884, suggests that Turgenev ‘turned his soul inside out’, and points to the three distinct phases of his career: the last phase manifests Turgenev’s faith, love and self-sacrifice but also a shying away from the role of a prophet or preacher. Tolstoi summarizes the last period of Turgenev’s life thus: A faith which was not formulated … and which moved him in his life and his works; a faith in goodness, love, and selfsacrifice, which is expressed by all his heroes who sacrifice themselves, and most vividly of all and most charmingly in his ‘Don Quixote’ where the paradoxical quality and special form freed him from feeling ashamed of his role as a preacher of good.34 The theme of sacrifice was especially strongly pronounced in Turgenev’s prose poems. According to V.M. Golovko, ‘In his “Prose Poems” Turgenev examined all the forms of self denial such as compassion, love, aesthetic pleasure and asceticism that were included in Schopenhauer’s ethical and philosophical notion of self-awakening as manifested in his work on individual principles’.35 Tsvetaeva was concerned with the same themes while working on her autobiographical prose and essays in the 1930s. Thus in her 1931 essay ‘Art in the Light of Conscience’ (‘ɂɫɤɭɫɫɬɜɨ ɩɪɢ ɫɜɟɬɟ ɫɨɜɟɫɬɢ’)36 Tsvetaeva poses a question on selfdestruction or self-denial that results from aesthetic pleasures, ascetic behaviour and self-sacrifice; in her story ‘The Living about the Living’ she portrays Voloshin as a selfless individual whose life was devoted to the principles of goodness that transgresses the social boundaries of class, gender and ideology; and in her 1936 story Otherworldly Evening (ɇɟɡɞɟɲɧɢɣ ɜɟɱɟɪ)37 Tsvetaeva creates a group portrait of postSymbolist poets who sacrificed themselves to the forces of history. In many ways, just as Turgenev’s prose poems lament the past in anticipation of death, Tsvetaeva’s autobiographical writing of the 1930s presents her as an impassionate flâneur who wishes to immortalize in the impressionistic Turgenevan manner some moments of the past. In her 1933 autobiographical story House at Old Pimen (Ⱦɨɦ ɭ ɫɬɚɪɨɝɨ ɉɢɦɟɧɚ) written during her émigrée period in Paris, Tsvetaeva refers to Turgenev on several occasions and quotes from his 1879 poem in prose

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‘How good and how fresh the roses were ...’ (‘Ʉɚɤ ɯɨɪɨɲɢ, ɤɚɤ ɫɜɟɠɢ ɛɵɥɢ ɪɨɡɵ ...’).38 In this elegiac story permeated with nostalgic overtones Tsvetaeva commemorates Russian aristocratic culture as represented by Dmitrii Ivanovich Ilovaiskii (1832-1921), one of the most famous Russian historians of modern times, and laments pre-1917 revolution-minded youth, depicting them in the same vein as the terrorist girl in Turgenev’s poem The Threshold. Tsvetaeva links the story of Ilovaiskii’s family both to Russian history and to her autobiographical narrative that inscribes members of her own family into a list of significant representatives of Russian creative intelligentsia whose names were forgotten in the Soviet 1930s. The story of Ilovaiskii’s life provides Tsvetaeva with an opportunity to meditate on Russian history and various approaches to historical accounts, facts and memoirs. By depicting Ilovaiskii as an important Russian historian and an upholder of the conservative tradition that favours Slavophile ideals, Tsvetaeva reveals her polemical touches that are aimed at those émigré critics and biographers whose images of Russia appear romanticized and imbued with archaic overtones. Not by coincidence, the story was rejected by the newspaper Latest News (ɉɨɫɥɟɞɧɢɟ ɧɨɜɨɫɬɢ) whose chief editor Miliukov, a prominent Russian historian and politician, disliked Tsvetaeva’s creative accounts of Russian history, finding them beyond his comprehension.39

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NOTES 1. Fritz Nies, Poesie in prosaischer Welt: Untersuchungen zum Prosagedicht bei Aloysius Bertrand und Badelaire, C.Winter, Heidelberg, 1964. 2. Adrian Wanner, ‘From Subversion to Affirmation: The Prose Poem as a Russian Genre’, Slavic Review, LVI, 3, 1997, pp. 519-41 (519). 3. I.S. Turgenev, Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, ed. V. Fridliand., X, Stikhotvoreniia v proze etc., Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, Moscow, 1962, p. 310 (hereafter Sob. soch.). Subsequent translations from Russian are my own. 4. Stasiulevich’s introductory note is included in the twelfth issue of the journal Vestnik Evropy in 1882 (p. 473). Quoted in Turgenev, Sob. soch., X, p. 311. 5. J. Frauenstadt, ed., Aus Artur Schopenhauers handschriftichem Nachlaß, Leipzig, 1864. 6. See, for example, such works as: L.P. Grossman, ‘Posledniaia poema Turgeneva (Senilia)’ in B.V. Varneke et al., eds, Venok Turgenevu: Sbornik statei, A.A. Ivanchenko, Odessa, 1919, pp. 57-90; A Walicki, ‘Turgenev and Schopenhauer’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, X, 1962, pp. 1-17; E.M. Golovko, Khudozhestvennoe-filosofskie iskaniia pozdnego Turgeneva, Izdatel’stvo Sverdlovskogo Ural’skogo universiteta, Sverdlovsk, 1989, pp. 141-68. 7. The full analysis of the unofficial publication of the poem produced by Iakubovich and its distribution during Turgenev’s funeral is included in: Lynn Ellen Patyk, The Double-Edged Sword of Word and Deed: Revolutionary Terrorism and Russian Literary Culture, unpublished PhD thesis, Stanford University, December, 2005, pp.112-25. 8. S. Vengerov,‘Turgenevskii Porog’, Russkoe bogatstvo, 10-11, 1905, p. 151. 9. Eva Kagan-Kans, Hamlet and Don Quixote: Turgenev’s Ambivalent Vision, Mouton, The Hague, Paris, 1975, p. 101. 10. Loc. cit. 11. Ibid., p. 142. 12. Tsvetaeva’s links with German Romanticism are extensively discussed in the following: Olga Peters Hasty, Tsvetaeva’s Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the Word, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1996; Timo Suni, Kompozitsiia ‘Krysolova’ i mifologizm Tsvetaevoi, Institute of Russian and East European Studies, Helsinki, 1996. 13. Turgenev, ‘Dva slova o Granovskom’, Sob. soch., X, pp. 242-9 (244). 14. Turgenev, ‘Faust. Tragediia. Sochinenie Gete. Perevod M. Vronchenko. St Petersburg 1844’, Sob. soch., X, pp. 201-30 (221).

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15. Marina Tsvetaeva, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, ed., Anna Saakiants, Khudozhestvennaia literatura, Moscow, 1984, I, pp. 222-3 (hereafter Soch.). 16. Tsvetaeva, Soch., I, p. 223. 17. Loc. cit. 18. Tsvetaeva, Soch., I, p. 222. 19. Turgenev, Sob. soch., X, p. 208. 20. Kagan-Kans, p. 16. 21. Ibid., p. 97. 22. Ibid., p.17. 23. Turgenev, Sob. soch., X, p. 211. 24. Ibid., p. 55. 25. The discussion of the prose poem and Bakhtin’s theory of the novel can be found in: Jonathan Monroe, A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1987. 26. Tsvetaeva, Soch., I, p. 223. 27. Kagan-Kans, p. 100. 28. I. Annenskii,‘Umiraiushchii Turgenev. Klara Milich’in Kniga otrazhenii, Nauka, Moscow, 1979, p. 43. 29. M.M. Bakhtin, ‘K filosofii postupka’, in Filosofiia i sotsiologiia nauki i tekhniki, Moscow, Nauka, 1986, pp. 80-160. 30. M.M Bakhtin, ‘Avtor I geroi v esteticheskoi deiatel’nosti’, in Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, Sergei Averintsev and Sergei Bocharov, eds, Iskusstvo, Moscow, 1979, pp. 7-180. 31. Alastair Renfrew, Toward a New Material Aesthetics:Bakhtin, Genre and the Fate of Literary Theory, Legenda, Oxford, 2006, p. 54. 32. Tsvetaeva, Soch., II, pp. 175-234. 33. Quoted in Kagan-Kans, p. 141. 34. Ibid., pp. 141-2. 35. Golovko, p. 156.

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36. Marina Tsvetaeva, ‘Iskusstvo pri svete sovesti’, in Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, V, Terra, Knizhnaia lavka-RTR, Moscow, 1997, pp. 24-52. 37. Marina Tsvetaeva, Nezdeshnii vecher, in Marina Tsvetaeva, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, IV, Terra, Knizhnaia lavka-RTR, Moscow, 1995. 38. Tsvetaeva, Soch., II, Dom u starogo Pimena, pp. 34-70. 39. Nina Berberova, Kursiv moi: Avtobiografiia, W. Fink Verlag, Munich, 1972, p. 195.

Ivan Turgenev’s Phantoms: The Spectre of Hesitation Claire Whitehead

Following what was, by his standards, an unusually long period of gestation of more than eight years, Turgenev finally completed his short story, Phantoms (ɉɪɢɡɪɚɤɢ) in late 1863 and it was published in the inaugural issue of Dostoevskii’s new journal, Epoch, in February 1864.1 When judged against the novels which made Turgenev’s name, Phantoms enjoys a relatively modest reputation. Reaction may well have been influenced by Turgenev’s own pronouncements on the story both pre- and post-publication. In the aftermath of the hostile reception given to Fathers and Children, his habitual lack of confidence in his own work appears to have become even more acute as he struggled to decide whether or not Phantoms deserved to see the light of day. Sending the story to V.P. Annenkov, he asked the critic to read his ‘nonsense’; whilst in a letter to Dostoevskii dated 13 May 1863, he confided his fear that the story was ‘too uncontemporary, almost child-like, especially in these heavy and significant times’.2 Such dismissive characterizations arguably made it easier for others to criticize the work. In an 1864 volume of The Contemporary, for instance, M.A. Antonovich argued that ‘as a fantasy, it is very pale, not fantastic; the images inspire neither fear, nor mystery, nor horror, nor joy’.3 Commenting upon Turgenev’s later story, The Dog (ɋɨɛɚɤɚ) of 1866, his close friend, V.P. Botkin, argued that it should not be published because of the weakness of its fantastic sections and because one failure in this genre, Phantoms, that is, was surely enough.4 Not all critics, however, share the opinion that the story is such an unfortunate failure. Phantoms features a first-person male narrator who is apparently repeatedly visited by a phantasmal female figure, Ellis. She conducts him on a series of nocturnal flights during which he witnesses scenes which are both geographically and historically varied: they include contemporary views of Blackgang Chine on the Isle of Wight, the Black Forest, Paris and St Petersburg as well as glimpses of Stenka Razin on the banks of the Volga and Rome during Caesar’s reign. These scenes are described from the narrator’s quite literal bird’s-eye perspective and produce what Turgenev labelled ‘a series of pictures linked together in a relatively superficial manner’.5 And among those critics who do not simply dismiss the story as a failure, it is these pictures which have attracted most attention. They have been discussed, for instance, in terms of their symbolic significance (Andreeva), their lyricism (Petrov) and their expression of Turgenev’s philosophical pessimism (Muratov).6 However, following the lead of James Woodward in 1972, the focus in

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what follows is upon the ‘frame narrative’, consisting of the narrator’s encounters and exchanges with the phantom woman, rather than on what is observed during the flights.7 Turgenev himself played down the importance of this frame and claimed that the phantom figure was introduced for no other reason than to solve the compositional problem of how to link the story’s fifteen scenes more dynamically. What is more, in response to Botkin’s query regarding the nature and meaning of Ellis, the author simply claimed, ‘I understand Ellis as little as you’, as if to deflect attention away from this aspect of the story.8 The very terms of this dismissal, however, open the way for an alternative interpretation of Phantoms. By shifting attention away from the content of the story’s pictures and from the ‘meaning’ of Ellis, it is possible to consider how the composition and execution of the frame sections show Turgenev successfully mastering the genre of the fantastic. According to Tzvetan Todorov, in order to be considered ‘fantastic’, a text must generate hesitation concerning whether the events described are natural or supernatural.9 The fantastic lasts as long as the hesitation regarding interpretation persists; as soon as one opts for a natural or supernatural reading, the narrative must then be classified as either fantastic-uncanny in the case of the former or fantastic-marvellous in the case of the latter. Whilst uncertainty in the face of apparently supernatural events can obviously be experienced by characters within the fictional world, it is the hesitation of the reader which is decisive. Fundamental to any investigation of the potential to categorize a work as ‘fantastic’, therefore, is an interrogation of the devices used to present the ambiguous events to the reader. In literary narratives, it is not the events per se which provoke hesitation but the manner in which these events are described, their verbal representation. In the case of Phantoms, Woodward appears to suggest that no hesitation is experienced because ‘although Ellis is plainly a “fantastic” creation, her existence in the fiction as a “real” character is established quite unequivocally’.10 I do not agree. The status of the phantom figure and of the narrator’s experiences in her company is open to considerable question during both the opening and closing passages of the story. Therefore, the nature of the narrative and syntactic devices employed to sustain this ambiguity, and their impact upon reader interpretation, warrants discussion. Such an analysis will illustrate not only that Turgenev had understood the basic tenets of this literary genre, but also that he had recognized and assimilated a number of the techniques exploited by his predecessors and pointed the way forward to various successors. Amongst the most significant factors contributing to interpretive ambiguity in Phantoms is the status of the narrative voice. In featuring a first-person narrator, the story conforms to the general pattern of

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Turgenev’s prose works which has been usefully outlined by Leon Burnett: Whereas Turgenev’s novels depend upon the device of the omniscient, third-person narrator - familiar to readers as a convention of the realistic tendency paramount in the latter half of the nineteenth century - the shorter prose works are more inclined to be written from the point-of-view of a first-person narrator of a romantic (or, let us say, susceptible) disposition.11 Todorov claims that such homodiegetic narration is better suited to the creation of hesitation than its heterodiegetic counterpart for two principal reasons: firstly, as Burnett’s characterization of Turgenev’s first-person narrators underlines, such voices are not a priori considered to be as reliable as third-person narrators; and secondly, readers find it easier to sympathize with first-person narrators and thus share their emotional state - if they hesitate, the reader is more likely to do so.12 The inherent lesser reliability of the first-person narrative voice in Phantoms is reinforced by two particular characteristics. The first concerns the degree to which he is isolated within his fictional world. Apart from Ellis, the only other character with whom the narrator has any direct contact during the story, however briefly, is his housekeeper. And apparently the only witness to his nocturnal adventures is his dog. Consequently, no alternative voice exists within the narrative either to confirm or deny the narrator’s allegations that a phantom actually does visit him. It is precisely the potential for ambiguity offered by such isolation of the narrative voice which prompted Guy de Maupassant to recast the initial third-person version of his story, Le Horla, into a first-person diary format narrative for its second appearance in 1887.13 Secondly, the in media res opening of Phantoms sees the reader provided with almost no information regarding geographical setting, time or characteristics of the narrator which might serve to establish reliability. Indeed, those details which are provided before the narrative ‘action’ begins establish rather the contrary impression: of the narrator’s ‘susceptible disposition’. In the opening paragraph, the reader is informed that the narrator has difficulty in sleeping, having been troubled by a séance of table-turning in which he was recently involved, and is suffering from agitated nerves. The combined effect, therefore, of the status of the narrative voice and the few hints to his personality that are given is to make the reader wary of attributing full trustworthiness to the descriptions of events he provides. This unreliability creates optimum conditions for the provocation of hesitation. Interpretive difficulties stemming from this unreliability make themselves felt immediately in the description of the first appearance of the apparently supernatural figure in the opening chapter. Both here and

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subsequently, Turgenev employs a variety of techniques to compromise the reader’s perception of what actually happens. Recalling the scene of the dead countess’s visit to Germann in Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, the overarching uncertainty in the first chapter of Phantoms concerns the question of whether the narrator is asleep or awake when he perceives the figure of the woman. The very first line of the story sees him describing how he has trouble falling asleep; a few lines later he claims to begin to fall asleep, before finally describing how he only ‘seems’ to do so.14 Modalization phrases, such as the ‘ɦɧɟ ɤɚɡɚɥɨɫɶ’ used here, are a key technique in the fantastic because of the manner in which they express a speaker’s doubt regarding the truthfulness of their own statements. The difficulty for the reader here is that it is entirely possible, given the narrator’s terms of expression, that what he witnesses appearing in his room is not an occurrence in reality but, rather, and much less disruptively, a product of his dreams. Uncertainty similarly surrounds the sound the narrator claims to hear just prior to the appearance of the figure. He records how he is startled ‘ɤɚɤ ɛɭɞɬɨ’ (‘as if’) a harp string had sounded in his room. But does such a sound actually ring out? The comparator suggests that the narrator is startled in a manner concordant with what his reaction would have been if he had heard a harp; but, crucially, it does not unambiguously state that this is what occurred. Like modalization phrases, comparators are a device favoured by the genre of the fantastic. Particular features of the setting of this opening scene also render reliable interpretation problematic. In a further echo of the nocturnal visitation episode in The Queen of Spades, the narrator describes how the moon shines into his room and casts a shaft of light across the floor. Perhaps anticipating a method favoured by Chekhov, the narrator then animates this natural phenomenon as he describes how the moon ‘looked me directly in the eyes’ (77). Conventionally, such animation merely makes of the natural surroundings something more than just a passive backdrop for a story’s action. However, in a work such as Phantoms, where the boundaries between natural and supernatural are interrogated, such animation assumes a far greater potential significance. It suggests somehow that the rules of the natural world may not be as we usually conceive of them and, in so doing, renders the task of definitively interpreting events all the more difficult.15 Just such a difficulty is encountered in the description of how, following the perception of the sound of the harp, the narrator sees the shaft of moonlight apparently give way to reveal the female phantom. Reader interpretation is problematized by a combination of techniques here. The change in light is preceded by another sound which is said to ‘ɪɚɡɞɚɟɬɫɹ’ (‘ring out’) in the room. However, the person or object responsible for producing this noise is not identified because the verb is used in its reflexive form. It has been shown elsewhere that the potential for

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masking agency afforded by reflexive verbal forms makes them a highly effective tool in the fantastic.16 A further three such verbs are employed successively to describe how the moonlight raises itself up, stretches itself out and whirls upwards of its own accord, without revealing how this is possible. The narrator’s inability to account satisfactorily either for what he hears or for what he sees is expressed by the repeated use of ellipsis in these lines. Of the four sentences which constitute this brief description, the first three drift into non-existence by means of ellipsis. This punctuation not only betrays the narrator’s amazement at what he sees; it also hints that information vital to unambiguous interpretation may be missing. However, the provision of any meaningful physical details regarding the woman who has appeared out of the moonlight is denied by the narrator’s somewhat clichéd claim that she appeared ‘as if through a mist’ (78). This first appearance of the phantom is brought to a peak in the short section of direct dialogue which ensues between her and the narrator. And the contrasting patterns of their speech during this exchange underlines the narrator’s complete lack of understanding of what it is he is experiencing. Although the woman’s speech is peppered with ellipsis (as if to suggest her enigmatic status), it is striking that she speaks only to make statements. The narrator, conversely, is confined to posing questions: ‘Who are you? … Tell me, who are you?’ (loc. cit.) He receives no answer and so his state (as well as that of the reader) of helpless comprehension persists. The narrator closes the opening chapter with a modalized description of how he sees the shaft of moonlight stretching across his bedroom floor once again where previously ‘ɤɚɡɚɥɨɫɶ, ɫɬɨɹɥ ɩɪɢɡɪɚɤ’ (‘it seemed, the phantom had stood’: loc. cit.). And so, at the close of this first chapter, the reader has to ask what it is that has just taken place. Has the narrator dreamt the appearance of this woman? Or has he, somehow or other, experienced this phantom in reality, in a manner which questions the validity of the rules which both he and the reader conventionally consider to govern the natural world? The distinguishing feature of texts which belong to the genre of the fantastic is precisely that they never provide a definitive answer to such questions. In important respects, Phantoms adheres to this model by placing its emphasis on mystery rather than on explanation. The phantom woman makes a further three appearances to the narrator before he takes his first nocturnal flight with her. In the description of each of these, syntactic devices make interpretation of her status as either unambiguously natural or supernatural impossible. In the first, in chapter two, as the narrator lies on his bed, he hears a voice behind him ask why he did not come to the old oak tree as he had promised during the first visitation. The source of this question is hidden, however, as the speech tag describes how ‘ɪɚɡɞɚɥɫɹ ɜ ɤɨɦɧɚɬɟ ɹɜɫɬɜɟɧɧɵɣ ɲɟɩɨɬ’ (‘a clear whisper rang out in the room’: loc. cit.). The verb ‘to ring out’ is repeated from the first chapter and, again, because of its reflexive form,

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the person who pronounces this whisper is not identified. What is more striking, however, is that even after he has turned round to see the phantom standing there staring at him, the narrator refuses to identify her definitively as the source of the next speech. She appears to utter the command ‘come’ but the narrator prefers to employ a reflexive verb once again as he describes ‘ɫɥɵɲɢɬɫɹ ɫɧɨɜɚ ɲɟɩɨɬ’ (‘a whisper was again heard’: loc. cit.). This insistence on the intransitive form distances the action from its supposed performer in a manner which should be seen to render the phantom woman less than human. And yet for all the unfamiliarity and mystery which is generated in this brief scene, there is a peculiar insistence on the notion of repetition. In a chapter which consists of only twelve concise sentences, Turgenev’s narrator employs the words ‘ɨɩɹɬɶ’ (‘again’) or ‘ɫɧɨɜɚ’ (‘anew’) on no fewer than four occasions. Such repetition creates an intriguing tension between the notions of apparent otherworldliness and familiarity which underpins the story as a whole. It also summarizes and exacerbates the interpretive dilemma confronting the reader by indicating that the categories of ‘known’ and ‘unknown’, which are conventionally considered to be mutually exclusive, may not be as easily delineated in this fictional world. Whereas in the opening chapter doubts are generated by the question of whether or not the narrator is asleep during the phantom’s first visit, uncertainty regarding the trustworthiness of the narrator’s account of her third appearance, described in the third chapter, is first aroused when he reveals that he has drunk almost a whole bottle of wine at dinner. Inebriation is often provided as a potentially rational explanation for supernatural events in this genre: one thinks again of Pushkin’s Germann or of the protagonist in Mikhail Zagoskin’s Unexpected Guests (ɇɟɠɞɚɧɧɵɟ ɝɨɫɬɢ) of 1834.17 Todorov argues that alcohol, like drugs, dreams and madness, supplies an explanation of the apparently otherworldly as ‘real-imaginary’ because, in actual fact, no supernatural occurrence took place; it was nothing more than the product of a deranged imagination.18 The phantom’s appearance is again prefaced by the perception of a sound described using an intransitive verb: ‘ɨɩɹɬɶ ɩɨɫɥɵɲɚɥɫɹ ɡɜɭɤ’ (‘again a noise was heard’: loc. cit.). Once again, the sentence ends in ellipsis, as if inviting the reader to make the necessary inference: it is the ghostly woman who is approaching. And yet, in his description of how ‘someone embraced me tightly from behind’ (78-9) the narrator himself seems reluctant to make this inference. Indefinite pronouns (such as the ‘ɤɬɨ-ɬɨ’ used here) are frequently encountered in the fantastic where, either because of genuinely limited visual perspective, as here, or because of utter incomprehension, characters are unable to name the people or things carrying out actions. What is interesting in this case, though, is that all clues would seem to point to an identity for the narrator’s assailant (and therefore justify the use of ‘ɨɧɚ’)

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but he prefers to stick with the less definitive pronoun. The figure then asks the narrator once again to come to the old oak tree and, as he agrees, he turns to face the woman. She disappears almost immediately but, despite the brevity of their confrontation, the narrator says: ‘it seemed to me that I had seen her before, but where and when?’ (80). The suggestion, albeit attenuated by the modalization phrase (‘ɦɧɟ ɩɨɤɚɡɚɥɨɫɶ’), that the narrator somehow knows his otherworldly visitor is also typical of the fantastic. In Théophile Gautier’s Spirit, first published a year after Phantoms, the protagonist repeatedly sees the figure of a woman appear in a mirror and describes how, although she is quite unknown to him, he feels as if he recognizes her. In both works, the strangeness / familiarity dichotomy underpins the central supernatural / natural dilemma and compounds the reader’s sense of hesitation. As Turgenev’s narrator sits in his rooms just before dusk on the day after the woman’s third appearance, he mulls over what he is experiencing and notes that he is incapable of explaining it. This admission makes explicit what has been implied by his use of syntax and punctuation and confirms that, for the time being, the hesitation regarding the interpretation of events in the fictional world is shared by protagonist and reader. He then asks himself the question beloved of all protagonists in the fantastic: ‘am I going out of my mind?’ (loc. cit.). He is allowed to come to no conclusion, however, as whilst looking out of the window and noting how the atmosphere becomes petrified and filled with ‘some sort of almost unnatural crimson colour’ (loc. cit.), he appears to lose dominion over his own actions.19 He describes how he ‘seemingly’ falls into a vicious circle and then finds himself pulled by an ‘invincible, though, quiet, force’ (loc. cit.) out of his chair and towards the corner of the forest where the old oak tree stands. This power recalls the ‘unknown force’ which twice draws Germann towards the countess’s house in The Queen of Spades.20 When he reaches the wood, he sees the woman who has urged him to come. Despite the fact that the physical description that he gives of her here is the longest yet, its attenuated terms do little to resolve the reader’s uncertainty. She is said to ‘seem’ to be ‘as if’ woven out of semi-transparent, milky mist; when she eventually turns to look at him, it is with a gaze expressing neither happiness nor sorrow but ‘some sort of lifeless attention’ (81). The combination of modalization phrase, comparator and approximative adjective betrays the narrator’s lack of conviction in what he sees and hinders the reader’s ability to interpret. On the surface, this would appear to be the narrator’s fourth encounter with the phantom. However, the use of repetition in this description renders its actual status ambiguous. For instance, the narrator’s first words to the woman are uttered ‘ɫ ɭɫɢɥɢɟɦ’ (‘with effort’: loc. cit.) which is the very same qualification that has been attached to his opening address to the figure during their initial encounter. When he speaks, his voice is said to ‘ɪɚɡɞɚɬɶɫɹ’ (‘ring out’:

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loc. cit.), a verb which has been employed on several previous instances, usually to qualify sounds associated with her. And when the female voice tells the narrator that she loves him, the speech tag notes ‘ɩɨɫɥɵɲɚɥɫɹ ɲɟɩɨɬ’ (‘a whisper was heard’: loc. cit.), a repeat of the qualification in chapter two of her command to come to the oak tree. The specificity of such verbal echoes means that they are difficult to ignore. It might be argued that they do little more than reinforce the strangeness / familiarity dichotomy which has been indicated by the repetition of ‘again’ and ‘anew’ earlier, and which runs through the story. However, more radically, one might also suggest that this repetition implies that the meetings are not, in fact, separate and distinct, but actually one and the same dreamed / imagined / hallucinated occurrence. What is not in doubt is that they complicate interpretation of this scene and the status of the encounters still further. Contrasting strongly with the ambiguous status of the woman, the narrator shows himself at his most rational yet in this fourth chapter. In response to her demand that he ‘surrender himself’ to her, he argues that this is impossible because, as a phantom, she can have no body (loc. cit.). He then asks a series of questions which, whilst acknowledging her status as a phantom, seek to understand this as logically as possible. He first asks whether she is made of smoke or steam or air, then where she has come from and, finally, whether she has ever lived on earth. The act of posing such questions sees the narrator conform to a stereotypical pattern of behaviour for protagonists in the genre of the fantastic. These men frequently pose questions not only as a means of soliciting more information but also in order to show themselves to be logical creatures not easily given to a belief in the supernatural. To both the narrator’s and reader’s frustration, however, the woman gives absolutely no response. She simply ignores him and asks that he utter the words: ‘take me’ (loc. cit.). He is initially unwilling to do so and his rational need to understand continues to dominate as he asks himself what this all means, how she intends to take him, or try to take him, when she has no body. A few moments later, however, and apparently against his will once again, he does say them and thus embarks upon his first nocturnal flight with the phantom. From its fifth chapter onwards, Phantoms is dominated by descriptions of the scenes the narrator witnesses during these flights. Nevertheless, hesitation regarding the nature and intentions of this mysterious female figure does not evaporate entirely. Alongside passages which show Turgenev at the height of his realist descriptive powers, the reader encounters elements which conform far more closely to the practice of the fantastic. For instance, in the seventh chapter, during an account of the pair’s first prolonged flight, the narrator provides the most detailed description to date of his female companion. Once again, although it gives some information, the account is full of gaps because

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many of the details are only partial or obscured. The description of her having a ‘small, not Russian face’ (85) clearly underlines her foreignness but does little to identify her actual origins. The narrator then focuses in more detail upon the characteristics of this face. He again notes its semitransparency and states that its colour is ‘ɢɫɫɟɪɚɛɟɥɨɜɚɬɨɟ’ (‘greyish whitish’: loc. cit.). This type of compound, approximative adjective is an archetypal syntactic device of this genre because of the manner in which it expresses the difficulty in isolating the complexion of the figure’s face to a single colour. More originally, and in a symbolically-laden fashion, the narrator then compares this face to an inanimate object: the figure on an internally-illuminated alabaster vase. In their early encounters, the phantom woman has been characterized by her inhuman, almost deathlike immobility and this only begins to change when she flies and displays a much greater degree of animation. The comparison of her face to an inanimate object implicitly signals her non-natural status without getting any closer to stating what she actually is. This description closes with the narrator’s remark that ‘ɨɩɹɬɶ [ɥɢɰɨ] ɩɨɤɚɡɚɥɨɫɶ ɦɧɟ ɡɧɚɤɨɦɵɦ’ (‘again the face seemed familiar to me’: loc. cit.). On yet another occasion, therefore, we find the use of the temporal adverb ‘again’ accompanied by the suggestion that, despite all the apparent strangeness and non-humanness of the woman’s face, it is somehow already known to the narrator. This blurring of categories which are conventionally mutually exclusive is a mainstay of Turgenev’s method of hindering reader interpretation in Phantoms. The passage of dialogue between the narrator and Ellis, which follows this description, provides a clear illustration of the consequences that first-person narration has upon the provision of information in this story. As on previous occasions, this dialogue is characterized by questions from the narrator and enigmatic responses from his companion. But the most significant factor in the uncertainty generated here is the fact that, of the eight utterances made by the phantom, only the final three are qualified by any sort of speech tag. For more than half their conversation, the reader has to rely on her words alone for information. And whilst during this dialogue the simple fact that the woman responds to the narrator’s questions might make it seem that progress towards an ultimate solution is being made, her answers do very little to help clear up narrator and reader hesitation. When the narrator asks her name, she says that he should call her ‘Ellis’; however, his extrapolation from this that she might be English is met with a curt ‘No’ (loc. cit.).21 She does tell him that she has appeared specifically to him because she loves him and that she is happy. However, when he attempts to delve more deeply by asking whether she is a condemned soul who has sinned, she replies ‘I do not understand you’. He persists, begging her in the name of God to reveal something, but she again claims not to understand him. What impedes the reader here is not simply Ellis’ unhelpful answers but the

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fact that, as the extremely limited speech tags indicate, the narrator is incapable of looking beyond her words to discern whether her ignorance is actual or feigned. This could, potentially, have been achieved by a third-person, omniscient narrator with the ability to access not only the narrator’s thoughts but also those of Ellis. As it is, when the dialogue closes with Ellis’ reassurance to the narrator not to be afraid, neither he nor the reader is any closer to understanding what this figure is or what her intentions are. It is a dialogue which flatters to deceive: it holds out the potential for greater information but actually delivers very little. The almost complete absence, during some twelve chapters in the middle section of Phantoms, of elements which provoke reader hesitation can be seen to be explained by a remark made by the narrator in chapter eleven. Just prior to embarking on a second night of flight, he notes that, unlike on the first day, he is now not afraid of Ellis; rather he is glad of her presence. He then adds, crucially: ‘I did not even try to understand what was happening to me’ (88). Whilst Todorov is correct when he argues that the most crucial hesitation to the existence of the fantastic belongs to the reader, the narrator’s decision no longer to pursue actively a solution to his mysterious encounters nevertheless changes the tone of Turgenev’s story.22 This admission clearly relegates the question of who or what this woman is to the background. The focus of the story is now predominantly upon the contents of the scenes the narrator is shown during his flights and hesitation is temporarily absent. However, in its final two chapters, Phantoms returns to the style exploited in its opening passages and, in so doing, falls back into line with conventions of the fantastic. The penultimate chapter describes how, on the flight home after the visit to St Petersburg, Ellis becomes petrified by the sight of something approaching in the sky. The first indication of her discomfort comes when the narrator describes how she presses herself to him ‘ɤɚɤ-ɬɨ ɫɬɪɚɧɧɨ’ (‘somehow strangely’) in flight (106). When he turns to look at her, his blood freezes in his veins because he ‘had never seen anything similar even on a living human face’ (loc. cit.). This remark serves as a timely reminder to the reader that Ellis still does not appear to be human despite the fact that the progression of the story has seen her depicted as increasingly alive and corporeal. The attenuated terms in which the ‘something’ in the sky is described recall the earlier accounts of the appearance of the phantom herself. On turning to look in the direction indicated by Ellis, the narrator sees ‘ɧɟɱɬɨ ... ɧɟɱɬɨ ɞɟɣɫɬɜɢɬɟɥɶɧɨ ɫɬɪɚɲɧɨɟ’ (‘something ... something truly terrifying’: 107). The double use of the indefinite pronoun betrays his inability to identify exactly what it is that he does see. The ellipsis between the two can be taken to express both his stupefaction and his hesitation at this sight. This thing is all the more frightening because it lacks definite contours. It is ‘ɱɬɨ-ɬɨ ɬɹɠɟɥɨɟ, ɦɪɚɱɧɨɟ, ɢɡɠɟɥɬɚ-ɱɟɪɧɨɟ, ɩɟɫɬɪɨɟ, ɤɚɤ ɛɪɸɯɨ ɹɳɟɪɢɰɵ, - ɧɟ ɬɭɱɚ ɢ

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ɧɟ ɞɵɦ’ (‘something heavy, dark, yellowish-black, speckled, like the belly of a lizard, - neither cloud nor smoke’: loc. cit.) and it moves, snake-like, across the earth. The combination here of another indefinite pronoun and multiple consecutive adjectives (including one of approximative colour) communicate the narrator’s difficulty in finding the appropriate verbal terms for what he witnesses visually. Further to the comparisons to a lizard’s belly and a snake, the object in the sky is then likened to the wings of a vulture and to a spider preparing to pounce on a fly. Whilst this multiplicity of animal comparators may be intended to naturalize the vision to something more comprehensible for both narrator and reader, in their repetition, these contrasts actually trigger greater uncertainty about what it is that Ellis is so afraid of. Recalling his earlier questions to the phantom woman, the narrator now asks the object in the sky: ‘who are you, what are you, dreadful mass?’ (loc. cit.). The paragraph closes with a sentence which, in its use of multiple subclauses involving numerous repetitions, suggests a loss of descriptive control: it was a power moving; that power which there is no resisting, to which all is subjugated, which is without sight, without shape, without sense, which sees all, knows all, and like a bird of prey picks out its victims, like a snake stifles them and stabs them with its frozen sting (loc. cit.). This type of sentence structure foreshadows, albeit in a somewhat less extreme fashion, a technique used repeatedly by Guy de Maupassant in Le Horla. As his narrator describes how he loses control of himself to an apparently supernatural intruder, the French writer increasingly uses extended sentences with multiple subclauses and repetitions and only very weak punctuation.23 In Phantoms, in spite of all the descriptive difficulties betrayed by these syntactic devices, the narrator then confidently informs Ellis that the mass in the sky is ‘death itself’ (107). At these words, the phantom cries ‘all is at an end! I am lost!’ (107-8) and the chapter closes as the narrator loses consciousness, saying that this is all too much to bear. Having reintroduced a strong element of narrator and reader uncertainty regarding the mass in the sky in the penultimate chapter, Phantoms then refocuses this onto the figure of Ellis herself in the closing chapter. It opens when the narrator regains consciousness to find himself lying on his back in the grass with a feeling of pain as if from a bruise. He briefly describes his surroundings, notes that they appear familiar and then begins to recall what has just happened to him. He asks a series of five questions which show that he is no closer to solving the mystery surrounding Ellis than at the beginning of the story: what is it that frightened her? does she really exist under this thing’s influence? is she really not immortal? can she also be the victim of annihilation? how

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is this possible? (108) His musings are disturbed as he hears a sound which ‘ɪɚɡɞɚɥɫɹ’ (‘rang out’: loc. cit.) close by. The verb recalls the descriptions of the noises which have preceded Ellis’s first appearances and, lo and behold, when he turns round he sees a woman lying not far away. He asks whether it can really be Ellis and his doubts appear to stem largely from the fact that Ellis is a phantom whilst the woman lying next to him is a living woman. In contrast to the milky white, semitransparent woman who has first visited him, this woman has dark, piercing eyes and lips which are warm, moist and smell of blood. The woman then bids the narrator ‘farewell, forever’ (loc. cit.) and disappears as the sun rises. This first part of the final chapter closes therefore without any definitive identification of the woman lying on the ground as Ellis. The reader may feel encouraged to believe that it is her; however, this is not established as irrefutable fact. Phantoms concludes with a second part of this final chapter in which the narrator reflects on what has occurred and which is dominated by questions. He describes how he waits for many following nights, not without a little fear, for the reappearance of this phantom; but that she never comes. He even goes out to the oak tree but admits that nothing unusual happens there. He concedes that he gives a great deal of thought to what he has experienced and spends considerable time attempting to figure out this ‘incomprehensible, and almost unintelligible phenomenon’ (109). His conclusion is that: ‘not only can science not explain it, but that even in fairy tales, in legends, nothing similar is encountered’ (loc. cit.). And he acknowledges that the central point of his confusion revolves around the nature and identity of Ellis: ‘what actually was Ellis? a ghost, a restless soul, an evil spirit, a sylph, a vampire, or what?’ (loc. cit.). Voicing a fear that is shared by numerous protagonists of the fantastic, the narrator admits that he did not ask the advice of other people for fear that they would think him a madman. This represents a final enforcement of the isolation of his voice and condemns the reader to complete dependence upon this narrator’s interpretation of events. And the likelihood of any definitive interpretation is all but ruled out by his admission that he puts all his various thoughts about Ellis to one side because he is simply ‘not up to it’ (loc. cit.). On the one hand he has more practical matters, such as the emancipation of the serfs, to worry about; and on the other, he now has significant health problems. The concerns about the management of his estate as a distraction from musings about his apparently otherworldly encounters with Ellis remind one of the type of mundane, practical concerns which often occupy nineteenth-century protagonists in the fantastic. Take Mikhail Platonovich in Vladimir Odoevskii’s The Sylph (1837), for example, who, following his induction into a higher poetic realm, is shown to reconnect with the rational world by building a potash factory and settling lawsuits over property. Turgenev’s narrator’s medical problems

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take the form of insomnia, a cough and difficulties with his chest; he elaborates: ‘my whole body is drying out. My face is yellow, like that of a dead man’ (loc. cit.). His doctor, that ultimate arbiter of the rational in this genre, has diagnosed him with anaemia and ordered him to go to Gastein. This diagnosis would appear to confirm that Ellis has been sucking the narrator’s blood during their nocturnal flights, but a medical doctor is hardly likely to offer vampirism as an explanation for anaemia. The story closes with a brief paragraph which sees the narrator returning to his earlier state of musing and self-interrogation. He asks himself what the meaning is of the clear and sharp sounds of a harmonica that he hears whenever somebody’s death is spoken of in front of him. And he ends with the question: ‘why do I shudder in such anguish at the mere thought of annihilation?’ (loc. cit.) In a manner which chimes with everything that has gone before, this question unsurprisingly receives no response. The story is left open-ended with the reader, perhaps even more so now than the narrator, wondering what has happened and what the significance of it all is. What this analysis of Phantoms has shown is that Turgenev had mastered many of the narrative and syntactic devices which are key to the creation of an effective ‘fantastic’ story. Building upon the examples provided by writers such as Pushkin, Zagoskin and Odoevskii earlier in the century, Turgenev ensured that the reader’s ability to interpret the figure of Ellis and the adventures of the narrator in her company as natural or supernatural was fundamentally compromised. The isolation of the narrator’s voice irrevocably undermines the reliability of his accounts; the attenuated syntactic terms in which many of his descriptions of Ellis are made obfuscate her status acutely; the manipulation of categories such as ‘known’ and ‘unknown’ profoundly complicates the reader’s ability to reconstruct the nature of their encounters. Nevertheless, as the lack of such features in the central passages of Phantoms ought to make clear, it remains difficult to argue that Turgenev’s work should be considered primarily as a fantastic short story. As Dostoevskii commented in a letter sent prior to the story’s publication, it is largely a question of degree: If there is something in Phantoms which could be criticized, then it is that it is not completely fantastic. There should have been even more. There would then have been greater boldness. You have the creature explained as a vampire. In my opinion, there was no need for this explanation.24 Such a comment is justified. What Turgenev illustrates here is that, in terms of mastery of techniques, he could have made Phantoms into a fully-fledged, accomplished fantastic story. However, perhaps because he was preoccupied with different concerns (such as the pessimistic

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description of man’s fate) or because he felt that such a story was inappropriate at such a politically intense time, he chose to pull back from such an undertaking. Nevertheless, Phantoms remains a notable landmark in the history of the genre of the fantastic. It displays a range to Turgenev’s talent as a writer which is often ignored and makes clear both how he was influenced by his generic predecessors in the fantastic and how he might have inspired those who came after him.

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NOTES 1. N.I. Piksanov contends that Turgenev first thought of the story no later than the second half of 1855 when he was in discussion with Mikhail Katkov, the editor of Russkii vestnik, about publication of the story (‘Istoriia “Prizrakov”’ in N.L. Brodskii, ed., Turgenev i ego vremia: pervyi sbornik, Moscow-Petrograd, 1923, p. 174). Patrick Waddington claims that serious work on the story began in 1861 (Turgenev and England, Macmillan, London and Basingstoke, 1980, p. 106). Leon Burnett, in his unpublished conference paper, ‘Phantoms of the Opus: Turgenev’s Prizraki in Context’, delivered to the Neo-Formalist Circle conference in September 1987, argues that first thoughts of the story can be traced back to a letter Turgenev wrote to Pauline Viardot in 1849 in which he describes a dream of flying. 2. I.S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvatsati vos’mi tomakh: Pis’ma, V, Moscow-Leningrad, 1963, p. 125. 3. Quoted in Piksanov, p. 165. 4. V.P. Botkin and I.S. Turgenev, Neizdannaia perepiska, Academia, Moscow, 1930, p. 219. 5. Turgenev, Sochineniia, IX, p. 389. 6. See A. Andreeva, ‘“Prizraki” kak ispoved’ Iv.S. Turgeneva’, Vestnik Evropy, IX, 1904, pp. 5-22; S.M. Petrov, I.S. Turgenev: Tvorcheskii put’, Goslitizdat, Moscow, 1961, pp. 419-27; A.B. Muratov, I.S. Turgenev posle “Ottsov i detei”, Leningrad University, Leningrad, 1972. 7. J.B. Woodward, ‘Turgenev’s Phantoms: A Reassessment’, Slavonic and East European Review, 50, 1972, pp. 530-45. 8. Turgenev, Pis’ma, V, p. 179. 9. See T. Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique, Seuil, Paris, 1970, p. 29. 10. Woodward, p. 535. 11. Burnett. 12. Todorov, pp. 88-9. 13. Le Horla recounts the story of a narrator who believes that initially his house and eventually his own self is invaded by an invisible creature who may or may not have arrived on a boat from South America. In the original third-person version, the respected doctor Marrande is called upon to verify the apparently supernatural claims of the narrator. The shift to a first-person format suppresses any such alternative voices leaving the reader to rely on the increasingly incomprehensible narrator. 14. Turgenev, Sochineniia, IX, p. 77. Henceforth, all references to Phantoms are taken from this text, and page numbers will be given in the main text. Translations are my own.

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15. Such suggestive animation of the physical surroundings can be seen in Chekhov’s The Black Monk when the protagonist, Kovrin, describes how it seems to him that the whole natural world is looking at him waiting for him to comprehend it. 16. See Claire Whitehead, The Fantastic in France and Russia in the Nineteenth Century: In Pursuit of Hesitation, Legenda, Oxford, 2006, pp. 25-38. 17. In Zagoskin’s story, the narrator recounts the experience of his father who was, apparently, visited by four guests, including three Cossacks, who undergo a series of grotesque physical transformations. In the course of their evening together, a startling amount of alcohol is consumed and the protagonist’s perceptions become clouded accordingly. However, the potentially rational explanation for the seemingly supernatural events as nothing more than a dream is undermined by the revelation that a large number of empty bottles are found in the house the following day. 18. Todorov, p. 50. 19. This description features a further syntactic device associated with the genre of the fantastic: indefinite adjectives. The combination of ‘ɤɚɤɨɣ-ɬɨ’ (‘some sort of’) with the adverb ‘almost’ indicates how the natural world is increasingly haunted by otherworldly or supernatural forces. 20. Woodward, p. 540, suggests that the name of the phantom, Ellis, should be interpreted as an ‘inverted phonetic rendering’ of the Russian noun ‘ɫɢɥɚ’ (‘power’). 21. Waddington, pp. 107-9, proposes a number of English influences which might have led Turgenev to choose this name for the phantom. 22. See Todorov, p. 37. 23. One illustrative example can be found in Maupassant’s narrator’s description of how his experience with his invisible intruder has shown him man’s relative weakness in the universe: Everything which surrounds us, everything that we see without looking at it, everything that we brush against without knowing it, everything that we touch without feeling it, everything that we meet without making it out, exerts upon us, upon our organs and, through them, upon our ideas, upon our very heart, rapid, surprising and inexplicable effects. How profound it is, this mystery of the Invisible! We cannot probe it with our paltry senses, with our eyes which cannot perceive either the too small, or the too large, or the too near, or the too far, or the inhabitants of a star, or the inhabitants of a drop of water… with our ears which deceive us (…) … with our sense of smell, weaker than a dog’s ... with our sense of taste which can only just judge the age of a wine. Guy de Maupassant, Le Horla, in Contes et nouvelles, Paris, Gallimard, 1979, p. 914. 24. Letter dated 23 December, 1863 and quoted in Piksanov, p. 182.

Richard Peace’s Publications Compiled by Derek Offord

1967 ‘The Rôle of Taman’ in Lermontov’s Geroy nashego vremeni’, The Slavonic and East European Review, XLV, 104, 1967, pp. 12-29. 1971 Dostoyevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1971 (paperback, 1975), 347 pp. 1972 Review of Prestuplenie i nakazanie (Literaturnye pamiatniki) by F.M. Dostoevskii; Literaturnoe nasledstvo, LXXXIII: Neizdannyi Dostoevskii; Vospominaniia by A.G. Dostoevskaia; Dostoevskii i russkie pisateli; Dostoevskii i ego vremia in Britain-USSR, XXXVII, 1972, pp. 9-10. 1974 Review of Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor by Ellis Sandoz in The Slavonic and East European Review, LII, 126, 1974, p. 133. Review of Dostoevsky and Dickens: A Study of Literary Influence by N.M. Lary in The Modern Language Review, LXIX, 2, 1974, pp. 478-9. 1975 ‘Gogol’’s Old World Landowners’, The Slavonic and East European Review, LIII, 133, 1975, pp. 504-20. ‘Gogol’ i psihološki realizam: Shinel’’ (Serbo-Croat translation of ‘Gogol and Psychological Realism: Shinel’’ (1976)), Filozofski pregled, I-II, Belgrade, 1975, pp. 21-43. 1976 Russian Literature and the Fictionalisation of Life: An Inaugural Lecture delivered in the University of Hull on 11th March 1976, Hull, 1976, 18 pp.

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‘Gogol and Psychological Realism: Shinel’’ in Richard Freeborn et al., eds, Russian and Slavic Literature, Selected Papers in the Humanities from the Banff ’74 International Conference, Slavica Publishers, Inc., Cambridge, MA, 1976, pp. 63-91. ‘The Logic of Madness: Gogol’’s Zapiski sumasshedshego’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, (New Series) IX, 1976, pp. 28-45. ‘N.V. Gogol, Shinel’: 1. Realism and Psychology; 2. Language and Style’, Exeter Tapes, 1976. Review of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Reception in Russia by N.W. Ingham in The Slavonic and East European Review, LIV, 2, 1976, pp. 315-6. 1977 ‘N.V. Gogol, Povest’ o tom, kak possorilsya Ivan Ivanovich s Ivanom Nikiforovichem: 1. The “Laughter” of the Tale of the Two Ivans; 2. The “Tears” of the Tale of the Two Ivans’, Exeter Tapes, 1977. Review of Dostoevsky the Literary Artist by E. Krag in The Slavonic and East European Review, LV, 4, 1977, pp. 535-6. 1978 ‘Russian Concepts of Freedom’, Journal of Russian Studies, XXXV, 1978, pp. 3-15. ‘Dostoyevsky’s The Eternal Husband and Literary Polemics’, Essays in Poetics, III, 2, 1978, pp. 22-40. 1979 Review of Dostoevsky and the Psychologists by M. Kravchenko in The Slavonic and East European Review, LVII, 4, 1979, pp. 585-7. 1980 Review of The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol by Simon Karlinsky and Gogol’s ‘Dead Souls’ by James B. Woodward in The Slavonic and East European Review, LVIII, 4, 1980, pp. 580-3.

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1981 The Enigma of Gogol: An Examination of the Writings of N.V. Gogol and Their Place in the Russian Literary Tradition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981, 344 pp. ‘Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy as Novelists of Ideas’, Transactions of Russian-American Scholars in the U.S.A., XIV, New York, 1981, pp. 231-8. 1982 ‘Gogol, Nikolai 1809-52’ in Justin Wintle, ed., Makers of Nineteenth Century Culture 1800-1914, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, etc., 1982, pp. 257-8. 1983 Chekhov: A Study of the Four Major Plays, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, and London, 1983, 186 pp. ‘Dostoevsky and the Golden Age’, Dostoevsky Studies: Journal of the International Dostoevsky Society, III, 1983, pp. 61-78. 1985 Review of Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859 by Joseph Frank in The American Scholar, Winter 1984-5, pp. 133-5. ‘Gogol: The Greatcoat’ in Roger Cockrell and David Richards, eds, The Voice of a Giant: Essays on Seven Russian Prose Classics, University of Exeter, Exeter, 1985, pp. 27-40. Review of Solzhenitsyn: A Biography by M. Scammell in The London Review of Books, VII, 7, (18 April 1985), p. 6. ‘Is there a Russian Threat?’, University, 3 (March), University of Bristol, 1985, pp. 13-20. 1986 ‘Tschechow, Die drei Schwestern’ in Bodo Zelinsky, ed., Das Russische Drama, Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann-Bagel, Dusseldorf, 1986, pp. 162-77.

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1987 ‘Some Dostoyevskian Themes in the Work of Maksim Gorky’, Dostoevsky Studies: Journal of the International Dostoevsky Society, VIII, 1987, pp. 143-54. ‘Chekhov’s Modern Classicism’, The Slavonic and East European Review, LXV, 1, 1987, pp. 13-25. Review of Dostoevsky: The Myths of Duality by Roger B. Anderson in The Slavonic and East European Review, LXV, 4, 1987, pp. 627-8. 1988 Review of Chekhov: The Silent Voice of Freedom by Valentine Tschebotarioff Bill in The Slavonic and East European Review, LXVI, 4, 1988, pp. 644-5. ‘Some Dostoyevskian Themes in the Work of Maksim Gor’kij’ (reprint of article of 1987), Russian Literature, XXIV, 1988, pp. 525-38. 1989 ‘A.N. Ostrovsky’s The Thunderstorm: The Dramatization of Conceptual Ambivalence’, The Modern Language Review, LXXXIV, 1, 1989, pp. 99-110. Review of D.V. Grigorovich: The Man who Discovered Chekhov by Michael Pursglove in The Slavonic and East European Review, LXVII, 1, 1989, pp. 127-8. ‘The Mirror-world of Gogol’s Early Stories’ in Jane Grayson and Faith Wigzell, eds, Nikolay Gogol: Text and Context, Macmillan, London, 1989, pp. 19-33. ‘The Napoleonic Theme in Russian Literature’ in H.T. Mason and W. Doyle, eds, The Impact of the French Revolution on European Consciousness, Alan Sutton, Gloucester, 1989, pp. 47-63. ‘The Nineteenth Century: The Natural School and its Aftermath, 184055’ in C.A. Moser, ed., The Cambridge History of Russian Literature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, etc., 1989, pp. 189247.

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‘[An Introduction to Chekhov’s Plays]’ (reprint of Introduction to Chekhov: A Study of the Four Major Plays (1983)) in Thomas A. Eekman, ed., Critical Essays on Anton Chekhov, G.K. Hall and Co., Boston, MA, 1989, pp. 126-39. 1990 ‘The Analytical Genius: Bednye liudi and the Russian Prose Tradition’ in A. McMillin, ed., From Pushkin to Palisandriia: Essays on the Russian Novel in Honour of Richard Freeborn, Macmillan, London, 1990, pp. 52-69. 1991 ‘Oblomov’: A Critical Examination of Goncharov’s Novel, Birmingham Slavonic Monographs, no. 20, Birmingham, 1991, 87 pp. ‘Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead: “The Literary Construct”’ in E.J. Brown, L. Fleishman, G. Freidin, R.D. Schupbach, eds, Literature, Culture, and Society in the Modern Age: In Honour of Joseph Frank, Stanford Slavic Studies, IV, 1, Stanford, CA, 1991, pp. 239-59. ‘The Enchanted Wanderer: A Parable of National Identity’, Russian Literature, XXIX, 1991, pp. 439-54. ‘Gogol’ in T. Votteler, ed., Short Story Criticism, IV, Gale Research Inc., Detroit, MI, 1991, pp. 81-130. Review of Writings on Literature: N.S. Trubetzkoy ed. by Anatoly Liberman in The Slavonic and East European Review, LXIX, 4, 1991, pp. 707-8. 1992 Dostoyevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels (1971), reissued by Bristol Classical Press, London, 1992. Review of Novel Epics: Gogol, Dostoevsky, and National Narrative by Frederick T. Griffiths and Stanley Rabinowitz in The Modern Language Review, LXXXVII, 3, 1992, pp. 813-4.

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1993 ‘On Rereading Bakhtin’, The Modern Language Review, LXXXVIII, 1, 1993, pp. 137-46. ‘Dostoevskii as Prophet: The Case of Skvernyi anekdot and Krokodil’, The Slavonic and East European Review, LXXI, 2, 1993, pp. 257-65. Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes from Underground’: Critical Studies in Russian Literature, Bristol Classical Press, London, 1993, viii + 113 pp. ‘Gogol and the Problem of Conscience’, New Zealand Slavonic Journal 1993, 1993, pp. 35-48. ‘K voprosu o “literaturnosti” Zapisok iz mertvogo doma F.M. Dostoevskogo’, Litteraria humanitas, II: Genologické studie, Brno, 1993, pp. 287-93. ‘Chekhov into English: The Case of The Seagull’ in Patrick Miles, ed., Chekhov on the British Stage, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 216-25. ‘“In Exile” and Russian Fatalism’ in Robert Louis Jackson, ed., Reading Chekhov’s Text, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1993, pp. 137-44. 1994 ‘Introduction’ and ‘Bibliography’ in Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, Village Evenings near Dikanka and Mirgorod, The World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1994, pp. vii-xxviii. Review of Fyodor Dostoevsky: ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ by W.J. Leatherbarrow in The Modern Language Review, LXXXIX, 3, 1994, pp. 811-2. 1995 ‘Introduction’ and ‘Bibliography’ in Christopher English, tr. and ed., Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, Petersburg Tales, Marriage, The Government Inspector, The World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1995, pp. vii-xxxi.

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‘Introduction’, ‘Bibliography’, and ‘Notes’, in Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, The World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1995, pp. vii-xxiv, 531-7. A.S. Griboyedov, Gore ot uma, edited with an introduction, bibliography and vocabulary by Richard Peace and notes by D.P. Costello, Bristol Classical Press, Bristol, 1995, pp. iv-xxiii, 161-78. 1996 ‘Gogol’ i “Dvoinik” Dostoevskogo’ in K. Stepanian, ed., Dostoevskii v kontse XX veka, Klassika plius, Moscow, 1996, pp. 501-7. 1997 ‘“Krotkaia” Dostoevskogo: riad vospominanii, vedushchikh k pravde’ in N.F. Budanova and I.D. Iakubovich, eds, Dostoevskii: materialy i issledovaniia, XIV, Nauka, St Petersburg, 1997, pp. 187-94. ‘Dostoevsky’s Little Hero and “The Knight of the Sad Countenance”’ in Erik Egeberg, Audun Mørch, Ole Michael Selberg, eds, Life and Text: Essays in Honour of Geir Kjetsaa on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday, Meddelelser, University of Oslo, Oslo, 1997, pp. 221-37. ‘“Dom s mezoninom” - A Study in Inauthenticity’ in V.B. Kataev, R-F. Kluge, R. Noheji, eds, Proc. Anton P ýechov - Philosophische und Religiöse Dimensionen im Leben und im Werk: Vorträge des Zweiten Internationalen ýechov-Symposiums Badenweiler, 20-24 Oktober 1994, Munich, 1997, pp. 559-66. 1998 ‘Nikolai Gerasimovich Pomialovskii 1835-1863’ in N. Cornwell, ed., Reference Guide to Russian Literature, Fitzroy Dearborn, London and Chicago, 1998, pp. 657-9. ‘Nikolai Vasil’evich Gogol’ 1809-1852’ in N. Cornwell, ed., Reference Guide to Russian Literature, Fitzroy Dearborn, London and Chicago, 1998, pp. 331-2. ‘Notes from Underground (Zapiski iz podpol’ia)’ in N. Cornwell, ed., Reference Guide to Russian Literature, Fitzroy Dearborn, London and Chicago, 1998, pp. 255-6.

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‘Gogol and Dostoevsky’s The Double (Dvoinik)’ in R. Neuhäuser, ed., Proc. Polyfunktion und Metaparodie: Aufsätze zum 175. Geburtstag von Fedor Michajloviþ Dostoevskij (Dostoevsky Studies Supplements), Dresden and Munich, 1998, I, pp. 103-14. ‘Svetskaia povest’ and the “World” of Russian Literature’ in N. Cornwell, ed., The Society Tale in Russian Literature: From Odoevskii to Tolstoi, Rodopi, Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, 1998, pp. 115-25. 1999 ‘Dostoevsky and Pushkin’, Irish Slavonic Studies, XX, 1999, pp. 21-34. ‘From Pantheon to Pandemonium’ in Neil Cornwell, ed., The GothicFantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature, Rodopi, Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, 1999, pp. 23-35. ‘Russian Novel 1830 - 1855’ in Paul E. Schellinger, ed., Encyclopedia of the Novel, Fitzroy Dearborn, Chicago, 1999, pp. 1142-4. 2001 ‘Khoziaika: Structure and Confusion’ in Geir Kjetsaa, Lennart Lönngren, Gunner Opeide, eds, Translating Culture: Essays in Honour of Erik Egeberg, Solum Forlag, Oslo, 2001, pp. 236-45. ‘Starets Zosima: Pravoslavie i “Miry inye”’, Filologicheskie zapiski: Vestnik literaturovedeniia i iazykoznaniia, XVI, Voronezh, 2001, pp. 2442. 2002 ‘Dostoevsky and the Concept of Many-Faceted Doubling’, XXI vek glazami Dostoevskogo: Perspektivy chelovechestva (Materialy mezhdunarodnoi koferentsii, sostoiavsheisia v Universitete Tiba (Iaponiia) 22-25 avgusta 2000 goda, Moscow 2002, pp. 191-8. Russian translation of ‘Dostoevsky and the Concept of Many-Faceted Doubling’ (2002) in XXI vek glazami Dostoevskogo: Perspektivy chelovechestva (Materialy mezhdunarodnoi koferentsii, sostoiavsheisia v Universitete Tiba (Iaponiia) 22-25 avgusta 2000 goda, Moscow 2002, pp. 199-207.

Richard Peace’s Publications

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‘Baden-Baden Revisited’, Dostoevsky Studies, New Series, VI, 2002, pp. 73-81. ‘Goncharov’s The Frigate “Pallas”: Voyage and Russian Myth’, Philologia (Rizhskii filologicheskii sbornik), IV (Mif, Fol’klor, Literatura, Byt), Latviiskii universitet, Riga, 2002, pp. 121-9. The Novels of Turgenev: Symbols and Emblems, electronic publication, 2002, at http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~rurap/novelsof.htm 2003 Russian translation of ‘Dostoevsky and Pushkin’ (1999) in Dostoevskii i mirovaia kul’tura, XVII, Moscow, 2003, pp. 255-67. 2004 ‘Aspects of Gogolian Logic’, Essays in Poetics, The Journal of the NeoFormalist Circle, XXIX, Keele, 2004, pp. 127-33. ‘Motive and Symbol: “Crime and Punishment”’ (reprint of Chapter 3 of Dostoyevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels (1971)) in Harold Bloom, ed., Bloom’s Major Literary Characters: Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov, Chelsea House Publishers, Broomall, PA, 2004, pp. 153-73. Review of Dostoevsky by Richard Freeborn in The Slavonic and East European Review, LXXXII, 4, 2004, pp. 945-7. 2005 ‘Dostoevsky and the Syllogism’, Dostoevsky Studies, New Series, IX, 2005, pp. 72-9. ‘From Titles to Endings: Rothschild’s Violin’ in Joe Andrew and Robert Reid, eds, Essays in Poetics: Chekhov 2004: Chekhov Special Issues in Two Volumes, I, Aspects of Chekhov, The Journal of the Neo-Formalist Circle, Keele, 2005, XXX, pp. 133-40. Review of The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia by Kenneth Lantz in The Slavonic and East European Review, LXXXIII, 2, 2005, pp. 324-5.

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2006 Fyodor Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’: A Casebook, edited by Richard Peace, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2006, xii + 196 pp. (also in paperback). ‘Apollon Maikov and the Cult of the Leader’ in Sarah Young and Lesley Milne, eds, Dostoevsky on the Threshold of Other Worlds: Essays in Honour of Malcolm V. Jones, Bramcote Press, Ilkeston, 2006, pp. 75-83. Japanese translation of Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes from Underground’: Critical Studies in Russian Literature (1993), Noberu Shuppan Kikaku, Tokyo. 2007 Review of A Devil’s Vaudeville: The Demonic in Dostoevsky’s Major Fiction by W.J. Leatherbarrow in The Slavonic and East European Review, LXXXV, 2, 2007, pp. 336-7. Russian translation of Chapter 9 of Dostoyevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels (1971) in T.A. Kasatkina, ed., Roman F.M. Dostoevskogo “Brat’ia Karamazovy”: Sovremennoe sostoianie izucheniia, Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk, Institut mirovoi literatury im. A.M. Gor’kogo, Moscow, 2007, pp. 10-38. Russian translation of ‘Dostoevsky and the Syllogism’ (2005) in T.A. Kasatkina, ed., Roman F.M. Dostoevskogo “Brat’ia Karamazovy”: Sovremennoe sostoianie izucheniia, Rossiiskaia Akademiia nauk, Institut mirovoi literatury im. A.M. Gor’kogo, Moscow, 2007, pp. 673-80.