Hamlet and Don Quixote: Turgenev's Ambivalent Vision [2nd printing. Reprint 2015 ed.] 9783110901658, 9789027932211

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SLAVI STIC PRINTINGS AND REPRINTINGS edited by C. H. VAN SCHOONEVELD Indiana University

288

EVAKAGAN-KANS

HAMLET AND DON QUIXOTE: TURGENEV'S AMBIVALENT VISION

MOUTON PUBLISHERS · THE HAGUE · PARIS · NEW YORK

ISBN: 90 279 3221 2 © 1975, Mouton Publishers, The Hague, The Netherlands Second printing 1979 No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers Printed in The Netherlands

MY

FATHER

PREFACE

I would like to acknowledge my appreciation to the various people who have p r o vided advice and criticism in the preparation of this study. Gleb Struve and Simon Karlinsky read the manuscript in an earlier version. Edward J . Brown and Erica Brendel read and criticized certain chapters and made valuable suggestions. My special gratitude goes to Robert A. Maguire for reading the manuscript time and again. His constant encouragement and generous assistance were always at my disposal. Finally, I want to mention the late Victor Zirmunskij, who provided the original inspiration for this book with his article, "Iz èpoxi romantizma", Russkaja Mysl', written in 1914. I am grateful to the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants for making the preliminary r e s e a r c h possible. Indiana University also provided assistance so that I could complete this work. I would like to thank Daniel Armstrong for h i s extremely thorough help in editing my book. The translations f r o m Russian a r e my own, though I have frequently used v a r i ous English translations a s a basis, modifying and changing them as I felt they were inadequate o r inexact. In this work quotations f r o m Turgenev's works r e f e r to I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie soSinenij i pisem, 28 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1960-1968). The volumes containing Turgenev's works a r e numbered in Roman numerals, and those containing the letters in Arabic numerals.

E.K. -K.

TABLE

OF

CONTENTS

Preface

3

Introduction

7

1. Hamlet and Don Quixote

11

2. The Hero as Failure

29

3. Turgenev's "Women in Love"

41

4. First Love, Triumphant Love and Death

56

5. Passion and Death

75

6. The Abyss of Nature

82

7. Pessimism

92

8. Fate and Fantasy

107

9. Dream and Reality

121

Conclusion

137

Bibliography

143

Index of Titles of Turgenev's Works

154

Index of Names

157

I N T R O D U C T I ON

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. In Russia, except for the brief period of Symbolist and Formalist criticism, it was the social and political aspects that were (and still are) marked for analysis and comment; and attention is still focused almost exclusively on the novels. This study, while using the novels, will concentrate on the shorter works to bring out many features that have been neglected. In the West, some attention has been devoted to the more formal elements of Turgenev's art: the technique of the "wellmade" novel, the "point of view" approach, the consummate craftsmanship. Nonetheless, Henry James's summation of Turgenev as "taking a view of the great spectacle of human life, more general, more impartial, more unreservedly intelligent than that of any other novelist", reflects the prevailing opinion. Turgenev is still primarily esteemed for his broad depiction of Russian life, and for his discreet, sympathetic, but fundamentally unemotional presentation of his heroes' dilemmas. One essential feature of Turgenev's work has been overlooked. He is a philosophical writer, and it is necessary to read him this way in order to understand his art. Herein lies the fundamental difference between his works and Puäkin's Tales of Belkin or Lermontov's "Taman' ". Whence does this philosophy originate? What is the relationship between it and his a r t ? These are questions which I will attempt to answer in the following chapters. Turgenev was a thinker who drew freely and unsystematically upon many sources; his contemporary, Apollon Grigor'ev, emphasized his exceptional sensitivity to all the literary and intellectual currents of the day: Turgenev's talent is so adaptable, so flexible, that not only is it able to entertain all the ideas of the era, not only does it submit to theories - it also surrenders to casual fashions, to passing fads. Turgenev surpassed both Dostoevskij and Tolstoj in formal philosophical education; unlike them, however, he did not expound his philosophical views in any systematic form. Nevertheless, a philosophical substructure is always present in his works. His library testifies eloquently to the wide range of his interests; and his marginal notes in volumes of Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, Feuerbach, and other philosophers speak of his close acquaintance with the intellectual ideas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Turgenev insisted in his "Reminiscences of Belinskij" that both he and his friend lacked any faculty for thinking in purely abstract terms (XIV, 29). Given that Turgenev had spent years in Berlin studying philosophy and had hoped for and worked toward obtaining the Chair of Philosophy at Moscow University, these statements should be taken with some reservation. They do, however, demonstrate his dislike of rigid and arid systems. Turgenev's excursions into the realm of philosophy were not made to satisfy an abstract intellectual curiosity, but in order to find an answer to life's essential question. In a letter to M. A. Bakunin, Turgenev used a poetic metaphor to compare the study of a philosophical system with the process of stripping the petals from a rose in an attempt to uncover its secret inner heart (1, 196). As a poet,

8 Turgenev was sensitive to the subtle, organic structure of a philosophical edifice and p r e f e r r e d not to subject it to strict logical analysis. However, all his stories a r e philosophical in that they offer a general and consistent picture of life. T u r genev is almost never read this way; and yet this determines the kind of stories he wrote, their style, their structure, and the devices he used. The aim of this study i s to attempt to analyze and interpret Turgenev's fiction in this light, to r e - c r e a t e a coherent view of Turgenev's universe, and to try to demonstrate that Turgenev gives some answers - even if unsatisfactory - to the "eternal questions". Of particular interest is Turgenev's method of conveying his philosophic concepts. He proceeds f r o m an individual experience and then generalizes it into a comprehensive view of life, omitting all the consecutive stages. Thus the episodic event and the generalization a r e united in an inferential leap. While Dostoevskij, for example, individualizes every emotional experience, Turgenev brings it under a common rule, as though wishing to minimize the individual e x perience and to elevate it to a universal law of life. The d e s i r e to give a simple, exact expression to complex and unclear phenomena leads to the use of aphorisms. F o r example, in order to describe Natal'ja's suffering after her break with Rudin, Turgenev says: There lay ahead of her many painful days, nights, sleepless, tormenting e m o tions. But she was young - life was only beginning for h e r , and sooner or later life comes into i t s own. (VI, 341) [Underscoring mine. E.K.-K.] In later y e a r s , the philosophical significance of the aphorisms became clear, f o r in the Poems in P r o s e they develop into allegory, and the laconic f o r m of the maxim i s reflected in the few lines of the brief poems. This inferential aphoristic technique is consistent with the muted tones that color Turgenev's works. It is not f o r him to delve into the souls and minds of his protagonists. He never submits them to the searching experimentation conducted by his contemporary, Dostoevskij; nor does he subject their inner lives to the scrupulously minute anatomization p r e f e r r e d by Tolstoj. This i s both his strong and weak point. A "tourist of life", as he has been called by N. N. Straxov, his gentleness leads him to mask the tragic core in his works. Yet this very gentleness enables Turgenev to distill an i r r e s i s t i b l e sadness f r o m the contrast between an illusion which vanishes and the reality which i m p o s e s itself upon life. The sunlit landscape suddenly overcome by a shadow, the expectations of golden youth and the ruthlessness and disillusionment of death these a r e the opposing elements between which he strikes a fine balance. By d e scribing his tales a s "agglomerations of gloom", or a s "a completely hopeless and a permanently harrowing experience", Henry James and Edmund Wilson seem to have missed the secret of his a r t , which lies in creating a sense of measure and of harmony. These moods a r e best seen in the novellas and short stories. Turgenev's novels, which a r e in a sense romans Ì thèse, were written under the influence of the nineteenth-century Russian concept of the w r i t e r ' s responsibility to his society. The impact of the 1840s, and in particular h i s friendship with Belinskij, left an indelible mark on him. However stringent the demands of his social conscience may have been, T u r genev's novel is intrinsically very closely related to his novella or short story. How then can one justify the assertion that the philosophical underpinnings of T u r genev's views are revealed by a study of his short s t o r i e s ? Only insofar as a t tention i s not distracted by any social or political themes which consistently i n trude in the novels. But it is also no doubt true that once Turgenev felt released f r o m his social responsibilities, he allowed himself much greater freedom in using "non-realistic" devices - f o r example, prophetic d r e a m s and supernatural events - which opened up his innermost convictions and f e a r s . The "historicism" and r e a l i s m of Turgenev's novels a r e largely linked to a definite historical environment and period. And yet, although his novels a r e set

in a concrete time and milieu, the lives of his heroes are limited to their emotional and moral problems. We know exactly how Tolstoj's Nexljudov, Levin, and Nikolaj Rostov lived and worked on their estates. But do we really know anything specific about the activities of Lavreckij (A Nest of Gentlefolk) and Litvinov (Smoke)? Or with Rudin: apart from his social function, his debates and statements on ideological issues, apart from the pointed commentaries on the intellectual circles, Rudin is ultimately judged as a man, a man in his relationship with a woman. The artist in Turgenev uses the social activity of his hero as a circumstance which determines, to a certain extent, the individual's mode of existence. His real attention, however, is focused on the protagonist's inner life, his love and death; and these are problems which are vividly illuminated by the spotlight of the short stories. Each of Turgenev's novels is surrounded or preceded by a constellation of short stories which are intimately linked to the longer works. For example, "Asja" pure poetry - was followed by On The Eve, a tendentious work. Then came the poetry of "First Love" followed by Fathers and Sons with its acutely expressed ideas, and finally "Phantoms", which again is poetry. A prelude to the novel Rudin is provided by "A Hamlet of Söigrov District" (1849), "The Diary of a Superfluous Man" (1850), "The Two Friends" (1853), "A Correspondence" (18551856), and "A Quiet Sfc>ot" (1854). Each of these works treats a superfluous man; the focus, however, is not on the historical climate but on the individual problem of unrealized human potential, the failure to act on the simplest human level. Similarly, "Faust" (1856), "A Journey into the Woodlands" (1853-1857), and "Asja" (1857-1858) are linked to A Nest of Gentlefolk (1856-1859); in all these works the predominant themes are regret for wasted and fruitless years, lost love, and the chains of duty which accompany an acceptance of one's moral r e sponsibilities. Even the central situation of the novel is substantially paralleled in the novella 'Taust", for in both Turgenev tells the story of a middle-aged man who has not experienced genuine love until he meets a pure, naive, yet profound young girl who also loves for the first time. Although the situations are reversed, in both works one of the protagonists is not free and the love affair ruins the heroine's life. Also, in both works the ending spells out the same moral for the lover: the renunciation of personal happiness and the acceptance of stern duty. In addition to the affinity of plot there is also a striking analogy in the moods of calm and peace which affect the heroes in the country; undoubtedly, too, the characterization of Vera is a study for Liza Kalitina. Even the sentimental figure of Le mm is anticipated in the German tutor, Schimmel. At times, it is the novel that precedes the novella with which it is linked: for example, "The Torrents of Spring" (1870-1872) follows soon after Smoke (1867). Again, the thematic parallel is striking; in both works the hero is placed in the humiliating and false position of a slave in relation to the heroine, and is ravaged by destructive passion. It is also no coincidence that the heroines of the story and of the novel are the most powerful examples of female vampirism in Turgenev's fiction. In his novels, which look toward the future, Turgenev exhibits a social optimism comparable to Belinskij's, while in his stories he looks backwards, with nostalgia, to recapture the evanescent mood of the moment. Yet even the "social optimism" of the novel Is undercut by the tragic endings - Rudin dies alone in a far-off country; Liza retires to a convent and Lavreckij leads a solitary, barren personal life (A Nest of Gentlefolk) ; Elena and Insarov both die with all their hopes unfulfilled (On the Eve); Bazarov perishes from an infected finger (Fathers and Sons); Litvinov loses the one true love of his life and tries to accept reality (Smoke); and NeSdanov, the most dismal failure of all (Virgin Soil), commits suicide. Nor is it insignificant that twenty-six stories were written in the "IchErzählung" form, whereas in the novels there is an omniscient third-person narrator, more detached from the protagonist's point of view. Turgenev does not bring the reader into the subjective world of the novellette hero, but shows the

10

inner world a s though refracted through the prism of the author's consciousness of other protagonists. In his short stories there is a strong sense of identification between narrator and protagonists, for the person recounting the events is an individual remarkably like the author - a disillusioned and lonely man. Even the age of the narrator varies and reflects the author's true chronological age at the time of writing. The autobiographical element is further enhanced by the repetition of certain set phrases and images from Turgenev's own letters. For instance, the image of a "nest" applied to home often characterizes both the persona in the stories and Turgenev's view of himself. Stories which have no specific chronological setting are often a direct expression of Turgenev's experiences and his world view. In them ("Phantoms", "Enough", "The Dream") we see the undiluted essence of Turgenev's art; here, above all, the mask of objective reality has fallen away and left the naked skeleton. Although many of the stories contain some autobiographical element, this is not necessarily central either. For while the author may describe his own experience, what is more important is his conception of the world, and this is not connected with any given experience of his personal life. Significantly enough, these novellas lack any concrete locale; especially interesting, therefore, is "The Dream" in which there is not a single personal name, not to mention a definite location, and in which human relations are revealed in their purest form. In "Phantoms" Turgenev completely throws off the chains of time and space, for Ellis carries the hero at will to distant places and epochs. In these stories there are no dates, no historical or literary allusions; hence no data which could help the reader fix an orientation to historical or. sociological landmarks. Shortly before his death Turgenev said: "My whole biography lies in my works." In the last analysis we must turn to Turgenev's creative work to see how he d i s tilled his philosophy into those poetic images whose worth is to be judged by a e s thetic rather than historical criteria. One could choose as the epigraph to this study the following words from a letter which Turgenev wrote to Countess Lambert in 1859: In the fate of almost every human being there is something tragic - however, this tragic element is often concealed from the man himself by the trite superficiality of life. The man who lives only on the surface (and there are many such men) frequently does not even suspect that he is the hero of a tragedy. Around me are many peaceful, calm people, but if one stops to observe closely, one can see the tragic element in each one ; either a personal stamp, or one impressed by history, by the development of a nation. And in addition, we a r e all destined to die....Can one wish for anything more tragic? (3, 354) [Underscoring mine. E.K.-K.]

1.

HAMLET The

AND

Hero

as

DON

QU I Χ Ο Τ Ε

Will

or

Idea I sovremennyj îelovek Izobraïen dovol'no verno S ego beznravstvennoj duSoj, Sebjaljubivoj i suxoj, Mefitan'ju predannyj bezmerno, S ego ozloblennym umom, KipjaSCim ν dejstvii pustom. PuSldn, Evgenij Onegln

Turgenev's lecture on "Hamlet and Don Quixote" provides an important clue to his understanding of human nature. It is the best exposition in all his works of the destructive nature of excessive cerebration. The lecture was delivered in 1860 and is often used to support the contention that Turgenev's views had evolved: disillusionment with the intellectuals of the 1840s had supposedly led him to the painful conclusion that his contemporaries were dreamers incapable of action and that the real future of Russia lay with the new radical generation. According to Richard Freeborn, for example, Turgenev, faced with the new political situation of the 1860s (the period of the Great Reforms and the reaction to them), was induced to draw more fundamental conclusions about human nature in general, and therefore evolved a theory of two contradictory human types which would serve as a model for his studies in the future. *1 This is true as far as it goes. However, as early as 1847, Turgenev expressed ideas which foreshadowed his essay of 1860. He saw Hamlet as a basic type in Calderón1 s play La vida es sueño: Le Sigismond de Calderón (le personnage principal) c'est le Hamlet espagnol, avec toute la différence qu'il y a entre le Midi et le Nord. [The Northern] Hamlet est plus réfléchi, plus subtil, plus philosophique... (1, 281) The Southern type lives a full, natural uninhibited life, while the meditations of the Northern "Hamlet" reduce his existence to a barren, futile dissection of the self. This geographical division between the spontaneous Mediterranean and the cold, reflecting Northerner is sustained consistently in Turgenev's works, as we shall see in the following chapters. In "Hamlet and Don Quixote", Turgenev attempted to create a universal yardstick of human types. Hamlet's basic traits are his egotism, lack of faith, and the self-analysis which inevitably accompanies these attitudes. Nothing in life can command his devotion, and he is preoccupied solely with his own ego and his own condition of life. Doubting everything, he also doubts himself; having no ideal, he is inspired by an irony directed primarily at himself. In contrast, Don Quixote burns with enthusiasm and is happy despite his failures. Hamlet's doubts and r e flections (reflekslja)*2 paralyze his will and render him Incapable of action. One of Turgenev's heroes, Sanin ("The Torrents of Spring"), acknowledges that weak people never finish anything; they merely wait for the end. A number of Turgenev's heroes diagnose their own states or are defined by the author in similar terms: the Hamlet of Sßigrov District is "devoured by reflection"; Veret'ev ("A Quiet Spot") Is "demoralized, crushed"; Rudin is "an incomplete being"; and Aleksej PetroviC ("A Correspondence") is "his own spider". Violent self-denunciations

12

are the principal features of that form of Hamletism which gives rise to spiritual disintegration: Oh yes, we are great psychologists! But our psychology is akin to pathology; our psychology is the subtle study of the laws of a morbid condition and morbid development, with which healthy people have nothing to do.... (VI, 169) An inevitable consequence is a condition of melancholy and pessimism. For Hamlet also suffers; he yearns to love, yet his egotism and self-contempt make him incapable of experiencing any strong emotion. His feeling of despondency is aggravated by an awareness of his own responsibility for the situation in which he finds himself. The hero of "A Correspondence" asks himself how it is possible for a man to ruin his own life to such a degree, and to torment himself so mercilessly. Turgenev's Hamlet is not a Byronic hero. Not even Steno - whose dependence on Byron's "Manfred" is a commonplace of criticism - fits this category. Steno is not a Byronic hero because he does not feel that he is superior to mankind and above all laws. He does not fling a resounding challenge at fate, as do the heroes of Byron and Lermontov. Rather, the mood of disappointment evokes an elegiac tone. Turgenev's heroes find no compensation for their suffering in a proud awareness of their strength and in a contempt for the crowd. Although the Hamletic hero-figure in Turgenev's work recognizes the worthlessness of the masses, his irony is directed primarily against himself. Turgenev's obsessive preoccupation with this problem in his own heroes clearly reveals his own awareness of the Hamlet-like nature of his own personality. In a letter of 27 March 1858 he pleads with Lev Tolstoj to take him as an example and avoid ruining his own life in the same way as he, Turgenev, has done. Turgenev describes the awful feeling of emptiness as one contemplates a life that has slipped through one's fingers, and the horror of staring ahead at a future that offers nothing. Aleksandr Herzen's wife Natal'ja provided an interesting corroboration of this attitude. While giving Turgenev his due as a talented and even charming man, she noted his ironic and sneering manner which put her off: "One feels cold with him as in a newly white-washed room." Turgenev externalized the dichotomy within him by making a universal inference in his essay on Hamlet and Don Quixote as the two primary human types. In the lyrical confession entitled "Enough", he admits that once man has tasted the bitterness of cold analytical reasoning, he can never again enjoy the sweetness of life. This same tormented note runs through most of his works. Undoubtedly, factors in his personal life contributed to his spiritual malaise, but it is more important to establish the presence of this mood in much of his work than to establish its source. The idea that self-analysis can be crippling was not, of course, original with Turgenev. Schelling, for example, had written: "Pure reflection is a spiritual sickness in man, all the more so where it tyrannizes over the whole man. It nips his higher existence in the bud, and it kills at the root his spiritual life, which can only proceed from unity.... Pure reflection makes man's separation from the world permanent. "*3 In his general preface to the Comédie Humaine, Balzac said: "Si la Pensée est l'élément social, elle est aussi l'élément déstructeur... " It seems possible to say that this reflected the spirit of the time, inasmuch as both Herzen and Belinskij touched upon the problem. *4 Yet there is a difference between their views and Turgenev's. Herzen and Belinskij attributed this mood to a specific historical situation. For Turgenev, on the other hand, every thinking man, that is, every human being who centers his analytical powers on himself, is afflicted: will is needed in order to act, but thought and will are irrevocably severed, and this is the tragedy of the human condition. Turgenev's first hero, Steno, veers toward despair and dies because he has lost his faith. He en-

13 vies the good fortune of the monk who believes In God, but nothing links Steno to humanity any longer - alone and free, he stands face to face with himself, and the fatal duality between reflection and feeling makes his life odious to him. The antipode of Hamlet is seen in the figure of Don Quixote. Don Quixote burns with an enthusiasm which is directed toward an ideal. He does not calculate or weigh the consequences of his service and self-sacrifice. Nothing can break his determination and failure does not dismay him, since truth for him exists outside his ego and his faith in that truth is unshakable. Thus he is fearless, patient, devoid of egotism, determined, and full of confidence. Turgenev sums him up in the same words that he uses to describe the cranes in "Phantoms": "His will, his indomitable will."*5 A connection is thus established between spontaneity and will, the features that are so tragically lacking in Hamlet. Unlike Hamlet, Don Quixote knows little, but he knows the one thing that matters - why he is living on this earth - hence, his strength, the majesty of his judgment, and the halo which surrounds him even in the most humiliating and comic situations. Thus, two contradictory principles determine spiritual life. In Don Quixote, it is the heart that predominates, in Hamlet, the head. The "heart" is both wise and active, while the "head" is in the first place without insight, and in the second place without will: "Only that man who is led by his heart finds the right way"