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Lydia Ginzburg's Prose
Reality in Search of Literature
By Emily van Buskirk PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-7377-7
CHAPTER 1
Writing the Self after the Crisis of Individualism:
DISTANCING AND MORAL EVALUATION
In a New Year's reflection at the beginning of 1932, Lydia Ginzburg wrote a startling self-description: "My sense of myself is that I'm a piece that's been torn, with its threads still hanging, from the fabric of social reality, which I've succeeded in bringing up close to my eyes, a scrap of reality that's just handy enough for close observation." In sensing that she's a random piece of a whole, she signals her departure from the usual posture of autobiographical subjects, who present themselves in their narratives as uniquely deserving of the reader's attention. And instead of making a neat temporal split between the narrating and the narrated "I" — the "I" now and the "I" in retrospect — Ginzburg offers herself to herself as an object for self-analysis, not as an autonomous entity, but (to explicate the logic of her suggestive metaphors) as an inextricable part of the social fabric.
Ginzburg's approach to herself as a fragment of social reality means that she highlights not what is unique, but rather "everything that is psycho-physiologically and historically law-governed." She analyzes her fate and the fate of others as "the point where universal tendencies intersect." At the same time, despite her overwhelming interest in those universal tendencies, she selects the individual person as the unit of analysis. Even in 1934, when pressures mounted to adopt a Marxist methodology, Ginzburg understood that while historians and economists could build theories around mass phenomena, she herself required "a method that's suitable for understanding both the historical process and the fate of a single person as a social being."
Beginning in 1925 and spanning the seven decades of Soviet rule, Ginzburg wrote all kinds of documentary prose — essays, dialogues, and longer narratives bridging the essay and the novelistic diary — containing miniature analyses of individual characters that together constitute a vast canvas of the social realities of her time. Her essays provide rich material for cultural and literary historians alike, who rely on them to understand individual figures such as Osip Mandelstam or Anna Akhmatova, as well as life during the Leningrad Blockade or the working milieu of the cultural intelligentsia. At the same time, Ginzburg's experiments in prose are driven by a larger, more ambitious goal: to describe and portray a new concept of the self, appropriate for her times. This is a project undertaken in response to both a crisis in values and a crisis in literature.
Ginzburg tended to view literary evolution through the prism of concepts of personality and selfhood, and defined the great writers in her pantheon (Rousseau, Herzen, Tolstoy, Proust) as those who discovered and introduced new ways of understanding the self. She lamented the fact that literature after Chekhov and the Symbolists had entered a period of stagnation, due to a failure to arrive at new concepts of the person. During World War II, Ginzburg declared, "The absence of a grand style is the universal characteristic of the whole epoch. It is in general the decline of the culture of the humanities." Here she is not referring to the crisis of the humanities as academic disciplines (so familiar to us now), but rather to a crisis in values and the loss of belief, whether in individualism or social progress. She goes on to describe how the Soviet Union represents the most extreme case, since in it "high literary culture was violently cut off." However, in the West, despite its freedom of expression, literature also suffers from the inertia caused by "the absence of a new fundamental concept of the person" (otsutstvie novoi printsipial'noi kontseptsii cheloveka). As I have already noted, Ginzburg does not use the term "self," which has no equivalent in Russian. Her preferred subject is chelovek, person or human being, which she uses to refer both to herself and generalized others. On occasion, she uses the first-person pronoun "I" (in its personal and abstract senses), the reflexive pronouns "oneself" (sebia and sam, within words such as "self-assertion," samoutverzhdenie). She frequently speaks of kharakter (character, personality, disposition), and on rare occasions, of lichnost' (personality, person, individual). The meanings of Ginzburg's chelovek could be said to overlap with Charles Taylor's definition of the self as a being "of the requisite depth and complexity to have an identity ... (or to be struggling to find one)."
For Ginzburg, the interrelationship between a crisis in literature and a crisis in human culture hinges on the concept of the self and its ethical grounding. She suggests that ethics is, in the final analysis, the core content of literary activity: "Literature is concerned with characteristics, personalities, and actions — with every conceivable form of generalized human behavior. And whenever behavior is involved, all basic life values become ethical values." In linking together selfhood, ethical behavior, and narrative, she follows a long philosophical and literary tradition. Charles Taylor remarks in Sources of the Self that "Selfhood and the good, or in another way selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes." And as thinkers from Aristotle to Paul Ricoeur have shown, we look to existing narratives to teach us lessons about how to be good, and create new ones when examining the ethical challenges of our own lives. Ginzburg makes a link between literature, ethics, and selfhood in the specific social and historical context of the twentieth century, which fomented an acute awareness of social evil, a psychological and philosophical distrust of human wholeness, and — last but not least — a distrust of the narrative form and its habitual categories.
Ginzburg perceived the world around her as morally catastrophic. Even in its periods of relative stability, she viewed everyday Soviet life as a "kingdom of immorality." She describes the people of her generation, who faced two world wars and the horrors of Stalinism, as "twice and thrice smashed to bits" to the point where they realized "the ineradicable nature of social evil and the illusoriness of the individual consciousness." The delusions — that societal reorganization could eradicate social evil, and that the individual consciousness had unconditional value — could both be traced back to nineteenth-century humanism.
Ginzburg inherits and perpetuates the obsessions of the great nineteenth-century Russian authors who sought to portray the person typical of their times, and then to question this self's moral accountability. Yet in her own historical context, the nineteenth-century practice of presenting characters as "self-sufficient souls" appeared to her as "fruitless, epigonic." She sought new ways and forms of perceiving and analyzing the twentieth-century person, with nothing but a shaky "moral routine" to guide his or her thoughts and actions. In plans for her unfinished quasi-diary, quasi-novel Dom i mir (Home and the World), Ginzburg describes the hero she will portray as a "consciousness that is at once subjectively positive but also nonindividualistic" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). He is "positive" in that he refuses to understand his situation as tragic and tends to seek out ways to justify himself, and "subjective" in that his worldview is not rooted in universal values. But it is the last term — "nonindividualistic" — that marks Ginzburg's most significant departure from her predecessors.
Individualism, as Steven Lukes has shown, has a wide variety of meanings, depending on the cultural and historical context. The concept Ginzburg is rejecting emerged from German Romanticism, which celebrated (as Lukes summarizes) "a notion of individual uniqueness, originality, self-realization." Since each person embodied unique qualities or potentialities, he had the obligation to achieve self-perfection and thereby fulfill his role in world history.Herder extended this principle of uniqueness to nations or peoples. The sociologist-cum-philosopher Georg Simmel draws a sharp contrast between the eighteenth-century ideal, promoting the development of the person as a representative of life-in-general or nature ("a mere crosspoint and a resolvable pattern of fundamentally general laws") and the nineteenth-century one, which emphasized difference and "the deepening of individuality to the point of the individual's incomparability." In a sense, with her emphasis on general laws (zakonomernost'), Ginzburg brings elements of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century approaches into her twentieth-century prose, while also accounting for intervening developments such as the collapse of religious belief.
In her book On Psychological Prose, Ginzburg surveys different philosophies of individualism related to German and Russian Romanticism. She emphasizes the connections between individualism and religious beliefs:
The commandments of God and the absolute transcended the individual and were therefore beyond dispute. Even the metaphysically understood requirements of the elect personality transcended his individuality, inasmuch as they were requirements of his spirit, to which the empirical individual was obliged to submit.
She goes on to remark that some concept of absolutes that transcend the individual (Ginzburg describes these absolutes as "suprapersonal," or sverkhlichnye) persisted even in early positivism, in naturalism, and in Western utopian socialism. Indeed the Decadents, too, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, "could not even avoid reliance on the idea of sin, which is why [the school of Decadence] so easily accommodated itself to dogmatic religion, although the latter would seem to have been fundamentally opposed to it." Yet, starting with the broad ascendance of atheism (under the influence of Schopenhauer, among others) in the second half of the nineteenth century, the most difficult challenge for "nonreligious ethics" was "to establish fresh criteria of value and fresh principles of individual human behavior — to discover, in other words, the reasons for their necessity." A "critical impasse" in individualism was caused by the sense that a single life could have no meaning unless the soul had some sort of absolute value or afterlife.
Ginzburg, firm in her atheism, places her twentieth-century hero in a position where this crisis has already lost its tragic quality. In the 1930s drafts of Home and the World, she specifies that her hero is a consciousness that is "isolated; nonreligious and nonrevolutionary, disconnected, nontragic (death does not contradict it), extra-moral, infantile, relativistic, etc." In some senses, these attributes correspond to the negative connotations of individualism in French thought. Leaving aside Rousseau (whose main influence in this regard was on the German Romantics), individualisme in France referred to the phenomenon of an isolated person inhabiting a disharmonious social order. Ginzburg planned to represent her hero "against a backdrop of the history of personal self-consciousness (Rousseau to the present) — from lofty individualism to decadent subjectivity." I speak of Ginzburg's self as "post-individualistic" (instead of her own term, "nonindividualistic") inorder to underscore her awareness of the history of self-consciousness, "from Rousseau to the present," and the enduring power of the Romantic concept.
The most relevant epithet Ginzburg uses for her nonindividualist hero, one that sums up his qualities and predicament, is "immanent." This word often describes the early Formalists' approach to literary texts through the study of factors intrinsic (or "immanent") to the work, while bracketing historical context, the author's biography, and other extra-literary influences. The concept traces back to Kant, who designated as "immanent" those principles limited to the realm of experience, empirically verifiable, as opposed to being transcendentally derived. In one narrative, Ginzburg introduces her autobiographical (yet typical) hero as a representative of the "immanent" consciousness, which is "global in scope." She explains that "people of this mentality lack unconditional values that are posited externally. Their values (and without values no one can act) are either given them by the rules of [social] community [sotsium], or are the outcome of their own inclinations, talents and abilities." As she writes in a 1940s draft, the actions of people like this respond to immediate situations — in fact, she speaks at this point of "the person" as a "situation," an "intersection of biological and social coordinates" from which behavior and "functioning" arise.
The tragedy of the immanent consciousness is not in its death, for as Ginzburg writes, "it does not dare wonder at its own finitude." It is in the very experience of reality as disjointed, of the moments of one's life as bearing no relation to one another. Ginzburg writes that this consciousness experiences time in the "spatialized" manner that Henri Bergson blamed for preventing our access to time's "duration," and hence to our deeper (profond), more fluid and persistent selves. This segmentation and isolation of time seems to devalue one's emotions, pleasure as well as pain. For, as she writes, "there is something even more offensive in the fragility and futility of suffering than there is in the momentariness of pleasure — some kind of disrespect for the person." This immanent consciousness is constantly in a state of perplexity: it cannot rationally get a grip on feelings that pass without leaving a trace. Moreover, "it cannot have a relationship to death, because death doesn't concern it. It is eternally empty — like a sieve, placed below pouring water." Ginzburg investigates the question of this type's "moral victory or defeat in battle with its fatal disjointedness." She makes the predicament of the immanent consciousness — fragmented and uncertain of its own reality — into a central subject of her reflections, whether on the ethical potential of this kind of consciousness, or its import for the justification of art and the literary methods appropriate for her times.
Ginzburg's writings follow in the analytical tradition of documentary prose as practiced by writers such as Alexander Herzen, who made "theoretical, generalizing thought, and the depiction of reality in terms that remain unmediated by the invented world of the artist" into the structural material of his memoir, My Past and Thoughts. The techniques she employs in order to represent the immanent consciousness disrupt novelistic conventions of plot and character. The novel in the twentieth century was an impossibility for her just as it was for Osip Mandelstam, who famously argued in "The End of the Novel" (1922) for the "connection between the fate of the novel and the status at a given time of the problem of the individual's fate in history." Since the "compositional measure of the novel is human biography," if a person can have no biography then there can be no novel. Mandelstam understood the twentieth-century person as lacking the power and even the very sense of time to sustain a full biography.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lydia Ginzburg's Prose by Emily van Buskirk. Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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