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Overview
Originally published in 1990.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691603728 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1045 |
| Pages: | 180 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.50(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Worlds Within Worlds
The Novels of Ivan Turgenev
By Jane T. Costlow
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1990 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06783-4
CHAPTER 1
RHETORIC AND SINCERITY: TURGENEV AND THE POETICS OF SILENCE
All of Turgenev's novels are, to a very large extent, novels of polite conversation, where the narrative's progress is marked less by event than by the nuance of verbal exchange and encounter. The Soviet scholar L. V. Pumpiansky, in an article of 1940 whose terminology has been often repeated, defined Turgenev's novels as "personal novels about culture" — in distinction to the "novels of event" associated with Balzac.
Turgenev's disdain for the complex, melodramatic plotting of authors like Dumas is unequivocal in his 1852 review of Evgeniya Tur's novel, The Niece: "Novels à la Dumas with numbers of volumes ad libidum certainly exist in our country; but the reader will permit us to pass over them in silence. They may well be a fact, but not all facts have significance" (V, 373). Turgenev's own sense of the possibilities open to the Russian novel is evident in this review in his naming of two existing narrative types: those associated with Charles Dickens and with George Sand. Turgenev qualifies his enumeration of possibilities by questioning whether Russia is yet sufficiently "pronounced" as a society to permit four-volume novels; his implication is that the unformed nature of Russian society calls for fragmentary narrative: "Are the elements of our society's life sufficiently pronounced to expect four volumes from the novel that attempts to depict them? The most recent success of various sketches seems to prove the opposite. As yet we are hearing separate sounds from Russian life, which poetry answers with equally rapid echoes" (V, 373).
My intent here is not to address the problem of the narrative precursors and sources of the Turgenev novel — though it does appear to me an interesting problem, and one as yet incompletely answered. The sources of Turgenev's own novelistic form lie both in existing narrative traditions, and in the drama, a form in which he worked throughout the 1840s and into the early 1850s, until his full-length play, "A Month in the Country," met with disapproval and critical misperception in the 1850s. What is of interest to me here is the fact that Turgenev elaborates a novelistic form that depends less on the complexities of plot than on the revelations of conversation — and his first novel, Rudin, is in this regard a crucial guide to what conversation in Turgenev is all about. Turgenev's first exercise in that larger form he both sought and feared is a novel about talk — about rhetoric, truth, sincerity, significance — and as such suggests the aesthetic that will inform all of his work.
The historical and biographical impetus for this novel's concerns lies in that period of Russia's intellectual life that Rudin to some extent depicts: the connection of Turgenev's fictional hero with the anarchist Bakunin, the representation in Pokorsky of N. Stankevich, an intellectual mentor idolized after his early death, the depiction of the atmosphere of Moscow's philosophical circles of the late 1830s — all of these historical referents have been extensively documented. What is striking about Turgenev's novel, however, is its translation of the agonies and ideas of his generation into a novel that, in criticizing the rhetoric and philosophizing of its hero, finds other ways of articulating life's significance. Turgenev's translation of his generation's concerns is ultimately a subversion — not merely of Bakunin/Rudin, but of philosophy per se, and of the pretensions of philosophical discourse. Turgenev's novel is a protracted act of disengagement from an intellectual milieu that had possessed him — and in its movement from philosophy to narrative the novel traces an evolution that was Turgenev's own.
The evolution that I will trace in these pages is one enacted in several works of Turgenev's early years as a novelist. The passages of Turgenev himself as he moved toward the novel as a genre are complex, and should not be overlooked in considering the forms his later narrative took. The transition from the fragmentary form of The Huntsman's Sketches to the longer form of the novel was of great moment to Turgenev himself: he struggled with longer narrative, doubted his abilities in his first effort (Two Generations, which he destroyed), and wavered throughout his career in knowing just how to name his longer prose: novellas or novels. The passages I will trace here, however, have less to do with length than with language, and with the author's efforts to distance himself from the rhetoric and effusions of his youth. Rudin, Turgenev's first novel; "Journey into the Woodland," a novella of 1857; and "Diary of a Superfluous Man," of 1850, all concern themselves with the problematics of revelation, consciousness, and speech. Rudin is most directly linked to the excesses and pretentious rhetoric of German Idealism in Russia, and is hence most specifically grounded in the cultural moment of Turgenev's youth. "Journey into the Woodland" alludes to another of Turgenev's youthful enthusiasms, his early lyric poetry; its narrative traces the author's movement beyond what seemed to him imitative solipsism. All three works, however, articulate an understanding of narrative's specific possibilities that is crucial in our reading of Turgenev. What he articulates, in these works, is a way of understanding what is "significant," an understanding that is characteristically grounded in the tension between worlds: of consciousness and simplicity, rhetoric and silence, solipsism and sincerity. The rhetoric — and rhetoricians — of significance fade in Turgenev's narrative (as in his life) before the nuance of gesture, hiddenness, and the everyday. These narratives hold something of a privileged place in Turgenev's oeuvre: they establish how he will construe narrative meaning, and point to how we must read it.
Turgenev returns to philosophy and poetry in his novels, but in a form radically understated and oblique, with none of the pretensions of his early selves. He continues to be read as a "novelist of ideas," as an admirer of men who embody ideas and ideals. Such readings are not wrong, but they do need serious qualification, for in many cases the "defeat" of the hero at the hands of reality implies a defeat of ideas as well, and an affirmation of the medial and immediate existence the hero has challenged. What survives Turgenev's heroic ideologues — and both Rudin and Bazarov are his most explicitly ideological figures — is not banality but an everyday existence that holds to a balance which those heroes disdain. Turgenev is in no way blind to the miseries and stupidities of Russian reality — but his narratives evoke a daily simplicity and fullness that breaks with the Gogolian. It is these visions of everyday life — of everyday language and measured labor — that are Turgenev's ideals.
Writing of Turgenev's early narrative poem "Parasha," Waclaw Lednicki has suggested both its debt to, and distance from, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, in precisely this realm: the everyday. "Turgenev marries his hero to Parasha and commands them to attain the goal of 'everyday happiness/ which was not reached by Onegin and Tatyana, nor by Lensky. ... The bourgeois happiness from which Pushkin saved Lensky became the fate of Turgenev's heroes." To call such happiness a "fate" from which others are "saved" suggests doom and desolation; I will suggest the opposite — that it is this "everyday happiness" that Turgenev evokes as ideal in Rudin, and that such happiness for Turgenev involves breaking with notions of heroism, epiphany, and absolutes.
In a letter of 1860 to Evgeniya Lambert, Turgenev described a departure from St. Petersburg that was also a return to a "well-lived life": "And I'm glad to get rested after a worrisome Petersburg winter — to live for a while a normal life, with a small dose of quiet boredom — that true sign of the proper passing of time" (P, IV, 90). The well-lived life, the life of "quiet boredom," is what remains after satire and heroism in Turgenev's novels; it has its civic counterpart in Turgenev's "English" liberalism, his commitment to evolution, his despair at the increasing alienation of late nineteenth-century politics. The language of Turgenev's novels is the language of that well-lived life, a language of understatement and modesty, a language that avoids confession, gossip, and revelation. There is, of course, lots of gossip in Turgenev's novels — in both Rudin and A Nest of Gentry and in the later Smoke — just as there is much revelation and confession in Rudin. But what is important to note is that these ways of speaking are distanced and displaced by Turgenev, that he is critical of his characters for the ways in which they use words. It is this criticism that is so central to both Rudin and A Nest of Gentry — and in the former novel it is criticism that marks Turgenev's own disdain for the language of philosophy, revelation, and abstraction.
Turgenev's disdain for "philosophizing" is matched by his scorn for the lust for significance; in another letter to his friend Evgeniya Lambert, Turgenev reproaches her for her longing for perpetual "significance." The reproach is articulated in terms that are essential to his own narrative:
You're wrong to say it's better if we don't see one another frequently. ... What does it matter if occasionally during these meetings, especially when others are there — the conversation takes a light, frivolous turn. ... As long as there's no vanity in your heart, for that's also a kind of pride. I remember how as a young man I wanted every moment to be significant ... an impertinent and far from innocent longing! Let the stream murmur to itself until it reaches the sea. (P, III, 386)
The longing for all of life to be "significant," with which Turgenev here reprimands his pious friend, is a longing he seems to have associated with youth. In Fathers and Children it is the youthful Arkady who longs for significance: "One should structure life so that every moment is significant — Arkady murmured thoughtfully" (VIII, 324). At novel's end, this enthusiastic disciple of Turgenev's nihilist has become the character to whom is given the chance of continuity and "everyday happiness," the chance to perpetuate the life of his father, a life at peace with nature and himself. There seems little doubt that, for Turgenev, such life was "significant" — but it also seems clear that for the disciple Arkady significance meant something other than domestic life with Katya: it meant, perhaps, struggle and defiance, an articulation in word and gesture of the "principles" of nihilism. Despite the destructive implications of nihilism, Arkady seems to grasp it as a system, an ideology, that will endow his life with meaning. Bazarov is perhaps more consistent in scorning his friend's longings for "significance."
Rudin, Turgenev's first great hero of ideas, enters the salons of the provincial gentry with much the same aspirations as Arkady: to construe life as incessantly significant. In the character Rudin the youthful longing for significance is bound up with German metaphysics — whose Russian adherents were so adept at naming significance and so inept at simply living. Bakunin boasted in a letter of 1836 to have lived not a single moment of life without consciousness. Significance for the Idealists meant consciousness of the Idea, consciousness of oneself as the instrument of Being. To claim life's significance as Rudin does is to claim that life signifies to the extent that it points to something beyond itself: "Rudin spoke of what gives eternal significance to the momentary life of man" (VI, 269). Rudin's eloquence is an attempt to render life as metaphor — to see its meaning in eternity, not in time; in poetry, not in prose. It is these attempts to jump out of causality — to escape consequence and temporality — that Turgenev's text finally condemns. It is a condemnation that has import for Turgenev's own understanding of "meaning" and the significant in life: meaning for Turgenev that is temporal, linear, "prosaic," meaning that is derived not from an eternal beyond, but from the movement and enigmas of the present.
Turgenev articulates his commitment to narrative, linear meaning in "Journey into the Woodland," a story conceived before Turgenev began work on Rudin, but that was completed and published only in 1857, one year after Rutin's publication. The story traces the narrator's two-day journey into the depths of a primeval forest. Among other things, the story narrates a transition of genre and voice: the first day — a day of angst and consciousness of alienation from nature — is predominantly descriptive prose, prose that casts the narrator's subjectivity onto the world. This first section is heavily allusive: Turgenev seems to allude to (and invert) Dante, investing this portion of the text with literary echoes and language that begs allegorical or emblematic reading; thus the story's extended references to marks (sledy) and how to read them.
One of the narrator's first impressions is of a silent, burdened file of diggers (kopachi) who make their way through the forest: "They all walked without speaking, in a kind of consequential silence [Oni vse shli molcha, v kakoi-to vazhnoi tishine]" (VII, 52). In this work filled with references to silence, the "important" silence of these diggers becomes an enigmatic figure, a symptom of some inexplicit literary meaning. The narrator goes on to "dig into" himself (translating literal digging into metaphor), to descend into regretful reverie and anguish at his wasted life; he is delivered from anguish by his peasant guide, who offers him water — and solace.
The narrator's peasant guide becomes Turgenev's Virgil, leading the man of consciousness out of his solipsistic hell. The second day of the story differs from the first most importantly in its change of genre: the second day is dominated by the peasants' stories — the voices, that is, are predominantly those of the peasants; the narrator functions only in chorus with them. In this evolution "Journey into the Woodland" recapitulates, in condensed form, Turgenev's own transition as a writer from imitative lyric to the narrative techniques of The Huntsman's Sketches. It also suggests, however, an attitude toward the burden of literary consciousness — for if the first day is laden with allusions, echoes, is indeed structured by the archetypal journey into hell, the second day is seemingly free of such referentiality. The opening metaphor of the first day has to do with digging: the silent diggers become a metaphor for the poet/narrator's own absorbed depths — but also for meaning that is not "on the surface," not apparent. The significant image of the second day replaces vertical movement with horizontal: the story closes with a description of a fire in the forest, which is not destructive but restorative, because it moves along the surface:
... looks like a surface fire.
— What kind of fire?
— A surface fire; the kind that runs along the ground. Now with an underground fire it's impossible to manage. What can you do when the ground is burning two feet down? Only one escape: dig, ditches — and you think that's easy? But a surface fire — that's nothing. (VII, 68)
The replacement of digging with lateral movement is what the story itself has achieved: the narrator — and the narration — have moved from self-absorbed reminiscence to shared stories. The implication is that the narrative of the second day takes its (restorative, communal) meaning from movement on the surface, that it is as free of allusion and of literary consciousness as it is of self-absorption. Turgenev's narrator draws at the end of this story a "rule for life," an intimation of balance and measure. But it seems clear that Turgenev as artist has narrated rules for art, as well: the preference is given to story, to surfaces, to the metonymic movements of prose.
The explicit preferences of this tale go to narrative, simplicity, "surface" meaning. Turgenev seemingly throws off both the solipsism and the literary consciousness of the first day of the "Journey." To read Turgenev thus would be to accept a kind of narrative simplicity and explicitness. The actual qualities of his prose diverge from that ideal, however: the allusiveness and literary consciousness of the first day in the woodland journey always remain in his realistic narrative, as do the aesthetic and philosophical concerns to which it alludes. Turgenev's prose retains its metaphoric dimensions, its tendency to lyric and allegorical meanings that qualify the simple movement of plot. His prose continues to "dig," to allude to oblique, as well as explicit, meanings.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Worlds Within Worlds by Jane T. Costlow. Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. ix
- NOTE ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION, pg. xi
- INTRODUCTION, pg. 3
- Chapter One. RHETORIC AND SINCERITY: TURGENEV AND THE POETICS OF SILENCE, pg. 11
- Chapter Two. GOSSIP, SILENCE, STORY: LANGUAGE IN A NEST OF GENTRY, pg. 30
- Chapter Three. HISTORY AND IDYLL IN A NEST OF GENTRY, pg. 55
- Chapter Four. ON THE EVE AND THE SIRENS OF STASIS, pg. 82
- Chapter Five. ODINTSEVA'S BATH AND BAZAROV'S DOGS: THE DISMANTLING OF CULTURE IN FATHERS AND CHILDREN, pg. 105
- CONCLUSION, pg. 138
- NOTES, pg. 143
- BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 159
- INDEX, pg. 163