Waiting for Pushkin: Russian Fiction in the Reign of Alexander I (1801-1825) (Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics 44) (Studies in Slavic Literature & Poetics)

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Table of Contents Preface Chapter I: Fiction in Alexander’s Russia: the social and cultural context I.1 The writer and the tsar I.2 History and fiction: the impact of the Napoleonic wars on Russian letters I.3 The seeds of professionalisation: book market and authorship I.4 The socio-cultural life of the gentry: salons, soirées, clubs and literary activity

11 19 20 27 33 44

Chapter II: Literary circles, periodicals and the debate over prose 63 II.1 Literary groups and journals in the early nineteenth century 65 II.2 Early-nineteenth century criticism and the question of prose fiction 71 II.3 The battle over language: Beseda versus Arzamas 90 Appendix: major circles and societies (1800-1820) 102 Chapter III: The eighteenth-century literary heritage III.1 The influence of “high” eighteenth-century prose: the oriental tale III.2 Eighteenth-century traditions and issues of gender in Zinaida Volkonskaia’s Laure III.3 Kropotov’s appropriation of Sterne: The Story of a Brownish Kaftan III.4 The eighteenth-century legacy and the new “novel of education”: Aleksandr Izmailov’s Evgenii, or the Disastrous Consequences of Poor Upbringing and Company III.5 Fon Ferel’ts’s political travelogue: The Journey of a Critic

103 111 131 149

156 170

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Table of Contents

Chapter IV: Sentimentalism in early–nineteenth–century Russia: Karamzin’s epigones and new trends in sentimental prose IV.1 The origins IV.2 Russian sentimentalism between tradition and innovation IV.3 Women writers, female heroines and the serious sentimental mode: the case of Mariia Izvekova IV.4 The sentimental heroine between tradition and innovation IV.5 Sentimental novels and short stories: Nikolai Brusilov and the intertextual dialogue between serious and humorous sentimental modes IV.6 The sentimental journey IV.6.1 Russia and the Grand tour IV.6.2 Travel accounts and sentimental travelogues IV.6.3 The parody and the factual in early nineteenth-century Russian travelogues IV.6.4 Fedor Lubianovskii Journey Through Saxony, Austria and Italy Chapter V: Contemporary literary influences: pre-romantic and romantic trends V.1 Historical narratives at the beginning of the nineteenth century: the search for a genre V.1.1 The role of Western literary influences and contemporary historical events in the development of the genre V.1.2 Historical narratives during the reign of Alexander I V.1.3 Nikolai Artsybyshev and Gavril Gerakov: the dialogue between fictional and non-fictional representations of history V.1.4 Fictional representations of the past: the sentimental model V.2 The Russian gothic: supernatural, horror and terror in early nineteenth-century Russia: Nikolai Gnedich’s Don Korrado de Gerrera V.3 Zhukovskii and the Western European ballad revival V.3.1 Supernatural and horror in Zhukovskii: Liudmila and Marina’s Grove

191 193 197 210 226

240 263 264 267 273 285 297 299 303 307 310 315

320 346 355

Conclusions

365

Bibliography

377

Index

411

Note on transliteration: the transliteration system used in this volume is that of the Library of Congress, minus diacritics.

Acknowledgments This project has a long gestation. I first discovered this little known period of Russian fiction over ten years ago, while examining the aftermaths of Karamzin’s ground breaking reform of prose language and style. I gleaned little information from the various histories of Russian literature I consulted, and the sting of doubt was born; was it conceivable that prose fiction had been largely dormant during the two decades or so separating the two “fathers” of the modern novel, Karamzin and Pushkin, especially since the early nineteenth century was in fact one of the liveliest periods in Russia’s cultural history? Moreover, was it historically plausible that the masterpieces of Russian fiction coming out in the late 1820s and 1830s were borne out of such a sizable void? Intrigued by such inconsistency, in 1994 I started my research toward a PhD at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Tony Cross. The following four years proved to be an exciting period with the discovery of a string of hidden gems in the National Library and, especially, in the Rare Books section of the Academy of Sciences Library in St. Petersburg. From such research a body of fascinating narratives started to emerge, and with it the pre-Pushkin phase of development of Russian fiction began to take a clearer shape. Once the first findings had been organised in a coherent PhD thesis, however, I realised that my dissertation would necessarily tell only part of the story – further investigation was needed to provide a comprehensive map of Russian fiction in the age of Alexander and to restore the “missing link” between the age of Karamzin and that of Pushkin. The financial support of a Junior Research Fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge enabled me to further my research and to publish my findings in a series of articles on selected authors and narrative genres. A further nine months visit to Harvard was instrumental in broadening the horizons of my investigation to include gender issues and women writers, perhaps the most forsaken of all the “forgotten authors” I have encountered during my research. Conversations with, and advice from, many colleagues over the years have made this publication possible. I am particularly

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Acknowledgments

indebted to Tony Cross, whose patience, erudition, and passion for the subject has been a constant source of inspiration. I would have achieved little without his open-minded guidance in the early stages of my research and human warmth ever since. I would also like to thank Bill Todd, for his kind invitation to Harvard, the stimulating conversations that ensued and for his ongoing friendliness and support subsequently. Jonathan Haslam and Elinor Shaffer for their perceptive advice and encouragement at different stages of my research; Charles Drage, Aileen Kelly, Gitta Hammarberg, Wendy Rosslyn, Mary Zirin, Sara Dickinson, Barbara Heldt, Rosalind Blakesley, Tatiana Artemeva, Natalia Kochetkova, Emily Finer and Irina Goncharenko for stimulating exchanges and collaborations over the years. Warm thanks to my colleagues of the Eighteenth-Century Russia Study Group and of Corpus Christi College whose friendliness and encouragement has been a treasured source of support. I would also like to express my appreciation to the librarians working at the Rare Book Section of the Academy of Sciences Library in St Petersburg who, despite economical and political crisis, maintained intact their professionalism, expertise and kindness. Thanks also to the staff of the University Library in Cambridge (in particular to Ray Scrivens) and the Houghton Library at Harvard, who granted me permission to quote material from their collection of Zinaida Volkonskaia’s papers. Equally important in the genesis of this book has been the support of my friends and family, in particular of my husband Rupert, who as a result of my research has inadvertently become a world expert on Andrei Kropotov. Without his invaluable moral support this book would have never been written.

Preface Russian prose fiction of the age of Alexander I (1801-1825) has been left largely unexplored in recent scholarship, both in Russia and in the West. Drawing from a vast range of little-known texts, this study is intended to provide an overview of the intense literary activity occurring in the first quarter of the nineteenth century and in so doing to contribute to filling a significant gap in the literary history of modern Russia. The neglect surrounding prose fiction in the two decades between the activity of Nikolai Karamzin and Aleksandr Pushkin may be explained by features peculiar to the literary situation of the country at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Although a plethora of authors of prose fiction were active at the time, none of those have so far achieved the star quality of contemporary poets such as Konstantin Batiushkov, Nikolai Gnedich and Vasilii Zhukovskii. The prominence given to early nineteenth-century poets in recent scholarship, the constellation of so-called “minor” authors of novels and stories, and their compression between two “giants” of Russian modern literature – Karamzin and Pushkin – in part explains the distorted picture of early nineteenth-century prose fiction held by the majority of literary scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.1 This, however, has not always been the case, for a number of reprints of and secondary literature on prose fiction in the age of Alexander appeared in the pre-revolutionary period. The situation, however, began to change after 1917. The ideological approach to literature, and its corollary, the teleological view of literary history as an evolution toward the great achievements of realism in the 1830s and 1840s, meant a marginalisation of preceding decades typecast as the realm of a highly “individualistic” and therefore “a-social” sentimentalism. Such simplistic dismissal not only swept away the 1

In the past such concerns have been voiced by a few authoritative scholars such as Sipovskii (Sipovskii 1899: 455) and Berkov (Berkov 1969: 6).

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complexity and richness characterising this age of Russian fiction, but also resulted in there being only a sparse number of both scholarly studies on the period and, crucially, new editions of early nineteenthcentury works of fiction that, except for a handful of collections, have never been republished since. Such shortage of modern editions and the difficulty of retrieving rare and unfamiliar primary sources in Russian archives have further hampered a revision of received views on the period. Thus a combination of factors has generated the misleading belief that no or few narratives worthy of consideration were published in the country for over two decades. In a historical perspective, such a view has created a discontinuity in the literary evolution of modern Russian prose which has been artificially divided into two separate blocks – the eighteenth century ending with Nikolai Karamzin’s last works of fiction in the early 1800s, and a nineteenth century starting with Aleksandr Pushkin in the 1820s. Yet the age of Alexander was an active melting pot for fiction that changed the way prose writing was created by authors and perceived by the reading public at large. As Iurii Lotman once wrote “The beginning of the nineteenth century was not just a chronological watershed in the history of Russian prose, but an ideal and artistic one as well.”2 This book aims at stimulating the critical debate on an important, albeit under-studied, age and ultimately to further its reintegration into Russia’s literary history. Such goals require not only a close reading of the little-known novels and stories of the time, but also a systematic mapping of prose genres and literary influences. In this respect, it is hoped that the present book will serve as a stepping stone for further studies on the period, together with muchneeded investigations of the many links between Alexander’s age and the remarkable literary achievements of Russian fiction during the ensuing reign of Nicholas I. Although the latter task surpasses the boundaries of this book some of the findings of this research will be projected forward in time by sketching out points of contact between narratives at the dawn of the nineteenth century genres and later developments of Russian fiction. The early nineteenth century is a momentous time for Russian cultural life. The new freedom enjoyed by Russians at the beginning “Начало XIX века было не только хронологической, но и идейнохудожественной вехой в истории русской прозы.” Lotman 1961: 3. See also Tamarchenko 1961. 2

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of Alexander’s “liberal” reign injected new life into artistic activities in general, and into the literary arena in particular. The number of Russians taking up the pen soared, and began to include nonaristocratic writers and female authors, whilst literary institutions such as societies and journals proliferated. Although still socially narrow and numerically small when compared to contemporary England and France, for example, an eager readership for works in prose was establishing itself, pushing up the demand for novels, stories and other narrative genres. In short, a dynamic prose fiction was rapidly growing in scope, audience and prestige in early nineteenth-century Russia. As Vittorio Strada remarks, after the end of the eighteenth century the relationship between Russian and Western European literature shifted from one of passive imitation to one of progressive emancipation.3 Translated in ever increasing numbers during the reign of Alexander, Western works and critical writings channelled into Russia a wealth of new aesthetic theories, stylistic devices, themes and genre patterns. The process of the “compressed assimilation” of foreign literary influences typical of modern Russia was given a further boost in the post-Karamzin period when authors as a whole were less sensitive to the hierarchy of genres established by eighteenth-century classicists; they were also equipped with a more modern literary language and style and were thus capable of appropriating and re-working genres already part of the Russian literary canon together with and the latest literary trends coming from the West. Viewed in the context of nineteenth-century literature as a whole, such intense experimentation and dynamism in terms of genres, styles and topics characterising the “formative years” of modern prose represented the foundation for an original and distinctive national fiction in Russia.4 The heterogeneity characterising prose writing during the reign of Alexander and the difficulties involved in the task of mapping a neglected literary period of Russian fiction pose a series of methodological problems. In addressing the somewhat similarly neglected field of women’s writing in Russia, Catriona Kelly alerts us 3

Strada 1984: 33. See also Strada 1980: 393-406 and Drage 1978: 107. Mersereau 1976: 39. See also Vinogradov 1963: 19. Bakhtin too highlights the seminal function of the process of assimilation of foreign traditions (through translations, re-workings and appropriations of literary prototypes) in the rise of the novel (Bakhtin 1981: 376 and passim).

4

14

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to the necessity to expose the rationale behind the process of selection, and to disclose the methodological parameters and aesthetic constraints necessarily involved in the task.5 Additionally, there are risks involved in employing general categories such as period trends and genres as a framework for the textual analysis of specific works. Yet such categorisations are very much needed, for, as Neuhäuser puts it, “there can be no study of literature in a historical perspective without a classification of the literary process in periods, trends or movements on a chronological base”.6 Hence, the works discussed in this study have been selected according to their ability to typify major genres and exemplify key tendencies of early nineteenth-century prose. Preference has been accorded to authors who have generally been overlooked (or the little known output of otherwise celebrated authors such as Nikolai Gnedich and Vasilii Zhukovskii) but whose work, nevertheless, proves to be essential to glean a comprehensive view of the period. Two main methodological criteria have been applied in charting early nineteenth-century prose fiction: a classification in period-trends (investigating the role played by eighteenth-century genres, the impact of Karamzin’s sentimental work and the influence exerted by Western pre-romantic and romantic trends) paired with a generic taxonomy (looking at the development of the novel, story, povest’ or novella, and the “new” minor genres shaping early nineteenth-century fiction). Such a framework is employed as a “working hypothesis” in Eikhenbaum’s expression,7 rather than a rigid system that would not do justice to the generic fluidity characterising this age of Russian prose. In the same way period labels such as “classicism”, “sentimentalism”, “pre-romanticism” and “romanticism” are employed as ordering concepts to map a period characterised by an unprecedented literary syncretism. In short, without entering into the merits of the theoretical debates on these period labels, which are far from being resolved and probably will never be, such criteria of classification are employed as useful tools to be validated by textual analysis and contextualised in relation to the specifics of early nineteenth-century Russian fiction. The overall structure of this book is designed to provide the reader with both a general overview of the literary activities of the 5

Kelly 1994: 6 and passim. Neuhäuser 1973: 11. 7 Eikhenbaum 1978: 56. 6

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15

period and a detailed textual analysis of a representative number of novels and stories published during the reign of Alexander I. In the first two chapters Russian prose writing is viewed from an historical perspective. Chapter I, Fiction in Alexander’s Russia: the social and cultural context, investigates the environment in which prose fiction was produced and critical views on the genre were developed in the early-nineteenth century. The chapter is divided into four sections: the first charting the changing relationship between writers and the court leading to a growing sense of independence experienced by contemporary authors; the second section investigates the direct and indirect impact of the Napoleonic campaigns on Russian fiction; the third section investigates the fast evolution of key channels of literary diffusion – the book market and the press – during the reign of Alexander I; finally the last section examines the influence of the gentry’s aesthetic criteria on contemporary authors through the quasi-cultural venues of salons, clubs and other sites of social interaction among the Russian elite. Chapter II, Literary circles, periodicals and the debate over prose, focuses on cultural institutions such as literary groups and journals’ editorial boards and their role in the “professionalisation” of Russian letters and its rising status in the cultural and spiritual life of the country. This chapter provides an overview of key critical issues in the early nineteenth century, such as the discussions around the possible merits and potential role of prose fiction within Russia’s literary system and the “literary language question” debated by the two rival societies Beseda and Arzamas. Having discussed the social, institutional and political environment, we begin an analysis of literary works, examining the influence exerted by both national and foreign literary traditions on prose writing in the age of Alexander via a textual analysis of a selected number of novels and short stories. Chapter III, The eighteenth-century literary heritage, begins with a preliminary overview of Russian narrative genres in the eighteenth century, fleshing out the main points of contact between authors active in the age of Alexander and their predecessors. Of course any author of note develops his or her own artistic voice, specific style and individual themes. However, this process starts from specific sources of literary inspiration, be they national or foreign, remote or more contemporary. Whatever the starting prototypes may be, the relationship with existing literary conventions

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and trends is central to the formation of a writer’s individual aesthetics. In the first section such elements of continuity with established genres emerge from the analysis of the oriental tale (vostochnaia povest’), epitomised in the work of its most eminent early nineteenth-century representative, Aleksandr Benitskii. The second section looks at the literary output of the first Russian author of society tales, Zinaida Volkonskaia, showing how, starting from the stylistic premises of the literature of the French enlightenment, Volkonskaia created a work ahead of her time in terms of psychological insights and clarity of style. The third section investigates the output of Andrei Kropotov as symptomatic of the appropriation of Western eighteenth-century works by Russian authors. The fourth section analyses Aleksandr Izmailov’s Evgenii, or the Disastrous Consequences of Poor Upbringing and Company, a pseudo-novel of education which skilfully combines the tradition of the classic comedy with eighteenth-century prototypes of popular fiction, resulting in an original, satiric version of the roman à thèse. The chapter concludes with the finest political travelogue of the time, fon Ferel’ts’s The Journey of a Critic. The influence of late-eighteenth-century sentimentalism and its undisputed leader Nikolai Karamzin is the topic of chapter IV, Sentimentalism in early nineteenth-century Russia: Karamzin’s epigones and new trends in sentimental prose. This chapter opens with an historical overview of the origins of the trend and of the main stylistic, thematic and generic features as showcased in the work of its Russian founder. The main goal of this chapter is to demonstrate, against common belief, that early nineteenth-century sentimentalism was a diversified trend able to accommodate both Karamzin’s epigones and innovators (sections one and two). Through the analysis of a selected number of authors the chapter demonstrates the unrecognised variety of genres and narrative modes within the trend, pointing to the crucial role played by sentimentalism in the postKaramzin period in the development of nineteenth-century fiction. Starting from these critical premises the chapter examines the socalled “feminisation” of Russian fiction engendered by sentimentalism, and its implication for women writers, a topic illustrated through the case of Mariia Izvekova, one of the most popular female authors of the time (section three). The drive towards experimentation with diverse literary traditions and genres characterising contemporary prose fiction

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sometimes challenged the conventional representation of women as obedient wives and loving mothers promoted by sentimentalism. This is demonstrated in section four with the investigation of the anonymous novel The Russian Amazon. Moreover, Nikolai Brusilov’s Poor Leandr, or the Author without Rhetoric, a masterpiece in early nineteenth-century ironic literature, provides an example of sentimental humour acting as a renovating force within the trend and within Russian fiction as a whole (section five). The chapter concludes with an overview of the sentimental travelogue, a genre that was tremendously popular during the reign of Alexander, enjoying a vast following among writers and readers alike. Although the majority of contemporary authors tended to write a highly subjective account of their real (or supposedly real) journeys, a number of them sought to combine “guide book” descriptions with the stylised manner of the sentimental novel of travel. The investigation of one of these “mixed travelogues”, Feodor Lubianovskii’s Journey Through Saxony, Austria and Italy, allows us to form a more comprehensive picture of the genre in the post-Karamzin period. Chapter V, Contemporary literary influences: pre-romantic and romantic trends, explores the reception of the avant-garde of Western European literature at the beginning of the nineteenthcentury, a process characterized by the rapid assimilation and transformation of foreign traditions into an autonomous and original national prose in Russia. Literature rarely develops in a vacuum and virtually all authors and literary epochs need to be viewed in a comparative perspective. Even so, there exist chronological and geographical instances in the history of modern literature when the reception of foreign influences played a determining role in the development of a distinctive national literature. Early nineteenth-century Russia is certainly a case in point, for the various stages of literary reception and assimilation – from translations to re-workings and original production – are at the core of Russian fiction in the pre-Pushkin period. Literary influences intersect with historical events (the Franco-Russian wars, the 1812 Napoleonic invasion, the Congress of Vienna) in stimulating this process of literary appropriation. A case in point is the new genre of the historical novel (section one). Still in its infancy in the century’s first decade, the genre was galvanised by a powerful combination of literary influences (Western romanticism in

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particular) and historical circumstances. Alongside the pseudohistorical narratives inspired by the Ossianic fashion and the sentimental prototypes provided by Karamzin’s historical povesti, antiquarian interests also stimulated a more faithful representation of Russia’s past. Hence special attention is paid to Gavril Gerakov and Nikolai Artsybyshev, two authors who wrote scholarly works and historical novels, a double perspective on history generating fascinating results. Sections two and three examine the impact of the English gothic novel and the German gothic ballad on early nineteenthcentury letters. Works belonging to the so-called “gothic wave” were eagerly received by Russian readers and readily appropriated by writers such as Nikolai Gnedich (author of the first Russian “novel of horror”), Andrei Turgenev and Vasilii Narezhnyi. These were among the first Russian “gothic” authors to transform themes and stylistic devices alien to the Russian literary tradition into an integral part of its literary agenda before such influence had been fully recognised by literary critics. As his novella Marina’s Grove testifies, Vassilii Zhukovskii too was part of this literary avant-garde and one of the main architects of romantic fiction in Russia. By adapting foreign modes to the cultural framework of his readership Zhukovskii successfully “Russified” Western masterpieces, thus inaugurating a new phase in the reception of Western literature in Russia. Finally, in the concluding chapter, I review the fundamental developments of the period and project their impact on Pushkin’s generation and beyond. The Bibliography includes a listing of both primary and secondary sources and is meant to provide a useful instrument for further investigation; in particular the list of primary sources provided there, although not claiming to represent a comprehensive inventory of all the works of fiction published in the age of Alexander, can be used as an additional means to gauge the extent of literary activity in Russian prose fiction between Karamzin and Pushkin.

Chapter I

Fiction in Alexander’s Russia: the social and cultural context For the past two centuries literature has played a particularly important role in Russian society, acting as the vehicle by which fundamental ideal, moral and social issues have been addressed. Literature’s special status in modern Russia took root in the age of Alexander (1801-1825), a period also marked by the rise of a new conception of writing as a professional activity.1 In the present chapter we investigate the link between political, economic and social conditions and the changing understanding and function of literature in early-nineteenth-century Russia. Modern Russian literature needs to be placed in its historical and political context to be fully understood, especially as the Russian authorities have traditionally maintained considerable control over cultural activities. In the early nineteenth century the ascension to the throne of the “liberal” tsar Alexander brought significant changes to the way culture was perceived and practised by the elite. After the short but oppressive rule of Paul I, the “mild and merciful reign” of his successor, as Kotzebue defined it,2 resulted in a renaissance of Russian arts comparable to the thriving cultural life under Catherine II (1762-1796). Alexander created an environment in which ideas could be discussed and works could circulate, thus directly stimulating the expansion of the book market in general and literary activities in particular. In this chapter we shall initially look at the influence exerted on literary activities by the political system of Russia (section 1). In section 2 we will broaden this survey by investigating the contrasting impact of the ten years of the Napoleonic wars on contemporary 1 2

See Sakulin 1908: 209-212 and passim; Vatsuro and Gillel’son 1972: 8-9. Kotzebue 1802: II/10.

The socio-cultural context

20

literature. The social composition of the reading public and the channels of literary diffusion (the book market and the publishing enterprises) will be the object of section 3. This overview of the historical and political context will be completed in the fourth section by examining the socio-cultural environment in which contemporary authors wrote, discussed and published their work in early-nineteenthcentury Russia.

I.1 The writer and the tsar The relationship between an absolute monarch and artistic expression is one traditionally fraught with difficulties, as freedom of expression can never be unconditional in an autocratic system. All Russian authors depended on approval from the higher spheres for, no matter how liberally inclined they were, all tsars were highly interventionist in carrying out their responsibilities. Moreover, in the case of Russia’s “Enlightened” rulers – Catherine the Great and Alexander I – the liberal approach to culture flaunted at the beginning of their reign would eventually be abandoned in an effort to regain full control over intellectual activities. Alexander’s grandmother, Catherine the Great, was the first Russian sovereign to encourage literary activity both inside and outside her court, believing that it would add lustre to her reign.3 Prior to the French Revolution of 1789, after which she veered towards more conservative policies, writers were allowed a certain degree of freedom. An imperial edict of 1783, for example, permitting the foundation of private printing presses resulted in a dramatic increase in publishing enterprises.4 The fact that the Empress herself wrote plays, articles and short fictional pieces granted literature as a whole a degree of respectability in the eyes of her contemporaries. As a consequence of Catherine’s example and of her proactive cultural policy writing began to be recognised within the court and its entourage (if not yet within society at large) as an occupation of some social importance and a dignified pursuit for the educated. 3 4

See Serman 1992. Marker 1985: 105-106.

The socio-cultural context

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Catherine directly supported artists, architects, thinkers and authors through patronage and via more indirect forms of sponsorship, such as undemanding employment in the bureaucracy or army. This latter form of sponsorship strengthened the bond between author and state to such an extent that in Catherine’s time few authors did not serve somewhere in the state apparatus or in the army. Catherine also granted the bureaucracy of censorship wide powers over the publication of books and periodicals, an authority that was accountable only to the judgment of the Empress herself. In this way Catherine both encouraged and maintained control of literary activities, including the press and the book market. The liberalism that characterised the first part of her reign was evident in the thriving cultural life of the 1760s-1780s, eventually encouraging the formation of cultural establishments independent of the court. The contradictions inherent in “enlightened despotism” came to the fore in the last years of her reign when Catherine turned her previously liberal approach to printing into a severe and systematic censorship repressing free expression and enterprise.5 At this point, outlawed political and intellectual debate found an outlet in private gatherings such as Masonic lodges, salons, circles, clubs and literary evenings, i.e. in venues outside the direct control of the Empress and her court. Towards the end of the eighteenth century such informal gatherings began to play a leading role in Russia’s intellectual life, a process paving the way for the private cultural assemblies, associations and enterprises characteristic of the early nineteenth century. Moreover, after the liberal atmosphere of earlier times, the repressive policy of Catherine in the 1790s exacerbated both writers’ sense of estrangement from the court and their disaffection for absolutist rule. Such sentiments, which by the turn of the century were 5

Censorship in the late 1790s halved the number of books published in the preceding decade (see Marker 1985: 64 and 228-231). The case of Nikolai Novikov (1743-1818) encapsulates the influence of the liberal policies of Catherine on the expansion of the Russian book market, and its consequent decline following the suppression of public presses. Novikov’s Typographical Company (1784), together with a number of other editorial endeavours, increased dramatically the number of Russian books and journals. His activity was seriously curtailed by Catherine, who in 1792 ordered his imprisonment. The rising curve of printing and editorial enterprises was definitely put to an end by the revocation of the freedom of the press in 1796. However, the role played by Novikov in the formation of a modern publishing system in Russia was widely acknowledged by his contemporaries. See, for example, the enthusiastic appraisal of Novikov by Nikolai Karamzin in his article of 1802 “O knizhnoi torgovle i liubvi ko chteniiu v Rossii” in Karamzin 1982: 98-100 (98).

22

The socio-cultural context

felt by a significant segment of the educated, would be strengthened in the post-Decembrist period, when they became one of the distinctive features of Russia’s budding intelligentsia. Catherine’s son and successor Paul I (1796-1801) pushed to an extreme the restrictive policy pursued by his mother in her last years, establishing a reactionary regime which de facto paralysed cultural and literary activities.6 Following the depressing reign of Paul, the accession to the throne of his young son Alexander, who became emperor at twentyfour, represented a breath of fresh air for Russia. At the very beginning of his rule Alexander (partly influenced in his liberal outlook by his tutor, the Swiss Frédéderic César de Laharpe, a great admirer of Rousseau) promised to abolish serfdom, to introduce mass education and to establish a rational system of government. Such proposals were greeted with enthusiasm by Russian society at large and the intellectual elite in particular.7 The memoirist Filipp Vigel’ (1786-1856) encapsulates the expectations of freedom nurtured by many educated Russians after the despotic regime maintained by his predecessor: Once again Russia is entering a splendid new epoch, a fascinating new world […]. Everyone felt a kind of moral freedom. Everyone began to seem more well 8 disposed, their gait was more confident, their breathing freer.

Even the generally detached account of Robert Porter, an English traveller who visited Russia during the first years of Alexander’s reign, echoes the optimism widespread in Russia at the time: “The people groaned beneath his [Paul’s] yoke; and few if any

6

In his memoirs the German writer Kotzebue well describes the haphazard censorship criteria adopted by censors trying to divine the tsar’s wishes and, more generally, the atmosphere of widespread terror enveloping Russia during the brief reign of Paul I. Kotzebue 1802: II/240-254 and passim. 7 Raeff 1967: 395-396 and passim. 8 “Опять вступает Россия в новую блистательную эпоху, в новый мир, сначала столь очаровательный [...]. Все чувствовали какой-то нравственный простор. Взгляды сделались у всех умиротвореннее, поступь смелее, дыхание свободнее”. Vigel’ 1891-1893: I/177 and 180. Seized by the widespread enthusiasm for the new tsar, Vigel’ regarded the early part of his reign as superior even to that of the Semiramis of the North, Catherine II: “Но нет: даже и при ней не знали того чувства благосостояния, которым была объята вся Россия в первые шесть месяцев правления Александра. Ею управляла любовь, и водворялись в ней свобода и порядок”. Ibid.: I/180.

The socio-cultural context

23

tears followed him to his grave. How different is the aspect of the nation and its Sovereign at this moment!”9 The “beautiful beginning of the days of Alexander”, as Pushkin eloquently defined this period,10 was dotted with projects of reforms and progressive measures, some of which directly concerned authors and publishers. Only three weeks after Alexander had assumed the throne the repressive printing laws of the previous six years were abrogated, a move that (as had happened at the height of Catherine’s power) resulted in the advancement of intellectual life,11 the book market and the periodical press.12 In some cases Alexander’s plans of political reforms found a direct echo in contemporary works of prose, as in the case of the oriental tale, whose main representative, Aleksandr Benitskii, was directly involved in the works of the Commission for the Drafting of Laws.13 The tsar’s liberal orientation gradually faded after the Congress of Vienna of 1815, leaving most of his early projects of reform of the early days unaccomplished. The failure of this second Russian enlightenment masterminded by Alexander marked a definitive parting of ways between the government and the educated public now seeking a greater independence from the court’s directives. Even before 1815, however, in spite of the relaxed political atmosphere, the relationship between culture and the centre of power 9

Porter 1813: I/67. Paul’s reputation of being a harsh despot spread in Western Europe particularly after his death. Foreign commentators wrote numerous accounts describing the strict and unreasonable discipline imposed by Paul both in the army and in civil life. Often his excesses were attributed (by Englishmen in particular) to the faults inherent to the autocratic monarchy. James, for example, wrote that “Tsarist power does not require elaborate explanation: it is pure oriental despotism, which, in these days, labours hard to suppress the growing sentiment of European liberty”. James 1817: II/4-5. 10 A. Pushkin, “Pervoe poslanie k tsenzoru” in Zavodchikov: 50. 11 Scholars have often identified the beginning of the reign of Alexander as a key phase in the rapid development of Russian nineteenth-century thought. Berdiaev, in somewhat impressionistic terms, recognised the seminal role of a period which he defines as “coloured by the love of freedom and by efforts towards reforms [...]” and dominated “by Russian universalism, which had so determining an influence upon Russian spiritual culture in the nineteenth century. It was then that the Russian soul of the nineteenth century and its emotional life took shape”. Berdyaev 1947: 20-21. See also Raeff 1967: 560. 12 Albeit privately owned presses grew steadily after Alexander’s accession, Ruud calculates that by 1807 Russia had only 12 of them, against 54 owned by the state. Ruud 1982: 28. 13 On Benitskii see chapter III.1.

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The socio-cultural context

remained fundamentally ambiguous. Freedom of expression, which is an essential element for the full development of editorial and book market activities, continued to be at the mercy of the political climate; as history had demonstrated, a change in the tsar’s policy would immediately translate into stifling interference by the authorities appointed in publishing and book distribution.14 Early-nineteenthcentury authors – from Ivan Pnin and Vasilii Popugaev to Pushkin – were well aware of the threat of a possible veto coming from the tsar or his agents at any stage in the publishing process, an atmosphere of apprehension that loomed over all editorial and book market activities. This climate of uncertainty was made even worse by the lack of a censorship code or clear guidelines for censors.15 For example, in the early years of his reign, the tsar promulgated the first censorship law in Russia (1804) establishing, among other things, that prior to publication all manuscripts needed to be submitted to a commission appointed for the purpose at the Ministry of Education.16 By setting the operative rules for censorship, Alexander seemed to want to regulate the interference of the various bureaucratic bodies, if not his own, with the aim of raising the general level of knowledge. Yet, in the space of a few years, in 1811, the police were endowed with the additional power (besides that of punishing the authors, publishers and sellers of prohibited printed material) of acting as a censorship apparatus. These amendments added to the 1804 law resulted in constant rivalries between the two bodies, and made any attempt to publish a risky proposal.17 The situation was made even more uncertain by the fact that censors, authors and publishers alike could still be prosecuted after permission for publication was granted. As William Todd remarks: “the central problem was not censorship in itself [...] but the unpredictability, arbitrariness and vindictiveness of the government”, and of the individual censor, a chaotic situation which persisted throughout the nineteenth century.18 Authors were painfully aware that permission to print was in fact discretionary, depending on both a favourable political climate 14

Florinsky 1953: II/727. See Ramer 1982: 507 and Kufaev 1927: 44-49. 16 “Ustav o tsentsure (9 iuliia 1804)” set the basic principles of censorship (section I), functions of censorship committees (II), obligations of authors, translators, editors, typographers (section III). Extracts of the censorship regulations have recently been reprinted in Ilarionov 1999: 44-52. 17 See Vezirov 1965: 86. See also Saltz Jacobson 1975: xvi-xvii. 18 Todd 1986: 73. 15

The socio-cultural context

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and the whims of a particular censor. Ivan Pnin, for example, in an article entitled “Sochinitel’ i tsenzor” (“The Author and the Censor”, 1805), puts forth a scatting criticism of the arbitrariness of censorship. Written in the form of a dialogue between the two characters, Pnin’s piece bluntly exposes the senseless powers given to the censor and concludes by rejecting any limitation to the freedom of expression. Interestingly, he supports his critique on both ethical and aesthetic grounds. When the censor presents an abridged copy of the author’s work (appropriately called “Istina”, “The Truth”), the latter retorts: You, who have deprived my “Truth” of its soul, who have taken away all of its beauty, now you want my permission to disfigure it, to render it absurd? No, Mr Censor, your request is inhuman; am I guilty because you do not like my truth any 19 more than you understand it?

A few years later, towards the end of the Alexandrine epoch, Pushkin was to restate some of the arguments expressed by Pnin. In “Pervoe poslanie k tsenzoru” (“First Epistle to the Censor,” 1822), for instance, Pushkin discriminates between two categories of censors, praising the learned and liberal few (“He’s every writer’s friend, he’ll challenge the elite, / He’s prudent, firm and just, he’s tolerant, discreet”) and launching into a caustic attack against the ignorant and obtuse ones: What wouldst thou do with us, thou blockhead and thou coward? Where thou shouldst theorise, thou actest very forward; Not understanding us, thou prunest most things back; 20 According to whim, what’s white thou callest black.

The limits of Alexander’s liberal policy also emerged in another field of literary activity, the independent presses. Shortly after his ascension to the throne, in March 1801 and again in February 1802, 19 “Вы, отнимая душу у моей “Истины”, лишая ее всех красот, хотите, чтобы я согласился в угождение вам обезобразить ее, сделать ее нелепой? Нет, г. цензор, ваше требование бесчеловечно, виноват ли я, что истина моя вам не нравится, и вы не понимаете ее?” Pnin, “Sochinitel’ i tsenzor” in Smirnovskii 1902: 168. 20 “Он друг писателю, пред знатью не труслив, / Благоразумен, тверд, свободен, справедлив. / А ты, глупец и трус! Что делаешь ты с нами? Где должно б умствовать, ты хлопаешь глазами, / Не понимая нас, мараешь и дерешь: ты черным белое по прихоти зовешь”. Pushkin, “Pervoe poslanie k tsenzoru” in Zavodchikov: 51. English translation by Adrian Room in The Complete Works of Pushkin 2002: II/92-95 (93). The epigram circulated in manuscript copies until 1857 when it first appeared in print.

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The socio-cultural context

Alexander issued two edicts allowing the re-establishment of private printing enterprises.21 Following the blueprint of the decree issued by Catherine in 1786, the freedom of printing books and periodicals was granted anew, providing that “there was nothing in them contrary to the laws of God and the state”, otherwise the authorities were entitled to “not only confiscate the book, but to condemn the guilty part in accordance to the law”.22 In this case, as with the censorship law, the discretionary power of the authorities was guarded and the freedom of the press, although nominally granted, was in actual fact constrained within very narrow boundaries. It soon became apparent that the degree of freedom allowed to cultural activities depended on the political atmosphere, rather than on transparent legislation. However at this stage the educated few were still under the spell of the young, dashing tsar and his liberal entourage, believing their social and political aspirations were about to be reflected in Russia’s internal and international policy – a misplaced faith reminiscent of the short term and ambiguous idyll between intellectuals and Catherine the Great.23 Yet, the permissive climate of the 1800s and early 1810s meant that many censors were recruited from the intellectual milieu (e.g. academics and editors of and contributors to periodicals), an environment, by and large, sympathetic to authors.24 As a consequence, Russian writers for a time did enjoy relative autonomy and freedom to operate without political interference. The projects of reform and the loose censorship characterising the period contributed in no small part to a surge of literary activity at both amateur and professional level. The early reign of Alexander features thriving literary discussions and readings in the elegant salons of the capitals and provincial towns, the proliferation of literary groups and journals and a sharp growth in output, both quantitatively and qualitatively, of Russian fiction. Further support for literary activities independent of the court was provided by cultural institutions such as university associations, independent presses and specialised journals.25 21 The “Ob otmene zapreshcheniia vvozit’ iz-za granitsy knigi i muzykal’nye noty i o dozvolenii tipografiiam pechataniia knig” (Ilarionov 1999: 43) and the “Ukaz Aleksandra I Senatu o razreshenii chastnykh tipografii” (repr. in Vezirov 1965: 86). 22 Ibid. 23 See, for example, the telling case of Sumarokov’s relationship with Catherine and the political establishment discussed in Levitt 1999. 24 See Monas 1957: 130 and passim; Blakely 1993: 471. See also chapter III.1. 25 Education boomed under Alexander I with the creation of 6 universities, 3 lyceums, 57 gymnasia and 511 district schools, a phenomenon that contributed in no small part

The socio-cultural context

27

In the eyes of Russians who had had direct experience of the descending phase of Catherine’s enlightened autocracy and the gloomy years of Paul’s reign, the transformation was striking. In comparing the two epochs Aleksandr Labzin (1766-1824) writes: At that time, only one university press existed in the whole of Moscow and even that lay almost totally idle; book shops, or rather book stalls, could only be found on the Spasskii Bridge and new books were a rarity. Now, instead of having a single academic press here [in St. Petersburg] and the one belonging to the university in Moscow, see how many presses there are here and in other cities as well, look how 26 many book shops have appeared!

Thus, the beginning of Alexander’s reign right to the pivotal year 1812 did indeed epitomise those “wonderful beginnings” for Russian society and culture so clearly perceived by contemporaries. Literature benefited enormously from the liberal atmosphere of the time, first of all in material terms: the relaxed political atmosphere had made book publishing a lot easier, thus increasing the number of works of literature available on the Russian market. In terms of artistic aspirations, the liberalisation of gatherings and journals further encouraged prose writing and critical debates, two spheres of literary activity that were rapidly expanding in early-nineteenth-century Russia.

I.2 History and fiction: the impact of the Napoleonic wars on Russian letters As has been mentioned earlier, Napoleon’s attempted invasion of Russia, culminating in 1812, marked a watershed in Alexander’s political orientation.

to the expanding readership. The same cannot be said for other early projects of reform, such as the abolition of serfdom and the rationalisation of the government structure. See Saunders 1992: 75. 26 “Во всей Москве существовала одна только университетская типография, и та стояла почти без дела; книжные – не лавки, а лавочки были только на Спасском мосту; новые книги были редкостью. Сейчас, вместо одной академической типографии здесь [в Санкт-Петербурге] и университетской в Москве, мы имеем столько типографий и в других городах, и столько появилось книжных лавок!” Labzin 1818: 430-431. See also Karamzin’s observations in his “O knizhnoi torgovle i liubvi ko chteniiu v Rossii” in Karamzin 1848: III.

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Historians have variously explained Alexander’s increasing conservatism in the last decade of his reign. The tsar’s growing religious concerns, disillusionment with the feasibility of his numerous projects of reforms, and growing preoccupation with a foreign policy which diverted his attention from internal affairs, are all likely to have contributed to this change. After 1812, Russia’s central role on the European playing field was epitomised by the Congress of Vienna and the Holy Alliance promoted by Alexander. This signalled a change in focus from internal to international affairs, and, more generally, a transformation in the tsar’s political views. Earlier statements of intention for far-reaching changes in the structure of the Russian polity, such as placing legal limits to absolutism, became increasingly rare in the post-Napoleonic period,27 and reshuffles at the highest spheres of government sent clear signals of the altered political atmosphere. In 1812 the liberal Mikhail Speranskii, the most influential statesman of the early period, was dismissed from office and subsequently exiled; perhaps more alarmingly, his plans of reform were shelved for good. At the time of Speranskii’s fall, a man of opposite political beliefs, Aleksei Arakcheev, was rapidly climbing the ladder of Russian power.28 The influence of this ultra-conservative army officer reached its peak in 1815 when, as vice-president of the Committee of Ministers, count Arakcheev was de facto the most powerful man in the empire after the tsar. Arakchheev’s reputation is most commonly linked to the infamous project of forcing whole peasant communities to live in military colonies regulated by tight discipline.29 Arakcheev’s influence was so notorious that the whole of the post-Napoleonic age is often referred to as “arakcheevshchina,” a term symbolizing the atmosphere of reactionary repression closing over Russian society.30 In addition, after 1812 the government tightened censorship through the intervention of the Ministry of Police and the appointment of a series of conservative officials. The enlightened principle that censorship should be liberal in order for knowledge to advance in Russia, which until then had underpinned Alexander’s initiative in this 27

See Saunders 1992: 72; Pushkarev 1963: 3. Although the appointment of Arakcheev marks the beginning of this conservative phase, Alexander made liberal declarations as late as 1818. Egorov 1996: 81. 29 Under the personal backing of Alexander in between 1816 and 1821 the military colonies numbered as many as 750,000 male peasants and their families. 30 See Seton-Watson 1967: 109 and passim. 28

The socio-cultural context

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sphere, gave way to a more distrustful outlook on publishing as a channel of seditious ideas. Under the aegis of Admiral Shishkov, president of the Russian Academy and, from 1824, Minister of Public Education (a career culminating with the post of Chief Censor under Nicholas I), conservative views were swiftly translated into practice.31 Such a trend in the government hardly fulfilled the expectations of a considerable segment of Russian educated society and of Russian people at large. In particular, officials who had served abroad during the Napoleonic campaigns (including writers such as Konstantin Batiushkov and Sergei Glinka) had experienced European society and felt the painful contrast between life in Russia vis-à-vis the relatively free existence of their Western counterparts. During the victorious march of the troops across Europe, many officials became acquainted with ideas of Enlightenment as well as a lifestyle devoid of autocratic repression and the degrading institution of serfdom. Moreover, the bulk of the Russian army was made up of serf-soldiers who, in the course of the military campaigns, came to be viewed as human beings by their superiors, a change that would have an impact on their representation in Russian literature, starting from Denis Davydov’s Dnevnik partizanskikh deistvii 1812 goda (Diary of Partisans’ Deeds in the Year 1812) and culminating with Tolstoi’s Voina i mir (War and Peace, 1865-1869). Upon their return home after the victories of 1812 and 1814 such influential segments of Russian society felt that the time was ripe for dramatic reforms in the direction of a more liberal society and a more representative political system.32 The young generation of Russian writers of progressive leanings – A. Pushkin, A. Griboedov, A. Del’vig, V. Kiukhel’beker – spent their formative years in the midst of the Napoleonic wars when patriotic feelings were linked to hopes of substantial changes in the running of the country.33 The link between these feelings and the ensuing Decembrist uprising has been often remarked upon, not least by the insurgents themselves, the “children of 1812”.34 Arguably, such hopes were not confined to the upper echelon of society; the peasantry too expected a betterment of their lot after having sustained the patriotic war against foreign invaders and being openly praised by the Emperor himself.35 Well-to31

Cf. Ruud 1982: 51 and passim. Pushkarev 1963: 60. 33 See Lotman 1983: 5 and passim. 34 The expression is I. M. Murav’ev-Apostol’s, quoted in Bazanov 1953: 60. 35 See, for example, Alexander’s manifestos of 13 and 16 July 1812 quoted in Bazanov 1953: 64, f.n. 1. On peasants’ role in partisan resistance against Napoleon see Hartley 1991: 32-34. 32

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do women too were propelled by the historic events into roles previously considered a male dominion. In 1812 several women’s societies were founded to assist collateral victims of the war, among which the Women’s Patriotic Society was perhaps the most important. This type of philanthropic association brought women into public life, not just vicariously through print as before, but through contact with the state, in the form of its institutions, its funding, its officials and tsardom itself.36 Historical events merged with Alexander’s many projects of liberal reforms that had fuelled hopes of a wider political participation and turned sour following the tsar’s conservative u-turn after the war. Too many plans of reform had been discussed and too much change had been anticipated for the political debates to disappear altogether from social discourse. Instead, to some extent replicating a trend seen in the late reign of Catherine, such debates moved away from the government’s control into the private venues of salons, Masonic lodges and, increasingly, secret societies. This last type of gathering was quite new on the Russian scene and signals the shift by some intellectual circles from a generic disappointment with Alexander’s policy to active conspiracy. Starting from 1816, the year in which the first known secret society, Soiuz spaseniia (Union of Salvation), was established, groups nurturing precise political plans began to flourish in a trend which would eventually lead to the Decembrists’ failed coup of 1825. Thus, the reign of Alexander finally extinguished the hope that there existed a common ground between the intelligentsia and the tsar;37 by Pushkin’s time the idyll can be considered definitely over: the few holding the levers of power and progressive intellectuals had irrevocably parted ways. The effects of the Napoleonic campaigns on Russian society went far beyond the sphere of internal politics.38 Russia’s victories over the Grande Armée marked the peak of the country’s influence in the West to the extent that after 1812 the Russian Empire was for the first time in history taken to be Europe’s mightiest state. At home, military triumphs fed feelings of national pride that, in their turn, 36 Rosslyn 2004: 5. The first annual report of the Women’s Patriotic Society was published in the journal Syn otechestva in 1816. 37 For a discussion of the applicability of this term to the pre-Decembrist period see Riasanovsky, “The Emergence of the Russian Intelligentsia” in Stavrou 1983: 3-26 and Berdiaev 1947: 26-33. 38 See Wesling 2001.

The socio-cultural context

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stimulated a rediscovery of Russia’s own cultural and linguistic roots vis-à-vis those of her rivals.39 Russia’s fascination with her native traditions and past history was in itself a by-product of the rediscovery of national culture in contrast with the universalism of the age of the Enlightenment. However, it was through this process of romantic “nationalisation” that Russia found her own voice within the European context, moving in the span of only a few decades from a position of dependence on Western culture to intellectual equality. As a result, national and historical themes became popular in Russian music and painting. The aristocracy, until then oriented towards the West, now strove to Russianise its private and social life, as shown by the new fashion for traditional Russian dishes, crafts, interior design and rural recreations. Canvases on historical themes were commissioned by the wealthy, while folksongs, military marches and wartime patriotic music became all the rage with large segments of the public.40 The same wave of patriotism was reflected in journals of the 1805-1813 period, filled with high-spirited accounts of the campaigns under way, whilst Karamzin’s first eight volumes of his History of the Russian State sold like hot cakes in the bookshops of the capitals. If Russian culture, historic writing and journalism as a whole received a great boost by the momentous events, arguably it was literature that best expressed and channelled the patriotic feelings dominating the country in the post-war period. A wave of national pride at home combined with Romantic trends coming from the West in prompting the success of narratives centred on Russia’s past history. During and after the Napoleonic campaigns this topic rapidly spread across the whole of the generic spectrum, from odes to poems, from historical sketches to povesti and novels.41 Just as in the rest of Europe, where the Napoleonic wars fired the imagination of novelists, in Russia too the synergy of patriotic feelings and recent Western trends gave rise to a new genre: the novel with a contemporary historical flavour set against the background of the Napoleonic campaigns. Unfortunately, whilst Western European

39

See Lieven 1993: 174 and Dixon 1999: 168 and passim. On the fashion for folk motifs in early nineteenth-century Russian culture see Figes 2002: 104-105 and Stites 1998: 188-189. 41 On historical narratives see chapter V.1. 40

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works on the topic are well known, their Russian counterparts have generally escaped the attention of scholars.42 Within the group of novels appearing just after the first campaigns against Napoleon, the anonymous Prince V.-skii and Princess Shch-va, or To Die for the Glory of the Motherland, and The Russian Amazon43 stand out, providing evidence of the direct impact of the ongoing conflict against France on contemporary Russian fiction. These works represent a fascinating instance of the readiness with which novelists provided a voice for national feelings at times of great upheaval and change. Moreover, the “Napoleonic theme” not only occasioned a flurry of “historical” works such as the ones mentioned above, but affected the way such narratives were written. As Sorokine remarked, war had a liberating effect on literature as the urgency to represent contemporary historical events spurred authors to forgo established genres and literary styles. Authors dealing with the Russian past had invariably opted for the lofty style and archaic lexicon prescribed by classicism, even when they were staunch supporters of a middle style for fiction, a practice well exemplified by Karamzin’s Natal’ia, boiarskaia doch’ (Natal’ia, the Boyar’s Daughter, 1792) and especially Marfa Posadnitsa (Marfa the Mayoress, 1803).44 A lofty style in historical narratives was also adopted by P. L’vov in Khram slavy rossiiskikh geroev (Temple of the Glory of Russian Heroes, 1803), and by V. Narezhnyi in Predslava i Dobrina. Interestingly, narratives dealing with contemporary history present a rather different picture, for clearly novelists were searching for alternative means to describe the momentous events affecting Russia. Galvanised by the keen interest of readers in current events 42

Very few studies examine such works at any length, and even when they do (such as the otherwise valuable article by Arkhipova (see Arkhipova 1985: 39-56)) they tend to concentrate exclusively on the well known memoirs by Glinka and Bestuzhev. 43 The full titles of these works are: Kniaz’ V.-skii i Kniazhna Shch-va; ili: umeret’ za otechestvo slavno. Noveishee proisshestvie vo vremia kompanii frantsuzov s nemtsami i Rossiianami 1806 goda. Rossiiskoe sochinenie (Prince V.-skii and Princess Shch-va, or To Die for the Glory of the Motherland. The Latest Events Occurring During the Campaigns of the French against the Germans and Russians in the Year 1806. A Russian Work, 1807) and Russkaia Amazonka, ili geroiskaia liubov rossiianki. Otechestvennoe proisshestvie, sluchivsheesia v prodolzhenie poslednei protiv Frantsuzov kompanii v 1806 i 1807m godakh (The Russian Amazon, or the Heroic Love of a Russian Woman. A Patriotic Event in the Course of the Latest Campaign Against the French in the Years 1806 and 1807, 1809). For a critique of these two works see chapter V.1 and IV.4 respectively. 44 See Arkhipova 1985: 40 and passim.

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and influenced by first-person accounts of the conflict such as war diaries and letters from the front popular at the time, prose writers eschewed lofty tones prefering to harness the historical events in a fictional framework, to merge realistic description and adventurous plots, real characters and imaginary heroes. In short, such works not only represent a fascinating instance of the lively intersection between history and fiction – they also brought about a more realistic approach to contemporary history, introduced new plot patterns and narrative styles contributing to establish realistic trends in early-nineteenthcentury fiction. The year 1812 in many ways brought to maturity a number of cultural trends developing in the early years of Alexander. In the specific case of Russian belles lettres, patriotic feelings stemming from the victory over Napoleon and closer contacts with the West acted as a catalyst on literature in general and fiction in particular. Moreover, the effects of the liberal years of Alexander’s early rule combined with the uplifting atmosphere following the victory over France in creating an intellectual core progressively independent from the centre of power. By 1815, the year when Alexander presided over the Holy Alliance as “the policeman of Europe” and chose the ultraconservative Arakcheev as vice-president of the Committee of Ministers, it was too late to turn back the clock of Russia’s intellectual history. Russian authors, increasingly disillusioned with official policy, looked for new means to describe the momentous events affecting Russia and the feelings of hope and frustration characterising much of the country’s intellectual elite in the post-1812 period.

I.3 The seeds of professionalisation: book market and authorship The reign of Alexander is epitomised by the tension between the old conception of literature characteristic of the epoch of classicism and a new, more dynamic understanding of writing. This process of transition is reflected in all aspects of literary activity, ranging from the occupation of writing itself to the production and distribution of books. At the beginning of the century, publishing began to be recognised as a professional and possibly profitable enterprise, although reality was rarely that rosy for it was not unusual for enterprises related to the book market to go bankrupt. Yet the various

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phases of book production – the papermaking, printing, publishing and selling – were increasingly perceived as professional and potentially lucrative undertakings. In an 1811 issue of Russkii vestnik (The Russian Herald) for example, we read: Some reproach the booksellers for the dissemination of poor translations, but is it fair to do so? They are salesmen, not critics: they sell books for profit, not according to quality. For them books are, and ought to be, merely merchandise. 45 Booksellers will only demand merchandise that will sell.

Moreover, after the “publishing blackout” in the period from Catherine’s ukaz of 1796 outlawing private presses to the flood of liberticidal edicts issued by Paul, Alexander’s permissive cultural policy was instrumental in the revival of publishing activities. However at this stage the production of literature did not yet show the features of a truly professional undertaking. The small reading public, lack of a well-developed and articulated audience for literature and unpredictable censorship remained the main obstacles to the full affirmation of the professions linked to the book market.46 The various activities connected to the literary production – ranging from writing to editing and distribution – were unlikely to be profitable. Moreover, when compared to Western Europe, Russia’s book market appeared relatively underdeveloped. During the 1800-1805 period, for example, the average number of books published in Russia was 400 volumes per year and steadily increased to 585 by 1825.47 A more recent calculation has established that a total of almost 12,000 volumes came out during the age of Alexander alone, compared with the 9,920 volumes appearing in the 1725-1800 period. Such figures are matched by the growth of Russian printing presses both in the capitals (from 54 to 82), and in the provinces (from 31 to 80).48 The “Некоторые упрекают продавцов книг в распространении плохих переводов, но справедливо ли? Они не критики, а продавцы: они продают книги не по их достоинству, а по доходу; для них книга есть и должна быть только товаром. Книготорговцы продают тот товар, который приносит доход”. [Anon.], Russkii vestnik 1811: XIV/40-41. 46 For a thorough definition of the term “professionalisation” in connection with nineteenth-century Russian literature see Todd 1986: 1-10 and 45-105; Meynieux 1966a, 1966b. 47 Muratov 1931: 34-37. Kufaev gives considerably different data: for the years 18011805 he indicates an average of 143 books published per year (Kufaev 1927a: 51). A number of studies, however, reach estimates very similar to Muratov’s. See, for example, Shtorkh and Adelung 1810 and Zaitseva 1978: 191-192. 48 Berdnikov and Polonskaia 1997: 190. 45

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situation of paper manufacturing in early-nineteenth-century Russia provides a further explanation for the slow development of the Russian press industry in comparison to that of other European countries. By 1801 there were twenty-three paper mills in the Russian Empire (Alexander himself ordered the installation of several paper machines of the latest type in the Imperial paper mills at Peterhof) compared with the five hundred in Germany and the two hundred in Spain.49 Nikolai Karamzin, who was usually ready to stress any improvement in Russian intellectual life, had to admit that “our book market is not yet comparable with that of Germany, France or England”.50 A further obstacle to the development of a modern book market and to the professionalisation of literature was the highly hierarchic structure of early-nineteenth-century Russian society.51 In 1812, despite an overall population of 41 million, 96 per cent of Russian citizens were illiterate peasants (46% were serfs);52 less than 2 per cent belonged to the nobility, and approximately the same percentage was composed of the clergy and the middle layers of the population. Because of the low literacy level of the bulk of Russians, the demand for secular books in general and refined literature in particular was restricted to a small elite, mainly represented by the high society of Moscow and St. Petersburg.53 In Chuvstvitel’noe puteshestvie po

49 Although the amount of paper produced does not equal the overall amount of paper used, part of which was imported from the West, according to Hunter these data nevertheless give a good indication of the comparatively narrow circulation of printed materials at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Hunter 1978: 349, 485, 523 and passim. 50 “Наш рынок книг еще нельзя ровнять с немецким, французским или английским”. Karamzin, “O knizhnoi torgovle i liubvi ko chteniiu v Rossii” in Karamzin 1848: III/546-547. 51 A modern book market requires a well-organised network for book distribution, which in turn depends on the transport system, and more generally the level of industrialisation of the country. See Cipolla, “Literacy and the Industrial Revolution” in Cipolla 1969: 62-99 and Feather 1988. 52 Westwood 1993: 11 and 600. Four decades later the estimated adult illiteracy was still remarkably high, estimated at about ninety to ninety-five per cent in 1850, compared with forty-five to fifty per cent in Western Europe. 53 Iakovlev, for example, wrote: ““Богатые и обязавшиеся иметь библиотеки – их не много! – А гг. сочинители, журналисты, переводчики не разорятся на покупку книг. Бедные! Бедные книгопродавцы!... Но будет время [...], и у нас книжная торговля распространится, книгопродавцы и сочинители разбогатеют”. P. Iakovlev, Blagonamerennyi 1820 VI: 302-303. See also Starr, “Russian Art and Society, 1800-1850” in Stavrou 1983: 87-112 (91).

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Nevskomu prospektu (A Sentimental Journey Along the Nevskii Prospect) Pavel Iakovlev went to the core of the matter: Why doesn’t the book market expand? For example, why don’t we buy as many books as the Germans or the French? Surely not because we buy their books and they don’t buy ours? That may be a factor, but it is more likely due to the fact that 54 in Russia itself there are barely 1000 people who love reading.

This situation directly affected contemporary fiction in qualitative terms too, for cultivated authors were expected to satisfy the sophisticated taste and particular aesthetic requirements dictated by the cosmopolitan gentry. Moreover among the elite, reading, as well as writing, was perceived as a fashionable pastime, and literary works were commonly regarded as ornaments in the houses of the aristocracy. Several elements hint at the widespread conception of the book as a luxury item, such as the considerable number of expensive editions provided with elegant covers and the features of the ex-libris depicting the heraldic emblems of noble owners.55 Interestingly, even the font chosen and the graphic design of title pages of many books and journals reflect the taste of an extremely refined reading public. Editors and printers conformed to the same aesthetic standards that inspired the classical colonnades of the Admiralteistvo and the palaces of the nobility along the Fontanka,56 the Greek style of paintings hanging in the salons, and the “style Empire” dictating ladies’ fashion of the time.57 Furthermore, the reliance of a “Но почему эта [книжная] торговля не распространяется больше и больше? Например, почему мы не покупаем такое же количество книг как немцы и французы? Не потому ли, что мы покупаем их книги, а они наши не покупают? Может быть, еще и потому, что у нас в России еще не тысячи любителей чтения”. Pavel Iakovlev, “Chuvstvitel’noe puteshestvie po Nevskomu prospektu” in Blagonamerennyi 1820: VI/302. For a discussion of Iakovlev’s literary work see chapter IV. 2. 55 This trend will change in the 1850s when the raznochinnaia intelligentsiia began to represent a significant proportion of the reading public. See Kashutina, “Knizhnyi znak i russkii chitatel’ XVIII-pervoi poloviny XIX veka” in Zaitseva 1987: 122. 56 Kufaev 1927a: 74-75. Elsewhere Kufaev notes that whilst collecting valuable books was a phenomenon already noticeable in eighteenth-century Russia, it was only at the beginning of the nineteenth century that it acquired the features of a potentially lucrative and organized business. Indication of the increasing professional character of early nineteenth-century book-collecting is demonstrated by the appearance of bibliographies for bibliophiles. Kufaev 1927: 20-21. 57 See Vrangel’ 1908: 380-381; J. Kennedy, “The Neoclassical Ideal in Russian Sculpture” in Stavrou 1983: 200 and Vereshchagin 1908: 472-493. 54

The socio-cultural context

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considerable part of book production on high society readers is reflected in the concentration of the publishing and distributing enterprises in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the two cities that represented the hubs of aristocratic life. In Alexander’s times the secular book trade remained fundamentally an urban and cosmopolitan affair, as it had been under Catherine. 58 In his Vospominaniia (Memoirs) Aleksandr Smirdin, one of the leading booksellers of the time, was critical of the superficial attitude to literature held by noblemen and women of the time, lamenting that: “Only the fashion of owning a library in the houses of the aristocracy and the wealthy sustains the trade”.59 Aleksandr Labzin in his article “O chtenii knig” (“On the Reading of Books,” 1818) expressed a similar opinion and compared the fashion for literature to that for clothes: In aristocratic and wealthy homes, people only own books to keep up with the latest fashion […] they change their books as often as any other fashionable commodity; intellectuals are just as fickle: they want to choose books just as they 60 choose their hairstyle or their outfits – in the latest colours or patterns.

Such an elitist and often superficial view of literature combined with a penchant for foreign books, a preference resented by earlynineteenth-century authors and critics alike,61 and later referred to in ironic-bitter tones by Pushkin in Pikovaia dama (The Queen of Spades).62 58 In St. Petersburg, for example, the main bookshops were gathered around the elegant promenades frequented by the nobility. Fashionable knizhnie lavki were to be found on Nevskii prospekt, in the Gostinnyi dvor (as in the case of Glazunov’s and Plavil’shchikov’s) and along Sadovaia street. A. Zaitseva, “Novye materialy o russkikh knizhnykh lavkakh v St. Petersburge v kontse XVIII-nachale XIX veka” in Luppov 1980: 126-128. Notwithstanding the small, albeit growing, demand from provincial readers, by the end of the 1820s most of the vast Russian empire was still lagging behind the rapid development of publishing activities in the two major cities. Marker 1985: 180. 59 Aleksandr Smirdin, “Vospominaniia” in Kufaev 1927a: 88-89. See also SmirnovSokol’skii 1957. 60 “Торговлю поддерживала только мода иметь библиотеку в аристократических и богатых домах. […], книги меняют как модный товар; ученые также подвержены этой суетности: они выбирают книги подобно тому, как они выбирают новую прическу или новую одежду модного покроя и цвета”. A. Labzin, “O chtenii knig” in Galakhov 1894: 427. 61 See for instance A.F. Merzliakov, “Rassuzhdenie o rossiiskoi slovesnosti v nyneshnem ee sostoanii” in Frizman 1980a: 132. 62 A. Puskhkin, Pikovaia dama (1834), Chapter II.

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The experiences of four leading publishers – P. N. Beketov, S. I. Selivanovskii, P. A. Plavil’shchikov and Ivan Glazunov – further illustrate the ephemeral character of private enterprises in the book market sphere. In 1802 Beketov, a rich nobleman and patron of fine arts and literature, launched a printing and publishing house in Moscow, an enterprise burned down to ashes a decade later in the 1812 fire. Notwithstanding the intense activity of his press (over 100 editions were published, amongst them works by authors such as Kheraskov, Gnedich, Karamzin, Dmitriev and Zhukovskii) and of the adjoining bookshop, Beketov did not expect to make a profit out of such dealings. Rather he saw himself as a benefactor of the arts, regarding his publishing activities as an extension of his literary avocations. The social conditions and goals of Selivanovskii and Plavil’shchikov were quite different from those of Beketov. The first was a printer of serf origin who, quite exceptionally for the time, succeeded in setting up his own business after having served for a period as a printer’s apprentice. Aiming at establishing a professional and lucrative activity, Selivanovskii realised the limited profit a printing business alone could provide, a situation he tried to circumvent by setting up a publishing house. Plavil’shchikov, who was the son of a tradesman,63 represents a similar case of a multiple profession in the field. Although very active as an independent publisher (by the 1810s he was regarded as an important figure), Plavil’shchikov’s activities in the book market were quantitatively too small to be remunerative and so he relied more on a government commission for the management of the state-owned theatrical press than on his own free-lance venture.64 In an attempt to widen his clientele in 1815 Plavil’shchikov embarked on a third commercial activity, opening a bookstore with annexed reading room for his customers (the first of its kind in Russia). The bookshop cum reading room was a success and soon became one of the main literary venues of the capital.

63

Zaitseva indicates the rising number of booksellers coming from the merchant ranks as one of the main characteristics of the developing book trade during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Zaitseva 1980: 116-119. See also M. Fundaminskii, “Knigoprodavtsy Millery i nachalo chastnoi knizhnoi torgovli v S. Petersburge” in Zaitseva 1987: 139-142. 64 During the period 1807-1824 Plavil’shchikov published 227 volumes, i.e. an average of 12/13 books per year, with a peak of 26 volumes issued in 1817. See Muratov 1931: 44 and Grits, Trenin and Nikitin 1929: 51.

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Karamzin, an attentive observer of the changes that the Russian book market was undergoing, proudly remarked on the striking increase of bookstores in Moscow: “For the past 25 years there have only been two bookshops in Moscow and their sales came to less than 10 thousand rubles a year. Now there are twenty of them and all together they earn around 200,000 rubles a year”. 65 Although Karamzin’s figures were probably inflated by his eagerness to spot improvements, the market for books was indeed growing at a fast pace. In particular, the knizhnaia lavka began to fulfil an important social and intellectual function. Given the size of the readership, bookstores such as Plavil’shchikov’s represented a treasured meeting place for the budding intelligentsia in which to exchange opinions about literature in an informal setting.66 “Oh beloved bookshop!” – wrote Aleksandr Izmailov (somewhat ironically) – “Whenever one happens to go in, one finds men of letters within”.67 Similarly, in Iakovlev’s A Sentimental Journey Along the Nevskii Prospect the narrator, on entering a bookshop, exclaims: “The bookshop! There is no better place to spend one’s time; here gather the book lovers and the authors! We go there, choose a book – read and listen!” 68 The lively debates of the scarce but dedicated customers created a particularly close relationship between readers and dealers.69 “За последние 25 лет в Москве были только две книжные лавки, и их продажи едва достигали 10 тысяч рублей в год. Теперь их 20, и вместе они выручают около 200,000 рублей в год”. Karamzin, “O knizhnoi torgovle i liubvi ko chteniiu v Rossii” in Karamzin 1848: III/543. 66 As with clubs and coffee houses, the discussions held in bookshops had an unceremonious, informal character contrasting with the literary conversations in salons where the host/ess acted as moderator. See also section 2 of the present chapter. 67 “О лавка дорогая! В нее как ни прийдешь, всегда словесников найдешь!” A. Izmailov, Blagonamerennyi, XXIX (1824), 43. Private bookshops appeared in Russia during the second half of the eighteenth century (the first knizhnaia lavka of St. Petersburg was inaugurated in 1784). Until then the reader would resort to state book shops or purchase directly from the (mostly German) bookbinders. See Stolpianskii 1923: 109-120. 68 “Книжная лавка! [...] Нигде нельзя лучше провести время; сюда заходят любители чтения, сюда заходят … авторы! Войдем и мы, выберем какуюнибудь книгу – почитаем и послушаем!” P. Iakovlev, Blagonamerennyi, 1820: XV/143. See also pp. 144-146. 69 At the turn of the century book dealers and publishers were often directly involved in writing and discussing literature. Hence the broader function of literary centres performed by bookshops. On this see T. Kondakova, “Moskovskii tipograf i izdatel’ A.G. Reshetnikov” in Nemirovskii 1984; Zaitseva 1978: 194-195. 65

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The socio-cultural context

Sometimes such familiar liaisons encouraged booksellers to double as publishers and to tailor the book production to the taste of their customers, thus minimising the financial risks involved in such ventures. This was, for example, the alternative adopted by one of the most renowned and wealthy booksellers in St. Petersburg, Glazunov.70 The appearance of the most disparate titles in his publishing list – from children’s literature to atlases – testifies to the broadening interests of the early nineteenth-century reading public, as well as to Glazunov’s entrepreneurial flair which represented something quite new in Russia. Glazunov’s dynamic enterprise, although potentially very lucrative, was however frustrated by a book market too socially confined to allow a sizeable expansion, as a result of which over a period of forty years only 188 titles came out from his publishing house.71 Writing books – like printing, publishing and selling them, was not an established or professional activity as yet. Authorship was generally considered a leisure pursuit for noblemen, and the right of the author to be remunerated for his work was still a concept alien to the majority of Russians at the beginning of Alexander’s reign. As Porter observed in his travel account: Owing to the peculiar constitution of this empire, the arts and sciences are, in general, but secondary objects in the minds of the natives. Military glory is all their [the nobles] aim: and, if it chances to be united with the spontaneous growth of any milder genius, it is well; the possessor is pleased and his friends delighted; but no 72 fame accrues from classical endowments.

From a financial point of view the profit resulting from the publication of literary works was as a rule modest or non-existent, and surviving by one’s pen alone was a nearly impossible task for Russian authors.73 As a consequence, writers’ earnings depended on the 70

In the period 1800-1811 Glazunov owned as many as five bookshops in St. Petersburg, most of them at the Gostinnyi dvor or in the proximity of the Nevskii prospekt. See A. Zaitseva, “Novye materialy o Sanktpeterburgskom knigotorgovtse i izdatele I.P. Glazunove” in Luppov 1979: 78-79. 71 Muratov 1931: 46. 72 Porter 1813: 133. 73 The difficulties met by aspiring authors of the time are humorously described in Nikolai Brusilov’s Bednyi Leandr, ili avtor bez ritoriki (1803). For an account of Brusilov’s work, see chapter IV.5. Authors, especially when publishing for the first time, rarely ganed any financial return from the sale of their work. An exception appears to be that of the young Fedor Lubianovskii, who claimed that his travelogue Puteshestvie po Saksonii, Avstrii i Italii v 1800, 1801 i 1802 published in 1805 sold

The socio-cultural context

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concessions publishers made to them – usually in the form of a payment “in kind,” i.e. with books in exchange for original works74 – or, more often, on the occasional support granted by affluent patrons and by the tsar.75 Alexander, like his immediate predecessors, rewarded chosen authors either indirectly, allocating state posts, promotions and pensions through the Treasury, or directly with occasional presents.76 However, patronage by either the tsar or a highranking benefactor, no matter how generous they were, did not represent a secure – or unfettered – source of income. The lack of adequate remuneration in part explains why in the age of Alexander, as in Catherine’s time, the majority of writers sought stable employment, generally in the Army or in the Imperial bureaucracy.77 Of course a small number of writers could count on their personal wealth, and therefore were less constrained by financial considerations. The poor financial return, however, was not the sole obstacle. It may be argued that in a society where the overall majority of literati came from the gentry, and where the status of this class relied on state service, the author’s links with the state apparatus were as much psychological as financial. The deep-rooted conception that the nobleman’s self-worth was linked to his rank in the government, army

nearly 40,000 copies in the following year alone, leaving him with a profit of nearly 220,000 rubles; a statement frankly difficult to believe. Lubianovskii 1872: 203. 74 The same kind of honorarium was often given to translators, as, for example, in the case of the young Nikolai Karamzin and the poet Ivan Dmitriev, who in his Memoirs of 1823 observed: “Я отдавал свои переводы книготорговцам; они печатали их за асвои средства, а мне платили за них книгами по договоренности. Таким образом я завел порядочную русскую библиотеку”. Dmitriev 1974: 22. 75 Grits, Trenin and Nikitin 1929: 144-172. 76 Although it was unusual for the tsar to provide an adequate life pension, there were notable exceptions as in the case of Nikolai Karamzin (appointed by Alexander as court historiographer) and Nikolai Gnedich who, besides the help of patrons such as Count Stroganov, Prince Gagarin and Aleksandr Olenin, also received a pension from the tsar. Generally, however, Alexander provided subsidies in the form of appointments in the administration or in the army, or valuable presents. At the very beginning of his reign, Alexander showed an impressive generosity towards writers; in 1802 alone he distributed to Russian authors 160,000 rubles worth of presents. Meynieux 1966a: 81-82. 77 As we shall see, this was the case of the majority of the authors examined in this book, including Aleksandr Benitskii (III.1), Aleksandr Izmailov (III.4), Nikolai Brusilov (IV.5) and Fedor Lubianovskii (IV.6). Of course this was not an option for women authors who, when devoid of a personal source of income, could only hope for the support of individual patrons or government institutions.

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or at court in many ways prevented a professionalisation of writing.78 No matter in what esteem one’s literary achievements were held, literary activities were still perceived as a pastime that could be pursued in parallel to one’s career in the state service, without replacing it. Yet at the beginning of the century the recognition of literature as a profession in its own right was an issue amply debated in journals and literary circles, indicating that a change was imminent. For instance, a recurring complaint in writings and private correspondence of the first decades of the century was the lack of recognition for the authors’ role within a social milieu obsessed with mundane preoccupations. “Le siècle en général et notre pays en particulier n’est pas du tout littéraire” – wrote, for example, Dmitrii Buturlin to Aleksandr Olenin in 1809 – Un starshinstvo de huit jours et un petit avancement de grade qu’on escamotte per fas et nefas est bien plus important que toutes les collections in folios et mènent plus directement au but de chacun. Ainsi l’a voulu le Destin, et il faut des générations 79 pour faire prendre un autre pli aux cerveaux compatriotes.

Writers’ concern with their position in society found a public outlet in contemporary journals. Karamzin’s article “Otchego v Rossii malo avtorskikh talantov?” (“Why are There Few Writers of Talent in Russia?” 1802), Zhukovskii’s “Pisatel’ v obshchestve” (“The Writer in Society”, 1808), and Pushkin’s “Razgovor knigoprodavtsa s poetom” (“Conversation between a Bookseller and a Poet”, 1824), for example, chart these growing concerns with the status of literature and of the author in contemporary Russia. At the same time a sizeable proportion of writers continued to assert the uncommitted, non-professional nature of their work. Fedor Lubianovskii, to quote one of the numerous examples available, introduced his Puteshestvie po Saksonii, Avstrii i Italii v 1800, 1801 i 1802 (Journey through Saxony, Austria and Italy in 1800, 1801 and 1802, 1805) by stating that: “I was not born to be an author […] But the very thought that I am not an Author already encourages me to present my trifles to the public, they are written without any pretension to authorship but merely to pass the time”.80 78

See Levitt 1999. See also Lotman 1987: 15-16, and Gareth Jones 1998. “Dva pis’ma grafa Dmitriia Petrovicha Buturlina k Alekseiiu Nikolaevichu Oleninu (Belkino 10 Aout 1809)” Russkii arkhiv 1860: VII/1121. Italics in the original. 80 “Не рожден я быть писателем [...]. Но сама мысль, что я не Писатель, очень ободряет меня выйти на сцену со своими безделушками, написанными совсем 79

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In her novel of 1803 Elizaveta de S***, ili istoriia rossiianki (Elizaveta S***, or the Story of a Russian [Lady],) Natal’ia Golovkina similarly understates her literary undertakings. Golovkina fashions a typical rejection of professional intent in the sentimental style that involves a meek dedication to her husband and the avowedly “familiar” character of her work. Finally, in an attempt to pre-empt unfavourable criticism Golovkina affirms that: “Not being an Author, or desiring glory, I have no reason to fear the critics. This feeble attempt, the fruit of my solitude, is nothing less than the sincere product of my heart”.81 Such statements of unprofessionality, and such an openly understated and leisured take on works that were actually going into print seem undoubtedly odd to the twenty-first-century reader but were considered common practice at the time. The polarised views on literature seen above would not change significantly until well into Nicholas’ reign. In this respect Pushkin’s clear understanding of the commercial side of literary activity (“I write for myself, but publish for money” – “ia pishu dlia sebia, a pechataiu dlia deneg” – as he bluntly put it in a letter to Viazemskii in the early 1820s) will still be an exception in a society not yet prepared to consider writers as professional entities. However, by the end of Alexander’s age the figure of the professional writer had gained currency at least in the cultural milieu if not in society at large, while the persona of the amateur author was slowly but steadily eclipsing from view.82 To summarise, we can describe the Russian early nineteenthcentury book market as a field in rapid expansion in terms of volume of trade. Yet, due to the narrow readership, the inefficient distribution network and the political interference hovering over printing activities particularly after 1812, book-related enterprises remained hazardous не по-писательски, а только для времяпрепровождения”. Lubianovskii 1805: 5 (the italics are mine). 81 “Поскольку я не писатель, и я не желаю прославиться, у меня нет причин бояться критики. Эта слабая попытка, плод моего уединения, не представляет ничего другого как искреннюю дань сердца”. [N. Golovkina], Elizaveta De S***, ili istoriia rossiianki (M., 1803), [i]. On this issue see also chapter IV.3. 82 The development of an understanding of literary activity as a profession is reflected in the linguistic use of the terms lit(t)eratura, slovesnost’ and pisatel’, sochinitel’ and lit(t)erator. According to Meynieux, until 1800 there is no specific term of general use to designate literature in the modern sense of the word. The above quoted expression referred to scientific, religious and literary works. The age of Alexander is a landmark in this respect: the term lit(t)eratura is now applied exclusively to artistic texts. Meynieux 1957: 105-107 and passim.

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undertakings in this period. Such features of the book trade at the dawn of the nineteenth-century are intertwined with the prevailing views on authorship, an activity that was still largely perceived as unprofessional and the exclusive domain of members of the elite in their leisure time. Yet leading writers – from Karamzin to Zhukovskii, Batiushkov and Pushkin – were calling out for a professional approach to literature, an aspiration that will finally come true in the age of Alexander’s successor, Nicholas I (1825-1855).

I.4 The socio-cultural life of the gentry: salons, soirées, clubs and literary activity In the present section we describe the socio-cultural context in which literature was created and discussed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. As first highlighted by the Formalists, and subsequently by the Historicists and Neo-Historicists, a preliminary investigation of the so-called literaturnyi byt provides indispensable material for the analysis of literary evolution.83 The link between a text and its social and cultural context also underpins Lotman’s semiotic analysis of literature, for, as he observes, “the entire sum of historically determinate artistic codes that make a text meaningful is related to the sphere of extra-textual relations”.84 The relationship between literature and society is a methodological framework particularly fitting to investigate the early nineteenth century, a time when the educated, cosmopolitan and urban reading public had a clear, direct influence on literary norms, genres and styles of contemporary fiction.85 This section investigates in some detail the interaction between the gentry’s codes of societal behaviour, and the aesthetic criteria adopted by authors of prose in the prePushkin period.

83

See Tynianov 1967: 47; Idem, 1970: 110. Veeser 1989: 1-32; Hunter 1990: ix-xxiv, and Thomas 1991. 84 See Lotman 1977: 50. 85 Authors and publishers were concentrated in St. Petersburg and Moscow (albeit the provincial gentry avidly read and discussed literary works). Due to the thinness of cultural life in the provinces and the ebbing role of Moscow as a cultural centre after the 1812 fire, St. Petersburg played a key role in setting the standards of taste that were slavishly emulated in the rest of Russia. Shevyrev 1988: 99.

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As we have seen in the previous section, the first two decades of the century were characterised by a comparatively narrow – albeit rapidly growing – reading public still mostly confined to the upper strata of the Russian population. Not surprisingly given the high social and geographical concentration of literacy, the leading writers of the time tended to share the same social background and cultural milieu as their readers.86 A significant number of early nineteenth-century authors were nobles by birth (although frequently from the impoverished provincial gentry) and most of them shared, or aspired to, the same social and aesthetic values as their readers. The tight connection between the Russian social elite and literary activity was reinforced by the custom, dating back to the eighteenth century and intensified in the early nineteenth, of practising literature within family groups of the gentry. Historical factors contributed to tighten the social and cultural bond already existing between the educated reading public and the author. In Alexander’s time the gentry, who were no longer obliged to serve the state since the 1762 edict issued by Peter III (although the majority of them in fact did serve, in part out of well established habit, in part for financial need, in part for the status that only a government position could bring them), were a class at the peak of its privilege and potentially, if not always de facto, independent from the direct control of the tsar.87 Moreover, while for the best part of the eighteenth century social activities were well established in the official settings of the court and the residences of the influential members of government, from the late eighteenth century onwards this was not necessarily the case. By the early nineteenth century the institution of patronage had diminished in several of its aspects. The Academy and wealthy aristocrats no longer played an important part and contacts between writers and the government were not as direct as they had been in the eighteenth century. Gradually, the development of other institutions such as universities, journals and literary groups would reduce patronage and encourage writers to seek broader audiences, for profit,

86

As in the eighteenth century (e.g. Lomonosov, Fedor Emin, Mikhail Chulkov), there existed a minority of writers of non-noble origins (the raznochintsy of a later date), such as some of the members of the Free Society of Admirers of Literature, Science and the Arts (1801-1812; 1816-1825). On this society see chapter 2.I. 87 Westwood 1993: 11-13; Lovell 2004: 249-250.

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as well as for personal satisfaction, thus pre-empting the court’s role of sole sponsor and organiser of intellectual life in Russia.88 Such a transfer from the court to the gentry’s gatherings was brought about by a variety of factors, among which figure prominently the mounting disillusionment of the elites with the “liberal tsar” after 1812 and, more generally, the gentry’s changing approach to culture. Spurred by the post-Napoleonic reaction, the emancipation of cultural and literary life was a fast-moving process in Russia.89 The Decembrist rebellion and the grievous limitations imposed on cultural and literary freedom that followed made the gap between Russian political power and intellectual society finally unbridgeable.90 In the meantime gentry venues were viewed with increasing suspicion by the authorities until, after 1825, only strictly private groups such as literary salons and circles were tolerated, and even then under the strict control of the police. As S. Reisner points out, the preoccupation of the Third Section with apparently harmless salon life is indicative of the potential influence of these gatherings on Russian society.91 The impact of recent historical events merged with longstanding changes in Russia’s high culture begun with Alexander’s predecessors. For the best part of the eighteenth century nobles’ education had a utilitarian value (Peter the Great encouraged instruction as a service requirement). However, by the end of Catherine’s age, education was rapidly expanding and was increasingly seen not just as a means of advancement, but also as a mark of noble status,92 a trend which reached its peak with a decree of 1809 imposing educational requirements for access to the higher spheres of civil service. Arguably, in a society where – at least theoretically – anyone could attain nobility through service to the state, cultural attainments helped to create an esprit de corps: a 88

Marker 1985: 234. The decline of the lofty ode traditionally serving the purpose of eulogising the tsar has been interpreted as an intra-literary signal of this malaise. See Zhivov 1996: 428 and passim. 90 The Moscow salon of Zinaida Volkonskaia provides a good example of such political dissent. After her sister-in-law Mariia Volkonskaia had decided to follow her husband Sergei into exile in Siberia, Zinaida organised a musical evening in her honour in which Pushkin also took part. This event was perceived by both guests and authorities as an act of political opposition. 91 See Aronson and Reisner 1929 qnd 2001; Brodskii 1930: vii. 92 Children’s books and journals, for example, began to appear in the 1780s. Such specialised publications testify to the growing importance placed on education by the Russian gentry. On this issue see Iu. Lotman, “Zhenskii mir” in Lotman 1994: 62. 89

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psychological unity among the long term nobles vis-à-vis the parvenus.93 In other words, service to the state was increasingly seen as just one of the required attributes of noble status. It is not surprising perhaps that, given that culture sustained the gentry’s identity as a social group, the initiative of noblemen and noblewomen in this sphere grew accordingly. In the late eighteenth century cultural activities began to cluster around the more intimate settings of salons and clubs, venues now acquiring the additional function of hubs for intellectual debate. 94 By the end of Catherine’s age authors had acquired a relative independence from the court,95 and were attracted by the lively cultural and social activities taking place in gentry venues. Part recreational, part intellectual, such gatherings represented a middle phase between state patronage and writing as an independent and remunerative exercise. In this perspective, the intense literary activity occurring in gentry venues may be seen both as an offshoot of the improved status of literature with the Russian elite and of the relative independence of gentry culture from the centre of power. As a result, by Alexander’s time literature played an important part in the life of the Westernised gentry, a feature reflected in the curriculum of young noblemen and noblewomen. A good knowledge of the latest literary trends and some literary skills became an essential requirement not only within salons but also in the working environment, to the point that career advancements could depend on a degree of literary training and know-how. Various types of literary activity took place in gentry’s venues ranging from literary societies, to clubs and soirées. Societies, whose role in nineteenth-century intellectual life is hard to overemphasize, at this stage offered intimate settings where sincere (and intensely sentimental) friendship was exalted.96 Yet, the debates promoted by literary societies and circles were comparatively specialised and usually programmed in advance unlike discussions held in other types of gatherings. Literature was also a frequent – albeit not exclusive – topic of discussion in aristocratic clubs, venues which attracted a nonspecialised audience rather blasé about planned activity. Clubs 93

Tovrov 1987: 25-37. The sense of social belonging to the gentry’s circles was an essential, and lasting, element of the salon gathering. Even as late as the 1840s and 50s when raznochintsy authors emerged, the social criterion was still operating in salon reunions. See Brodskii 1930: vii. 95 See Garde 1996: 14. 96 See Raeff 1967. 94

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provided venues in which to exchange opinions about what was going on in literature and in the arts, as well as in other fields.97 Clubs played a particularly important social and cultural role in the capitals where they involved various layers of contemporary society. As Iakovlev wrote in his humorous travelogue quoted above: There are a number of clubs in St. Petersburg: the Angliiskii, Bol’shoi Tantsoval’nyi, Kupecheskii, Meshchanskii, Mal’enkii Tantsoval’nyi and Amerikanskii. The Angliiskii is frequented by functionaries and the wealthy; the Bol’shoi Tantsoval’nyi by mid-ranking people, by keen young players of Boston and Whist, and by thrifty old men; the very same people frequent the Meshchanskii with the addition of thousands of German craftsmen, whereas apprentices attend the Mal’enkii 98 Tantsoval’nyi.

Finally, the salons represented in some respects a middle position between the literary circles and the aristocratic clubs. Discussions about literature were generally organised in advance and held at regular intervals (often weekly), but their tone was as a rule lighter and less specialised than that of the societies. Even when serious literary activity took place (for example, during the Saturday gatherings at Prince Golitsyn’s in Moscow, where Aleksei Merzliakov read some of his critical essays),99 the general atmosphere of these assemblies was social rather than scholarly. Nevertheless, literary meetings held in salons frequently attracted a particular literary group and could thus mark the debut of a literary society. There were notable exceptions to this rule, such as A. N. Olenin’s salon in St. Petersburg where, during the first decades of the century, important authors such as Krylov, Ozerov, Shakhovskoi and Gnedich met. Unlike most literary venues of the time, Olenin’s house did not become the centre of a particular literary group, 97

Raeff 1984: 141. “В Петербурге есть несколько клубов: Английский, Большой танцевальный, Купеческий, Мещанский, Маленький танцевальный и Американский. В Английский ездят богатые и чиновники; в Большой танцевальный – люди среднего состояния, молодые любители бостона и виста и расчетливые старики; в Мещанский такой же народ, а также тысячи ремесленников-немцев; подмастерья же посещают Маленький танцевальный”. P. Iakovlev, Blagonamerennyi, XV (1820): 139-140. In Progulka v Akademiiu khudozhestv (1814), Batiushkov thus depicts the activity of the backward Starozhilov in a St. Petersburg club: “С какой целью он ходит в клуб десять лет подряд? Для того чтобы слушать, придумывать или распускать городский новости или газетные тайны, чтобы нещадно ругать все новое и прославлять любимую старину, пообедать и заснуть за чашкой кофе под стук шаров?” Batiushkov 1989: I: 81. 99 A.L. Zorin, “Merzliakov” in Nikolaev 1989-1999: IV/27-30 (28). 98

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notwithstanding the host being a classicist close to Shishkov’s circle. His salon remained one of the writers’ favourite places for open discussion, a neutral ground where the Olenins acted as mediators between the different literary parties of the time.100 Patterned on eighteenth-century French salons, the Russian equivalent was organised around a hostess – more rarely a host – who directed informal conversations and encouraged impromptu literary exploits. The relaxed atmosphere and friendly relationships among their cohorts, a sort of “democratic” informality typical of Russian salons, was well captured by an outsider, the English traveller John James: Madame is always at home, and as the company come uninvited, it is a chance whether the party will be large or small: but it differs in its very essence from the nature of formal assembly, and to whatever extent it may be swelled in the course of 101 the evening, still appears only as a domestic circle enlarged.

Yet, despite the easy-going demeanour sported by salon goers this was in fact a poise dictated by precise social – and cultural – codes. Salons, where leisure activities and literary discussions characteristically intermingled, also provide the clearest example of the close relationship between the aristocracy’s social, leisure and literary activities. Anna Kern, a noblewoman of the time immortalised by Pushkin, for example, thus describes the appeal of Olenin’s literary salon: “I truly enjoyed visiting the Olenins, for there we played a variety of amusing games and sometimes our literary celebrities joined in”.102 By Alexander’s time, polite society dictated the social behaviour of the writer in a number of ways, effectively directing his or her literary choices. Given the social proximity between authors and high society, most writers enjoyed a position of social and cultural equality with their immediate audience, sharing the same experiences and values. Moreover by the early nineteenth century reading was mostly a 100

See Georgievskii 1978; Timofeev 1983; Sakulin, 1908: 290; Annenkov 1985: 120121. 101 James 1817: II/3. 102 “Мне очень нравилось бывать в доме Олениных, потому что у них играли в разные занимательные игры, в которых иногда принимали участие наши литературные знаменитости”. [A.P. Kern], “Vospominaniia o Pushkine” in Annenkov 1874: 111.

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collective affair or, as Lotman puts it, a form of friendly interaction finding in the salon the perfect venue.103 Interestingly, the influence of salon discussions and readings extended to the way literature was produced, in that works were generally written to be read aloud at the gathering in the first place; friendly criticism voiced in such venues normally led the author to revise his or, more rarely, her work to reflect the audience’s feed-back. With parallels with eighteenth-century France, salons became the main arbiters of literary taste, exerting a far-reaching influence on literary production in Russia.104 Refined writers, who targeted high society as their designated audience, were not only expected to take an active part in salon life, but also to translate into their work the aesthetic principles governing such gatherings. Such tenets shaped the expectations of the reading public, the linguistic codes and even the field of representation for literature. In short, the values of salon society permeated contemporary literature at every level, from the understanding of writing as a leisured activity detached from commercial consideration, to the prescription of aesthetic tenets for works of literature often judged according to the same shifting taste that dictated society behaviour, to the choice of literary language.105 Polite conversations, the avowed sensitivity of salon ladies and the orientation towards the “feminine” governing salon life were being transferred into literary works. In this latter respect, the role of the hostess in early nineteenth-century salon culture was in fact far more significant than that of the amiable handmaid of a more eminent spouse. While in the second half of the eighteenth century women would only occasionally be directly involved in literary debates, by the beginning of the nineteenth century educated noblewomen were expected to take a leading role in the literary life of aristocratic circles.106 Ladies, whose albums were unavoidable resting-places for 103

Lotman 1983: 33. DeJean 1989. 105 Zhukovskii thus described this social environment: “Большой свет означает круг избранных [...], превосходящих других состоянием, образованностью, саном, происхождением; это республика, имеющая свои собстенные законы, покорная своему идеальному и каждую минуту произвольно сменяемому правителю – моде, где существует общее мнение, где царствует разборчивый вкус, где раздаются все награды, где происходит оценка и добродетелей и талантов”. “Pisatel’ v obshchestve” in Zhukovskii 1980: III/365-374 (365). 106 According to Lotman the home education received by noblewomen, although more superficial, was substantially similar to that of their male counterparts (Lotman, “Zhenskoe obrazovanie v XVIII-nachale XIX veka” in Lotman 1994: 75-89 (87)). See 104

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contemporary poems, would regularly lead intellectual conversation and encourage authors to participate in the literary discussions of the salons.107 Although in some respects the Russian situation is reminiscent of that of pre-Revolutionary France, the Russian salon was already marked by the idea that women could not operate as intellectual equals to men, and the most famous women of the era remain attractive ornaments, “muses,” rather than active writers.108 The image of the refined lady and its impact on literature went beyond the immediate boundaries of the salon, involving the whole of early nineteenth-century Russian high culture. The ideal of the gentlewoman, manifest in some degree in all spheres of the gentry’s social and cultural life,109 was most apparent in literature that male authors transformed in the main outlet for the “feminisation” tendency of Russian high society and culture. The exaltation of feminine values in literature is first of all provided by the editorial strategy of many contemporary journals saturated with endorsements of the “lady’s taste”. Moreover, ladies, allegedly representing the majority of the reading public,110 were openly targeted as the audience by a number of periodicals. Women’s journals with titles such as Mikhail Makarov’s Zhurnal dlia milykh (Journal for the Darlings, 1803),111 Damskii

also Natal’ia L. Pushkareva, “Russian Noblewomen’s Education in the Home as revealed in Late 18th- and Early 19th-Century Memoirs” in Rosslyn 2003: 111-128. 107 One example is S. A. Ponomareva who gathered in her salon major contemporary poets (as her album witnesses) and required her guests to follow the pattern of literary debate she chose. See also Pushkin’s humorous description of the albums of “provincial misses” in Evgenii Onegin, IV/XXVIII. 108 Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal and Mary Zirin, “Introduction: Russian Women Writers 1760-1992” in Ledkovsky, Rosenthal and Zirin 1994: xxix. On this issue see also ch. IV. 3. 109 Musical activity, for instance, is described using topoi of sentimental literature. See Shalikov’s Puteshestvie v Malorossiiu (1805): “there is nothing more touching than the languid sounds of a piano played by a woman in tears in those quiet and tender moments of the evening in a secluded chamber bathed in the pale light of the moon”. (Quoted in Richard Stites, “The Domestic Muse: Music at Home in the Twilight of Serfdom” in Wachtel 1998: 191-192). 110 Sakulin 1929: 211. 111 The salon audience addressed by Zhurnal dlia milykh (1804) is reflected both in the content (charades, rebuses, sentimental povesti) and in the pocket-size format and elegant cover. The journal enjoyed considerable success gaining in its only year of publication one hundred and sixty-eight subscriptions (Russkii vestnik, one of the major periodicals of the time reached its peak with seven hundred subscriptions). Smirnovskii 1902: 13 and passim. As late as the mid 1820s almanacs reflected their target audience in titles such as Moskovskii al’manakh dlia prekrasnogo pola na 1826 god or Venok grazii (1828).

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zhurnal (The Ladies’ Journal, 1806)112 and Shalikov’s Aglaia (18081812) proliferated.113 The noblewoman – or rather, the ideal formed of her within high society – acted at a profound level, influencing contemporary authors (male and female) in their choice of themes and stylistic and linguistic devices. Values generally associated with women and the diction of the Russian lady became media to create a new literature centred on feelings as a substitute for classical norms. Yet, as observed by C. Heyder and A. Rosenholm, “sentimentalism approved of women’s writing not for its own sake, but in the expectation of its sophisticating effect on (male) culture”.114 Outside the amateurish literary activity conducted in the gentry’s gatherings, within which the lady held a central position as coordinator of debates and “arbiter of taste”, women were not meant to play an active part in contemporary literary production. There were very few women authors active at the beginning of the century (Anna Bunina, Mariia Izvekova and Zinaida Volkonskaia are the most renowned exceptions), and even fewer of them were members of formal literary societies, or were engaged in literary criticism. Although sentimental literature dealt with the “affairs of the heart”, a traditionally feminine set of topics apparently tailor-made for a woman’s pen,115 in actual fact ladies were not expected to transcend the confines of the salon’s activity. Thus, whilst occupying a prominent social and literary position within leisured gatherings and representing a large section of the cultured reading public, educated noblewomen played the ancillary role of a literary prototype outside that limited sphere. The embodiment of polished taste and delicate sensibility, salon hostesses provided an ideal image for authors to transfer from salon life into literature. In other words, as Wendy Rosslyn has observed, in early nineteenth-century Russia the literary status held by the noblewoman, however high, was also nominal.116 112

This heading was later appropriated by Prince Shalikov for his new journal of the years 1823-1833. 113 See the opening article in the first issue of Moskovskii zritel’: “Хороший вкус и чистота слога, тонкая разборчивость литераторов и нежное чувство женщин будут одним из главных моего [Шаликова] внимания”. Cited in Smirnovskii 1902. See also Gitta Hammarberg, “Women, Critics and Women Critics in Early Russian Women’s Journals” in Rosslyn 2003: 187-208; Hammarberg 2001. 114 Caroline Heyder and Arja Rosenholm, “Feminization as Functionalization: the Presentation of Femininity by the Sentimentalist Man” in Rosslyn 2003: 51-71 (64). 115 See Poovey 1984: 37-38. 116 W. Rosslyn, “Conflicts over Gender and Status in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia: The Case of Anna Bunina “Padanie Faetona”” in Marsh 1996: 57 and passim.

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Within the exaltation of the feminine by sentimental writers, those features attributed to the woman of quality (“Natural simplicity, an innocent expression and domestic virtue,” as Vladimir Izmailov encapsulated them)118 shaped the image of the sentimental heroine119 and provided the standard for literary and linguistic excellence. In the specific case of prose writing, this dominating role of the ideal woman inaugurated the phenomenon defined by Uspenskii as the “feminization of language and literature”.120 From a stylistic viewpoint, high literature in general, and sentimental prose in particular were based on the linguistic usage and aesthetic taste of the salon’s lady; according to these standards any low expression, archaism or pedantry was rejected as bookish, graceless and therefore unworthy of ladies’ attention. As we will see in chapter II.3, ladies’ discourse provided the blueprint for the linguistic reform promoted by Karamzin and was adopted by a good number of early-nineteenthcentury authors. As remarked by Vinogradov, putting aside sentimental works, where the relationship between salon discourse See also Rosslyn 1996 and Rosslyn 1997; Vowles 1994 and Kelly 1994. See also R. Zernova, “Les femmes écrivains” in Etkind 1996: 675-678. 117 Harries 1994: 122 and passim. The influence of salon values and contemporary literature was mutual, an interaction particularly noticeable in the figure of the idealised woman. The idealised representation of the sentimental heroine was projected in its turn into the everyday life of the aristocracy. Compare for example Vladimir Izmailov’s glorification of women (“Милые, милые женщины! Где тот уголок на земле, который бы не освещался солнцем и не украшался вашими прелестями? В гуках ваших держава мира; в глазах – скипетр природы…” Puteshestvie v Poludennuiu Rossiiu v 1799 godu (Izmailov 1805: 68)) with the address to the lady in salons and private letters. The sentimental-style praise of noblewomen would occasionally reach excesses comparable to those of archsentimental authors. See, for example, the humorous incident related by Smirnovskii about Ivan Kiselev, a nobleman famous for his ‘exaggerated’ sentimental praise of ladies’ beauty: “Он начал восхищаться цветом ее лица, восхваляя его белизну, нежность и проч. Та все молчала и только улыбалась; но когда он сказал следующую фразу: “Вы только лилия, окруженная золотым, лучезарным сиянием!” бедная не выдержала. “Ах, Иван Кузьмич, – вскричала она: не можете представить себе, как вы нам всем надоели!” И ушла от докучливого кавалера”. Smirnovskii 1899-1904: I/12. 118 “Природная простота, невинность во взгляде, домашняя добродетель”. Izmailov 1805: 69. 119 Although in sentimental fiction the low-class (mainly peasant) heroine was generally preferred to one of high social standing, it may be argued that although of humble conditions, she shares the main traits (modesty, refinement, thoughtfulness) attributed to the lady. See chapter IV, in particular the examples provided in chapter IV 3. 120 Uspenskii 1985: 58.

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and prose language is obvious, such social jargon provided the prototype for much of contemporary literature.121 The language spoken in contemporary Russian salons was homogeneous in so far as it adhered to the criterion of refined taste embedded in the social activities and conduct of the gentry.122 However, the notion of iziashchnyi vkus (refined taste) itself was linked to fashion and therefore in constant flux. Moreover, even when focusing on salon speech within a narrow span of time we gauge it to have a fundamentally hybrid character, for the widespread use of French in the gentry’s conversation and private letters influenced both the syntactic structures and lexicon of this social dialect.123 In their turn hybrid features of salon discourse seeped into contemporary fiction. Although the vast majority of works in prose were written in Russian, interpolated French words and awkward Gallicisms were not unusual although authors as a whole strove to avoid such linguistic and stylistic slips. Iakob Galinkovskii, for example, voiced such concerns in a footnote to his novel Sidoniia: I tried as far as I could to avoid the foreign words we educated people cannot do without in conversation. I tried to think in Russian when writing my novel and if

121

Vinogradov 2000. See also W. Gareth Jones, “Russian Language as a Definer of Nobility” in Di Salvo and Hughes 1996: 293-298. 123 Vigel’, for example, wrote in his memoirs: “Последствия прежнего французского воспитания сильно у нас прослеживались: почти все мои знакомые не могли обходиться без французского языка”. Vigel’ 1891-1893: I/166. Karamzin’s reform of literary language, however, spurred the use of spoken Russian in high society: “В лучших обществах повсеместно употребляется французский язык” wrote Nikolai Brusilov in 1805 “редко когда дама из большого света имела понятие о русской словесности до времен Карамзина – он первый начал приятно писать и познакомил дорогих дам с русской словесностью”. (Brusilov 1990: I/23). See also the observations by Vladimir Izmailov: “Обстоятельства эпохи, в которую появился Карамзин, привели общества в Петербурге и Москве к утончению идей, искусств и образа жизни. Не было только языка, соответствующего тону разговора и обществу, новым понятиям века, новым нравам, легкая приятность которого могла бы победить в светских людях, и особенно в женщинах, непростительное предубеждение против русского языка. И он, наконец, мог бы получить достоинства лучших языков в Европе”. Quoted in Galakhov 1880: 119. See also Karamzin “Otchego v Rossii malo avtorskikh talantov?” in Karamzin 1982: 101-104 (102). See also Vinogradov, 2000: 195-211 and passim. As we will see, the excesses of the ‘gallicised’ education of young Russian nobles and the mania for all that came from France was abundantly criticised both in articles and in works of fiction. See chapters III.3 and IV.1. 122

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some unwieldy non-Russian expressions have crept in then they have most likely 124 done so against my will or according to our ingrained habit of turning to French.

From a generic viewpoint, salon genres (i.e. bouts-rimés, letters, album verses, madrigals)125 traditionally perceived as “feminine” at the beginning of the century gained the status of authentic literary forms. An article appearing in 1820, for example, maintains that: Albums have increased our taste for reading and writing – to be sure, our whim for literature. It has long been said that ladies alone can teach us how to speak and write pleasantly, that only their authentic, delicate taste can tempt us away from the odd and base language spoken by characters in Russian novels. […] Since albums first appeared, we have started to write better and more pleasantly, to express ourselves more freely and with more refinement, in a manner that resembles society 126 conversation more closely.

The minor genres promoted by sentimentalists offer a typical example in this respect. Works such as bouts-rimés (in which poems were composed to fit given rhymes), humorous epistles, album verse and other minor genres often entailed the collective participation of a group of friends and acquaintances gathering in a salon for a literary evening. Although such salon production can hardly be regarded as accomplished works, the influence of such “trifles” on serious sentimental genres should not be underestimated.127 124 “Я старался, по возможности, избегать иностранных слов, принятых, в основном, среди образованных людей, а также таких, без которых мы никогда не обходимся в наших разговорах. Сочиняя роман, я хотел думать по-русски, и если вкрадется сюда какое-нибудь не русское выражение, то это произойдет неосознанно или из-за нашей привычки обращаться к французскому языку”. Galinkovskii 1808: VI/354. As we will see in chapter II the widespread use of French as a blueprint for Russia’s literary language was increasingly regarded as an obstacle to literary development. 125 As Tynianov observed: “Салоны, разговоры милых женщин, альбомы – культивируют малую форму “безделицы”: ‘песни’, рондо, акростики, шарады, буриме и игры, превращаются в важные литературные явления”. Tynianov 1970: 111; see also Tynianov 1967: 41. 126 “Альбомы распространили среди нас вкус к чтению и письму – прихоти к литературе… и это понятно! … Давно говорили, что только женщины могут научить нас приятно говорить и писать; давно сказано, что только их правильный, тонкий вкус может заставить нас отвыкнуть от странного и низкого языка, которым говорят герои русских романов. [...] Со времени появления альбомов у нас начали писать лучше, приятнее; выражаться свободнее, приличнее, ближе к общепринятому разговорному языку”. [Ia], “O al’bomakh”, Blagonamerennyi 1820: II/374-375. 127 See Hammarberg 2002: 308-311.

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Domestic settings that allowed the author greater freedom to express his own feelings became the most popular type of gathering for sentimental authors to the extent that salons served as the vehicle for the language, style and ideology of sentimentalism. The salon functioned as an experimental laboratory for Nikolai Karamzin and his followers, as we will see in Chapter IV. Readers showed a predilection for these “minor” genres, and journals and almanacs responded to this demand by reserving a place for this type of literature,128 although it may be argued that the diffusion of such “intimate”, salon-like genres in contemporary periodicals demonstrates their amateurish character. Almanacs retained their salon-oriented character at least until the end of the reign, in that these pocket-size, elegant (karmannye knizhki) volumes hosting short pieces and poems were chiefly aimed at providing material for conversation and prototypes for album verses.129 This preference for “minor” forms shaped by typical salon genres provides further evidence of the close link between the gentry’s social gatherings and contemporary literary production during the reign of Alexander. In addition to the aesthetic function of salon life, the influence of aristocratic society on contemporary authors was further buttressed by the patronage system still operating at the beginning of the century. As we have seen, early-nineteenth-century authors were generally unable – and often unwilling – to live by their writing. They could, however, secure a degree of financial stability by undertaking a parallel profession (generally in the military or bureaucratic apparatus) that would leave them enough time for writing without denting their status. Alternatively, authors could attempt to obtain economic help from the tsar himself or from high-ranking nobles whose philanthropic act would bring to the patron public attention and esteem. The protection accorded by a rich patron did not necessarily entail direct financial help to the author. Wealthy aristocrats occasionally had the important role of introducing literati into the circles of the beau monde, a circumstance that was beneficial, if not essential, for the 128

The readership of literary journals included aristocrats, high officials, literary critics: a public sharing the literary values of polite society’s “conversational” language and taste we have discussed. 129 A. I. Reitblat, “Literaturnyi al’manach 1820-1830-kh gg. kak sotsiokul’turnaia forma” in Panov 1995-1996: 167-181 (168-169).

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130

actual publication of literary works. Evidence of the ties between authors and aristocratic patrons is provided by the dedications introducing a number of prose works. T. Roboli has argued that the dedication to a “benefactor of the arts” is a typical eighteenth-century feature, replaced in the early nineteenth century by dedications to the author’s friends.131 Arguably, however, such intimate dedications were found primarily in the works of sentimental writers.132 Far into Alexander’s epoch the title page or the first page of a number of prose works showed dedications to highplaced nobles, providing evidence that, although not as pervasive as in the age of Catherine, patronage relationships between nobles and writers were still commonplace. The dedication to princess Golitsyna in Pavel Sumarokov’s Puteshestvie po vsemu Krymu i Bessarabii v 1799 godu (Journey through all of the Crimea and Bessarabia in the Year 1799) provides a valuable illustration of the rhetoric of writer-patron relationships at the turn of the century. The author, aiming to distance himself from conventional expressions of gratitude, exposes the clichés common in contemporary dedications: Prominent and minor writers alike, and translators in particular, have set themselves the rule of dedicating their work to illustrious people; for this purpose they have introduced certain forms, they borrow words and expressions to praise people to 133 the heavens and to assure them, although not always sincerely, of their devotion.

At that point the author launches into a series of supposedly “iskrennii”, but in actual fact utterly conventional, eulogies of his female patron (“I shall be silent about the rare Qualities of Your soul, 130

See the hilarious description of the relationship between authors with high social aspiration and members of the gentry in A. Izmailov’s Evgenii ili pagubnye sledstviia durnogo vospitaniia i soobshchestva, in Izmailov 1890-1891: III/189-196. 131 See T. Roboli, “The Literature of Travel” in Eikhenbaum and Tynyanov 1985: 47. For a theoretical discussion of dedications and inscriptions see Genette 1997: 117143. 132 The fictionalised persona of the sensitive friend played an important function in sentimental fiction. In this respect, the intimate dedication is part and parcel of sentimental aesthetics. For a discussion of this literary trend in early- nineteenthcentury fiction see chapter IV.1. 133 “Крупные и мелкие писатели, и особенно переводчики, приняли за правило посвящать свои труды знаменитым людям и ввели для этого определенную форму, по которой они одним словом, одним выражением превозносят их до небес и уверяют их, хоть и не всегда искренне, в своей к ним преданности”. Sumarokov 1800: [1].

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I shall refrain from speaking of Your charitable deeds to family...”).134 Sumarokov’s skilful adulation (albeit voicing criticism towards the customary panegyrics, his dedication is in fact the ultimate act of flattery) is suggestive of the privileged relationships occurring between a number of aristocratic families and contemporary authors. Women writers represent a somewhat different case. Whilst it could be argued that apologies about playing down one’s talent are a feature of both male and female dedications and introductions, the argument put forward by women in these paratexts is usually based on gendered assumptions.135 As Madelyn Gutwirth observes in regard to eighteenth-century France, each woman who took up the pen was compelled to elaborate a defence, be it that her work was an innocent use of leisure hours, or the use of a talent discovered by merest chance, or that, grandly but unselfishly, it will result in the improvement of readers.136 In earlynineteenth-century Russia the first of these defensive strategies prevails, hence the widespread cliché of writing as a pastime, in the case of women authors, acquires specific gendered connotations.137 With the notable exception of the self-confident and financially independent Volkonskaia,138 dedications and introductions to works authored by women were devised to reassure the reader on their primary role as mothers/wives/daughters. In sum, salons, circles, clubs, dinners, even balls (!) functioned as the real literary laboratory of high poetry and fiction: there the writer met his public, his patrons together with the critics and the potential publishers of his works, and there he read aloud, modified, and sometimes even created his works.139 As Todd remarks: “Я умолчу о Ваших редких душевных качествах, не стану говорить о Ваших благих делах для моей семьи.”. Ibid.: [2]. 135 Sometimes “defensive strategies” transpire from the title, as in M. Gladkova’s 15ti dnevnoe puteshestvie 15-ti letneiu, pisannoe v ugozhdenie roditeliu i posviashchaemoe 15-ti letnemu drugu (1810). 136 Gutwirth 1978: 19. 137 See, for example, the case of Mariia Izvekova investigated in chapter IV.3. 138 On Volkonskaia see chapter III.2. 139 The fundamental role played by salons and other aristocratic gatherings at the beginning of the century (which, following Eikhenbaum’s terminology, need to be regarded as authentic literaturnye fakty) has been unjustly ignored in most studies on the period. A few, but significant, exceptions are the pioneering book by Aronson and Reiser – critics belonging to the Formalist circle – (Aronson and Reiser 1929; recently reprinted: Spb.: Akademicheskii proekt, 2001), and more recent works by V. Vatsuro and M. Gillel’son (Vatsuro and Gillel’son 1986), together with the above quoted study by Todd (Todd 1986). 134

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The cultural practices of the early nineteenth century aestheticised the everyday life of the Westernised gentry and, concomitantly, brought the matter and manner of this everyday life into literature. Social gatherings became aesthetic forms, 140 and literary patterns served as models for behaviour and its interpretation.

The influence exerted by gentry gatherings on contemporary literary activity, the role played by the noblewoman, the impact of her behaviour and speech style on the shaping of contemporary fiction and the patronage relationship linking an author to a rich benefactor, are evidence of the close relationships between the gentry’s aesthetic values, their understanding of literary activity and the production of contemporary prose. We have mentioned how salons represent a middle phase between a patronage system and writing as an independent or semiindependent exercise according to the constraints imposed by censorship practices. But how was literature perceived in the context of the social life of the aristocracy at the turn of the century? Did literature simply serve as a form of entertainment in the salons of the capital, as a component of the range of social skills required from members of the Russian elite? In other words, was literature still perceived solely as a leisure occupation? This question, which is central to a definition of literature in the period examined in this book, does not have a single answer. The age of Alexander is a borderline period of Russian literature where two different conceptions of writing – as a pastime and as a professional activity – often coexist and influence each other, as illustrated by the case of gentry venues. A sense of unease at the pressure exerted by salon culture and a questioning of literature as a leisure occupation started to emerge at the beginning of the century, even with authors who did explicitly advocate a “salon training” for writers. Karamzin, for example, underscores the need for the author to interact with high society, for it would otherwise be difficult to “form the author’s taste no matter how learned he may be”,141 a position echoed in Konstantin Batiushkov’s “Rech’ o vliianii legkoi poezii na iazyk” (“A Discourse on the Influence of Light Verse on Language”, 1816). In this inaugural speech at the Society of Admirers of Russian 140

Todd 1986: 7. N. Karamzin, “Otchego v Rossii malo avtorskikh talantov?” in Karamzin 1982: 101-104 (103). 141

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Literature delivered in 1815 Batiushkov defended the role of salon culture, which in his view had taught poets “to fathom the secret play of passions, to observe manners […], and to speak clearly, lightly and pleasantly”.142 Similarly Zhukovskii indicates that participation in salon activities is conducive to literary creation, for “[the writer] learns to think swiftly in society and it eventually teaches him to adopt the art of embellishing his most profound thoughts with simple and pleasant words”.143 Yet Karamzin, Batiushkov and Zhukovskii elsewhere expressed unease at the concept of writing as a salon activity, a concept clashing with the sentimental ideal of the locus amoenus, i.e. of a quiet existence in a natural environment acting as a source of aesthetic inspiration and ethical values vis-à-vis the artificial and immoral life of the town. Although early-nineteenth-century writers often opted for the country estate to concentrate on literary creation and discussions,144 the ideal of the retreat into the bosom of nature and a sense of despising the vanities of the world needs to be taken as a more general signal of a cultural and philosophical mood rather than in a literal sense (both Karamzin and Zhukovskii remained active players in the literary and political debates); rather, as Thomas Newlin suggests, it reveals the disillusionment with the utopian ideals of the Enlightenment leading to the revaluation of private life and the interiorisation of ethical principles.145 Such ambivalence between the private and the social sphere emerges later on in two of the articles quoted above, for example, where Zhukovskii argues that literati need to dedicate time to the retired life of study (“in solitude the writer’s thoughts grow deeper”), a concept echoed by Karamzin, for whom an author requires “constant labour”, “ten or twenty years of study”, and to live in isolation.146 Obviously, isolation and erudition had little to do with the values of salon society. The gradual affirmation of romantic trends further affected the perceived relationship between author and society, both in its narrow 142

Quoted in Terras 1985: 42. “В обществе он учится быстро думать, и, наконец, заимствует у него искусство украшать самые глубокие мысли легкими и приятными выражениями”. Zhukovskii, “Pisatel’ v obshchestve” in Zhukovskii 1980: III/365374 (369). 144 See Roosevelt 1995: 291 and passim. 145 Newlin 2001: 97-98. 146 N. Karamzin, “Otchego v Rossii malo avtorskikh talantov?” in Karamzin 1982: 101-104; Zhukovskii, “Pisatel’ v obshchestve” in Zhukovskii 1980: III/365-374. 143

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and its more general sense. For authors such as Batiushkov, the choice between salon and study eventually loses its problematic features. Later in the same year of his speech at the Society of Admirers of Russian Literature Batiushkov wrote “Nechto o poete i o poezii” (“Something about the Poet and Poetry,” 1815) in which has no qualms in urging authors to remove themselves from the allure of society: I wish – and let them call my desire strange! – I wish the poet could be prescribed a special way of life, a poetic diet; in a word, that the life of the poet could become a science […] The first rule of this scientific discipline should be: live as you write, and write as you live […] So then, withdraw from society and surround 147 yourself with nature.

With Pushkin’s generation, when the cultural function of the salon was nearly exhausted, the irreconcilable differences between salon literature and writing as a profession, independent from and even antagonistic to the ethos of the beau monde, finally surfaced. In Evgenii Onegin, for instance, the poet vents all his vexation with literature viewed as a salon exercise: Whenever dazzling ladies proffer Their quartos to be signed by me, I tremble with malicious glee; My soul cries out and longs to offer An epigram of cunning spite – 148 But madrigals they’ll have you write!

Although himself an active participant in salon life, Pushkin rejects the criterion of “elegant taste” as a kind of censorship, just as

“Я хочу – пускай мое желание назовут странным! – хочу, чтобы поэту предписали особый образ жизни, поэтическую диетику; одним словом, чтобы из жизни стихотворца сделали науку [...]. Первое правило этой науки должно быть: живи как пишешь, и пиши как живешь [...]. Итак, удались от общества, окружи себя природой”. K. Batiushkov, “Nechto o poete i o poezii” (1816) in Batiushkov 1989: I/41. Italics in the original. See also his “Opyty v proze” (1810) in Ibid.: 266-271. 148 Когда блистательная дама / Мне свой in-quarto подает, / И дрожь и злость меня берет, / И шевелится эпиграмма / Во глубине моей души, / А мадригалы им пиши! A. Pushkin, Evgenii Onegin, IV/XXX (English translation by James Falen and Roger Clarke in Pushkin 1999-2002: IV/113). 147

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tyrannical as the tsar’s own, even if more elusive.149 Thus Pushkin, Griboedov and many authors of their generation challenged the required salon taste, superficiality and bon ton as aesthetic tenets for serious literature. As we have seen, in the age of Alexander the social venues of the gentry represented a mixed blessing for the budding literati. Although they propelled literature to the forefront of Russia’s high culture, they also exercised a tyrannical pressure on the writer’s social conduct and aesthetic choices that was particularly noticeable after the events of 1812. By the end of the reign such gatherings had exhausted their literary function and were hampering, rather than encouraging, writers’ creative efforts. The constraints salon culture imposed on literature were, however, already surfacing during the borderline period 1801-1825, an age in which salon literature prospered side by side with a more specialised approach to writing. It was not long before the salon had lost its literary function, a role taken on by the editorial offices of the so-called thick journals and literary almanacs. This latter type of publication, which in the previous two decades had been at the heart of salon production, by the late 1820s had shed its amateurish features to promote a professional take on literature and to provide a source of income for writers and aspiring authors.150 In the reign of Nicholas, almanacs and thick journals finally cemented a new relationship between the author and his or her wider public, now operating on trade principles rather than on salon society’s assumptions and tastes.

149

For a discussion of the various forms of censorship in Russia see Monas 1989: 722. 150 Reitblat 1995-1996: 177-178.

Chapter II

Literary circles, periodicals and the debate over prose As we have seen, the reign of Alexander marked a rapid growth of cultural and literary activities. Within such a congenial age for writing, literary societies played a fundamental role by stimulating and providing an outlet for lively literary debates of the age. Such literary institutions were particularly beneficial to authors of prose, providing a dynamic environment in which authors were encouraged to examine and try out a wide range of narrative genres and stylistic registers. Whilst the results of such intense experimentations will be investigated further on, the present chapter is concerned with the modality of literary activities held in early nineteenth-century societies, and the mechanisms by which these quasi-professional gatherings stimulated contemporary fiction and promoted its reception. Literary societies proliferated at an unprecedented rate during the reign of Alexander I, soon positioning themselves at the heart of serious literary undertakings vis-à-vis the more leisured approach characterising the salon.1 Their influence was not limited to the literary field, for literary societies were actually beginning to act as a magnet for the educated and to encompass the whole of Russia’s intellectual life.2 As we will see in the first section of this chapter, however, such institutions played a particularly important role in the literary life of the country to the extent that the vast majority of men of letters were at some stage in their career attached to a literary group. Societies’ members included both authors and critics, although at this stage creative writing and its assessment were not necessarily separate domains as authors often doubled as critics.

1 2

Hollingsworth 1974: 23. Aronson and Reisner 1929: 75-77.

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Societies played a crucial role in furthering the professionalisation process at a time when writing was still perceived as an essentially leisured pursuit, for the more specialised and committed approach to writing characterising the societies opened the path to the incipient professionalism of creative and critical writing alike. In the early years of Alexander’s reign, however, such an approach to literature was in its early stages. Men of letters and their readers generally belonged to the same social milieu, forming a cultural elite that shared a similar upbringing, reading and aesthetic tastes. Readers, critics and writers were often united by bonds of friendship, or at least acquaintance, and their frequent social intercourse in the drawing rooms of the capitals and provinces engendered informal exchanges about literature. In the narrow cultured milieu of early nineteenth-century Russia this intimate environment had its advantages in that it provided writers with both a sense of belonging and an immediate audience for their work. Towards the end of Alexander’s reign, when such close bonds between authors and readers proved increasingly claustrophobic, writers resorted to literary societies and journals as more independent venues for their activity. In the second section of this chapter we investigate the role played by these literary institutions in shaping the main critical positions on prose fiction. In the age of Alexander the take on narrative genres per se was almost without exception doubtful if not outright negative, a stance that dated back to the age of classicism. However, though few and far between, positive reviews and articles on fiction appearing in journals of the time planted the seeds of the enormous prestige of Russian fiction in the later nineteenth century. In the wake of the patriotic feelings aroused by the Napoleonic wars a critical debate was under way as to the form that Russian literary language should take, an issue of high resonance for it involved the topical question of Russia’s national identity in relation to the West. As we will see in section 3, at the core of the matter lay the choice of whether to revert to the presumed Old Slavonic roots of Russian or whether to look at foreign languages as models for this reform, two opposite stands epitomised by the major literary societies of the time, Beseda and Arzamas. The literary language question raging in the Russia of the 1810s had an effect on contemporary authors of prose, at least until the Western-oriented views of Arzamas finally prevailed, in a process

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leading to the elegant, clear norms of Russian literary language established by Pushkin. In Alexander’s times, however, whilst the direction Russian literature was about to take was not yet clear, tension between old Slavonic traditions and alien linguistic models created a thriving terrain for literature. Diverging views confronted each other both in critical writing and via literary works, becoming a sub-text for novels and stories, comedies and epigrams, poems and drama. In other words, the battle for the future of the Russian literary language was fought not just in the arena of literary criticism, but in literary works themselves that were employed as the most effective test bench to demonstrate what Russian literary language should be like.

II.1 Literary groups and journals in the early nineteenth century In the memoirs and correspondence written at the beginning of the century, literary gatherings are referred to in a number of ways, e.g. kruzhki, obshchestva, sobraniia, vechera, skhodki and domashnie chteniia.3 Such assemblies may be classified into two major groups, according to the degree of organisation and specialisation of their activities. As we have seen, literary discussions held during soirées at gentry venues (sobraniia, vechera, skhodki, domashnie chteniia) were generally characterised by their episodic and unprofessional character.4 By contrast, the regular literary meetings held by circles and societies (kruzhki and obshchestva) were distinguished by a new, more committed approach to literature.5 In the course of Alexander’s reign the debates held in the semi-professional environment of the societies supplanted the literary conversation of salons and other informal gatherings as the primary influence on literary activity, becoming by the 1820s the driving force and catalyst for change in Russian literary life.6 3

For a list of the major literary societies active during the 1800s to 1820s see the appendix at the end of this chapter. 4 See chapter I.2. 5 See Aronson and Reisner 1929: 15-83. 6 Raeff 1967: 584.

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In early nineteenth-century Russia, literary societies often began as private assemblies linked by bonds of friendship or even kinship (as, for example, in the case of the three Turgenev brothers and their father),7 and convening in the home of one of the members.8 However, in direct contrast to salon gatherings, and possibly in response to the leisured approach adopted there, societies observed a high degree of formality, as evidenced by the statutes drafted, the minutes taken and the careful membership selection procedures.9 This self-regulatory aspect of early nineteenth-century literary societies reflects the determination of a number of literati to start addressing literature in a professional manner and within a specialised environment. Such semi-professional organisations fulfilled numerous functions within contemporary literary production and literary criticism. Firstly, by strengthening the members’ sense of belonging to a professional body, societies provided psychological support to young authors struggling for social recognition. As Aleksei Merzliakov noted in describing the activity of the Druzheskoe literaturnoe obshchestvo (Society of Literary Friendship):10 “Young people, united by acquaintance or friendship wrote, translated, discussed their work, in this way perfecting themselves on the difficult path of literature and taste”.11 Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, literary societies functioned as a catalyst in the development of literary criticism. The fervid discussions about literature held in these venues would help refine the critical argument within the societies before reaching a 7

Saburov 1939. See also chapter V.2. This was, for example, the case of Beseda and of the Druzheskoe literaturnoe obshchestvo (officially recognised in 1801, but meeting informally in Voeikov’s house since spring 1800). The few members and the personal relations linking them, together with the short life and vague programme of most of the circles, characterise the early stage of the professionalisation process. 9 Arguably Masonic lodges present in Russia provided ready-made organisational structures for more formal literary associations. Altshuller 1992: 112. 10 As we will see in further detail in chapter V, the Druzheskoe literaturnoe obshchestvo was set up by a group of students and ex-students of Moscow University and the attached pansion linked by familial (Andrei and Aleksandr Turgenev) or friendship ties (V. Zhukovskii, M. Kaisarov, A. Merzliakov, A. Voeikov), as indicated by the name of the society itself. Their activity was characterised by enthusiastic, albeit often erratic, commitment to literary undertakings. Numerous critical projects were pursued only to a degree, partly due to the short life of the society, which lasted only six months. Brodskii: 109-110. 11 “Молодые люди, связанные знакомством либо дружбой, писали, переводили, обсуждали свои переводы и сочинения и таким образом совершенствовали себя на трудном пути словесности и вкуса”. Quoted in Iezuitova 1981: 36. 8

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wider audience in the form of articles and reviews, thus amplifying the ideas first aired within the group and stimulating further critical responses. While the prose question as such will be examined further on, it is at this stage worthwhile to emphasise the societies’ role as a medium for critical discourse through the publications edited or coedited by their members. Virtually all these associations established their own journals or almanacs12 (in which appeared the proceedings of the society’s meetings and members’ work), as a result of which the majority of early nineteenth-century literary publications were founded by, or linked to, one of these organisations.13 The one-man enterprises typical of the eighteenth century did not disappear altogether, as in the case of Prince Shalikov’s Damskii zhurnal (The Ladies’ Journal) and Petr Makarov’s Moskovskii Merkurii (The Moscow Mercury).14 Yet even when the journal was a one man job, it tended to be more wide-ranging in content than its eighteenth-century predecessors and to maintain close links with a literary organisation. The Vol’noe obshchestvo liubitelei slovesnosti, nauk i khudozhestv (Free Society of Admirers of Literature, Sciences, and Arts, 1801-1812; 1816-1825) is a case in point.15 One of the main associations of the time, the progressive Free Society gathered a number of writers mostly of non-noble origins (K. Batiushkov, I. Pnin, P. Popugaev, I. Born, A. Vostokov, A. Izmailov, N. Ostolopov, N. Brusilov et al.). Their selected poems appeared in the one-issue almanac Svitok muz (The Muses’ Scroll, 1803) whilst their critical views were made public via the Trudy obshchestva liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti (Proceedings of the Free Society of Admirers of Literature, Sciences and Arts) and the Periodicheskie izdaniia of 1804.16 In

12 The main early nineteenth-century almanacs (Taliia of 1801, Svitok muz of 1802, and Utrenniaia zaria of 1808) followed the example set by Karamzin, the editor of the first Russian almanacs: Aglaia (1794-1795) and Aonidy (1796). Almanacs consisted of collections of different pieces (historical, political etc.) and minor literary works (sentimental lyrics and narratives including fragmentary travel accounts), gathered in a pocket-size volume aimed at providing fashionable material for salon conversation. See Todd 1986: 79-82; Vatsuro 1978; Korovin 1989: 5-9. 13 Evgen’ev-Maksimov, Mordovchenko and Iampolskii 1950: 154. 14 Petr Ivanovich Makarov (1764-1804) is better known for his novel of travel Pis’ma iz Londona (1803-1804). 15 On the Free Society see Brown 1986: I/164-168 and passim. 16 Similarly, Beseda edited its Chteniia (Readings), while its members contributed to periodicals such as Drug prosveshcheniia (The Friend of Enlightenment) and Dramaticheskii vestnik (Theatrical Messenger).

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addition to these official publications, three journals were close to the society’s views, Aleksandr Benitskii’s Tsvetnik (The Flower Garden, 1809), Nikolai Brusilov’s Zhurnal rossiiskoi slovesnosti (Journal of Russian Literature, 1805), and A. Izmailov’s Sankt-Peterburgskii vestnik (The St. Petersburg Herald, 1812).17 Sometimes the grand publishing plans for new journals, although carefully designed, did not materialise, as in the case of the periodicals planned by the Obshchestvo slovesnosti i premudrosti (Society of Literature and Learning, 1821) and the four projects conceived by Arzamas between 1818 and 1824. In this latter instance Decembrist conspirators within the society, anticipating a later trend, aimed to use the planned journal (which did not see the light partly due to censorship and partly to the group’s immature approach to the practical market aspects of such an enterprise) to influence public opinion through literature and literary criticism.18 Even when they did materialise, these editorial enterprises were generally short-lived, reaching an average of only five to six issues due to the interference of censors, limited financial backing and the narrow readership.19 Yet despite these obstacles, literary journals proliferated at an unprecedented rate and in the first twelve years of the century alone forty new periodicals appeared in Moscow and St. Petersburg alone, including the highly successful Vestnik Evropy (Messenger of Europe, 1802-1820) founded by Karamzin.20 Whereas these editorial enterprises were often aimed at ensuring a wider circulation of the society’s ideas and members’ works, it is equally important to note for the purpose of this book that they also provided a much broader arena for both critical and creative writing, allowing the diffusion of an extremely diversified body of literature, including prose genres.

17

See Evgen’ev-Maksimov, Mordovchenko and Iampolskii 1950: 165. Todd 1997: 40-41. 19 Ibid. 20 Golovenchenko and Petrov 1963: 26; Ruud 1982: 29. Evgen’ev-Maksimov, Mordovchenko and Iampolskii, however, believe that as many as sixty journals appeared during the first decade of the nineteenth century alone, a figure possibly referring to the whole of the Russian empire. Scholars have often remarked on the different geographic distribution of literary journals: at the turn of the century Moscow – where both Novikov and Karamzin had based their journalistic activity – was the core of Russian periodical publications. This situation lasted until the 1810s when St. Petersburg gradually became the leading centre (in the 1812 to 1820 period twenty-one journals out of a total of thirty were published in St. Petersburg and nine in Moscow). Evgen’ev-Maksimov, Mordovchenko and Iampolskii: 156; Kupreianova 1981: 37. 18

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The journals’ content consisted of a miscellany of various materials of disparate merit and calibre. Critical writings, which ranged from imaginary dialogues to letters to the editor, appeared alongside original and translated articles and book reviews.21 Moreover, such periodicals had a loose structure that made the inclusion of eclectic literary material – ranging from amateurs’ output to works of a higher artistic standing – not just possible, but perfectly suitable.22 Thus, a sizeable segment of the short stories and novels written during the reign of Alexander first appeared in periodicals and were then published separately, as in the case, for example, of works by Andrei Kropotov and Pavel Iakovlev.23 Preference was usually given to prose genres whose small format allowed publication in a single issue or to forms that were easily divisible into instalments, such as the tales and “minor” prose pieces typical of sentimentalism,24 together with the fragmented genres par excellence of the literary travelogue and epistolary novel. The high degree of variability both in terms of the quality and the character of the works published is also explained by the relative unconcern of editors with sales figures. As a consequence authors enjoyed a greater freedom of manoeuvre within literary journals than, for example, the comparatively expensive book format would have allowed. Hence the experimentation with genres and styles that made periodicals the main literary laboratory for contemporary fiction. However eclectic and short-lived, journals promoted a range of prose genres and broadened their readers’ literary interests while providing the literary critic with a vehicle to voice his views. These intertwined activities laid the foundation for literature to make a more incisive impact in Russian society, its influence gradually expanding beyond the literary domain as advocated, for example, by N. Polevoi’s Moskovskii Telegraf (Moscow Telegraph, 1825-1834).25 Moreover, the “great intellectual ferment and exhilarating optimism about Russia’s prospects of modernisation”26 marking the pre-1812 period 21

Such hybrid forms of critical writings were inspired by the ferment of stylistic and generic experimentation characteristic of contemporary narrative genres. Some examples of these forms of criticism will be quoted in section 3 of the present chapter. 22 Often the lack of a precise editorial line was intentional. See, for example, Benitskii’s foreword to Taliia, the almanac he edited in 1807: “Разнообразие, что более всего приятно, есть цель, которой держался Издатель”. Taliia 1807: I/[1]. 23 See chapters III.2, IV.2 and IV.4 respectively. 24 For a discussion of sentimental genres see the introduction to chapter IV. 25 Rzadkiewicz 1996: 65. 26 Raeff 1967: 395.

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found in the literary journal and association its main outlet. Once relative freedom of expression was curtailed by the changed political atmosphere of the post-Napoleonic period to become positively stifling after the failed Decembrist coup of 1825, intellectual forces would converge on literature and related activities. This sphere of Russian culture would from then on assume a social power and moral significance unknown to other European countries.27 Moreover, in the historical context of the late 1820s-1830s literary periodicals and almanacs had become an established literary and critical medium for the increasingly market-conscious writer. This is proved by the success stories of commercially skilled journalists, such as Faddei Bulgarin, Nikolai Grech and Nikolai Polevoi, and by the sizeable honoraria paid to contributors by Pushkin’s new Sovremennik (The Contemporary, 1836-1837).28 Such a change in approach is even more striking in the case of the almanac, a type of publication which had previously been at the heart of salon production, but which started to play an important role from 1822, the year in which A. Bestuzhev and K. Ryleev published Poliarnaia zvezda (The Polar Star).29 By the late 1820 almanacs had shed their amateur features to promote a professional take on literature and to provide a source of income for writers and aspiring authors.30 In the reign of Nicholas, almanacs and thick journals finally cemented a new relationship between the author and his or her wider public now beginning to operate on trade principles rather than on salon society’s assumptions and tastes. At the same time, thanks to the high-profiled critical debate hosted in their pages, journals had started to function as the main arena for the formation of both literary and political opinion in Russia, a direction Arzamas had already envisaged in their aborted journalistic project. If such a reading of the social role taken on by much nineteenthcentury Russian literature and criticism is a widely accepted notion, the build-up to such a phenomenon is often overlooked. The double function (aesthetic and ethical) increasingly ascribed to literature in 27

Mordovchenko 1959: 60; Strelsky 1938: 354; Kotliarevskii 1917: 40 and passim and Frizman 1980b: 4. 28 Todd 1997: 40-42. 29 Pushkin, in his article “Ob al’manakhe Severnaia lira” (1827) clearly perceived the importance of literary periodicals writing that “Альманахи сделались представителями нашей словесности. По ним со временем станут судить о ее движении и успехах”. (Pushkin 1937-59: II/48). Pushkin’s prediction was eventually taken up by Belinskii who, among others, called the late 1820s the “era of the almanac”. See Monas 1957: 130. 30 Reitblat 1995-1996: 177-178.

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the course of the century started to emerge in the Alexandrine age, a time when the tsar’s shift from liberalism to mystical conservatism definitely estranged liberal-minded intellectuals from the state. Disillusioned with the court and critical of salons’ influence on literature, the cultured few increasingly looked at literature and literary institutions as fields in which their ideas could be expressed.

II.2 Early nineteenth-century criticism and the question of prose fiction Members of literary kruzhki shared a conviction that writing was destined to perform an important role in the development of a modern and independent Russian culture and society, an issue made more urgent by Napoleon’s attempted invasion. Putting aside patriotic statements and wishful thinking, the general feeling among critics was that contemporary literati, prose writers in particular, were unprepared to meet such a task. The burden of bureaucratic censorship and a small reading public were identified as delaying factors, as were “internal” considerations, such as the lack of a solid literary expertise among contemporary authors. In this context critics would often attempt to act as “guides”, i.e. to provide writers with useful comments about their works by exposing defects as well as merits, and readers with aesthetic guidelines in order to evaluate them more successfully. Such a role was described, for example, by Aleksandr Pisarev who, in a survey of contemporary reviews published in 1804 in Severnyi vestnik (The Northern Messenger), questioned the opinion held by Karamzin at the turn of the century that, due to the fragile state of contemporary literature, criticism could prove fatal (“In Russia – wrote Karamzin – authors are so few and far between that they should not be intimidated”):31 Many still ask whether, since our literature has barely emerged from its cradle, it would be better to give it time to develop its potential? The answer is that our literature will improve more quickly and effectively with the help of the salutary

31 N.M. Karamzin, “Pis’mo k izdateliu” in Frizman 1980a: 22. The article was firstly published in 1802, in the first issue of Karamzin’s Vestnik Evropy, a journal that, in keeping with the editor’s views at that point in time, avoided criticism on contemporary Russian authors.

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advice given in reviews. Reviews pave the way for literature, allowing it to proceed towards its goal with assured steps.32

Petr Makarov and Nikolai Brusilov also endorsed what can be loosely defined as “constructive criticism”, i.e. comments able to encourage contemporary authors, rather than simply mock their shortcomings. To that end the critic should, in Brusilov’s view, read the book carefully several times and understand the author’s aims before pointing out not just its flaws, but also its merits.33 The need for a careful assessment of literary works is echoed in a number of articles, including Dmitrii Dashkov’s piece of 1812 “Nechto o zhurnalakh” (“Some Remarks on Journals”). Defining periodicals as the arena of literary criticism, Dashkov writes that The [journal] editor’s main task is that of acquainting his readers with the latest works of our literature, comparing them, pointing out their qualities and shortcomings, etc. His judgement should be balanced and impartial […] He should never offend with biting remarks or scorn and should use the dangerous weapon of 34 mockery with great caution.

Criticism, however, rather than informing readers was often written by and for authors forming part of the restricted circles of connoisseurs, a trait typical of a time when literary life was rapidly turning from the official and public realm to the private and domestic

“У нас же так мало писателей, что не стоит труда пугать их”. Pisarev remarked that “Многие еще спрашивают, что, поскольку наша словесность едва вышла из колыбели, не лучше ли дать ей время еще развить, так сказать, свои способности. На это можно отвечать, что с помощью полезных советов, указываемых в рецензиях, наша словесность может быстрее и надежнее усовершенствоваться; рецензия прокладывает ей дорогу, по которой она смелыми шагами идет к своей цели”. A. Pisarev, “Rassmotrenie vsekh retsenzii, pomeshchennykh v ezhemesiachnom izdanii pod nazvaniem Moskovskii zhurnal, izdannyi na 1797 i 1799 god N. A. Karamzinym”, Severnyi vestnik 1804: VIII/142. Italics in the original. 33 N. Brusilov, “Nechto o kritike” in Frizman 1980a: 57. The article was published in Zhurnal rossiiskoi slovesnosti in 1805. Brusilov’s novel Bednyi Leandr, ili avtor bez ritoriki voices similar concerns (on this work see chapter IV.5) as does P.I. Makarov (see Makarov 1817: I/XIV). 34 “Главной целью его [издателя журнала] должна быть критика. Издатель знакомит своих читателей с новейшими произведениями отечественной словесности [...], показывает их достоинства и недостатки, сравнивает и т.д. Его критика должна быть умеренна и беспристрастна. [...] Он никогда не оскорбляет язвительными словами или презрением и очень осторожно употребляет опасное орудие насмешки”. D. Dashkov, “Nechto o zhurnalakh” in Frizman 1980a: 107-108. 32

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35

sphere symbolised by the lady’s salon. As a result in 1825, right at the end of the period examined in this book, Pushkin, somewhat overstating his argument, complained that “We have some sort of literature, but not criticism”, adding that “we shall never have our criticism while we continue to be guided by our personal relationships”.36 The generic views on the critic’s role seen above were shared by the majority of literati, whilst opinions differed on the precise tasks and methodology critics should adopt. Attempts were made to define the critic’s duty in more detail, but these attempts did not yet result in a systematic and theoretical approach to literature. At the time Russia was experiencing a slow transition from long-established classicist principles to new ideas coming from the West, a state of affairs that explains the ambiguity characterising early nineteenth-century literary criticism. The writings of Aleksei Merzliakov, perhaps the most authoritative literary theorist in the reign of Alexander, are highly representative of an era suspended between two conflicting conceptions of literature, the esprit de sistème of classicism and the romantic emphasis on creative – and critical – freedom.37 The Lomonosovian “doctrine of the three styles” still features in Merzliakov’s Kratkaia ritorika (A Short Rhetoric, 1809), an influential work (it was reprinted three times in the ensuing decade) that was heavily based on eighteenth-century German classicism. However, similarly to fellow members of the Vol’noe obshchestvo liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti (Free Society of Admirers of Literature, 1816-1825)38 such as Aleksandr Griboedov, Nikolai 35

See Carolyn Heyder and Arja Rosenholm, “Feminisation as Functionalisation: the Presentation of Femininity by the Sentimentalist Man” in Rosslyn 2003: 51-72. 36 A. Pushkin, “A. A. Bestuzhevu” in Lebedev and Lysenko 1978: 93-95 (94). 37 A. Merzliakov (1778-1830), critic and poet, was among the founding members of both the Druzheskoe obshchestvo and of the Obshchestvo liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti at Moscow University. This latter grouping was created in 1811, lasted to the 1930s and was resurrected in 1992. Merzliakov was appointed lecturer in Russian literature at Moscow University in 1804 where he soon aroused the enthusiasm of a large audience, as one of his students, Mikhail Dmitrev, witnesses in his memoirs (Dmitrev 1998: 67-68 and 114-116). There he also succeeded in establishing the teaching of Russian literature as an independent subject, separating it from other philological disciplines. Mordovchenko 1959: 264-265. 38 The Free Society was founded in St. Petersburg to discuss cultural issues, but with the election of Glinka as its president in 1819 the republican ideals of future Decembrists began to dominate in the Society’s agenda. In between 1818 and 1825 the Society published a monthly, Sorevnovatel’ prosveshcheniia i blagotvoreniia (The Champion of Enlightenment and Philanthropy).

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Gnedich, Konstantin Batiushkov and Vil’gelm Kiukhel’beker, Merzliakov has been defined as a neo-classicist of the new wave. Influenced by the Jena romanticism the critic at times adopts some of the new concepts coming from Germany, such as nationalistic fervour, the idealisation of the writer as a leader and prophet, and the belief in a free and inspired creation, without, however, relinquishing the basic theories of classicism.39 As a result, the critical system erected by Merzliakov contains profound contradictions, constantly shifting between a notion of literature as an art form regulated by established principles and rules, and one where the literary work is seen as an individual endeavour, free from any external authority or superimposed conventions. Such conflicting notions about literature predictably affected Merzliakov’s views on the critic. He sees this figure alternately as the bearer of a set of guidelines in what would otherwise be an undirected and constantly shifting aesthetic taste, and as a mere spectator of the literary process.40 Vasilii Zhukovskii, on the contrary, represents one of the few literati to fully support new literary and critical trends coming from the West. Outlining his views on literary criticism, Zhukovskii speaks of “the profound and refined sense of beauty” as the main inborn inclination a critic should possess. An understanding of rhetoric should be acquired, yet the critic should always be guided by his own feelings in the judgement of a literary work.41 Only at the very end of Alexander’s era did such vague romantic ideas finally take a more systematic shape in works such as the almanac Mnemosyne (1824-1825) published by the literaryphilosophical circle Liubomudry (The Wisdom Lovers), Orest Somov’s O romanticheskoi poezii (On Romantic Poetry, 1823) and A. Galich’s Opyt nauki iziashchnogo (Essay on the Science of the Beautiful, 1825), signalling the emergence of a fully fledged romantic aesthetic theory in Russia.42 Classical and romantic aesthetics still coexist in Pushkin’s critical writing, where the poet embraces romantic ideas on artistic freedom at the same time as the principles of poetic discipline and verisimilitude of classical derivation. In his creative output, however, 39

Terras 1985: 9. A. L. Zorin, “Merzliakov” in Nikolaev 1999: IV/29. 41 V. Zhukovskii, “O kritike (pis’mo izdateliam Vestnika Evropy)” in Mordovchenko 1959: 80. 42 Terras 1985: 10. 40

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Pushkin achieves a perfect balance between apparently incompatible principles, a task none of his contemporaries did, or perhaps could, achieve at a theoretical level. The debates on the role of literary criticism and of literature naturally involved discussions on prose fiction, a genre sidelined by eighteenth-century critics, but rapidly rising from its peripheral position, featuring in societies’ agendas and publications. In this regard four main issues may be identified as particularly relevant for the development of the genre in early nineteenth-century Russia: the role of the writer and the literary critic in contemporary cultural life, the issue of the nationalisation of Russian literature in terms of technique and subject matter, the search for criteria to assess contemporary fiction, and the question of literary language. The issue of what contemporary prose writers should aspire to was often approached indirectly via a critique of the two main narrative trends of the time: sentimental literature championed by Karamzin, and the latest works of Western and Russian preromanticism. During 1800-1810 the old question as to whether fiction, in particular the most recent trends in prose, was to be considered a worthy literary form for the educated reader was still intensively debated. However, towards the end of the eighteenth century a new factor had already intervened to alter the terms of the discussion about Russian fiction: Karamzin’s reform of prose language and style. By creating a body of works that both targeted and drew inspiration from salon society, Karamzin set the conditions for a wider recognition of prose as a genre not only suitable for, but intimately connected to and even produced by, that social milieu. In so doing Karamzin offered a viable alternative to the unsophisticated eighteenth-century popular fiction ostensibly disdained by cultured readers and critics alike.43 By the beginning of the nineteenth century Karamzin’s reform of prose had become incorporated within the fabric of much contemporary fiction; however, there was still no critical recognition of this process. Quite the opposite was true. The linguistic programme of sentimentalism, for instance, was one of the main points of contention between the literary societies, de facto igniting Beseda versus Arzamas controversy.

43

Although educated readers overtly frowned upon “unsophisticated” fiction, evidence suggests that by the end of the eighteenth century the gentry purchased and read popular literature as a form of entertainment. Schaarschmidt 1982: 428-429.

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Karamzin had also removed from high prose the stylistic elements scorned by classicists (convoluted plots, clumsy syntax, lengthy formats), thus effectively providing a viable alternative to the eighteenth-century novel of adventure.44 Thus, while the most recent prose trends of pre-romantic fiction were as a rule dismissed off-handedly, the critique of sentimental prose was generally more varied and better articulated. Although Karamzin’s career as an author of fiction had come to an end by the beginning of the century, his work continued to be highly influential for at least another decade. Alongside authors who employed sentimental themes and stylistic devices in a creative way, a number of his followers were producing hyper–sentimental, lachrymose works which Karamzin himself had been the first to pan.45 Cashing in on the success of stories such as Iuliia and Bednaia Liza (The Poor Liza),46 Karamzin’s povesti were treated as ready-made narrative models and slavishly imitated. Eventually such practices alienated some previously sympathetic critics, their support gradually eroded by the younger generation of sentimental writers, including Shalikov, A. Izmailov and Galinkovskii. As a result, doubts were cast on the part played by the trend in the evolution of Russian prose as a whole. Despite this, some critics, perhaps considering the most original amongst early nineteenth-century representatives of the trend such as Nikolai Brusilov and Pavel Iakovlev, made a distinction between the father of sentimentalism and his imitators, holding on to Karamzin as a role model for early nineteenth-century prose writers. 47 In an article appearing in Patriot, for example, Karamzin is described as “a highly talented author gifted with a genius for 44

K. Skipina, “On the Sentimental Tale” in Eikhenbaum and Tynyanov 1985: 21-44. N. Karamzin, “Otchego v Rossii malo avtorskikh talantov?” in Karamzin 1848: 526-532. Complaints against Karamzin’s epigones were so widespread as to be voiced in novels’ prefaces, as in the case of Nikolai Ostolopov’s Evgeniia ili nyneshnee vospitanie (1803). As we will see in chapter IV, the picture is however made more complex by the fact that sentimental authors themselves often wrote, alongside “serious” sentimental narratives, parodies of the trend, as in the case of Nikolai Brusilov. 46 Bednaia Liza was extensively imitated particularly during the first decade of the nineteenth century. Interestingly, in order to attract readers, titles of sentimental stories often contained cross-references to Karamzin’s Liza as in A. Izmailov’s Bednaia Masha (Poor Masha, 1801), the anonymous Neschastnaia Margarita (Unhappy Margarita, 1803) and Brusilov’s Istoriia bednoi Marii (The Story of the Poor Maria, 1805). See Toporov 1995 and Brang 1960. 47 See Meilakh 1973: 71. 45

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scholarship and edified by the [refined] taste of society. We have expected him to bring about long awaited changes in our literature and he has done so”.48 The anonymous critic provides a number of reasons for appreciation of Karamzin that were current among the writer’s advocates. In the first place the linguistic and stylistic reform he had championed was deemed to be crucial for a rapprochement of Russian literature with Western European standards. This was a point reiterated by many of his followers such as Petr Makarov who, in a rather epigrammatic tone, affirmed that “Karamzin has marked a watershed in the history of our literary language. We believe in this, as thus do the public”.49 Moreover, Karamzin was indicated as the author who, drawing from the work of Marmontel,50 Voltaire and Sterne, was able to give new meaning to the genre of the story (referred to as povest’, less frequently as skazka), a short format that, as we will see in chapter IV, proved instrumental in bringing about profound changes in Russian fiction. The position taken by liberal-minded critics was quite different. While recognising the value of Karamzin’s achievements, at best they confined his influence to the late eighteenth century. In their view the trend he represented marked an important phase in literary history, but one that was now surpassed due to the changed requirements of contemporary literature, an argument later taken up by Polevoi’s famous critique of Karamzin’s work appearing in his Moskovskii telegraf (The Moscow Telegraph, 1825-1834) in 1829.51 Examples of this critical perspective are provided by the articles and reviews penned by Aleksandr Benitskii,52 for example, and published in his “Г. Карамзин – писатель большого таланта, одаренный гением науки и образованный вкусом света, должен был произвести и произвел перемены, которые некоторым образом требовала и ожидала наша литература”. [V.V. Izmailov]: II, 2/207. 49 “Г. Карамзин положил начало новой эпохи в истории русского языка. Так думаем мы, и так думает публика”. Makarov 1817: II/48. 50 Among Karamzin’s works the critic singles out the povest’ Iuliia as one of the highest results of such imports, earning him the name of Russian Marmontel (Ibid.: 207-208). 51 Rzadkiewicz 1997: 74 and passim. 52 Aleksandr Benitskii (1782-1809) led an active, although brief, life. A poet, a prose writer (chiefly of vostochnye povesti, as we will see in chapter III.1) and a translator, Benitskii was also one of the first writers to be engaged in literary criticism at a professional level in Russia. In 1807 he edited in St. Petersburg the first and only issue of the almanac Taliia, in which he published works by members of the Vol’noe obshchestvo liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti, nauk i khudozhestv (including Gnedich, Batiushkov and Popugaev). His literary journal Tsvetnik hosted articles by leading writers of the time, including Batiushkov, Ostolopov, Vostokov, Gnedich, A. 48

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Tsvetnik, a remarkable publication for the high standard of its editorials. In his trademark epigrammatic manner the writer encapsulated much of contemporary criticism of the “plaintive” style of Karamzin’s imitators: “I am” – wrote Benitskii – “against those sentimental-lachrymose writers who, captivated by the agreeable style of Mr Karamzin without feeling the true beauty of his work, make servile imitations of it in the same way that provincial dandies ape the court gentry”. 53 In Benitskii’s view sentimentalism, besides being fashiondriven and imitative, was doomed by depictions of feelings as overstated as they were inauthentic. Benitskii reproached “trendy writers” for shedding bitter, passionate, diamond-like tears over every trifle, and forcing the sensible reader either to laugh or yawn. Their sensibility consists of nothing more than well-known expressions which have almost become repugnant through frequent 54 and inappropriate use.

As was made clear in the numerous book reviews appearing in Tsvetnik, Benitskii tried to erase sentimentalism from the literary scene,55 rather unsuccessfully considering that as late as 1822 Pushkin was to write: “To the question ‘Whose prose is the best in our literature?’ The answer is ‘Karamzin’s’. But that is not great prose as yet”.56

Izmailov and Khvostov. See Kubasov 1900: 280-311; Dement’eva, Zapadov and Cherepachova, 1959: 131-133; V. P. Stepanov, “Benitskii Aleksandr Petrovich” in Nikolaev 1989: I/237-238; Gorshkov 1982: 226-229 and Evgen’ev-Maksimov 1950: 166-167. 53 “Я против тех сентиментально-плаксивых писателей, которые, пленяясь приятным слогом г. Карамзина, но не чувствуя настоящих его красот, рабски ему подражают; подражают так, как провинциальные щеголи придворным господам”. A. Benitskii, Tsvetnik 1810: II/249. 54 “Модные же наши писатели проливают над всякой безделкой горючие, жаркие, бриллиантовые слезы и принуждают здравомыслящих читателей или смеяться, или зевать. Вся их чувствительность заключается в известных словах, которые от частого и неуместного употребления сделались почти невыносимыми”. Ibid. 1809: I/145-146. As we will see in chapter III.1 Benitskii also conducted oblique attacks on the sentimental style in his oriental tales. 55 See, for example, his review of Neshchastnye liubovniki, pastusheskaia povest’ (The Unhappy Lovers. A Pastoral Tale published in St. Petersburg in 1809 under the initials S.P.), a work criticised on the ground that: “Он написал не пастушескую повесть, как сказано в заглавии его книги, а сказочку, и сказочку сентиментальную, то есть вздорную”. A. Benitskii, Tsvetnik 1809: VII/100-101. 56 A. Pushkin, [O proze] in Lebedev and Lysenko 1978: 38-39 (39).

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A further motive for criticism of sentimentalism was its leader’s excessive reliance on Western European linguistic models, a point, for example, made by Ivan Born in his Kratkoe rukovodstvo k rossiiskoi slovesnosti (A Short Manual of Russian Literature).57 Born attacks the indiscriminate use of foreign expressions for “Even conceding that all languages must, in the course of time, evolve and assimilate expressions from other languages, why do we have to be servile and needlessly parrot some other language when ours is superior?”58 Such critical views were further developed during the debates held by the Free Society of Admirers of Literature, Sciences and Arts,59 whose members were critical of the gallicisms filling the works of Karamzin’s epigones. The group was also united in its belief that literature should hold a civic role in Russian society, a purpose clearly alien to sentimentalism. The involvement of literature in the life of the country required the creation of a new language suitable both to express a broader range of topics and to play a role in shaping public opinion. In his inaugural speech the first president of the society, ProkopovichAntonskii, rejected Karamzin’s reliance on the gentry’s jargon as the main guideline for literary language, arguing that since the nobility preferred to speak a foreign language altogether, salon discourse could not stand as an example for national literature. This line of argument was often aired in the pages of the Zhurnal rossiiskoi slovesnosti (Journal of Russian Literature),60 whose editor-in-chief Nikolai Brusilov, himself the author of sentimental narratives, tended to oppose the language and style of Karamzin’s followers rather than of the trend tout court. 57 Ivan Born (1778-1851), an amateurish poet, as well as a literary critic, was particularly active on the literary scene in the 1800s. In 1801 he was among the members of the Free Society of Amateurs of Sciences, Letters and Arts, and later (from 1803 to 1807), its president. O. A. Proskurin, “Born, Ivan Martynovich” in Nikolaev 1989: I/312-313 (312). 58 “Любой язык с течением времени должен развиваться и заимствовать иностранные выражения, однако зачем без необходимости преклоняться и подражать чужому, если мы имеем свое, которое нередко превосходит чужое?” I. Born, “Kratkoe rukovodstvo k rossiiskoi slovesnosti” (1808), cited in Mordovchenko 1959: 117. 59 Iezuitova 1981: 36-51; Neuhäuser 1974: 205. Though the members of Vol’noe obshchestvo did not always agree on the literary trend most suitable to express these ideals, the critical debates held within the society were characterised by an earnest search for new literary possibilities beyond the traditional guidelines of classicism and sentimentalism. Evgen’ev-Maksimov 1950: 165. 60 Smirnovskii 1901: V/156-170.

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Notwithstanding his sentimental allegiance, however, Brusilov also employed critical arguments similar to Born’s, stating that: A kind of Franco-Russian language [is used] that neither a Russian nor a Frenchman can understand. I cannot possibly know all the languages in the world so when I read a Russian book I would like it to be written in Russian… In any case to 61 mix Russian with French is ludicrous.

The anti-Karamzin party attracted additional supporters in the 1810s, including those who had been previously sympathetic to his literary reform.62 The Friendly Literary Society provides a case in point; founded in 1801 by a group of young men of letters who were initially united by their admiration for Karamzin, the society (or at least a large segment of its membership) gradually shifted to antisentimentalist positions. In a talk given to the Society, Andrei Turgenev, a great admirer of German and English pre-romantic literature, positively dismissed the Karamzinian trend of Russian fiction as “insignificant and trivial”,63 an opinion shared by Merzliakov, among others.64 In the wake of patriotic feelings aroused by the events of 1812, the negative evaluation of sentimental works spread further.65 During these years of national enthusiasm, when debates, articles and reviews underscored the need for a distinctly Russian literature actively involved in the civic life of the country, the Westernised language and the introspective characteristics of sentimental prose rapidly lost ground among Russian literary critics. Demands for cultural “Каким-то французско-русским языком, которого ни русский, ни француз не понимает. Я не могу знать все языки в мире, но если я беру читать русскую книгу, то хочу, чтобы она была написана по-русски… В обоих случаях мешать русское с французским кажется нелепым”. Zhurnal rossiiskoi slovesnosti 1805: III/141-143. Concerns about the indiscriminate use of gallicisms were voiced also by authors who, similarly to Brusilov, were themselves under the spell of sentimentalism. See, for example, Ia. Galinkovskii’s attacks on gallicisms in his novel “Sidoniia, ili Nevinnoe verolomstvo”. Galinkovskii 1808: VI/354. 62 Some spotted this volte-face: “Было время, когда всем хотелось сентиментальной славы; пришло другое время – и каждый пытается сказать и написать – умно или глупо, без необходимости, эпиграмму против сентиментальности”. Anonymous article in Aglaia 1808: I/37. 63 Russkii bibliofil 1912: I/26-30. 64 Iu. M. Lotman, “A.F. Merzliakov kak poet” in Lotman 1958: 5-54 (15 and passim). 65 Interestingly, Karamzin’s reputation as a prose writer was boosted by his hugely popular Istoriia Gosudarstvo Rossisskogo (1818). At that point, however, it was the style of his historical work rather than that of his sentimental tales that was held to be a model for contemporary writers. 61

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independence were expressed with increasing frequency after the conflict with France drew to an end. Authors such as N. Gnedich (in his public speech for the opening of St. Petersburg Public Library in 1814) and I. Murav’ev-Apostol (in his Pis’ma iz Moskvy v NizhniiNovgorod, Letter from Moscow to Nizhnii-Novgorod) pointed the finger against the interference of foreign influences in the development of a national literature and called for a literature describing the “Russian people” (narod) rather than exclusively concerned with the Westernised elite. In the post-war period such views were exacerbated by the bitter realisation of lagging behind Western Europe, a sense of inferiority worsened by the obvious gap existing between Russian and foreign prose fiction. “We are not yet rich in our own works” admitted a disconsolate critic in the influential Russkii vestnik (The Russian Herald), a complaint filling many journals of the time. Thus, until we have stories depicting society and the human heart, until we have novels that, instead of appealing exclusively to our imagination, please our heart and mind – until that time we must persuade ourselves to sharpen our intellects with 66 the help of foreign minds.

In the same vein three years later Pushkin encouraged authors to draw from Russia’s own cultural heritage in the form of “national customs, history, songs, folk-tales, etc.”,67 a set of sources Pushkin himself would prove to be of great inspirational value. Thus, in the post-Napoleonic period when literature was striving for national identity, much of the critical debate about Russian prose had shifted its focus to possible alternatives to sentimental fiction. As we have seen, some critics, such as Benitskii, Merzliakov and Bestuzhev, looked at the classicism of the age of Catherine as a viable foundation for a modern fiction engaged in civic issues.68 Supporters of both neoclassicism and sentimentalism, however, had to take into account the contemporary Western European trends making their mark on the Russian literary scene. The literature of the “Мы еще не богаты собственными произведениями. Итак, пока у нас не будет повестей, изображающих общество и человеческое сердце, пока у нас не будет романов, не тех, которые только будят воображение, но тех, которые живым описанием добродетели услаждают сердце и разум: до тех пор мы поневоле должны острить свой ум чужими умами”. [Anon.], Russkii Vestnik 1819: II/54. 67 A. Pushkin, “O frantsuzskoi slovesnosti” in Lebedev and Lysenko 1978: 39-40 (40) 68 See Mordovchenko 1959: 259-279 and 314-375. See also Gareth Jones 1976: 95-120. 66

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Sturm und Drang and works of English pre-romantic authors, for example, could count on keen followers both among readers and young writers. It was precisely Karamzin’s reform of Russian prose that had prepared the ground for such a positive reception, for whilst the new style of sentimentalism had made prose fiction into a genre palatable to a wider audience, the creation of a flexible literary language had enabled the new generation of writers to experiment with some of the most innovative genres imported from the West. However, the growing stream of Western European novels translated into Russian were a concern to many. Zhukovskii, a writer generally open-minded in literary matters and himself influenced by pre-romantic trends, expressed alarm at the flood of new novels on the Russian book market: “What are the booksellers shouting about in their leaflets? Novels. gothic, entertaining, sentimental, satirical, and moral novels. What do the visitors to the Nikol’skaia in Moscow buy? Novels”. He describes a negative picture that concludes with the rhetorical question: “What is the merit of these vaunted titles that seduce readers’ curiosity?”69 The innovations introduced by Western pre-romantic writers, and readily picked up by Russian authors, were rarely grasped by contemporary Russian critics, let alone proposed as a worthy model. Part of the problem lay in the fact that the critical tools available were lagging behind the rapid developments taking place in contemporary fiction. Overall the criteria employed to assess these works dated back to the age of Catherine, a time when original novels and stories were just making their appearance in Russia. Eighteenth-century classicism, although not condemning prose genres per se, had pigeon-holed them into a system of strict generic and stylistic guidelines according to the nature of the subject matter (tragic, serious or light-hearted) and the established hierarchy of genres.70 According to these criteria, only narrative works that conformed to the well-established principles of authority, truth and utility (such as the philosophical tale, for example) were found to be acceptable to the classicist literati, while the novel, deemed to treat futile if not altogether immoral topics, was clearly perceived as a marginal – if not altogether outcast – genre. Such a set of guidelines “О чем кричат криготорговцы в своих витиеватых прокламациях – о романах ужасных, забавных, чувствительных, сатирических, моральных и т.д. Что покупают посетители Никольской улицы в Москве? Романы. В чем состоит достоинство этих прославленных названий, которые обманывают любопытство?” Vestnik Evropy 1808: I/5. 70 Mylne 1981: 54-55. 69

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were inadequate to come to grips with the rather more sophisticated fiction produced during the age of Alexander. Karamzin had done a great deal to loosen the straitjacket that classicism had imposed on fiction by defending the imaginative character and entertaining potential of the genre: [The novel] doubtlessly captivates the majority of the reading public; it occupies the heart and the imagination, describing both the strongest and at the same time the most ordinary passion in its multifarious plots. Not everyone can philosophise or imagine himself in the place of a great historical hero; but anyone can recognise himself in the romantic hero because everyone loves, has loved or has wanted to love.71

Few, however, adopted such a tolerant approach. The anonymous verse satire “Liza-Romanist”, for example, starts with a recurrent issue in early nineteenth-century criticism, the contrast between the good old times and the immorality of the present brought in by foreign influences (novels in particular): It is well known how Russians used to live, Unaware of contemporary amusements: they used to bring up children Inspired solely by moral principles And our girls novels didn’t read!72

If the critics’ response to new narrative subjects and styles was generally negative, comments were particularly derogatory in the case of the most “extreme” among the new prose genres, the gothic novel. During the 1810s, translations and reworking of romany uzhasov flooded the book-market on the wave of the enthusiasm shown for the genre by Russian readers.73 Notwithstanding their popularity with the public, and the influence gothic novels indubitably “[Роман] без сомнения пленителен для большой части публики; он захватывает сердце и воображение [...], изображая сильную и при том самую обыкновенную страсть в ее разнообразных сюжетах. Не каждый способен философствовать или ставить себя на место героев истории; но все любят, любили или хотят любить, и находят в романтическом герое самого себя”. N. Karamzin, “O knizhnoi torgovle i liubvi ko chteniiu v Rossii” (1802) in Karamzin 1848: 547-548. 72 “Известно в древности как Русские живали, / Не зная нынешних затей: при воспитании детей / Им только нравственность внушали, / И наши девушки романы не читали!” “Liza–Romanist”, Khar’kovskii Demokrit, V (1816), reprinted in Sipovskii 1903: 270. 73 Russian translations of English gothic novels began to appear in the 1790s, to reach their peak in the 1800s two decades later. On the reception of the gothic novel in early nineteenth-century Russia see chapter V.2. 71

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exerted on Russian writers, they were met with widespread resistance from literary critics, who were nearly unanimous in their rejection.74 The scenes of horror and the detailed depiction of the supernatural typical of the genre, not only clashed with the “moralising” principles underlying both sentimental and classical conceptions of literature, but also represented a great challenge to the ideal endorsed by a number of critics of a rational and balanced prose engaged in civic issues.75 In terms of subject matter, narrative texture and artistic treatment the gothic novel was considered an incoherent and defective literary genre, an aesthetic judgement that was often driven by – and interwoven with – the rejection of its content on ethical grounds. The pages of journals during the 1810s and early 1820s reveal critics’ preoccupation with the alleged immorality, sensationalism and stylistic inelegance of this new genre, which was competing with sentimental narratives in the preference of the reading public. A number of articles simply dismissed the gothic novel with a touch of irony at its characteristic dreamy – or, more appropriately, nightmarish – features. In an article entitled “On some of the latest English novels” published in Liubitel’ slovesnosti (The Lover of Literature), for example, the anonymous author, in a rather tongue-incheek manner, affirmed that: “It is clear at first sight that if anyone had the gift of being able to write in his sleep, then he could easily compose such a novel”.76 Similar tones were employed in Orest Somov’s playful poem Plan romana à la Radcliff (Plan for a novel à la Radcliffe, 1816) targeting the idiosyncratic blend of marvellous and threatening atmospheres of the genre: Robbers, an underground prison, A tower, half a dozen owls; 74

Vatsuro 1969: 191-192. A similar phenomenon had occurred in England where the gothic novel, however popular with readers, did not generally meet the approval of critics. Howard 1994: 149. 75 Ziolkowski singles out two features of the genre to explain the critics’ negative response: “Psychologically it signalled a turn from the portrayal of manners in an integrated society to the analysis of lonely, guilt-ridden outsiders. In literature it exemplified a longing for adventure in explicit departure from the moralizing and essentially conservative tone of sentimental-domestic novels. In short, the gothic romance stands out as one of the earliest and most conspicuous symptoms of the incipient reaction against Enlightenment”. Ziolkowski 1977: 84. 76 “Так с первого взгляда покажется, что, если бы кто-нибудь получил дар писать во сне, то без особых трудностей мог бы сочинить подобный роман”. Quoted in Sipovskii 1903: 247.

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Gleaming through ravines the moon has risen, Wolves are baying, the wind howls; Awful dreams torment my heroes Fiery dragons, flying griffins from myth; Fear, horror after them flows… There you have it, a novel a la Radcliffe!77

With her trademark irony Zinaida Volkonskaia too dismissed the trend as a passing fad: Grâce à Dieu, l’on se civilise, Tous avancent à pas de géants, Dans l’esprit, le goût et la mise Nous voyons les progrès du temps. Jadis l’on n’aimait que l’antique, Tous étaient grec, egyptien; Maintenant l’on veut du Gothique 78 Du Franc, du Goth, et de l’élan.

Many more were the critics voicing their concerns about the popular novel of horror in a rather earnest, when not irate, tone.79 Echoing responses to the genre current in the late eighteenth century,80 reviews contained abrasive comments on what was viewed as a flood of trashy works. The gothic novel was seen as a challenge to both aesthetic and social values: stylistically graceless and extreme in terms of its topics, the genre seemed to pose a serious danger to public morality. This latter argument was a sort of leitmotif in early nineteenth-century reviews, particularly in those penned by sentimental critics.81 Petr Makarov, for example, attacked Lewis’ The Monk (1796) for its “absence of any moral purpose”, stating that: “Разбойники и подземелья, / С полдюжины на башне сов; / Луна чуть светит сквозь ущелья, / Вдали – шум ветров, вой волков; / во сне моим героям снится / Дракон в огне, летящий Гриф; / Страх, ужас в след за ними мчится…/ Вот вам роман à la Radcliff!!” O.S. 1816: V/61 (Reprinted in Sipovskii 1903: I/270). 78 Zinaida Volkonskaia, “Couplet sur le gothique” (s.d., presumably written in 1812 or earlier) in [Volkonskaia], Album: [10]. 79 Gothic novels were often seen as the worst representative of an overall disreputable genre, a notion expressed, for example, by V. Tomilin in a review article titled “O romanakh” published in 1823 in the journal Blagonamerennyi (quoted in Olga Glagoleva, “Imaginary World: Reading in the Lives of Russian Provincial Noblewomen (1750-1825)” in Rosslyn 2003: 129-146 (135)). Compare also with the negative critical reception of Nikolai Gnedich’s gothic novel Don Korrado De Gerrera (1803), discussed in chapter V.2. 80 Budgen 1979: 65-83. 81 On this issue see Vatsuro 2002: 105-112 and 263-273. 77

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A book is good, when it is pleasant or useful – and when it is pleasant and useful at the same time so much the better. In regard to pleasantness: we don’t believe that the depiction of murders, violence, torture, and all sorts of evil deeds please anyone. In regard to usefulness, given that novels by Mrs Radcliffe [sic]82 have no purpose, convey no true understanding of the world or of men, reveal neither moral truth, nor point to any new traits of the human heart, they are in no way useful. On the contrary these novels can be very damaging indeed!83

Moreover, “such an unrelenting feeling of fear gets on one’s nerves”, writes Makarov switching to a tongue-in-cheek tone, for “sustained exposure to fear can lead to rather unhappy consequences, as any doctor can confirm”.84 Filipp Vigel’, a member of Arzamas, friend of Pushkin and an attentive observer of the literary taste of his contemporaries, echoes Makarov’s point. Yet he also registers the strange attraction many of his acquaintances felt towards gothic novels: “I was often infuriated by the terrors described by Mrs Radcliffe, whose agonizingly pleasant way of writing worked on the sensitive nerves of my friends”.85 Andrei Bolotov responded with a similar combination of distaste for the extreme nature of gothic novels, and involuntary fascination with the genre,86 a reaction, it must be said, not at all uncommon in educated circles, both in Russia and in the West. Most critics were shocked by the strong and mysterious power gothic novels seemed to have over “less discerning” readers. The exposure to raw evil and the continuous probing of deep-seated human 82

As frequently happened with translations of English gothic novels, The Monk appeared in Russia under the name of the more popular Radcliffe. On this issue see chapter V.2. 83 “Книга тогда хороша, когда она приятна или полезна, – а еще лучше, когда приятна и полезна вместе. Рассуждая о приятности, мы не думаем, что картины убийств, насилия, пыток и всех злодеяний могли бы кому-нибудь нравиться. Рассуждая о пользе, романы госпожи Радклиф, не имея никакой цели, не давая справедливого представления об обществе, о людях, не открывая новые моральные истины, не показывая никакие новые черты человеческого сердца – не приносят пользы ни в каком отношении, но могут быть вредны!” P. Makarov, “Retsenziia na Monakha”, Moskovskii Merkurii 1803: III/139 and 218-219. Makarov’s remarks may be compared with the similar argument expressed in early reviews of The Monk quoted in Bottin 1996: 20. 84 “Продолжительные впечатления ужаса действуют на нервы. Продолжительные впечатления ужаса приводят иногда к печальным последствиям: в этом ссылаемся на всех врачей”. Makarov 1803: 218. 85 “Я часто бывал вне себя от ужасов госпожи Радклиф, которые мучительноприятным образом действовали на раздражительные нервы моих товарищей”. Vigel’ 1891: I/167. 86 See Newlin 2001: 131.

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fears would, in their view, harm readers’ virtue, especially in the case of the “impressionable” and “weak minds” of youngsters and women (!). This latter category of readers was often commented upon, as we have seen in the mock-poem “Liza-romanist” quoted above, signalling how the widespread popularity of gothic and other novels among female readers, and particularly noblewomen, was considered exceedingly disgraceful at a time when books were supposed to inculcate in women’s minds the correct ideas about their duties as wives, mothers and daughters. As Makarov wrote: “We know of women who have spent three sleepless nights reading The Abbey of St. Claire, or the Mysteries of Udolpho. It would be advisable if such books bore the epigraph: et la mère en défendra la lecture à la fille”.87 In short, as far as women were concerned, men did encourage reading, providing it was for the purpose of their moral improvement, as opposed to reading for pleasure.88 Misogynistic comments like the ones seen above reflect the surprise and concern at the fact that women not only read, but also actually wrote, novels of terror, the most “un-feminine” genre. In Russia, unlike in the more advanced England and France, women did not venture to write novels of the gothic type at this stage. Ladies, however, were not just voracious readers but occasionally – and of more concern for their male contemporaries – the translators of gothic works, as in the case of Mariia Arbuzova.89 Fears that women would be led astray by gothic novels in part explains why Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) became the main target of much criticism against the new literary trend, for the famous English writer embodied what (male) critics feared and abhorred most: a woman using her pen freely, surpassing the boundaries of perceived feminine propriety, and having a direct impact on a female readership.90 In Russian culture’s so-called age of feminisation, when patriarchal values perfectly merged with the aesthetic principles of sentimentalism, Radcliffe threatened the ideal

“Мы знаем женщин, которые не спали по три ночи, прочитав Аббатство СенКлерское, или таинства Удольфские. На книгах такого рода всегда надлежало бы ставить эпиграф: et la mère en défendra la lecture à la fille”. Makarov 1803: 218. 88 Olga Glagoleva, “Imaginary World: Reading in the Lives of Russian Provincial Noblewomen (1750-1825)” in Rosslyn 2003: 132. 89 See Rosslyn 2000: 74 and 147. On Arbuzova see also footnote 96 below. 90 The gothic novel has been claimed by feminist scholars as a “feminine genre” either directly on grounds of its authorship and audience, or in terms of its thematisation of female anxieties. See Kahane 1985: 334-351. On Radcliffe’s “self-defence” in her “On the Use of the Supernatural in Poetry” see Clery 2000: 3-6 and passim. 87

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of the “sensitive lady” as a model of delicate feminine taste.91 One can glean the deep fears underlying the literary argument against Radcliffe’s novels from contemporary reviews, such as the one penned by the sentimental writer and critic Vladimir Izmailov (under the pseudonym ‘O.O.O.’): The Englishwoman [Radcliffe] devoted her pen to the most terrifying fantasies that could be contrived – not by the heart of a woman – but by the imagination of the most inflamed fanatic. We can only hope that the English Muses, having momentarily frightened us with the wild horrors of Radcliffe’s imagination, will soon charm us with pleasant descriptions in the taste of Marmontel.92

Besides gender concerns, gothic novels were criticised for their imaginative and irrational themes, a critique that was often extended to prose fiction as a whole.93 In a typical attempt to set moral boundaries to the new narrative trends coming from the West, for example, an anonymous critic as late as 1820 advised Russian writers to convey sound moral principles and tamed sentimental qualities in their work, stating that:

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On the phenomenon of feminisation see chapter I.4 “Англичанка [Радклиф] посвятила свое перо ужаснейшим вымыслам, которые только может представить не сердце женщины, а воображение разгоряченнейшего фанатика. Мы можем только надеяться, что английские музы, испугав нас на минуту дикими ужасами воображения Радклиф, пленят нас скоро приятными картинами во вкусе Мармонтеля”. “O.O.O.” [V.V. Izmailov] 1804: II-2/213. Occasionally a positive piece appeared, as in the case of Makarov’s praise of the sentimental features of the gothic novel in his review of The Children of the Abbey (1796) by Regina Maria Roche (Moskovskii Merkuryi 1803: II/211-213). Deti abbastva had been translated from a French version by Mariia Arbuzova (1st ed. M.: 1802-1803, 2nd ed. Orel: 1824). Arbuzova was also the translator of the anonymous Tainstvennyi zamok, angliiskaia povest’. Perevod s frantsuzkogo (M., 1803). 93 As Devendra P. Varma pointed out, in England the gothic movement towards fantasy and romance was connected with the development of a larger reading public. Thus the profession of letters depended on the taste of the readers, rather than on that of a patron. Varma 1987: 220. In Russia the professionalisation of literary activities was in its initial stage. The “gothic flood” of English novels at the turn of the eighteenth century, and especially the original endeavours in the genre by Russian writers such as Karamzin and, a few years later, Zhukovskii and Gnedich, points at similar developments in the book market toward the popular tastes of a wider audience. 92

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The author should possess a virtuous heart, given that unbridled passion, imagination, and prejudices inexorably give rise to chimeras that suffocate the 94 intellect. However, everlasting and indispensable moral principles do exist.

As we have seen so far Russian critics were generally opposed to new trends in Russian prose fiction. Only a few voices followed Karamzin’s tolerant approach and strove to detect, and objectively explain, the new set of aesthetic guidelines and artistic aims of preromantic authors. This was the case, for example, of an anonymous article on contemporary English novels appearing as early as 1806. The extreme and frightful situations described in “On some of the latest English novels” were not regarded as the product of an exalted imagination. The author of this article uses derogatory terms to describe the narrative technique at work, writing that “[the writer] changes the scenes solely in order to show the play of passions in an imagined context, and [to achieve this scope] puts the protagonist in questionable, confusing, and dangerous situations”.95 Nonetheless, the anonymous critic shows surprising acumen in explaining the feeling of terror arising from gothic novels as the product of a precise narrative technique designed to unveil the deepest human emotions. As we have seen, the lively debate on sentimental, gothic and pre-romantic fiction was triggered by the increasing popularity of these genres with early nineteenth-century readers and young writers alike. Literary critics, however, generally adhered to the precepts of classical aesthetics, a set of principles that were clearly inadequate to the appraisal of prose as a whole, quite apart from vanguard fiction. This situation eventually resulted in a split between educated readers and literary critics whose tastes were, for the first time in Russian history, at odds. By the end of Alexander’s reign, however, the advancement of fiction begun by Karamzin and consolidated during the first two decades of the century created the conditions for the full acceptance of fiction in Russia. This meant that it was difficult to defend a position that relied on blunt dismissals of fiction as a genre unworthy of the literati’s consideration. “У автора должно быть добродетельное сердце, так как неумеренное воображение, страсти, предрассудки беспрестанно рождают в нас химеры, которые накидывают на ум повязку; но существует вечный и непременный закон нравственности”. Nevskii zritel’ 1820: I/54. 95 “Он [автор], меняет сцены только для того, чтобы представлять игру страстей в разнообразнейшем виде, приводить действующие лица в сомнительные, запутанные, опасные положения”. Cited in Sipovskii 1903: 250. 94

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The sparse and non-judgemental articles on new literary trends played an important role in sowing the seeds of a deeper understanding of fiction in the pre-Pushkin period. Superseding classicist arguments against the imaginative in literature and looking beyond the moralising-patriarchal tenets of sentimentalism were the necessary steps towards the recognition of prose genres as literary forms worthy of serious consideration. Early nineteenth-century debates on prose fiction eventually bore their fruit; by the time Pushkin published his first novel (Arap Petra velikogo (The Moor of Peter the Great, 1828)) and stories (Povesti Belkina (Tales of Belkin, 1830)) fiction was universally recognised as an influential genre.

II.3 The battle over language: Beseda versus Arzamas The early nineteenth century witnessed an antagonistic debate about the future direction of Russian literary language fuelled by two literary societies, Beseda and Arzamas. The Beseda versus Arzamas controversy helped to clarify theoretical positions and to stimulate discussions on which language Russia was to adopt as its modern literary language. Much of the debate revolved around the writings of Admiral Shishkov, the charismatic leader of the Besedisty (who, in parallel to his literary activities, cultivated a meteoric political career ascending within a decade from president of the prestigious Russian Academy to Minister of Public Education and finally, under Nicholas, censor-in-chief), and of Karamzin, the point of reference for the Arzamastsy. Karamzin’s position, which represented a sort of blueprint for Arzamas’ members given that he took no part in the dispute,96 originated in the last decades of the eighteenth century. In this period a prototype of a national standard language, in which the refined and spoken standards were merged, made its appearance.97 Such middle language, however innovative, was initially confined to non-literary 96 Although not formally a member of Arzamas, Karamzin was on friendly terms with most of its members, whose company he frequented at Ostafievo, P. Viazemskii’s estate: “To tell the truth” – Karamzin wrote – “here I know of nothing cleverer than the Arzamasians – one could truly live and die among them”. Cited in Roosevelt 1995: 302. 97 Vatsuro 1989: 139.

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genres, such as journalistic and scientific publications, while refined poetry and lofty forms in general continued to conform to stylistic and linguistic principles set by classicist theorists.98 Naturally, prose writers, whose work was sidelined by classicism, proved to be receptive to the literary potential of such a middle language, an appeal that, as we will demonstrate in subsequent chapters, continued in the early nineteenth century. The process of rapprochement of the literary and spoken languages according to a homogeneous “middle” standard was accelerated by two factors: the translations of Western European narratives and the Westernisation of the Russian gentry during the reign of Catherine. Imported fiction was translated at an increasing rate in order to meet the growing demand of Russian readers. The task of rendering foreign novels into Russian posed significant problems for translators, who struggled to reproduce the flexible language of French and English authors. Syntactic constructions and even the lexicon of foreign works were then borrowed (often clumsily) by translators, who in so doing were shaping a new, Europeanised, albeit hybrid, literary language.99 At the same time French was adopted by the Russian elite as their language of choice, a usage that gradually led to a linguistic appropriation and transposition of syntactic and lexical elements into the Russian speech of refined noblemen and noblewomen. Literature played a part in this process, for French and English novels (often read in their French translation) helped to forge that particular fashionoriented salon discourse characteristic of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century. In its turn, this social jargon provided the model for Karamzin. According to Vigel’, “before [Karamzin] we did not have another style, apart from the high-flown or vulgar: he conceived a new, noble and simple [style]”,100 a view echoed by Nikolai Gogol’ who once wrote that in the age of Alexander “The Russian language acquired a freedom and adroitness at flying from subject to subject […] When our poetry left the church, it suddenly found itself at a ball”.101 98

Vinokur 1971: 107. V. Lèvine and I. Serman, “La formation de la prose narrative et de la langue littéraire dans la seconde moitié du XVIII siècle” in Etkind 1992: 462. 100 “До него не было у нас другого слога кроме высокопарного или площадного; он изобрел новый, благородный и простой [слог]”. Vigel’ 1891: I/186. 101 “Русский язык вдруг получил свободу и легкость перелетать от предмета к предмету […], поэзия наша, выйдя из церкви, очутилась вдруг на балу”. “Vybrannye mesta iz perepiski s druz’iami (XXXI: V chem zhe nakonets sushchestvo russkoi poezii i v chem ee osobennost’)” in Gogol’ 1994: VI/153-154. 99

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Starting from the mid-1780s, Karamzin’s conception of the “new style” was illustrated in a number of articles and reviews published in the Moskovskii zhurnal (1791–1792)102 and applied in his literary and particularly narrative, works which, by the turn of the century, provided authors with a concrete alternative to the obsolete classicist norms.103 In opposition to the complicated, declamatory constructions of the “old style”, Karamzin proposed the reduction of the sentence’s length, which he shaped according to the principle of the fluency of oral discourse and of “pleasantness” (priiatnost’). Bookish norms were replaced by an easily pronounceable, “natural” literary language modelled on the fashionable conversation of the beau monde104 and of the ladies in particular.105 Karamzin’s novyi slog stemmed from the notion that any language undergoes continuous metamorphosis in order to convey the ideas of the age effectively. Concerning literature, Karamzin believed that in order to progress any written language should keep pace with the spoken discourse of the educated class, which in the specific of late-eighteenth to early nineteenth-century Russia consisted in a Frenchified, “tasteful” speech style. Extra-linguistic factors underlay Karamzin’s argument in that France was considered to be (at least before the 1789 Revolution) at the forefront of Western civilisation. Looked at in this perspective, the “Frenchification” of Russian was in line with the patriotic feelings of the age, for such reform was deemed essential for the advancement of the national culture in the European context. According to these tenets, Karamzin modified the literary vocabulary, introducing French words in order to express new meanings (borrowings), creating new Russian words modelled on French (calques) and, at the same time, limiting the use of Slavonicisms. Moreover, a new literary style was developed on the basis of the Russo-French phraseological system that, together with 102

Cross 1971: 40-49. See Introduction to chapter IV.1. 104 The socio-linguistic aspect of Karamzin’s novyi slog has to be considered in the context of the elitarian features of Russian literature at the turn of the eighteenth century. As we have seen in chapter 1, by the early nineteenth century close bonds linked authors and polite society, an occurrence that explains the constant linguistic interaction between these two spheres. 105 For Karamzin and his followers the lady’s discourse, marked by tonkii vkus and estestvennost’, epitomised an emotionally “direct” language. Such purported “naturalness” was highly regarded by sentimentalists who, as observed by Harries, wanted to redefine works of fiction as “spontaneous effusions, unpremeditated and unconventional forms”. Harries 1994: 128. See also Uspenskii 1985: 58. 103

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the introduction of specific periphrases and unusual metaphors, contributed to the creation of a refined literary language actually very close to the style of salon discourse.106 Karamzin, however, criticised the indiscriminate introduction of gallicisms into Russian, a phenomenon that, as we have seen in chapter I.2, was widespread in the early nineteenth century. On the contrary, Karamzin fostered a selective adoption of French words and sentence structures aiming at fulfilling the new expressive needs that Russian could not otherwise meet. Karamzin’s reform of prose exerted a lasting influence on literature and literary debates well into the first two decades of the reign of Alexander. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the language of sentimental literature represented the model for many refined authors – or those aspiring to refinement – while educated Russian readers were familiar with a sentimental literary language and style which by then had become, in Formalist terms, a “literary fact”. Beseda liubitelei russkogo slova (Colloquium of Admirers of the Russian Word, 1811-1816) and Arzamas (1815-1818) perhaps represent the most influential and well-known literary societies during the reign of Alexander I. Although both Beseda and Arzamas discussed a number of topics, it was the controversy over literary language between the two societies that raised fundamental issues for the future of Russian prose fiction. Beseda was the first of the two groups to be created, dating back to 1807 when some of its members – Aleksandr Shishkov, Ivan Krylov, Gavrila Derzhavin, Nikolai Gnedich and Aleksandr Shakhovskoi – began to meet regularly out of a common need to discuss literary and political matters. Four years later, a reluctant tsar gave his permission for the society to be established.107 Beseda embodied the criticism against innovative linguistic trends in Russian literature, a position that had been supported by literati of classicist leanings since the 1790s. Although by the 106

Vinogradov 1969: 96-97; Hammarberg 1991: 93-94. Al’tshuller 1984: 50-51. Aleksandr Turgenev, a future member of the Arzamas, thus described the foundation of Beseda in a letter to his brother Sergei: “Здесь учереждено теперь новое общество словесности под названием: Беседа любителей Российского слова; оно состоит из четырех разрядов, из которых в 1м председательствует Шишков, во 2-м Державин, в 3-м Хвостов, в 4-м Захаров. Уже прошли два публичных собрания общества. Много съезжается из знатной публики; но мало проку, потому что члены большей частью и в сторожа на Парнасе не годятся, или безграмотные законодатели в словесности”. “Pis’ma A.I. Turgeneva k S.I. Turgenevu (2-3 Maia [1]811, St. Petersburg)” in Istrin 1911: 436. 107

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beginning of Alexander’s reign these literary trends were well established among writers and readers, an offensive against Karamzin’s reform was mounting among critics. When, in 1803, Shishkov’s fundamental work of theory Rassuzhdenie o starom i novom sloge rossiiskogo iazyka (Treatise on the Old and New Style of the Russian Language) appeared, the polemic against Karamzin’s novyi slog finally flared up.108 Shishkov’s positions are skilfully summed up in the concise talk he gave at the opening of Beseda, on March 14, 1811. In this speech Shishkov divided Russian literary language into three categories, stressing the importance of Church Slavonic as the traditional and true linguistic and stylistic model for the top two literary echelons on the grounds that Church Slavonic would surpass in sophistication languages of more recent formation. According to Shishkov the authority of Church Slavonic was derived from its secular existence during which the language had functioned as a mark of cultural unity among the Slavs,109 an issue Shishkov had thoroughly investigated in the Rassuzhdenie o krasnorechii Sviashchennogo Pisaniia (Treatise on the Eloquence of the Holy Scriptures, 1810). Hence, Shishkov considered the Russian language to be a national asset to be protected from external influences that would contaminate and therefore impoverish it, as Karamzin’s reforms had demonstrated. This critique is concentrated in the third part of the speech, where Shishkov condemns the Westernised Russian of Karamzin and his followers as extraneous to the country’s specific national character: Our third kind of literature consists of works that we have had for no more than a century. We have borrowed them from other countries […], we have imitated them too slavishly and, by chasing after the modes of thought and the characteristics of these languages, we have lost a great deal from our own expressions.110

108

The offensive began long before 1803, as, for example, in the case of Shatrov and of the future Besedist P. Golenishchev-Kutuzov. V. Vatsuro, “V preddverii pushkinskoi epokhi” in Vatsuro and Ospovat 1994: I/6. The polemics, however, had an episodic character and were not led by an organised group, as would happen during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. 109 Colucci 1972: 175. 110 “Наша третья словесность, составляющая те роды сочинений, которые мы не имели, процветает не более одного века. Мы взяли ее от чужих народов [...], слишком рабственно им подражали и гонялись за образом мыслей и свойствами их языков, и во многом отклонили себя от своих собственных понятий”. Quoted in Al’tshuller 1984: 53.

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Predictably, Shishkov’s solution to the unsatisfactory state of contemporary Russian was to go back to its – supposed – Church Slavonic roots, in actual fact to the mythical language of the past.111 Radishchev’s style in Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu (Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, 1789), for example, is indicated by the Besedisty as a model of archaist prose vis-à-vis the “frivolity” of Karamzin’s camp (without, incidentally, being deterred by the radical content of the work, which is left silent). Setting aside linguistic considerations, Shishkov’s call for change can be visualised as a movement backwards and inwards, while that of the Karamzinists was projected towards West European language and culture.112 Moreover, considering the fact that in at the turn of the eighteenth century the Russian language was perceived as an essential part of national culture,113 the Karamzin versus Shishkov controversy needs to be examined in terms of a cultural clash, rather than as a struggle of a political nature.114 In this respect, Lotman and Uspenskii have explained the virulent tone of the debate by the fact that the two linguistic ideals emerging from it – Church Slavonic vis-à-vis Westernised Russian – represented the climax of a long chain of cultural and literary antithesis: written principle/oral standard, linguistic rules/immediate perception, archaic/contemporary, national/cosmopolitan. In other words, the debate between Karamzin and Shishkov had its origins in one of the most persistent conflicts in modern Russian culture: the Russia/West antithesis, a clash emerging with renewed force each time the Europeanising tendencies gained ground in the country.115 This interpretation is seemingly confirmed by the fact that in the first decade of Alexander’s reign every aspect of Russian politics and culture (language included) appeared to be dominated by foreign influences, particularly French. The portion of Russian society fearing 111

For a discussion of the different theories maintained by the two societies on the evolution of the Russian language and of its relationship with old Slavonic, see Zhivov 1996: 432 and passim. 112 See Uspenskii 1985: chapter II. 113 Iu. Lotman and B. Uspenskii, “Tekstologicheskie printsipy izdaniia” in Lotman, Uspenskii and Marchenko 1984: 516. 114 Soviet scholars were at pains to connect Shishkov’s reactionary ideas in politics with his linguistic theories, a link difficult to establish given, for example, that Karamzin and Shishkov seemed to share similar political beliefs in their mature years. 115 Iu. Lotman and B. Uspenskii, “The Role of Dual Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture (Up to the End of the Eighteenth Century)” in Lotman and Uspenskii 1984: 30.

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these Westernising tendencies and harbouring proto-Slavophile feelings touched base in the linguistic theories of the Archaists. Shishkov’s “linguistic romanticism”,116 the idealisation of Church Slavonic, which he considered a virile, unadulterated language (in contrast with the feminine and aestheticised vocabulary of the Innovators), is directly reflected in the bookish style and lexical choices he both endorsed and directly applied in his writings.117 Yet Church Slavonic was not the only linguistic model put forward, for Shishkov repeatedly praised the expressive qualities of popular speech and literature, albeit confining their influence to folklore genres.118 The critic tried to restore the prestige of Church Slavonic by promoting the by then antiquated, archaic style, lexicon and sentence structure as a model for contemporary literary language. Such a programme was utopian both in the conviction that the secular process of estrangement from Old Russian could be reversed, and even more so in his belief that Church Slavonic could actually meet the expressive requirements and the new content that contemporary Russian literature was beginning to address. The publishing effort of Beseda (in five years the society produced a large number of publications including nineteen issues of its journal, Chteniia v Besede liubitelei russkogo slova, Readings at the Collegium of Admirers of the Russian Word) and the intellectual calibre of its activity were matched at the time only by the members of the opposition, the Arzamastsy. The numerous skirmishes between individual members of the two societies sprang from the diverging conceptions about the contemporary literary language. In judging stylistic matters Beseda relied on the principles of classicism, basically following Lomonosov’s theory of the three styles. As noted above, the linguistic norms endorsed by members of the society were based on Church Slavonic, which was considered to be the main lexical and syntactic 116

Definition by Uspenskii (Uspenskii 1994-1997: II/380-384). In addition to his “Rassuzhdenie” which appeared in 1803, Shishkov wrote two other major works on linguistic and stylistic subjects, both published during the first decade of the century and re-published as a separate book after 1812: “Pribavlenie k rassuzhdeniiu o starom i novom sloge rossiiskogo iazyka” (1804) and “Rassuzhdenie o krasnorechii Sviashchennogo pisaniia” (1810). In his manifestos he employed a solemn and archaic language modelled on Church Slavonic, whose stylistic qualities were recognised by his contemporaries, including Shishkov’s literary opponents. Al’tshuller 1989: 114. 118 Shishkov’s programme diverged from that of Karamzin from a socio-linguistic point of view as well. He was oriented toward the language of two social groups: the clergy, formerly Russia’s educated elite, and the “people” and their folkloric heritage. 117

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source for learned literary Russian, in direct contrast to the new “conversational style”.119 Arzamas viewed Church Slavonic as a dead language, rooted in religious thought and based on bookish norms irremediably distant from the common linguistic use. Following in Karamzin’s footsteps, the process of secularisation of the Russian language was therefore considered a functional requirement in the rapprochement of the written language with the spoken standard. Interestingly, such basic oppositions in terms of linguistic and stylistic parameters was reflected in virtually every aspect of the members’ activity, ranging from literary works and theoretical and polemical writings to personal letters and social behaviour. Beseda’s classicist conception was reflected in their predilection for lofty genres that alone were deemed suitable to express high civic ideals, a trend which gained ground in the post1812 years, as we have seen in chapter I. Accordingly, preference was granted to the poem, particularly the epic (Gnedich’s and ShirinskiiShikhmatov’s translations of The Iliad) and the tragedy (Derzhavin, Shakhovskoi). Middle genres, the fable (Khvostov, Krylov), for example, and the comedy (Krylov, Shakhovskoi), were also appreciated, although their function was considered secondary to that of the traditionally lofty genres. The fable was considered by the Besedisty to be a literary form largely uncontaminated by foreign influences and thus a faithful bearer of a Russian tradition unchanged throughout the centuries. Interestingly the Besedisty’s re-evaluation of Russian folklore somewhat paralleled romantic trends developing in Western Europe, and represented an important step toward the acknowledgement of popular achievements as part of the national literary legacy.120 Following the classicist tradition, comedy was regarded as a genre particularly appropriate as a vehicle for disputes on literary or social matters. Within this clear-cut classical hierarchy it is perhaps not surprising that prose genres as a whole were virtually banned from the literary repertoire of Beseda, with the exception of genres expressing civic values, such as the historical novel. Notwithstanding the variety of narrative forms and the popularity achieved by then by both Russian and foreign fiction, Beseda’s conformity to the aesthetics of 119

Garde 1996: 18-19; Tynianov 1968: 34. Tynianov was the first to point out that Beseda and Arzamas cannot be classified according to classicist or romantic trends, for both factions fall in the transitional area between the two period styles. Tynianov 1968: 25-36.

120

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classicism precluded an unprejudiced appraisement of the potential inherent in the genre, a position which, as we have seen, was widespread among early nineteenth-century Russian critics. Arzamas’s admiration for Karamzin represented a further obstacle towards a dispassionate judgement of prose fiction by members of the opposite faction. Founded in 1815 with the avowed intent of rebuffing Beseda’s offensive against the innovators in linguistic matters, Arzamas gathered together a number of authors of early sentimental leanings (including Zhukovskii, Batiushkov, Denis Davydov, Aleksandr Turgenev, Vasilii Pushkin and his young nephew Aleksandr), some of whom were to become involved in the Decembrist failed coup of 1825. The establishment of Arzamas was prompted by their enraged reaction to Aleksandr Shakhovskoi’s comedy, staged in 1815, Urok koketkam, ili Lipetskie vody (A Lesson for Coiquettes , or the Lipetsk Spa). The piece, the last in a long series of parodies of the so-called Karamzinists written by Besedisty (this time the target of the lampoon was Zhukovskii, easily recognisable in the character Fialkin), this time prompted an organised counter-attack: a jointly-written satire of the Archaists (“Videnie v arzamasskom traktire, izdannym obshchestvom uchenykh liudei”, “A Vision at the Inn at Arzamas, published by the Society of Scholars”), followed soon afterward by the foundation of the society itself. The Arzamastsy shared a preference for middle genres and styles recently brought into the limelight of Russian literature. Short stories focusing on the individual’s experience and feelings and a penchant for marginal subjects recounted in a light tone and elegant style underpin the Arzamastsy’s works both in prose (Zhukovskii, Turgenev, Davydov) and in poetry (Batiushkov, Zhukovskii, Davydov, Viazemskii).121 As with Beseda, the character of Arzamas critical theories was also stressed by its adherents at a meta-literary 121

These stylistic and thematic guidelines, true in principle, found exceptions. In particular, the conviction that literature should also deal with social matters and that it should express strong patriotic feelings was a concern that was not restricted to the Archaists’ field. Karamzin, for example, clearly exemplified these concerns in his article “O sluchaiakh i kharakterakh v rossiiskoi istorii, kotorye mogut byt’ predmetom khudozhestv” (1802), as well as in his historical povesti. The depiction of history by a number of writers associated with Karamzin is also highly patriotic (see chapter V.1). The poetry of the Arzamastsy as well was sometimes concerned with civic issues as, for example, in the case of Viazemskii’s poems against serfdom. Batiushkov is another case in point: although he took an active part in the Arzamas, classicist theories had a significant influence on his poetry. Al’tshuller 1989: 115.

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level. A distinctive feature of Arzamas was its informal approach to literary activities, a feature in direct contrast to the meticulous regulations adopted by Beseda.122 The trademark informality of Arzamas (which in actual fact responded to a precise code of behaviour, that of the salon dandy) became the distinguishing mark of its members. Lack of formality translated into familiarity in spheres that transcended the literary debate, as for example in the personal behaviour of the adherents and in the location chosen for their assemblies. While the carefully regulated meetings of Beseda took place in Derzhavin’s imposing salon, for example, the Arzamastsy made a point of holding their humorous gatherings in an assortment of places, including a carriage on the way from St. Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo. The Arzamastsy’s writings were often intentionally constructed on the borderline between narrative and non-narrative genres. Such works mixed and matched from genres such as the letter, the diary and the travel account, exhibiting familiarity and an ironic approach to writing that engendered audacious use of new linguistic and stylistic devices. This is particularly evident in the letters of the Arzamastsy where short and incisive sentences and a simple, often coarse, lexicon was alien to both the archaisms of Beseda and to the polished style of sentimentalism.123 On the one hand, their social behaviour and the deliberately colloquial language and ironic register of the Arzamastsy responded to precise linguistic conventions. Neologisms and covert literary references, familiar nicknames, diminutive words and coarse expressions formed an intimate language fully intelligible only within the restricted entourage of the group, a trend already detectable in the 122 After the establishment of Beseda the Archaists used to meet monthly at Derzhavin’s palace on the banks of the Fontanka. Reportedly as many as 500 people sometimes attended the meetings. Rosslyn 1997: 176. 123 The ‘relaxed-jocose’ style of the Arzamastsy is exemplified in the incipit of a letter dated January 1817 Zhukovskii wrote to Dashkov: “Здравствуй, Шурка! Если ты дуешься на меня за мое неотвечание на два письма твои, то перестань; раздует тебя горой, и Шаховский подумает, что ты опился Липецких вод: а то будет неприятно для Арзамаса”. (reprinted in Russkii Arkhiv, VI (1869) 842). Another example is provided by Viazemskii’s letter to A. Turgenev of March 26, 1817: “Где ты, где ты? Что ты, что ты? Как ты, как ты?” followed by some resentful lines written in the typical Arzamassian tone: “нет, ты не Тургенев; ты – скучный и досадный Шишков; твой родитель был гневный Шаховский; ты воспитан на скамьях Беседы…” (in Vatsuro and Ospovat 1994: 374). See also Tynianov’s discussion of the two branches of letter writing in early nineteenth-century Russia, the “literary”, refined epistle vis-à-vis the “non-literary”, intimate correspondence of the Arzamatsy. Tynianov 1970: 112.

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literary polemics of the 1800s.124 On the other hand, as remarked by Stepanov, their jargon was an extreme expression of that element of educated colloquial speech that letter writing began to introduce into early nineteenth-century literary language.125 This display of a casual and unceremonious attitude had significant effects on the style of the group’s critical output, as well as private correspondence.126 While in literary works members of Arzamas generally used the refined conversational language promoted by Karamzin, in the polemical writings against Beseda a rather different kind of style came to the fore. The unceremonious, witty tone of the oral and private correspondence among the members served as the society’s idiosyncratic jargon and distinctive rhetorical style. In Batiushkov’s mocking poem, the “ballad-epic-lyric-comicepisodic hymn”, “Pevets v Besede liubitelei russkogo slova” (“The Bard at the Colloquium of the Lover of the Russian Word”, 1813) against Beseda is, for example, a eulogy to the informal and “inebriated” discussions of the Arzamatsy: Let’s get completely drunk in tribute to the Muses, As our forefathers used to drink! Death to reason, away with taste! Praise to Beseda’s sons! Lomonosov was clever Even cleverer than us Though he became immortal for his drunkenness And we are even more intoxicated than he was. We will live and drink to glory, Woe betide our enemies!127

124

Vatsuro 2000 . Stepanov 1985: 82. See also ibid., pp. 67-85. 126 The humorous tone was perceived by the Arzamastsy as their specific mark vis-àvis the “tedious” style of the Besedisty. As Batiushkov wrote in a letter to Gnedich in 1809: “Я мог бы написать все гораздо злее, в роде Шаховского. Но побоялся, потому что тогда не было бы смешно”. (cited in Batiushkov 1989: II/112). In this regard the society anticipates the powerful incursion of poetry into the life of the Russian nobility typical of the romantic age in general, and of the Decembrist movement in particular. See Iu. Lotman, “The Theatre and Theatricality as Components of Early Nineteenth-Century Culture” in Lotman-Uspenskii 1984: 159. See also Iu. Lotman, “The Decembrist in Everyday Life” in ibid.: 71-124. 127 “Напьемся пьяны Музам в дань, / Как пили наши деды! / Рассудку гибель, вкусу брань, / Хвала сынам Беседы! / Пусть Ломоносов был умен, / И нас еще умнее, / За пьянство стал бессмертен, / А мы его пьянее. / Для славы будем жить и пить, / Врагам беда и горе!” K. Batiushkov, “Pevets v Besede liubitelei russkogo slova” in Batiushkov: I/389. 125

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In a wider historic perspective the language of the Arzamastsy was charged with literary potentialities. The colloquialisms elaborated in the ripostes against Beseda and in the members’ non-narrative writings (accounts of meetings, manifestos, epistles) in the late 1820s started to penetrate literary works, posing alternatives to the, by then outmoded, sentimental style. In that respect Arzamas’ letters and polemical writings played an important part in the process of rapprochement of the literary and the spoken language beyond the confines of salon discourse set by Karamzin. In this perspective the Beseda versus Arzamas debate over the Russian literary language functioned as a catalyst for experimentation in innovative stylistic and linguistic devices and represented a landmark of new possibilities for Russian prose which would eventually be pursued in the late 1820s and 1830s by Decembrist writers, and particularly by Pushkin. From an historical perspective the “new style” advocated by the Arzamastsy emerged victorious in that an a priori double linguistic standard for literary and spoken usage disappeared, leaving Russian in line with the rest of Europe in terms of its linguistic and stylistic flexibility and wider readership appeal.

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Appendix: major circles and societies (1800-1820) 1800s-1810s Druzheskoe literaturnoe obshchestvo (Friendly Literary Society) Vol’noe obshchestvo liubitelei slovesnosti, nauk i khudozhestv (Free Society of Admirers of Literature, Sciences and Arts) Obshchestvo istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh (Society of Russian History and Antiquities) Literary kruzhok (circle) of the Iunkers’ school at the Senate Kruzhok of P. I. Shalikov Kruzhok of N. M. Murav’ev Kruzhok of the Charitable Pension at the First Pedagogical Institute Kruzhok of A. P. Benitskii

1810-1820s Obshchestvo liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti (Society of Admirers of Russian Literature) Obshchestvo slovesnosti i premudrosti (Society of Literature and Learning) Obshchestvo liubitelei otechestvennoi slovesnosti (Society of Admirers of National Literature) Moskovskoe obshchestvo istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh (Moscow Society of Russian History and Antiquities) Beseda liubitelei rossiiskogo slova (Colloquium of the Admirers of the Russian Word) Kruzhok of the pupils of Tsarskoe Selo Kruzhok of E. Engel’gardt Vol’noe obshchestvo liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti (Free Society of the Admirers of Russian Literature) Arzamas Kruzhok of F. P. Shakhovskoi Kruzhok of A. A. Shakhovskoi Kruzhok of P. A. Katenin Kruzhok of N. Turgenev Zelenaia lampa (The Green Lamp)

Chapter III

The eighteenth-century literary heritage The socio-cultural picture of Russia in the reign of Alexander I outlined in chapters I and II provides the starting point for a closer investigation of the remarkable developments undergone by prose fiction in the early nineteenth century. A synergy of liberal trends in cultural policy characterising the first decade of the century and the subsequent surge of patriotic feelings arising from Napoleon’s defeat energised literary activity at every level. Such momentous times accelerated the rise of prose fiction more than any sphere of artistic expression. For one, the drive towards narrative experimentation put in motion by Karamzin in the late eighteenth century was taken up with renewed enthusiasm by the next generation of Russian authors galvanised by the favourable political and cultural atmosphere of the age of Alexander. Whilst, as we will see in the following chapter, a number of prose writers redefined the traditional contours of sentimentalism, others delved deep into pre-existing narrative modes in the ongoing search for new creative routes for prose writing. Thus, genres pre-dating Karamzin such as philosophical tales and novels of adventure were re-shaped by early nineteenth-century prose writers, creating a diverse and complex body of works in prose, side by side with works written along the lines of sentimentalism. The present chapter analyses the output of Aleksandr Benitskii, Zinaida Volkonskaia, Andrei Kropotov, Aleksandr Izmailov, Savilii fon Ferel’ts and others by investigating the stylistic and thematic points of contact between these writers and the literary modes that emerged in the eighteenth century. In short, novelty and tradition were closely interwoven in Russian fiction of Alexander’s time, a feature that calls for a preliminary overview of the developments of prose genres in the course of the eighteenth century. Modern Russian literature is generally considered a byproduct of the wide-ranging reforms Peter the Great introduced to

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modernise his country and propel it onto the European chessboard. In the literary field, as in many other spheres of Russian life, Peter’s Westernising revolution ended up shaking the country to its very foundations. As a result of the injection of entirely new poetry, drama, journalism and, eventually, novels coming from the West in the course of the eighteenth century, Russian literature underwent dramatic transformations and the configuration of literary genres was recast beyond recognition. Extensive and comparatively rapid as it was, the penetration of Western literary trends was far from uniform across genres. Whereas by the 1750s Russia had imported almost all Western verse forms, and a considerable amount of original poetry had been written, prose fiction still lagged behind. Povesti such as the heroic and knightly tales of Western European origins and seventeenth-century works such as Gistoriia o rossiiskom kavalere Aleksandre (Story of the Russian Chevalier Aleksandr), Povest’ o Frole Skobeeve (Tale of Frol Skobeev) and Bova Korolevich (Prince Bova, which later inspired Pushkin’s Tale of Tsar Saltan)1 were mostly anonymous and commonly circulated in manuscript form well into the 1750s.2 The situation began to change in the second half of the century and, by the time Catherine II came to the throne, the taste for genuine “Russian tales” created a niche market for this type of fiction. Hence collections of eclectic material, including picaresque novels, oriental tales and Russian folk stories aimed at satisfying a growing demand for “local colour”, if not for realistic descriptions, began to appear.3 Yet the Russian short story was still modest in numerical terms and hampered by its reliance on Western prototypes in the genre. The novel appeared in Russia slightly later than the story and povest’, landmarks in the genre dating to the 1760s with the publication of what is commonly considered the first (semi)original Russian novel, Fiodor Emin’s Nepostoiannaia Fortuna, ili pokhozhdenie Miramonda (Inconstant Fortune, or the Voyage of Miramond) of 1763.4 Emin’s novels were followed by a series of 1

For a complete record of eighteenth-century Russian works held in Pushkin’s personal library see Modzalevskii 1910 and 1988. See also Stennik 1995. 2 The first Russian literary journal, Ezhemesyachnye sochineniia (Monthly Composition), which contained some popular tales, was published in 1755. 3 Rogger 1960: 170. 4 Later works include Nagrazhdennaia postoiannost’, ili prikliucheniia Lizarka i Sarmandy (Constancy Rewarded, or the Adventures of Lizark and Sarmanda, 1764) and Pis’ma Ernesta i Doravry (Letters of Ernest and Doravra, 1766).

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milestones in the genre, including Mikhail Chulkov’s Peresmeshnik, ili slavianskie skazki (The Mocker, or Slavonic Tales, 1767), and Prigozhaia povarikha (The Comely Cook, 1770), the first of Kheraskov’s Neoclassical novels, Numa, ili protsvetaiushchii Rim (Numa, or Flourishing Rome), (1768), and Matvei Komarov’s Van’ka Kain (1779). Emin and Chulkov provide topical examples of a decisive phase in Russian fiction when writers, after the rapid absorption – via translations and re-adaptation – of the “European corpus” occurring in the 1750s and 1760s began to produce a body of quasi-original Russian works. In the first of Emin’s novels, Inconstant Fortune, the author eased this transition by incorporating a variety of material, including Greek myths, Arabic literature, Byzantine romance, and Russian popular tales, blended together in an idiosyncratic narrative aimed at satisfying the eclectic tastes of contemporary readers.5 In so doing Emin created a layered work that could be read both at “face value”, as a novel of love and adventure, and at a metaphorical level, as a vehicle for political and philosophical ideas.6 In this latter respect, Emin extolled what he saw as the greatest potential of the genre, namely to inform the reader about “various countries, their mores and politics” in order to acquaint him or her with a wealth of serious topics,7 but in a more digestible form than attempted by classicist authors and in a pleasant style. Mikhail Chulkov too aimed at creating a literature of entertainment accessible to a socially diverse readership. To this end Chulkov, unlike Emin, had no qualms in forsaking the didactic intent characterising the age of classicism in order to focus on concrete aspects of the every-day life of his characters. Indicative in this respect is the story of the “comely cook” Martona, replete with 5

Budgen 1976: 67-94. In keeping with the precepts of neoclassicism, Nepostoiannaia fortuna addresses the issue of the ideal political government based on the principles of Enlightenment. Oriental settings offer the necessary “cover” for Emin’s criticism of contemporary events and European political systems, a device widely used by European – and later Russian – authors of “oriental tales”. See also Avtukovich 2004. 7 Emin voices this intent in Inconstant Fortune: “Хорошо написанные романы, нравоучения различного рода, описание стран с их нравами и политикой – самые полезные книги молодых юношей для приобщения молодых юношей к наукам”. Emin 1763: II/291. The influence of sentimentalism on Emin is clear in Letters of Ernest and Doravra, a work inspired by Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloïse. In his programmatic foreword to the novel Emin writes: “I desire to publish this insignificant work of mine for the one and only reason of inciting tender hearts to commiserate upon our misfortunes”. Emin 1766: I/i. 6

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realistic details about the heroine’s picaresque love encounters. Stylistic devices such as the liberal use of popular sayings and, more generally, the adoption of a literary language patterned on popular speech contribute to the sense of authenticity emanating from Chulkov’s work. Yet, as it has recently been shown, what is commonly held to be a masterpiece of eighteenth-century prose fiction appears to be less original than previously believed.8 Despite relying on foreign sources, however, the vivid picture of Russian society emerging from The Comely Cook has been considered “authentic” until very recently and as such provided a source of inspiration for generations to come, including authors active at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Yet, in the context of eighteenth-century fiction, the successes of Chulkov, Emin and a few others represent isolated cases, for foreign novels and short stories continued to appeal to the Russian reader much more than native ones. Translations played the lion’s share in the body of prose writing published in Catherine’s time with works by Voltaire, Fénelon, de Genlis, Florian, Wieland, Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, Swift and Fielding filling Russian books and periodical publications. The activity of Russian translators had been on the rise since the reign of Elizabeth (1741-1762) when the court supported their work both directly, through orders coming from the government-run presses, and indirectly via the official backing of the first privately owned journals that regularly published translations of foreign literature (Trudoliubivaia pchela – The Industrious Bee, 1759 – and Prazdnoe vremia v pol’zu upotreblennoe – Idle Time Usefully Employed, 1759-1760). Catherine, who acceded to the throne after the short reign of Elizabeth’s nephew Peter II, was famous for her intense cultural activity and under her rule literary translations gained momentum with the institution of a permanent group of translators at the Noble Cadet Corps. Specific imperial requests (such as the translations of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Fielding’s Adventures of Joseph Andrews personally commissioned by Catherine) and flourishing private editorial enterprises such as Nikolai Novikov’s further increased the number of works translated into Russian. 8

Manfred Schruba has convincingly demonstrated that Chulkov’s The Comely Cook is a remake of a work by the French writer Louis Charles de Monbron (1706-1760), Margot la ravaudeuse (1749). Manfred Schruba, “Prigozhaia povarikha na fone frantsuzskogo pornograficheskogo romana (Chulkov i Fuzhere de Monbron)” in Klein, Dixon and Fraanje 2001: 328-341.

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The growing demand for translations had a beneficial effect on Russian literature in at least two respects. On the one hand translations of successful novels and short stories increased readers’ appetite for prose fiction; on the other hand, the task of rendering foreign literary texts in Russian had an impact on original works of fiction. To understand this phenomenon one must bear in mind that Russian authors often doubled as translators, an activity that at the time involved a high degree of creative input on the translator’s part to the extent that the final products often bordered on self-standing creations. In this respect the task of translating/re-writing a literary text broadened and sharpened the technical repertoire of Russian authors while providing an array of plots and subject matters that could be reproduced in semi-original works. Russian authors of the 1770s and 1780s did exactly that, appropriating material from both Western prototypes and Petrine traditions to create a variety of hybrid genres such as the cultivated folk tale (a genre tried by Catherine herself), stories of travel and adventure and of contemporary life and manners, classical, didactic, and finally sentimental. Yet, it was only at the very end of the century that, in the wake of the tremendous success of Karamzin’s povesti, that Russian fiction took off as an original genre deserving serious consideration.9 Even so, only about one in ten works published in Russia in the late eighteenth century was Russian, the remainder still consisting of translations. The affirmation of prose fiction was fraught with difficulties in eighteenth-century Russia, a state of affairs not surprising in a century dominated by classicism. Russian classicism, a literary movement that outlived its Western counterparts by several decades, followed in Boileau’s footsteps in condemning the vast majority of prose fiction as a corrupted and corrupting genre, with the exception of works engaged in civic themes such as the philosophical tale. Part of the problem lay in the fact that novels and short stories allegedly gave free rein to the author’s imagination, a creative method abhorred by classicists who strove to control precisely the imaginative component of the creative process via the adherence to “universal” and rational guidelines.10 “Low” topics and the sub-standard literary language used in many eighteenth-century narratives contributed to 9

In between 1789 and 1803 Karamzin wrote 15 original stories, trying his hand at all the existing sub-genres and adding to the Russian repertoire new types, such as the historical and pre-romantic povesti. 10 See Budgen 1979: 65; Goodliffe 1971: 124-135.

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their negative reception by Russian classicists. Ultimately, it was the “lawlessness” of the genre that made prose fiction in general, and novels in particular, unacceptable to eighteenth-century critics, a rejection that slowed down its development and inhibited its wider appreciation. Such attitudes to prose fiction led to a separation between a small segment of fiction addressing universal topics and aimed at the cosmopolitan and discerning reader vis-à-vis the bulk of less ambitious, openly entertaining works directed to a wider public. This generic and stylistic division of Russian letters into two separated branches was reflected at a linguistic level by the phenomenon of diglossia: whereas the language of novels was based on the spoken discourse intelligible to a broad readership, erudite authors employed expressions derived from Church Slavonic, the exclusive domain of the socio-cultural elite.11 As the century grew older and the Europeanisation of the nobility increased its pace, the breach between the higher echelons and the rest of Russian society gaped wider. In many ways this situation was mirrored at a literary level, where the “cultural alienation” of the nobility further deepened the breach between both low and high literature, and fiction and nonfiction. The lack of a uniform literary language,12 together with the dominance of classical aesthetics, contributed to the delayed development of a “middle” and truly national corpus of novels and stories. Yet, notwithstanding all their differences, these two types of fiction seemed to share one feature – the lack of concern for Russian life and mores and a general disregard for credible plots and national specific settings. Heavily reliant on foreign templates, popular writers churned out fantastic adventures in foreign lands, while their classical counterparts were preoccupied with disseminating the seeds of universal wisdom. Whilst fiction was frowned upon by critics, the normative character and abstract drive of classicism also began to attract negative responses – albeit in a low key – during the reign of Catherine. Signs of disaffection loomed in the literature of the 1770s, at first confined to the theatre and in satiric genres appearing in

11

Garde 1996: 14. On this issue see chapter II. See also the excellent essay by Hans Rogger “Towards a National Language” in Rogger 1960: 85-125. 12

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13

periodical publications. Authors such as A. A. Ablesimov, M. I. Popov and V. I. Maikov, for example, successfully promoted the comic opera, a genre that broke with the dramatic rules of classicism by embracing a middle standard for Russian theatre and bringing national life onto the stage. With its credible representation of reality, the introduction of characters of lower social standing and the employment of a language closer to the spoken idiom (via colloquialisms and proverbs, for example) the comic opera had de facto opened the path to middle genres. Yet in the eighteenth century Russification and popularisation were not common requirements of works of fiction, a failing pointedly noted by Andrei Bolotov in his review of L’vov’s Rossiiskaia Pamela, ili istoriia Marii, dobrodetel’noi poselianki (The Russian Pamela, or the Story of Maria, the Virtuous Countrywoman), where he writes: “It would be good if anybody at all was to write a Russian novel observing both naturalness and plausibility, and in which everything was conceived according to Russian features, manners, and customs.”14 At the turn of the century serious doubts about the traditional division between “high” and “low” literature advocated by classicists began to be voiced in a wave of criticism that opened new perspectives for middle genres in general and for the novel and story in particular. Socio-cultural factors (the expansion of literacy and book printing and the gradual professionalisation of literary activity) and changes in cultural life (the proliferation of journals and cultural debates) contributed to lifting the status of fiction. A fundamental role in this process was played by sentimental writers such as M. Murav’ev and, especially, Karamzin, whose activity as an author, critic and journal editor in the 1780s and 1790s served as an example for future literary enterprises.15 Following the 13

See I. Z. Serman, “Stanovlenie i razvitie romana v russkoi literature serediny XVIII veka” in Kastorskii 1959: 82-95.

“Хорошо было бы, если бы кто-нибудь написал нам такой роман, в котором соблюдались бы найстрожайшим образом и натуральность, и правдоподобие, и в котором бы все согласовывалось с российскими нравами, обстоятельствами и привычками, но такого романа у нас пока до сих пор нет, и нам остается только желать, что такой появится”. Bolotov’s review of Pavel L’vov’s Rossiiskaia Pamela, ili istoriia Marii, dobrodetel’noi poselianki (The Russian Pamela, or the Story of Maria, the Virtuous Countrywoman, 1789) in Bolotov 1933: 217. 14

15

On this issue see Iu.V. Stennik, “Esteticheskaia mysl v Rossii XVIII v.” XVIII vek 1986: XV/49-50.

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widespread success enjoyed by Western European sentimentalism and by its Russian imitations, Karamzin created works of fiction directed at both a sophisticated audience and at average readers. Additionally Karamzin’s reform of Russia’s literary language was instrumental to the rise and expansion of a number of prose genres in the early nineteenth century. The supple style of sentimentalism, although based on a specific social dialect (the “ladies’ discourse”), had the crucial merit of weakening the barrier between literary and spoken language. From a generic viewpoint, Karamzin’s promotion of a variety of “minor” narrative forms had the effect of further eroding the hierarchy of literary genres established by classicism. In short, Karamzin liberated fiction from many of its previous limitations in a move that opened the path for further experiments in narrative form and style occurring in the age of Alexander. Yet Karamzin’s reform of Russian prose fiction had its problems; the middle standard advocated by sentimentalists de facto continued the tradition of educated prose vis-à-vis the “clumsy” novel of adventure, while Russian everyday reality remained largely underrepresented in sentimental literature. Authors who moved outside the sentimental sphere of influence and penned works perceived as unacceptable to a sophisticated audience were marginalised by the classicist camp as much as by the sentimental circles. In other words, a sufficiently high degree of refinement, both in language and in subject matter, remained a fundamental requirement for any literary work to be accepted by the literary establishment. As will be demonstrated in this chapter, it was only at the beginning of the nineteenth century that the last constraint on the full development of Russian fiction – sentimental sophistication – was finally overcome. Authors of the immediate post-Karamzin period, although rarely reaching the creative heights of later generations, had the great merit of carrying through the transition from a double-track literature – popular, dealing with low topics, vis-à-vis refined prose, dealing with subtle feelings or serious philosophical issues – to a more “democratic” and ultimately stimulating middle narrative ground.

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III.1 The influence of “high” eighteenth-century

prose: the oriental tale16 The vostochnaia povest’ – the Russian version of the French conte philosophique and the English philosophical tale – played an important role within Russian “high” literature for over four decades, starting in the 1770s and finally coming to a close in the second decade of Alexander’s reign. The oriental tale reached the peak of its popularity during the age of Catherine when, due to its philosophical topics and refined style, oriental narratives received the approval of classicist theorists. The genre maintained a high profile in Russian letters well into the first decade of the nineteenth century, when the oriental tale became one of the main literary outlets for progressive ideas. Notwithstanding its repute with contemporaries and its topicality as the “Enlightenment genre” in an age dominated by projects of political reform, the Russian oriental tale has been largely overlooked by scholars, particularly in its later developments during the reign of Alexander I. In order to fill this gap, the present section provides a brief review of the origins and main generic features of the vostochnaia povest’ followed by an investigation of Aleksandr Benitskii, whose oeuvre perfectly encapsulates the main features of the oriental tale in the decade 1800-1810. Beside its historical interest, the genre is fascinating in its own right, standing out from a stylistic and thematic point of view. Authors of oriental tales addressed widespread concerns among the cultured elite expressed via oriental allegories and semi-transparent comparisons between Russia and an imaginary East, employing a literary language that was remarkably terse and elegant. Of course the device of weaving a political and social critique into the fabric of a fantastic plot and the predilection for a stereotyped orient as both a convenient and a popular setting is neither original nor specifically Russian. Rather, the vostochnye povesti of the 1800s represent a continuation of literary trends emerging during Catherine’s reign under the direct influence of English and French works. This genealogy explains the political and idealogical content of a genre nurtured by a confidence in literature as an effective means to sway the ruler towards political reforms characteristic of the age of 16

Some of the material discussed in this section appeared in Tosi 1999.

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Enlightenment. After 1812 such beliefs will be definitely abandoned by the Russian intellectual elite, a change of heart that provides important clues on why the oriental tale lost its topicality and ultimately vanished at exactly that point in time. If the genre as such ended together with the illusion of a liberal monarchy for Russia, its literary legacy certainly outlived the early nineteenth century in at least two respects. Firstly, the vostochnaia povest’ marks the starting point of Russian “orientalism”, i.e. of Russia’s perception, representation and popularisation of what came under the broad definition of the Orient. Secondly, by the end of the 1810s the genre had developed accomplished narrative strategies to disseminate political ideas, a narrative edifice made of layer upon layer of allegories and metaphors in exotic disguise. Such parallels between two or more levels of reading required the reader’s competence to be deciphered, and signal an advanced stage in the peculiar communication between Russian writers and their audience via a highly symbolic text. Some of these devices were taken up and further developed by later nineteenth-century writers for whom the struggle to express their ideals (be they political, religious or philosophical) in times of reaction and cultural stagnation represented one of the greatest aesthetic challenges. The vostochnaia povest’ emerged in Russia during the second half of the eighteenth century in the wake of the success of two concurrent literary phenomena: the first Russian translation of the One Thousand and One Nights (Tisiacha i odna noch’. Skaski arabskie, published between 1756 and 1765),17 and the growing popularity of philosophical fiction coming from France and England. The success of the Arabian Nights marked the beginnings of the “oriental fashion”, a cultural phenomenon Russia eventually came to share with the rest of Europe.18 The main literary offshoots of such infatuation for the East are represented by the philosophical tale, a genre geared from the start to disseminate the philosophical and aesthetic tenets of the Enlightenment, and its popular counterpart, the spicy novels of adventure set in exotic lands.

17

Neuhäuser 1974: 50; Marker 1985: 97 and 203. See also Shklovskii 1929: 84. The oriental fashion in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, France, Germany, Italy and Russia manifested itself in sculpture and architecture, as well as in literature. As in the case of “Oriental” literature, in architecture too the classic style became loaded with “eastern” elements. See Shvidkovsky 1996: 167-183. 18

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The English tradition of philosophic-moralising prose was well represented in Russia by the numerous translations of Dr Johnson,19 Goldsmith and Addison appearing in the course of the eighteenth century, a tradition that prompted Russian writers to try out the sophisticated genre of the oriental tale. Yet, in the wake of the widespread “literary Gallomania”, i.e. the admiration for and imitation of everything French investing Russia in the second half of the eighteenth century, it was the conte philosophique that provided the most powerful prototype for the Russian oriental tale. In France the conte philosophique first rose to prominence during the early eighteenth century and was then codified in its unique form by Voltaire, an author who exerted the single greatest influence on Russian authors of oriental literature, including drama20 and prose fiction.21 Voltaire’s celebrated stories were known and appreciated by Catherine and her contemporaries until, following the events of the French Revolution, the reaction against the Philosophes set in. After an all-time low in his popularity, the author Voltaire – if not always the philosopher – regained ground in the early years of Alexander’s reign, a rehabilitation which led to an unprecedented number of translations of his stories.22 In 1803 an anonymous critic (most likely to be the journal’s editor Petr Makarov) voiced the enthusiasm of a large section of the Russian educated readership in Moskovskii Merkurii (The Moscow Mercury): “Who does not know Voltaire’s novels! Who has not read Candide, The Princess of Babilonie and Micromegas! [...] Where would one find a pen subtler than that of Voltaire – filled with philosophy, and running with astonishing lightness across the page, scattering splendid pearls of wit?”23 With similarities to the last years of Catherine’s reign, when Voltaire’s allegories went out of fashion due to a much more guarded political atmosphere, the appreciation for Voltaire waned after 19

On the Russian translations of Samuel Johnson’s work see Levin 1994a: 46-47, 5455, 61-62, 106-107. See also 1994a: 159-160. 20 Lomonosov, for example, patterned his oriental tragedy Temira i Selim (1750) – set among the Moslems in the Near East – on Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732). 21 Zaborov 1970: 107; Sipovskii 1909-1910: I/73-92; Zaborov 1978: 20-23. 22 Ibid.: 168; M. P. Alekseev, “K istorii russkogo vol’terianstva v XIX v.” in XVIII vek 1966: VII/302-311 (302-303); Iazykov 1879: 16-17. 23 “Кто не знает романов Вольтера! Кто не читал Кандида, Принцессу Вавилонскую, Микромегаса! […] Где взять тонкое перо Вольтера – напитанное философией, и которое, однако ж, с удивительной легкостью бегает по бумаге, резвясь и роняя блистательные перлы остроумия?” [Anon] 1803: 156-157.

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Alexander took a conservative turn in the 1810s.24 This change of political atmosphere precipitated the decline of the vostochnaia povest’, a genre that as such virtually disappeared from the literary horizon after that date whilst other “Oriental” genres continued to gain ground. Born as a literary vehicle for the main philosophical tendencies of the age, which it attempted to popularise in a form agreeable to both the cultivated and the average reader, the oriental tale borrowed its narrative features from a rich literary pool. Hence its compound narrative character that echoes a vast array of genres including the popular novel of adventure, the Bildungsroman, and especially the exotic folk tale and the literature of travel.25 The philosophical variant of the oriental tale may be defined as an imaginary narrative, structured on a succession of episodes (often resulting from a journey – either manifest or implied – of the narrator) and organised around a philosophical, political or ethical theme. In this type of narrative exotic settings and characters generally function as a framework for the presentation of the main abstract topic (such as the transience of life, the vanity of human ambitions), or for the definition of ethical and civic duties. A vehicle of philosophical satire (as in Voltaire’s oriental contes), or medium of political criticism (as in Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, 1721),26 the eighteenth-century oriental tale was a mixture, in varying proportions, of fiction and ideology where the latter generally dominated.27 In other words, exotic settings and characters were devoid of ethnographic content, rather serving to convey moral and civic teachings in harmony with the “practical” and didactic function of literature in the age of classicism.28 All other aspects of these tales – the stylistic, the narrative, the structural – are ultimately subordinated to this aim; hence the homogeneous and stereotyped character of settings broadly defined as “oriental” or “exotic” which, stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean to Asia,29 may also include ancient Greece and Rome. 24

Zaborov 1970: 107; Sipovskii 1909-1910: I/73-92. See Adams1993: 145. 26 Conant 1908: xxiv. 27 On this issue see Lamarque and Haugom Olsen 1994: 391-392; Keener 1983: 3-8 and J. Saveil, “La discontinuité dans Candide” in Mervaud and Menant 1987: II/823830 (823); Coulet 1970: 439-441. 28 Weitzman 1967: 1850; Brunetière 1922: 193. See also Stennik 1986 and Stepanov 1983: 105-120. 29 See Maggs 1984: 81-82. 25

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As had happened in France two decades earlier, the vostochnaia povest’ initially added sophistication and injected political views into the narrative provided by popular novels of adventure with an Eastern flavour. The rapprochement of these hitherto separated narrative trends, the adventure-entertaining and the philosophic-didactic, represented, at least in theory, an ideal combination for the diffusion of Enlightenment ideals,30 and occasionally Masonic teachings, among a broader public.31 Hence, the development of the Russian oriental tale in many ways follows that of other European countries. This is in part due to the direct influence of numerous translations of French and English works, and partly to the fact that the Russian elite in Catherine’s age was in many respects on the same wave-length as its Western counterpart.32 Differences are, however, detectable; literary imports were grafted on to the existing substratum of earlier literary influences, ranging from oriental works, mostly received through Byzantium, to the rich tradition of the folktale, both in its original form and in re-workings by Russian writers.33 Hence some oriental tales, such as D. N. Zinov’ev’s Torzhestvuiushaia dobrodetel’ (The Triumph of Virtue, 1789)34 and S. Glinka’s Selim i Roksana (Selim and Roxana, 1798),35 despite the “serious” intentions professed by the authors, resulted in a string of spicy adventures closer in tone to the fanciful folktales and the remarkably popular Thousand and One Nights.36 As in France, where oriental tales also inspired a number of contes licencieux mocking the moralising tendency of their more sober counterparts, in late-eighteenth-century Russia one observes a similar branching out into a sophisticated philosophically-oriented

30

In the eighteenth century the majority of original Russian novels were of the “plotted” type. As Skipina observes, the focus on a string of adventures caused them to swell to extraordinary dimensions. Skipina 1985: 21-22. 31 Baehr 1991: 100-103. 32 L. I. Sazonova, “Perevodnaia khudozhestvennaia proza v Rossii 30-60kh godov XVIII v.” in Kurilov, Pigarev and Purishev 1982: 122-128. 33 Kubacheva 1962: 299. 34 The full title being: Torzhestvuiushaia dobrodetel’, ili zhizn’ i prikliucheniia gonimogo fortunoiu Selima (Virtue Triumphant, or the Life and Adventures of Selim, Pursued by Fate). On this work see Drage 1978: 115-117. 35 The full title being: Selim i Roksana, ili prevratnost’ zhizni chelovecheskoi, vostochnaia povest’. 36 Gareth Jones 1979: 77. See also Cross 1993: 87.

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genre and a more popular, adventurous one.37 Interestingly, whilst the philosophical tale was to survive well into the early nineteenth century, the popular variant was absorbed into the broader tradition of the adventurous and picaresque novel. The philosophical tale at the turn of the eighteenth century, in tune with the French and English sources, conveyed an allegorical and didactic message in which the exotic or ancient setting served as a scenario of convenience. Some oriental settings were used to project a satirical picture of Russia in disguise (as in F. Emin, Prikliucheniia Femistokla (The Adventures of Themistocles, 1763) and Fonvizin’s Kallisfen (Callisfen, 1786);38 others acted as an allegorical canvas for philosophical beliefs (as in Krylov’s Kaib, 1792)39 or as a device to depict an ideal society (as in M. Kheraskov’s Kadm i Gearmoniia (Cadmus and Harmonia, 1786).40 Interestingly, many eighteenth-century oriental tales took the form of “lessons to the Tsar” along the lines of Les aventures de Télémaque by Fénelon (1695), a narrative type in which the ideal relationship 37

Kubacheva detects three main trends: the moral-didactic, the entertainingadventurous and the philosophic-satirical variant. Kubacheva 1962: 299. See also Belozerskaia 1896: 47-50. Interestingly, translators’ choise of oriental tales were, to an extent, related to their gender, with women translators preferring the “safer” moral-didactic variant, while their male counterparts tended to translate works of a political cast. Rosslyn 2000: 73. 38 The honest Kallisfen, a disciple of Aristotle, falls victim of the corrupted court of Alexander the Great. The Greek setting serves as a metaphor for Fonvizin’s satire of absolutism in general and of the reign of Catherine II in particular. By the same token, Kallisfen reflects both the ideal enlightened philosopher and Fonvizin’s personal experiences at the Russian court. Strycek 1976: 493-494 and Pigarev 1954: 232-235. See also G. N. Moiseeva, I. Z. Serman, “Zarozhdenie romana v Russkoe literature XVIII veka” in Moiseeva and Serman 1962-1964: I/40-65 (57); Kubacheva 1962: 309-312; Städtke 1971: 28-29 and M. Al’tshuller, “Krylov i vol’ter’ianstvo” in Bartlett, Cross and Rasmussen 1988: 347-359 (349). 39 Kaib tells the story of the eponymous oriental sovereign who, ignorant of the actual conditions of his subjects, idealises the existence of the peasants. An incognito journey through his reign makes him realise the harsh reality of country life. The tale, clearly influenced by Voltaire, is also a parody of Rousseau’s utopia of life in the bosom of nature. See Gorbatov 1991: 43. See also Städtke 1971: 56 and Stepanov 1989: 238. 40 M. M. Shcherbatov’s unfinished Puteshestvie v zemliu Ofirskuyu g.S., shvetskogo dvorianina (Journey of Mr. S., a Swedish Nobleman, to the Land of Ophir (written in 1783-1784, but published only in the nineteenth century) and M. N. Murav’ev’s Obitatel’ predmestiia i Emilievy pis’ma (An Inhabitant of the Suburbs and Letters from Emile (first printed probably in the 1790s for the Grand Princes Alexander and Constantine to whom Murav’ev was a tutor) forms part of this latter group of philosophical narratives.

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between the intellectual and the enlightened monarch is depicted in a safely remote location. The popularity of this topic in Russia reflected the illusion nurtured by the intellectual elite of holding an important moral – if not institutional – role in the political life of their country. Such hopes were directly encouraged by the self-image of enlightened monarchs actively promoted by both Catherine and Alexander, at least until international events brought their policy to more conservative positions, in a turn that twice crushed the illusion of a wider participation in the running of the country. In this respect, the vostochnaia povest’ provided a suitable outlet for the civic aspirations of Russia’s intellectual elite in times of relative freedom of expression. Moreover, the narrative “filter” made the oriental tale a relatively safe arena for a “political dialogue” of sorts (or – quite literally – of a didactic monologue, as in Murav’ev’s case) between the writer and the tsar. Hence the prestige enjoyed by the genre at the onset of Catherine’s age and the short-lived revival in the early reign of Alexander when a group of young and progressive Russian writers including Aleksandr Izmailov,41 Nikolai Brusilov,42 Pavel L’vov43 and, above all, Aleksandr Benitskii tried their hand at the genre.44

41

In 1806 Izmailov published “Ibragim i Osman. Vostochnaia povest’” in Liubitel’ slovesnosti (1806: VII/101-198). The work, as indicated in a footnote to the title, was “read at the Free Society of the Admirers of Literature, the Sciences and the Arts” (ibid. 101). It was soon reprinted under the pseudonym “I.- ” in the first issue of Blagonamerennyi (The Loyalist) of 1818 with the original sub-title: “Work hard, do good and you will be contented”. After the death of the author the story was included in a volume of collected works (Efimovich 1849: II/365-90). As suggested by the sub-title, Izmailov’s tale is characterised by a strong didactic aim. 42 Among Brusilov’s oriental tales figure Azem, published in his Bezdelki, ili nekotorye sochineniia i perevody N.B. (Brusilov 1803: 18-33), and Kabul, which appeared in his collected works and translations Plody moego dosuga (Brusilov 1805: 65-67). This latter collection includes translations of oriental works by D’Alambert (see, for example, chapter 2: “Vostochnye basni iz d’Alamberta” [“Oriental Fables by D’Alambert”] and others (chapter 3: “Mysli vostochnykh mudretsov” [“Thoughts of Oriental Sages”], most probably a translation from the French). 43 P. L’vov, Khram istiny, videnie Sezostrisa, tsaria egipetskogo (1790) and Opravdavshisiia vizir (1801). 44 The success of the genre in the reign of Alexander I is testified to by numerous translations of foreign (mostly French) oriental tales appearing in contemporary periodicals. Zhukovskii, for example, at the time of his editorship of Vestnik Evropy (1808-1810), translated and published a number of contes orientales (see Ehrhard 1938: 76).

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In the years of the Unofficial Committee and of the Commission for the Drafting of Laws,45 in which Benitskii himself participated as a translator, the ideals of the enlightened monarchy were revived in Russian society and, through the vostochnaia povest’ – the narrative genre which traditionally expressed them – in Russian literature. The contextual factors outlined above help to explain some features peculiar to the Russian oriental tale, a genre which maintained a unique stability in an age of intense generic and stylistic experimentation: early nineteenth-century oriental tales differed very little from their eighteenth-century predecessors. If there were changes, these occurred in further reducing the imaginative element in favour of the philosophical argument conveyed by the story. In the oriental tales of the 1800-1810s the theme of enlightened absolutism performed a central role; in parallel to this political concern the narrative element played a minimal function whilst the adventurous component disappeared all together from what had virtually became a plotless narrative. At the same time the exotic element was treated more than ever before as a literary cliché, often being merely sketched in line with popular stereotypes about the “East”. In early nineteenth-century vostochnye povesti oriental settings, which were often anticipated in the title, served as nothing more than an indication to the reader about the work’s hidden philosophical or political agenda. The format also changed, and with a minimal plot-thread the oriental tale became not just shorter in form,46 but also austere, virtually laconic in style. Aleksandr Benitskii, an author whose work, according to Mirsky’s enthusiastic appraisal, “surpassed in elegance everything written before Pushkin”, well epitomises the terseness and stylistic clarity typical of the genre at this point in its history.47 Benitskii’s original style, like that of Zinaida Volkonskaia, was shaped with an eye on the French eighteenth-century tradition, particularly the much celebrated Voltaire. Both Benitskii and Volkonskaia captivate today’s reader for the simple, almost “naked”, quality of their 45

The “Komissiia po sostavleniiu zakonov” was created in 1801, to put into practice Alexander’s belief that “in a well-ordered state all offences must be comprehended, judged and punished by the force of law” (quoted in Hartley 1994: 33-34). Upon his release Radishchev was also invited to take part in the works of the Commission. 46 The short or medium length of these tales made them an ideal genre for periodical publication and most of them (all in Benitskii’s case) were indeed published in literary journals and almanacs. 47 Mirsky 1927: 93.

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writing, particularly when compared to the ornate style dominating much of early nineteenth-century fiction. Arguably, these two authors were the first Russian writers who successfully emulated the light touch and the seemingly effortless witticisms typical of the best in eighteenth-century French tradition, a heritage that Pushkin was soon to take in his stride and bring to perfection. Aleksandr Benitskii (1782-1809), a nobleman of modest fortune, after having been educated in Schaden’s pension in Moscow and having served in the army, in 1804 began to work as a translator for the Commission for the Drafting of Laws.48 During the few years he was employed in the government post Benitskii led an active literary life. A prolific writer of poems, prose works (chiefly of oriental tales) and translations (for example of Lessing’s Filotas), Benitskii was also engaged as a professional literary critic, indeed one of the most esteemed in early nineteenth-century Russia. His writing, especially his prose works, was acclaimed at the time, particularly within a small circle of fellow literati.49 As his friend and colleague Aleksandr Izmailov wrote, his oriental tales “may be placed alongside the best prose works in our language”.50 In 1807 Benitskii edited the first and only issue of the almanac Taliia in St. Petersburg; the almanac was an outlet for the work of the Free Society of the Admirers of Literature, the Sciences and the Arts. In 1809, together with Izmailov, he launched the literary journal Tsvetnik (The Flower Garden), published monthly for two years and also closely associated with the Free Society.51 In Tsvetnik there also appeared a number of works in verse and prose, among which the most interesting are short stories by Benitskii and Izmailov.52 The regret for Benitskii’s untimely death at the age of twenty-seven was widely felt among his generation of St. Petersburg writers, for, as 48

Stepanov 1989: 237. As is the case with a number of prose writers of the time, Benitskii has been rarely acknowledged by twentieth-century scholars. However, when this has happened, as, for example, in the case of Mirsky, Kubasov and Kubacheva, the appreciation of his works has been unanimous. See Mirsky 1927: 92-93; Kubasov 1900), 280-311; Kubacheva 1962: 313. 50 “[Восточные повести] могут стать в один ряд со многими лучшими прозаическими сочинениями на нашем языке”. A. Izmailov, Tsvetnik, 1809: XI/268. 51 The journal consisted mainly of critical pieces by the two editors and by some of the leading writers of the time, including Batiushkov, Ostolopov, Vostokov, Gnedich and A. Izmailov. 52 See Dement’ev, Zapadov and Cherepakhov 1959: 131-133; Gorshkov 1982: 226-229; Evgen’ev-Maksimov, Mordovichenko and Iampolskii 1950: 166-167. 49

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Nikolai Grech wrote shortly after the writer’s demise, “Within a short time Benitskii became well-known and acquired a high reputation in our literature; his premature death deprived Russia of a young writer with great promise.”53 Both in terms of their literary relevance and quantity Benitskii is undoubtedly the chief author of oriental tales in early nineteenth-century Russia. The oriental narratives he published, including oriental stories and “dramatic trifles”, exemplify the philosophic-didactic trend dominating the genre in the first decade of the reign of Alexander. Our overview of the oriental tale in the early nineteenth century, therefore, will refer primarily to Benitskii’s works, focusing in particular on the story Na drugoi den’ (To the Next Day, 1809) which was well known at the time.54 In Benitskii’s tales the exposition of philosophical ideals plays a key role in the narrative, leading, as we will demonstrate, to peculiar stylistic outcomes. The author constructs his tales on the abstract propositions of the Age of Enlightenment, expressing in particular an unconditional faith in the liberating possibilities of Reason. Each story functions as a demonstration of this philosophical principle, showing, in the case of Vizier and Bedouin,55 the negative outcome of irrational conduct,56 or, in the case of To the Next Day, Grangul’57 and Ibragim, the positive advancement towards “true knowledge”. In this second group of tales the exemplary philosophic goal is presented as a “journey for the truth”58 undertaken by the hero. Benitskii’s positive characters strive to act according to the ideal of rationality both in their personal behaviour and in their “За короткое время сделался известным и приобрел отличное имя в нашей литературе; его преждевременная смерть лишила Россию прекрасных надежд в этом молодом писателе”. Grech 1822: 327. 54 According to Arsen’ev, contemporary writers were particularly fond of three povesti: Ibragim ili velikodushnyi, vostochnaia povest’ (Ibragim or the Magnanimous. Oriental Tale, 1806 (hereafter: IV)), Bedouin (both of 1807) and Na drugoi den’ (To the Next Day (hereafter: DD)). A. Arsen’ev 1887: 167. 55 Incidentally, Vizier is the only Oriental tale written by Benitskii to contain an explicit (albeit fleeting) reference to Russia (see V: 14). Mentioned by the Turkish vizier of the title as an example of military discipline and efficiency, Russia (like France with Montesquieu) is presented from the “external”, supposedly objective, point of view of the foreign character. 56 See Kubacheva 1962: 313. 57 For an account of Grangul’s plot see Neuhäuser 1975: 146. 58 This expression was employed by Benitskii in his explanatory footnote to the “Oriental trifle” “Grangul” (Tsvetnik, 1809: II/19). 53

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conduct as political figures. Their feelings and inclinations are filtered through a process of reasoning and self-knowledge that eventually frees their political and civic deeds from any prejudice or superstition; such a single-minded pursuit of moral perfection eventually transforms these characters into models of virtue and rational behaviour. The moral aim underpinning Benitskii’s tales is further demonstrated by a series of topoi characteristic of didactic literature, such as the narrator’s edifying tone, his disquisition of a philosophic and ethical nature, the use of aphorisms, and finally his interpolated comments on the hero’s conduct. To the Next Day, one of Benitskii’s most mature and representative works, provides a case example in point. Set in an unspecified time, and in a vague oriental ambience, this work narrates the story of Narud, Nabob of Bagar, who progresses from being a flawed ruler into becoming the embodiment of the enlightened monarch. The essence of the tale is presented on the very first page, where the personality of Narud is briefly outlined (well brought up, “he had a mind uninfected by prejudice, but his heart was by nature too kind, and consequently also gullible”)59 and its universal significance expressed by an aphorism (Gullibility is the source of all weakness, but “the weakness of the sovereign represents the heaviest yoke for the people, for the monarch’s court is fast in taking advantage of it and in calling it virtue”).60 Like the hero of a classical tragedy, Narud is detached from any concrete historical or geographical reality. The theme of the palingenesis of a naive sovereign is presented in a two-phase plot-line, with a first part illustrating the ill effects of Narud’s personality on the country’s welfare, and a second part depicting a reversal in the hero’s behaviour and policy. Eventually, by adopting a style of government shaped on the principles of the Enlightenment, Narud makes his rule just and his country prosperous. The turning point in the plot is represented by the introduction of Onida, the daughter of a valiant soldier, and the embodiment of enlightened values. Following a chance encounter between the two, the passionate Narud is struck by Onida’s beauty and falls for her. His wish to marry her, however, will be fulfilled “Имел ум, не зараженный предрассудками, отличные познания, но сердце от природы слишком доброе – и, следовательно, легковерное”. DD: 6. 60 “Слабости государя […], если он не скроет их от наблюдательных глаз царедворцев, есть самое тяжелое иго для народа, ибо царедворцы не замедлят воспользоваться ими и назвать их добродетелями”. Ibid. 59

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only once Narud embraces the principles of rationality in both his personal and political conduct via a process of self-criticism and selfimprovement. The weak-willed Narud initially seeks advice on how to win the girl’s affection from the ministers, the viziers and fakirs, and, finally, with the scholars, a request which results in an amusing series of encounters.61 Eventually the ruler, exasperated by the sophistries and inconsistent suggestions coming from his entourage, resolves to “trust his feelings and occasionally seek advice from his intellect”, as a consequence of which he proposes to Onida.62 To Narud’s dismay she sets as a preliminary condition that of educating him first, a task she however keeps postponing “to the next day”. Finally the reason for these delays, and the symbolic meaning of Onida’s elusive words, is revealed: she employs the same expression previously used by Narud’s ministers to dismiss her late father’s righteous claims for reward.63 Once such misconduct is unveiled and Narud realises his indirect role in it, he mends his ways by dismissing his subordinates and taking the reins of government.64 Narud’s new sense of direction in political affairs finally wins him Onida’s hand. The story can be interpreted on two levels of meaning; at one level it can be read as a Bildungsroman describing an individual’s progression from naive gullibility (legkoverie) to independent judgement (pravosudie). At a second level the story of Narud is a metaphor for the Enlightened utopia of a just autocrat ruling according to the principle of rationality, justice and direct involvement in all aspects of government, ideals by which the tale rises to universal significance. The ending, however, points at flaws inherent to the monarchic system, however enlightened it may be. Narud makes seemingly liberal concessions to his subjects, abolishing the custom of bowing in front of the monarch65 and encouraging them to submit their complaints directly to him,66 de 61

In his Oriental tales Benitskii frequently attacks the excessive power of the Church, blamed for cashing in on popular credulity, an anticlerical stand stemming from the contempt for any kind of superstition of the age of Enlightenment. 62 “Он решился […] верить чувствам и советоваться с рассудком”. DD: 19. 63 The use of a pun to express the moral of a story is a feature typical of classical literature that well serves the strong didactic aim of the tale (Städtke 1971: 59). 64 Narud exclaims “Впредь будут целовать зеркало истины, а не зеленые каблуки моих туфель!” (DD: 36). 65 “Запрещаю народу становиться на колени передо мной, ибо […] что же останется Богу?” (DD: 44). 66 Cf. DD: 44-45.

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facto establishing a paternalistic relationship with “his children”, the people,67 while his authority over the ministers and the priests remains absolute.68 Moreover, once Narud dies, none of his descendants prove to have either the requisites, or the willpower, to become charismatic leaders, as a consequence of which corruption spreads fast and the kingdom becomes easy prey to the enemy.69 Between the lines Benitskii casts some doubt on the hereditary monarchy per se, however enlightened the rulers may be. This argument was not (and perhaps could not) be developed further and the story as a whole conveys a positive representation of the making of an enlightened monarchy following the principles of Reason, ideals which permeate the story both at the level of form and content. At a plot level Onida embodies the ideal of rationality vis-àvis the sentimental and passionate Narud. Whilst the ruler’s actions and speech are dictated by what he feels for her (“Beauty! Allow me to disclose a secret which lies heavy on my heart, allow me to reveal the feelings which you have aroused with your beauty”),70 her response is characteristically unemotional (“cold-blooded” as the author puts it). The outspoken Onida is far from being intimidated by social status or allured by sentimental declarations. Never afraid to speak her mind, Onida dissects Narud’s declarations of love, thus crushing his hopes of an easy conquest: “Beauty attracts the lover: a spouse needs to have something more: his ability to do good.”71 Such tension between Narud, the sentimental hero and Onida, the reasonable “classical” heroine, is further emphasised by the stylistic features of their discourses. Narud’s emotional utterance and 67 A comparable model of king-father (a common cliché in the rhetoric of absolutism as a whole) is similarly employed in Benitskii’s earlier work Ibragim ili velikodushnyi. In this story the ruler addresses his subjects as “my children” and is called, in turn, “good sovereign” or “good father” (IV: 4). A. Izmailov employs the same familial metaphor in Ibragim and Osman, his oriental tale of 1806. The death of the revered king is thus described: “Его смерть произвела всеобщий плачь в Дамаске. Казалось, что весь народ составлял одно семейство, оплакивающее нежно любимого отца, и в самом деле Осман был отцом для жителей Дамаска”. (Izmailov 1806: 197-198). Here and hereafter, unless otherwise stated, the italics are mine. 68 Cf. DD: 44-46. 69 “Долго продолжалось благоденствие Багарян, долго управлял ими Наруд, но он умер: – с ним умерло счастье его народа”. DD: 47. 70 “Прекрасная! Разреши открыть тайну, тягостную для моего сердца, позволь открыть чувства, которые ты возбудила своей красотой”. DD: 20-21. 71 “Красота прельщает любовника: супругу нужно нечто большее […] – способность делать добро”. Ibid.: 23.

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elaborate speech are parodies of the sentimental style, while Onida’s concise discourse is an embodiment of classical clarity. In rejecting Narud’s proposal (“I lay at your feet the crown of Bagal, my treasures, my power! Share with me the dominion of the monarch, his glory and magnificence!”),72 for example, she again rebuffs the grandeur of his offers and, by way of contrast, the pompous style of his utterance: “Crowns, treasures, dominions: what need have I of them?” she quips “Love is love and has nothing to do with titles and wealth.”73 Similarly her answer to Narud’s disheartened cry (“Onida, beautiful Onida, what should a man do to seek your love?”)74 is the rather laconic reply: “Undergo education.”75 Faithful to her rational persona, Onida never expresses her feelings for Narud, not even when she finally agrees to marry him. Moreover, from the very start the heroine dictates the terms of their relationship with a self-confidence that leaves Narud dumbfounded. Independent and poised Onida is unfettered by Narud’s position of power to the point of imposing a moral (and political!) trial before agreeing to marry the king: “I own nothing, but I will not sell my freedom for the crown of Bagar [...] My heart is free, but freedom has not tired it. The chains of wedlock are chains all the same.”76 Anticipating the idealisation (the “terrible perfection” in Barbara Heldt’s definition)77 typical of many later-nineteenthcentury heroines in Russian literature, Onida offers an early “Бросаю к твоим ногам корону Багара – мои сокровища – власть мою! Раздели со мной царствование, его славу и великолепие!” Ibid.: 21. Note the use of graphic devices typical of sentimentalism, such as the emotive connotation of dashes and exclamation marks. On this issue see Hammarberg 1991: 37-40. 73 “Корона – сокровища – власть – зачем они мне? […] любовь есть любовь, а не титулы и богатства”. DD: 22. Note the different use of dashes in the two speeches quoted above. In Onida’s discourse they serve the “rational” principle of concise discourse and concentration of meaning. 74 “Онида, прекрасная Онида, что должен сделать человек, который ищет твоей любви?” Ibid.: 23. 75 “Подвергнуться испытанию”. Ibid. A similar opposition between the two main characters of the tale is found in Benitskii’s Bedouin. In this tale, published in 1807, the correspondence of the moral traits of the characters and the style of their speeches is explicitly stated. While Osman “with fervour began to sing the praise of the Ottomans”, Bedouin “answered briefly but sensibly; praised what merited praise in his people and criticised what he considered to be foolish”. (Benitskii 1807: 164). 76 “Я ничего не имею, но я не продам свою волю за корону Багара […] сердце мое свободно, но свобода мне не наскучила. Оковы супружества, всегда оковы”. DD: 22. This speech echoes Volkonskaia’s lexical choice to describe her heroine’s childbearing (“enchained by maternal love”) (see section 2 of the present chapter). 77 Heldt 1987. 72

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prototype of the morally strong woman who, against all odds, wields moral power over a seemingly stronger man. Arguably, such an antithesis was already a topos in Russian fiction at the time, as testified by authors as diverse as Mariia Izvekova (Milena) and Nikolai Gnedich (Don Korrado), who, following the example set by Karamzin’s famous story Bednaia Liza, opposed their principled heroines to fickle, or outright evil, male counterparts. However, Benitskii gives a personal twist to this binary representation. Onida, unlike most contemporary heroines, does not fall victim to the hero’s moral failings with the ensuing trail of unhappiness and misfortune. Contrary to the progeny of Karamzin’s Liza, whose actions are driven by feelings and emotions, Onida is the paradigm of rational judgement, a feature rarely ascribed to a heroine in a period dominated by sentimental conceptions of femininity. Such uncommon traits are explained by the fact that, like most idealised heroines in nineteenth-century literature, Onida essentially embodies the author’s own ideals both at a moral and aesthetic level.78 Benitskii’s classicism and enlightened beliefs thus give birth to a character antithetic to the standard early nineteenth-century heroine of sentimental derivation: sensitive, meek and at men’s mercy.79 Benitskii’s oriental stories as a whole obey the classicist principle of “elegance and lucidity”,80 the author being, in Mirsky’s words, “too Voltairean to imitate sentimentalism”,81 a trend the author effectively parodied through his oriental tales and in his critical articles, as we have seen in chapter II. Not surprisingly, the narrator in Benitskii’s tales – as in early nineteenth-century vostochnye povesty as a whole – finds himself at odds with his sentimental counterpart; he provides a sober, “objective” description of the heroes’ actions, vis-à-vis the total empathy with the feelings and sorrows of the characters of the sentimental narrator. Moreover, whereas the first type of narrative revolves around the experience and feelings of the individual (via the narrator’s re-experience of them), the oriental tale is focused on the exemplary quality of the character’s deeds that therefore need to be exposed in a rational and detached manner. Scant attention is paid to

78 On this issue see Rosalind Marsh, “An Image of Their Own?: Feminism, Revisionism and Russian Culture” in Marsh 1998: 2-41 (8-13). 79 For a discussion of this issue see chapter IV.3. 80 See Mirsky 1927: 93 81 Ibid.

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any individual feature of the hero and heroine,82 whose portrayal is limited to a few exotic “references” such as foreign names and alien habits. Iurii Lotman has argued that “the philosophical novel allows the writer to create a synthetic picture of society based on an economy of material”,83 an observation that fits particularly well the early nineteenth-century oriental tale with its linear plots, and paucity of characters and events. The oriental element as a whole is often exhausted in the characters’ first name, in the works’ title, and in the very first paragraphs of the text. In Benitskii’s Vizier’ for example, the initial lines (in brackets, as in the caption of a play) are devoted to sketching the oriental setting: “The divan-room in the house of Gassan, a rich Turkish man living in Galat, a suburb of Constantinople.”84 Similarly, in Aleksandr Izmailov’s Ibrahim and Osman whose exotic setting is done with in the first paragraph (“In the Reign of the glorious caliph Harun Alrashid lived a old sage called Ibrahim, not far from Bagdad”85), as in Nikolai Brusilov’s Kabul where the location of the story is compressed into one short sentence (“Kabul was born on the banks of the river Moor”).86 An extreme example of such “synthesis” and “economy” is again provided by Vizier, a work in which the plot virtually disappears and the tale is reduced to a single dialogue between two characters, the merchant Hassan and his nephew, the newly appointed Vizier. The structure of Benitskii’s oriental tales is underpinned by a well-ordered sequence (sometimes remarkably similar as in the case of To the Next Day and Bedouin) of brief episodes, each illustrating a step in the acquisition of philosophical and ethical knowledge. At the same time the didactic message is spelled out via interpolated philosophical disquisitions and aphorisms. Graphic devices such as italicised words or sentences add a visual prominence to such gnomic message. In the anonymous Persten’ (The Finger Ring, 1805) for instance, the plot revolves around the solution of the riddle: “What in

82

Onida, for example, is described with the generic epithets of “young” and “beautiful”, while Narud’s appearance is left silent. 83 Lotman 1961: 16. 84 “Диванная в доме Гассана, богатого турка, живущего в Галате, Константинопольском предместье”. Vizier: 6. 85 “В царствование славного Калифа Гаруна Альрашида, жил неподалеку от Багдада старый мудрец по имени Ибрагим”. Izmailov 1806: 101. 86 [N. Brusilov], “Kabul” in Brusilov 1805a: 65.

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the world is most useful, most pleasant and most necessary?”87 Similarly, in Fedor Glinka’s Zlatoperaia ptichka (The Bird with Golden Feathers, 1818) the narrative revolves around the question of whether it is possible to know the human heart.88 Repetitions of the questions and the use of italic type draw the attention of the reader until the correct answers are finally provided (respectively “To do good” and “Truth”).89 A similar case is provided by A. Izmailov’s Ibrahim and Osman, which ends with the hero’s moral teaching summarised in his (italicised) speech and further stressed by the concluding sentence: “Work hard, do good and you will be contented.”90 From what we have said so far it is clear that the rational demonstration of a philosophical principle permeates Benitskii’s works at every level, from the characters’ discourse to the persona and speech style of the narrator; from the choice of settings and topics to the overall style of his oriental tales, a feature which broadens the range of readings applicable to DD, not just as a model of individual behaviour, and a metaphor of enlightened government, but also a triumph of classical clarity. In this, Benitskii successfully combines the philosophical aim with the narrative structure, an accomplishment that escaped other contemporary “oriental” writers. At this point one can address some key questions, such as why the oriental tale did not survive the 1810s, and what (if any) was the literary legacy left by this genre to the following generations of Russian writers. In addition to the death of its main representative, Benitskii, an obvious external factor lies in the declining “liberal impetus” characterising the second decade of the reign of Alexander I. A mouthpiece for Enlightenment ideals shaped by the aesthetic tenets of classicism, the oriental tale looked irremediably obsolete in the new era following the Napoleonic wars. To this explanation, however, one must add an “internal”, purely literary, factor to explain the waning of this popular genre from Russia’s literary scene, namely the loss of the diversity of “Что всего полезнее на свете, что всего приятнее и что всего нужнее?” Anon. 1805: 118 and passim. Italics in the original. 88 See F. Glinka 1818. 89 [Anon.], 1805. 87

90

Izmailov 1806: 197-198. Ibragim i Osman was reprinted in Blagonamerennyi, I (Spb., 1818) and in A. Efimovich (ed.), Sochineniia Izmailova, II (Spb.: A. Smirdin, 1849).

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material and versatility of form characterising its eighteenth-century phase. In particular, the “adventures in exotic lands” theme that had spiced up so many philosophical tales from Voltaire’s in France to Sergei Glinka’s in Russia disappeared altogether from the work of Benitskii and his contemporaries. Whilst the narrative element was streamlined, philosophical or political ideas took centre stage, a shift that made the genre dangerously close to the philosophical essay, i.e. was leading to a dead end in narrative terms. Neither the schematic plot-structure and laconic style characterising the vostochnaia povest’ at this stage, nor its tendency towards abstraction and didacticism, its one-dimensional heroes in the straitjacket of a philosophical or moral belief, could satisfy the more sophisticated reader of the 1820s. However, philosophical topics and “oriental” settings, which had made their first appearance precisely in the genre of the oriental tale, never totally disappeared from Russian fiction. Both the young Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolai Turgenev, for example, drew up plans for philosophical novels.91 More generally, in the ensuing decades philosophical and moral issues were to take centre stage in Russia, becoming an integral component of the “dialogic” – in Bakhtinian terms92 – “open” form of the novel (Pushkin, Gogol’, Dostoevskii) and of the “philosophical-realistic” story (Turgenev, Chekhov). Similarly, the exotic theme and oriental setting evolved along a non-linear pathway, shifting genres – from fiction, briefly to poetry, and back to fiction – geographical co-ordinates and, more significantly, literary function. In the 1810s and early 1820s the oriental theme figured in a variety of smaller verse forms (short poems, fables, “dialogues”, fragments) which came out in the leading literary journals of the time.93 Typical examples of this trend are the poems Kabud puteshestvennik. Vostochnaia skazka (Kabud the Traveller. Oriental Tale) by Vasilii Pushkin,94 the anonymous Vostochnaia apologiia. Abiuzei i Tair (An Oriental Apologia. Abuzei and Tair)95 and Kalif’ i Dervish. Basniia (Caliph and the Dervish. A

91

Lotman 1961: 8. Bakhtin 1981. 93 The enduring popularity of oriental narratives is testified to by sections of journals specifically devoted to “vostochnaia literatura” (cf., for example, the prestigious Syn otechestva of 1820, issue 66/II). 94 V. Pushkin 1821. 95 [Anon.] 1809. 92

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Fable). Despite sharing the same type of setting with the oriental tale such short pieces display a lack of concern with issues of a moral and philosophical nature. Rather, they are oriental “trifles”, unsophisticated works representing a sort of “tail-end” to the vostochnaia povest’, now emptied of its ideological substance. Such works, together with the odd oriental tale coming out in the 1810s such as Vasilii Narezhnyi’s Turetskii sud’ (A Turkish Judge) and Chernyi god (The Black Year, 1816), a picaresque novel set in the Caucasus and containing many features of the eighteenth-century vostochnaia povest’,97 kept alive the oriental theme in Russian literature. One of the few counterexamples to this trend in the 1810s is provided by Zinaida Volkonskaia, who wrote engaging exotic tales in a more fashionable style. Une tribu du Brésil, Les Maris Mandingues and L’enfant de Kachemyr,98 written in French, were inspired by the romantic novel by Bernardin de St Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788), a work which took late- eighteenth-century Europe by storm.99 Paul et Virginie counted among its many imitators Iuliia Krüdener (La cabane des lataniers, 1800) and Baroness De Staël (Mizra, 1786 and Zulma, 1797), two authors who were personally acquainted with Volkonskaia and whose work is likely to have influenced her own version of the exotic tale.100 Volkonskaia’s stories, set in the four corners of the world (South America, Africa, Near East, plus Europe as represented in the society tale Laure), contributed to the establishment of a romanticised conception of the “primitive”, a Rousseauian approach anticipating new perceptions and representations of the exotic soon to emerge in Russian literature.101 Starting from the 1820s “oriental” settings gradually changed location and features: from faraway lands the exotic moved closer to 96

V. 1823. Narezhnyi’s oriental tales display a lack of authentic local colour and a good dose of didacticism, two features that make them appear as relics of the eighteenth century. 98 Published in Volkonskaia 1819. 99 His work displays simplified Rousseauian beliefs, as the author epitomised in his preface, where he writes: “Notre bonheur consiste à vivre suivant la nature et la virtu”. Saint-Pierre 1984: 78. 100 See Ley 1967: 112-172. 101 In the same years as Volkonskaia, Vasilii Narezhnyi wrote the oriental story Turetskii sud’ (A Turkish Judge) and Chernyi god, ili Gorskie kniaz’ia (A Black Year, or Mountaineer Princes, 1818), a picaresque novel set in the Caucasus and containing many features of the eighteenth-century vostochnaia povest’, such as stereotypical “local colour” and didacticism. Not surprisingly the novel was considered a relic of the eighteenth century. 97

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home, a proximity that introduced a greater attention to the actual characteristics of the regions described. This stemmed from the convergence of historical, cultural and literary factors, including the continuing military conflict within and adjacent to the Russian borders; scientific investigations and increased popular knowledge of these areas and, last but not least, literary fashion.102 As a result, by the late 1820s-early 1830s the exotic milieu of some of the best known novels and stories of the time was provided by traditional areas of conflict between Russia and her non-European neighbours, particularly the southern borderlands of the Caucasus and Black Sea area of the expanding Russian Empire. In this respect Edward Said’s re-contextualisation of romantic Orientalism, involving questions of national identity, cultural difference and the (im)morality of imperial domination,103 may be fruitfully applied to the Russia of Alexander I and his successors, as Monika Greenleaf has demonstrated.104 In addition to the hidden ideological message underlying the exotic revival of the 1820s, however, literary influences per se played an important role in shaping Russia’s romantic notions of the East. In particular the gothic-oriental genre launched by Clara Reeve and William Beckford,105 together with more recent works that were taking England and Europe by storm, such as Coleridge’s Kubla Khan (1816) and Byron’s oriental verse-tales, had an enormous impact on early nineteenth-century Russian authors.106 In the romantic age “oriental” settings, finally cleared of the concerns and literary modes of the classicist tradition and of the fleeting gothic fashion for exotic milieux, made a triumphal comeback in Russian fiction. A number of works, starting with Pushkin’s southern poems (Prisoner of the Caucasus of 1822 and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai of 1824, both inspired by Byron’s Oriental poems), followed by Aleksandr Bestuzhev’s Livonian cycle of 1823-1825 and the Caucasian works of the 1830s, such as Ammalat-Bek (1832) and Nulla-Nur (1839), and Lermontov (Bela,

102

On the exotic theme in romantic literature see Austin 1997 and Greenleaf 1994. Said 1995. 104 Greenleaf 1984: 108 and passim. 105 Nikolai Gnedich, for example, tried his hand at exotic settings such as Spain at the time of the Inquisition in his novel of horror Don Korrado de Gerrera (1803). 106 A comprehensive overview of the influence of Byron in Russia and of the bibliography on the topic is provided by Nina Diakonova and Vadim Vatsuro (Diakonova and Vatsuro 2005). 103

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1839), associated adventurous plots in the Russian “colonies” with the psychological introspection of the romantic hero typical of this literary era.108

III.2 Eighteenth-century traditions and issues of gender in Zinaida Volkonskaia’s Laure In the process of reconstructing the history of Russian fiction in between Karamzin and Pushkin a number of received notions are necessarily refuted. One of the most entrenched of these presumptions is that female authors are absent from the literary scene. In recent years a number of feminist studies have began to dent this belief by placing female authors of the Pushkin generation – writers such as Elena Gan, Mariia Zhukova, and Nadezhda Durova – back on the literary map. In an attempt to fill obvious gaps in traditional histories of modern Russian literature, attention has also turned to little known eighteenth-century women writers and translators.109 Yet, due to constraints similar to those encountered with “mainstream” male authors in the age of Alexander (a scarcity of modern re-editions of primary sources and the notion perpetuated in secondary sources that the beginning of the nineteenth century represented a pause in the history of Russian fiction), female prose writers in this “in-between” period have only begun to attract scholarly attention. In this context Zinaida Volkonskaia represents an important instance of women’s participation in Russia’s literary life, providing us with a glimpse of the specific problems women were facing when taking up the pen at the time, as well as shedding light on other key issues, such as that of the cultural bilingualism of the intellectual elite in the long eighteenth century, roughly during the period 1730-1825. Thus, with the aim of illuminating larger cultural patterns without losing sight of the writer’s specificity, Volkonskaia’s output is placed 107

On the impact of Russia’s “internal colonisation” on Russian literature see Etkind: on line at: http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2003/59/etk.html (consulted 15.02.2005). 108 Such romantic views of the Caucasus were later challenged by Tolstoi’s tales of military life, such as his early stories Nabeg (The Raid, 1853), Rubka lesa (The Wood-Felling, 1855), and his last work of fiction, Khadzhi-Murat (Hadji-Murat, 1904). 109 See Rosslyn 2003: 1-35.

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in the overall context of early nineteenth-century prose writing, while issues of gender are investigated as they emerge from Volkonskaia’s own work. Incidentally, such a contextualising approach is applied in this book to women writers as a whole in an effort to re-integrate their literary production in the broader picture of Russian fiction in the age of Alexander. Zinaida Aleksandrovna Volkonskaia (1789-1862) is renowned as a grande dame of the Russian and European beau monde in the first half of the nineteenth century rather than for her literary exploits. Born into one of the most illustrious Russian families (her father was Prince Aleksander Mikhailovich BelozelskyBelozersky, a leading diplomat during Catherine’s reign) Zinaida belonged to the Emperor Alexander’s entourage from an early age. After the death of her father, she was made to marry Prince Nikita Grigorevich Volkonskii, a member of the highest Russian aristocracy who was to serve as aide-de-camp of Alexander I. In 1808 the nineteen-year-old Zinaida became lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna and for a time, during the Napoleonic wars, was romantically involved with the tsar himself, to whom she remained close until his death in 1825. Around this time Volkonskaia’s salon in Moscow became an important venue for writers and musicians alike. Her natural talents as a singer, actress and writer together with her legendary beauty and renowned kindness attracted to her salon, first in Moscow (1824-1829) and later in Rome, the top echelons of European intellectual society (including Mme De Staël, Goethe, De Maistre, and Mickiewicz) and the main representatives of the Russian “Golden age”: Pushkin,110 P. Viazemskii, E. Baratynskii, Denis Davydov, D. Venevitinov (who all dedicated famous verses to her)111 and Nikolai Gogol’. Moreover, Pushkin and, as some scholars believe, Lev Tolstoi based fictional characters of high society women on Zinaida.112 However, Volkonskaia’s influence on Russian letters 110

In a letter to A. Turgenev of 1829, for example, Zhikharev wrote that Pushkin was “busy writing wonderful verses and reading them to Zinaida Volkonskaia at whose house the poet and the whole writing coterie gathered on Sundays”. (Zhikharev 1934: II/425). On the relationship between Pushkin and Volkonskaia see Terebenina 1975: 136-145. 111 For a selection of poems dedicated to Volkonskaia by these and other authors see Murav’ev 1987. 112 See Pushkin’s heroines by the telling names of Zinaida (in “Na uglu malen’koi ploshchadi…”) and Zinaida Vol’skaia (in the unfinished society tale “Gosti s’’ezzhalis’ na dachu…”). Both works in Pushkin 1994: 37-42 and 143-145. Tolstoi’s

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waned after her conversion to Catholicism and gradual withdrawal from literary and social life during her stay in Rome, where she eventually died in 1862.113 Rumours about Volkonskaia’s conversion (and her well-known liberal inclinations) caused Nicholas I to accept her request to leave Russia in 1829, an act tantamount to exile. Volkonskaia’s role in nineteenth-century European and Russian culture is now generally acknowledged thanks to the numerous biographical studies devoted to the “Queen of the Muses and beauty”, as Pushkin called her.114 What is still missing is a comprehensive study of Volkonskaia’s literary output that – apart from a few mentions in histories and dictionaries of Russian women writers115 and in the biographies devoted to her – has so far been overlooked. Yet Volkonskaia’s work deserves critical attention for at least three reasons: the high literary standard of her writing, the topical issues she addresses in the novels and stories, and her position as the leading Russian francophone writer of the age. In some respects Volkonskaia is an exception to the rule, for her literary endeavours clashed with accepted notions of women’s role in the cultural and literary sphere, notions that very few of her contemporaries dared to question. In the vast majority of cases, works penned by women at the time fully complied with the tenets of sentimentalism, a trend that gave some scope to female artistic expression, providing that it was limited to a purely “feminine”, immediate outpouring of the heart. In other words, women’s intellectual activity was meant to be an amateurish exercise, serious study and professionalism being allegedly alien to the female nature and possibly devious. Volkonskaia swam against the tide by embracing a completely different set of values and striving towards intellectual rigour and a markedly rational approach to the act of writing which is ahead of her time. Her unaffected, “brainy” style marks her out from the bulk of female writers in the age of character of Helene in War and Peace may also have been inspired by Volkonskaia, according to Maria Fairweather (Fairweather 2000: xviii-xix). 113 On her conversion see Mazon 1960: 31-43. 114 Biographical studies on Volkonskaia include: Garris 1916; Poltoratzky 1913; Trofimoff 1966; and the excellent long essay by Belozerskaia (Belozerskaia 1897). For additional references see Mary Zirin, “Volkonskaia, Zinaida Aleksandrovna” in Ledkovsky, Rosenthal and Zirin 1994: 725-726 (726). 115 Kelly 1994b: 55-57; Lotman, “Russkaia literatura na frantsuzkom iazyke” in Lotman and Rosenzweig 1994: 10-53 (49); Mary Zirin, “Volkonskaia, Zinaida Aleksandrovna” in Ledkovsky, Rosenthal and Zirin 1994: 725-726; Okhotin 1989: 468-469.

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Alexander. In an epoch when relatively few women wrote fiction (Mariia Izvekova, Iuliia Krüdener, Natalia Golovkina, Mariia Pospelova, Ekaterina Puchkova and to a lesser extent Anna Bunina)116 and an even smaller number escaped the prescriptions of sentimentalism as the feminine trend, Volkonskaia’s choice of themes, styles, literary models and overall originality is in advance of her time. Her unconventional approach to writing is partly explained by her upbringing and goes hand in hand with the phenomenon of the cultural bilingualism of Russia’s intellectual elite in the long eighteenth century. As with many representatives of the highest echelons of Russian society, Volkonskaia’s formative years were marked by the spirit of the French enlightenment passed on by her father, a true eighteenth-century cosmopolitan who was also a minor writer in French, an art-collector and an amateur philosopher, corresponding – among others – with Kant,117 Voltaire and Rousseau. Imparting the sort of broad education generally (but not exclusively) reserved to young men,118 he took particular care in the upbringing of his favourite daughter, nourishing her natural artistic gifts and feeding her intellectual curiosity with a good dose of encyclopedic culture from an early age. As a consequence, the writer acquired a truly broad education that included Latin, Greek, Italian and French, European history, literature, and music making her a true cosmopolitan and one of the leading figures of both Russian and European high society during the reigns of Alexander and Nicholas I.119 The young Zinaida voices her love for learning early on in an occasional poem, a typical genre of early nineteenth-century salon culture, dedicated to Antoine Spada, former abbot from Piedmont and her tutor. Sous l’air aussitôt que la lumière Aussitôt que la chandelle Vient éclairer mon manoir, 116

The poet Anna Bunina also represents an exception (see Rosslyn: 1997). Her work in prose (Vechera u kamina), however, is in line with the sentimental canon. 117 On Aleksandr Mikhailovich Belozelskii (1752-1809) see Zaborov 2001: 198-199; Mazon 1964: 9-164; Mazon 1966: 579-580; Bayara Aroutunova, “Introduction” in Aroutunova 1994: 17-18. 118 Natal’ia Pushkareva, “Russian Noblewomen’s Education in the Home as Revealed in Late 18th– and Early 19th–Century Memoirs” in Rosslyn 2003: 111-128 (116 and passim). 119 For Volkonskaia’s role in French émigré circles see Azadovskii 1939: 195-214.

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Je m’assieds dans ma ruelle, Et je lis matin et soir. Mes biens surpassent les vôtres J’ai des livres, et puis rien… Mais cherchont l’esprit des autres N’y perderai – je pens – le mien? Gloire à ma bibliothèque! Elle vaut un coffre-fort; Milton, Le Tasse et Séneque Donnent le mépris de l’or. Il vous faut du pain pour vivre: Moi, j’ai besoin de bouquins! Et j’aime mieux un bon livre, Que mille livres sterlings!120

This short, light poem testifies to the author’s inquisitive mind and the spiritual value she attached to books vis-à-vis other material possessions – a theme much visited by Russian authors in the age of the enlightenment, starting from Antioch Kantemir’s first satire K umu svoemu. Na khuliashchikh ucheniia (To My Mind. On the Detractors of Learning, 1729). Interestingly, in the early nineteenth century the Enlightened argument in defence of learning as a means of individual and social advancement is occasionally appropriated by female writers (Volkonskaia and Bunina) and invested with a more specific gendered content: the right of women to undertake intellectual pursuits. A second point of interest in the poem is the selection of John Milton,121 Torquato Tasso122 and Lucius Seneca, a triad of culturally diverse authors often grouped together in the curriculum of eighteenth-century educated Russians, a reflection of the “compressed assimilation” of Western culture noted by Iurii Lotman.123 Volkonskaia’s education, linguistic preferences, and early literary tastes were going to shape her mature work in which Western literary tradition plays a lion’s share, providing the stylistic and cultural framework onto which the author grafted new topics and developed original narrative forms. As with many women at the top ranks of the aristocracy, French remained Volkonskaia’s dominant written (and spoken) language throughout her life, although the author tried to improve her 120

Couplets à Spada (s.d., presumably written in 1807) in Z. A. Volkonskaia, Album: [14]. On A. Spada see Mazon 1966: 391-392. 121 Milton’s Paradise Lost was first translated into Russian in 1745. See Boss 1991: 3-29. 122 Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata was first translated into Russian in 1772. 123 Lotman 1997: 148.

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Russian later in life without ever properly mastering it. Thus Volkonskaia forms part of a small group of early nineteenth-century Russian women writing in French, including Natalia Golovkina124 and Iuliia Krüdener, although in Krüdener’s case the appellation of “Russian writer” is perhaps doubtful.125 The literary production of Russian authors writing in French is the tip of the iceberg of the cultural bilingualism characterizing Russia’s elite culture for over a century, and as such forms an integral part of modern Russian literature.126 Not only do these authors belong to the Russian literary tradition, but they also unveil specific features of elite culture in the long eighteenth century. Although bilingual writers as a whole are condemned to a “half-destiny” – relegated to a no-man’s-land, they are not fully part of either of the countries they relate to127 – clues about their cultural identity are provided by contemporaries’ opinions and writers’ own self-identification in terms of their national identity as authors. In Volkonskaia’s case, although the vast majority of her work was written in French, the bulk of it either came out in Russia, or she commissioned Russian translations or attempted to translate it herself. Moreover, Volkonskaia was universally regarded as a Russian writer both in France, where some of her works were published, and at home. Volkonskaia also regarded herself as Russian, her choice of writing in French being a direct consequence of her cosmopolitan, enlightened upbringing marked by the dominance of French civilisation, in terms of tutors, readings and, more generally, her social entourage and cultural orientation. For this reason Volkonskaia’s works in French represent not just a sample of 124

Golovkina wrote the epistolary novel Elisabeth de S., ou l’histoire d’une russe écrite par une de ces compatriotes, 1802 (translated into Russian by I. Voeikov in 1804 under the title Elizaveta de S***, ili istoriia rossiianki). She also wrote the novel in two volumes Alphonse de Lodère (1807). 125 Krüdener, or Kriudener, was the author of the short novel Valérie (1804), a work that took Europe by storm. Born in Riga (then part of the Russian Empire) Krüdener spent most of her adult life in Western Europe and (unlike Volkonskaia and Golovkina) kept sporadic cultural and literary contacts with her home country. See E. P. Grechanaia, “Fenomen baronessy Kriudener” in Grechanaia 1998: 5-34. See also Kelly 1994b: 53-59. 126 Iu. M. Lotman, “Russkaia literatura na frantsuzkom iazyke” in Lotman and Rosenzweig 1994: 21-3. On the issue of cultural bilingualism see also V. Iu. Rozentsveig, “Russko-frantsuzkoe literaturnoe dvuiazychie XVIII-serediny XIX veka” in ibid.: 54-74 (55-57). An idea of the extent of this phenomenon may be drawn from Gennadi (Gennadi 1874). 127 On bilingual Russian writers see Beaujour 1989.

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Russian literature but, more generally, a sample of elite culture at the time. Interestingly, while in the late eighteenth century this phenomenon concerns mostly male writers (such as Fonvizin and N. Karamzin), women writers including Nataliia Golovkina, Iuliia Krudener and Volkonskaia dominate the Franco-Russian scene at the beginning of the nineteenth century. From Pushkin onwards until the post-revolutionary period a lesser, more sporadic, use of French again involves mostly male authors (such as the early Pushkin, Petr Chaadaev, and Fedor Tiutchev). According to Catriona Kelly, early nineteenth-century Franco-Russian women authors stand out from other female authors in two respects: for their focus on female psychology and for the recognition, implicit in their work, that literature can represent a viable pursuit for women.128 Among the Franco-Russian authors, Lotman has singled out precisely Volkonskaia for her fine description of female psychology, going as far as stating that her masterpiece, Quatres nouvelles, marks the passage from the “feminine” type of literature promoted by Karamzin and his followers to the psychological prose of pre-romanticism.129 Volkonskaia’s broad education nurtured her natural skills as a singer and actress, as well as an author, a set of eclectic cultural interests that led to excursions into various genres, including an opera, Giovanna d’Arco (Joan of Arc, 1821),130 some travel notes, Pis’ma iz Italii (Letters from Italy, 1825),131 and a pseudo-historical narrative, Tableau slave du cinquième siècle.132 In Russia the reception of these works was, as a whole, far from positive, and both

128

Kelly 1994b: 55-56. Lotman, “Russkaia literatura na frantsuzkom iazyke” in Lotman and Rosenzweig 1994: 10-53 (51). 130 The full title being Giovanna d’Arco, Dramma per Musica ridotto da Schiller della Principessa Zeneide Volkonsky. Volkonskaia played the main role and commissioned her portrait dressed as a romantic woman warrior to the painter Fedor Bruni, sending copies to a number of Russian acquaintances including Pushkin. An undated sketch of this portrait is preserved in her album. Volkonskaia, Album s.d.: [2]. 131 Pis’ma iz Italii was published in Del’vig’s Severnye svety in 1825 in a Russian translation by Volkonskaia herself. 132 This work was first published in Paris in 1824. In 1825-1826 a Russian version by Petr Ivanovich Shalikov appeared in Moscow. 129

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the travel notes and the historical narrative134 were rejected by Russian critics on either historical or linguistic grounds. In France, on the contrary, Volkonskaia was well received, as witnessed by the influential critic Saint Jullien, who in a review of Tableau slave wrote that Volkonskaia “is a worthy rival of the best among our French women writers for the freshness of her style, which is always pure, elegant and harmonious”.135 Volkonskaia’s oeuvre also includes a few works of imaginative prose: lyrical fragments such as Kniagine Marii Volkonskoi (1826, dedicated to her sister-in-law, one of the Decembrists’ wives who followed their husbands into exile after the 1825 failed coup), the sketch Portret (The Portret)136 and the short narrative Mechta. Pis’mo (The Dream: A Letter).137 Arguably, the highest literary achievements of the “Russian Corinne”, as Volkonskaia was often called,138 are the Quatres Nouvelles; among them the story Laure deserves special attention. These collected stories, which came out in 1819 during a period of withdrawal from social life, represent the author’s first substantial work of fiction. As with most of her literary output (only the “archaeological novel” Skazanie ob Ol’ge (Tale of Ol’ga, 1836)139 was written originally in Russian), the Quatre Nouvelles were written in French. The novella Laure is a textured, sophisticated work of fiction engaging the reader at a number of levels. First of all the story tackles 133

Pis’ma iz Italii (excerpts in Volkonskaia 1865: 1-22) was stigmatised in an anonymous review appearing in the journal Syn otchestvo (Syn otchestvo 1825: III/307-308). 134 See the negative review of her Skazanie ob Olge and Tableau slave in Russia visà-vis the positive reception in France (Trofimoff 1966: 66-67 and 71). Within Volkonskaia’s circle, however, positive judgements were expressed on Laure. See, for example, Viazemskii’s letter to A. I. Turgenev where he writes that Laure displays “fine observations and an accomplished style” (quoted in Garris 1916: 39). Later Belinskii mentioned Volkonskaia as one of the only four women writers of the age of Pushkin deserving to be remembered (Belinskii: VII/654). 135 M. A. Jullien, [Review no.] 339: “Tableau slave du cinquième siècle”, Revue encyclopédique 1824: XXII/709-710 (709). Similar appraisals were voiced in Gazette de France and in Drapeau Blanc. See Belozerskaia 1897: LXVII/953. 136 Both reprinted in Murav’ev 1987: 33, 34. 137 Reprinted in English translation in Kelly 1994a: 14-18. 138 In the wake of De Staël’s tremendous popularity and influence, the appellation of “Corinne” was generously granted both in Russia (where the novel was translated in 1809) and in Western Europe in the first decades of the nineteenth century. On this phenomenon see Vincent 2004: 22 and passim. 139 Reprinted in Murav’ev 1987: 36-120. Excerpts of this work are reprinted in Uchenova 1986: 19-60.

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the position of women in contemporary European society, suitably expressed by a female narrator privy to its workings. Secondly, Laure reflects Volkonskaia’s interest in exploring the characters’ psyche, an aim she successfully achieves through the realistic description of their inner thoughts and emotions. Finally, in an age when imitation was widespread, Volkonskaia draws from the most popular trends of the time, only to accommodate them to her own artistic purposes. The result is an original narrative signalling an artistic assurance unusual not only with female authors, but with a considerable segment of writers – male and female – at a time when Russian literati were viewed and often viewed themselves as part-dilettante, partprofessional figures. Moreover, issues such as the position of noblewomen in polite society, in the family and in relation to intellectual pursuits are interwoven with realistic depictions of the beau monde and with personal reflections based on the author’s own experience. The autobiographical component, the fine psychological analysis and the dissecting quality of the narrative voice endow this work with a topicality rare in early nineteenth-century Russian fiction by both male and female authors. Laure was first published in Moscow in 1819 in a volume called Quatres Nouvelles. It was subsequently reprinted in Naples in 1828, and again in a selection of Volkonskaia’s works in 1865 and, more recently, in an anthology edited by Iu. M. Lotman and V. Iu. Rozentsveig.140 As for contemporary reception of this novel, unlike in the case of other works by Volkonskaia, very little seems to have been written on it, apart from a letter of prince Viazemskii to Aleksandr Turgenev of 1819 where he describes Laure as being full of sensitive observations and beautifully written.141 Originally Laure was published as part of a collection that included, besides the “European story”, as Laure was called, three “exotic tales” (Une tribu du Brésil, set in South America, Les Maris Mandingues – West Africa – and L’enfant de Kachemyr – Afghanistan).142 Although the exotic tales are distant from Laure in terms of setting and artistic accomplishment (but not entirely unrelated, as we will see), the four novellas as a whole form a 140

See Volkonskaia 1865; Lotman and Rozentsveig 1994 Saitov 1899. 142 See Volkonskaia 1819. A few years later Laure was re-issued in Naples by the Imprimerie d’Ange Coda (see Volkonskaia 1828), in Volkonskaia’s selected works (see Volkonskaia 1865) and, more recently, in Lotman and Rozentsveig 1994: 384423. 141

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“geographical cycle” in which each of them represents a continent: America, Africa, Asia and Europe. One of the underlying themes of Volkonskaia’s stories is the position of women in contemporary society – polite society in the case of the “European story”, and an “uncivilised” social environment in the case of the exotic tales. Independently from the type of setting, constrictive systems based on artificial codes of behaviour such as that of salon society (Laure) and that of a chauvinist structure (Les maris mandingues) have devastating effects on female characters and on interaction among women and between the sexes. By contrast, in societies where women and men are allowed to follow their naturally good inclinations, such premises reflect positively at every level of societal and personal relationships, including those among women (Une tribu du Brésil). Such a topic had been current with French authors of the age of Enlightenment, such as Fontanelle (Ericie ou la vestale, 1768), and Marmontel (Les Incas, ou la Destruction de l’empire de Pérou, 1777).143 In their work the issue of women’s oppression is made remote by the exotic setting and is generalised as part of a wider polemic against despotism and prejudice. Such features were in keeping with the polarisation of gender notions typical of enlightenment philosophy, where the masculine, i.e. the supposedly natural realm of the intellect, dominated over the sphere of feminine emotions.144 Whilst Volkonskaia’s three exotic tales reflect the eighteenth-century approach to women’s oppression, Laure steps out from this tradition. In this story the “women question” is treated as a topical problem, and one close to home, to the experience of the author and of the target reader. In other words, there is a clear link between the author’s close acquaintance with the aristocratic milieu (an environment of which Volkonskaia had been part for over ten years, at the time of writing Laure) and Laure’s story. At the turn of the century the critique of salon society values represented a current theme in Russian fiction, particularly in the early society tales by sentimental authors, such as Karamzin’s Iuliia (Julia, 1796) and Moia ispoved’ (My Confession, 1802), Iuliia Krüdener’s unfinished Élisa, ou l’éducation d’une jeune fille (1799) 143

The work earned an immediate success in Russia. Translated for the first time as early as 1778 by Mariia Sushkova (a second edition came out in Moscow in 1782), translations of Les Incas continued to appear at the beginning of the nineteenth century (in 1800 and 1819). See Rosslyn 2000: 46-47. 144 On this issue see Hammarberg 2002: 299-326.

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and Nikolai Ostolopov’s Evgeniia, or Modern Education. In such works the critique of salon life is often interwoven with topics of the novel of education,145 a genre dealing at the time with the ruinous effects of salon society values on the upbringing of young nobles. A good dose of didacticism is a trademark of the genre, as attested by works of Sophie Cottin and Mme de Genlis in France, and Nikolai Karamzin, Nikolai Ostolopov and Vasilii Narezhnyi in Russia. Russian early society tales, whether written by men or by women, conformed to the tenets of sentimentalism reflected at the plot level, falling into a set of binary oppositions – countryside versus city, natural environment versus society, family woman versus salon lady. In his tale Iuliia Karamzin had introduced into Russia the basic typology of the genre, an example readily followed by a number of his imitators. Volkonskaia breaks with this tradition and Laure is neither a didactic tale nor, for that matter, a sentimental story, for while the author explores topics belonging to these two genres, she chooses different stylistic options and an altogether new outlook. Whilst early society tales condemned the salon lady on the ground that the family – child-rearing in particular – was the natural sphere for women, Volkonskaia addresses the issue from an original feminine perspective. She investigates the social pressures, psychological motives and consequences of salon life on women, and in so doing shifts the emphasis from a generic critique of salon society and salon ladies to the psychological analysis of the characters and their social behaviour. In that respect Volkonskaia represents a rare instance of an early- nineteenth-century woman writer who implicitly rejects sentimental stereotypes both in the representation of the heroine and in the idea that writing should “stem from the heart”, i.e. should be an emotive and unprofessional exercise. Indeed it is precisely such disregard for the dominant feminine canon that enables Volkonskaia to address topical gendered issues from her individual perspective of a female author. The source of inspiration for such themes is to be found outside Russia, in the famous heroines of the much admired Madame de Staël: Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807). Volkonskaia’s esteem for de Staël was far from being universally shared in contemporary Russia, where she was widely blamed for damaging women’s morals or simply for monopolising the admiration of women readers at the expense of

145

On this genre in early nineteenth-century Russia see Tosi 2001: 391-402.

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young (male) Russian writers.146 In contrast to the generalised distrust for “indecent” French novels that inflamed women’s imagination”,147 Volkonskaia’s high esteem for De Staël stemmed from a strong affinity of experience and opinions between two writers who shared similar first-hand knowledge of women’s position in European intellectual and worldly circles.148 From the point of view of the narrative style, however, these two authors are worlds apart. Volkonskaia’s ideal of classical balance and clarity is at odds with the rhetoric of romanticism employed at the time by De Staël and, more generally, by a score of Western and Russian authors at the beginning of the nineteenth century.149 Laure starts with a description of the eponymous character, a young and naive noblewoman from the French provinces, and her progression from the obscure castle of her aunt where she is brought up to the good society of Montpellier. Desperate to escape the grim life imposed by her aunt, the fifteen-year-old Laure marries the nobleman Hyppolite, a step that, as the narrator ironically observes “est regardée par les demoiselles, comme l’est un advancement en grade par le jeunes militaires.”150 Laure naively sees her newly acquired married status as a pass both to personal freedom and to a more glamorous existence. Once wed, the inexperienced Laure is thrown into the grandeur of balls and elegant receptions. Lacking in a sound moral and intellectual education, the beautiful and inexperienced heroine is exposed to the menaces posed by society. She soon falls victim to intrigues and gossip, a fact that enables the narrator to unveil the moral corruption and false pretences of the beau monde. Finally recognising the dangers and evils of salon life, the heroine draws inwards into the small circle of her husband and his male friends to pursue a string of intellectual interests, including literature, ancient and medieval history, music, and painting. Laure’s drive towards learning, however, does not provide a viable alternative to worldly life. Her existential path is eventually decided by the birth 146

K. Batiushkov, “Opyty v proze” (1810) in Batiushkov 1989: I/ 266-271 (267). Olga E. Glagoleva, “Imaginary World: Reading in the Lives of Russian Provincial Noblewomen (1750-1825)” in Rosslyn 2004: 129-146 (134-135). 148 See Gutwirth 1978. 149 Stylistically, the aesthetics of Romanticism live on in the society tales of Russian women writers of the 1830s-1840s, such as Elena Gan (see, for example, The Ideal, 1837, and Society’s Judgement, 1840), while a greater precision of style and realism marks the work of her contemporary Mariia Zhukova (see the cycle of stories Vechera na Karpovke, 1837-1840). 150 Z. Volkonskaia, Laure in Volkonskaia 1819: 9 (hereafter: Laure). 147

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of a son, an event that brings to an end the heroine’s intellectual occupations. The autobiographical element is an important component of Laure’s story in terms of plot, narrative technique and readers’ reception. The fabula draws on the author’s own experience as a young girl of sixteen who had been given away in marriage by her stepmother to an advantageous, albeit unloved, match who introduced her to the hectic round of balls and soirées around the young emperor Alexander. Arguably, the choice of a French setting serves to screen both the autobiographical undertones and references to life in Russian court circles. The cosmopolitan nature of salon life in Europe at that time makes possible a smooth transferral of Volkonskaia’s experience in St. Petersburg to the society of a French provincial town. Autobiographical elements are apparent throughout the story to the extent that not only can the narrative plot be read against the canvas of Volkonskaia’s own life, but the narrator’s speech is perceived as the author’s own voice. Contemporary readers would have certainly grasped the autobiographical framework in which Laure moves. Let’s look, for example, at the opening lines of the story describing a freshly painted portrait of the heroine: Le portrait de Laure venait d’être terminé: l’artiste avait parfaitement rendu l’expression de ses grands yeux noirs voilés par une tendre langueur; son nez grec, sa bouche enfantine, cet ensemble de mélancolie et de gaîté qui inspirait l’intérêt le plus doux, s’y retrouvaient comme dans un miroir fidèle.151

This description of Laure closely resembles contemporary portraits of the young Volkonskaia made by some of the best known portraitists of the time, such as Louis Berger and, especially, Fiodor Bruni.152 The autobiographical component also shapes the persona of the narrator: while Laure presents features of the author as a young girl, the narrator is constructed as an alter ego of the more mature Volkonskaia. In this way a double viewpoint on the social setting is brought into play – the heroine’s superficial gaze vis-à-vis the omniscient and mocking eye of the narrator. The interplay of these two voices produces an inter-textual dialogue of sorts: the views of the young Volkonskaia, voiced by the heroine, are countered by the 151 152

Laure: 7. The portraits are reproduced in Aroutunova 1994: 2 and 206 respectively.

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author’s critical stance expressed by the narrator. While Laure is unable to see beyond the glitter of the beau monde, the narrator expresses the point of view of the disaffected insider who has acquired the experience and distance necessary to decode its most hidden mechanisms. The reader is expected to share the author’s first-hand experience of salon life and to be aware of the moral and social implications of the heroine’s conduct. Moreover, the reader is positively invited to identify with the narrator’s point of view on the characters and by extension on worldly society via narrative devices including the employment of the first person plural in exhortative sentences, as in, for example: “Mais écoutons cette grande et belle dame.”153 Laure is clearly a “society tale” of sorts, a generic link provided by the author herself in the dedication of the Quatres nouvelles to her sister-in-law Sophia: “Dans ma nouvelle d’Europe, j’ai essayé de retracer quelques-uns des traits qui, dans la société, t’ont souvent frappée comme moi, et sur-tout de peindre la légèreté coupable avec laquelle on y porte les jugemens.”154 The author’s first-hand knowledge of salon society, the “involvement” of the addressee, and the critical stance on the beau monde underlying the work are current topics of the society tale155 (a genre favoured by women writers of the 1820s and 40s),156 of which Laure may be considered, together with Golovkina’s epistolary novel Elisabeth de S., as one of the earlier, rare prototypes by women authors of the time.157 Interestingly, rather than turning to popular sentimentalism like most of her female contemporaries, the non-conformist Volkonskaia looks back to the eighteenth century for inspiration. The author draws from the “objective”, dissecting style of the age of Enlightenment (a literary tradition that, as we have seen, was central to Volkonskaia’s upbringing) to shape her personal narrative technique where her mocking tone and concise style echo Voltaire’s contes and Fonvizin’s comedies rather than Karamzin or De Staël. In 153

Laure: 59. Laure: [2]. 155 The beginning of the genre is generally dated to the late 1820s-early 30s. See Neil Cornwell, “Introduction” in Cornwell 1998: 1-7; Jursa Ayers 1994. 156 Kelly calls the period 1820-40 “the reign of the society tale”. Kelly 1994b: 56. 157 Krüdener’s Valérie, an epistolary novel “à la Werther”, also echoes some of the critical standpoints of the society tale, this time in the context of the Romantic exaltation of the sensitive individual vis-à-vis the conventions dictated by polite society. See Krüdener 1974. 154

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Laure the sentence structure, in the best French eighteenth-century tradition, is agile and elegant, and the situation of noblewomen is depicted with wit and subtle ironic devices, rather than through outward moral tirades, as was the case in the Russian early society tale of the sentimental type. The author explores topics widespread at the time, but she does so from a different angle – the female perspective – and through the unusual prism of psychological realism, a narrative perspective still embryonic in Russian literature at the time. In Laure the narrative situations are realistic and the characters are described with psychological insights rare – if not unique – in Russian fiction before Pushkin. The description of Laure’s debut in society is revealing in this respect. The heroine becomes totally absorbed in the whirl of balls, outings and other societal occupations, a vacuous way of life she embraces without qualms, for “La connaissance qu’elle va faire du grand monde lui semble le vrai bonheur.”158 “Tout la frappe vivement, mais avec confusion, comme une grande clarté qui éblouit la vue. Elle ne se rend raison de rien, tout lui paraît merveilleux, et son âme suit ses regards.”159 With the same lack of discernment Laure chooses her company with the sole criterion of having a good time, looking out only for those who make her laugh with their foolish jokes. The satire of salon society also stems from vivid, almost grotesque depictions of gentry social gatherings that reveal how the worldly life experienced by Laure demands that its acolytes conform to artificiality, ostentation and, ultimately, loss of individuality. In a passage describing the first ball attended by the heroine, for example, we read: Les mises les plus baroques, les modes parisiennes renforcées, la toilette la plus simple à coté de la plus éclatante, des femmes plaquées de rouge, et d’autres affectant la pâleur qui marque une âme tendre, un mélange de ridicule, d’élégance, de couleurs tranchantes, de laideur surchargée, et des graces négligées; voilà ce qui forme le tableau sans harmonie qu’offre cette nombreuse réunion. […] Les mots d’arrivée, de commencement et de fête volent de bouche en bouche. Tous se précipitent à-la-fois vers la porte du jardin […] Une attention stupide s’empare de leurs esprits; ils regardent sans voir, se laissent entraîner vers un but qu’ils ignorent, ou plusieurs d’entre eux vont sans plaisir et presque sans curiosité; mais chacun cède 160 à l’impulsion générale. 158

Laure: 15. Ibid.: 26. 160 Laure: 41-42. Italics by Volkonskaia. 159

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Whilst sentimental authors such as Karamzin and Nikolai Brusilov161 produce a somewhat gentler, more humorous critique of salon society, the sarcastic tones of Volkonskaia are perhaps closer to Aleksandr Griboedov’s Gore ot uma (Woe from Wit), a play written between 1820 and 1824, published in censored form in 1833, but circulating in manuscript form at about the same time as Laure. Besides the novel of education and the proto-society tale, Volkonskaia draws from a variety of popular genres that she reelaborates with an equal amount of irony and originality. Laure’s plot, for instance, is far from novel and possibly inspired by works widely read at the time, ranging from the novels of education by Mme de Genlis and Sophie Cottin, and the Gothic works of Ann Radcliffe. Volkonskaia, however, not only eschews the most common pitfalls of Russian derivative literature, but also goes as far as questioning literary stereotypes of a number of genres. Narrative clichés are inserted in the story, only to be immediately neutralised by the subtle wit of the narrator. This ironic device results in a deconstruction of some of the most common artifices of early nineteenth-century prose. The description of the heroine’s early youth under her aunt’s authority, for example, is initially laden with topoi of the gothic novel, including a decayed and secluded castle in which the heroine is effectively buried alive by an unfeeling relative: Le château de Sivry, situé non loin de Toulouse, ressemblait fort à un couvent. Le genre de vie qu’on y menait n’était guère plus varié: les plaisirs fuyaient épouvantés, à la vue de ce sombre donjon, de ces énormes fenêtres, de ces salons aussi vastes que vides, et de ces meubles couverts d’étoffes décolorées; et la 162 présence de la vieille châtelaine n’était pas faite pour les ramener.

Clichés of the gothic novel wildly abused by Russian and Western authors in the early nineteenth century, such as the castle topos, the excessive dramatisation and the polarisation of characters on moral grounds, are equally shunned in this novella.163 The stereotyped opposition of an evil relative versus a virtuous heroine hinted at in the beginning of the story, for example, is abandoned early on in the piece by providing close insights into the characters’ psyche and inner motivations. Thus, if Laure’s aunt is initially 161

On Brusilov see chapter IV.5. Ibid.: 9-10. 163 Volkonskaia mocked the “gothic craze” seizing Europe at the time in the poem “Couplet sur le gothique” (see chapter II.2). 162

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portrayed as insensitive to the needs of her niece and unable to impart to her a proper upbringing, a closer look at her motives shows that her behaviour clearly stems from affection and a genuine concern for the girl’s welfare. Similarly Laure is a sentimental-gothic heroine of sorts, whose sensitive soul suffers in the castle’s claustrophobic environment, but at the same time she exhibits unflattering traits, such as inconsistency and superficiality. Clearly the usual prototype of the saintly heroine of the novel of horror and of sentiments is abandoned, and in its place emerges a nuanced and realistic portrait of a young girl coming of age. It is precisely Laure’s complex character that makes Volkonskaia’s heroine psychologically credible, distinguishing her from the saccharine perfection of the sentimental heroines populating early nineteenth-century fiction: Laure, avec un coeur aimant, avec plus d’imagination que d’esprit, ayant dans le caractère autant de faiblesse que de vivacité, aurait eu besoin d’être bien dirigée: mais madame de Sivry, qui se vantait de l’avoir élevée elle-même, n’avait su ni lui inspirer l’amour de l’étude, ni développer les qualitiés de son coeur […] Laure avait-elle pris l’habitude d’écouter sans entendre, et lorsque, par momens, elle voulait prêter quelque attention aux discours de sa tante, la nullité de ce qu’elle entendait la rejetait aussitôt dans un vague d’idées qui ressemblait à un engourdissement moral; l’esprit de Laure en était pénétrée, et son existence était 164 devenue un bâillement presque continuel.

Volkonskaia’s heroine moves outside the traditional confines of sentimentalism and pre-romanticism, a non-conformity that gives her free rein to explore the existential choices available to women of rank embodied by Laure. More precisely, through Laure’s trajectory from salon lady to intellectual woman, to mother and wife, the author investigates the options available for women outside the socially acceptable but morally objectionable roles of the coquette and salon lady. The heroine tries the full range of options open to a lady of her standing without, however, being able to find independence or personal fulfilment. After her appreciation of worldly life wanes, Laure finds herself in a position of personal and intellectual isolation where no authentic social or intimate relationship seems possible. At the very end of the tale, childbearing puts a stop to Laure’s quest for personal realisation: “Un sentiment profond, immuable, constant, vint la fixer à jamais. Elle devint mère: et ses goûts, jusqu’alors toujours extrêmes et toujours changeans, furent à jamais enchaînés par 164

Laure: 10-11.

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l’amour maternel.”165 The laconic ending and the telling lexical choice of the term “enchained” referring to Laure’s role as a mother, however, seems to indicate that the retreat into the bosom of the family is not given as a positive – nor desirable – solution. Thus this story once again sets itself apart from the vast majority of contemporary works, including those by women authors, where motherly love according to the sentimental canon is idealised and offered as the balm to all afflictions.166 In some of these works, epitomised by Mariia Izvekova’s Milena (1809), the whole plot revolves around the heroine’s near-saintly endurance of all evils for the sake of her progeny.167 Contrary to this tradition, in Volkonskaia’s work such passivity and conformity to traditional patriarchal values are tolerated rather than glorified. Laure’s existential path – from the seclusion of her aunt’s castle to the retreat in the bosom of her family via the false steps of salon life and the failure of intellectual pursuits – reflects the limits to women’s freedom in early nineteenth-century Russian and European polite society, limits tested by Volkonskaia herself. In so doing Volkonskaia implicitly questions the social organisation that allots women such a limited range of roles, an issue that will be taken up again by Russian women writers of the 1830s and 40s, particularly by Elena Gan and Mariia Zhukova. In this light we can legitimately see in the work’s ending, with its concise tone and telling lexical choices, the acknowledgement of a defeat much wider than the heroine’s own. Like the much-admired De Staël before her, Volkonskaia demonstrates how women’s struggle for independence is doomed to failure, and that outside the two realms of the salon and the household all occupations are de facto forbidden for educated women at the outset of the nineteenth century. As the author puts it in her Travel Notes: “Notice the similarity between women’s most precious adornment and teardrops. Are pearls not created to remind our sex, even when festively attired, of our fate?”168 As with De Staël, Volkonskaia’s activity as an artist and a writer can be seen as a living effort to break away from the traditional roles of salon lady, wife and mother, a goal that Volkonskaia, unlike her heroine Laure, did, at least to a degree, achieve. Notwithstanding the many hindrances to 165

Ibid.: 143. See the near religious exaltation of motherly feelings in Karamzin’s Iuliia in Karamzin 1986 (109-125): 112-113 and passim. 167 On this work see chapter IV.3. 168 “Otryvok iz putevikh zapisok” in Volkonskaia 1865. 166

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her most serious intellectual endeavours (the tsar’s disapproval of her acting and singing,169 the slander of Russian worldly and intellectual society, for example) some of her work was well received in Russia, Volkonskaia eventually becoming the first woman to be elected as an honorary member of the Society of Russian History and Antiquities at Moscow University (Obshchestvo istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom universitete) and of the Society of Admirers of Russian Literature. Furthermore she managed to maintain throughout her life a degree of financial and personal independence, together with a measure of self-assurance about her intellectual standing that was quite rare for Russian women of the time. Volkonskaia’s exceptional case can be explained by a number of factors, including the cosmopolitan upbringing she received, her personal wealth, the decision to live abroad for much of her life and, last but not least, her natural gifts as a writer and artist. However, the price she paid was high: criticism from both worldly and literary Russian circles, recurrent spiritual crisis and thirty years of “voluntary” exile from her home country.

III.3 Kropotov’s appropriation of Sterne: The Story of a Brownish Kaftan As we have seen in section 1, writers such as Benitskii, Izmailov and Volkonskaia brought into the early nineteenth century a classical view of prose fiction as a channel for civic and philosophical ideas expressed according to a high standard of stylistic and linguistic clarity. The eighteenth-century literary tradition, however, was not limited to classicism and lofty genres pitched at an educated audience, for these same readers showed a growing interest in popular and folklore narratives, although high literature was still the only genre sanctioned by critics.170 Rather, it was outside the narrow 169

As Rosslyn points out, “acting was not perceived as intrinsically immoral (amateur performances were given by the elite and theatre arts figured in the curricula of upper-class educational institutions), prejudice attached to public display for payement”. Wendy Rosslyn, “Female Employees in the Russian Imperial Theatres (1785-1825)” in Rosslyn 2003: 257-277 (260). 170 Notwithstanding the fact that members of the nobility officially frowned upon popular literature there are indications that the numerous collections of folklore appearing in the 1770s-1790s (such as those by Popov, Chulkov and Levshin that

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circle of refined men of letters that popular tales, translated novels and, from the 1770s onward, original or quasi-original Russian novels found an enthusiastic readership. Within this so-called “second line” of Russian prose the picaresque novel and the comic and grotesque modes had played a fundamental role171 in shaping a literary subculture that continued to develop its own patterns and forms throughout the eighteenth century in parallel to the official one.172 However, by the early nineteenth century lofty genres had became less impermeable to this tradition as a number of authors adapted plot patterns and stylistic modes of low fiction to the taste of the educated readership. Hence genres that grew in popularity during the eighteenth century, such as oriental-adventure tales and realistic novels, gained further momentum in the reign of Alexander I. In their search for an alternative to the Europeanised elite literature embodied by sentimentalism, authors coming from the lower provincial nobility, such as Andrei Kropotov, Aleksandr Izmailov, Savilii fon Ferel’ts and Vasilii Narezhny, drew from the eighteenth-century tradition, both Russian and Western European, to represent the everyday life of their heroes in a more realistic manner. In Izmailov’s and fon Ferel’ts’s case, the rich legacy of eighteenth-century Russia, including narratives in the picaresque,173 comic,174 and grotesque mode, served as a springboard for the creation of novels that were both nation-specific and, at the same time, congenial to the tastes of a socially and culturally diverse audience. Hence the employment of more sophisticated narrative techniques and a flexible literary language (with varying degrees of success) in the depiction of Russian reality. This effort to lift the were reprinted many times, right into the nineteenth century) often found a place in the libraries of respectable households. See Schaarschmidt 1982: 428-429. 171 For a discussion of the role of comic devices, verbal wit and humorous episodes in picaresque novels see Parker 1967: 60-61; Wicks 1989: 64. According to D. Gasperetti picaresque narratives are characterised by a “carnivalesque” spirit, i.e. the parodic inversion of the official world through excesses and comic reversals. Gasperetti 1993: 166-183 (168). 172 See Morris 2000; Cox 1980: 86; Kuz’min 1966: 194; Iu. Strieder, “Le rôle du roman picaresque dans l’évolution du roman russe” in Etkind 1996: 844-862; Striedter 1961: 157-181. 173 Here the term “picaresque” is used in its broad meaning. For a critical review of the term see LeBlanc 1986: 61 and passim. 174 Following Boileau, neo-classicists did not exclude the comic mode; rather it was confined to genres at the bottom layer of the literary hierarchy such as the heroiccomic poem. See Brown 1980: 282-290.

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Russian novel to a higher artistic level represents an important phase in the evolution of the genre in the nineteenth century, anticipating a trend that was to bloom fully with writers such as Gogol’ and Dostoevskii in the so-called “age of realism” in Russian literature. In some cases, as with Kropotov’s Istoriia o smurom kaftane (The Story of a Brownish Kaftan, 1809), however, Russian authors adhered to Western templates in a manner similar to their eighteenthcentury counterparts, producing works which under a Russian varnish were in fact unacknowledged translations of Western works. Andrei Kropotov (1780-1817), a prolific and eclectic writer whose work was comparatively successful in his day, is now by and large forgotten, in part due to the fact that his work has not been reprinted since. Born into a family of the small provincial gentry, Kropotov had neither personal fortune nor a permanent state post to support his literary ambitions and, like many of his fellow-writers at the time, struggled all his life to survive by his pen. Nonetheless, he managed to publish a short-lived journal and a number of stories and poems inspired by eighteenth-century traditions and by sentimental and pre-romantic trends.175 Although trying his hand at the full range of genres available, Kropotov maintained throughout his career a penchant for comic and satirical modes of eighteenth-century derivation, particularly in works published between 1809 and 1815, the most productive period of the author’s life. Narratives in this vein include the collection where Istoriia o smurom kaftane first appeared176 and the works printed in Demokrit (Democritus), Kropotov’s editorial enterprise of 1815. Written in the form of a letter by the narrator, Istoriia o smurom kaftane describes the changing fortunes of a minor civil servant, Panfil, in an ironic tone, at times verging on the grotesque. The story, which is set in the chancellery offices of an unidentified provincial town, revolves around the hero’s picaresque adventures to obtain the caftan referred to in the title. Although Panfil longs for a 175

See the “Ossianic”, pre-romantic narrative “Landshaft moikh voobrazhenii” and the two sketches “Burnaia noch’” and “Melangoliia” [sic], all published in Kropotov 1809b. “Landshaft” is reprinted in Korovin 1990: 429-439. 176 Istoriia o smurom kaftane, kotorym obladatel’ netol’ko chto zhelaet prikryt’ sobstvennye svoi plechi, no i vykroit’ zhene svoei iubku (hereafter: Istoriia) firstly appeared in Kropotov’s Chrezvychainye proisshestviia. Ugnetennaia dobrodetel’, ili porosenok v meshke (Kropotov 1809a). The volume, whose title is derived from one of the three narratives published in it, also included a series of poems by the author. All the works published in the collection would be reprinted unaltered in Kropotov’s journal Demokrit (see Demokrit 1815: II/98-121).

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number of other garments and objects, his main concern and efforts are directed towards the acquisition of an old, dusty coat left in the government offices. Through the vicissitudes of the small clerk a sharply ironic picture of bureaucratic life vividly emerges, to the extent that Panfil may be considered a forefather of the long series of petty clerks who populate nineteenth-century Russian novels, Nikolai Gogol’s Shinel’ (The Overcoat, 1842) being one outstanding example.177 Such a link was already hinted at by Faddei Bulgarin, who in the mid- nineteenth century praised Kropotov in an oblique criticism of the fashion-driven writers of the Natural School: “Kropotov was a predecessor of the so-called Natural School with the difference that Kropotov was a million times more talented that all of today’s literati put together”.178 Yet, contrary to my previous belief,179 this novella is not as original as it appears at a first glance; rather, it is an unacknowledged translation of Sterne’s pamphlet of 1759 A Political Romance; to my knowledge Kropotov’s novella represents the first Russian translation of Sterne’s first literary work. Under the semblance of a quasipicaresque story concerning a petty squabble about a coat, A Political Romance is Sterne’s attempt at a Swiftian satire aimed at the dignitaries of the spiritual courts and defending Sterne’s dean in a church dispute. To this end Sterne transforms the diocese of York

to a country parish, the Archbishop to an ordinary parson, and the Dean to his parish clerk. Soon after its publication in England A Political Romance was burned at the demands of outraged churchmen, although a few copies survived. Sterne’s pamphlet was re-published after his death in 1769 under the title of A Political Romance; it was subsequently called The History of a Good Warm Watch-Coat, as reflected in the title of Kropotov’s translation. Although Kropotov does not acknowledge anywhere his Istoriia being a translation (let alone a translation of the celebrated Sterne!),180 a textual comparison between Sterne’s pamphlet and Kropotov’s narrative reveals very few differences between the two texts. Minor alterations include the absence of the dedication (“A Political Romance, Addressed To --- ---, Esq; of York. To which is 177

On a possible connection between the two authors see Tosi 1998. “[Кропотов] был предшественником так называемой натуральной школы с той разницей, что у Кропотова в миллион раз было больше таланта, чем у всех нынешних писак”. Bulgarin 1847-1849: VI/131. 179 See Tosi 1998. I thank Emily Finer for this suggestion. 180 On the popularity of Sterne in early nineteenth-century Russia see chapter IV.5. 178

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subjoined a key”) and the Latin epigraph on the title page (“Ridiculum acri fortius et melius magnas plerumque secat res”), together with slight differences in punctuation. Such omissions and discrepancies may stem from the use of a French (or possibly German) intermediary version by Kropotov. However, there is one additional alteration that needs mentioning – the Russianisation of the characters’ names and “job descriptions”, according to which the parish clerk John becomes povytchik Ivan, the sexton Trim, the storozh181 Panfil and so on. Such changes point to a conscious coverup on Kropotov’s part, a hypothesis even more convincing if we consider the obvious attraction that an avowed first translation of a work by the celebrated Sterne would have had for contemporary Russian readers. Although consisting of a small number of changes, such Russianisation of Sterne’s text results in a very different reading of the work in Russia. Abstracted from its national context and political sub-text – a “double reading” certainly apparent to its contemporary English audience – the Istoriia was read in Russia at face value, as a picaresque story of a poor Russian clerk. Arguably, in a society obsessed with hierarchy and class-based privileges, Panfil’s wish to improve his appearance through the possession of new garments encapsulates the widespread aspirations of the chancellery men created by Peter the Great to climb the social ladder. In that, Istoriia o smurom kaftane is fascinating indeed in its anticipation of subject matters and narrative modes that were to play such a fundamental role in Russian fiction in the decades to come and whose direct impact on writers such as Gogol’ cannot be ruled out.182 Hence key topics in nineteenth-century Russian literature, such as the description of the bureaucratic milieu, the choice of a simple clerk as the hero and the grotesque quality attached to this environment, made their first appearance in Russian literature in this little known, unacknowledged translation of Sterne. Kropotov developed his comic line in other narratives, including the novella Chrezvychainye proisshestviia. Ugnetennaia dobrodetel’, ili porosenok v meshke (An Extraordinary Event. Dispirited Virtue, or the Piglet in a Sack), a work that gave the title to his 1809 collection in which Istoriia was also published. Chrezvychainye proisshestviia is built on the play between the 181

Panfil is employed as a guard (storozh), the lowest level of the Russian bureaucratic apparatus. See McFarlin 1979: 242 and 253. 182 See Tosi 1998.

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reader’s expectations of “an extraordinary event” and the mundane and deliberately trivial nature of the plot. Centred on the misdemeanours of the piglet referred to in the title, the anecdote provides a pretext for comic, albeit slightly absurd, situations and for casting sideways irony at, for example, the obsession for legislating on any possible instance of human (and, indeed, animal!)183 behaviour.184 Irony targeting meta-literary topics also figures in this work, emerging, for instance, in the tongue-in-cheek address to readers (“If you are curious to discover everything relating to this detail, it will be worth your while to read the following to the end.”),185 a “Sternian” technique not uncommon in Russian prose fiction of the period. Kropotov also pokes fun at the affectations of a certain type of sentimental narrative, openly contrasted to the comic take and the trivial plot of An Extraordinary Event: Smiling nature dawdled in the ethereal waves of blessedly dissolved air – the bronze rays of Phoebus waltzed along the dusky pathways of the undulating horizon – the little birds emitted a captivating cooing – the playful zephyrs were caressing a rose – the rose was pouring forth its fragrance – the fragrance was fluttering into the nose – and the nose imparted this pleasant harmony to the entire natural being – and thus the entire natural being felt the cool which also reached the nerves of the corpulent skipper’s wife reposing on the voluptuous bosom of the connubial pleasure. With slow clumsiness she opens her dark-brown eyes – musical apparitions are gently somersaulting in her glance… Suddenly her tender ears are 186 penetrated by the piercing squeal of the piglet and the angry yelp of Oreshka.

“[…] по закону людей, так и по закону свиней, мой поросенок не может быть обвинен в суде и должен быть судим как несовершеннолетний”. Chrezvychainye proisshestviia. Ugnetennaia dobrodetel’, ili porosenok v meshke in Kropotov 1809a: 1-24 (14) (hereafter: Chrezvychainye proisshestviia). 184 Ibid.: 1-3 and 14. 185 “Если вам будет интересно узнать все подробности, то вам стоит прочитать нижеследующее”. Ibid.: 14. On this device see also chapter IV.5. 186 “Улыбающаяся природа валандалась в эфирных волнах благорастворенного воздуха, – бронзовые лучи феба вальсировали по смуглым стезям курчавого горизонта, птички испускали пленительную воркотню, игривые зефиры целовали розу, роза разливала благовония, а благовоние порхало в нос, а нос сообщал всему натуральному существу эту приятную гармонию; и потом все натуральное существо ощущало прохладу, которая коснулась и нерв тучной шкипарши, возлежавшей на сладостном лоне семейственного удовольствия, она с медленной мешковатостью открывает свои темно-пиюсовые глаза – в ее взгляде приятно кувыркаются нотные призраки… вдруг пронзительный вопль поросенка и гневный лай орешки поражают ее нежный слух”. Ibid.: 14-17. 183

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Although at times truly amusing An Extraordinary Event suffers flaws that were widespread in the popular prose of the eighteenth-century, such as an orthography more idiosyncratic than was usual for contemporary works, an erratic plot and a fluctuating style in which colloquialisms and sub-standard locutions are not suitably amalgamated. To an extent the idiosyncratic syntax, orthography and punctuation of Kropotov’s novella epitomises the fluid linguistic parameters and the lack of a solid “technical” competence still afflicting Russian writers of the lower nobility in the early nineteenth century. If we consider the literary tradition prior to Kropotov, however, the stylistic flaws of An Extraordinary Event reveal yet another aspect: the difficulties met by a writer of high literary aspirations in dealing with a traditionally low genre such as comic fiction. This problem was shared by a number of postKaramzinian authors who strove to adjust genres traditionally perceived as (at best) unrefined to the polished taste of the salon. Judging from the repeated reassurances of “politeness” later made by Kropotov in the programme of his satirical journal Demokrit,187 the writer was well aware of the necessity for even ironic and comic works to appeal to the refined reader. By the early nineteenth century Russian literary language had matured sophisticated narrative techniques, including authorial irony and parody, modes that could be used to distance the educated narrator from the lowly events described in the work. Indeed the narrator’s interpolated remarks, his asides to the reader and ironic shafts towards other narrative modes (in this case sentimentalism), reveal a double persona, that of the comic writer narrating a trivial story, alongside that of the skilled humorist playing with meta-textual references addressed to more sophisticated readers. Thus, in the line that starts from Mikhail Chulkov and continues through Narezhnyi and Gogol’, the now neglected Andrei Kropotov and his forgotten work may reveal a missing link in the development of the comic-picaresque genre in modern Russian literature. 187

See Kropotov 1815. The type of satire included in the journal is summarised later on: “V zakliuchenii obiazivaiu sebia pred moimi chitateliami, chto vse pomeshchennoe v Demokrit budet tol’ko legkaia shutka, no nikogda bran.’” Ibid.: 37. The journal published several ironic and comic pieces, including short narratives written by Kropotov after Istoriia. These works often have an openly critical intent against certain aspects of contemporary society (Russian Gallomania in particular). Kropotov’s articles bear the imprint of eighteenth-century satirical journals.

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Ultimately, however, the link is only thematic (the poor clerk theme of The Story of a Brownish Kaftan, the trivial and paradoxical topic of An Extraordinary Event), for Kropotov’s attempt at lifting an amusing anecdote in the spirit of the eighteenth-century popular novel to the taste of the more discerning readership of his time ultimately failed due to the author’s lack of “technical” expertise and his inability to extricate himself from the clumsy style characterising much of the eighteenth-century novelistic tradition.

III.4 The eighteenth-century legacy and the new “novel of education:” Aleksandr Izmailov’s Evgenii, or the Disastrous Consequences of Poor Upbringing and Company Whilst Kropotov’s literary activity strives to make comic narratives acceptable to the refined reader, Aleksandr Izmailov’s Evgenii, or the Disastrous Consequences of Poor Upbringing and Company (Evgenii ili pagubnye sledstviia durnogo vospitaniia i soobshchestva) seemed to go in the opposite direction: reworking genres as different as the comedy of manners and the picaresque novel to create one of the most successful realistic novels of the time. During the age of classicism comic modes had dominated the lower strata of literature. Ironic and satiric devices, however, played an important role in refined genres, such as comedies (Fonvizin, Krylov), fables (Krylov) and satirical journals (Chulkov, Emin, Novikov, Krylov). Each of these two branches of eighteenth-century humorous writing – popular fiction addressing a broader audience and nonnarrative genres for the cultivated readers – was driven by different literary purposes and was marked by distinctive stylistic features, linguistic standards and choice of topics. Writers of comic fiction, free from rigid linguistic and thematic norms, had adopted a colloquial language and low style, while authors of comedies, fables and satirical journals were all dependent on the tenets of “propriety”. Decorum as the guiding principle in terms of style and topics was supported by the Enlightenment belief that literature had the duty (and the actual power) to correct social evils.188 Hence the didactic goal of much 188

See Tumis 1967: 1167-1169.

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classical literature focusing on moral and social issues, such as the moral corruption allegedly of its higher spheres and, more specifically, the gentry’s tendency to ape all things French (Gallomania).189 Starting from Kantemir’s satires and culminating with Denis Fonvizin’s celebrated comedy Brigadir (The Brigadier, 1769), the character of the Frenchified dandy represented a favourite object of parody in the age of classicism.190 While distancing themselves from this tradition as a whole, early nineteenth-century authors of fiction appropriated selected topics and devices of eighteenth-century humorous genres.191 Cultural and historical factors contributed to a revival of themes central to classicist comedies such as Gallomania and its related contempt for national values. On the one hand, the controversy between Beseda and Arzamas made Gallomania a central issue within the debate on the reform of the Russian literary language. On the other hand, historical events, such as the 1806-1807 campaigns against France and the subsequent attempted invasion of 1812 by Napoleon, gave new impetus to anti-French sentiments both at a social and cultural level. During the reign of Alexander I the revival of these eighteenthcentury topics extended beyond the traditional genres of the satire, the comedy and the fable192 into narrative genres with completely different objectives and stylistic make-up, such as the novel and the sentimental povest’. In this context, Izmailov’s Evgenii represents one of the first and most interesting examples of the re-elaboration of eighteenthcentury genres within the new co-ordinates of early nineteenthcentury literature. Whilst the first part of Evgenii operates within the conceptual and stylistic framework of refined classical forms (the comedy in particular), the second part, interspersed with colloquialisms and explicit sexual episodes, is closely related to the eighteenth-century tradition of low fiction, particularly the picaresque novel. By merging and reshaping elements drawn from literary spheres as far apart as popular fiction and classical comedy, Izmailov bypassed the hierarchy of eighteenth-century genres and created a 189

Berkov 1977: 118. A. Strycek, “Denis Fonvizine” in Etkind 1992 : 444-452; A. Monnier, “La prose non-narrative du XVIII siècle” in ibid.: 495-593. 191 N. Petrunina, “Proza 1800-1810-kh gg”. in Kupreianova 1981: 65. 192 See, for example, the anti-French feelings expressed by Krylov in his comedies of 1806-1807, Modnaia lavka and Urok dochkam, or the satirical programme of literary journals such as Kropotov’s Demokrit (1815). 190

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thoroughly original and ironic “novel of education”. The influence of Izmailov’s own version of the genre was felt throughout the first two decades of the century, from Nikolai Ostolopov’s almost contemporary and eponymous Evgeniia, ili nyneshnee vospitanie (Evgeniia, or Modern Education, 1803), to Narezhnyi’s Aristion ili perevospitanie (Aristion, or Re-Education, 1822) and Mariia, to a number of sentimental narratives concerned with the issue of gentry upbringing. Aleksandr Izmailov (1779-1831) was one of the most popular and active authors in early nineteenth-century Russia. As was typical of many writers of his time, Izmailov kept a post in state administration in parallel to his busy career as a man of letters. Translator and author of poetry, fables, novels and povesti,193 Izmailov was also one of the leading personalities within St. Petersburg’s literary (in 1801 he founded the Free Society of Admirers of Literature, Sciences and Arts) and editorial circles. Svitok muz (The Muses’ Scroll, 1802-1803), the periodical which published the Society’s collected works, and Blagonamerennyi (The Loyalist, 1818-1827) were among the writer’s most successful enterprises. 194 Evgenii was Izmailov’s first original work; as the author later recalled, “when I was still young, I occupied myself for the first time with the not insignificant task of writing a novel”.195 Published in two parts, in 1799 and 1801, Evgenii was received favourably by early nineteenth-century readers, although generally panned by critics.196 193

Izmailov’s first published work was the translation of some poems by Malherbe printed in Sanktpeterburgskii zhurnal in 1798. His original poetry ranges from the classicist genres such as odes and epigrams to the “minor” genres (madrigals, songs, epistles in verses etc.) in vogue at the time. Despite being prolific in many literary genres, including sentimental and Oriental povesti such as Bednaia Masha (1801) and Ibrahim i Osman (1806) his fables represent his most popular and lasting achievement. 194 Cf. [Anon.], “Biografiia” in Izmailov 1890: I/3-9; Proskurin 1992: 405-406; see also chapter II.1. 195 “Еще молод, в первый раз занялся таким немаловажным сочинением как роман”. A. Izmailov, “Predislovie” in Izmailov 1891: [1-2]. 196 Nikolai Grech, a contemporary of the author, wrote that “V 1798 [sic], [Измайлов] издал роман, не слишком хорошо принятый публикой”. (Grech 1822: 326). The work, however, had a wide diffusion at the beginning of the century; the famous book dealer A. Smirdin, for example, decided to include it in his catalogue of 1827, notwithstanding the comparatively high price (ten rubles) of the two-volume novel. Smirdin 1827: 607/entry no. 18369. The work was reprinted in the author’s Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (M., 1891): III: 1-344.

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The fabula is comparatively straightforward and resembles an inverted Bildungsroman: the immoral education received by the hero as a child causes his moral descent down to his final psychological and social downfall. The reader is alerted to the novel’s main topic early on in the piece by the fairly detailed title – Evgenii ili pagubnye sledstviia durnogo vospitaniia i soobshchestva – which provides an outline of the three-step progression described by the novel: the hero’s “bad education”, followed by the “bad company” he mixes with and ending with the inevitable “ruinous consequences”. The first chapters, devoted to Evgenii’s durnoe vospitanie (bad upbringing), describe the spoiled childhood of the eponymous hero and the various stages of his education: first conducted by the ignorant and immoral French tutor, Monsieur Le Pendard (i.e. scoundrel),197 and then his years at Moscow’s boarding school headed by the German Ezelman (i.e. ‘donkey’, esel in German) where pupils “acquire foreign languages, which constitute the major part of the nobility’s education”.198 The dissolute university years in Moscow complete the hero’s “bad upbringing”. There Evgenii meets the second main character of the novel, the student Razvratin (i.e. debauched), an early embodiment of the raznochinets who becomes his inseparable companion in drink and bad deeds (durnoe soobshchestvo). Together they move to St. Petersburg, where Evgenii, registered in the Imperial Guard at his birth like Pushkin’s hero Petr Grinev in The Captain's Daughter, prepares for military service. The journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg, with similarities to Radishchev’s Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu (Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, 1790), gives Izmailov a pretext to depict a grim picture of the life of Russian peasants. Honest countrymen are compared with the Westernised urban gentry and represented by the two arrogant and dissolute travellers who, unlike Radishchev’s hero, are unmoved by the miseries they witness during their journey. In this episode, continuing the eighteenth-century tradition established among others by Vladimir Lukin, Fonvizin, Iakov Kniazhnin and Radishchev, Izmailov underlines the direct link between the petimetr

197

On the typology of the foreign teacher in Russian literature see Manning 1936: 2832. 198 “Обучаются чужим языкам, составляющим главнейшую часть образования дворянства”. Evgenii ili pagubnye sledstviia durnogo vospitaniia i soobshchestva (hereafter: Evgenii) in Izmailov 1891: III/22.

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(the Russianised term for petit maître) and the inhumane treatment of the Russian peasant.199 The depiction of Evgenii’s and Razvratin’s libertine existence in the salons and boudoirs of the capital gives the narrator the opportunity to introduce a whole gallery of grotesque representatives of the Russian gentry – Mrs Vetrovaia (‘Windy’) and Mrs Litsemerkina (‘Hypocrite’), Miss Milovzoraia (‘Sweetlook’) – whose names mirror their immoral inclinations.200 The disastrous consequences (pagubnye sledstviia) of the hero’s misbehaviour soon ensue: burdened with overwhelming debts, the twenty-four-year-old Evgenii dies, the same tragic destiny soon befalling his friend Razvratin. The main theme of the novel – the effects of poor education on a young Russian aristocrat and more generally the moral starvation of the Westernised gentry – was a popular subject in eighteenthcentury neoclassical genres (comedies, fables, satiric journals and didactic stories).201 Writers such as Nareznyi kept the topic on the literary agenda, introducing some of the ideas of the age of Catherine into the new century. In Evgenii, or Re-Education, for example, Narezhnyi echoes the didactic intent of his eighteenth-century predecessors by describing the making of the young nobleman of the title into a rake, thanks to the debauched life in the capital. In this respect parallels between Narezhnyi’s and Izmailov’s works may be drawn in that both Aristion and Evgenii epitomise the spoiled progeny of Westernised gentry, and both illustrate the consequences of a flawed and immoral upbringing. Sent by their parents from their provinces of origin to the city in order to receive a higher education, they both lead an immoral life from which they emerge utterly impoverished, both morally and financially; in both works their parents’ death brings the heroes’ debauched existence to an end. However, the two works differ in their conclusion: Evgenii dies at an 199

Soviet scholars have emphasised the importance of these passages to bolster the interpretation of Evgenii as a work criticising the social privileges of Russian aristocracy (see, for example, Sokolov 1960: 94). However, a direct social critique is confined to a small segment of the work (a few pages – from 111 to 115 – in a 344page-long novel), the remainder of the work being concerned with a moral critique of the Russian Gallomaniac. 200 Lotman 1961: 15. In the novel, unlike in classical satires, there are very few personages (for example the minor figure of Mariia’s father; see Evgenii: 34-42) embodying the moral values endorsed by the narrator in his numerous notations and digressions. 201 For a brief overview of the genre see Drage 1976: 27-29.

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early age, whilst Aristion undergoes the standard process of moral reeducation. In Izmailov’s case the ethos typical of classical genres is detectable mainly in the first part of Evgenii, and in particular in the first two sections.202 Echoing the genre of the roman à thèse, the initial chapters explore the theme of contemporary education and are marked by the didactic and highly polemic tone traditionally attached to such issues. This is also in tune with the eighteenth-century comedy on the topic championed by Fonvizin’s Nedorosl’, where the shortcomings of the hero epitomise those of Russian petits mâitres as a whole. Philosophical overtones underlie Izmailov’s treatment of the theme of education, particularly in the conviction that a child’s upbringing is a fundamental factor in the formation of the individual’s personality; a belief that reflects the influence of Locke’s theories, widely debated in Catherine’s times and often echoed in Russian literature of the 1760s-1780s.203 In Evgenii the narrator inserts recurrent digressions about the responsibility borne by parents in the shaping of their child’s personality via authorial interpolations such as “It is true that, in those years when we still lack our own reason, we attempt to imitate the people who hold us dear” and “In our younger years we inherit much of our behaviour from those who surround us.”204 Such remarks shift the focus from the particular circumstances of Evgenii’s upbringing to considerations of a more general, philosophic character. The depiction of Evgenii’s Francophile education leads to a widespread criticism of the gentry’s excessive passion for all that is foreign, two themes which were often connected in eighteenthcentury comedy205 and later in early nineteenth-century fiction. As we have seen, Izmailov does not spare any aspect of the Russian fixation with France, whose disastrous consequences on the gentry’s way of life and morals are illustrated at length.206 In that respect the work can be read as a systematic description of virtually all the negative effects that a superficial Westernisation had on the Russian 202

The first part of the work consists of three sections (kniga I, II and III) comprising nine, four and eight chapters respectively. 203 Serman: 1964: 34. 204 “Правду говорят, что в годы, когда мы не имеем еще собственного суждения, мы стараемся делать то, что видим делают те, кто нас любит”. (Evgenii: 72) and “Мы с молодых лет перенимаем многое у окружающих”. (Evgenii: 81). 205 Bukharkin 1993: 314-315. 206 Smirnovskii 1899-1904: IV (1904)/103-104.

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gentry, targeting old and new generations, urban salon society and provincial estate alike.207 In the spirit of eighteenth-century satires, the gloomy fate met by Evgenii, as well as by the majority of his aristocratic acquaintances, serves as a warning of the imminent ruin facing the Russian gentry. Interestingly, the influence of eighteenth-century satirical genres is detectable not only in the main theme represented by the gentry’s Gallomania and in the strong moralising message conveyed, but also in the narrative structure, style, and techniques employed in the characters’ portrayal. As E. Kukushkina demonstrates in respect of late-eighteenth-century prose, the influence of classical comedy is signalled by a number of features such as the presence of theatrical devices and scenic effects, speaking names and stereotyped characters.208 Besides the well-established genre of the classical comedy, however, writers of fiction were also influenced by the more recent sentimental drama as, for example, Eugénie (1767) the first drama by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a work that enjoyed tremendous popularity in Russia at the turn of the century. Incidentally, Izmailov’s work may have been directly inspired by the French piece (possibly the name of the hero that gives the title to the work hints at this link) in terms of topics and in the combination of tragic and comic registers.209 Depictions of melodramatic gestures and dialogues were assimilated by late-eighteenth-century authors of fiction with the intent of enhancing the pathos of emotional scenes. Izmailov, like other writers of the time such as Nikolai Gnedich and Mariia Izvekova, continues and develops this trend in Russian prose. Two major theatrical devices underpin Evgenii’s narrative design: the depiction of gestures and the role of the characters’ direct speech. According to a method of representation typical of drama, the reader is invited to gauge qualities from their utterances and gestures. When applied to a narrative context this technique results in reducing the narrator’s input in the description of the heroes and in a shortage of insights into the characters’ psyche. Gestures and first person speeches have a pivotal function in Evgenii, as they were soon to 207

Noblewomen, with the only notable exception of Mariia, are described in sharp satirical tones, their vanity making them easy victims of the moral corruption imported from the West. Evgenii’s mother, unfaithful and corrupt, is held responsible for her son’s poor education and moral wreckage. Similar features are shared by the ladies of St. Petersburg salons, who are mainly engaged in seducing vain lovers and debating the latest imports of Parisian fashion. (See Evgenii: 155) 208 Kukushkina 1991: 58-60. See also Moiseeva 1962-1964: 40. 209 Karlinsky 1985: 104.

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have in Gnedich’s Don Korrado and Izvekova’s Milena. In a way that bears similarities with the eighteenth-century comedy of manners,210 the dialogues are interjected in this work to achieve both didactic purposes and comic effects; or, more precisely, didactic purposes through comic effects. Caustic attacks against the use of French or Frenchified Russian by the aristocracy, which as we have seen was a favourite target of satire during the reign of Catherine,211 are a recurrent topic in the novel. Evgenii in particular embodies the gentry’s uncritical imitation of all that is foreign, including the unashamed parroting of the French tongue.212 Mimicking the “bilingualism” characterising gentry jargon, the language spoken by Evgenii and Razvratin is a bizarre hybrid saturated with French words and expressions. The humorous implications of the linguistic mixture of French and Russian are further enhanced by the elegance of their speech style, replete with rhetoric questions and polite turns of phrase which contradict the vulgarity of its content: “Apropos” says Razvratin after one of their usual drinking sessions, “didn’t they notice that I was just a bit îvre?”213 Such dissonant linguistic usage is reinforced in Evgenii’s utterances: “I’m trying to get to know some jolie merchande des mode or other. French actresses aren’t very pretty […], shouldn’t I go after a dancer?”214 Dialogue between Evgenii’s parents about their child presents stylistic and lexical features which again reveal the poshlost’ thinly disguised under a varnish of social refinement, although this time the linguistic marker is the contrast between affectionate appellatives and their less than noble intentions, reminiscent of Gogol’s Dead Souls: “When, matushka, shall we have the newborn baptised?” “Just wait, papin’ka,” is her reply, “first of all you and I should consider how to sign him up for the Guards… Listen

210

See Berkov 1977: 111. Ibid.: 56; Iu. Lotman, “Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke” in Lotman 1992: 353. 212 Smirnovskii compares the Westernised characters Evgenii and Razvratin with Fonvizin’s hero Ivanushka on the grounds of their uncritical acceptance of all that is foreign. Smirnovskii 1899-1904: IV (1904)/95. 213 “Не заметил ли он, что я был немного îvre?” (Evgenii: 56) 214 “Постараюсь познакомиться с какой-нибудь jolie marchande des modes. Французские актрисы не очень красивы… Вот разве взять танцорку”. (Evgenii: 140-141) 211

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my dear, write to someone or other in Petersburg so they can make him a sergeant as soon as possible.”215 Evidence of Izmailov’s debt to eighteenth-century comedy is also provided by the schematic depiction of the characters dominating the first part of the novel. Following a literary pattern typical of the eighteenth-century comedy of manners, Evgenii’s personages are depicted as types, one-dimensional persons labelled by their speaking names.216 The various petit mâitres, coquettes, and spoiled noblemen embody a social or moral failing, a one-sided view that ends up freezing them in a predictable set of behaviours and thoughts. As a rule in Evgenii the characters are introduced in the narrative without the support of either psychological insight or physical characterisation; generic features and comparative observations take the place of detailed and exhaustive depictions. For example, Razvratin, who plays a central role in the novel, is introduced to the reader by a “flat” portrayal, intentionally devoid of any specific, characterising detail: “[He] was of average abilities, average education, he boasted like a pedant, drank like a common workman, played billiards like a marker, gossiped like a pilgrim.”217 The epithet posredstvennyi and the description by way of comparison are largely responsible for Razvratin’s stereotypical portrayal. A similar case is provided in the novel by Mariia, a positive heroine of the sentimental type, her features amounting to a string of literary clichés: “Maria was of slim build, face white as a narcissus flower in bloom, with a crimson blush constantly playing on her cheeks, long eyelashes, and scarlet lips.”218 In the first part of Evgenii the obvious didactic purpose is conveyed by a schematic and somewhat predictable plot design bearing similarities with the eighteenth-century comedy of manners, a “– Когда же матушка окрестит новорожденного? – Постой, папинька, отвечала она, – надо нам с тобой сначала подумать о том, как бы его записать в гвардию… Послушай-ка, напиши кому-нибудь в Петербург, чтобы его поскорее сделали сержантом”. (Evgenii: 10) For a discussion of ironic devices in this work see Smirnovskii 1899-1904: IV (1904)/90. 216 Unlike in the eighteenth-century comedy, in Evgenii there are virtually no characters embodying moral virtues. The role of moralist is filled by the narrator, whose ethical observations are interpolated into the novel’s plot. 217 “[ Он] был посредственных дарований, посредственных знаний, хвастал как педант, пил как ремесленник, играл на бильярде как маркер, злословил как богомолка”. (Evgenii: 44) 218 “Мария имела тонкий стан, лицо равное белизной распускающемуся нарциссу, пурпурный румянец, беспрестанно игравший на ее полных щеках, большие длинные ресницы, алые уста...” (Evgenii: 30) 215

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genre surviving into the new century with popular pieces such as Iakov Kniazhnin, in the comic opera Neshchastie ot karety (Misfortune from a Coach).219 Accordingly, the sequence of “fearful consequences” of Evgenii’s upbringing inevitably tag onto one another, resulting in the inevitable immorality of the protagonist. Such linear narrative design is also reflected in the division of the novel into short chapters, each describing the subsequent phases of Evgenii’s life. Each chapter is preceded by a detailed title that, similar to the stage directions of a play, provide the setting and outline the situation of each “scene”. In this respect too the eighteenth-century classical comedy left a visible mark on this work in terms of narrative themes, representations of the characters and overall narrative structure. Yet in the second part of the novel we observe a gradual deviation from the initial didactic-moralising purpose and topics borrowed from classicism towards quite different literary and ideological models. The description – and criticism – of the dissolute life led by the Russian Westernised elite was not the unique domain of eighteenth-century classicism. Popular tales such as, for example, the anonymous Gistoriia o rossiiskom kavalere Aleksandre (Story of the Russian Chevalier Alexander, 1740 c.), Neschastnyi Nikandor (The Unfortunate Nikandor, 1775) and Vasilii Levshin’s Povest’ o novomodnom dvoriane (Story of a Modern Nobleman, 1780) describe the adventures and love intrigues of debauched noblemen. The outlook may vary from a tolerant perspective, as in the Story of Alexander, to a harsh condemnation as in Levshin’s povest’. What these works share, however, are rather crude, Hogarthian vignettes depicting amatory episodes via a vigorous and imaginative telling. Izmailov draws from this tradition to create a daring description of the descending phase in Evgenyi’s life. As the hero plunges even deeper into debauchery and spending sprees, the guidelines of decorum and the edifying tone characterising the first chapters give way to a crescendo of love intrigues and quasi219

Cf., for example, the explanatory titles of the chapters, such as “Evgeniia krestiat i zapisyvaiut v gvardiiu” (part I, chapter II). Often the titles have witty overtones reminiscent of Sterne and Fielding (cf., for example, part I, chapter II “Содержащая в себе преддверие к 3 [главе]”). In the second part of the work chapters’ titles are often a humorous list of mundane actions, such as: “Евгений катается, удивляется, обедает, одевается, рекомендуется, танцует, ужинает и засыпает”. (Evgenii: part II, chapter I)

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picaresque adventures.220 From this part of the work emerges a lifelike picture of the everyday life of the Europeanised Russian gentry, an evil world of intrigue where nothing counts except material possessions and immediate pleasures. Such a shift of focus from a moralising perspective to a picaresque-like narrative reaches its peak in the sections on Evgenii and Razvratin in St. Petersburg. The hilarious episode of Evgenii’s seduction of the middle-aged and lascivious Mrs Razvatina is an example in point. With a narrative technique reminiscent of Fielding, Evgenii bursts into Mrs Razvatina’s bedroom as soon as her husband has left home; in a sequence of events which does not leave much to the imagination of the reader, he achieves his adulterous aim: “He threw her an ardent look, she looked tenderly back, he squeezed one of her tiny fingers, she did the same with his fingers, he kissed her tiny hand, she gently kissed his cheek, and so on …”221 In the meantime his friend Razvratin “that night likewise enjoyed the pleasures of love, although not with the lady, but with the maid”.222 The burlesque of these parallel love encounters is further stressed in the sudden reversal of Evgenii’s fortune when, after having heard from Mrs Razvatina’s maid the words agreed upon with his mistress (“[She] isn’t very well, she suffers terribly from a headache and an unbearable heat within”)223 he bursts into her bedroom only to find her engaged with a new lover. This string of events culminates in the final episode with the servant Lizanka. Evgenii, who “owned six horses, yet didn’t have even one mistress in his house,”224 decides to employ “for a wife” the “comely” but “shameless” Lizanka. Soon

220

Sakulin ascribed Izmailov’s work as a whole to the rich Russian tradition of adventure novels, in the evolutionary path which from Chulkov leads to Narezhnyi (Rossiiskii Zhilblas, 1819), Bulgarin (Ivan Vyzhigin, 1829) and Gogol’ (Mertvye dushi, 1842). Sakulin 1908: 178. The influence of the picaresque novel, namely that of Lesage, on Izmailov has been remarked also by Striedter (Striedter 1961: 179). 221 “Он бросил на нее странный взгляд, она посмотрела на него с нежностью; он пожал ее пальчик, она взаимно пожала его пальцы; он поцеловал ее ручку, и так далее...” (Evgenii: 200). The Sternian ellipsis is the author’s. 222 “так же насладился этот вечер любовными утехами, хоть и не с барыней, а со служанкой”. Ibid. 223 “[Она] не очень здорова; у нее очень сильно болит голова и ужасный внутренний жар”. Ibid.: 260. Later on Evgenii himself will sarcastically play on the double meaning of this expression in the caustic letter he sends to his previous lover. See ibid.: 274-275. 224 “[Он] имея шестерых лошадей, не имел еще у себя в доме ни одной женщины”. [!] Ibid.: 343.

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“Evgenii found it dearer to maintain her than his six horses.”225 Employing a narrative tone reminiscent of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Chulkov’s The Comely Cook, the risqué comparison between the employment of a woman of loose morals and the possession of horses is further pursued in the explicit depiction of the licentious liaison she carries on in Evgenii’s household. “Whenever Lizan’ka performed even the slightest service for him she also succeeded in prising some little gift from him whereas neither Razvratin, nor the servant Mishka, who was himself far from unattractive, ever gave her anything at all, although she served both of them far more often by her than Evgenii.”226 In such passages Izmailov successfully imitated colloquial speech to create a narrative style poles apart from the artistic sophistication and politeness recommended by critics of both classical and sentimentalist persuasions. Izmailov’s linguistic realism goes hand in hand with an increasing attention to the lowly details of the heroes’ existence, a shift of focus which explains the name “Rossiskii Ten’er’ I,”227 which Izmailov himself adopted.228 Such a change of focus brought about other important transformations in the novel,229 most notably the insights into the characters’ psychology introduced in the latter part of the work. Evgenii and Razvratin’s moral wreckage eventually equips the two anti-heroes with individual traits and dynamic personalities, “[Ее] содержание выходило Евгению несравнимо дороже содержания шестерых его лошадей”. Ibid. 226 “Каждый раз, как только Лизонька оказывала ему какие-нибудь услуги, она выманивала у него себе какой-нибудь подарок; несмотря на это Развратин и [слуга] Мишка, который был очень недурен собой, ничего ей не дарили, хотя она услуживала им чаще Евгения”. Ibid.: 344. 227 The term “Teniers-ism” (Ten’erstvo in Russian, from the Flemish seventeenthcentury artist David Teniers) had pejorative connotations indicating a work of low subject matter, inclined toward caricature and exaggeration. Beside Izmailov, Narezhnyi and Gogol’ too were blamed for the “Teniers-ism” of their work. LeBlanc 1986: 98 and passim. 228 Sakulin 1908: 247 and 478. Interestingly, Izmailov introduces spicy scenes in his sentimental povest’ Bednaia Masha, a quite unusual occurrence in the generally prudish sentimental fiction: “Изменник сидел на стуле, ее соперница сидела у него на коленях, будучи полуодета. Обняв его одной рукой и положив нерадиво голову к нему на плечо, она нежно целовала его. Он держал другую ее руку и прижимал ее к губам и своей груди”. A. Izmailov, “Bednaia Masha” in Korovin 1990: 106. 229 The existence side by side of didactic purposes and realistic depictions in the work has been remarked by Sipovskii (Sipovskii 1909-1910: I/914). See also Kubasov 1900: 106. 225

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as a result of which their tragic destiny ends up moving the readers, rather than distancing them from their fate as had been the case at the beginning of the novel. This change is particularly noticeable in the representation of Razvratin, who in the last chapters is finally endowed with a complex and intriguing personality. Whilst in Evgenii’s case his behaviour stems from a flawed education, Razvratin’s immoral conduct is described as the outcome of a precise philosophical and ethical choice inspired by the reading of Rousseau and Voltaire [!].230 Accordingly, he openly theorises about his selfishness, lack of any moral principles and atheism. The negation of God in particular endows Razvratin with demonic depths, a trait whose “gothic” potential was to be fully explored in Gnedich’s eponymous character in Don Korrado. Interestingly in Izmailov’s work – as in Gnedich’s – the narrator eventually steps back from his previous didactic stance, leaving room for his readers to gather sympathy towards his anti-heroes. In the introduction to Evgenii, Izmailov hints at the reasons for the shift from an initial roman à thèse inspired by classical comedy to a “picaresque novel of (dis)education”:231 “Any writer picking up a pen should do the utmost for his work either to educate or amuse his readers.”232 Such a synthesis of aspirations held by high and low eighteenth-century comic genres, together with the overall absence of a clear moral message and the realism of both language and subject matter, gave rise to one of the most interesting novels of the time. Yet contemporary critics showed little enthusiasm for realism, burlesque and ambiguous moral messages and, soon after the novel’s publication, Izmailov was accused of serious lapses in aesthetic taste and moral standing: “Throughout the book [the author] satisfies solely his own taste, showing no sympathy whatsoever for his reader’s morals or taste.” To that the anonymous reviewer adds: “the skilled Author reveals the passions and vices only half-way” (i.e. without appending a moral judgement): “this is not the way to write

230

Evgenii: 78-79. Brown observes in regard to Evgenii, that “Picaresque novels sometimes incorporate the novel of education,” or vice versa. Brown 1986: II/188. 232 “Каждый писатель, принимаясь за перо, должен стараться всеми силами, чтобы сочинение, которое он напишет, принесло его читателям пользу или удовольствие”. Evgenii: i. 231

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an educative novel”, in that condemning precisely what makes Evgenii so appealing to the twenty-first-century reader. In sum, Izmailov follows his own creative drive, overturning traditional ethical and aesthetic constraints, manipulating different comic traditions, and mixing devices and topics of high and low genres. Glimpses of everyday life in early nineteenth-century Russia, a mimetic language made of colloquialisms, and a realistic representation of the characters contribute to make Evgenii a unique work whose humorous portrayal of the urban gentry was matched only by Brusilov’s Bednyi Leandr. In an historical perspective Izmailov’s work challenged received notions about fiction, pointing at the potentialities of the novel form, a choice of genre that played a fundamental role in Izmailov’s ample, “dialogic” utilisation of different literary models of eighteenth-century derivation.234 In that respect, the “protean” novel, according to Bakhtin characterised by its highly flexible structure and by its propensity to incorporate and reshape the most disparate stylistic, linguistic and thematic elements, was instrumental to Izmailov’s creative adaptation of the eighteenth-century literary legacy.235 By merging “low” and “high” literary traditions, Izmailov bypassed both classical and sentimental aesthetic and ethical standards, at the same time showcasing the breadth of thematic and stylistic options inherent in the novel form. This mixture of realism and grotesque, social critique and entertainment value was further extolled by authors such as Narezhnyi, Faddei Bulgarin and Gogol’, a development that in the space of a few decades caused the much despised novel to become one of the leading genres in Russian literary history.

“Во всей книге тешит только свой вкус и не имеет ни малейшего сострадания к нравственности и вкусу читателя […] Искусный автор обнажает страсти и пороки только до половины […]: так не пишут романы воспитания”. [Anon.], “Ob’’iavlenie o povesti Evgenii,” Novosti. Ezhemesiachnoe izdanie na 1799 god 1799: III/271-283. See also Meilakh 1973: 201. 234 In his introduction Izmailov defines the novel genre as a “nemalovazhnoe sochinenie”. Evgenii: i. 235 Bakhtin 1981. 233

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III.5 Fon Ferel’ts’s political travelogue: The Journey of a Critic As we have seen above, Izmailov incorporated the Radishchevian template of the journey through the Russian countryside to underline the grim effects of the dissipated life led by Westernised gentry on Russian peasants. Attacks directed at sections of the nobility originated in the eighteenth century when literature became a vehicle for social themes and a purported antidote to social evils. In the age of Catherine the Russian petimetry represented a popular target of satire encountered in both high genres and in narrative prose. Although such social issues gained citizenship in literature, the criticism referred to individual members of the Westernised gentry rather than involving a broader social critique of the landowner-serf relations.236 As the eighteenth century grew old, however, this politically neutral outlook began to change under the influence of Enlightened and Masonic ideas. A number of writers, among them Nikolai Novikov in his editorials for Truten’ (The Drone, 1769-1770) and Iakov Kniazhnin, in the comic opera Neshchastie ot karety (Misfortune from a Coach, 1779), gave a more radical reading of the topic, establishing a connection between the gentry’s Gallomania and the exploitation of their serfs. Moreover, peasants took centre-stage in Russian literature starting with Karamzin’s Bednaia Lisa, a work that, as Richard Peace points out, “launched a new theme that would yield to a deeper, genuine compassion for the peasant until, with Tolstoi, the peasant would no longer evoke compassion, but become a figure to be emulated”.237 Although, as Priscilla Roosevelt remarks, prior to 1812 few members of Russia’s intelligentsia were bothered by the contrast between the country idylls they celebrated and the serfdom of their villages,238 there are important exceptions to this trend, such as Radishchev’s Journey of 1790, a work which marks a further signpost in the treatment of the peasant theme. On a narrative canvas borrowed mainly from Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy of 1768 (other influences possibly including Masonic journeys, Fénelon’s Les aventures de Télémaque and 236

Karlinskii 1984: 321. Peace 1981: 6. 238 Roosevelt 1995: 303. 237

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Rousseau’s Les confessions) and introducing a new pre-romantic emphasis on the self, Radishchev endowed Russian literature with unprecedentedly inflammatory tones on the institution of serfdom. Although very few first editions of Radishchev’s Journey survived Catherine’s wrath, a considerable number of samizdat copies circulated in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century.239 In addition in 1804 the journal Severnyi vestnik (Northern Messenger) published, albeit anonymously and under a new title, the only excerpt of the work to be printed in Russia before the first full edition of 1905, the chapter “Klin”. The reign of Alexander saw a new revival in ironic representations of the Westernised Russian, in particular the Gallomaniac, a target of satire that chimed with the nationalistic sentiments taking hold during and after the wars against Napoleon. Fonvizin’s Brigadir (The Brigadier, 1769), for example, enjoyed great popularity during the Napoleonic invasion and was the last play to be staged by the Moscow Theatre before the French occupation, and again after theatrical performances resumed in 1814.240 In the majority of cases early nineteenth-century prose writers followed the example set by the comedy of manners, in terms of both subject matter and of the moral(istic) approach to the issue of the Russian fop typical of the genre. The first and more conventional part of Izmailov’s Evgenii bears witness to this phenomenon, as does a string of sentimental works published in the wake of Karamzin’s Poor Lisa and Rytsar’ nashego vremeni (A Knight of our Time). In a few instances, however, early nineteenth-century authors voiced more radical views termed by Peace “the fight for a new humanism” which, by attacking the institution of serfdom, struck at the very heart of the medieval non-humanist consciousness.241 The wind of change in Russian politics brought in by the young tsar seemed to some a timely moment to take up Radishchev’s legacy (perhaps directly 239

Zapadov calculates that only about 30 copies out of a print-run of 650 escaped destruction. However, the book aroused great interest in contemporary readers and soon hand-written copies of it were passed from hand to hand and further reproduced. This early but not unique example of samizdat (for example Kantemir’s satires had circulated in this form prior to their publication) made the circulation of the Journey possible, although it is difficult to establish exactly how wide the readership may have been. About 100 manuscript copies have survived to the present day and some scholars believe that at least double the number of manuscript copies circulated at the time, some estimating the number to reach 300. See Zapadov 1992: 479 and passim. 240 Segel 1967: II/320. 241 Peace 1981: 5.

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encouraged by Alexander’s full pardon to the writer after his accession to the throne) and engage in outspoken attacks on serfdom, one if not the pillar of Russian absolutism.242 Radishchev’s Journey provided the preferred format with which to articulate progressive views about society nurtured by some members of the enlightened elite. From a stylistic point of view, however, fresh stylistic modes were sought as an alternative to Radishchev’s idiosyncratic style, a pastiche of archaisms, colloquialisms and sentimental modes. The few political travelogues coming out in the early nineteenth century are indeed characterised by the realistic depiction of Russian life via a simple style and a streamlined lexicon, often in open opposition to the sentimental aesthetics and florid rhetorical devices. Such features are exemplified by the work of Savilii fon Ferel’ts, an author who has gone undeservedly unnoticed in recent scholarship, particularly in the West. His travelogue entitled Puteshestvie kritiki (The Journey of a Critic) came out from Selivanovskii’s publishing house under the pseudonym S* fon F* in 1818, although fon Ferel’ts had probably completed the work sometime between 1802 and 1809,243 and certainly before 1810, the year when the imprimatur was granted by the censor Aleksei Merzliakov. Very little background information is available about the Journey, a work that after remaining hidden from view for over a century re-emerged in a landmark reprint of 1951. The editor of the volume, Kokorev, albeit still groping in the dark about its authorship,244 started a renaissance of critical interest for fon Ferel’ts’s Journey, a work predictably held in high esteem by Soviet scholars attracted by its purported “social realism” and political agenda.245 Further research was thus carried out and a few years later the riddle about the author’s persona was solved: S* fon F* stood for Savilii (or Savelii) Karlovich fon Ferel’ts, an obscure professor of German birth (he was born in 1771 in Augsburg) who had moved to St. Petersburg with his family in 1774. After the premature death of 242

A number of periodicals of the time (such as Satiricheskii teatr of 1808) continued the tradition of eighteenth-century satirical journals, addressing similar social concerns. See Lotman 1961: 4-8. 243 Kokorev 1951: 19. 244 In the introduction to the re-issue of the Journey it is (wrongly) suggested that the author might have been Denis Fonvizin’s nephew, S. P. Fonvizin (Kokorev 1951: 8 and passim). 245 See Ovchinnikov 1989: 281, fn. 4.

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his father, he settled down in Vladimir, earning a living as a private tutor first (from 1792 to 1802), then teaching at the local Gymnasium before getting a series of jobs in the provincial administration.246 According to G. Makogonenko fon Ferel’ts was both close to the spirit of the Novikov circle and well acquainted with eighteenthcentury authors such as Fonvizin and Radishchev, whose work he would access in the library of Vladimir’s Gymnasium.247 On the same note, V. Bazanov hints at fon Ferel’ts’ proximity to Decembrist circles via his publisher Selivanovskii, whose links with the group are well documented.248 Not surprisingly, Soviet critics have focused on the political message carried by fon Ferel’ts’s work; however, there is more than its ideological content to make the Journey both a compelling and a path-breaking novel. From a purely aesthetic viewpoint the work is remarkable for its original manipulation of eighteenth-century traditions, resulting in one of the most poignant novels of the period. Additionally, the Journey is one of the few works to provide an unforgiving description of the Russian countryside brought to life by the skilled use of the skaz technique in reporting the characters’ speech and by grotesque portrayals of the landlords, two techniques later brought to perfection by Gogol’. The paradox (not unique in Russian literary history) of a German-born author producing a work that is outstanding for its “Russian-ness” is interesting per se. Moreover, the damning depiction of the small rural estate represents an unusual achievement at a time when authors fed the public trite representations of life in the bosom of nature in the spirit of the pastoral idyll matured in Russian literature in the course of the eighteenth century. As typical of the travelogue as a whole the fabula of this work is fairly simple, being organised around a series of events witnessed by the traveller-narrator during his journey, which he allegedly puts in writing in a correspondence addressed to an unspecified “dear friend”. As the sub-title reveals (“Letters of a Traveller Describing to his Friend Various Vices of Which for the Most Part he Himself Was an Eye-Witness”),249 this work is 246 Ibid., pp. 282-283; Makogonenko 1956: 718 and passim. See also Sokolov 1960: 109. 247 Makogonenko1956: 719 and passim. 248 Bazanov 1953: 50. 249 Fon Ferel’ts, Puteshestvie kritiki, ili Pis’ma odnogo puteshestvennika, opisyvaiushchego drugu svoemu raznye poroki, kotorykh bol’sheiu chastiiu sam byl ochevidnym svidetelem (M., 1818) (hereafter: Puteshestvie kritiki).

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underpinned by a didactic intent. At each stop the narrator relates to his milyi drug a different occurrence in his journey, each episode revealing either individual failings or social flaws of the landowners thickly populating this novel.250 This is in stark contrast to idyllic recollections of life in the countryside as expressed, for example, by Sergei Aksakov (1791-1859) in his celebrated memoirs Semeinaia khronika (Family Chronicle).251 Representatives of the provincial nobility embody both common human flaws (for example meanness and questionable hygiene), and faults which are clearly class-specific, in particular a superficial “Westernisation,” and its most deplorable consequence: the appalling treatment inflicted on serfs, be it sexual violence, disregard for family ties, economic exploitation or sheer cruelty.252 The sub-title sets the work in the framework of the epistolary travelogue, a mainstream genre whose repute had been established by authors as diverse as Denis Fonvizin’s Pis’ma iz Frantsii (Letters from France, 1777-1778), Radishchev, Nikolai Karamzin Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika (Letters of a Russian Traveller, 1792), Nikolai Brusilov’s Moe puteshestvie ili prikliuchenie odnogo dnia (My Journey, or One Day’s Adventures, 1803) and Narezhnyi (Mariia). Additionally, the sub-title provides hints about the narrative mode of a work presented as a reliable account of events experienced directly by the narrator.253 If “assurances of reality” represent a typical feature of the travelogue, including its sentimental variant,254 in this case the reader’s expectations are directed towards a realistic – and highly polemical – account of a journey through the Russian countryside.255 Such hints are confirmed early in the Introduction in which many topoi of early nineteenth-century fiction are initially displayed, 250

Most letters/chapters are provided with a descriptive title, for example: “1: First impressions of a towndweller about the rural countryside” (“1. Pervoe vozzrenie gorodskogo zhitelia na derevenskogo prirodu”); “2: The inhuman actions of N. towards his peasants” (“2. Bezchelovechnyi postupok N. s svoimi krest’ianami”) etc. 251 Aksakov 1973. 252 This topic is given particular relevance in the last chapter of Puteshestvie kritiki, entitled: “Vot v chem sostoit prosveshchenie”. 253 Such feature is suggested by the tautological combination of “sam” (he himself), “byl ochevidnym” (eye-witness) and “svidetelem” (witness) in the sub-title. 254 The genre of the sentimental travelogue is discussed in chapter IV.6. 255 The epigraph from Horace “Quid rides? Mutato nomine fabula de te narratur” (“Why are you laughing? This story is about you,” which is also paraphrased in the chapter “Khotalov” of Radishchev’s Journey) further enhances the condemnatory tone of the sub-title, at the same time calling into play the perspective gentry reader.

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starting from a typical disclaimer of professionalism on the narrator’s part (“My friend never wished to be an author”.256) The friend who doubles as “editor” assures the reader that, counter to the author’s own desires and expectations, it was he who took the initiative of publishing a work he deemed “edifying, and therefore exceedingly useful”.257 Yet in the ensuing paragraphs such typical sentimental clichés are vigorously debunked both in terms of style and content, setting the overall tone of the work. The addressee thus explains the aim (or lack thereof) of the Journey: Besides, I don’t know who can make use of my work, for if one was to expect the people whose vices are described here to correct their crimes after reading my letters, then these vices would exist no longer (…). Vices in this world have 258 always existed and always will.

The introduction ends with a Sternean invitation (not unusual in the early nineteenth century, as we will see in the following chapter) to the readers to reach their own conclusions about the “educative” potential of the work they are about to start: Readers with any common sense can judge for themselves whether a piece of writing is purposeful or not. As a diligent publisher I feel obliged to ask all those who are able to read or even only to listen, whether they understand or not, that these letters be received in a generous, benevolent fashion […] If anyone should feel inclined to learn how to be virtuous by reading of the misdeeds of others, then let 259 him learn.

Thus, in opposition to the belief treasured by both classicist and sentimentalist writers, the introduction expresses a disenchanted view of both the corrective powers of literature and on the “Мой друг никогда не имел желания быть […] писателем”. “Predislovie” in Puteshestvie kritiki: 21 257 “Назидательно для нравов и потому очень полезно”. Ibid. 258 “Впрочем, я не знаю, какую оно может принести пользу. Если предположить, что люди, пороки которых здесь описываются, прочитав эти письма, ужаснутся своим преступлениям и исправятся, так их уже давно нет на свете […]. Пороки в мире всегда есть и всегда будут”. Ibid. 259 “Благоразумные читатели сами могут судить, полезно ли это сочинение или нет. Я со своей стороны по долгу издателя должен усердно просить, и прошу всех читателей, умеющих читать или только слушать, с понятием и без понятия, чтобы они благосклонного приняли эти письма. […] Впрочем, если комунибудь захочется из пороков других поучиться добродетели, то пусть учится”. Ibid.: 21-22. 256

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perfectibility of mankind, a pessimistic approach reiterated throughout the work. The travelogue proper starts, so to speak, in medias res, i.e. without the support of factual information; few (if any) hints are provided about the exact location of the places visited (such lack of geographical co-ordinates is not unusual in contemporary travelogues and generally indicates a setting close to home), the immediate reason for travel or the background of the traveller-narrator. Whilst geographical coordinates and motivations for the journey are kept silent in the course of the novel, the persona of the narrator gradually assumes precise psychological connotations. The unnamed traveller emerges as a young nobleman educated in the capital whose sound ethical principles contrast with the moral bankruptcy of the provincial landowners he encounters during his journey.260 Incidentally, the hero is himself part of this group in terms of rank, polite behaviour and etiquette, a social equality which makes the actual moral gap between them appear even wider. The hero’s outlook on social relations and human nature is at times naïve, while his understanding of life in the Russian provinces prior to his journey is virtually non-existent. In this way his young mind is a sort of tabula rasa on which the events witnessed during his travels inevitably leave a deep mark. As the story unfolds, the narrator, initially under the spell of sentimental views of the Russian countryside, is taken aback by the appalling situation of Russian peasants, who clearly do not partake of the pastoral dream shared by a sizeable segment of the Russian nobility at the time. Significantly, the corrupted morals of the landowners represent the direct cause of their serfs’ misery, a state of affairs that opens the narrator’s eyes to contemporary society outside the “civilised” urban sphere, revealing the yawning gulf between the provincial, backward nobility and the enlightened elite of the capital. As the historian John LeDonne remarks, “in the provinces nobles still considered ignorance and boorishness as their birthright at the beginning of the nineteenth century”.261 Unlike other early nineteenth-century travelogues set in Russia, in fon Ferel’ts’s case the narrator is able to generalise the separate events he witnesses, each of which functions as a piece in the realistic picture of the Russian province eventually emerging from this novel. 260 261

See ibid.: 50 and 53. LeDonne 1991: 8.

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Thus, the events experienced during his journey bring about a change in the persona of the traveller-narrator, a young representative of the enlightened nobility who gradually comes to realise the painful gulf between the high ethical principles he cherishes and real life, between himself as a representative of the educated few and the provincial, backward landowners. This sharp awakening well serves the polemical intentions of the work, giving narrative momentum to the political message fon Ferel’ts clearly aims to put across to his readers. Indeed, the author succeeds in his intent, for this work communicates a strong sense of the injustice pervading Russian society and, at the same time, a feeling of helplessness of the educated few unable (or unwilling) to change the peasants’ situation.262 The corruption of the judges, the atavistic inability of the peasants to react, the landowners’ irremediable ignorance and almost instinctive, entrenched dislike for virtue and honesty, their widespread greed and materialistic approach to life leave the traveller-narrator haunted and dejected, albeit morally “reeducated”. Hence the acquisition of knowledge has deep implications in the characterisation of the hero, whose feelings gradually shift from moral outrage to pessimism and isolation. Eventually the heronarrator comes to the painful realisation of being an outsider both among the peasantry with whom he commiserates, and among the provincial gentry, whom he despises. Such psychological features endow him finally with a romantic sensibility anticipating many features of the lishnye liudi (superfluous men) who were about to become a constant presence in the Russian novel. By intertwining social satire with insights into the hero’s psyche fon Ferel’ts fully exploits the didactic potential of the genre, shaping his work as a journey of both personal growth and social discovery for the narrator and his target audience. Notwithstanding the proviso made in the Introduction, readers are in fact meant to acquire awareness of social issues so to speak “in parallel” to the traveller-narrator with whom they allegedly share education and outlook. 262

The narrator often spells out the sense of impotence and frustration when confronted with the misery of peasants’ life. For instance, after a particularly gruesome incident the traveller-narrator, overwhelmed by what he witnesses, exclaims: “Если случаи, подобные этому, будут часто втречаться, то я не премину, бросив все, поскорее убраться домой. Не устоит и каменное сердце, видя такие примеры бесчеловечия; видя несчастных и не имея возможности облегчить их невыносимую участь! Прости”. Puteshestvie kritiki: 69.

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Realism – both psychological and situational – is an important narrative mode in fon Ferel’ts’s work, for similarly to Radishchev’s Puteshestvie and Nikolai Novikov Otryvok puteshestviia v *** (Fragments of a Journey to ***, 1772), a convincing description of the places visited serves as a springboard to launch a scathing attack on the provincial gentry.263 Fon Ferel’ts, however, extends the boundaries of realistic description attempted by his predecessors in the “political travelogue” by depicting a series of real-life, at times graphic, sketches of the Russian province replete with nightmarish details. To this end fon Ferel’ts combines a number of stylistic features of eighteenth-century derivation. In the first place the narrator’s speech is concise and sardonic, a style reminiscent of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century satirical journals.264 Such a polemical tone is, however, counterbalanced by frequent dialogues and popular sayings that extol the expressive potential of everyday speech of both landowners and peasants, a mimetic technique that had already been successfully experimented within the eighteenth century, for example in Chulkov’s The Comely Cook. In both works such a device helps to create a linguistically lively narrative while endowing specific events with a universal meaning by referring to the popular wisdom distilled in the sayings.265 Moreover, the author adopts speaking names originating from eighteenth-century comedies and satirical journals and still popular among his contemporaries, such as Izmailov, Narezhnii and other sentimental writers. Indeed, there is a direct reference in the text to the masterpiece of eighteenth-century comedy, Fonvizin’s Nedorosl’ (The Minor) in the persona of one of the landowners, Prostakov.266 Yet the writer breaks away from the by then stereotyped representation of this social group to imbue the topic of corrupt nobility – embodied in the novel by Prostakov and similar specimens of the small landowner – with new relevance for the contemporary reader. Comedy of manners, Radishchev’s travelogue, the eighteenth-century novel are just some of the influences

263

Makogonenko 1956: 711 and passim. The anonymous Satiricheskii teatr, ili zrelishch liudei nyneshnego sveta (1808) provides evidence of the continuing tradition of eighteenth-century satirical journals. On this periodical see Lotman 1961: 4 and passim. 265 See, for example, the ending of letter XII (Puteshestvie kritiki: 72). 266 See ibid.: 40 and passim. 264

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detectable in fon Ferel’ts, an author exceptionally well versed in reshaping previous traditions to meet his own artistic ends. The main point of difference from eighteenth–, as well as early nineteenth-century, tradition lies in the role granted to serfs in the narrative. In A Critic’s Journey peasants take centre stage in the story and are invariably described with sympathy as innocent human beings at the mercy of their owners. By contrast, the tyrannical behaviour of their masters is described in unforgiving detail. At one point, for example, the narrator finds himself at dinner with a certain “gentleman G.M.”, depicted as a dreadful specimen of the Russian landowning class, all too ready to inflict corporal punishment on his terrified servants. An allegedly scalding bowl of food served to his dog leads to whipping an innocent man,267 or indeed the sadist G.M. acts according to the whim of the moment to inflict physical abuse on his helpless serfs: “He got up from his chair and told me: I’ll go for a little walk in the courtyard, I may well find someone who I can pick on. I’m dying to beat someone or other. He went on his way and less than quarter of an hour had passed before screams and moans could be heard.”268 Descriptions like the one above represent rare occurrences in early nineteenth-century travelogues, where the effects of landowners’ moral corruption on their serfs is at best hinted at within

267

A similar trifle leads to an even harsher punishment, again described in some graphic detail: “Две бабы пришли к столу и у каждой было по блюду с ягодами. Он при входе ее вскочил из-за стола как бешенный и вскричал: “Как! Вы принесли только ягод за целый день?” Бедные бабы испугались, не могли выговорить ни слова и стояли как полумертвые. Но он, не отступая от них, бил по щекам то одну, то другую, беспрестанно крича: ну-у-ну-у-го-во-ри!.. почему так мало? Но эти женщины стояли как окаменелые. Тогда он вышел из терпения, закричал по своему обыкновению: кнутьев! И пошел с ними за разделку. Хлопанье кнутьев и стон баб продолжались около получаса. Я думал, что он уже бьют их насмерть, однако побои кончились, стон умолк и он вернулся. “Дуры!” – Сказал он, смеясь, – “сами себя бьют! Я думал, что все всего собрали два блюда; но, выйдя на двор, увидел, что там стояло еще шесть баб и каждая с таким же блюдом: так я их всех пощекотал в два кнута”. “За что ж?” – Сказала тогда жена, – “если они сделали свое дело исправно. Нет необходимости!” Он отвечал: “зато впредь принесут больше. Их не бить, и добра не видать!” […] У него только и радости, когда бьют своих людей!” Ibid.: 82-83. 268 “[Он] встал со стула и сказал мне: “я теперь похожу по двору, может, кого найду, к кому можно будет придраться. До смерти хочется постегать когонибудь. Пошел, и не прошло и четверти часа, как уже слышен был вопль и стон”. Ibid.: 84.

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the reassuring context of a relationship characterised by a condescending, patriarchal benevolence. Vasilii Narezhnyi’s Mariia (1824) provides a fitting example of the strategies in play in early nineteenth-century fiction to circumvent wider social questions. In this sentimental story Narezhnyi, an author elsewhere more daring in his critique of the rustic gentry, hints at the bad treatment of serfs as an eventuality, an isolated instance ascribed to specific faults of an individual landowner. Echoing a position expressed in many sentimental works a stereotypical portrait of a negative representative of this class is supplied: The Countess, although not possessing an entirely bad character, was so haughty, so pompous in her own radiance that she rarely graced anyone among her servants with a benign glance. She viewed them as insects that she could smother and trample at her will. But despite all this, since her feelings on the matter were known to all everybody endeavoured to minister to her with the utmost servility, and everything was carried out in such an exemplary fashion that everything in our 269 crowded, splendid home was relatively peaceful.

On the contrary, Fon Ferel’ts’s commitment to provide an accurate picture of peasants’ life extends to the descriptions of sexual violence, a topic otherwise absent from contemporary fiction. This is exemplified by the episode in which the inquisitive hero prompts a dejected fourteen-year-old girl met on the way to recount her story. It soon comes out that this beautiful peasant girl was brought up from an early age as her mistress’s favourite maiden, a seemingly ideal placement, at least until one day she found herself the prey of her master’s unwanted attentions. With a pretext he summons the unsuspecting girl in the summer house, locks all the exits and starts his sexual advances: At first, unaware of his evil intentions, I was somewhat embarrassed. Then, when he started looking at me with fiery eyes glistening from lust I felt rather frightened. Finally, when he began making frantic propositions I was overcome by such agitation that I nearly fell to the floor in a fainting fit. A thunderous blow would “Супруга графа, хоть и не была совсем плохого нрава, но так высокомерна, так напыщена своим сиянием, что редко кого-либо из подвластных ей людей удостоивала ласковым взглядом. Она считала их за насекомых, которых могла душить и топтать по своему желанию; при всем том, однако ж, такой образ ее чувствований был всем известен, и все старались служить ей с подобострастием, и все шло наилучшим образом, и в нашем многолюдном великолепном доме все было очень спокойно”. V. Narezhnyi, Mariia in Narezhnyi 1983: II/285-312 (290). 269

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not have been as frightening as the unpleasant words with which he voiced his devilish intentions to stain my innocence and honour. I thought of perhaps finding salvation in flight and with this intention hurtled towards the window so as to jump from it without observing its height, but he stopped me, seized me with both hands and dragged me to the sofa. However, gathering all my strength, I managed to escape from his grasp, but unable to hide from him, I resorted to tears and supplications… This further inflamed his passion and he again dragged me again towards the same sofa. There I continued to struggle with as much strength as I could muster. Finally, completely exhausted, I lost consciousness. He took advantage of this opportunity and achieved his brutish intentions. On regaining my senses I found myself in the lusty embraces of the kidnapper of my innocence and honour and began to shed bitter tears. He, after looking at me for some time in silence, finally said: “If you don’t wish to precipitate your ruin then be forever silent regarding all that has passed between us, otherwise I will make you perish like a worm, whatever it may cost 270 me”.

In the above passage surface echoes of sentimental phraseology are used to describe the heroine’s seduction, especially at the beginning of the episode quoted above (“Gromovoi udar ne stol’ by dlia menia byl strashen, kak sii gnusnyia ego slova…”). Yet fon Ferel’ts clearly moves away from the sentimental blueprint of Richardson’s Pamela type replicated ad nauseam in Russian literature of the period, opting for a more realistic description of the heroine’s ordeal.

270 “Сначала, не предвидя еге злого намерения, я ни мало не оробела; потом, когда он начал смотреть на меня пламенными, сверкающими от сладострастия глазами, я несколько испугалась. Наконец, когда он начал делать мне неистовые предложения, я пришла в такой трепет, что едва не упала на пол без чувств. Удар грома не был бы для меня так страшен, как его гнусные слова, которыми он выражал свое мерзкое намерение похитить мою невинность и честь. – Я хотела искать спасение бегством: с этим намерением я бросилась к окну, чтобы несмотря не его высоту, выпрыгнуть из него; но он этого не допустил, ухватил меня обеими руками и потащил на софу. Однако, я, напрягши все свои силы, успела вырваться из его рук; но не имея возможности скрыться от него, прибегла к слезам и просьбам… Это еще больше распалило его неистовое сердце, и он вторично повлек меня на ту же софу. Я и тут, сколько могла, противилась; наконец совершенно обессилев, лишилась чувств. Он воспользовался этим случаем и совершил свое скотское намерение. Очнувшись, я увидела себя в сладострастных объятиях похитителя моей невинности и чести и начала горько плакать. Он молча смотрел на меня некоторое время и затем сказал: если ты не хочешь ускорить свою погибель, то предай вечному молчанию все, что сейчас случилось между нами. В противном случае, во что бы мне это ни стало, я доведу тебя до того, что ты пропадешь как червь”. Puteshestvie kritiki: 63. The girl finds herself pregnant, as a consequence of which she is forced by her master to marry a peasant “of repellent looks, deaf, crooked, hunchbacked and old” (!). Ibid.: 61.

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We have seen a similar lack of reticence before, for example in Izmailov’s unsentimental description of Evgenii’s sexual encounters, something certainly not unique in both eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature. However, Izmailov describes the erotic deeds of his anti-hero in a farcical manner, a feature made possible by the consensual nature of Evgenii’s sexual relationships. On the contrary, in the episode quoted above – a disturbing display of human depravity against a helpless victim – the narrative tone is remarkably different from Izmailov’s work and indeed from any other description of carnal love which had appeared in Russian literature until then. With fon Ferel’ts sexuality sheds its usual openly entertaining or subtly titillating overtones to show its ugliest side in a display made shocking by its explicit tones. In so doing the author goes against the grain of the prevailing salon taste, breaching many of the social and the literary taboos of the time. The cruel and senseless conduct of specimens of the provincial gentry (of whom the author had personal experience as private preceptor of young noblemen in the Vladimir province) reveals the utter powerlessness of the serfs and the sadism of a social elite no one has the power, or the willingness, to keep in check. In that respect, the blunt, uncompromising depiction of the servant’s hard lot penned in this novel is symptomatic of the growing disenchantment of Russia’s cultured elites with changes from above, changes initially supported by the emperor himself. More specifically, fon Ferel’ts’s Journey suggests that the concern for the “peasant question” was mounting among the progressive segment of Russian society in the age of Alexander I.271 Contrary to Soviet interpretation, however, realism is not the only narrative tool employed by the author to denounce Russia’s social system. Fon Ferel’ts tests the full narrative potential of distorting realistic portraits, pioneering a more imaginative use of exaggeration, caricature and grotesque in nineteenth-century prose fiction, as exemplified by the following passage: In the mean time a tall woman came out of a side room; she was portly to the extent that, although the door frames had been widened, she was all the same obliged to turn sideways to pass through. She was the lovely mistress of the house, the wife of Mr Bezporiadkii […], a worthy ornament of high society. I made acquaintance with her and her retinue, that’s to say her miserly smell, her numerous mice, lap dogs and cats. The features of her face formed a terrifying and extremely vile caricature. What is more, it seemed that she bathed not more than once a year, 271

On this issue see also Newlin 2001: Chapter I.

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and as a consequence of this her brow and cheeks were covered in soot and dirt to such an extent that it would have been incredibly easy to set fire to her face […] She didn’t cover her head and it seemed to me that her hair hadn’t been combed for as long as her face hadn’t been washed. And if one were to immerse them for some time in a pharmaceutical solution, one would have produced a whole deep dish of grease: she was impregnated with butter to such an extent that, together with her sweat and lack of hygiene she had gone off! At the entrance of such a refined lady I 272 leapt out from my seat.

The character of Bezporiadokava follows the rather nauseating description of her appearance outlined in the passage above, a device which testifies to fon Ferel’ts’s brilliant application of expressionistic techniques by which the characters’ personality is projected onto their external appearances, conduct, names and speech. A similar caricatural power in the portrayal of extreme meanness is to be found in Nareznyi’s later novel Aristion, or ReEducation (1822), in Tarakh and his wife, whose self-imposed poverty causes the misery of their starved and shamelessly exploited serfs. Tarakh represents one of the several negative types of landowners found in Narezhnyi’s novel who have been indicated as the prototypes for Gogol’s Nozdryov, Plyushkin and Petukh in Dead Souls.273 Albeit a wide artistic gap exists between the two writers, it is not utterly implausible to add fon Ferel’ts as an additional source of inspiration for the puppet-like landowners populating Gogol’s novel.274 Further points of contact between the Journey and Dead Souls are identifiable in the fabula (a journey through the Russian countryside, including a stop in a provincial town, into which a series of cameo portraits of landowners and sketches of peasant life are “Между тем из боковой комнаты выходит женщина всокого роста и настолько дородная, что, хотя обе двери были растворены для нее, ей пришлось побочиться в дверях, чтобы пройти бех помех. Эта славная хозяйка дома, жена Безпорядокова […], достойна быть украшением большого света; я с ней знаком и со всей ее свитой, то есть, скаредным запахом, множеством мосек, шавок и кошек. Черты ее лица представляли страшную и самую гнусную карикатуру [sic]. Кроме того, казалось, что она умывается не больше одного раза в год: потому что на ее лбу и щеках было так много сажи и грязи, что за неимением трута, можно было на ее лице разжигать огонь. […] На голове у нее ничего не было. Мне кажется, ее волосы столько же времени были нечесаны, сколько не мыто было лицо; и если их положить на некоторое время в аптекарские тиски, то, наверное, можно было бы выжать целую глубокую тарелку жира: так они были напитаны коровьим маслом, которое даже протухло от пота и нечистоты! При входе этой почтенной дамы я вскочил со своего места. [...]”. Puteshestvie kritiki: 41-42. 273 Brown 1996: II/191-193. 274 See Bazanov 1953: 56-57. 272

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set), in some narrative devices (the intersection of realism and grotesque) and in the general setting of the two works (the world of the Russian landowner represented as a mixture of pretentiousness and squalor). The Journey pales in comparison to Gogol’s fantastically complex narrative; yet when set in the context of Alexander’s times Fon Ferel’ts stands out for the realisation that the distorting lenses of the grotesque provide a particularly apt tool to capture the inhumanity and poshlost’ characterising the provincial gentry. Moreover, as mentioned above, fon Ferel’ts endows the persona of the traveller-narrator, an idealist of the pre-romantic generation who is repelled by social injustice but unable to translate his feelings into action, with a set of idealogical issues which were about to play a fundamental role in the Russian novel. Impotence, a sense of isolation and a deep disillusionment with the power of reason to improve men’s lot leads to the bitter irony and pessimistic tones featuring in the Journey. As the narrator puts it: A large number of people pass from one extreme to the other. Some are incredibly impolite, stubborn, inclined towards prejudice and evil. Others have an enlightened reason, elevated thoughts and noble feelings but act badly. Truly enlightened, truly good men are very rare indeed. Very few know how to cultivate their intellect so as, when liberating it from prejudices and false opinions, they do not at the same time liberate it from understanding those higher truths, which constitute the superiority of man…Believe me, my friend! A simple shirt can clothe a great 276 man just as easily as fine attire can clothe one who is odious and false.

This set of ideas run counter to the optimistic, enlightened views underpinning the travelogue, be it in the classical version of the oriental tale of travel, or in its sentimental variant represented by Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveller. Fon Ferel’ts’s sombre 275

Chapter XXII is the most significant in this respect. Following a chance encounter with the landowner L.D., the narrator acquaints himself with speculations involving the sale and purchase of “souls”, through which the shrewd landowner lands enormous financial gains. Puteshestvie kritiki: 98-101. 276 “Большая часть людей переходит всегда из одной крайности в другую. – Одни чрезвычайно грубы, упрямы, закостенелы в предрассудках и злы. Другие имеют просвещенный разум, возвышенно мыслят, благородно чувствуют – и подло делают. Истинно просвещенные, истинно добрые – очень редки. Очень немногие умеют образовывать свой разум так, чтобы освождая его от суеверий и ложных мнений, не освобождались от познания тех высоких истин, которые составляют достоинство человека. […] Поверь, друг мой! Простая рубашка может быть так же удобна для великого человека, как пышный наряд подлого и гнусного”. Puteshestvie kritiki: 26.

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narrative exposes the gulf between ideals and actual reality underlying mainstream literature, an undertaking that brings to mind Krylov’s satire of the Rousseau-inspired representations of the Russian countryside as expressed in his tale Kaib of 1792. In fon Ferel’ts’s case the immediate target is sentimentalism and pastoral dramas,277 genres that aim at deceiving the public about the state of the Russian peasant: My friend, what a difference there is between the wretched characters we watch at the theatre and the wretched characters we encounter in real life! There, plagued by calamities and wishing to arouse compassion in the audience, he strives to squeeze a tear from his heart though it remains stony, his eyes dry. Here, the wretched man wishing to hide his sorrow from view strives to hold back his tears, 278 though his eyes shed floods of them all the same.

In the same way as rational reasoning is rejected for its powerlessness to change the peasants’ situation, so artistic fabrications increase the sense of revulsion felt by the sensitive (but unsentimental) narrator travelling through the Russian provinces. In that respect, the reaction against sentimental fiction and pastoral dramas underlying this work reflects both the disillusionment with the didactic mission of the literary work and the role of the writer and, more broadly, the fading trust in the ability or feasibility of Russia’s social and cultural progress led by the educated few. Yet sentimental lexicon and stylistic devices crop up in the course of the narrative, for example in the widespread use of the epithet “liubeznyi drug” referring to the addressee of the work, which is reminiscent of Karamzin’s travelogue,279 and in some sentimental “lapses” in the narrator’s discourse, as when he first notices the 277

Cf. the fashion for pastoral dramas in music taking hold of Russia from the 1770s onwards. Even authors otherwise more original in their description of the dispossessed such as Vasilii Maikov (author of the mock-epic Elisei, ili razdrazhennyi Vakkh (Elisei, or Bacchus Enraged, 1769-70)) at the same time penned idealised pictures of the landowner-serf relations (see his Dereven’skii prazdnik, ili uvenchannaia dobrodetel’ (A Country Holiday, or Virtue Crowned, 1770)). 278 “Какая разница, друг мой! Между несчастными, которых мы видим в театре и несчатными в реальной жизни! Там, угнетаемый бедствами, стремясь возбудить в зрителях сожаление, силится выжать из своего сердца слезу; но сердце его каменно, глаза сухи. Здесь страждущий, желая скрыть свою скорбь от других, силится удержать слезы; но слезы стремительными потоками текут из его глаз”. Puteshestvie kritiki: 27. 279 See, for example, the opening words of letters I, II, V, and X and the ending “Разлука с тобой начинает тяготить мое сердце […] Скоро надеюсь броситься в твои объятья”. Ibid.: 132.

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traumatised peasant girl mentioned earlier. The description of this encounter between the heroine in distress and the sensitive traveller could have easily been encountered in a sentimental povest’: Her face clearly showed the cruel suffering of her heart, but could not completely cloud the beauty and pleasantness of this accomplished creation of nature. I barely managed to hold back my tears (for few young men of feeling would manage to do so at the sight of a beautiful weeping woman) and began to beg her in 280 the most persuasive manner to disclose to me the reason for her sorrow.

Such an occurrence, which may surprise in a work so patently opposed to idyllic representation of reality, is however understandable if we consider that sentimentalist writers had introduced into Russian literature a new vocabulary and syntax to describe the state of mind of “sensitive heroes.” In other words, the presence of sentimental modes may be ascribed to “technical” reasons, as tools used by fon Ferel’ts to convey the emotional participation of the narrator in the sufferings of the peasants. In that respect the writer forms part of a group of early nineteenth-century authors (Benitskii, Izmailov, Brusilov, Iakovlev) who employed sentimental devices outside the framework of the genre, applying them ad hoc and adapting them to their individual narrative goals, a creative approach to sentimentalism that continued throughout the first half of the century. In conclusion, fon Ferel’ts gives a new lease of life to existing literary modes (sentimental, realistic, satirical and grotesque) by devising his own narrative strategies, and by setting himself the clear task of denouncing the endemic social injustice of the Russian provinces. Running counter to the prevailing aesthetic codes of the time, the author pierces the veil of rhetoric clouding the literary representation of two fundamental social ills – the superficial Westernisation of the Russian nobility and its corollary, the state of slavery inhabited by peasants. In so doing fon Ferel’ts fleshes out emerging anxieties among the elites about the institution of serfdom, an issue which in his novel takes shape vis-à-vis romanticised notions of pastoral life. Indeed the bleak reality of life in the Russian “Жестокая сердечная скорбь весьма живо изображалась на ее лице, однако она не могла совсем омрачить красоту и приятность этого искуснейшего творения природы. […] Я, едва удерживая слезы в глазах (редко молодой чувствительный человек может удержаться от слез при виде плачущей красавицы), начал самым убедительным образом просить ее, чтобы она открыла мне причину своей жестокой горести”. Ibid.: 61. 280

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countryside described by fon Ferel’ts surpasses any previous attempts by Russian writers, for, as the narrator spells out in the last letter, “‘In the real world men are for the most part incomparably more corrupt and repulsive than those who are represented in comedies and tragedies.”281 As a result, at a time when authors of fiction were expanding their horizons by manipulating a wide range of literary traditions with mixed success, fon Ferel’ts stands out as a writer who through frequent incursions into the eighteenth-century tradition, creates one of the most ideologically charged and aesthetically challenging literary representations of Russian provincial life before Gogol’. The crude scene of country life encountered in The Journey of a Critic is the prelude to an important trend in later trends in Russian prose fiction in that a realistic perspective on the peasants’ lot becomes a key theme from the 1830s onwards, as a number of authors, such as Nikolai Polevoi in Rasskazy russkogo soldata (A Soldier’s Story, 1833-1834) and later writers of the so-called Natural School (such as Dmitrii Grigorovich), describe peasant life in all its misery and squalor, a type of literature by then tremendously popular. As noted by leading scholars (Makogonenko, Neuhäuser, Lotman), literary trends dating back to the eighteenth century, particularly to the reign of Catherine, although gradually losing their importance and prestige, continued to influence Russian letters in the course of the nineteenth century and even beyond.282 Although crucial work has been carried out on specific links between authors belonging to the two periods, a wider picture of the web of contacts between eighteenth-century fiction and the later developments is still lacking. As I hope to have demonstrated in this chapter, a step in this direction may be achieved by investigating the age of Alexander I, i.e. the most obvious trait d’union between eighteenth-century fiction and the modern novel as it emerged in the age of Pushkin and Gogol’. Themes, literary patterns and stylistic devices dating back to the age of classicism played an important role alongside sentimentalism and recent pre-romantic trends as part of the “compressed assimilation” of past traditions and new trends that characterised Russian fiction genres in the period between Karamzin and Pushkin.

281 “Большая часть их [людей] на самом деле несравнимо сквернее и гаже, чем их изображают в комедиях и трагедиях”. Ibid.: 132. 282 Makogonenko 1980: 777; Neuhäuser 1974: xii; Lotman 1961: 16.

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Clearly, the complex picture of the genre that we have started to chart in this chapter is at variance with received notions about the development of prose fiction in Russia as found in most general studies on the topic. A typical example of widespread views on the topic is provided by W. Brown’s History of Russian Literature in the Romantic Period, in which the author detects two divergent lines in the development of Russian fiction in the 1800-1810 period. On the one hand Brown places the “Karamzinian line” that mediates sentimentalist and pre-romantic influences from the West. The second trend he describes stems in part from native Russian naturalistic and satirical tales and in part from the pre-sentimentalist traditions of the picaresque and satirical-philosophical novel of Western inspiration. According to Brown these two varieties of Russian prose “coexisted, like oil in water, in separate layers”.283 On closer analysis, however, the situation is more complex than the picture outlined above suggests; the perceived freedom to experiment experienced by early nineteenth-century writers led to a new approach to existing literary traditions, both Russian and foreign. As we have demonstrated in this chapter in the literary melting pot of early nineteenth-century Russia, authors drew inspiration from what were until then deemed incompatible literary sources, effectively going against the grain of both classical and sentimental aesthetics. As we have seen in this chapter, Aleksandr Izmailov, for example, drew from genres as different as the classical comedy of manners, eighteenth-century “low” novels and sentimental tales. Andrei Kropotov fashioned an “undercover” translation, Istoriia o smurom kaftane, that tried to raise the status of a popular form such as the picaresque novel. In the work of Vasilii Narezhnyi classic and sentimental traditions go hand in hand with picaresque modes, while fon Ferel’ts looks back at a number of eighteenth-century genres to create one of the best political travelogues of the time. As we have illustrated in this chapter, the relationship with eighteenth-century literature was rarely one of absolute imitation. In addition to the factors discussed above, new concerns towards reading audiences mark an important phase in the development of prose writing in early nineteenth-century Russia. As J. Paul Hunter observed, “a good novelist reads audiences as readily as history and tradition: the novel reaches into the past for nourishment or support only in order to reach toward a future in which its readers’ 283

Brown 1986: II/145.

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expectations and desires are located”. A revisionist approach to past traditions was by this time a requirement to meet the taste of a reading public well-versed in the latest Western trends and expecting Russian works to be of a comparable literary standard in terms of innovation and topicality. Themes and stylistic devices adopted from both “high” and “low” eighteenth-century literature were revisited to accommodate the changed tastes of a new literary epoch, a phenomenon that involved early nineteenth-century prose fiction at every level, sentimentalism included.

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Hunter 1990: 351.

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Chapter IV

Sentimentalism in early nineteenth-century Russia: Karamzin’s epigones and new trends in sentimental prose The present chapter opens with a general survey of sentimentalism, one of the most popular narrative trends in the early nineteenth century, followed by an investigation of the main genres of sentimental prose (the povest’, the novel, and the travelogue) via a textual analysis of selected works. The overall aim of the chapter is to cast a fresh look on the distinctive features of sentimentalism in the pre-Pushkin period, and in so doing dispel the myth that by the time Karamzin had turned his back on creative writing to become a full-time historian sentimentalism had already spent all its creative potential. The enduring popularity of the trend in early nineteenth-century Russia explains only in part the ubiquitous presence of sentimental devices in contemporary fiction, for obviously recourse to fashion does not fully explain the phenomenon. The closer analysis of sentimental works of the period reveals a rather different, more complex picture than the one circulating in many histories of Russian literature. In the first place works grouped under the general umbrella of sentimentalism demonstrate a significant generic, thematic and stylistic variety. Secondly, Karamzin had established sentimentalism as the genre for contemporary prose writing, a move that, as seen in chapter II, by the early nineteenth century was questioned by a number of critics and authors. At a literary level such contentions catalysed a wide range of responses that made sentimentalism a crucial point of reference for early nineteenth-century prose writers, helping them to shape their own individual voice vis-à-vis well established models. Moreover, the key role played by the trend at a crucial stage in the formation of modern prose in Russia meant that sentimental topics and devices were treated as a rich warehouse of thematic and stylistic material

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ready to use as authors saw fit. Hence it is rare, if not unique, to find an early nineteenth-century story or a novel totally immune from sentimental devices and topics. This holds true even in the case of a variety of works penned by authors in open breach with sentimental aesthetics such as A. Benitskii, Z. Volkonskaia, S. fon Ferel’ts, Fedor Lubianovskii and Pavel Iakovlev. Sentimental authors themselves approached the trend from different angles. Some, such as Prince Shalikov, continued to pursue the existing prototypes of serious sentimental fiction, pushing imitation to its limits. With his characteristic overdoing of the timetested patterns of the serious sentimental story Shalikov created a travesty of the genre that was recognised as such and lampooned by contemporaries. Starting from different premises, Mariia Izvekova also emphasised the tearful sentimental mode. In an effort to make her work impregnable to criticism Izvekova adopted the sentimental canon both in terms of her self-image as a woman author and in her portrayals of idealised femininity. Her sentimental allegiance, however, did not save her from vicious attacks by the literary establishment. I will argue that criticism against her stems from deepseated misgivings about women’s literary undertakings, especially when – as in Izvekova’s case – they were met by a degree of commercial success. As far as women writers were concerned there was no safe ground outside the realm of family circles and dilettante pursuits. Others, however, such as the anonymous author of The Russian Amazon, created a type of sentimental heroine that implicitly undermined traditional roles assigned to women in the social and literary discourse of early nineteenth-century Russia. A more common strategy to avoid the trappings of serious sentimentalism was to reclaim some of the original features of a trend renowned for its ironic energy as much as for its tearful potential. Nikolai Brusilov is a representative example of a younger generation of authors who extolled the humorous drive of the trend as a source of regeneration for Russian sentimentalism.

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IV.1 The origins Even at its apogee in the 1790s Russian sentimentalism, similarly to most eighteenth-century genres, was primarily a derivative movement whose building blocks were borrowed from the literature of France, England and Germany. Thus, our attention needs to turn (however briefly) to sentimentalism as a Western European phenomenon. As Birkhead demonstrated just short of a century ago in her pioneering essay on this literary movement, sentimentalism seemed perfectly to reflect the cultural and philosophical context of the age.1 The “Moral School” philosophy of Shaftesbury (human beings are naturally prone to act benevolently) and the Sensualist theories of John Locke, who posited feelings as the basis of human knowledge (what man knows derives ultimately from what his senses tell him), played an important role in the formation of a cult of sensibility in literature.2 The term was initially applied to the ethical sphere to denote the feelings of compassion and sweet sadness found in a sympathetic contemplation of human sorrow. By designating sensibility as “that capacity of enjoying art which depended upon feelings” Edmund Burke broadened the concept to include the aesthetic fields.3 The term, defined in its turn by Richardson in his Postscript to Clarissa as “a delicacy of feeling, swiftness of response to the emotions of love and pity”,4 became a topos of sentimental literature indicating a kind of responsiveness that is both aesthetic and moral, the capacity to feel both for others’ sorrows and for beauty. The faith in the power of sympathy in human relations at a personal level (often held in tandem with pessimistic ideas about the nature of the world and society) translated to a focus on the individual’s experience and feelings underpinning the work of writers first in the West, and subsequently in Russia.5 In Chto nuzhno avtoru? (What Does an Author Need? 1793) Karamzin established a clear connection between the ethical and the aesthetic levels of the literary work, 1

Birkhead 1925: 93-116. See also Neuhäuser 1974: 8-25. See Brissenden 1974: 22-55. On the influence of Sensualism on Karamzin’s linguistic reform see Breuillard 2002-2003. 3 Cited in Wright 1937: 23. 4 Clarissa was first translated into Russian in 1791-1792. 5 Birkhead 1925: 96. 2

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pointing at the moral qualities as an essential component of the artist’s vocation. So-called sentimental features were already part of Russian literature before the affirmation of the movement as such, as demonstrated, for example, by the works of A. Kantemir, A. Sumarokov and M. Kheraskov.6 Furthermore, during the second half of the eighteenth century the flourishing of translations of Western European didactic-sentimental authors (i.e. A.-F. Prévost, P. Marivaux, Mme de Lambert, Mme de Genlis),7 comedies (by Marivaux, Diderot, P.-A. Beaumarchais, C. Gellert)8 and moralistic excerpts from English weeklies (mainly from The Spectator and The Universal Magazine)9 gave further impulse to the development of sentimental modes in Russian literature. As a direct consequence of foreign imports, native authors began to pay attention to the “qualities of the heart” (chuvstvitel’nost’), a broad attribute often tinged by moralistic tones and identified in a number of disparate Western European writers.10 Eventually, after an initial phase of translations and consumption of foreign works, in the 1770s and 1780s Russian imitations began to appear in the form of novels, short stories and travelogues in the sentimental style.11 Judging from the tremendous popularity of Russian sentimental novels during the reign of Catherine II, the genre immediately struck a chord with contemporary readers, whose acquaintance with Western “novels of feeling” primed them for the Russian variant of the trend. Starting with Fedor Emin’s Pis’ma Ernesta i Doravry (The Letters of Ernest and Doravra, 1766) – an

6

See Gorbatov 1991: 111 and Nazaretskaia 1967: 3-37. For an account of the influence exerted by Western “tearful comedy” on the young Kheraskov see Neuhäuser 1974: 39. 7 Abbé Prévost was translated into Russian from the late 1750s (Mémoires d’un homme de qualité in 1756-1758, a separate translation of Manon Lescaut appeared in 1790-1793, Le philosophe anglois in 1760). The first Russian version of Marivaux’s weighty La vie de Marianne dates to 1762, while his comedies were translated starting from the late 1760s. Mme de Lambert was equally well known in the 1760s although Russian editions of her work came out only in the 1770s. See Neuhäuser 1974: 32-36. On Karamzin’s translations of Mme de Genlis see Kafanova 2002-2003: 741-757. 8 Neuhäuser 1974: 38-46. 9 Cf. ibid.: 46; Levin 1979: 1-96. 10 Kochetkova 1980: 748. 11 On the importance of Karamzin’s early translations on the formation of his own poetics see Kafanova 2002-2003: 747 and passim.

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avowed imitation of the celebrated Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse – the genre took off, usually in the form of the epistolary novel.13 Nikolai Emin’s Roza (1788) – under the spell of Richardson14 – and Igra sud’by (The Play of Fate, 1789) – inspired by Goethe’s Werther – and Pavel L’vov’s popular Rossiiskaia Pamela, ili istoriia Marii, dobrodetel’noi poselianki (A Russian Pamela, or the History of Maria, the Virtuous Countrywoman, 1789) and Mikhail Murav’ev’s Emilievy Pis’ma (Emilii’s Letters, 1789-1790)15 followed suit, preparing the ground for what has been called Russia’s “mass movement” toward sentimental literature.16 This semi-original production took place alongside a second wave of translations of foreign works (in particular the poetry of James Thomson, Edward Young, Thomas Gray and Salomon Gessner, together with Rousseau’s novels).17 The influence exerted by the English “graveyard” poets on late-eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Russian writers of fiction was enhanced by the fact that their works, following a French trend, were translated mostly into prose.18 Such translations gave impetus to a pre-romantic strand within Russian sentimental literature, an undercurrent that early in the new century was to develop into a separate and highly popular genre. During the same crucial period (1770s-1790s) the literary and philosophical material published in Masonic journals and the creative output of authors close to Masonic circles gave additional thrust to the full development of a native “literature of feelings”.19 Yet it was in the early 1790s, with Karamzin’s intense literary activity as a critic and 12

Gorbatov 1991: 32-34. See Fraanje 2001. 14 Richardson’s novel appeared in Russia (via France) in the late 1780s: Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded of 1740-1741 was translated into Russian in 1787 and 1796), Clarissa of 1747-1748 was translated in 1791-1792, The History of Sir Charles Grandison of 1753-1754 in 1793-1794. 15 On this work see Rossi 1997. 16 The term is Zapadov’s (Zapadov 1983: 136). 17 Gorbatov 1991: 112 and 150. See also Neuhäuser 1974: 31 and 93. 18 An excerpt from James Thomson’s The Seasons (1727-1730) appeared in Russia in 1781. Numerous translations followed at the turn of the century. Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1742-1744) was first translated into Russian in 1785. Young’s The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (17421745), for example, was translated into prose throughout the 1770s-1790s (overall there appeared over twenty translations); the first Russian translation in verse appeared only in 1803. On this phenomenon see Levin 1979: 135. 19 Masonic thought and sentimental literature share the focus on the individual’s psyche, and the priority given to moral questions over social issues. On this link see Nazaretskaia 1969: 79-93 and Kochetkova 2002-2003: 689-700. 13

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author during the Moskovskii zhurnal period (Moscow Journal, 17921794), that sentimentalism finally reached its climax, directly competing with classicism.20 Karamzin’s activity had the great merit of making prose genres palatable for educated readers, thus setting in motion a process of legitimization that was to produce long-term results. The role played by eighteenth-century sentimentalism in the evolution of Russian literature in general, and of fiction in particular, has been acknowledged by a number of scholars both in Russia and in the West.21 The legitimisation of prose genres and the refinement of the literary language upheld by sentimental writers in the late eighteenth century gave new impulse to Russian fiction. By the time Alexander came to power the path was definitely opened for the genre to assert itself, a development of incalculable importance for the future of Russian fiction.

20 Although there is little agreement on the chronological boundaries of sentimentalism in Russia most scholars identify the last decade of the eighteenth century as the culminating phase of the movement. 21 Whereas Russian sentimentalism as a whole is well represented in Western literary criticism the post-Karamzin period has attracted scant attention. Two exceptions to this trend date back to the 1960s-1970s (Brang 1960 and Städtke 1971). In Soviet Russia sentimentalism represented for some time a terra incognita until, in the late 1930s, Gukovskii introduced a division of sentimentalism in a democratic trend (Fonvizin, Radishchev) versus a conservative one (Murav’ev, Karamzin). A change in the critical approach occurred with the “rehabilitation” of Karamzin in the 19501960s, followed a decade later by fresh studies dedicated to the trend as a whole. See Lotman 1957; Meilakh 1973, and Orlov 1979. For a bibliography of literary criticism on Russian sentimentalism see N. Kochetkova, “Izbrannaia bibliografiia” in Kochetkova 1994: 259-270.

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IV.2 Russian sentimentalism between tradition and innovation Sentimentalism was at the height of its popularity in Russia during the last decade of the eighteenth century, years that saw the apogee of Karamzin’s activity as a critic and a writer of imaginative prose. If not the initiator of sentimentalism in Russia, the writer, borrowing an apt expression by Aleksandr Veselovskii, was certainly its main “organiser”,22 for Karamzin played a decisive role in crystallising the influences coming from Western Europe and in setting the basic guidelines for a strong national tradition in the genre.23 Although Karamzin’s literary activity virtually came to a halt in 1803, when he turned to historical writing and ceased to take active part in literary debates, he continued to be one of the most influential personalities in early nineteenth-century Russian letters.24 Notwithstanding the mounting criticism of sentimentalism Karamzin’s intellectual leadership was never successfully challenged. As remarked by Anthony Cross, his ability to influence, form and create continued to play a fundamental role in Russian literature throughout his time as court historian.25 In particular, after the appearance of the first volumes of his History Karamzin was appraised with patriotic enthusiasm to the extent that any voice out of the adoring chorus was deemed inappropriate. Mikhail Kachenovskii, the historian and editor of Vestnik Evropy on and off between 1805 and 1830, gave vent to his frustration about Karamzin’s “sacred” status in a letter to Gnedich dated July 1820: For God’s sake don’t mention my criticism of the History! See what has already befallen me and I only reviewed the Preface. Some turned their backs on me, others pretended they didn’t know me; a third group called me a crank and a

22

Veselovskii 1904: 40. See Nebel 1967: 7, Gorbatov 1991 and Simmons 1935: 168. 24 From the time Karamzin turned to historical writings he abandoned the cult of feelings, the surviving sentimental modes serving a different aesthetic purpose. See Dewey 1958: 42-43. 25 See Cross 1971: xx-xxi. 23

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dangerous man; others even tried to slander me in the service; Zhukovskii ceased to 26 have any dealings with me.

Furthermore, Karamzin’s poems, povesti and novels, of which new editions proliferated during the reign of Alexander I, were avidly read, if no longer by literary critics, then certainly by both readers and writers at the beginning of the century.27 Most importantly, authors of various aesthetic beliefs found in the innovative generic, stylistic and thematic guidelines set by Karamzin a springboard for their own literary endeavours. Indeed, from a thematic point of view, his work represented a breakthrough in modern Russian prose with its trademark exploration of the hero’s individual sensibility and moral features. According to this new focal point, the individual’s selfhood and emotional distress (chuvstvitel’nost’)28 and a sympathetic attitude towards man’s sufferings (sochuvstvitel’nost’) become key attributes of the sensitive hero/ine.29 Karamzin carefully investigated the narrative possibilities of a plot revolving around the personality of his sentimental characters, an inward-looking approach that brought about a thematic shift of eighteenth-century prose from the outside world of the heroes’ actions to the intimate world of the individual’s emotions. The attention to the character’s subjective experience is signalled in Karamzin’s works by particular stylistic devices that became the hallmark of the literary movement at the turn of the century. The heroes’ sensitivity is expressed by means of a highly “Не говорите Бога ради о критике на Историю! Досталось мне уже и за рецензию на одно лишь Предисловие: одни отворачивались от меня, другие меня не узнавали; третьи называли меня попеременно то сумасбродным, то опасным человеком; иные даже старались вредить мне по службе; Жуковский прекратил со мной всякие отношения”. Cited in Russkii arkhiv 1869: IV/971. 27 See Cross 1996: 39. See also Lotman 1966: 285 and Galakhov 1880: II/62. 28 In the Introduction to his translation of excerpts from Sterne’s work, Iakob Galinkovskii thus explained the meaning of the term: “Сентиментальность значит: тонкая, нежная и подлинная чувствительность”. [Ia. Galinkovskii], “Primechanie” in Galinkovskii 1801: ii. 29 The two concepts were often closely related in the late-eighteenth early-nineteenth centuries. Cf. for example the definition of chuvstvitel’nost’ given in the Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi of 1794: 839, quoted in Orlov 1977: 67, where the term is defined as “качество человека, трогающегося несчастьем другого”. The notion of sentimentalism as a quality, including the feeling of sympathy towards humankind, is also voiced in the above quoted “Introduction” in which Galinkovskii refers to Sterne in these terms: “как сентименталист, как филантроп (человеколюбивый) – он первый, или лучше, предводитель своей секты”. Galinkovskii 1801: ii. Italics in the original. 26

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stylised language and specific lexical markers, such as selected epithets to describe the characters’ psychological traits (e.g. nezhnyi, chuvstvitel’nyi, liubeznyi, milyi), the physical repercussion of certain mental conditions (such as sighs, tears, paleness, faintness) culminating in the highly emotional utterances (exclamations, emotional monologues and dialogues) – all due to become distinguishing features of sentimental prose. Starting from Karamzin’s example, heroes’ finely tuned sensibility and moral standing are revealed in their appearance as well as behaviour: sentimental characters are typified by distinctive physical attributes which shape the enduring image of the chuvstvitel’nyi geroi, and, more frequently, of the chustvitel’naia geroinia.30 Often worshipped as “angel’ krasoty and dobrodeteli” (“angel of beauty and kindness”), the sentimental heroine is typically endowed with bol’shie – often golubye – glaza and nezhnoe litso (wide, blue eyes and gentle face), used as qualifiers of her inner qualities. It may be noted that by the end of the eighteenth century such physical attributes lost their poignancy and became clichéd traits of this type of hero. The characteristic sensitivity and contemplative attitude of sentimental heroes are vouched for by their heightened sensibility to surrounding nature. A picturesque or sublime landscape and bucolic scenes of rural life are designed to arouse in the responsive hero (and in the reader) an immediate emotional reaction.31 Hence the abundance of touching views, solitary reflections in a locus amoenus, and reveries in a suitably idyllic environment described in lyrical tones. Roslav, the protagonist of the sentimental novella Nevidimka, ili tainstvennaia zhenshchina (The Invisible or Mysterious Woman, 1815), typically relishes every detail of the surrounding nature:

30

See, for example, the description of the sentimental heroine in Mariia Izvekova’s Milena ili redkii primer velikodushiia (hereafter: Milena): “Она не была совершенной красавицей, но пленяла взоры и трогала сердца [...]. Имела величественный вид и самое благородное лицо, в котором, казалось, была изображена ее душа”. (Milena: 7-8). Here and elsewhere in the text (unless otherwise stated) the italics are mine. The ethical significance of physical features was underlined by the physiognomic belief that internal qualities manifest themselves in the external appearance of individuals. 31 Sentimental narratives as a rule are set in the countryside, far away from the city, identified as a source of evil. Spring and Summer are the seasons preferred by sentimental heroes, Autumn and Winter being mostly depicted in connection with the sad mood of the hero/ine. See Brang 1960: 262.

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At the hour when the evening was fading, Roslav stood on the banks of Lake Geneva; its trembling surface reflected the shadows gathering on the water, the arc of the pale skies, and the full sphere cast by the moon. […] “What a ravishing place!” Roslav said to himself, “What romantic dreams are conceived under the influence of nature by evening! […] Oh Rousseau!” 32

The enclosed landscapes borrowed from the classical eclogue play a key role in defining the typical settings – and the aesthetic values – of sentimental prose, a process of appropriation hinted at by sentimental authors themselves.33 In this context the idealised Nature of Ovidian and Virgilian tradition serves as a spatial embodiment of the yearning for an intimate existence in the safe cocoon provided by family, friends and inspiring readings voiced by sentimental authors.34 The eponymous heroine of Pavel L’vov’s novel Aleksandr i Iuliia (1801) for example: […] yields to the pleasure of reading the songs of Ossian. At Iuliia’s feet the waves are playing dolefully, breaking along the sandy shore, around her nightingales are singing and turtle-doves coo; yet the touching songs of the Scottish Bard stir her 35 feelings more than anything.

Perhaps not surprisingly given the didactic and moralising drive typical of the genre, sentimental representations of nature are echoed in non-narrative genres such as manuals of conduct. S. Remezov’s Shchastlivyi vospitannik (The Joyful Pupil, 1808) for example, was an educative book composed of brief passages with titles typical of the genre, such as “Liubov k otechestvu” (“Love for the Fatherland”) and “Kak chitat’ knigi” (“On How to Read Books”). In this latter chapter the author, besides mentioning commendable authors, describes the ideal setting in which this activity is meant to take place:

“В часы угасающего вечера, на берегу Женевского озера, в котором тихо дрожали и тени, набегающие на воду, и своды бледнеющих небес, и полный шар восходящей луны, стоял […] Рослав. […] Какие восхитительные места! – Говорил Рослав сам себе, – и какие романтические мечты рождаются под влиянием вечерней природы! […] О Руссо!” I. 1815: 74. 33 Cf. M.N. Murav’ev, “O pastusheskom stikhotvorstve”, in Murav’ev 1847: II/259260. 34 On the influence of classical idyll on Russian sentimentalism see Surkov 1991: 1011 and passim. 35 “[…] и тут поддается она удовольствию чтения песен Оссиана. У ног Юлии уныло шутят волны, расстилаясь по песочному берегу, вокруг нее поют соловьи, стонут горлицы; но больше всего ее чувства волнуют трогательные песни Шотландского Барда”. L’vov 1801a: 57-58. 32

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I take Virgil, go to the garden (…) and am thus transported by the incomparable poet; falling deeper into thought, I dream of ancient times and compare 36 the past with the present – and my spirit turns to the future only under protest.

Similarly to the response aroused by nature, the feeling for loved ones is also conducive to “outpourings of the heart”, a key feature of the narrative discourse striving, using J. Starobinski’s term, towards a transparency of emotions.37 Perhaps not surprisingly in this context, love and friendship are depicted in strikingly similar terms, being glorified as the highest attribute of the sensitive soul. A typical example of the sentimental relationship between male heroes is provided by the anonymous Neshchastnyi L***. Rossiskoe sochinenie (The Unhappy L***. A Russian Work, 1803): Their acquaintance increased still further. […] They were living in such a way that they could visit each other frequently, share their free hours with each other, and speak of their feelings with genuine candour. L*** felt a strong attachment and genuine friendship towards him – he decided to confess his feelings – and to unite them both forever with uninterrupted ties of friendship, he desired to call him his friend – his friend, this precious title 38 which he himself found so flattering.

Friendship is a sacred feeling and its betrayal causes a painful blow from which sentimental heroes can never fully recover. The disillusioned Erast in Nikolai Brusilov’s Legkoverie i khitrost’ (Naivety and Deceitfulness), for example, reverts to marital love as a substitute for misplaced friendship: “Later in life, Erast had many acquaintances, but he had already ceased to seek friends and often said that a good wife is the best friend in the world”. 39 After all there is little to set love apart from friendship in the literature of sentimentalism, for an identical phraseology and “Я беру Виргилия – иду в сад [...] и восхищаюсь этим несравненным поэтом; углубясь в мысли, я мечтаю о веках древности, сравниваю прошлое с настоящим, и мой дух против воли обращается к будущему”. Remezov 1808: 67. 37 Starobinski 1971. 38 “Их знакомство еще больше укрепилось [...]. Они, живя таким образом, часто посещали друг друга – проводили вместе свободное время, и с истинной откровенностью делились своими чувствами. Л*** чувствовал к нему сильную привязанность истинной дружбы – решился объявить свои чувства и – соединиться навсегда непрерывными узами дружбы, желая называться его другом, этим драгоценным именем, которое для него было лестно”. Anon. 1803: 13-14. 39 “Эраст впоследствии имел много приятелей, но уже не искал друзей и часто говорил, что хорошая жена это лучший друг на свете”. Brusilov 1979: 254. 36

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situational configurations make the two feelings in fact interchangeable. Friendship represented a fundamental value in the age of both sentimentalism and romanticism, extolled within the literary discourse at a variety of levels: textual via the persona of the sentimental and romantic hero, and meta-textual, in the cult of friendship cultivated by late-eighteenth early nineteenth-century authors such as Karamzin, Batiushkov, Zhukovskii and Pushkin. Intimate relationships in the secluded space of the countryside provide a key chronotope40 in the literature of feelings, for, as T. Roboli puts it, “sentimentalism embraces the thematic unity of the near and the intimate in a person’s internal and external aspects”.41 Such an ideal world, in which men, free from the yoke of social interactions, entertain wholesome relationships, abandoning themselves to a simple life in symbiosis with nature, runs through Western literature of all ages, but acquires special topicality in the late eighteenth century. Brought to the surface of literary and philosophical discourse by Rousseau, taken up by sentimental writers and re-shaped in the age of romanticism, Nature eventually becomes a literary and cultural cliché debunked – among others – by Pushkin, who in the poem Tsygany (The Gypsies, 1824) shrewdly exposes the shortcomings of this myth. Not surprisingly, such literary naturalism went hand in hand with the idealisation of the village and its inhabitants as the idyllic scenery of choice. In a trend that in Russia goes back as early as the 1750s,42 peasants, shepherds and the like were represented as morally (if not materially) privileged individuals in perfect unison with nature vis-à-vis the socially privileged but morally corrupt few spoiled by civilisation. Starting with works such as Karamzin’s Poor Liza, in which the bucolic idyll is broken by the interference of the urbane Erast, the glorification of the Russian people (narod) went several steps further, putting down deep roots in Russian culture. The rural myth took various shapes, ranging from the Slavophiles’ romantic utopia of the 1840s43 to Tolstoi’s yearning for the intuitive freedom of 40 The term was introduced in literary theory by Mikhail Bakhtin to describe the manner in which literature represents time and space, two dimensions that are inseparable in the literary work. Accordingly, each genre presents a different intersection of the chronological and spatial dimensions. See: Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel” in Bakhtin 1981, and “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism” in Bakhtin 1986. 41 Roboli 1985: 50. 42 Rogger 1960: 126-185. 43 On this issue see Walicki 1975.

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a primeval existence and for closer contact between the writer and the people. Arguably, the sympathetic outlook on the Russian peasant professed by sentimental authors contained in itself a potential for radical views of what was later to be referred to as the peasant question. Yet authors who developed such sentimental premises to voice a critique of serfdom were few and far apart: Radishchev at the end of the eighteenth century, and fon Ferel’ts at the beginning of the nineteenth century, may be quoted as the most relevant instances in this respect. In the vast majority of cases authors stuck to the idyllic views of sentimentalism, effectively using it as a screen for the harsh reality of the Russian countryside hidden behind the thick curtains of pastoral illusion. On the whole, sentimental authors justified the grim state of the Russian peasant as part of a divinely ordained status quo, rather than reaching unpalatable conclusions of a social or political nature. As a result, even though peasants are often the main heroes of sentimental works, their image is in fact purified from any realistic trait and, what is more, gentrified. As fon Ferel’ts argued,44 their fictional persona reflected a much treasured ideal held by a large portion of the Russian elite. Yet notwithstanding appearances, ultimately neither the peasant nor the countryside constitutes the main concern of sentimental prose. Rather, nature (of which the peasant is one ingredient) provides the perfect setting for a highly solipsistic (and inherently elitist) genre centred on the fictionalised image of the author as a sentimental persona and on the web of interactions between author, narrator and reader. Indeed, the pose of close friendship between the educated and sensitive narrator (i.e. the fictional persona of the author) and the equally polished narratee (i.e. the literary image of the reader) represents a key-point in Karamzin’s fiction.45 A wealth of technical devices aimed at reducing the customary distance between author, narrator and reader are activated in this type of fiction. Plot events, for instance, are related through the narrator’s emotional voice in order to appeal directly to the archetypal sensitive reader. Such efforts to remove the barriers between text and reader are also witnessed to by the suspension of communication (aposiopesis) which takes place each time the narrator’s emotional state reaches an emotive climax. Typically, such emotive peaks are introduced by rhetorical questions 44 45

See chapter III.5. Dickinson 1995: 179. See also Hammarberg 1991: 1-44 and 132.

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such as: “Who can possibly describe the surprise and sorrow of the unhappy Emiliia?”46 – questions that seem to pre-empt any rendition of emotions in the written text. Frequently the narrator advertises a suspension of the narration in medias res, in actual fact proceeding to relate a series of events allegedly too sad to be fully described to the sensitive reader. The anonymous Modest i Sofiia (Modest and Sofia, 1810) offers an example in point: “I am not going to describe either the old man’s sombre, speechless grief, nor his loving daughter’s cries and torments. My feeling heart restrains me”.47 Incidentally, situational parallels to this narrative device may be detected at the plot level, in the fainting fits seizing sentimental heroines when overcome by intense emotions. Such devices invite readers to share sentimental ideals of compassion and sensitivity not only with the characters of the work, but also with the author, who projects himself simultaneously at the different levels of spectator, narrator and reader. Sentimental writers went to great lengths to establish a strong connection between their persona as author and the text, and such emotional exchanges reinforce that, while creating a strong meta-textual rapport between authors and readers quite unprecedented in Russian fiction. Thus the borderline between literature and reality was considerably eroded by the “autobiographical” quality of sentimental narratives as flagged by Karamzin, who positioned his self-styled sentimental persona at the core of his work.48 By claiming a first-hand experience of the events he related, Karamzin aimed at blurring the distinction between the author and his fictionalised image and, ultimately, between literature and life.49 From a structural viewpoint, the attention given to the inner, often trivial experience of private individuals yields to the virtual “plotlessness” characterising sentimental fiction at the turn of the eighteenth century. In contrast to earlier sentimental authors such as 46 “Кто может описать удивление и горесть несчастной Эмилии?” [N.P. Brusilov], ‘Legkoverie i Khitrost’’ in Orlov 1979: 244-254 (252). 47 “Не буду описывать ни мрачной, безмолвной горести старца, ни воплей и терзаний нежной дочери; сердца чувствительные поймут меня”. [Anon.] 1810: 2. 48 As Hammarberg argues “Literary posing and the habit of creating life out of literature was part and parcel of the sentimentalist movement”. This aspect of sentimental fiction was taken to the extremes by the main epigone of Karamzin, Prince Shalikov, who “took the most histrionic aspects of Karamzin’s narratorial image and made no distinction between life and art”. Hammarberg 1996: 276. 49 Cf. Lotman 1987: 17. The pilgrimage to the purported site of Karamzin’s poor Liza’s suicide ultimately testifies to the success of this strategy.

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N. Emin and P. L’vov, Karamzin was a “miniaturist” who opted for shorter prose forms even when writing novels,50 a trend further pursued by the majority of early nineteenth-century prose writers. The condensation of the story line was accompanied at a syntactic level by a refinement and contraction of the sentence, generally composed of short, rhythmical periods.51 Aiming at conveying emotional subtleties, Karamzin paid close attention to stylistic and lexical features of written Russian, realising that the task at hand required profound reforms of the existing literary language. As we have seen in chapter II, the principle underlying Karamzin’s literary agenda was the concept of “taste” (vkus), a term inspired by the shifting codes of behaviour ruling aristocratic salons. Noticeably, in both Karamzin’s theoretical writings and in his literary work the notion of vkus was transposed from the sociological sphere into the aesthetic field, where it stood for the principles of harmony and elegance. By modelling the literary idiom on the refined language spoken by the aristocracy Karamzin obtained harmonic effects ranging from the adoption of a simple, albeit lyrical phraseology to a carefully balanced syntax.52 Beyond their linguistic function, it is hard to overestimate the very concrete role played by salons as key venues of intellectual and literary debate of the time. Literature was discussed and even created in such venues, a proactive role that, as Hammarberg observes, is particularly significant in the development of a sentimental aesthetic. During the years 1793-1795, for example, Karamzin drew inspiration from literary soirées held in the salon of the Pleshcheev family to create a number of works that, first seeing the light as domestic games, were then handwritten in albums, finally getting released in the public sphere as part of published collections, such as almanacs. Thus, the close link established by sentimental authors between real life and literature is also reflected in the double function of the salon, a space at the same time public and private, real and fictional. 50 Karamzin wrote two novels, the short Rytsar’ nashego vremeni and Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika. Although lengthy, the latter is composed of a series of letters, i.e. of separated pieces united by the homogeneous narrative tone and themes. Given the fragmentary character and the widespread adoption of the epistolary form, sentimental novels of travel can be regarded as a compound of smaller narrative pieces. Cf. section 2 of the present chapter. 51 Skipina emphasises the central role played in Karamzin’s prose by the isocolic organisation of the sentences, i.e. by the “construction of a period in a series of separate members, or cola, in which the principle of equality is observed”. Skipina 1985: 25. 52 See Gerasimova 1969. See also chapter II.2.

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The almanac – Karamzin issued two of them in the 1790s: Aglaia (1794-1795) and Aonidy (1796) – provides a good example of borderline publication, right at the threshold between salon/private and public/published enterprises. Designed mainly for women and addressing a small circle of acquaintances, the almanac contained minor literary forms penned by both professional and amateur writers. Moreover, as Gitta Hammarberg demonstrates, the almanac provided a less official, less bookish and more intimate arena than the literary journal, and was often used in salon gatherings as a template for occasional verse and other salon genres.53 The influence of the salon extends to the genres favoured by sentimental writers. Whilst Karamzin had given a distinctive sentimental flavour to a number of pre-existing prose genres, such as the povest’ and the travelogue, he had also brought to the forefront of Russian literature a number of formerly peripheral or non-literary forms such as fragments, epistles, poetry in prose. Moreover, new genres appeared under the influence of English sentimental and graveyard poetry, such as plotless prose sketches consisting in an account of the hero’s lyrical meditations, pioneered in Russia by Karamzin’s Progulka (A Walk, 1789).54 “Narrative poems”, nature descriptions, fragments,55 meditations, elegies in prose, psychological portraits,56 together with non-literary forms (i.e. casual conversations, intimate confessions, diaries and letters) and salon genres for the female audience (i.e. trifles, charades, album pieces), were brought out of the ladies’ closet in turn-of-the-century Russia.57 “Minor” and “mixed” genres, together with the povest’ and the sentimental travelogue, attained a level of popularity until then achieved exclusively by the lengthy novels of love and adventure. Furthermore, by introducing sentimental phraseology and an emotive tone in small and mixed forms Karamzin drew narrative genres nearer to poetry, adding rhythm and harmonious 53 Hammarberg 2002a. On the cultural role played by the salon in early nineteenthcentury Russia see also chapter 1.4. 54 Levin 1979: 9. 55 See Cross 1971: 111, Hammarberg 1991: 132-202; Jones 1995: 20-23 and Rossi 1998. 56 Petrunina 1981: 52. 57 Such minor genres appeared both in collected works and, more frequently, in literary journals. Often a special section (“Smes’”) was devoted to anecdotes and fragments. See for example the case of the periodical published by Nikolai Brusilov in 1805, Zhurnal rossiiskoi slovesnosti, which was divided into three sections: “Proza” (povesti, otryvki, russkaia slovesnost’), “Stikhotvoreniia” and “Smes’”.

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assonances to the range of stylistic options available to early nineteenth-century prose writers.58 Interestingly, short narrative forms continued to flourish both as self-standing works, and as an integral part of the povest’ and novel (especially the travelogue), genres which represented the largest, and most popular, sentimental output during the years of Alexander’s reign. This process of generic reconfiguration enacted by Karamzin is, to an extent, typical of periods of transition59 and known to Western sentimental fiction as well.60 In the specific area of Russian literature it had the two-fold function of further denting the generic hierarchy established by classicism61 by focusing on genres related to the private, “feminine” sphere, and of widening the range of prose forms.62 In other words, sentimental “pleasantness” and the enthusiastic endorsement of minor genres and of middle stylistic and linguistic registers inaugurated a new phase in the history of Russian fiction that had moved away from both the lofty genres preferred by classicist authors and the lengthy and unpolished eighteenth-century novels of adventure.63 Although there is basic agreement between Russian and Western scholars about the fundamental features of late-eighteenthcentury sentimentalism, the situation becomes rather murky in relation to the early nineteenth century. As a rule the sentimental quality of specific literary works is easily recognised, whilst opinions diverge when it comes to forming a common definition, setting chronological boundaries and assessing the role played by the trend in earlynineteenth-century Russian fiction. Scholars have questioned a definition of sentimentalism in the post-Karamzin period as a literary movement or “school”,64 some like R. Neuhäuser maintaining it had already slipped to the rank of trend65 or, as in the case of A. Pypin and 58

See Kucherov 1941: 106-107. See Tynianov 1970: 101-116. See also Greenleaf 1994: 2-18. 60 Harries 1994. 61 See Introduction to chapter III. As far as poetry is concerned the so-called “light genres” (i.e. madrigals and elegies) began to appear as early as the 1760s, in the periodical press of the time. Significant in this respect are the two journals published by Kheraskov and his circle, Poleznoe uveselenie (1760-1762) and Svobodnye chasy (1763). See Neuhäuser 1974: 45. 62 On the function of femininity in sentimental genres see Carolin Heyder and Arja Rosenholm, “Feminisation as Functionalisation: the Presentation of Femininity by the Sentimentalist Man” in Rosslyn 2003: 51-71. 63 See Skipina 1985. 64 See Vinogradov 1979: 161-162. 65 See Neuhäuser 1973: 15. 59

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K. Skipina, to a step lower, to that of a literary current. Others (B. Tomashevskii, G. Smith, and W. Brown) have disputed the very definition of sentimentalism as a literary school, preferring to call it a “border trend” sandwiched between classicism and pre-romanticism.67 What may appear as mere matters of definition in actual fact reflect the different critical outlook on, and assessment of, sentimental prose in the post-Karamzin period. With the exception of a few scholars for whom the end of Karamzin’s activity as an author would have – against all evidence – brought the trend to a halt,68 there is general agreement on the tangible influence of Karamzin’s literary heritage throughout the first two decades of the nineteenth century.69 Even so, the significance of sentimentalism for contemporary authors and its far-reaching implications in Russian literature as a whole are far from being universally acknowledged. In fact, the majority of histories of Russian literature do not cover the period in any depth, dismissing the entire post-Karamzinian generation as epigones and their work as the worthless “tail-end” of the movement.70 As will be demonstrated in this chapter, the picture is actually far more complex and intriguing than this. Clearly, at the beginning of the new century the movement found its prominence within Russian fiction being challenged on a number of fronts. On the one hand the tearfulness, melodramatic inclinations and imitative character of some sentimental works provoked a mounting reaction against the movement as a whole. On the other hand authors were quick to incorporate pre-romantic modes coming from the West as viable alternatives to sentimentalism. In short, coinciding with the cessation of Karamzin’s literary activity, 66

See Pypin 1902-1903: IV (1903)/212-213. See also Skipina 1985: 43. Cf. B. Tomashevskii, “Primechaniia” in Batiushkov 1948: xxxix-xl; Brown 1980: I/22. A similar point of view was expressed by Gukovskii (Gukovskii 1965: 19-23 and passim; repr. M.: Intraga, 1995) who regarded sentimentalism as the initial phase of romanticism. Such views are shared by a number of scholars including L. Pumpianskii, P. Zaborov, M. Ehrhard and N. Fridman. Smith provides a comprehensive survey of the debates on the use of the terms sentimentalism and preromanticism (Smith 1976: 181-182 and passim). 68 See, for example, Pavlovich 1974: 214-215. Evidence of Karamzin’s influence is provided by the numerous povesti and novels directly inspired by Bednaia Liza, such as A. Izmailov’s Bednaia masha (1801), the anonymous Neschastnaia Liza (1810), Prince Dolgorukii’s Neschastnaia Liza (1811) and N. Brusilov’s Istoriia bednoi Mar’i (1805). See Orlov 1966: 24-26. 69 See, for example, Lévine and Serman 1992: 472. 70 For examples of this stance see Meilakh 1958: 363-370 and Altshuller, “Transition to the Modern Age: 1790-1820” in Moser: 123. 67

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sentimentalism lost its previous position of near hegemony in Russian prose, gradually becoming one among a range of possible sources of themes, plot and literary styles available to contemporary prose writers.71 Yet as I set out to demonstrate in this chapter, despite gradually shifting (borrowing Neuhäuser’s definition) from the rank of an avantgarde movement to that of a literary trend,72 sentimentalism was still playing a pivotal role on the Russian scene, radiating a direct or indirect influence on virtually all prose writers of the reign of Alexander I.73 Evidence of the trend’s influence on contemporary prose fiction is given by the ubiquitous presence of stylistic devices and thematic patterns typical of sentimental fiction, a presence that extends to works openly rejecting the trend in favour of other narrative modes. At a general level, as will be illustrated in the present chapter, the “psychological language” created by Karamzin and the experiments with various narrative forms became the starting points for the literary production of a great number of early nineteenthcentury authors, inside and outside the sentimentalist camp. Writers such as Benitskii, Narezhnyi, Volkonskaia and Gnedich, for example, interpolated in their works sentimental passages as “quotations” for critical ends, thus giving rise to an intertextual dialogue between different trends of contemporary prose. Even when narrowing it down to sentimental works, however, the contours of the trend were more nuanced than is generally acknowledged, an occurrence after all not surprising at a time when imitations coexisted alongside autonomous re-elaboration and parodies.

71 A number of scholars date the beginning of the decline of sentimentalism to the 1790s (see Orlov 1977: 250-254; Neuhäuser 1974: 87). Orlov, however, concedes that in the 1790s the phenomenon affects mostly poetry, later calling the 1789-1796 period “лучшее время нашей сентиментальной литературы” (Orlov 1977: 251-254 and 269). 72 See Neuhäuser 1974: 1 and 87. 73 Stepanov points out that “Карамзин и его последователи получили возможность широкого воздействия на литературную жизнь, отстаивая принципы новой эстетики в ряде журналов, находившихся под их руководством”. (Stepanov 1958: 164-165). Makogonenko, criticising the widespread partition of Russian literature according to a chronology of convenience – the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries – points out that the development of literary trends and tendencies forming during the eighteenth century continues during the 1800s-1820s period. Makogonenko 1980: I/766.

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In the post-Karamzin period sentimental fiction was a genre embracing a great variety of works, a diversification due to a number of causes. The double pressure to cater for the more sophisticated tastes of early nineteenth-century readers and to fend off the biting attacks of the Besedisty certainly played a part in the phenomenon. If it is true that some authors clung to sentimentalism in its more tearful and uninspiring form,74 it is also true that many took a more original stand, widening the traditional thematic and stylistic compass of the trend. Between the two ends of imitation and innovation authors such as Fiodor Lubianovskii (IV.6.4) take a neutral position, relating to Karamzin’s work in a utilitarian manner, as a convenient repository of narrative devices and topics. As a result Russian sentimental fiction at the beginning of the nineteenth century emerges as a dynamic and varied body of novels and stories including both imitations and works taking issue with “classic” sentimental literature, parodies of hyper-sentimental narratives,75 and humorous sentimental works, as we will see in the course of this chapter.

IV.3 Women writers, female heroines and the serious sentimental mode: the case of Mariia Izvekova So far we have touched several times upon the phenomenon of the so-called feminisation of Russian literature and literary life, a key cultural paradigm in the period between Karamzin and Pushkin. In chapter I we have looked at the feminisation process undergone by early nineteenth-century culture with particular reference to the role of women in the literary salon. Chapter II investigated the feminisation of the literary language with reference to the “ladies’ discourse” as the avowed template for the linguistic reform promoted by Karamzin. Chapter III examined images of positive heroines in the work of Benitskii and Volkonskaia which directly challenged the sentimental ethos and aesthetic conventions. 74

Brang 1960: 261-264. Parodies of sentimental literature began as early as the 1790s. See, for example, V. Pushkin “Letter to I. Dmitrev” (1796) (cited in Neuhäuser 1973: 85). Prince Shalikov noted the diffusion of such parodies of sentimentalism, lamenting that “There was a time when everybody longed for fame as a sentimental author; another time has arrived and everybody now endeavours, apropos and not apropos, to voice and write an epigram against sentimentality”. (P.I. Shalikov, Aglaia 1808: I/37). 75

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In this section we focus on the ideal of women as both centre of the family and as a pivotal force in the cultural life of the country, a double image of Mother and Muse, private and public persona, which is recurrent in the literary discourse of the time. Sentimental heroines populated the work of authors of both sexes, and represented the most transparent manifestations of the feminisation process investing early nineteenth-century high culture. In this section we analyse the main features of this type of heroine as represented by women writers, a group overall faithful to the stereotypical image of the positive heroine. Yet, however dominant, the canonic representation of the sentimental heroine was in no way the only one circulating in contemporary stories and novels; it will be discussed further in the following section devoted to the anonymous novel The Russian Amazon. Boris Uspenskii, Gitta Hammarberg and others have demonstrated that an idealised conception of the feminine dominated the social and cultural life of the Russian gentry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. By endorsing the ideal of woman as the natural depository of sensitivity, good taste and refined discourse, authors of sentimental fiction translated the process of feminisation of Russian culture into the literary field.76 Nikolai Karamzin and Russian sentimentalists in general, starting from the Rousseauian notion of the “natural idyll”, shaped a feminine realm centred on a small domestic group living in close contact with Nature.77 Within the binary oppositions underlying sentimental literature, such as countryside versus city, state of nature versus society norms, women became a fundamental element of the equation; a flagship for all that was “natural”, i.e. commendable in mankind. In this way, “feminine” qualities such as emotionality, tenderness and spontaneity acquired a universal value, becoming the essential ingredients of both female and male characters. In this context, the sentimental heroine was invested with a symbolic value that served a fundamentally male ethos, having little to do with the reality of women’s existence and self-perception. Hence, confined within the entourage of family relations the status and very existence of the positive heroine is defined by her relationship of subordination to male characters, whether her father, fiancé or husband. 76 The term “feminisation” was first employed in Viktor Vinogradov’s Iazyk Pushkina (Moscow-Leningrad, 1935) and is now commonly used amongst literary historians. See, for example, Levin 1964; Uspenskii 1985; Hammarberg 1994a. 77 See Hammarberg 1994a: 113 and passim.

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Within this gender-based system female characters are allowed limited initiative, a feature which contributes to the homogeneous representation of this type of heroine. As Catriona Kelly remarks, there is a clear connection between the literary image of the “sensitive” lady and social ideology for “Once women had been established in literary practice as sensitive and virtuous, it was a short step to associating them with these qualities’ aesthetic corollaries, morality and decency”.78 Indeed in Russia, as in the West, the idealisation of the “proper lady” reflected and responded to a value system that governed not just the aesthetic expression but the social act.79 Viewed in this perspective the sensitive and obedient heroines filling polite fiction in the early nineteenth century reflected and, at the same time, endorsed the patriarchal system of values in place in Russian society.80 At the time he majority of women writers espoused such ideas, or at least appeared to do so, judging from their work. In one of the few overviews of Russian women writers of this period, Yael Harussi makes a number of interesting points about the narrow social background of female authors and their acceptance of patriarchal values, as voiced in their writings and narratives.81 This overview, however, needs a few correctives. In the first place the picture of the numerically small group of early nineteenth-century women authors is not complete without the inclusion of FrancoRussian writers, such as Natalia Golovkina, Iuliia Krüdener and, in particular, Zinaida Volkonskaia. As we have seen, Volkonskaia regarded her art as a vocation, a feature reflected in the independently minded heroines populating her work. Such features make this writer a notable exception to the general rule, but one certainly worth considering, not least for the higher level of her artistic achievements compared to most of her contemporaries, male and female alike. On a more general level, many of the attributes that Harussi deems specific to women writers, such as their similar social background (most of them were nobles) and self-perception as authors (a defensive stand), may well be applied to male writers of the prePushkin generation. Furthermore, it is safe to say that the “feminine” features of many novels and stories of the period reflect only tangentially a male/female divide. Such homogeneity across gender is 78

Kelly 1994: 52-53. Poovey 1984: xii. 80 On this issue see Andrew 1988: 1-5. See also Rosslyn 1996: 55. For the broader European context see May 1981. 81 Harussi 1989: 35-48. 79

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particularly noticeable in sentimental works where the creative output of male writers is hardly distinguishable from that of their female counterparts. The work of male and female authors of serious sentimental narratives showcases similar sets of aesthetic canons, stylistic devices and stereotypical representations of the heroine and of the relationship between the sexes. Yet one important difference exists between male and female writers of the time: while men explored a variety of topics and styles, the range of topics and devices explored by women is much more limited. As a rule women conformed to the idea that a narrowly defined sentimentalism and, increasingly, romanticism was the unique domain for the feminine pen. This is hardly surprising given that women, unlike men, were not part of the supportive network of literary groups and societies within which new trends were tested and discussed, new devices tried out in informal readings prior to publication. Women authors were not just few in numerical terms, but also out of touch with each other and rarely part of the maledominated literary establishment. Moreover, their right to be taken seriously still hung in the balance, a situation that put their published work, once outside the realm of the family and the salon, under intense critical scrutiny. Of course this situation is not exclusive to Russia, for Western female authors found themselves under similar constraints.82 The Russian case, however, is more extreme in terms of both the hold and the long-term effects sentimental views had on women writing. For explanations of this state of affairs it is worth looking in more detail at the sentimental fixation with the feminine and its ethos about women’s place in society and in the literary field. In the first place, sentimentalists certainly encouraged women’s direct participation in the literary process, yet they also set fixed limits to their creative activity. Petr Makarov, one of the most outspoken supporters of women’s participation in Russia’s literary life, is a good example in this respect. His views on the matter are so hearty as to appear proto-feminist, at least at a first glance. For example, Petr Makarov maintained that women’s intellectual capacities “are even superior to ours, and need only to develop further”,83 adding for good measure that “women have always been, and will always be, the first (albeit often invisible) source of human deeds, the cause for all that is

82 83

See, for example, the case of Mme De Staël as discussed in Gutwirth 1978. Petr Ivanovich Makarov, “Nekotoryia mysli” in Makarov 1817: I/66.

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graceful and great”.84 Makarov goes as far as accusing whoever “is against education for women” of being “their enemy, a selfish man, a lover or a husband who wants to keep hold of the right of saying to his wife (in whom he looked for a house minder or a nanny): I am cleverer than you!”85 In a final apotheosis of the Russian lady Makarov hails women writers as the future enlighteners of the motherland.86 Yet, between the lines of what appears unmitigated praise of women’s intellectual and creative faculties, Makarov sets clear spatial limits to their enterprise which is to be restricted to the salon, the boudoir and, more generally, the intimate space of the household. Even within this spatially defined sphere the lady holds an ancillary role, as mentors of her progeny and source of inspiration for husbands and male acquaintances within the well-controlled realm of the household. Hence, Makarov’s belief that Russian women ought to imitate French salonnièrs whose houses provide “the best schools for taste and enlightenment and in whose assemblies there sit authors and writers”87 is to be taken with a pinch of salt. Russian ladies had to stick to an ancillary and ultimately “decorative” role, unlike the celebrated salonnièrs of eighteenth-century France. As Makarov’s case attests, little had changed since Poslanie k zhenshchinam (Epistle to Women, 1796) in which Karamzin emphatically praised women as Muses to the male writer.88 Whilst paying tribute to the ladies as source of inspiration was trouble-free, the issue of women’s active participation often met negative or, at best, condescending responses. Their role being (at best) that of cultural entertainers and Muses, women writers could find a niche as dilettante authors whose intellectual accomplishments were to be looked at with compliance by male writers, as one would encourage the endeavours of a child.89 As Makarov puts it: 84

Ibid.: 71. Ibid.: 66. 86 Cf. ibid.: 72. 87 Ibid.: 60. 88 “Чтоб быть писателем, творцом, / Для вас, красавицы, приятным; / Чтоб слогом чистым, сердцу внятным, / оттенки вам изображать / Страстей счастливых и несчастных, / То кротких, то ужасных; / чтоб вы могли сказать: / “Он, право, мил и верно переводит / Всё темное в сердцах на ясный нам язык; / Слова для тонкикх чувств находит!” N.M. Karamzin, “Poslanie k zhenshchinam” (1796) in Karamzin 1966: 169-179 (170). 89 As seen in chapter II young people and women were often written off as “frail minds” in need of shelter from the literary excesses characterising new trends in prose fiction. 85

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Bring the throne of philosophy into your boudoir, create new amusements for yourself, adorn yourself with new graces. Employ science to benefit your pastimes and pastimes to benefit science. In this way you will have accomplished genuinely 90 good deeds.

Ultimately, even these marginal occupations are subordinated to the role of wife and mother which Makarov, in synchrony with contemporary patriarchal ideology, kept firmly at the centre of women’s interests and existence.91 Thus, sentimentalism imposed many restraints on female activity, thus neutralising many positive effects of the much trumpeted participation of women in Russia’s literary life. Yet, notwithstanding its obvious limitations, it may be argued that sentimentalism had the merit of creating a congenial atmosphere for women to take up the pen, in so far as praise of feminine aesthetic faculties offered women the opportunity to write. The price for such a safe cocoon, however, was an aesthetically narrow horizon and a psychologically binding set of tenets that account for the fairly uniform body of works produced by women writers of the age of Alexander. Writing had to “transcribe” the outpouring of the sensitive soul, to stem directly from the heart in a spontaneous thrust towards creation, a belief that wrote off any professional stance. Sentimentalism reinforced the social conventions of the time forbidding women, especially if highly placed, to take on any professional enterprise, be it writing, singing or acting, as the case of Zinaida Volkonskaia seen above well illustrates. Apart from the isolated cases of Anna Bunina92 and Volkonskaia, no other woman writer of the time attempted to shake off such notions; they were far too concerned with the task of justifying the very act of writing to contravene widely accepted social conventions. Strategies to negotiate some sort of acceptance by the literary establishment included presenting one’s work as a “leisured occupation”, a product of women’s “spare time”. This argument, as we have seen, was not exclusive to women writers, for any form of “Принеся трон философии в свои будуары, создав себе новые удовольствия, украсясь новыми приятностями, употребя науку на пользу забав, а забавы на пользу наук, – вы бы сделали истинное благодеяние”. Makarov 1817: I/61. 91 Petr Ivanovich Makarov, “Na sochinenie G. Segiura o zhenshchinakh”, in Makarov 1817: II/11. 92 On Bunina see Rosslyn 1997. 90

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cultural professionalism was deemed inappropriate for members of the nobility. A subtle difference in the understanding of professionalism is, however, noticeable. Whilst male representatives of the Russian gentry were allowed and even expected to engage fully in cultural activities as historians, authors and artists provided that they did not expect remuneration and did not withdraw from social life, women were expected to view cultural activities as a pastime and not a vocation. Hence the gendered arguments found in the prefaces of literature penned by women, the almost obsessive assurance of being fully engaged as daughters/wives/mothers, the disavowal of any proactive role, and the show of total reliance on parental or marital authority. Women authors as a whole complied with the sentimental canon and patriarchal ethos with an ardour that surpassed even the most eager amongst their male counterparts. Such a compliance translates into the hyper-“feminine” style of their work, in the respect for stylistic and thematic conventions and, significantly, in the stereotypical representation of their heroines and of the relationship between the sexes. In order to avoid the harsh criticism that had befallen, for example, Radcliffe, it was customary for women writers to set the moral firmly at the core of the literary work. In particular, the insistence on the moral integrity of a flawless heroine figures highly in early nineteenth-century novels and stories penned by Russian women. Not surprisingly, the “serious”, tearful strand of sentimentalism seemed the sole genre able to guarantee female authors the right to write and, at the same time, to safeguard them against damning accusations of immodesty and immorality; whether these strategies bore the expected fruit is another matter. The case of Mariia Izvekova (1789?-1830) provides a case in point. A precocious novelist, poet, and playwright Izvekova – or devitsa (maiden) Izvekova, as she signed her work and was often referred to – began publishing at an early age, her first novel Emiliia, ili pechal’nye sledstviia bezrassudnoi liubvy (Emilia, or the Sad Consequences of Reckless Love, 1806) coming out when she was only about fifteen years old. One year later she published the drama Al’fons i Florentina, ili schastlivyi oborot (Alphonse and Florestina, or A Turn for the Better, 1807), followed by a second novel, Torzhestvuiushchaia dobrodetel’ nad kovarstvom i sloboiu (Virtue Triumphant over Perfidy and Malice, 1809) and later Milena, ili redkii primer velikodushiia (Milena, or a Rare Example of Magnanimity,

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1811). This was to be Izvekova’s last published piece, for the works written after the writer’s marriage in 1811 remained in manuscript form and have not survived.93 Although popular with readers, Izvekova’s work was rejected by the most prominent critics as mediocre and essentially imitative. It was often held to be an illustrative example of the epigonic nature of women’s writing as a whole and in particular of women’s supposed proclivity to duplicate popular Western works. Thus Izvekova’s excessive reliance on Western authors – Ducre Duremil, Radcliffe, Genlis were indicated as her main sources – was generalised as part and parcel of women’s dilettante approach to writing. Gendered attacks against Izvekova were rife. S. Zhikharev, for example, playing on the double meaning of the term tolstyi roman (literally “fat novel”) define branding Emiliia a “fat novel written by an even fatter lady”94 while Konstantin Batiushkov numbered Izvekova among “our doleful Russian Sapphos”.95 Vissarion Belinskii’s comments were no less damning when, two decades later, he was to write about Izvekova’s three main novels in sarcastic terms: “What choice of amazing titles – they emanate the purest virtues! As for the content – it is even better, even more virtuous, albeit, one must admit, boring in the extreme”.96 The “feminine features” of her work – extreme sentimentalism, an imitative approach to Western works, and, especially, a strong moral message – did not deter less prestigious critics in expressing their admiration for Izvekova. An anonymous female reviewer of Emiliia, for example, compares her to Mlle de Scudéry and Miss Fanny Burney in the depiction of the sad consequences of reckless love and concludes by underlining the fact that given the moral aim of the novel the author obviously spent her time more profitably than her peers.97 All in all, the image of sentimental author Izvekova carefully wrought for herself seemed to exacerbate critics’ attacks rather than mollifying them as she presumably intended to. In the introduction to her work Izvekova projects a stereotypical persona of the sentimental woman writer guided by a strong moral purpose, a patently unprofessional angle, and a show of submission to parental authority. 93

V.P. Stepanov and S.V. Sheshunova, “Izvekova” in Nikolaev 1992: II/400-401. Zhikharev continues his scathing criticism with an epigram: “Извековой роман с Извековой и сходен: / Он так же, как она, доброден / И так же ни к чему не годен!” Zhikharev 1934: I/91. 95 K. Batiushkov, “Vydenie na beregakh Lety” (1809) in Batiushkov 1989: I/374-375. 96 Belinskii 1953-1959 (1955): 653. 97 Anon., Moskovskii zritel’ 1806: III/70-75. 94

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Forwords by sentimentalist writers set the emotional tone of the work and stressed the narrator’s sensitivity and moral principles in keeping with Karamzin’s teachings, as expressed, for example, in his programmatic article “What Does an Author Need?” mentioned earlier. In the foreword to Milena the author’s persona is shaped around three key points. Firstly, the author is at pain to stress her feelings of filial respect and submission, underlining her debt to her mother, to whom the work is dedicated in the most emphatic tone.98 Secondly, Izvekova’s mother is described as a powerful influence on the author, instilling in her “modesty, patience and sound morality”,99 a triad women were supposed to embody inside and outside the literary discourse. Thirdly, Izvekova’s mother Milena is indicated as the prototype for the homonymous heroine with her spirit of sacrifice for the sake of her progeny, a theme that has a special significance in Izvekova’s novel. Albeit maternal sacrifice is a common feature of sentimental fiction, the mother-daughter relationship outlined in the preface acts as a blueprint for the mother-son rapport central to Izvekova’s novel. The sentimental image of the author is further enhanced in the build-up to Izvekova’s defensce of her activity as a writer, which is justified on two accounts: filial respect and the “desire to please” her mother100 (who, incidentally, seems to have stage-managed her daughter’s career) and patriotic aspirations.101 Interestingly, her “weak” sex and young age are also mentioned with the intent of fending off “a malicious critic […] who is sharpening his harmful arrow on me”– a plea ending with the comforting remark that the “readers’ enjoyment” of her work would suffice to compensate for the “distress” caused by caustic criticism, an argument already aired in the introduction to her first novel Emiliia.102 In that respect Izvekova complies with sentimental prescriptions in terms of ideological tenets, avowed non-professionalism and adherence to “feminine” aesthetics with its emotional language and overall perception of writing as an immediate outpouring of the heart. On the front page we read: “Найдостойнейшей матери с глубочайшим почтением и совершенной преданностью посвящает искренняя дочь.” 99 See Milena: ii-iii. 100 See ibid.: iii-iv. 101 Mary Zirin, “Izvekova, Mariia Evgrafovna” in Zirin, Ledkovsky and Rosenthal 1994: 267-268 (268). 102 “Злобная критика [..] изострит на меня свои вредные стрелы”. Izvekova 1806: ii. 98

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Furthermore, her authorial persona showcases many of the attributes specific to the sentimental woman writer: young, unprofessional, selfless and submissive, and whose uncomplicated self was in agreement with the sentimental ideal of femininity. Yet, as we have seen, Izvekova’s tactful conformity to sentimental beliefs on female authorship obviously wasn’t enough to fend off critics’ attacks. There is no contradiction here, for the gendered criticism of Izvekova’s work reveals the enduring unease of the literary establishment towards women’s attempted “invasion” of the male domain of authorship; it was indeed hard to square authorship with women’s ancillary role. On the other hand female readers and the public at large did not seem to share such derogatory views, judging from the widespread – if short-lived – popularity of Izvekova’s work. Such positive reception by readers is symptomatic of a widening acceptance of – and perhaps even preference for – women writers in Alexander’s Russia in the wake of the popularity of Western female authors and thanks to the positive atmosphere created by the feminisation of Russian elite culture. Moreover in her work Izvekova fashions a self-image in many ways identical to that of her heroines, a conscious blurring of the confines between the literary and meta-literary level typical of sentimental fiction. In her third novel, for example, Milena’s name in itself is a giveaway in that it contains the syllable mil- from the fashionable word milaia (variously translated as “dear”, “charming”, “cute”), a linguistic marker that set the tone of the narrative and by the same token oriented the reader.103 Milena is a perfect example of the stereotypical victim of a string of unlikely vicissitudes that she endures with exemplary stoicism. Izvekova adopts the triangular plot replicated in so many serious sentimental narratives. Such (by then well-tested) typology includes a love story between the sentimental heroes fraught with apparently insurmountable obstacles in the form of an evil or unsympathetic relative (usually male – father), an antagonist to their happiness (usually male, unrequited love for the heroine) or in the form of the different social standing of the lovers. In Milena’s case, the heroine is a gentle girl who having lost her mother at a young age, finds herself under the authority of a father made “gloomy and severe” by his grief, a feeling exacerbated by his sons being summoned to military service. Milena and her elder sister 103

Carolin Heyder and Arja Rosenholm, “Feminization as Functionalization: the Presentation of Femininity by the Sentimentalist Man” in Rosslyn 2003: 51-71 (52).

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Sofiia end up so terrified as to “tremble in his presence as leaves in a terrible storm”.104 Sofiia becomes a surrogate mother of her younger sister, taking upon herself the task of bringing up Milena “in the spirit of kindness” to became a woman of the highest sentimental standard. By all accounts Sofiia succeeds in her intent, judging from the portrait of the fifteen-year-old Milena, who is by then a perfect sentimental heroine: She was not altogether a beauty, but she captivated the gaze and touched the heart. She was of medium height, her countenance was stately and of the noblest physiognomy, which seemed to portray her soul. Roses and lilies blossomed together on her sweet face, an innocent smile never left her crimson lips, and her sky-blue eyes and light brown hair rendered her so pleasing that even the most perfect beauty with 105 all her privilege must sometimes concede to her advantage.

In Milena the beautiful soul is not matched by a striking appearance, a feature that appears with frequency in the work of women writers. Although not a conventional beauty, Milena’s appearance radiates kindness and serenity in keeping with the theories of the Swiss poet and physiognomist Lavater dear to sentimental writers, according to which facial features mirror the inner make-up of the individual. Hence Milena is endowed with “wide, sky-blue, heavenly eyes”, a faithful mirror of (and window to) her sensitive soul. Moreover, like any sentimental character worthy of their name, Milena readily responds to the natural environment; in fact she is in perfect synchrony with it: A delicate, light-winged zephyr gently shook the little leaves of the trees. A limpid, crystal rivulet made its way over the pebbles, babbling pleasantly. The majestic moon lit up the picture faintly, and ascending conceitedly between the stars, it crowned the charming picture of nature, delighting in its tranquillity. Milena sighed, leaned over the window and sank into a sweet reverie. She delighted in this pleasant view for a long time. Suddenly a dreadful storm broke. The delicate leaves could not oppose the impetuous wind’s cruelty, and the naked trees, that had only a moment before been covered with green, seemed to embody a dreadful representation of

104

Milena: 14. “Она не была совершенной красавицей, но пленяла взоры и трогала сердца. Она была среднего роста, имела величественный вид и самое благородное лицо, в котором, казалось, была изображена ее душа. Розы и лилии расцветали на ее милом лице; невинная улыбка никогда не оставляла ее алых губ, а небесноголубые глаза и светло-русые волосы делали ее столь приятной, что и самая совершенная красота при всей своей правильности должна была иногда уступать ей преимущество”. Ibid.: 7-8. 105

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human life. “Alas!” she cried with feeling “Thus are our lives subject to change. Not 106 long ago I was happy, but now… now…” and here her heart held her back.

As the reader could reasonably anticipate, Milena’s tender soul was soon to be subjected to a sequence of harsh trials. She is in love with her childhood friend Viktor, but the two are separated by his departure on military service. In their farewells they swear eternal love to each other, a promise Milena is soon forced to forgo, in part due to the belief that Viktor has died in a shipwreck, in part because of the unrelenting pressure on her father’s part. Respectful of her filial duties Milena ends up marrying the fickle but wealthy Erast. With similarities to Evgenyi in Izmailov’s homonymous novel, Erast is not altogether evil; rather he is plagued by a weakness of character which makes him fall prey to bad company and prone to immoral deeds. Sure enough Erast’s volatile behaviour brings about a string of calamities that Milena bears stoically, under the double obligation of wife and then mother of Erast’s son, the suitably named Milozvor. Erast’s betrayal, various misdemeanours and jealousy aroused by the reappearance of Viktor translate into a long ordeal for Milena, who tries to juggle marital and parental obligations, at the same time attempting to suffocate her enduring love for him. These conflicts between roles that are equally precious according to the sentimental canon, however, do not lead to insights into the heroine’s psychological motives. This is due to Milena’s unflinching resolve in carrying out her parental duties first and foremost. Her lack of moral dilemmas ultimately robs her of any real individuality and overloads the narrative with descriptions of the heroine’s exemplary behaviour and saccharine features. Moreover, the juxtaposition of perfect heroes versus fickle or evil anti-heroes forms a black and white picture hardly novel at the time, having being replicated ad nauseam in serious 106 “Нежный легкокрылый зефир тихо колебал листочки деревьев. Прозрачный, кристальный ручеек приятно журчал, пробираясь по камешкам. Величественная луна, которая слабо освещала предметы и с важностью возвышалась среди звезд, довершала картину природы, наслаждавшейся спокойствием. Милена вздохнула, облокотилась на окно, и погрузилась в сладкую задумчивость. Долго восхощалась она этим приятным зрелищем. Вдруг поднялась ужасная буря. Нежные листья не могли противиться жестокости порывистого ветра, и обнаженные деревья, которые минуту назад были покрыты зеленью, представили ее взору ужасное изображение человеческой жизни. Увы! Вскричала она с чувством, – таким вот переменам подвержена наша жизнь. Недавно я была счастлива, но теперь… теперь… тут сердце ее стеснилось”. Ibid.: 33-34.

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sentimental narrative of the previous three decades or so. The end result is made even less convincing by the fact that the narrative often lacks internal logic, a shortcoming – it must be said – not unique to Izvekova’s work, and one reflecting a wider problem with early nineteenth-century serious sentimental fiction. The staple theme of the lost love regained is especially problematic in the longer form of the sentimental novel where the happy ending is delayed almost indefinitely by a string of events patched together. The comparatively complex narrative required by the novel form would have necessitated finer narrative skills than Izvekova possessed in order to co-ordinate the various sub-plots and to keep the readers’ attention focused. This not being the case, the fabula is generally based on “fortuitous” encounters and a piling up of these coincidences that eventually undermines the credibility of the events described. Milena, for instance, meets Viktor “by chance” in the most unlikely places – at a ball in a provincial town, in the woods, in a cemetery – at least five times in the course of the novel, a series of coincidences that fail to convince even the most naive of readers. Eventually Milena, following the staple pattern of serious sentimental fiction, is brought to a close by the unavoidable happy ending, the blissful marriage of Milena and Viktor in a final apotheosis of virtue triumphant over ill fate and men’s adverse action. Thus in many respects Milena provides one example within an overall homogeneous body of works represented by early nineteenthcentury serious sentimental prose fiction of the “serious” type. One topic, however, is given particular, almost obsessive, relevance in Izvekova’s work: motherhood. Of course this theme is not the unique domain of women writers, for motherhood is a key feature of the sentimental heroine – and the respectable woman – as a whole. Yet in Izvekova’s work, as with many of her female contemporaries, this topic is centre-stage, providing a rare indication of topics bearing a specific relevance for women writers. Such a feature is particularly interesting in the case of Milena, for motherhood becomes the central event of the novel, defining the heroine’s personality and her actions. Milena’s arranged wedding is described in detail as an ordeal where the bride is a victim brought close to death by the distress.107 However, the ensuing year of married life is skimmed by with a swift description of Milena’s acceptance of her fate and docile behaviour 107

See ibid.: 37-39.

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towards her husband, described as the “sole master of her destiny”.108 The breaking point in Milena’s existence is the birth of her son Milozvor: “Then she forgot everything that she had suffered and in taking him to her heart, she considered herself fortunate”.109 Her attachment to Milozvor somehow reflects on Erast, even though his behaviour is now openly immoral, for motherhood makes Milena’s heart participate in Milovzor’s father’s destiny.110 Milena is willing to forgo everything for the sake of her son for, as she explains to Viktor, “I am a mother – how could I be unhappy while holding my child in my arms?” (“Ia mat’ – sledovatel’no mogu li byt’ neshchastliva, derzha ditia moe v svoikh ob’’iatiiakh?”), an argument whose emotional and rhetorical power silences the astonished Viktor (“raztrogannyi Viktor ne mog otvechat ni slova”).111 Clearly in Milena’s view motherhood entails the sacrifice of personal happiness, in this case her love for Viktor: “I love you, I love you more than anything on earth, but honour and Milozvor are more precious even than you are”.112 And once again Viktor is left speechless by this further rejection while in awe of Milena’s exquisite virtue (“rare woman” is all he can utter), 113 a feeling that of course ends up strengthening his love for her. Notwithstanding Milena’s exemplary behaviour she attracts the wrath of Erast who, blinded by his jealousy, separates the heroine from her son, incarcerating her in his aunt’s castle. The depiction of Milena’s confinement is laden with gothic topoi, such as eerie cemeteries, apparitions of ghosts in the moonlight, dungeons and evil relatives working hard to make the heroine’s life utterly miserable. This part of Izvekova’s work follows the sentimental-gothic trend that had made the fortune of a number of western women writers in the late eighteenth century, including Ann Radcliffe. More specifically, close parallels are noticeable between Milena and a wellknown novel by the celebrated Mme de Genlis: Adèle et Théodore, ou lettres sur l’éducation. First published in Paris in 1782, the work achieved great popularity in Europe, including Russia, where a translation appeared a decade later. Adèle et Théodore includes a sub108

Ibid.: 40. “Тогда она забыла все, что претерпела и, прижав его к своему сердцу, считала себя счастливой”. Ibid.: 41. 110 Cf. ibid.: 42. 111 Ibid: 60. 112 “Я люблю тебя, люблю больше всего на свете, но честь и Милозвор мне дороже и самого себя”. Ibid. 135 113 “Редкая женщина!” Ibid. 109

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novel entitled “Histoire de la Duchesse de C*** écrite par elle-même” narrating “the nine years of captivity in a dungeon where the light of day never shone”, as reported in an explicatory footnote.114 The story of the heroine’s imprisonment by an evil husband clearly struck a chord with contemporary Western readers and was sometimes translated as a separate work.115 Admittedly the imprisoned heroine represented a staple situation of gothic novels. Yet a number of similarities may be noticed between Milena’s captivity and the story of the duchess of C.***. For example both heroines are forced by an unfeeling father to marry a jealous and callous man; both are separated from their child and confined within gothic spaces equipped with the usual array of scary paraphernalia and replete with supernatural phenomena. However, if Izvekova was directly inspired by Genlis, an author we know she revered, the French writer was outdone in terms of the pathetic treatment of the heroine’s motherly feelings. Such feelings reach the paradox of self-denial and readiness to the ultimate sacrifice of her life, as Milena herself proclaims whenever the pretext arises: “I shall be with you forever [Milozvor]! Let your cruel father, beneath whom you have trembled, impale your heart as he did before, and then let him spill the blood of your unhappy mother and force you from her embrace”. These words were 116 pronounced in a voice so touching, that they astonished all those present.

Even in the contest of sentimental exaltation of motherhood such attachment to her son assumes ludicrous proportions as the story progresses. Paradoxical situations arise as a consequence of her perceived parental duties, as when Milena takes upon herself the blame for Erast’s crimes and his prison sentence in order to avoid her child being called the “son of a murderer”. A similarly unlikely occurrence is represented by Milena’s refusal to have the marriage with Erast annulled after he absconded to the Ukraine and married a rich heiress. To her father’s repeated appeals to “leave her tyrant” and 114

Mme de Genlis, “Histoire de la Duchesse de C*** écrite par elle-même” in Genlis 1782: II/248. 115 English editions started to appear as early as 1783, followed by a further three translations before the end of the century (in 1784, 1788, and 1796). The Affecting History of the Duchess of C*** who was Confined Nine Years in a Horrid Dungeon appeared as a separate volume in 1820. 116 “– Буду всегда с тобой [Милозвор]! Пусть жестокий отец твой пронзит сначала сердце, под которым трепетал ты, и тогда, пролив кровь несчастной твой матери, исторгнет тебя из ее объятий.– Эти слова, произнесенные самым трогательным голосом, поразили всех присутствующих”. Milena: 139.

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marry the loyal Viktor (who has now conveniently inherited a handsome fortune) the usually obedient Milena opposes a staunch refusal on the ground that her son “ne budet omochen’ slezami raskaianiia (repentance)”.117 Even once Erast has passed away, thus apparently clearing the path to Milena’s union with Viktor, her perceived duty as a mother further delays the happy ending, in this case with the justification that Viktor’s loathing for Erast – a pretty natural reaction given the circumstances – would reflect badly on Milozvor. Milena’s resolution is further bolstered by her son’s illness, an event she interprets as a punishment for her feelings for Viktor. At this point Milena – rather perversely – decides to take the veil, a resolution Viktor manages to overturn only by saving Milozvor from sure death in a fire, an event that earns him the right of becoming his stepfather, a role that finally seals his union to Milena. Such insistence on motherhood as the supreme quality of the sentimental heroine and of the woman writer may be interpreted as a safety net, a strategy consciously adopted by female authors to preempt accusations of un-feminine behaviour. Of course there were occasional departures from the canon, as for example in the case of the entrepreneurial heroine of Virtue Triumphant over Perfidy and Malice, Izvekova’s novel of 1809, who takes part in a duel in the place of her husband. Traditionally, both in literature and reality, by masquerading as men women could take on some of the behaviours otherwise forbidden to them, providing such transgressions were well motivated and that they finally returned to their previous roles. In the same year as Virtue Triumphant another novel made transvestitism as a means of deviation from gender norms its main topic: The Russian Amazon.

117

Ibid.: 133.

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IV.4 The sentimental heroine between tradition and innovation118 The anonymous novel Russkaia amazonka (The Russian Amazon),119 is a fascinating and unique product of early nineteenthcentury Russian fiction, directly challenging both the gender canons and literary models upheld by contemporary polite literature. As the full title, The Russian Amazon, or of the Heroic Love of a Russian Woman. A Patriotic Event in the Course of the Latest Campaign Against the French in the Years 1806 and 1807, reveals the work tells the story of a woman who masquerades as a man and serves as a soldier in the campaigns against Napoleon. The theme of a woman warrior directly questions the sentimental ideal of the female heroine dominating Russian fiction at the beginning of the nineteenth century and beyond. Furthermore, by incorporating thematic and stylistic features associated with the low eighteenth-century picaresque novel the story attempts to challenge and extend the accepted literary mode for high genres of the age. In this Russkaia Amazonka forms part of the literary experimentation and the dynamic approach to diverse narrative traditions characterising prose writing in early nineteenth-century Russia. The story begins with a brief introduction in the sentimental vein of the three main characters, Ol’ga, the Russian Amazon of the title, her father the landowner B., and her fiancé, the officer Vasilii P***, and then moves on to describe a string of adventures involving the heroine of the title. With the outbreak of the Russian offensive against the French Army in 1806 the tranquil existence of the main characters is shaken, causing a fundamental change in their make-up and in their interactions. When Vasilii decides to take part in the fight against Napoleon the resourceful heroine promptly contrives and implements a scheme to stay at her lover’s side. Using all her cunning, Ol’ga persuades the reluctant Vasilii to help her flee the paternal home, to cross-dress as a man and to fight the French at his side. This undertaking represents a landmark in 118

Some of the material contained in this section has been published in Tosi 20022003. 119 The full title being: Russkaia Amazonka, ili geroiskaia liubov rossiianki. Otechestvennoe proisshestvie, sluchivsheesia v prodolzhenie poslednei protiv Frantsuzov kompanii v 1806 i 1807m godakh (hereafter: Amazonka). The novel was published by the prolific printing house of A. Reshetnikov.

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Ol’ga’s portrayal: from this point, until the very end of the novel, the heroine described according to the sentimental conventions of the first pages is transformed into a mercurial and enterprising woman warrior. Such a change in Ol’ga’s characterisation is paralleled in the plot: the heroine’s participation in the war against Napoleon sets in motion a rapid succession of adventures. Soon after having joined the army, Vasilii and Ol’ga are separated in the heat of a battle, Vasilii ending up as a wounded prisoner of the French, while his fiancée manages to escape and hide for a time in a Prussian tavern. Despite being now far away from the battlefield the “Russian Amazon” is still in danger. While maintaining her disguise, Ol’ga starts travelling about Prussia in search of Vasilii, and is confronted with a succession of threats to her virtue. These episodes range from the potentially dangerous exposure of her sexual identity to attempted rapes, often described in graphic detail. Eventually Ol’ga escapes unharmed from her various assailants, finds the wounded Vasilii and organises his escape from the French military hospital in Prussia where he is held captive. Ol’ga manages also to rescue an unhappy girl, Liza, to introduce her to Truler, a friend of Vasilii whom she eventually marries, and to bring all of them to safety in Russia. The two couples, thanks to the heroine’s tireless endeavours, finally settle down in Ol’ga’s village. The heroine thus acts as a deus ex machina, orchestrating her friends’ destiny and ensuring a happy ending for all the parties involved. The character of the female warrior and the adventurous-picaresque plot involving a self-assertive heroine were not new in either Russian or West European literature and folklore.120 The theme of the Amazon was still very much alive in late-eighteenth early nineteenth-century Europe. Popular works such as Theresa van Hoog’s The Magnanimous Amazon, or the adventures of T. Baroness van H. With Anecdotes of Other Eccentric Persons (London, 1796) or Cuvalier de Trie and Varez’s Hilberge l’Amazone, ou les Montenegrins, pantomime en trois actes (1810), and more accomplished oeuvres such as T. Grossi’s La fuggitiva. Novella in dialetto milanese (1807) and Heinrich Kleist’s tragedy Penthesilea

120

Cf., for example, the “polenitsa” (female bogatyr’) appearing at the end of Dobrynya i zmei (re-printed in Costello and Foote 1967: 84-97 (94-97)). In the 1820s Zinaida Volkonskaia, cashing in on the appeal of the amazon theme among her peers, wrote the tragedy Giovanna d’Arco, dramma per musica, ridotta da Schiller. Following the success of its private representation in Rome in which she herself played the leading role, Volkonskaia commissioned her portrait dressed as a romantic woman warrior and sent copies to, among others, Pushkin. See Trofimoff 1966: 60.

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(1807-1808) may have exerted some influence on the author of The Russian Amazon.121 In terms of historical setting and, to an extent, subject matter the closest parallels with The Russian Amazon, however, are to be found in Nadezhda Durova’s The Cavalry Maiden: It Happened in Russia (Kavalerist-devitsa: Proisshestvie v Rossii), published three decades later, in 1836. Durova’s autobiographical novel follows a similar plot pattern: once escaped from her father’s home, the heroine in male disguise joins the Russian cavalry and fights against the French (Durova took part in both the 1806-1807 and 1812 campaigns), distinguishing herself by bravery.122 The hypothesis that Durova might have been inspired by the earlier The Russian Amazon is a conjecture which we cannot altogether rule out. However, albeit sharing similar topics, the two works are far apart in terms of narrative technique and overall purpose. The most obvious difference between them lies in the author’s perspective on the heroine. Durova’s first person narrative of her adventurous life as a cavalry officer breathes a sense of independence and a deep vocation for military life.123 Durova’s radical rejection of the social constriction attached to her gender at the time represents a decision of no return, taken with pride and resulting in extreme consequences. The Russian Amazon Ol’ga, on the other hand, is a sentimental heroine who temporarily breaks free from the given role of obedient daughter and wife. Her rebelliousness is made acceptable by both her patriotic feelings and her sentimental attachments. Furthermore, The Russian Amazon is part and parcel of the eclectic literary experimentation

121

On the prominence of this theme in English literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries see Dugaw 1989; Shepherd 1981. In the 1820s Zinaida Volkonskaia, cashing in on the appeal of the amazon theme among her peers, wrote the tragedy Giovanna d’Arco, dramma per musica, ridotta da Schiller. 122 On Durova’s novel see the excellent introduction by Mary Fleming Zirin, “Nadezhda Durova, Russia’s “Cavalry Maiden”” in Durova: 1990: ix-xxvi. See also Costlow, Sandler and Vowles 1993: 22-23. 123 On the phenomenon of women warriors in world history, including Russia, see Jones 1997; Wheelwright 1989; Ivanovna 1992. As Ann Marsh-Flores remarks, there were well-known cases of Russian women masquerading as men during the Napoleonic wars. The wife of General Khrapovitskii, for example, disguised herself as a soldier in order to follow her husband to war (and receiving the St George Cross for bravery at the end of it). However, it appears that her true sexual identity was an open secret at the time. Marsh-Flores 2003: 628 (f.n. 41).

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characterising Russian prose during the first quarter of the century, a literary context far from that of Durova’s work. In this latter respect, a remarkable feature of The Russian Amazon is the integration of two distinct traditions: the popular-picaresque genre, to which the character of the woman warrior belongs, and the sentimental story, a genre, as we have seen, still very much in vogue at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Ol’ga’s heroic deeds and erotic vicissitudes, which form the bulk of the work, are clearly reminiscent of the eighteenth-century tradition of the popular novel. Such links are confirmed by the generally vivid style, a mode perfectly suited to convey the realism of some situations. Certainly less polished, less “elegant” than the staple sentimental story, this work manages, however, to avoid the clumsiness typical of the eighteenth-century novel of adventure. The dramatic immediacy of some episodes is enhanced by the vivid dialogues, succinct descriptions given in short sentences, and realism conveyed through a visual, almost cinematic, quality – all of which are reminiscent of the eighteenth-century picaresque novel. Such thematic and stylistic features are grafted onto the narrative and ideal framework of the sentimental story, an allegiance that is occasionally reflected at a stylistic level, as at the inception and ending of the work. By encompassing the theme of the woman warrior within the aesthetics and ideals of sentimentalism – and by endowing Ol’ga with typical sentimental features and final domestication – this work seeks to achieve a balance between the popular and the lofty; in other words to challenge sentimental concepts while creating a “niche of acceptability” within polite literature for this unconventional heroine. As a result, for much of the novel Russkaia Amazonka is played right at the edge between “high” and “low” fiction, effectively pushing forward the limits of what constituted a morally “proper” and stylistically acceptable literary work in early nineteenth-century Russia. As we shall demonstrate, the merging of features from two far removed literary traditions has important consequences at the structural, narrative and conceptual level of the work. Following a “circular” narrative layout typical of many sentimental stories, Ol’ga, her father and Vasilii begin their narrative existence in the natural setting of the idyll type, a situation mirrored in the ending when the countryside marriages of Ol’ga to Vasilii and Liza to Truler finally crown their conjugal bliss in idyllic surroundings. From then on Vasilii and Ol’ga “live in peace, love and

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tranquillity”, without “even one sad day clouding their well-being”.124 According to this blueprint, in the initial and final sections of Russkaia Amazonka the relationship between the main characters conforms to the ideal of the patriarchal family built on well-defined gender roles. Thus, in conformity to the sentimental canon, at the beginning and at the end of the novel Ol’ga is represented as a prototypical rule-abiding heroine, the ideal proper lady modelled on the notion of the “feminine” current in Russian sentimentalism. If, as we have seen, the beginning and ending of Russkaia Amazonka conform to the feminine ideal described above, it is also obvious that the bulk of the plot detaches itself from the sentimental canon to adopt characteristics from the popular novel, a genre traditionally abounding in reversals of gender roles and social status. More specifically, Russkaia Amazonka shares the general progression of events common to popular works on the woman warrior theme. In her study on the English ballad Dianne Dugaw identified the following basic structure of the genre: (1) the initial courtship and threatened separation of the two lovers; (2) a discourse during which the heroine proposes that she disguise herself as a soldier and follow her man to war; (3) the various trials she undergoes to prove both her love and value; (4) various tests of love; (5) the happy resolution of events.125 Despite the peculiar features of Ol’ga’s story and the “Russianness” of this novel, the basic plot pattern is identical to the one seen above, a further element pointing at the popular roots of this work. The folklore origins of the woman warrior theme and the lofty aspirations informing the novel as a whole open up a series of contradictions which the author finds difficult to resolve. Discrepancies are particularly evident in the characterisation of the heroine – a transvestite soldier and, at the same time, a virtuous noblewoman – and in the narration of her adventures. Ol’ga’s departure from the sentimental cliché is introduced and explained as a consequence of the dramatic historical events involving Russia. As we have seen in our cursory summary of the work, the idyllic relationship between the heroine and her fiancé is halted early on in the piece by the impending departure of Vasilii to war. Ol’ga reacts to the menace war poses to her love idyll by breaking free from the paternal “[…] живут в мире, любви и спокойствии, и ни один грустный день не омрачит их благополучие.” Amazonka: II/117. 125 Dugaw 1989: 92-93 and passim. Other scholars have remarked on the clichés peculiar to this literary theme across a variety of genres (the popular song, the novel, the fictional biography, plays and operas). See Dekker and Van de Pol 1989: 1-30. 124

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home to fight for her own, and her country’s, happiness. Hence the 1806-1807 campaigns, besides providing a compelling historical setting for Ol’ga’s adventures, supply the psychological motivation for the heroine’s unconventional behaviour.126 Although sparse, depictions of battles and consideration of international policy do perform an important role in the novel at a number of levels. In the first place, contemporary historical events function as a prelude and a counterpoint to Ol’ga’s adventures, broadening the spatial and chronological co-ordinates of the staple sentimental story. Furthermore, the patriotic theme of Russia’s valiant fight against the French endows the adventures of this Russian Amazon with a “sense of reality” and an immediacy which escaped the majority of contemporary Russian novels, making the historical chronotope of this work particularly relevant for the early nineteenthcentury reader.127 Moreover, the patriotic feelings that the warfare against France arouses in the heroes (and in the reader) are also exploited to more indirect and subtle narrative ends. Ol’ga’s avowed love for her country, together with her feelings for the Russian officer Vasilii, provides a moral “justification” for the metamorphosis of a subdued sentimental heroine into an unconventional, and potentially subversive, woman warrior. However poignant this “patriotic justification” must have seemed to the early nineteenth-century reader, Ol’ga is obviously a figure difficult to reconcile with the ideal of the proper lady upheld by contemporary polite literature and society. As a female warrior in male attire, and as an independent woman in charge of her own and others’ destiny, Ol’ga emancipates herself (at least temporarily) from the set of values defining the sentimental heroine. If the idea of a woman who adopts an independent role outside the domestic sphere in itself poses

126

Such a justification reflects historical and sociological reasons for the relaxation of the usual barriers between genders. See Illich 1983: 143-145. War may have a “liberating” effect on literature as well. The urgency to represent contemporary historical events may spur authors to forgo established genres and literary styles. As argued in chapter II, the ten years of the Napoleonic wars, which started with the battle of Austerlitz in 1805 and culminated in the 1812 attempted invasion, functioned as a direct and powerful stimulus for Russian writers towards originality and national literature. See also Sorokine 1974: 15 and passim. 127 Cf., in this respect, the very first lines of the novel: “Война! Война!... кричали на всех больших улицах столицы! Этот голос пронесся в отдалейнейших провинциях нашей Империи, и везде повторяли, война! Гибель французам! Все принимают оружие, все готовы стремиться на поражение неприятеля […]”. (Amazonka: I/[3]).

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a threat to the patriarchal ideology,128 this holds particularly true for the case of a female warrior, as war is almost by definition a myth centred on masculinity.129 As we shall see, Ol’ga’s adoption of a malelike behavior and attire releases her from the male authority of both her father and future husband and, more generally, undermines the validity of the traditional gender roles. However, in the age of sentimentalism, no positive heroine could be perceived as such without conforming to the fundamental precepts of virtue and sensitivity.130 In the context of early nineteenth-century “feminised” culture, “male” features needed to be toned down if the risk of the heroine being perceived as a caricature of a masculine – or, worse still, loose – woman was to be avoided. Such aversion to any “male” pursuit for the heroine mirrors at a narrative level the widespread concern that writing in itself may challenge the “natural” role of women as devoted daughters and mothers. The author’s anxiety to maintain the novel within the confines of propriety, an indispensable “accessory” of early nineteenth-century literature for the educated, is apparent in the narrative in the frequent assurances about Ol’ga’s morality and femininity despite her unorthodox deeds and trans-sexual disguise. Thus, notwithstanding the fact that for much of the novel Ol’ga’s characterisation de facto contravenes the staple features of the proper lady, the author is at pains to forestall a complete departure of the heroine from the sentimental prototype. Such preoccupation is reflected in the purported “mixed” nature of Ol’ga, who, throughout her metamorphosis into a soldier and a decision-maker, maintains some of the key features of the sentimental heroine. As the narrator explains: “Nature had provided Ol’ga with a strong and brave spirit, as her deeds demonstrate; but also the opportunity to show us her sensitivity”.131 Even as a soldier Ol’ga does not boast about her bravery, strategically playing down her “male” virtues. Throughout her adventurous deeds the heroine never disengages completely from her 128

Dorothy Atkinson, “Society and the Sexes in the Russian Past” in Atkinson, Dallin and Warshofsky Lapidus 1978: 3-38 (35). 129 See Sharon Macdonald, “Drawing the Lines – Gender, Peace and War: An Introduction” in Macdonald, Holden and Ardener 1987: 1-26. 130 This sentimental ideal of the feminine informed the rules of behaviour for educated women in the early nineteenth century, as witnessed by contemporary manuals of conduct (see, for example, Remezov 1808). 131 “Ольга от природы получила душу твердую и мужественную, что и доказала своими поступками; но она также имеля случай показать нам свою чувствительность”. Amazonka: I/104.

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“feminine identity”, which is signalled by attributes such as her sensibility, charm and, in particular, chastity.132 More masculine features of the heroine’s personality – her uncommon independence and strength of character in particular – are gradually, almost cautiously, added to her initially conventional portrait.133 Notwithstanding her “sentimental qualities”, Ol’ga’s “masculine” prowess for adventurous enterprises is both a key feature of her personality and the source of the motivation essential to much of the plot. Ultimately it is Ol’ga’s man-like determination and quest for independence that make her hazardous plan practicable and, eventually, successful. From the moment Ol’ga resolves to follow Vasilii to war no obstacle (whether physical, psychological or moral) can deter her from carrying out the intended scheme, which significantly broadens the range of the actions available to her and her intellectual horizons.134 The first step to obtain the autonomy required to carry out her plan is to neutralise her father’s and fiancé’s control or, when feasible, win their support. Using her eloquence and intellectual resources Ol’ga frees herself from the duty of obedience to any male authority, a step which subverts to the core the gender-based world of sentimental literature. Once free to act on her own volition her range of actions widens dramatically and a wealth of adventures and daring enterprises await her. One condition, however, stands firm for Ol’ga to maintain her autonomy: to keep up her male disguise. Cross-dressing represents the male “cover” allowing her to fully realise her potential as an individual, a guarantee of Ol’ga’s 132

Representative in this respect is Ol’ga’s account in a letter to her aunt of Vasilii’s wounding during a battle: “Слабые удары женщины не могли очистить к нему дорогу, и он скрылся от глаз моих”. (Amazonka: II/3) Incidentally, a few lines later, this self-diminishing description is openly contradicted by the heroine (Amazonka: II/4). 133 The heroine’s first reaction to the news of the imminent departure of Vasilii to war, for example, is centred on her (hyper)sensitivity in conformity with the sentimental prototype. “Ольга предалась ей с силой, которую не могла скрывать слабость пола”. (Amazonka: I/6). Interestingly, once the emotional response expected from a “lady in distress” is given, the narrator adds to Ol’ga’s psychological portrayal features such as bravery (“muzhestvo”) and a fighting spirit which are rarely associated with sentimental heroines: “Но в самых сильных переживаниях своей горести, Ольга нашла чрезвычайную крепость и мужество, которые только и могли побудить ее к исполнению намерения, в котором надеялась найти облегчение своей печали”. (Ibid.) Soon “[…] душа ее тверда и готова на героические поступки” (Ibid.: I/9). 134 “Ее новое положение” – for example – “заставило ее внимательно слушать разговоры [о политике], которые до этого казались ей скучными” (Ibid.: I/29-30).

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independence in that it provides her with a new identity and role: soldier first and decision-maker later. Of course, besides its practical function of protecting Ol’ga by hiding her sex, the uniform is also a disguise replete with gender connotations and patriotic symbolism. Once dressed as a soldier Ol’ga feels that her integration into the exclusively male realm of the army will be perfectly achieved. As she explains to Vasilii: “I will try on this uniform and I am convinced that you will then cease to doubt my strength”.135 Notably, Ol’ga’s cross-dressing is presented matter-offactly and does not cause the heroine any real anxiety. Once dressed in male clothes, the metamorphosis of this sentimental heroine into a Russian soldier is rapid and startling: “[…] in the space of a few minutes in place of a beautiful woman there appeared in front of P*** [Vasilii] a fine officer and his comrade”.136 Ol’ga demonstrates a natural inclination for, or at least remarkable skills in adjusting herself to, the military life and, more generally, to her new male role. Once enrolled, she is described wearing a knapsack and a greatcoat thrown across her shoulders and “in the space of a few days she became so used to the soldier’s labour as to take no notice of it”.137 Finally, in battle “[…] the bravery of the young officer surprised not only her affectionate lover, but also many of the time-honoured fighters”.138 In such passages Russkaia Amazonka inhabits the marvelous world of popular literature where swift reversals of status and personality are presented in a matter-offact manner and where no deed seems out of the hero’s reach.139 The freedom enjoyed by Ol’ga is, however, limited both in time and nature. It soon appears clear that the disclosure of her sexual identity would place the heroine in the vulnerable position shared by any gentlewoman devoid of male protection. The author dwells on this predicament by exploiting the sexual ambiguity inherent in Ol’ga’s cross-dressing through explicit and erotic episodes which clearly exceed the mild titillation accepted in sentimental narratives. Following a reiterative pattern, each key advancement of the heroine “Я примеряю этот мундир и уверена, что тогда ты перестанешь сомневаться в моих силах”. (Ibid.: I/19). 136 “[…] через несколько минут вместо красавицы очутился возле П*** прекрасный унтер офицер и товарищ ему по слежбе” (ibid: 48/I) 137 “Через несколько дней она так привыкла к трудам, что и не заметила их”. (ibid.: I/54-55). 138 “[…] храбрость молодого Унтер офицера удивила не только ее нежного возлюбленного, но и многих заслуженных воинов” (ibid.: I/70). 139 On the “displacement of conventions” as a literary device see Bakhtin 1965. 135

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towards her goal is hampered, and her self-confidence shaken, by a sequence of sexually-oriented attacks on her allegedly “most precious possession”, her virginity. The underlying purpose of these saucy episodes is in line with sentimental ideals as Ol’ga, a character endowed with a seemingly boundless ability to overcome obstacles, finds herself at a loss without her male “armour”. In this context her “gender mutation” carries the only guarantee of both her autonomy and her moral integrity. These implications of Ol’ga’s cross-dressing are evident in an episode where her sex is finally revealed, after she as been bodysearched by the German doctor Bibern. When Ol’ga tries to stop him, Bibern’s suspicion is aroused and Finally he tore her under-shirt, and in front of him appeared the most splendid breasts he had ever seen [...] A young and pretty girl, far from her parents, appeared to him as an agreeable windfall. The clothing which was unsuited to her sex gave him a great advantage over her, and with the audacity of an old but naughty child he 140 prepared himself to turn towards her.

Bibern’s mistaken assumption that Ol’ga’s “unsuitable” clothes would also indicate a loose morality reiterates a similar misconception in an earlier attempt at Ol’ga’s virtue, by a French soldier. The heroine’s appeal to spare her innocence is cut short as the Frenchman bluntly retorts that: “All this is fine, but I do not believe in the innocence of good-looking women who serve as soldiers. But do not be afraid, I will not take vengeance for what your Cossacks are doing to us. The battle between us will not be at all bloody”.141 Such an assumption that by cross-dressing and living as a man a woman demonstrates a loose morality obviously poses a major problem for the author, who wishes to maintain this unusual heroine within the boundaries of the “proper” (i.e. chaste) lady despite her male disguise and role. As Marina Warner has remarked in regard to Joan of Arc, the sacrifice of sexuality seems to be a general precondition for positive “Наконец он растегнул камзол, и перед ним открылась прелестная грудь, какую ему только доводилось видеть. Биберн был холостой человек около пятидесяти лет, но очень здоров и несколько развращен; молоденькая и прелестная девушка, отдаленная от своих родителей, тотчас показалась ему приятной находкой. Одежда, неподходящая ее полу, давала ему над ней большое преимущество, и он со смелостью старого шалуна собирался волочиться за ней” (Amazonka: II/24-25). 141 “Это прекрасно, только я не верю в невинность красавиц, которые служат солдатами. Однако ты не бойся, я не буду мстить за то, что с нами делают ваши казаки. Сражение с тобой совсем не будет кровопролитным” (ibid.: I/91). 140

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heroines (whether literary or authentic) to attain honorary male status, an observation Mary Zirin has extended to Durova’s Devitsakavalerist.142 Although this explanation applies also to Russkaia Amazonka, there are additional, more specific literary and cultural reasons for Ol’ga’s sexual abstinence. In the context of the early nineteenth-century system of values, a woman warrior is compatible with the ideal of the proper lady only insofar as the reader is assured of her chastity. In order to maintain at least a varnish of morality, an essential feature of high fiction in the early nineteenth-century, the heroine’s “purity” of mind and body needs to be unequivocally stated. If her unconventional behaviour can be justified by Ol’ga’s feelings towards her country and her beloved, the loss of her virginity would automatically exclude the heroine of Russkaia Amazonka from the collectivised representation of “proper” daughters and wives, and the work from the edifying type of fiction accepted in polite society. This point is expressed at the plot level by the fact that Ol’ga’s chastity represents her passport to retaining her status as a positive heroine and to eventually returning to the set-up of the family nest, within which she can be re-invested with the role of worthy daughter and wife. Ol’ga herself realises that the loss of her virginity would result in the end of her sentimental dreams to marry Vasilii and the destruction of her social standing. In that respect Russkaia Amazonka, like other contemporary works of literature, reflects at a literary level the uncertain predicament of early nineteenth-century women evading the stifling but protective sphere of the patriarchal family.143 After her narrow escape from the French soldier’s attack, for example, Ol’ga’s first thoughts are not so much for her feelings about the attempted rape, but for the consequences it would have had on her relationship with her fiancé (!): “P*** [Vasilii], her dear P*** was in her thoughts, he had almost lost her for ever; another minute, and he would have lost a great treasure”.144 More generally, she defines her “innocence” as her “right to men’s respect”.145 For his part Vasilii, a character otherwise far from resolute, shows an unexpectedly strong will when Ol’ga’s “honour” is 142

Mary Zirin, “Nadezhda Durova Russia’s ‘Cavalry Maiden”’ in Durova 1990: ixxxxv (xvii). 143 See Kelly 1994b: 51-52. 144 “П***, милый П*** был у нее в мыслях, она едва не погибла ради него навеки; еще минута, и он бы лишился великой драгоценности!” (Amazonka: I/97). 145 See ibid.: I/91.

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concerned. Preserving his future wife’s chastity until their wedding, both from others and from himself, constitutes an absolute priority for Vasilii.146 In this perspective, the sexual trials with which Ol’ga is continually confronted in the middle part of the work serve the crucial function of proving time and time again the heroine’s unscathed virtue. Furthermore, by showing that freedom for a proper lady is possible only in exceptional historical situations and for a limited time, the heroine – and the reader – is reminded of the frailty inherent in women’s social position. The barely disclosed pleasure on the narrator’s part in describing such episodes (as shown by some tonguein-cheek remarks and the generally ironic tone)147 together with a degree of voyeurism reveal the additional purpose of gratifying both the (probably male) author and the prospective male reader. Thus, the male perspective on the sexual attacks suffered by Ol’ga enacts a symbolic punishment on the heroine in response to her potentially subversive behaviour, a view remarkably different, for example, from the “feminine” viewpoint of Durova whose story breathes a sense of independence and romantic rebellion against woman’s fate.148 In contrast to Ol’ga, there is one female character in the novel who is devoid of any sentimental features and whose actions appear free from any moral constraint. A farcical episode introduces the character of Liza, a servant in the inn where Ol’ga is spending the night. Having mistaken Ol’ga’s sexual identity, she enters her room. Woken up by suspicious noises Ol’ga, sword in hand, is ready to oppose a strenuous resistance to her assailant only to realise that this time the intruder is quite harmless: Her small voice wiped away her fear, and the explanation for this nightly visit seemed hilarious to her. The person who came on tiptoe into her bedroom did not

146

When the two heroes are obliged to share a bed, for example, Vasilii takes all possible measures to avoid any physical contact with Ol’ga: “А когда случалось так, что в горнице была только одна кровать, то П*** [Василий] ложился не раздеваясь, принимал все предосторожности, которые ему предписывала честь и скромность его возлюбленной”. (Amazonka: I/55) 147 The narrator, for example, remarks: “Несчастной девушке, видно, суждено было претерпевать неприятности разного рода, и та, которую мы сейчас упоминаем, конечно, не из последних”. (Ibid.: II/15) And again, a few pages later, in the same half-mocking tone: “Казалось, что судьба играла скромностью Ольги”. (Ibid.: II/17). 148 Mary Zirin, “Nadezhda Durova Russia’s “Cavalry Maiden”” in Durova 1990: ixxxxv (xvi-xvii).

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pose the least danger: it was the girl serving in the inn, who, taking Ol’ga for a man 149 and attracted by her beauty, had decided to spend the night with her.

The narrator comments in an ironic aside: “The reader can see how unfortunate her [Liza’s] plan was, and anyway it was not in Ol’ga’s power to satisfy her”, a sentence meant to reassure the reader by cutting short the possibility of a homosexual romance between the two.150 Yet the servant Liza is antithetical to the sentimental heroine in that her sexual life is guided by her instincts, rather than by moral(istic) codes of behaviour. Indeed, Liza’s unabashed sexual drive presents an interesting contrast to Ol’ga’s carefully kept chastity: The girl was not bad herself, young and used to loan her favours to all the travellers who took her fancy. During the course of the dinner she had done all that she could think of to attract Ol’ga’s attention; but, having failed to obtain the success she had hoped for, had decided to take such an action fully convinced that a young 151 man would not be able to resist her.

This saucy passage is devoid of moral reprehension in describing women’s carnal desires and the whole scene is farcical rather than didactically inclined, a feature arguably made possible by Liza’s lower social status and marginal role in the work. In that respect, the character of Liza is reminiscent of Martona, the heroine in Chulkov’s novel The Comely Cook (Prigozhaia povarikha, 1770), and of another Liza, or better “Lizan’ka”, of A. Izmailov’s novel Evgenii, or the Ruinous Consequences of a Bad Education and Company seen in the previous chapter. However, such explicit descriptions are a rare occurrence in early nineteenth-century fiction in general and within The Russian Amazon in particular. Whilst the gentlewoman Ol’ga has to maintain at least the most fundamental feature of the sentimental “Но такой голос уничтожил ее страх, и объяснение этого ночного происшествия сделало для нее само происшествие смешным. Человек, тихонько вошедший в ее горницу, совсем не был для нее опасен: это была служанка в трактире, которая считала Ольгу мужчиной и, прельщенная ее красотой, решилась провести с ней ночь”. (Amazonka: II/20) 150 “Читатель видит, как неудачно она произвела свое намерение; впрочем, Ольга не могла ничем ей помочь”. (ibid.: II/21) 151 “Девушка была недурна собой, молода, и прывыкла одаривать своей благосклонностью всех путешественников, которые ей нравились. Она в продолжение ужина делала все возможное, чтобы обратить на себя внимание Ольги; но, не достигнув желаемого, она решилась на такой поступок в полной уверенности, что молодой человек не в состоянии будет ей противиться”. (ibid.: II/20-21) 149

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heroine, her virtue, the servant Liza belongs to a string of lively heroines of the lower class who can be spared the lack of an edifying subtext. Yet, as we have demonstrated, the heroine of Russkaia Amazonka is a character ultimately unsettling to the social and moral order as represented in contemporary polite fiction, albeit in a more complex and indirect way than Liza. Although Ol’ga’s freedom relies on her ability to disguise her true sexual identity, for most of the novel she is independent from any familiar supervision and in complete charge of her own destiny. Her ability to swiftly assume the role – and appearance – of a man and a soldier, and to plunge herself into extraordinary adventures, draws from the picaresque novel popular in the eighteenth century. As a result, the realism of certain episodes and the immediate, unfettered style employed to narrate Ol’ga’s deeds seem far indeed from the refined sentimental story. At the same time the heroine is endowed with sentimental features devised to justify her unconventional persona which, together with the ideal of the patriarchal relationship between genders affirmed at crucial points in the novel, conform to the sentimental ideals dominating early nineteenth-century polite literature and society. With similarities to Vasilii Narezhny and Andrei Kropotov, the author of The Russian Amazon attempts to extend the range of “acceptable literature” by combining modes of the popular novel with narrative and idealogical features of the sentimental genre, the most authoritative template for cultivated prose in the early nineteenth century. As with Kropotov, here too the narrative framework does not always succeed in smoothly harmonising two different literary traditions, or in accommodating the subversive implications of Ol’ga’s character within the sentimental canon. Yet the novel is overall original and innovative; the Russian Amazon emerges from the junction of low and lofty genres. Her character accommodates traits which were deemed incompatible in a polite heroine, such as virtue and sensitivity with autonomy and defiance of conventions. Hence, her adventurous but virtuous life challenges the dichotomist representation of female characters and extends the taxonomy of female types beyond the two traditional categories of “saints” and “sinners” usually applied to the early nineteenth-century heroine.152 As such it broadens the reach of accepted literature on two fronts, aesthetic and ideological. 152

Matich 1983: 325-343 (325). See also Poovey 1984: x.

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The “double life” of this Russian Amazon also demonstrates that the sentimental heroine, albeit widespread, was not the sole positive template for women in early nineteenth-century fiction. This novel represents a poignant attempt to create a heroine who was original and at the same time acceptable to the educated reader. Russkaia Amazonka, however, seems to achieve something more: with its peculiar mixture of subversive traits and traditional features, this work implicitly questions the validity of the received notion of women’s passive role in Russian society, an ideal which sentimentalism had so perfectly translated into literature.

IV.5 Sentimental novels and stories: Nikolai Brusilov and the intertextual dialogue between serious and humorous sentimental modes In the vast majority of imitative works sentimental patterns were intentionally exploited and calculatedly taken to their extreme limits153 by authors who, with the notable exception of Shalikov, were in fact well versed in a number of different literary styles. Weak imitations of Karamzin include works such as P. L’vov’s Pis’ma Skimnina (The Letters of Skimnin, 1813) Kropotov’s Landshaft moikh voobrazhenii (The Landscape of my Imagination, 1809) and Puteshestvie v Malorossiiu (Journey to Little Russia, 1803) by Petr Shalikov. In such narratives sentimentalism degenerated into meaningless sentimentality, in a set of ready-made formulae, or “hypersentimentalism”, that was readily identified as such and amply ridiculed at the beginning of the century from the Archaists’ side. Notably, sentimental authors too aired their dissent with the direction taken by epigones of Karamzin in prefaces to novels and stories, a favourite locus of literary debate in the early nineteenth century. Nikolai Ostolopov, for example, in his introduction to his novel Evgeniia, ili nyneshnee vospitanie (Evgeniia, or Modern Education, 1803), criticises the fickle approach to the task of writing adopted by some of his fellow authors: Fashion is everywhere, even in books. For a while now almost everything published by our authors has been doleful and sad; they are all shedding tears of

153

See Hammarberg 1996: 275-283.

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sensibility and forcing others to cry too, as if we didn’t have enough sorrow without 154 them.

Others, like Nikolai Brusilov, Pavel Iakovlev and – as seen in the previous chapter – Andrei Kropotov, took a humorous or parodic stance towards the shortcomings of early nineteenth-century serious sentimentalism, an approach that requires some elucidation. Parodies are contemporary with, or at least chronologically very close to, the literary movement jeered at, for they presuppose in the writer a literary expertise and deep awareness of the characteristics of their literary target. Additionally, crucial for the success of the parody is a high narrative “competence” in the reader, who is required to be well versed in all the peculiarities of the movement parodied,155 i.e. able to unravel the various clues hinting at the presence of a hidden subtext.156 Not surprisingly given their opposite raisons d’être, sentimental selfirony on the one hand and parodies of sentimental works on the other present different generic, stylistic and thematic features. The Besedisty were among the keenest critics of sentimentalism, for mocking and eventually shattering sentimental aesthetics was considered of crucial importance in winning the literary argument. To this end the full potential of “polemical” genres, such as the epistle, the epigram, the satire and the comedy, was exploited by both parties, inflaming the literary debate of the time. Incidentally. literary skirmishes fought with the weapons of irony and satire played an important part in the formative years of Pushkin and other writers of his generation who were taken under the wing of either Beseda or Arzamas.157 The success of irony directed at sentimentalism and sentimental irony eventually reached such levels as to arouse a feeling of isolation in a staunch representative of the old guard, Shalikov. He lamented a generalized volte-face of his fellow writers with tones of nostalgia for the past glory of serious sentimentalism: “There was a time when each and every one aspired to a sentimental fame, whilst now everybody tries with or without cause to write an epigram against

“На все бывает мода, даже на книги. С некоторого времени почти все наши авторы пишут жалостное, печальное; все проливают чувствительные слезы и заставляют других плакать, как будто и без них у нас мало горестей”. Ostolopov 1803: [1]. 155 See Genette 1980: 76-77. 156 Furst 1984: 16. 157 Lotman 1983: 30 and passim. On Beseda and Arzamas see chapter II.3. 154

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sentimentality”.158 However amusing and, to an extent, effective as an immediate critical tool, in the long run satirical pieces churned out by the Beseda did not leave a lasting trace in Russian literature. In contrast with the destructive stance of the Besedisty, sentimental humour inspired authors to take a proactive role in finding viable alternatives to Karamzin’s epigones. After all Karamzin himself had censured the exaggerated tearfulness of some followers as “slezlivost’ i zhemanstvo” (lachrimosity and affectation) and there was no reason to halt such a process of self-criticism at the time when the trend’s own excesses had reached alarming levels. Moreover, Sternian irony and sceptical humour were widespread narrative modes in the post-Karamzin period, having seeped into a variety of narrative and non-narrative genres such as personal letters and literary criticism. In their turn, following a circular path of sorts, ironic devices experimented with in the rebuttals against the Beseda exerted a degree of influence on sentimental humorous novel and stories.159 Self-irony in the work of early nineteenth-century sentimental writers in itself was nothing new, for since Sterne humour had traditionally served as a device to renew and revitalise sentimentalism from within.160 What is new in early nineteenth-century Russia is a sense of urgency behind sentimental irony, a tangible effort to use humor as the most effective means to fight back against criticism and to advance a more modern conception of the literary work. It is perhaps this very sense of urgency, fuelled by the pressing attacks from the Besedisty’s camp, that stimulated sentimental authors to widen their narrative repertoire and to further develop humorous modes in their narratives. Notwithstanding the significant role played by irony, scholars have generally overlooked the humorous trend within Russian sentimentalism. Yet sentimental authors have traditionally showed ironical consciousness of the limitations of the narrator’s feelings, starting from Sterne, whose humour left a clear trace in Karamzin’s Natal’ia boiarskaia dochka (Natalia, the Boyar’s Daughter, 1792), Dremuchii les (The Deep Forest, 1795), Rytsar’ nashego vremeni (A “Было время, когда все хотели сентиментальной славы, пришло другое, и каждый старается, кстати и нестати, сказать и написать эпиграмму против сентиментальности”. P. Shalikov, Aglaia, 1808: I/37. 159 On the interaction between narrative and non-narrative genres see Hammarberg 1996b; Iurii N. Tynyanov, “Literaturnyi fakt” in Tynyanov 1967: 5-29; Stepanov 1985: 67-86. 160 Elizabeth Harries refers to Sterne’s Sentimental Journey as a “simultaneous inauguration and critique of the cult of feeling”. (Harries 1994: 98). 158

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Knight of Our Time, 1802-1803) and, in particular, Moia isopoved’ (My Confession, 1802).161 Gitta Hammarberg is one of the few to lament the fact that even in cases where humour is obviously at work, the serious aspects are the ones that have caught the attention of scholars, as if irony would contradict the basic principles of sentimentalism. Clearly one of the chief goals of sentimental authors, the readers’ emotional involvement, may be achieved through a number of narrative modes ranging from serious-tearful to humorous. In other words laughter is as viable a medium as tears to bring about readers’ emotional involvement.162 Having said that, humorous sentimental fiction does present the reader with a number of stylistic peculiarities, in addition to heterogeneity in terms of subject matter and narrative structure not otherwise observed in “serious” sentimental narratives. From a thematic viewpoint humorous works, by bringing in new topics and amplifying the range of allusions attached to them, lead to an extension of the text’s referentiality, and of its thread of textual and contextual references, or sub-text.163 From a stylistic point of view, ironic modes stem from the exploitation of linguistic nuances, a feature that in itself considerably widens the range of narrative devices vis-à-vis serious sentimental literature. This point is illustrated by the mature use of irony, parody and humour as media of literary innovation observed in a number of narratives appearing in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Sentimental narratives of the humorous type include the 1802 story The New Sentimental Traveller, or My Stroll in A**,164 Brusilov’s My Journey, or One Day’s Adventures and Poor Leandr, or the Author without Rhetoric, Pavel Iakovlev’s A Sentimental Journey Along the Nevskii Prospect, and Iakob de Sanglen’s Life and Opinions of a New Tristram.165 Interestingly, as shown by the titles above, the majority of humorous narratives belonged to the genre of the literary 161

See Jefferson 1992: 24; Hammarberg 1991: 112-121. Ibid., pp. 203-307. See also Meilakh 1973: 57 and Hunter 1990: 138. 163 Furst 1984: 12-16; Lukács 1971: 75-76. 164 Novyi chuvsvitel’nyi puteshestvennik, ili progulka v A** was signed with the pseudonym K.*G.* which may possibly stand for either Karl Gablits or Grigoryi Gol’chikin (see Masanov 1957: I/12-13). Dickinson favours the first option (Dickinson, 1995: 210/fn. 106 and passim). The work is reprinted in Korovin 1990: 392-442. 165 The original titles being Moe puteshestvie, ili prikliucheniia odnogo dnia (1803), Bednyi Leandr, ili avtor bez ritoriki (1803), Chuvstvitel’noe puteshestvie po Nevskomu prospektu (1820-1822), and Zhizn’ i mneniia novogo Tristrama (1825). 162

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travelogue, an occurrence that may be explained by the tremendous popularity enjoyed by Laurence Sterne’s famous A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy.166 Sterne, who had already exercised an important influence on Karamzin’s humorous sentimental fiction,167 continued to be favoured by both readers and authors at the beginning of the nineteenth century168 and beyond. Pushkin, for example, held Tristram Shandy in great esteem, as echoed in his remark that “Richardson, Fielding and Sterne maintain the fame of the novel”.169 Lev Tolstoi was so enthralled by Sterne as to translate part of A Sentimental Journey in 1850. Going back to the early years of the century, The New Sentimental Traveller, a work inspired by the English author, contains a symptomatic eulogy to the “immortal Sterne:” No doubt, my choice of a literary genre in which the immortal Sterne has engraved for us his unsurpassable creation will appear audacious to my sensible reader; it is certainly difficult to follow in the footsteps of an author whose equal is 170 born only once in centuries.

Translated into Russian many times during the reign of Alexander I, Sterne was much admired for the exceptional creative freedom he seemed to enjoy and for the informal relationship between the author and his reader established in his work. Echoing a leitmotif of Sterne’s reception in the West, a Russian anonymous critic remarked: “He has demonstrated that it is possible to write and speak about everything, to treat the reader more freely than has ever been 166

Maslov’s (incomplete) list of translations of Sterne’s works into Russian includes thirteen titles, mostly excerpts from the Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy (Maslov 1924: 339-376). 167 On Sterne’s influence on Karamzin’s Natal’ia boiarskaia doch’ see Kanunova 1975; on Karamzin’s Rytsar’ nashego vremeni see Cross 1964: 100 and Cross 1971: 124. See also Maslov 1924: 361-362. On the reception of Sterne in Russia see Stewart 2004. 168 Fragments of Sterne’s made their appearance in Russian periodicals at the end of the 1770s. A complete edition of A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy was first published in 1793, while excerpts (parts I-IV) of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy appeared in 1804-1807. 169 “Ричардсон, Филдинг и Стерн поддерживают славу прозаического романа”. A. S. Pushkin, “O nichtozhestve literatury russkoi” in Pushkin 1937-1959: XI/268272 (272). 170 “Конечно, благоразумному читателю покажется дерзким мой выбор сочинения такого рода, в котором бессмертный Стерн начертал нам найпревосходнейшее свое творение; конечно, трудно идти по следам такого автора, которые рождаются раз в столетие”. K.* G* 1990: 392.

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171

previously attempted”. Additionally, for a number of early nineteenth-century authors Sterne’s work represented the epitome of a balance between serious and humorous sentimental modes where “The sharpness of irony breathes the cheerfulness of kindness”.172 Likewise Mikhail Murav’ev, the sentimental author and tutor of the emperor-tobe Alexander in the late 1780s and 1790s, did not seem to find the two modes at odds, stating that “In [Sterne’s] works, satirical laughter is often to be found next to tears of sensibility”.173 This view of the English author is further reinforced by Iakov Galinkovskii in his Introduction to a selection of excerpts from Sterne’s work by the title Krasoty Sterna (The Beauties of Sterne, 1801).174 Galinkovskii identifies Sterne as “The wonder of English Humorists and an icon in his own way for the whole of Europe”.175 More specifically, Galinkovskii proposes Sterne’s distinctive style as a model for contemporary sentimental writers. Thus Sterne, often in tandem with Karamzin, who was perceived as his Russian intermediary, stood at the beginning of the nineteenth century as an authoritative alternative to “sentimental excesses:” I wish that those who over-enthusiastically proclaim their sensitivities before every little shrub, every small brook in the vicinity of our town – would learn from

“Он доказал, что можно писать и говорить обо всем; поступать с читателем так свободно, как еще до этого никто не делал”. Biografiia Sterna 1903: I/245. 172 “Полным соли остроумием дышит веселость добродетели”. The expression refers to the Sentimental Journey. [Anon.] 1815: IV/117. 173 “Часто в сочинении его [Стерна] смех и сатира соседствуют со слезами чувствительности”. M. N. Murav’ev, “Stern” in Murav’ev 1847: II/307-308 (307). The article was probably written at the end of the 1780s and beginning of the 1790s and printed in a very small number of copies at the Imperial Library while Murav’ev worked as tutor to the grand dukes Alexander and Nicholas. 174 The full title being Krasoty Sterna, ili Sobranie luchshikh ego Pateticheskikh povestei i otlichneishikh zamechanii na zhizn’. Dlia chuvstvitel’nykh serdets, perevod s aglinskogo, s portretom Sochinitelia (published in Moscow by Selivanovskii). Galinkovskii’s selection follows a London edition of 1782 called The Beauties of Sterne: Including all his Pathetic Tales, and Most Distinguished Observations on Life. Selected for the Heart of Sensibility, edited by “a certain W. N., an English scholar”, as reported by Galinkovskii (Galinkovskii 1801: iii-iv). Extracts from Krasoty Sterna were first published in the journal Ippokrena (Hippocrene) in 1800 (Levin 1979: 61/fn. 201). See also his “The English Novel in 18th-Century Russia” in Cross and Smith 1994: 143-167; Maslov 1924: 347-348. On Galinkovskii’s literary activity, see Lotman 1959: 230-256. 175 “Чудо английских юмористов и образец в своем роде для всей Европы”. Galinkovskii 1801: I. Italics in the original. 171

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Sterne how to feel with more authenticity, to look at the world’s stage not solely with 176 tear-stained eyes [...].

A number of Galinkovskii’s contemporaries, of whom Nikolai Brusilov is perhaps the most outstanding representative, seem to have taken his advice to heart (and put it into practice).177 Sternian irony and sceptical humour were so widespread at the beginning of the nineteenth century that sometimes the task of drawing the borderline between parodies of sentimentalism and sentimental irony is problematic. What is clear is that self-ironic tones served as a topical device to renew and revitalise sentimental literature from within, preempting critics’ arguments against sentimental clichés and, at the same time, setting themselves apart from the uninspiring work of Prince Shalikov and the like.178 Nikolai Brusilov’s humorous novel Bednyi Leandr (The Poor Leandr) is at the cutting edge of the wave of experiments and aesthetic innovations introduced in early nineteenth-century sentimentalism. Given Brusilov’s literary skills, his diverse literary production and the short period within which his body of works was created, the author is an ideal candidate to represent the variety of synchronic approaches towards the sentimental tradition.179 Nikolai Brusilov (1782-1849) was the son of a humble landowner in Orel Province. At the age of eight he moved to St. Petersburg where, with the help of an influential patron, he was enrolled in the prestigious Pazheskii korpus. It was during the years of his military instruction that the future writer first tested his literary skills with a series of satires of his army comrades,180 a beginning similar to that of his contemporary Andrei Kropotov. Brusilov’s penchant for satiric and ironic modes was nurtured during these years by readings from French Encyclopédistes, Rousseau and the eighteenth-century journals of N. Novikov, M. Chulkov, and N. “Желаю, чтобы и те, которые слишком пристрастились проповедовать свою чувствительность при всяком кустике, при всяком ручейке в пределах нашего города, – поучились у Стерна чувствовать с большей подлинностью, глядя на сцену мира не одними заплаканными глазами [...]”. (Galinkovskii 1801: iv-v). 177 The imitation of Sterne’s Journey was a phenomenon of European scale in the late eighteenth century. See, for example, Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771), Francis Verne’s Le Voyageur sentimental ou ma promenade à Yverdun (1786) and Charles-Marguerite Mercier Dupaty’s Lettres sur l’Italie (1785). 178 Hammarberg 1996a: 275-283. 179 Some of the material contained in this section has been published in Tosi 2000. 180 Brusilov 1893: 47; 49-51. 176

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Strakhov. Brusilov served in the army for two years, from 1796 to 1798, and then worked in the civil service, initially at the rank of state-secretary and later as governor of Vologda province.182 At the same time he cultivated his literary talents, which would materialise in a number of works of prose, poetry and literary criticism.183 The translation of a comedy by Louis Mercier (Gvadelupskii zhitel’, 1800) marked the beginning of an intense period in his career as an author, which reached its peak in 1803. In that year alone Brusilov published four books, the new edition of the 1795 collected works Trifles, or Some Works and Translations by N. B. (Bezdelki, ili Nekotorye sochineniia i perevody N. B.),184 the ironic Bednyi Leandr, ili avtor bez ritoriki (the work which marks the high point of Brusilov’s career as an author), Moe puteshestvie, ili prikliucheniia odnogo dnia (My Journey, or One Day’s Adventures, 1803),185 a literary travelogue partially inspired, as indicated by the author, by François-Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma chambre (1794),186 and the “sentimental novel of adventure” Starets, ili prevratnost’ sud’by (The Old Man, or the Reversals of Fortune, 1803). In this latter work Brusilov questions the traditional constraints of the sentimental storyeclogue in an attempt to broaden its thematic and generic boundaries.187 The following year, the author joined the Free Society of Admirers of Literature, Science and Art and edited the official periodical of the society, the Journal of Russian Literature (Zhurnal rossiiskoi slovesnosti),188 in which appeared a series of articles and

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Akutin 1973: 106. A.V. Zorin, “Brusilov, Nikolai Petrovich” in Nikolaev 1989: I/331; Botsianovskii 1893; Bulich 1902: 101. 183 Brusilov 1893: 49. 184 The volume, to which the author promised to add a second part if “the first effort of the young author of these Trifles is favourably greeted by the public” (Brusilov 1803b: 1), includes pieces satirising contemporary life, and the oriental tale Azem. See also Akutin 1973: 108. 185 Sara Dickinson reports the contrasting views on this work among critics who have designated My Journey either as a parody of the sentimental travelogue (see, for example, Roboli 1985: 57) or as a “hyper-sentimental” narrative. Although she does not take a clear side in the debate, Dickinson sheds doubts on Brusilov’s purported self-awareness in the satirical effects achieved by his work (Dickinson 1995: 220226). 186 Brusilov 1803d: 2-3 and passim; Brusilov 1893: 65. 187 Kochetkova 1973: 59-60. 188 Besides Brusilov’s works the journal published pieces in verse and prose articles on literary matters by A. Benitskii, A. Izmailov and N. Ostolopov. Brusilov published a number of essays and ironic pieces on contemporary literary life in general and on 182

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serious sentimental tales including Istoriia bednoi Marii (The Story of the Poor Mariia, 1805).189 In this work, “a true sentimental storyidyll” in Petrunina’s fitting definition, Brusilov effectively adopts the plot scheme of Karamzin’s Poor Liza, thus adding his name to the long list of authors cashing in on the story’s success.190 However imitative in intent (as the author would ironically admit in his later Memoirs),191 in Poor Mariia Brusilov uses Karamzin’s well-known plot as a canvas on which to orchestrate a brand new narrative which effectively casts a new look on the serious sentimental tale.192 In 1806 there appeared in the literary periodical The Lover of Literature (Liubitel’ slovesnosti) the short sentimental story Naivety and Deceitfulness, Brusilov’s last work of fiction.193 This povest’ further confirms Brusilov’s ability to draw from late eighteenth-century models in the serious sentimental tale (in this case mainly Karamzin’s Iuliia) in a creative vein. As is apparent from the brief biographical account given above, Brusilov was a rather eclectic author who moved at ease across registers, producing in quick succession both serious and humorous sentimental works.194 Such versatility was shared by many early nineteenth-century authors in search of an individual style.195 Yet the writer’s profession in particular. On the author’s contribution to the Journal of Russian Literature see Akutin 1973: 114-121. 189 This povest’ has been mistakenly attributed to N. Milonov by Orlov (Orlov 1979: 241). 190 Karamzin’s success may be gauged by the popular response to one of his most successful novellas, Poor Liza, whose publication saw readers flocking in pilgrimage to the pond where the eponymous heroine had drowned. Petr Shalikov’s Temnaia roshcha, ili pamiatnik nezhnosti (The Dark Grove, or the Monument to Tenderness (first edition: Moscow, 1798. Reprinted in Orlov 1979: 190-202 and in Korovin 1990: 86-100) represents one of the most pedantic imitations of Karamzin’s novella. On early nineteenth-century imitations of Poor Liza see Toporov 1995: 439-478. 191 “Написал Бедную Машу в подражание Бедной Лизе, Мое путешествие в подражание де-Метру и еще две или три повести – в подражание не знаю уж кому”. (Brusilov 1893: 65). 192 In this perspective, Brusilov’s Poor Mariia represents an additional example of the variety of approaches to Karamzin’s models. 193 Brusilov’s activity as a writer continued after that date. Similarly to Karamzin, however, Brusilov abandoned fiction in favour of historical research. 194 Brusilov’s inclination toward humorous writing is manifest throughout his literary career, starting from the time of his enrolment in the Pazheskii korpus. Beyond the narrative works, irony is also a distinctive mode in his Memoirs and in the satiric pieces against the Besedisty published in the Journal of Russian Literature (see Zhikharev 1934: 486). 195 Cf., for example, Andrei Kropotov, also trying his hand at both serious and humorous works, Aleksandr Izmailov and the young Nikolai Gnedich.

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Brusilov stands out for his literary know-how and for the staggering transformations that occurred within his sentimental work. During a period of just three years, the author explored virtually all the narrative patterns and styles offered by the trend. Sandwiched in between two works of serious sentimental fiction, The Old Man and Naivety and Deceitfulness, Brusilov explores the narrative potential of the humorous strain of sentimental prose with the literary travelogue My Journey, or One Day’s Adventures and the short novel The Poor Leandr. Bednyi Leandr consists of an ironic account of the adventures of the eponymous hero, an inexperienced young provincial who nurtures illusions of becoming a writer. Spurred on by the “hot climate”, by the reading of “some Novels which ignited his imagination”,196 and the alluring prospects of fame projected by his mentor, the elderly Doctor of Eschatology, Leandr decides to move to the city of M. [Moscow]. There, he begins his literary training in the art of writing under the guidance of one of his mentor’s friends, the Doctor of MetaphysicsLogic-Cosmology [!], a personage who will allegedly “indicate to him the fastest way to Parnassus”. The actual life of an aspiring Russian author is at odds with Leandr’s optimistic expectations. For a start, his teacher’s lengthy explanations on the art of Rhetoric and the “dryness of the subject” rapidly cool down Leandr’s initial enthusiasm: The tropes of speech, stated the Doctor of Metaphysics-Logic-Cosmology in a lecturing tone, slowly counting on his fingers, are six, namely: Metaphor, Synecdoche, Metonymy, Antonomasia, Catachresis, and Metalepsis. Leandr didn’t have the strength to listen to him any further, and being by nature hot-tempered […] departed, vowing that in the future he would never have anything to do with a similar 197 Pedant in a woollen cap!

In this passage Brusilov pokes fun at the supporters of classical aesthetics, whose theories are here depicted as formulaic and archaic vis-à-vis sentimentalists’ “spontaneous” and “discursive” approach to “[Жаркий] климат и некоторое романы разгорячали его воображение”. Brusilov 1803a: 3-4 (hereafter: Leandr). Note that the use of the capital letter for the word “Romany” is Brusilov’s. Such a device is employed throughout the work, generally to underline the ironic overtone of a particular word or expression. 197 “Тропов речи, – говорил Доктор Метафизико-Логико-Космологии важным голосом, считая медленно по пальцам, шесть, а именно: метафора, синекдоха, метонимия, антомазия, катахрезис и металесис. Леандр не в силах был дальше слушать его и, будучи от природы горяч, швырнул в бешенстве в Доктора Риторикой и ушел от него, поклявшись, что никогда впредь не будет иметь дело ни с каким педантом в шерстяном колпаке!” Leandr: 12-13. 196

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literary creation, thus getting to the heart of a controversy that was to climax with the Beseda versus Arzamas debate. Such a satire of the inane attachment to the rules of eloquence and rhetoric divorced from any actual literary ability (a widespread topic in eighteenth-century literature as a whole) is here particularly reminiscent of Voltaire’s Candide ou l’Optimisme (1759). Brusilov’s Bednyi Leandr shares a number of features with Candide, ranging from the amused scepticism characterising the narrator’s standing, the features of the heroes’ mentors, and finally, the ideal of a secluded life in the countryside outlined in the ending of both stories. Having abandoned the lessons of the Panglossian “learned man”, Leandr decides to pursue the writing profession according to his own ideas and, particularly, giving free rein to his imagination: Why tie down one’s imagination? Why confine it within boundaries without necessity? I will take a pen and begin writing… When do I stop? When I become tired? No, this is foolish! – Until my pen is gone? No, this too is not good, and is not 198 new either […] I will stop writing when I feel like it!

As this passage highlights, the narrator’s irony is wider than a critique of the supporters of neoclassical aesthetics, attacking both sentimentalism’s unmitigated cult of spontaneity and any preconceived idea tying down the author’s pen. Creating a literary work, however, is not as simple as Leandr had anticipated: The Authorial spirit is plague-like; once infected, it is difficult to cure! It gave Leandr no respite day or night. During the day Leandr never ceased to compose in his mind plans for a Poem, an Ode, a Novel. At night he dreamed that his creations […] had become the source of general awe, and that due to his fame all the learned men 199 and the Literati flocked to become acquainted with him.

198

The tongue-in-cheek description of Leandr’s “unrestrained imagination” refers back to the Introduction where the narrator, ironically pretending to be seized by a “sudden impetus”, exclaims: “Воображение есть лучший Ритор!” an affirmation followed by some hesitation: “Но нужно ли оно для Истории?” (Leandr: 1). This passage also echoes a similar tongue-in-cheek description of contemporary authors in Karamzin’s Moia ispoved’ (Karamzin 1848: 3/504-520 (504-505)). 199 “Дух авторский как чума, кто раз им заразился, тому трудно вылечиться! Он не давал Леандру покоя ни днем, ни ночью. Днем Леандр беспрестанно сочинял в голове планы поэм, од, романов: а во сне видел, что творения его […] сделались предметом общего удивления, и что все ученые и литераторы за славу считают быть с ним знакомы”. Leandr: 14.

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Eventually Leandr produces a “small composition” that, to his great dismay, is received rather coldly by the reading public and fiercely attacked by literary critics:200 “Good God! Cried Leandr in despair, is there a sadder creature than an Author!”201 Notwithstanding the failure of his book, Leandr is invited to participate in what he expects to be the intense literary life of the beau monde. A new disillusionment awaits the “poor Leandr”, for the cultured gentry whom he had expected to find debating crucial literary issues is actually enthralled by empty conversations and card games. Satirical shafts are directed at the frivolity and moral levity of Moscow’s salon society as a whole, a literary topic frequently encountered in eighteenth-century comedies and satirical-moralistic articles and appropriated by authors of fiction at the beginning of the nineteenth century.202 Far from being interested in literary matters (as the narrator bluntly observes “Nobody is concerned with literature”),203 aristocrats regard good appearances as the main virtue of noblemen: “In our age happiness depends on trifles: if a person is able to dance well, sing well, and play cards well, then his happiness is achieved! Higher talents are not necessary for happiness!” 204 200 Leandr thus laments the negative reception of his work: “Жестокие критики без пощады нападают. Малейшая грамматическая ошибка, малейшая неосторожность в правописании, все ими критикуется со строгостью. Они, видно, забыли слова видного сатирика: La critique est aisée, сказал Буaлo, mais l’art est difficile” (Leandr: 20). The French quote – which is actually from P. Destouches’s play Le Glorieux (1732), and not from Boileau as Brusilov states – is probably taken from Karamzin’s “Pis’mo k izdateliu” published in the first issue of his Vestnik Evropy (1802). 201 “Боже мой! – Вскричал Леандр в досаде, есть ли на свете творение жальче Автора!” (Leandr: 19) 202 Among Brusilov’s contemporaries it is worth mentioning the above quoted novel by Aleksandr Izmailov Evgenii, or the Ruinous Consequences of a Bad Education and Company, and Nikolai Ostolopov’s Evgeniia, or the Modern Education. In both cases, the imported sets of negative values are held responsible for the heroes’ lack of morals, ultimately causing their premature death. 203 “Литература ни к чему не ведет”. (Leandr: 20). The gentry’s “immoral” passion for card games was a common topic in early nineteenth-century fiction. See, for example, the satirical treatment of the topic in A. Izmailov’s Evgenii (Izmailov 1891: III/280). For a contemporary account of the Russian gentry’s passion for card games, see the travel memoirs of the Englishman Robert Porter (Porter 1813: 134 and passim). 204 “Счастье человека в нашем мире зависит от безделицы: хорошо молодой человек танцует, хорошо поет, хорошо играет в карты, – счастье его сделано!” (Leandr: 20). The term bezdelitsa, or bezdelka (here employed to derogative ends), had also been used by Brusilov as a book title for his collected work of 1803 Bezdelki, ili nekotorye sochineniia i perevody N.B. A hint of self-referential irony may be

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Cards in particular, a key theme in Russian literature at the time of Griboedov and Pushkin, emerged at the beginning of the century as a vehicle of social critique of the idle Russian gentry buzzing around the fashionable salons of the capitals. “Boston, Pass, Whist, Misère”, exclaims the narrator, “this is the kind of talk of intelligent creatures, of hundreds of educated people, who sit together for whole days!” With similarities to the hero of fon Ferel’ts’s Journey, the young and idealist Leandr cannot but feel excluded from a social sphere he is by birth associated with: “Not playing cards, he was completely superfluous amid such company”.205 Although both authors give shape to the first embryonic lishnye liudy of Russian literature there are fundamental differences between the two. The bitter critique of the provincial gentry voiced by fon Ferel’ts is at odds with Brusilov’s humorous take on social evils. This is in part due to the fact that Brusilov takes issue with a narrow segment of the gentry (Moscow’s so-called intellectual elite) and addresses wider social concerns only tangentially, focusing his satire on the interactions of the literary few. More significantly, his satirical shafts are to be viewed within the context of humorous sentimental literature with its characteristic debunking of its own principles, be it stylistic (tearful sentimentalism) or sociological (the salon). Brusilov aims at showing how threadbare contemporary literary life is, exhibiting the modishness of writers and haughtiness of critics who move around aristocratic salons passing themselves off as literary connoisseurs. An example of such satire is given in a chapter subtitled “Razgovor o literature” (“Conversation on literature”),206 constructed on the dialogue between two salon-goers on Rousseau and Voltaire207 and, most interestingly, touching on the purported causes of the “collapse” of contemporary Russian literature: detected in the above quoted passage, as in the brief explanation attached to the choice of the book title in Brusilov’s Memoirs: “Карамзин и Дмитриев издали Безделки, ну как же мне отстать от них? И я издал “Безделки”. И во всей силе слова бездельная”. (Brusilov 1893: 65). On the use in literature of the term “bezdelka” see Lauer 1967. 205 “Бостон, пасс, вист, мизер, вот разговор разумнейшей твари, сотни людей с воспитанием, сидящих вместе целые сутки! […] Он, не играя в карты, был совершенно лишний среди таких людей”. (Leandr: 22). 206 Ibid.: 28-34. 207 The opinions expressed by the one of the two characters, the “man in a dark caftan”, are quoted by Zaborov as an example of the double judgment given on Voltaire by early nineteenth-century authors: while the author Voltaire was praised, Voltaire the philosophe was generally considered immoral and dangerous. Zaborov 1970: 136.

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Why is our literature in such a declining state? – It is not difficult to resolve this question, said a man of letters who was playing Boston, putting down his cards: in the first place, our language is utterly despised even within our own country. Who speaks it? A foreign language is used in the circles of the best society. […] Who is 208 then left to read our books?

His speech is abruptly interrupted by his fellow men of letters, more eager to resume their card game than to discuss “vital” literary issues: “Secondly... – It is your turn to play! It is your turn to play! – cried out the three players to the Man of Letters. These words interrupted the Man of Letters’ speech at its high point”.209 The humour of this passage is further enhanced by the unexpected reaction Leandr’s admission of literary aspirations arouses among the literati: – I’ll tell you about myself – said Leandr joining in the conversation, – I have started to write…. – What? – the man with high pretensions, interrupting Leandr’s speech, – You too are an author! Truly, I would have not thought so! – Leandr admitted his weakness. – Believe me – said the man with high pretensions, pressing Leandr’s hand with a smile, – if you wish to feel happy and contented, smash your ink-pot and tear up your papers. – And having said these comforting words he bowed 210 to Leandr with great courteousness and departed, leaving Leandr utterly astounded.

Here Brusilov’s pointed irony on contemporary approaches to literature tackles one of the topoi of Russian sentimentalism, the salon

“Отчего литература у нас в таком упадке? – Этот вопрос решить не трудно, – сказал игравший в бостон литератор, положа карту, – во-первых, потому, что язык наш в совершенном презрении у нас самих. Кто говорит им? Во всех лучших обществах употребляется иностранный. […] Кто ж станет читать наши книги?” (Leandr: 32). 209 “Во-вторых… – Вам ходить! Вам ходить! Закричали литератору трое, игравшие с ним в карты. Слово это перебило на самом лучшем месте речь литератора […]”. (Leandr: 33). Interestingly Odoevskii employs a similar device in his society tale Knyazhna Mimi (Princess Mimi, 1834) where a “serious” salon’s discussion (here about social issues) is interrupted by eager card players impatient to resume the game. 210 “Я вам про себя скажу, – сказал Леандр, вмешиваясь в разговор, - я начал было писать… Как? Прервал с удивлением речь Леандра человек большого тона, – и вы автор! Я, право, бы так не думал! – Леандр признался ему в своей слабости. – Поверьте мне, сказал человек большого тона, пожимая с улыбкой руку Леандра, если хотите быть счастливы и спокойны, разбейте чернильницу и сожгите свои бумаги. – Сказав утешительные слова, он поклонился Леандру весьма учтиво и ушел, оставя его в крайнем изумлении”. (Leandr: 33-34). 208

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– the privileged sphere of literary creation (as well as of intimate interaction) so often eulogised by Karamzin’s followers. In constructing his criticism of polite society’s set of values and codes of behaviour, Brusilov’s novel anticipates some of the chronotopes and character types – if not the biting tones – of the society tale of the 1820s and 1830s (starting from Volkonskaia’s Laure (1819)) and of Griboedov’s comedy Woe from Wit.211 Particularly interesting on this score is the characterization of Leandr as a “superfluous man”, whose sincerity and honesty cannot but collide with the frivolity and moral hypocrisy of high society. In contrast to the later critiques of salon society, Brusilov describes the conflict between the hero and the social milieu with light humour rather than bitter denunciation. Leandr, unlike Chatskii for example, leaves Moscow and its salons in silence, without uttering his dissent. Frustrated in his attempts to acquire literary fame by his pen, or become part of the city’s literary set, Leandr gives up his elusive dreams and goes back to his provincial estate. At the end of his “adventures”, we find the hero transformed into a judicious landowner: Having erased from his head the hollow inclination towards writing, Leandr began to occupy himself with agriculture. In a short time he had completely recovered his mind. […] Then he realised from his experience the truth of his venerable greatgrandfather’s words, that a good farmer is much more beneficial to society than a bad 212 Author!

The passage above reiterates with tongue-in-cheek tones the idea that taking up the pen must be considered an insane decision given the nearly prohibitive conditions (such as the excessive harshness of critics213 and lack of a knowledgeable reading public) experienced by Russian authors. The new existence described in the bucolic ending provides further evidence of the links between Bednyi Leandr and Voltaire’s Candide on a number of levels, starting from the two heroes’ 211

7.

On the genre of the society tale see Shepard 1981: 111-162 and Cornwell 1998: 1-

212 “Выбив из головы пустую склонность к авторству, Леандр стал заниматься земледелием. За короткое время он полностью вылечил свою голову. […]Тогда на опыте он удостоверился в истине слов своего прадедушки, что хороший земледелец гораздо больше приносит пользы отечеству нежели плохой автор!” (Leandr: 38). Italics in the original. 213 On Brusilov’s views on literary criticism see chapter II.2.

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worldview. Personal experience and the realization of their mentors’ failings leads both Candide and Leandr to take a close look at reality and to forsake their initial faith in an artificial system of beliefs, a move reflecting the typical scepticism of the homme de lumières towards any philosophical straitjacket. In contrast to their mentors, who remain true to their system of ideas, the heroes react to their teaching, becoming – quite literally – down-to-earth individuals. Candide and his small entourage of friends, after having gone through a string of breathtaking adventures, finally find in the cultivation of a small patch of land a fulfilling way of life. Candide then interrupts the philosophical lucubration of Pangloss, wisely remarking: “Cela est bien dit, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin” – a motto that brings the story to a close.214 Leandr, finally withdrawn to his country estate and estranged from his mentor, comes to a conclusion, as we have seen, closely resembling that of Candide.215 The conclusion of Bednyi Leandr brings to the surface the underlying conflict between the ideal of self-determination and the demands of life in society limiting writers of noble birth to the role of gentlemen, a state of affairs that kept haunting writers of the Pushkin generation. From a literary perspective, the aspirations of the young hero towards self-improvement reflect a dynamic typical of the Bildungsroman genre,216 and more particularly, of Russian sentimentalism. In the specific of Brusilov’s novel, this conflict is resolved by Leandr’s retirement to his country estate, away from the irksome requirements of social life. In this respect this novel reflects a wider trend emerging in mid-eighteenth-century elite culture which saw the withdrawal into the quiet familiar landscape of the estate as an increasingly attractive prospect for the Russian nobleman, serving as both an ideal and a practical alternative to the increasingly impersonal and abstract public realm.217 Sentimentalism came to voice these concerns, in so far as it expressed the sense of unease widely felt by the Russian gentry whilst giving literary shape to the topical antithesis

214

François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Candide in Voltaire 1966: 259. Akutin reports that early on in his literary career (presumably in his Trifles of 1795) Brusilov translated Voltaire’s work and held the French philosopher in great esteem throughout his life (Akutin 1973: 106). See also Meilakh 1973: 72; Kochetkova 1994: 72. 216 See Moretti: 1987: 15. Martin Swales argues that a psychological requirement of the Bildungsroman’s hero is his struggle against a series of stifling social, institutional and mental pressures (Swales 1978: 34-35). See also Shaffner 1984 and Hardin 1991. 217 See Roosevelt 1995: 291 and passim; Newlin 2001: 5 and passim. 215

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between the corrupted and corrupting urban space and the pastoral idyll offered by the countryside. The uneasy relation between these two chronotopes in the literature of sentimentalism218 is embraced whole-heartedly by Leandr’s choice of a “natural life” alone in his country estate and far from the fatuous clamour of the city, a choice that leaves no room for compromise between the two spheres. In stark contrast to the disillusionment with the idyllic quality of life in the Russian countryside expressed at the time by authors such as Radishchev and fon Ferel’ts, Brusilov’s work suggests that self-realisation and inner harmony are only possible away from societal interaction.219 Bednyi Leandr shares with the apprenticeship novel an additional feature – the fundamental role granted to the narrator in the depiction of the hero’s existential course. Leandr’s literary ambitions and gradual disillusionment are depicted through the moralising-ironic voice of the intrusive narrator whose interpolated comments frequently break the storyline. Throughout the novel this external viewpoint exposes Leandr’s false turns and comments upon them (a typical remark being: “How wrong Leandr was to think that!”).220 Such mocking interpolations cease only at the very end, once Leandr is “converted” to the narrator’s viewpoint, and the hero’s and the narrator’s values finally overlap. In this way the moral perspective expressed throughout the work by the didactic-ironic voice of the narrator is not only confirmed by the hero’s life experiences, but is finally legitimised by Leandr’s eventual adhesion to this set of values. Yet the humorous observations and digressions uttered by the intrusive narrator go beyond moralising. If in the serious sentimental 218

In his article “Mysli ob uedinenii” (Thoughts on Solitude, 1803), for example, Karamzin advocates solitude in the countryside as a way out from the maliciousness of society. This is, however, proposed as only a temporary remedy for “man is not meant for a perpetual solitude, and cannot recreate himself”. (“Mysli ob uedinenii” in Karamzin 1848: III/533-537 (535)). On the ambivalent view Russian sentimental authors held on polite society and on the ideals of privacy and solitude see chapter I.4. 219 The antithesis between the wholesome life-style in the country versus the insidious immorality of city life underlies a number of Brusilov’s works. In Istoriia bednoi Marii (The Story of Poor Maria, 1805) natural solitude is the favourite environment of the heroine, and her chosen refuge after the tragic death of her lover (see Brusilov 1979a). In his last published literary work Legkoverie i khitrost’ (Naivety and Deceitfulness, 1806) the country girl Emiliia embodies the values of genuine kindness and honesty sought by the romantic Erast. Their marriage is however threatened by the socialiser Edmon, whose mundane intrigues eventually prove ineffective against Emiliia’s unshaken sentimental ethics (see Brusilov 1979b). 220 “Как Леандр ошибался, когда так думал!” (Leandr: 20)

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tale the emotional “response” of the narrator to the sorrowful events recounted has its main role in prompting a similar emotional reaction in the sensitive reader, in the ironic-sentimental tale the reader’s involvement is achieved through a wider spectrum of narrative modes and narratorial functions. The main obstacles (societal, institutional, or psychological) which Leandr must overcome in his quest for selffulfillment provide a series of targets for the narrator’s irony, starting from the salon milieu as the gullible hero experiences it. Comic efficacy is achieved in these sections through the two well-known devices of “verbal irony” arising from the narrator’s commentary and “situational irony”.221 The moralising asides by the “superior” narrator set in contrast with Leandr’s naive point of view are effective in creating humorous effects, as with the hero’s initial response to the bombastic teachings of the “Doktor Ekhatologii” [sic] where “Leandr listened attentively […], even trying to learn some of it by heart, simple-mindedly supposing that such a learned man had to be able to write well”.222 The description of the rather prosaic reality of the Muscovite beau monde, an environment regulated by idiosyncratic codes of behaviour and empty occupations, gives rise to comic effects. Ironic distortion clearly plays a fundamental part in the description of this environment, and yet the picture of salon life at the beginning of the century provided by the novel is, as with the best comedies, believably realistic.223 Although of primary importance, gentry society is not the main target of Brusilov’s work as, for example, had been the case with Izmailov’s Evgenii and Ostolopov’s Evgeniia, or Modern Education. As we have seen, Brusilov engages with a light-hearted critique of the major literary “schools” of eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Russia. In addition to the formalisations of neoclassical aesthetics and some of the topoi of sentimental literature, the narrator also directs his ironic darts against the eighteenth-century popular novel, a tradition which certainly exerted an influence on early nineteenth-century authors of humorous fiction, Brusilov included. In the eighteenth century authors such as Mikhail Chulkov and Matvei 221

This terminology is borrowed from Muecke, who identifies “verbal irony”, somewhat tautologically, as “the irony of an ironist being ironical”, whilst “situational irony” is defined as “a state of affairs or an event seen as ironical” (Muecke 1978: 49). 222 “Леандр внимательно слушал их, старался даже некоторые места запомнить наизусть, полагая по своему простодушию, что такой ученый человек должен уже писать хорошо”. (Leandr: 11). 223 On the relationship between wit and satirical modes see Jefferson 1992: 20 and L. Milne, “Satire” in Jones and Feuer Miller 1998: 86-103.

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Komarov created “unsophisticated” forms of burlesque and farce drawing from a rich literary subculture, a combination of folklore, pulp fiction, translated lowbrow literature and the novel itself. This tradition of comic-picaresque fiction diverged in style, topic and target audience from the official literature of classicism and serious sentimentalism, trends that were often openly ridiculed within these works.224 Although occasionally sharing narrative devices,225 these two main trends of Russian fiction – sentimentalism and comic-picaresque – continued to be widely perceived as antagonistic in the early nineteenth century. The comic-picaresque line of prose, later to be revived by Gogol, was pursued during the reign of Alexander I by writers such as Aleksandr Izmailov, Vasilii Narezhnyi and Andrei Kropotov. Authors of sentimental fiction, although aware of this tradition and possibly marginally influenced by it, felt the need to distance themselves from the eighteenth-century novel, as evidenced by frequent critical remarks appearing at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the Introduction to Bednyi Leandr Brusilov thus warns the perspective reader: Do not presume however that by using the word “adventures” mentioned in the beginning I meant that the following ten chapters will contain anything extraordinary or supernatural, or anything resembling a Novel. In this work there are no shipwrecks, no tempests, no desert islands, and no savages who would cook human beings on a spit. […] All the events narrated here are entirely ordinary. For lovers of 226 the extraordinary I advise reading The Mysteries of Udolpho or Bova Korolevich.

Brusilov’s ironic treatment of popular eighteenth century narratives is in line with the ideal of aesthetic refinement hailed by sentimentalists. Yet his adherence to sentimentalism doesn’t prevent him from criticising it, for self-parody and Sternian devices 224

Gasperetti 1998: iii. Ironic digressions of a self-conscious narrator are widely used in Chulkov’s work. As an example of this technique see the opening of his novel of 1768, Skazka o rozhdenii taftianoi mushki (The Tale of the Origin of the Taffeta Beauty Spot). See Chulkov 1992b: 58-59. 226 “Не думайте, однако ж, что, употребив в начале слово приключения, я имел в виду, что в следующих десяти главах будет заключаться что-нибудь чрезвычайное или чрезестественное, или что-либо похожее на роман. Здесь нет ни кораблекрушений, ни бурь, ни необитаемых островов, ни диких, которые бы жарили людей на вертеле. [...] Все происшествия здесь весьма обыкновенны, любителям чрезвычайностей советую читать Удольфские таинства или Бову Королевича”. (Leandr: 2). 225

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represented the narrative tools to question the traditional rules and conventions of serious sentimental fiction in particular, and literary creation in general. Hence Brusilov’s complex thread of ironic and self-parodic topics and ironic devices that allow him to expand the thematic and stylistic compass of the text’s referentiality to an extent which was unparalleled by any of his Russian predecessors, including Karamzin. In particular he redresses the traditional perception of the author’s and reader’s position, challenges the traditional role of omniscient narrator vis-à-vis the reader as passive recipient of a “sealed”, one-way literary discourse. Lengthy digressions from the main plot line – a valuable device of both self-irony and reader “displacement” borrowed from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy – have the important function of raising the readers’ awareness of the mechanisms of narration and of their own activity in progress. Chapter IV, for example, opens with Leandr daydreaming of becoming a well-known and respected author. Such a narrative line is however swiftly by-passed by a long tongue-in-cheek digression having no apparent connection with the plot: How happy he was while nurturing these dreams! Besides, sleeping is able to make us happy just by providing us with dreams! Oh sleep! Sweet sleep! What if you did not exist! As an author has rightly said if there was neither hope nor sleep, life would be miserable. The wretch who has suffered all the cruelties of fate and has lost even hope, once asleep forgets his sorrows and finds consolation from his misfortunes! […] In a word, sleep is one of the main joys of man! However, do not think, dear reader, that I am by any means eager to go to sleep! […] I return to the 227 story of Leandr.

The climax in readers’ involvement is reached at the very end of the work when they are invited to add their own sentimental finale, in case they do not feel satisfied with the one provided: “I ask you one thing only. If you do not find enough sentimentality in this little book, I leave at the end one or two blank pages; write on them, fill them

“Как он бывал тогда счастлив этими мечтами! Но одними ли мечтами сон делает нас счастливыми! О сон! Милый сон! Что если бы тебя не было! Правду сказал один автор, что если бы не было сна и надежды, жизнь была бы не так приятна для человека. – Несчастный, претерпевший все лишения судьбы, потерявший даже надежду, во сне забывает свои горести и находит утешение в своих злоключениях! […] Словом, сон – это одно из первых блаженств человека! Однако ж не думай, любезный читатель, что я любитель сна”. (Ibid.: 14-16). 227

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with whatever you like”.228 The narrator goes so far as to suggest that the reader should throw away the book and re-write it altogether: “If after everything you still do not like this book, if you find in it something superfluous, ... In that case toss it in the fire-place, and write a better book yourself”.229 In the very first pages, the narrator draws attention to the mechanics and techniques of his story-telling through a running commentary on the stylistic and generic choices he makes in the novel. Such ironic digressions fragment the narrative, forcing the reader to reflect early on in the piece on the activity of reading itself, an implicit invitation that is repeated throughout the novel. Thus the fictionalised persona of the reader (narratee) is provided with an “active” role as a purported co-narrator of the novel he or she is in the very process of reading – a device that was extensively employed by sentimental authors. As we have seen, various kinds of deliberate disruptions of the plot – such as ironic asides, digressions, and authorial commentaries – create a metatextual level of both reader’s and narrator’s “participation” in the story. Elizabeth Harries convincingly demonstrates how in Western European sentimental fiction such fragmentation techniques divert part of the reader’s attention from the story itself to the way the work is constructed, thus encouraging the reader’s full imaginative involvement.230 Ironic digressions thus magnify the level of participation of the addressee in the work, an aim that is consistent with the fundamental goal of sentimental literature: the emotional engagement of the reader. In the chapter with the Sternian title “Bez zaglaviia” (“Without Title”), for example, the narrator thus halts the story: “Only in the following chapter will the reader see what the argument was about, if he has not by then already acted on the recommendation I make at the end of the book”.231 Later, following the passage describing discussions about literature which is suddenly discontinued by other characters’ eagerness to resume a card game, the narrator interpolates “Прошу тебя только об одном. Если в этой книге ты найдешь мало Сентиментальности, оставляю в конце книги две чистые страницы, пиши на них, дополняй, что тебе надо”. (Ibid.: 39). Italics in the original. 229 “Если же эта книга тебе не понравится, если ты найдешь в ней что-нибудь лишнее, или… В таком случае брось ее в камин, и напиши книгу лучше этой”. (Ibid.: 39-40). 230 Harries 1994: 98-121. 231 “В чем состоял этот спор, читатель узнает в следующей главе, если до этих пор он еще не сделал с моей книгой то, что я советую ему сделать в конце книги”. (Leandr: 27-28). 228

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remarks on the writing act, alerting the reader to the narrative devices at work: “These words interrupted the speech of the Man of letters at its high point and thus spared the reader from boredom, and myself from unnecessary effort”.232 In line with late-eighteenth-century humorous sentimental fiction, Brusilov employs irony as a subtle and pervading narrative device directed towards the limitations of sentimentalism itself.233 Moreover, the use of irony against serious sentimental modes that are employed elsewhere by Brusilov himself activates an inter-textual dialogue between his own serious and humorous works. In the opening of Bednyi Leandr, for example, the humorous voice of the narrator engages in a synchronic reflection on the act of writing in the Sternian manner. Using a “stream of consciousness” technique of sorts the narrator utters: I want to write the adventures of Leandr, but where shall I begin? I do not know. To write for a public audience is not a laughing matter! Yet this does not trouble me. I will systematically write everything that has happened, I will write directly, plainly without any Logical demonstration, without Rhetorical figures, 234 whatever comes to mind.

Such exposure of the narrative device is further pursued in the following paragraphs where the narrator highlights with feigned modesty the positive aspects of the artistic method chosen for Bednyi Leandr.235 “Это слово перебило в самом лучшем месте речь Литератора и тем самым избавило читателя от скуки, а меня от лишнего труда”. (Ibid.: 33). 233 The epithet “bednyi” attached to the hero’s name in the title itself (which is repeated throughout the novel) can be interpreted as a synchronic parody of serious sentimental tales of the Poor Liza type. Moreover, “internal” references to Brusilov’s own sentimental tale Poor Masha, a re-make of Karamzin’s celebrated story, supply additional self-parodic overtones. 234 “Хочу описать приключения Леандра, но с чего начать? Не знаю. – Писать для публики не шутка! Однако ж это меня не затруднит. Буду писать по порядку как что было, напишу прямо, просто, без всяких логических доказательств, без риторических фигур – что прийдет в голову”. (Leandr: 1). Cross points out that Karamzin exploited such Sternian devices (although to a lesser degree than Brusilov) in his Rytsar’ nashego vremeni. In this work the self-conscious narrator frequently breaks the narrative to reveal the artificiality of a given literary technique in a tonguein-cheek manner (Cross 1971: 124). For a later example of this literary technique see Sanglen 1825: 3-4. 235 Cf. the modest and self-ironic manner of the narrator in the opening passage of Bednyi Leandr with Brusilov’s Memoirs: “Восопминания мои [...] просто воспоминания о прошлом. Я рассказываю пусть не красиво, но точно, так, как я видел и понимал вещи [...]. Не ища писательской славы, я и тем буду доволен, 232

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Ironic reflections and the stylistic devices of serious sentimentalism climax in the last pages of the novel where, while inviting the dissatisfied reader to add by his own pen a more poignant sentimental ending to the story, the narrator takes the opportunity to list humorously the clichés of the trend: Provide a picturesque description of the topoi which fill all Novels but not my story, such as: a pleasant valley, a small brook in a beautiful forest murmuring among the pebbles at sunset. Tell how the sweet sound of the pipe played by a happy shepherd, reverberating among the steep mountains surrounding the valley, resounded vividly in your heart, without forgetting the bleating of the lambs, the weeping of a fiddle. In a word mix in these pages more sentimentalism which would make a dear 236 and beautiful woman shed a tender tear while reading your appendix…

The ironic reflection on sentimental devices in Bednyi Leandr, as in humorous sentimentalism as a whole, carries self-referential connotations, enforcing a meta-textual (sometimes even inter-textual) critique of the author’s own literary production. In Brusilov’s case the topoi of the sentimental idyll parodied in the ending of Bednyi Leandr were employed without the slightest hint of irony in previous as well as subsequent works, such as The Old Man, or the Reversals of Fortune, The Story of Poor Mariia, and Naivety and Deceitfulness. From this perspective Brusilov’s eclectic and undeservedly forgotten production, alternating between “serious”, “hyper-sentimental” style and ironic modes, encapsulates the developments of the era, providing a fitting example of the use – and simultaneous questioning – of a variety of features within sentimental literature as a whole. We have demonstrated that Bednyi Leandr is constructed on concentric layers of irony, each targeting a different social or literary если эти записки освежат память о прошлом или доставят какое-нибудь удовольствие, или минуту сладкого сна”. (Vospominaniia: 46). According to Stepan Zhikharev (1788-1860), an acquaintance of the author, such an unpretentious attitude towards his own work reflects a distinct trait of Brusilov’s personality (Zhikharev 1934: II/175). 236 “Опиши живописным пером то, чем все романы наполнены и чего нет в моей повести, то есть: приятную долину, ручеек, журчащий по камешкам среди прекрасного леса, заходящее солнце. Скажи, как милый звук счастливого пастушка, играющего на свирели, отражаемый крутыми горами, ограждающими эту долину, живо отдавался в твоем сердце, не забудь блеяние овечек, лаяние какой-нибудь фидельки, словом, добавь на этих страницах побольше сентиментальности, заставь милую красавицу уронить нежную слезу, читая твое дополнение …”. (Leandr: 40). Italics in the original. Compare with Galinkovskii’s criticism of sentimental excesses in his Introduction to Krasoty Sterna (Galinkovskii 1801: iv-v).

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objective. The most obvious target of humour in the novel is the hollowness of Moscow’s salon life, which the author effectively criticises while avoiding the excesses of didacticism widespread amongst contemporary authors. More subtly, following Sterne’s example, Brusilov employs ironic devices to question traditional attitudes towards the enterprise of reading and writing itself. Various types of humorous appeals are directed to the reader, inviting him or her to intervene in the narrative. Such addresses are aimed at eliciting the reader’s emotional involvement and, more generally, at stimulating his or her active response to the literary process. Secondly Sternian devices, such as the humorous “laying bare” of narrative techniques employed and the abrupt, and apparently haphazard, departures from the main narrative line, prompt the reader to reflect on the stylistic devices underpinning prose as a whole and serious sentimental fiction in particular. Finally, attention has been drawn to deep-seated use of irony in Bednyi Leandr and the humorous treatment of stylistic and thematic clichés of serious sentimentalism elsewhere employed by Brusilov. Through irony and self-irony, Brusilov mocks the lachrymose excesses of the trend, and in so doing demonstrates that a wider range of stylistic and thematic components were firmly on the agenda of contemporary sentimental writers. Bednyi Leandr’s “internal” irony of serious sentimental modes thus provides an indirect but most effective response to the frequent accusation of unoriginality made against early nineteenth-century sentimentalism. Brusilov’s novel Bednyi Leandr demonstrates that in Alexander’s Russia, as in late eighteenth-century Europe, irony and self-irony regenerated Russian sentimentalism “from within”, injecting new life into a literary trend too often perceived as formulaic, imitative and ultimately depleted.237

IV.6 The sentimental journey In the wake of the cultural phenomenon of the Grand tour to southern Europe and the concurrent success of literary travelogues and travel accounts in eighteenth-century Europe, fictional or semifictional journeys continued to be an important presence in the 237

On the issue of parody as a mechanism of literary development, see Tynyanov, “Dostoevskii i Gogol (k teorii parodii)” in Tynianov 1967: 412-453.

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Russian book market in the age of Alexander. Our overview of the genre begins with a brief excursus on the cultural and literary context of the travelogue as it emerged in the eighteenth century, followed by a more detailed investigation of the genre at the beginning of the new century.

IV.6.1 Russia and the Grand tour From the late sixteenth century onwards travel to Italy was regarded in England and France as an important part of the education and life experience of refined noblemen.238 English and French tourists were joined in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by a comparatively large number of aristocrats and artists who travelled to Southern Europe from Holland, the German states, Sweden and Russia. Although the travellers of each country had their favourite routes,239 Italy was generally regarded as an indispensable, and pleasant stage of their instruction, at least until the ideal image of Europe constructed on a North-South axis lost its relevance. The second half of the century witnessed a re-orientation of the mental map of the continent, as a consequence of which Italy began to lose its cultural prominence, while France, England and Holland – the financial centres of Europe – were held to be the core of the Western world. In the mean time, the Italian peninsula, and especially Rome, the “eternal city”, was perceived and described by these cosmopolitan tourists as the epicentre of Western civilisation and time spent there a necessary element in the upbringing of young European gentlemen. The affirmation of a common cultural heritage and the enthusiasm for antiquities united educated men (and increasingly women) of every European country in what may be defined as a supra-national itinerant community.240 Experience of the Grand tour, real or fictitious, served 238

The journey with educative or explorative objectives began in the Middle Ages. Until the fifteenth century, however, the instructive journey to Italy was undertaken mainly by pilgrims, concentrating on the religious monuments and reliquaries, or by merchants, explorers and adventurers. The fashion for the cultural journey was a phenomenon connected with the cosmopolitan attitude toward knowledge characteristic of the age of the Enlightenment. See De Seta 1982: 130-135. 239 English noblemen, for example, as a rule travelled to Paris, central and southern France and to northern and central Italy, while French tourists tended to visit England, Germany or Italy. See Brizzi 1976: 204. 240 De Seta 1982: 17-25.

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as the main thematic frame for the eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury popular genres of the travel account and novel. The participation of Russia in that cultural and literary phenomenon is witnessed by the increasing popularity of travel books, both original and translated, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.241 Russia’s fascination with Italy and its culture dates back to the age of Peter the Great. The policy of opening towards Europe and the affirmation of a secular culture in Russia spurred a small number of noblemen, commoners and artists, in particular painters, to undertake “educational” journeys to Western Europe, Italy included.242 Peter himself promoted numerous expeditions to Europe for young Russians (in 1697 alone, the tsar sent more than one hundred young nobles to Italy, Holland and England)243 to gain new technical (especially nautical) and artistic expertise for Russia, a trend which was followed four decades later by Catherine. The travel accounts penned by Petrine writers featured informative content and matter-of-fact style in tune with the pragmatic character of the age.244 In the course of the eighteenth century, however, alongside these “practical” guides appeared personal diaries245 and novels of adventure describing real or fictitious journeys. This latter genre, with its complex plots and extraordinary

241

Sipovskii 1899: 528-529. Literature of travel in pre-Petrine Russia consists mainly of Palomicheskaia literatura (the name referring to the palm carried by the pilgrims as a symbol of peace). Inaugurated by the monk Daniil’s account of his journey of 1106-1107, medieval travel literature generally depicted journeys to the holy land. More rare were the travel accounts of Russian merchants, a late-fifteenth-century example of which is Afanasii Nikitin’s journey to Persia and India (Khozhdeniie za tri moria). Picchio 1968: 58-59 and 174-178. Leisured travel as part of the gentry’s education emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century, especially after 1762, the year in which Peter III emancipated Russian nobility from compulsory service to the state. On travel writing in eighteenth-century Russia see Dickinson 2001. 242 See Goldovskii 1993: 19-27. 243 Russian travellers were initially directed to Italian universities, later to Northern European institutions (Gitermann 1980: 397-398). The number of nobles sent abroad during the reign of Peter reached its peak in the year 1696 when thirty-nine noblemen (compared to the twenty-two sent to England and Holland) were dispatched to Italy. See Venturi 1973: 1001; Cross estimates that one hundred and fifty Russians were sent to England during the reign of Peter I (Cross 1980: 148 and passim). 244 See Prokof’ev 1974: 130-131. 245 See, for example, Petr Tolstoi’s journal of his tour through Europe in the years 1697-1699 and the travel diary of Boris Kurakin whom Peter had sent to the West to learn nautical sciences. Pypin 1902-1903: III (1902)/ 224-238 and 248-258 (Repr. C. Van Schooneveld (ed.), The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1968); Dickinson 2001: 1-29.

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events against a backdrop of foreign ways of life, was met by popular acclaim in Russia at the turn of the eighteenth century.246 During the second half of the eighteenth century an evergrowing number of Russian noblemen followed their Western contemporaries along the path of the Grand tour, a trend given impetus by Peter III’s ukaz of 1762 relieving nobles from compulsory state service. This new-found freedom allowed the most affluent among them to travel abroad, establishing the fashion of the journey for leisure and educational purposes as a must for the higher echelons of the Russian nobility. This social trend, which was already noticeable in Elisabeth’s times, gained further impetus in the age of Catherine the Great,247 as part of the wider phenomenon of the cultural rapprochement between Russia and the West tenaciously promoted by the “Enlightened tsarina”. By purchasing famous collections of foreign paintings (for example Sir Robert Walpole’s) and private libraries (Diderot’s, Voltaire’s) and entering into correspondence with some of the greatest minds in Europe, she made educated Russians feel, for the first time in its history, like active players in a broader intellectual milieu. The cultural links between educated Russians and their Western counterparts were further enhanced by political events such as the influx to Russia of a sizeable segment of the French nobility under threat after Robespierre’s coup of 1792, and more generally by Russia’s growing importance on the European chessboard. The ever-tighter cultural and political relations between Russia and the rest of Europe created a sense of proximity of which the Grand tour represents one of the most obvious cultural off-shoots. While Western Europe was clearly a key reference point in the consciousness of eighteenth-century Russians, the reverse is certainly not true, although it must be noted that Northern Europe was rapidly securing a place in the mental map of the Western elites. In the last decades of the century new countries were included in the Grand tour: Spain, Greece, Scandinavia, Poland and Russia, although the Northern route was less often used due to practical difficulties involved in travelling in both countries. All the same, in the reign of Catherine, Russia – together with Scandinavia – started to be a tempting destination for the more enterprising tourists.248 Following a period of stagnation in Paul I’s short reign, the increased mobility of Russian wealthy gentry made the educational 246

Kucherov 1941: 114. Cf. Cross 1980: 231. 248 See Wolff 1994. 247

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tour of Western Europe a cultural requirement for the accomplished young noblemen of Alexander’s time. The fictionalised accounts of these journeys at a cultural level stem from Russia’s fascination with Western classical culture. At a literary level this body of works reflect the influence of foreign patterns of travel-writing pre-existing Russian’s first-hand experience of the Grand tour. As Sara Dickinson remarked: The production of Russian travel writing depended upon the supranational context as much as upon specific Western European texts: notions of literary travel writing became available in this sphere, and when Russian examples of the genre 249 came into being, they were conceived as part of the internationally defined genre.

IV.6.2 Travel accounts and sentimental travelogues The genre of travel fiction came to the forefront of European literature in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the vogue for the Grand tour was at its apogee, and rapidly became one of the most popular and widespread narrative forms in eighteenthcentury Western literature, in particular French and English. From a generic viewpoint the eighteenth-century fictional account of a journey had its antecedents in the non-fictional forms of the travel account and the guidebook. Such accounts were initially focused on erudition and edification, or were simply intended to provide practical information to the reader. During the Renaissance authors of travel accounts mostly aimed at instructing the reader through the (supposedly) objective and therefore “reliable” information given in their writings. The authenticity of these accounts was often maintained by the employment of narrative modes usually associated with a “true” relation of events experienced by the narrator, such as the first-person forms of the epistle and diary. Although the author’s personal observation of the customs and cultures of the country visited was certainly part of the travel account, until the mideighteenth century the main purpose of the genre was to provide the reader with a reliable account, a feature that explains the persona of the narrator as an impartial observer.250 Alongside the “real experience” of the traveller, a wealth of additional information on the history, customs, places of artistic interest and political system of the 249 250

Dickinson 2001: 10. Hunter 1990: 351 and 354.

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country visited was often borrowed extensively from secondary sources, giving the genre its miscellaneous character.251 As the century grew old and sentimentalism affirmed itself, the persona of the traveller, his subjective experience and his recollections came to play an important role, sometime eclipsing the factual descriptions which had previously been the raison d’être of the genre. This phenomenon is clearly detectable in many travel accounts published during the reign of Catherine, a time when the popularity of the Grand tour among Russian noblemen and women was echoed in the proliferation of travel diaries and collections of letters, many of which, incidentally, remain unpublished to this day. Although not designed as fictional travelogues, literary devices were obviously exploited in the best known specimens before Karamzin tried his hand at the genre: A. Kurakin’s Journal de mon voyage (1770-1772),252 E. Dashkova’s Le petit tour dans les Highlands (1777), and Fonvizin’s Pis’ma iz Frantsii (Letters from France, 1777-1778). This body of works provided a precedent for eclectic inclusions of different styles and formats (e.g. the letter and diary) which were going to shape the fictional travelogue of the sentimental type emerging in the 1790s. As in many other cases, Russian authors of travel writing continued to look at their Western counterparts, especially since works such as Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, Rousseau’s Les confessions (1782) and Charles Dupaty’s Lettres sur l’Italie en 1785 had made a success of the sentimental novel of travel in contemporary Europe. By the time Karamzin did the same in his country, Russian authors could count on a range of devices to endow their real or alleged experience as travellers with a distinctly intimate tone. Since the projection of the narrator’s feelings and subjective experience became the key concern of travelogues of the sentimental type, the purported objectivity characterising travel accounts lost its urgency in what had become a highly subjective – and highly stylized – version of the travel account. There were, of course, points of 251

Ibid.: 54-57. In an attempt toward the classification of the literature of travel, PineCoffin divided the genre into two classes, those written for tourists (i.e. memoirs), and those written by them (i.e. letters and journals). The scholar, however, immediately amends the definition, adding that “the distinction is not always valid because books of memoirs are often so detailed that other travellers use them as guidebooks”. PineCoffin 1974: 55; see also Petrunina 1981: 52. 252 The full title being Souvenirs de voyage en Hollande et en Angleterre par le Prince Alexandre Kourakine à sa sortie de l’Université de Leyde durant les années 17001772.

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contact, especially in the “packaging” of these works; the title and sub-title of many sentimental travelogues, for example, calculatedly invited association with their more factual antecedents, as in the case of Fiodor Lubianovskii examined later in this section. Structurally, too the hybrid character was put to good use by sentimental authors who cashed in on the peculiar interplay between a detailed depiction of setting, history and customs and the traveller’s own experience of them (in P. Adams’ expression, “realism” and “romance”), i.e. between objective and subjective reporting which, in different proportions, had shaped the literature of travel from its outset.253 Against the backdrop of this tradition, however, sentimental authors set out specific literary formulae, codified techniques and recurring images. This had the effect of dramatically narrowing the options made available by the protean and stylistically inclusive format of the literature of travel. As Dickinson points out, writers such as Sterne and Dupaty acted as foreign models: Russian writers adopted specific formal and thematic elements, including not only turns of phrase and types of subject matter, but also particular points of view and even narratorial poses, all features that sought to connect the figure of the traveller 254 with Western tradition.

Travel fiction in the age of sentimentalism revolves around the tale of the highly individualised traveller-narrator and his (more rarely her) subjective experience in foreign lands, or in remote regions of the author’s own country. Following the example of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, the actual journey (which was sometimes an imaginary one) functioned as a quest for motifs and events able to stir the imagination of the narrator and, through his poignant account of them, to raise the reader’s emotional response. The focus on subjective experience and the attention to detail were recognised early in the day as distinctive features of Sterne’s Journey and, by extension, of the sentimental journey as a whole. In his short essay 253

Adams 1983: 108. To some extent this feature is inherent in any account based on the cultural experience of the “other”, the “foreign”, since, as Augustinos pointed out, “travelling is essentially an experience of cultural encounters, the travelogue is a discourse of representations. As such, it has a two-fold significance: it imparts information about the place visited and, at the same time, it is a mirror reflecting the reasoning process, values and perpetual framework that representatives of one culture use consciously or unconsciously to understand another culture”. (Augustinos 1994: ix-x). 254 Dickinson 2001: 3, 4.

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entitled “Stern” (“Sterne”) Mikhail Murav’ev, for example, thus describes the author’s unrivalled technique: “His intention was not to describe the town, government, agriculture, trade or the arts; he wanted to scrutinise the people. […] A single word, a silence, a glance or a feeling guarded by the heart could serve as material for a whole chapter of his book”.255 Such features of Sterne’s travelogue were adopted (and adapted to their specific aesthetic and intellectual requirements) in Russia from the early 1790s onwards by Karamzin and Radishchev. The pivotal role of the traveller-narrator and the emphasis placed on his subjective experience, described in minute detail, provide sentimental travelogues with their distinctive flavour. The autobiographical mode and the introspective quality of the narrative were central to the genre, independently of the format chosen – be it the epistolary novel of Dupaty and Karamzin or the journal intime of Sterne, Rousseau and Radishchev, the sentimental journey consisted of a first-person narrative centred on the personality of the traveller.256 In parallel to the generic shift from non-narrative travel account to fictional travelogue sentimentalism engenders a shift of the narrative focus from the external world to the domain of the self. Accordingly, devices that served to enhance the verisimilitude of the descriptions in the travel account authenticated the illusion of “true confession” by the traveller-narrator in sentimental travelogues. In particular, the “intimate” diary and epistle allegedly directed to friends or relatives – a format indeed employed in the first nonnarrative travelogues – provided an ideal narrative edifice for the sentimental journey.257 From a structural viewpoint, sentimental travelogues share the basic pattern common to travel literature as a whole. The formal “В его намерения не входило описывать города, правление, земледелие, торговлю, художества; но он хотел наблюдать людей. […] Одно слово, молчание, взгляд, чувствование, скрытое в сердце, давали материал для целой главы его книги”. M.N. Murav’ev, “Stern” in Murav’ev 1847: II/307-308 (307). 256 Although in the majority of cases the traveller-narrator is introduced as the image of the author in the text, in a few stylised travelogues the author fulfils the narrative function of editor. The travel letters (as in the case of D. Gorikhvostov’s Pis’ma Rossiianina puteshestvovashago po Evrope s 1802 po 1806 goda (1808) and P. L’vov’s Pis’ma Skimnina (1813)) are presented in the prefaces as documents that the author has retrieved and has decided to publish. This stylistic device, widespread in a variety of literary genres, has the function of explicitly stressing and enhancing the supposed veracity of the travelogue. 257 For a review of the role of letter as a “literary fact” at the beginning of the century see Stepanov 1985: 67-86. 255

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similarity between the two is detectable in the circular route covered by the traveller who, after having visited foreign lands, returns to the original location. The round trip paradigm is reflected in a predictable sequence of four basic stages – the departure, the journey, the exploration, and the return to the motherland – each of which can be expanded at will.258 Such a loose canvas in fact provides a “structure of convenience” which the author of travel literature can easily adapt to a variety of narrative styles, textures and purposes.259 In the case of the sentimental travelogue each of these four phases encompasses both factual descriptions of the journey and the emotional experiences and personal reflections of the narrator, interpolated with stories and digressions of various kinds. Emotive overtones are heightened in the initial and final stages of the journey. At the outset the sentimental traveller experiences the departure as a painful detachment from his country and loved ones, and once the passage across the national border is achieved the traveller’s emotional outpourings flow unrestrained. The famous incipit of Karamzin’s Pis’ma directed to his milye druz’ia provided the main model for early nineteenth-century authors of travel novels: “We have separated, separated! My heart is attached to you with all my most tender feelings, yet I am parting from you forever, we shall part!”260 As we shall see, this kind of emotive address eventually became a long lasting cliché of the genre in Russia.261 Similar allocutions expressing the psychological state of the narrator are repeated with varying frequency throughout the narrative, functioning as an

258

Cf. Racault 1986: 89. This sequence, which is an essential requirement in any narrative travel account aiming at a minimal degree of realism, is not strictly necessary in the case of the sentimental travelogue. Although as a rule this kind of novel obeys the scheme illustrated above, the pivotal emphasis placed on the subjectivity of the traveller-narrator can, as in the case of De Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma chambre, bypass any actual description of the journey. 259 Cf. Hunter 1990: 352. 260 “Расстался я с вами, расстался! Сердце мое привязано к вам всеми нежнейшими своими чувствами, а я беспрестанно от вас удаляюсь и буду удаляться!” Karamzin 1984: 5. 261 After Karamzin’s Pis’ma the emotive address to the friends remained for more than three decades a common opening of Russian narrative travelogues. Compare, for example, one of the first passages of Kiukhel’beker’s Puteshestvie through Germany and Italy (1820-1821): “Как описать вам, друзья, чувство, с которым оставил я Россию? Я плакал как ребенок, и эти слезы, которые удержать был не в состоянии, живо заставили меня почувствовать, что я русский и что вне России нет для меня счастья. У вас, мои милые, у вас мое сердце, у вас мое все”. Cf. Kiukhel’beker 1978: 9.

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emotional leitmotif which keeps the narrator-narratee relationship firmly on emotional grounds.262 The impending return home occasions expressions of comparable emotional intensity towards the end of the novel. This time, however, the nostalgic invocation to friends, or, more rarely, to relatives, is turned on its head by the ecstatic anticipation of the imminent reunion with the loved ones in the intimate space of the “clean cottage” (opriatnaia khizhinka): “And you, my dears”, – we read in the closing lines of Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveller – “prepare a clean cottage for me as soon as possible, in which I may freely enjoy the Chinese lanterns of my imagination, be sad in my heart and find consolation with friends!”263 By the early nineteenth century, however, within the highly stylised genre of the sentimental travelogue, new trends branched out. On the one hand a more sophisticated use of sentimental devices brought fictional modes into the non-narrative genre of the travel account, a feature exemplified by Lubianovskii’s work. On the other hand, we find to a higher degree than in other sentimental genres, a proliferation of humorous sentimental travelogues and parodies, two approaches exemplified by Brusilov’s My Journey, or One Day’s Adventures and Pavel Iakovlev’s A Sentimental Journey Along the Nevskii Prospect. This inverse process (stylistic devices shifting from travelogues to travel accounts) and the humorous questioning of the traditional features of the sentimental travelogue signal a more mature phase in the history of the sentimental travelogue. While authors of travel literature had the necessary technical expertise to diversify their creative range, they were also supported by the belief that the broader palette of textual references contained in their work would be grasped and relished by the increasingly competent readership of early nineteenth-century Russia.

262

Hammarberg defines allocutional features as “forms in vocative function [...] used to single out, name, and describe the addressee and to gain and retain his attention”. Cf. Hammarberg 2002a: 299-326. 263 Karamzin 2003: 457. The return to Russia is often accompanied by the expression of patriotic feeling. Cf. for example Galinkovskii’s Sidoniia where the narrator in a letter to his friend Viktor thus describes his feelings in approaching the Russian borders: “Не буду описывать тебе тот первый восторг, с которым причалили мы к родному берегу [...]. Хорошо видеть чужие края, жить под счастливейшим небом; но это все ненадолго. Предпочтение ко всему русскому, к своей материземле, к своим обычаям [...] составили род болезни”. Ia. Galinkovskii 1808: IV/352-353.

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IV.6.3 The parody and the factual in early nineteenth-century Russian travelogues The literature of travel, whether factually-based or openly fictitious, played a leading role share in early nineteenth-century Russia. It represented a large segment of contemporary literature, and one enjoying great visibility. Travel accounts and travelogues were available both in separate editions,264 and in instalments in literary journals some of which were entirely devoted to the publication of this type of literature, as in the case of Zhurnal noveishikh puteshestvii (Journal of the Latest Travels, 1809). This journal, of which only three issues came out, was edited by Shreder and N. Grech and published by Plavil’shchikov in St. Petersburg. A large part of the Zhurnal was devoted to translations of foreign literature of travel (travelogues, letters and accounts – zamechaniia – of geographical discoveries). Due to their fragmented character, novels of travel (and epistolary travelogues in particular) represented, as may be inferred, a particularly suitable genre for periodical publication. Contemporary readers’ appetite for travel literature, on the one hand, and for sentimental fiction on the other, induced an increase in the number of authors exploiting the format of the sentimental travelogue.265 Feodor Lubianovskii, an author whose work is distant from the sentimental tradition, nonetheless admits his debt to contemporary fashion, at least as far as the title of his work is concerned.266 Notwithstanding the seminal role played by sentimental travelogues on the early nineteenth-century literary scene, critical studies have not done justice to the genre. Similarly to the critical reception of early nineteenth-century sentimentalism as a whole, only a small number of investigations (some of which are not even substantiated by an analysis of the actual texts)267 have been devoted 264

The long list of literary travelogues recorded, for example, by Sipovskii (in Sipovskii 1899: 458-539) and Sopikov (Sopikov 1904: 155 and passim) provide a good indication of the popularity enjoyed by the genre in Alexander’s Russia. 265 Cf. Wilson 1973: 82. 266 “Я осмелился так назвать свои письма по той самой причине, по которой в наше время всякий сбор стихов называется поэмой и потому, что, наконец, это вошло в обячай”. F. Lubianovskii, Puteshestvie po Saksonii, Avstrii i Italii v 1800, 1801 i 1802 (Spb., 1805): 5 (hereafter: Puteshestvie). 267 See, for example, Reuel Wilson who dismisses the genre as “dilettantish and derivative” (Wilson 1973: 84) without substantiating his argument by means of a

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to the genre,268 the dominant view still being that post-Karamzinian authors of sentimental travelogues were far less distinguished than their immediate predecessors. One of the aims of this chapter is to demonstrate that the Russian travelogue underwent important developments in the early nineteenth century. On the one hand the genre as a whole attained a better balance between the fictional (sentimental) and factual components; on the other hand early nineteenth-century writers established a strong tradition of humorous travelogues previously unknown to Russia, taking Western milestones in the genre as a starting point. Travelogues by Sterne, DeMaistre and Dupaty were enormously popular in Russia in the early reign of Alexander. The first complete edition of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey appeared in Russia in 1793,269 advertised as a work displaying “tender feelings, delicate and keen sayings, moral and philosophical thoughts based on perfect knowledge of the human heart”.270 The Russian version of Dupaty’s Lettres sur l’Italie en 1785 appeared a few years later, in 1801; De Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma chambre was translated for the first time the following year.271 Alongside this relatively new intake, Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveller (written in 1789-1790,

textual analysis or further critical discussion. Some of the problem lay in the difficulty of retrieving primary sources during most of the twentieth century, until fairly recently a choice of early- nineteenth-century narratives has came out in Russia in Korovin 1990. 268 The most significant exceptions to this rule are the above quoted study by Sipovskii and the short essay by Roboli (Roboli 1985: 44-66). Since the early twentieth century there have been very few works dedicated to the genre after Karamzin. One of the rare studies of Russian narratives of travel which includes the 1800-1825 period is the research conducted by Sara Dickinson in her forthcoming book, Breaking Ground: Travel Writing and Russian National Culture from Peter I to the Era of Pushkin. 269 In early nineteenth-century Russia the fame of Sterne’s Journey remained unsurpassed by any of his other works. This phenomenon is reflected in the frequency with which extracts from his travelogue appeared in periodicals at the turn of the nineteenth-century, both before (excerpts appeared in 1779) and after the first complete translation into Russian of the Sentimental Journey was published in 1793 (the first complete translation of Tristram Shandy is of 1804-7). Levin 1994a: 13. See also Atarova 1988: 79-80. 270 Quoted in Levin 1994a: 13 271 Cf. Kucherov 1941: 112. The literature of travel published in Russia was mostly made of translations (of the 108 titles listed by Sopikov, only a handful are original Russian works). As with other literary genres French and (more rarely) English and German were the main languages of travel literature coming to Russia. See Sopikov 1813: 155 and passim.

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partially published in 1791-1792, until the first complete edition came out in 1801) kept its tremendous popularity intact until well into Alexander’s reign. As Vigel’ recalls in his memoirs, many contemporaries were blown away by Karamzin’s new style: “He invented a new, noble and simple [language], and used it to write his foreign travels and his captivating tales, which astonished Russia so pleasantly with their novelty”.272 Notably, the fame of Karamzin’s Letters spread outside Russian borders, an occurrence indeed rare – if not unique – in the early nineteenth century, providing the first glimpses of the admiration Russian fiction was soon to gain in the West.273 August von Kotzebue, for one, called him “an entertaining writer, known even in Germany by his Letters of a Russian Traveller” and someone with whom he was delighted to discuss “Wieland, Schiller, Herder, and Goethe, and my dear native country, to which he seemed very partial”.274 A number of scholars have remarked upon the hybrid character of Karamzin’s Pis’ma, a work that unites fictional and non-fictional elements in terms of both topic and content.275 Stylistic flexibility is paralleled by the exceptional variety of the material, which included reported discussions, reflections, lyrical outpourings, tales, dramatic scenes, dialogues, conversations, historical anecdotes, theatrical reviews and translations of foreign writers.276 As Gareth Jones remarks, Karamzin’s “show of collecting disparate pieces”, is one of the main examples of the fragmented forms diffused in the late eighteenth century277 whose potential he had already tested in his shorter narratives. Following Western trends, in his Pis’ma the writer had adopted the “open” configuration of the epistolary novel, and in so doing had introduced to Russia what was to become the most popular format for the genre.278 In the preface to his Puteshestvie v Kazan’, Viatku i Orenburg v 1800 godu (Journey to Kazan, Viatka and Orenburg in the year 1800), a sentimental travelogue inspired by Karamzin’s work, M. Nevzorov reveals the rationale behind his choice of the epistolary form: “I decided to write my remarks and “[Карамзин] изобрел новый, благородный и простой [язык], и написал им путешествие свое за границу и пленительные повести, которые своей новизной так приятно удивили Россию”. Vigel’ 1891-1893: I/186. 273 See Toporov 1995: 6. 274 Kotzebue 1802: II/176-177. 275 Cf. Roboli 1985: 49; Anderson 1968: 21-31. 276 Cf. Roboli 1985: 49. 277 Jones 1995: 20. 278 Tynyanov 1970: 111. 272

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notes […] in the form of letters; this mode seems more convenient for the free expression of any kind of thoughts and feelings”.279 The variety of subjects and the freedom with which a number of sentimental authors shifted among them was one of the main targets of Iakovlev’s parodic Chuvstvitel’noe puteshestvie po Nevskomu prospektu (A Sentimental Journey Along the Nevskii Prospect) investigated below. Perhaps more importantly from a sentimental perspective is the intense “exchange” of intimate communications between the narrator and his purported addressee; this is supported by the artifice of a correspondence that, however stylised, keeps up the illusion of an “authentic” sentimental communication.280 Karamzin’s Letters exercised a long-lasting influence on early nineteenth-century writers. Starting from authors such as V. Izmailov, P. Sumarokov, F. Lubianovskii, M. Makarov and Nevzorov, the novel provided the main model for Russian travelogues right into Pushkin’s times.281 As Roboli has observed, though, however strong it was, the influence of Karamzin’s work was not uniform, either qualitatively or quantitatively.282 In many cases Karamzin’s template was not straightforwardly imitated, but served as an inspiring blueprint from which original works were created. A number of early nineteenth-century travelogues (by V. Izmailov, prince Shalikov, P. Iakovlev and especially Lubianovskii) will be examined with the aim of showing both the literary value and narrative variety of the sentimental travelogue. Some of these works have been chosen for their “bare” quality. Because the stylistic and formal devices have not been concealed under a finely woven narrative they offer a vantage point to recover the “narrative grammar” of the genre, i.e. the rules and conventions which have come to be identified with the travelogue in the post-Karamzin period. Moreover, by selecting authors of sentimental travelogues who enjoyed a fleeting moment of glory when they were first published, “Я решил делать замечания и записки [...] в виде писем; такой способ кажется наиболее удобным для свободного выражения всякого рода мыслей и переживаний”. Nevzorov 1803: iii-iv. 280 The actual hiatus existing between the journey as it was experienced by Karamzin and the fictional account of it given in the Letters is investigated in Lotman 1987: 32 and passim. See also Lotman and Uspenskii 1984b: 534-540. Cf. also the pioneering study by Sipovskii who methodically analysed the textual variants of the different editions revised by Karamzin in between 1797 and 1820. Sipovskii 1899: 158-237. 281 See Sipovskii 1899: 358. 282 Roboli 1985: 47. 279

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one is able to get closer to the aesthetics of early- nineteenth-century popular literature.283 As mentioned above, eighteenth-century sentimental travelogues (mainly Karamzin’s Letters, but also, to a lesser degree, works by Sterne, Dupaty and De Maistre) represented the main model for Russian authors during the reign of Alexander. The output of early nineteenth-century writers reflects the different trends of the genre in Europe, ranging from works focusing on the factual account of a journey, to prose presenting a bare minimum of realistic description of places and encounters. At the fictional extreme we may position the “over-sentimental” (and “over-Karamzinian”) travel writers such as Shalikov (Puteshestvie v Malorossiiu, Puteshestvie v Kronshtadt, Journey to Kronshtadt 1805),284 P. L’vov (Pis’ma Skimnina) and V. Izmailov (Puteshestvie v Poludennuiu Rossiiu v 1799 godu). These works, which are pedestrian imitations of Karamzin’s Letters, are oriented towards a formulaic introspection of the traveller. Hence they reject external reality in favour of a projection of the narrator’s imagination and feelings which bears only tenuous links to the journey itself. As Shalikov writes at the beginning of his Puteshestvie v Malorossiiu, “In this Journey there are neither statistics, nor geographical descriptions: they only describe the impressions of a traveller… And not with a fancy brush – No! with a modest pencil!”285 In other words, the travel theme serves the hero and narrator’s show of sensitivity, a feature that incidentally marks an all-time low in realistic descriptions in the history of the travelogue genre. An example of this highly stylised branch of the sentimental travelogue is provided by the journey into provincial Russia by Vladimir Izmailov, Puteshestvie v Poludennuiu Rossiiu v 1799 godu (A Journey to Southern Russia, 1802). The novel was inspired by Karamzin and Dupaty’s travelogues, as indicated by the epigraph of the novel, taken from Letters from Italy: “Some travellers bring statues, medals or

283

Kochetkova 1994: 10. See also Sipovskii 1899: 457. Shalikov is the most open among Karamzin’s epigones in regard to his imitative approach. See Hammarberg 1996a. 285 “В этом Путешествии нет ни статистических, ни географических описаний: в нем описаны только впечатления путешественника… Не блестящей кистью – нет! А скромным карандашом”. Shalikov 1803: 2. 284

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products of nature from foreign countries; I merely return with ideas and feelings”.286 The end result, however, is far removed from its avowed models in terms of artistic accomplishment, for Izmailov turns Karamzin’s lyrical depiction into an excess of sensitivity and preposterous melancholy, while the narrative style lacks a forceful or distinctive character. In Izmailov’s epistolary novel the descriptions of the geography, population and social life of Little Russia (Ukraine) are filtered through the point of view of a sentimental traveller. This traveller shares the fundamental traits, speech-style and lexicon of Karamzin’s sentimental hero to such an extent that Karamzin himself privately lamented Izmailov’s unabashed plagiarism in a letter to Kamenev.287 In this regard, the passages devoted to the highly idealised depiction of women and of the relationships entertained with them by the traveller-narrator are particularly revealing. He repeatedly falls for the exotic beauties encountered during his voyage, describing his attraction in the sublimated tones typical of sentimentalism: “She [the girl] smiled and the smile was for me […] I felt a sweet but wellintentioned stirring, and only permitted myself to steal a look of the most innocent kindness, which could not offend modesty”.288 This encounter is followed by a characteristic passage exalting the ideal of female perfection in which Izmailov follows the existing typology of exotic beauties replicated in many sentimental travelogues. Typically, the narrator sublimates his sexual attraction for the chance encounters behind a eulogy on the charms of innocent women, be it a Russian peasant or an equally unspoilt Ukrainian beauty: “Dear, dear women! Where is there a nook on earth unlit by the sun and unadorned by your charms? Show me a being who would

286 “Некоторые путешественники привозят из чужих стран статуи, медали, произведения природы, я же возвращаюсь с идеями и чувствами”. Shalikov 1803: title page. 287 “В письмах Измайлова я заметил несколько эпизодов, скопированных у меня; но ему простительно, – он по-русски ничего не читал, кроме моих безделок”. (quoted in Kucherov 1941: 115). 288 “Она [девушка] улыбнулась, и улыбка принадлежала мне [...]. Я почувствовал сладкое, но добродетельное движение, и только позволил себе украсть у меня взглядом самую невинную ласку, которая не может оскорбить стыдливость”. Izmailov 1805: I/67-68 (hereafter: Puteshestvie).

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not have chosen to live and breathe by your side? The world is held in your arms, and in your eyes – nature’s sceptre”. 289 Finally, the rapture of idealisation takes a moralising turn and the traveller-narrator feels obliged to provide women with a typical sentimental lesson: “If you want to be worthy of the altar of the world, respect morals, modesty and goodness”.290 According to a mannerism typical of Karamzin’s epigones, authors such as Rousseau291 are frequently mentioned in the narrative via interpolated remarks such as “Ne tak li i Russo i Klei-n-Shtok [sic] liubili naturu?”292 This device serves to enhance the emotive colouring of the scene described “by proxy”, i.e. by referring to celebrated writers as repositories of aesthetic codes, rather than describing the setting or the narrator’s response to it in any detail. The limited representation of the factual elements of the journey is brought to its extreme consequences in Pavel L’vov’s Pis’ma Skimnina (The Letters of Skimnin). In this epistolary travelogue the motif of the journey has the function of a mere “pretext” for the emotive outbursts directed to the narrator’s “milyi drug”. As suggested in the first lines (“pust’ moi pis’ma, serdtsem odnim sostavlennyia, ostanutsia u tebia pamiatnikom...”),293 and reiterated at various points throughout the text, the main objective of what is “Милые, милые женщины! Где тот уголок на земле, который бы не освещался солнцем и не украшался вашими прелестями? Где то существо, которое бы не жило и не дышало вами? В руках ваших держава мира; в глазах – скипетр природы”. Ibid.: 68 290 “Но, если хотите быть достойны алтарей мира, уважайте нравы, скромность и добродетель”. Ibid. A curious comparison between women in Kiev and those in Moscow follows this passage. Whilst the first are characterised by their “prirodnaia prostota” and “nevinnost’ v vzorakh” similar to “Russkaia Klera”, the latter are depicted as Graces endowed with “svetskaia liubeznost’” and “tonkii vkus” who are able to “chuvstvovat’ i liubit’ kak Russova Eloisa” (Puteshestvie: 69). 291 References in the story to characters reading works by foreign authors was a common literary device in late-eighteenth early nineteenth-century sentimental fiction (N. Kochetkova, “Chtenie v zhizni chuvstvitel’nogo’ geroia” in Kochetkova 1994: 156-189). 292 Puteshestvie: 8. 293 L’vov 1813: 3 (hereafter: Pis’ma Skimnina). The emotive addressal to the “dear friend” is a recurrent incipit in virtually all the works of the epigones. Cf., as an additional example, Gorikhvostov’s Pis’ma rossiianina: “С удовольствием пользуюсь этими минутами, чтобы выполнить вместе и приятную обязанность засвидетельствованием уверения в непременности моих чувств к вам. Изъявленное желание при отъезде останется в сердце моем; оно будет сопровождать меня в путешествии [...]. После разлуки с вами приятное воображение о будущем оставляло питать меня до этого места. ” [Gorikhvostov] 1808: 7-8. 289

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supposedly a travel account is actually a lengthy lamentation about the unrequited love of the narrator for an unfeeling Countess. Early on in the piece this feature of the travelogue is thus explained by the narrator: “A man preoccupied with another person does not see or feel what is around him. A strange business! He doesn’t even notice the passing of time! Sometimes I travel 20 versts and it seems that I’ve only gone 3; sometimes I travel 3 and they seem like 20”.294 The type of travelogue examined above complies with the journey-of-the-imagination format, i.e. with literary creation disconnected from the “reality” of the travel, a feature that justifies the accusation of artificiality often made against the trend. The hypersentimental character of such novels of travel was readily identified and parodied at the beginning of the nineteenth century in works such as the anonymous Puteshestvie moego dvoiurodnogo brata v karmany. Vol’nyi perevod (My Cousin’s Journey into His Pockets: A Free Translation, 1803),295 Brusilov’s Moe puteshestviie ili prikliuchenie odnogo dnia, and Iakovlev’s Chuvstvitel’noe puteshestvie po Nevskomu prospektu.296 Improbable travelogues from a pocket, the author’s past, or along Nevskii prospekt provide the pretext for the parodic “laying bare” of the genre’s main topics and devices in an ironic or satirical tone. Among these humorous sentimental travelogues Pavel Iakovlev’s Chuvstvitel’noe puteshestvie deserves particular attention, for the story displays the lively wit of an author 294 “Человек, занятый посторонним предметом, не видит, не чувствует того, что его окружает. Странное дело! – Он даже не замечает течение времени! – Я иногда проеду верст 20, а мне кажется, что я проехал 3; иногда проеду 3, а мне кажется 20”. Pis’ma Skimnina: 20. 295 Although sub-titled “vol’nyi perevod”, Puteshestvie moego dvoiurodnogo brata v karmany can be numbered among the original Russian travelogues due to the number of “indigenous” references such as, for example, to Russian books and to Karamzin’s work (see Roboli 1985: 65, note 24). 296 This work, written in 1818, was at first published in instalments in the journal Blagonamerennyi (1820-1822). It came out in a separate edition in 1825 and again in recent years (Konechnyi 2002: 55-87). However increasingly parodied during the reign of Alexander I, the genre of the sentimental travelogue had its illustrious defenders. For example, A. Izmailov, who was the editor of Blagonamerennyi, and, incidentally, also Iakovlev’s uncle, did not share his nephew’s sharp criticism of the genre. Around the same time as the publication of the Chuvstvitel’noe puteshestvie Izmailov wrote: “Зачем нападать на путешествия, в которых самые мелочные обстоятельства описаны так искусно, что очаровывают читателя? Пусть подобные писатели наполняют листки приятным излиянием своих чувств при виде горы, реки, кустиков [...]. Подобные выписки, изобличая критика в желании привязываться к словам, показывают тем самым его бессилие”. Quoted in Galakhov 1850: 100.

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who made his name by his parodies of Karamzin’s work. Similarly to Brusilov’s humorous-sentimental novel Bednyi Leandr, Iakovlev adopts an ironic Sternian manner to address a number of topics including the state of contemporary literary life. Unlike Brusilov, who targeted literary salons and circles, Iakovlev mocks the “fantastic ignorance” of self-styled “authors”: Here’s the first miracle!... I saw a Poet who writes flowing, pleasant, harmonious poetry… and knows no Grammar! (Genius!) – In his poetry life is described, strong sonorous scenes – he does not charge after ideas… (Ardent fancy!) – […] He speaks of everything, with strange vocabulary. (Uncommon memory!) Here’s the second miracle!... I saw the translator of History of the Tamarskii and he doesn’t know a single word in Tamarskii! (Genius, which does not turn away from 298 any difficulties!).

This is clearly one of Iakovlev’s hobbyhorses, ridden again in a later sentimental parody, the story Neschastiia ot slez i vzdokhov (Misfortune from Tears and Sighs, 1824-1825). The life experiences of the main character, Erast Liodorovich Chertopolokhov, result in a hilarious exposé of the failings of sentimentalism, as one can sample in the following passage: I am very glad to see a new Sterne before me – says the host, Boganatov, to him; Erast presses his hand in a friendly manner, a heartfelt sigh flies from his breast, and a joyful tear rolls from his left eye!... – I read your tale with pleasure, says the hostess – and Erast kneels in admiration, clasping the valuable package to his heart, a tear of heartfelt pleasure running from his right eye. – How sweetly, how pleasantly you write! says fond Julia […], throwing him a piercing glance… and Erast swelled up… began to suffer palpitations, and tears poured quickly down his jaundiced 299 cheeks!... he had no strength to speak… his words faltered within his breast. 297

For a detailed biography of Pavel Iakovlev see Kubasov 1903: 629-642. “Первое чудо!… Я видел поэта, который пишет гладкие, приятные, гармоничные стихи… и не знает грамматики! (Гений!) – В его стихах, исполненных жизни, сильных, звучных картин – он не гоняется за мыслями… (пламенное воображение!) – [...] Он говорил обо всем, но всегда чужими словами (необыкновенная память!) Второе чудо!... Я видел переводчика Тамарской Истории, который ни слова не знает по-тамарски... (гений, которого никакая трудность не останавливает!)” Iakovlev 1822: 21 (hereafter: Chuvstvtil’noe puteshestvie). Italics in the original. 299 “Я очень рад, что вижу у себя нового Стерна, – говорит ему хозяин, и Эраст дружески пожимает руку Богатонова, и из его груди летит сердечный вздох, и радостная слеза катится из левого глаза!.. – Я с удовольствием читала ваши повести, – говорит ему хозяйка, – и Эраст почтительно кланяется, прижимает к сердцу дорожный картуз, и слеза сердечного удовольствия бежит из его правого глаза. Как мило, как приятно вы пишите! – Говорит ему нежная Юлия [...], 298

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As with Brusilov’s work, in Iakovlev’s Chuvstvitel’noe puteshestvie Sternian devices such as the self-mocking attitude towards the narrator’s own writing in process, the direct involvement of the reader through narratorial asides, and the play with plot construction are skilfully employed, as witnesses, for example, the opening passage of the story: I am exactly the same as I was at school, when I journeyed through the alphabet… just as quick, talkative – and inconstant!.. O! I am as inconstant as a woman… I do not know whether I bored the others? (or whether I’m bored now?..O 300 my poor readers! It is obvious to you!)

Chuvstvitel’noe puteshestvie is essentially a mock travelogue engaging in a full-scale parody of sentimentalism, starting from its characteristically fragmented form, to a plethora of interruptions and digressions intended to mock the excessive “liberty” in both the choice and the treatment of topics typical of serious sentimental travelogues.301 By the same token, the plot is intentionally wafer thin: a twenty-five-year old author, in competition with the thriving fashion for sentimental, cosmopolitan travelogues, decides to write the account of his prosaic journey along the Nevskii.302 Such an intentionally trivial plot canvas itself mocks the tendency to magnify minutiae of the individual’s experience indulged in by writers of sentimental travelogues. The choice of trivial topics is ridiculed in parallel to the allegedly “disjointed”, staccato rhythm of the genre:

бросив на него пронзительный взгляд… и Эраст вспыхнул… затрепетал, и слезы градом посыпались по его бледножелтым ланитам!... он не в силах говорить... слова замирают в груди его”. P. Iakovlev, “Neschastiia ot slez i vzdokhov” (18241825), quoted in Galakhov 1850: 95. See also Brang 1960: 260-261. 300 “Я точно таков же, каким я был в училище и путешествовал по азбуке… так же скор, болтлив – и непостоянен!.. о! непостоянен как женщина… Не знаю, наскучивал ли я другим? (наскучиваю ли теперь?.. О мои бедные читатели! Это вам известно!)”. Chuvstvtil’noe puteshestvie 1820: IV/299. 301 Roboli calls Iakovlev’s Chuvstvitel’noe puteshestvie a feuilleton to be considered “against the background of the parodying of literary travel accounts” (Roboli 1985: 58). 302 “Одним словом, я объявляю себя врагом всех путешественников и желаю – но сначала напишу грозное воззвание к этим охотникам до наблюдений – к этим космополитам – и докажу, что всего хуже путешествовать. Но для исполнения этого желания, я желаю окончить мое путешествие по Невскому проспекту. Извините, терпеливые читатели, если заметили, что я спешу – домой”. Chuvstvitel’noe puteshestvie 1820: IV/301.

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What sort of a traveller am I? – Now here’s something that I have not yet considered!.. I think that it is best of all to be a sentimental traveller! It is to my advantage that I can write everything that comes into my mind; I can even make it up (between ourselves); I can put any number of exclamation marks into my journey… as many ellipses as I please!.. Surely the whole stock of sighs, tears and willows 303 cannot have run dry already?

By parodying the narrative themes and stylistic devices of the sentimental travelogue, Iakovlev intentionally undermines the lyrical, introspective character of the sentimental journey, and provides an exceedingly “down to earth” account of a “journey” consisting of a very prosaic stroll and its aftermath.304 Just as a sailor after his journey around the world looks at his map of the seas he has traversed – just as...and so on and so forth… just as I, having returning to my place of solitude (consisting of the Admiral’s quarters in the first district, house number 110, on the fourth floor), just as I (sitting on a down sofa) fly into the past with a thoughtful countenance, I remember my adventures on Nevskii Prospect, and 305 to divert myself I declare: I have travelled!

Between these two extremes, the middle ground is taken by travelogues achieving a balance between realism and romance, a task traditionally fraught with difficulties. In this case too Karamzin’s Letters provided an important starting point for a number of authors of the age of Alexander I. Petr Makarov, for example, presents his Pis’ma iz Londona (Letters from London)306 in terms clearly “Какого же рода я путешественник? – Вот о чем я еще и не думал!... Думаю и решаю, что лучше всего быть путешественником сентиментальным [sic]! Выгода моя в том, что я могу писать все, что мне вздумается; могу даже выдумывать (между нами говоря); могу в своем путешествии ставить без числа восклицательные знаки… точек, сколько угодно!... Неужели весь запас вздохов, слез, веточек истощился?” Chuvstvitel’noe puteshestvie 1820: VII/332. Maslov quotes the above passage to demonstrate the Sternian origin of the work’s extremely free narrative structure but bypasses the parodic intent underlying Iakovlev’s fragmented plot. (Maslov 1924: 372-373) 304 Roboli argues that the genre of the parodic travel account overlaps in authors such as Iakovlev with the developing genre of the feuilleton. The central theme of this type of travelogue would be the description of manners or urban life. (Roboli 1985: 58). 305 “Как мореплаватель после кругосветного путешествия рассматривает карту пройденных морей – как и прочю и проч… так я возвращаясь в свое уединение (состоящее из адмиралтейской части 1го квартала, в доме под № 110, в 4 этаж) так я (сидя на пуховом диване) летаю мысленным взором в прошлом, вспоминаю свои приключения – на Невском проспекте и говорю себе в утешение: я путешествовал!” Chuvstvitel’noe puteshestvie 1822: VI/312. 306 Makarov’s Pis’ma iz Londona was firstly published under the title Rossiianin v Londone, ili pis’ma k druz’iam moim (A Russian in London, or My Correspondence 303

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reminiscent of Karamzin’s work: “My friends, I do not write for the amusement of idle people, but to inform you about myself, to provide some sort of benefit to your children or acquaintances!”307 P. Sumarokov’s Puteshestvie po vsemu Krymu i Bessarabii v 1799 godu (Journey through all of the Crimea and Bessarabia in the Year 1799, 1800) was also intended as a knowledgeable and “impersonal” account. Besides the sub-title (“S istoricheskim i topograficheskim opisaniem vsekh tekh mest”), the whole structure, choice of subjects and style of the work reflect this factual purpose. For example, applying the guidebook format, indications about the places described are displayed at the margins of the pages in order to facilitate reference. Yet devices of the sentimental travelogue, in particular the use of emotive remarks expressed by a stylised travellernarrator, are also employed by Sumarokov.308 Such features in a travelogue clearly intended to reproduce the non-narrative genre of the guidebook demonstrate the widespread influence of sentimentalism on contemporary literature, travel accounts included. In this way the influence between the two branches of travel writing – factual and fictional – comes full circle: travelogues influence travel accounts and vice versa; facts and fiction blend in different ways and in different proportions in the melting pot of the genre in the early nineteenth century. The flexibility of the Karamzinian template is further illustrated by the group of travelogues and memoirs recounting the experience of the Napoleonic wars, such as the extremely successful (and much researched) Pis’ma russkogo ofitsera (Letters of a Russian Officer, 1808) by Fedor Glinka and the Dnevnik partizanskikh deistvii 1812 goda (Diary of Partisans’ Deeds in the Year 1812, 1814-1838) by Denis Davydov. Written by authors serving in the Russian army, accounts of the war experience, both abroad and within national borders, inject the genre of the sentimental travelogue with new life. While maintaining intact the existing narrative framework these works gave voice to the patriotic feelings ignited by the fight against France

with Friends) in two instalments (the first part in the journal Moskovskii Merkury (I/1803), the second part in Vestnik Evropy (IX: 1804). 307 “Друзья мои, я пишу не для забавы праздных людей, а для того, чтобы, уведомляя вас о себе, принести еще некоторую пользу и детям вашим и приятелям!” Makarov 1817: x. 308 P. Sumarokov, Puteshestvie po vsemu Krymu i Bessarabii v 1799 godu (1800) (reprinted in Korovin 1990: 290-391). See Sumarokov 1800: 1 and 3.

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and fed the public’s eagerness for “real” accounts of the war during its progress or in its immediate aftermath. Other less known authors tried their hand at combining fictional devices of the sentimental travelogue with factual information on the countries visited. Fedor Lubianovskii’s Puteshestvie po Saksonii, Avstrii i Italii v 1800, 1801 i 1802 godakh (Journey Through Saxony, Austria and Italy in the Years 1800, 1801 and 1802), for example, adopts the epistolary framework successfully exploited by Karamzin, at the same time minimising sentimental topics and allocutions to accommodate the fundamentally descriptive contents of his work.

IV.6.4 Fedor Lubianovskii Journey Through Saxony, Austria and Italy Fedor Lubianovskii (1777-1869), the son of a highly placed Ukrainian ecclesiastic, was enrolled in the faculty of history and philosophy at Moscow University at the age of fifteen. There he became acquainted with the mason I. Turgenev, joining his entourage,309 an association that after his graduation opened the path to a brilliant career in the state service. The writer was at first employed by the general and diplomat N. Repnin, subsequently attended A. Arakcheev as his temporary adjutant, and then worked in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, headed by M. Speranskii310 (whom Turgenev knew well), a career finally culminating with his election as a Senator. In parallel to his official career Lubianovskii typically doubled as a poet, translator, memoirist, and prose writer.311 Lubianovskii’s reputation as an author stemmed from the Journey through Saxony, Austria and Italy in the years 1800, 1801 and 1802, a work which enjoyed a considerable, although short-lived, popularity, according to both the author himself312 and to a later commentator who conceded that: “Having published his Journey in

309

I.P. Turgenev, friend of Novikov and father of four children, all very active in early nineteenth-century literary and political life (see chapter V. 2). 310 See Vigel’ 1891-1893: 27. 311 Cf. Dmitreva 1994: 397. 312 See Lubianovskii 1872: 203.

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1803, he gained fame as a writer; however, at that time, fame was easily earned”.313 Within high-society circles news of the imminent publication of Lubianovskii’s work was greeted with keen anticipation. Ia. Bulgakov, for example, reports in a letter addressed to his son Aleksandr dated 30 January 1805 (i.e. only a few months prior to publication): “[Liubianovskii] wants to print his journey (with Princess Lobanova) and Volkovskaia assured me that it is well written”.314 Having read the work, Bulgakov confirmed in a second letter to his son the positive reception of the Puteshestvie by contemporary readers: “They praise the book; it describes everything that I saw and noted when travelling with the Princess Lobanova and describes it well”.315 Lubianovskii clearly considered his work a success, not least for the financial return (nearly 125,000 rubles), which was remarkable by contemporary standards.316 A possible reason for the work’s positive reception may lie in the combination of the popular format of the sentimental travelogue with detailed descriptions of popular destinations on the grand tourist’s map. After all the work was based on the experience of the author’s educative journey through Germany, Austria and Italy during the years 1800-1802 and was directed to a public eager to acquire first hand information on the experience of the European travel. This intent is anticipated in the terse, matter-of-fact title that notably does not refer to the epistolary format typical of contemporary sentimental travelogues. Yet notwithstanding its facade, the actual circumstances of the trip (such as its purpose and practical preparation for it) which the author describes at length in the Memoirs, 317 are by-passed in the 313 “Издав в 1803 году [sic] свое Путешествие, приобрел известность писателя, которая, впрочем, в то время приобреталась легко”. [Anon.], Russkaia starina 1896: III/546. 314 “[Лубяновский] хочет печатать свое путешествие (с княгиней Лобановой), которое, как уверял Волковской, написано хорошо”. Bulgakov 1898: I/555. 315 “Книгу хвалят; он описывает, и хорошо, все, что видел и приметил, путешествуя с княгиней Лобановой”. Ibid.: II/43. Cf. also A. Turgenev, “Pis’ma k Andreiu Sergeevichu Kaisarovu v Gettingen (Moskva, 12-go Maia 1805)” (Turgenev 1911: 338). 316 “В один 1806 год разошлось его около сорока тысяч экземпляров; от него у меня, после всех издержек, из ничего оказалось сто двадцать пять тысяч рублей”. Lubianovskii 1872: 203. Sopikov lists the price for the three volumes in octavo as five rubles, a comparatively large sum for the time (Sopikov 1904: 161/entry no. 9212). 317 “Родственница его [Лобанова], весной 1800 года ехала к водам за границу: он отпустил меня за ней. И он, и первый мой благодетель” И. В. Лопухин

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Journey, a disparity that points to a precise narrative strategy on Lubianovskii’s part. By the same token, potentially useful items of information about the stages of the journey and the situation of the roads, accommodation and meals are few and far between. The initial content seems to point to the literary travelogue of the sentimental type, rather than to the guidebook format. The narrative design too, with its combination of the epistolary and the travel journal formats, follows the blueprint of the sentimental travelogue. Each letter, ordered according to the chronology and the topography of the journey, bears the indication of the place described, whilst the date on which the places were visited is rarely recorded. The omission of time co-ordinates, which are usually included in epistolary narratives (as, for example, happens in Karamzin’s Pisma russkogo puteshestvennika and in Makarov’s Pis’ma iz Londona – Letters from London, 18031804), is in line with Lubianovskii’s inattention to the actual conditions of the journey. Notwithstanding such loose chronological and spatial coordinates each epistle maintains a degree of thematic unity.318 This is in part due to the relationship between narrator and narratee patterned on the sentimental model. The letters forming the novel are addressed to a “sensitive friend”, a presence that is emphasised in two strategic parts of the Puteshestvie: at the very beginning of the novel,319 and towards the end.320 However, the emotional excursions expressing the melancholic feelings of the narrator towards his far-away friend are confined to the beginning and the end of the work. Rather, addressing a fictional friend serves Lubianovskii as a technical device for the introduction of a variety of topics. Hence, the persona of the friend pops up благословил меня в путь с отеческой любосью, и, между прочим, наставлениями взяли с меня клятвенное слова не вступать в массонские ложи и ни в какие тайные общества”. Lubianovskii 1872: 189. 318 Information about the subject of each letter is given in the “soderzhaniie” where the author provides explanatory headings to each of them. Sometimes they are quite concise (cf., for example, “pis’mo I: Sochinitel’ govorit o tsele svoego puteshestvia”). In other instances the heading functions as a brief summary of the letter’s contents (cf. “pis’mo XIX: Obraz zhizni priezzhaiushchikh dlia lecheniia v Karlsbad. Mestopolozheniie sego goroda”). At other times they provide a detailed list of the subjects treated (cf. “pis’mo XXIV: Torgovlia, promyshlennost’. Raznyia uchrezhdeniia. Vengriia. Rekrutskii nabor. Voisko. Blagoustroistvo. Knigoprodavtsy. Anekdoty. Obshchee poniatie o Pravlenii”). 319 “Вот тебе, любезный друг, и мое путешествие”. Lubianovskii 1805 (hereafter: Puteshestvie po Saksonii): I/5. 320 “Когда судьба, разлучившая нас, велит быть опять вместе […]”. Ibid.: III/283.

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throughout the work, albeit in a less direct manner. In particular, allusions to the “liubeznyi drug” appear mainly en passant in passages having the function of introducing a new description in the narrative321 or as a pretext for the narrator to address certain themes.322 This background presence is also called upon as a pretext to insert the narrator’s personal opinions in the main plot-thread (“Are you asking me to compare Rome in its current condition with ancient Rome?”)323 or to introduce incidental episodes and descriptions.324 The wide spectrum of material included in the Puteshestvie is paralleled by an assortment of styles ranging from the non-narrative mode of the travel guide to highly stylised forms borrowed from sentimental fiction. As is to be expected, political, economic and legal matters are treated in an objective, “matter-of-fact” and concise style, similar to the guidebooks proliferating in the age of the Grand tour.325 In these passages the sentences are generally paratactic and the vocabulary limited to the essential,326 in marked contrast to the colourful imagery and stylised speech used by the narrator when engaged in more personal recollections and reflections. As one may expect, in keeping with sentimentalism, where the natural environment inevitably stimulates an emotional response, the description of natural landscapes belongs to this latter category.327 Detached descriptions of landscapes are extremely rare in Lubianovskii’s work; nature serves the narrative purpose of externalising the inner world of the sentimental traveller, rather than describing a specific landscape. As Lubianovskii puts it: “When you see, as it were, all her [nature’s] kingdom together in all its diversity, as if she were admiring herself; then it is difficult to remain Е.g.: “что тебе сказать, друг любезный, об етом городе?” Ibid.: I/109. “Спросишь, какая была цель моего путешествия?” Ibid.: I/5. 323 “Требуешь ты от меня, чтобы я сравнил Рим в настоящем его положении с древним Римом …” Ibid.: III/48. 324 Е g. “Для любопыства твоего, посылаю тебе выписку из сочинении Г. Домо [...]” Ibid.: I/180. 325 Quotations from a variety of sources (cf., for example, the references in the passages dedicated to the peasants’ situation (Puteshestvie po Saksonii: I/187 and passim) and inscriptions on monuments (cf., for example, ibid.: I/145)) are also reported. 326 See, for example, the description of the land laws in Bohemia: “Земля перестает быть владельческой; но обязанности крестьянина к своему помещику тут не прерываются. Закон их определяет; крестьянин отдает ежегодно помещику часть урожая”. (Lubianovskii 1872: I/183). Occasionally data and tables are inserted in the informative sections (cf., for example, ibid.: I/197). 327 See Kochetkova 1994: 207; Hammarberg 1991: 46. 321 322

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indifferent. New feelings involuntarily are born within you; you become curious and amazed”. 328 In a true sentimental vein idyllic imagery is adopted to create scenery aimed at exciting the emotional response of the narrator. Furthermore, the typical locus amoenus in the countryside is associated throughout the Puteshestvie with idealised views of the peasants’ supposedly simple and wholesome existence: “Sometimes when I climb the hill and wait for the sunrise, thus meeting the beautiful morning, I hurry to take breakfast with the happy family who live there”.329 Interestingly, when detailed description of the actual conditions of German or Austrian country life is provided, a rapid shift from the sentimental narrative stylistic modes to an “objective” speech style occurs.330 The natural landscape is occasionally depicted with pre-romantic tones, as a stormy and magnificent space. The environment surrounding the traveller functions in this case as a vehicle for the rapture stirred by the sublime: It is a pity that I am not a Painter. Had I been, I would have presented you with the view from the Apennine Mountains in all their surroundings and majesty, with all their contrasts: the vast cliffs fenced in by an abyss, the contrast of bright and calm 331 against raging and dark water, the perpetual thunder against the silence of solitude.

“Когда увидишь, так сказать, вместе все ее [природы] царства и все разнообразие, которым она сама будто любуется; то трудно оставаться равнодушным. В тебе невольно рождаются новые чувства; ты любопытствуешь и удивляешься”. Puteshestvie po Saksonii: I/141. The variety of nature and its picturesque character are important components of the “beautiful landscape” in Lubianovskii’s work. Cf., for example, the description of Tivoli: “Здесь природа употребила всю игру и все свое волшебство. На каждом шагу новые, неожиданные виды, которые поминутно меняются. Ступишь, перед глазами одно и то же место, но уже в ином образе”. (Ibid.: III/111). Cf. also ibid.: III/12. 329 “Иногда, взобравшись на холм, ожидаю восхода солнца и, встретив таким образом прекрасное утро, спешу завтракать со счастливой семьей поселянина”. Ibid.: i/28. Besides landscapes in their natural state, representing the ideal of the unspoiled space, the narrator is also attracted by the “artificial” garden. The picturesque character of gardens such as the one visited in Verlits (ibid.: I/61) is described according to the typical patterns of the sentimental locus amoenus. 330 See ibid.: I/24-35. 331 “Жаль, что я не художник. Представил бы я тебе все разнообразие этой местности и величественного вида с Аппеннинских гор: огромные скалы, ограждающие пропасть, которая принимает в себя подающие волны; противоположность светлых и тихих с разъяренными и темными водами; их вечные громы в безмолвном уединении”. Ibid.: 133-134. A feeling comparable to the attraction to tempestuous nature is aroused in the narrator at the sight of Gothic architecture. Although favouring the neatness and harmony of classicist architecture the narrator admits his fascination for the “variety and fear” emanating from Gothic 328

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In that respect Lubianovskii reflects the wider phenomenon of the gradual steering of many Russian authors of the time towards a romantic sensibility. In the same years, for example, such a shift from idyllic to pre-romantic modes engendered by a particularly dramatic landscape was described by Aleksandr Turgenev, with his customary sharpness, in his Puteshestvie russkogo na Broken’ v 1803 (Journey of a Russian to the Broken in 1803). Characteristically, Turgenev attaches these two types of representation of Nature to two authors familiar to any educated Russian, Gessner and Macpherson (Ossian): [Broken] is torn asunder by the strong winds, inflamed by the sun. [The Alps] are in everlasting slumber – but [Broken] is the scene of the eternal battle of poetry. Despite their snowy peaks, the Alps are always inviting to the gaze; yet the view of Garts is wild and terrible. The first comes from Gessner’s brush; the second could 332 have been created by the pensive Ossian.

More surprising in Lubianovskii is perhaps the use of the same register for the description of works of art, as anticipated by the first letter of the book: “More than anything I loved to occupy myself with nature and her imitators, the arts […]. Let me permit myself to speak of several works of art, not as an expert and artist, but as an admirer of everything that is good”.333 The contemplation of Western European masterpieces arouses a “sentimental” response in the traveller similar to that originating from the sight of a natural landscape. As the narrator anticipates in the first letter, artistic monuments are judged according to the emotional reaction of the spectator and are described from his subjective viewpoint: It is easy to say that my imagination and feelings have deceived me in several cases; another might easily have looked at the objects I found so pleasant as if they were looking at a piece of plain stone […] But I forgive myself this deception.

buildings: “Тем не менее этот странный род готического зодчества иногда очень нравится [...]”. (ibid.: III/140-141). 332 “Его [Брокен] разрывают силные ветры, его распаляет солнце. Там вечный сон – здесь вечная борьба стихий. Несмотря на снежную высоту Альп вид их очень привлекателен; вид Гарца и дик и ужасен. Первые вышли из-под кисти Геснера; вторые могли бы произвести задумчивого Оссиана”. Turgenev 1808: 92. On this work see also chapter V.2. 333 “Больше всего я любил заниматься природой и искусством, ее подражателем [...]. Если я позволяю себе говорить о некоторых произведениях искусств, то не так как знаток или художник, а как любитель всего хорошего”. Puteshestvie po Saksonii: I/7.

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Pleasant minutes are so rare in life that sometimes we can enjoy them even when in 334 error.

Hence the depiction of the subject of a painting is often indistinguishable from the account of an occurrence or scene in a natural setting allegedly taking place under the eyes of the writer. An indicative example is the description of Alcis and Galatea by Claude Lorrain. Omitting any indication of its actual subject (the name of the picture and the artist are identified only in the index) the account begins in medias res with a detailed rendition of the natural landscape represented in the painting: “On one happy seashore a dreadful cliff was to be seen. A thick grove darkened its steep summit and at its base, grey waves broke ceaselessly”.335 Occasionally the subject of a painting is represented as a purely narrative episode, as in the case of Correggio’s Magdalene336 and Canova’s Hebe and Magdalene.337 In the third volume, dealing with the journey through Italy, the traveller explores the classic sites of the Grand tour: Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples. Ample space is devoted to the stylised account of the narrator’s walks in the Italian countryside and his Grand tour of galleries, monuments and sites of antiquity. Roman ruins are depicted with the sublime tones prevalent in contemporary literature where antiquity became a romantic symbol of the passage of time and the transience of all human endeavours. Hence lyrical passages are devoted to the melancholic feelings of the traveller wandering around the remains of the once mighty Roman Empire. Leaving the “eternal city”, the narrator speaks his sorrowful adieu to the personified ruins: Forgive me, you contemporaries of the glorious Romans, you indestructible remains of their magnificence, you famous places of unforgettable deeds, you banks “Легко может случиться, что воображение и чувство в некоторых случаях меня обманывали; легко может быть, что другой смотрел бы как на кусок простого камня на те преметы, которые мне было бы очень приятно рассматривать [...]. Но я прощаю себе этот обман. Приятные минуты в жизни столь редки, что иногда мы имеем их только в заблуждении”. Ibid.: I/7-8. 335 “В одной счастливой стороне на берегу моря виден странный утес. На его крутом верху чернеет густая роща; седые волны беспрерывно разбиваются об утес…” Ibid.: I/11. 336 “Если бы где-нибудь в роще мы вдруг увидели одну из Граций, которая избегала мира и шумных его забав, пришла бы одна в отдаленный грот питать в тишине свою душу и сердце любимым чтением … ” (Ibid.: I/45). 337 “Если бы также, гуляя по саду в тихий вечер, вошел ты в отдаленную рощу [...], увидел сидящую возле ручья на камне юную деву …” (Ibid.: III/121). It may be maintained that the use of the conditional tense is the only apparent difference in respect to the depiction of a “real” episode. 334

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of the Tiber, and you waters of Tivoli! I shall see you no more. But I shall always 338 remember and feel this pleasure which I owe to you alone.

The idealised splendour of Roman times enhances the contrast with its decaying remains,339 a theme which introduces broader considerations on the inevitable lapse of time and the transitory nature of all human matters. As the passage continues, the narrator passionately expresses man’s impotence in opposing the destructive power of Time, employing tones typical of Graveyard poets: “Time, like a certain powerful and wrathful God, touches everything and turns it into a grave. Should these places keep their glorious names? Place here stone on stone, heap on heap, and write on its deformed bulk: Ruined Temple”.340 Reflecting a widespread attitude among tourists and foreign residents alike,341 in the comparatively few sections devoted to the Italian way of life the author shows either a critical or a detached attitude to the public and social spheres.342 In that respect the contrast between a great past and the contemporary state of affairs stems at the same time from a literary fashion and from the ideological standpoint of many Western travel accounts of Italy.343

“Простите еще раз, современники славных Римлян, неразрушившие остатки их великолепия, и вы, места, знаменитые незабвенными деяниями, и вы, берега Тибра, и вы, Тивольские воды! Мне уже вас не увидеть. Но всегда я буду помнить и чувствовать то удовольствие, которым вам одним был обязан”. Ibid.: III/131. 339 “Как я могу изобразить всю эту перемену и особенно молчание этого опустошенного места?” Ibid.: III/130. 340 “Время как некий сильный Бог в гневе, всего коснулось, и все стало гробом. Должно ли это место сохранять еще свое славное имя? Положите здесь камни на камни, груды на груды и напишите на этой безобразной громаде: Храм разрушения”. Ibid. Italics in the original. 341 Pine-Coffin 1974: 10. Compare, for example, the point of view on Italy expressed by the traveller-narrator in Galinkovskii’s Sidonia: “В Италии можно остаться совершенно русским; нельзя уберечься от слабостей, которые, кажется, заразили там сам воздух”. The corruption of Italian life seems, however, to exert a certain attraction on the Russian traveller: “Италия – это хранилище роскошных удовольствий. Этот образ жизни есть необузданность желаний, эти изнеженные нравы, эти женщины перевоспитывают человека”. Galinkovskii 1808: IV/353. 342 Cf., for example, the following passage: “Я хотел написать некоторые замечания о тосканцах; но они были бы только повторением сказанного мною прежде о неаполитанцах и римлянах. В Италии везде одинаковые лица; различий либо нет вовсе, либо совсем незаметные”. (Puteshestvie po Saksonii: III/147). 343 See Pine-Coffin 1974: 5-10. 338

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Despite presenting so little information on the particulars of the tour, the Journey itself displays detailed accounts of the countries visited in the style of the guidebook, including descriptions of foreign cities and countryside, monuments and past history, ways of life and political systems. As Andrei Turgenev pointed out in a letter to his friend Andrei Kaisarov, Lubianovskii somewhat overstretched his literary skills in trying to provide an encyclopedic account of the places visited,344 as a result of which the informative-didactic sections represent the weakest part of the novel. The most successful passages are those relating personal observations, digressions and emotional experiences in the sentimental vein. In the opening letter345 the author refers to sentimentalism as an aesthetic and cognitive paradigm to understand reality, the ideal traveller-narrator being described as one “who can learn and be touched by all he sees and hears; whose intellect and heart have found new sustenance in every location, and who at last returns with new knowledge, with new memories and the best new feelings”.346 Through the emotive experience generated by the journey, the traveller undergoes a process of inner development that, in its turn, is proposed as an exemplum to the reader. Hence the fusion of experience and imagination, reason and feelings, the purpose of informing and educating with that of touching readers’ souls. As with Karamzin and his followers, the instructive aim typical of Grand tour literature goes hand in hand with the sentimental aspirations of improvement of the self and of fellow men in general. In this respect, Lubianovskii wrestles with a key concern of travel fiction as a whole: the search for a balance between factual experience and the fictional representation of it, between “realism” and “romance”, a seeming ambivalence to which only sentimentalism seemed to offer a viable solution. “В ней [первой книге] содержание материала интереснее и обещает больше, чем автор был в силах исполнить”. Turgenev considers more positively the account of the journey to Italy: “Он [Лубяновский] читал мне рукопись следующих частей, об Италии; тут, кажется, написано лучше”. Turgenev 1911: 338. 345 The first letter has the function of an introduction to the novel (in the index its content is referred to as an account of the aim of the travelogue – “Писатель говорит о цели своего путешествия”. Puteshestvie po Saksonii: I/226). As was often the case, the preface also provides precious clues on the literary influences at work. 346 “Тот, которого все, что он слышит и видит может научить или тронуть, ум и сердце которого находили себе во всех местах новую пищу, и который, наконец, возвращается с новым знанием, с новыми воспоминаниями и с новыми лучшими чувствами”. Ibid.: I/6. 344

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As has been demonstrated in this chapter, in the years of Alexander’s reign sentimentalism was much more than a relic of a previous age. On the contrary, sentimentalism was alive and kicking in the early nineteenth century, both in its “diluted” form as a rich supply of themes and narrative devices for non-sentimental authors (as in Lubianovskii), in its serious version (as in Shalikov and Izvekova), and in its many humorous interpretations. Moreover, in the post-Karamzin period the generic experimentation with narrative modes set in motion by its founder in the late eighteenth century underwent an accelerated phase injecting contemporary fiction with a new wave of creative verve. As we have seen, a number of his followers like Nikolai Brusilov and Aleksandr Izmailov capitalised on the literary heritage left by Sterne and Karamzin, keeping alive the experimental attitude to narrative genres and styles that had been the hallmark of the trend from its inception. Thus, the attraction showed by early nineteenthcentury Russian authors for Sterne’s “stylistic freedom” lasted long after the sway of sentimentalism was over. Absorbed into the fabric of Russian fiction by the early nineteenth century, Sternian devices such as deliberate ambiguity and paradox could then serve a number of functions, including providing a primary model of “camouflage techniques” for a literature fettered by censorship.347 In short, the age of Alexander marks a crucial phase in the history of Russian fiction, a stage in which generic, stylistic and thematic features of eighteenth-century sentimentalism were reelaborated, tuned to the demands of contemporary readers and passed on to the next generation of writers. Cutting out sentimentalism from the general picture of modern Russian prose cannot but result in the twenty-year gap – the age from Karamzin to Pushkin – too often found in histories of Russian literature. On the contrary the period represents a stepping stone for things to come. Even if we set the chronological discontinuity created by such an omission to one side, subsequent developments in prose genres are indeed hard to imagine without factoring in the intermediate stage between what can be termed the birth of Russian modern fiction and its maturity. As I have argued, an experimental drive in matters of genre and style and sentimental irony as a device of creative regeneration are two distinctive features of prose fiction in the 347

Peace 1981: 5 and passim.

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Karamzin and post-Karamzin period. These features became part of the nineteenth-century literary tradition to the extent that meta-textual and often tongue-in-cheek references to sentimentalism abound in the best authors the century produced, from Pushkin to Gogol’, from Dostoevskii to Tolstoi.348

348

See Weststeijn 1988: 322; Hammarberg 199: ix; Kochetkova 1975: 14-15 and 134135 and Meilakh 1973: 73.

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Chapter V

Contemporary literary influences: pre-romantic and romantic trends As scholars have generally observed, Russian literature in the eighteenth century was consistently slow in reacting to the literary tendencies originating from Western Europe. During the reign of Alexander, however, due to the efflorescence of literary activity and the widespread experimentation with new literary forms and subjects, the process of assimilation of Western influences underwent a dramatic acceleration until, by Pushkin’s time, the literary hiatus between Russia and the West was virtually obliterated. A vast number of foreign authors and literary tendencies which in Europe had taken decades to develop were rapidly absorbed and re-elaborated in a very short time by Russian writers. Due to this concurrence of diachronic literary trends, it is extremely difficult to establish a clear sequence in – or to circumscribe the boundaries of – Western European trends penetrating early nineteenth-century Russia. The application of period-trends in Western European literature to the Russian situation is no more successful. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the tradition of classicism coexisted with sentimentalism and, as demonstrated in this chapter, the eighteenthcentury literary heritage was not discarded at the time when romantic trends made their appearance. In particular a growing fascination for Western European genres such as Graveyard poetry and Ossian’s songs intersected with “new” trends such as the gothic novel, Sturm und Drang literature and the romantic ballad. Russian translations of English sepulchral poetry and Ossian’s songs date back to the 1770s and 1780s (Young was translated for the first time in 1772, Ossian in 1781). The early days of the Russian reception of English pre-romanticism were marked by slavish imitation and readers had to wait until the new century to appreciate the true impact of these works on Russian fiction. Within a short time-span, however, new motifs, themes and styles coming from the West were absorbed and transformed into original Russian works,

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thus activating a process of assimilation which played a fundamental role in the creation of a modern national prose in Russia. In this chapter we investigate the role of pre-romantic and romantic trends in a number of different genres, ranging from historical narratives to gothic novels (Nikolai Gnedich’s Don Korrado) to romantic ballads (Vasilii Zhukovskii’s Mar’ina roshcha). The first section is devoted to fictional representations of national history in the period 1800-1820, a process eventually leading to more accurate and sophisticated representations both in the work of historians and authors. Although historical novels in the modern sense of the word appeared at the end of our period from the pen of Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, historiography and literature on historic themes acquired new momentum in the first two decades of the century. The historical juncture of the Napoleonic wars sparked a wave of interest in Russia’s past, a past that included both the remote past of their ancestors and the events that had just taken place in a Europe that had been shaken by the French Revolution and then by Napoleon. This interest was strong enough for history to become a crucial component of the cultural and literary discourse of the time. Early nineteenth-century historical povesti, novels and ballads were mostly inspired by the Northern (and therefore in many respect akin to Russia) poetry of Macpherson / Ossian in which the mythical past and folklore tradition were merged, and by the sentimental prototypes of the pseudo-historical narratives provided by Karamzin’s povesti. Yet, in parallel to these trends, a number of historians doubling as writers of fiction worked on more plausible representations of Russia’s past. Just as with Karamzin and Pushkin, authors such as Nikolai Artsybyshev and Gavril Gerakov made history the object of both scholarly research and imaginative writing, a double perspective resulting in greater attention to historical accuracy. In the first section we will seize the opportunity to look across the generic divide, comparing the scholarly and fictional treatment of history in the work of these writers. In the second section we investigate a number of narratives in the gothic vein, including Gnedich’s early novel Don Korrado de Gerrera (1803), a work rarely mentioned by scholars. This striking novel reveals the full scale of the influence of the gothic on Russian prose fiction, after just one decade after the first translation of a novel of terror, Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron in 1792. Gnedich is the initiator of the Russian “novel of terror” vis-à-vis the far more

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1

tamed “novel of horror” whose influence had already been tangible in Karamzin’s Ostrov Borngol’m (Bornholm Island, 1794) and SierraMorena (1795). Gnedich draws key elements from both the English novel of horror and the German Sturm und Drang to shape a work based on graphic violence and demonic heroes; here, a heightened pathos and the crude vocabulary of the dialogues run counter to the prevailing rules of “literary politeness” promoted by Karamzin and his followers. In other words, Don Korrado represents a watershed between the sentimental version of the gothic novel and the first truly romantic interpretation of the genre to be created in Russia. In the last section we look at the influence of gothic fiction on Zhukovskii’s early ballad Liudmila and novella Mar’ina roshcha (Marina’s Grove) via an analysis of their textual relations. The author’s attraction to the new Western European ballad (Bürger, Southey and Schiller) was part of Zhukovskii’s more general fascination with romantic genres such as Graveyard poetry, Sturm und Drang literature and, particularly, the gothic novel. Starting from this broad literary background, Zhukovskii translated the avant-garde modes of the fantastic and the supernatural into the national context, in a move that by transforming foreign influences into a distinctive part of the literary heritage did much to propel Russian prose fiction into the age of romanticism.

V.1 Historical narratives at the beginning of the nineteenth century: the search for a genre In 1826 Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii wrote: We are living in a historical era; soon we will live in a historically superior era. History is no longer an isolated pursuit, it is felt in the memory, intellect and heart of our people. We see, hear and perceive it every minute; it permeates all our feelings. History jostles up against us when we take a walk, it insinuates itself between you and your lady in the cotillion. […] We got married to history willy-nilly, and there has been no divorce. History is our “better half” in all the gravity of the phrase.2 1

Cf. foot-note 91 below. “Мы живем в исторический век; потом мы будем жить в историческом веке в превосходной степени. Теперь история не только существует на деле, но и в памяти, в уме, в сердце у народов. Мы видим ее, слышим, осязаем ежеминутно; она пронизывает все наши чувства. Она толкает вас на прогулку, втирается между вами и вашей дамой в котильон [...]. Мы обвенчались с ней волей и 2

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This passage well renders the passionate interest of the educated milieu for their national past, a socio-cultural as well as a literary phenomenon that took hold of Russia in the early nineteenth century. As Stephen Lovell remarks “in the early nineteenth century educated society developed a new sense of time: it was awakened to history, and listened with rapt attention to the voices of earlier generations”.3 However, it would be misleading to date the start of antiquarian interests and the sense of a national identity to Bestuzhev’s time; such concerns originated much earlier than the 1820s, going back at least to eighteenth-century historiography.4 As Hans Rogger observes, the historical perspective and the constant comparison with Western Europe reached its peak in the age of Catherine and allowed Russians to add a new dimension to the evaluation of their own culture.5 V. Tatishchev’s Istoriia Rossiiskaia s samikh drevneishikh vremen (Russian History Dating Back to the Most Ancient Times) – completed in 1739 but only published in 1768 and generally regarded as the first modern history of Russia6 – and the publication of Drevniaia rossiiskaia vivliofika, a re-edition of old chronicles,7 both represent fundamental steps in the development of a modern understanding of history and a building block of Russia’s national identity.8 Catherine herself was greatly concerned with the Russian past and the style of its representation, an interest expressed in the pseudo-historiographical Zapiski kasatel’no Rossiiskoi istorii (Notes Regarding Russian History, 1783), followed by three historical

неволей, и нет разговора. История – наша половина, во всей тяжести этого слова”. Bestuzhev-Marlinskii 1838: 254-255. 3 Lovell 2004: 249. 4 Cf. Mazour 1975: 60. 5 Cf. Rogger 1969: 253. 6 Wachtel 1994: 22. See also Mazour 1975: 28. 7 The work was initiated by N. Novikov, who between 1773 and 1775 published ten volumes of historical sources; it was continued by Tatishchev with Prodolzhenie drevnei rossiiskoi vivliofiki published in 1786. These volumes provided the Russian reading public with the first collection of ancient chronicles in a non-manuscript form. They represented the largest source of historical material published until then and fascinated Russian readers with the “new” charm of medieval works. 8 By the second half of the eighteenth century a number of members of the Russian elite, such as Shcherbatov, Boltin, and Golikov were actively engaged in historical studies and in the publication of source material.

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plays. The empress’s involvement in both the non-narrative and fictional depiction of historical events initiated a tradition of close interplay between historiographic works and historical literature. This interaction between scientific and fictional representations of history has been defined by Andrew Wachtel as an “inter-generic dialogue in which a chosen historical period is illuminated through multiple competing narrative perspectives”.10 Such communication across genres was of course facilitated by the fact that historic works were often of a literary turn. Interchange and fluidity between the fictional and historic continued in the early nineteenth century when both Karamzin and Pushkin, and a string of less well known writers between them, explored these different ways of writing about Russia’s past, and the narrative potential of inter-generic exchanges between the two. National history was an established literary topic in the eighteenth century, appearing both in the classicist’s codified forms (for example, the tragedies by Kheraskov and Kniazhnin, and the odes by Trediakovskii and Lomonosov) and occasionally in the “plebeian” novel. As for fiction, historical themes were not high on the agenda of eighteenth-century writers – when the Russian past did make an appearance, authors seemed unsure on how to handle historical events in a narrative context. Usually such works were cluttered by a hotchpotch of mythological, biblical, folkloric and epic sources (spiced up with the occasional love story). As a result, eighteenthcentury historical narratives lacked a distinctive “historical” characterisation,11 a feature that made this diverse body of works historical in name only.12 Such a lack of a distinct generic profile made eighteenth-century pseudo-historical narratives at best “precursors” of the historical novel as it was to take shape in the late 1820s-early 30s.13 9

Catherine’s historical plays are: Podrazhanie Shekspiru, Istoricheskoe predstavlenie bez sokhraneniia teatral’nykh obyknovennykh pravil, iz zhizni Riurika, Nachal’noe upravlenie Olega, and Igor, all of 1786. See Moracci 2004. 10 Wachtel 1994: 7. 11 See Vinogradov 1959: 508-636. See also Städtke 1971: 94-110. 12 Cf. Sipovskii 1928: 64-66. 13 In the essay mentioned above Sipovskii attempted a classification of the lateeighteenth-century historical novel, dividing the genre into four main trends: imitations of the gallant novel; works cantred on a love story; novels criticising contemporary society; and finally narrative entirely focused on historical events. In other words, the bulk of late eighteenth-century historical narratives were heavily reliant on other genres. See also Sipovskii 1903: II/474 and Belozerskaia 1896: 59.

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The true turning point in the history of the genre came with the reign of Alexander, for, similarly to the impulse given to the genre in England by the turmoil of the Civil Wars, the events of 1812 became a source of inspiration for writers of historical novels in Russia as much as abroad.14 As György Lukács remarked The historical novel arose at the beginning of the nineteenth century at about the time of Napoleon’s collapse [...]. Of course, novels with historical themes are to be found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, too [...], but are historical 15 only as regards their purely external choice of theme and costume.

In his “classic” analysis of the genre Lukács characterised the new type of historical novel as a kind of narrative providing “an artistically faithful image of a concrete historical epoch”, where “the individuality of the characters derives from the historical peculiarities of their age”,16 and history is perceived as a process, i.e. as the concrete precondition of the present.17 Additionally, an awareness of the differences between epochs introduced new stylistic and linguistic requirements, with a growing awareness that for a plausible depiction of Russian’s past specific narrative idioms were required.18 While writing his Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo (History of the Russian State, 1818-1824), for example, Karamzin realised that the sentimentalist style he had so energetically promoted for over two decades was ultimately unsuited to the task. His search for a specific language able to convey the flavour of past ages led to a partial revision of some of his previous opinions on modern Russian vis-à-vis Church Slavonic. Although he continued to view the two idioms as separate languages, he ceased to condemn the use of Slavonic as “barbaric” and inelegant, at least when used in connection with historical topics. This change of heart is reflected both in Karamzin’s historical tales and in his voluminous History of the Russian State in both of which the author frequently used old Slavonic as a linguistic and stylistic template. More generally, as suggested by V. Vinogradov, the historical novel was the genre destined to wrestle

14

See Hunter 1990: 338 and passim. Lukács 1981: 15. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid.: 18. 18 Zhivov 1996: 450-452 and passim. See also Cross 1971: 223-224; Sipovskii 19091910: II/473-474. 15

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with the legacy of Russia’s linguistic tradition, as well as taking on a role in depicting the past in contemporary literature.19

V.1.1 The role of Western literary influences and contemporary historical events in the development of the genre The rise of a new type of historical novel is closely connected to the establishment of a modern understanding of history – the general sense of cultural and historical differences distinguishing specific epochs and countries – and to deep changes in the perception of a nation’s identity. The connection between patriotism and historical literature is a constant in many cultural landscapes at different points in time. Feelings of national pride emerge, as a rule, in opposition to “the other”, be it a different national, religious or cultural entity. Russia simultaneously developed antiquarian interests and a national consciousness vis-à-vis the West. This was the case in spite of the contradictions inherent in this binary opposition: Russia’s drive towards her own past and native traditions was in itself a byproduct of romantic notions of the past coming from Germany and England. At the turn of the century writers such as Karamzin, Nikolai Murav’ev and Sergei Bobrov were inspired by the English example in trying to arouse stronger patriotic feelings in their fellow countrymen.20 Conscious of the connection between patriotism and history, in the early years of Alexander’s reign Karamzin penned a series of essays on the subject, before taking on the colossal job of writing his country’s history. For Karamzin, Murav’ev, Bobrov and others the strong national pride of the English in their history, political system and linguistic heritage provided a model for Russians to imitate.21 Discussions about the meaning of history featured with increasing frequency in the agenda of early nineteenth-century literary groupings, such as the Free Society of Admirers of Russian Literature whose monthly Sorevnovatel’ prosveshcheniia i blagotvoreniia (The Champion of Enlightenment and Beneficence) advanced pre-romantic 19

Vinogradov 1959: 533. See A. Cross, “‘Them’: Russians on Foreigners” in Franklin and Widdis 2004: 7492 (85-92). 21 Cross 1993: 104-108. 20

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ideas of the “national spirit” and promoted an identification with Russia’s historical past. The wave of patriotism following 1812 gave a new lease of life to cultural influences coming from the West, adding a new twist to their appropriation by Russia’s ideological and cultural framework. This process predates and prepares the reception of the author of the historical novel: Walter Scott. During the first two decades of the century Scott was known in Russia to a very narrow circle of readers, some of whom had direct or indirect contacts with the Scottish author while travelling through England and Scotland. Such was, for example, the case of Dmitrii Severin, who was to describe his encounter with Scott in Pis’ma russkogo v Anglii (Letters of a Russian in England) printed in 1815 in an issue of Rossiiskii Museum (The Russian Museum). Incidentally Severin’s piece represents one of the first mentions of the Scottish author in a Russian periodical. Anna Bunina also had contacts with Scott, albeit only indirectly in the form of a letter (in French) voicing her admiration for one of Scott’s early poems, Marmion.22 M. Al’tshuller dates the Russian reception of Scott’s novels (for the most part known to Russian readers in French versions or in translation from French) to the mid-1810s, Waverly being the first work to be translated into Russian.23 Scott was already well known as a poet, but his fame as a novelist took off in Russia with The Legend of Montrose (translated in 1824), a work that fed the desire for romantic images associated with bygone epochs.24 Critical articles of a more original bent began to appear in the Russian press by the end of the 1820s; they were initially translated from the French.25 In the same years Russian literati doing the Grand tour, such as A. Turgenev and A. Olenin, made Scott’s Abbotsford House a favourite stop.26 A few more years, however, went by before the Scottish writer acquired 22

Cf. M. P. Alekseev, “Val’ter Skott i ego russkie znakomstva” in Alekseev 1982: 247-393 (354-60). 23 Al’tshuller 1996: 30. See also Al’tshuller forthcoming. 24 A. A. Shakhovskoi further spread Scott’s fame in Russia by adapting some of the Scotsman’s novels in his plays of the early 1820s. At the same time Shakhovskoi’s mention of Scott in the titles of his plays suggest that Scott was sufficiently well known and popular among the Russian public of the early 1820s. See A. A. Gozenpud, “Val’ter Skott i romanticheskie komedii A.A. Shakhovskogo” in Levin 1966: 38-48. 25 M. P. Alekseev, “Val’ter Skott i ego russkie znakomstva” in Alekseev 1982: 261 and passim. 26 Ibid.: 262-267 and passim.

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27

iconic status and his romantic historical novels exerted a powerful influence on Russian authors.28 Other trends of West European pre-romanticism and romanticism were stepping stones for the historical novel in Russia as it emerged in the 1830s: the rediscovery of national culture vis-à-vis the universalism of the age of the Enlightenment; the unexplored world of folklore art brought to the surface of the cultural discourse by authors (Grimm) and philosophers (Herder);29 and the “ancient” Nordic poetry created by Macpherson30 represent some of the most influential trends on Russian authors. The impact of English pre-romantic poetry and prose began to exert an influence on Russian authors of fiction almost immediately, as works published during the 1780s and 1790s (Karamzin’s in particular) testify. It was in the early nineteenth century, however, that this literary influence engendered a wide range of works in prose which transformed foreign literary input into the creation of a preromantic literature in Russia. This occurrence is especially noticeable in the case of Macpherson’s epic poems. In the context of the growing “romantic” interest in national folklore and popular literature the seeming antiquity of Ossian played an important role in its success, exerting an impact on both Russian and European authors.31 However, the distinct northern quality of Ossian’s Gaelic poems touched a particularly sensitive chord in Russia. The setting and atmosphere created by Macpherson – with its lyric description of sublime nature, the tempestuous and nocturnal landscapes, bards and harps – typified the ideal of a Northern popular poetry. With a geo-cultural shift typical of this age, “Gaelic” (together with Scandinavia and Ireland) is taken to signify “Northern”, and “Northern” in its turn translates into “Russian”.32 At the end of this process of appropriation Macpherson was perceived as part of the national tradition alongside literary monuments such as Slovo o polku Igoreve (The Tale of Igor’s Campaign), only recently re-discovered at the time. Hence the 27

Zinaida Volkonskaia, for example, commissioned a statue of Scott to be placed in the “allée de mémoirs” embellishing the garden of her Roman villa. 28 Iu. Levin, “Prizhiznennaia slava Val’tera Skotta v Rossii” in Alekseev 1975: 5-42; Al’tshuller 1996: 30. See also Jones 1997: 74-76; Artemieva and Mikeshin forthcoming. 29 Cf. Makogonenko 1981: 56-58. 30 The first translation into Russian by E. Kostrov was published in 1792. See Levin 1980: 59-71. See also section two of the present chapter. 31 See J. Wordsworth, “Introduction” in Macpherson 1996: [iii]. 32 See Sharypkin 1972.

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Ossianic vogue in early nineteenth-century prose and theatre (as with Vladislav Ozerov’s tragedy Fingal, staged in 1805), and the Ossianic motifs employed in literary narrations of Russia’s past.33 At the beginning of the nineteenth century Russia found itself at the crossroads of a number of intersecting literary influences coming from the West. These influences were grafted on to a wellestablished tradition of historical writing which had matured in the course of the eighteenth century. Moreover, after the French Revolution Russia reached an extraordinary historical junction. First victim and then spectacular victor in the Napoleonic wars, propelled to the forefront of the diplomatic scene in the post-war period as the leader of the new European order, Russia enjoyed an international prestige that was to remain unsurpassed for over a century. Such events could not but exert a powerful impact on Russia’s self-perception and national identity, boosting feelings of national pride that found a natural outlet in literature and the arts in general. However, at a time when Russia was perceived as a political equal of the major European powers, the country was still in the process of shaping its literary identity as a reality at once separate from the West and on an equal footing with it. The anti-French feelings flaring up in Russian society in the wake of the Napoleonic wars acted as a strong incentive for authors to shape an original national voice in works centred on themes of immediate relevance for Russian readers. This atmosphere engendered a more critical reception of Western European trends, which came increasingly to be regarded as a starting point for original creations rather than as absolute cultural templates. In this context of renewed pride in the country’s past and present a number of authors actively searched for new ways of writing about history.

33

For a comprehensive account of the influence of Macpherson’s work in Russia, see Levin 1980: 55-85 and passim.

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V.1.2 Historical narratives during the reign of Alexander I By the beginning of the nineteenth century the term “historical novel” was still understood simply as “a novel on a theme taken from past history;”34 a generic definition that allowed works vaguely set in past ages to be called “historical”. This conception of the genre partly resulted from the lack of an established tradition of historical narratives inherited from the eighteenth century35 that allowed a wide freedom in the choice of themes and styles. A number of writers were to draw from virtually all the existing prose genres, particularly from sentimental literature and Western European models, adapting them to an historical setting. Shorter prose forms such as the novella (povest’), the sketch, the sentimental fragment and Ossian-type narratives also served as models for emerging historical fiction. In other words authors looked in various directions for cues on how to express the patriotic feelings sweeping the nation, albeit with a preference for Ossianic motifs and style in representing Russia’s mythological past.36 Russia’s fascination with history extended beyond the confines of national history; an interest in ancient Greece and Rome, for example, was given a new impetus in the early nineteenth century by authors of neo-classical leanings, such as Nikolai Gnedich (author of one of the best Russian translations of the Iliad of all times) and Konstantin Batiushkov.37 However, topics from the national past had a special relevance for Russians at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Whilst historical topics were easy to find, a fitting narrative style proved a thorny issue. In the end most early nineteenth-century authors relied on the popular models of Karamzin’s sentimental-historical povesti (Natal’ia, boiarskaia doch’ – Natal’ia, the Boyar’s Daughter, 1792 – and Marfa posadnitsa – Martha the Mayoress, 1802) and Ossian’s

34

Cf. Lotman 1961: 25. Cf. Sipovskii 1928. 36 Levin 1979: 58-59. 37 See, for example, Batiushkov’s historical tales on ancient Roman history, Laviniia and Levkad. 35

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songs, the success of which was complemented by the publication of ancient letopisi.38 Yet the widespread experimentation in prose genres typical of the time, the absence of a satisfactory national model for historical narratives, and a past increasingly perceived as a concrete historical reality stimulated early nineteenth-century authors to explore alternative options. A number of authors of historiographical works doubled as writers of fiction, framing the Russian past they had studied in detail in the fictional framework of the novel. The relationship between a historiographer’s reconstruction of events and the fictional representation by a novelist is a phenomenon of seminal importance in Russian historical fiction; a comparison of these two types of work lays bare the mechanisms by which historical material was transposed from the scholarly to the fictional sphere.39 Hence, authors directly involved in the study of history such as Nikolai Artsybyshev and Gavril Gerakov provide interesting examples of the unrecognised role played by “historiographers” in the search for a new historical prose at the beginning of the nineteenth century.40 In their works of fiction the effort of providing a circumstantiated depiction of the historical period stimulated by preliminary historiographical research was intertwined with a number of narrative models – from sentimental to “Ossianic” to gothic – a combination that paved the way to the emergence of the romantic historical novel of the 1820s and 1830s. Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, for example, displays a similar combination of disparate narrative models. His novel on the Novgorodian topic Starinnaia povest’. Roman i Ol’ga (An Ancient Tale, Roman and Olga, 1823), is a pastiche of episodes à la Karamzin, historiographical observations and emphatic declamations typical of romantic authors such as Friedrich Schiller, whilst his cycle of stories on Livonian history (Zamok Neigauzen – The Castle of Neigauzen, 1824; Revel'skii turnir – Tournament at Reval, 1824; Krov’ za krov’ – Blood upon Blood, 1825, and others) combine historical observations with a strong gothic component. For a more balanced and streamlined treatment of 38

See, for example, the rediscovery of ancient manuscripts, such as Slovo o pol’ku Igoreve (unearthed c.1790 and published in 1800), as an indication of this interest. Cf. Simmons 1935: 186. 39 For issued raised by generic transposition see Emerson 1984. 40 This aspect of the evolution of modern historical fiction in Russia has generally been ignored, the focus being on narratives of the Karamzinian and Ossianic types. See, for example, Brown 1996: II/157-158 and Al’tshuller 1996: 30-31.

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historical topics in Russian fiction we will have to wait until Pushkin’s novel Kapitanskaia dochka (The Captain’s Daughter, 1836), which followed his major historical project Istoriia Pugacheva (The History of Pugachev, 1833). Yet, in Gerakov’s and Artsybyshev’s case too, as later with Pushkin, the transferral of an historical theme from the scholarly sphere to the realm of fiction involved a re-consideration of the different approaches required by the two tasks, ultimately signalling the growing awareness of different levels of historical accuracy required in non-fictional and fictional narratives.41 Hence the early nineteenth-century provided the test bed for new parameters for historical writing, both of a historiographical and of a fictional nature. The work of historians doubling as novelists marks an important point in this arc of development. The acquisition of specific features for historical narratives – such as the accurate depiction of the customs and mentality characteristic of the age described – contributed to a differentiation of historical narratives from other prose genres and, eventually, to the establishment of a modern historical prose in Russia.

41

This awareness also emerges in literary journals of this period. See, for example, the anonymous article entitled “O skazkakh i romanakh”, where the author stated: “Характер и цель романа совершенно отличны от цели и характера истории [...]. Историк заключен в границах действительности. Если историк из любви к приятному и интересному будет стараться придать своему сочинению вид романа, то его история будет несовершенна: он унижает ее высокую цену”. Anon. 1806: 153.

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V.1.3 Nikolai Artsybyshev and Gavril Gerakov: the dialogue between fictional and non-fictional representations of history Nikolai Artsybyshev (1771-1841) was a professional historian, a member of historical societies,42 and collaborator with Count Rumiantsev in the latter’s collection of diplomatic documents.43 He was also author of various articles and works on Russian history, including Pristup k povesti o Russkikh (Intruduction to a History of the Russians, 1811), an historical piece aimed at reconstructing the national past through the succession of Russian tsars and their deeds; and, a few years later, Rogneda ili razorenie Polotska (Rogneda or the Ruin of the Poles, 1818), a fictional narration on a glorious episode from Russian history.44 Because of the meticulous citing of historical sources (mainly letopisi and ancient povesti) throughout the text and the use of footnotes and endnotes, Artsybyshev’s Pristup was easily recognisable by his contemporaries as a narrative of an historiographical character. In this case, the term povest’ was associated with the ancient chronicle rather than with the contemporary narrative genre. From a stylistic point of view, the (semi)scholarly character of the work is achieved by the choice of an impersonal, “objective” discourse, only rarely interrupted by the narrator’s interpolated comments on the events described. One of the few exceptions occurs in a passage on Vladimir and his immoderate passion for women, a theme having clear potentials for narrative treatment: Nestor represents Vladimir as being so partial to women that, other than his wives, Rogneda, Grechanka, Bogemka, Bolgarka and others unknown, he would have had three hundred concubines in Belgorod; three hundred in Belgogorod and two

42

Artsybyshev (or Artsybashev) was active both in the provincial society Obshchestvo liubitelei otechestvennoi slovesnosti (Kazan’) and in the Obshchestvo istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom universitete (Zorin 1989: 116). 43 Mazour calls Artsybyshev one of an “expert in the field of archaeography and archival art” in the early nineteenth century. Mazour 1975: 71. 44 Rogneda, which had been published anonymously in Severnyi vestnik, appeared in a separate edition in 1818. See Kucherov 1941: 112.

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hundred in the settlement at Berestov, and besides that immense number, virgins and 45 married women were brought to him!

However, the “intrusion” of the narrator’s point of view is limited to “common sense” considerations and does not introduce a different, “subjective” speech style. Artsybyshev defers any fictionalisation of the episode to his later work Rogneda, where the narrator provides a vivid account of the numerous sentimental liaisons of Vladimir. In this later work the narrator’s discourse plays a leading role in the “fictionalisation” of historical data. In particular, the author’s moral stance reveals itself both in the narrator’s interpolated comments on Vladimir’s conduct and in the way each episode is presented to the reader. Constructed on the opposition between the physical strength of Vladimir the warrior versus the moral weakness of Vladimir the private man, the narrative framework itself reflects a moral gauge applied to historical figures that is typical of both classical and sentimental narratives. Humanity is weak and mortal; mighty souls are often destined for mighty flaws. Under the burden of the passions their steadfastness is broken down; – their gloomy passions extinguish the lamp of their intellect. Manly in battles, steadfast in adversities, wise Vladimir was the worst of men in his love for women. This hero was not in awe of arrows and sharp swords: he dealt proudly with haughty Monarchs; but he submitted like a weak boy to the power of charming eyes. A strong army could not frighten him but one smile from rosy lips could conquer him. Vladimir son of Sviatoslav does not sleep, he is brooding; his imagination is drawing the features of Rognedina. He falls asleep at sunrise and sees the beauty before him in a dream, as if in reality. Vladimir prepares to embrace her – awakes – and embraces his bed 46 curtains. “Нестор выставляет Владимира таким женолюбом, что кроме его жен: Рогнеды, гречанки, богемки, болгарки и неизвестных, у него было как будто бы еще триста наложниц в Белгороде, триста в Белгогороде и двести в сельце Берестовом, и сверх этого необъятного числа к нему будто бы приводили девиц и замужних женщин!” Artsybyshev 1811: 103-104 (hereafter: Pristup). 46 “Слабо и тленно человечество; великие недостатки часто бывают уделом великих душ. Под бременем страстей изнемогает твердость; разум гасит свой светильник в их мраке. Мужественный в битвах, твердый в несчастии, мудрый Владимир был по женолюбию последним из людей. Героя не ужасали стрелы и острые мечи; гордо поступал он с надменными монахами, но покорялся как слабый отрок силе прелестных глаз. Нестрашны были ему сильные сражения, но он был побежден одной улыбкой розовых уст. Не спит Святославов сын и думу думает; воображение рисует ему черты Рогнеды. Заснул он на восходе солнца, и сон как наяву представил ему красавицу. Владимир простирает объятья – просыпается… и обнимает завесы своего ложа”. Artsybyshev 1818: 37-38 (hereafter: Rogneda). 45

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With the shift from historiographical writing to historical fiction, the narrator clearly felt free to alter the letopisi version, to which he so carefully adhered in Pristup, and to follow his own creative impulse,47 thus exploiting the fictional possibilities of this juicy historical episode. Artsybyshev’s representation of history draws inspiration from the most popular trends in contemporary historical fiction: Ossianic poems, stylised features of old chronicles48 and sentimental povesti. This latter influence is particularly evident in the choice of some stylistic devices (orthographic means of expression: dashes, dots, exclamation marks)49 and by the moralising sentimental approach to the historical event highlighted in the first lines of the passage quoted above. Occasionally, however, despite the adherence to sentimental clichés, a vivid description of the historical characters emerges in Rogneda, especially in some of the passages describing Vladimir’s carnal passions, as a result of which the hero emerges as a real man and not just an abstract historical figure. Gavril Gerakov (1775-1838), professor of history at St. Petersburg’s Kadetskii korpus, was the author of a large number of historical and patriotic50 works which were often the target of mocking reviews in the first two decades of the century.51 Like Artsybyshev, Gerakov also wrote two different types of work about the same historical episode (in this case the vicissitudes of Prince Menshikov), the – allegedly – historiographic fragment Kniaz’ 47 Reference to different levels of historical accuracy required in fictional vis-à-vis non-fictional works is often stated in the introduction in order to pre-empt any possible criticism. This is, for example, the case of L’vov’s foreword to his Khram slavy velikikh Rossiian, where he writes: “Моя книга – не история, а подражательное ей повествование [...]. Поскольку я не историк, то я и не думаю, что я мог подвергнуться взыскательному ответу за мои ошибки”. L’vov 1822: [i] (hereafter: Khram slavy) 48 Characteristic in this regard is the repetition of the same etymological root, as in: “Не спит Святославов сын и думу думает”. (L’vov 1822: 38; the italics are mine). L’vov further exploits this stylistic device in Khram slavy. 49 Cf., for example, “Ты не видел ее… и веришь пустым мечтам своего распаленного воображения… Увижу …” and: “Отошли со слезами прелестными, и глазами спрашивали друг друга: что случилось с нежным Владимиром? [...] Долго стоял он перед ним в нерешительности – долг и страсть боролись в его сердце, наконец, – победила последняя”. (Khram slavy: 39-40). 50 In between 1801 to 1817 Gerakov wrote eleven works on historical subjects, for the most part of the pseudo-historiography type. 51 Tolstikhina 1989: I/539-540.

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Menshikov. Liubopytnoi istoricheskoi otryvok 1727go goda (Prince Menshikov. A Curious Historical Fragment of the Year 1727) and the povest’ Kniaz’ Menshikov i v ssylke velikii chelovek (Prince Menshikov, or the Exile of a Great Man) both published in 1811. The divide between the fictional and the non-fictional version is, however, more blurred than with Artsybyshev, as the titles reveal. The generic labels of otryvok52 and povest’ seem at odds with the precise chronological reference to “the year 1727” indicating a scholarly intent. This double aim – narrative and scholarly – hinted at by the title reflects the alternation of two different approaches to the historical topic. Unlike most historical narratives at the time long sections are written in an unadorned style, sentences are generally concise, and the description of historical events is supported by a precise chronology. The full historical background to important figures is provided. Catherine I, for example, is thus introduced in the narrative: The Wise Sovereign Catherine I, who governed the Russian Throne after the death of her Husband Peter the Great, died on 17 May 1727. Peter II, the Lawful Successor to this vast Empire, inherited the throne. This Sovereign was born in 1715 53 to the Tsarevich Aleksi Petrovich and the Princess Volfenbitel’skaia.

Further on, however, the narrator expresses his moralistic criticism of a number of historical figures, such as Menshikov, whose life had supposedly been ruined by his unbridled ambition.54 In these

52 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, thanks to Karamzin’s achievements, “the short form of the fragment had gained the status of bona fide literary form”, mostly associated with sentimental prose. Hammarberg 1991: 270. See also the Introduction to chapter IV. 53 “Екатерина I государыня премудрая, которая управляла Российским престолом после смерти своего супруга Петра Великого, скончалась 17 мая 1727 года. Петр II законный наследник этой обширной империи унаследовал ее после Екатерины. Этот государь родился в 1715 году от царевича Алексея Петровича и принцессы Вольфенбительской”. Gerakov 1811a: [1] (hereafter: Kniaz’ Menshikov, liubopytnyi istoricheskii otryvok). 54 The same moralising approach characterises Menshikov, istoricheskaia povest’ (1810) by Sergei Glinka (1776-1847), Fedor Glinka’s elder brother (cf. Al’tshuller 1996: 35-37). In this work Menshikov’s ruin is attributed to his excessive ambition, the evil deeds of his enemies and the corruption rife at his court. As in Gerakov’s story, the exile restores a sense of morality in both Menshikov and his fallen adversaries. Unlike Gerakov, however, Glinka limits himself to the narration of Menshikov’s trials, abstaining from any political evaluation of the episode. Cf. Glinka 1810: 9 and passim.

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parts the sentimental features prevail over historical accuracy, as, for example, in the passages on Menshikov’s exile: Investigators quickly came after him and condemned him to spend the rest of his life at Berezov. His wife and children followed him into exile, she was blinded by tears and died of the journey. – He tolerated his misfortune with greater steadfastness than is usually thought, and, having been of a weak constitution, made himself healthy and stout. No one ever heard him grumbling about his fate; he was occasionally pained to see his daughters; but he was convinced that he must piously 55 submit to the will of God and the will of the Sovereign.

Gerakov’s second work, Kniaz’ Menshikov i v ssylke velikii chelovek, is a fictional narrative underpinned by the historiographic purpose of rehabilitating Prince Menshikov. This intent is made clear in the title, where the epithet velikii (‘great’) is associated with the hero’s name, and confirmed in the first introductory lines.56 The depiction of Menshikov as a great historical figure provided with heroic traits (although his moral flaws are also acknowledged) is associated with a eulogy for Peter the Great’s reforms. The originality of Gerakov’s work lies in the author’s ability to unite an accurate depiction of the past with the fictionalisation of historical events as, for example, the outset of the remarkable social rise of the young Menshikov, the former pie-seller who became Peter I’s favourite. We can say that fortune, which frequently accomplishes its whims, quickly removed Menshikov from his unworthy state. At this time Peter I was still at that happy age which does not blush to occupy itself with unimportant business; on seeing the young pie-seller almost daily from the window of His apartment, he took pleasure in idle hours listening to his witty jokes, unknowingly fell in love and to some extent prepared himself to participate in Menshikov’s fate. […] One soldier of the guards got angry with young Menshikov’s excessively stinging jokes and pulled his ears; Menshikov screamed so loudly that Peter I in His Palace, hearing an unusually highpitched cry, looked out of the window […] Menshikov, his eyes full of tears and with “Скоро за ним приехали следователи и осудили [sic] его остаток жизни провести в Березове [...]. Супруга его ослепла от слез и умерла в дороге, а дети последовали за ним в ссылку. – Он сносил свои несчастья с большей твердостью, чем думали и, будучи слабого сложения, сделался здоровым и дородным. Никто не слышал, чтобы он роптал на судьбу, иногда больно было ему видеть своих дочерей; но он сам старался внушить, что Божьей воле и воле государя необходимо свято повиноваться”. Kniaz’ Menshikov, liubopytnyi istoricheskii otryvok: 26-27. 56 “Частые несправедливые суждения о князе Меньшикове и решительные заключения о столь знаменитом человеке послужили причиной моего желания представить благоразумным читателям его кончину, достойную великого человека”. Gerakov 1811b: 7 (hereafter Kniaz’ Menshikov i v ssylke velikii chelovek). 55

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a bold expression, appeared fearlessly before the sensitive Monarch […] and did not 57 miss the opportunity to demonstrate his wit with jokes.

After that encounter Menshikov is nominated “komnatnyi pazh” (page of the chamber), the first step in his dazzling political career. The balance between scholarly precision, legends and fictional events is supported by the author’s terse style, which, contrary to most historical narratives of the time, rarely lapses into the pitfalls of sentimental58 and Ossianic modes.

V.1.4 Fictional representations of the past: the sentimental model Works by Nikolai Artsybyshev and Gavril Gerakov have provided examples of intergeneric dialogue between fictional and non-fictional representations of history producing interesting literary results. To strike a balance between the historical and the fictional element became a preoccupation not just for writers engaged in scholarly research into Russia’s past. Karamzin’s Natal’ia represented one of the most influential sentimental-historical narratives at the beginning of the century, providing a popular template for Russian authors in the early days of the historical novel.59 However great Karamzin’s influence after the publication of his History, and however popular his povesti, the sentimental prototype looked increasingly out of step with the literary sensibility of Alexander’s age. As had happened with other genres, the work of 57 “Можно сказать, что счастье, часто исполняющее свои прихоти, в скором времени извлекло Меньшикова из этого недостойного сословия. В это время Петр I еще был в тех счастливых летах, когда не краснеют, занимаясь пустыми делами; почти каждый день он находил удовольствие в праздные часы слушать из окон своих покоев острые шутки пирожника. Так, он нечувствительно полюбил Меньшикова и некоторым образом подготовил себя принимать участие в его судьбе. [...] Один гвардейский солдат, рассердясь на слишком колкие шутки молодого Меньшикова, отодрал его за уши. Меньшиков так громко кричал от боли, что Петр I в своем дворце, услышав необыкновенный пронзительный крик, выглянул в окно. [...] Меньшиков с заплаканными глазами, без всякого страха со смелым видом предстал перед чувствительным монархом [...] и не упустил случая показать свою остроту в шутках”. Ibid.: 12-13. 58 An exception is the sections on the misery experienced by Menshikov and his sons in Siberia, narrated according to the sentimental template. 59 Lotman 1961: 3-55.

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his followers, while lacking some of Karamzin’s redeeming qualities, did much to expose the inadequacy of sentimentalism as the leading voice of contemporary fiction.60 One of Karamzin’s epigones was Petr Kazotti, the author of a pseudo-historical novel Boiara B...v i M...v, ili sledstviia pylkikh strastei i narusheniia obeta. Rossiiskoe proisshestvie, sluchivsheesia v tsarstvovanie tsaria Alekseia Mikhailovicha (Boiar B…v and M…v, or the Consequences of Fiery Passions and the Breaking of Vows. Russian Events Occurring in the Reign of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, 1807). This work is exemplary in its use of the historical setting as an element entirely subsidiary to the sentimental love story. The first part of the title bears the distinctive mark of the moralising narrative, while the second part seems to stress the “Russian-ness” and the supposed historical verisimilitude of the literary content (suggested by the genre definition proisshestvie and by the verb sluchit’). This is a point further underscored in the introduction, where Kazotti writes: “The plan for this book is taken from the Russian truth told to me by elderly, respectable people”.61 These “assertions of truthfulness” were a common device of sentimental prose62 which, as epitomised by Kazotti’s work, did not necessarily indicate a historical characterisation of the period. Boiara B...v i M...v revolves around the vicissitudes of two lovers, the “honest boiar” Matveev and the “lovable” Mariia. Contrary to the sentimental canon, a longed-for marriage does not bring the work to a happy ending. Instead, the tribulations of the virtuous couple after their marriage, ranging from the loss and eventual recovery of their daughter, to the rape of Mariia and the ensuing search for the offender, are spread over one hundred pages. 60

Cf. Al’tshuller 1996: 30-37; Brown 1996: 157-158. “План этой книги взят из Русской истины, которую мне рассказывали старые почтенные люди”. Kazotti 1807: 1 (hereafter: Boiara B...v i M...v). Compare with the beginning of Karamzin’s Natal’ia where the narrator initiates an imaginary dialogue with his ancestors. N. M. Karamzin, “Natal’ia, boiarskaia doch’” in Karamzin 1848: III/82-84. 62 See, for example, N. Murav’ev’s Vsevolod i Veleslava, proisshestvie, sokhranivsheesia v pis’makh (1807) and F. Malinovskii’s Verolomstvo druga, povest’ ob Ol’ge, Liudmile i Milovzore. Proisshestvie (1813). At the beginning of the century there appeared numerous works of this kind where the historical setting mentioned in the title actually played only a marginal role in the narrative. Compare, for example, the anonymous Kniaz’ O...ii i Grafina M...va, ili urok o modnom vospitanii. Istinnoe Rossiiskoe proisshestvie, sluchivsheesia v tsarstvovanie Imperatritsy Ekateriny I. Rossiiskoe sochinenie (1810), a work clearly appealing to the growing interest in national history. 61

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The only description of the “tsardom of tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich” is relegated to a few initial pages in which an extremely vague, “timeless” picture of the epoch is given while later on we find only sporadic reference to the historical period in which the novel is set. Interestingly, there are clear textual parallels between Kazotti’s work and Karamzin’s Natal’ia, starting with the opening paragraphs of the two works. Natal’ia begins with a rhetorical question addressing a target reader purportedly sympathetic to nostalgic views about the past: Who among us does not love those years when Russians were Russians, when they wore their own proper clothes, walked with their own gait, lived by their own customs, and spoke their own language with all their heart, that is to say, they 63 spoke as they thought?

In the incipit to Boiara B...v i M...v Kazotti rephrases Karamzin’s arguments glorifying the ancient times: When the wise Monarch Aleksei Mikhailovich reigned on the Russian Throne; when truth and good deeds shone in the hearts of Russians with all their greatness; when the noble Boiar conversed with his subjects without pride, passing the time in friendly conversation; when people spoke according to their hearts; […] When a young girl was educated not by Frenchmen, or dancing-masters, but by her parents nd old mamushka who formed her intellect and heart, and the law of God was 64 her main science.

Interestingly in both passages the historical specific is lost in the tirade on the “good old days” of the patriarchal age (Patriarkhal’nyia vremena in Karamzin’s words) vis-à-vis the corrupted morals of contemporary Russia.65 “Кто из наc не любит те времена, когда русские были русскими; когда они одевались в свое собственное платье, ходили своей походкой, жили по своим обычаям, говорили на своем языке от своего сердца, то есть говорили, как думали?” N.M. Karamzin, “Natal’ia, boiarskaia doch’” in Karamzin 1848: III/81. 64 “Когда на Российском престоле царствовал мудрый монах Алексей Михайлович, когда истина [sic] и добродушие блистали во всем величии в русских сердцах [sic]; когда знатный боярин беседовал без гордости с селянином и в дружеских разговорах проводил время: язык их говорил то, что думало сердце; [...] Когда молодая девушка воспитывалась не у француженок, не у танцемейстеров, а образовывали ее ум и сердце родители и ее старая мамушка; – Божий закон был ее главной наукой”. Boiara B...v i M...v: 1-3. Note the reiteration of the temporal mark “kogda” as a stylistic device to emphasise the temporal – and ideal – distance between past and present times. 65 Cf. Cross 1971: 108. 63

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As had happened in Karamzin’s historical stories, Kazotti endows the Russian past with features taken from the idyll, depicting old Russia as a sentimental microcosm where people lived an honest and simple life. Kazotti’s characters speak the typical jargon of sentimental heroes, for the overall aim of Boiara B...n i M...v is not that of providing a faithful historical setting, but rather of involving the reader at an emotional level while imparting a moral lesson on the present state of Russia. This moralising and nostalgic perspective on Russian history, however dominant among sentimental authors, was not unique. In particular, novels set (and written) during the Napoleonic wars offer a much more plausible picture. Sometimes contemporary events served as a realistic narrative frame for the sentimental story, as in the case of Nevidimka, ili tainstvennaia zhenshchina (The Unseen, or a Mysterious Woman, 1815). In the story the protagonist is Roslav, a Russian officer, stationed in Switzerland waiting to recover from battle wounds to rejoin the army, which he does at the end of the story.66 Little detail is given about the war, the bulk of the novella being devoted to Roslav’s infatuation for the mysterious woman of the title. Nonetheless, in the immediate aftermath of the conflict with France, this historical background provides a poignant realistic device, injecting new life into the otherwise overused sentimental tale of unhappy love. The anonymous novel The Russian Amazon investigated in the previous chapter provided a much more impressive case of integration of realistic details about contemporary events and sentimental devices. A similar instance is provided by another novel which appeared in the same year: V. Z.’s67 Kniaz’ V.-skii i Kniazhna Shch-va; ili: umeret’ za otechestvo slavno. Noveishee proisshestvie vo vremia kompanii frantsuzov s nemtsami i Rossiianami 1806 goda. Rossiiskoe sochinenie (Prince V-skii and Princess Shch-va, or to Die for the Glorious Motherland. The Latest Events During the Campaigns of the French Against the Germans and the Russians in the Year 1806. 1807). As is typical of sentimental fiction, the plot of Kniaz V-skii centres on the troubled love story between the characters of the title, eventually leading to a positive dénouement where love triumphs and the lovers are blissfully happy. In this respect the novel is not dissimilar from the dozens of sentimental narratives of this kind 66

See I. 1815: 75 and 115. Possibly, the initials V.Z. stand for Vladimir Vel’iaminov-Zernov. Cf. Masanov 1957: 190. 67

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published at the beginning of the century. Yet, on closer inspection this work stands out; the promise of “the latest” historical events promised in the title is actually fulfilled with vivid descriptions of the Napoleonic wars. The attention to detail (particularly remarkable in the first chapter) and the realism of the battlefield scenes in the second part of the novel are, at least in part, explained by the close proximity of the first Franco-Russian war and the availability to the author of a vast amount of historical records, journalistic reports, and oral accounts.68 Commercial reasons may also have played a role in so far as anything related to the Napoleonic wars could be reasonably expected to meet the favour of contemporary readers. More interesting perhaps is the successful integration of the historical elements into the sentimental love story. In particular, in the sections describing the events of 1805-1806 (the political situation in Europe, the battle of Austerlitz) the historical situation is woven into the personal life of the main characters – the princes V-skii, Ippolit and, in particular, Erast – themselves engaged in the fight against the French. The protagonists play a part in the military conflict either actively, as soldiers in the case of male heroes, or passively, as spectators, in the case of the heroines. Erast, for example, is supposedly killed in the battle of Austerlitz, an event that sets in motion a string of consequences on the level of the plot, such as the introduction of new characters and new turns of events destined to play a key role in the parallel love story. In the sections devoted to the depiction of the sentimental relationship between Princess Shch. and Erast, the interaction with the historical setting is maintained by the constant reference to the repercussions of the war on their liaison. This weaving of historical and personal culminates in Erast’s fortunate escape; the compelling prelude to the realisation of the heroes’ happiness is made plausible at a narrative level by the realistic descriptions of battle scenes throughout the novel. Similarly to the Russian Amazon the historical events directly affect the personality of the characters. The supposed killing of Erast, for instance, causes his father’s madness, Erast’s experience of the war marks his transition to manhood, whilst for his sister Katerina it means the end of a carefree youth. By weaving together external events with insights into the characters’ psyche, V. Z. contributed to the creation of a new type of sentimental novel where the historical and personal spheres were 68

See Sorokine 1974: 51-76.

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intertwined. In a more general perspective Kniaz’ V-skii provides evidence of the wide-ranging experimentation in historical fiction engendered by the climate of intense patriotism and burning interest in the nation’s past sweeping Russia in the early nineteenth century. The works investigated in this section demonstrate that the representation of history engaged prose writers as never before in the literary and cultural melting pot of Alexandrine Russia. This body of works inaugurated a new way to write about historical events, providing the stepping stone for the historical novel to emerge as an authoritative genre in Russia’s literary landscape.

V.2 The Russian gothic: the supernatural, horror and terror in early nineteenth-century Russia: Nikolai Gnedich’s Don Korrado de Gerrera70 Pre-romantic trends coming from the West – and here the term is intended in its broader meaning so as to include the Graveyard poetry of Thomson, Young and Gray, the English gothic novel as well as the German Sturm und Drang movement – had a tremendous influence on early- nineteenth-century Russian literature.71 While this influence, with the possible exception of the gothic novel,72 is generally recognised in secondary literature, very little work has been conducted on how these works were actually assimilated by Russian 69

A similar plan underlies the long novel written by the same V.Z., Natal’ia T-tch-va i Na-y-n’, ili liubovniki, soslannye v Sibir’. Istoricheskoe proisshestvie, vziatoe iz vremen Petra Velikogo, izdannoe sochinitelem Kniazia V-skogo i Kniazhny Shch-voi, ili umeret’ za otechestvo slavno (1807). The story of the secret love between Natal’ia and Na-y-n’ and its unfortunate consequences (the heroine’s murder of her unwanted child, the exile and the separation of the wretched lovers and their final “redemption”) intersect with depictions of the historical setting. See, for example, the first chapter dedicated to life at court during Peter’s reign, and the sections devoted to the Tunguz, a Siberian tribe. Unlike V. Z.’s previous novel, however, entire sections follow the sentimental template at the expense of historical accuracy. 70 Some of the material contained in this section has been published in Tosi 1999 and Tosi 2001. 71 This definition of pre-romanticism is far from being universally accepted (see Smith 1976: 173-184). For a survey of the term in English scholarship see P. W. K. Stone, “Pre-Romanticism” in Watson 1988: 102-117. 72 The influence of the English gothic novel on Russian literature has been generally neglected, with the notable exception of the pioneering research by Vadim Vatsuro (cf. Vatsuro 2002). In recent years, in the wake of the growing interest in the English gothic, research on the trend in Russia has gained momentum (see Cornwell 1999).

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authors in the early nineteenth century. A close reading of a number of texts alongside their more or less explicit foreign sources reveals a degree of flexibility and confidence in the treatment of foreign templates that would take scholars unfamiliar with the literary output of the period by surprise. As we will demonstrate, this creative approach is interesting both per se and for its crucial role in the rise of a highly original prose in nineteenth-century Russia. Nikolai Gnedich is a case in point. Although he has been generally associated with the neo-classical school his early output showcases the impact of pre-romantic and romantic trends on Russian fiction in the pre-Pushkin period. Nikolai Gnedich (1784-1833) has been widely acknowledged as one of the most significant authors in early nineteenth-century Russia and the majority of his translations and works of poetry have been investigated extensively by his contemporaries as well as by modern scholars. During his lifetime Gnedich was esteemed primarily for his translations, and in particular for his monumental version of the Iliad – the work that established his reputation as an author. Pushkin, for instance, admiringly described it as “one of the few works which proudly places Russian literature ahead of Europe”.73 Later came the turn of Gnedich’s original lyrics to attract critical attention. Irina Medvedeva, the editor of Gnedich’s complete poems in the Soviet series Biblioteka poeta, for example, regarded his verse as “the most significant and original part” of the writer’s literary output.74 This clear predilection for Gnedich the poet and translator over Gnedich the prose writer meant a widespread neglect of his literary output prior to the work on the Iliad from 1811.75 Gnedich’s stories and novels, which were all written in his youth, still need to be reassessed in the context both of the author’s work and of nineteenthcentury literature as a whole. In this chapter we shall examine a remarkable work by Gnedich, Don Korrado de Gerrera, in the context of the romantic inclinations characterising the outset of his literary career, before he “Перевод Илиады стоит среди нескольких произведений, которые русская словесность с гордостью может выставить перед Европой”. A. Pushkin, Opyt otrazheniia nekotorykh neliteraturnykh obvinenii (quoted in Medvedeva 1956: 5). See also Tikhanov 1884. 74 Medvedeva 1956: 5. 75 In most cases little mention is made of the author’s early production. Neuhäuser and Vatsuro are the main exceptions to this rule (see Neuhäuser 1974 and Vatsuro 2002: 313-318). 73

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veered to more conservative positions in the years of his adherence to the Beseda. The decade 1800-1810 was a key formative period for the young Nikolai. His interest in languages and cultures and his involvement in discussions and translations of cutting-edge contemporary literature, the newly re-discovered Shakespeare and Milton,76 the still influential English Graveyard poetry,77 and the latest arrivals on Russia’s literary scene, Schiller and, a few years later, Walter Scott, all date from this period.78 Gnedich was not alone in his attraction to pre-romantic moods coming from the West; by the early nineteenth century a growing number of Russian authors had adopted the ideals of spontaneity, original genius and imagination. Symptomatic of this new atmosphere is Sergei Glinka’s “Foreword” to his 1803 translation of Young’s Night Thoughts.79 Prompted by the legendary image of the author circulating in the West, Glinka gave a brief but enthusiastic account of the poet’s life. In this he projected for the Russian reader an image of Young that was indubitably romantic, a distillation of the ideal of the Poet-Genius driven by his “ardent imagination” and devoted to a “high [artistic] gift” (velikoe darovanie): Endowed with a great Genius, he devoted himself exclusively to Poetry; in his prime of youth he felt an overwhelming aspiration towards fame, which always presages high talent and leads to indifference towards all the gifts of happiness. But 76

The perception of Shakespeare as a romantic author was borrowed from Sturm und Drang writers and particularly from Schiller, himself a great admirer of Shakespearian tragedies. See Alekseev 1955 and Boss 1991. 77 Excerpts from James Thomson’s The Seasons (1727-1730) were published in Russian journals starting from 1781; the first complete translation was that by D. Dmitrevskii in 1798. Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742-1745) began to appear in a prose version in Kheraskov’s journal Vechera in 1772, followed by two “indirect” translations from German versions in 1778 and 1780 (published in Novikov’s journal Utrennii svet) and one from French in 1806. An incomplete translation of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1750) came out in Pokoiashchiisia trudoliubets in 1784. A complete translation in prose was published in 1785. 78 On the reception of Milton in Russia see Boss 1991. For a list of the first translations of Schiller’s tragedies in Russian see Passage 1963: 17, footnote 1c). See also R. Iu. Danilevskii, “Shiller i stanovlenie russkogo romantizma” in Alekseev 1972: 3-95. 79 Glinka’s Iungovy nochi is a free translation of the French rendition of Young’s “Nights I-IV” by Le Tourneur (Levin 1994a: 219/n.219). This was one of the first verse translations of Young to appear in Russia (for an explanation for the dominance of prose translations of Young’s Night Thoughts in Russia before 1803, see ibid.: 145).

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Young suffered both unhappiness and lack of fame for a long time; in the end he 80 gained only the latter, which, despite all men’s effort, crowns only the true Genius.

Young formed part of a heterogeneous ensemble of Western authors revered by some of the most brilliant among the new generation of writers close to Gnedich, such as Aleksei Merzliakov, Iakob Galinkovskii, Vasilii Narezhnyi and Andrei Turgenev.81 Anticipating trends that would flourish in the Russia of the 1820s, these young men avidly read and discussed authors they perceived as archetypical poet-geniuses whose work encapsulated romantic creativity, originality and aesthetic freedom. Andrei Turgenev was a particularly important figure in the literary life of early nineteenthcentury Moscow, an inspirational role model for many, including the young Gnedich. The oldest of four brothers, all of whom played an active part in the cultural life of early nineteenth-century Russia, Andrei Turgenev was well acquainted with the most recent trends in Western European literature, well-travelled, and an energetic organiser of literary events. With the help of his brother Nikolai in 1801 he founded the Friendly Literary Society which gathered the young and progressive writers revolving around Moscow University. The Friendly Literary Society harnessed their enthusiasm and was instrumental in promoting English and, especially, German preromantic literature in Russia with an eye to setting national literature on a similar course. In particular, contemporary German literature was a favoured topic of discussion, bordering on the technical when members tried their hand at translations of Goethe, Schiller, Kotzebue and Wieland.82 Surely enough the translations of the much admired champions of a new aesthetics soon started to produce a direct impact on writers that were either part of or gravitated around the society, including Nikolai Gnedich, Vasilii Narezhnii andVasilii Zhukovskii.83 “Влекомый рождающимся Гением, он предался исключительно Поэзии, и в самом расцвете молодости ощутил непреодолимое стремление к славе, предзнаменующее всегда великое дарование и заставляющее равнодушно смотреть на все дары счастья. Но Юнг долгое время приносил неразделенные жертвы счастью и славе; и наконец получил только последнюю, которая вопреки всем человеческим усилиям увенчивает истинного гения”. [S. N. Glinka] 1803: [v]. For a brief account of Sergei Glinka’s literary career see Kiseleva 1989: I/576. 81 See Saburov 1939: 5-6; Vigel’ 1891-1892: II/217-219; Lotman 1959: 248-249; Shmidt 1960. See also Veselovskii 1904: 59-60 and passim. 82 See Zorin 1995-1996: 7-35. 83 Other members included Aleksei Merzliakov and Aleksandr Voeikov. 80

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Russian renditions of the two main representatives of the German Sturm und Drang movement, Goethe and Schiller, pre-date the period discussed here, going back to the 1780s84 and 1790s respectively.85 Once again, however, following a period of assimilation, the impact of the two German authors on Russian works becomes evident at the turn of the century when a wave of “Schillerism” and Werther-like characters sprouted in drama and prose fiction. One of the first Russian works to be written in this vein was Narezhnyi’s Mstiashchie evrei (The Revenge of the Jew) appearing in 1799 in the journal Ippokrena (Hippocrene). The story, with its gruesome plot and highly emotional style, stood out from the rest of the material published in the periodical, which consisted mainly of more traditional pieces by students of Moscow University where Narezhnyi studied between 1799 and 1801. After a brief interlude during which Narezhnyi devoted himself to classicist poems, fables and historical narratives of the Ossianic type (Rogvol’d), the author came back to Schillerian modes with two tragedies, Dimitrii Samozvanets (The False Dimitrii, written in 1800 and published in 1804) and the tellingly entitled Den’ slodeistva i mshcheniia (The Day of Crime and Revenge, 1800).86 These works were followed by the unpublished gothic piece Mertvyi zamok (The Dead Castle, 1801), directly inspired by Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).87 Gnedich followed a very similar path to Narezhnyi, and his attraction towards pre-romantic trends during his years at Moscow University (1800-1802) is demonstrated by his early publications. These include the first Russian translation of Schiller’s tragedy Fiesko (1803),88 re-workings of Macpherson’s songs,89 excerpts from

84

The first incomplete Russian version of Goethe’s Werther (1774) came out in 1781; see Kochetkova 1995: 265-267. In late-eighteenth early nineteenth-century Russia Goethe was celebrated almost exclusively as the author of Werther (Zhirmunskii 1937: 91-97). 85 Die Räuber marked the beginning of Schiller’s fame in Russia. A re-worked German version of the play by K. M. Plümicke was translated for the first time in 1793 by N. Sandunov and was first performed in Moscow in 1805. See also Danilevskii 1972: 37-41. For a list of the early Russian translations of Schiller’s tragedies see Passage 1963: 17/ fn. 1c. See also Danilevskii 1972. 86 Ippokrena 1800: VII/353-496. 87 See Larionova 1995-1996: 36-49. 88 See Kibal’nik 1989: I/586. Whilst Kostka omits Gnedich, Egunov and Danilevskii stress the importance of his early works for the fortunes of Schiller in Russia. (See Kostka 1965: 13-17; Egunov 1966: 317 and Danilevskii 1972: 50-53.

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90

Milton’s Paradise Lost and, in 1808, a translation into Russian (via Ducis’ French version) of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Gnedich’s predilection for pre-romantic modes informs his narrative output at the time: the novella Morits, ili zhertva mshcheniia (Moriz, or the Victim of Vengeance) is a remake of an unspecified German source, the original story Neschastnaia liubov’ (Unhappy Love),91 and the novel Don Korrado de Gerrera (1803). At the time of its publication Don Korrado baffled readers and was met with exceptionally caustic reviews from critics. In order to understand the strong reactions aroused by Gnedich’s novel we need to consider the issue within the framework of the reception of another key genre of European romanticism: the gothic novel. The birth of the gothic novel in England is marked by the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto(1765), a work followed by a stream of tales of terror and of horror.92 Authors such as Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and Charles Maturin set the standard for a cultural phenomenon soon spreading throughout Europe and merging into other pre-romantic trends, such as the German Sturm und Drang.93 The gothic novel was characterised by an atmosphere of mystery and suspense suggestive of a supernatural and potentially threatening dimension to human actions. Essential

89

See Gnedich’s Posledniaia pesn’ Ossiana (M., 1804) and Krasoty Ossiana (M., 1806). 90 In 1805 Gnedich translated part of book III of Milton’s masterpiece (see Boss 1991: 116). 91 Moriz came out in separate edition in 1802 signed “N.G-ch”, Gnedich’s pseudonym. Both these works were published in Gnedich’s early collection Plody uedineniia (1802: authorship initially attributed to the little-known M. Dmitrevskii). More recently Egunov has provided convincing textual evidence that Plody uedineniia was one of Gnedich’s first works (Egunov 1966: 312-319). 92 As a whole scholars agree on the distinction between two branches of the gothic novel: the “novel of terror” and the “novel of horror”, or Schauer-Romantik. The first kind, the main examples of which are provided by Walpole’s and Radcliffe’s works, is based on the building up of expectations of dreadful events, through a refined suspense technique. The second group of gothic novels, which includes the narratives of Lewis, Beckford and Maturin, on the contrary, aims at shocking the reader with a succession of fully described horrors. (Cf. Seed 1981). Varma recognises a third group: the gothic-historical novel, identifying Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto as its major example (Varma 1987: 129-131 and 206). 93 As has been noted, the historical situation of Europe at the end of the century played a significant role in the spreading of the “gothic fashion”. The 1780s were chaotic years for England, and for the rest of Europe, climaxing at the end of the decade with the French Revolution. See Tompkins 1986: 19.

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ingredients of the genre included a gothic villain inhabiting a haunted castle, and an innocent heroine, victim of his cruelty. The gothic novel emerged in a period characterised by a growing critical attitude towards the tenets of classicism and the rationality of the Augustan Age.94 The shift from the ideal of classical perfection to the predilection for “irregularity” and “asymmetry”,95the fascination with the supernatural and the fantastic embodied by the Middle Ages, which characterise the gothic novel, was prepared by the Graveyard poetry of the 1740s and early 1750s. Edward Young’s The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742), and Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), for example, explore the theme of the ruin in conjunction with the idea of the fleeting life of men surrounded by hostile Nature. As a minor gothic author, Nathan Drake, spells out in The Abbey of Cundale: “The view of the Abbey too, dismantled and falling fast to decay, presented an image of departed greatness admirably calculated to awaken recollections of the mutability and transient nature of all human possessions”.96 In the context of European pre-romanticism the ruin becomes a literary locus, a source of melancholic contemplation signalling a new sensibility. Macpherson’s The Poems of Ossian (1760-1763), which glorify a mythical medieval past, are part and parcel of this new sensibility and antiquarian interest. In this way the feeling of nostalgia for an idealised Middle Ages interweaves with the new aesthetic principles of imagination and irregularity underlying a number of pre-romantic trends such as Graveyard poetry, Ossianic songs and the gothic novel. A fundamental theoretical support to the new tendencies was provided by Edmund Burke’s ground-breaking essay A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) defending the sublime arising from melancholy and terror as a fundamental principle for contemporary arts.97 The gothic revival reached Russia very rapidly, affirming itself in architecture from the early 1770s and in the 1790s in 94

Cf. Fiedler 1990: 139 and passim. Cf. Sage 1988: 130. 96 Drake 1972: 71. 97 In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful of 1756 Burke maintained that the feeling of the “sublime” lies in representations of the “vastness of dimension”, the “rugged and negligent”, the “dark and gloomy”, the “original and the irregular”. Burke 1958: 124. 95

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literature. As elsewhere in Europe, in Russia too the neo-gothic taste for buildings and gardens soon merged with the fashion for the “medieval” novel of terror, which spurred a number of translations, imitations and re-workings of this literary genre.98 Architecture in the neo-gothic style was introduced by Catherine herself, and was therefore granted acceptance immediately.99 Literature, however, did not enjoy such an influential patron and struggled to win over critics. In the literary sphere the official date of the arrival of gothic literature on the Russian shores is set at 1792, the year of the first Russian translation of Clara Reeve’s Old English Baron (1777),100 and of William Beckford’s Vathek,101 although it is safe to assume that a few readers read gothic novels in English or via French translations before that date. Although fiercely opposed by critics,102 the genre soon won the favour of readers, as demonstrated by the numerous translations, imitations and re-workings of the “tales of terror”, notably Karamzin’s The Island of Bornholm (Ostrov Borngol’m, 1794). The gothic craze reached its peak in terms of audience and literary influence in the decade 1800-1810 when novels by the controversial Mrs. Radcliffe were translated into Russian, usually via a French version.103 Radcliffe reached such a high level of popularity that her name alone on a book cover was perceived as a guarantee of commercial success; hence the number of works by other authors (including Lewis’s The Monk) attributed to the “celebrated Radcliffe”.104 Incidentally, it has been calculated that almost half of the Russian translations of gothic novels saw the light in Moscow, many of them by the pens of students of Moscow University who

98

See Vatsuro 1973. See D. Shvidkovsky, “Russian Neo-Gothic in the Age of Classicism” in Shvidkovsk 1996: 185-223; Gareth Jones, “Catherine the Great’s Understanding of the ‘Gothic’” in Klein, Dixon and Fraanje 2001: 233-240. 100 See Vatsuro 1973. 101 An English translation of Beckford’s Vathek (originally written in French) was published in 1786. The work appeared in Russian under the following title: Kalif Vatek. Arabskaia skazka (perevedena s frantsuzskogo) (Spb., 1792). 102 For a review of the critical reception of the gothic novel see chapter II.2. 103 Radcliffe was the most popular author of gothic novels in Russia. Her works were intensively translated at the beginning of the nineteenth century. During the year 1802 alone, for example, seven translations of her novels appeared. (Cf. Sopikov 19041908: 174-175). The first Russian edition of The Mysteries of Udolpho of 1802 was translated from a French edition, as was the case with the majority of Radcliffe’s work. 104 See Masanov 1963: 99-101. 99

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attended in the same years as Narezhnyi, Gnedich and Zhukovskii.105 Given their well-documented interest for gothic literature their direct collaboration or indirect contribution to these translations cannot be altogether ruled out. In the wake of Radcliffe’s success other gothic writers such as Charles Maturin soon appeared on the shelves of bookshops and further consolidated the fortunes of the genre in Russia. The first mentions of Maturin, an author already causing a stir in the West, date to 1816 when reports of his newly released tragedy Bertram reached Russia via journals such as Russkii invalid (The Russian Invalid) – by the pen of the poet and journalist V. I. Kozlov – and Vestnik Evropy. Excerpts of his work, however, appeared only a decade later when fragments from Maturin’s last novel The Albigenses (1824) were translated via a French version. Similarly, Maturin’s masterpiece Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) became known to the majority of Russian readers only in 1831, although a few, such as Pushkin who read it in 1823 while in Odessa, were acquainted with the novel before that date. Incidentally Melmoth made a strong impression on the poet who in Evgenii Onegin called Maturin’s novel a “genial’noe proizvedenie” (“a work of genius”).106 With similarities to the exploitation of Radcliffe’s name for commercial reasons in the 1810s, by the 1830s Maturin’s level of fame in Russia occasioned fake attributions to his pen of lesser known authors, such as De Quincey, whose Confessions of an Opium-Eater came out in 1834 as “sochinenie Matiurina, avtora Mel’mota” (“the work of Maturin, author of Melmoth”).107 To understand the enduring interest in the gothic and its remarkable influence on Russian authors we need to go back to the success enjoyed by Radcliffe in the first decade of the century, a period in which this literary trend acquired the cultural and literary dimensions of a “goticheskaia vol’na” (gothic wave).108 Notwithstanding their popularity with authors and the public at large, gothic novels were stigmatised by critics on aesthetic and moral grounds. The use of horror, violence and supernatural forces as literary themes, the creation of satanic types and the dark tones of the 105

Larionova 1995-1996: 42. Evgenii Onegin 3/XII. See M. N. Alekseev, “Charlz Robert Met’iurin i russkaia literatura” in Alekseev 1978: 3-55. 107 Masanov 1963: 100. 108 See Mersereau 1983: 54-55; Grossman 1925: 20-21; Peterson 1987: 36-49 and the above quoted volume edited by Cornwell (Cornwell 1999). 106

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most extreme among gothic novels ran counter to sentimental and classical aesthetics, in the same way as the emerging literary trends of civic engagement in the Napoleonic period. Similarly to what had happened in the West, however, damning reviews sprinkled trhoughout contemporary journals were powerless against the mounting wave of gothic works flooding the book market and beginning to influence contemporary writers.109 In the end readers’ tastes prevailed over critics’ preconceptions: English gothic literature, and Radcliffe’s novels in particular, remained popular throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, inspiring a long line of writers, from Karamzin,110 Narezhnyi and Zhukovskii, to BestuzhevMarlinskii,111 O. Somov, the young Gogol’, Dostoevskii and Bunin.112 Among the known instances of gothic influence in Russian literature, Gnedich’s Don Korrado has generally been omitted. Yet his work represents a watershed in the reception of the genre, for no Russian author before him had yet gone to such an extreme in adopting the “excesses” of the European gothic novel of horror and of Sturm und Drang literature in a narrative work. As we will see below, among his contemporaries only Nareznyi with his gothic drama The Dead Castle may be compared to Gnedich for the extent to which he pushed the boundaries of acceptability in contemporary literature. However, The Dead Castle was doomed never to appear in print and therefore its impact on contemporary literature was very small indeed. Intriguingly, however, some parallels between Narezhnyi’s drama and Gnedich’s Don Korrado have been detected,113 an instance which suggests a degree of communication – if not of active co-operation – between the two authors during their university years. Don-Korrado de Gerrera, ili Dukh mshcheniia i varvarstva Gishpantsev (Don Corrado de Gerrera, or the Spirit of Vengeance and the Barbarity of Spaniards) is a weighty volume of nearly four hundred pages, structured in two parts and nineteen chapters. Set in Spain at the time of Philip II, the plot revolves around the villain-hero Don Corrado. Under the cover of his position as an officer in the Royal army, Corrado perpetrates an impressive number of crimes including manslaughter, the malicious seduction and rape of innocent 109

See Sipovskii, Ocherki, I: 17, 19 and passim. See Vatsuro 1969: 190-209. 111 See Vatsuro 1995. 112 See Kozmin 1904. On this theme see also Troitskii 1985; Vinogradov 1979: 165166; Vatsuro 1973: 164. 113 Larionova 1995-1996: 44. 110

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maidens, the confinement and starvation of his own father, and responsibility for the murder of his brother. The escalation of his misdemeanours is eventually put to an end by the young and brave Don Ribero, who reveals his crimes and consigns the cruel Corrado to the Inquisition. Finally the unrepentant villain ends his life in agony. As was to be expected from such extreme subject matter, critics immediately panned the work. Unlike gothic-sentimental novels, which at the time were enjoying considerable public success in Russia, readers also appeared baffled by the novel’s disturbing subject and its terrifying atmosphere. Russians as a whole were accustomed to terror “tamed” by sentimental modes, as in the work of writers such as Mrs Radcliffe, Karamzin,114 and Zhukovskii. Indeed a certain type of gothic was not very far from the fundamentals of sentimentalism, a link often remarked upon by today’s scholars but already detected in the eighteenth century by, among others, the prototypical sentimental author – Samuel Richardson. In his postscript to Clarissa (1748) Richardson wrote: “Terror and commiseration leave a pleasant anguish in the mind, and fix the audience in such a serious composure of thought much more lasting and delightful than any little transient starts of joy and satisfaction”.115 With its graphic descriptions of murders, tortures and rapes Don Korrado was indeed far from this literary trend: Gnedich introduced Russian readers, accustomed to the relatively tame novel of terror, to the “immoderation” of the gothic novel of horror. S. Zhikharev, an acquaintance of the author, condemned the uninterrupted chain of frightening episodes described in Don Korrado, a rejection only partially mitigated by the acknowledgement of their powerful effect on the reader’s imagination (“Thus a cold shiver makes one’s flesh creep”)116 and of the moral calibre of the author (“This novel is the work of a most kind and wise man”).117 P. Makarov’s review of the work published in Moskovskii Merkurii (The Moscow Mercury) is definitely more hostile. Don Corrado stabs, stifles and strangles – himself not knowing why – without distinction for age or sex, relatives and strangers, enemies and friends – anybody his hand can reach. From the first to the last page this novel provides only

114

See Vatsuro 1969 and Derek Offord, “Karamzin’s Gothic Tale: The Island of Bornholm” in Cornwell 1999: 37-58. 115 Richardson 1985: 1497. 116 “[…] так мороз и продирает по коже”. Zhikharev 1934: I/259. 117 “Этот роман – сочинение очень доброго и умного человека”. Ibid.

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descriptions of murders, poisoning and crimes narrated with astonishing cold118 bloodedness.

The critic stigmatised the exaggerated display of “gothic horrors” and the irrational behaviour of the violent hero. According to the critic the real core of the matter, however, was the “indifference” (khladnokrovie) of the author, i.e. his purported lack of a moral compass, his apparent refusal to formulate any judgement on the villain’s wrongdoing. Hence the rejection of the work as a capricious succession of horrors by contemporary critics, a judgement followed by the – perhaps even more damning – neglect from modern scholars.119 On close analysis, however, Gnedich’s novel reveals itself to be a fascinating work based on a precise aesthetic design, and meriting reappraisal both per se and for its place in Russian literary history. As we shall demonstrate, the first original novel of horror to appear in Russia was grafted onto a rich literary tradition, spanning from Milton and Shakespeare, to the Graveyard school, Schiller and Lewis. A number of pre-romantic aesthetic and philosophic issues form its complex backdrop, which is expressed through the literary conventions, narrative techniques and plot devices of the English gothic novel. The composite character of Gnedich’s sources is in tune with the eclectic nature of the gothic novel, a genre traditionally drawing from multiple literary roots; it channels these sources into its distinctive narrative template.120 Typical ingredients of the genre range from the characteristic atmosphere of mystery and apprehension aimed at stimulating the reader’s imagination, to analogies in settings, character types and plot structures.121 Gnedich’s work forms part of this tradition, incorporating elements derived from the warehouse of “Дон Коррадо режет, душит, давит – сам не зная для чего – всех без разбора возраста и пола, родных и чужих, врагов и друзей – всех, до кого может достать его рука. От первой до последней страницы этот роман представляет только картины убийств, отравлений, злодеяний, рассказанных с удивительным хладнокровием”. Makarov 1803: IV/54-55. 119 Don Corrado has never been re-printed since its first edition in 1803, a circumstance which in part explains the scant number of scholarly studies on Gnedich’s novel. When the work is actually mentioned, it is often done superficially or incorrectly (cf. Simpson 1986: 35-36; Brown 1996: 259 and Belozerskaia 1896: 36). 120 See Vatsuro 1995: 209 and passim. 121 Hume 1969: 284. 118

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the author’s romantic literary interests into the generic mould of the gothic novel of horror. As with most gothic novels, the historical setting in Don Korrado is deliberately left vague. Adopting clichés deriving from Enlightenment literature and often exploited by gothic writers, Medieval Spain is represented as the epitome of religious fanaticism and political reaction. It is possible that the choice of the historical setting had been inspired by Schiller’s tragedy Don Carlos (1787), a work certainly familiar to the young Gnedich, who, as we have seen, was a keen admirer of the German author.122 As in Don Korrado, in Schiller’s tragedy the Spain of Philip II is a reign dominated by violence and superstition. Schiller, however, driven by a powerful revolutionary impulse foreign to Gnedich, does not linger on the description of the horrifying events. In this libertarian work frightful events serve as a narrative tool to attack political and religious oppression: “[The] Spanish army is burning farms and countryside, Spanish soldiers are building gallows in every town. Spanish officers behead people for their love of freedom. Spanish priests burn them for their religion”.123 In a way typical of many gothic writers, Gnedich borrowed the theme of medieval irrationality and religious fanaticism enhanced by the Mediterranean setting – i.e. an alien and potentially threatening environment – to tinge the plot with a gloomy quasi historical atmosphere.124 In other words the geographical setting (mainly Spain, and to a minor extent England and Germany) and time period (the sixteenth century, i.e. the “Dark Ages” of European history) are exploited as a canvas of convenience for the succession of Corrado’s devilish deeds, rather than for their historical or political dimension. This intent is anticipated early on in the piece, both in the sub-title

122

Don Carlos was staged for the first time in Russia in 1787 at the Petersburg Court Theatre and, a few months later, in Riga: see Kostka 1965: 13. 123 Schiller 1987: 12. As Kostka points out, notwithstanding the political ideals conveyed in Schiller’s works, this aspect was generally ignored in Russia, at least until the reign of Nicholas I. (Cf. Kostka 1965: 14-17). The German writer was perceived as one of the major representatives of romantic aesthetics. Karamzin, for example, after having attended a performance of Don Carlos in Berlin in 1789, expressed enthusiasm for the “romantic” qualities of the play: “What a force in his emotions! What picturesque language!” (cited in Neuhäuser 1974: 107 and 112). 124 Lewis’ The Monk, for example, fully exploits this narrative device. See also the similar narrative function played by Italian settings in Radcliffe’s works.

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(“Dukh mshcheniia i varvarstva Gishpantsev”) and in the Introduction. The grim tones of the subtitle are further stressed in the pseudo-historical, highly biased information provided in the introduction: Who does not know the Spaniards – the epitome of superstition and violence? The Spaniards [sic] – where not only the mob, blinded by false convictions, wanders in the darkness of superstition, [...] but even the Nobles, even the Sovereigns, serve us as examples, the best of which is King Philip II, whose whole life has been driven by the high goal of committing crimes [...]. 50,000 innocents became the victims of the superstition and violence of Philip; 8,000 have fallen by the hand of his favourite, the grandee de Alba, and who after all that can be astonished at the deeds of 126 De Gerrera?

The setting sketched above creates a suitable atmosphere for the unfolding of the sequence of crimes narrated in the opening pages. The impact of Corrado’s nightmarish violence on the reader is reinforced by the generous use of the dramatic dialogues and theatrical gestures, a stylistic device widely employed throughout the novel. Atmospheric suggestions and the graphic qualities of these passages are further intensified by the exploitation of striking “visual” oppositions and “acoustic” effects. Hence the stark colour contrasts, the sudden shift of a light setting into a dark, ominous one, or the palpable tension created by a dead calm loaded with a suspense which eventually erupts in the sudden breaking of sound: “Imagine a deep and extensive valley, completely strewn with ashes and piles of dead bodies, and the stream which waters it mingled with the blood and stopped in its flow, choked by corpses; wails and moans rend the air”.127 Whilst the horrendous bloodshed of innocent victims

125

Makarov observed that “the Spaniards would be upset by such a title. The author determines the features of a country after the features of a character that is not historically grounded, being himself imaginary”. Makarov 1803: 53. 126 “Кто не знает Испанцев – образцов суеверия и бешенств? Испанцев [sic] – где не только чернь, ослепленная ложными истинами, блуждает во мраке суеверия, [...] но сами вельможи, сами государи являются примерами, из которых лучший – государь Филипп II, вся жизнь которого освещена великой целью злодейств [...]. 50000 невинных сделались жертвами суеверия и ярости Филиппа; 8000 пали от руки его любимца – вельможы Альбы, и кто после этого усомнится в делах Де Герреры?” Gnedich 1803: [5]-[6] (hereafter: DK). 127 “Представьте глубокую пространную долину, которая вся покрыта пеплом и грудами мертвых тел, и река, орошающая ее, смешалась с кровью и остановилась в своем течении, спершись от трупов; вопли и стенания

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(“mothers, the elderly, youngsters”) is described at length with a forensic realism of sorts, the disclosure of its perpetrator, according to the suspense technique typical of the genre, is delayed for a few pages. Eventually a rhetorical question uttered by the indignant narrator – “Can this possibly be the deed of men?”128 – heralds the appearance of the murderer who: Splattered with blood [...], smiles with joy, with a contented gaze on his face contemplates the plundering. This is Don Corrado de Gerrera, admiring the deed he has accomplished with his own hands! This is a monster, produced by aberrant nature; this is a horror of existence. These are brutalities to make mankind shudder; 129 his heart is dead to the voice of nature.

The strong tones and gruesome events described in the first pages are not fully supported at this stage by a convincing plot, or by psychological insights into the hero’s psychological motivations for his actions. Progressively, however, the narrative line is enriched by the intersection of different narrative levels and by a more nuanced portrayal of Corrado. The first step in this direction is taken with interpolated flashbacks to the hero’s formative years, a device often encountered in gothic novels to provide the villain with some sort of psychological background and with individual features meant to make the staple image of the villain more plausible. To this end Gnedich introduces a framed story, inserted toward the middle of the first part, devoted to the first two decades of Corrado’s life, his childhood in Spain, and his later roaming through Europe. The account of Corrado’s upbringing and past experiences marks a breakthrough in the narrative structure of the novel. Firstly, this device introduces wider spatial and temporal co-ordinates into the picaresque-like adventures of the young Corrado. Secondly, and most importantly, these episodes provide the reader with insights into the villain’s earlier life and psychology, which partly explain the vicious character emerging in his mature years. Furthermore, the narrative сотрясают воздух”. DK: I/9-10. Here and hereafter the italics are mine, unless otherwise stated. 128 “ Как? Неужели это дела человека?” DK: I/12. 129 “Oбрызганный кровью [...] с радостной улыбкой и удовольствием во взляде смотрит на разграбления. Это Дон Коррадо Де Геррера, любующийся делом своих рук! Это чудовище, произведенное заблуждающейся природой, это ужас естества. [Это] зверства, от которых содрогнется человечество, сердце его мертво для голоса природы. Адское суеверие, искажающее божество – представляющее его разгневанным и мнящее умилостивить его кровью”. DK: I/12-13 (Italics in the original).

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structure as a whole gains momentum from the depiction of Corrado’s personality and past; the fragmentary material of the first chapter is now organised around an intriguing central character who gives a degree of narrative unity and meaning to the long chain of gruesome events. Born in a barbaric country and brought up amongst “pirates who owned vessels on which they sailed, robbing and killing without consideration for either the sex or station of their victims”, Corrado, “who was still a child, was nourished by the same air breathed by the villains”.130 His immoral father’s encouragement plays an important role in the formation of a child endowed with an extraordinary personality which circumstance turns to evil purposes. Thus, the “gifted” son, once embarked on the path of crime, easily surpasses the example set by his father (and indeed any other imaginable example!): “From an early age Corrado was sly and cunning and his father loved him. He turned sixteen, and he surpassed his father, which is not surprising, given the fact that he was born with a manly character, he was born for high deeds”.131 Henceforth, Corrado’s inexhaustible thirst for power and glory dominates his existence, leading to the series of crimes described throughout the novel: “Nothing attracted him as glory did; he looked at it with greedy eyes. Thus every victory aroused in him an ardent flame. He wanted to gain renown, and falling on innocent victims, plundering and killing them, he thought he would win the

“[…] разбойники, имеющие корабли, на которых, плавая, грабили и убивали, не уважая ни пол, ни состояние, [Коррадо] будучи еще ребенком, питался воздухом, которым дышали злодеи”. Ibid.: I/105-106. 131 “С самого младенчества Коррадо был злой и хитрый, и отец любил его. Прошло шестнадцать лет, и он превзошел отца: неудивительно – он родился с мужественным характером, он родился для великих дел”. Ibid.: I/107-109. 130

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laurels [of glory]”. In this light the sequence of horrors related in the first chapters of the novel becomes, at least in retrospect, plausible. The psychological insights into Corrado’s pathological craving for universal fame and power are further explored in the course of the work. The gothic villain gradually acquires the traits of a Faustian character, a Prometheus attempting to demonstrate his superiority over any human or natural law. This solitary struggle undertaken by the fierce Corrado to prove his supremacy sets the scene for the second part of the narrative describing the escalation of the villain’s crimes and eventually engendering his tragic death. Although fully developed only later in the narrative, important hints in this respect are again detectable in the initial pages. Particularly revealing is the choice of a passage from Schiller’s The Robbers (Die Räuber) to serve as the incipit to the novel: “Look, look! all the laws of the world are broken, the bonds of nature are severed; an ancient hostility has risen from hell!”133 These lines, which serve as an epigraph on the title page immediately under the characteristic gothic title, anticipate the frightful atmosphere of the work. Furthermore, they interject the philosophical conflict underlying the whole novel, between the body of rules governing human and natural life (laws of the world, bonds of nature) on the one side, and the chaotic principle embodied by Don Corrado (ancient hostility), on the other. This opposition rests on antithetical pairs (humanity / inhumanity, light / darkness, God / Satan) whose dense religious and literary references harness a symbolic reading of the text. Similar basic dualities underlie the opening scene, centred on the nightmarish aftermath of a slaughter perpetrated by the villainhero.134 In this introductory episode the derogatory qualifiers associated with the villain (“monster”, “dread of nature”) are opposed to his innocent victims, his behaviour against nature (“his heart is deaf to the voice of nature”) vis-à-vis that of devout men. Providing hints to Corrado’s titanic personality and aspirations, the incipit sets the stage for the main motifs and themes of the novel. “Ничто его так не прельщало – как слава; он смотрел на нее алчными глазами. Таким образом, каждая победа возбуждала горячий пламень. Он хотел завоевать себе славу и, нападая на невинных, разграбляя и убивая их, он думал, что пожинает лавры [славы]”. Ibid.: II/112-113. 133 “Посмотрите – посмотрите! Все законы мира нарушены; узы природы прерваны; из ада возникла древняя вражда!” Ibid.: title page. 134 Cf. ibid.: II/12-13. 132

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Throughout the narrative, the portrayal of the main character is constructed on the accumulation of epithets similar to those quoted above, which highlight the inhuman and unnatural traits of Corrado’s personality. The villain is depicted alternatively as a beast or a devilish creature, a “tiger” and a “monster”, who, characteristically, stares at his victims with a devilish grin: “with a smile of joy, with a contented gaze he contemplates the plundering”.135 According to a typical technique of the gothic novel, these features are enhanced by means of contrasting the evil Corrado with characters of heavenly perfection described in the sentimental style. This is particularly evident in the case of the heroines who, without exception, fall prey to Corrado’s lustful desires. Their virtues, beauty and innocence make them particularly vulnerable to Corrado’s seduction, for, as has been noted in regard to the English gothic novel, modesty and delicacy encourage sexual aggressiveness in the gothic villain.136 The young Sharlotta, for example, is described as the “flower of her sex” (“tsvetok svoego pola”), whose naive affection for Corrado eventually decides her tragic destiny: “She returned his caresses with the innocence of an Angel. Poor Sharlotta, what a rapacious beast has broken into your heart”.137 Similar is the representation of Corrado’s main victim, his wife-to-be Olimpia, whose idealised portrayal is clearly reminiscent of sentimental narrative devices (“my coarse brush is not able to portray her beauty; I will only say that she was one of the three Graces...”)138. Interestingly, as in the case of Sharlotta, her seduction is described through the metaphoric opposition of predator and prey: “Oh you, young, good hearted, candid; – a wolf can easily catch an innocent little sheep”.139 Corrado aspires to rise above feelings of love and compassion and in this light “inhumanity” is an attribute that he perceives and cherishes as evidence of his superior moral and physical strength; it is the distinguishing mark of the “[…] с улыбкой радости, со взором удовольствия смотрит на разграбления”. Ibid.: II/12. 136 See Mise 1980: 111, 118 and 223. Mario Praz recognises in the idea of pleasure obtained through sadistic or masochistic cruelty a characteristic not just of the gothic novel, but of romantic literature as a whole. See Praz 1984; see also Howells 1978: 12. 137 “Шарлотта вернула [Коррадо] все ласки с невинностью ангела. Бедная Шарлотта – какой хищный зверь вкрался в твое сердце”. DK: II/127. 138 “Моя грубая кисть не может изобразить ее красоту; скажу только, что она была одна из трех Граций”. Ibid.: II/138. 139 “О молода – добросердечна – проста, – волку не трудно поймать невинную овечку”. Ibid.: I/64. 135

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villain’s dream of omnipotence. At the height of his power, Corrado expresses this belief in the form of a melodramatic monologue: The blood-sucker stares with a devilish smile at the quivering limbs of the murdered. “So”, he utters, “here’s the amiable offspring of nature – Ah! How it trembles, how it curses me. Curse, curse! Offspring of hated nature! Yet this is still 140 only a trifle, a beginning on the way to hell”.

Don Corrado’s violent and nihilistic behaviour, increasingly motivated by his dreams of omnipotence, challenges any obstacle, including his own human limits, as expressed in a second dramatic monologue: Oh! I possess so much strength, so much courage, so much hatred to torment all your [nature’s] favourites – and I will utterly annihilate even you. Away from the sight of humanity! Stifle rage, silence the smallest voice of regret! Make my heart one of stone! Then, once broken free from a throng of Furies, I will hunt all the favourites of nature until the seas will be stained with their blood, until the stench of 141 their corpses will rise to the height of the skies. I long for blood.

Thus, as in Lewis’s The Monk, Corrado increasingly behaves like a fiend in human shape, an overpowering, Miltonic “superman” before whom men and nature alike shrink.142 Once the ephemeral nature of his dreams of supremacy is revealed the hero is spiralled into the abyss of torture, death and eternal damnation. In the end the villain acquires the traits of a tragic romantic hero and the reader, although repelled by Corrado’s sadism, is at the same time attracted by a character whose titanic struggle is doomed to failure. Whilst the first part of the novel is dedicated to the depiction of Corrado’s success, which is obtained at the price of extreme violence, the second part reveals the descending phase in the hero’s life. The height of Corrado’s power is marked when he is given a “Кровопийца с адской улыбкой смотрит, как трепещут члены убитых. “Так, – говорит он, вот любезное чадо природы – а! как оно трепещит, как клянет меня. Кляни! – кляни! – чадо ненавистной природы! Но это еще цветок – это еще щекотание для ада”. Ibid.: II/145-146. 141 “О! Я имею столько сил, столько мужества, столько ненависти, что всех, всех любимцев твоих [природы] замучаю живыми – тебя саму всю изувечу. Так прочь с глаз человечества! Ярость, заглуши, истреби малейший глас сожаления! Сделай сердце мое каменным! – Потом, сорвав толпу Фурий, – будет гнать всех любимцев до тех пор, пока не смешаются все моря с их кровью, пока смрад их трупов не распространится до высоты небес. Крови хочу я!” Ibid.: II/145-147. 142 Corrado’s victims and associates are terrified by his ruthlessness. The natural environment also seems to retract in front of the villain’s “unnatural” behaviour. After one of the many bloody deeds perpetrated by Corrado, for example, “природа вздрогнула от ужаса; солнце скрылось за черными тучами, облака разверзлись, сверкнула молния и заревел страшный гром”. (DK: I/82) 140

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gothic castle as a reward for a crime he has committed. This mansion, which is placed in a remote and deserted location beside an old cemetery,143 is characteristically adorned by gloomy crypts and mouldy vaults: Amid the mountains of the Sierra Morena a gothic castle was situated. On the southern side a river ran close by; on the northern and eastern sides it was surrounded by thick forests. A wall made of stone which had at each corner a high gothic tower encircled the castle; beneath one of them there was a fairly large underground cave. There reigned a perpetual night; there was only dampness and 144 coldness, there lived frogs and mice.

As is apparent from the passage above, Corrado’s castle is represented according to the typical literary conventions of the Western European gothic novel and in a setting already well represented in both foreign and Russian literature.145 However, a number of other pre-romantic genres contribute to the depiction of particular areas in the proximity of the medieval mansion. The decaying cemetery adjacent to the castle, for example, contains the whole gamut of images of death characteristic of Graveyard poetry, a genre, as we have seen, closely related to the gothic novel.146 In Gnedich’s case the most probable source of inspiration for the depiction of the cemetery and annexed dungeon appears again to be Schiller’s Fiesko, a play which Gnedich had translated a few months before the publication of Don Korrado.147 143

On the characteristic of “gothic” buildings see Praz 1968: 7-34. See also Botting 1996: 8. The influence of motifs and atmosphere of Macpherson’s songs is also detectable. This link is supported by the fact that shortly after the publication of Don Corrado, Gnedich translated and reworked a number of Ossianic poems which he most probably already knew in 1803. 144 “Между Моренских гор есть готический замок. С южной стороны протекает около него река; с северной и восточной окружают его густые леса. Замок обнесен каменной стеной, имеющей по углам высокие готические башни. Под одной из них находилась довольно большая подземная пещера. В ней царствовала вечная ночь. В ней были только сырость и холод, и [жили] лягушки и мыши”. DK: II/ 5-7. 145 See, for example, Karamzin’s Sierra Morena. See also footnote 159 below. 146 The literary model provided by English gothic literature clearly played a major role in the depiction of Corrado’s castle. It might, however, be inferred that, as was often the case in the West, an additional source of inspiration was probably provided by actual examples of neo-gothic buildings. 147 Compare Gnedich’s depiction of the cemetery (Schiller 1799: II/157) and the dungeon (Schiller 1799: II/6) with these excerpts from Schiller’s tragedy Fiesco. Verrina, for instance, threatens his daughter Bertha thus: “Down into the lowest vault beneath my house! There whine and cry aloud! Be your life painful as the tortures of

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The castle, representing the focal point in the gothic novel, has been recognised by Bakhtin as the fundamental chronotope of the genre. The decaying mansion of the villain is the place where the vestiges of past centuries, old legends and spells meet with present times, an encounter producing fantastic and fearsome events.148 Furthermore, a strong narrative significance is attached to the castle, for its gloomy setting incites an upsurge of the supernatural forces latent in the narrative. The gothic mansion is thus a place full of mysterious implications, a lieu symbolique in which the supernatural events, carried to their extreme, often lead the narrative to a tragic closure. Don Korrado conforms to the features of the genre not only by the description of the castle and its chronotopical connotations, but also by the narrative and symbolic function assumed by the gothic building. The eerie atmosphere breathed within the mouldy walls of his ancient mansion induces a tragic turn in Corrado’s life. Initially the villain-hero finds his perfect dimension in his newly acquired castle, the dark and gloomy space he had yearned for since his childhood, when “his soul was thrilled by frightening events. […] When the storm chased a black cloud, […] when the thunderclap left everybody stunned; then – oh! then he felt happy”.149 In the castle Corrado builds a miniaturised hell within whose perimeter he feels able to govern the world by imposing his rule of violence and terror. Thus the villain’s father, old and ailing, but potentially able to reveal his son’s criminal past, is confined in the cave underneath one of the towers, while his brother is killed.150 Corrado’s angelic wife is constantly watched by the frightful attendant Vooz (a character very similar to the homonymous attendant in Narezhnyi’s drama The Dead Castle) and effectively imprisoned within the confines of the thick the writhing worm. May you drag thy load of misery throughout the endless circle of eternity!” (Schiller 1799: I/IV). Further on, an old cemetery is described in graphic terms: “the church-yard where corruption preys on the moulding carcasses, and Death holds his abhorred feast – where shrieks of tormented souls delight the listening devils, and sorrow sheds her fruitless tears into the never-filling urn” (Schiller 1799: III/I). 148 See Bakhtin 1986: 278. See also Praz 1968. 149 “[…] он не любил пресмыкаться; в юности его душа возвышалась при странных явлениях. […] Когда буря гнала черныя облака, […] когда треск грома оглушал людей; тогда – о! Тогда-то был он весел”. DK: I/109-110. 150 Fratricide often marks the apex of the tragedy in both gothic novels and Sturm und Drang dramas, including Schiller’s The Robbers (see Shklovskii 1928: 50). Morits, or the Victim of Revenge fully develops the theme of the inimical brothers typical of early romantic literature (cf. Neuhäuser 1975: 73).

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forest surrounding the castle which mark the spatial boundaries of her husband’s absolute power. While Corrado is at first comfortable within the enclosed and gloomy environment of his gothic mansion, such an environment eventually precipitates the dramatic reversal of his fortune. The remorse lying in Corrado’s subconscious surfaces in the dark castle, a space conducive of nightmares and apparitions destined to haunt the hero. Starting from sleep, the terrified villain imagines being confronted with the phantoms of his victims. In contrast to his outstanding physical and mental strength, the hero’s psychological balance begins to be weakened by remorse. Visions, apparitions and other supernatural phenomena haunt him, contributing to blur the boundaries between dreams, visions and reality, inevitably leading to Corrado’s mental breakdown: “he became thoughtful; anxiety was portrayed on his forehead. Thus, the voice of conscience thundered, but he closed his ears and did not listen to it. His face expressed fear and a tortured conscience”.151 Thus, in keeping with a narrative device often employed by gothic writers, supernatural events, magnified by a haunted environment, provide insights into the most remote regions of the human mind. The character’s subconscious proves to be able to terrify and cause the most unbearable sufferings to the otherwise unconquerable villain: “Ah, my peace – oh, I would sacrifice thousands of pistoles to stifle this damned thunder, to free my head from this dream – a dream which is the main cause for my anxiety!” – Thus the thunder of conscience struck the villain, he felt it and trembled. An overpowering fear and suspicion grew in his soul, he dreaded that 152 somebody would reveal his deeds.

Despite deep psychological suffering, the indomitable Corrado will not repent, unlike his assistant Richard, and he vigorously fights to suppress any signs of mental weakness which could reveal in him the much despised human frailty. Corrado remains till the end faithful to his role as a demonic, super-natural figure whose principles – if not spirits – remain unbroken even under threat “Он делается задумчивым; на его лице изображается беспокойство. Так гремел глас совести, но он затыкал уши, он ничего не слышал. На его лице был изображен страх и мучение совести”. DK: II/50-51. 152 “А мое спокойствие – о, я бы не пожалел тысячи пистолей если бы заглушил этот проклятый гром, если бы вырвал из головы моей этот сон – сон, главную причину моего беспокойства! Так, гром совести поражал злодея; он чувствовал его и трепетал. Великий страх и подозрение родились в его душе, он боялся, чтобы никто это не обнаружил”. DK: II, 55. 151

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of the Inquisition’s tortures. Whilst in the first chapters of the novel Corrado is depicted as a melodramatic character whose extravagant emotions are designed to excite the last possible twinge of sensation, he gradually emerges as a powerful, romantic hero – an alien soul depicted in his lonely and extreme struggle to rise above the crowd. It is precisely in the dream of super-humanity unrelentingly pursued by Corrado that the reader finds the plausible cause of the villain’s unscrupulous conduct, eventually leading to his fall and death by the hand of the Spanish Inquisition.153 By contrast to the powerful image of the villain conveyed with stylistic intensity throughout the work, the scene which brings the novel to a close after Corrado’s death appears rather blunt and feeble. In depicting the happiness finally achieved by Olimpia and her rescuer Don Ribero, Gnedich employs modes of the sentimental idyll that present a stark contrast with the gothic tones used in the rest of the work. Arguably, however, tongue-in cheek innuendo is detectable in the bucolic finale: “Their life was comparable to that of a quiet May – obscured from time to time by light clouds: their life flowed by like a clear brook which was occasionally troubled by raindrops”.154 Devendra P. Varma, one of the pioneers of gothic studies, has suggested that villains in the gothic novel of horror share the same lineage as and similar characteristics to the romantic (or “Byronic”, in M. Simpson’s words)155 hero. Both the gothic novel of horror and the romantic novel would reflect an attraction for, if not a glorification of, the exceptional individual who knows no laws and no limits, as opposed to the ordinary mortals who surround him or her. Quite clearly, the creation of Corrado – a character altogether unique in Russian contemporary literature – is much indebted to Gnedich’s early literary interests: Milton and Shakespeare, English gothic writers, Schiller and Goethe, all authors who had variously interpreted and romanticised the Miltonic image of the Devil often associated in their works to the myth of Prometheus.156 In this literary framework Gnedich gives birth to the first modern demon to appear in Russian fiction, a precedent followed by a vast progeny of Russian heroes, of

153

See Varma 1987: 189-190. “Их жизнь была похожа на тихий май, омрачаемый иногда легкими облаками; жизнь их текла как чистый ручей, мутящийся иногда от дождевых капель”. DK: II: 209. 155 See Simpson 1986: 11. 156 See Boss 1991: 157-158 and passim. 154

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Raskolnikovs and Stavrogins whose dreams of super-humanity lead them to a tragic fight against all human conventions and moral rules. As we have now seen, the young Gnedich, attracted by “[all] that exceeded the usual state of things”,157 as a contemporary put it, introduced into Russian prose the exaggerated style and literary themes of the novel of horror and, more generally, of Western romanticism. In Don Corrado the author sharply breaks with both the classicist and the sentimental tradition, deliberately opposing aesthetics based on rationality, harmony and elegance in favour of freedom and unbridled imagination, and in the predilection for gruesome topics. In a historical perspective, the early work by Gnedich and Narezhnyi contributed to the broadening of themes hitherto treated in Russian prose by depicting the violent passions and extreme aspirations of the hero, introducing the themes of the mysterious and the uncanny and, more generally, drawing attention to aspects of reality that were new to the Russian scene. These thematic choices required the exploration of new literary techniques that the author borrowed and adjusted to his requirements from recent English and German trends. Similarly to the first gothic writer, Horace Walpole, who professed to have been inspired by Shakespeare’s tragedy in the conception of The Castle of Otranto,158 Gnedich strove to renovate a literary language and style that was clearly inadequate to express a new romantic sensibility. Hence a narrative experimentation provides the novel with a complex stylistic structure, including interpolated poetry, framed stories and, most notably, “theatrical” speeches and gestures. As we have demonstrated in relation to Izmailov’s novel Evgenyi in chapter III, theatrical devices were commonly employed in prose fiction of the period.159 Yet a special case has to be made for the gothic novel; as Clery persuasively argues, tragic drama and gothic romance shared a fundamental kinship, stage tragedy representing a vital model for the hyperbolic emotion found in gothic novels.160 Hence, the frequent use of dramatic dialogues to enhance the poignancy of the narrative and to clothe the hero in a romantic aura. Again like Walpole Gnedich turned to the theatre, in particular to 157

See Zhikharev 1934: 259-260. See Walpole 1996: 9-14. 159 On the role of theatrical devices in later nineteenth-century prose see Weststeijn 1988: 329. 160 Clery 2000: 13-14 and passim. 158

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Schiller, whose tragedies had been sources of inspiration for authors such as Radcliffe and Lewis.161 Gnedich fully understood the application of drama to the new gothic style, a technique he had learned during his formative years in contact with the Turgenevs and Narezhnyi. Aleksandr Turgenev and Vasilii Narezhnyi, however, embodied polarised views about the application of pre-romantic modes in Russian literature. Turgenev looked at Schiller’s style as a means to an end, a poignant way to represent a new type of romantic hero embodying a number of moral and philosophic issues, criticising Narezhnyi’s more superficial approach as reflected in his early literary output.162 In his stylised description of his journey to Germany, Puteshestvie russkogo na Broken’ v 1803 godu (Journey of a Russian to the Broken in 1803), Turgenev is in synchrony with key philosophical concerns of preromanticism with his reflections on Nature as a timeless entity vis-àvis the transient existence of men, of the inevitable passage of time as a limiting factor of any human endeavour, and of the feeling of sublime as a trigger of intense aesthetic experiences. À propos his ascent on the Broken, the highest German summit, Turgenev notes: What a considerable antiquity, what an untouchable bulk do you defy, my feet! These rocks, whose immensity leads one to astonishment, are of course relics of a primitive world; time itself has venerated them; they have witnessed past centuries, and remain monuments for the coming centuries. If thunder makes a strong impression on us in a peaceful valley, then it should do the same here, so to speak in 163 its own realm, where it creates countless echoes against the wild cliffs!

Incidentally, this perspective was taken up by Zinaida Volkonskaia in her Otryvki iz putevikh vospominanii (Fragments from Travelling Memories, 1829), an account of her visit to Germany164 in 161

See Simpson 1986: 15-18 and 35. For an account of the influence of Matthew Lewis’ work in early nineteenth-century Russia, see Vatsuro 1975: 271- 277. 162 Larionova 1995-1996: 39. 163 “Какую почтенную древность, какую неприкосновенную громаду ты попираешь, нога моя! Эти скалы, величина которых приводит в изумление, конечно, остатки первобытного мира, перед которым благовело само время; они свидетели минувших тысячелетий, и останутся памятниками древнего мира для грядущих времен […]. Если в тихой долине гром производит сильное впечатление на наши души, то он должен иметь такое же действие здесь, в, так сказать, его собственной области, где он бывает бесчисленными отголосками диких утесов!” Turgenev 1808: 78-80. 164 See Z. Volkonskaia, Otryvki iz putevikh vospominanii (1829) in Volkonskaia 1865: 3-22 (3-5 and passim).

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which her obvious delight in Gothic architecture is expressed in typical romantic terms reminiscent of Turgenev’s Puteshestvie. Narezhnyi’s early work shows a very different approach to pre-romanticism, where Sturm und Drang style is exploited to achieve striking, but ultimately shallow, effects.165 Within these two branches of Russian Schillerism, Gnedich occupies a middle position; albeit at times melodrama takes the upper hand, in general Gnedich recognises the complexity of Schiller’s work, applying romantic modes in order to address landmark moral and philosophical issues. The role played by both Schiller and the gothic novel is noticeable mainly in the emphasis on dramatic devices, which Gnedich had already employed earlier in Plody uedineniia (The Fruits of Solitude, 1802). Egunov has argued that in Gnedich’s early collection of narratives, pieces and poems the characters’ discourse in the prose works closely resembles the speeches of the personages in the plays.166 In Don Korrado the author further expands the stylistic potentialities of theatrical devices (particularly of dialogues and monologues), achieving high dramatic effects, a trademark technique with authors of gothic novels as a whole.167 The stylistic importance of drama can be gauged by the sheer amount of melodramatic dialogues and monologues filling entire sections of the novel. Throughout the work the third-person form expressing the narrator’s viewpoint alternates with the characters’ utterances conveying their viewpoint on the events. This device establishes a balance between the two voices empowering the characters – and particularly the villain-hero – to interject regularly their own subjective and emotional views on the events. As we have seen, Nikolai Gnedich’s Don Korrado, the first novel of horror to appear in Russia, relied upon German and English prototypes recently brought to the attention of contemporary Russian writers and readers of prose. The author experimented with the narrative modes and techniques of the gothic and Sturm und Drang literature in order to convey the extreme emotions of his characters and to give a convincing narrative shape to the “new” themes of the grotesque, the sublime and the supernatural. In that respect Gnedich’s novel, Narezhnyi’s early work and A. Turgenev’s writings and literary activity were instrumental for the rapprochement of Russian prose towards the avant-garde of Western European literature, sowing seeds 165

Larionova 1995-1996: 40. See Egunov 1966: 313-314. 167 See Howells 1978: 16. 166

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which would eventually fully germinate in the 1820s-1830s. On the fertile literary background of early Russian romantic prose and folklore literary tradition, the “second wave” of European romanticism (the French École frénétique168 and the German Kunstmärchen of Ludwig Tieck and Ernst Hoffmann169) put forth deep roots influencing authors such as Bestuzhev-Marlinskii,170 Pushkin, A. Vel’tman, Gogol’171 and Dostoevskii.172 The discovery of the dark side of human existence – the sinister, the nocturnal, the demonic, the torn sub-conscious of extreme heroes – which Gnedich’s novel, Karamzin’s tales and Zhukovskii’s ballads and povesti introduced into the realm of Russian high literature for the first time – would become an integral and pivotal theme of Russian prose of the 1820s, 1830s and thereafter. As Vadim Vatsuro remarked: The history of the penetration in Russia of the gothic novel and its reception by Russian readers and authors represents a whole chapter in the evolution of Russian literature. It would not be overly bold to assert that disregarding this influence our notion of the stylistic changes and of the shaping of romanticism would be inevitably 173 incomplete and even distorted.

V.3 Zhukovskii and the Western European ballad revival Vasilii Zhukovskii is generally considered the pioneer of romanticism in Russia, who brought his country on to the same wavelength as the rest of Europe, thus accelerating the process of literary rapprochement between East and West at a crucial stage in Russia’s cultural history. Celebrated author, literary organiser, editor of Vestnik Evropy, host of a leading literary salon and from 1826 tutor to the future tsar Alexander II, Zhukovskii holds an undisputed place 168

See Busch1980: 269-283. See Botnikova 1977: 12-13 and passim. 170 See N. Kovarsky, “The Early Bestuzhev-Marlinsky” in Eikhenbaum and Tynyanov 1985: 109-126 (121-122). 171 See Swensen 1994; Busch 1980: 28-42. 172 See Fridlender 1979: 217. Interestingly, the young Dostoevskii, similarly to Gnedich at the onset of his career as a writer, was captivated by Shakespeare’s plays and Schiller’s tragedies. The influence of such authors is reflected in Dostoevskii’s early works, in particular in the now forgotten dramas Boris Godunov and Maria Stuarda (ibid., p. 67). 173 Vatsuro 1973: 146. 169

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in the history of nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture. For these reasons, unlike many of the authors examined so far, Zhukovskii has already been thoroughly investigated from a number of different perspectives, including the central issue of the impact of Western influences – German romanticism in particular – on his literary output. Little research, however, has been devoted to one important aspect: the influence of the gothic novel on Zhukovskii’s early work in prose and poetry. To this end we are going to investigate the ballad Liudmila and novella Mar’ina roshcha, two works revealing the author’s attraction to the latest pre-romantic and romantic trends in Western literature, gothic included. Alongside the writers examined above – Turgenev, Gnedich, and Narezhnyi – Zhukovskii also figures amongst the Muscovite literary avant-garde that clustered around the Moskovskii universitetskii pansion and the University itself at the turn of the century. Like Gnedich (his companion in studies and later close friend), Zhukovskii initially found an outlet for his literary interests in his rather “free translations” and re-workings of many masterpieces of contemporary European literature. Clearly the author perceived the gothic novel as part and parcel of a variety of diverse genres such as Shakespeare’s plays and Graveyard poetry, Sturm und Drang literature and the romantic ballad, a genre inaugurated by Gavriil Kamenev’s Gromval (1802). However chronologically and typologically far apart, these trends seemed to share a similar attraction towards the theme of death, the fantastic and the supernatural. Thus gothic themes emerged simultaneously from multiple literary sources, for they fitted perfectly within the new romantic sensibility already widespread in Germany, England and France, but only recently penetrating Russia. These motifs were anticipated by Zhukovskii’s reading, translation and – in his youthful poems – imitation of Gray and Ossian; they were further elaborated following Zhukovskii’s acquaintance with the popular novels of horror and terror. Finally, the German and English romantic ballads provided Zhukovskii with the inspiration for his personal rendition of the fantastic and supernatural in poetry with the ballad Liudmila, and in prose with the novella Mar’ina roshcha. In this section we attempt to re-trace the source of some of the gothic motifs, themes and stylistic devices encountered in Zhukovskii’s early ballad and novella. An investigation of gothic

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borrowings across the generic boundaries of poetry and prose will allow us to investigate the influence of the gothic across genres and ultimately the significance of this phenomenon for the novella form in the age of Alexander I. In Western Europe the ballad revival formed part of the burgeoning interest in national traditions and history. Johann Herder, for instance, argued that artistic expression developed over the course of the centuries in popular art, and that folklore embodied the true national spirit. The surge of interest in popular traditions explains the tremendous success and sensation caused by the publication of Macpherson’s apocryphal Gaelic songs of Ossian (1762-1763) and Thomas Percy’s anthology of old ballads and sonnets, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). These works were the forerunners of a series of (real or purported) collections of popular ballads which, in turn, provided the canvas for the numerous imitations and adaptations of the folklore model which occurred throughout Europe, particularly in England and Germany in the 1770s and 1780s. The German poet Gottfried Bürger, inspired by English collections of popular ballads, created masterpieces in the genre, including his celebrated Lenore. Bürger created a literary, sophisticated version of the folklore ballad, employing stylistic elements typical of folklore tradition, such as the onomatopoeic expressions, the refrains and the pressing rhythm of the stanzas. He also borrowed themes of the mysterious and macabre from folklore models; these struck a sensitive chord in the age of pre-romanticism. For example, Bürger introduced into the genre the romantic theme of individual tragedy, endowing the new ballad with a solemn tone and with psychological depths unknown in its original form. His success radiated all over Europe and influenced a number of distinguished authors, including Walter Scott and Robert Southey in England and Zhukovskii in Russia.174 The revival of the medieval ballad is generally considered to be a landmark of a new literary sensibility characterising the onset of romanticism. The ballad was perceived both in Western Europe and in Russia as a genre which, due to its oral medium and folklore origins, endowed authors with unparalleled freedom of expression. Yet this new ballads were not aimed at faithfully reproducing the folklore model, but rather at recreating the medieval atmosphere of a popular genre in order to inject literary texts with a naive zest and primeval 174

Cf. Katz 1976: 11-12.

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colouring. Unlike their folk antecedents romantic ballads present a richness of texture, syntax and vocabulary and great attention to psychological realism, features which while darkening the light tone distinctive of the popular ballad added a wider stylistic spectrum and depth of description. One of the attractive features of the popular ballad in the lateeighteenth early nineteenth century was its display of romantic topics ante litteram, such as the recurring motifs of the fantastic, the mysterious and the magical. Each country was deemed to have given a unique representation of these common themes, although different national specific traits were often mixed and matched. Bürger, for example, draws inspiration from English folklore collections (mostly Percy’s Reliques), combining foreign elements with national folklore; in their turn English writers such as Scott and Southey drew inspiration from Bürger’s ballads, producing further synergies of different national elements. The revival of primitive spontaneity and medieval atmosphere underlying the romantic ballad is partly the product of the complex interplay of an anti-classical re-interpretation of history and nostalgic attitudes towards the Middle Ages. In that ideal context the pseudonational character of the ballad represented a literary alternative to the universalism of the age of classicism and the rationality of the Age of Reason.175 This shift of cultural values is reflected in the change of aesthetic models. The irregular, the supernatural and the “wild” associated with the Middle Ages become the trademark of the preromantic trends brought into cultural prominence in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century and gradually assimilated by Russian authors. The interaction between these literary forms has been remarked by a number of scholars. A. Friedman, for example, observes that: Spectral ballads were the poetic counterpart of the gothic novels, and their success was dependent upon the same taste that sponsored the horrifying design of Fuseli and those late eighteenth century productions of Hamlet, Lear and Macbeth, in 176 which the macabre aspects of the tragedies were painfully exaggerated.

The proximity of romantic ballads and gothic novels is clear in a number of key authors of the time. Robert Southey’s gothic ballad The Old Woman of Barkeley, for example, is populated by 175 176

See Praz 1984. Friedman 196: 285.

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demons and sinister visions;177 Bürger is clearly under the spell of supernatural horror; Matthew Lewis produced a gothic adaptation of Bürger’s Lenore178 whilst Zhukovskii’s novellas and early ballads are imbued with gothic atmospheres.179 The interaction of gothic themes and Western romantic literature as a whole is manifest in Liudmila and Mar’ina roshcha, the first romantic ballad and one of the first gothic povesti to appear in Russia. Although the fascination with folklore literature was not a new phenomenon in Russia, dating back to eighteenth-century collections of popular works by M. Popov, M. Chulkov and V. Levshin,180 Zhukovskii’s ballads set off the romantic rediscovery of folklore literature in Russia on a grand scale. Zhukovskii was so captivated by West European literary ballads that he committed himself to translating and reworking some of the best Western representatives of the genre: Bürger’s Lenore (translated three times, in 1808, 1812 and 1829), Southey’s Rudiger (1813) and The Old Woman of Barkeley (1814),181 in addition to nearly all the ballads written by Schiller. The author cultivated the genre throughout his literary career, publishing thirty-nine ballads in all. For the most part Zhukovskii’s ballads consist of translations from foreign authors, while five are generally considered to be original, although even these are heavily dependent upon foreign models.182 It must be said that Zhukovskii’s “Russian” ballads display only a superficial national colouring; yet the author initiated the exploration of the Russian folklore heritage within the new cultural and literary perspective of pre-romanticism. Besides its wider impact on Russian literature, the genre played a seminal role in the author’s literary production, not only in numerical terms but also in the formation and elaboration of Zhukovskii’s own aesthetic system.183 Like many Western authors at the time, Zhukovskii was fascinated by the extreme simplicity and spontaneity of popular 177

Also revealing is the fact that this work was later incorporated by Lewis in his gothic novel of horror, The Monk (1796). 178 Lewis’ Ballad of the brave Alonzo and the beautiful Imogen was inserted in his novel The Monk. Some scholars believe Karamzin’s quasi-gothic story Sierra-Morena was directly inspired by Lewis’s “ancient Spanish” ballad. See Krestova 1966: 261271. 179 Serman 1996: 161. 180 Cf. chapter III. 181 For an investigation of Zhukovskii’s translations of Southey see Ober 1965. 182 Cf. Semenko1975: 161. 183 Cf. Serman 1996: 162.

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literature in general, and of the ballad in particular, where the popular stood for the author’s unbridled imagination. This critical perspective explains Zhukovskii’s admiration for Bürger whom he considered “unique in this form, since he has the truly adequate tone of voice for the genre he selected; that simplicity of narration that a storyteller must have. In Bürger liveliness is the consequence of freedom”.184 In his translations and re-workings of foreign ballads Zhukovskii borrowed the “simplicity” and folklore atmosphere, the romantic attraction towards the sublime and the fantastic, and the attention to the characters’ psychology that had featured in his German and English models. These elements permeated Zhukovskii’s early work, endowing his initial sentimentalism with romantic atmospheres and his heroes with greater psychological depths. Zhukovskii’s interest in Western European pre-romantic and romantic trends dates to his attendance at the Moskovskii universitetskii pansion, at the time directed by Ivan Turgenev, the father of Andrei and Aleksandr, who were also studying at the institution.185 The years spent at the Moskovskii pansion and, later on, at the attached University, played an important part in Zhukovskii’s literary development and would leave a lasting mark on his career as a writer. As we have seen above, the Turgenevs and their circle were instrumental in the diffusion of German and English trends in Russia via animated literary discussions, translations and publications.186 They introduced the precocious Zhukovskii, who composed his first verses at the age of eight, to English Graveyard poetry and German Sturm und Drang literature and, in particular, the works of Schiller, for whom they already nurtured a sentiment close to veneration. The influence of Western pre-romanticism is detectable in Zhukovskii’s early translations and original poems and in his first work in prose, the “sepulchral” Mysli na grobe (Thoughts on a Grave).187 Revealingly, his first work to appear in print, only a few months after 184

Zhukovskii 1878: V/551. Zhukovskii considered freedom in the poet’s expression and thematic choices as fundamental characteristics of the new literary trends vis-à-vis classical guidelines: “Древние поэты изображают сильно и резко [...], но они холодные для чувств и неудовлетворенные для рассудка. Новые свободнее в своих формах, роскошнее в смеси красок и хоть не с довольной определенностью изображают предметы, зато они глубже обращаются к чувтвам и рассудку”. V. Zhukovskii, “O poezii drevnikh i novikh” in Frizman 1980a: 96. 185 Cf. Rezanov 1908: 8-9. 186 Cf. Shmidt 1960. 187 Vol’pe 1941: V/356. See also Ehrhard 1938: 40.

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graduation, was a translation of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1802), which was published in Karamzin’s Vestnik Evropy and immediately enjoyed great success.188 The interest in pre-romantic trends continued in the years of his participation in the Society of Literary Friendship (1801-1802) and thereafter, as witnessed by his translation of 1808 of another important figure of English pre-romantic poetry, James Thomson. Zhukovskii’s Zapiski (Memoirs) of 1809-1812 provide evidence of his broad interests in foreign literature including authors such as Macpherson and Southey, Christian Heinrich Spiess, Schiller and Goethe.189 Judging from the remarkable collection of Western European books both in original and in Russian translations collected in his library in Tomsk, these interests reached the extreme fringes of romanticism, including works such as Lewis’ The Monk and Charles Nodier’s Le vampire.190 Zhukovskii’s attraction to the literature of terror and horror is reflected in the publication of a number of gothic novels and stories in Vestnik Evropy during the years of his editorship (1808-1809).191 Although expressing concern about the flood of novels (gothic included), some of them of scant literary value, flooding the Russian book market,192 Zhukovskii recognised the significance of recent trends coming from Western Europe and the importance of their diffusion in Russia. Furthermore, as Marcelle Ehrhard remarks, Zhukovskii realised that in order to be marketable the journal needed to publish more popular material like novels of horror, sentimental tales, and humorous narratives alongside critical articles; he put this belief into practice by translating a number of similar works for the journal.193 Judging from contemporary reviews, his translations were met by critical acclaim: Who wouldn’t enjoy reading the beautiful translations by Zhukovskii in Vestnik Evropy? – writes an anonymous critic in the “Novye knigi” (“New Books”) section of Syn otechestvo (Son of the Fatherland) – “Who does not confess, even if not in public, then at least to himself, that after

188

Cf. Serman 1996: 160. Veselovskii 1904: 524. 190 Cf. Kanunova 1978: 7. 191 Additional circumstantial evidence of Zhukovskii’s interest in the gothic (such as letters, translation projects etc.) is discussed in Vatsuro 2002: 274-282. 192 Cf. chapter II.2. 193 Ehrhard 1938: 76. 189

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Karamzin only Zhukovskii has grasped the secret of translating light prose into the Russian language?”194 More generally, the fascination for a number of pre-romantic and romantic genres, ranging from the Sturm und Drang to Bürger’s folklorism and I. Foss’s exoticism, is a constant of the writer’s literary career.195 In this light Zhukovskii’s early ballads and povesti clearly stem from an eclectic interest in romantic genres, gothic included, assimilated in his youth and continually referred to throughout his literary career.196 As Z. Vol’pe points out, after his early interest in French and English elegiac poetry with its characteristic “joy of grief”, Zhukovskii found in pre-romantic ballads a further deepening of the same themes, this time endowed with the new colouring of terror and nightmare typical of the English novel of horror.197 A clear echo of these influences is detectable in Liudmila and Mar’ina roshcha, two works replete with gothic atmospheres and devices, such as the attractiveness of the villain-hero and the spatially and chronologically remote setting; these features created both a distance from everyday standards and a sense of uneasiness in contemporary readers. The Russian public had already detected a link between gothic literature flooding the book market and Zhukovskii’s early work. Visual testimony to Zhukovskii’s image of romantic balladnik (i.e. “the Balladier”, Zhukovskii’s nickname) is provided by a number of portraits, in particular the famous painting of 1815 by O. Kiprenskii.198 The landscape surrounding the poet echoes the atmosphere of his ballads according to a typical gothic iconography, featuring a stormy sky, steep cliffs, a rough sea and a gloomy medieval castle lurking in the background. The critics’ initial reaction, it must be said, was one of bewilderment. In an unsigned review of Zhukovskii’s free translation of Lenore by Bürger, appearing in the journal Syn otechestvo (Son of the Fatherland) in 1816, for example, we read:

“Кто не наслаждался чтением прекрасных переводов Жуковского в Вестнике Европы 1808, 1809 и 1810 годов? […] Kто не признавался, естьли не перед всеми, то по крайней мере про себя, что после Карамзина один Жуковский постиг таину переводитъ на Русской язык легкую прозу?” [Anon.] 1816. 195 Veselovskii 1904: 465. 196 Cf. Kozmin 1904: 8 and passim. 197 Cf. Vol’pe, “Predislovie” in Zhukovskii 1939-1940: I (1939)/xii. See also Vol’pe 1941: 361. 198 Ibid.: 360. 194

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Ah, amiable creator of Svetlana, how many souls should you have to account for? How many young people have you seduced with manslaughter? I foresee such a series of the slain and murdered, the strangled and drowned! What a series of 199 pale victims of death by ballads, and what deaths!

Eventually, however, Zhukovskii’s gloomy and marvellous atmospheres won over readers who realised that his work had effectively inaugurated a new phase in Russia’s literary history. With his customary acumen Filipp Vigel’ registered such reactions in his Memoirs: Corpses, ghosts, devilries, murders, moonlight, yes, it all belongs to fairytales and English novels; instead of Hero, waiting for the drowned Leander with tender trepidation, we are given the unrestrained and passionate Lenora with the prancing corpse of her lover! Without his [Zhukovskii’s] wonderful talent, we could not have been forced to read his ballads without repugnance, or at last, even to take a liking to them. I do not know if he has spoiled our taste; at the very least he has created new feelings, new pleasures for us. Here is the start of Romanticism in 200 Russia.

“Ах, любезный творец Светланы, за сколько душ придется тебе отчитаться? Сколько молодых людей ты соблазнишь на душегубство! Какой ряд предвижу я убийств и мертвецов, висельников и утопленников! Какой ряд бледных жертв смерти от баллады, и какой смерти!” [Anon.] 1816: 4. 200 “Мертвецы, привидения, чертовщина, убийства, освещаемые луной, да это все принадлежит сказкам и разве что английским романам. Вместо героини, ожидающей с нежным трепетом утопающего Леандра, он представит нам бешенно-страстную Ленору со скачущим трупом любовника! Необходим его чудесный дар, чтобы заставить нас не только без отвращения читать его баллады, но даже полюбить их. Не знаю, испортил ли он наш вкус; по крайней мере, он добавил ли нам новые ощущения, новые наслаждения. Вот и начало романтизма у нас”. Vigel’ 1891-1893: I (1891)/342-343. 199

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V.3.1 Supernatural and horror in Zhukovskii: Liudmila and Marina’s Grove While Zhukovskii’s ballads are for the most part “creative translations”, in Liudmila’s case the relationship with its avowed model, Bürger’s Lenore (1774), is deliberately one of loose dependence.201 In other words, Zhukovskii employs the German prototype in Liudmila (and in his later ballad Svetlana) as a basic canvas on which to create his own original work. Incidentally, Zhukovskii was later to author a faithful translation of Bürger’s Lenore (1829), this time published under its original title.202 Liudmila is a short ballad about love and death fully exploiting the naive power of the fantastic legend underpinning Bürger’s work. Zhukovskii, however, sets his ballad in Medieval Russia, a location and periodisation that is only hinted at by means of reference to the Livonian wars (sixteenth-seventieth century) and by the employment of archaic expressions.203 The plot is centred on supernatural and in many ways historically unspecific events which follow the death of Liudmila’s lover. The very first lines present the reader with the heroine’s anxiety about the fate of her far-away lover, whom she invokes with touching questions (Where are you, my darling? What’s the matter?).204 The next stanzas briefly outline the plot scenario; the heroine’s self-delusive hopes of seeing her lover again eventually fade when his fellow soldiers return home without him. Liudmila, deaf to her mother’s attempts at reconciling her with the tragic truth, utters blasphemous words which eventually induce God’s exemplary punishment. The moment she loses faith in Providence marks her departure from the Christian world of the living: Will you have the torments of hell my dear? Or heavenly rewards? When you are with your darling paradise is everywhere, When you are apart you have reached the border of paradise and a dismal abode. 201

For a review of contemporary debates on Zhukovskii’s ballads see Tynianov 1968: 40-42 and passim. 202 Cf. Sozonovich 1908: 105. 203 Cf. Semenko 1960: II/451. 204 “Где ты, милы? Что с тобою?” V. Zhukovskii, Liudmila in Zhukovskii 19591960: II (1959)/ 7-13 (7) (hereafter: Liudmila).

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Pre-romantic and romantic trends No, the Saviour has forgotten me!” Thus Liudmila cursed life, 205 and thus she called the creator to judgment...

When midnight strikes and Liudmila is approached by her lover’s ghost, she readily follows him, apparently unaware of his true nature. The lovers’ journey on horseback is pinpointed by the string of questions posed by the increasingly apprehensive Liudmila (the repeated “What is there before death? What is there before the grave? / The house of the dead is the womb of the earth” and the refrain: “Are we close, my dear?”)206 to which her lover-ghost answers laconically (“Is the maiden afraid in my company?” and “The journey is long”).207 Here the fast galloping of the ride is paralleled by the heroine’s pressing questions in a crescendo of both poetic rhythm and action, making way for the impending tragedy. Their ride into the night marks Liudmila’s final crossing of the symbolic threshold between the world of the living protected by God and marked by daylight, and the realm of the frightening domain of the doomed and deceased symbolised by the dark night. Accordingly, the tone of the ballad begins to shift from the naive, dream-like atmosphere of the first seven stanzas, where the impending presence of the dead is only hinted at,208 to a nightmarish scenario. Insights into the heroine’s psychological state are provided indirectly, through the reiterated questions she asks her taciturn lover and by her perception of the surroundings described through fine acoustical and visual counterpoints: “Are we close, my dear?” “Here I’m hurrying closer” […] What is it that is reflected in Ludmilla’s eyes? A row of stones, crosses, graves? And among them a divine temple. The horse carries her through the graves; The walls echo with the sound of hooves; and a scarcely heard whisper in the grass like the quiet eyes of the deceased “Что, родная, муки ада? / Что небесная награда? / С милым вместа всюду рай / С милым розно – райский край / Безотрадная обитель. / Нет, забыл меня спаситель!” Так Людмила жизнь кляла, / Так творца на суд звала …” Liudmila: 9. 206 “Что до мертвых? Что до гроба? / Мертвых дом земли утроба”; “Близко ль, милый?” Ibid.: 11-12. 207 “Страшно ль, девица, со мной?” and “Путь далек”. Ibid. 208 Cf., for example, Liudmila’s first thoughts about the death of her lover: “Иль безвременно могила / Светлый взор твой угасила”. (Liudmila: 7) and her mother’s foreseeing warning “Дочь, воспомни смертный час”. (Liudmila: 9). 205

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209

The rapid crescendo of fearsome adventures culminates with Liudmila’s final realisation of the true nature of her lover (“Your home – a grave; My husband – a corpse”)210 and the surrounding gothic horrors, poignantly depicted through the pressing rhythm of verses which convey Liudmila’s distress: The appearance which was so dear before is now frightening With hollow dead cheeks; With dull half open eyes; 211 With hands crossed on the chest.

These horrible visions lead to the frightful death of Liudmila who is sucked into the world of the deceased: What’s happening to Liudmila? She’s turning to stone, Her eyes grow dim, her blood turns cold, She falls dying on the dust, There are groans and wails in the clouds; Squeal and grind under ground.212

The povest’ Mar’ina roshcha (Marina’s Grove), published in Vestnik Evropy a few months after Liudmila came out, is also set in Russia (in the countryside around Moscow) during the reign of prince Vladimir. Indications of the medieval setting are supplied by the subtitle (“Starinnoe predanie” “An ancient legend”), by the activity of some characters (namely Rogdai who is a bogatyr’ “dolgo sluzhil mogushchestvennoiu myshtseiu velikomu Novgorodu”)213 and by a few lexical archaisms scattered throughout the narrative (i.e. the ancient names Rogdai and Uslad, and the use of terms such as terem “Близко ль, милый?” – “Вот примчались’” [...] / Что же, что в очах Людмилы? / Камней ряд, кресты, могилы? И среди них божий храм. / Конь несется по гробам; / Стены звонки вторят топот; / И в траве чуть слышный шепот; / Как усопших тихий глаз... / Вот денница занялась”. Ibid.: 12. 210 “Дом твой – гроб; жених – мертвец”. Ibid.: 13. 211 “Страшен милый прежде вид; / Впалы мертвые ланиты; / Мутен взор полуоткрытый; / Руки сложены крестом”. Ibid. 212 “Что ж Людмила? / Каменеет, / Меркнут очи, кровь хладеет, / Пала мертвая на прах. / Стон и вопли в облаках; / Визг и скрежет под землею”. Ibid. 213 V. Zhukovskii, Mar’ina roshcha in Zhukovskii 1959-1960: IV (1960)/369-390 (375) (hereafter: Mar’ina roshcha). 209

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and ochi). As in Liudmila and in gothic literature as a whole, the remote historical setting is superficially defined and limited to a handful of generic hints.214 As in Don Korrado the stylised representation of the Middle Ages as a remote and “dark” time provides a setting of convenience on which to graft fantastic and frightful events. Mar’ina roshcha narrates the story of a “love triangle” between the young Mariia, her sensitive lover Uslad, and the evil Rogdai, who embodies the main threat to their happiness. Following a plot structure borrowed from the sentimental novella of the Bednaia Liza type,215 the villain’s love for Mariia sets off a series of tragic events, eventually leading to the death of the main characters. The positive heroes, Mariia and Uslad, fall in love and decide to marry as soon as Mariia reaches sixteen years of age and Uslad returns from a journey to Moscow. During her lover’s absence, however, Mariia is courted by the “slavnyi i moguchii bogatyr’” (“renowned and mighty bogatyr’”) Rogdai. Flattered by his expensive presents and her prospects of a leisured life at the side of the powerful warrior, Mariia breaks the promise previously made to Uslad and agrees to marry a Rogdai mollified for the occasion. However, a chain of misfortunes unfolds after her betrayal and Mariia, who had never ceased to love Uslad, is eventually killed by Rogdai in a jealous rage. Uslad comes back only to discover the tragic events and, after having witnessed the apparition of Mariia’s ghost, he dies slowly on her grave of heartbreak.216 The majority of the characters represented in the work, particularly Mariia and Uslad, share the main features of sentimental heroes. The epithets applied to Mariia’s portrait (prekrasnaia, 214

Brown defines Mar’ina roshcha as a “quasi-historical” tale and one “among the earliest offshoots of the Nataliia type of love story” to which “the elegist Zhukovskii gives an unhappy ending” (Brown 1996: II/157-158). Al’tshuller remarks the absence of a convincing historical characterisation (Al’tshuller 1997: 33). 215 On Karamzin’s Bednaia Liza and its imitations see chapter IV.1. 216 In the gothic novel the description of terrifying events is often linked with a feeling of pleasure. In Mar’ina roshcha Uslad experiences a feeling of “ecstasy through fear” at the apparition of Mariia’s ghost (cf. his exclamation at the sight of her spectre: “О ужас! О радость!” followed by the narrator’s remark: “Священный ужас наполнил его сердце”. (Mar’ina roshcha: 387)). Zhukovskii explains the features of this new sensibility in Vestnik Evropy: “Горесть бывает не горесть, а наслаждение. Ужас имеет свой сладостный трепет, несчастье приятно в воспоминании”. Quoted in I. Aizikova, “Prozaicheskie perevody V. A. Zhukovskogo v Vestnike Evropy” in Ianushevich 1992: 77-88 (77).

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chuvstvitel’naia, molodaia – beautiful, sensitive, young –) are characteristic in this respect, as is her behaviour, which is prone to deep – if not enduring – feelings (“Not a single tender feeling could have effaced itself from her heart”).217 Similarly Uslad is endowed with sentimental features, starting from his angelic appearance and artistic endowments, evidence of a sensitive soul: “Nature had rewarded him with a beautiful soul, a beautiful face and the talent for composing beautiful songs”.218 Yet a few elements in his portrayal spoil the usual sentimental typology and usher in a change of atmosphere; a darker side to the hero’s personality, for example, occasionally surfaces in conflict with his angelic appearance: “He had a charming face and his eyes were sombre, tender and shining under his thick black brows”.219 Interestingly, Uslad’s literary preference for tales of terror over typical sentimental readings are also at odds with the archetypal chuvstvitel’nyi geroi in a meta-textual reference which sets the tone for events to come: “Nobody could tell frightening tales so well; they made timid girls tremble and nestle up to their mothers, and men’s hair stand on end”.220 The overall atmosphere of Mar’ina roshcha, the temporal setting of the events, and, above all, the characterisation of the villain Rogdai depart from the sentimental pattern along similar lines as Karamzin’s Ostrov Borngol’m, the first original Russian gothic tale.221 As had happened in Liudmila, the absence of Mariia’s lover brings the heroine to take a morally reprehensible action, which sets in motion a chain of negative events, culminating in the tragicsepulchral finale. Furthermore, similarly to Liudmila, the morally questionable choice of the heroine introduces a distinct change in narrative tone, anticipated by a few hints in the opening paragraphs. As in the ballad the playful tone of the folklore model is subordinated “Никакое нежное чувство не могло изгладиться в сердце ее”. Mar’ina roshcha: 371. 218 “Природа наградила его прекрасноую душою, прекрасным лицом и дарованием слагать прекрасные песни”. Ibid.: 370. 219 “[Услад] имел лицо прелестное, черные глаза, омраченные длинными ресницами, нежные, сияющие под черными густыми бровями”. Ibid.: 371. 220 “Никто не умел так хорошо рассказывать страшных сказок, от которых робкие девушки трепетали и прижимались к своим матерям, а на голове молодых мужчин становились волосы дыбом”. Ibid.: 370-371. 221 Cf. Vatsuro 1969. the issue of the influence of Karamzin’s Ostrov Borngol’m on Zhukovskii’s Svetlana (his second ballad inspired by Bürger’s Lenore) is discussed in Nebel 1967: 175. 217

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to the gloomy tones of gothic literature, so in the novella the idyllic love story between Mariia and Uslad gives way to an atmosphere of terror and suspense centred around the villain Rogdai. Rogdai plays a pivotal role in Mar’ina roshcha. Endowed with a powerful and disquieting personality, he shatters the peaceful idyll of Mariia’s village to such an extent that an eerie atmosphere envelops his terem and surrounding forest, lingering even after his death.222 Rogdai is equipped with a demonic aura, which is closely reminiscent of Nikolai Gnedich’s Don Korrado223 and, more generally, of a long series of gothic heroes: He was called Rogdai cruel heart; since not a single philanthropic feeling was known to him, the wrinkles on his brow were never smoothed; he was terrible and indomitable in revenge, neither a wail nor the smile of an innocent infant could 224 permeate his forbidding soul.

As with Don Korrado, Rogdai’s demonic features equip him with a psychological complexity alien to the other characters in the story. The most frequent epithets characterising the anti-hero (zhestokyi, strashnyi, surovyi and chernyi)225 bear negative connotations. His passionate love for Mariia, however, endows Rogdai with moving and “human” features: For the first time he felt a desire to be someone’s favourite, for the first time he learned to soften his thunderous voice; sometimes a smile showed on his lips; he thought of Mariia everywhere and every minute […] and even quite often got 226 involved in the happy games of the villagers to oblige her. 222

See Mar’ina roshcha: 380. Cf. section 2 of the present chapter. 224 “[Назвали его] Рогдай жестокое сердце; ибо ни одно человеколюбивое чувство не было ему известно, никогда на его лице не заглаживались морщины; грозный, неукротимый во мщении, ни вопли, ни улыбка невинного младенца не проникали в его неприступную душу”. Mar’ina roshcha: 375. 225 The epithet chernyi and the terms semantically connected to it (mrachnyi, nochnoi, tumannyi) are fear-provoking, anticipating and symbolising the deadly turn of the events. Such metaphoric meaning underpins the description of Rogdai: his face is swarthy and covered with a dark, dishevelled beard (Mar’ina roshcha: 374), his eyes are dark and menacing. His terem is also isolated in a dense wood and shrouded in darkness (ibid.: 384). In both works supernatural events occur at night, more precisely after midnight has struck. 226 “Впервые почувствовал он желание быть любимым, впервые научился смягчать свой громозвучный голос; иногда на его губах показывалась усмешка; везде и всякую минуту он думал о Марии [...] и даже нередко, чтобы угодить ей, вмешивался в веселые игры поселян и поселянок”. Ibid.: 375. 223

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Arguably his potential for love and affection (and therefore redemption) is pre-empted by Mariia’s “betrayal”; wounded by his unrequited feelings he shuts himself up in his gloomy terem. The very human feelings of passion and jealousy shape this tragic romantic hero, inevitably attracting a measure of sympathy in the readers. Once he discovers Mariia’s attachment for the absent Uslad his fury strikes against the object of his adoration and he kills the “innocent” heroine. The metamorphosis into a feral creature is highlighted by the altering of Rogdai’s features, a physical transformation which reflects the depths of his inner sufferings: “His face turned red, his eyes, like coal, began to flash; he gnashed his teeth terribly”.227 The last part of the story, following the heroine’s death, is set within the surroundings of Rogdai’s mansion. After having learned about Mariia’s last months of life and her unchanged feelings for him, Uslad enters the now deserted terem, a mansion depicted in purely gothic style with an eye for the creation of a frightening and sepulchral atmosphere. Located in a thick, dim wood, the tall mansion, like its surroundings, is described as a place as silent and deserted as a tomb.228 While wandering around Rogdai’s terem Uslad witnesses horrific scenes in the true gothic spirit: Midnight was already near – on reaching the apex of the sky, the full moon shone down almost on Uslad’s head. He nears the terem; throws its gates wide open, – they creak and clatter; he goes into the courtyard – everything is empty and quiet. […] A wild fox, scared by the approach of a human […] darted into the high grass, its eyes 229 flashing at him […]. Uslad grew timid and began to look about him.

Such a description of the environment sets the atmosphere for the imminent apparition of Mariia’s ghost: The midnight hour, universal silence, the gloominess and emptiness of the awful terem – all these prepared his soul for something unusual: he was filled with mysterious anticipation. […] Uslad shuddered; horror penetrated all his limbs; he fancied he heard wailing, coming as if from a grave; he fancied that a doleful, wistful “Лицо его побагровело, глаза его засверкали, как угли; он страшно заскрежетал зубами”. Ibid.: 384. 228 “Все было в нем тихо, как будто в могиле”. Mar’ina roshcha: 384. 229 “Полночь была уже близко – полная луна, достигшая вершины неба, сияла почти над самой головой Услада. Он приближается к терему; входит в широкие ворота, растворенные настежь, – они скрипели и хлопали; входит на двор – везде пусто и тихо [...]. Дикая лиса, испуганная человеческим приходом [...] бросилась в высокую траву, сверкнув на него глазами [...]. Услад почувствовал робость и начал осматриваться”. Ibid.: 385. 227

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ghost wandered along the roofs of the abandoned terem; his veins throbbed strongly; blood rushed to his head and caused sounds in his ears that resembled sepulchral groans.230

Clearly both Liudmila and Mar’ina roshcha echo key features of the gothic chronotope.231 In both works the horrific events reach their climax at midnight, are enhanced by moonlight and a threatening silence and take place in the vicinity of a desolate mansion and adjoining tomb (Mar’ina roshcha) or in a cemetery (Liudmila). Furthermore, in both works, the natural environment acts as a catalyst for uncanny events enhanced by visual and acoustic effects. Moreover in both works the sudden stillness and silence creates an atmosphere of suspense conducive to frightening turns in the plot. In the ballad the lovers’ ride towards the cemetery is accompanied by a depiction of the natural environment reflecting the heroine’s suspended mood: “The impetuous wind ceases; the forest subsides; the moon appears”.232 Similarly in Mar’ina roshcha the apparition of Uslad’s lover is anticipated by an eerie silence: “He listens – hears nothing – only the brook’s delicate currents trickle across the sand with a murmur, occasionally a dragonfly buzzes and a withered leaf breaks from the tree and falls trembling to the ground”233 and “the surroundings, clothed in a transparent cloak of twilight, were peaceful, everything was silent – the air, the water and the groves”.234 In both Liudmila and Mar’ina roshcha the threatening turn of events is immediately preceded and then accompanied by a sudden and dramatic “response” in the surrounding space; thus in the ballad: “Время полночи, всеобщее безмолвие, мрачность и пустота ужасного терема – все готовило душу к чему-то необычайному; таинственное ожидание наполняло ее. […] [Услад] содрогнулся; ужас наполнил все его члены, ему казалось, что он слышит стоны, исходящие как будто из могилы; казалось, что скорбное, тоскующее привидение бродило по горницам оставленного терема; его жилы сильно бились; кровь, устремившаяся в голову, производила в его ушах звуки, подобные погребальному стону”. Ibid.: 386-387. 231 For a definition of the term see section 2 of the present chapter. 232 “Ветер буйный перестанет; / Стихнет бор, луна проглянет”, and “Ветер стихнул; бог молчит; / Месяц в водный ток глядится”. Liudmila: 10-11. 233 “Слушает – ничего не слышит – один только легкие струики ручья переливаются с журчанием по песку, изредка стучит стрекоза, изредка увядшии листок срывается с дерева и с трепетанием падает на землю”. Mar’ina roshcha: 379. 234 “Окресности, одетые прозрачною светлого сумрака, были спокоины; все молчало – и воздух, и воды, и рощи”. Ibid.: 386. 230

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At midnight the wind ceased; It is cold in the field, the forest rustled; 235 The moon was hidden by clouds.

A similar occurrence takes place in the novella: “Suddenly a quiet breeze blows from the peaceful forest: the little leaves from the surrounding trees began to stir, the bright moon was clouded over”.236 In both works the rousing of the natural elements precedes the sepulchral apparition of the lover’s ghost (or its recognition as such in the case of the ballad) – on whose tomb both Uslad and Liudmila die. Furthermore, in both cases the atmosphere of suspense preceding the apparition of the deceased lover is also highlighted by the rapid succession of “broken sentences”, whose rapid rhythm well conveys the psychological – and physical – distress experienced by the heroes.237 Using the device of suspense and insights into the character’s distressed mind, Zhukovskii achieves highly dramatic effects and a narrative poignancy rare in contemporary literature. As demonstrated above, the ballad Liudmila and the novella Mar’ina roshcha share a number of thematic and stylistic features, including the common historical setting, the focus on the supernatural, the atmospheric function of the natural space and the sepulchralgothic ending. Although constructed on different generic canvases, both the folklore ballad and the sentimental povest’ incorporate motifs and stylistic devices of Western pre-romanticism, in particular those of gothic literature. Themes and devices of the novel of terror were already an integral feature of European pre-romantic literature at the time; not so in Russia where, as we have seen, the real impact of the genre dates from the 1800s-1810s. In this context Zhukovskii acted as a literary innovator and perhaps the most influential pioneer of romantic trends in Russia. Hence, in the historical perspective of the evolution of early nineteenth-century Russian literature, Zhukovskii’s adoption of elements of the gothic novel both in poetry and in prose is “Ветер встал от полуночи; / Хладно в поле, бор шумит; / Мецяц тучами закрыть”. Liudmila: 10. 236 “Вдруг от дубавы подымается тихий ветерок: листочки окрестных деревьев зашевелились, яасная луна затуманилась […]” Mar’ina roshcha: 387. 237 Compare the last sentences in the ballad (“Тихо, тихо вскрылся гроб.../ Что же, что в очах Людмилы? (Liudmila: 13) and “Что ж Людмила? Каменеет. Меркнут очи, кровь хладеет” (ibid.)) with the minutes preceding Uslad’s vision of Mariia’s ghost: “Услад остановился… и весте с ним остановился призрак, опять устремив на него умаляющие взоры… Услад был в нерешимости… не знал, идти ему или нет”. (Mar’ina roshcha: 387) 235

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of fundamental importance for the assimilation of the genre as part of the romantic tradition in Russia. Moreover Zhukovskii’s adoption of the terrifying and the supernatural as key literary themes engendered the representation of a new range of human emotions within the narrative framework of the sentimental novella.238 In this respect the subjective experience of fear and anxiety endows the heroes with a complexity alien to their sentimental counterparts; the sublime called for a more poignant depiction of the character’s psychological depths which surface when confronted with extreme situations and eerie landscapes. Furthermore, gothic modes tested in Liudmila were later tried in the narrative framework of Mar’ina roshcha, in a move that widened the thematic and stylistic compass of the novella in the age of Alexander I. As R. Iezuitova remarks, in Zhukovskii’s early stories the author merges a variety of narrative traditions without setting himself the task of reforming the sentimental version of the genre.239 Arguably, however, the introduction of pre-romantic and romantic modes coming from the West ended up reconfiguring the genre, subverting its co-ordinates and goals. Finally, in addition to acquainting the reading public with the topics and atmospheric details of romantic literature, Zhukovskii Russified Western genres by adapting foreign modes to the cultural framework of his readership. Such sophisticated cultural mediation inaugurated a new phase in the reception of Western literature in Russia in the early nineteenth century and beyond, a phase marked by critical reception and re-elaboration that transformed foreign influences into an integral part of Russian literature. As Nikolai Gogol’ remarked: […] We would never have stumbled upon the Germans had there had not appeared in our midst a poet, who showed us all this new, atstounding world through the clear lens of his unique nature, which is more accessible to us than that of the Germans. This poet is Zhukovskii – our most remarkable and original author!240

238

See Meilakh 1973: 56. Cf. Iezuitova 1989: 74. 240 “[…] мы сами никак бы не столкнулись с немцами, если бы не явился среди нас такой поаэт, который показал нам весь этот новый, необыкновенный мир сквозь ясное стекло своей собственной природы, нам более доступной, чем немецкая. Этот поэт – Жуковский, наша замечательнейшая оригинальность!” N.V. Gogol’, Vybrannye mesta iz perepiski s druz’iami in Gogol’ 1994: VI/154. 239

Conclusions In the previous chapters we have investigated the literary developments that occurred during the reign of Alexander I (18011825). It has been shown that this was an age characterised by lively experimentation involving every field of the cultural life of the country interesting both per se and for its long-term effects on Russian culture. In particular, the liberal atmosphere marking the first decade of the reign acted as a catalyst for contemporary literary activity, encouraging an expansion of publications and critical debates around literature. The main focus of this book has been to provide a comprehensive picture of this fascinating phase in the development of nineteenth-century fiction by drawing on a large number of littleknown texts. The framework of the genre in the pre-Pushkin period has been charted by highlighting the primary influences acting on contemporary novels and stories, such as the role played by preexisting prose genres, the heritage of late eighteenth-century sentimentalism, and the influence of Western European literary “avant-garde.” Notwithstanding the crucial role of this period, its prose fiction has been largely left in the dark. Overshadowed by the towering achievements of the following cohort of Russian authors, the early nineteenth century has been squeezed off the literary map, as if Pushkin’s generation emerged from a void, out of context and out of step with their cultural antecedents. By investigating the links between the age of Alexander and the eighteenth-century literary traditions and contemporary developments in the West, we have highlighted the continuity of historical evolution of modern Russian fiction both per se and within the European context. In this concluding chapter I wish to flash out how these literary developments of the era of Alexander impacted on the advancement of Russian letters in the remainder of the century, thus bridging a gap too often found in literary histories on the period. As we have seen in the first two chapters, the whole literary culture of the country whilst “waiting for Pushkin” developed at an

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accelerated pace, advancing on a number of key fronts. The relationship between Russia and Western culture evolved beyond recognition; literary societies and journals firmly established themselves; women writers increasingly contributed to Russia’s literary life; the market and readership for prose fiction expanded to such an extent that by the age of Pushkin literature was ready to take on a leading role within Russian culture and society. Ultimately, the process of institutionalisation and professionalisation of intellectual activities occurring in the early nineteenth century further consolidated the position of the writer in society and was instrumental in creating the unique prestige and influence enjoyed by literature and literary criticism in Russia from Pushkin to Soviet times. Many factors contributed to these dramatic changes in the way literature was perceived by Russia’s intellectual elite and the public at large: extra-literary occurrences, such as the liberal drive of the young Alexander and the crucial historical junction in European history, merged with specific literary aspects such as the erosion of classicism and the concomitant drive towards generic experimentation put in motion by Karamzin’s reforms at the end of the eighteenth century. As we have seen in chapter I, following a period of reaction at the end of Catherine’s reign and the ensuing depressing rule of her son Paul I the accession to the throne of Alexander brought significant changes to the way culture was perceived and practised in Russia. The first years of Alexander’s reign were dotted with progressive measures: the newly crowned emperor promised to abolish serfdom, to introduce mass education and to establish a rational system of government. Such grand proposals never fully materialised; yet some laws and measures sympathetic to authors and publishers were swiftly implemented. Just three weeks after assuming the throne, for example, Alexander abolished the repressive printing laws of the previous six years, a move that we have seen greatly stimulated the growth of the book market and the periodical press. Perhaps more important than specific measures were the overall effects of Alexander’s liberalism in creating an environment in which ideas could be discussed and both Russian and foreign works could freely circulate. This open policy galvanised literary activity, with tangible effects ranging from the proliferation of groups and journals to a remarkable expansion of the book market for both translated and Russian works.

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The lively cultural climate characterising the first years of the reign was further encouraged by historical events such as the Napoleonic wars, starting with the battle of Austerlitz in 1805 and culminating in the 1812 attempted invasion of Russia. After 1812, the country enjoyed an unprecedented position of power on the European playing field, epitomised by the Congress of Vienna of 1815 and the ensuing Holy Alliance promoted by Alexander, to the extent that for a time the Russian Empire was generally taken to be Europe’s mightiest state. As a result, the long-held perception of the continent as divided into a more advanced West and a backward East was rapidly changing. The Napoleonic wars had a powerful impact on Russia’s self-perception too, boosting feelings of patriotism and nationalism. Arguably the rapid process of Westernisation of Russian culture and society initiated by Peter the Great was never fully “accomplished”, the idea of “learning from the West” being from its inception fraught with contradictions. By Alexander’s time the uneasy relationship with Western Europe had surfaced in a wide range of texts, rapidly becoming a key issue in the cultural discourse of nineteenth-century Russia. It was through this process of romantic “nationalisation” (even though Russia’s fascination with its native traditions and past history was in itself a by-product of the rediscovery of national culture by contemporary Western culture) that Russia found her own voice within the European context, moving in the span of only a few decades from a position of dependence on Western culture to one of intellectual equality. In short, after a century of “lagging behind” the West, in the age of Alexander Russian culture was finally “catching up” with the rest of Europe. Yet notions of the “West” continued to serve as a foil to define Russia’s national identity and to project views about her destiny in a number of different ways: from the polarised positions of Beseda and Arzamas, which sowed the seeds of Slavophiles and Westernisers’ positions in the mid-nineteenth century, to Aleksandr Herzen’s humanist outlook, to utopian versus dystopian views of the country’s future emerging in the second half of the century. As we have seen in chapter II, the political and ideal changes occurring in early nineteenth-century literary life had remarkable repercussions on the way literature was created and received by Russian readers in the early nineteenth century and beyond. In the first place the phenomenon of the “professionalisation” of writers’ activities emerged alongside the aristocratic view of belles

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lettres as a leisured occupation and topic of conversation for the nobleman left over from the eighteenth century. A growing number of intellectuals regarded writing in general, and writing of prose fiction in particular, as a professional and fundamental cultural activity. This new concept of literature is reflected in the mushrooming of literary societies (more than four hundred, including familiar literary groups, sprouted in the period). Such cultural institutions played a key role in fostering the status of prose fiction in Alexander’s Russia by promoting a range of editorial activities and by equipping the relatively small number of authors of the time with a sense of shared identity and common cause. Moreover, literary societies directly or indirectly promoted journals and other editorial activities which hosted the work of established and emerging authors without seeking any financial return from writers. The eclectic character of the periodicals allowed authors of fiction a greater freedom of manoeuvre and provided an appropriate arena for experimentation in a number of “minor” prose genres, such as sketches, prose poetry, anecdotes and epistles, which would easily fit in the periodical’s format. In short, these publications represented a heaven for the budding professional author and functioned as the main literary laboratory of the time. In addition to this, periodical publications, in whose orbit virtually all contemporary literati gravitated, represented the main channel for literary criticism in general and for the “literary language question”, a key hurdle in the affirmation of Russian modern fiction. The end result of the activities promoted by literary society and other groupings of the pre-Pushkin period was the conspicuous increase in the number and quality of narratives published and a steady growth in the number and sophistication of the reading audience for works in prose. In the longer term, such early nineteenth-century literary institutions provided a stepping stone for the next generation of writers and critics. The Society of Literary Friendship, Arzamas and Free Society of Admirers of Literature, Sciences and Arts and their publications, for example, provided the arena for the discussion of and experimentation with a wide range of national and foreign modes which extends beyond the chronological and generic boundaries of this book. The activities they fostered, for instance, were instrumental in nurturing the main trends of nineteenth-century Russian poetry, such as meditative, civic and politically engaged verse, which had a

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direct impact on Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov and Fedor Tiutchev. Arzamas and The Green Lamp played a formative role on the young Pushkin, who had taken an active part in them in his youth, leaving their imprint on the “playful” and competitive streak underlying his work, whilst both Lermontov and Tiutchev started their activities under the influence of F. Merzliakov and the Free Society. Nikolai Polevoi, the future editor of the influential Moskovskii telegraf (Moscow Telegraph, 1825-1834), one of the first tolstye zhurnaly (“thick journals”), also carried out his literary apprenticeship on the wave of the patriotic fervour of 1812, and its ensuing romantic search for the popular roots of Russian culture. More specifically, his future editorial career stems from his participation in the late 1810s in two trend-setter publications, The Russian Herald and The Messenger of Europe.1 Thus the evolution of nineteenth-century literary criticism too was affected by the changing literary milieu of Alexander’s age. Issues about the role and features of the literary work discussed in the first professional literary societies set off a reconfiguration of criticism which must not be overlooked when examining nineteenthcentury aesthetic thought as a whole. As we have seen in chapter II, the perceived literary inferiority to the West became a burning issue in the early nineteenth century, which engendered a search for ways of bridging the cultural gap between Russia and Europe. Literary criticism took on the role of defining aims and features of a truly national literature, mainly confined to linguistic and stylistic features at first, but increasingly looking at the moral and political content of the work of literature as time went by. In particular, the Napoleonic campaigns followed by the Decembrists’ rebellion galvanised critics into demanding a truth-seeking literature, “engaged” with the social and moral questions troubling the country and able to reflect emerging ideas of nationhood. Such a moral, social and national function of literature was not new, and in fact dated back to the age of classicism, with its trademark criticism of the social and cultural phenomena of Gallomania, its preoccupation with the civic role of art and its faith in the unique didactic potential of literature. However, it was with the joint impact of Alexander’s initial liberalism in cultural matters, the Napoleonic wars and romantic theories coming from the West that a 1

See Iu. Mann, “Nikolaï Polévoï” in Etkind 1996: 911-920.

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new understanding of the author as a moral leader and a prophet began to emerge. Without these early nineteenth-century developments literature and criticism would have been unable to emerge as a powerful outlet for political, social and moral issues. When reaction did strike after 1825 the moral, and sometime political, role played by literature and literary criticism in society was already an established feature of Russian cultural life that political conservatism could not uproot but only try – unsuccessfully – to suppress. In chapters III, IV and V we have investigated the specific changes occurring in prose fiction at this time, looking at how the lively cultural and literary atmosphere and the changing literary tastes characterising the first two decades of the century impacted on the genre, stimulating a re-assessment of the role of past and recent literary trends, national and foreign traditions. The linguistic and stylistic reform of prose writing inaugurated by Karamzin at the end of the eighteenth century, the “discovery” of the individual by sentimental authors and a growing taste for pre-romantic and romantic trends imported from Western Europe inter-acted with older literary traditions, making the age of Alexander an active melting pot for prose fiction. The drive towards experimentation with generic boundaries and stylistic registers characteristic of early nineteenthcentury fiction opened the path for a string of later novels defying categorisation, from Evgenii Onegin to Dead Souls and War and Peace. The main concern of this book has been to investigate a representative body of works in prose of the period in order to describe and explain the hybridisation of genres and the experimental mode typical of the early nineteenth century and to shed light on its long-term impact. As scholars of Formalist belief have postulated, the evolution of literary genres is not a linear process.2 The mutual relationship between prose genres (and between narrative and non-narrative forms) is unstable, and periodically questioned by different generations of authors. Moreover, the stylistic and thematic conventions previously associated with a given genre are altered or adjusted according to the writers’ artistic requirements, to

2

See Tynianov 1967: 30-47.

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371 3

contemporary taste, to the literary and cultural environment and, finally, to the changing system of inter-generic relations.4 Having said that, in some periods this reshuffle happened at an accelerated pace: the first quarter of the century is one such time. Some genres at a certain point of their evolution lose their recognised individuality and specific features, disappearing as such from the literary scene. However, these extinct – or extinguishing – genres leave behind a trail of stylistic devices and narrative topics which provide the raw material to be employed in different generic contexts. This is, for example, the case of the early nineteenth-century oriental tale examined in chapter III. As has been demonstrated, there were numerous concomitant causes for the disappearance of the genre from the literary arena after the 1800s, including political factors such as Alexander’s declining liberalism which deprived the genre of its drive and, ultimately, of its raison d’être; its fate was finally sealed by the death of its main representative, Aleksander Benitskii, in 1809. If the oriental tale, which by the beginning of the century was mainly a vehicle for Enlightenment ideals, found itself at a dead end with the changed political atmosphere of the 1810s, philosophical topics and exotic settings did not disappear from Russian prose after that date. On the contrary, philosophical, moral and religious questions which had first appeared in Russian fiction precisely in the imported genre of the oriental tale continued to be key topics in the later nineteenth century; however, new generic channels were found to express a more complex set of ideal issues. Hence, the schematic framework of the oriental tale was avoided by the employment of more flexible narrative forms, its abstraction averted by firmly grounding philosophical issues in contemporary reality and psychologically convincing characters. Exotic settings too became more relevant for contemporary Russian readers. From the 1820s onwards, with Pushkin, Bestuzhev-Marlinskii and Lermontov, the exotic settings which had found citizenship in Russian fiction in oriental tales switched from far-away and stylised locations to nearby areas of conflict between Russia and the adjoining non-Christian countries south of the empire. The “dialogic” – in Bakhtinian terms – and “open” form of the novel of Pushkin, Dostoevskii and Gogol’, and of the 3 4

Cf. Lotman 1977: 6 and passim. See also Bakhtin 1981. See Tynianov 1967: 38; Todorov 1970: 12 and passim. See also Colie 1973.

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“philosophical-realistic” story of Turgenev and Chekhov, thus replaced the schematic plot-structure and the laconic style of the oriental tale. Likewise, the pseudo-oriental ambience was abandoned in favour of contemporary Russian settings; the one-dimensional, static characters of eighteenth-century derivation epitomising a philosophical or moral belief gave way to “real”, concrete figures embodying the contradictions inherent in their human condition and ideals. Such a trend was also anticipated by a number of early nineteenth-century authors who focused on “real” life as the basis for fiction. Fon Ferel’ts, A. Izmailov, the anonymous author of The Russian Amazon and others put forward truthful representations of Russian life which did much to promote a realistic trend in the novel after the sentimental interlude in the late eighteenth century. Andrei Kropotov’s The Story of a Brownish Kaftan, examined in chapter III, provides an example of a translation (of Laurence Sterne’s A Political Romance) in which the true authorship of the work is kept secret. This novella, which up to now has been read as an original work, introduced topics of great resonance in Russian literature. Dejected clerks and the outlandish maze of the Russian bureaucracy, which made their first appearance in Kropotov’s Kaftan, became central themes in the work of the ensuing generation of writers, playing an important role in authors of the calibre of Gogol’ and Dostoevskii. While some genres die out, others evolve and at some point in their evolution veer from their traditional path by revising the conventional guidelines of the genre, or emphasising one of their initial elements. This renewal “from within” of certain narrative forms played a particularly important role in the early nineteenth century when a number of authors sought alternative routes for the sentimental travelogue, novel and story. For instance, as we have seen in chapter IV, Fedor Lubianovskii gave new meaning to contemporary sentimental travelogue, a genre which at the beginning of the century displayed the first symptoms of decline. By carefully balancing the factual depiction of a journey with the experience of it by the fictional persona of the sensitive traveller, his work offered an alternative to the early nineteenth-century over-sentimental travelogue. From this springboard the genre evolved further. One of the subsequent directions it took in Russia was that of placing the narrator’s viewpoint and ideas at the very core of travel fiction, with

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the depiction of external reality in the background. Pavel Iakovlev’s parody A Sentimental Journey Along the Nevskii Prospect was the first work in which the genre of the epistolary travelogue was successfully employed as a framework not for the staple sentimental feelings à la Karamzin, but rather for the expression of the narrator’s own viewpoint on reality in a playful manner. Authors such as Konstantin Batiushkov (Progulka po Moskve – A Stroll Around Moscow, 1811, and Progulka v akademiiu khudozhestv – A Stroll through the Academy of Arts, 1814) and Fedor Dostoevskii (Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh – Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, 1863) further explored the potential of the genre, employing the epistolary format as a vehicle for the expression of the author’s beliefs now tending to the travelogue-essay format. An even more remarkable generic renewal “from within” in early nineteenth-century fiction is provided by Nikolai Brusilov’s The Poor Leandr. As we have demonstrated, the author drew from Sterne to give shape to a new, modern conception of the novel form which cuts loose from pre-existing Russian traditions. Skilfully constructed in several layers of parody and self-parody, this work significantly extends the range of topics addressed in humorous sentimental prose of the time. Furthermore, “Sternian” devices, such as the involvement of the reader in the narration (achieved not just via ironic asides as in Karamzin, but through incessant interruption of the narrative flow and direct, often provocative, addresses to the purported reading audience), amplify dramatically the textual referentiality of the novel. The Poor Leandr is also a pioneer of the “literature of metafiction”, i.e. “self-conscious” or “reflexive” narratives which reflect on their fictional status, and literature in general. In the perspective of the evolution of nineteenth-century fiction, Brusilov’s testing of the manifold options of the genre inspired by Sterne expanded the confines of the Russian novel. The particularly “fluid” situation of prose genres during the reign of Alexander stimulated a number of authors to merge narrative and non-narrative modes in search of new expressive options for contemporary prose. One of the most interesting examples of intergeneric borrowing is that of the historical novels by Gavril Gerakov and Nikolai Artsybyshev, examined in chapter V. Their attempts to translate their scholarly research on Russian history into fictional representation of the national past were only partially successful. However, the use of historiographical research in creative prose

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writing which their work anticipated became a widespread technique in nineteenth-century historical prose, brought to perfection by authors such as Aleksandr Pushkin in The Captain’s Daughter and Lev Tolstoi in War and Peace. New genres and sub-genres making their entry into nineteenth-century Russian literature – and with them a range of narrative topics and stylistic devices – were instrumental in the refinement and, consequently, in the rise of the status of prose fiction. Genres of recent import, such as society tales, gothic novels and romantic ballads, were eagerly received by readers as Russian taste steadily veered away from the idyllic sentiment of Karamzin’s work towards new trends coming from England, Germany and France. Russian authors of fiction answered this call with increasing effectiveness by fusing national features with foreign literary traditions stretching far beyond the linguistic and stylistic modes attempted by their eighteenth-century predecessors. Genres such as Graveyard poetry, the gothic novel and German pre-romanticism, together with the newly re-discovered Shakespeare and Milton, and the latest arrivals on Russia’s literary scene, Friedrich Schiller and Walter Scott, rapidly became part of a literary “reserve” of motifs and themes from which many authors freely drew in their search for new paths for Russian fiction. This happened at a time when the ideals of spontaneity, original genius and imagination underpinning preromantic trends coming from the West were openly endorsed by a growing number of Russian authors, including Nikolai Gnedich, Vasilii Narezhnyi and Andrei Turgenev. Slightly younger authors, such as Aleksandr BestuzhevMarlinskii (1797-1837) and Orest Somov (1793-1833), began their literary career by adopting the premises laid down by the first generation of Russian pre-romantic writers, taking up the theories and developing their artistic application. Bestuzhev-Marlinskii began his career as an author of fiction in 1821 with his Poezdka v Revel’ (Journey to Revel) appearing in Grech’s journal Syn otechestva (The Son of the Fatherland). The author’s début was inspired by the sentimental travelogue inaugurated by Karamzin, a genre whose extreme flexibility, as we have seen, led to various creative interpretations by Russian authors in the first two decades of the century. Like many of his immediate predecessors, Bestuzhev-Marlinskii too exploits the “inclusive” nature of the genre to create a Journey that is a mix of meditations and vivid description,

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of poetry and prose, spiced up with romanticised historical events. In the same years Bestuzhev-Marlinskii was a staunch supporter of romantic aesthetics, views taking shape in a number of works spanning the major genres available to an author of such leanings: historical, gothic, Byronic, and exotic tales. Although for his tales the writer looked abroad for inspiration, the previous two decades acted as a creative springboard, making his rapid assimilation of Western romanticism possible, and allowing his ultra-romantic tales to be enthusiastically received by contemporary readers. BestuzhevMarlinskii’s work as a whole bears the mark of the lively scene of the capital’s early nineteenth-century societies, for like many authors before him, he too relied on publication linked to them to reach a readership well-versed in the latest literary trends, including A. Izmailov’s The Loyalist and The Champion of Enlightenment and Philanthropy, the organ of the Free Society of Admirers of Russian Literature.5 Somov arrived in St Petersburg in 1817 from the Ukrainian provinces, and he too was quick to take part in the busy literary life of the capital, joining the growing number of professional writers surviving by their pen alone. A year later this versatile author became an active member of one of the first strongholds of romantic ideas in Russia, the Free Society of Admirers of Russian Literature, later editing the society’s journal. As with Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, in Somov’s case the thriving life of St Petersburg literary circles energised his young talent and formed his views on literature. In On Romantic Poetry, his flagship essay of 1823, Somov finally gave systematic shape to the ideas circulating in Russia since the beginning of the century, widening their appeal and amplifying their diffusion.6 Because the relationship between Russian and European literature had by the early nineteenth century shifted from one of slavish imitation to the creative reception of foreign models, genres borrowed from Western Europe were promptly followed by reelaboration and original works. One example of this trend has been illustrated in the section devoted to Vasilii Zhukovskii’s early work. The German and English ballad, translated and re-worked by the author both in verse and in the povest’ form, represented one of the main generic channels through which the aesthetics of European 5 6

On Bestuzhev-Marlinskii see Kovarsky 1985. On Somov see Brown 1986: II/267-270.

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romanticism penetrated – and became an integral part of – Russian poetry and prose. A second example is provided by Nikolai Gnedich’s Don Korrado, the first novel of terror to appear in Russia. The work largely relied upon German and English prototypes mostly unfamiliar to contemporary Russian readers. Gnedich adopted the basic themes, setting and plot of the Gothic novel of terror. However, on the canvas of a classic Gothic story the author displayed an innovative narrative technique inspired by Schiller’s plays, and was able to convey the extreme emotions of his characters. Thus with Don Korrado the avant-garde of Western European literature, the English Gothic novel and the Sturm und Drang theatre are introduced into Russia sowing seeds which will eventually germinate with the following generations of Russian prose writers: Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, Orest Somov and Feodor Dostoevskii. Thus the years of Alexander’s rule were fundamental for the development of Russian literature in a number of ways: a professional take on writing affirmed itself together with an active dialogue between writers, critics and the reading public; the relationship with Western culture moved from a strong sense of inferiority to one of near-equality, foreshadowing an age when cultural influences between East and West finally consisted in a reciprocal exchange. Prose fiction also turned a corner in the period between Karamzin and Pushkin, as new genres and narrative modes were rapidly introduced on to the Russian scene, old genres were freely re-worked in a milieu characterised by an unfettered dynamism and mould-breaking attitudes, providing the foundations of the Russian novel and story and setting the trend for decades to follow.

Bibliography The following is a selected bibliography including the main primary and secondary sources cited in this book and consulted in its preparation. The following abbreviations are used in the bibliography: Spb. (St. Petersburg), M. (Moscow), L. (Leningrad), University (U) Press (P), Gos. (Gosudarstvennyi), Izd. (Izdatel’stvo), Tip. (Tipografiia). The bibliography is divided into the following sections: Primary sources (in alphabetical order) a) Russian works of fiction b) Contemporary Russian non-fictional works, translations, memoirs, letters, diaries, critical articles, historical documents. c) Western-European memoirs, letters, diaries, critical articles and literary works. Secondary sources (in alphabetical order): a) In Russian b) In other languages

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Index Ablesimov, A. A., 109 Addison, Joseph, 113 Africa, 129, 140 Aksakov, Sergei, 174, Family Chronicle (Semeinaia khronika), 174, albums, 50-51, 55-56, 205, 206 almanachs, 56, 62, 67, 70, 74 Aglaia, 52, 206 Aonidy, 206 Mnemosyne, 74 Muses’ Scroll, The (Svitok muz), 67 Polar Star, The (Poliarnaia zvezda), 70 Taliia, 119 Al’tshuller, Mark, 304 Alexander II, 347 America, 129, 140 Arakcheev, count A. A., 28, 33, 285 Arbuzova, Mariia, 87 Artsybyshev, Nikolai (or Artsybashev), chapter V.1.3, 18, 298, 308, 309, 315, 373 Intruduction to a History of the Russians (Pristup k povesti o Russkikh), chapter V.1.3 Rogneda or the Ruin of the Poles (Rogneda ili razorenie Polotska), chapter V.1.3 Arzamas, chapter II.3, 14, 64, 68, 70, 75, 86, 241, 250, 369 Asia, 114, 140 Austerlitz, battle of, 319, 367 Austria, 287, 290 ballad, chapter V.3, 100, 230, 297, 298, 299 Baratynskii, E. A., 132

Batiushkov, K. N., 11, 29, 44, 60, 67, 74, 98, 202, 217, 307, 373 “Bard at the Colloquium of the Lover of the Russian Word, The” (“Pevets v Besede liubitelei russkogo slova”), 100 “Discourse on the Influence of Light Verse on Language, A” (“Rech’ o vliianii legkoi poezii na iazyk”), 59-60 Laviniia, 307 Levkad, 307 “Something about the Poet and Poetry” (“Nechto o poete i o poezii”), 61 Stroll Around Moscow, A (Progulka po Moskve), 373 Stroll through the Academy of Arts, A (Progulka v akademiiu khudozhestv), 373 A Vision on the Banks of Lethe (Vydenie na beregakh Lety), 217 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de, 163, 194 Eugénie, 163 Beckford, William, 130, 325, 327 Vathek, 327 Beketov, P. N., 38 Belinskii, V.G., 70, 138, 217 Belozelsky-Belozersky, A. M., (father of Z. A. Volkonskaia), 132 Berger Louis, 144 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, J-H., 129 Paul et Virginie, 129 Beseda, chapter II.3, 15, 64, 75, 241, 242, 250, 322 Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, A. A., 70, 81, 130, 298, 299-300, 308, 329, 346, 371, 374-375, 376

412 Ammalat-Bek, 130 An Ancient Tale, Roman and Olga (Starinnaia povest’. Roman i Ol’ga), 308 Blood upon Blood (Krov’ za krov’), 308 Castle of Neigauzen, The (Zamok Neigauzen), 308 Journey to Revel (Poezdka v Revel’), 374 Nulla-Nur, 130 Tournament at Reval (Revel'skii turnir), 308 Bakhtin, M. M., 128, 169, 340 chronotope, 22, 231, 255, 257, 340, 362 dialogic novel, 128, 169, 371 Benitskii, A. P., chapter III.1, 16, 23, 68, 77-78, 81, 102, 103, 111, 117, 149, 186, 192, 209, 210, 371 Bedouin, 120, 124, 126 Grangul’, 120 Ibragim or the Magnanimous. Oriental Tale (Ibragim ili velikodushnyi, vostochnaia povest’), 120, 123 To the Next Day (Na drugoi den’), 120-127 Vizier, 120, 126 Bildungsroman, see novel bilingual authors, 131, 134-137 Bobrov, Sergei, 303 Boileau, 107, 151, 252 book trade, chapter I.3, 15, 19, 21, 24, 27, 38, 70, 82-83, 264, 328, 329, 352, 366 Bolotov, A. T., 86, 109 Born, I. M., 67, 80 A Short Manual of Russian Literature (Kratkoe rukovodstvo k rossiiskoi slovesnosti), 79 Brown, W. E., 151, 168, 184, 188, 208 Bruni, F., 137, 143 Brusilov, N., chapter IV.5, 17, 67, 68, 72, 76, 79-80, 117, 126,

Index 146, 169, 174, 186, 192, 201, 263, 272, 373 Azem, 117, 248 Kabul, 117, 126 Memoirs (Vospominaniia), 362 My Journey, or One Day’s Adventures (Moe puteshestvie ili prikliuchenie odnogo dnia), 174, 244, 248, 249, 272 Naivety and Deceitfulness (Legkoverie i khitrost’), 201, 249, 257, 263 Old Man, or the Reversals of Fortune, The (Starets, ili prevratnost’ sud’by), 248 Poor Leandr, or the Author without Rhetoric (Bednyi Leandr, ili avtor bez ritoriki), chapter IV.5, 17, 282, 244, 247, 249, 263, 373 Story of the Poor Mariia, The (Istoriia bednoi Marii), 248, 263 Trifles, or Some Works and Translations by N. B. (Bezdelki, ili Nekotorye sochineniia i perevody N. B.), 117, 248, 252 Bulgarin, F. V., 70, 152, 170 Ivan Vyzhgin, 166 Bulgakov, Ia., 286, 289-290 Bunina, Anna, 52, 134, 135, 215, 304 Bürger, G. A., 299, 348-349, 350, 351, 353, 354, 355 Leonore, 348, 350, 354, 355 Burney, Fanny, 217 Burke, E., 193, 326 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 326-327 Buturlin, Dmitrii, 42 Byron, Lord / Byronic 130, 342, 375 Byzantium, 115 Caliph and the Dervish. A Fable (Kalif’ i Dervish. Basniia), 128

Index Canova, Antonio, 291 Catherine I, 313 Catherine II, 19, 20-22, 23, 26, 30, 37, 41, 47, 57, 81, 82, 91, 104, 106, 107, 108, 111, 113, 115, 116, 117, 132, 160, 161, 163, 170, 171, 187, 194, 265, 266, 268, 300, 327, 366 Notes Regarding Russian History (Zapiski kasatel’no Rossiiskoi istorii), 300-301 Podrazhanie Shekspiru, Istoricheskoe predstavlenie bez sokhraneniia teatral’nykh obyknovennykh pravil, iz zhizni Riurika, Nachal’noe upravlenie Olega, 301 Igor, 301 Caucasus, 29, 129, 130, 131 censorship, 21, 29, 61, 68, 71, 294 first censorship law of 1804, 24 ukaz of 1801 and 1802, 25 ukaz of 1796, 34 ukaz of 1783 (on printing press), 20 Chaadaev, P. Ia., 137 Chekhov, A. P., 128, 372 Chulkov, M. D., 105, 106, 150, 156, 157, 166, 167, 178, 238, 246, 258, 350 Comely Cook, The (Prigozhaia povarikha), 105, 105, 106, 167, 178, 238 Mocker, or Slavonic Tales, The (Peresmeshnik, ili slavianskie skazki), 105 Church Slavonic, 94-97, 108, 302 classicism / neo-classicism / classicists, 13, 14, 32, 33, 49, 52, 64, 73, 74, 81-83, 91, 96, 98, 105, 107, 108, 110, 114, 125, 127, 150, 156,-157, 165, 188, 196, 200, 207, 208, 249, 250, 257, 258, 267, 292, 366, 369 clubs, 15, 21, 44-62

413 Coleridge, S. T., 130 Kubla Khan, 130 comedy (classical), 97, 98, 145, 156157, 161, 162, 163, 164, 168, 171, 188 comic opera, 109, 165, 171 comic mode in fiction, 155, 157, 257258 Commission for the Drafting of Laws, 23, 118, 119 Congress of Vienna, 17, 23, 28, 367 contes licencieux, 115 conte philosophique, 111, 113 Correggio (Antonio Allegri), 291 Cottin, Sophie, 141, 146 My Cousin’s Journey into His Pockets: A Free Translation (Puteshestvie moego dvoiurodnogo brata v karmany. Vol’nyi perevod), 282 Cross, A. G., 197 cultural alienation, 108 cultural bilingualism, 131, 134, 136 Cuvalier de Trie and Varez, 227 Hilberge l’Amazone, ou les Montenegrins, pantomime en trois actes, 227 Dashkov, Dmitrii, prince, 72 “Some Remarks on Journals” (Nechto o zhurnalakh”), 72 Dashkova, princess E. K., 268 Le petit tour dans les Highlands, 268 Davydov, D., 29, 98, 132, 284 Diary of Partisans’ Deeds in the Year 1812 (Dnevnik partizanskikh deistvii 1812 goda), 29, 284 Decembrists, 29, 46, 68, 70, 98, 101, 173, 369, 370 dedications, 43, 57-58, 218 Defoe, Daniel, 167 Moll Flanders, 167 Del’vig, A. A., 29 demonic hero, 299, 342, 346, 360 De Quincey, 328 Confessions of an OpiumEater, 328

414 Destouches, Philippe, 251 Le Glorieux, 251 Derzhavin, G. R., 93, 97, 99 Diderot, Denis, 194, 266 Dickinson, S., 267, 269 Dmitrev, I. I., 38 Dmitrev, M., 73 Dolgorukii, prince, 208 Neschastnaia Lisa, 208 Dostoevskii, F. M., 128, 151, 295, 329, 346, 371, 372, 373, 376 Boris Godunov, 346 Maria Stuarda, 346 Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh), 373 Drake, Nathan, 326 The Abbey of Cundale, 326 Dupaty, C. M., 268, 269, 270, 274, 277, 278, 279 Lettres sur l’Italie en 1785, 247, 268, 274 Dugaw, Dianne, 230 Durova, Nadezhda, 131, 228, 236, 237 The Cavalry Maiden: It Happened in Russia (Kavalerist-devitsa: Proisshestvie v Rossii), 228 East, see Orient École frénétique, 346 Eikhenbaum, B. M., 14 Elizabeth, tsarina,106 Emin, F. A., 45, 104, 105, 106, 116, 157, 194 Constancy Rewarded, or the Adventures of Lizark and Sarmanda (Nagrazhdennaia postoiannost’, ili prikliucheniia Lizarka i Sarmandy), 104 Inconstant Fortune, or the Voyage of Miramond (Nepostoiannaia Fortuna, ili pokhozhdenie Miramonda), 104, 105

Index Letters of Ernest and Doravra (Pis’ma Ernesta i Doravry), 194 The Adventures of Themistocles (Prikliucheniia Femistokla), 116 Emin, N. F., 195, 205 Roza, 195 The Play of Fate (Igra sud’by), 195 Engel’gardt, E., 102 England / English, 13, 35, 87, 112, 130, 153, 193, 264, 265, 302, 303, 304, 325, 333, 347-349, 374, 375, 376 English weeklies, 113, 194 The Spectator, 194 The Universal Magazine, 194 enlightenment, 60, 105, 111, 112, 115, 120, 121, 122, 127, 140, 145, 156, 214, 305, 332 enlightened tsar, 117-118, 121-123, 127 see also liberalism Ehrhard, Marcelle, 352 ex-libris, 36 Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe, 106, 116, 171 Les aventures de Télémaque, 116, 171 Ferel’ts’s, S. K., fon, chapter III.5, 103, 150, 151, 192, 203, 252, 256, 372 The Journey of a Critic (Puteshestvie kritiki), chapter III.5, 16, Fielding, Henry, 106, 165, 166, 244 History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, The, 106 Finger Ring, the (Persten’), 126 folklore, 31, 81, 96, 97, 150, 227, 230, 258, 298, 305, 346, 348-351, 359, 363 Fontanelle, B., 140 Ericie ou la vestale, 140 Fonvizin, D. I., 116, 137, 144, 156, 157, 159, 161, 163, 171, 172, 173, 174, 178, 268

Index Kallisfen (Callisfen), 116 The Brigadier (Brigadir), 157, 172 Letters from France (Pis’ma iz Frantsii), 268 Nedorosl’ (The Minor), 162, 179 Formalism, 44, 93, 370 Foss, I.G., 353 fragmented genres, 69, 206, 261, 275, 277, 284 France, French, 13, 35, 36, 50, 54, 81, 87, 92, 112, 113, 115, 120, 128, 136, 138, 141, 157, 161, 171, 174, 106, 111, 115, 116, 117, 118, 129, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 145, 153, 157, 158, 159, 163, 171, 193, 195, 214, 224, 228, 231, 235, 236, 244, 247, 265, 267, 269, 270, 318, 247, 304, 306, 317, 319, 325, 327, 328, 346, 353, 374 French Revolution, 20, 51, 92, 113, 137, 290, 298, 306 Friedman, A., 350 Gallomania, 113, 155, 157, 158, 163, 171, 172 Galich, A. (pseud. of Aleksandr Ivanovich Govorov), 74 Essay on the Science of the Beautiful (Opyt nauki iziashchnogo), 74 Galinkovskii, Iakob, 76, 246, 323 Sidoniia, ili Nevinnoe verolomstvo, 54-55 The Beauties of Sterne (Krasoty Sterna), 246 Gan, Elena, 131, 142, 148 The Ideal (Ideal), Society’s Judgement (Sud sveta), Gellert, Christian, 194 gender, chapter III.2, 88, 217, 219, 225 cross-dressing, 225, 226, 234-235 and gothic genre, 326, 337

415 feminisation, chapter IV.3, 16, 50-52, 87 masculinity, 232-233 and sentimentalism, IV.3, IV.4, 52, 212-213 woman as Muse, 51, 211, 214 woman as Mother / ideal of motherhood, 58, 87, 141, 147, 149, 162, 211, 215216, 218, 220, 221-225, 232 Genlis, Stéphanie Félicité de, 106, 141, 146, 194, 217, 223 Adèle et Théodore, ou lettres sur l’éducation, 223 The Affecting History of the Duchess of C*** who was Confined Nine Years in a Horrid Dungeon, 224 L’Histoire de la Duchesse de C., 224 Gerakov, Gavril, chapter V.1.3, 18, 298, 308, 309, 315, 373 Prince Menshikov. A Curious Historical Fragment of the Year 1727 (Kniaz’ Menshikov. Liubopytnoi istoricheskoi otryvok 1727go goda), 313314 Prince Menshikov, or the Exile of a Great Man (Kniaz’ Menshikov i v ssylke velikii chelovek), 313-314 Germany, Germans, 35, 36, 73, 74, 80, 153, 159, 173, 193, 235, 264, 275, 286, 289, 299, 303, 319, 320, 323, 324, 325, 326, 332, 333, 343349, 351, 352, 355, 364, 374, 375, 376 Gessner, Salomon, 195, 290, 291 Glazunov, I. P., 38, 40 Glinka, F. N., 29, 127, 284, 313 The Bird with Golden Feathers (Zlatoperaia ptichka), 127 Letters of a Russian Officer (Pis’ma russkogo ofitsera), 284

416 Glinka, S. N., 115, 128, 322, 313 Selim and Roxana (Selim i Roksana), 115 Young’s Nights (Iungovy nochi), 322-323 Goethe, J. W. von, 132, 195, 275, 324, 343, 352 The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werther), 195, 324 Gogol’, N. V., 91, 128, 132, 151, 152, 153, 155, 163, 166, 167, 169, 173, 183, 184, 187, 188, 258, 295, 329, 346, 364, 371, 372 Dead Souls (Mertvye dushi), 164, 184, 370 Overcoat, The (Shinel’), 152 Sellected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (Vybrannye mesta iz perepiski s druz’iami), 364 Goldsmith, Oliver, 106, 113 Golitsyn, prince, 48 Golitsyna, princess, 57 Golovkina, Natal’ia, 43, 134, 136, 137, 144, 212 Alphonse de Lodère, 136 Elizaveta S***, or the Story of a Russian [Lady] (Elizaveta de S***, ili istoriia rossiianki) (Russian translation of Elisabeth de S., ou l’histoire d’une russe écrite par une de ces compatriots), 43, 136 [Gorikhvostov, D.], 270 Pis’ma rossiianina, puteshestvovashogo po Evrope s 1802 po 1806 god, 270 gothic novel, see novel Gnedich Nikolai, chapter V.2, 11, 14, 18, 38, 48, 74-81, 93, 97, 119, 125, 130, 162, 163, 168, 197, 209, 298, 299, 307, 347, 360, 374, 376 Don Corrado de Gerrera, or the Spirit of Vengeance

Index and the Barbarity of Spaniards (Don-Korrado de Gerrera, ili Dukh mshcheniia i varvarstva Gishpantsev), chapter V.2, 125, 130, 163, 168, 298, 299, 358, 360, 376 The Fruits of Solitude (Plody uedineniia), 345 Moriz, or the Victim of Vengeance (Morits, ili zhertva mshcheniia), 325 Speech for the opening of St. Petersburg Public Library in 1814, 81 Unhappy Love (Neschastnaia liubov’), 325 Grand tour, 263-268, 286, 288, 291, 294 Gray, Thomas, 195, 320, 326, 348, 352 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 195, 322, 326, 352 Graveyard poetry, 195, 206, 292, 297, 299, 320, 322, 326, 331, 339, 347, 352, 374 Grech, N. I., 70, 120, 159, 273, 374 Greece, Greek, 36, 105, 114, 134, 266, 307 Greenleaf, Monika, 130 Griboedov, A. S., 29, 62, 73, 146, 252, 254, Woe from Wit (Gore ot uma), 146 Grimm, F. M., 305 Grossi, T., 277 La fuggitiva. Novella in dialetto milanese, 277 grotesque in fiction, 145, 150, 151, 152, 154, 160, 169, 173, 183, 184, 186, 346 Gutwirth, Madelyn, 57 Hammarberg, G., 205, 206, 211, 243 Harries, Elizabeth, 260 Harussi, Yael, 212 Heldt, Barbara, 124 Herder, J. G. von, 275, 305, 348 Herzen, A. I., 367 Heyder, C., 53

Index Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus, 346 Holland, 264, 265 Holy Alliance, 28, 33, 367 Hoog, Theresa van, 277 The Magnanimous Amazon, or the adventures of T. Baroness van H. With Anecdotes of Other Eccentric Persons, 277 Iakovlev, Pavel, 69, 76, 192, 241, 243, 272, 276, 280, 281284, 373 Misfortune from Tears and Sighs (Neschastiia ot slez i vzdokhov), 281 A Sentimental Journey Along the Nevskii Prospect (Chuvstvitel’noe puteshestvie po Nevskomu prospektu), 35-36, 39, 244, 274, 276, 280, 282-284, 373 Iezuitova, R. V., 364 Italy, 42, 244, 264-265, 279, 286, 292, 293 Izmailov, A. E., 39, 67, 68, 75, 76, 103, 117, 119, 123, 126, 127, 149, 150, 151, 156170, 171, 178, 182, 186, 188, 221, 238, 257, 258, 294, 343, 372, 375 Evgenii ili pagubnye sledstviia durnogo vospitaniia i soobshchestva (Eugene, or the Disastrous Consequences of Poor Upbringing and Company), chapter III.4, 16, 156, 157170, 171, 182, 238, 257, 343 Ibrahim and Osman. Oriental Tale (Ibragim i Osman. Vostochnaia povest’), 126, 127 Poor Masha (Bednaia Masha), 208, 261 Izmailov, V.V., 53, 88, 276-279 A Journey to Southern Russia (Puteshestvie v

417 Poludennuiu Rossiiu v 1799 godu), 276-279 Izvekova, M., chapter IV. 3, 16, 52, 125, 134, 148, 162, 163, 192, 294 Alphonse and Florestina, or A Turn for the Better (Al’fons i Florentina, ili schastlivyi oborot), 216 Emilia, or the Sad Consequences of Reckless Love (Emiliia, ili pechal’nye sledstviia bezrassudnoi liubvy), 216217 Milena, or a Rare Example of Magnanimity (Milena, ili redkii primer velikodushiia), 125, 148, 163, 216-225 Virtue Triumphant over Perfidy and Malice (Torzhestvuiushchaia dobrodetel’ nad kovarstvom i sloboiu), 225 James, John, 49 Jones, Gareth W., 277 journals, 91, 195 LITERARY, chapter II.1, 15, 26, 31, 64, 72, 81, 84, 96, 102, 06, 109, 118, 158, 178, 155, 157, 172, 178, 195, 206, 246, 273-275, 309, 322, 328, 329, 366, 368 Champion of Enlightenment and Beneficence, The (Sorevnovatel’ prosveshcheniia i blagotvoreniia), 304, 375 Democritus (Demokrit), 152, 155, 158 Damskii zhurnal (The Ladies’ Journal), 51-52, 67 Drone, The (Truten’), 170 Ippokrena (Hippocrene), 324 Lover of Literature, The (Liubitel’ slovesnosti), 85, 248 Loyalist, The (Blagonamerennyi), 375

418

Index Messenger of Europe (Vestnik Evropy), 68, 197, 328, 343, 347, 352, 353, 357, 369 Moscow Journal (Moskovskii zhurnal), 196 Russian Herald (Russkii vestnik), 34, 81, 196, 369 Journal for the Darlings (Zhurnal dlia milykh), 51 Moscow Mercury, The (Moskovskii Merkurii), 67, 113 Flower Garden, The (Tsvetnik), 68, 78, 119-120 Journal of Russian Literature (Zhurnal rossiiskoi slovesnosti), 68, 79, 247 Journal of the Latest Travels (Zhurnal noveishikh puteshestvii), 273 St. Petersburg Herald, The (Sankt-Peterburgskii vestnik), 68 Contemporary, The (Sovremennik), 70 St. Petersburg Herald, The (Sankt-Peterburgskii vestnik), 68 Northern Messenger, The (Severnyi vestnik), 71, 171 Patriot (The Patriot), 76 Russian Invalid, The (Russkii invalid), 328 Russian Museum, The (Rossiiskii Museum), 304 Satirical Theatre (Satiricheskii teatr), 179 Son of the Fatherland (Syn Otechestvo), 353, 354, 374 Industrious Bee, The (Trudoliubivaia pchela), 106 Idle Time Usefully Employed (Prazdnoe vremia v pol’zu upotreblennoe), 106 OTHER: 67

The Friend of Enlightenment (Drug prosveshcheniia), 67 Theatrical Messenger (Dramaticheskii vestnik). 67 “THICK”: 62, 369 Moscow Telegraph (Moskovskii Telegraf), 69, 369 Johnson, Samuel (Dr. Johnson), 106, 113 Kachenovskii, M. T., 197 Kaisarov, A. S., 66, 288, 293 Kamenev, Gavriil, 278, 347 Gromval, 347 Kant, Immanuel, 134 Kantemir, A., 135, 157, 171, 194, To My Mind. On the Detractors of Learning (K umu svoemu. Na khuliashchikh ucheniia), 135 Karamzin, N. M., 11, 12, 16, 18, 35, 38, 39, 44, 60, 68, 71, 7579, 82, 83, 89, 90, 91-93, 97, 98, 100-101 103, 107, 109, 110, 125, 131, 137, 141, 145, 146, 148, 170, 171, 174, 184, 185, 188, 191, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 202-211, 214, 218, 240-243, 244, 245, 248, 249, 254, 260, 268, 270-272, 275, 276-281, 283, 284, 285, 287, 289, 294, 295, 298, 299, 301, 302, 303, 305, 307, 315, 316, 317, 318, 327, 329, 330, 346, 352, 353, 359, 366, 373, 374 WORKS: “Epistle to Women” (“Poslanie k zhenshchinam”), 214 Bornholm Island (Ostrov Borngol’m), 299, 327, 359, History of the Russian State (Istoriia gosudarstva rossiskogo), 31, 302

Index Julia (Iuliia), 129, 140, 141, 148, 248 Knigth of Our Time, A (Rytsar’ nashego vremeni), 171, 243 Letters of a Russian Traveller (Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika), 174, 184, 272, 274, 275, 287 Martha the Mayoress (Marfa posadnitsa), 32, 307 My Confession (Moia ispoved’), 141 Natal’ia, the Boyar’s Daughter (Natal’ia, boiarskaia doch’), 32, 307, 309, 315, 317 Poor Lisa (Bednaia Liza), 76, 125, 170, 171, 174, 358 Sierra-Morena, 299, 339 “What Does an Author Need?” (“Chto nuzhno avtoru?”), 193, 218 “Why are There Few Writers of Talent in Russia?” (“Otchego v Rossii malo avtorskikh talantov?”), 42, 59, 60, 76 Kazotti, Petr, 316 Boiar B…v and M…v, or the Consequences of Fiery Passions and the Breaking of Vows. Russian Events Occurring in the Reign of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich (Boiara B...v i M...v, ili sledstviia pylkikh strastei i narusheniia obeta. Rossiiskoe proizshestvie, sluchivsheesia v tsarstvovanie tsaria Alekseia Mikhailovicha), 316-318 Kelly, Catriona, 13, 137, 144, 212 Kern, Anna, 49 Kheraskov, M. M., 38, 105, 116, 194, 301 Numa, or Flourishing Rome (Numa, ili protsvetaiushchii Rim), 105

419 Cadmus and Harmonia (Kadm i Gearmoniia), 116 Kiprenskii, O., 354 Kiukhel’beker, Vil’gelm, 29, 74, 273 Kleist, Heinrich, 227-228 Penthesilea, 227-228 Kniaz’ O...ii i Grafina M...va, ili urok o modnom vospitanii. Istinnoe Rossiiskoe proisshestvie, sluchivsheesia v tsarstvovanie Imperatritsy Ekateriny I. Rossiiskoe sochinenie, 316 Kniazhnin, Ia. B., 160, 165, 170, 301 Misfortune from a Coach (Neshchastie ot karety), 165, 170 Komarov Matvei, 105, 258 Van’ka Kain, 105 Kotzebue, A. von, 19, 275, 324 Kozlov, V. I., 328 Kropotov, A., 16, 69, 103, 149, 150158, 188, 239, 240, 241, 246, 258, 372 An Extraordinary Event. Dispirited Virtue, or the Piglet in a Sack (Chrezvychainye proisshestviia. Ugnetennaia dobrodetel’, ili porosenok v meshke), 154-156, 152, 154 The Landscape of my Imagination (Landshaft moikh voobrazhenii), 240 The Story of a Brownish Kaftan (Istoriia o smurom kaftane), 151-155, 188, 372 Krylov, A. I., 48, 93, 97, 116, 157, 158, 185 Kaib, 116, 185 Krüdener, Iuliia, 129, 134, 136, 140, 144, 212 La cabane des lataniers, 129 Élisa, ou l’éducation d’une jeune fille, 140 Valérie, 136, 144 Kukushkina, E. N., 162 Kurakin, A., 268

420 Journal de mon voyage, 268 Kurakin, Boris, 265 Labzin, Aleksandr, 27, 37 “On the Reading of Books” (“O chtenii knig”), 37 Laharpe, Frédéderic César de, 22 Lambert, Mme de, 194 Lavater, J. K., 220 LeDonne, John, 176-177 Lermontov, M. Iu., 130, 369, 371 Bela, 130 Lesage, Alain René, 166 Lessing, G. E., 119 Filotas, 119 Levshin, V. A., 150, 166, 350 Story of a Modern Nobleman (Povest’ o novomodnom dvoriane), 166 Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 85, 325, 328, 331, 338, 344, 350, 352, Ballad of the brave Alonzo and the beautiful Imogen, 350 The Monk, 85, 328, 338, 352 liberalism, 20-21, 71, 267, 366, 369, 371 literary language, 50, 64, 65, 75, 77, 79, 92-93, 95, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 151, 156, 157, 196, 163, 197, 202, 209, 218, 323, 368, 370 “New style” (novyi slog), or “middle style”, 32, 82, and salon speech, 50, 5354, 56, 205, 210 and Gallicisms, 54 and archaisms,53, 92, 9597, 99, 302 debates on, chapter II.3, 64, 240-241, 250 literary circles (kruzhki), 15, 21, chapter II.1, 281, 351, 366, 375 literary criticism, chapter II, 109, 150, 152, 192, 197, 216, 218-

Index 219, 242, 247, 344, 368, 369, 370 “Liza-Romanist”, 83, 87 Lobanova, princess, 286 Locke, J., 161, 193 Lomonosov, M. V., 45, 73, 96, 100, 113, 301 Temira i Selim, 113 Lorrain, Claude, 291 Lotman, Iu. M., 12, 44, 50, 95 Lovell, Stephen, 300 Lubianovskii, Fedor, chapter IV.6.4, 192, 210, 269, 272, 273, 276, 285, 372 Journey through Saxony, Austria and Italy in 1800, 1801 and 1802 (Puteshestvie po Saksonii, Avstrii i Italii v 1800, 1801 i 1802), chapter IV.6.4, 17, 42, 285 Memoirs (Vospominaniia), 286 L’vov, P. Iu., 109, 117, 195, 200, 205, 240, 277, 279, 312 Temple of the Glory of Russian Heroes (Khram slavy velikikh Rossiian), 32, 312 The Russian Pamela, or the Story of Maria, the Virtuous Countrywoman (Rossiiskaia Pamela, ili istoriia Marii, dobrodetel’noi poselianki), 109, 195 Aleksandr and Iuliia (Aleksandr i Iuliia), 200 The Letters of Skimnin (Pis’ma Skimnina), 241, 270, 277, 279 The Temple of Thruth, the vision of Sesostris, tsar of Egypt (Khram istiny, videnie Sezostrisa, tsaria egipetskogo), 117 Opravdavshisiia vizir, 117 Lukács, György, 302 Macpherson, James, see: Ossian Maikov, V. I., 109, 185, 186

Index A Country Holiday, or Virtue Crowned (Dereven’skii prazdnik, ili uvenchannaia dobrodetel’), 185 Elisei, or Bacchus Enraged (Elisei, ili razdrazhennyi Vakkh), 185 Maistre de, François-Xavier, 132, 247, 274, 277 Voyage autour de ma chamber, 247, 274 Makarov, M., 278 Makarov, P. I., 67, 72, 77, 85-86, 87, 113, 213-215, 283, 287, 331 Letters from London (Pis’ma iz Londona), 283, 287 “Retsenziia na Monakha M.G. L’iuisa”, 86, 118 Mackenzie, Henry, 246 The Man of Feeling, 246 Malinovskii, F., 316 Verolomstvo druga, povest’ ob Ol’ge, Liudmile i Milovzore. Proisshestvie, 316 Maria Fedorovna, dowager empress, 132 Marmontel, J.-F., 77, 88, 140 Les Incas, ou la Destruction de l’empire de Pérou, 140 Masons, 21, 30, 195, 285 Maturin, Charles, 325, 328 Albigenses, The, 328 Bertram, 328 Melmoth the Wanderer, 328 Medvedeva, Irina, 321 Merzliakov, Aleksei, 48, 66, 73-74, 80, 81, 173, 323, 369 A Short Rhetoric (Kratkaia ritorika), 73 Mickiewicz, A., 132 Milton, John, 135, 322, 325, 331, 338, 343, 374 Paradise Lost, 135, 325 minor genres (salon), 55-56, 69, 206207, 368 Mirsky, D.,125, 148, 163 Modest and Sofia (Modest i Sofiia), 204

421 Monbron, Louis Charles de, 106 Margot la ravaudeuse, 106 Montesquieu, baron de, 114 Lettres persanes, 114 Moskovskii universitetskii pansion, 66, 347, 351 Moscow University, 285, 324, 325, 328 Murav’ev, M. N., 109, 117, 195, 245, 270 Emilii’s Letters (Emilievy Pis’ma), 195, Murav’ev, N., 102, 303, 316 Vsevolod i Veleslava, proisshestvie, sokhranivsheesia v pis’makh, 316 Murav’ev-Apostol, I. M., 81 Letter from Moscow to Nizhnii-Novgorod (Pis’ma iz Moskvy v NizhniiNovgorod), 81 Naples, 292 Napoleon I, Napoleonic, 46, 70, 81, 103, 157, 171, 226, 298, 302, 369 military campaigns/wars, 15, 19, 29, 64, 227, 284, 306, 307, 318, 319, 329, 367 1812 attempted invasion of Russia, 17, 27-33, 35, 69, 71, 80, 97, 112, 157, 170, 302, 304, 367, 369 Narezhnyi, V. T., 18, 129, 141, 156, 158, 161, 166, 167, 169, 174, 180, 183, 188, 209, 239, 258, 323, 324-325, 328, 329, 341, 343, 344, 345, 346, 347, 374 Aristion, or Re-Education (Aristion ili perevospitanie), 158, 183 Day of Crime and Revenge, The (Den’ slodeistva i mshcheniia), 324 Dead Castle, The (Mertvyi zamok), 324, 329, 341 False Dimitrii, The (Dimitrii Samozvanets), 324

422 Mariia, 158, 175, 180 Predslava i Dobrina, 32 Revenge of the Jew, The (Mstiashchie evrei), 324 Rogvol’d, 324 Russian Gil Blas, A (Rossiiskii Zhilblas), 166 Turkish Judge, A (Turetskii sud’), 129 Black Year, The (Chernyi god), 129 Natural School, 152, 187 Neuhäuser, Rudolf, 14, 207, 209 Nevzorov, M. I., 275, 276 Journey to Kazan, Viatka and Orenburg in the year 1800 (Puteshestvie v Kazan’, Viatku i Orenburg v 1800 godu), 276 Newlin, Thomas, 60 Nicholas I, 12, 43, 44, 62, 70, 90, 133, 134, 332 Nikitin, Afanasii, 265 Journey Beyond the Three Seas (Khozhdeniie za tri moria), 265 Noble Cadet Corps, 106 Nodier Charles, 352 Le vampire, 352 novel, 31, 32, 43, 54, 55, 65, 69, 81, 82, 83, 91, 191, 194, 198, 205, 207, 210, 211, 212, 216, 217, 222, 230, 231, 250, 251, 257, 258, 260, 262, 265, 268, 276 Bildungsroman, 114, 122, 159, 255, 257, 258, epistolary, 69, 195, 270, 275, 278, 287 gothic, chapter V.2, 18, 82, 83-89, 223-224, 297, 298, 299, 347, 350, 352, 364, 397, 398, 374, 376 historical, chapter V.1, 97, 375 of adventure, 76, 104, 105, 107, 110, 112, 114, 115, 118, 130, 150, 166, 206, 207, 229, 265 picaresque, 116, 129, 150, 156, 158, 166, 168, 188,

Index 226, 227, 229, 239, 259, 335 Novikov, N. I., 106, 157, 170, 173, 178, 246, 300, 322 Odoevskii, A. I., 253 Princess Mimi (Knyazhna Mimi), 253 Olenin, A. N., 42, 48-49, 304 One Thousand and One Nights, 112 Russian translation (Tisiacha i odna noch’. Skaski arabskie), 112 Orient, 104, 105, 111, 112, 113, 118, 129, 130, 150, 185 oriental tale (vostochnaia povest’), 16, 140, 111-129, 185, 371, 372 orientalism / exoticism, 112, 114, 116, 118, 126, 128, 129, 130, 140, 278-279, 375 Oriental Apologia, An. Abuzei and Tair (Vostochnaia apologiia. Abiuzei i Tair), 128 Ossian (Macpherson), 200, 290-291, 297, 305, 308, 312, 324, 326 The Poems of Ossian, 326 fashion, 18, 306, 307, 308, 312, 315 Ostolopov, N. F., 67, 119, 141, 158, 240, 247, 251, 257 Evgeniia, or Modern Education (Evgeniia, ili nyneshnee vospitanie), 141, 158, 240, 251, 257 Ozerov, V. A., 48, 306 Fingal, 306 patronage, 21, 56-57, 59, 246 “peasant question”, chapter III.5, 29, 160, 203 Palomicheskaia literatura, 265 Paul I, 19, 22, 27, 34, 266, 268, 366 Percy, Thomas, 348, 349 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 348, 349 periodicals, see journals Peter I, 46, 103, 104, 265, 314-315, 320, 367

Index Peter II, 313 Peter III, 266, 313 ukaz of 1762, 45, 266 petimetry (petits maîtres), 160, 161, 170 Philip II of Spain, 330, 332, 333 picaresque novel, see novel Pypin, A.N., 207 Pisarev, Aleksandr, 71 Plavil’shchikov, P. A., 38-39, 273 Pnin, Ivan, 24, 25, 67 “The Author and the Censor” (“Sochinitel’ i tsenzor”), 25 Poland, 267 Polevoi, N. A., 69, 70, 77, 188, 369 A Soldier’s Story (Rasskazy russkogo soldata), 188 political travel see travelogue Poor Lisa (Neschastnaia Liza), 208 Popov, M. I., 109, 150, 350 Popugaev, Vasilii, 67 Porter, Robert, 22, 40 Pospelova, Mariia, 134 pre-romanticism, 14, 76, 80, 82, 89, 195, 208, 291, 351, 353, 363, 364, 374 Prévost, A.-F., 194 Prince Bova (Bova Korolevich), 104 professionalization of literary activities, 15, 33-44, 63-66, 70, 109, 133, 175, 206, 215216, 217, 218, 219, 366, 367, 376 Prokopovich-Antonskii, 79 Prometheus, myth of, 336, 343 prose fiction: debates on, chapter II.2, II.3, 63-64, 67, high/low, 97, 169, 170, 189, 226, 229, 236 neo-classicist, 107-108 popular, 75, 83, 85, 87, 89, 97, 105, 108, 110, 112, 114116, 127, 139, 146, 149, 150, 155, 156, 157, 158, 165, 188, 278, 327-329, 348, 351, 352, 304, 305, 312 translations, 17, 34, 83, 91, 97, 158, 105, 106, 107, 112,

423 113, 115, 116, 119, 131, 136, 150, 151, 152, 153, 158, 184, 188, 194-195, 223, 247, 275, 277, 285, 297, 299, 300, 304-305, 307, 321, 322, 324-325, 327-328, 340, 347, 348, 350-354, 366, 372 publishing and printing, chapter I.3, 26, 27, 29, 106, 107, 172, 195, 205, 213, 275, 322, 324, 352, 353 Puchkova, Ekaterina, 134 Pushkin, A. S., 11, 12, 18, 23, 29, 43, 44, 49, 61-62, 65, 70, 73, 74-75, 78, 81, 86, 90, 98, 101, 104, 118, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 137, 138, 145, 159, 187, 191, 202, 210, 212, 242, 245, 253, 256, 278, 294, 295, 297, 298, 301, 309, 321, 328, 346, 365, 366, 368, 369, 371, 374 “Conversation between a Bookseller and a Poet” (“Razgovor knigoprodavtsa s poetom”), 42 “First Epistle to the Censor” (“Pervoe poslanie k tsenzoru”), 23, 25 Evgenii Onegin, 60, 328, 370 Gypsies, The (Tsygany), 202 Queen of Spades, The (Pikovaia dama), 37 Moor of Peter the Great, The (Arap Petra velikogo), 90 Tale of Tsar Saltan (Skazka o tsare Saltane), 104 Tales of Belkin (Povesti Belkina), 90 Prisoner of the Caucasus (Kavkazskii plennik), 130 Fountain of Bakhchisarai, The (Bahchisaraiskii fontan), 130

424 Captain’s Daughter, The (Kapitanskaia dochka), 160, 309, 374 History of Pugachev, The (Istoriia Pugacheva), 309 Pushkin, V. L., 98, 128, 210 Kabud the Traveller. Oriental Tale (Kabud puteshestvennik. Vostochnaia skazka), 128 Radcliffe, Ann, 84-86, 87-88, 146, 216, 217, 223, 324, 325, 327, 328-329, 330, 344 The Mysteries of Udolpho, 87, 259, 324, 327 Radishchev, A. N., 95, 118, 160, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 178, 179, 203, 257, 271, 272 Journey from Petersburg to Moscow (Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu), 160 realism, 11, 142, 145, 151, 167, 168, 169, 172, 182, 184, 229, 239, 270, 285, 319, 334, 349 Reeve, Clara, 130, 298, 325, 327 Old English Baron, The, 298, 327 refined taste (iziashchnyi vkus), 36, 50-54, 61, 64, 70, 77, 88, 90, 91, 93, 155, 196, 199, 205, 210, 276 Reisner, S., 46 Remezov, S. A., 200 The Joyful Pupil (Shchastlivyi vospitannik), 200-201 Repnin, N. 285 Reshetnikov, A., 226 Richardson, Samuel, 182, 193, 195, 244, 330 Clarissa, 193, 330 Pamela, 182, 195 Roboli, 57, 202, 276 Roche, Regina Maria, 88 Rogger, Hans, 300 romanticism, 14, 17, 18, 31, 60, 74, 96, 129, 178, 187, 188, 200, 202, 213, 237, 290, 292, 293, 299, 305, 325, 343,

Index 346, 347, 349, 352, 354, 369, 375, 376 Rome, 105, 114, 132, 133, 264, 288, 291-292, 307 Roosevelt, Priscilla, 171 Rosenholm, A., 52 Rosslyn, Wendy, 52 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 21, 105, 129, 134, 168, 171, 185, 195, 200, 202, 211, 246, 252, 268, 270, 279, 281 Les confessions, 171, 268 Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 195 Russian Amazon, the (Russkaia Amazonka), chapter IV.4, 17, 32, 192, 211, 226, 192, 211, 225, 318, 319, 372 Russian Revolution of 1917, 11 Ryleev, K. F., 70 Sandunov, N., 325 salons, 15, 21, 26, 44-62, 63, 91, 93, 99, 101, 132, 134, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 155, 160, 162, 182, 205, 206, 210, 213, 214, 251, 252-254, 257, 263, 281, 347 Said, Edward, 130 Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de, 129 Paul et Virginie, 129 Saint Jullien, 138 samizdat, 171 Scandinavia, 266, 305 Schiller, F., 275, 299, 308, 322-325, 331, 332, 336, 340, 343, 344, 345, 350, 352, 374, 376 Don Carlos, 332 Fiesko, 325, 340 Robbers, The (Die Räuber), 336, 341 Scotland, Scottish, 200, 304 Scott, Walter, 304-305, 322, 349, 374 The Legend of Montrose, 304 Marmion, 304 Waverly, 304 Scudéry, Madeleine, de, 217 Selivanovskii, S. I., 38

Index sensualism, 193 sentimentalism, chapter IV, 14, 16, 84, 85, 87, 98, 103, 105, 110, 124, 125, 133, 134, 140, 141, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 156, 167, 169, 185, 186, 188, 189, 288-290, 307, 330, 352-353, 358-359, 364, 370, 372, 374 critique of, 75-82, 89, 94, 98, 154, 191, 197-198, 208, 209, 242-243, 247, 259, and gothic novel, 299, 308, 329, 330, 337, 342, 343, 373 and history, chapter V.1.4, 298, 307, 311-312, 314, 315 and humour, chapter IV.5 and moral principles, 84, 88, 90, 193-194, 198, 199, 200, 202, 212, 216, 218, 221, 223, 236, 238-239, 256-257, 274, 279 and neo-classicism, 297 and nature, 60, 174, 199203, 206, 211, 220, 232, 289-290 and pre-romanticism, 195, 208, 290, 363, 370 and romanticism, 351 stylistic devices, chapter IV, 17, 53-54, 93, 99, 101, 186, 188, 189, 205, 302 Severin, Dmitrii, 304 Letters of a Russian in England (Pis’ma russkogo v Anglii), 304 Shaftesbury, earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 193 Shakespeare, William, 322, 325, 331, 343, 347, 374 King Lear, 325 Shakhovskoi, A. A., 48, 93, 97, 98, 102, 304 A Lesson for Coiquettes, or the Lipetsk Spa (Urok koketkam, ili Lipetskie vody), 98

425 Shalikov, P. I., prince, 67, 76, 102, 204, 210, 240, 241, 246, 248, 276, 277, 279, 294 The Dark Grove, or the Monument to Tenderness (Temnaia roshcha, ili pamiatnik nezhnosti), 248 Journey to Little Russia (Puteshestvie v Malorossiiu), 241, 277, 279 Journey to Kronshtadt (Puteshestvie v Kronshtadt), 277 Shirinskii-Shikhmatov, P. A., 97 Shishkov, A. S., chapter II.3, 29 Treatise on the Old and New Style of the Russian Language (Rassuzhdenie o starom i novom sloge rossiiskogo iazyka), 94 Treatise on the Eloquence of the Holy Scriptures (Rassuzhdenie o krasnorechii Sviashchennogo Pisaniia), 94 Simpson, M., 342 skaz technique, 174, 152-154, 156 Skipina, K., 208 Slavophiles, 96, 202, 367 “small clerk” (literary theme), 152154, 156, 372 Smirdin, A., 37 Memoirs (Vospominaniia), 37 societies, chapter II.I, 47, 48, 52, 6768, 79-80, 96, 98, 100, 102, 213, 247, 302, 310, 323324, 352, 368, 369 Arzamas, chapter II.3, 65, 68, 71, 75, 86, 242, 250, 367, 368 Green Lamp, The (Zelenaia lampa), 102, 369 Collegium of Admirers of the Russian Word (Beseda liubitelei russkogo slova), chapter II.3, 64, 75, 322, 367, Free Society of Admirers of Russian Literature (Vol’noe

426

Index obshchestvo liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti), 73, 102, 303, 369, 375 Free Society of Admirers of Literature, Sciences and Arts (Obshchestvo liubitelei slovesnosti, nauk i khudozhestv), 67, 79, 102, 117, 119, 247, 368 Society of Admirers of Russian Literature (Obshchestvo liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti), 61, 102 Society of Literary Friendship (Druzheskoe literaturnoe obshchestvo), 66, 102, 368 Society of Literature and Learning (Obshchestvo slovesnosti i premudrosti), 68, 102 Society of Russian History and Antiquities at Moscow University (Obshchestvo istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom universitete), 102, 149, 310 Society of Admirers of National Literature (Obshchestvo liubitelei otechestvennoi slovesnosti), 102 Society of Admirers of Russian Literature (Obshchestvo liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti), 102 Society of Russian History and Antiquities at Moscow University (Obshchestvo istorii i drevnostei rossiyskih pri Moskovskom universitete), 102, 149 PROCEEDINGS, 67 Proceedings of the Free Society of Admirers of Literature, Sciences and Arts (Trudy obshchestva liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti), 67

LITERARY-PHILOSOPHICAL:

74, 102 Liubomudry (The Wisdom Lovers), 74, 102 PHILANTHROPIC: 30 Women’s Patriotic Society, 30 SECRET: 30 Soiuz spaseniia (Union of Salvation), 30 society tale (svetskaia povest’), 129, 132, 144, 145, 146, 253, 254 Somov, O., 74, 84, 329, 375, 376 On Romantic Poetry (O romanticheskoi poezii), 74, 375 Plan for a novel à la Radcliffe (Plan romana à la Radcliff), 84 Sorokine, D., 32 Southey, Robert, 299, 349, 350, 352 Rudiger, 350 The Old Woman of Barkeley, 350 Soviet criticism, 11-12, 173, 182, 196, 321 Spada, Antoine, 134-135 Spain, Spaniards, 35, 266, 330, 332333, 335 Spanish Inquisition, 330, 342 Speranskii, M. M., 28, 285 Spiess, Christian Heinrich, 352 Staël, Anne Louise Germaine, Mme de, 129, 132, 138, 141, 142, 144, 148 Corinne, 138, 141 Delphine, 141 Mizra, 129 Zulma, 129 Starobinski, J., 201 Sterne, Laurence, 77, 149, 152, 153, 154, 165, 171, 176, 242, 244, 245, 246, 259, 263, 268, 270, 271, 277, 281, 294, 372, 373 A Political Romance (later titled The History of a Good Warm Watch-Coat), 152, 153, 372

Index A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, 171, 243, 244, 245, 268, 269, 272, 274 The Life and the Opinion of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, 244, 259 Story of the Russian Chevalier Aleksandr (Gistoriia o rossiiskom kavalere Aleksandre), 104, 166 Strada, Vittorio, 13 Strakhov, N.I., 246-247 Sturm und Drang, 82, 297, 299, 320, 324, 326, 329, 341, 345346, 347, 352, 353, 376 style empire, 36 Sumarokov, A. P., 194 Sumarokov, P. I., 57, 276, 284 Journey through all of the Crimea and Bessarabia in the Year 1799 (Puteshestvie po vsemu Krymu i Bessarabii v 1799 godu), 57, 284 superfluous men (lishnye liudi), 178, 254 “suspension of communication” (aposiopesis), 203-204, 284, 373 Sweden, 264 Swift, Jonathan, 106, 153 Gulliver’s Travels, 106 Tale of Frol Skobeev (Povest’ o Frole Skobeeve), 104 The Tale of Igor’s Campaign (Slovo o polku Igoreve), 306, 308 Tasso, Torquato, 135 Tatishchev, V. N., 300, Russian History Dating Back to the Most Ancient Times (Istoriia Rossiiskaia s samikh drevneishikh vremen), 300 “Teniers-ism” (“Ten’erstvo”), 168 theatrical devices in fiction, 162-163, 333, 338, 343-344, 345, 362 Third Section, 46 Thomson, James, 195, 320, 322, 352 The Seasons, 195, 322

427 Tieck, Ludwig, 346 Tiutchev, F. I., 137, 369 Tivoli, 289, 292 Todd, William Mills III, 24, 58 Tolstoi, L. N., 131, 132, 170, 202, 244, 295 Khadzhi-Murat (HadjiMurat), 131 The Raid (Nabeg), 131 War and Peace (Voina i mir), 29, 370, 374 The Wood-Felling (Rubka lesa), 131 Tomashevskii, B. V., 208 travelogues (literature of travel), chapter IV.6, 48, 69, 107, 114, 138, 149, 191, 194, 206, 207, 244, 247, 249, 372, 373, 374 POLITICAL TRAVELOGUE: chapter III.5 TRAVEL ACCOUNTS AND GUIDE BOOKS: 17, 267, 284,

286, 289, 293, 344, 345 trifles (bezdelki), 42, 55, 78, 117, 248, 252 Turgenev, Andrei, I., 66, 80, 293, 304, 344, 352, 374 Turgenev, Aleksandr, I., 18, 66, 98, 140, 289, 323, 344, 345, 346, 347, 352 Puteshestvie russkogo na Broken’ v 1803 (Journey of a Russian to the Broken in 1803), 290-291 Turgenev, I. P., 285, 352 Turgenev, Nikolai, 102, 128, 372 Unfortunate Nikandor, The, (Neschastnyi Nikandor), 166 Unhappy L***. A Russian Work (Neshchastnyi L***. Rossiskoe sochinenie), 201 Unseen, or a Mysterious Woman, The (Nevidimka, ili tainstvennaia zhenshchina), 199-200 Uspenskii, B. A., 53, 95, 211

428 V.Z. [Vladimir Vel’iaminovZernov?], 318, 320 Prince V-skii and Princess Shch-va (Kniaz’ V.-skii i Kniazhna Shch-va), 32, 318-320 Varma, D. P., 342 Vatsuro, V. E., 346 Vel’tman, A. F., 346 Venevitinov, D. V., 142 Venice, 291 Verne, Francis, 247 Le Voyageur sentimental ou ma promenade à Yverdun, 247 Veselovskii, A. A., 197 Viazemskii, P. A., 43, 98, 142 Vigel’, F. F., 21, 86, 91, 275 Vinogradov, V. V., 53, 302 “Vision at the Inn at Arzamas, published by the Society of Scholars, A” (“Videnie v arzamasskom traktire, izdannym obshchestvom uchenykh liudei”), 98 Volkonskaia, Z. A., chapter III.2, 16, 52, 58, 85, 103, 118, 124, 129, 192, 209, 210, 212, 215, 228, 254, 305, 345 “Couplet sur le gothique”, 85 Fragments from Travelling Memories (Otryvki iz putevikh vospominanii), 345 Giovanna d’Arco, Dramma per Musica ridotto da Schiller della Principessa Zeneide Volkonsky, 137, 228 Quatres nouvelles, 137139, 144 Laure, 129, 138-148, 254 Une tribu du Brésil, 129, 139, 140 Les Maris Mandingues, 129, 139, 140 L’enfant de Kachemyr, 129, 139 Letters from Italy (Pis’ma iz Italii), 137

Index Tableau slave du cinquième siècle, 137 The Dream: A Letter (Mechta. Pis’mo), 138 Tale of Ol’ga (Skazanie ob Ol’ge), 138 Volkonskii, N. G. (husband of Z. Volkonskaia), 132 Vol’pe, Z., 353 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de, 77, 106, 113, 114, 116, 118, 128, 134, 144, 168, 250, 252, 254, 266 Candide ou l’Optimisme, 113, 114, 250, 254 The Princess of Babilonie, 113 Micromegas, 113 Zaïre, 113 Vostokov, A., 67 Wachtel, Andrew, 301 Walpole, Horace, 325, 343, 344 The Castle of Otranto, 325, 343 Walpole, Robert, sir, 267 Warner, Marina, 235 Westernisers, 367 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 106, 275, 324 women writers, chapter III.2, chapter IV.3, 16, 51, 52, 57, 58, 8788, 192, 206 Young, Edward, 195, 297, 320, 322323, 326 The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, 195 Zinov’ev, D. N., 115 The Triumph of Virtue (Torzhestvuiushaia dobrodetel’), 115 Zirin, Mary, 236 Zhikharev, S.P., 217, 263, 330 Zhukova, Mariia, 131, 142, 143, 149 Evenings by the Karpovka (Vechera na Karpovke), 143

Index Zhukovskii, V. A., chapter V.3, 11, 14, 38, 44, 60, 74, 82, 98, 198, 202, 298, 299, 324, 328, 329, 330, 246, 375 Marina’s Grove (Mar’ina Roshcha), chapter V.3, 18, 298, 299, Memoirs (Zapiski), 352 Liudmila, chapter V.3, 299 On Criticism (O kritike), 74 Svetlana, 354, 355, 359 Thoughts on a Grave (Mysli na grobe), 352 “Writer in Society, The” (“Pisatel’ v obshchestve”), 42

429