What Makes the Russian Literature of the 19th Century So Distinctive?
Francine Prose and Benjamin Moser
Sunday Book Review
- NOV. 25,
2014
Each
week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This
week, Francine Prose and Benjamin Moser discuss the great Russian writers and
their approach to the human heart and soul.
By Francine Prose
I could cite the
wild imaginings of Gogol, who can make the most unlikely event seem not only
plausible but convincing.
Trying to answer this
difficult question in 650 words or less, I could say that part of what makes
the 19th-century Russian writers so distinctive — why we still read them with
such pleasure and fascination — is the force, the directness, the honesty and
accuracy with which they depicted the most essential aspects of human
experience. Not the computer-dating experience, obviously, or the
airplane-seat-rage experience, or the “Where is the takeout I ordered an hour
ago?” experience. But plenty of other crucial events and emotions appear,
unforgettably, in their work: childbirth, childhood, death, first love,
marriage, happiness, loneliness, betrayal, poverty, wealth, war and peace.
Photo
Francine Prose Credit Illustration
by R. Kikuo Johnson
I could mention the
breadth and depth of their range, their success at making the individual seem
universal, the fact that — though they inhabited the same country and century —
each of “the Russians” is different from the others. I could applaud their
ability to persuade us that there is such a thing as human nature, that
something about the human heart and soul transcends the surface distinctions of
nationality, social class and time. I could cite the wild imaginings of Gogol,
who can make the most unlikely event — a man wakes up to discover that his nose
has gone missing — seem not only plausible but convincing; the way in which
Dostoyevsky’s people seem real to us, vivid and fully present, even as we
suspect that no one ever really behaved as they do, flinging themselves at each
other’s feet, telling their life stories at extraordinary length and in
excruciating detail to a stranger in a bar; the mournful delicacy of Chekhov,
his uncanny skill at revealing the deepest emotions of the men, women and
children who populate his plays and short stories; the ambition and insight
that suffuses Tolstoy’s small moments (jam-making and mushroom-picking) and
epic set pieces (a disastrous horse race, the Battle of Borodino); the subtlety
with which Turgenev portrays the natural landscape and his meticulously
rendered but ultimately mysterious characters.
Alternately, I could
suggest that anyone seeking a more complete answer to this question read
Nabokov’s “Lectures on Russian Literature.” Certain aspects of the book can be
irritating: Nabokov’s aristocratic prejudices, his contempt for Dostoyevsky’s
“neurotics and lunatics,” his dismissal of almost all Soviet-era literature.
(What about Akhmatova, Platonov and Babel?) On the other hand, no one has
written more perceptively about two of Chekhov’s most affecting stories, “The
Lady With the Little Dog” and “In the Gully,” nor presented such a persuasive
argument for the brilliance of “Anna Karenina.” And however we may bristle at
his suggestion that if we can’t read Gogol in Russian, we probably shouldn’t
read him at all, our admiration for Gogol is heightened by Nabokov’s
explanation of how he replaced the conventions “inherited from the ancients.
The sky was blue, the dawn red, the foliage green” — with fresh and precise
descriptive language. “It was Gogol . . . who first saw yellow and violet at
all.”
Better even than
reading Nabokov on the Russians is to read the Russians. Or reread them, since
their books so often strike us as more beautiful and meaningful each time we
return to them; they seem to age and change along with us, to surprise us much
as we are surprised to meet a dear friend, grown older. If I were to tell
someone where to start, I’d advise beginning with Gogol’s “The Overcoat”; or
Turgenev’s “First Love”; or Chekhov’s “The Black Monk” or “Ward No. 6,” “The
Bishop” or “The Duel”; or that greatest of all page-turners, Dostoyevsky’s “The
Brothers Karamazov.” I’d say read Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” which is perhaps
my favorite novel, or his “The Three Hermits,” which is to my mind the best
story ever written about the limits of pedagogy. I’d say read them all,
discover your own favorites, and when you reach the last sentence of the last
book on your shelf, start over and read them again.
Francine
Prose is
the author of 20 works of fiction and nonfiction, among them the novel “Blue
Angel,” a National Book Award nominee, and the guide “Reading Like a Writer,” a
New York Times best seller. Her new novel is “Lovers at the Chameleon Club,
Paris 1932.” Currently a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College, she is
the recipient of numerous grants and awards; a contributing editor at Harper’s,
Saveur and Bomb; a former president of the PEN American Center; and a member of
the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences.
◆ ◆ ◆
By Benjamin
Moser
Dostoyevsky
depicted humans as beings whose lunacy and lust and terror were held in check
by only the gauziest of veils.
An odd characteristic
of Russian literature is that the first novel to appear in the vernacular was
not an original work but a translation from the French — and not until the 18th
century. This was at least 200 years after the rest of Europe had shelved their
churchy tongues: Dante praised the “eloquence of the vernacular” at the
beginning of the 14th century; Du Bellay offered a “Defense and Illustration of
the French Language” in the 16th; and languages with far fewer speakers —
Dutch, Portuguese, Polish — had broad and distinguished literatures when all
the Russians had were a scattering of medieval epics and devotional works
written in the ecclesiastical language, Church Slavonic.
Photo
Benjamin Moser Credit
Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson
Even at the end of
the 19th century, Russian, as readers of Tolstoy know, still reeked of bog and
tundra. Classy people spoke French, and the relation of French to Russian in
the 19th-century Russian novel offers an uncomfortable metaphor for the society
as a whole: an elegant foreign language stretched like a glistening membrane
atop the “real” language of the people. As the classical colonnades of St.
Petersburg never quite hid the destitute swamp upon which they were built, the
language of Descartes never supplanted the hallucinated utopias that populated
the dreams of the Slavonic saints.
French was
civilization; Russian, its discontents. A generation before Freud, Dostoyevsky
— a favorite of Freud’s — depicted humans as beings whose lunacy and lust and
terror were held in check by only the gauziest of veils. The village idiot
admonishes the magnificent czar; the pretty princess, back from Baden-Baden,
brushes gigglingly past the soothsaying hag. In a land that knew no
Renaissance, the superstitious medieval village, with its thunderclaps and forebodings,
inevitably swamps the Gallic palace. The Russia of Dostoyevsky and Pushkin
lurks in the alleyway behind the mansion, a materialization of the id.
The experiences of
the Russian writers echoed their particular national history, but there is
nothing particularly national about the volcanic passions that threaten to
burst through the carefully maintained surfaces of every human life. That they
explored the depths did not mean that the great Russians neglected their
brilliant surfaces, whose Fabergé luster makes them irresistibly romantic, and
makes us feel the pathos of their destruction.
When that destruction
came, the surface — the heritage of Cartesian formalism — would keep the demons
at bay. If, a century before, French seemed like a froufrou frill, the vision
of humane culture of which it was a symbol now offered consolation, however
meager. Amid the Stalinist terror, nothing is more self-consciously classical
than the poems of Akhmatova, who wrote sonnets in besieged Leningrad; of
Tsvetayeva, who looked longingly, insistently, to Greece; or of Mandelstam,
who, in an instance unique in literary history, committed suicide by ode. If
Dostoyevsky insisted on the enduring reality of the irrational, the
20th-century poets described — but refused to reflect — the chaos swallowing
them, and clung to form as to a vital lie.
Joseph Brodsky wrote
that Russia combined “the complexes of a superior nation” with “the great
inferiority complex of a small country.” In a nation so tardily arrived at the
banquet of European civilization, its mentality makes the world’s biggest
country strangely provincial. But its smallness and its bigness offer an
obvious metaphor for the extremes of the human psyche. “I can be led only by
contrast,” Tsvetayeva wrote. In the eight time zones sprawling between the
galleries of the Hermitage and the frozen pits of Magadan, there is contrast
enough. Awareness of this unbridgeable distance makes Russian books, at their
greatest, reflections of all human life — and suggests that the old cliché, the
“Russian soul,” could lose the adjective.
Benjamin
Moser
is the author of “Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector,” a finalist
for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and the general editor of the new
translations of Clarice Lispector at New Directions. A former New Books
columnist at Harper’s Magazine, he is currently writing the authorized
biography of Susan Sontag. He lives in the Netherlands.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/books/review/what-makes-the-russian-literature-of-the-19th-century-so-distinctive.html
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