The Provincial Landowner in the Russian Cultural Imagination Bella
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Noble Farmers: The Provincial Landowner in the Russian Cultural Imagination Bella Grigoryan Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2011 © 2011 Bella Grigoryan All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Noble Farmers: The Provincial Landowner in the Russian Cultural Imagination Bella Grigoryan This dissertation examines a selectively multi-generic set of texts (mainstream periodicals, advice literature and fiction) that responded to a cultural need to provide normative models for the Russian nobleman’s domestic life and self, following the 1762 Manifesto that freed the gentry from obligatory state service. The material suggests that a prominent strain in the Russian novelistic tradition that took the provincial landowner as a central object of representation developed in the course of a series of encounters between prescriptive and creative literatures. In chapter one, the cross-pollination between generically diverse segments of late- eighteenth and early-nineteenth century print culture (namely, Andrei Bolotov’s agricultural advice and Nikolai Novikov’s satirical and Nikolai Karamzin’s mainstream journalism) is read as crucial for the formation of a proto-novelistic prose idiom for the representation of the nobleman in the provinces. In chapter two, the growing professionalization and concomitant commercialization of Russian letters is treated as a prominent factor in the polemical relations between Faddei Bulgarin and Nikolai Gogol. I suggest that prescriptive literature about farming and journalistic responses to it are a significant component in the intertextual links between Bulgarin’s Ivan Vyzhigin and Gogol’s Dead Souls. In chapter three, Ivan Goncharov’s oeuvre is read as a self- conscious attempt to arrive at the novelistic representation of a successful province- bound nobleman. His novelistic trilogy—A Common Story (Obyknovennaia istoriia), Oblomov and The Precipice (Obryv)—is situated vis-à-vis a growing corpus of Russian domestic advice literature to suggest that Goncharov’s prose re-works the extra-literary material. In broad terms, the study may be viewed in two, mutually supplementary, ways as (1) a “thick description” of three moments in the formation of novelistic gentry selves understood to be always in dialogue with prescriptive texts that sought to provide a normative discourse about a productive noble private life in the provinces and (2) a re- appraisal of writers long considered central to the establishment of the Russian novelistic tradition, with especially close attention paid to how these foundational figures navigated a multi-generic field of cultural production. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction. Noble Subjects at Home 1 Chapter One. Letters from Home: The Genesis of the Provincial Landowner in the Russian Novelistic Imagination 24 Chapter Two. How to Write a Model Landowner: Faddei Bulgarin, Nikolai Gogol and the Search for the Perfect Pomeshchik 84 Chapter Three: ‘Figura blednaia, neiasnaia’: The Provincial Landowner in Ivan Goncharov’s Novelistic Imagination 150 Conclusion 191 Bibliography 200 i LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1. An advertisement from Faddei Bulgarin’s Ekonom (March, 1841) 101 Figure 2. The title page of Vladimir Odoevsky’s Domostroitel’stvo i domovodstvo from Notes of the Fatherland (January, 1846) 113 ii NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION Throughout the text of the dissertation and in all discursive parts of footnotes, I use the Library of Congress system of transliteration with one exception: when listing last names of well-known Russian writers and monarchs, I use the commonly accepted spelling. Hence, in the body of the text, I transliterate Sergei, but write Tolstoy, rather than Tolstoi. When providing bibliographic information, I use the Library of Congress system without diacritics. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I am tremendously grateful to my dissertation sponsor, Professor Irina Reyfman. Her encyclopedic erudition and her seemingly inexhaustible dedication to students have enriched my graduate education in more ways than space permits me to list here. Professor Reyfman has read more drafts of my work than I can count and with an astuteness, meticulousness and patience at which I continue to marvel and to which I aspire as a teacher. I am grateful to Professor Cathy Popkin for her always insightful and encouraging responses to my work; her thoughtful guidance and questions helped me immensely in conceptualizing this project at early and late stages alike. I am grateful to Professor Robert Belknap for his kind willingness to serve on my committee on short notice, and for showing me generously a dazzling web of connections to and within European literature. Professor Richard Wortman guided me towards additional sources at a crucial point; I am deeply grateful both for these particular and invaluable recommendations and for his intellectual generosity in discussing the project more broadly conceived. I thank Professor Eileen Gillooly for raising a number of questions I continue to think about and for her invitation to discuss them at a later date. The Columbia Slavic department has provided a stimulating as well as a nurturing home for me. My warmest gratitude goes to everyone in the department. Conversations with Professors Valentina Izmirlieva and Alan Timberlake helped me re-think this project at an important juncture. I am grateful to Professor Liza Knapp for introducing me to the iv study of Russian literature when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley and for her continued support throughout these years. Two Junior fellowships from the Harriman Institute gave me the time and funding to write. The tireless staff at the Summer Research Lab at University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign, among whom Helen Sullivan deserves particular mention, welcomed me during two productive stays at the program. I came away with added insight from a number of conversations with scholars outside my department. I’m grateful to Anne Lounsbery for a number of such discussions. Collaborating with Katherine Antonova and Susan Smith-Peter on multiple conference panels as well as speaking with them on many less formal occasions has allowed me a generous glimpse at their scholarship and this has enriched my own work. I’m grateful to Erica Siegel for many years of friendship and for some much-needed help with practical matters recently. I’m grateful to Molly Brunson for her friendship and the home made soup that sustained me throughout November. It’s hard for me to imagine the last several years without friendships with Marijeta Bozovic, Sasha Senderovich, Rachel Vine, Tench Coxe, Jon Platt, Anne Kumer, Danny Carrera, Mathilde Cohen, Abi Kafka, Nanobah Becker, Marie Onaga and Tim Waters. Many thanks to Marie and Tim for their expert formatting! My parents have been unconditionally supportive ever since I can remember and incredibly enthusiastic as well as incredibly patient in more recent years. It brings me so much joy to dedicate this dissertation to my grandmother, Margarita Eroeva, because to her, perhaps even more than for V.P. Burnashev who wrote these lines in 1839, there has always been “poetry in a good recipe for mayonnaise.” v 1 INTRODUCTION Noble Subjects at Home The Russian Country House Poem Блажен, кто менее зависит от людей, Свободен от долгов и от хлопот приказных, Не ищет при дворе ни злата, ни честей И чужд сует разнообразных!1 Blessed is he who is less dependent on others, Free from obligations and work-related troubles Who seeks neither gold, nor honors at the court, And is free from varied bustle!2 Gavrila Derzhavin‘s ―To Eugene. Life at Zvanka‖ (―Evgeniiu. Zhizn‘ Zvanskaia,‖ 1807) opens with an almost studied, distinctly Horatian proclamation about the virtues of a private life in the country.3 This positive vision of rural domesticity entered the Russian 1 G.R. Derzhavin, Stikhotvoreniia. Biblioteka poeta (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel‘, 1957), 326. 2 Unless marked otherwise, all translations from Russian are my own. 3 Horace‘s poem begins by celebrating country life and the speaker‘s purported return to till his paternal fields. Horace‘s lyric subject, Alfius the usurer, abandons the pastoral fantasy by poem‘s end. Stephen Baehr has noted that ―[s]o important was this epode and its locus amoenus commonplaces to the conception of a rural paradise in Russian literature of the second half of the eighteenth century that its ironic last lines, which call this paradise into doubt as a daydream of an urban usurer, were sometimes omitted in translation.‖ Stephen Lessing Baehr, The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-century Russia (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991), 69. In free adaptations of the poem, these last lines were always omitted. N.N. Popovskii was the first to translate Horace‘s second epode. His 1751 translation was published in 1757 alongside Vasilii Trediakovskii‘s more creative verse transposition and prose treatise ―On the irreproachability and pleasure of country life‖ (―O besporochnosti i priatnosti derevenskiia zhizni‖). Popovskii‘s translation kept 2 literary imagination in the form of poetry, and an imitative brand of poetry at that: transpositions of Horace‘s Second Epode.4 ―To Eugene‖ may be read as a culmination point in the sizable set of eighteenth-century Russian adaptations of the Roman poem.5 Derzhavin‘s opening lines look as ―borrowed,‖ as the rest of the poem is absolutely unique. If the first stanza admits and asserts genetic links with a poetic intertext comprised of decades‘ worth of Russian variations on Horace‘s original, the text that follows, much as it may re-work the Horatian structure at times, treats the distinctive particulars of one gentry-man‘s life (the lyrical subject‘s/Derzhavin‘s)6 at his country estate (Zvanka). Derzhavin‘s originality lies in his willingness to endow with meaning the private pursuits of a province-bound nobleman in a manner virtually unseen in the tradition that precedes it.7 In the pages that follow I will outline the aims and terms of my inquiry: to examine a multi-generic selection of texts that attempted variously to Horace‘s concluding lines, Trediakovskii‘s transposition omitted them.