From the Elegy to the End of the Novel: Literary Experiences of Emotion

From the Elegy to the End of the Novel: Literary Experiences of Emotion by Alyson Louise Tapp A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Slavic Languages and Literatures in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Irina Paperno, Chair Professor Lyubov Golburt Professor Dorothy Hale Spring 2011 From the Elegy to the End of the Novel: Literary Experiences of Emotion © 2011 by Alyson Louise Tapp Abstract From the Elegy to the End of the Novel: Literary Experiences of Emotion by Alyson Louise Tapp Doctor of Philosophy in Slavic Languages and Literatures University of California, Berkeley Professor Irina Paperno, Chair Focusing primarily on Russian literature of the nineteenth century, this dissertation explores the dynamic structures of emotional experience that are embodied in and communicated by literary works. Moving from early nineteenth-century elegies, to Pushkin’s novel-in-verse, and to exemplary mature novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the dissertation concludes with the so-called “crisis of the novel” of the 1920s, seen from the perspectives of both Russia and England. Appealing selectively to work on emotions by literary critics, sociologists and philosophers, this dissertation is a contribution to the study of genre and narrative, as well as the individual works it treats. The chapters are united by their concern for the particular kinds of emotional experience (hope, embarrassment, desire, empathy) that are articulated by literary means. At the conceptual core of this study is the novel: I show how the representation of emotion in the elegy in the 1800s-1820s produces forms of temporality and sociality that ultimately support the novelistic configuration of author – character – reader through what I call the circulation of feeling. Moving to the high point of the Russian novel in the 1870s, I explore the narrative shapes and textures created by emotions— embarrassment in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and by desire in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The final chapter discusses the “crisis of the novel” in the 1920s, and shows how, in the face of weakened characters and erased plots, the essential configuration of author – character – reader is reinvented by two readers of Tolstoy, the scholar Boris Eikhenbaum and the English novelist Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s modernist novel, To the Lighthouse, and Eikhenbaum’s scholarly monograph, Lev Tolstoy: The Fifties, discover new ways to keep author, character and reader linked in circuits of emotional connection. Since the works I study form an arc that stretches from the first years of the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth, I aim to show how emotions in a literary text function as powerful impulses and structural principles which become wedded to the movement of literary history. 1 Table of Contents Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………. ii A Note on Transliteration……………………………………………………………... iii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter One From Elegy to Narrative: Loss, Hope and Futurity in Works by Zhukovsky, Viazemsky and Pushkin……………. 7 Chapter Two Embarrassment in The Idiot…………………………………………………………….. 51 Chapter Three Moving Stories: Emotion and Narrative in Anna Karenina……………………………. 82 Chapter Four The “Crisis of the Novel” in the 1920s: Boris Eikhenbaum and Virgina Woolf as Readers of Tolstoy…………………………..99 Works Consulted………………………………………………………………………135 i Acknowledgments Last of all, it is a pleasure to record on the first pages of this dissertation the experience of one more emotion: a debt of gratitude. I am profoundly grateful to Irina Paperno for her far-reaching and unfailing support and inspiration throughout my time at Berkeley and in the course of writing this dissertation. Her intellectual, professional and practical guidance, and, in equal measure, her generous, warm concern have been of enormous value. I extend my sincere thanks to my other dissertation advisers, whose warm encouragement also meant a great deal at each stage of the project: Luba Golburt taught me much with her sensitive and rigorous approach to reading my drafts; and Dorothy Hale engaged with my work more thoroughly and energetically than I could possibly have imagined asking of any outside committee member. The Berkeley Slavic Department has been a wonderful home for the past seven years, and I am grateful to all the faculty, each of whom has made distinct contributions—which I will hold dear—to my experience as a graduate student. I would like to thank Olga Matich, in particular, who has been a constant supportive presence. The experience of graduate school could have quite different, much harder and much less fun were it not for the company of students in the Slavic Department. It makes me very happy to think of remaining friends and colleagues with them in the years ahead. Most of the chapters of this dissertation have benefitted in some way from discussion at the graduate students’ kruzhok, and in the past seven years, I have learned a lot from all my fellow students: for that, thanks and admiration are due to the remarkable collective. For stimulating conversations, good reading tips, support with writing, and particular kindnesses at important moments, special thanks are owed, variously and on multiple counts, to Daniel Brooks, Anne Dwyer, Mieka Erley, Hannah Freed-Thall, David Houston, Zachary Johnson, Anna Lordan, Jessica Merrill, Anne Myers, Amy Petersen, Jillian Porter, Andrew Reynolds, Ben Schofield, and Katy Sosnak. I thank Matthew Owens, who has been close by me throughout this project, for all his support, and for sharing such delight in laughter and words. In the time it has taken me to write this dissertation, I have learned to play Bach on the cello, and for that gift, too, I thank Matthew. Finally, I express deep-felt gratitude to my parents: their love has enabled everything I have done. ii A Note on Transliteration Transliterations follow the Library of Congress system, except when an anglicized name has been well-established (e.g. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Zhukovsky, Mandelstam). The scholarly apparatus, however, follows the LOC system. iii Introduction Literary works express emotions and tell stories about emotions. At the same time, they come to participate in the emotional lives of their readers. The act of reading is a continuous braiding together of our experience of the emotions of others (of characters) and the emotions that are aroused in our own selves. Several strands combine to form the reader’s emotional experience of a text: an immediate apprehension—sometimes even a doubling in one’s own self—of a character’s emotion; a re-evaluation of a character or a scene in the context of the unfolding whole of the work; and an emotion that stems from the specifically literary nature of the medium in which this encounter takes place. This last component of a reader’s emotional experience is a part of an aesthetic or metaliterary response—elicited by the form and texture of the work or by the manipulation of literary and generic conventions. This dissertation explores the workings of specific emotions—hope, embarrassment, desire and empathy—in specific works of Russian literature, ranging from lyrical poetry to a scholarly monograph. At the center of this study are two novels that stand out at the head of the Russian nineteenth-century tradition for their remarkable emotional intensity—Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot (1868-69) and Lev Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1873-77). My discussion of literary experiences of emotion in novels by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is framed, on one side, by the discussion of the Russian elegy of the 1800s to 1820s, informed by the English elegy, and on the other side, by critical reflections on that novelistic tradition from the vantage point of the 1920s, made by Russian literary critics and an English novelist. Beginning with the elegy as one literary template of individual emotional experience, and moving towards the intersubjective and social world of the novel, I explore the dynamic structures of emotional experience that are created in and by literary works. Since the works I study form an arc that stretches from the first years of the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth, I aim to show how emotions in a literary text function as powerful impulses and structural principles which become wedded to the movement of literary history. A theme that recurs throughout the dissertation is movement itself, recognized by the ascendant psychological realism as a property of emotional experience, which unfolds in time and thus is forever in flux. The movements of emotion are various: there is the movement through time and between emotional states, the movement of bodies that display their sensibility and agitation, and the circulation of emotion between characters, authors and readers. Finally—the medium that captures all of these—there is the movement of language and narrative themselves. Thus, movement characterizes three recurring concerns of my study—temporality, sociality, and narrative—in their relation to emotion. * * * In recent years, literary scholarship has paid growing attention to the emotions as objects of study that can shed light on texts’ aesthetic, ideological and ethical dimensions as well 1 as on the emotions themselves.1 Emotions in literary (and other cultural) texts have been historicized, philosophized, theorized, and, equally, liberated from some of these disciplinary attempts

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