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Metaphysical Conflict Slavistische Beiträge ∙ Band 261 (eBook - Digi20-Retro) James B. Woodward Metaphysical Conflict A Study of the Major Novels of Ivan Turgenev Verlag Otto Sagner München ∙ Berlin ∙ Washington D.C. Digitalisiert im Rahmen der Kooperation mit dem DFG-Projekt „Digi20“ der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, München. OCR-Bearbeitung und Erstellung des eBooks durch den Verlag Otto Sagner: http://verlag.kubon-sagner.de © bei Verlag Otto Sagner. Eine Verwertung oder Weitergabe der Texte und Abbildungen, insbesondere durch Vervielfältigung, ist ohne vorherige schriftliche Genehmigung des Verlages unzulässig. «Verlag Otto Sagner» ist ein Imprint der Kubon & Sagner GmbH. James B. Woodward - 9783954791828 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 03:39:10AM via free access Slavistische B eiträg e BEGRÜNDET VON ALOIS SCHMAUS HERAUSGEGEBEN VON HEINRICH KUNSTMANN PETER REHDER• JOSEF SCHRENK REDAKTION PETER REHDER Band 261 VERLAG OTTO SAGNER MÜNCHEN James B. Woodward - 9783954791828 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 03:39:10AM via free access JAMES В. WOODWARD METAPHYSICAL CONFLICT A Study of the Major Novels of Ivan Turgenev VERLAG OTTO SAGNER • MÜNCHEN 1990 James B. Woodward - 9783954791828 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 03:39:10AM via free access ISBN 3-87690-477-3 © Verlag Otto Sagner, München 1990 Abteilung der Firma Kubon & Sagner. München James B. Woodward - 9783954791828 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 03:39:10AM via free access PREFACE Written between 1855 and 1862, the four novels Rudin, A Nest of the Gentry, On the Eve and Fathers and Sons are generally recognised as Turgenev’s most notable contribution to Russian and world literature. Many books, of course, have been written about them, progressively enriching our understanding of their meaning and deepening our awareness of Turgenev’s achievement. But the fact remains that these slender, elegant, graceful compositions still continue to provoke more fundamental disagreement than the famed ‘baggy monsters’ of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. His main reasons for writing them, their central issues and the vision of life which they reflect are still subjects on which no consensus exists. Are they primarily social chronicles, as Turgenev suggested, or are they rather to be seen as celebrations of life, of the beauty of love and youthful idealism? Are they paeans to the nobility of the human spirit or ironic comments on human folly? These and many other similarly basic questions continue to receive conflicting answers and to drive us remorselessly back to the texts. The same questions are addressed in the present study, but the question with which it is principally concerned is that of the novels’ essential character. It asserts, and attempts to substantiate, the view that they are, first and foremost, philosophical novels. This hardly constitutes, of course, a profound revelation. Seventy years ago the same term was applied to On the Eve in the well known study by Mikhail Gershenzon, and it is generally acknowledged that in each of the novels there is a significant substratum of philosophical ideas. But no attempt has yet been made to show how such ideas inform in each case all the elements of the fiction, investing each novel with its conceptual unity. Such an attempt is made in the present study, the main argument of which is that the disparate elements of the James B. Woodward - 9783954791828 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 03:39:10AM via free access 00050421 Preface Turgenevan novel cohere to express a philosophical theme which is essentially the same in all four cases. It is the theme, the study argues, of metaphysical conflict, of the metaphysical tension between the individual and the universe which originates in the Romanticism of Turgenev’s earliest works. The study offers a distinctive interpretation of this theme, and thus of Turgenev’s philosophical ideas, and examines its development in the four novels individually. It aims to show how it conditioned the nature of his art and determined those features which make it unique. Although the responsibility for the views expressed is entirely my own, I must acknowledge the immense debt of gratitude that I owe to the many turgenevedy from whose contributions and opinions I have benefited in recent years, particularly Nicholas Žekulin, Irene Masing-Delic, Peter Thiergen, David Lowe and Patrick Waddington. I would also like to thank the editors ofThe Slavonic and East European Review, Russian Literature, Scando-Siavica and Die Welt der Slaven for their permission to include in the book material from my articles published in their journals. Swansea J. B. WOODWARD January 1990 James B. Woodward - 9783954791828 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 03:39:10AM via free access 00050421 CONTENTS Preface v 1 The Philosophical Theme of the Turgenevan Novel 1 2 Rudin 15 3 A Nest of the Gentry 41 4 On the Eve 79 5 Fathers and Sons 122 Concluding Remarks 149 Notes 152 Select Bibliography 173 vii James B. Woodward - 9783954791828 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 03:39:10AM via free access James B. Woodward - 9783954791828 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 03:39:10AM via free access THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEME OF THE TURGENEV AN NOVEL In chapter 25 of A Nest of the Gentry the hero Lavretsky is reproached by his friend Mikhalevich for ‘elevating a personal fact, so to speak, into a general law, into an inflexible rule’. It is a criticism that Mikhalevich could have levelled with equal justification against his creator, for ‘the striving to seek out the general principles in particular phenomena’, which the hero of Rudin describes as ‘one of the basic attributes of the human mind and the essence of our entire civilization' (VI, 262), is continually in evidence in Turgenev’s 2 novels. Its most obvious manifestations are the simple, often ironic generalisations with which he is prone as narrator to react to the conduct or experiences of his characters. Thus in Rudin, for example, the surprise of Dar’ya Mikhaylovna Lasunskaya at the conduct of her • _ daughter Natal’ya prompts the author’s terse comment: ‘But it’s a rare mother who understands her daughter’ (VI, 280), and to Natal’ya’s anguish after her suspicions of Rudin’s limited capacity for love have been confirmed Turgenev responds with the observation: ‘However grievous the blow that might strike a person, he will have a bite to eat the very same day - forgive the crudity of the expression - and the next day he will eat more, and that is already the first consolation’ (VI, 342). Recurring in all the novels, such interpolations are indicative of the distance that Turgenev maintains between himself and his fictional creations, and they offer an insight into their fundamental character. For his novels in their entirety are similarly generalisations in the sense that they are primarily dramatised representations of the ‘general laws’ or ‘inflexible rules’ of life as he conceived them. Although the workings of these laws are translated into the experiences of characters whose lives and destinies engage James B. Woodward - 9783954791828 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 03:39:10AM via free access The Philosophical Theme of lhe Turgenevan Novel the reader’s attention, the novels, no less than his well known essay Hamlet and Don Quixote (1859), are testimony in the final reckoning to the lasting legacy of his philosophical education. They are the creations of a writer who is concerned less with the tragedies of individuals than with the tragedy of the human condition. Turgenev’s concern with broad philosophical issues, with the meaning of life and man’s relation to the world in which he lives, can be traced to the beginnings of his literary career which coincided with the heyday of Russian Romanticism. It is already apparent in his first known literary work, the poetical dramaSteno (1834), which was modelled on Byron’sManfred. The eponymous hero of this work is a typical product of the Romanticism of the period - an isolated intellectual who loses his faith in life and the capacity to love, but proudly asserts his human rights in the face of a hostile universe until he is finally driven to kill himself. As commentators have noted, Steno is ‘the first of Turgenev’s "superfluous men'”, the precursor of the numerous representatives in his fiction of this Russian socio- psychological type characterised by the kind of crippling conflict between head and heart in which Turgenev and his contemporaries recognised the particular affliction of their generation. But the significance of Steno for the future development of Turgenev’s art cannot be fully appreciated without reference to the deeper sense in which the term ‘superfluous’ is applicable to the heroes of his novels. For their most notable connection with this Byronie hero is ultimately to be seen in the fact that the social alienation which makes them ‘superfluous’ is merely a reflection of their similar metaphysical alienation. Their protests, of course, are directed against the prevailing social order which they aspire to change. But in the Turgenevan novel, as the later chapters of this study will show, social injustice is simply an expression of metaphysical injustice, of the immutable injustice of life itself. As a result, the social protests of the heroes of the novels acquire the significance of metaphysical protests. James B. Woodward - 9783954791828 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 03:39:10AM via free access 00050421 The Philosophical Theme of the Turgenevan Novel In rejecting social injustice they reject the reality of God’s world as Turgenev conceived it and, like Steno, pay the penalty of isolation and death. For this reason, though differing notably from one another as personalities and reflecting as representative figures the outlooks and ideals of different generations, they essentially conform to a single type.
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