• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

ERNEST HEMINGWAY AND IVAN TURGENEV : A STUDY IN THE NATURE OF LITERARY INFLUENCE' by Myler Wilkinson B.A., Simon Fraser University, 1976 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of English c Myler Wilkinson 1984 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY December 1984 All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without permission of the author. APPROVAL NAME : My1 er Wi 1ki nson DEGREE: Master of Arts TITLE OF THESIS: Ivan Turgenev and Ernest Hemingway: A Study in the Nature of Literary Influence EXAMINING COMMITTEE: Chai rperson: Professor Michael ,Stei g - - Professor David Stouck Senior Supervisor Professor of Engl i sh, SFU V--- Professor Jerry Zaslove Associate Professor of English, SFU . - Professor Peter Bui tenhuis Professor of English, SFU '. Professor Ross Labrie External Examiner Associate Professor of English, UBC Date Approved: 9 November 1984 PARTIAL COPYRIGHT LICENSE I hereby grant to Simon Fraser University the right to lend my thesis, project or extended essay (the title of which is shown below) to users of the Simon Fraser University Library, and to make partial or single copies only for such users or in response to a request from the library of any other university, or other educational institution, on its own behalf or for one of its users. I further agree that permission for multiple copying of this work for scholarly purposes may be granted by me or the Dean of Graduate Studies. It is understood that copying or publication of this work for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Title of Thesis/Project/Extended Essay Ivan Turgenev and Ernest Hemingway: A Study in the Nature of Literary Influence Author: - - - - i- (s~gnature)7- Myler Nil kinson ( name December 18, 1984 (date) ABSTRACT During the early 1920s in Paris when Ernest Hemingway was forging the remarkable prose style that soon would bring him to world prominence, no national literature was more important to him than that of $he nineteenth- century Russian masters. Oddly, very little critical attention has been paid to the pattern of influence which extends from the Russians to Hemingway. But of all the Russians--Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol-- there was one who held his critical attention first and longest. The writer was Ivan Turgenev, author of the short-story cycle A Sportsman's Sketches and later, the great novel of generational conflict, Fathers and Sons. An examination of Hemingway's reading habits at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris during thev1920s reveals that no author turns up nearly so often as Turgenev. A Sportsman's Sketches in particular, with its concern for landscape and terrain, its exact and subtle choice of natural description to evoke complex emotional states, its empathy for simple people who have not yet entirely lost connection with place, and its pathos connected with a simpler, more integrated past, presages much of what Hemingway will do in his own short-stories seventy years later. Fathers and Sons, with its themes of generational conflict , alienation and nihilism, was an epoch marking novel which made it possible for Hemingway to write a book like The Sun Also Rises. Ivan Turgenev belongs to the same literary family as Ernest Hemingway, a family which belongs to the larger tradition of late romanticism. It was Turgenev who revealed to the young Hemingway what was possible for an artist from a young national culture without centuries of literary tradition behind it. He was also a writer whom Hemingway had to misread and-then transform before he could find his own voice as an artist. To Linda, Nathaniel and little Anna, with love. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my senior supervisor, David Stouck, for showing me what it is to be a professional. My thanks also to Shirley Sookochoff for her help in bringing this manuscript to its final form. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page APPROVAL .........................:...... ii ABSTRACT ............................... iii DEDICATION ............................... v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................... vi INTRODUCTION "First There Were the Russiansf7 ................... 1 Notes to the Introduction ...................... 4 CHAPTER ONE "The History of An Influenceft .................... 5 Notes to chapter One ........................ 17 CHAPTER TWO "The Anxiety of Influence" ...................... 19 Notes to Chapter Two ........................ 40 CHAPTER THREE "Hemingway and A Sportsman's Sketches: The Thing Not Named" ..... 33 Notes to Chapter Three ....................... 72 CHAPTER FOUR "Fathers and Sons and The Sun Also Risest7 .............. 76 Notes to Chapter Four ........................ 94 CHAPTER FIVE "The Return of the Dead" ....................... 97 Notes to Chapter Five ........................ 104 EPILOGUE "TheRussianst ............................ 105 Notes to the Epilogue ........................ 111 APPENDIX A .............................. 112 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................. 114 vii INTRODUCTION First There Were the Russians In Dostoyevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the. roads in Turgenev, the movement of the troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoi. To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris . was like having a great treasure given to you. you could live in the other wonderful world the Russians were giving you. At first there were the Russians; then there were all the others. But for a long time there were the Russians. (Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast) Near the end of his life as Hemingway looked back on his beginnings as a writer he thought of the Russians. "At first there were the Russians," he wrote; "then there were all the others." About no other national literature or its achievements was Hemingway more explicit. And yet very little critical attention has been paid either to what Hemingway said about Russian literature in general or its specifie influence on his own development as a writer. It is an odd critical omission. No other American artist has been subjected to more influence studies than Hemingway. We have Hemingway and Twain, Hemingway and Anderson, Hemingway and Faulkner; yet when one looks closely at Hemingway's early years in Paris when the remarkable style was being forged, it becomes apparent just how central the Russian influence was 1 to Hemingway's conception of what was possible for a writer and his craft. It is beyond the scope of this study to draw all the important parallels and affinities which exist between Hemingway and the important Russian writers of the nineteenth-century--Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. This is an area of research which might fruitfully be takenup by future critics. Insofar as Hemingway could allow himself to recognize any writers as teachers and guides, the Russians were those guides. The nature and extent of this influence, however, remains a largely unexplored field. This paper will begin to chart that territory by looking closely at just one Russian writer and the influence his work had on Hemingway's om development as an artist. The writer is Alexander Sergeevitch Turgenev, the great nineteenth- century chronicler of Russian society and author of such books as A Sportsman's Sketches and Fathers and Sons. In A Moveable Feast Hemingway remembers that from the day he discovered Sylvia Beach's Paris bookstore in the last week of 1921 he began to read all of Turgenev's works.2 This discovery came at a critical point, perhaps the critical point, in Hemingway's life as an artist. He was just beginning to awaken to the realities of a European literary tradition and his own possible place in that tradition. He was reading voraciously--the Russians, the French realists and naturalists, the British from Lawrence to Joyce, and his peers amongst the America1 expatriates.' Through the early and mid years of the 1920s Hemingway was educating himself and coming to realize the standards which great writers of the past had set for any new voice hoping to join their ranks. The internal forces which, within a very short time, would give rise to the first published short stories, were beginning to define themselves against tradition. And in this tradition no figure loomed larger in Hemingway's consciousness than Ivan Turgenev. For reasons which I hope to make clear, reasons which were both psychological and aesthetic, Turgenev was to become the first of a very select group of writers which Hemingway could 4 admit as literary models. This study in the nature of literary influence will be presented in five distinct sections: first, anhistorical account of how Hemingway became aware of Turgenev, what he said about his work, how often he read him, and when; second, a theoretical chapter on the nature of influence in general followed by specific applications of the theory in connection with Hemingway and Turgenev; and third, two distinct chapters on the way influence, whether stylistic, psychological or ideological, transmits itself from Turgenev's short stories and novels such as A Sportsman's Sketches and Fathers and Sons into ~emin~wa~~s'work of the 1920s, sixty years later. Special attention will be paid to Hemingwayls early stories and his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. A fifth and concluding chapter will examine how literary influence between important writers such as Turgenev and Hemingway becomes a part of both historical and cultural tradition. The achievements of both artists will be measured within that tradition. A brief epilogue will attempt to open possibilities for further study in the area of nineteenth-century Russian influence on Hemingway. No writer influenced Hemingwayls early development as an artist more than Turgenev did. But there were other important literary forebears.

Load more

  125

Copy Link