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The Woman in the Window The Woman in the Window Commerce, Consensual Fantasy, and the Quest for Masculine Virtue in the Russian Novel Russell Scott Valentino The Ohio State University Press • Columbus Copyright © 2014 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Control Number 2014018801 ISBN 978-0-8142-1267-7 (cloth : alk. paper) Cover design by Mary Ann Smith Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na- tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Yasuko woman in my window And for Peter and Dante just a little shorter Property—the material foundation of both personality and govern- ment—has ceased to be real and has become not merely mobile but imaginary. Specialised, acquisitive and post-civic man has ceased to be virtuous, not only in the formal sense that he has become the creature of his own hopes and fears; he does not even live in the present, except as constituted by his fantasies concerning a future. —J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History There are now two great nations of the world which, starting from different points, seem to be advancing toward the same goal: the Russians and the Anglo-Americans. —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America Human beings love not so much the possibility of doing or not doing something as the possibility of talking about various things in words agreed upon among themselves. Such are the words con- sidered to be very important among them. Such is the essence of the word mine. —Leo Tolstoy, “Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse” And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good? Need we ask anyone to tell us these things? —Plato, Phaedrus contents List of Illustrations ix A Note on the Transliteration of Russian x Preface and Acknowledgments xi Introduction • In Search of (Russian) Virtue 1 Virtue Unearthed 1 The Very Word 2 Two Visions of (American) Virtue 5 After Virtual 9 American Property, Russian Earth 10 Virtue as One and as Many 17 Chapter One • Three Modern Characters: The Double, the Con Man, and the Woman in the Window 20 The Speaker’s Ethos 20 Characters 22 The Amazing Mr. Golyadkin (Junior) 25 Gogol’s Man of Confidence 27 The Woman in the Window 30 viii Contents Chapter Two • The Commercial Ethic in Gogol’s Dead Souls 40 Order in the Gallery 40 A Commercial Catalogue 42 The Advent of Refined Avarice 54 Le doux Chichikov and the Worth of a Man 58 Chapter Three • In Search of the Virtuous Man: Minor Readings 66 Divided Man 66 Whole Man 76 Chapter Four • Lara, Lolita, and Other Things that Start with L 89 Two Books, Four Movies 92 Women in Windows 99 Doubles and Heroes 105 Conclusion • DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and the End of an Idiom 110 World City 115 Body, Mind, Body 116 Property, the Road, and the Confidence Man 120 Doubt, the Double, and the Sick Cosmopolitan 123 Behind the Kitchen Door 128 Notes 131 Bibliography and Filmography 149 Index 161 list of illustrations Figure 1 Consensual Fantasies. Walter Pigeon as philologist Dr. Edward Morbius. Forbidden Planet, dir. Wilcox, 1956. 7 Figure 2 Hinc est Labor et Virtus. The infant Hercules strangling the serpents. Maksimovich-Amvodik, Emvlemy i simvoly. Hippisley, ed., 1989. 18 Figure 3 Vassily Tropinin, Woman at the Window, 1841. 35 Figure 4 At Her Window. Cinema Paradiso, dir. Tornatore, 1988. 37 Figure 5 Sports versus Politics. 86–87 Figure 6 The Refuge of Art. Lolita, dir. Kubrick, 1962. 93 Figure 7 The “constant poetic symptom.” Doctor Zhivago, dir. Lean, 1965. 98 Figure 8 Dressing up figures. Lolita, dir. Kubrick, 1962. 102 ix a note on the transliteration of russian The Library of Congress standard has been used for all words and nontranslit- erated titles. The same system has been used for names and toponyms except for the following: ый/ий—Bely/Dostoevsky, Yevgeny oй—oy: Tolstoy ь (omitted): Gorky, Gogol я/ю—Zamyatin, Tolstaya/Yury, Tyutchev ё—yo/e: Fyodor, Gumilyov/Kruchonykh initial e—ye: Yefim ьe/ьё/ьи—ye/yo/yi: Leontyev/Solovyov/Ilyich cert ain names with time-honored transliterations: Herzen, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, Meyerhold, Eisenstein, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, etc. x preface and acknowledgments This book has been slow to mature, and I have had the luxury of not rushing it. As with most things one carries around for a long time, it is hard to let it go. It somehow does not seem thick enough, though I imagine some readers will wish it were thinner. In either case, I hope long care has given it the strength to stand on its own. My work has benefited from the comments and suggestions of many friends and colleagues, and while a mere list cannot express the depth of my gratitude, I will give their names here nonetheless: Paula Amad, Anna Barker, Shaul Bassi, Murray Baumgartner, the late Stephen Beier, the late Rob- ert Belknap, Eliot Borenstein, Katherine Ann Bowers, Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Steve Choe, Daniel Collins, Corey Creekmur, David Depew, Douglas Dow- land, Natasa Durovicova, Caryl Emerson, Jacob Emery, Ed Folsom, Gregory Freidin, Rosalind Galt, Eric Gidal, Sabine Golz, Bruce Gronbeck, Daniel Gross, Barbara Harshav, the late Michael Henry Heim, Robin Hemley, David Hingstman, Steven Hoch, Andrea Jonahs, Liza Knapp, Marcus Levitt, Christo- pher Livanos, the late Robert Maguire, Peter Manning, Boris Maslov, Deirdre McCloskey, Susan McReynolds Oddo, Christopher Merrill, Paula Michaels, Margaret Mills, Peter Morningsnow, Quince Mountain, John Nelson, Kath- leen Newman, Seamas O’Driscoll, Irina Paperno, Ray Parrott, John Peters, Jillian Porter, John Raeburn, Oliver Ready, William Reisinger, Susan Scheckel, Jay Semel, Elizabeth Ann Skomp, Garrett Stewart, James Throgmorton, Oleg Timofeyev, William Mills Todd III, Leona Toker, Steven Ungar, Paul Valliere, Ashot Vardanyan, Sasha Waters, and Christopher Wertz. I am also thankful to xi xii Preface and Acknowledgments anonymous readers at Slavic Review, Poroi, Slavic and East European Journal, Partial Answers, and Modern Fiction Studies. I omit here the much shorter list of people whom I do not wish to thank and the surely more entertaining reasons that make me wish not to thank them. I was fortunate to receive an Old Gold Fellowship from the University of Iowa at the earliest stages of work on this project, in summer 1997, when I still thought it was part of a previous book. A special thanks to Irina Paperno, who suggested to me then that, faced with a 95,000-word manuscript that showed no signs of soon coming to its limit, I might actually be working on two books, not one. Two Vice President for Research Arts and Humanities Research Grants from the University of Iowa, in 2003 and 2005, helped to verify that, indeed, this was a separate book altogether by giving me time “to stand in the forest,” as my partner would put it, by which she would mean to reflect and to write. Parts of this book were published as articles. Chapter 1 contains a healthy dose of “A Catalogue of Commercialism in Gogol’s Dead Souls,” which was published in Slavic Review, 57.3 (1998); chapter 2 incorporates material from “What’s a Person Worth: Character and Commerce in Dostoevsky’s Double,” which was presented at the 13th International Congress of Slavists, in Lju- bljana, Slovenia, in 2003, and published in the conference proceedings by Slavica Publishers; chapter 5 includes portions of “From Virtue to Virtual: DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and the Corruption of the Absent Body,” which was pub- lished in 53.1 of Modern Fiction Studies in April 2007. The annual conferences of the American Association for the Advance- ment of Slavic Studies (in 1999), the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (in 1998), the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (in 2011), and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (in 2013) furnished venues for discussing my ideas with colleagues. Invited presentations at Grinnell College (in 2002), the Ohio State University (in 2006), and Indiana University, Bloomington (in 2011) helped me explore portions on the character trio of double, confidence man, and woman in the window. Two rhetoric seminars in Iowa’s Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry, one reading at Iowa’s Eighteenth and Nineteenth Cen- tury Studies Consortium, and two presentations in Iowa’s Department of Cin- ema and Comparative Literature helped me fine-tune both the ideas and the method of presenting them. The four years I devoted to editing The Iowa Review, from 2009 to 2013, gave me a profound appreciation for writers of literary nonfiction and for ideals of clarity, expression, and entertainment that scholarly writing rarely achieves, let alone tries for. If I’ve succeeded at all in these pages at approxi- Preface and Acknowledgments xiii mating those ideals, it is largely thanks to the examples of the numerous writ- ers whose work I had the privilege of ushering into print. If I haven’t, it is, of course, all their fault. As with any work that takes a long time to come to fruition, this one would never have seen daylight without, first, a partner, and second, a pub- lisher. I express my deepest thanks to the latter. The former I can never thank enough. Bloomington, November 2013 introduction In Search of (Russian) Virtue Virtue Unearthed There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.