Epic and the Russian Novel from Gogol to Pasternak
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Epic and the Russian Novel from Gogol to Pasternak Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History Series Editor – Lazar FLeishman (Stanford University) EPic and the RussiaN NovEl from GoGol to Pasternak Frederick T. GriffiThs and stanley J. rabinowiTz Boston 2011 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Griffiths, Frederick T. Epic and the Russian novel : from Gogol to Pasternak / Frederick T. Griffiths and Stanley J. Rabinowitz. p. cm. — (Studies in Russian and Slavic literatures, cultures and history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-936235-53-7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Russian fiction— 19 th century—History and criticism. 2. Russian fiction—20 th century— History and criticism. 3. Epic literature, Russian—History and criticism. I. Rabinowitz, Stanley J. II. Title. PG3098.E65G75 2011 891.73’309—dc22 2011006283 Copyright © 2011 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-936235-53-7 Book design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press in 2011 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com Effective December 12th, 2017, this book will be subject to a CC-BY-NC license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. Other than as provided by these licenses, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the publisher or as permitted by law. The open access publication of this volume is made possible by: This open access publication is part of a project supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book initiative, which includes the open access release of several Academic Studies Press volumes. To view more titles available as free ebooks and to learn more about this project, please visit borderlinesfoundation.org/open. Published by Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com CONTENTS Acknowledgments 6 Preface 9 1. Epic and Novel 11 The Double Plot of Epic 15 The Death of Epic 25 Polyphony and Pentecost 32 Temporal Closure 44 2. Gogol in Rome 50 “Taras Bulba” 54 “Rome” 62 Dead Souls, Part One 68 Dead Souls, Part Two 97 Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends 105 3. Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov 117 4. Tolstoy and Homer 144 5. Doctor Zhivago and the Tradition of National Epic 176 6. Stalin and the Death of Epic: Mikhail Bakhtin, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak 195 Works Cited 218 Index 231 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We gratefully acknowledge Ian David for his unstinting efforts in preparing the manuscript in its final version. Our deepest thanks go to Amherst College Dean of the Faculty Gregory Call for providing funds to see this project through to publication. The following publishers have generously given permission to use extended quotations from copyrighted works: Chichikov’s Journeys: or, Home Life in Old Russia, by Nikolai Gogol, translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney. Copyright © 1942 by The Readers Club and renewed 1965 by Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, by Nikolai Gogol, translated by Jesse Zeldin. Copyright © 1969 by Vanderbilt University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. The Iliad, by Homer, translated by Richmond Lattimore. Copyright © 1951 by the University of Chicago. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Remembrance of Things Past. vol. 3, The Captive, by Marcel Proust. translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. and by Andreas Mayor. Copyright 1981 by Random House, Inc., and Chatto & Windus. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. The materials in this book have been previous published as: Novel Epics: Gogol, Dostoevsky and National Narrative. Copyright 1990 by Northwestern University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. “Doctor Zhivago and the Tradition of National Epic,” copyright Comparative Literature, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Winter 1990). Reprinted by permission of the publisher, the University of Oregon. “Tolstoy and Homer,” copyright Comparative Literature, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Spring 1983). Reprinted by permission of the publisher, the University of Oregon. “Stalin and the Death of Epic: Mikhail Bakhtin, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak,” in Epic and Epoch: Essays on the Interpretation and History of a Genre, edited by Steven M. Oberhelman, Van Kelly, and Richard J. Goslan, 1994, Texas Tech University Press. PREFACE These essays address four Russian novels as they adapt a monumental tradition from outside of Russia. The readings focus not on the history of the Russian novel itself but on how these four works allusively incorporate a history of European letters so as to locate themselves within it, that is, how they trace their descent ultimately from Homer as well as from scripture. We are not concerned with the native forms of epic nor with the other writers, notably Pushkin, who framed a Russian identity within European letters, but only with what we consider the clearest cases of transforming the novel as a form by assimilating it to the epic tradition. In invoking that tradition, these novels claim position within world literature, and it is from that vantage point that we consider them: Were these writers finally within their rights in asking to be read beside Homer, Virgil, and Dante? For the burden of joining that company is not simply to be as critically esteemed as these poets or as widely read, but to continue the narrative cycle that they began. The first chapter defines terms and explains what we take the epic tradition to be. The following chapters vary widely in format to accommodate the various novels. Dead Souls is considered in the context of the other works that Gogol published or burned with and after it. We include The Brothers Karamazov as a limiting case: Directly because Dostoevsky so notably lacks the allusive technique through which the other three invoke their predecessors, the gestures that he makes to epic conventions at the end of the novel make all the clearer indication of the pressures that he felt from that tradition. We take War and Peace and Doctor Zhivago as unities unto themselves, though unities each with a triple conclusion. A final chapter considers further permutations of the epic tradition during the Stalinist period of Russian culture in literary criticism (Bakhtin), memoir (Nadezhda Mandelstam), and narrative poetry (Anna Akhmatova). 9 ...чаще поэты, разделенные временем и пространством, отвечают друг другу, как отголоски между утесами: развязка “Илиады” хранится в “Комедии” Данте. — В. Ф. Одоевский, “Русские ночи” (1835) … separated by time and space, poets quite often answer each other like echoes among cliffs; the denouement of the Iliad is given in Dante’s Comedy. — V. F. Odoevsky, Russian Nights (1835) 1. epic and noveL Two Romes have fallen, but a third stands fast; a fourth there cannot be. Rome, Byzantium, Moscow: through this prophecy the sixteenth- century monk Philotheus evades an old and still unanswered question — does Russia belong in Europe? — by proclaiming a Europe that spiritually belongs to Russia and should look to Moscow as the true and final capital of a renascent Christendom. For the Slavs to westernize has always seemed a compromise of the otherness and unworldliness that set them apart and above. By the logic of Christianity, their very innocence as outsiders can also signify spiritual election. The conversion of Christendom’s northern periphery to its center and capital recalls the miracles of the rejected rock as capstone, the carpenter’s son as Messiah, the meek inheriting. Something good can come from Nazareth. Indeed, it is to the Nazareths that one must look to find the future, for the old capitals, Rome as well as Jerusalem, fall prey to worldly success. Philotheus suggests how Slavophiles might welcome the prospect of leading Europe rather than joining it. Yet danger lurks in this proud calling, for the process of redeeming publicans and sinners entails large risks of joining their number. Already by Philotheus’s day the West had seen millennia of conquerors, among them the Romans themselves, battling their way to cultural enslavement. Though politically subjected, the Greeks may have prevailed culturally, as Horace already suspected: “Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes / intulit agresti Latio” (“Conquered Greece conquered her fierce victor and brought the arts into rustic Latium,” Epistles 2.1.156-57). The statuesque marble Romanness of Rome was framed by sophisticates who spoke Greek among themselves; in the best circles, Russians after 1812 both celebrated and compromised their expulsion of foreign masters by still speaking French as 11 12 1. Epic and Novel they pursued their own increasingly Napoleonic ambitions. The inheriting meek lose their meekness. Basic to the project of constructing the third and final Rome, in Europe but not of it, was the paradox that the wall erected against European influence would have to be built with European bricks. Perhaps the bulwark could become Russian by being grander than any wall yet built. In the fabrication of this national identity, novelists enjoyed influence rarely seen in Western letters since antiquity, the influence of prophets. Once Napoleon was beaten, writers in Russia sought to forge an independent literature that would not only celebrate the country’s new status as a world power but