Tolstoy and Zola: Trains and Missed Connections Nina Lee Bond Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2011 © 2011 Nina Lee Bond All rights reserved ABSTRACT Tolstoy and Zola: Trains and Missed Connections Nina Lee Bond ŖTolstoy and Zolaŗ juxtaposes the two writers to examine the evolution of the novel during the late nineteenth century. The juxtaposition is justified by the literary critical debates that were taking place in Russian and French journals during the 1870s and 1880s, concerning Tolstoy and Zola. In both France and Russia, heated arguments arose over the future of realism, and opposing factions held up either Tolstoyřs brand of realism or Zolařs naturalism as more promising. This dissertation uses the differences between Tolstoy and Zola to make more prominent a commonality in their respective novels Anna Karenina (1877) and La Bête humaine (1890): the railways. But rather than interpret the railways in these two novels as a symbol of modernity or as an engine for narrative, I concentrate on one particular aspect of the railway experience, known as motion parallax, which is a depth cue that enables a person to detect depth while in motion. Stationary objects close to a travelling train appear to be moving faster than objects in the distance, such as a mountain range, and moreover they appear to be moving backward. By examining motion parallax in both novels, as well as in some of Tolstoyřs other works, The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) and The Death of Ivan Il'ich (1886), this dissertation attempts to address an intriguing question: what, if any, is the relationship between the advent of trains and the evolution of the novel during the late nineteenth century? Motion parallax triggers in a traveler the sensation of going backward even though one is travelling forward. This cognitive dissonance relates to Tolstoyřs and Zolařs depictions of Darwinism in their works. Despite their differences, both writers subscribed to a belief in the Ŗfallacy of progressŗ and thought that technology was causing man, contrary to expectations, to regress. This dissertation explores the relationships between Darwinism, trains, and nineteenth-century notions of progress and degeneration in not only Anna Karenina and La Bête humaine, but also in The Kreutzer Sonata, and Zolařs Thérèse Raquin (1867) and Germinal (1885). The goal of this multi-disciplinary dissertation, which interweaves literary analysis with sociology, history of science, and visual cultural history, is to provide a new perspective on the relationship between technology and narrative. Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Note on Translation and Transliteration iv Introduction Railways and Narrative 1 Chapter 1 Missed Connections Between Tolstoï and Zolia 13 Chapter 2 D(E)volution: Tolstoy ŖApingŗ Zola 58 Chapter 3 Motion Parallax: Trains as Tricknology 93 Chapter 4 Trains, Carriages, and Walks: Defragmenting the Subconscious 137 Conclusion In a Modern State of Mind 171 Bibliography 187 Appendix Serial Publication Dates for the Rougon–Macquart novels in 200 France and Russia i Acknowledgments Large portions of this dissertation were, rather fittingly, written in planes, trains, subways, and buses. Of course, the internet helped tremendously. But despite the ease and utility of todayřs technologies, none of them helped as much as the generous support I received from my professors, colleagues, friends, and family. First and foremost, my heartfelt gratitude goes out to my dissertation sponsor Professor Irina Reyfman, who graciously took on this project and believed in it. I am deeply grateful for her support, supervision, and patience throughout the whole process. I am also indebted to Professor Catharine Nepomnyashchy, whose comments aided my dissertation immensely. Starting from my days as an undergraduate, her guidance and friendship have been invaluable to me. Special thanks go to Professor Peter Connor for his insights and his questions, one of which led to the appendix at the end of my dissertation. I especially want to thank my other committee members, Professor Richard Wortman and Professor Priscilla Ferguson, for their service on my defense committee and for their comments, which helped me see new possibilities for my dissertation. In the germinal phase of this project, I was fortunate to have Professor Cathy Popkin provide numerous critiques that had a significant hand in shaping the final document. I also appreciate the input that I received from Professor Liza Knapp and Professor Erk Grimm in the early stages. My dissertation is, like those before mine, built on the backs of many other scholars. I owe a special note of thanks to Professor Edwina Cruise, Professor Anne Lounsbery, Professor Alexis Pogorelskin, and Professor Carol Ueland, who generously shared their research with me. I would like to express my gratitude to the following ii colleagues who provided me with comments or research that enriched my own: Karin Beck, B. Tench Coxe, Ani Kokobobo, Kirsten Lodge, and Rebecca Stanton. I owe a special note of thanks to Professor Alla Smyslova for her helpful guidance and advice all these years. I would also like to acknowledge the fellowships I received from the Harriman Institute, which supported my research. A business-school professor once told me that research has shown that, while the recipient of a favor values it more than the performer initially, over time the latter will value it more. I know of at least one exception to this: I am forever indebted to my friend, Douglas Greenfield. It was from our conversations the genesis of this dissertation emerged. Words cannot express the depth of my appreciation for his guidance from beginning to end. My dissertation benefited tremendously from his comments on earlier drafts, and was made possible by his faith in and enthusiasm for this project. My deepest gratitude goes to my husband, John, without whom I may have never seen the light at the end of the tunnel. And, finally, I owe a long-standing thanks to my parents and my brother, whose love, support, and encouragement made sure that I would see this project through. iii A Note on Translation and Transliteration The translations of quotations taken from Russian and French works are my own, unless noted otherwise. In the footnotes and bibliography, I use the Library of Congress transliteration system for Russian, without diacritical marks. However, in the text of the dissertation and in narrative parts of foornotes, the names of well-known Russian writers are written in their most common English forms (Leo Tolstoy, not Lev Tolstoi). iv In loving memory of my father. To my mother. v 1 Introduction Railways and Narrative The nineteenth century, when it takes its place with the other centuries in the chronological charts of the future, will, if it needs a symbol, almost inevitably have as that symbol a steam-engine running upon a railway.1 H.G. Wells, ŖLocomotion in the Twentieth Centuryŗ Nikolai Leskovřs short story ŖThe Pearl Necklaceŗ (ŖZhemchuzhnoe ozherel'e,ŗ 1885) opens with a group of men discussing the lamentable meagerness of Ŗplotŗ [fabulа] in contemporary Russian literature. One of the storyřs narrators attributes the poverty of plot to railway expansion. Purporting to quote the Russian novelist Aleksei Pisemsky: I recalled and recounted a distinctive comment by the late Pisemsky, who said that the perceived literary poverty above all was tied to the spread of railroads, which are very beneficial to trade, but harmful to literary fiction. ŖNowadays a person travels a lot, but quickly and harmlessly, Pisemsky said, and that is why he cannot gather any strong impressions; thereřs no time and nothing for him to observe, everything glides by...But it used to be that as you went from Moscow to Kostroma Řon long-distance carts,ř in a public tarantass, or Řon transfer horses,ř some coachman would be a scoundrel to you, the passengers were insolent, and the innkeeper was an artful dodger…thus there was so much variety for you to get your fill by watching.ŗ2 200 Disagreeing with this explanation, one of the discussants cites Charles Dickensř short Christmas stories as an exception. After all, as one of the interlocutors points out, the popular English novelist Ŗwrote in a country where they traveled quickly, but nevertheless saw and noticed much, and the plots of his stories do not suffer from a 1 H.G. Wells, ŖLocomotion in the Twentieth Century,ŗ Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1902), 6. 2 Nikolai Leskov, ŖZhemchuznoe ozherel'e,ŗ Sobranie sochinenii v odinnadtsati tomakh (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1958), 432. 2 meagerness of content.ŗ3 A nameless third discussant then enters the conversation and offers to tell a story that reflects Ŗboth the century and modern manŗ while adhering to the constraints dictated by Dickensř stories: it will be a somewhat fantastic tale based on a true event that took place somewhere between Christmas and Twelfth Night; and the story will contain a moral lesson and end happily.4 In addition to these Dickensian traits, the story-teller also incorporates elements of the Russian Christmas story, a genre which Leskov popularized. Contrary to the conjecture introduced at the storyřs outset, ŖThe Pearl Necklaceŗ ultimately illustrates that plot-driven narratives could, and did, endure not only in England but also in Russia, despite the spread of railroads. Almost a half of a century after Leskovřs story appeared in print, in 1928, Osip Mandelstam made the opposite claim. Whereas ŖThe Pearl Necklaceŗ stresses continuity in fictional narratives between the periods before and after the introduction of the railways, the narrator of Mandelstamřs surrealist novella, The Egyptian Stamp (Egipetskaia marka), insists that [t[he railroad changed the whole course, the whole structure, the whole rhythm of our prose.