SOURCE: Brouwer, Sander. “Literary Character in Turgenev's Prose.” In Character in the Short Prose of Ivan Sergeevič Turgenev, pp. 31-73. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996.

[In the following excerpt, Brouwer studies elements of Romanticism and Realism in Turgenev's short stories, suggesting that the author creates a tension between the two styles in his short prose.]

2.1 SOME PROBLEMS OF TURGENEV'S PROSE

As P. Brang noted (Brang: 50), Turgenev's prose, especially the short stories, reveals a tension between the Realist and the Romantic style. Turgenev himself first indicated this tension in his 1870 draft for the novel Virgin Soil, whose main character is called a ‘romantic of Realism’, a term which would be applicable to a greater or lesser degree to the protagonists in all of his novels. S. I. Rodzevič (1918) adopted the term and regarded it as a key to Turgenev's oeuvre as a whole, but especially to the short stories. Various other critics see Turgenev's poetics as related to German ‘poetic Realism’ (Peterson). Still others regard him as a straightforward Romantic author (Granjard; Pahomov). In my view, this latter approach does not do justice to important aspects of Turgenev's poetics, for it is precisely the tension between the two principles that I see as important. Thus I find the attempt to divide his works into a Romantic, a Realist and a pre-Symbolist period (Koschmal) equally artificial and deductivist, despite the fact that Romantic qualities may be dominant in the earlier works (mainly in the poems and in the drama) and certain tendencies toward Symbolism may be discerned in the later stories (especially the ‘supernatural’ ones).

Another rather rigid dividing-line which critics often draw when speaking of Turgenev's oeuvre is one between different groups of his works, i.e. between the novels and the stories, especially the ‘supernatural tales’. This tradition came into existence as soon as the supernatural tales were published. Radical critics, from Herzen and Ogarev to Saltykov-Ščedrin, praised the novels and almost unanimously rejected the supernatural tales, which were found to “mark the author's break with the social problem, his turn towards mysticism, to ‘pure poetry’” (Zel'dcheji-Deak 1973: 351; this article gives a short survey of the critical reception of the supernatural tales). The influence of this position can still be felt in Pumpjanskij's treatment of the supernatural tales in the twenties, and in Šatalov's in the sixties. The representatives of another line of criticism, the so-called ‘aesthetic line’, were, on the contrary, favourably disposed towards these stories: for Družinin, Botkin and Annenkov, for example, the story “Faust” meant a victory of the ‘Puškinian’ over the ‘Gogolian’ principle (idem: 352). Both positions coincide, however, in the sharp distinction they draw between the supernatural tales and the novels, in which the social problem is seen to be central. The same line is later expressed by Merežkovskij, who found that

the development of political themes, the burning current issues, the apprehension of the various trends of the day in Turgenev's great novels (…) begin to wear out (…) and another Turgenev, not fashionable, and therefore not wearing out, begins to appear before us (…) who continues Puškin's tradition, the author of such works as “Living Relics,” “Bežin Meadow,” “Enough,” “Ghosts,” “The Dog,” and especially “The Song of Triumphant Love.”

(quoted from: ibidem)

From the beginning of the century, this concept influenced scholarly critics such as Geršenzon, Rodzevič, and V. M. Fišer (1920, cf. especially p.8) and through them later critics like Ledkovsky, who posits a sharp contrast between the stories and the so-called Realist works:

It is rather significant that Turgenev's ‘realistic’ works, in which he exposed the latest political and social trends of the contemporary Russian scene, have tended to become outdated at different periods since their publication (…) The true measure of Turgenev's achievement rests in his concern with the eternal themes of individual existence in an impersonal universe, on which he concentrates exclusively in his novellas and ‘mysterious tales’.

(Ledkovsky: 137-8)

Although Ledkovsky remarks that these eternal themes “can be detected in all his works” (idem: 138), her assertion is scarcely backed up; apart from in the supernatural tales, it seems that such themes are for her no more than foreign bodies.

I would prefer to treat Turgenev's prose works as having a common poetics, though different accents may be placed depending on period and genre. Jumping a little ahead, I would agree with Lotman (1986: 20) that the plots of Turgenev's prose works are laid on three levels: the contemporary and everyday, the archetypal and the cosmic. Each of these levels is present in every work, but their correlation to one another may differ. To this we shall return presently.

The sharp distinction between Turgenev's novels and his stories on thematic grounds is counterbalanced by the difficulties many scholars have in distinguishing between them on structural grounds. And this is no coincidence. It is worth pausing to reflect at greater length on the principal difference between short and long prose form when touching on this problem in connection with Turgenev.

As is argued by Hansen-Löve (1984) and Schmid (1991: 26-35), an important structural quality of modern short prose lies in the fact that the motivation for crucial deeds performed by characters and for aspects of their psychological make-up is not made explicit to a greater or lesser degree. Lacunae at the motivational level (such as chronological or linear-causal gaps; and psychological, sociological, biological or cultural motivation for the behaviour as displayed by the deeds and utterances of the characters) are compensated by more articulated segmentation at the level of narration (‘sjužet’), where the more or less conspicuous accumulation of parallellisms, repetitions, leitmotivical variation of isomorphous segments enhances the role of equivalences. Additional meaning (additional, that is, to the meaning generated at the level of interpretation of the events—let us remember that the choice of the events and the concretization of qualities of agents and setting already generates meaning) is thus generated by operations that involve that ‘paradigmatical’ axis of meaning generation in language, the metaphoric mechanism (cf. Jakobson 1960/1971).

The laconism of the short form is thus seen as functionally connected with an expected thematical complexity, which is only partly made explicit: extremely few details are given relating to a very broad range of thematical material that could be expected to generate an almost infinite wealth of detail.

The relative shortness of Turgenev's novels thus appears in a new light: their poetics reveals important characteristics of the poetics of the short prose form. Not only are the novels relatively short, which leads some critics to regard them as long stories, or novellas (pоvisti), rather than as novels¹—while conversely, some stories, like Spring Torrents, are sometimes treated as novels—but there is also a strong tendency to ‘orchestrate’ (a term of Pumpjanskij's; see below) the actions and the psychology of the characters by means of metaphor: by highlighting details of the natural setting in such a way as to suggest not biological/causal relations, but metaphorical equivalences.

The strongly schematic construction of the events in all the six novels, which appear to be almost six variations of a common fable (Gippius; Peterson: 74; Brang: 120-122) points to a conception of these events as being enacted according to some underlying pattern, and as being determined by a certain set of regularities—however little they are made explicit—rather than by the arbitrary chaos of empirical reality. In other words, the characters' deeds are apparently motivated not only by their specific individual psychological make-up, but also by a pre-determined conception of human fate and human existence.

It is therefore not coincidental that in the last two decennia there has been a greater critical interest in the ‘aesthetic’ qualities of Turgenev's novels, that is, in the aspects that have more to do with an active, metaphorical shaping of the characters' fate than with their ‘historical value’ as recordings of ‘slices of life’, or chronicles, as it were, of the Russian liberal aristocracy and radical intelligentsia. The interest has been most noticeable in the West. In Russia, the same approach has been less outspoken, undoubtedly for ideological reasons. (One of its representatives is V. M. Markovič, cf. Markovič 1975 and 1982; Erofeev 1982). The modern interest in the West has emerged partly as a reaction to a previous tendency to regard the socio-political aspect as the most relevant and to neglect Turgenev as a writer of lyrical prose, a “poet of nature and love” (Børtnes: 31-32). Nowadays, it is the mechanism of creating sets of interconnected images that generate additional meaning on a metaphorical plane, which attracts most interest². This is precisely the mechanism that I find to be of central importance in the image of the characters in the short prose, and it is this that I will concentrate on in my analyses of Turgenev's stories. Above, we have adopted Jakobson's general model of meaning-generation in which the metaphorical and metonymical principle are seen as reciprocally related and mutually dependent in any artistic text. Hansen-Löve (1984) argues that mechanisms of equivalence, which generate metaphorical meanings, tend to be more prominent in short stories, but we see them at work in Turgenev's novels as well—a feature which is undoubtedly connected with their relative shortness.

A similar phenomenon has been observed in Turgenev's drama. Here the unity of action dissolves as a consequence of the interweaving of secondary chains of action and more or less independent episodes. The accent is more on character depiction, while separate scenes tend to mask the unity of the main action. As Klein states, this process may largely be due to the influence of the poetics of the Natural School in Russian literature of the thirties and forties, with its predilection for (pseudo-) objective rendering of ‘slices of life’. Towards the end of the forties, however, the novelty of this device had already begun to wear off. According to Klein, Turgenev searched for a way to replace the lost unity of his drama with a unity of a different kind. This he found by “creating an overall field of reference, which accommodates numerous motifs and stylistic elements and joins them into a semantic whole” ([es gelingt] Turgenev, seinem Stück ein übergreifendes Bezugsfeld zu schaffen, das zahlreichen Elementen motivischer und stilistischer Art Raum bietet und zu einem Bedeutungsganzen zusammenfügt) (…) “the unity of the drama that he thus regains is the unity of an occasional field of associations” (Die wiedergewonnene Einheit des Stücks ist die Einheit eines okkasionell geschaffenen Assoziationsfeldes; Klein 14).

All this leads to the conclusion that the poetics of Turgenev's prose—both novels and stories—may in many respects be regarded as a single whole, and that these poetics are in important measure determined by the prominent role played by mechanisms of ‘verbal art’ interfusing with those of ‘narrative art’.

It has been observed that Turgenev's short stories differ typologically from the earlier “Ereignis-novellen” (Brang: 50): they give prominence to the psychological penetration into character rather than to the description of events—a fact which for some would be a proof of their Realist strain (for instance, Mersereau 1973). It is undoubtedly true that the clash of events in Romantic prose is based upon the dramatic opposition between characters, which are conceived largely in one dimension only. They tend to be schematic (‘flat’, in E. M. Forster's terminology), so as to facilitate a sharp ‘peripeteia’ (which was very early recognized as something typically ‘Romantic’ by Puškin in his letter to Bestužev of May-June, 1825³). Compared to this one-dimensionality, the characters in Realist prose, including those in Turgenev's stories, certainly appear as psychologically more convincing. They are ‘deeper’, more ‘rounded’, and there is a keener eye for inner conflict and contradiction. Still, it is obviously an illusion to think that they are ‘modelled after reality’ more than their Romantic counterparts, that they are any less the result of artistic and ideological operations and choices, or that they depend less on a creative consciousness. Paradoxically, the illusion of Realism in Turgenev's short stories (due to the characters being psychologically convincing) is accompanied by a weakening of both the internal logical-causal coherence of the event-structure and the explicit explanation for psychological processes. On the other hand, it is compensated by the strengthening of the level of (authorial) associations and allusions.

However, the weakening of the logical-causal coherence of the events in Turgenev's stories should not be merely interpreted as a sign of their Realism—in which ‘character dominates over event instead of event over character’, according to an often-heard definition of Realism as contrasted to Romanticism. Authoritative Russian critics who advanced Realism in literature indeed called for a probing into the human psyche, a making explicit of all its mechanisms, especially the more hidden ones. Belinskij expected from an author that he “illuminate with the torch of his fantasy all the bends of his heroes' hearts” … and Černyševskij wrote in his doctoral thesis that “one of the qualities of a poetic genius is his ability to understand the essence of a real person's character, to look at him with a penetrating eye” … quoted from Šatalov 1980: 56). However, in Turgenev's prose such penetration is missing—something which is quite fundamentally connected with his poetics as a whole. As Jane Costlow (1990: 30-54) has argued, there is a basic mistrust underlying all Turgenev's narration relating to the ability of language to render life as it really is. Such narration prefers not to explicate the depths of a character's psyche, but to present it as an enigma.

2.2 STATE OR UNDERSTATE?

In order to illustrate this, let us first turn to Turgenev's review of S. T. Aksakov's Notes of a Rifle Hunter. This review is of fundamental importance for an understanding of Turgenev's conception of nature and the principles of its description (Kagan-Kans calls it his “credo”; Kagan-Kans 1975: 84). I hope to show, however, that the method discussed is characteristic not only of Turgenev's descriptions of Nature, but also of his rendering of human character. If this is true, then it suggests that in the first place this method is connected with his general worldview and his poetics as a whole, and that secondly, in that worldview, human existence indeed obeys much the same laws as unconscious Nature.

For Ejchenbaum (1919), the way Turgenev depicts nature reminds one of Tjutčev and Fet, whose manner Turgenev himself described as follows: …

[There exist subtly developed, nervous, excitable-poetic personalities, who have some kind of special view of nature, a special flair for its beauties; they observe many of its nuances, many often hardly noticeable details, and they succeed in expressing them with utmost felicity, acuity and grace; it is true that the general lines of the picture either escape them, or they have not enough strength to grasp and to retain them. One could say that what is most accessible to them is the scent of beauty, and their words are fragrant. Details are predominant with them, at the expense of the general impression.]

(IV: 519⁴)

I think that Ejchenbaum here gives only half of the picture. In his own descriptions of nature Turgenev is far clearer and simpler than the above-mentioned poets. A few lines later Turgenev accuses such poets of trying to “eavesdrop” and to “peep into” nature (… idem: 520). In fact, this manner of depicting nature is for him one of the two extremes between which a good artist should steer a middle course. Exponents of the other extreme are the Romantic nature poetry of Victor Hugo and the Russian Romantic poet Benediktov. Let us look at this opposition in some more detail.

In the first place, Turgenev states that man's interest in nature is more than just an arbitrary one. Man cannot but love nature; love for nature is something that is given in the ‘human condition’: “Man cannot but be interested in nature, he is bound with her by a thousand threads: he is her son” (… IV: 516). But then he goes on to condemn a false kind of love for nature, a love that is based on a transplantation of the field of culture to the field of nature. Hugo and Benediktov are taken as paradigmatic for the kind of description that goes with this kind of love: …

[In this love for nature one often detects much egoism. To be specific: we love nature in relation to ourselves: we regard it as our own pedestal. By the way, this is why, in so-called nature descriptions, comparisons with human emotions incessantly creep in (‘and the whole inviolable cliff roars with laughter’, etc.), or else the simple and clear communication of impressions of sight is substituted for by treatises on the occasion. [And he adds in a note:] The main representative of this kind of poetry is V. Hugo (cf. his ‘Orientales’). The number of imitators and worshippers of this false manner is hard to enumerate, and yet not one of its images will last: everywhere one sees the author instead of nature; but only when nature firmly supports him can man develop strength.] (the quotation is from Benediktov's poem Utis [The cliff]—SB)

(ibidem)

As we see, Turgenev reproaches writers like Hugo and Benediktov for not rendering nature, but merely expressing their own thoughts and emotions. They regard nature from a distance, interpret it, as if its meaning were clear to them. On the other hand, he reproaches the Tjutčevs and Fets for having a fine ear for the subtleties of individual details, but not being able to capture or render the broad sweep of the picture. For Turgenev, nature should be described in such a way that it keeps a balance between entering into detail and rendering the general picture. Such a description would be consonant with the sense and meaning of nature itself: …

[No doubt, it [nature—SB] constitutes one great, harmonious whole—every point in it is connected with all the others—but at the same time it shows a tendency to make every point, every single entity want to exist exclusively for itself, regard itself as the centre of the universe, turn everything it is surrounded by into something that can be used, the independence of which is denied, that can be seized as property. For the mosquito that sucks your blood you are just nourishment, and it uses you just as quietly and guilelessly as the spider, whose web he has been caught in, would use it in its turn; just as the root, digging in the dark, uses the moisture of the earth. Direct your attention for a few moments to the fly, that easily flies from your nose to a piece of sugar, to a drop of honey in the heart of a flower, and you will understand what I intend to say, you will understand that it is definitely just as self-contained as you yourselves are.]

(IV: 516-17)

It seems that Turgenev sees the task of the artist as being to surmount this natural self-sufficient existence. Not by ‘stepping aside’ from it: that would lead to either a subjective description à la Hugo, which is tantamount to ‘seizing something as property’, only in a linguistic sense; or it would lead to a soulless rhetorical description à la Buffon (see idem: 518). The artist should surmount this self-contained existence by looking at nature “with full sympathy” (… idem: 517). He has to “separate from himself and reflect upon the phenomena of nature” (… idem: 518). Only then does nature “disclose itself and allow one to ‘take a peep’ at it” (… idem: 517).

This programmatical passage bears a remarkable resemblance to some passages in Turgenev's review of Ostrovskij's Poor Bride, written some eight months before his review of Aksakov's book (IV: 663 and 671), in which he reproaches Ostrovskij for having rendered his characters in far too much detail: “such an elaboration of the petty details of a character is untruthful—artistically untruthful” (… idem: 494). Not coincidentally, he compares this method with that of “a landscape-painter, who would undertake to work out the smallest fibres of the leaves, the smallest grains of sand in the foreground of his paintings” (… ibidem). Turgenev reproaches Ostrovskij for “having cut up his characters into small pieces to such an extent, that as a result the separate detail escapes the reader” (… idem: 495). Finally, Turgenev states his own position with unequivocal clarity: …

[Mr. Ostrovskij, in our opinion, steals, as it were, into the mind of each personality he creates; but we allow ourselves to remark that an author should accomplish that undoubtedly useful operation as a preliminary step. He should already have full command over his personalities before he shows them to us. ‘But that's psychology!’ some will say; perhaps so, but the psychologist has to disappear into the artist, like a skeleton is hidden from the eyes in a living, warm body, which it serves as a firm, but invisible support.]

(ibidem)

For Turgenev, explicit psychology should give way to psychology implicitly suggested by the artistic texture. Perhaps Costlow overstates the case slightly when she writes that “the attempt to constitute wholeness and purity of speech” is the “ideal which governs his antipathy to the verbal psychologizing of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky” (Costlow: 33)—not least because Tolstoj's manner of “verbal psychologizing” should not be too easily bracketed with Dostoevskij's. However, if she means that the image of a character in Turgenev's prose is the result of explicit statements about the character's thoughts and feelings (and inexplicit ‘showing’ of these thoughts and feelings through his behaviour) as well as of more understated, allusive forms of speech, then her point is quite valid.

Below I will argue not only that Turgenev's general method of presenting character in his prose follows the same pattern as his treatment of nature, but also that the dominant feature of the natural and human entities on which he focuses his attention is for him of the same kind. In broad terms, this feature represents, as we have seen, the collision between the centripetal force of the individual entity, asserting its rights as an individual⁵, and the centrifugal force of the environment in the widest sense—for a human being this would include both the socio-cultural environment and unconscious nature. First, however, I should like to make a few general remarks on Turgenev's technique of perspectivation.

2.3 NARRATOR AND CHARACTER

The specifics of the mutual relation between the perspectives of narrator, character and implied reader (narratee) in Turgenev's first four novels have been treated by V. M. Markovič (1975). Markovič discusses only Turgenev's novels, and then only the first four, because he finds the poetics of the last two, Smoke and Virgin Soil, to differ somewhat from these four. But I believe that his results are of great value for our insight in the poetics of the short prose as well. Firstly, this is because Markovič's method is typological: he treats the specifics of the interplay of character- and narrator-perspective in Turgenev's work as contrasting with those of Dostoevskij and Tolstoj. Secondly, I think that the structural qualities of the novels that Markovič has uncovered can be modified so as to be applicable to the short stories. So I will first outline Markovič's observations on the novels before proceeding to modify them for the short prose.

The central ‘poetic law’ that Markovič formulates for the construction of the interrelation of perspectives in Turgenev's novels is that “the narrator finds himself on one level … with the reader (I take it that Markovič must mean the ‘implied’ reader here; SB) and is principally at a distance from the characters” (Markovič 1975: 9). The perspective of the narrator shows different degrees of penetration into the inner world of the characters. Markovič distinguishes three main types. When narrating concrete behaviour of one or more characters over relatively short periods presented in relatively great detail, the narrator hardly ever comments on the psyche of the characters. He records only what he could have heard and seen, had he been present, and resembles an outside observer. However, in passages in which a shorter or longer period is summarized (from the length of a conversation to that of a few days or even weeks) the narrator is capable of informing the reader about the inner state of the characters, their thoughts, emotions, even those that are hidden from themselves. And in the generalized characterizations … there is a maximum degree of penetration; the narrator may oversee a whole life or its central episodes and formulate final conclusions about a character and revealing ‘who he or she is’. These oscillations between a position that resembles that of a real life observer on the one hand and that of an all-knowing and all-seeing viewpoint on the other seem to contradict and mutually exclude each other. But, as Markovič convincingly argues, they are really different realizations of one and the same basic position. In all three cases, the narrator takes the position (and the narration follows the logic) of “an ‘other’ unique person, who is able to understand (…) a given unique person, observing the restrictions of real life's … possibilities” (Markovič 1975: 23). It should be added, that this personal narrator not only analyses his characters, but also judges them (… idem: 24). In the long-term surveys this understanding is voiced in the tone of a person who after the event has had the opportunity to establish what has really happened, who is in a position to judge or at least convincingly draw his conclusions. It is justified by the retrospective viewpoint of the narrator. In the generalizations the narrator speaks in a tone analogous to that of a long-standing acquaintance who has had the opportunity to observe the character during that part of his life which preceded the events narrated, or at least long enough to form a judgment as to his long-term character traits and his deeper motives. Nowhere, however, does the narrator exceed the limits life sets to a ‘real life’ observer, whose evaluation is necessarily subjective. On the other hand, as has been said, his subjectivity is not made concrete; no data are given which would allow us to envisage the narrator as a particular individual; we cannot put our finger on any concrete psychological or ideological limitations of his perspective.

In Turgenev's stories with a third-person narrator too, the distance of the narrator from the narrated characters, the fact that he finds himself, as it were, in another dimension, … is his main specific quality. Though the narrator may present the characters and their actions in a subjective individual (for instance elegiac or ironical) tone, this tone nowhere allows us to imagine him as a concrete individual; his perspective nowhere betrays a psychologically concrete countenance. His knowledge of the events and situations of the related world is nowhere motivated by a personal acquaintance with (one or more of) the characters. Where the narrator gives personal comments or judgments, these always have a rather self-evident validity; even if they are emotionally coloured, they seem to express ‘what anybody would think of it’. Characteristic of Turgenev's method is that even in the (many) cases when an I-narrator is used, the language of this narrator is not stylized as the language of someone with some outspoken individually or socially characteristic viewpoint (Bachtin 1975.2: 221-2). In the few instances where there is such ‘skaz’, eg. in “The Dog” (see below), its function is not to characterize the narrator as having a limited viewpoint, but rather to give an extra convincing tone to the supernatural story: “Turgenev needed a narrator for the oral narrative form, but that form served the purpose of directly expressing his thoughts” (Bachtin 1975: 223).

Thus we see that the more the narrator is removed from the world of the characters, the greater is his penetration into the meaning of events; and, conversely, the closer he is, the less he seems able to grasp that meaning. This confirms the principle mentioned above that the perspectives of the characters in their world necessarily fall short of yielding an adequate insight into their situation in life and of seeing it in some meaningful context. In Turgenev's universe, the more one's perspective is limited to the world of everyday events, of history, or to the clash of personal interests, the more one fails to grasp the tragic truth of one's situation: to understand that tragedy, one needs detachment, distance. In the case of an I-narration, it is striking how often a retrospective position, removed as far as possible from the events related, is chosen⁶. This is the case in many of Turgenev's key stories, starting with “A Hamlet of the Ščigry District,“ in which the Hamlet has already parted from society life, through First Love (for the importance of the retrospective position, see Grübel 1984) to “Punin and Baburin” (where the narrator presents himself in the story's opening lines as an old and disillusioned man⁷). But we find it most clearly stated in “Diary of a Superfluous Man,” which is narrated from the standpoint of death: Culkaturin makes it clear from the beginning that he already has one foot in the grave, and the reader is constantly reminded of this fact thanks to the diary form, in which almost each entry opens with a reminder of approaching death. Many other stories tell of events from childhood (from the perspective of old age), or at least from a long time past (20 years seems to be a favourite span: we find it in several stories).

In Turgenev's novels there is a balance between a plain ‘showing’ of unique, concrete, individual characters with no narratorial comment, and emotionally lyrical or detached philosophical comment, in which the characters and their fate are placed in the context of universal laws of natural and human existence. Turgenev's predilection for this type of narration is no coincidence. It is best designed to bring to the fore those aspects of human character that are of central importance in his worldview: the discrepancies between individual ambition, self-realization, and the debt one has to pay to human society and Nature as a whole. Indeed, the task that the narrator seems to have set himself is to understand the “mutual dependence of antithetical qualities” (… Markovič 1975: 30) in the characters. Turgenev's main characters show a tension between certain qualities that in most cases can be broadly categorized as strength of reflection versus the will to act, or practical sense versus inspired enthusiasm: if one of the two qualities is more developed, this is achieved at the cost of diminishing the other. In the world of the characters themselves, the antithetical qualities are felt as tragic inner discord (for instance, as a paralyzing awareness of the uselessness of all human strivings in the face of all-pervading death) or else acted out as a conflict between self-realization and social existence⁸. As a rule, this results in the failure of the strivings of the individual, a failure which deprives the character's actions of meaning, for he fails not so much to achieve personal happiness, material well-being or social standing, but to shape his life as historically useful or as ideologically meaningful. It is only in the comment of the narrator (at least in a conscious form) that this tension is given shape as a general law. That is, it is something the given character shares with other historical, literary or mythological characters, for example. Alternatively, it may be evident on a ‘metaphysical’ plane: the character is seen as falling under the common law of nature (which is an objective law for the narrator, although not necessarily for the reader: for him, it is part of the author's individual worldview, the result of interpretative operations). Thus there is a gap between that which is unique, concrete and seemingly coincidental, and the general laws which it obeys. Nonetheless, because of the narrator's personal, ‘individual’ tone, his comments and his references to the general laws of human nature never form a straightforward explanation of the personage's character. Furthermore, when the narrator puts the unique and concrete fate of the character in the context of historical or cosmic order, this does not result in it acquiring any more intrinsic meaning than it already has from the point of view of the character himself.

2.4 INDIVIDUAL EXISTENCE AND THE PROBLEM OF MEANING

In his introduction to Turgenev's novel On the Eve, L. V. Pumpjanskij defined Turgenev's novels as “novels of character”, aimed at giving a “judgment on the social significance of the character” (… Pumpjanskij 1929: 9⁹). Central to the novels is the “judgment” not so much of some action of a character, but rather of certain qualities belonging to that character. These are first and foremost his ideological qualities, understood in the widest sense, to which psychological qualities, cultural-historical determination and details of his everyday life … are subsidiary. Indeed, Turgenev's central characters struggle to achieve some positive, meaningful, relevant position in life (a struggle, in which they do not as a rule succeed). The most important criterion for the judgment of a character in Turgenev's novels is that of his social productivity as opposed to his unproductivity. Turgenev criticism has come to use the term ‘superfluity’ for this last category, after the term he himself coined in his “Diary of a Superfluous Man.” The latter, however, is not a novel, which already indicates that there is good reason not to restrict Pumpjanskij's definition too strictly to the novels alone. Indeed, Pumpjanskij's observations touch on the central thematic categories of Turgenev's narrative prose as a whole. In a more recent period, Ju. Lotman formulated these categories on a more abstract level: “the plots of Turgenev's narratives … are founded on the collision of meaningfulness and meaninglessness [of the characters' existence; SB]” (Lotman 1986: 17).

What is implied in Pumpjanskij's and Lotman's definitions is of quite far-reaching importance for the image of character in Turgenev's prose. Character is central in his prose works, but how is the “social significance” and “meaningful existence” of a character to be presented? In order to do this, it is my conviction that Turgenev used metaphorical means of characterization rather than, or at least alongside, metonymical means.

However, in the first place Turgenev's descriptions of his characters are based on metonymic relationships: a character's outward appearance is mostly indicative of his psychological make-up and his social status—see, for instance, the initial description of the boys in “Bežin Meadow”¹⁰—and so are his dress, his manners, the cigars he smokes, his home, his carriage, and so forth. Metonymical relations exist as a rule between a character's psychology and ideological position on the one hand, and his social and historical background, including the education he has received on the other. The same can be said of a character's words and actions, that are usually logical results of characterological (emotional, instinctive, volitional), intellectual and moral dispositions and/or conscious choices. However, the relation of character to meaning is of a totally different nature. The question of whether the life of a character has meaning is answered not by the absence or presence of a relation of that character to something contiguous with his existence in the world (e.g. esteem in the eyes of others, personal satisfaction), but it of necessity requires a position outside of that world¹¹. Even the disappearance of all relations between the character and his world—his death—does not answer that question, for death may give meaning. In order to establish whether an individual existence has or has not been meaningful, it must be asked whether that existence has been¹² in tune with the laws of the cosmic whole (be they of a teleological or of a static, immanent nature), which laws essentially escape relations of contiguity with that existence. And this is indeed the aspect that is most central to the life of Turgenev's characters.

In Turgenev's narratives such a cosmic order is felt to be present although it is mostly made explicit in reviews and letters and in a few stories like “Enough,” or passages in “A Journey into Poles'e,” for instance. This order is present ‘in the background’ and it can only be reconstructed tentatively, requiring a “poetic lecture” of the text (Schmid 1992: 26-27). Such a reconstructed cosmic order can with some reason be called a “personal myth”, to borrow a term Jakobson introduced for a group of Puškin's texts that share a common plot-structure (Jakobson 1975). For such a myth belongs to a conception of human life that relates individual existence, self-sufficient and contained in the illusion that actions lead to lasting results, to archetypes and ever-recurring patterns. In other words, every individual life essentially repeats the old tragedy of a hopelessly doomed struggle with all-pervading death. This is the light in which I would interpret Turgenev's frequent comparison of his characters to cultural archetypes (Faust, King Lear, Chor'-Socrates [in the 1847 version in “The Contemporary” Chor' and Kalinyč were further compared to Goethe and Schiller—III: 447], Hamlet, Don Quixote, Jeanne d'Arc [in “Living Relics,” cf. Droblenkova] and others). Furthermore, many plots are reminiscent of plots and situations from European literature and culture: Lavreckij's life recalls that of the holy martyr he is named after, Theodorus Stratilatus (Markovič 1982: 165-166; Costlow: 61-63), Insarov's that of Tristan (Masing-Delic 1987) and his relationship with Elena brings to mind that of Aeneas with Dido (Costlow: 86, 92). Bazarov recalls Oedipus (Masing-Delic 1985) and his relationship with Odincova reflects that of Actaeon with Diana (Costlow: 105-137; her book offers still other interesting parallels). Below I will show parallels between the figure of Gerasim in “Mumu” and the epic hero Vasilij Buslaev as well as between him and St. Christopher. Porfirij in “The Dog” will be seen to replay the myth of, again, Actaeon. This side of Turgenev's poetics is still under-investigated, despite it being in the centre of interest in recent times, and shows him to be a forerunner of Modernism in not unimportant respects (cf. Schmid 1992: 25).

Furthermore, in Turgenev's texts there is, as a rule, no personal perspective (of either character or personal narrator) that can be detected as the carrier of this personal myth, something which would also be linked with a paradigmatical and ‘mythological’ mechanism of meaning-generation (idem: 25-26). In general, Turgenev's prose thus shows traits of that ‘re-mythologizing’ tendency in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European literature that has been pointed out by Lotman and Minc 1981, among others (cf. below, section 2.6).

Before we proceed to indicate the main lines along which ‘added’, metaphorical qualities of the narrated world are generated (of which the first among them are the narrated characters), I should like to make a few general remarks on the world-picture that is sensed in the background of practically all of Turgenev's works. Of course, I cannot go into all the details and aspects of that view—the reader is referred to Kagan-Kans' study (1975), which, though arguable in some matters of detail, still remains a valuable survey of the ‘philosophy’ that formed a characteristic background to Turgenev's works and remained basically unchanged throughout his life.

It could be said that, paradoxically, in Turgenev's worldview the common law governing all being is an absence of meaning, in the sense of some occult, eternal principle of being that goes beyond that being itself. Costlow convincingly argues that it is the “attempt to jump out of causality—to escape consequence and temporality” for which Rudin is condemned by Turgenev's text (Costlow: 16). Still, causality and consequence are equally inadequate for an understanding of human life: Turgenev seems convinced that human life is totally subdued to blind fate: “the secret game of fate, which we, blind mortals, style ‘blind chance’” (… V: 128); “the secret forces on which life is built, and that occasionally, but suddenly, break through the surface” (… idem: 98). These “secret forces”, that sometimes suddenly break through the surface are of great importance for the later ‘supernatural’ stories, in which that “breaking through” is realized as the occurrence of supernatural phenomena. But for his work as a whole too this forms an indication that Turgenev's narrated world is not solely to be understood as being ruled by causality, one of the main categories of metonymic relations. Let me repeat that this by no means implies that it is possible in that world to escape the visible, factual world, ruled by causality: where any attempt to do so is made, it inevitably fails. Just as Actaeon was immediately punished by a terrible death when he had beheld the unveiled divinity¹³, so any direct contact with the occult in Turgenev's world inevitably leads to death or at least despair. It is not even necessary for man to take the initiative: fate will overtake him gratuitously. In Turgenev's later work, approximately from the time of “A Journey into Poles'e” (see Chapter 6), this blind fate is generally identified as ‘all-levelling nature’, which is why the descriptions of nature often acquire gloomy undertones. The fables of most of Turgenev's works have been summarized (in the rather felicitous wording of Ju. Lotman) as:

the continuous incursion of nature with its law of death and birth, its expelling of the old in favour of the young, the weak in favour of the strong, the refined in favour of the rude, and with its indifference to human aims and ideals, to everything that brings order in the life of man.

(Lotman 1986: 19)

This intrusion makes human life “meaningless and therefore tragic. But this is not the lofty tragedy of meaning, but the hopeless tragedy of meaninglessness” (ibidem). This tragedy, from the point of view of the character and his strivings, often comes in the shape of the unexpected and unmotivated death of the central character, which strips his life's activities of all meaning, but which for the author, in contrast, seems inherent to existence and wholly in tune with the laws of the universe. It is of pivotal importance for Turgenev's worldview that death renders life senseless. Here, again, there is no consolation whatsoever to be gained from some ‘higher’ layer of meaning; in Turgenev's world, there is no cause which is worth dying for. Consequently, the martyr as a type is unthinkable in that world, for a martyr's death could crown a life and give it a deep religious significance. Also, Turgenev's tragic characters are not like the hero from Classical tragedy, who dies for a higher cause. In Gogol's Taras Bul'ba the death of Taras and his son serves the liberation of the Ukraine and thus provides a sense of fulfilment. But there is never any such pathos in Turgenev—Rudin dies nameless on the barricades for a lost cause; Insarov dies before he has even attempted a great deed; Bazarov's death serves no purpose; Neždanov kills himself from disappointment in his own ideals, and so on.

Human existence thus seems caught between the illusion of “causality and consequence” (Costlow) on the one hand—the belief that will, purpose, rational and emotional aims can effect definitive changes—and an irrational, hostile, blind fate that dooms every individual to a death which makes all his strivings meaningless on the other. This indeed is the cornerstone of Turgenev's image of man.

2.4.1 HAMLET AND DON QUIXOTE

I refer, of course, to the well-known dichotomy of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Don Quixote’, which Turgenev elaborated in a speech given in 1860 (V: 330-350)—a dichotomy which plays a role, in one form or another, in practically all of his narrative works. His first thoughts on the subject occurred as early as 1847, and it can be said that almost all of the more important characters in any of Turgenev's works show some traits that allow us to relate them to the Hamlet/Don Quixote dichotomy. This was shown by Kagan-Kans (1975), who discusses many aspects of the dichotomy and its place in Turgenev's personal worldview as well as showing how it is reflected in his work. Let us briefly outline the meaning of this opposition.

For Turgenev, on the one hand there is the coldly reasoning, self-analytical Hamlet, whose main energy, in his lack of faith, is directed towards himself. Doubting everything, including himself, his basic attitude is one of realism: he takes life as it is, without any illusion, fully aware of the gaping abyss that awaits man at the end of the road; he is therefore ironical about any ‘higher truth’. This attitude paralyzes his will and renders him incapable of action. Though he may clearly distinguish the rights and wrongs of human life, of his own situation, or of the world, he denies that there is any higher truth that might be the key to bringing about happiness. On the other hand, there is Don Quixote, the unselfish enthusiast, always in action, who uncalculatingly follows an ideal, confident of a truth that is outside of himself. Unfortunately, this is at the expense of lacking a sufficient measure of practicality and a clear sense of reality and discrimination. This opposition is at the heart of Turgenev's work, in which there is an indissoluble bond between heroic enterprises or even intentions and the way these come to a meaningless end. In his plots the failure of the main hero is standard; a failure that is always unexpected and senseless. A strong or gifted individual, who stands out from the rest, is equipped with a personality structure such as to render him doomed to accomplish nothing.

Kagan-Kans points out that the origins of this dichotomy lay with the Romantic recognition of modern man's self-alienation, of the predominance of sterile intellectual reflection, which torments him, and of self-analysis, which cripples him. However, she seems to be of the opinion, which I do not share, that Turgenev actually gave more weight to the ‘Don Quixote’ side of human nature, and that at various stages of his career he found this ideal human type embodied in various contemporary types. In this she seems to be influenced by the concept of Geršenzon (1919), who was, to my knowledge, the first to rediscover the importance of Turgenev's lecture “Hamlet and Don Quixote” for his views on the essence of human life¹⁴. He holds that Turgenev's hopes were all set on the Don Quixotes, on ‘heart’ instead of ‘head’, on enthusiasm which is directed towards an ideal outside of the ego rather than cold analytical self-analysis and concentration on the self. Similarly, Kagan-Kans posits: “there is no doubt that, disturbed as he was by the Mephistopheles in him, Turgenev set before himself the ideal of the integrated (…) harmonious being” (Kagan-Kans: 16). I believe that Turgenev's worldview was much more tragic. True, he admires the Don Quixotes for their unselfish activity, their enthusiasm, and their strength of will. But he also calls them …

[crack-brained Don Quixotes, who are only useful to humanity and can set its feet marching because they see but one sole point on the horizon, a point whose nature is often not at all what it seems to their eyes. Involuntarily the question arises: does one then really have to be insane to believe in truth? and is the mind that has taken full control of itself for that very reason really deprived of all of its strength? Even a superficial discussion of these questions would lead us very far indeed.]

(V: 340-341)

This is why Ju. Lotman very rightly remarks that in Turgenev's works heroic deeds may be highly valued, but “even the value of the heroic deed does not attach meaning to it” (Lotman 1986: 18)¹⁵.

Furthermore, condensing his characters into certain types, like Hamlet and Don Quixote, is a means of raising them to the plane of a higher conflict: the individual, historically concrete characters are, on a higher level, actors who play out the historical world drama of human existence in their own age. But for Turgenev, this eternal drama in its turn reflects an eternal, cosmic drama. The Hamlets and Don Quixotes are mere human incarnations of two cosmic forces that can be observed in another form in nature itself. The following passage is worth quoting at length:

[in that separation, that dualism, of which we have spoken, we have to acknowledge the fundamental law of all human life; that the whole of that life is nothing other than the eternal reconciliation and the eternal strife between two principles that are continuously being separated and continuously merge. If we were not afraid to frighten your ears with philosophical terms, we would be ready to say that the Hamlets are the expression of the fundamental centripetal force in nature, that makes every living being regard itself as the centre of creation and everything else as existing only for its own purpose (thus the mosquito that sat on Alexander the Great's forehead, quietly convinced of its right to do so, fed on his blood as his due food; just so Hamlet, despising himself, unlike the mosquito, which has not risen to such a level, just so Hamlet, we were saying, regards things always as they are relevant to himself). Without this centripetal force (the force of egoism) nature could not exist, and nor could it without that other, centrifugal force, according to which everything that exists, exists only for the other (this force, this principle of devotion and sacrifice […] is represented by Don Quixote). These two forces of stagnation and movement, of conservatism and progress, are the basic forces of all existence. They explain the growing of a flower to us, but also give us the key to understand the development of the most powerful peoples.]

(V: 341)

These words cannot fail to bring to mind Turgenev's review of S. T. Aksakov's Notes of a Rifle Hunter, in which nature is also presented as dominated by two main forces: the centripetal, according to which “every single entity wants to exist exclusively for itself, regards itself as the centre of the universe, turns everything it is surrounded by into something that can be used”, and the centrifugal, according to which “every point is connected with all the others” (… IV: 516). The same centripetal and centrifugal forces we recognize in the two fundamental human types described in “Hamlet and Don Quixote”; the image of the mosquito sucking human blood occurs in both texts, though in the later one the mention of Alexander the Great makes it especially telling. In all, I believe it is justified to compare Turgenev's artistic method of presenting human characters with that of his depiction of nature. In both, the artist should on the one hand avoid going into all too subtle details, yet on the other he should refrain from bare subjectivism or soulless rhetoric. As we have seen, this middle position between aloofness and involvement is indeed characteristic of Turgenev's narrators (cf. section 2.3).

Of course, there is an important difference between the natural and the human spheres. Hamlet feels self-contempt, to which level the mosquito “has not risen”—that is, he has raised the natural principle to the level of consciousness and moral awareness; while the altruistic Don Quixote embodies, however unconsciously, the unifying tendency that seems to exist in nature only as a principle. Still, the underlying mechanism is the same: individual existents, be they natural or human, function in the world of Turgenev's texts only as the relative poles of an opposition¹⁶. Ultimately, it is the author's aim to present the individual existent—the character—as part of the total whole. We have Turgenev's own words as evidence that this whole is of an aesthetic nature: it is “that general, endless harmony, in which everything that exists—exists for the other” (… IV: 517). The detached position of the narrator, of which we have spoken, is analysed by Grübel (1984) in First Love as precisely this position of aesthetic distance resulting from the retrospective viewpoint of old age which offers a way out of life's dilemma between will and knowledge, the ethical and the epistemological. In the story it is presented as the contrasting and consecutive stages of rash youth and disillusioned maturity.

2.5 NOVELS AND STORIES

Such is the fatal dichotomy that Turgenev sees in human nature. Up to now we have treated this worldview and important features that are related with it, like the relation between character and narrator, and between character and narrated world, without any regard to the question of narrative genre. This is on the one hand justifiable in view of the relative shortness of Turgenev's novels, which makes them more than usually similar to the story. But on the other hand, differences between the image of character as shown in the novel as opposed to the story may not be overlooked. I will now briefly state my position in this matter.

The poetics of Turgenev's short prose has up till now been investigated too little (Muratov 1985: 3) to be able to give more than a tentative general characterization of what distinguishes it from that of the novels. However, Pumpjanskij's proposition, quoted above, that what is central to Turgenev's novels is the “judgment on the social significance of the character”, may give us a clue as to how to proceed with the stories. It is true that the central character in the novels is depicted in his social and historical surroundings. However, this does not mean, of course, that in his so-called ‘realist’, ‘social-critical’ novels, Turgenev objectively reflects some given social reality (even though he does at the same time comment on and criticize it). At the root of these works there lies a personal ideology (in the broadest sense), which principally organizes this reality, which constructs it anew, and projects its own coordinates onto it. This ideology I regard as a kind of personal myth—which in the novels is expressed on levels other than in the stories. As Ju. Lotman remarks: “the plots of Turgenev's works develop … on three levels: firstly, the level of contemporary reality, secondly, the archetypal level, and thirdly, the cosmic” (Lotman 1986: 20). It may be said that the specific weight attached to these mutually interdependent levels varies according to the genre (and the period). In the novels, the central character is depicted first of all in his social and cultural-historical dimensions. Central here is his social failure: his superfluity, inability to enter into productive relations with society. Details in his image do in fact point to a metaphoric layer of meaning, but this layer ‘remains in the background’ more than in the stories: there the metaphorical, paradigmatical features of the central character ‘compete’, so to say, more strongly with the image built on relations of contiguity: social, historical, cultural, even biological determination, psychological (emotional, volitional and so on) consistency, and causality in the relations between character and actions¹⁷.

In his book on the Tales of Belkin (1991), Schmid discerns three devices based on the interaction of the paradigmatical structure with the causal-narrative structure. Two of them may be recognized in Turgenev's stories, as well, the first being the construction of intratextual equivalences and paradigms. The second is the “focusing and decontextualisation of separate motifs by allusion to other (fremde) texts and the activation of intertextual equivalences” (Schmid 1991: 49). The third device analyzed by Schmid (in the work of Puškin) is the realisation and unfolding of set phrases and sayings. This device, however, is of practically no importance for Turgenev.

For Turgenev's artistic method in his short prose, Pumpjanskij has used the term “orchestration”:

The fundamental specific trait of the Turgenevian story is its powerful ‘orchestration’, which works through the depiction of the scenery and is ‘philosophical’. … Herein lies its main difference from the ‘Tales of Belkin’, from ‘Taman’, from the stories of Gogol and the young Dostoevskij, and this is why it has had such an enormous influence on West European (especially German and English) literature.

(Pumpjanskij 1929.2: 5)¹⁸

The term “orchestration” fairly well covers that layer of metaphorical features of the image of character that I find so important in Turgenev's stories. The term “philosophical” is more difficult to accept. Pumpjanskij himself slightly chides Turgenev for the lack of “methodology” in his “philosophy”:

Of special interest is the ‘method’ of this philosophizing: from the single observation, from a connection discovered, thought soars to a general judgment on life, omitting all intermediate steps, and so a tremendous flight of thought unites the fragmentary ‘episode’ with the general ‘doctrine’. (…) Thus, between the perfectly single observation and the highly consequential (оtvitstvinnijsim) generalization there is no inner barrier, no ‘methodological space’ at all.

(Pumpjanskij 1929.2: 8)

It will be clear that Pumpjanskij here requires something of Turgenev's “philosophy” that cannot be expected from it, and that it does not pretend to give. Turgenev's worldview cannot be reconstructed as a systematic “philosophy”, but rather as what I have called a personal myth. Neither can I therefore agree with Kagan-Kans' reassessment of Turgenev as a “philosophical” author (Kagan-Kans: 7). All the same, it is true that whereas in the novels Turgenev's worldview is expressed more in the “judgment” passed on the social unproductivity of the character, in the short works the various forms of orchestration do highlight the character's ‘existential’ failure, i.e. the meaninglessness of his existence against the background of life in general, or the cosmic life often embodied in Nature¹⁹. It is significant that Kagan-Kans came to her reassessment on the basis of an examination of Turgenev's short works rather than of the novels, where the social aspect is more prominent. But, as I hope to have shown, the social and the ‘existential’ in Turgenev's works are actually interrelated, uniting on an abstract level in what Ju. Lotman has called the opposition of meaningfulness versus meaninglessness.

2.6 THE PARADIGMATIC IMAGE OF CHARACTER

In the previous chapter I introduced the various ways in which the paradigmatic image of character can be constructed. I will now discuss some mechanisms that are of special relevance for Turgenev's short prose.

In general, such a paradigmatic relation is constituted by creating a thematical or formal equivalential relation between particular elements of the text, be they details of the description of a character's outward appearance or certain inner qualities, details of objects, space- and time-characteristics, thematic elements, names, and so on. These equivalences form a structure, a network of their own, adding new layers of meaning to the temporal-causal sequence of events. In the analyses in the following chapters this mechanism will be shown as it operates Turgenev's stories. We will see that as a result of creating equivalential relations between various elements of the characters' environment, this environment is metaphorically shaped to consist of two opposed semantic fields; the central character's action then constitutes a transgression of the boundary between these fields.

This makes it possible to place many of Turgenev's characters in Ju. Lotman's well-known categories of ‘mobile’ versus ‘immobile’ characters. For Lotman, only those actions can be considered narrative events that form a transgression by a character of the border between semantic fields, that themselves in one way or another reflect categories active in the cultural conceptual system (Lotman 1970: 282). The characters fall into two main classes: firstly, characters who are tied to a certain semantic field (for instance: the town versus the countryside, civilized Europe versus an uninhabited island, the woods versus the castle, etc) or class (for instance: rich versus poor, friends versus foes, dead versus living, representatives of Nature versus those of Society of Civilization) and who remain within its borders; they serve mainly as the exponents of the semantic field and may therefore be called ‘classificators’. The second main class of characters are the “active characters” …, who are ‘mobile’ and can transgress these borders. A third class may be recognized in those characters who help or hinder the active ones to cross the border, but they may also be seen as a subgroup of the first class. Since the type of text with a ‘narration’²⁰ is constructed on the basis of texts without narration as their negation, the ‘mobile’ character is introduced as a person who has freed himself from a certain convention, and is thus able to cross the semantic boundary in spite of the usual prohibition of such an action²¹.

2.6.1 INVARIANT EVENT-STRUCTURE

Most of Turgenev's stories reveal a remarkable similarity in their basic plot skeleton. In general, the stories do not concentrate on the presentation of a psychological development, which may to a certain extent be connected with the generic nature of the short prose work as such. For example, the novella “is deliberately plotted to concentrate on one central conflict which, in turn, illuminates the inherent disposition of an already fully developed character” (Silz: 6). Moreover, however strictly the characters in Turgenev's works are seen in metonymic relation with their world, and their actions in a strictly temporal and causal relation with themselves and with the characters' psychology, still, in the course of the careers of many central characters, an invariant fable may be detected without great difficulty. Again, the specific poetics of the prose story may play a role here: short narratives (of novella length) “are likely to approach the conditions of poetry (…) The shorter the work of fiction, the more likely are its characters to be simply functions and typical manifestations of a precise and inevitable sequence of events” (Mudrick: 214-215). Though this statement may seem to refer more to an earlier type of short story, in which ‘plot’ was dominant over ‘character’, and not to Turgenev's stories, in which the narration concentrates more on the motivation for the characters' action—and, conversely, the effect of their action (and that of other characters' actions) on their inner life—the recurrent pattern of these actions is nonetheless evident. In general, planning the protagonists' career as a fixed pattern already indicates that human life is thought of as dependent on more than just contiguous relations with the ever-changing environment of concrete circumstance.

Once more I should like to approach the invariant structure of the stories on the basis of an analysis of the novels—which in this respect, as we have seen, structurally do not differ essentially from the stories on account of their shortness. Dale Peterson has called attention to a “recurrent formulaic structure within the basic fable that constitutes the central symbolic action in Turgenev's six novels” (Peterson: 74²²). This “basic scenario” Peterson describes as “the injection, or more commonly the return, of an ex-provincial protagonist into the heartland of what Turgenev labels, in the last words of his last novel, Bezymjannaja Rus', ‘Anonymous Russia’”; this appearance, in what is for the protagonist a new milieu, results in a clash with the environment, which “coincides with his meeting a heroine who emerges from that same milieu”; both the protagonist and the “indigenous heroine who is an overreacher in her environment (…) usually prove to be totally incompatible once suspended in the resident culture surrounding them” (Peterson: 76-77). I quite agree with Peterson that the result is

a novel in which psychological and characterological causation and sequence are less important than perceived analogies and contrasts with and among other life postures. The fully developed idea of such a novel often crystallizes in the form of an illustrative scene or an archetypal portrait of cultural relations as embodied in an apprentice figure confronting an inevitable initiation.

(idem: 81)

Thus at the root of the novels lies the protagonist's transgression of a boundary, whereby he enters an alien milieu in which his character is tested. He is subsequently met by a (female) representative of that milieu who is going in the opposite direction, out of that milieu, into which she no longer fits. All this is even more the case for Turgenev's short prose work, with the main difference that, as I said in the preceding section, it is not so much the social confrontation which is central in the short prose, but the ‘existential’. It may be added that, whereas in the novels various narrative lines may interweave, such as the social and the amorous line (and with less intensity the confrontation of the protagonist with nature), the stories tend to concentrate on a single narrative line. In the majority of the stories, the movement of the protagonist into peasant Russia is often central, and his meeting with peasant types who are not really representative of that milieu (or at least, of what is commonly thought to be representative of it). This is the case in most of the stories from Notes of a Hunter, and in “Father Aleksej's Story,” while we find an interesting inversion of this scheme in “Mumu” (see Chapter 5). Alternatively, there is a movement into and a confrontation with Nature itself: “A Journey into Poles'e” (see Chapter 6), “Bežin Meadow” (which combines elements of both types, as do other stories—see Chapter 4). Or again, the protagonist may be immersed in the deeper regions of inner life, another unknown realm: the unexpected power of passion (be it love: “Faust,” Asja, First love, Spring Torrents, “The Brigadier,” among other stories, or greed, as in “King Lear of the Steppes”). Yet again, an intrusion into another reality may be felt: that of the irrational, threatening, supernatural, in the so-called ‘supernatural tales’ (among them “The Dog,” see Chapter 7).

On the level of story, the characters of Turgenev's prose works are thus already ‘characterized’ by their fate, which repeats the common pattern of all individual life striving for some measure of self-affirmation. Those events in their lives are selected that demonstrate their failure. In the novels this is predominantly their social failure, in the short prose more often their existential failure, often somehow connected with their amorous hesitancy—their ‘amorous unproductivity’, to play on Pumpjanskij's term ‘social unproductivity’²³.

This failure is in general shaped as the character's incapacity to adjust to the alien environment in which he has been placed. Next I should like to examine how the opposing ‘environments’ and the border between them which has been transgressed by the character are constructed.

2.6.2 THE TRANSGRESSION-SCHEME IN TURGENEV'S SHORT PROSE

One of the aims of this book is to show the importance for the study of Turgenev's work of taking into account the folkloric connotations displayed by many motifs in his short prose. Data concerning Turgenev's knowledge of Russian folklore and popular religion and superstition have been collected (e.g. Azadovskij 1960 and Maslennikova 1976), but the relevance of folkloric images in his work has hardly been acknowledged, and certainly not elaborated upon. And it is often through the folkloric or popular religious connotation of certain details that equivalential relations are made possible. This is shown in the analyses of “Bežin Meadow,” “Mumu,” “A Journey into Poles'e” and “The Dog.” One of the most important equivalential relations in these stories is that between details of the different spaces the characters move in; as a result these spaces acquire the traits of the opposition, well known from Russian folklore, between ‘this’, ‘our’ … and the ‘other’ … land, whereby that other land is identified as the realm of spirits, the supernatural, the irrational, threatening and horrifying ‘yonder’. But in the meantime, the sharp opposition between the two spaces also models that between other semantic categories: that between civilization and uncivilized Russia, between culture and nature, between everyday reality and the supernatural.

On the one hand, the method of constructing this classification of space and of characters and their actions through the use of folkloric connotations—which make equivalential relations between elements possible—is quite specific for the work of Turgenev, but on the other hand the occurrence of such a classification, thanks to which the actions of the characters acquire the quality of transgressing a boundary, is not unique for his work, nor, for that matter, for Russian literature.

It has been observed that the depicted world in modern prose increasingly tends to resemble the arbitrary chaos of empirical reality, and the narrative point of view to restrict itself to an individual perspective. However, on the plane of event-structure and personage-constellation, this process has been accompanied by a tendency to “convert major segments of the narration and whole plots into stereotypes” (Lotman 1987: 106). While the fictional world was becoming as diverse and manifold as reality, the acts of its inhabitants were not. Why was this so? Let us follow Lotman's thoughts in more detail.

Lotman sees as a new and central phenomenon of the modern novel²⁴ the fact that “elements of the text, such as the names of the objects, the action, the names of the personages etc., as they appear in the work, are already marked by the socio-cultural and literary semiotic environment” (idem: 105²⁵). The connotations that these elements carry in the extra-textual semiotic reality, and which they preserve in the work, influence the development of the plot: they “function as coding mechanisms, which cut off certain possibilities of plot-development and stimulate others” (ibidem). For instance, the plot of The Queen of Spades would have been impossible with a cavalry officer instead of an engineer as its main hero; if the ulan and the treasurer in Lermontov's The treasurer's wife from Tambov had fought it out in a regular duel instead of at the card table, the plot would have been entirely different. In contrast, when an element of extra-textual reality enters into a folk-tale (for instance, Ivan kills the dragon with a rifle), then this does not alter the plot at all. I presume that Lotman here points to the phenomenon described by Bachtin as the ‘being under discussion’, the “disputed nature” … of the object in a modern work of literature. Of course, this disputed nature can have various effects, depending on other factors. It may become the dominant principle of the work, as in Dostoevskij's polyphonic novels, or it may be tuned down and submit to the lyrical intonation of the author's word, as in the works of Turgenev.

This question is not unimportant for our problem, literary character. In modern literature, what are possible or impossible actions for a given personage is in large measure determined by who he ‘is’, that is, what social, cultural, ideological, or other semiotic codes characteristic for his culture he incorporates. As Lotman says: “the poetics of the plot in the novel are in important measure the poetics of the hero, since a certain type of hero is connected with certain fixed plots” (idem: 104-105). Since every object, situation or character, retaining its extra-textual semiotic context, brings with it a whole spectrum of possible lines of plot development, there seems to exist an extraordinary wealth of possible transformations and combinations of plot structures. We get the impression that an author could construct his plot as he pleases. But this is not the case. As Lotman explains:

The sharp increase of differentiation of plots in the nineteenth century would have led to the total destruction of narrative structure, had this not been compensated for, at the other pole of organization of the text, by a tendency to convert major segments of the narration and whole plots into stereotypes. … This stereotyping leads to the activation of archaic plot models which are stored in cultural memory.

(idem: 106)

In other words, modern narrative has recourse to mythological patterns (cf. Lotman, Meletinskij and Minc 1988). For Lotman and Minc, the history of the development of artistic literature can to an important extent be seen as the process of translating mythological, that is, non-discrete and cyclical texts, into the discrete and linear language of narration. One of the four major periods when mythology influenced art is that of the rise of the novel, during which mythological models were carried over into the discrete world of artistic texts (Lotman and Minc 1981: 42). I think that we would be right to understand the period of the rise of the novel not as the relatively short period in which the modern novel acquired its definitive shape, but as a more prolonged process, closely connected with other cultural changes: it is the process of ‘novelization’ … of which M. Bachtin speaks. Thanks to the dialogical structure of the novel that has been unveiled by Bachtin in the novels of Dostoevskij, but which can be said to be characteristic of whole types of artistic texts²⁶, a new and unique combination becomes possible of the typologically conflicting ‘central’ and ‘peripheral’ mythological text-generating systems, given form as correlating elements of one and the same structure.

The central mythic text-generating system fixes the world as a single, constantly repeated, cycle. The peripheral generates texts which fix accidental deviations from the norm, that is, excesses and anomalies that do not unite in some orderly, lawful whole. With the disintegration of mythic culture, texts from the central mythic system came to be ‘translated’ into discrete linear language, that is, they partly adopted the form of the texts from the peripheral system i.e. linear narrative with an elementary plot. Qualities that belonged to one personage were now distributed among several, who formed pairs and opposites. Furthermore, since beginning and end were now marked, change was introduced, the simplest variant being the chain ‘entering a closed space and then leaving it’, a process which may be said to represent temporal death followed by resurrection. But as texts from the central system established homomorph equivalences between entities from different spheres, an elementary semiotic situation was created around them. The narrative had to be interpreted, what was told about some particular events had a personal meaning for every member of the audience: “The myth always tells about me. A ‘novelty’, an anecdote, tells about the other. The first organizes the world of the listener, the seconds adds interesting details to his knowledge of that world” (Lotman 1973: 13).

Historically, modern prose developed from ‘peripheral’ texts (idem: 12). These ‘novella's’, which tell of the unexpected and the excessive, absorbed elements of the central mythological texts, that is, they modelled the unexpected along the lines of the plot scheme ‘temporal death followed by resurrection’. Simultaneously, the semiotic, ‘modelling’ capacity of modern prose increased: it projected these unexpected events onto the world of the audience.

In modern prose, the unexpected and the death-resurrection plot scheme are united through interrelation, not through hierarchical ordering. A personage in a modern prose work can combine poles of different oppositions and thus of different micro-plots (on the other hand, one opposition may be distributed over different personages). He may thus be at one and the same time a member of semantic fields which in the general system of oppositions of the work are seen as each other's opposites. This combination of different qualities may be modelled over time as a metamorphosis, and this is done with the help of the mythological model of temporal death followed by resurrection. Or it may be modelled as the simultaneous existence of contradictory qualities in one person. Such a personage unites ‘personalities’ that in a mythological text would have been distributed over two personages, who are each other's opposites. Paradigmatical for such a unity is the combination of the gentleman and the robber, which we encounter in the work of Puškin, and which plays such an important role in many works in the period of roughly 1780-1850, from Schiller to Dumas, from Zschokke to Bulwer-Lytton²⁷.

So far we have seen that in Turgenev's stories, with the help of equivalential relations between elements of the text, the actions of the characters are modelled according to the archetypal scheme of transgressing the boundary between semantic fields. The characters themselves fall into two classes: mobile characters and classificators. On the basis of this classification, other groupings may become possible. As a consequence, different characters may undertake parallel or opposed actions, and this will be shown in the analyses of the stories in the following chapters.

Thus in Turgenev's stories, through parallellism in characters' lives and careers, and through pairing as a result of equivalential relations between elements of the setting and of a character's own appearance, habits and so forth, the personages are classified according to the principle of analogy and contrast. This is clearly a paradigmatical, not a syntagmatical principle²⁸. Now analogy and contrast have long been acknowledged as one of the fundamental building blocks of Turgenev's art. Stender-Petersen (246) speaks of the principle of “die gegenseitige Komplementarität der Charaktere” as a consistent feature in all of Turgenev's creation²⁹. It is not difficult to convince oneself that pairs of characters are indeed a recurrent phenomenon in his stories: in Notes of a Hunter we have Chor' and Kalinyč, and Čertopchanov and Nedopjuskin; in “Two Landowners” Chvalynskij and Stegunov; in “Two Friends” Vjazovnin and Krupicyn; in “A Quiet Spot” Astachov and Veret'ev; in “Three Portraits” Lučinov and Rogačev; Fabij and Mucij in “The Song of Triumphant Love”; we have Punin and Baburin; of course, there are Hamlet and Don Quixote, and so on. (For an enumeration of the most important pairs in the novels, cf. Stender-Petersen: 246-254).

Furthermore, as I have already said, Turgenev's tendency to put individual characters in the perspective of archetypes and recurring schemes can be seen as linked to mythological identification. As such, it may be considered a special case of the paradigmatical principle of analogy.

Thus we see that for an understanding of the image of character in Turgenev's works, it is by no means sufficient to restrict oneself to the collection of data on the ‘psychological content’ of the characters. Aspects of characterization are closely connected with plot, setting, theme and with the question of perspective. Indeed, as Baruch Hochman puts it:

the organization, or schematism (of literary character—SB), does not reside within the characters alone. It is not just a matter of what is given within the self-contained limits of the characters—that is, it is not just a matter of the patterning of their responses, commitments, traits, and other features (…). Even when we retrieve characters as relatively autonomous entities, we perceive them as part of an organizing structure made up of elements that are interfused with each other and that illuminate each other.

(Hochman: 64)

2.7 THE CULTURAL CONTEXT

Turgenev's use of the device of analogy and contrast, and his tendency to reduce the main events in narrative texts to certain basic schemes, can, as we have seen, be connected with what we have called a personal myth, at the basis of which lies a dualistic model or structure. In the following, I should like to develop an idea of Ju. Lotman's, who suggests that Turgenev's worldview as manifested in his artistic texts takes a polemical position with regard to certain mythological schemes that lie deeply hidden at the root of conceptions of man and his role in the social environment (that is, contemporary Russia) of nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture.

In all European literature, the Romantic period saw the revival of interest in the ‘hero’, that figure of strength and stature who represents the society around him. As Reed shows, a new feature of the Romantic attitude towards the hero, as compared with earlier periods, is that he “is presented as the solution to a major problem of the age, the modern problem of an overly developed reflective thought” (Reed: 5). Romanticism constructed an ideal of the hero who overcomes this disease of the age, “who seemed to possess wholeness, unselfconscious passion, and the ability to act” (ibidem). However, another major theme in the Romantic attitude towards the hero is that the same ability to act brings him into conflict with the accepted social norms and values. The definition of the hero from earlier periods, as one who “represents (…) a socially approved norm, for representing which to the satisfaction of society he is decorated with a title” does not apply here at all (ibidem). This leads to a very complex variety of possible relationships between the hero and society and its values. The hero is never an outright antisocial being. His actions set him apart from society, but he always remains committed to it in one way or another. In his rejection of society there always remain traces of hope that it might be reorganized, whether by reviving the values of the past or by bringing about some social or moral ideal. The scale of possible attitudes manifested by the active hero thus ranges from his plundering of society to his redeeming it. On the other hand, it can be plausibly argued (see Garber 1967, for instance) that the suffering and inactive ‘anti-hero’, who refrains from any active engagement, stems from the same roots as the active, rebellious one, precisely because it is not the latter's own selfish desires which generate the values he adheres to, but, in the final analysis, his compassion with the sufferings of others. The active and the passive hero, one might say, differ merely in tactics, not in overall aims. Furthermore, the passive, uncommitted figures like Manfred or René are as much isolated from society as their active counterparts; they likewise transgress the boundary of accepted social values, though they do not ‘act’ in the technical sense.

A third main current in the Romantic attitude towards the hero is the fact that his activity acquires demoniacal overtones. On the one hand, this may be connected with the interest in the figure of the rebellious and fallen angel (together with a revival of interest in Christian mythology)—as was noted by Lotman and Minc (1981: 49). On the other hand, by transgressing the boundary of accepted norms and thereby, in the mythological world model, of Civilization, the active hero acquires a privileged relationship to Nature, which, as Reed shows, had by this period long ceased to a source of bliss (Reed: 11-14).

In Russia, Puškin was the first to use the well-known Romantic emplois of the gentleman-dandy and the robber, who both stand out from their social environment (the dandy in the sense that his behaviour is based on deliberately shocking the society he belongs to), in order to model his transgressors of the boundary of accepted norms and values (for the many and various examples in Puškin's work of such types, see Lotman 1979: 29-30).

At the same time in Puškin's work, yet most strongly in that of Gogol', the mechanism that we have mentioned earlier (section 2.6.2) came into effect—namely, that elements of the text retain their extra-textual socio-cultural and literary semiotic connotations, this yielding additional expectations as to the probability or improbability of certain developments in the plot. The demoniacal active personage acquired traits that may be regarded as specific to the Russian cultural tradition. In his role of outsider, i.e. a personage who is related to society as someone from outside its boundaries, he shows a fundamental ambivalence: he is seen as either a redeemer of that society or as its undoer. As a matter of fact, the same ambivalence with regard to the Romantic active hero in the Western tradition had already been discovered by Garber (Garber 1967: 326; 328). But it has a special importance in the Russian situation, where it converges with a traditional popular fundamental mistrust of representatives of the cultured elite, a tradition that was still very alive in the period under discussion (see below)³⁰.

The importance of the ambivalent hero in the Russian situation was used by Lotman to formulate a set of possible plots that may be regarded as specific to Russian culture of the nineteenth century. He calls such a set of possible plots that are typical of a given culture typical a “plot range.” … In his view,

Genealogically the plots … of the Russian novel go back to European ones; from the eighteenth century on, they are constructed according to much the same schemes. The national specifics of the plot are confined to a certain couleur locale in the actions, but the plot structure itself is not affected. To create the ‘Russian plot’ was the work of Puškin and Gogol'.

(Lotman 1987: 10)

In his article, Lotman traces one particular line of this Russian plot range. He postulates that the West European novel can be broadly characterized as based upon the striving of the hero who occupies a place that is unfit for him (that is, one which does not satisfy him, which is unseemly), in order to gain a better one (idem: 11). The typical West European plot is motivated by the hero's urge to change his position in life, in society. But in contrast, in one of its main lines, the Russian novel “poses the problem of a change of essence of the hero and of the life that surrounds him” (… ibidem). The main character, who would typically have transgressed the boundaries of social conventions, has a vocation to transform either life around him or his own self. Schmid (1992: 104) regards turns of event of this latter type as characteristic of Russian Realist prose. In Russian criticism they are known as … which can be translated as ‘illumination’, ‘gaining an insight’, and as ‘shift of consciousness’, ‘an inner, mental change’, ‘a transgression of moral and characterological boundaries’, a ‘moral, religious or social insight, an inner revulsion, an ethical-moral purification and perfection’ and even as the Joycean ‘epiphany’ (cf. Schmid idem: 104-105 and references in note 2). I am inclined to agree with Schmid on the limitation of this concept to a particular period³¹; however, Schmid would probably agree with Lotman that the phenomenon is typologically specific to Russian Realism.

In the structuring of the plot and the personages in this type of Russian novel, the main personage, who has a vocation to transform the world, may, however, be cast in one of two roles: either as the ‘undoer’ or as the ‘redeemer’ … idem: 12) of the world he is called upon to transform. (In the case of the transformation of his own self he will undo or save himself: he will plumb the depths of crime and of sin, pass through a moral crisis and will be reborn—or not, as the case may be)³².

The combination of elements of the redeemer and undoer in the work of Puškin is already very significant. But it is in the work of Gogol' that this dichotomy acquires its obviously mythological features. The undoer, from Gogol' onwards, assumes the characteristics of the Antichrist:

In this quality he on the one hand inherits the image-repertoire … of the demoniacal hero of Romanticism, and on the other the popular and traditional notions connected with this figure. He arrives from the outside like a pernicious temptation from the devil. …

(Lotman 1986: 12)

On the other hand, “the redeemer-hero, too, appears as an arrival from the outside” (idem: 13; for examples, see idem: 12-14).

This, then, seems to be the mythological scheme in the structuring of the plot and the personages (at least in this type of Russian literature) that is regenerated as a consequence of the creation of the ‘Russian novel’ by Puškin and Gogol', and that is continued by Dostoevskij and to some extent by Tolstoj. Transgressing a boundary—let us remember that Lotman distinguishes transgressing a boundary as the most important plot-shaping function in narrative literature—is indeed linked in this type of novel with certain notions that are inherited from Russian traditional culture, notions that are expressed in the mythological motifs and schemes of folklore. The first important notion is that—transgressing a border is thought of as stepping into an inversed world, a world absolutely, qualitatively different from the original, which consequently and of necessity involves a qualitative change in the personality of the transgressor. The second is that—this ‘other’ person, someone who belongs to such another world, is regarded as potentially either ‘holy’ or ‘evil’, and thus in relation to the first, ‘our’, world, takes the position of either redeemer or undoer. (In relation to his own fate the terms would be ‘doom’ and ‘rebirth’).

The first notion is described by Lotman and Uspenskij as typical of a culture in which there is a dominant worldview that may be described as ‘mythological’, as opposed to ‘historical-discrete’. In such a culture,

When some object occurs in a new place, it may lose the connection with its previous state and become another object (in some cases this may correspond with a change of names). This explains the characteristic ability of mythological space to model other, non-spatial relations (semantic or axiological, among others).

(Lotman and Uspenskij 1973: 288)

Russian medieval culture (from the eleventh to the seventeenth century) retained important features of this worldview, especially in its organization of space (Lotman 1965), but also in some ideological particularities (Lotman and Uspenskij 1977: 4-5; cf. Lotman and Uspenskij 1977.2). Important mechanisms were still active in the lower cultural strata in the nineteenth century.

The second notion reflects the basic traits that are ascribed in Russian traditional culture to a figure standing outside the collective, the Old Russian outcast. …

The Old Russian outcast as a socio-psychological phenomenon has been described by Lotman and Uspenskij (1982). Here also, Old Russian culture retained characteristics of the mythic cultural stage, in which mastering some kind of special knowledge was regarded as sorcery, and as such was considered dangerous, “a force that disturbs the social equilibrium and that contains a potential threat for the established order” (Lotman and Uspenskij 1982: 111). This special knowledge was nevertheless felt to be indispensable to society. Therefore, any ‘learned’ persons, such as doctors, horse-doctors, smiths or, for that matter, clergymen, could be regarded as dangerous, as enemies or intruders. Conversely, the power of sorcery could be ascribed to strangers, for instance, to foreigners, Cossacks or robbers. Old Russian culture retained an ambiguous attitude towards all persons who in one way or another were outsiders to society. It is true that foreigners as well as persons who were masters of a special field of knowledge were regarded as enemies, but they were also treated with a certain respect mixed with fear. It is the complex attitude towards this class of persons that, according to Lotman, influenced the image of the protagonist-outsider in Russian nineteenth-century literature. His and B. A. Uspenskij's article on the outcast in Russian culture was originally meant as an introduction to a wider investigation into the cultural position of the ‘intelligentsia’ in Russian culture of the modern period³³. In forming its own self-image, the intelligentsia, at first the cultured nobility, later in the nineteenth century the educated elite in general, adopted many of the semantic categories with which in Old Russian culture the outcast had been endowed. This image in its turn was reflected in the image of the protagonist in Russian literature. Central here is the dichotomy ‘saviour/undoer’.

Of course, this ‘reflection’ of the image of the outcast should not be understood as the more or less conscious shaping of a literary character after the model of some Old Russian outcast type. For traditional notions connected with the outcast are stored in deep layers of the cultural memory; they can be seen as a remote … cultural context, defined by Smirnov as:

semantic norms of speech, consolidated in daily practice, that are in one way or another assimilated … by an author; they determine the intrinsic possibilities of the development of the events in the work, which are either activated or suppressed with the help of external stimuli (biographical and social); (…) a semantic norm, that covers the whole range of texts that are objectively commensurable in content. …

(Smirnov 1981: 118³⁴)

For Lotman, as we have seen, the main differential quality of Russian narrative prose as against its West European counterpart was its concentration on the main character, whose surroundings or whose personality were changed, while western literature concentrated on changing that character's position in life. Whether a saviour or an undoer, such a character embodied the idea that human actions could effect qualitative changes in human existence. In Turgenev's prose, this idea is forcefully denied, as we have seen. In this, however, his prose is deeply concerned with questions specific to Russian literature. The worldview it expresses should be seen in its fundamental interaction with that literature:

Turgenev's novels and stories played a de-mythologizing, sobering role in Russian literature of the nineteenth century. For that very reason it seemed that they fell outside the general structure of the ‘Russian novel’. It was easy to conceive of them as novels of ‘failure’, that is, to regard them as the negative realization of the European model. Of course, this meant distorting the genuine Turgenevian structure, the essence of which lies not in the success or the failure of the hero's career, but in the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of his existence.

(Lotman 1986: 18-19)

The failure of the hero to give meaning to his life, to find a meaningful activity, then, can be seen as a dialogically shaped denial of a tendency in another branch of Russian literature. Turgenev's failed heroes are invariably depicted as transgressing the boundary that is for others impossible to transgress, or as ‘coming from the outside’, as we have seen. But Turgenev denies them the aura of saviour or undoer, that surrounded such characters in the works of that other branch.

Notes

1. Among them Turgenev himself, who wrote to Paul Heyse on March 21 (April 2), 1874: “es geschieht Ihnen wie mir: wir beide schreiben keine Romane, nur verlängerte Novellen” (Pis'ma X: 215).

2. Full-length landmark studies are, for example, Ledkovskij 1973, Kagan-Kans 1975, Peterson 1975, Costlow 1990, Allen 1992; some important essay-length studies are Fischler 1976, Thiergen 1978 and 1989, Børtnes 1984, Clayton 1984 and Masing-Delic 1985. But the list could be extended considerably.

3. “pоlnо tibi pisats bystryi pоvisti s rоmanticisкimi pirikоdami—etо kоrоsо dly pоemy bajrоnicisкоj.” [You've written enough of those fast stories with Romantic tossings—that befits Byronic poems; Puškin X: 115].

4. In all quotations from Turgenev's works, Roman numerals indicate the volume of the second Academy edition of the Pоlnоi sоbranii sоcininij (see References under Turgenev), Arabic numerals the page number.

5. cf. “every single entity regards itself as the centre of the universe, turns everything it is surrounded by into something that can be used”; quoted above.

6. A very special variant in Notes of a Hunter is the detached position of the narrator as a hunter, a figure between two worlds—see Chapter 3.

7. More or less the same position is taken by the main character of Smoke, which shows the importance of the device not only for the stories and not only for the I-narration.

8. This conflict can be dated back to the classical opposition ‘vita activa’ as opposed to ‘vita contemplativa’, stemming from Plutarch; Turgenev can nowhere be seen to give preference to either side: he is not inclined to particularly admire public activity, be it in the field of commerce or in civil or military service; nor does he take refuge in the comforts of idyll, as is admirably shown by Costlow: 55-82.

9. The Russian has … (heroic novel), but Pumpjanskij makes it clear that ‘heroic’ is meant not in the laudatory, but in the formal or technical sense, which is why I prefer to translate ‘of character’. Some ten years later, Pumpjanskij gave a variation on this qualification, comparing Turgenev's novels with those of George Sand: both are “personal novels about culture” (Pumpjanskij 1940: 92). I agree with Costlow, who, having quoted the second passage, argues that for Turgenev, the ‘Sandian’ type of novel forms a contrast with the novels à la Dumas, with their “complex, melodramatic plotting”, as he himself indicated in his review of Evgenija Tur's novel The Niece (1851) (Costlow: 11). Thus she concludes that “Turgenev elaborates a novelistic form that depends less on the complexities of plot than on the revelations of conversation” (idem: 12). She then proceeds to interpret Rudin as “a novel about talk” (idem; Costlow's italics). To my mind, such an interpretation tends to reduce too strongly to one aspect the total complex of social relations around which the novel is built.

10. Nevertheless, metaphorical elements may appear in these descriptions, as in the comparison of Kostja's face with a squirrel's (III: 92). Such comparisons are not rare and show a certain recurrent pattern. Though they may not denote a supernatural sphere, as the leitmotivic details do in the later stories—among them comparisons of details of outward appearance with animals (see Koschmal: passim)—they nonetheless tend to form an intertextual pattern (see the remark on Kostja and Kalinyč in Chapter 4). Perhaps Turgenev shows a certain ‘system’ in the animal-comparisons, and it would be interesting to investigate how far that system is indebted to the classification of human faces according to a resemblance with certain animals that was introduced by Lavater. In any case, the method of comparison with animals is based on a metaphorical principle.

11. One could say that ‘meaning’ is a tertium comparationis between a character and his life: speaking of the meaning of a character's life is applying a metaphor.

12. Note the present perfect tense, that projects the ‘exotopic’ position of the judging perspective into a temporal post hoc.

13. Cf. my analysis of The Dog in chapter 7.

14. Indeed, it is to be expected that for a thinker as close to Symbolism as Geršenzon, the Don Quixote type, the ‘Schwärmer’ and idealist, would be more to his own personal taste.

15. In the years 1840-1850, Turgenev still cherished slight hopes that moderate, ‘enlightened’, practical landowners, like Ležnev (Rudin) or Lavreckij (A Nest of the Gentry) might perhaps bring about lasting positive changes at least to the deplorable state of the Russian rural economy, and enlighten the burden of the peasants (see Thiergen 1989, Kurljandskaja 1980: 64-5, and my remarks in chapter 5). But Lavreckij fails, too, and no positive expectations remain.

16. We have already had the opportunity to connect this with the main direction taken by the rendering of the characters in themselves, i.e. to show the mutual interdependence of antithetical qualities: consciousness and deeper understanding of the world are accompanied by a weakening of the volitional faculty.

17. In Hansen-Löve 1984 and Schmid 1991: 72-74 the short story is described as a genre especially suited to the interweaving of ‘verbal art’ mechanisms with ‘narrative art’ mechanisms.

18. Besides “philosophical”, Pumpjanskij calls Turgenev's orchestration “elegiac” (ibidem). The elegiac orchestration may occasionally develop into direct, explicit narrator's reflections of the type described by Pumpjanskij thus: “The image of life, built by youth, is arbitrary; only old age sees life as it really is, in all its emptiness and horror. (…) Until the threshold of death, until old age, man lives barred from the truth; in other words, life is a chain of perceptional illusions!” (Pumpjanskij 1929.2: 10). We recognize in this passage the traits of the author's worldview, as it connects with the narrator's position, that we have treated before.

19. For the theme of nature, I refer the reader to Chapters 3 (on the Notes of a Hunter), 4 (on Bežin Meadow) and 6 (on A Journey into Poles'e).

20. I use the term ‘narration’ here as a translation of Lotman's Russian ‘sjužet’ in order to remain consistent with the terminology proposed in section 1.7. I do not consider, however, that Lotman here means the Formalist ‘narration’ as opposed to ‘story’. What he means is a type of text that relates narrative events, which are themselves defined as transgressions of a (semantic) boundary.

21. “the mobile personage differs from the immobile in that he is permitted to perform certain actions that are forbidden to others (…). The right to some special behaviour (heroic, immoral, moral, insane, unpredictable, peculiar; but always independent of the circumstances that compulsively restrict the immobile personages) is shown by a long series of literary heroes” (Lotman 1970: 295). Characters, in Lotman's conception, are defined with respect to the function they have in the plot. It is clear that we are interested in broader aspects of character. I shall therefore use Lotman's otherwise very fruitful concept only insofar as it is of use for the analysis of peculiarities of plot in Turgenev's work, and will not discuss its merits or its possible shortcomings in themselves.

22. As a matter of fact, this recurrent structure had been described as early as 1919 by V. Gippius (see Gippius 1919/1989).

23. I hope that the reader will agree that this is more than just a play on words. The fact that Černyševskij in his famous review of Asja, called A Russian man at a rendez-vous, interpreted the amorous failure of its hero without much difficulty as a sign of his social failure, indicates how closely the amorous and the social test of Turgenev's protagonists were interrelated for the reading public.

24. In my view, the term ‘novel’ may here be taken to denote more than the novel in its narrow sense, viz. any narrative work in the period when literature had become ‘novelized’ (the term is Bachtin's). Russian nineteenth-century literature from Puškin and Gogol' on can be called ‘novelized’. It is based on the hybridization and stylization of various genres, the extra-literary diversity of speech plays an essential role in it; the literary image is constructed “in maximal contact with the present, that is felt as uncompleted” (Bachtin 1975: 455). In this respect, the main development of Russian literature does not differ from that of European literature in general, a development which Bachtin described as a process of emancipation of the personages' speech from the authors'. This is connected with a growing ‘self-consciousness’, a growing awareness of the conventionality of language.

25. Lotman had already pointed to this phenomenon in connection with the theme of cards in Puškin's work (Lotman 1975: 120).

26. “the dialogical structure does not belong exclusively to the novels of Dostoevskij, but it rather is a quality of the novel-form as such. One could even extend the scope further and say: of certain types of artistic texts” (Lotman 1973: 29).

27. For an investigation into the transformation of this image from myth through folklore and early modern West European literature (Shakespeare, Calderón) to late Romanticism (Lermontov), see Frejdenberg 1987.

28. It can be noted that in working thus, Turgenev follows the tradition of classifying types of characters into oppositional pairs that is known from European Romanticism. In itself, it may be traced back to Schiller's well-known distinction of the ‘naïve’ and the ‘sentimental’ type (for other variants, see Potthoff: 139). Turgenev's own variant is best expressed in his ‘Hamlet’ versus ‘Don Quixote’ dichotomy.

29. Stender-Petersen also finds that classification and schematization predominate in the works of Gončarov (Stender-Petersen: 228).

30. Whether historically the same mistrust lies at the root of the ambivalence in Western Romanticism remains an open question. We should probably think that in the given period it was more pronouncedly (rather than exclusively) the case in Russia than in Western Europe.

31. Nevertheless, this type of plot can clearly be traced back to the Christian vita and even to pre-Christian ‘metamorphosis’ literature (Apuleius, Ovidius). On the other hand, some, not unimportant, offshoots in twentieth-century Russian prose can be found.

32. As regards the actions of such a character, Lotman notes that they may constitute a transformation of the traditional love-scheme:

    The function of the female personage ‘to be undone’ or ‘to be redeemed’ may be given to ‘the world’, to Russia, while the active personage assumes the masculine emploi—as is the case in Blok's My Russia, my wife … and Pasternak's Life—my sister … seen through the prism of Hamlet's ‘Ophelia—sister—lover’.

    (Lotman 1986: 12)

    Cf.:

    The combination of the image of the robber with the motif of being in love is an exceptionally stable one.

    (Lotman 1979: 34)

    Compare, too, the entanglement of the ‘social’ and the ‘amorous’ plot lines in Turgenev's novels, mentioned above.

33. Information of B. A. Uspenskij, Moscow.

34. Approximately the same definition had already been given in Smirnov 1978: 187, but in Smirnov 1981 I find the wording more felicitous.

List of abbreviations

GPI—Gosudarstvennyj pedagogičeskij institut

GU—Gosudarstvennyj universitet

MAE—Muzej antropologii i ėtnografii

SPR—Slavistic Printings and Reprintings

SSLP—Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics

TZS—Trudy po znakovym sistemam

UP—University Press

UZ—Učenye zapiski

WSA—Wiener slawistischer Almanach

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