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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature
The torrent of "irrelevant" details (such as the bland assumption that "full-grown young pigs" commonly occur in private houses) produces such a hypnotic effect that one almost fails to realize one simple thing (and that is the beauty of the final stroke). A piece of most important information, the main structural idea of the story is here deliberately masked by Gogol (because all reality is a mask). The man taken for Akaki Akakievich's cloakless ghost is actually the man who stole his cloak.
But Akaki Akakievich's ghost existed solely on the strength of his lacking a cloak, whereas now the policeman, lapsing into the queerest paradox of the story, mistakes for this ghost just the very person who was its antithesis, the man who had stolen the cloak. Thus the story describes a full circle : a vicious circle as all circles are, despite their posing as apples, or planets, or human faces.
So to sum up: the story goes this way: mumble, mumble,
lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave, mumble, lyrical wave,
mumble, fantastic climax, mumble, mumble, and back into
the chaos from which they all had derived. At this
superhigh level of art, literature is of course not concerned
with pitying the underdog or cursing the upperdog. It
appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the
shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless
and soundless ships.
As one or two patient readers may have gathered by now,
this is really the only appeal that interests me. My purpose
in jotting these notes on Gogol has, I hope, become
perfectly clear. Bluntly speaking it amounts to the
following; if you expect to find out something about
Russia, if you are eager to/know why the blistered Germans
bungled their blitz, if you are interested in "ideas" and
"facts" and "messages," keep away from Gogol. The awful
trouble of learning Russian in order to read him will not be
repaid in your kind of hard cash. Keep away, keep away. He
has nothing to tell you. Keep off the tracks. High tension.
Closed for the duration. Avoid, refrain, don't. I would like to
have here a full list of all possible interdictions, vetoes and
threats. Hardly necessary of course—as the wrong sort of
The opening page of Nabokov's Turgenev notebook.
reader will certainly never get as far as this. But I do
welcome the right sort—my brothers, my doubles. My
brother is playing the organ. My sister is reading. She is my
aunt. You will first learn the alphabet, the labials, the Unguals, the dentals, the letters that buzz, the drone and the bumblebee, and the Tse-tse Fly. One of the vowels will make you say "Ugh!" You will feel mentally stiff and bruised after your first declension of personal pronouns. I see however no other way of getting to Gogol (or to any other Russian writer for that matter). His work, as all great literary achievements, is a phenomenon of language and not one of ideas. "Gaw-gol,"
not "Go-gall." The final "1" is a soft dissolving "1" which does not exist in English. One cannot hope to understand an author if one cannot even pronounce his name. My translations of various passages are the best my poor vocabulary could afford, but even had they been as perfect as those which I hear with my innermost ear, without being able to render their intonation, they still would not replace Gogol. While trying to convey my attitude towards his art I have not produced any tangible proofs of its peculiar existence. I can only place my hand on my heart and affirm that I have not imagined Gogol.
He really wrote, he really lived.
Gogol was born on the 1st of April, 1809. According to his mother (who, of course, made up the following dismal anecdote) a poem he had written at the age of five was seen by Kapnist, a well-known writer of sorts. Kapnist embraced the solemn urchin and said to the glad parents: "He will become a writer of genius if only destiny gives him a good Christian for teacher and guide. " But the other thing—his having been born on the 1st of April—is true.
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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature
IVAN TURGENEV (1818-1883)
Ivan Sergeievich Turgenev was born in 1818 in Orel, Central Russia,
in the family of a wealthy squire. His early youth was spent on a country estate where he was able to observe the life of the serfs and the relations between master and serf at their worst: his mother was possessed of a tyrannical nature and led her peasants and also her immediate family a miserable life. Though she adored her son, she persecuted him and had him flogged for the least childish disobedience or misdemeanor. In later life, when Turgenev tried to intercede for the serfs, she cut his allowance, obliging him to live in misery in spite of the rich inheritance that awaited him. Turgenev never forgot the painful impressions of his childhood. After his mother's death he did much to improve the peasants' circumstances, freed all his domestic servants, and went out of his way to cooperate with the government when the peasants were emancipated in 1861.
Turgenev's early education was patchy. Among his numerous tutors, indiscriminately engaged by his mother, there were all sorts of odd people, including at least one professional saddler. One year at the Moscow University and three at the Petersburg University, whence he was graduated in 1837, did not give him a feeling of having obtained a well-balanced education, and from 1838 to 1841 he attended the university in Berlin, filling out its gaps. During his life in Berlin he became intimate with a group of young Russians similarly engaged, who later formed the nucleus of a Russian philosophic movement highly colored by Hegelianism, the German "idealist" philosophy.
In his early youth Turgenev produced some half-baked poems mostly imitative of Mikhail Lermontov. Only in 1847, when he turned to prose and published a short story, the first of his series of A Sportsman's Sketches, did he come into his own as a writer. The story produced a tremendous impression and when later together with a number of others it was published as a volume, the impression only grew stronger. Turgenev's plastic musical flowing prose was but one of the reasons that brought him immediate fame, for at least as much interest was contributed by the special subject of these stories. They were all written about serfs and not only present a detailed psychological study, but go even further to idealize these serfs as superior in their human quality to their heartless masters.
From these stories some purple patches:
"Fedya, not without pleasure, lifted the forcedly smiling dog up into the air and placed it into the bottom of the cart."
("Khor' and Kalinych")
"... a dog, all his body a-quiver, his eyes half-closed, was gnawing a bone on the lawn." ("My Neighbor Radilov")
"Vyacheslav Illarionovich is a tremendous admirer of the gentle sex, and as soon as he sees a pretty little person on the boulevard of his country-town, he there and then starts to follow her, but —and this is the peculiar point—he at once begins to limp." ("Two Country Squires")
At sunset on a country-road:
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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature
"Masha (the hero's gypsy mistress who left him) stopped and turned her face to him. She stood with her back to the light —
and thus appeared to be of a dusky black all over, as if carved in dark wood. The whites of her eyes alone stood out like silver almonds, whereas the iris had grown still darker." ("Chertopkhanov's End")
"Evening had come, the sun had hid behind a small aspen grove ... its shadow spread endlessly across the still fields. A peasant could be seen riding at a trot on white horse along a dark narrow path skirting that distant grove; he could be seen quite clearly, every detail of him, even the patch on his shoulder—although he was moving in the shade; the legs of his horse flickered with a kind of pleasing distinctness. The setting sun flushed the trunks of the aspen-tree
s with such a warm glow that they seemed the color of pine-trunks." {Fathers and Sons)
These are Turgenev at his very best. It is these- mellow colored little paintings—rather watercolors than the Flemish glory of Gogol's art gallery—inserted here and there into his prose, that we still admire to-day. These plums are especially numerous in A Sportsman's Sketches.
Turgenev's presentation in the Sketches of his gallery of idealistic and touchingly human serfs stressed the obvious odiousness of serfdom, an emphasis that irritated many influential people. The censor who had passed the manuscript was retired and the government seized the first opportunity to punish the author. After Gogol's death Turgenev wrote a short article which was suppressed by the Petersburg censorship; but when he sent it to Moscow the censor passed it and it was published. Turgenev was put in prison for a month for insubordination and then was exiled to his estate where he remained for more than two years. Upon his return he published his first novel Rudin, followed by A Nest of Gentlefolk and On the Eve.
Rudin, written in 1855, depicts the generation of the 1840s, the idealistic idealistic Russian intelligentsia bred in German universities.
There is some very good writing in Rudin, such as ". . . many an old lime-tree-alley, gold-dark and sweet-smelling, with a glimpse of emerald light at its end," where we have Turgenev's favorite vista. Rudin's sudden appearance in Lasunski's house is fairly well done, based as it is on Turgenev's pet method of having a convenient fight at a party or dinner between the cool, bland, clever hero and some quick-tempered vulgarian or pretentious fool. We may note the following typical sample of the whims and ways of Turgenev's characters : "Meanwhile Rudin went up to Natalia. She rose, her face expressed confusion. Volyntsev, who was sitting next to her, rose too. '—Ah, I see a pianoforte,'—Rudin began softly and caressingly, as if he were a travelling prince.' " Then somebody else plays Schubert's Erlkonig. " '—This music and this night'
[a starry summer night which "seemed to nestle and to let one's soul nestle too"—a great exponent of the "music and night" theme was Turgenev], said Rudin,—'reminds me of my student years in Germany.' " He is asked how students dress.
"—Well, at Heidelberg I used to wear riding boots with spurs and a Hungarian jacket with braidings; I had let my hair grow, so that it almost reached down to my shoulders." Rudin is a rather pompous young man.
Russia in those days was one huge dream: the masses slept—figuratively ; the intellectuals spent sleepless nights—
literally—sitting up and talking about things, or just meditating until five in the morning and then going out for a walk.
There was a lot of the flinging-oneself-down-on-one's-bed-without-undressing-and-sinking-into-a-heavy-slumber stuff, or jumping into one's clothes. Turgenev's maidens are generally good get-uppers, jumping into their crinolines, sprinkling their faces with cold water, and running out, as fresh as roses, into the garden, where the inevitable meeting takes place in a bower.
Before going to Germany, Rudin had been a student at Moscow University. A friend of his thus tells us of their youth: "Half-a-dozen youths, a single tallow candle burning . . . the cheapest brand of tea, dry old biscuits . . . but our eyes glow, our cheeks are flushed, our hearts beat . . . and the subjects of our talk are God, Truth, the Future of Mankind, Poetry—we talk nonsense sometimes, but what is the harm?"
As a character, Rudin, the progressive idealist of the 1840s, can be summed up by Hamlet's answer "words, words, words."
He is quite ineffectual in spite of his being wholly wrapped up in progressive ideas. His whole energy spends itself in 46
Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature
passionate streams of idealistic babble. A cold heart and a hot head. An enthusiast lacking in staying power, a busybody incapable of action. When the girl who loves him, and whom, he thinks, he loves too, tells him there is no hope of her mother consenting to their marriage, he at once gives her up, although she was ready to follow him anywhere. He departs and roams all over Russia; all his enterprises fizzle out. But the bad luck that haunts him and which at the outset was the inability to express the energy of his brain otherwise than by a flow of eloquent words finally shapes him, hardens the outline of his personality, and leads him to a useless but heroic death on the barricades of 1848 in remote Paris.
In A Nest of Gentlefolk (1858) Turgenev glorified all that was noble in the orthodox ideals of the old gentry. Liza, the heroine of this novel, is the most consummate incarnation of the pure and proud "Turgenev maiden."
On the Eve (1860) is the story of another Turgenev girl, Elena, who leaves her family and country in order to follow her lover Insarov, a Bulgarian hero whose sole object in life is the emancipation of his country (then under Turkish domination).
Elena prefers Insarov, who is a man of action, to the ineffectual young men who surround her in her Russian youth. Insarov dies of consumption and Elena continues bravely in his path.
On the Eve, in spite of its good intentions, is artistically the least successful of Turgenev's novels. Nevertheless, it was the most popular one. Elena, though a female character, was the type of heroic personality that society wanted: a person ready to sacrifice everything to love and duty, bravely surmounting every difficulty fate put in her path, faithful to the ideal of freedom—emancipation of the oppressed, freedom of the woman to choose her way in life, freedom of love.
After showing the moral defeat of the idealists of the 1840s, after making his only male active hero a Bulgarian, Turgenev was reproached for not having created a single positive active type of a Russian male. This he tried to do in Fathers and Sons (1862). In it Turgenev pictures the moral conflict between the good-meaning, ineffectual and weak people of the 1840s and the new strong revolutionary generation of the "nihilistic" youth. Bazarov, the representative of this younger generation, is aggressively materialistic; for him exists neither religion nor any esthetic or moral values. He believes in nothing but
"frogs," meaning nothing but the results of his own practical scientific experience. He knows neither pity nor shame. And he is, par excellence, the active man. Though Turgenev rather admired Bazarov, the radicals whom he thought he was flattering in the face of this strong active young man were indignant at the portrait and saw in Bazarov only a caricature drawn to please their opponents. Turgenev, it was declared, was a finished man who had expended all his talent. Turgenev was dumbfounded. From the darling of the progressive society he suddenly saw himself transformed into a sort of detestable bogey. Turgenev was a very vain man; not only fame, but the outward marks of fame, meant a lot to him. He was deeply offended and disappointed. He was abroad at the time and remained abroad for the rest of his life, making but rare short visits to Russia.
His next piece of writing was a fragment, "Enough," in which he declared his decision to give up literature. In spite of this he wrote two more novels and continued writing to the end of his life. Of these last two novels, inSmoke he expressed his bitterness against all classes of Russian society, and in Virgin Soil (Nov') he tried to show different types of Russians confronted with the social movement of their time (the 1870s). On one hand we have the revolutionaries trying hard to get in touch with the people: (1) The Hamlet-like hesitations of the hero of the novel, Nezhdanov, cultured, refined, with a secret yearning for poetry and romance, but devoid of all sense of humor, like most of Turgenev's positive types —
moreover, weak and hampered in everything by a morbid sense of inferiority and his own uselessness; (2) Marianna, the pure, true, austerely-naive girl, ready to die there and then for the "cause"; (3) Solomin, the strong silent man; (4) Markelov, the honest blockhead. On the other side we find the sham liberals and frank reactionaries, such as Sipyagin and Kallomeytsev. It is a very tame affair, this novel, with the author's fine talent struggling, and just failing, to keep alive the characters and the plot he had selected not so much because his art urged him, but rather because he was eager to air his own views upon the political problems
of his day.
Incidentally, Turgenev, as most writers of his time, is far too explicit, leaving nothing to the reader's intuition; suggesting and then ponderously explaining what the suggestion was. The labored epilogues of his novels and long short stories are painfully artificial, the author doing his best to satisfy fully the reader's curiosity regarding the respective destinies of the characters in a manner that can hardly be called artistic.
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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature
He is not a great writer, though a pleasant one. He never achieved anything comparable to Madame Bovary, and to say that he and Flaubert belonged to the same literary school is a complete misconception. Neither Turgenev's readiness to tackle any social problem that happened to be a là mode, nor the banal handling of plots (always taking the easiest way) can be likened to Flaubert's severe art.
Turgenev, Gorki, and Chekhov are particularly well known outside of Russia. But there is no natural way of linking them.
However, it may be noticed perhaps that the worst of Turgenev was thoroughly expressed in Gorki's works, and Turgenev's best (in the way of Russian landscape) was beautifully developed by Chekhov.
Besides A Sportsman's Sketches and the novels, Turgenev wrote numerous short stories and long short stories or nouvelles.
The early ones are devoid of any special originality or literary quality; some of the later are quite remarkable. Among the latter "A Quiet Backwater" and "First Love" deserve particular mention.
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