After this … but here again the whole adventure is lost in fog, and what happened afterward is absolutely unknown.
3.
Perfect absurdities do happen in the world. Sometimes there’s not the slightest verisimilitude to it: all at once the very nose which had been driving about the place in the shape of a civil councilor and had made such a stir in the town, turned up again as though nothing had happened, in its proper place, that is, right between the two cheeks of Major Kovalev. This happened on the seventh of April. Waking up and casually glancing into the mirror, he saw—his nose! He puts up his hand—actually his nose! “Aha!” said Kovalev, and in his joy he almost danced a jig barefoot about his room; but the entrance of Ivan stopped him. He ordered Ivan to bring him water at once, and as he washed he glanced once more into the mirror—the nose! As he wiped himself with the towel he glanced into the mirror—the nose!
“Look, Ivan, I think I have a pimple on my nose,” he said, while he thought: “How horrible it will be if Ivan says, ‘No, indeed, sir, there’s no pimple and, indeed, there is no nose either!’”
But Ivan said: “There’s nothing, there’s no pimple: your nose is quite clear!”
“Damn it, that’s wonderful!” the major said to himself, and he snapped his fingers. At that moment Ivan Yakovlevich the barber peeped in at the door, but as timidly as a cat who’s just been beaten for stealing the bacon.
“Tell me first: are your hands clean?” Kovalev shouted to him while he was still some way off.
“Yes.”
“You’re lying!”
“My right hand to God, they’re clean, sir.”
“Well, be careful.”
Kovalev sat down. Ivan Yakovlevich covered him up with a towel, and in one instant with the aid of his brushes had smothered the whole of his beard and part of his cheek in the kind of crème they serve at merchants’ name-day parties. “Would you look at that!” Ivan Yakovlevich said to himself, glancing at the nose and then turning his customer’s head to the other side and looking at it from that angle. “Really makes you wonder.” He went on pondering, and for a long while he gazed at the nose. At last, delicately, with a quite understandable caution, he raised two fingers to take it by the tip. This was Ivan Yakovlevich’s system.
“Now, now, now, careful!” cried Kovalev. Ivan Yakovlevich let his hands drop, and was flustered and confused as he had never been confused before. At last he began gently tickling him with the razor under his beard, and, although it was awkward and not at all easy for him to shave without holding on to the olfactory portion of the face, at last he did somehow, pressing his rough thumb into Kovalev’s cheek and lower jaw, overcome all difficulties, and finish shaving him.
When it was all over, Kovalev dressed hurriedly, hailed a cab, and drove to a cafe. Before he was inside the door he shouted: “Waiter, a cup of chocolate!” and at the same instant peeped at himself in the mirror. The nose was there. He turned around gaily and, with a satirical air, slightly screwing up his eyes, looked at two military men, one of whom had a nose hardly bigger than a vest button. After that he started off for the office of the department in which he was urging his claims to a post as vice-governor or, failing that, the post of an executive clerk. Crossing the reception room he glanced at the mirror; the nose was there. Then he drove to see another collegiate assessor or major, who was very fond of making fun of people, and to whom he often said in reply to various biting observations: “Ah, you! I know you, you’re as sharp as a pin!” On the way he thought: “If the major doesn’t split with laughter when he sees me, then it’s a sure sign that everything is in its place.” But the sarcastic collegiate assessor said nothing. “Good, good, damn it all!” Kovalev thought to himself. On the way he met Podtochina, the officer’s wife, and her daughter; he was profuse in his bows to them and was greeted with exclamations of delight—so there could be nothing wrong with him, he thought. He conversed with them for a long time and, taking out his snuffbox, purposely put a pinch to each nostril while he said to himself: “So much for you, you silly petticoats, you biddies! but I’m not going to marry your daughter anyway. This is only par amour!”
And from that time forth Major Kovalev promenaded about as though nothing had happened, on Nevsky Prospect, and at the theaters, and everywhere. And the nose, too, as though nothing had happened, sat on his face without even a sign of coming off at the sides. And after this Major Kovalev was always seen in a good humor, smiling, resolutely pursuing all the pretty ladies, and even on one occasion stopping before a shop in Gostiny Court and buying the ribbon of some order, I cannot say for what purpose, since he was not himself a cavalier of any order.
And this kind of thing took place in the northern capital of our vast land! Only now, taking everything under consideration, we can see that much of it is implausible. Saying nothing of the fact that the supernatural separation of the nose and its appearance in various locales in the guise of a state councilor is truly odd,—how was it that Kovalev failed to realize one can’t advertise for a nose in the newspaper? I don’t mean to say here that I feel an announcement is too expensive: that’s nonsense, and I’m not the mercenary sort. But it’s inappropriate, clumsy, bad form! And then again—how did the nose end up in a fresh-baked roll, and how did Ivan Yakovlevich himself? … that I can in no way understand, I positively cannot. But what’s stranger and more incomprehensible than anything else is how authors can choose such subjects. I concede that it’s absolutely incomprehensible, it’s truly … no, no, I absolutely don’t understand. In the first place it’s decidedly no use whatever to the fatherland; in the second place … but in the second place there’s no use either. I simply don’t know what to make of it …
But all the same, taking everything into account, although, of course, one might assume both one thing and another, and even another, perhaps even … well and then where don’t absurdities occur? But still and all the same, when you stop and think, there’s something to all this. No matter what anyone says, such things do happen in the world: rarely, but they do happen.
(1835-6) Translated by A.L. and M.T.K.
Section B
Early-modern Utopias and Dostoevsky’s responses to Utopian Thought
AN ALTERNATIVE TO individual escape from present-day realities was found in Russian utopian visions with their genesis in the epoch of Enlightenment. The period’s rationalist definition of Man was appropriated by social theorists, who began to chart a new destiny for Russia in the Masonic lodges in St. Petersburg and Moscow, out of which most of Russia’s early-modern literary discourse grew. For instance, Lomonosov’s literary rival and a Mason, A. P. Sumarokov, who began his first Epistle on Poetry in 1747, by postulating that “Man has an advantage over cattle, because he can reason better,” published his first utopian Russian work, The Happy Society: A Dream (Son: Schastlivoe obshchestvo) in his journal The Industrious Bee (Trudoliubivaia pchela) as early as 1759.
In the century and a half that followed the publication of this early utopian document a number of works envisioning societies made happy by reason were published in Russia, but they were more often than not of questionable literary merit. The notable exceptions are curious in that nearly all of them—despite their embrace of western rationalism as a precondition to technological progress—generally exhibit an animus towards western social constructs. Most portray the future world as desirable only if controlled by Russia. Sumarokov’s younger Mason-compatriot, M. M. Kheraskov (1733-1807), gives us a Cadmus (in one of his three Masonic allegorical novels, Cadmus and Harmonia, 1789) who forgets about any further search for his sister Europa once he reaches the promised land of the Slavs. F. V. Bulgarin (1789-1859), generally regarded as a true progenitor of modern Russian sci-fi with his triad of utopias Plausible Fantasies, or Travels around the World in the 29th Century (Pravdopodobnye nebylitsy, ili stranstvovania po svetu v 29-m veke, 1824), Incredible Implausibles, or a Journey to the Center of the Earth (Neveroiatnye nebylitsy, ili Puteshestvie k sredotochi
iu zemli), and A Scene from a Private Life in 2028 (Stsena iz chastnoi zhizni v 2028-m godu, 1828), envisions a credibly different technological future, but one in which the social order is a replica of the Russian society of his own day. To convey the flavor of this early utopian patriotism we offer an abridged sampling of Bulgarin’s work without much additional commentary, as its predictions of technological advances speak for themselves.
Indeed, exhaustive commentary on individual works will no longer be possible for the rest of the volume which is subdivided into sections highlighting a particular theme or school, and each writer will be introduced within the confines of the section’s preface. Yet, a longer aside must be devoted to another work from this period, titled The Year 4338. Letters from Petersburg (4338–j god. Peterburgskija pis’ma).1 Its author, prince V. F. Odoevsky (1803-69), was arguably as important a personage in the nineteenth century as Lomonosov had been in the eighteenth. On the surface, it might be hard to imagine what prompted this sober-minded writer and literary critic (who was also a foremost musicologist, inventor, collector of archival materials, and walking encyclopedia) to turn to the subject of utopia in the work The Year 4338. But from another point of view it is perhaps not so strange. As one of the principal founders of the society Lovers of Wisdom, Odoevsky was interested in the creation of a national school of philosophy which would allow Russia to objectify its cultural heritage and project Russia’s destiny as a civilization uniquely equipped to surpass all European accomplishments.2 In this sense, Odoevsky’s work functions as an extended polemic with P. Ia. Chaadaev’s famous denunciations of the Russian cultural heritage (published, also in letter format, in the mid-1830s)3 and as a reflex on Lomonosov’s struggle a century earlier to open the professorial ranks at the Russian Academy to native Russians. In a fictional fulfillment of Lomonosov’s dreams, Odoevsky promises Russia a glorious future, governed solely by Russian scientists and philosophers, a future—in refutation of Chaadaev’s claims—based on the innate Russian character which he depicts as cultured, pleasant and hospitable.4
Some of these visions may provoke a condescending smile from the modern reader, but others are quite interesting. Among the latter are predictions for the future use of air transportation as essentially the sole means of travel, buildings transparent when viewed from the skies, telegraph and general communication accomplished solely by means of electricity, a huge water-pump system that relieves Petersburg from the danger of floods, artificial lighting for greenhouses, exclusive use of plastics in clothing with electrical ornaments, artificial scents for freshening rooms, and a magnetic memory system—perhaps an early imaginative conception of a computer—centralized in a huge, multi-story building of the Academy with cables leading to all the reaches of the civilized hemisphere. Based on the approbative nature of these visions some Soviet scholars have argued that The Year 4338 is an allusion to G. F. W. Hegel’s three-phase dialectic of cultural history, was planned as part of a trilogy concerned with alternate visions of Russia in the past (Petrine Russia), the present (Odoevsky’s Russia), and the future, in the last phase according of which, two formerly antagonistic societies, those of Moscow and Petersburg respectively, were to merge into one metropolis and thus form a Hegelian “synthesis.” In this way, Russia was to represent the only civilization capable of synthesizing the desirable attributes of the native Muscovy character with the best Western features of Petersburg.5
But Hegel’s notion of human history unfolding independent of divine will—a vision central to the ideology which ultimately fueled the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917—was at odds with Odoevsky’s. In this connection it is thus significant to emphasize that the title date projects the destruction of Russia (along with the rest of the world) due to a collision with a comet predicted to occur 2,500 years from l838.6 It is also noteworthy that any elucidation of Russia’s technological response to this coming event is poignantly absent. Instead, the work exists in the form of a fragment, in which the promise of Russia’s golden future and the threat of its demise from the comet were left in a delicate balance. In order to comprehend such an equivocal ending, one must understand that Odoevsky never understood history in Hegelian terms, but rather in terms of the brothers Schlegel and F. W. J. von Schelling. If Odoevsky planned his trilogy with reference to Hegel’s dialectics, he must have proceeded on an assumption which would reject rather than confirm Hegel’s theory, as he does in his seminal work, The Russian Nights (Russkie nochi), first published four years later.7 This novel reasserts the Schellingean view of philosophy as a poetic form of cognition; in it any true meaning would be revealed through the “inner feelings”8 of the select few younger philosopher-poets, destined to lead Russia to an ultimate union with the Absolute—God. The Year 4338 seems to be modeled along similar assumptions and offers two possibilities for the future of Russia: it may elect to develop on a path predicated by Hegelian concepts of human “progress” and thus ascend to world supremacy through the ever-present dialectic of History. However desirable such a path might appear, it is doomed in a relativist universe to a nonrelative physical collision and to destruction by Halley’s Comet. However, if Russia were to strive for an absolute, nonrelative knowledge of itself, it would become a non-materialist society on a path leading Man to the absolute union of Spirit and Matter. Seeking the ultimate unity with the Absolute on Schelling’s terms, Russia could then perhaps transform the comet into an anagogic harbinger of the union with God. Just such a thing happens in another fragment devoted to a collision with a comet, written by Odoevsky some years prior to 4338. In the story, Two days in the Life of Earth (“Dva dni v zhizni zemnogo shara”),9 Earth inexplicably avoids the physical impact of the comet at the last moment only to be drawn, just as oddly, into a union with the “non-burning” Sun the very next day. The survival of Earth is predicted within the narrative by an old sage, no doubt representing Schelling’s (and Odoevsky’s) concept of the philosopher-poet, whose inner feeling (vnutrennee chuvstvo) dictates such an outcome, while his very own son and the rest of the people are overwhelmed by the frenzy of an impending catastrophe.10
Now, admittedly, this is a very Romantic and certainly a non-empirical solution to the problem of a comet impacting the Earth. But since the idea of dealing with such cosmic impact is gaining greater currency in these days, Odoevsky’s alertness to the issue might be said to be prescient in and of itself. Parenthetically it must be said that despite the fact that literally thousands of asteroids and comets are mapped and closely tracked by modern-day astronomers in hopes that such an impact might be predicted in time and somehow averted—and despite a most impressive display of multiple imagined advances in technology which could possibly prevent such a collision (rockets, A-bombs, laser or particle beams) with an oncoming “chunk” of inter-planetary matter—nearly all late 20th-century movies and fiction on the theme represent mankind facing such a scenario in terms no less Romantic than Odoevsky’s. Nearly all their plots show mankind utopically united in the face of such danger and led by either an extraordinary scientist, president, secret agent, pilot, computer wizard, etc., or any combination of these. All mankind thus entrusts its fate to a select few agents of the materialistic universe just as Odoevsky does with his philosopher-poets in 4338. But somehow such modern scenarios are hardly more reassuring to those who remember mankind’s non-poet leaders’ casual use of technology in wiping out human lives on an incredible scale in the past century. Nor is the response of humanity—which is now aware that a meteorite collision likely caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and countless other species—more united or constructive at present than in Odoevsky’s story.
Be that as it may, Odoevsky’s implicit rejection of neo-Hegelian philosophy as the sole guiding principle for attaining a glorious future was one of the first notes of caution to sound in nineteenth-century Russia. It is then ironic that the future-fictions of both Odoevsky and Bulgarin (whose writings are alluded to by Odoevsky in 4338) were mainly remembered by those interested in t
he varied possibilities that technological advances might bring to the future. Indeed, a rich catalogue of such predictions—predating Jules Verne’s by decades—can be compiled from their writings, and excerpts from them are chosen for this reason for this anthology. It must be reasserted, however, that neither author posited his visions of an improved world solely in materialistic terms.
Utopian constructs based on notions of natural advantage began to appear only after the 1850s and the import of neo-Hegelian, Marxist views: in these the belief in the betterment of mankind rested on satisfying material needs. Chernyshevsky’s novel, mentioned earlier, was the most influential example. From it we offer in this section “Vera Pavlovna’s Fourth Dream,” perhaps the most influential passage in this extremely popular and influential work. Our brevity cannot do the justice to the power that this work as a whole exercised on the imagination of the Russian intelligentsia. What is to be Done was one of the principal texts used to justify the Russian Revolution. Some of the novel’s idealism carried into early post-revolutionary thinking: there was to be an Edenic society in which the Lion and the Lamb would lie together in the tranquility of social justice and in a world with no further need of a divine presence.
Dostoevsky found such blatantly idealistic designs for the future of human society annoyingly delusional, as already discussed with particular regard to the Notes from Underground. The latter is an early example of Dostoevsky’s well-known mastery of the novel. In contrast, we offer here three examples of Dostoevsky’s prowess as a writer of short stories. All come from the Diary of the Writer, (Dnevnik Pisatelia) which appeared in a serialized form between 1873-1881, but was difficult to obtain in Russia in its entirety for nearly a century.11 The Diary contains elements crucial to our understanding of Dostoevsky’s philosophy and his reactions to the cityscape human culture which Peter had compelled Russia to embrace as a utopian dream, calling it a paradise. In the earliest of our three stories Dostoevsky transports us into the final underground—the netherworld of the city cemetery. This work might easily be renamed Dialogues of the Dead, as it indeed is Dostoevsky’s shrewd and incredibly acidic variation on this ancient theme. The city’s literal underground and its attendant real, non-philosophical suffering are also richly evoked in another masterpiece from The Diary, The Little Boy and the Savior’s Christmas Tree (Mal’chik u Khrista na Elke). They, and our third selection, Dream of A Ridiculous Man (Son Smeshnogo Cheloveka) were chosen as superb examples of the author’s continuing experimentation with the fantastic realm, which began with The Double (1846), one of Dostoevsky’s earliest published works. In it the protagonist clearly suffers from morbid delusions, but Dostoevsky’s narrative forces the reader to guess where reality ends and madness begins. Similarly, but in a much more intense fashion, in both Bobok and The Boy the narrative “reality” transgresses the boundaries between the living and the dead. Teetering on the same boundary is the protagonist of the Dream of A Ridiculous Man, whose persona provides a shrewd commentary on the impossibility of materialistic utopian dreams as advocated in Chernyshevsky’s work. Embracing such tangible yet fragile concepts as the value of individual freedom and dignity, Dostoevsky’s fiction as a whole negates Petersburg as a setting in which humanity can flourish.
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