The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Like words, things also have their cases. Chernyshevski saw everything in the nominative. Actually, of course, any genuinely new trend is a knight’s move, a change of shadows, a shift that displaces the mirror. A serious man, moderate, respecting education, art and crafts, a man who has accumulated a profusion of values in the sphere of thought—who perhaps has shown a fully progressive discrimination during the period of their accumulation but now has no desire whatsoever for them to be suddenly subjected to a reconsideration—such a man is much more angered by irrational innovation than by the darkness of antiquated ignorance. Thus Chernyshevski, who like the majority of revolutionaries was a complete bourgeois in his artistic and scientific tastes, was enraged by “the squaring of boots” or “the extraction of cubic roots from boot tops.” “All Kazan knew Lobachevski,” he wrote to his sons from Siberia in the seventies, “all Kazan was of the unanimous opinion that the man was a complete fool.… What on earth is ‘the curvature of a ray’ or ‘curved space’? What is ‘geometry without the axiom of parallel lines’? Is it possible to write Russian without verbs? Yes, it is—for a joke. Whispers, timid respiration, trills of nightingale. Written by a certain Fet, a well-known poet in his time. An idiot with few peers. He wrote this seriously, and people laughed at him till their sides ached.” (Fet he detested as he also did Tolstoy; in 1856, while buttering up Turgenev—whom he wanted in The Contemporary—he wrote him “that no ‘Youth’s’ [Tolstoy’s Childhood and Adolescence] nor even Fet’s poetry … can sufficiently vulgarize the public for its not being able to …”—there follows a vulgar compliment.)

  Once in 1855, when expatiating on Pushkin and wishing to give an example of “a senseless combination of words,” he hastily cited a “blue sound” of his own invention—prophetically calling down upon his own head Blok’s “blue-ringing hour” that was to chime half a century later. “A scientific analysis shows the absurdity of such combinations,” he wrote, unaware of the physiological fact of “colored hearing.” “Isn’t it all the same,” he asked (of the reader in Bakhmuchansk or Novomirgorod, who joyfully agreed with him), “whether we have a blue-finned pike or [as in a Derzhavin poem] a pike with a blue fin [of course the second, we would have cried—that way it stands out better, in profile!], for the genuine thinker has no time to worry about such matters, especially if he spends more time in the public square than he does in his study?” The “general outline” is another matter. It was a love of generalities (encyclopedias) and a contemptuous hatred of particularities (monographs) which led him to reproach Darwin for being puerile and Wallace for being inept (“… all these learned specialties, from the study of butterfly wings to the study of Kaffir dialects”). Chernyshevski had on the contrary a dangerously wide range, a kind of reckless and self-confident “anything-will-do” attitude which casts a doubtful shadow over his own specialized work. “The general interest,” however, was given his own interpretation: his premise was that the reader was most of all interested in the “productive” side of things. Reviewing a magazine (in 1855), he praises such items as “The Thermometric Condition of the Earth” and “Russian Coalfields,” while decisively rejecting as too special the only article one would want to read, “The Geographical Distribution of the Camel.”

  Extraordinarily indicative in respect of all this is Chernyshevski’s attempt to prove (The Contemporary for 1856) that the ternary meter (anapaest, dactyl) is more natural to Russian than the binary one (iamb, trochee). The first (except when it is used in the making of the noble, “sacred”—and therefore hateful—dactylic hexameter) seems more natural to Chernyshevski, “more wholesome,” in the way that a bad rider thinks a gallop is “simpler” than trotting. The point, however, was not so much in this as in that “general rule” to which he subjected everything and everyone. Confused by the rhythmic emancipation of Nekrasov’s broad-rolling verse and by Koltsov’s elementary anapaests (“Why asleep, muzhichyók?”) Chernyshevski scented something democratic in the ternary meter, something which charmed the heart, something “free” but also didactic, as opposed to the aristocratic air of the iamb: he believed that poets who wished to convince should use the anapaest. However, this was not all: in Nekrasov’s ternary verse it happens especially often that one-syllable or two-syllable words occur in the unstressed parts of the feet and lose their accentual individuality, while their collective rhythm on the other hand is heightened: the parts are sacrificed to the whole (as for instance in the anapaestic line “Volga, Vólga, in spring overflówing” where the first “Volga” occupies the two depressions of the first foot: Volga Vól). All I have just said is nowhere, of course, examined by Chernyshevski himself, but it is curious that in his own verses, produced by him during the Siberian nights, in that terrible ternary meter whose very shoddiness has a tang of madness about it, Chernyshevski unwittingly parodies Nekrasov’s device and carries it to absurdity by cramming into the depressions two-syllable words normally accented not on the first syllable (as “Volga”) but on the second, and doing it thrice in one line—surely a record: “Remote hills, remote pálms, surprised gírl of the nórth” (verses to his wife, 1875). Let us repeat: all this leaning toward a line created in the image and likeness of definite socio-economic gods was unconscious on Chernyshevski’s part, but it is only by making this tendency clear that one can understand the true background of his strange theory. With all this he had no understanding of the real, violinic essence of the anapaest; neither did he understand the iamb, the most flexible of all measures when it comes to transforming stresses into scuds, into those rhythmical deviations from the meter which according to his memories from the seminary seemed to Chernyshevski unlawful; finally he did not understand the rhythm of Russian prose; it is only natural, therefore, that the very method he applied to prove his theory had its revenge on him: in the passages of prose he quoted he divided the number of syllables by the number of stresses and got the result of three, not the two he would have got, he said, had the binary meter been more becoming to the Russian language; but he did not take into account the main thing: the paeons! For in the very passages he quotes, whole pieces of sentences follow the scudded rhythm of blank verse, the most blue-blooded of all meters; i.e., precisely the iamb!

  I am afraid that the cobbler who visited Apelles’ studio and criticized what he did not understand was a mediocre cobbler. Is all really well from the mathematical point of view in those learned economic works of his, whose analysis demands an almost superhuman curiosity on the part of the investigator? Are they really deep, those commentaries of his on Mill (in which he strove to reconstruct certain theories “in keeping with the new plebeian element in thought and life”)? Do all the boots he made really fit? Or is it merely an old man’s coquetry which prompts him twenty years later to recall complacently the errors in his logarithmic calculations concerning the effect of certain agricultural improvements on the grain harvest? Sad, all of this, very sad. Our overall impression is that materialists of this type fell into a fatal error: neglecting the nature of the thing itself, they kept applying their most materialistic method merely to the relations between objects, to the void between objects and not to the objects themselves; i.e., they were the naïvest of metaphysicians precisely at that point where they most wanted to be standing on the ground.

  Once in his youth there had been an unfortunate morning: he was called on by a book peddler he knew, old, long-nosed Vasiliy Trofimovich, bent like a babajaga beneath the weight of a huge canvas sack full of prohibited and semiprohibited books. Not knowing foreign languages, hardly able to spell out Roman letters and weirdly pronouncing the titles in a thick peasant way, he guessed instinctively the degree of seditiousness of this or that German. That morning he sold Nikolay Gavrilovich (both of them squatting on their haunches beside a pile of books) a still uncut volume of Feuerbach.

  In those days Andrey Ivanovich Feuerbach was preferred to Egor Fyodorovich Hegel. Homo feuerbachi is a cogitating muscle. Andrey Ivanovich found that man differs from th
e ape only in his point of view; he could hardly, however, have studied the apes. A half-century after him Lenin refuted the theory that “the earth is the sum of human sensations” with “the earth existed before man did”; and to his trade announcement: “We now turn Kant’s unknowable ‘thing in itself,’ into a ‘thing for us,’ by means of organic chemistry,” he added quite seriously that “since alizarin has existed in coal without our knowledge, then things must exist independently of our cognition.” Similarly, Chernyshevski explained: “We see a tree; another man looks at the same object. We see by the reflection in his eyes that his image of the tree looks exactly the same as our tree. Thus we all see objects as they really exist.” All this wild rubbish has its own private hilarious twist: the “materialists’ ” constant appeal to trees is especially amusing because they are all so badly acquainted with nature, particularly with trees. That tangible object which according to Chernyshevski “acts much more strongly than the abstract concept of it” (the Anthropological Principle in Philosophy) is simply beyond their ken. Look what a terrible abstraction resulted, in the final analysis, from “materialism”! Chernyshevski did not know the difference between a plow and the wooden soha; he confused beer with Madeira; he was unable to name a single wild flower except the wild rose; and it is characteristic that this deficiency of botanical knowledge was immediately made up by a “generalization” when he maintained with the conviction of an ignoramus that “they [the flowers of the Siberian taiga] are all just the same as those which bloom all over Russia!” There lurks a secret retribution in the fact that he who had constructed his philosophy on a basis of knowing the world was now placed, naked and alone, amidst the bewitched, strangely luxuriant, and still incompletely described nature of northeast Siberia: an elemental, mythological punishment which had not been taken into account by his human judges.

  Only a few years earlier the smell of Gogol’s Petrushka had been explained away by the fact that everything existing was rational. But the time for hearty Russian Hegelianism was now past. The molders of opinion were incapable of understanding Hegel’s vital truth: a truth that was not stagnant, like shallow water, but flowed like blood, through the very process of cognition. The simpleton Feuerbach was much more to Chernyshevski’s taste. There is always a danger, however, that one letter will fall out of the cosmic, and this danger was not evaded by Chernyshevski in his article “Communal Ownership,” when he began to operate with Hegel’s tempting triad, giving such examples as: the gasiformity of the world is the thesis, while the softness of the brain is the synthesis; or, even stupider: a cudgel turning into a carbine. “There lies concealed in the triad,” says Strannolyubski, “a vague image of the circumference controlling all life of the mind, and the mind is confined inescapably within it. This is truth’s merry-go-round, for truth is always round; consequently, in the development of life’s forms a certain pardonable curvature is possible: the hump of truth; but no more.”

  Chernyshevski’s “philosophy” goes back through Feuerbach, to the Encyclopedists. On the other hand, applied Hegelianism, working gradually left, went through that same Feuerbach to join Marx, who in his Holy Family expresses himself thus:

  .… no great intelligence

  Is needed to distinguish a connection

  Between the teaching of materialism

  Regarding inborn tendency to good;

  Equality of man’s capacities—

  Capacities that generally are

  Termed mental; the great influence

  Exterior circumstances have on man;

  Omnipotent experience; sway of habit

  And of upbringing; the extreme importance

  Of industry; the moral right to pleasure,

  And communism.

  I have put it into blank verse so it would be less boring.

  Steklov is of the opinion that with all his genius, Chernyshevski cannot rank with Marx, in relation to whom he stands as the Barnaul craftsman Polzunov stands to Watt. Marx himself (“that petty bourgeois to the marrow of his bones” according to the testimony of Bakunin, who could not stand Germans) referred once or twice to the “remarkable” writings of Chernyshevski, but he left more than one contemptuous note in the margins of the chief work on economics “des grossen russischen Gelehrten” (Marx in general disliked Russians). Chernyshevski repaid him in like coin. Already in the seventies he was treating everything new with negligence, with malevolence. He was particularly fed up with economics, which had ceased to be a weapon for him and by this token took on in his mind the aspect of an empty toy, of “pure science.” Lyatski is quite wrong when—with a passion for navigational analogies common to many—he compares the exiled Chernyshevski to a man “watching from a deserted shore the passage of a gigantic ship (Marx’s ship) on its way to discover new lands”; the expression is especially unfortunate in view of the fact that Chernyshevski himself, as if anticipating the analogy and wishing to refute it in advance, said of Das Kapital (sent to him in 1872): “I glanced through but didn’t read it; I tore off the pages one by one and made them into little ships [my italics], and launched them on the Vilyui.”

  Lenin considered Chernyshevski to be “the one truly great writer who managed to remain on a level of unbroken philosophical materialism from the fifties right up until 1888” (he knocked one year off). Once, on a windy day, Krupskaya turned to Lunacharski and said to him with soft sorrow: “There was hardly anyone Vladimir Ilyich liked so much … I think he had a great deal in common with Chernyshevski.” “Yes, they undoubtedly had much in common,” adds Lunacharski, who had tended at first to treat this remark with skepticism. “They had in common both clarity of style and mobility of speech … breadth and depth of judgement, revolutionary fire … that combination of enormous content with a modest exterior, and finally their joint moral makeup.” Steklov calls Chernyshevski’s article, “The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy,” the “first philosophical manifesto of Russian communism”; it is significant that this first manifesto was a schoolboy’s rendering, an infantile assessment of the most difficult moral questions. “The European theory of materialism,” says Strannolyubski, rephrasing Volynski somewhat, “took on with Chernyshevski a simplified, muddled, and grotesque form. Passing scornful and impertinent judgment on Schopenhauer, under whose critical fingernail his own saltatory thinking would not have survived for a second, he recognized out of all former thinkers, by a strange association of ideas and according to his mistaken memories, only Spinoza and Aristotle, whom he imagined himself to be continuing.”

  Chernyshevski hammered unsound syllogisms together; the moment he had gone the syllogisms collapsed and the nails were left sticking out. In eliminating metaphysical dualism he fell into gnoseological dualism, and having lightheartedly taken matter as the first principle, he got hopelessly lost among concepts presupposing something that creates our perception of the external world itself. The professional philosopher Yurkevich had no trouble at all in pulling him to pieces. Yurkevich kept wondering how does Chernyshevski account for the spatial motion of the nerves being transformed into nonspatial sensation? Instead of replying to the poor professor’s detailed article, Chernyshevski reprinted exactly a third of it in The Contemporary (i.e., as much as was allowed by law) and broke it off in the middle of a word, with no comment. He most definitely did not give a hoot for the opinions of specialists, and he saw no harm in not knowing the details of the subject under examination: details were for him merely the aristocratic element in the nation of our general ideas.

  “His head thinks about the problems of humanity … while his hand carries out unskilled labor,” he wrote of his “socially conscious workman” (and we cannot help recalling those woodcuts in ancient anatomical atlases, where a pleasant-faced youth is depicted nonchalantly leaning against a column and showing the educated world all his viscera). But the political regime that was supposed to appear as the synthesis in the syllogism, where the thesis was the commune, resembled not so much Soviet Russia as the
Utopias of his day. The world of Fourier, the harmony of the twelve passions, the bliss of collective living, the rose-garlanded workmen—all this could not fail to please Chernyshevski, who was always looking for “coherency.” Let us dream of the phalanstery living in a palace: 1,800 souls—and all happy! Music, flags, cakes. The world is run by mathematics and well run at that; the correspondence which Fourier established between our desires and Newton’s gravity was particularly captivating; it defined Chernyshevski’s attitude to Newton for all his life, and it is pleasant to compare the latter’s apple with Fourier’s apple costing the commercial traveler a whole fourteen sous in a Paris restaurant, a fact that led Fourier to ponder the basic disorder of the industrial mechanism, just as Marx was led to acquaint himself with economic problems by the question of the wine-making gnomes (“small peasants”) in the Moselle Valley: a graceful origination of grandiose ideas.

  While defending communal ownership of the land because of its simplifying the organization of associations in Russia, Chernyshevski was prepared to agree to the emancipation of the peasants without land, the ownership of which would have led in the long run to new encumbrances. At this point sparks flash from our pen. The liberation of the serfs! The era of great reforms! No wonder that in a burst of vivid prescience the young Chernyshevski noted in his diary in 1848 (the year somebody dubbed “the vent of the century”): “What if we are indeed living in the times of Cicero and Caesar, when seculorum novus nascitur ordo, and there comes a new Messiah, and a new religion, and a new world? …”