Through the Russian Prism Through the Russian Prism ESSAYS ON LITERATURE AND CULTURE Joseph Frank PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY Copyright © 1990 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Oxford All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Frank, Joseph, 1918- Through the Russian prism : essays on literature and culture / Joseph Frank. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-691-06821-6 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-691-01456-6 (pbk.) 1. Russian literature — 19th century — History and criticism. 2. Russian literature — 20th century — History and criticism. 3. Soviet Union — Intellectual life — 1801-1917. 4. Soviet Union — Intellectual life — 1917- I. Tide. PG3012.F7 1990 89-33185 891.709 — dc20 CIP This book has been composed in Linotron Galliard Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Paperbacks, although satisfactory for personal collections, are not usually suitable for library rebinding Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following periodicals for granting permission to reprint articles that were first published in their pages: “ Dostoevsky ’ s Realism ” was first published in Encounter* March 1973, pp. 31-38. “ The Birth of Russian Socialism ” first appeared in Partisan Review 29, no. 2 (1962). “ Deadly Idealist, ” first appeared in the New Republic* February 21, 1983. Reprinted with permission of The New Republic, © 1983, The New Republic, Inc. “ Fathers and Sons ” and “ From Gogol to the Gulag Archipelago ” first appeared in the Sewanee Review 73 (fall 1965) and 84 (spring 1976). Copyright 1965 and 1976 by the University of the South. Reprinted by permission of the editor. “ Ralph Ellison and Dostoevsky ” and “ Alexander Herzen ” first appeared in the New Criterion* September 1983 and September 1985. Reprinted by permission of the editor. “ N. G. Chernyshevsky: A Russian Utopia, ” first appeared in the Southern Review* January 1967. “ Roman Jakobson: The Master Linguist ” and “ Voices of Mikhail Bakhtin ” are reprinted with permission of the New York Review of Books. Copyright © 1984-86 Nyrev, Inc. “ Freud ’ s Case History of Dostoevsky, ” “ Dostoevsky and the European Romantics, ” “ The Search for a Positive Hero, ” and “ The Road to Revolution ” first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement* July 18, 1975; February 20, 1976; September 17, 1976; November 13, 1981, and are reprinted with permission of the editor. “ Russian Populism ” first appeared in the Slavic Review* December 1961, and is reprinted with permission of the editor. “ A Word on Leskov ” is reprinted from the American Scholar 48, no. 1 (Winter 1978 — 79), with permission of the editor. THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO PAULETTE For her ninetieth birthday. Contents Preface xi P art O ne : Contemporaries C hapter O ne Roman Jakobson: The Master Linguist 3 C hapter Two The Voices of Mikhail Bakhtin 18 C hapter T hree Ralph Ellison and Dostoevsky 34 C hapter F our The Lectures of Professor Pnin 49 P art Two: Overviews C hapter F ive Russian Thought: The Road to Revolution 57 C hapter S ix The Search for a Positive Hero 75 C hapter S even Russian Populism 83 C hapter E ight From Gogol to the Gulag 89 P art T hree : Dostoevsky C hapter N ine Freud ’ s Case History of Dostoevsky 109 C hapter T en The Background of Crime and Punishment 122 C hapter E leven The Devils and the Nechaev Affair 137 C hapter T welve Approaches to the Diary of a Writer 153 x ■ Contents C hapter T hirteen Dostoevsky: Updated and Historical 170 C hapter F ourteen Dostoevsky and the European Romantics 179 P art F our : The Dilemmas of Radicalism C hapter F ifteen Nikolay Chernyshevsky: A Russian Utopia 187 C hapter S ixteen Sons against Fathers 201 C hapter S eventeen Deadly Idealist: Mikhail Bakunin 209 C hapter E ighteen Alexander Herzen: Who Is to Blame? 213 C hapter N ineteen The Birth of “ Russian Socialism ” 219 C hapter T wenty A Word on Leskov 225 Index 229 Preface T he essays and reviews collected here are all concerned with the problems of Russian culture, literature, and history, and are the offshoots of my work on Dostoevsky. A number of them deal direcdy with Dostoevsky ’ s own writings, or with opinions about him; others discuss the manner in which his presence, and the issues raised by his work, continue to remain central to the Russian literature of the present and the recent past; still others are inspired by a general fascination with the Russian cultural his tory that has played so decisive a role in shaping our modem world. This is the double sense of my title, Through the Russian Prism. which is meant to stress not only the fateful influence of Western ideas in Russia — an influ ence with which Dostoevsky was so memorably concerned — but also the equally fateful, if less recognized, way in which such ideas, in their Russian metamorphosis, have returned to affect their original progenitors. The chapters are printed largely as originally written, though I have done some editing to bring them up to date and added new material here and there to turn a limited review into a more substantial consideration of the subject. The present volume became more than an idea when Walter H. Lippin cott told me that he would be happy to add such a collection to the Prince ton list. This provided the stimulus for me to set to work in earnest, and I am very grateful for his energizing remark. My friends and colleagues in the Stanford Slavic Department — Edward J. Brown, Gregory Freidin, La zar Fleishman, William Mills Todd Ш (now at Harvard), Richard J. Schupbach — have also provided important intellectual support and per sonal encouragement. It has been a privilege to be able to work in their midst. To these names I should add Victoria Bonnell (Mrs. Gregory Frei din), who in her capacity as a historian of Russia vigorously urged, during a memorable (for me) walk at Sea Ranch, that I collect my incidental pieces on Russian topics. The funds for research of Stanford University helped to defray the ex penses of preparing the manuscript, and Karen Rezendes typed a good part of it with efficient good humor. The reader of the manuscript, Hugh McLean, placed me in his debt both for his appreciation and by the many helpful suggestions he made for the improvement of the text. My copy editor, Lois Krieger, worked very hard to unscramble the tangle of spell ings and transliterations caused by first publication in differing periodicals, and in general to rectify my unscholarly habits. My warmest thanks to them for their aid. xii • Preface And most thanks of all, finally and once again, to my wife Marguerite, whose untiring insistence over the years that I take the trouble to bring together my scattered writings furnished the initial and sustaining impulse for thinking about what became this collection. Joseph Frank Stanford, California, July 1989 “ Please note, gentlemen, that all those high European teachers, our light and our hope — all those Mills, Darwins and Strausses — sometimes consider the moral obligations of modern man in a most astonishing manner. You will start laughing and you will ask: why did it occur to you to start talking precisely about those names? — For the reason that it is even difficult to conceive — speaking of our intelligent, enthusiastic and studious youth — that these names, for instance, would escape them during the initial stages of their lives. Is it possible to conceive that a Russian youth would remain indifferent to the influence of these and similar leaders of European progressive thought, especially to the Russian aspect of their doctrines? — this is a funny expression: ‘ Russian aspect of their doctrines ’ ; let people excuse it; I am using it solely because this Russian aspect does actually exist in those doctrines. It consists of those inferences from these doctrines which, in the form of unshakable axioms, are drawn only in Russia, whereas in Europe, it is said, the possibility of such deductions is not even being suspected. ” F. M. Dostoevsky, Diary of a Writer (1873) PART ONE Contemporaries CHAPTER ONE Roman Jakobson: The Master Linguist No scholar of modem times has done more to revitalize the study of what has come to be called “ the human sciences ” — and particularly the science of language — than Roman Jakobson; and it is good to have this summary of his career {Dialogues^ 1983) in the form of question-and-an- swèr sessions with his former student and then wife, Krystyna Pomorska. The sessions took place in 1980, two years before Jakobson ’ s death. First published in French, the dialogues are now made available in English — the language in which Jakobson wrote most of his works after coming to the United States in 1941. 1 1 Roman Jakobson and Krystyna Pomorska, Dialogues (Cambridge, Mass., 1983). 2 Tzvetan Todorov, “ L ’ Heritage formaliste, ” in Robert Georgin et al., Jakobson^ Cahiers cistre no. 5 (Lausanne, 1978), 51. 3 Georges Charbonnier, Entretiens avec Claude Lévi-Strauss (1961; reprinted, Paris, 1969); Raymond Aron, Le Spectateur éngagé: Entretiens avec Jean-Louis Missika et Dominique Wolton (Paris, 1981). Jakobson of course was a formidable polyglot, who published first in his native Russian and could shift easily into French, German, and Czech, among other languages, as the occasion required. Tzvetan Todorov, who first heard him lecture in Bulgarian, and then came to know him well, has estimated that he could command about twenty languages — all of the Slavic group, all of the Romance group, and most of the Germanic family. 1 2 Indeed, his writings are so scattered, exist in so many languages, and cover so many discipines that the condensed overview of his activity offered by Dialogues is more than welcome. All the same, these dialogues are not as illuminating as they might have been — for a perfectly comprehensible and easily forgivable reason. Books composed of conversations with well-known representatives of thought are a form much cultivated by the French, who delight in the thrust and parry of verbal controversy; and these works are at their best when the questioner probes at the weak spots of whatever ideas and positions are being offered. Examples of such successful dialogues, where the subject was forced to stretch or defend his own views, are the conversations be tween Lévi-Strauss and Georges Charbonnier, or the dialogues between Raymond Aron and two young ex-Maoists who had taken part in the fe brile spring uprising of 1968 in Paris. 3 No such challenge, of course, is posed here to Jakobson by his wife; it 4 • Contemporaries is, touchingly, rather the opposite that occurs. For when, occasionally, she feels that he has not given himself enough credit on one or another score, she supplements his account by her own. The result is rather a celebration than a conversation or true dialogue. But since the emphasis remains strictly on Jakobson ’ s work, which there are certainly reasons enough to celebrate, the tone does not become too adulatory. And since he is allowed to speak at length, and uninterruptedly, on all the phases of his multifari ous activities and interests, the book has the additional value of providing some final thoughts on the issues that preoccupied him all his life and have had such momentous consequences for contemporary culture. Jakobson was, if one must place him in some conventional category, by profession a linguist. But he had a bold and wide t -ranging speculative mind, which was constantly seeking to extend the limits of his linguistic inquiries and to examine their relations with other spheres of culture. He was anything but a narrow specialist, and he combined, to an unusual de gree, a passion for scientific exactitude, for precision and clarity of thought, with an equal passion for Slavic literature, history and folklore, avant-garde painting and poetry, and the technique of the cinema. Readers of his work will be constantly surprised by the breadth of his range of reference, and by the startling ingeniousness of a mind capable of seeing relationships that nobody had previously suspected to exist. It is little wonder that, touching as he did on so many fields (and even creating the new discipline of neu rolinguistics), the name of Jakobson should gradually have become known far beyond the area of his major professional preoccupation. ; Some of Jakobson ’ s fame, to be sure, may be attributed to historical chance. It was an accident, but a very happy one, that he was teaching in the same École Libre des Hautes Etudes, founded in New York during the Second World War by French and Belgian refugees, where Lévi-Strauss was also giving courses in anthropology. Each attended the other ’ s lec tures, and Lévi-Strauss, as a result, began to see how Jakobson ’ s linguistic views could help him to solve some of the anthropological problems he was then wrestling with. 4 It was this encounter that gave birth to French structuralism. Before very long structural linguistics was thus projected into the lime light as the key science for our time, whose postulates could furnish a new foundation for the study of culture much as Darwinian evolution had done for the latter half of the nineteenth century. Such an influence would scarcely have been possible, however, if Jakobson had not already worked out his linguistic theories at a philosophical level that made their general implications readily apparent. And Jakobson himself, in addition to his 4 Jakobson ’ s course has since been published in English: Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Mtuning trans. John Mepham (Cambridge, Mass., 1978). Roman Jakobson • 5 researches on linguistics, carried on a steady activity all his life as a cultural essayist and literary critic, whose writings are accessible to an audience of nonspecialists and whose theories raise fundamental issues in aesthetics and literary criticism. Indeed, during his last years he devoted much of his attention to applying linguistics to the interpretation of poetry; and this effort gave rise to more public controversy than perhaps any other feature of his activity. Certainly one of the major reasons for Jakobson ’ s impressive scope, and his openness to the widest cultural perspectives, was his early contact with the explosion of Russian avant-garde art in the first quarter of the present century. Much to the astonishment — and perhaps amusement — of his staider scientific colleagues, the mature Jakobson always attributed the highest importance to his immersion in this bohemian climate when he was a young man; and he continues to do so in the dialogues. When not much older than an adolescent, he had been an intimate friend of the mys terious and vagabond Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov (whom he contin ued to call “ the greatest Russian poet of our century ” ), a poet who had not only sought “ the philosopher ’ s stone ” by creating neologisms that would transform all Slavic words into one another, but also dreamed of finding “ the unity of world languages in general. ” 5 Much better known was an other close friend, Vladimir Mayakovsky, who, for a short while before his suicide, came to be regarded almost as the Bard of the Bolshevik revolu tion. Jakobson was equally intimate with the Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich and other young experimental painters then at the start of distin guished careers, such as Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Goncharova. Moreover, Jakobson continued to remain faithful to these companions of his youth; in an informative afterword, Pomorska includes a touching portrait of his visits, when he returned to the Soviet Union after 1956 as an international celebrity, to the last survivor of the Futurist group, Alexis Kruchenykh, with whom the twenty-year-old Jakobson had once pub lished a joint volume of poetry under a pseudonym and with a punning title. Then living in abject poverty in Moscow, Kruchenykh had remained an impenitent Futurist to the end, continuing to incarnate some of the jesting, irreverent, high-spirited but, all the same, intensely dedicated at mosphere of the bygone years before the First World War. Those were the years, Jakobson recalls, when “ Russian futurist poetry was beginning to take hold ” ; and this “ blossoming of modern Russian poetry followed the remarkable developments of modem painting, in par ticular French postimpressionism and its crowning achievement, Cubism. ” Russian culture at this time, as Jakobson rightly observes, had “ acquired a 5 Cited in Vahad D. Barooshian, Russian Cubo-Futurism, 1910-1930 (The Hague, 1974), 11-12.