Editing Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy

Mikhail Katkov and the Great Russian Novel

Susanne Fusso

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781609092252
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

In Editing Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, Susanne Fusso examines Mikhail Katkov's literary career without vilification or canonization, focusing on the ways in which his nationalism fueled his drive to create a canon of Russian literature and support its recognition around the world. In each chapter, Fusso considers Katkov's relationship with a major Russian literary figure. In addition to Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, she explores Katkov's interactions with Vissarion Belinsky, Evgeniia Tur, and the legacy of Aleksandr Pushkin. This groundbreaking study will fascinate scholars, students, and general readers interested in Russian literature and literary history.

CHAPTER 1

KATKOV AND BELINSKY

LOVE, FRIENDSHIP, AND THE WORLD-HISTORICAL NATION

In the obituary for Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov that appeared in the Times of London on August 2, 1887, one day after he had died of stomach cancer, he is characterized as “a statesman who started from the assumption that Russia is to maintain her present greatness and to become greater in the eyes of the world by nationalizing the different elements of the Empire.”¹ Most of the obituary describes Katkov’s political journalism, a paragraph is devoted to his educational reform program, but no mention is made of his literary activity, of the fact that he was the editor who published the greatest works of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. This omission is not accidental, but reflects the way in which Katkov has been represented in history, in Russia and, as a result, in the West. Katkov is indeed remembered for his political activity, not his literary activity. Yet anyone looking at the career of the twenty-year-old Katkov would hardly predict such an outcome. In the years 1838–40, the person Katkov most resembles in his intellectual preoccupations and writings is Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky (1811–48), who became the first major Russian literary critic and theorist. Thanks to his eventual identification with the politically radical camp in Russian letters, over the course of the twentieth century Belinsky was canonized by Soviet literary scholarship, while the early writings of Katkov, who eventually became a fierce and influential conservative and defender of autocracy, were left in obscurity. How did Katkov become the person who enabled the creation of the great Russian novel in the second half of the nineteenth century? In this chapter I will consider first Katkov’s deeply personal involvement with Belinsky and other young Russian thinkers who were trying to assimilate German idealist philosophy in both their lives and their understanding of art. Then I will examine the theoretical principles, largely inspired by Hegel, that emerge from Katkov’s early journalistic writings and translations.

Love and Philosophy

In his recent study The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism, John Randolph explores the domestic dramas that accompanied the reception of German idealist philosophy in Russia in the 1830s and 1840s, with particular emphasis on the Bakunin family and Belinsky’s relations with them.² Randolph writes of the loose circle of students and ex-students of Moscow University, sometimes labeled the Stankevich Circle after one of their important figures, Nikolai Vladimirovich Stankevich (1813–40),

Not only did these charismatic students show a dangerously independent streak, they also seemed oblivious to the conventional limits of philosophical activity. In its native Germany, post-Kantian Idealism was practiced in public institutions, such as university lecture halls and scientific publications. Russian analogues to this institutionalized Idealism existed, inside of the Imperial Academy; yet the most famous and charismatic traditions surrounding Russian Idealism were produced more intimately, on the stage of private life.

Randolph continues,

On the one hand, this private cult of philosophy seemed to violate what many regarded to be the proper limits of abstract thought by pulling it so deeply into the sphere of intimate relations. On the other hand, . . . there was something progressive—if comical—about this idealistic habit of “living through” philosophy. It had allowed its practitioners to break their subservience to the Empire’s religious and political dogmas. In the process it made them independent, “complete,” and fully “modern” men (to borrow Herzen’s phrases), and prepared their subsequent, autonomous role in Russian life.³

One of Katkov’s biographers writes that in this period, “Philosophical systems were not only being thought through [peredumyvalis’] but being lived through [perezhivalis’], so to speak.”⁴ Randolph’s book does not mention Katkov, but Katkov was involved with both Belinsky and Bakunin in personal dramas that reveal his embeddedness in the “private cult of philosophy” in which Russian literary theory, among other major currents in Russian thought, was being born.⁵

Belinsky’s letters in the late 1830s are documents of his inner life and his struggles to explain that life in terms of his own understanding of Hegel’s philosophy. It has often been pointed out that Belinsky, who was from a poor background and whose education was spotty, did not know German well enough to master Hegel in the original. He was dependent on friends like Mikhail Bakunin and, as he mentions several times, Katkov, to form his conception of Hegel. As Herbert Bowman writes,

The power of the circle to arouse intense interest in works of philosophical speculation to which it did not always provide an authoritative guide worked to place a member like Belinski in an unfortunate position of intellectual dependence. Such intellectual dependence carried with it a psychological dependence upon more learned friends; and to this dependence Belinski’s imperfect education made him particularly susceptible. The fact that such a large measure of Belinski’s philosophical knowledge thus came to him at second hand was to constitute one of the principal sources of the extravagance and frequent distortion of his philosophical creed.⁶

Katkov’s contributions to Belinsky’s understanding of Hegel tended to be in the realm of aesthetics, but by 1837 Bakunin had developed a way of applying Hegel to the art of living. As Randolph writes, “Mikhail [Bakunin] had hit upon the ideal for which he would become famous in the literary circles of the 1830s and early 1840s: the call to reconcile oneself with reality and thereby become a ‘real man.’ It was an ambition he translated with celebrated ease from technical German into Romantic Russian, projecting both himself and Hegel into the foreground of Russian thought for the first time.”⁷

Aileen Kelly has lucidly described Bakunin’s “new understanding of reality, based on Hegel’s famous dictum in the Introduction to the Philosophy of Right: ‘The real is the rational and the rational is real.’”⁸ As Kelly explains, Hegel’s dictum meant only “that there is a logical order in the development of all things, in which all historical forms and institutions have their necessary place as successive expressions of the dialectical development of Absolute Reason.”⁹ But Bakunin and other early Russian students of Hegel understood it to mean that one must accept the status quo; the catch phrase for this in Russia was “reconciliation with reality,” which allowed Russian thinkers to overcome their alienation from “the repugnant world around them.”¹⁰ In the period of his discipleship to Bakunin, Belinsky wholeheartedly accepted the need for “reconciliation with reality,” the conservative interpretation of Hegel to which he clung until 1840.

Even after Belinsky emerged from under Bakunin’s spell, the influence of his teacher can still be detected in his correspondence. Belinsky wrote voluminous letters both to Bakunin and to other friends in which he painstakingly analyzed his own life experiences, testing them against his understanding of “deistvitel’nost’,” Bakunin’s rendering of Hegel’s Wirklichkeit, “reality” or more precisely “actuality”; the Russian word “deistvitel’nost’” is usually translated as “reality.” In relation to Katkov, the most important of Belinsky’s letters concern their rivalry in the fall of 1838 and winter of 1839 over the actress Aleksandra Mikhailovna Shchepkina (1816–41), daughter of the great actor Mikhail Semionovich Shchepkin (1788–1863). Twenty-three-year-old Shchepkina was first in love with twenty-one-year-old Moscow University student Katkov. As Belinsky tells it, “The young lady [his constant epithet for Shchepkina] loved another, and that other loved her, but he conducted himself so realistically [deistvitel’no] that she thought he didn’t love her.”¹¹ At this juncture twenty-eight-year-old Belinsky, an old friend of her family, expressed romantic interest in her. Again in Belinsky’s account, “Concluding from my wild behavior that I adored her, she decided to love me, with the thought that if I were to marry her, she could be happy with me, a noble person who loved her, as happy as one can be in a loveless marriage.”¹² In Belinsky’s complex world of emotion, “when she almost clearly expressed to me that she loved me . . . I came to know what hell is and what true suffering is, suffering without sadness, without any moisture, but with only dry, burning despair.”¹³

Learning of Belinsky’s interest, Katkov renewed his attentions to Shchepkina, and Belinsky (with apparent relief) stepped aside. In the September–October 1839 letter in which Belinsky recounted the affair to Stankevich, he describes the dénouement as follows: “[Katkov’s] love was a religious ecstasy; our young lady turned out to be a creature who was in the objective sense beautiful [prekrasnoe], passionate, and, in the area of passion, profound, but not at all of our world, and we both saw that we had been fools and bottom feeders [griazoedy, lit. “mud-eaters”]. He was the first to realize it—first he got angry at himself, cursed his feelings for all he was worth, and now he laughs.” Belinsky goes on to offer the Bakuninesque moral of the story: “Oh, brother, what a person he is! You knew him as a kind of embryo. He is angry at his feelings and this whole affair, but it turned him upside down, pierced his coarse mass with rays of light, and now he is a marvelous young man. . . . He is still a child, but his childhood promises an impending and powerful manhood.”¹⁴ In Belinsky’s version, Katkov’s love for Shchepkina had been a necessary stage in the spiritual development of Katkov the man. Belinsky’s final words on her are written three years later, on the occasion of her death, to Katkov himself: “In Moscow I found myself at a funeral—of Aleksandra Mikhailovna Shchepkina. The poor girl—she so much wanted to live, she so much wanted not to die; but she died!”¹⁵

The Fifty-Year-Old Uncle

Belinsky’s letters are not the only venue he chose for describing the Shchepkina episode. In November 1838, while the affair was still in progress, Belinsky used it as material for one of his few artistic works, the play The Fifty-Year-Old Uncle; or a Strange Illness (Piatidesiatiletnii diadiushka, ili Strannaia bolezn’), written to be performed at M. S. Shchepkin’s benefit on January 27, 1839, in Moscow. In his September–October 1839 letter to Stankevich describing his involvement with Shchepkina, Belinsky calls the real-life drama a “tragicomedy with vaudeville couplets.” His play, which attempts with moderate success to be both tragic and comic, presents the Belinsky-Shchepkina-Katkov triangle through the characters of Nikolai Matveevich Gorsky, Lizanka Dumskaia, and Vladimir Dmitrievich Malsky. Gorsky is the “uncle” of the play’s title, the guardian of the orphaned Lizanka and her sister Katenka. It is telling that the twenty-eight-year-old Belinsky depicts himself as fifty years old, moreover as not just a suitor but a father figure. Lizanka is presented as the pensive, quiet sister who resembles Pushkin’s Tatiana (from Eugene Onegin) while Katenka takes the role of the frivolous, humorous counterpart of Pushkin’s Olga. And Malsky, a student at Moscow University who is also Gorsky’s “nephew and ward,” is Katkov, “sketched in almost portrait-like fashion.”¹⁶ The play was first performed at Shchepkin’s benefit, with Aleksandra Shchepkina playing her fictional double, Lizanka Dumskaia.

The plot of Belinsky’s play is simple: Lizanka, Katenka, and Malsky have grown up under Gorsky’s roof, and family tradition has destined Katenka to marry Malsky. But in the course of the play it becomes clear that frivolous Katenka does not really know her own mind, while Malsky is beginning to realize that his true love is Lizanka. Meanwhile Gorsky, Malsky’s uncle and the guardian of Katenka and Lizanka, is overcome by passion for Lizanka. He confesses his love to her, and she initially recoils in horror. But as she comes to believe that Katenka loves Malsky, whom she herself loves, she decides that a loveless marriage to her kind guardian is the best fate for her. There are feeble complications in the form of a meddling woman and her son, but in the end Katenka and Malsky make it clear to each other that they are not in love (another suitor for Katenka conveniently turns up at the right moment), and Gorsky, having overheard Malsky talking to himself about his love for Lizanka, magnanimously steps aside so that Malsky and Lizanka can be united.

The play is an intriguing document of Belinsky’s feelings about himself and about Katkov at a moment when the outcome of their own real-life drama had not yet been determined. The age difference between them is exaggerated, and the Katkov figure is depicted as a handsome, vigorous, and (unlike Katkov) rich young man. Gorsky says at one point, “That young rogue with his pretty little mug wants to torment me . . . torture me . . .”¹⁷ His own appearance, in contrast, is far from attractive in his own eyes. Looking into a mirror, he says, “What is that over there—let me see . . . Bah! It’s me—what a good-looking fellow, devil take it! . . . (He hits himself on the head.) What’s that? A bald spot . . . (He hits himself on the stomach.) And that? A fat, fifty-year-old belly! Well, what a fine lover, what a fine suitor!”¹⁸

Like an eighteenth-century Russian playwright, Belinsky gives his characters speaking names. Gorsky could be derived from “gora,” “mountain,” but it also evokes “gore,” “sorrow,” and “gor’kii,” “bitter.” Dumskaia evokes “duma,” “thought, meditation.” Most tellingly, the name of the Katkov figure, Malsky, is derived from the root meaning “small,” and includes the first syllable of “mal’chik,” “little boy.” This is consonant with Belinsky’s attitude in his letters, where he harps on Katkov’s youth and greenness and most often refers to him as “the youth.” A year later, in fall 1839, Belinsky would describe his feelings on seeing Katkov and Shchepkina commune lovingly: “I could not stand to see the agitation and alarm with which she would wait for her youth [Katkov], how, sensing his arrival, she would run out of the room in order to hide her agitation, how later they would talk to each other, their faces shining with bliss.”¹⁹ Something similar is experienced by Gorsky: “Who could have foreseen it? No, rather—who could have helped but see it! She has loved him for a long time, but she hid it. . . . He has also loved her for a long time—before he even realized it. . . . You can’t deceive the heart—it has a thousand eyes . . . a thousand ears—it sees everything, hears everything.”²⁰

In the description of Malsky, the play also reproduces the ambivalent attitude toward Katkov that Belinsky evinces in his letters. Despite his attractiveness, Malsky is accused repeatedly of being proud and pompous, and Katenka adds the accusation of “lack of candor and secretiveness.”²¹ Gorsky’s hostility to his “nephew and ward,” even before the rivalry over Lizanka develops fully, bursts out in a rema...