Hunting Nature

Ivan Turgenev and the Organic World

Thomas P. Hodge

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501750854
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria russa

In Hunting Nature, Thomas P. Hodge explores Ivan Turgenev's relationship to nature through his conception, description, and practice of hunting—the most unquenchable passion of his life. Informed by an ecocritical perspective, Hodge takes an approach that is equal parts interpretive and documentarian, grounding his observations thoroughly in Russian cultural and linguistic context and a wide range of Turgenev's fiction, poetry, correspondence, and other writings. Included within the book are some of Turgenev's important writings on nature—never previously translated into English.

Turgenev, who is traditionally identified as a chronicler of Russia's ideological struggles, is presented in Hunting Nature as an expert naturalist whose intimate knowledge of flora and fauna deeply informed his view of philosophy, politics, and the role of literature in society. Ultimately, Hodge argues that we stand to learn a great deal about Turgenev's thought and complex literary technique when we read him in both cultural and environmental contexts. Hodge details how Turgenev remains mindful of the way textual detail is wedded to the organic world—the priroda that he observed, and ached for, more keenly than perhaps any other Russian writer.

Chapter 1

Catching Nature by the Tail

Systems are prized only by those to whom the whole truth is not given, who want to catch truth by the tail. A system is exactly like the truth’s tail, but the truth is like a lizard: it will leave the tail in your hand and the lizard will run away. It knows that it will soon grow another one.

—Turgenev, letter to Tolstoy (1857)

Gagin was in that particular state of artistic ardor and fury which, like a fit, suddenly seizes dilettantes when they imagine that they have succeeded, as they express it, in “catching nature by the tail.”

—Turgenev, “Asya” (1857)

Identifying Turgenev’s philosophical outlook in a straightforward, comprehensive way is a daunting task. As many observers have pointed out, he was an eclectic intellectual of towering erudition, deeply read in Western thought, for whom an all-encompassing philosophy is difficult to pin down precisely.¹ The many particular thinkers who influenced him—Pascal, Spinoza, Herder, Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, to name only a few—seem to hold more or less sway depending on the period of writing and the particular sphere of Turgenev’s fiction: Hegel in the conflicts of characters and ideas; Pascal and Feuerbach in matters of faith, hope, despair; Schopenhauer in the shape of plots and mood; and so on. None dominates completely or definitively. In Turgenev’s representations of and thoughts on the natural world, though these shifted and evolved over the course of his life, Schelling and Goethe seem to have left the deepest imprint.

The Roots of Turgenev’s Nature Philosophy

The Naturphilosophie of Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) took shape at the end of the 1790s and exerted a profound influence on Russian thought in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Imported and promulgated by several professors in Russia’s capitals—Danilo Vellanskii at the Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg, Aleksandr Galich (Govorov) at St. Petersburg University, Ivan Davydov and Mikhail Pavlov at Moscow University—Schelling’s Romantic theories sought to rescue nature from the Enlightenment view of the nonhuman world as a rationally structured, mechanistic array of animals and plants ruled by the immutable laws of Newtonian physics.² Schelling posited nature not as an inert zoological-phytological specimen cabinet validated by human perception, but as a living being, an organism in and of itself, that could perceive and act. With Schelling, nature evolved from beheld to beholder, and humans themselves were part of it, not external spectators. This new status, predicated on a rejection of Descartes’s dualistic worldview of mind and body, has been summed up well by Aileen Kelly:

In Schelling’s monistic vision of the universe, matter and mind, spirit and nature, are not distinct kinds of entities, but simply differing degrees of organization and development of an evolving organic whole, a single primal force or absolute, striving upward in a process of self-discovery, whose highest manifestation is achieved in human consciousness. The Cartesian model of the world gave primacy to reason as the tool for apprehending reality; in Schelling’s organicist vision, imagination and intuition (as expressed in art and religion) are the primary instruments for penetrating the mysterious underlying unity of the universe. At the summit of being is the artist, whose creativity represents the fusion of consciousness and the unconscious, expressing their foreordained identity.³

In the early to mid-1820s, such thinking particularly infected and inspired the so-called Wisdom Lovers (liubomudry), led by Prince Vladimir Odoevskii, who knew Schelling personally, and by the poet Dmitrii Venevitinov. Schelling, wrote Isaiah Berlin, “is largely responsible for the characteristically romantic notion that poets or painters may understand the spirit of their age more profoundly and express it in a more vivid and lasting manner than academic historians.”⁴

As a student at Moscow University in 1833–34, Turgenev imbibed the lectures of Pavlov, whom he called, in his autobiography, “a follower of Schelling’s philosophy who lectured on physics in keeping with that philosophy.”⁵ During Turgenev’s graduate studies at the University of Berlin from 1838 to 1841, Schelling was read and discussed at length with his friends, including Mikhail Bakunin and Nikolai Stankevich. Seven years later, Turgenev wrote that, in 1840, “we [students] would excitedly await Schelling.”⁶ Turgenev soon came to view Schelling’s ideas with a certain ironical distance, commenting in 1847 on the dramatic shift in philosophical fashion and noting that the philosopher had been forgotten in Berlin.⁷ Discussing the title character’s devotion to German Romantic Idealism in the 1855 story “Iakov Pasynkov,” Turgenev wrote that “Romantics, as we know, are almost extinct now,” and by the late 1850s, Schelling appears in the novel On the Eve (1859) as an abstruse and musty throwback.⁸ Shadows of Schelling’s perception of nature and the role of the artist are nonetheless detectable for the entirety of Turgenev’s career, as, for example, when Lezhnev describes his youthful tree-hugging in Rudin (1855), or when the narrator of the prose poem “The Dog” (1878) meditates on the oneness of human and animal: “I understand that in this moment, in both [the dog] and in me, there lives one and the same feeling, that there is no difference between us. We are identical; in each of us burns and shines the same trembling little flame … This is not an animal and a man exchanging glances … These are two pairs of the same eyes fastened upon one other. And in each of these pairs—in the animal and in the man—one identical life fearfully draws closer to the other.”⁹ His Schellingian education no doubt played some role in the conspicuous way Turgenev, one of nineteenth-century Russia’s more prominent dog-fanciers, explored canine characters and themes.¹⁰

Turgenev’s admiration for Goethe was deep, unequivocal, and lasting.¹¹ His responses to Faust, for example, can be found in a lengthy review article (1844–45), the story entitled “Faust” (1856), and numerous letters.¹² In Berlin, Turgenev conversed at length with Bettina von Arnim, Goethe’s former lover, and the German master’s work and thought were hotly debated by Russian émigré students at the time. As Peter Thiergen has convincingly shown, Goethe, who was something of a proto-Lamarckian evolutionist, challenged the eighteenth-century notion of nature as a well-ordered paradise, consistently depicting the merciless voracity (in Werther, 1774–87) and indifference (in Die Wahlverwandtschaften [Elective Affinities], 1808–9) of the constantly metamorphosing natural world, and this stance was readily taken up by such writers as Novalis and Heine.¹³

The most important Goethe source for students of Turgenev’s nature philosophy is the rhapsodic essay entitled “Nature” (“Die Natur,” 1782–83), which proffers concepts that would be repeated and reshaped in many of Turgenev’s own depictions of the natural world.¹⁴ In a brief series of paradoxical aphorisms, the essay portrays Nature as an engulfing, maternal, goddess-like figure:

We are surrounded by her and locked in her clasp: powerless to leave her, and powerless to come closer to her … She creates new forms without end: what exists now, never was before; what was, comes not again; all is new and yet always the old … She speaks to us unceasingly and betrays not her secret … Individuality seems to be all her aim, and she cares nought for individuals. She is always building and always destroying, and her workshop is not to be approached … Nature lives in her children only, and the mother … is the sole artist—out of the simplest materials [she creates] the greatest diversity, attaining, with no trace of effort, the finest perfection … She has thought, and she ponders unceasingly; not as a man, but as Nature. The meaning of the whole she keeps to herself, and no one can learn it of her … She is rough and gentle, loving and terrible, powerless and almighty.¹⁵

Anticipating Schelling’s vitalist views, Goethe suggests that nature has conscious agency. All species of animals and plants are children of the great mother and therefore as similar to one another as siblings, all variations on an Urtier and an Urpflanze—a single, idealized animal prototype and plant prototype.¹⁶ Thus humans are one with nature and, distinct from Schelling’s conception, do not occupy a higher place within it. Instead, nature is indifferent to individuals, including humans, and can be both destructive and constructive—remorselessly so.¹⁷ In the concluding paragraph of “Nature,” Goethe’s narrator seeks requited affection from nature: “She has placed me in this world; she will also lead me out of it. I trust myself to her. She may do with me as she pleases. She will not hate her work.”¹⁸

From the complex of Goethe’s and Schelling’s thoughts on the natural world, Turgenev seems to have assimilated a number of ideas that become central figurations in his own nature writing: the natural world is unitary and monistic, and therefore inclusive of humanity. “With Turgenev,” as Robert L. Jackson explained, “we are certainly in the presence of an archetypal vision of the epic unity, wholeness, and organic character of nature and the vital life processes.”¹⁹ Nature is a living entity, with thoughts and feelings, and yet is pitiless and mute before the totality of organisms that constitute her. She is endlessly fertile, beautiful, attractive, enigmatic, and creative—even artistic.²⁰

Of all her traits, however, it was perhaps nature’s indifference that most haunted Turgenev. For his entire life, Goethe’s reassurance that “She will not hate her work” was neutralized by a grim Turgenevian corollary: she is, in equal measure, by no means bound to love her work. Turgenev’s writing, not surprisingly in his ideologically contentious age, is saturated with procatalepsis, and this extends to his imaginative conceptualization of nature’s intentions. How will she ignore me? What reason will she have to abandon me? he frequently seems to be thinking about nature, just as so many of his hapless male protagonists think about women, when they find themselves on the brink of never attaining, or losing, the joy of mutual affection. Margarita Odesskaia has called nature’s indifference “perhaps the principal [motif] over the course of Turgenev’s entire creative life.”²¹

It is therefore instructive to assemble a comprehensive collection of Turgenev’s statements on nature’s indifference, as I have done in appendix 1. Surveying Turgenev’s own ruminations on nature over nearly five decades, we see distinct patterns emerge, and they bear clear traces of Schelling and Goethe. In Turgenev’s statements, both in his fictions and his letters, nature is beautiful, majestic, silent, deaf, calm, maternal, pitiless, devouring, amoral, unstoppable, eternal. Twice, in the closing sentence of two of his most important works—“Diary of a Superfluous Man” (“Dnevnik lishnego cheloveka,” 1850) and Fathers and Children (Ottsy i deti, 1860–61)—he concludes the text by quoting the final stanza of Pushkin’s “Whether I wander along noisy streets” (1829), a contemplation of human mortality and the inevitability of being replaced:

И пусть у гробового входа

Младая будет жизнь играть,

И равнодушная природа

Красою вечною сиять.

And may youthful life play

At the crypt’s entrance,

And may indifferent nature

Shine with eternal beauty.²²

As we see in appendix 1, Turgenev even chose to imitate this quatrain in one of his own poems, “The Tit” (“Sinitsa,” 1863), and quoted Pushkin’s “indifferent nature” in two letters—once in jest, to the poet Afanasii Fet (1860), and once in dead earnest, fatally ill at the end of his life (1882).

If Pushkin ushered the notion of indifferent nature into Russian high culture, it was Aleksandr Herzen who developed it, from the mid- to late 1840s, as a key sociop...