Byronism, Napoleonism, and Nineteenth-Century Realism

Heroes of Their Own Lives?

Tristan Donal Burke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000484922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Byronism, Napoleonism and Nineteenth-Century Realism offers a fresh analysis of the nineteenth-century European novel, exploring the cultural images of Byron and Napoleon as they appear in the construction of 'bourgeois heroism.' Utilising a unique pan-European perspective, this volume draws together concepts of heroism with theoretically informed questions of form, particularly the role of the hero-protagonist and development of literary realism. Observing Byron and Napoleon as parallel entities, whose rise and twin fame cast long shadows in the first decades of the nineteenth century, this text exemplifies the force of personality which made them heroes. Even where they were reviled, their commitment to challenging moribund cultural and social values make them touchstones for all those who attempted to understand the nineteenth century's modernity. Integrating the study of heroism in the nineteenth-century novel with key developments in critical theory, Byronism, Napoleonism and Nineteenth-Century Realism is essential reading for students and scholars of the bourgeois hero, as well as those with a wider interest in nineteenth-century literature.

1 Byronism, Revolution, and the Birth of Bourgeois Individualism Heroism in Pushkin and Lermontov

DOI: 10.4324/9781003160168-2

I

Georges Bataille describes the fate of the heroic in modernity: ‘Reason subordinates the heroic moment to services rendered.’¹ Under capitalism, argues Bataille, heroism is no longer free to exist for itself but instead is chained to demands made upon it from outside: the demands of capitalism to render services, in the form of wage labour, or to accrue capital. This is parallel to Lukács’s argument, which I set out in the introduction, that subjectivity and heroism undergo fundamental changes under the rise of capitalism: from a subjectivity that expands and asserts itself in the world to one that is self-contained within the private individual. Bataille’s formulation adds that the private individual’s heroism not only no longer exists in epic self-assertion, but rather in his or her ability to render services to capitalism. In either wage labour or the accruing of capital, Bataille argues, the demand of capitalism is the demand of self-interest: ‘[T]he form that material interest has actually taken today [is …] personal interest, precisely under the form of self-interest, within capitalist society.’² What Bataille describes, then, is a becoming-professional of the hero and a subordination of the heroic to private interests. This is part of a more general turning inwards of subjectivity, which I have suggested in my introduction is the fate of heroism in the nineteenth century. Heroism under capitalism takes the form of being a professional. As I discussed in the introduction, the spirit that justifies engagement with capitalism combines a heroisation of the bourgeois figure as risk-taker and speculator, along with a valourisation of the safe, stable values of professionalism and integration into the bourgeois social world. With the rise of high capitalism, a system that dominates and defines all social relations in society, the only position available to heroism is as an appendage to the dominance of capital, and, if the bourgeois class ultimately only has an interest in the accumulation of capital, then the mode of heroism valourised can only be one that tends towards this.³ The heroic assertive pole of bourgeois identity, then, must necessarily inhabit an increasingly small niche in the global smooth running of a dominant capitalist system.

In this chapter, I argue that the production of the professional hero is evident in two important early Russian novels by Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, but that, in their Russian context, where bourgeois capitalism was not as advanced as in Western Europe, this remains connected to the heroic efforts of the new bourgeoisie to assert their own values, as the bourgeoisie in Western Europe did several decades earlier. Heroic efforts which Pushkin and Lermontov show, will themselves pass away, to leave a bourgeois conformity to the reign of high capitalism. I particularly demonstrate how both the heroic, revolutionary efforts to assert subjectivity and the shift to bourgeois, professional heroism, as depicted in these writers’ works, are, in part, the results of the Europe-wide influence of Byron. In Pushkin and Lermontov, a shift occurs, from the Byronic heroic subject of revolution to the ‘heroic’ subject of capitalism.⁴ This shift is also a move away from the aristocratic salon culture towards a peculiarly Russian, and very nascent, form of bourgeois capitalism, centred on the cosmopolitan cities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, as well as on imperialist conquest in the Caucasus.

Marx and Engels write in The Communist Manifesto that, under bourgeois capitalism, ‘all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away […] and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.’⁵ In the novels I discuss in this chapter, it is the formally regulated relations of society embodied by the aristocratic social code and the salon that are ‘swept away,’ and instead heroism becomes an expression of the ‘real conditions’ of nineteenth-century ‘life’ – integration and success in capitalism. This process is informed, in Russia, by the consumption of Western literature: ‘[T]he bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country […] from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.’⁶ It is important that Marx and Engels particularly note the creation of world literature as an important aspect of the bourgeois upheaval of society. Key to this development of world literature is Byron, who, as I have shown in the introduction, exerted a broad influence over so much European literature and was read avidly in translation by Pushkin and Lermontov. For these two writers, Byron, I argue, is a model for revolutionary thought but also informs the integration into professionalised heroism which marks the stability of the bourgeoisie. The Byronic informs this through a revolutionary ideology that overturns the aristocratic world in favour of a heroic individualism, which then mutates into bourgeois individualism and defines itself against the Byronic. The Byronic is rejected by the bourgeois subjectivity that it has historically informed, though the traces of the Byronic remain.

I will explain how a cosmopolitan literary taste amongst the Russian intelligentsia in which Pushkin and Lermontov moved provided the raw materials from which to fashion the nascent bourgeois hero, particularly through the writings and cultural image of Byron. My case studies are the two major novels of the period: Pushkin’s ‘novel-in-verse’ Eugene Onegin (Yevgeniy Onegin, 1825–1832, published in one volume 1833) and Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (Geroy nashego vermeni, 1840).⁷ The analogous birth of the bourgeois hero took place much earlier in Western European literature. Marx begins Grundrisse with a discussion of ‘Robinsonades,’ the Robinson Crusoe conceits of classical economics which imagine the point of departure of ‘socially determined individual production,’ which is to say a conception of economic production based around the unit of the individuated subject. ⁸ For Marx, the individual, ‘heroic’ production of the Robinson Crusoe figure becomes a privileged starting point for Western capitalism.⁹ Crusoe as a character is a new hero for the new bourgeois class and is an origin point for the bourgeois individual. As Franco Moretti puts it, ‘Robinson Crusoe is the genuine beginning of the world today.’¹⁰ Russia, which developed capitalism later than Western Europe, and which developed it from different forms of social organisation – for example, serfdom and absolutism – which persisted into its nascent capitalist period, sees a different version of the single individual becoming heroic in relation to capitalism. Particularly notable, from this global perspective, is the increased speed with which bourgeois heroism is produced and dissolved. In English literature, the heroism which is produced in Robinson Crusoe is clearly decaying in Dickens and Thackeray a little less than a century and a half later, in spite of Byronic and Napoleonic revitalisation. In Russian literature, according to this reading, the process occurs across two texts in some 15 years.

The distinct economic, ideological, and cultural trajectory of capitalism in the Russia of the nineteenth century is described by Marshall Berman as the ‘modernism of underdevelopment.’¹¹ Russia did not have the advanced capitalist economy of Western Europe, and yet, particularly amongst the metropolitan elite (in whose social sphere these novels are both set), elements of advanced modernity were active within the culture and society, alongside the emergence of the nascent bourgeois class. This is reflected in the two novels not least in their depictions of the shift from older models of heroism towards a professional, bourgeois notion of the hero. Such elements were given cultural shape via Western literature, and whilst both Pushkin and Lermontov explicitly name their protagonists as new models of heroism, that heroism is created and situated in relationship to the cultural legacy of Byron.

As such, these works are transitional in terms of form and allusion: both mutate Byronic poetry towards the novel and mutate Byronic forms of heroism into bourgeois forms of heroism. In this chapter, I suggest some contextual and ideological explanations for this by relating both the content of the works and the contexts in which they are written to the Byronic Hero as revolutionary and to the Decembrist Revolt in Russia. I also argue that A Hero of Our Time is a much more pessimistic, post-revolutionary, and post-Romantic text than Eugene Onegin. A Hero of Our Time attempts to lay the revolutionary possibilities of Byron to rest and substitutes them with a model of purified bourgeois professionalism. In this situation, Byron remains a more generalised cultural memory rather than a model for heroism. Eugene Onegin, on the other hand, is more Byronic and more positive about the liberating effects of revolution. This is in part because Eugene Onegin is related specifically to the context of the Decembrist Revolt of 1825 – in terms of its ideology of subjectivity, an aristocratic revolution with features of the bourgeois revolutions of Western Europe – whereas A Hero of Our Time is written with a greater distance and disenchantment. Yet even in A Hero of Our Time, the radical possibilities of the Byronic Hero are not fully exhausted, and elements of dissonance enter into the seemingly stable construction of the bourgeois hero. The contradictory revolutionary aristocracy of the Byronic Hero, which I discussed in the introduction, haunts these texts.

Some of the ideas of cultural transition that I address in this chapter, particularly in relationship to Lermontov, are dealt with in Elizabeth Cheresh Allen’s book A Fallen Idol Is Still a God: Lermontov and the Quandaries of Cultural Transition. However, useful as her work is, and I will be referring to it in the chapter, my interpretation differs importantly from hers. Allen rejects big theories of cultural transition, including Marxism, preferring instead to think about cultural transition in terms of ‘the lives of individuals,’ as though large-scale models of cultural change and localised occurrences are opposed.¹² It seems evident to me that in Marx’s writings, and later Marxian readings of both literature and history, claims of large-scale change can only be made through minute readings of particular historical incidences. There is no contradiction there. Indeed, Allen’s work is particularly problematic because it presupposes a notion of the ‘life of the individual’ in trans-historical terms. Rather, I am interested in how the very notion of ‘the life of the individual’ is historically mutable precisely because it changes in different historical, economic, and cultural situations. Similarly, her rejection of social and material conditions in defining culture is so total as to look reactionary: ‘[T]he ideals and norms, the values and beliefs, of a historical period […] might have little to do with the social system or material conditions.’¹³ It is precisely part of the aim of this chapter to show how the discourse of heroism posits models of individuality linked to the specific historico-cultural circumstances in which they exist. The lives of individuals cannot be presupposed, but rather must emerge from a more historically inflected reading.

Most important to this study though is Allen’s carefully argued contention, drawing on many previous critics and theorists of Romanticism, that Romanticism aspired to ‘values of integrity and its offspring integration.’¹⁴ Allen singles out subjectivity as an area where Romanticism aspired to integrity:

[T]he Romantic ideal of the self presupposed a psychological core of human identity that always had the potential to become fully integrated and whole, even if divided by conflicting attributes of human nature and the complex conditions of contemporary existence.

Furthermore,

while striving to unite the divergent parts of the self into a whole, Romanticists also often assumed that such a whole self could never exist in mere ‘sensible people’ […]. Individuals possessing an overarching wholeness would be ‘geniuses’ or ‘heroes.’

Allen observes that the Romantic ‘period faded and passed away, leaving behind members of a younger generation, including Lermontov, as they floated in a sea of cultural transition during a time bereft of Romanticism’s cultural integrity and integration.’¹⁵ Allen suggests that whilst Lermontov registers this in A Hero of Our Time, he still ‘had an implicit vision of cultural health, even while representing cultural malaise.’¹⁶ However, I see Lermontov’s post-Romanticism as being essentially pessimistic. The valorisation of a subjectivity based on the Romantic idea of an integral, psychological core is transferred under capitalism to the private individual rather than being the special attribute of geniuses or heroes; any old bourgeois can feel heroically self-contained (though of course often still marked with repressed contradictions). Thus, on the one hand, what is heroic in Romanticism, integrated subjectivity, becomes a general delusion of the bourgeois way of life, captured in the idea of the private individual. On the other hand, and to complicate this further, the possibilities of self-contained subjectivity no longer exist in the face of the material contradictions of capitalism. Allen calls this post-Romantic anomie, ‘a sense of loss of cultural integration and integrity’ but does not link this specifically to the rise of high capitalism.¹⁷ I argue that the tensions between integrity and capitalist individuation on the one hand, and the breaking down of self-contained subjectivity on the other, are already found in Byron and Pushkin, who are generally accepted as Romantic writers, and that these tensions only become more marked in Lermontov.

II

I turn now to briefly establishing the ways in which both authors conceive of their protagonists as heroes and the way in which this differs from the conventional notions of heroism that one may find in any standard dictionary. These conceptualisations of the hero are specifically modern and related to questions of textuality.

It is evident that both Eugene Onegin and A H...