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Editing Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy
Mikhail Katkov and the Great Russian Novel
Susanne Fusso
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eBook - ePub
Editing Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy
Mikhail Katkov and the Great Russian Novel
Susanne Fusso
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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.
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Sujet
HistorySous-sujet
Russian HistoryCHAPTER 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 âa 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.â1 Most of the obituary describes Katkovâs 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 1838â40, the person Katkov most resembles in his intellectual preoccupations and writings is Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky (1811â48), 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 Katkovâs 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 Katkovâs 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 Belinskyâs 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 (1813â40),
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 progressiveâif comicalâabout this idealistic habit of âliving throughâ philosophy. It had allowed its practitioners to break their subservience to the Empireâs religious and political dogmas. In the process it made them independent, âcomplete,â and fully âmodernâ men (to borrow Herzenâs phrases), and prepared their subsequent, autonomous role in Russian life.3
One of Katkovâs biographers writes that in this period, âPhilosophical systems were not only being thought through [peredumyvalisâ] but being lived through [perezhivalisâ], so to speak.â4 Randolphâs book does not mention Katkov, but Katkov was involved with both Belinsky and Bakunin in personal dramas that reveal his embeddedness in the âprivate cult of philosophyâ in which Russian literary theory, among other major currents in Russian thought, was being born.5
Belinskyâs 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 Hegelâs 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 Belinskiâs imperfect education made him particularly susceptible. The fact that such a large measure of Belinskiâs 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
Katkovâs contributions to Belinskyâs 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, âMikhail [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 âreal man.â 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.â7
Aileen Kelly has lucidly described Bakuninâs ânew understanding of reality, based on Hegelâs famous dictum in the Introduction to the Philosophy of Right: âThe real is the rational and the rational is real.ââ8 As Kelly explains, Hegelâs dictum meant only âthat 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.â9 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 âreconciliation with reality,â which allowed Russian thinkers to overcome their alienation from âthe repugnant world around them.â10 In the period of his discipleship to Bakunin, Belinsky wholeheartedly accepted the need for âreconciliation with reality,â the conservative interpretation of Hegel to which he clung until 1840.
Even after Belinsky emerged from under Bakuninâs 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 âdeistvitelânostâ,â Bakuninâs rendering of Hegelâs Wirklichkeit, ârealityâ or more precisely âactualityâ; the Russian word âdeistvitelânostââ is usually translated as âreality.â In relation to Katkov, the most important of Belinskyâs letters concern their rivalry in the fall of 1838 and winter of 1839 over the actress Aleksandra Mikhailovna Shchepkina (1816â41), daughter of the great actor Mikhail Semionovich Shchepkin (1788â1863). Twenty-three-year-old Shchepkina was first in love with twenty-one-year-old Moscow University student Katkov. As Belinsky tells it, âThe young lady [his constant epithet for Shchepkina] loved another, and that other loved her, but he conducted himself so realistically [deistvitelâno] that she thought he didnât love her.â11 At this juncture twenty-eight-year-old Belinsky, an old friend of her family, expressed romantic interest in her. Again in Belinskyâs account, âConcluding 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.â12 In Belinskyâs complex world of emotion, âwhen 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.â13
Learning of Belinskyâs interest, Katkov renewed his attentions to Shchepkina, and Belinsky (with apparent relief) stepped aside. In the SeptemberâOctober 1839 letter in which Belinsky recounted the affair to Stankevich, he describes the dĂ©nouement as follows: â[Katkovâs] 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. âmud-eatersâ]. He was the first to realize itâfirst he got angry at himself, cursed his feelings for all he was worth, and now he laughs.â Belinsky goes on to offer the Bakuninesque moral of the story: âOh, 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.â14 In Belinskyâs version, Katkovâs love for Shchepkina had been a necessary stage in the spiritual development of Katkov the man. Belinskyâs final words on her are written three years later, on the occasion of her death, to Katkov himself: âIn Moscow I found myself at a funeralâof Aleksandra Mikhailovna Shchepkina. The poor girlâshe so much wanted to live, she so much wanted not to die; but she died!â15
The Fifty-Year-Old Uncle
Belinskyâs 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 boleznâ), written to be performed at M. S. Shchepkinâs benefit on January 27, 1839, in Moscow. In his SeptemberâOctober 1839 letter to Stankevich describing his involvement with Shchepkina, Belinsky calls the real-life drama a âtragicomedy with vaudeville couplets.â 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 âuncleâ of the playâs 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 Pushkinâs Tatiana (from Eugene Onegin) while Katenka takes the role of the frivolous, humorous counterpart of Pushkinâs Olga. And Malsky, a student at Moscow University who is also Gorskyâs ânephew and ward,â is Katkov, âsketched in almost portrait-like fashion.â16 The play was first performed at Shchepkinâs benefit, with Aleksandra Shchepkina playing her fictional double, Lizanka Dumskaia.
The plot of Belinskyâs play is simple: Lizanka, Katenka, and Malsky have grown up under Gorskyâs 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, Malskyâs 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 Belinskyâs 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, âThat young rogue with his pretty little mug wants to torment me . . . torture me . . .â17 His own appearance, in contrast, is far from attractive in his own eyes. Looking into a mirror, he says, âWhat is that over thereâlet me see . . . Bah! Itâs meâwhat a good-looking fellow, devil take it! . . . (He hits himself on the head.) Whatâs 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!â18
Like an eighteenth-century Russian playwright, Belinsky gives his characters speaking names. Gorsky could be derived from âgora,â âmountain,â but it also evokes âgore,â âsorrow,â and âgorâkii,â âbitter.â Dumskaia evokes âduma,â âthought, meditation.â Most tellingly, the name of the Katkov figure, Malsky, is derived from the root meaning âsmall,â and includes the first syllable of âmalâchik,â âlittle boy.â This is consonant with Belinskyâs attitude in his letters, where he harps on Katkovâs youth and greenness and most often refers to him as âthe youth.â A year later, in fall 1839, Belinsky would describe his feelings on seeing Katkov and Shchepkina commune lovingly: âI 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.â19 Something similar is experienced by Gorsky: âWho could have foreseen it? No, ratherâwho 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 timeâbefore he even realized it. . . . You canât deceive the heartâit has a thousand eyes . . . a thousand earsâit sees everything, hears everything.â20
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 âlack of candor and secretiveness.â21 Gorskyâs hostility to his ânephew and ward,â even before the rivalry over Lizanka develops fully, bursts out in a rema...