Literature and the Theory of Literature: The Development of the Russian Classics against the Backdrop of the European Tradition

ABSTRACT

The article examines the development of the classics and of notions of classical writers in the Russian language and literature against the background of the European tradition. Beyond the specific scholarly subject, the article explores the general problem of the institutionalization and genre-based repertoire of literary theory; the strategies of literary theory, the function of the classics and classical writers, and the models of preservation and transfer of tradition that were formulated by European theory and Russian literary practice in the late eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth.

KEYWORDS:

• Theory of literature
• literature
• classics

This article is the republished version of:

Literature and the Theory of Literature: The Development of the Russian Classics against the Backdrop of the European Tradition

Notes

1. From time to time there has been a return to this idea with at least a 2,000-year history. Today, however, one can perhaps insist on being its creator in the sense to which Goethe referred: ‘All wise things have already been thought, what is necessary is only to think them again.’

2. We should note that poets become the creators of poetics in cultures that follow a model even if they are infused with original content - like Roman culture with regard to the Greek and French with regard to the ancient classical canon.

3. Regarding Horace’s ‘Epistle to the Pisos,’ known under the later title of ‘The Art of Poetry,’ or ‘Poetics,’ or ‘The Study of Poetry,’ as a work of fiction – a poiema – of the literature of late antiquity, see: (Gasparov 1963). See also: (Losev 1979).

4. Perhaps only one definitive constraint should be introduced at the very outset. Theory – and in this respect it differs from other scholarly discourses on literature – refers to literature from a universal perspective. It is in this sense that we will use the concept of ‘theory.’

5. The scholarly study of the problem was initiated by E.R. Curtius in the late 1940s. See, in particular, his 1948 article ‘Goethe as Critic’ (Curtius 1950). Until the late 1920s and immediately after World War II, Curtius himself was intensively involved with contemporary literature (thereby causing consternation among his ‘academic’ colleagues, particularly Leo Spitzer), first French (see: Curtius 1925), then English-language literature as a translator of Eliot; later he specifically focused on Eliot and Hesse in close connection with their being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

6. To be sure, history has seen authors who have successfully combined writing and scholarly activities. It would be a stretch, for example, to describe as ‘a writer’s theory’ the works of Andrei Bely about the theory of verse and about Gogol’s oeuvre or, conversely, to refer to Iurii Tynianov’s novels as ‘the prose of a literary critic.’

7. The idea of ‘world literature’ (Weltlitteratur) is inextricably bound up with the name of Goethe, although the term itself was established before it first appeared in Goethe’s papers and in conversations with him – for example, in the writings of Schlözer and the later Wieland. See: (Schamoni 2008; Weitz 1987). For the history and semantics of the term, as well as the strategies of its study and interpretation in German research, see, e.g.: (Birus 1995).

8. This idea was expressed in extremely pointed fashion by Mikhail Bakhtin in preparatory materials for а 1944 update of his book on François Rabelais. We quote this extract, which is as important as it is underestimated by our theory: ‘Our European theory of literature (poetics) emerged and developed on the basis of a very narrow and limited set of literary phenomena. It came together during epochs of stabilization of literary forms and national literary languages, during epochs when major events of literary and linguistic life – upheavals, crises, struggle, and storms – were already in the distant past, when the very memory of them had already been smoothed, when everything had already been shaken out and had settled down – settled down, of course, only in the very highest reaches of officialized literature and language’ (Bakhtin 2008: p. 705).

9. For writers’ criticism of Goethe’s works, see, e.g.: (Birus 2001; Unger 2012) and others.

10. (‘The Lay of Igor’s Host’ (‘Slovo o polku igoreve’) is an anonymous epic poem, believed to date to the twelfth century, about a failed raid by Igor Sviatoslavovich against the Polovtsians in 1185. While its authenticity is questioned by some critics, it is widely considered to be a towering achievement of early Russian literature. – Trans.)

11. Professor Davydov took over the chair of Russian philology in 1831.

12. The exact start date and end date of I.A. Goncharov’s work on his memoirs has not been established. Commentators believe that the author wrote them in the 1860s. See: (Goncharov 1954: p. 510).

13. It should be borne in mind, however, that Mezhevich’s account was published in 1842 and could have been available to Goncharov as a source of implicit polemics.

14. According to Mezhevich’s account, Kachenovskii was supposed to lecture right after Davydov and entered the lecture hall ‘a few minutes before the end of I.I. Davydov’s lecture’ (Mezhevich 1842: p. 18).

15. ‘Zoilus squashed by the immortal hand’; ‘Khavronios! Inveterate foul-mouth’ (Pushkin coined the name ‘Khavronios,’ apparently to convey a mixture of swinishness (khavron’ia is a derisive term for ‘pig’) and academic pedantry (with the Greek suffix ‘-os’) – Trans.); ‘Slanderer without talent’; ‘Lover of fighting in the journals’; ‘There’s life in the old dog yet’; ‘Where the ancient Kochergovskii is’; ‘Like a nameless satire’; and others. The ‘vicious spider’ Kachenovskii was one of the ‘exhibits’ in ‘My Insect Collection’ (1829).

16. An analysis of Kachenovskii’s scholarly views and of the ‘skeptical school,’ of course, goes beyond the scope of our subject. Nor will we relate the well-known history of the literary polemics between Pushkin and Kachenovskii between the late 1810s and 1820s, whose emotional echo Goncharov heard in the public argument in 1832. In the context of our subject we will focus on the assessment of Kachenovskii’s scholarly views given by S.M. Solov’ev in a biographical dictionary published for the centennial of Moscow University (Biograficheskii slovar’ 1855: I, 383–403) and on Kachenovskii’s comment, preserved in Solov’ev’s memoirs, about Pushkin as historiographer: ‘We have only one writer who could have written history in simple but lively and powerful language that is worthy of it. That is Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, who provided a superb model of historical exposition in his History of Pugachev’s Rebellion’ (Solov’ev 1915: p. 43). We also remind the reader that a concept of Kachenovskii’s views regarding the theory of the arts and on his lectures in esthetics can be formed on the basis of ‘An Experiment of Outlining a General Theory of the Fine Arts’ (‘Opyt nachertaniia obshchei teorii iziashchnykh iskusstv’), which was issued by I.P. Voitsekhovich in 1823 (Russkie esteticheskie traktaty 1974: I, 285–321).

17. Bulgarin responded to Mezhevich’s memoir: ‘Mezhevich refers to black curls, but in fact, they were chestnut-colored.’

18. Goncharov, of course, was familiar with the collected works edited by P.V. Annenkov; he censored the seventh (supplemental) volume (1857).

19. In the history of antiquity the concept of ‘classical writer’ (scriptor classicus) in the meaning of ‘exemplary writer’ came later; it was recorded no earlier than the second-century A.D. Usually it is dated to the ‘Attic Nights’ of Aulus Gellius, in the nineteenth book of which we find: “‘ … е cohorte illa dumtaxat antiqiore vel oratorum aliquis vel poetarum, id est classicus adsiduusque aliquis scriptor, non proletarius’ (Noctes Atticae XIX 8, 15)/‘ … of the ancient cohort of orators or poets, that is to say any exemplary and good writer, rather than a proletarian’ ((Gellii Avl 2008: p. 358) Russian translation by O.Iu. Boitsova). We should note that the structure of the phrase – the opposition between classicus and proletarius – still shows a clearly distinguishable etymological vestige, prompted Curtius at one point to make an ironic comment about the ‘tidbit’ for Marxist literary sociology and at the same time to point out the role of chance in literary terminology.

20. We remind the reader that this early work by Gracian is usually classified as baroque rhetoric.

21. This trend also received development in Slavic studies: from D.I. Chizhevskii and D.S. Likhachev to I.P. Smirnov.

22. From the first century of the Roman Empire right up to the time of Goethe, all Latin education began with a reading of the First Eclogue (of Virgil). ‘ … anyone unfamiliar with that short poem lacks one key to the literary tradition of Europe’ (Curtius 1978: p. 197).

23. The Virgil Society (http://www.virgilsociety.org.uk).

24. The conflict between the ‘postrhetorical’ understanding of style and genre and the rhetorical standard was captured and described by V.G. Belinskii in a review of the ninth edition of Koshanskii’s ‘General Rhetoric’ (1844). Belinskii insisted on the concept of a writer’s individual style and challenged the rigid connection between style and genre, i.e. the principle of ‘Virgil’s Wheel,’ a typology of three styles that conformed to specific genres and themes, which had been sustained in Europe for more than a thousand years, but in Russia, in his view, were altogether ‘made up’:

Mr. Koshanskii has forgotten […] that, besides the made-up high, middle, and low styles, there is also the uncountable multitude of styles that genuinely exist: there is Lomonosov’s style, there is Derzhavin’s style, the styles of Fonvizin, Karamzin, Zhukovskii, Batiushkov, Pushkin, Griboedov, and so on. He has forgotten that there are not three styles, but as many styles as there are gifted writers.

And furthermore: what is this empty way of dividing works into types by their external forms and defining which style suits each kind of literary composition? You were a witness of a flood that destroyed a city: you have the power to describe it in the form of a letter or in the form of a simple story. The style of your description will depend on the character of the impression this event made on you. How can one say which style you should use in writing a letter to your brother about your father’s death? (Belinskii 1955: VII, pp. 513-514)

25. It goes without saying that the orientation to French syntax stemmed from the abandonment of Latin syntax (‘Lomonosov’s Latin-German syntax’); Latin syntax corresponded to the rhetorical tradition, while French syntax was associated with the style of modern European literatures. This was how Karamzin’s reform of the Russian literary style in the first half of the nineteenth century was assessed; N.I. Grech, in Readings on the Russian Language (Chteniia o russkom iazyke), wrote about the influence of Karamzin’s style on Russian literature: ‘His style amazed all readers and acted upon them like an electric shock … He saw and proved in practice that the Russian language, which is based on its own rather than ancient principles, has the structure of modern languages, which is a simple, direct, logical structure … Lomonosov created the language. We are indebted to Karamzin for the Russian style … Since then Russian literature has begun to grow, both in the number of works that it has produced and in the number of readers’ (Grech 1840: p. 124–138).

26. See also in his ‘Old Notebook’ (‘Staraia zapisnaia knizhka’): ‘The French language, with its precision, clarity, and logical turns of phrase, can serve as a good course and instruction for the proper formation of style in another language as well’ (Viazemskii 1878–1896: VIII: p. 487).

27. Regarding the influence of the French language: on lexical borrowings, semantic calques, and the restructuring of the syntax of Russian literary language according to the French model, see: (Vinogradov 2002: 220–223; Rusenski 1985: p. 28–30).

28. The emergence of French classics and classical writers is a special and fairly well-studied subject, which we will not touch on in this article. We will only cite a few positions from the extensive bibliography of recent decades: (Compagnon 2011; Bonnet 1998; Viala 1993).

29. ‘When and where does a classical national author appear? When he finds in the history of his nation a harmonious and meaningful unity of great events and their effects; when he does not search in vain for greatness in the way of thinking of his countrymen … when he himself, filled with the spirit of the nation, feels capable of sympathizing, through an innate genius, both with the past and the present; when he finds his nation at a high level of culture so that his own literary production becomes easier; when he sees before him many collected materials, the perfect or imperfect efforts of his predecessors, and when … he need not pay a high price for his studies; that he is able to conceive and execute a great work in a unified state of mind in the best years of his life … A superior national writer may be expected only from a nation that stands at a certain level’ (Gëte 1980: X, 270–271).

30. A notable event was the translation into Russian and publication in 1783 of a work by Huet, one of the first theories of the novel, and certainly the most authoritative European theory (Iue 1783). First published in 1670 together with the novel Zayde by J. R. de Segrais and Madame de La Fayette (Huet 1670), Traitté de l’origine des romans by Pierre Daniel Huet, previously the author of a short novel and in the future a member of the French Academy and a bishop, by 1711 had gone through eight separate editions, was translated into English (1672), Dutch (1679), Latin (1682), and German (1682), and remained relevant all the way until the second half of the nineteenth century. Huet constituted the novel as a genre in the system of poetics, ordered and structured its theory, genesis, and history; in 1886 the creator of historical poetics would call Huet ‘the first conscious theoretician’ of the novel (Veselovskii 1939: p. 16).

31. Compare: ‘Lettre au Spectateur sur la littérature russe’ (Karamzin 1987: p. 460). Nearly a quarter-century later, in his ‘Speech Delivered at a Ceremonial Meeting of the Imperial Russian Academy on 5 December 1818,’ Karamzin would formulate this same idea as follows: ‘ … Our undoubtedly happy fate in all respects is some kind of extraordinary speed: we are maturing in a matter of decades rather than centuries’ (Karamzin 1964: II: p. 234).

32. Dostoevsky commented on this meaning of the epoch, the ability to ‘fit other geniuses into his soul as his own,’ in his Pushkin speech (Dostoevsky 1972–1990: XXVI: p. 148).

33. Regarding scholarly activities in the department of philology of Moscow University after the reform of 1803–1806, see, e.g.: (Andreev 2000: p. 154–161).

34. The tradition of literary studies has canonized the two cases of the ‘transfer of plot lines.’ Pushkin’s guiding influence, however, was not limited to The Government Inspector and Dead Souls. For example, on 7 April 1834, Pushkin wrote in his ‘Diary’: ‘Gogol on my advice has begun a History of Russian Criticism’ (Pushkin 1937–1949: XII: p. 324). M.A. Tsiavlovskii’s work ‘Echoes of Pushkin’s Short Stories in Gogol’s Oeuvre’ became an important attempt at a targeted search for traces of conversations with Pushkin in Gogol’s writings. Tsiavlovskii explicated traces of discussions with Pushkin that took place in the winter of 1833–34 in three stories: “The Portrait,” “The Nose,” and “The Overcoat.” We will present only one example, the study of which was given a generalizing continuation in V.E. Vatsuro’s article ‘“The Great Melancholic” in Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg.’ Pushkin’s ‘Diary’ contains an entry from 17 December 1833:

In the city they’re talking about a strange incident. In one of the buildings that belongs to the department of the court stables the furniture started moving and jumping; the bosses were informed. – Prince V. Dolgorukii set up an investigation. – One of the officials called a priest, but while he was praying the chairs and tables didn’t want to stand still. Various opinions are passed around about this. N. said that it’s court furniture and it wants to go to Anichkov [Palace].

The streets are unsafe. [Genral] Sukhtel’n was attacked on Palace Square and robbed. The police are apparently busy with politics, not with thieves and the pavement (Pushkin 1937-1949: XII, 317-318). This story, in Tsiavlovskii’s opinion, influenced the description of the ‘strange incident’ of the ‘dancing chairs in Koniushennaia Street,’ which in the story ‘The Nose’ follows right after the story about Major Kovaliov’s loss of his nose (Tsiavlovskii 1962: 257-258). Vatsuro is very likely right to conjecture that in this story there is at least one more reference from Pushkin–the end of the text, which is done as a ‘prose paraphrase of the last stanzas of “Little House in Kolomna.” (Vatsuro 1977: 52)

35. Later L.V. Pumpianskii contended that ‘the pairing of the tragic and the comic’ that was displayed in the parallel existence of the poetry of Pushkin and Gogol may be regarded as an expression of ‘the general character of the duality of a great culture’ and a repetition of the ‘eternal interdependence’ that can be observed among the Greeks; in Spanish literature in Cervantes; under Louis XIV; and in Shakespeare (Pumpianskii 2000: p. 257).

36. To this day, the best work on this subject is still V.E. Vatsuro’s article ‘“The Great Melancholic” in Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg.’ In analyzing the well-known cases of Pushkin’s guiding influence on Gogol’s oeuvre, as well as the interpretation of the ‘transfer of plot lines’ by the writers themselves and their contemporaries, Vatsuro constructs an overarching biographical and creative storyline that has its own logic, psychological motivation, and ethical foundation.

37. V.E. Vatsuro, conjecturing that Gogol’s reflections were polemically oriented toward E.F. Rozen’s memoirs, pointed out a change (perhaps an unconscious one) in the model of Gogol’s creative and personal behavior after Pushkin’s death. Gogol’s jocularity, which contrasted with Pushkin’s ‘somber emotional melancholy,’ gave way to a model of inheritance and succession: ‘The sense of succession was very strong in Gogol; should one be surprised at the fact that Gogol was able even involuntarily to model his personality on Pushkin’s personality if the entire, long, and torturous journey of his spiritual, intellectual, and esthetic searches led to this’ (Vatsuro 1977: p. 63).

38. Vestnik Evropy, 1809, Part 48, No. 21.

39. The letter ‘On Criticism’ has been studied in detail, both in the context of Zhukovskii’s oeuvre and in the context of the journal policy of Vestnik Evropy, of which Zhukovskii was the editor in 1808–1809. Without commenting on this text, which has been commented on a number of times, we will merely remind the reader of the discursive tactics chosen by the author, which were not unimportant to an understanding of the purpose of the ‘letter.’ The thoughts on criticism, including on ‘our classical writers,’ were set forth on behalf of an imaginary interlocutor who only knew how to read Russian but had still read all the good books, both original and translated ones, ‘from cover to cover.’

40. In 1836 four notebooks of Kantemir’s satires were published; at this point the series was cut off (Kantemir 1836). The original plans included publication of Trediakovskii, Lomonosov, Sumarokov, Kheraskov, Petrov, Bogdanovich, Khemnitser, Fonvizin, Kostrov, Kniazhnin, and Murav’ev. (For the announcement of the series, see: (ZhMNP 1835: Vol. 8, No. 10).)

41. See, e.g., P.A. Viazemskii’s foreword to ‘The Fountain of Bakhchisarai’: ‘A Conversation Between the Publisher and the Classic from the Vyborg Side or from Vasil’evskii Island’ (1824).

42. The announcement of the series being prepared that was published by ZhMNP explained: ‘Russian classics’ are ‘our writers from the last century’ (ZhMNP 1835: Vol. 8, No. 10, p. 251).

43. In a review of the first issues of the ‘Russian Classical Writers’ series, N.A. Polevoi, explaining why authors of the last century had been ‘left nothing but a historical name’ and why, after achieving fame among their contemporaries, they did not have ‘life in posterity,’ pointed to the fact that eighteenth-century Russian literature was in its ‘infancy.’

44. (Starodum (which roughly translates as ‘Old Thinker’) was a key character in the 1782 comedy ‘The Minor,’ by Denis Fonvizin. Believed to express Fonvizin’s own views, Starodum was a nobleman who espoused old-fashioned values of education, morality and good breeding from the era of Peter the Great. – Trans.)

45. (A reference to Vladimir II Monomakh (1053–1125), who reigned as Grand Prince of Kievan Rus’ from 1113 to 1125. – Trans.)

46. (Boian is a singer mentioned in ‘The Lay of Igor’s Host.’ While many literary historians believe Boian was the name of a specific poet-singer, some argue that it was used as a generic noun for a singer in that era. http://feb-web.ru/feb/slovenc/es/es1/es1-1471.htm—Trans.)

47. The same trend of constructing an overarching literary history – ancient and modern – is evident in one of Pushkin’s drafts, which its publishers titled ‘Outline for a History of Russian Literature.’ We will quote its first section, which probably pertains to 1829:

Chronicles, folktales, songs, proverbs.

Missives of the tsars. The song of [Igor’s] host The battle with Mamai.

Peter’s reign. The reign of Elizabeth. From Catherine to Alexander.

The influence of French poetry (Pushkin 1937-1949: XII, 208).

48. (Mikhail Nikitich Murav’ev (1757–1807) was a prominent figure in the Russian Enlightenment and a trustee of Moscow University. – Trans.)