Russian Literary Criticism

"Rye", Grigoriy Myasoyedov (1835-1911), Oil on canvas, 1881

I love books and I'm wary of literary criticism. Some works of lit crit do a great job of putting works of literature into historical and cultural perspective, broadening our understanding of their significance. But literary criticism can also obfuscate the real virtues of a good book and only confuse and alienate readers. As we've seen frequently on The Overleaf, the most common forum for criticism is found in the introduction of a novel or short story collection in which the story is spoiled and the author of the work is derided as being overrated. This can be off-putting, and make curious readers think that the book they're about to enjoy is too complex for them to understand, turning them off completely. I guess everyone has their job to do.

This is precisely what The Overleaf seeks to address. I try to make books more accessible by demystifying them. Ideally, authors write for readers, not for critics. But now and then I come across a work of literary criticism that enhances my enjoyment and understanding of literature.  So here are two books I discovered while doing research for my essays about the Russian short story. One is not so good, the other is excellent. One wades in a morass of generalities, one gets down to brass tacks about style and context.

Lectures on Russian Literature (1889) by Ivan Panin

After being thrown out of Russia as an anti-Tsarist revolutionary, Ivan Panin emigrated to Germany and then the United States in the 1870s, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard and began giving lectures on Russian literature. After converting to Christianity, he became consumed with what he claimed were significant numerical patterns in the Bible that revealed a secret meaning. This volume of his lectures on Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, and Tolstoy (conspicuously omitting Dostoyevsky) is currently available for free, while his Biblio-numerological obsessions have fallen by the wayside. 

Unfortunately, Panin is given to rhapsodic fits of purple prose that sing lofty praises of the usual suspects. He has a vague construct of the evolution of the soul and ascribes stages of the soul's development to the work of each author. Hence, Pushkin is the "singer", Gogol the "protestor", Turgenev the "warrior" and Tolstoy, "the preacher", creating a top heavy construct that parallels the development of Russian culture with man's destined journey toward God. Fair enough, but it's hardly about literature. He even uses this idea to bash venerable English writers like George Eliot, Charles Dickens and W.M. Thackeray for not being as clever and inspired as his beloved Russians. For all that, he only ever scratches the surface of their work, and his rhapsodies are unabashedly sentimental and quite frankly, corny. We can partly forgive his evangelical zeal. These great Russian books were still fairly new to American readers and he clearly wanted to get the word out, but his emphasis on rhetoric and lofty language doesn't serve his subject our our understanding very well. This book does explore and contextualize Russian literature, but only within very narrow parameters. Modern readers are likely to roll their eyes and utter a collective, exasperated, "Oh, brother!" You can give this one a miss.

Download Lectures on Russian Literature from Project Gutenberg

Essays on Russian Novelists (1911) by William Lyon Phelps

This one has much more meat on the bone. In his day, Phelps was an immensely popular lecturer, public speaker, newspaper columnist, preacher, and later, host of his own radio show. His lectures on literature at Yale at the turn of the twentieth century attracted lots of media attention, and his rising celebrity status aroused the jealousy of his veteran colleagues on the faculty. Apparently, one hundred years ago, it was possible to parlay a career as an academic into stardom. If he were alive today, he's be doing TV commercials, have his own cooking show and a hundred thousand Twitter fans.

Phelps is also opinionated, but backs his opinions up. The excellent introduction explores how the culture, language, history, politics and geography of Russia all contribute to the singular character of Russian literature, which sets the table nicely for his commentary. While walking us through the major Russian writers, he calls out Dostoyevsky for his lack of proportion and occasional incoherence, but praises him for his many flashes of brilliance. He gives Tolstoy props for his immense contributions to world literature, but disdains the author's didacticism and (unlike Panin) questions the sincerity of the author's Christian anarchic zeal in light of his legendary egotism. He dislikes Gorki's bloodless socialist realism but admires a couple of his stories. Generally, his criticism of a given author's work serves to highlight the author's very best qualities. This is balanced, constructive and enlightening criticism--a rare thing indeed. Alert readers will soon notice that Phelps is what we in the twenty first century would call a cultural conservative, but like Panin, he was a man of his time and his somewhat myopic views about religion and morality don't detract too much from his insights. I would have loved to have had this guy as a college professor.

Phelps favors Turgenev as the greatest Russian writer, a view reflective of his era. I think that Turgenev is considered the greatest of all Russian writers by European and American critics at the turn of the twentieth century because the structure of his novels adhered more closely to established forms of Western literature than his contemporaries. Turgenev's emotional reserve and familiar templates fit European tastes better than the sprawling, prodigious, emotional styles of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Since this book was first published in 1911, Tolstoy has supplanted Turgenev as the preeminent Russian novelist in many minds, and apart from Turgenev's brilliant 1862 novel Fathers and Children, his books aren't read as widely in the West as they once were. That's a shame because his novels and short stories are great stuff indeed. I would encourage anyone interested in Russian literature to read them.

As for the rest, apart from Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chekhov, Phelps explores a few novels by authors barely known one hundred years later, including Mikhail Artsybashev's Sanin (1907), The Red Laugh (1904) by Leonid Andreyev and The Duel (1905) by Aleksandr Kuprin (also known as In Honour's Name). Just learning of novels and authors entirely new to me made this book worth reading, and it's an ideal companion to Best Russian Short Stories, an anthology we explored at the end of my series about Russian short stories. If you want to better understand Russian literature in context, I would suggest having a look at these two books together to get a taste of some of the lesser known authors. 

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Dickens Does America

U.S. wall map from 1845, just three years after Dickens' journey, Click here for the full rez version.

When Charles Dickens set sail for North America from Liverpool on January 3, 1842, the nation he visited was a work in progress, and one hundred seventy one years later, it remains so. It's infrastructure was scrappy, its people a little rough around the edges, and its geographical obstacles daunting, but the pluck of its citizens and its vast natural resources made its potential seem limitless. In many respects, the United States was what we would now consider a third world country, or at most a developing nation. Dickens was both charmed and appalled by what he saw there, and his criticisms did not go over well with the American public upon publication. At the time, Dickens was the biggest literary star of his day with a huge readership in the former colonies and around the world. so its understandable that his missive stung a bit.

American Notes for General Circulation (1842; this edition: 1913) by Charles Dickens

Americans can be a little touchy about criticism from their former imperial rulers, and patronizing lectures in stern English accents tend to make us cringe. It's in our DNA. But, to use an American phrase, "he called 'em the way he saw 'em", and while his tone can be a little paternal in places, his motivation was not to flout his cultural superiority but to write an accurate record of what he experienced. Between the lines, one gets the feeling that Dickens really wants the young nation to succeed and to live up to its own constitutionally prescribed standards regarding human rights. He also presents vivid portraits of cities, towns, the wilderness and the people he met on his journey with that singular Dickensian eye for detail and ear for dialect. This is Charles Dickens, after all, so you can expect beautiful writing and short jabs of dark, poignant humor. I won't spoil it for you, but here are a few highlights of the journey:

He made land on the continent near Halifax after a rough journey with choppy seas and the dismal echoes of aggrieved stomachs churning across the Atlantic. On the first leg of his journey, he headed for Boston, stopping at Lowell and Worcester, Massachusetts, down through Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut via the Connecticut River, then via the Long Island Sound to New York and on to Philadelphia. 

Dickens was not the typical holiday maker. In all of the major cities he visited, he made a point of visiting the local prisons, insane asylums, poor houses and rehabilitative facilities for the disabled, making American Notes a sort of twisted Zagat's guide for the disenfranchised. Boston had the best of facilities, New York and Philadelphia the worst. One of the most engrossing passages in the book concerns meeting Laura Bridgman, a young deaf and blind girl in Boston who learned special sign language fifty years before Hellen Keller. Dickens was much encouraged by the orderliness and cleanliness of the city and its facilities and was sufficiently moved by Bridgman's story to include a very detailed description of her education, making her world famous. By contrast, his description of New York's darker corners and of a prison in Philadelphia in which all the inmates are in perpetual solitary confinement conveys the essence of human despair and the depths of the author's compassion.

Laura Bridgman

From Philadelphia, Dickens travelled to Washington D.C. where he watched Congress in session and was unimpressed by showy political posturing and rhetoric, but positively appalled by the preponderance of tobacco chewing and the poor marksmanship of perpetually masticating Yanks when aiming for the spittoon, even in the White House. Of American cities in general and of Washington, D.C. in particular, he notes that America seems to be in a perpetual state of construction as many public buildings and public works projects stood unfinished, often awaiting funding for completion. When traveling between cities, the roads were muddy and perilous and wagons often cramped and uncomfortable. Locomotives were brand new and could only carry him along a few routes. An American road trip was not for the faint of heart in the 1840s.

Crossing into Richmond, Virginia and Baltimore, Dickens experienced his first glimpses of the grim reality of slavery. The picturesque vistas of Richmond were spoiled by a painful awareness of the inhumane treatment of African Americans. In fact, at the end of the book, he devotes and entire chapter to denouncing slavery in the bluntest terms, including several unsettling excerpts from newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves, complete with graphic details of distinguishing wounds and disfigurements from various physical abuses that would identify them. He also cites stories concerning duels, murders and assassinations to illustrate the young nation's tendency for gun violence and vigilante justice. Sobering and prescient stuff, to say the least.

He then left Dixie for Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Louisville en route to St. Louis (where your humble blogger resides). It was a tough journey by boat, and Dickens describes the transition from the Ohio River to the Mississippi in dramatic terms as the pristine beauty and relative tranquility of the Ohio gives way to the muddy clutter and the ferocious current of the Mississippi. At the time, Missouri was the western most state in the Union--the last stop before reaching the wild, lawless Indian territories. From St. Louis, he made a visit to the Illinois prairie, back to St. Louis and back through Ohio up to Lake Erie and on to Canada, passing through Niagara Falls and completing his six month journey at West Point.

In many ways, his reportage of America mirrors the view of many outside observers at virtually any point in its history (Alexis de Tocqueville's Journey to America, written a decade earlier, comes to mind). Dickens sees a world of contradictions: beauty and brutality, industry and soul-chilling poverty, equality and oppression. In fact, as Dickens tells it, my forefathers were friendly, earnest men with great spirit and gumption, who spat great wads of tobacco juice on the floor, kept their heating stoves on high, had a few bugs to work out of their conception of human rights, embraced an informal, egalitarian attitude in court proceedings and legislatures, swore allegiance to lofty ideals that they struggled to live up to in practice, and used quaint and colorful colloquialisms. Except for the constant spitting part, these words could be aptly applied to the present day, and as an American, I really don't have a problem with that assessment. One hundred seventy one years later, American Notes is both a valuable historical document of what the U.S. once was and a still-relevant, farsighted commentary on what it has become.

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