Joe Andrew

The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature

Preface. Neil CORNWELL: Russian Gothic: An Introduction. Richard PEACE: From Pantheon to Pandemonium. Derek OFFORD: Karamzins Gothic Tale: The Island of Bornholm. Alessandra TOSI: At the Origins of the Russian Gothic Novel: Nikolai Gnedichs Don Corrado de Gerrera (1803). Michael PURSGLOVE: Does Russian Gothic Verse Exist? The Case of Vasilii Zhukovskii. Claire WHITEHEAD: The Fantastic in Russian Romantic Prose: Pushkins The Queen of Spades. Roger COCKRELL: Philosophical Tale or Gothic Horror Story? The Strange case of V.F. Odoevskiis The Cosmorama. Cynthia C. RAMSEY: Gothic Treatment of the Crisis of Engendering in Odoevskiis The Salamander Carolyn JURSA AYERS: Elena Gan and the Female Gothic in Russia. Priscilla MEYER: Supernatural Doubles: Vii and The Nose. Ignat AVSEY: The Gothic in Gogol and Dostoevskii. Leon BURNETT: The Echoing Heart: Fantasias of the Female in Dostoevskii and Turgenev. Ann KOMAROMI: Unknown Force: Gothic Realism in Chekhovs The Black Monk. List of Contributors. Select Bibliography. Index.

Pushkin’s Southern Poems

The main focus of the present volume is prose literature of the 1830s and 1840s. Pushkin’s Southern Poems, therefore, stand apart from the main body of the book, as they are, of course, poetic in form and because they appeared about ten years before the period concerned. A consideration of them, however, provides a good prelude to the main discussion. As Stephanie Sandler argues ‘These are stories of sexual involvement, extended anecdotes about coupling and separation’.1 In other words, at the very beginning of his artistic maturation (and, therefore, at the inception of modern Russian literature proper), Pushkin placed issues of gender at the centre of his preoccupations. These three works, then, can be seen as a meditation on sexual relations which led into the central issues of Evgeny Onegin which, in turn, exerted a profound influence on the literature of the 1830s.

Elena Gan and A Futile Gift

The Ideal is unusual in its depiction of the oppressive atmosphere and stultifying routine of life in a provincial garrison town from which its heroine seeks to escape, but otherwise the story is improbable and the style sententious. 1 This recent dismissive comment from John Mersereau is, in fact, one of very few remarks of any kind passed on the work of Elena Gan in Western criticism. (Mirsky accords her ten, not very gracious lines.2) This ignorance of Gan’s work, which is only now being redressed, is particularly to be regretted, given that, as Richard Stites has observed, she was ‘one of a number, larger than is commonly held, of cultivated women … who passed the ordinary limits of women’s consciousness of their age to look at the larger world around them’, and thereby anticipated the ‘woman question’ by twenty years.3 In her short life (she died in 1842 at the age of 28), Gan did, indeed, like many writers of svetskiye povesti (society tales),4 place women at the centre of her work. What is striking about her ceuvre, however, is not merely the questions she asked about women’s roles, but also the challenging way she dealt with these problems. In the four works considered here (The Ideal, (1837) The Locket, (1839) Society’s Judgement,5 (1840) and A Futile Gift, (1842)), Gan’s project was to subvert the literary imaging of women, as well as to offer new responses to the questions she was helping to formulate.

Alexander Herzen: Who Is To Blame?

Sir Isaiah Berlin has commented: ‘At the heart of Herzen’s outlook (and of Turgenev’s too) is the notion of the complexity and insolubility of the central problems’.1 In his major work of fiction, Who Is To Blame?2 (1846), completed, appropriately enough, one year before he was to leave Russia forever,3 Alexander Herzen, the leading Russian philosopher of his generation,4 addressed himself to several of these ‘central problems’. Beltov, the principal male protagonist, is an heir of Onegin, Chatsky and Pechorin, yet another ‘superfluous man’; Lyubov Krutsiferskaya is yet another daughter of Tatyana and her character can be regarded as an investigation, ostensibly from a quasi-feminist perspective,5 of the fate of the so-called strong woman in the depths of the Russian provinces, ‘the kingdom of darkness’, to which the novel pays great attention. The central plot, the love triangle between Lyubov, her husband, Krutsifersky and Beltov, is one of the first investigations in Russian fiction of the theme of adulterous love.6 In many respects, then, Who Is To Blame? while being deeply flawed as an artistic whole, can be regarded both as a summation of the debates in literature in the 1820s and 1830s,7 and as an anticipation of the novels of Turgenev, a life-long associate and sometime friend of Herzen.8

V.F. Odoevsky and the Two Princesses

Ivan Turgenev’s works, both at the time and since, have been regarded as amongst the first in Russian literature to present positive portraits of the ‘strong heroine’ or ‘new woman’.1 Closer examination, however, especially of the shorter works like Asya, First Love and Spring Torrents, particularly from a feminist perspective, reveals that much traditional misogyny remains in his writing and that, ultimately, his depiction of women is fundamentally ambivalent.2 The Work of V.F. Odoevsky is a similar instance. Although he began publishing in the 1820s,3 Odoevsky published his most significant works in the 1830s and early 1840s, that is, precisely at the same time as the first real emergence of women prose writers in any numbers, including Elen Gan and Mariya Zhukova.4 Gan, Zhukova and other writers of the period began to formulate what later became known as the ‘woman question’,5 a somewhat portmanteau term which covered in particular the lack of opportunities for women to find any sort of career and the problems of the ‘marriage market’, especially the arranged marriage. One issue which received an especially high prominence was that of women’s education (or rather, the lack of it).

The Law of the Father and Netochka Nezvanova

In this final chapter I wish to pursue two main strands. Firstly, by way of conclusion, I will draw out some of the principal themes and arguments presented in the earlier chapters, and, secondly, I will offer an analysis of certain aspects of Dostoevsky’s Netochka Nezvanova (1849) which illuminate these themes in a dramatic and peculiarly intense fashion.

Mariya Zhukova and Patriarchal Power

In a sense even more fundamental than is the case for her younger contemporary, Elena Gan, Mariya Zhukova’s life1 and works have been ‘hidden from history’. Where Mirsky makes a few rather condescending remarks about Gan, he is completely silent on the subject of her more prolific fellow writer. The situation is no better in the much more recent Cambridge History of Russian Literature of 1989 which also has not a single reference to Zhukova, although a number of minor male prosaicists of the period feature. (Richard Stites also fails to mention her.) Finally, however, this silence is ending. Zhukova’s major works have recently been republished in Russia2 (rather more extensively than those of Gan, in fact), while a lengthy section on Zhukova is to be included in Catriona Kelly’s forthcoming Russian Women’s Writing 1830–1990: A History.

Nikolay Chernyshevsky and the Real Day

Whatever is thought of its literary merits,1 it would be hard not to acknowledge that What Is To Be Done? (1863)2 is amongst the most famous and influential books in the Russian Language. It has been called ‘a Bible for all advanced Russian women with aspirations toward independence’,3 and its impact can be said to have gone far beyond the literary or even intellectual world more generally: ‘In its political effects, as a fundamental text of Russian socialism, this novel has probably changed the world more than any other.’4 This is not an exaggerated claim; Lenin himself noted: Chernyshevsky’s novel is too complicated, too full of ideas, to understand and evaluate at an early age …. But after the execution of my brother, knowing that Chernyshevsky’s novel was one of his favourite books, I set about reading it properly and sat over it not just a few days but whole weeks. It was only then I understood its depth. It’s a thing that can fire one’s energies for a lifetime.5 Certainly, the novel, written in the Peter and Paul Fortress before the author was exiled to Siberia, made a profound impression on Chernyshevsky’s contemporaries and became one of the central texts in the debates around the ‘woman question’.6 In turn, it prompted a series of anti-Nihilist novels and other writings for the next decade or so.7

Nikolay Gogol: The Russian ‘Malleus Maleficarum’

That Gogol had difficulty in dealing with women, both in life and in fiction, is no secret.3 However, in a consideration of women in Russian fiction one can hardly bypass a writer of such importance. He has acquired many reputations: as founder of the so-called ‘natural school’, as a champion of the oppressed, as a symbolist, a religious writer, a proto-Surrealist and many more such labels have been attached to him and his mysterious, complex works.4 Despite his own paradoxical sexuality and the general absence of serious portraits of women in his work, much recent interest has been devoted (in the West at least) to problems of sexuality in his fiction, culminating in an extended psychoanalytical study of one short work and an elaborate hypothesis as to his own psycho-sexual motivations.5 It is against this critical background that any survey of Gogol’s female characters must be located. Nevertheless, as the two quotations above are intended to suggest, the image of women that emerges from his fiction was not merely conservative, patriarchal and misogynist, but positively and specifically medieval in orientation.

Ivan Turgenev and the ‘New Eve’

Such recent comments are the common currency of Turgenevan criticism. From Dobrolyubov’s challenging review of On the Eve, When Will the Real Day Come?, which appeared in the same year as that novel (1860), Turgenev has been acknowledged as one of the first in Russian literature to give an accurate and sympathetic account of the ‘new woman’. The novel was also acclaimed in Turgenev’s own lifetime as a prophecy of the later ‘Going-To-The-People’ movement of the 1870s.4 Certainly, the characters of Yelena Stakhova and, to a lesser extent, Natalya in Rudin (1856), mark a dramatic change in the depiction of women in Russian literature. The suffering victims or demonic temptresses are replaced by energetic, independent and active women, who at least strive to determine their own destinies. However, as Ripp indicates, the choices available have their limitations: ‘choosing a man to love’ (as Natalya also does) is not the same as choosing a life. Moreover, if we look at Turgenev’s female portraits more generally, his work must be seen as only a transition to the ‘real day’ of Chernyshevsky and other radical writers of the 1860s and 1870s.