American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

The Rise of the Russian Novel: Studies in the Russian Novel from Eugene Onegin to War andPeace by Richard FreebornReview by: Walter ArndtThe Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Winter, 1973), pp. 448-451Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/305641 .

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Reviews

Richard Freeborn. The Rise of the Russian Novel: Studies in the Russian Novel from Eugene Onegin to War and Peace. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973. 289 pp., $18.50 (cloth), $8.95 (paper).

Some may find it difficult to quell the unworthy suspicion that the subtitle of this survey of the first 40 years of the Russian novel is cunningly chosen. It ducks the petrifying task of supplying a coherent generative analysis of "the" novel but retains the fun and zest of discussing certain novels in chronological order, relying on the master title to raise the caliber of the whole above an essay collection. Treelike, a manuscript on these lines-as university-press editors know-grows ring after annual ring of excursus and qualification in the drawer of every other young Slavist who has had the survey course in the 19th-century novel conferred, or thrust, upon him. Each of these manuscripts only awaits the masterly interweaving, those syncretic over- view chapters between the monographs which critics of both East and West, jointly or severally, have failed to provide. None seem to attain this maturity, and few are, like Freeborn's, successfully pared to a lesser but viable form.

In the present case, if ever there existed that rage to discover in those dynamic decades a single, if complex and changeful, pattern, it has been cast off with other presumably childish things. If one hugs the master title to one's bosom one will be very much aware that those Pythian analytic discourses A la Blackmur, instructing us how "the novel" in the abstract was evolving and what-all it was "undergoing," are missing. But the different tacks Freeborn takes with each novelist, implicit con- trasts emerging between lines of analysis, and the occasional explicit cross compari- sons, suffice to maintain some cohesion, if not a clear unity, of viewpoint-with one yawning, destructive exception presently to be attended to. There is no harm as long as one realizes what is being offered and what is not. After all, in the writing of literary as well as political history not only the Why but also the How and What of any hap- pening, the very making of any sort of pattern out of a raw existential welter, already is the fruit of an individual creativity akin to poetry.

Throughout the nine essays here sorted into chapters, from the buxom initial dec- ade (Eugene Onegin, A Hero of Our Time, and Dead Souls, ca. 35 pages each) through the more asthenic and half-anonymous middle ("From the Forties to the Sixties" and "The Novels of Goncharov," 20 pages each) to the bulging late 60's (Crime and Punishment and War and Peace, total 110 pages), Freeborn exhibits economy without rigor, a pleasant urbanity, and at least sobriety if not iconoclasm in his judgments. This is refreshing in a field where received ecstasies and a family loyalty to the ques- tionable are as rife as they are in courses in the American novel. Each of these essays offers competent, at times enlightening and provocative pr6cis and criticism, with the

448 SEEJ, Vol. 17, No. 4 (1973)

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Reviews 449

exception of the one on Eugene Onegin. This for some reason amounts to little more than a book report, leaving the tutelary magic, the perpetual sway of the careless rhymes over the Russian literary imagination, a mystery.

The treatment elsewhere, if one may venture a summary judgment too reminis- cent of a report card, hovers between adequate and magisterial throughout, almost always rising well above the former, almost always short of the latter. Where the book excels the three or four previous works directly comparable, it does so not by vir- tuosity but by relaxed yet sustaining structure, lucid formulations, and by the sea- soned mind behind them. These are typical essay virtues. They are the arithmetic product, as it were, of confident control of subject matter and sure marshaling of argument, for one factor; for the other, awareness of where it all belongs in the shift- ing contexts of history, thought, and culture, and hence what to make of it, and distilling spare but sure generalizations. The following passage perhaps conveys as well as any some of these qualities, while also characteristic of the tenor of Free- born's prose. What is more, it is part of the most comprehensive and interesting of the few overarching extrapolations from the immediate subject in the book: "Rely- ing little in construction on coincidence or plot, the Russian novel, in its greatest examples, is a form designed to enact a situation, a particular scene, a present dra- matic immediacy in which the lives and spirits of human beings are suddenly pene- trated, illuminated and laid bare. Pechorin's discovery of himself, Chichikov's ulti- mate discomfiture, the meaning of Oblomov's dream, Raskolnikov's disenchantment, Andrey Bolkonsky's knowledge of love in death, Pierre Bezukhov's discovery of God in life are all offered to us as moments of revelation when the meaning of each life is dramatically illuminated. The history of the evolution of the Russian nineteenth- century novel may be seen as an ever deeper penetration into the privacy of human experience. ... In each case the private dilemma mirrors the divisiveness of society; in each case it asserts its independence of social causes." (36-37.)

One cannot help feeling that Freeborn's training should qualify and tempt him to place his general observations in a broader comparative setting, and in a search for deeper insights contrast them against the lessons of novel history elsewhere. He hardly does this at all. Comparative analysis only within the large but limited world of the Russian 19th-century novel-and the essay format insures that there is little even of this here--lacks full authority and perspective until the focus is widened at suggestive intervals to draw on the two or three most pertinent novel literatures out- side Russia. One does not get from Freeborn quite the magisterial guidance and stereoscopic vision that one gets (with an extra fillip of showmanship) from Isaiah Berlin: a view from the bridge between present and past, a focus on literature as common concern and cultural early-warning system. There is not the challenge of tentative triangulations among Russian, English, and French that one gets from John Bayley or Richard Gregg; let alone the heightened understanding mediated by Ger- man and Polish literature, which is waived by almost everyone out of an oafish sort of Umlaut Angst and an equally dreary polonophobia absorbed like antibodies in graduate school from the Russians.

On the other hand, some sections are most happy feats of both inclusiveness and compression. The essay modestly titled "Crime and Punishment" is in effect a tightly argued monograph on Dostoevskij both before and after exile, which manages to draw on almost every work of clear relevance to the novel itself. It is well fortified, as are all the essays, with illustrative footnote references to both older and most recent literature. The same scheme of bringing much of the author's oeuvre to a focus sub- servient to the titular work is used in "War and Peace," with almost equal success. This essay has other impressive merits. For one, nobody since John Bayley in his

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450 Slavic and East European Journal

Tolstoy and the Novel has as devotedly and as fruitfully worried the secret of the simul- taneous vividness and authorial dyspathy that marks Tolstoj's scenes or diagnosed the characters' curious detachment from any personal past so convincingly as a necessary concomitant of Tolstoj's cameralike panning.

An unaccountable act of surgery which, to this observer, leaves not the proverbial running sore but a bleeding stump and inevitably crabs the whole gait of the book is the excision of Turgenev and the doomed attempt to stuff Lermontov and Gondarov and some lesser gauze into the cavity. It is true that abroad, during the three or four decades before World War I and probably much after that, Turgenev's image and influence were alive (though lessened by selective translation and skewed by dis- tance), while Lermontov and Gondarov were unknown or underrated. But this is no justification for even a well-meaning, perhaps less than deliberate, act to reverse the emphasis by simply switching the beam and the region of underexposure. Is Turgenev now a suitable target for neglect?

A book like the present must as a stopgap for a literary history try to report, and account for, the value judgments of writers, critics, public, "reception," "influence," and the like. But it should also be, and Freeborn knows this well, a modern critical account disrespectful of the patina of received opinion (including one's graduate teachers' and theirs before them), owing as little as may be to encrusted sentiment. Under both these aspects, the respective treatment meted out here to Turgenev's and Lermontov's prose is at fault. The prominence of the Pe6oriniada in this book is in fair accord, true, with the impact made by it in its time and with the faddish ven- eration it has kindled on occasion since. But its influence on the novel form, as here implied by comparison and by its chapter status, is seriously overstated. The vir- tual erasure of Turgenev, on the other hand, is of course in glaring discord with his contemporary eminence and with the imprint he left on the Russian and European novel. If this was to be deliberate and reasoned omission, at least from the vantage point of modern taste or critical judgment, Turgenev should have been carefully debunked here-the fate just wished on Lermontov-and his undeserved authority and popularity at the seminal midcentury should have been shrewdly and shrug- gingly accounted for.

As it is, the Dying Swan of Pjatigorsk as well as the novels of Gon6arov as a whole have earned themselves chapters here. Parcontre, the unprecedented domination of the novelistic scene by Turgenev in the 15 years between the Sportsman's Sketches and Crime and Punishment figures anonymously, as it were, as a two-page episode within an anemic filler chapter called "From the Forties to the Sixties." Is this per- haps part of Gon6arov's posthumous revenge for Turgenev's methodical and mnemo- technically unique plagiarisms from his novels? Whatever the rationale, a footnote referring to Freeborn's useful Turgenev study of 1963 is a derisive substitute for a new discussion in situ of this still enigmatic, effusive yet stubbornly private, titan of the midcentury.

Returning to the intact portions of Freeborn's survey, one notes that there are many fine examples supporting the initial attribution to Freeborn of sensitive, ar- ticulate intelligence and a responsive (though perhaps circumscribed) literary cul- ture. One is the discussion of temporal retardation in Crime and Punishment (p. 191)- which, incidentally, would have gained from a recollection of Thomas Mann's per- cipient reverie in The Buddenbrooks on the cancellation of time by the sea and the even more relevant passages which illumine The Magic Mountain. Another such little excellence among many is the characterization, or rather analysis of characterization, of Princess Mary (not Penorin's, heaven forbid, but Prince Andrej's) (229-30). In the synthetic chapter which concludes the presentation, somewhat meager and eclec-

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Reviews 451

tic though it is, a very shrewd and arresting notion is that of consciousness of time versus neglect of it as a potential classifying element in the 19th-century novel in Russia (perhaps everywhere?). While only tentatively sketched out, it whets the appetite for a more thorough test, even while warning flags go up in the back of one's head against all analytic panaceas.

A critical standpoint--a set of defined novelistic values, and judgments demon- strably flowing from it in mutual concord-these are not consistently in evidence. We are told pretty precisely, though we may of course disagree with consternation, what set of properties makes Lermontov's novel accomplished and valuable (pene- tration of the hero's inner experience; timelessness and depth of portraiture; status as a "remarkable whole on its own terms," backed by a Belinskij rhapsody re flowers and seeds; wealth of meaning and implications, profound vitality), and what other set of properties does the same for Dead Souls or Oblomov. We are not told very clearly how far these sets do or should overlap and what master set can or should be glimpsed through all of these and others. Is it too captious to say that discernment and opinion on this matter alone entitle a critic to speak, as Freeborn does, of "the" Russian novel? Here is one important province in which the device of "Studies in ..." does not serve the author well. For while the generic quest can be, and often has been, driven much too far, this scheme allows him to evade it more completely than is sound.

Walter Arndt, Dartmouth College

Vasa D. Mihailovich, comp. and ed. Modern Slavic Literatures. Vol. 1. Russian Litera- ture. (Library of Literary Criticism.) New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972. xii, 424, $15.00.

This tome deals with 69 Russian writers of the 20th century, among them for some reason Cexov and Lev Tolstoj. Aside from a brief introduction, the book consists entirely of excerpted passages from a broad spectrum of critics, reviewers, and mem- oirists-Russian, American, and European. It is intended, the introduction states, "as a reference tool for students, scholars, librarians, and researchers" and represents "the first such compendium on Russian literature in any language." The novelty in question seems indisputable. The nearest relatives would seem to be such essays in montak as Veresaev's Gogol' v Uizni and Aronson and Rejzer's Literaturnye salony i kru'ki. But the relationship is not close, since the former illuminates a single writer and the latter a single literary cultural phenomenon, and both pursue the aims of more conventional books in spite of their innovative format.

Is Modern Slavic Literatures, volume 1, a reference tool? Certainly it will be a boon to harried term-paper writers, containing as it does many eminently quotable statements which can be cited to imply that the student has done extensive critical reading. How it can serve scholars, librarians, and researchers is harder to see, in the absence of any editorial context whatever. There are-apparently on principle (but the principle is never discussed)-no biographical or bibliographical summaries for the writers represented, just as no editorial identification is supplied for the critics quoted. Pieces of arguments, opinions, and observations (some acute, some not) float haphazardly, unrelated to the works from which they have been excised, the tendencies of those who produced them, or the controversies of which they may have formed part. What, for example, might an uninitiated reader make of the ten pages devoted to Mandel'stam, which contain four paragraphs by Gumilev (on Kamen'), two by Zirmunskij (who speaks in 1916 of "the whole path" of Mandel'stam's devel-

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