Russia and Goethe

592 C. V. PONOMAREFF 'the poet's identity stands out in isolated splendor as she conducts her private quest romance - heractual romance with death and her speculative romance with the "compound vision" of immortality, a vision curtailed and heightened by the limitations of perception within time,' Besides its lyrical straining after the Latinate sublime, such clotted prose manages to resist interpretation. Despite aU this, Johnson's individual readings ofpoems and clusters ofpoemsthe 'pearl' poems, for example - can be sensitive, often provocative; and that, for some readers, will justify portaging over boggy transitions. 'But if the quest cannot be completed,' he says of Dickinson, 'or even organized into a single coherent thrust, individual moments of vision - attainments of true perspective can be recorded, shaped into discrete poetic wholes.' Whether or not Johnson has managed to complete his own quest, his study of Dickinson sometimes achieves the individual moments of vision, the true perspective he writes about. With a big shot of Emersonian self-reliance - something fast disappearing among literary critics - he could achieve an authentic voice also. Russia and Goethe CONSTANTIN V. PONOMAREFF Andr~ von Gronicka. The Russian Image ofGoethe: Goethe in Russian Literatllreof the Second Halfof the Nineteenth Century. Volume 2 University of Pennsylvania Press 1985. 268. $25.00 Andr~ von Gronicka published his first volume on Goethe in Russia in 1968. The present volume on Goethe's reception in Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century, and including the Russian Symbolists of the twentieth, is as comprehensive, scholarly, and lucid as was his first. With its publication he can now be said to have closed an important gap in Russian-German cultural and literary relations. Though Victor Zhirmunsky's distinguished three-volume '937 study of Goethe in Russian literature has preceded his, it will not take the comparative reader long to recognize the pre-eminence of von Gronicka's contribution for its lack of Marxist bias and, as a result, its greater objectivity. The second volume adds substantial material to von Gronicka's basic contention that Goethe's impact on Russian writers and poets made a significant difference to Russian literary development . It deals with a wide spectrum of writers including liberals, radicals, and Slavophiles. Most interesting to this reviewer are his chapters on Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and the Symbolists. This volume provides a wealth of crucial insights into the study of GermanRussian cultural cross-currents. It becomes fairly obvious that the Russians on the whole had a rather narrow and self-serving view of Goethe, seeing him primarily through Werther, Fallst (the first part), and his ballads. Very few Russians in the course of a century were Goethe specialists, and to some, such as Turgenev, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 4 , SUMMER 1987 RUSSIA AND GOETHE 593 Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, Goethe proved to be a lifelong artistic and spiritual thorn in the side. The Russians took only what they needed from Goethe, ignoring for the most part his total achievement and disfiguring him in the process. Consequently, much of his fascinating life and work is missing for the Russians: little is made of his many loves and friendships, which are an important link to his works; even less attention is paid to his scientific discoveries, his Oriental studies, his philosophy, and, most surprising from a Russian point of view, his social involvement and his basic humanity. Instead the Russians seem to have been drawn powerfully to the figures of Negation in Faust and Mephisto. Still worse, the Russians' initial aesthetic impulse towards Goethe in the first half of the century soon became ideologically motivated to the point where, as von Gronicka puts it, the Symbolists distorted Goethe's image 'into a likeness of themselves.' Von Gronicka's second volume completes the picture of both the gains and the losses suffered by the Russians during a century of confrontation with one of Europe's poetic and intellectual giants. ...