How the Russians Read the French: Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy

Introduction: The Russians and the French

Introduction The Russians and the French A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Ernest Renan, Discours et conferences The heroes of French literature create the formulas for the Russian reader’s self-expression. Yury Lotman, “Russkaia literatura na frantsuzskom iazyke” We can’t blindly imitate the French. P. A. Plavil’shchikov, “Teatr” Europe and her destiny will be completed by Russia. Fyodor Dostoevsky, letter to Apollon Maikov The nineteenth-century Russian novel has a philosophical depth and moral power that distinguishes it from its European peers. Where does this come from and can it be located? Russian censorship constrained the discussion of political and philosophical questions in expository prose, so that the issues had to appear in disguised form in fiction, but that is only part of the answer; Russian authors eluded these restrictions by emphasizing the universal in their novels and doing so at an earlier stage of the desacralization of literature than their Western counterparts. They did this in dialogue with Europe. Nineteenth-century Russian writers, like many others of the period, were quite consciously creating a new national literature. Literate Russians who lived in an imitation European subculture were painfully aware that the level of Russian culture was far lower than that of 3 Western Europe and saw themselves self-consciously through Western European eyes, at once admiring Europe and feeling inferior to it; they suffered from the disease of “France,” whose language and culture had shaped the world of the Russian aristocracy from the time of Catherine the Great.1 Germany was going through a similar process at the same time; the Germans, too, strove to surpass French culture, to attain “a release from the hegemony of French literature,” in order to construct their own national identity.2 The Russian arts had openly imitated the European throughout the eighteenth century, a rich subject that will go unexamined here. Perhaps because Russian critics have wanted to see their tradition as having finally achieved independence from Europe by the middle of the nineteenth century, few have investigated the effects of French literature on the great Russian novel.3 Since the two monumental volumes of Literaturnoe nasledstvo published in 1937–39, Yury Lotman has contributed the most important theoretical and historical studies of the effects of the French tradition in Russia.4 He has discussed Russian literature written in French from 1730 to 1830, reaffirming that “until the middle of the nineteenth century, the French language was the bridge for the movement of ideas and cultural values from Europe into Russia.”5 As we shall see, it continued to bridge the two cultures well into the 1870s, in Anna Karenina. Lotman’s theory of interacting cultures explores how a foreign text becomes essential for the creative growth of one’s own: Russians view the foreign cultural world through the lens of their own national selfimage and create a construct of the West in contrast with Russia’s own dominant codes, a process that is inevitably dialectical.6 When in 1778 Denis Fonvizin writes of the French that “money is their divinity” and “amusement the sole object of their desires,” he is implicitly opposing their “inexpressible moral degradation” to Russia’s high religious morality .7 This cultural self-perception underlies the method of composition I propose to analyze. National consciousness is notoriously difficult to define, yet, as Hugh Seton-Watson says, it nonetheless exists.8 In Russia the sudden importation of Western European culture and technology under Peter the Great was the impetus for a growing national self-awareness in which admiration of Western Europe conflicted with the desire to feel pride in Russia . The replacement of things Russian by things European penetrated the countryside; Peter’s 1722 decree that houses face outward along a linear street altered the traditional circular settlement.9 The continued 4 Introduction presence of privileged German advisers under subsequent tsars led to a reaction against all things foreign—“German” dress, coffee, tea, tobacco—and to the identification of foreignness with deceit and corruption .10 The German Tsarina Catherine, in attempting to avoid the reaction to her predecessor, the German Tsarina Anna, fostered the emergence of an official nationalism, praising the Russian national character in order to create loyalty to herself. The period of German regents, ministers, and officers appointed by Tsarina Elizabeth was followed by one of French fashions, books, manners , and language. To be distinguished at court or society, one had...