Poverty of the Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature about the Po

Introduction: Poverty and Imagination

We had promised each other that all our thoughts would be common to us both and that henceforth our two souls would be as one—a dream unoriginal, after all, except that having been dreamt by all men, it has been realized by none. —Charles Baudelaire, “The Eyes of the Poor” Russian literature boasts a long and varied tradition of works about or including the poor, and its history is yet to be written. This is not that book. The present work proposes instead something at once more modest and more ambitious: to explore what might be called the poetics of the perception of poverty.1 To approach poverty as a cultural construction, the initial question I ask of every text is a perceptual one: do the observers of the poor (authors, narrators, characters, social commentators), viewers who may themselves be rich or poor, see themselves in the needy? Does the spectacle of poverty inspire us to a sensation of identity, similarity, or difference, or do we simply fail to compare? By extension, an essential question—essential , it turns out, even more for historical reasons than for the evident methodological ones—is the degree to which the poor do the same in return . The skill of putting oneself in someone else’s shoes thus stands at the center of attention throughout. Whether such displacement is always a commendable thing is another matter. The act can be perceived in a variety of ways: as the essence of what artists do in representational art, a deeply Christian movement of compassion, a demonic distortion of the imaginer’s true self, the only hope for the reconciliation and harmonization of humankind, the key to manipulating others for good ends or ill, or plain old nosiness. It also has a special relevance in relation to the poor. Projection is a fiction in the most real sense, since another’s experience can never truly be my own; yet it retains its value amidst its unreality. Introduction: Poverty and Imagination ix Fewer texts are included here than omitted, though that is an inevitability in any case given the pride of place poverty held in nineteenth-century Russian literature. Specifically, the main works under consideration are Karamzin’s “Poor Liza”; Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights”; “Overcoat,” the Petersburg tales generally, and the Selected Passages of Gogol; Tolstoy’s “Lucerne ”; and The Idiot and the 1880 Pushkin Speech of Dostoevsky. Even this small selection will provide an almost bewilderingly wide range of views on the identity of the poor. To summarize a general trend, it might loosely be said that Russian writers of the modern period can with some frequency imagine the poor as being like us in every way other than money—though this is perhaps a slight overstatement—but they cannot imagine that the poor imagine as we do. POVERTY It would not be a great exaggeration to say that the primal scene of all nineteenth -century Western thought involved an observer gazing at someone poor, most commonly on the streets of a great metropolis, and wondering what that spectacle meant in human, moral, political, and metaphysical terms. Such encounters had been going on since time immemorial, but the revolution in France which ushered in the new century by destroying the foundations of the old one had raised the stakes as never before. Now, in the epoch that would produce Marx, even those who had seen nothing especially interesting in the lower classes suddenly found it impossible to maintain their indifference. Yet who were the poor? What governed their actions? What did poverty mean? The questions that grew out of this encounter were numerous and troublesome, for they cut straight to the heart of Western concepts of individual and social identity and received notions of good and evil. Had those without earned their sad fate through their own actions? Were they, on the contrary, the most innocent people? Had they been victimized by an unjust social structure? Were the indigent less trammeled by the things of this earth and so closer to God? Perhaps with the patina of decorum scraped away, they formed deeper bonds with other humans . Perhaps, in Russia at least, those confined to living modestly were less exposed to European ways and more in touch with native roots. If hunger drove a man to steal, was he still guilty? What if he killed? Coinciding developments in social history and the history of ideas conspired to render such questions urgent and unavoidable. Poverty was by no...