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  • Russian Literature of 1868:In Search of a "Positively Beautiful Person"
  • Ilya Serman
    Translated from Russian by Edward Waysband

In Russian literature of the 1860s, the first attempt to create a character of an ideal human being was made by Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky (1828-1889) in his novel What Is to Be Done? (1863). Chernyshevsky's "unusual man" (1961: 221), Rakhmetov, was conceived as, in every respect, a harmonious person, and one who is supposed to have achieved this integrity the hard way, as a result of numerous self-inflicted trials. After Chernyshevsky, writers who presented their own versions of an excellent human being tended to follow this hagiographical pattern and connect their heroes' idealized spirituality with a certain deficiency of the flesh, that is, with the suppression of a powerful sexual drive characteristic of ordinary people.1

Rakhmetov's behavior, his way of life, his habits, the advice that he gives Vera Pavlovna regarding her family drama—are all determined by the feat which he believes he is preparing to accomplish. Like the Christian martyrs of the first centuries, Rakhmetov deliberately incudeals. The author does not explain what his feat might be, but the context of tmakes it clear that it is revolution. The moral and especially physical hardships for which Rakhmetov trains himself are those which he expects revolutionaries to face.

Rakhmetov's character attracted more attention than the novel's protagonists. Nor was it only with the ordinary reading public that the novel in which he appears was a great success. In 1860 he was singled out by, for instance, the theologian and publicist Aleksandr M. Bukharev (1824-1871), who wrote that "for such a man everything is only in [End Page 57] Christ, yet he aspires likewise to realize the truth and blessing of Christ in everything" (Dmitriev 188).2 Bukharev regarded the revolutionaries in Chernyshevsky's novel as ascetics devoted to the improvement of the human condition, and hence as modern versions of imitatio Christi. Russian radical critics received this view with a degree of ambivalence: "On the one hand, Bukharev's article justified, as it were, and gave his blessing to that general worship of What Is To Be Done? by the young generation of the 1860s. Yet while he sensed the hidden craving for faith and truth that motivated the revolutionary intelligentsia, he had no illusions about the nature of the beliefs and actions based on its daring godless worldview. Bukharev's reasons for admiring Rakhmetov were certainly unacceptable to the radical journalists" (Dmitriev 189).

Though some of the outstanding writers of that time, such as Leo Tolstoy, Fedor Dostoevsky, and Ivan Goncharov, were hostile to Chernyshevsky and his ideas, the figure of Rakhmetov had a considerable impact on Russian literature of the second half of the 1860s: paradoxically, a character from a flawed novel left an imprint on highly artistic literary works. Three counter-versions of the "positively beautiful person" (Dostoevsky 1989: 17) were created during the same year, 1868, in response to Chernyshevsky: Platon Karataev in Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot, and Tsar Fedor in Aleksei K. Tolstoy's (1817-1875) tragedy Tsar Feodor Ioannovich. I shall discuss the treatment of these characters as ways in which Russian literature rose to Chernyshevsky's challenge.

I

There is no documentation concerning conversations that might have taken place between Fedor Dostoevsky, Aleksei K. Tolstoy, and Leo Tolstoy while they were writing the works mentioned above, though, as I shall show, some indirect evidence is available. What insistently requires explanation is why it was in 1868, rather than a year earlier or later, that all three attempts to create "a positively beautiful person" were made? [End Page 58]

The three writers must have been stimulated by Dmitrii I. Pisarev's interpretation of Chernyshevsky's novel. The radical publicist Pisarev (1840-1868) was a dominant influence on the younger generation of the sixties. Yet no less important was the shape that public opinion had taken by 1868. For reliainformation on the public opinion of the time one should turn not to the censored press of tsarist Russia but to the diaries and correspondence of the period.

Thus...

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