Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism by Irina Paperno (review)

252Rocky Mountain Review statements from such sources as Ralegh, Browne, Solomon, the Revelations of John, Shakespeare, Donne, Chaucer, Paul, and the ubiquitous Augustine. In chapter two, "The Paradoxes of Idealism," Kane applies the contrast between polarization and hierarchy to the concept of temperance; hence Ruddymane is orphaned by the "loss of hierarchy in the marriage of Mordant and Amavia"; Guyon "constructs an adventure story for himself composed of adversaries he can outweigh" (55-56). These events Kane settles in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics and Lucretian Epicureanism. In this context, the materialism of Mammon sets itself against its "imaginary opposite," and the Renaissance man becomes his own analyst (65-69). Kane observes that the unpredictability ofthe organization of Book Three on chastity reflects the manner in which lawless fantasy manifests itself and the way in which such fantasy may be rectified. As Kane says of "the ecology of beauty"—his title for chapter three—"the pattern ofbehavior traced in the hymn ["Hymne of Beautie"] and elaborated in Book Three begins with the glimpse of beauty ["the first stage of the lover's passion"], passes through a stage of alienation, then ends in joy or in paralysis. . . ." Supporting these progressive stages of love, Kane cites material from Ficino, Ebreo, Ovid, Tasso, Ariosto, and Natalis Comes, all of whom Spenser appears to wish to outdo (86-96). Following Spenser's mounting complexity as old and new allegorical figures coalesce in Books Four through Six, Kane continues to bring fresh interpretation to the balance of the epic. Throughout his discussion, Kane expands not only into classical and Christian thought from the past but also forward into interpretations and expansions upon modern Spenserian critics like Thomas Roche, Charles Cochrane, Maurice Evans, Kathleen Williams, and many others acknowledged in the preface and elsewhere. Altogether, Kane's study contributes significant new perspectives to Spenser's visionary abstractions and allegorical philosophy. JOHN A. THOMAS Brigham Young University IRINA PAPERNO. Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. 305 p. Inspired by Rousseau's hedonism, George Sand's feminism, and Fourier's views on communal life and sexual freedom, Nikolai Chernyshevsky personally adopted, then articulated in his voluminous writings, a radical new model for social equality. As the foremost Russian utopian of his day, he deliberately espoused loveless marriage and the sharing ofone's spouse with at least one other male. Such calculatedly faithless marriages were themselves clearly as formidable a challenge to traditional values and conventional society as any act of terrorism. Those who shared his views were, in the main, members of a new social class, the raznochintsy—young university-educated men who were neither propertied nor of the peasants, many of them, as was Chernyshevsky, the rebellious offspring of pious priests. Book Reviews253 Paperno's over-arching thesis—that modes of behavior influence literary expression , which in turn encourages the imitation of literary models—is borne out by the circumstances which gave rise to, then followed in the wake of, Chernyshevsky 's best known work, What Is To Be Done?, still viewed in several respects as the prototypical socialist-realist novel. The work's extensive juxtaposition and conflation ofideas nevertheless reflect its author's distinctive binomial mode of thought. Its constant inversion of conventionally held values in turn becomes a kind of abstract game, betraying in a strikingly post-modern way the relativity of traditional presuppositions: weak, fallen women prove wiser and more virtuous than men; reality contradicts appearance in fictitious marriage , false suicide, faulty translation of texts, and even the positivist, atheistic reworking of Christian principles. The novel's exploitation of Christian symbols is, as Paperno makes clear, highly elaborate— its author's mouthpiece, Rakhmetov, himself a Christ-figure. Paperno's study affords a touchstone to much that equally concerned Chernyshevsky 's more illustrious contemporaries, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, thus enhancing our understanding of these and other important Russian writers. In Anna Karenina, we are reminded, the heroine dreams that both men in her life are concurrently her husband. (Coincidentally or not, they bear the same first name.) In an earlier draft, Karenin visits Dolly, who in fact repeats the question , " 'What is to be done?' " to which Anna's husband replies, " 'It...