Conrad and Turgenev: Towards the Real by Katarzyna Sokołowska (review)

Katarzyna Sokołowska's monograph, Conrad and Turgenev: Towards the Real, is the first to offer a detailed, in-depth study of Conrad's relationship with Turgenev. The book consists of three chapters as well as an introduction, conclusion, works cited, index of non-fictional names, and index of Conrad's works and letters. As noted in the introduction, literary and philosophical influences that situate Conrad within the context of European literature provide the thematic and formal insights to study his affinities with Turgenev. Sokołowska begins with the underlying assumption that Conrad, who participated in the emergence of the modernist movement, is also rooted in the tradition of realism, especially that of Balzac, Flaubert, and Maupassant, linking him to Turgenev. Indeed, Conrad's links to other major writers are legendary. Alongside Turgenev, Conrad admired above all the Victorian novelists: Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Hardy, and Gissing.

The above-mentioned affinities provide a helpful frame for the analysis of Conrad's complex attitude towards Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. The reader is informed that among the "great three" Russian writers, Conrad appreciated only the latter, who was the least purely national, the most cosmopolitan and Westernized of the three writers (10). But we have to be aware of the fact that Conrad did not employ Turgenev's techniques or themes, and he did not seek inspiration in his novels or short stories. Sokołowska contends that in order to trace affinities between the two writers "it is rather valid to concentrate on their outlooks, their worldviews, and their ideas concerning art, personality and politics" (19).

The first chapter, "Language and Representation," discusses Conrad's and Turgenev's complex relationships between language and reality. Sokołowska underlines that both writers are skeptical of the adequacy of language which cannot capture "all the nuances of both reality and the inner world of the self" (34). That is why silence is frequently equated with a failure to communicate the many shades of inner experience. Turgenev's characters withdraw into silence in order to escape deceptions of language. Conrad points out an equivalence of silence and commitment to work, i.e., "a capacity for keeping in touch with the concrete" (56). Special attention is paid to Conrad's rendition of vision, which offers direct contact with the real and embodies the immediacy of perception, in contrast to writing, which "is founded on meditating reality" (66). According to Sokołowska, Turgenev is committed to rendering the minute details of reality rather than to recreating the process of perception in the impressionist manner typical of Conrad (68). Conrad presents a solipsistic vision of the world, typical of modernism, giving voice to a conviction that reality is illusory and that man cannot transcend the subjectivity of his perception. He also conveys the experience of illusoriness in a world plunged in darkness, unlike Turgenev whose pessimistic outlook never leads him to a solipsistic vision. Sokołowska claims that, in Turgenev, darkness is an image that suggests "the inscrutability of human fate and builds up the bleak vision of the irrational threatening the even tenor of life" (87). The author contends that Turgenev's art is founded on the link between reality and its representation. The Russian writer values creative imagination but also warns that it may take autonomy over the real and "plunge man into a solipsistic world of his own." Conrad, on the other hand, creates a world where the hierarchy of original and copy has collapsed and representations turn into "simulacra" (135).

The second chapter, "The Unheroic Hero," begins with a statement that both writers explore the fragility of the modern self. For them, the heroic self is impossible, and consciousness can no longer be equated with autonomy, self-control, and rationality (145). Conrad hesitates between "the outright disavowal of the self and its affirmation" (145). He is also ambiguous about the grounds on which the self is dismissed. Conrad highlights the epistemological...