Saturday, December 7, 2013

The unusual case of Fathers and Sons

Fathers and Sons (1862) is so rich, so important, and so well-written that I assumed I would have a lot to write about it.  Well.  But when did that ever stop me?

The strangest side of the novel is its importance, its place in the intellectual history of Russia.  It was a surprise to its author, certainly.  Ivan Turgenev spent much of the rest of his writing life returning to the ideas of the novel and responding to his critics.  Even more amazingly, so did other writers including Fyodor Dostoevsky.

I do not know of another chain of novels like this one.  What Is to Be Done?, a novel by the radical journalist Nikolai Chernyshevksy appeared in 1863, in direct response to Turgenev.  Then in 1864 Dostoevsky published Notes from the Underground, an attack on Chernyshevsky.  Dostoevsky, like Turgenev, pursued his ideas into later novels, particularly Demons (1872) and one wild scene in The Idiot (1869).  Tolstoy responded, although I think rather more indirectly.  One of Vladimir Nabokov’s finest pieces of writing, Chapter 4 of The Gift (1938), piles onto Chernyskevsky.  I have no doubt there are dozens of other branches that I have not even heard of.  Soviet critics continued the debate decades into the twentieth century.

Still, it is that first, compact chain, 1862 – Fathers and Sons, 1863 – What Is to Be Done?, 1864 – Notes from the Underground, that I marvel at.  The central issues of the day engaged at the highest intensity in fiction.  As art, the episode did well, too, with two masterpieces, one of them a rare case of a genuine philosophical novel.  The Chernyshevsky book is pretty bad, and likely the most influential of the lot, a book that did real damage.

What most amazes of course is the place fiction had in Russian intellectual life at the time.

The intellectual history and the art of Fathers and Sons are cleanly separable.  I have seen this demonstrated:  Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Fathers and Children,” found in Russian Thinkers (1978), is all about the debate, while Nabokov’s notes in Lectures on Russian Literature (1981) are entirely about the art.  Both perspectives are valuable, but they are only barely related.  The book was unnecessarily well-written for the debate it sparked.  And if it had been politely ignored we would still read it as the finest Turgenev novel.

I have avoided mentioning – hinting at – what any of the ideas of the novel are or why they caused such a turmoil, or anything else about what the novel might actually be like.  Good, that gives me something to write about.

13 comments:

  1. That's an interesting chain indeed; I read Turgenev's and didn't care for it, skipped Chernyshevsky's, and loved Dostoevsky's. I can't imagine what he could be possibly reacting to in Chernyshevsky, but whatever it was, Notes from the Underground is a great piece of dark humour.

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  2. A number of parts of Underground are direct parodies of episodes from Chernyshevsky's novel. The one I remember best, probably because it is covered so thoroughly in Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air, is the part about giving up the sidewalk to an officer. Chernyshevky's hero, as you might guess, asserts his dignity as a human and stays on the sidewalk.

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    1. So Chernyshevsky was like some pre-bolshevist or something?

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    2. Yes, that sounds right. A revolutionary socialist with a utopian bent, pre-Marxist but close enough that Lenin was later able to pull Chernyshevsky into his own ideas.

      Like Dostoevsky, he went through a mock execution. He wrote the novel while in prison. These Russians, these poor Russian writers.

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  3. On this book I think my comment was along the lines that Turgenev created "real"characters instead of simply encasing ideas in caricatures. That definitely facilitates such chains.

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  4. To me the irony is that while Turgenev created "real" characters - not just Bazarov but almost all of the supporting characters - so many of his critics and readers were eager to turn them into caricatures for political purposes. The big debate almost required reducing Bazarov to a type.

    Whatever Dostoevsky's faults, this is not one of them.

    I have the idea that you have not read The Gift by Nabokov? I think it would be your kind of book, even more than most of his Russian novels. The Chernyshevsky chapter alone is stunning.

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  5. Now I'm going to have to read all of those, in order. That's Russian novelists for you, having philosophical arguments with each other in novels! I didn't know about this and now I must learn.

    I guess I'll have to read The Gift too. I'm pretty sure I did read it in college, but it's long gone now.

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  6. I need to revisit the Chernyshevsky to see just how readable it is. It certainly isn't good. But there are many kinds of bad.

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    1. I don't know about translations, but it's pretty readable in the original. It's true that the socialist ideas are everywhere and it's rather irritating, but there's also love, family building, suicide, friendship, high morals, etc. It's quite OK :) Just skip the dreams descriptions :)

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    2. Skip the dreams - no way, that's the good stuff! I know the book is readable from direct experience in the sense that I have read it myself. Still, for most people I fear the book would count as a Bad Read. Whatever that is. I don't actually know what people mean by "good read."

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  7. No, I haven't read "The Gift." Yet another addition to the tottering TBR stack. I appreciate the recommendation!

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  8. Ooh, this is the first I hear about this debate and am now opening tabs to read more. Excellent post!

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  9. Be sure to take a look at this piece by XIX Bek - there was a real explosion of fictional responses.

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