Monday, April 28, 2014

They related their histories to each other in a reasonable manner. - Nikolai Chernyshevsky's stories

To my surprise, two people wanted to read Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s bad yet significant radical revolutionary wish fulfillment fantasy novel What Is To Be Done? (1863) along with me.  To my dismay, they have written most of what I had thought I might write.

Let me catalogue these.  Scott G. F. Bailey wrote four posts:

Halfway through: “It's preachy and digressive and the prose is not great, but the prose is not as bad as I'd heard it was.”

What is not being done: Character, setting, interesting language.  “[A] D.H. Lawrence novel as penned by a writer of encyclopedia articles.”  A truly damning post.

Three quarters in: “This is the scene that launched What is to be Done? into its place as the most influential Russian novel of the 19th century.”  I’m going to write about this chapter even if I just openly plagiarize what others wrote.

Last thoughts:  “The last quarter of the novel is a mess, is what I'm saying.”

And here is Jean of Howling Frog Books, with a description I will not be able to top: “Sometimes I think it was written by an alien or something.”

What Is To Be Done? was written by one strange human, that is for sure.

One story that is in the novel, the one Scott develops in his series, is about a famous journalist, a radical idealist, who, while unjustly imprisoned on nonsensical charges writes a utopian fantasy which is as much about his own anxieties, about, say, his conventional wife, or his inadequate upper-body strength, as it is about social change.  The novel is full of meta-fiction and direct, mostly mocking, addresses to the reader – Laurence Sterne stuff – so the narrator is a central character, the only one with an interesting psychology.  Really interesting, I thought, comic and sad.  In The Gift, Vladimir Nabokov creates a Nikolai Chernyshevsky character much like this narrator, a sympathetic fool, and under Nabokov’s influence I could not help constructing him out of the text.  Scott was doing the same thing, but without Nabokov’s assistance, which is impressive.

We’re reading the novel as if it were written by someone like Gogol or Nabokov, with a self-revealing unreliable narrator, yet written with such conceptual purity that the real author does not allow himself a single interesting image or unusually good sentence.

A second story takes place outside of the novel.  Ivan Turgenev updates the old Superfluous Man to create young Nihilists, doctors who believe in nothing, not even science, and whose non-beliefs crumble when they fall in love.  Young radicals thought Turgenev was attacking them.  Chernyshevsky’s central male characters (besides a bonus superhero) are two doctors who do very much believe in science, progress, and reason, to the point that they often sound like Ayn Rand characters.  When they fall in love, they remain sedate creatures of pure reason.  See, old man, that ‘s where the youth of today is really at!  This is the stuff that made Fyodor Dostoevsky so blindingly angry that he wrote Notes from the Underground (1864), an inside-out parody of Chernyshevsky.  I imagine Dostoevsky grinding his teeth, pulling on his beard, spitting “People – aren’t – like – that!”

The third story is the fictional one, in which virtuous, heroic Vera Pavlovna escapes from her horrible mother, establishes a successful dressmakers cooperative, practices rational free love, and dreams of an imminent socialist utopian future.  That first part, with the mother, is the most conventional part of the novel, and is not bad; the sewing cooperative I find fascinating for negative reasons; the free love business is tedious but, I have to say to Chernyshevsky’s credit, genuinely, recognizably feminist, and not creepy, not the usual male harem fantasy; and the dreams are a major part of why people read (past tense, mainly) this bizarre book.

I guess making sense of all that is something to write about.  The title quotation is part of the tedious free love business, from p. 337 of Michael Katz’s 1989 translation.

21 comments:

  1. Any number of kindred spirits -- even 2 -- in the blogosphere is a wonderful experience. However, the sense of community among bloggers is indeed a peculiar and positive dynamic. Blogs offer opportunities for discoveries of books and ideas that would have otherwise remained unknown to us. Now -- even though I may not read him -- I know about Chernyshevsky. Bravo!

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  2. Erik McDonald is writing about Chernyshevsky, too. He just put up some translation comparisons. Very useful.

    RT, I think you will find the Dostoevsky side of the story quite interesting. .

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  3. This one has been on the shelf for years. It's something I think I should read sooner or later. I've heard the negative about it, and it hasn't put me off, so I'll remember your commentary when I get to it. Have you ever read about Sergei Nechaev? Now there's a fascinating character.

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  4. I had to look up Nechaev, so I have apparently not read that much about him. But I did place him. Herzen thought he was nutcase; Dostoevsky thought he was a nutcase.

    His fictional role model, the revolutionary superhero, is in Chernyshevsky's book. Nechaev must have been one of the first people to try to be this character in life.

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    1. Very manipulative, but still interesting in the revolutionary scheme of things.

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  5. Speaking of being a nutcase, I have just posted a provocative, nutcase perspective on a Flannery O'Connor story at my blog, Beyond Eastrod. I look forward to reactions.

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  6. Gotta think like a nut to understand a nut.

    I may touch on the religious element of Chernyshevsky - I will have to touch on it - but I am too ignorant to go to far with it. Chernyshevsky's innovation is to blend the revolutionary hero figure with the Russian Orthodox saint figure.

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  7. "When they fall in love, they remain sedate creatures of pure reason."
    Is it love if people remain sedate creatures of pure reason?

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    1. Chernyshevski would say that only through pure reason can we know we're actually in love. That was Dmitry's mistake in the first 2/3 of the novel, to let his reason be clouded. His clear logic tells him that Vera must be liberated not only from her miserable family, but eventually from her gratitude to him as well. There's a bizarre elliptical dialogue between Dmitry and the other doctor, Kirsanov, about the moral obligation to free others from their debts to us, or something like that. Real people have never had conversations like that.

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    2. Real people never have conversations like anything in that book. The greedy mother sounded like a person, I think--the more virtuous the characters were, the less real they sounded. Katya was...I don't even know how to describe how hilariously unreal Katya sounded like.

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    3. The greedy mother is at least a recognizable comic type, polished and simplified by fiction, but with antecedents out in the world around us.

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  8. Good god, I admire your patience and determination (and your readers') in keeping up with a bad novel, even a significant one.
    ====================================
    "Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
    Detectives Beyond Borders
    http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com

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  9. Ha ha ha ha! How I suffer for my art!

    There is a clear line from Chernyshevsky to Ayn Rand, but one big difference, and it's straight out of the psychology of each writer, is that when Rand praises self-interested egotism she means what we expect the words to mean. For Ch., rational self-interest somehow leads to renunciation, sacrifice, and even martyrdom. When Rand says "self, she means the self; when Ch. says it, he means the collective.

    Both positions, curiously, end up in similar places with respect to the social, economic, and sexual equality of women.

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  10. What does that even mean to relate their histories in a reasonable manner? Do people usually do it unreasonably? If so I've clearly been hanging out with the wrong crowd. It sounds like Jean has it right, the guy was definitely an alien. Or maybe a robot.

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  11. Sometimes my title quotations are distorted by lack of context. Not this one. It's from a love scene.

    Human versus alien / robot is the heart of the ethical issue. If people would only be reasonable enough to not be so human, my utopian scheme would work perfectly.

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    1. ...and that says it perfectly. If only people wouldn't be so dang human, everything would be fine! (In real life, this turns into "If only the right people, me for instance, were in charge, everything would be fine!" And thus we get ideological purges and gulags.)

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  12. This was such a great project. I can't believe only 2 or 3 people wanted to join. It was awesome. What a bizarre book.

    I just added some more thoughts to my post in a comment, about Chernyshevsky's evident complete ignorance about housekeeping and baby-raising.

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  13. Sadly, some of us have been too busy reading poems about hippopotamuses :)

    The Howling Frog Books blog is quite good, by the way. Entertaining and insightful comments about a variety of interesting books (Barbara Pym, The Quest for the Holy Grail, essays from the web-cartoonist of 'The Pain, when it will ever end?', etc. And this is just from the first page). Plus, the blog's motto is irresistible: 'To be literate is to possess the cow of plenty'.

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    1. Thanks! Someday I am going to embroider that motto and hang it on my wall. I need a suitably Indian-looking cow.

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  14. The narrator's ignorance is perhaps his finest comic trait. That or his petulance. I think I will write a bit about the accounting chapter. "Nikolai," I thought, "you are pushing the joke too far - no one will believe you are that foolish!" But they did.

    The Howling Frog King Arthur project has been a great treat.

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