Sergei Aksakov goes fishing, and goes to school

I wanted to continue pulverizing London, but I have a library book due, and that takes priority.  It’s a spiritual cousin of After London, actually, another book that seems to be about one thing but is also about a real love of nature.

Sergei Aksakov’s A Russian Schoolboy (1856) is the last of his trilogy of memoirs about his family and childhood.  I thought it was the least of the three, the one I am least likely to reread.  Still, anyone serious about Russian literature should read them all.

Aksakov has an odd place in Russian literature.  He was born eight years before Alexander Pushkin, so he was of the first great generation of Russian authors – Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol.  By the time he published anything, though, these writers were all dead, and the hot new thing was a young Leo Tolstoy.  Or second hottest, since, for three years or so, until his death in 1859, Sergei Aksakov was the Greatest Living Russian Writer.

His memoirs reach back even farther, to the 18th century, and to pre-Napoleonic Russia.  It feels oddly like a Russia before Russian literature – the students’ great literary arguments are over writers like Karamzin and Derzhavin.  Even the non-Russian writers feel strange – young Sergei becomes obsessed with the theater, and sees or acts in plays by the hugely popular Kotzebue, or the Lovers’ Vows of Elizabeth Inchbald, immortalized a few years later by Mansfield Park.  It’s all wonderfully exotic, or askew, a glimpse of a lost culture.

Although A Russian Schoolboy is primarily about his life at boarding school, Sergei’s greatest pleasures are outdoors - fishing, hunting, hawking, lepidoptery - and much of the finest writing in the book is in the chapter “A Year in the Country,” a reprieve from school caused by Sergei’s neurotically Proustian relationship with his mother.  He fishes, and fishes some more:

Meanwhile the building operations made it necessary to let the water out of the pond; and such fishing followed as was never known wither before or since.  All the fish in the pond made for the river which fed it, and the fish were as thick as they are in a tureen of good fish-soup…  Chub, carp, perch, pike, and large roach (three or four pounds’ weight) took constantly and at all hours…  My father liked especially to catch perch and pike, and I remember that he sometimes tied two hooks on one line and used small fish as bait; and often had two perch on at once, and once a perch and a pike. (73)

That’s part of one page.  There’s a lot of fishing.

It’s a nice little book.  A Russian Gentleman, about Aksakov’s grandfather and other relatives, is an even stranger look at an even more distant world, the last gasp of Russian feudalism.  A Russian Childhood counters Aksakov’s pleasant but strange childhood with an insightful portrait of his parents’ complicated marriage.  A Russian Schoolboy is more or less what its title suggests, a simpler book.  Come to think of it, I had the same reaction to Tolstoy’s contemporary Childhood, Boyhood, Youth – the child’s story is fresh and charming, the adolescent’s awkward and off-putting.  Such is life.

Translation by J. D. Duff in 1924.  I read the 1983 Oxford World’s Classics edition.

Cabbage whites and monster pigs - Sergei Aksakov's weird childhood

I left myself a note to look at page 235 of Years of Childhood.  Why?  Ah:

After a period which differed much in different cases, the outer skin of the caterpillar peeled off like a shell, and a chrysalis was left, either hanging or lying down.  The former kind had projections and horns, and were grey with patterns on them, or flesh-coloured, or sometimes gold-coloured; the latter were always dark in colour, and looked just like tiny dolls, closely swaddled in cradles…  Only one came out, a gold-coloured chrysalis which I had found under some projecting boards; it developed into the commonest sort of butterfly, a cabbage white; but our delight was of no common kind! (235)

Years of Childhood is partly a book about a boy’s awakening to the natural world.  I could have picked any number of comparable passages.  Aksakov’s first fish is a highlight, pp. 22-23, which excites him so much that he has a sort of hysterical fit, not uncommon for this oddly sensitive boy.  In the chapter “My First Spring in the Country,” Aksakov, age seven or eight, becomes hypnotized (“stupefied” is his word) by the change of seasons – the arrival of the birds, the flooding fields:

By me every change was noted exactly, and each step of spring was hailed as a victory.  From morning till night I ran from room to room and posted myself at my points of observation.  All my occupations were forgotten – reading, writing, games with my sister, even conversations with my mother. (206)

This is one of the weird parts of the book, of which there are a few, that makes me wonder if the standard critical view of Aksakov as a pioneer of so-called “realism” is missing something crucial.  There’s something else here, or in the passage on p. 163 where the boy becomes obsessed with the appearance and disappearance of a patch of frost “like a white table-cloth.”  Are the aspects of the natural world simply what they are, or is the boy seeing signs of something else?  What sort of meaning is he attaching to them?  And how does the adult Aksakov, fifty years later, understand the understanding of the boy?

The cabbage white should invoke Nabokov, another Proustian writer.  I am eager to read Speak, Memory (1967), particularly the earlier chapters about Nabokov’s own childhood on a Russian country estate, against Aksakov, which is now an obvious predecessor.  In The Gift (1938), Nabokov’s stand-in dismisses Aksakov for the howlers and blunders in his nature-writing (Aksakov’s first books were actually about hunting and fishing).  Perhaps this is Nabokov’s view, but it looks to me like classic misdirection.  I would look up the passage, but all of my books are packed.

I haven’t even mentioned the section, just three pages, in which the Aksakov family visits an eccentric millionaire who keeps English pigs “each as large as a moderate-sized cow” and has an orchestra play during dinner, the music of which, like the coming of spring, “petrifies” and “astonishes” the little boy.  A Russian Gentleman and Years of Childhood are not weird books, mostly. Just these little glimmers here and there.

How I went to sleep, and what happened afterwards, I have quite forgotten - Aksakov and Proust

Crazy-sounding claim first: Sergei Aksakov writes like Proust, sixty years earlier.  Aksakov is combing through his memory, recreating his childhood in as much detail as possible.  Sensory experiences are as important to the task as the recollections of actual events.  It’s the combination that is then turned into prose.  For example, Sergei is five years old, and ill:

Once in the early morning I woke, or became conscious, and could not recognize where I was.  All was unfamiliar: the large lofty room, the bare walls of fir planks, new and very thick, the strong smell of resin.  The sun – a summer sun, apparently – was just rising, and, as it shone through a window on my right above a thin canopy spread over me, was brightly reflected on the opposite wall.  Near me was my mother sleeping uneasily, in her clothes and with no pillows.  Even now I seem to see her black hair straying in disorder over her pale thin face.  (Years of Childhood, p. 2)

Seem to see – that has to be the truth.  Can this possibly be a genuine memory – “no pillows” and new fir planks and the precise location of the reflected sunlight?  With the help of Proust, I can guess at the procedure.  Imprecise memories, some elements very strong and others impossibly vague, are blended with his mother’s account of his illness (by the time Aksakov is writing, this would also be a distant memory) and a sensory experience, the smell of the resin, available to the author in the present that triggers or shapes or evokes the earlier recollection.  Aksakov knew all about the tea and the madeleine.

I was very fond of the smell of resin, which was sometimes used to fumigate our nursery.  I smelt the sweet transparent blobs of resin, admired them and played with them; they melted in my hands and made my long thin fingers sticky; then my mother washed and dried my hands, and I began to doze.  Visible objects became confused before me: I thought that we were driving, and that I refused to take some medicine which was offered me, and that the figure beside me was not my mother, but my nurse Agatha or my foster-mother…  How I went to sleep, and what happened afterwards, I have quite forgotten. (p.3, ellipses in original)

Proust begins Swann’s Way with a version of “how I went to sleep” that goes on for twenty pages and drives off who knows how many readers.  Nothing like this Modernist fracturing of the story can be found in Aksakov, which is structurally traditional and sometimes even clumsy, or is deliberately made to appear clumsy to simulate the process of memory.  And there’s nothing like Proust’s movement from childhood into adolescence, society, and even old age.  Still, when I read about young Sergei throwing hysterical fits, losing himself in books, and attaching himself so strongly to his mother – all surface similarities to Proust, I guess.  It’s the underlying projects that really are closely related.

Crazy-sounding, I said.  D. S. Mirsky made the Proust comparison in 1926, about as early as it could possibly be made.  Thanks to languagehat for posting the relevant passage of Mirsky’s essential A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900.  I could go backwards, too.  Aksakov had discovered, reading Gogol and Pushkin, the importance of the wash of detail.  Clothes, dishes, mannerisms, the colors of a bird or fish – these can in and of themselves be the basis for narrative.  I mean, very little happens in Aksakov’s books.  He’s just a little kid.  Yet everything is so intense for him.  If I ever write my memoirs, they will begin when I am two years old and end when I’m three, the only truly interesting time in my life. 

Astute, or patient, or long-suffering readers of Wuthering Expectations will know that I could push this all straight back to Walter Scott, since that’s where Pushkin and Gogol got the idea.  I’ll just file that away for now.

Strawberry wine and tarry bears - Sergei Aksakov's autobiography

With obscure writers, I have to resist the temptation to write, or, really, paraphrase, an encyclopedia entry.  Mostly I resist.  If you can read this, you have access to the internet, and can look things up.  Unless someone printed it out for you to read.  Or you saved it to a file so you could read it on the airplane, or at the laundromat, although those probably have wifi now.  Or perhaps – I seem to have lost my train of thought.

Encyclopedias.  Sergei Aksakov is not an obscure Russian writer, in Russian, but he’s an obscure writer in English, so maybe some encyclopedizing is in order.

He is now read for his three short volumes of semi-fictionalized memoirs.  They are available in Oxford World’s Classics editions, all translated by J. D. Duff, a great champion of Aksakov.  Duff’s English titles are:

A Russian Gentleman (1856)
Years of Childhood (1858)
A Russian Schoolboy (1856)

I’ve read the first, which is about Aksakov’s grandfather and parents, and ends with Aksakov’s birth, and I am in the middle of the second, which is a detailed account of his life from ages five to nine.  Then the poor fellow is sent off to school; that’s the third book, which I didn’t get to.  I doubt the order of reading matters much – note the odd order of publication.

Aksakov was sixty-five when the first book was published, which means his memoirs are about 18th century Russia.  He died in 1859, but for a few years was considered Russia’s greatest living writer.  Leo Tolstoy had recently published the first two volumes of his own childhood memoirs; he was twenty-eight in 1856.  Fyodor Dostoevsky was in exile in Siberia, or perhaps Kazakhstan.

Aksakov's memoirs are masterpieces, surprising masterpieces.  I wanted to read them for, I guess, background, as useful accounts of Russian life, to fill in my picture of the country life depicted in Fathers and Sons and Anna Karenina.  Aksakov’s books certainly serve that purpose, but they are far more richly written than I had expected.  I had planned to have all three books read by this point, but I had to slow down.  I wanted to slow down.

As the hosts had not thought of procuring sparkling wine from Ufa, the health of the bride and bridegroom was drunk in strawberry wine, three years old and as thick as oil, which diffused about the room the delicious perfume of the wild strawberry.  Mazan, with long boots smelling of tar on his feet, and wearing a long coat which made him look like a bear dressed up in sacking, handed round the loving-cup; it was ornamented with a white pattern and had a dark-blue spiral inside its glass stalk.  When the young pair had to return thanks, [the bride] was not much pleased to drink from the cup which had just left Karataev’s greasy lips, but she made no wry faces.  (A Russian Gentleman, 122)

Sergei Aksakov is writing about an event seventy or more years in the past, before his own birth.  He likely saw the cup himself, and heard the stories of the bride, his mother - maybe the tarry bear is his mother’s recollection, but I doubt it.  This is a powerfully imagined scene.  It is characteristic of Aksakov.

The rest of the week, more of this.  Please see His Futile Preoccupations for more Aksakov encyclopedism.  Welcome to visitors from the Classics Circuit!