In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian ModernismJohn GoodliffeCreating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, edited by Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman; x & 288 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, $39.95.In describing the history of a country’s literature, one may well be tempted to divide it into separate compartments and so lose sight of the continuity which is, in the final analysis, more worthy of (...) attention. Historians of Russian literature have often succumbed to this temptation and it became almost commonplace to read that in Russia the Realism of the nineteenth century gave way to the Symbolism which began in the twentieth; that Symbolism gave way to Futurism; and that in due course all the earlier “-isms” were swept aside by the Socialist Realism of the Soviet period. For Marxist-oriented Soviet [End Page 371] historians such preoccupation with compartmentalization was obsessive. This makes more than welcome a series of essays which is at pains to emphasize the essential connections and kinship between these various “-isms.”Four of the seven essays are intended to demonstrate how the Symbolists, while ostensibly breaking with the earlier tradition of positivism (the idea that art’s essential purpose is to help build a better world), were, in a number of important respects, continuing and even reinforcing what they claimed to despise. Thus, regarding art and life as indissolubly linked, they attempted to turn life into art and art into life. Their endeavors frequently led them into behavior that now appears “eccentric, at times even ridiculous” (p. 166). Olga Matich describes how Blok, Bely, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, and Zinaida Gippius attempted to model their sexual relationships on the pattern of the “erotic utopia” described by Vladimir Solov’ev in his seminal The Meaning of Love (1892–94). Joan Delaney Grossman discusses Nina Petrovskaia’s relationships with Bely and Valery Briusov. Michael Wachtel shows how Viacheslav Ivanov attempted to overcome his grief at the death of his first wife by using his creative powers to make contact with her “beyond the grave.”Irene Masing-Delic traces the Pygmalion myth through Pushkin, Baratynsky, Turgenev, and Chernyshevsky to the Symbolists who were especially attracted by a myth which showed how an artist could create life and even conquer death. In “Andrei Bely and the Argonauts’ mythmaking,” Alexander Lavrov considers the role of the “Argonaut” circle in establishing a Russian Symbolist culture in the first years of the twentieth century. The Argonauts’ credo was “life-creation” rather than “art-creation,” and they claimed to make no distinction between “talent for living” and “talent for writing.” Lavrov argues that the failure of the relationship between Bely and Nina Petrovskaia marked the disintegration of “Argonautism” and the culture they sought to create. It is left to Irina Gutkin in the concluding essay to guide us through the grotesqueries of Futurism into the apparently diametrically opposed, sanitized world of Socialist Realism, by way of Constructivism, Marxism, and Meyerholdian bio-mechanics, leaving us in little doubt that, appearances to the contrary, each of these movements was concerned with turning art into life and using it to create a better world. So ultimately, as she neatly sums up the thesis of the whole collection, “The aesthetic utopian ideal of art creating life, which took shape at the beginning of the twentieth century, was fused with the utilitarian tradition of the 1860s” (p. 181).I have deliberately reserved for the end comment on Irina Paperno’s introduction and opening article (“The Meaning of Art: Symbolist Theories”) in order to emphasize the manifest contribution she and her co-editor, Joan Delaney Grossman, have made to ensuring the coherence of this admirable collection. Professor Paperno’s clear and concise coverage of her topics makes it evident that she was determined that the book should not turn into the kind of bits-and-pieces patchwork that too many publications of this sort tend to [End Page 372] become without a firm editorial hand at the helm. Her earlier book on Chernyshevsky (Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, 1988) and Irene Masing-Delic’s Abolishing Death; a Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Literature (1992), form the first two parts of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Exile: The Sense of Alienation in Modern Russian Letters,John GoodliffeExile: The Sense of Alienation in Modern Russian Letters, by David Patterson; xii & 204 pp. University Press of Kentucky, 1994, $29.95.From the title of this book one might expect its principal focus to be on geographical and/or political exile, exile as punishment, of which there have been many examples in Russian life and letters, both before and after (...) the 1917 Revolution. But David Patterson prefers to interpret the word “exile” in a wider metaphysical and existential sense, so connecting it with the problem of alienation and the question of human identity. His purpose is to demonstrate that “the fundamental problem of meaning in human life is a problem of homelessness; that the effort to emerge from exile is an effort to return meaning to the word and thus the self to the other; and that the exile of the word is an exile of human being” (p. xi). (Incidentally this quotation anticipates the rather curious style of English which the author will adopt, regrettably typical of many academics.) The neurosis engendered by this problem of homelessness is one to which Russians have always been particularly prone, perhaps because their geographical situation on a vast inhospitable plain, stretching uneasily between Europe and Asia, has always generated a feeling of insecurity. So it is not at all difficult to find abundant examples of it in Russian literature. As Patterson makes clear in his preface, there are many Russian writers other than the ones he has chosen who well demonstrate estrangement and alienation. Indeed, one is tempted to suggest that a Russian writer who does not suffer from the neurosis is the exception to the general rule. And, pursuing the idea further, it might be possible to show that any novel, any poem, any piece of writing in any language, contains elements of the problem, since it derives almost inevitably from the very occupation of a creative writer.Thus, from the outset, Patterson runs the risk of making his “exile” definition so wide that the term becomes almost meaningless. It may well be [End Page 514] that his book would have been less diffuse had he kept his definition rather narrower. And since he professes that his aim is “not only to make a point about Russian letters but to draw on these Russian texts in an effort to arrive at a deeper understanding of a much larger, more pervasive problem” (p. xi), Patterson runs the further risk of allowing the texts he uses for his demonstration simply to turn into pretexts for uncontrolled and unstructured digression. It has to be said at once that these risks he proves unable or unwilling to guard against.From the nineteenth century Patterson begins, inevitably, with the well-worn theme of the “superfluous man.” Nothing very original here, as this particular label has been applied so often and so indiscriminately to Russian literature that it has turned into a kind of critical rubber stamp. But at least Patterson does not go over the well-worn ground of the realist novel, preferring to concentrate on Dostoevsky’s non-fictional Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, as embodying its author’s post-Siberian sense of estrangement from Russia and his search for a new identity, brought into focus by his trip to Europe. However, in the case of Tolstoy, Patterson reverts to fiction, concentrating on The Death of Ivan Ilich and Resurrection. In this connection he is perhaps rather less scrupulous than he ought to have been over the distinction between fiction and non-fiction.Noting the comments on Tolstoy, the reader becomes increasingly aware that the book is in many respects a more extended sermon than scholarly analysis. This is confirmed by Patterson’s decision in Part Three to include two early twentieth-century religious thinkers, Florensky and Shestov. Here we are guided through comparatively uncharted territory, but with the uncomfortable feeling that we are plunging into an ever darkening and more oppressive jungle of ideas. The feeling of oppression is not greatly relieved by the author’s somewhat heavy-handed style.The remaining four writers covered are from the “Soviet Period... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847–1880John GoodliffeTolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847–1880, by Donna Tussing Orwin; viii & 296 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, $35.00.In the opening words of the introduction, “this book is an attempt to reconstruct the ideas that led Tolstoy to write the masterpieces of his youth and middle age” (p. 3). Covering the first three decades of Tolstoy’s creative life, it focuses first on his (...) “initial vision” in the 1850s, principally derived from Rousseau’s belief in the superiority of natural morality over the artificial values created by so-called civilization. Then, by way of an analysis of The Cossacks (1863), it seeks to show how Tolstoy came to see that “natural morality was not enough” (p. 96). So, in War and Peace, he tried to depict a world in which human beings were at one with nature, where everything, even war, was natural and part of God’s purpose, so that there was no dichotomy between what is natural and what is civilized. The key word for War and Peace is thus sopriaganie—“linkage.”By the 1870s, when Tolstoy was writing Anna Karenina, he no longer saw God as directly involved in human affairs. Now God was “farther away, but higher and more indubitable” (from a letter to the poet Fet). From this shift in thinking is derived the “drama” of Anna Karenina, as distinct from the “epic” oneness of War and Peace. Whereas in the latter work Tolstoy wanted to see all aspects of life, human or otherwise, in harmony, in Anna Karenina, partly under the baleful influence of Schopenhauer, he came to depict an essential disharmony in life, which he and Levin sought vainly to resolve. Having reached this impasse, Tolstoy abandoned fiction as a medium for his ideas and turned to direct expression of them in essays, tracts, and the like.In writing her book Orwin set herself the virtually impossible task of presenting Tolstoy’s work “as he may have understood it himself” (p. 5). She succeeds in this as well as may be reasonably expected, largely through a detailed analysis of the relevant works of fiction and by drawing on Tolstoy’s correspondence with, for example, N. N. Strakhov. This type of approach is a risky one, since it inevitably treats the fictional texts principally as vehicles for philosophy, when clearly they are much more than that. It is to her credit that, in spite of this, Orwin generally succeeds in her task, although her bias is evident in the bold statement that without “moral law,” Anna Karenina would be Dallas (p. 207)! The other risk is that of treating the fictional texts as though they are somehow separate from Tolstoy the human being, as opposed to Tolstoy the thinker. In her conclusion Orwin refers belatedly and almost incidentally to Tolstoy’s marriage, his family and his growing older. But these factors were surely more crucial for the development of his ideas than she seems to have allowed for; the optimism of War and Peace reflecting the harmony of the early years of his marriage and the darker notes of Anna [End Page 166] Karenina indicating growing disillusion as the relationship between him and his wife lost its early bloom and Tolstoy approached his fifties.Deserving of fuller treatment too were the currents of thought in Russian intellectual circles in the 1860s and 70s which formed an essential background for Tolstoy’s ideas. These too are accorded only quite brief mention. In fact, the commentary on the fictional works, impressive in its depth, tends to be almost too detailed, in places verging on the repetitious. The book could have been more satisfactory if the detailed textual commentary had been more concise and the broader considerations given more extensive analysis. But Orwin’s decision to use a comparatively narrow focus was clearly deliberate and, if we accept its limitations, we can still recognize the importance of her book for Tolstoy studies.John GoodliffeUniversity of Canterbury, New ZealandCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)