The Plot of What to Do ?

What to Do? does not appear to be revolutionary at the start. The bulk of the action takes place in St. Petersburg from 1852 to 1856. The novel opens with “the mysterious disappearance and presumed suicide of Vera Pavlovna Lopukhov’s husband” (Freeborn, The Rise of the Russian Novel 132). Vera is a typical lower-middle-class Russian girl, but, ﬁ nding Lopukhov intellectually her inferior, she prefers the young doctor, Kirsanov, whom she marries after Lopukhov’s disappearance. The novel ends by quite unsubtly showing Lopukhov’s return to St. Petersburg under a pseudonym and the magnanimous reunion of the participants in a ménage à trois arrangement. The theme of female emancipation, Richard Freeborn observes, “is illustrated by the new morality, based on mutual respect between the sexes, that informs Vera’s relations with her two husbands”

(Lopukhov is a man of the new sort, who allows Vera to develop her full human potential) (Ibid.). Vera organizes communal cooperatives for seamstresses, and

“the vision of a world transformed as a result of socialism is linked with the theme of female emancipation . . . She is ﬁ nally granted, in her famous fourth dream, a utopian revelation of what a socialized industry in an era of Crystal Palaces could do for mankind” (Ibid.). Indeed, women would soon play a vital and growing role in the Russian revolutionary movement, both in its populist phase and later in the Marxist movement. Women “composed about one-eighth of revolutionary populists in the 1870s, most of them well educated,”

assuming the responsibilities undreamed of by traditional society (MacKenzie, Curran 353). About one-third of the Executive Committee of the People’s Will (a Russian terrorist organization, best known for the successful assassination of Tsar Alexander ii in 1881) was female, and they were subsequently incarcerated in the worst prisons alongside male terrorists (Ibid.).

The setting of What to Do? is “entirely realistic and quite speciﬁ c” (Moser 142). The initial events described are dated precisely: Lopukhov arrives at a St.

Petersburg hotel on the evening of July 10, 1856 and asks to be awakened at eight the next morning. At three in the morning a shot is heard on the Liteiny Bridge on the Neva River, although nothing is found on the bridge thereafter:

In the morning Lopukhov’s room is broken into and found to be empty except for a suicide note in which he speaks of planning to take his own life in the early morning on the Liteiny Bridge. The chapter then offers some discussion as to whether a suicide has actually occurred, but the circumstantial evidence seems persuasive. Section 2 then goes back in time to provide background on the supposed tragedy: after discovering that his wife, Vera Pavlovna, has fallen in love with Kirsanov, Lopukhov proposes to make it possible for Vera to marry Kirsanov by removing himself from the scene through suicide. (Moser 142-43) Chernyshevski seems to have developed a conventional Romantic novel spiced with a touch of forbidden radicalism. The novel’s ﬁ rst two sections contain a concretely realistic description of a dramatic situation with a bit of mystery, in the established tradition of the popular crime novel genre. Indeed, according to Charles Moser, the author “deliberately designed the book’s opening as a hook to seize his readers’ attention” (Ibid.). Substantially past the novel’s midpoint, in a brief passage ﬁ lled with contempt for the implied reader (section 28 of Chapter Three), Chernyshevski openly “informs us that Lopukhov was the anonymous man involved in both the ﬁ rst and second sections (however, even at this point he does not make it clear that the suicide he had described so painstakingly and realistically was a hoax: he only does that at the novel’s conclusion)” (Ibid.). In a similar way the reader of Nabokov’s The Gift will learn signiﬁ cantly later in the narrative that the girl whom Fyodor dates is the very same daughter of his landlords whom we had observed earlier.

The Novel about Novels

Though Chernyshevski’s major objective in writing What to Do? was to make certain essential political points, he also wished to make a statement on the nature of literature, and on the genre of the novel in particular (Moser 140).

For this latter purpose he worked out what may be regarded as a new form of the contemporary novel, and it is true that very few of his contemporaries realized what he was doing. Most contemporary critics of whatever persuasion evaluated the book in terms of its social and political ideas while paying little or no attention to its artistic character, an approach that has persisted in Soviet and Western scholarship. A careful reading of What to Do? demonstrates that

“Chernyshevski wished, among other things, to make an implicit statement about literature through the novel’s form and an explicit one in certain passages of the text” (Ibid.).

The beginning of What to Do? is curiously arranged: it opens in medias res, in the best style of a mystery novel. The ﬁ rst section, numbered 1, is entitled

“A Fool” and “describes the putative suicide; the second section, numbered 2 and entitled ‘The First Consequences of the Idiotic Affair,’ goes into the Vera Pavlovna Lopukhov-Kirsanov triangle” (Ibid. 143). And then Chernyshevski

suddenly smashes the traditional structure of the Romantic novel: Section 3 is entitled — and is — a “Preface.” “The subject of this novel is love,” it begins, “and its principal character is a young woman.” These statements turn out to be true, but their promise of conventionality, which the intelligent reader must by this time distrust, is very misleading. (Randall 108)

Only after the “Preface” in section 3 comes the ﬁ rst of six “chapters,” all except the last of which are quite lengthy and themselves divided into numerous sections (Moser 143). This structural “incongruity” will later be employed full-scale in The Gift: recognizing its literary predecessor allows us to appreciate the literary depth of Nabokov’s devices, which both mock and derive from Chernyshevski’s experiment.

Chernyshevski worked without taking notice of the fact that he was explicitly distancing his own oeuvre from that of “the great Russian novelists.” The salient feature of Chernyshevski’s work is its persistent parodic commentary on the conventional expectations of readers of ﬁ ne literature; some scholars go even further, claiming that it has been called a “novel” for no reason except that it is prose ﬁ ction of a certain length (Brown, “So much depends . . . ” 379). Apart from allegedly being badly written (a contemporary critic called What to Do?

“the most atrocious work of Russian literature,” and Turgenev commented that Chernyshevski’s style aroused physical revulsion in him), most critics agree that the novel abounds in “banal situations” and plot developments; it is “clumsy and awkward in style” (Paperno 26). It is clear though that one cannot judge this work as a regular piece of ﬁ ction. As Saul Morson notes, What to Do? consists of a constant alternation of narrative and metanarrative. In Chernyshevski’s work the experience of reading is a self-reﬂ exive and highly self-conscious process — the author repeatedly interrupts the story with interrogations of the reader and essays about the harmfulness of aesthetics: “So common are these metanarrative intrusions that the work often resembles a kind of socialist Sterne, a didactic Don Quixote. ‘Baring’ by exaggeration the devices it employs, Chernyshevski’s work can be taken as a kind of textbook model of the utopian genre’s techniques, particularly its techniques of didactic frame-breaking” (Morson 99-104). The same

“frame-breaking,” of course, is frequently featured in Nabokov’s mature prose.

At the very start of the “Preface” Chernyshevski inserts himself into the novel as a participant, if not a character. Such a device was by no means unprecedented;

[Ill. 2-8, 2-9] Th e foreign and Russian editions of What to Do?

Charles Moser reminds us that Pushkin “uses it extensively in Eugene Onegin, and Pisemsky employs it even more concretely in Troubled Seas, published at almost exactly the same time as Chernyshevski’s novel” (Moser 143). But this device has the effect of emphasizing a work’s ﬁ ctional nature by shifting away from reality, and underlining the fact that it is merely an intellectual construct. Beyond that the author as participant plays a didactic role, as Moser maintains: he is a mentor who tells his readers precisely what to think, comments sarcastically on their more blatant stupidities, and generally leads his ideologically uninitiated readers by the hand. Chernyshevski decisively takes up the mantle of literary didacticism:

“since he believes that literature can and should be instructive, he deliberately sets out to compose a didactic novel” (Ibid. 144).

Chernyshevski connects the issue of plot predictability with the epistemo-logical problem of how one “knows” anything in literature: “The only source of information in a literary work, says Chernyshevski, is its creator himself:

a reader cannot properly bring outside information to bear on the ﬁ ctional world” with which he is interacting (Ibid. 145). What to Do? is, then, not only a central document in the intellectual history of modern Russia, but also a major contribution to the continuing debate over the nature of literature in the Russia of the 1860s, and Chernyshevski’s demolition of the novelistic genre by means of a novel itself.

The Age of Realism

Although Chernyshevski wanted “literature to serve as a blueprint for social and political change, in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky the impulse towards change suggested a philosophy of right conduct . . . based on complex choices” (Freeborn, “The Nineteenth Century” 330). Neither Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky avoided confrontation with the most intractable issues of the day, and the answers they offered have not lost their vital relevance since their own time (Ibid.). Because of censorship restrictions, writings often cir culated in manuscript; sometimes “works were published abroad or printed on hidden presses. Occasionally authors gave up the struggle against social injustice and succumbed to the threats or rewards of the government” (Wren 391). The police were on their way to arrest the critic Belinsky when he died. Dostoevsky was condemned to death in 1849 and while he was on the scaffold his sentence was commuted to ten years in Siberia — strikingly similar to the scenario replayed with Chernyshevski just over a decade later.

The age of realism in nineteenth-century Russian literature was the age of the realistic novel. In the second half of the nineteenth century, “the positivist and materialist orientation of many educated Russians alienated them from a large part of Europe’s [ . . . ] cultural heritage” (Terras 294). The themes, imagery, and sensibilities of the Golden Age poets were largely derived from Western

literature; in sharp contrast, the major Russian novelists joined world literature on their own terms (Ibid.). Typical examples of the genre are those created by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the 1860s and the 1870s, especially Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov (Nabokov seriously contemplated translating both into English). As exemplary realistic novels “they create a sense of multifaceted and multidimensional reality based on detailed description [and] character-enhancing dialogue” (Freeborn, “The Nineteenth Century” 329). As “socially orientated works of ﬁ ction, they mirrored the reality of their day” using a variety of milieus, but beyond this limited topicality their realism has achieved a universal appeal (Ibid.). Fyodor Dostoevsky cultivated his image of Russia as “that of a super-nation whose mission was to create the conditions under which other super-nations could develop and resolve their conﬂ icts, so long as they acknowledged Russia’s leading role” (Hosking 310). Vladimir Nabokov, however, remained suspicious of and distant from Dostoevsky’s idea that suffering had endowed Russians with distinctive and humble wisdom, enabling them to bring the light of salvation to other peoples.

The nineteenth-century “tradition of realism was maintained in the closing decades of the empire,” but at the same time there were new cutting-edge literary movements — symbolism and futurism — making their appearance (Florinsky 373). The prominent authors of the realistic school, in addition to Leo Tolstoy, were Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreev and Ivan Bunin. Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), son of a former serf who became a merchant, qualiﬁ ed as a physician but devoted himself to literature and theater instead. It is his works which Nabokov “would take on a trip to another planet” (Strong Opinions 286).

In The Gift Nabokov perfectly balances the polyphony achieved by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky with the structural complexity and formal conventionality of literary devices used by Proust and Joyce; Chekhov’s dramatic tension and Bunin’s elegiac beauty. Nabokov’s last Russian novel catalogues and sums up the best developments achieved in modernist ﬁ ction written during the ﬁ rst quarter of the twentieth century in the major European languages.

Nabokov and the Chernyshevski Legacy

It is easy to see why Nabokov had a negative attitude toward Chernyshevski, or, more accurately, toward the tradition that crude Marxist and Soviet philosophers built up around Chernyshevski subsequently. Nabokov belonged to the younger generation of Russian émigrés and did not share the leftist sentiments of the old guard (the editorial board of the journal Sovremennye zapiski was composed of the latter group). Chapter Four of The Gift is nothing more than a comic, largely accurate, well-researched, concise biography of Chernyshevski. It introduces an imaginary authority named Strannolyubski (meaning “Strangelove”) who

reports that during Chernyshevski’s Siberian exile “once an eagle appeared in his yard . . . It had come to peck at his liver but did not recognize Prometheus in him” (G289). Fyodor’s (and Nabokov’s) purpose is “to expose Chernyshevski as the false Prometheus of Russian tradition, a savant whose sincere good intentions and abundant sufferings in the cause of righteousness cannot excuse the dullness, dogmatism, and anti-aesthetic bias of his judgments and inﬂ uence” (Moynahan 39).

The profound inﬂ uence of What to Do? on the lives of contemporary readers and the generation immediately following them was unprecedented in the history of Russian literature. The most fascinating literary response that it provoked appeared shortly after the novel was published — Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1865) explored the role of the underground man, a parodic persona whose life exempliﬁ ed “the tragicomic impasses resulting from his acceptance of all the im plications of reason in its then-current Russian incarnation, especially those that Chernyshevski chose to disregard” (Joseph Frank quoted in Katz, Wagner 33). In the eyes of the younger cohort, the “men of the forties” were notoriously weak in having no concrete or workable program for either reform or revolution. The “men of the sixties,” however, “were not only devotees of a veritable cult of Reason, Science, and Progress, but militant activists as well” (Stacy 56). Therefore, as militants, Chernyshevski and his allies were often regarded as forerunners of the Bolsheviks. Karl Marx was inspired to study Russian by a desire to read Chernyshevski’s writings on economics. At least to some extent, Chernyshevski persuaded him in the 1880s that Russia might avoid the capitalist stage of history and move directly from tsarist “feudalism”

into socialism, yet the message of Capital was the exact opposite: capitalism was inevitable (Priestland 72).

After its absurd blunder of allowing the publication of What to Do?, the government “had in fact achieved its objective, even though at considerable cost to its own reputation, of making Chernyshevski suffer for his affront and threat to the established order and traditions of Russian society. Moreover, the direct line of his inﬂ uence was cut, never to be re-established. What remained was the legacy of his earlier published writing and a myth of the man based on his martyrdom for the radical cause” (Woehrlin 322). No new writing appeared in Russia over Chernyshevski’s name until well after his death and an edition of his collected works in ten volumes was published legally only after the revolution of 1905.

All of the various revolutionary groups regarded Chernyshevski as a giant of the past, but there were more current documents to argue about and to inspire the youth. Marc Slonim, who participated in the populist movement as a member of the Socialist Revolutionary party, recalled that the young people in the early years of the twentieth century no longer read much of Chernyshevski, or thought very seriously about his novel (Slonim 105-107). Chernyshevski’s slide into neglect was reversed by the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

A catechism of the Russian revolutionary, What to Do? provided a “pattern for several generations of Russians to organize their emotional lives and personal relations,” and this aspect of the novel’s inﬂ uence “has been compared with that of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse and Emile on the emotional life of the people of the eighteenth century” (Paperno 31). Lenin read What to Do? in early adolescence and adored the works of Chernyshevski. He was “determined to make for others what Chernyshevski had been for him — an exemplar of genius”

(Tumarkin 35). Lenin even accepted the novel’s program for preventing marital conﬂ icts: separate rooms for complete privacy and the rational handling of love triangles. Not by accident did Lenin call his famous pamphlet on the necessity of disciplined, underground party of dedicated professional revolutionaries, “What is to be Done?” (1902; in Russian the title is identical to that of Chernyshevski’s novel), in which he states: “Give us an organization of revolutionists, and we will overturn the whole of Russia.”

During the Civil War, Lenin “found time to begin the process of Chernyshevski’s ofﬁ cial canonization” (Randall 146). The statue of Tsar Alexander ii in Saratov was replaced by one of Chernyshevski, who was henceforth described as the Great Predecessor, the title of St. John the Baptist. Although Stalin “had been less inﬂ uenced than Lenin by Chernyshevski, he was a great admirer of the man and his works, stating that What to Do? was the greatest novel ever written” (Ibid.).

With an obelisk and a museum in the writer’s hometown, the canonization of Chernyshevski was completed (Ibid.). In the year when Nabokov began his scandalous biography, the article on Chernyshevski appeared in the ﬁ rst edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in 1934. This ofﬁ cially sanctioned article was given forty columns (as compared to eighty-two on Karl Marx). It deﬁ ned Chernyshevski as “the great Russian savant and critic, publicist and revolutionary,” sparing no praise for the author of What to Do? as a philosopher, economist, historian, and political activist. Nabokov’s crow quill could not ask for a more suitable target.

Did Nabokov Really Hate Chernyshevski (and Did Chernyshevski Hate Pushkin)?

Some critics believe that the time is ripe to rescue Chernyshevski both from the Soviet icon frame and from the iconoclastic image of a long-bearded, impenetrable bore found in the West (Brown, “So Much Depends . . . ” 373). It cannot be overemphasized, Edward Brown states, that the most important and inﬂ uential novel of the Russian nineteenth century was not by Dostoevsky or Turgenev, but Chernyshevski’s What to Do?, a novel that combined the features of a Biblical text and a guide to practical behaviour.

Foreign radicals who turned to the Russian revolutionary movement studied Chernyshevski in order to learn how to set up labor cooperatives in Chicago and

New York. A translation into English of What to Do?, authored by Benjamin R.

Tucker, appeared in Boston in 1886. Tucker was a socialist leader in close touch with events in Chicago at the time, who had serialized his translation in his own periodical, Liberty (1884-86). Edward Brown lays out a series of interesting historical examples: apparently, What to Do? was the favored reading matter of

Im Dokument keys to (Seite 123-132)