Bunin, "К воспоминаниям о Толстом"

An essay ("On some memoirs about Tolstoy") by this Russian man of letters.  You can read the original here.

I read N. A. Tsurikov's Meetings with Tolstoy published in Vozrozhdenie – some very good and valuable articles.  Tsurikov is correct when he asserts that there is no end or limit to the memoirs written about Tolstoy.  Yet hitherto have we really seen many in which the real Tolstoy can be felt?  In the memoirs of Tsurikov he feels unusually alive.

Most of those who have written about Tolstoy, Tsurikov says, belonged to a very different milieu than their subject – and here I would like to add that this is precisely the problem.  Yet Tsurikov's work is another matter.  And for that reason, one would hate to see Meetings with Tolstoy lost amidst other works of this kind.

Tsurikov's work should also serve to correct others' memoirs and articles on Tolstoy.  Take, for example, a recently published article by a Mr. Brodsky in Rul', about the language of Tolstoy – the daily not the literary language – based on memoirs by Goldenweiser.  Brodsky actually comments that, "in the life of great artists, the details of their existence, the habits that seem insignificant at first glance, clothes, their manner of comporting themselves, their outward appearance and their language – again, their daily not their literary language – frequently yield what whole volumes of biography cannot replace," and to this end produces from Goldenweiser's book "some particularities of Tolstoy's language."  Were these particularities, however, personal traits of Tolstoy?  Ask Tsurikov and he will say: of course they weren't, they weren't at all.

This is precisely what I, Tolstoy's compatriot, would also say, having coming from the same way and stratum of life as Tolstoy.  No, these are not Tolstoyan traits, but our own general characteristics.  The particularities of language of that comparatively small locality, those distant points forming a circle whose center is Kursk, Oryol, Tula, Ryazan and Voronezh.  And haven't nearly all our greatest Russian writers used this very same language?   Because almost all of them are ours.  Tsurikov and I discussed this recently, a subject already mentioned in his Meetings with Tolstoy: we have so many famous compatriots from this remarkable region!  Zhukovsky and Tolstoy are from Tula; Tiutchev, Leskov, Turgenev, Fet, the Kireevsky brothers, and the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers hail from Oryol; Anna Bunina and Polonsky are from Ryzan; Kol'tsov, Nikitin, Garshin and Pisarev from Voronezh.  Even Pushkin and Lermontov are partially ours, since their kinsmen the Voyekovs and the Arsenevs are also from our area, from our beans and sprouts, as we say in these parts.   

I repeat: from the plethora of examples that Goldenweiser presents as evidence of the particularities of Tolstoy's language, I have yet to find a single one which would convince me of its uniqueness.

"Tolstoy lisped slightly, so that, for example, the word luchshe [better] was pronounced lutche."

Lisping has nothing to do with it.  I have never lisped and have always said lutche because that it how it is said in our parts, at home, in public, and in the countryside, where they used to sing:

'Tis better a life without care, than to stroll as a rich man!

"In most situations, Tolstoy pronounced the letter 'g' like a soft French 'h' (asche)."

On the strength of this statement above, even I, after six years of residence in France, say "Gospodi" [o Lord] almost like "Khospodi."

"Tolstoy used expressions such as namedni, davecha [recently], edakoi instead of etakii [such a], svita instead of armyak [a type of heavy coat]; Tolstoy said skrypka instead of skripka [violin], skorodit' instead of boronit' [to harrow], and stressed the penultimate syllable in the expression do smerti [until death]."  

And again I have to laugh because all of us have always spoken this way!

Incidentally, a general observation about our regional language.  Of course, it does not hurt to remember Pushkin's overused quote about the language of Muscovite prosphora bakers.**  And was our language any better?  To protect themselves from Tartar incursions, many from the service class whose origins could be traced to all corners of Russia came to us from Moscow.  Isn't it natural that precisely here an unusually rich language would be formed, the richest language of all, in fact?  In my opinion, that is exactly what occurred. 

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** Не худо нам иногда прислушиваться к московским просвирням, они говорят удивительно чистым и правильным языком.  – "And it would do us no harm sometimes to listen to those Muscovite prosphora bakers; their language is surprisingly pure and correct."

The Dead Hand

We may not recall the first ghost story we heard as children, but we will certainly remember the first time we realized a fear more complex than hunger, darkness, or separation from our parents (mine was at the age of seven or so, when I learned the word "dusk" in a story about, bizarrely, a train station and the ghost of a werewolf).  And what form this fear will assume predicates what we might have come to understand.  Do children comprehend death?  Regret and atonement?  The immortality of the human soul?  Considering that a large percentage of adults reflect little on such subjects, the answer must probably be no.  But a subtler answer would claim that children understand the everlasting soul as a natural extension of a near-endless terrestrial existence, because to a child life never seems quite complete.  Some children, however, do not have the luxury of sustained curiosity and innocence, which brings us to this famous tale.

Disliking a protagonist may detract from a story's enjoyment as much as overidentifying with him, and we cannot confess to liking Arthur Holliday.  Arthur is one of those lucky fellows who have nothing to say of any profundity because they have always floated atop the lapsing waves under the approval of the almighty sun.  They are rich, comely, and carefree, which makes them ideal for indulging in most of what our earth may offer:

Thus far, his life had been the common, trifling, prosaic surface-life of a prosperous young man, with no troubles to conquer, and no trials to face.  He had lost no relation whom he loved, no friend whom he treasured.  Till this night, what share he had of the immortal inheritance that is divided amongst us all, had lain dormant with him.  Till this night, Death and he had not once met, even in thought.

Over time, of course, these types are confronted with decrepitude and stare back only to find that their corpses look remarkably like all the wizened blighters they have spent their lives walking quickly past, not inspecting them too closely out of guilt.  Right now, however, Holliday is more concerned with the annual horse race in Doncaster.  He arrives in this small town and finds, to no one's surprise except his, not a single available room for the night.  Yet he is far from discouraged:

To a young fellow of Arthur's temperament, the novelty of being turned away into the street like a penniless vagabond, at every house where he asked for a lodging, presented itself in the light of a new and highly amusing piece of experience.  He went on with his carpet-bag in his hand, applying for a bed at every place of entertainment for travellers that he could find in Doncaster, until he wandered into the outskirts of the town. 

Holliday's spirits will soon decline.  But for the time being, he is content with his incognito gandering through a rustic province, since such experiences are usually alloyed with fictional details to make them even more appealing to his dinner party commensals (Holliday remains, by nature, a smarmy raconteur who adjusts his lies to his audience).  After losing more hope than he could reasonably be expected to nurture in his narrow breast, he comes upon a large sign in the shape of a hand and follows its index finger to an inn where one customer just so happens to be checking out in no small haste.  Why that man wishes to vacate such a precious berth on such a stormy night will not be discussed here.  Suffice it to say that Arthur overpays a conniving innkeeper for a shared room and does not bother to ask himself the question in our last sentence.  Surely, as an old French film terribly tells us, everyone has his reasons, with the implication being it is neither ours to know or to understand even if we did. 

Ghost stories have often functioned as a warning to children and young adults who may not take the consequences of their actions as seriously as they should – but these tales, with very few exceptions, now appear woefully pedantic.  As we have become more liberal in print, so have modern spooks engaged in far too much bloodletting to be considered nothing if not disgusting.  Somewhere in between these extremes lie the wonderful compositions of James, Lovecraft, Blackwood, Machen, and Doyle – atmospheric, elegant, and yet ghastly in their own wicked way.  Unlike subsequent horror writers, Collins did not possess a fascination with the macabre as much an incomparable eye for human frailty.  As such, the pleasure of reading him cannot be understated: his is a subtle craft made enthralling by an inborn ability to extricate intrigue from the mildest of subjects.  That he was once the most popular writer in England shows good taste occasionally even runs in whole countries.  We may think we understand the twists in his tales; but then it turns out that his twists have twists, and his tales have tails.  The secret he knows we are instinctively looking for is often mentioned very early on, almost as an aside.  Yet when we come to it at last it is revealed to have been a simple plot detail made somewhat more significant by the fact that what we thought would happen did indeed.  Ghost stories, after all, may not necessarily be explained by earthly logic.  And you may ask yourself why there can be no better name for our lonely inn than The Two Robins.

A Forgotten Poet

What we cannot imagine as citizens of our countries and, to a certain degree, citizens of the world, is not being able to return to our homeland.  Time shows that certain luxuries should not be taken for granted – money, health, appearance, attractiveness, cerebral precision – but we have little opportunity to ruminate the inability to travel.  In fact traveling and reading – the voyage of the soul – are two things we know we can accomplish at virtually any age.  There are few limitations on where we might venture and in this age of globalization, copyright mayhem and internet omnipresence, even fewer things that we cannot read.  Taking one of these liberties away would be odious; removing both would be an abomination.  Yet this is exactly what occurred behind the Iron Curtain under the auspices of New Russia, or whatever it was called.  Travel was generally restricted to other countries of the Socialist Brotherhood, and books were limited to those fine tomes whose protagonists exemplified the dynamic and heroic struggle of the proletariat against the evils of unchecked capitalism.  As dire as the fate of those ensconced within New Russia must have been (the point need not be belabored), there is also the plight of the writers and artists forced to quit their home for fear of violence or censorship.  In their minds Russia lived in a cryogenic state, frozen in the two decades preceding the Revolution when Russian literature had become the most brilliant and magnificent tradition in the world.  Russia may never regain its literary apogee, and in the meantime we must content ourselves with stories such as this minor masterpiece.

Ostensibly we are dealing with a nineteenth-century lyricist named Konstantin Konstantinovich Perov (which may call to mind this minor poet), who "had been styled the Russian Rimbaud" before his untimely drowning at age twenty-four – not that, of course, any form of drowning might be termed "timely."  It is now 1899, the semicentenary of the poet's demise.  In honor of his recently rehabilitated position near but not quite in the Russian pantheon, a celebration is had in "ponderous, comfortable, padded St. Petersburg."  The momentous occasion in "one of the best halls of the capital" indeed involves the true immortality of a writer, his reputation and readership after his decease; but other motives are present:

The hall was well packed with literary people, enlightened lawyers, schoolteachers, scholars, eager university students of both sexes, and the like.  A few humble agents of the secret police had been delegated to attend the meeting in inconspicuous spots of the hall, as the government knew by experience that the most staid cultural assemblies had a queer knack of slipping into an orgy of revolutionary propaganda.

This last observation is perhaps not as trenchant in retrospect even though, in the late nineteenth century, many promised and predicted mutiny against the Tsars; what they did and could not foresee was the empire that rose from the ashes of Imperial Russia.  In this literary hall an old man appears from the crowd, passes in front of the portrait of Perov hung centrally in his honor, and introduces himself as the poet in question, now a wizened greybeard of, however, acute taste and sensibilities.  He is not believed.  A delightful pantomime ensues with the man's feverish attempts to remain part of the conversation (he drags a piano bench towards the table of Amphitryon-like luminaries), as if he were attending his own wake.  Perov's poetry, praised by the omniscient third-person narrator at the story's onset, contained some elements that might be loosely termed incendiary.  There is a "veiled but benevolent allusion to the insurrection of 1825"; he is labeled "Russia's first experience in freedom"; he is exalted for his prescience, even if this insight could not possibly have been conscious at the time (such is, alas, the fate of authors whose works outlive them).  Throughout these proceedings awkward tension builds, as if the corpse were twitching in his coffin or as if all too many of the guests came to realize that the body resting in peace inside the half-open pall was not the person being feted.  Is that person really the old Perov lurching behind the hosts, retaining "a remarkable dignity of demeanor," and explaining away his fifty-year hiatus as an impulsive display of Christian hermithood? 

What is and what is not resolved by the end of the story will not, of course, be revealed here.  Some readers might take exception to Nabokov's intentional vagueness regarding the origins of the "imposter," as he is called, but these readers need simpler ways to pass their time.  In all fairness, it might be worth pointing out that 1899 was also the year of Nabokov's birth and "the early twenties" the first years of his prodigious literary output.  The "lifespan" of our old, forgotten poet is precisely the period between Nabokov's creation and his becoming a published creator, so that he is an imposter insofar as his own voice has not been discovered until that point.  I fear these comments are as vague as the tale itself.  Another sidelight: A Forgotten Poet was composed in 1944, a year in which Nabokov was safely distant from his homeland and the bloodbath that used to be his Europe.  On the other ruthless hand, Russia at the same time was lurching towards a hegemony that would plague the world for almost another half-century.  No, still quite mystifying.  Perhaps Perov – derived from the Russian word for "feather" or "plume," a very appropriate name given his vocation – might furnish a better summary:

If metal is immortal, then somewhere
There lies the burnished button that I lost
Upon my seventh birthday in a garden. 
Find me that button and my soul will know
That every soul is saved and stored and treasured.  

That this is doggerel if nobly intended should be one hint; that Perov was seen to have "tears trickling from under his glasses" may well be another.  There is also a museum, a bench, and a text called The Georgian Nights, which is praised repeatedly and which may be understood as the watershed in Perov's truncated career.  Lastly I should mention that posthumously Nabokov in his homeland did not suffer the same cruel fate as Perov.  Who of his countrymen knew him as he walked the earth, however, is another matter entirely.

The Curtain

“Hypnotized by the image of its death, I think of its birth,” says this Czech–born author, who has been writing in French for more than twenty years, of his native country.  And with the Berlin wall’s collapse also now almost twenty-two years behind us, his writings are no longer heralded as topical but simply shelved away as remnants of an old fight which, I am happy to report, we appear to have won.  But what then is the fate of those brave Europeans who were forced to leave Communist countries because they refused to kowtow to the thought–free churning of the massive combine of human souls?  Well, Kundera for one is not concerned.  He is not concerned simply because he never thought of himself as an East European (he prefers, if anything, “Central European,” or no adjective at all), nor, for that matter, as a political dissident.  That he was exiled and expatriated is a drab detail on the luminous canvas of his artistic life.  Now free of these associations and at the cusp of his eightieth year, he can devote his time to his favorite subject – the history and development of the novel – which he exposes in typically unornamented fashion in his recent collection of essays.

The Curtain, like several of his other works, is divided symphonically into seven parts, all vaguely related and all general enough to merit some rather grandiose titles (“The consciousness of continuity,” “Aesthetics and existence,” “Memory, forgetting, and the novel”).  He defends this structure by claiming that

The beauty of a novel is inseparable from its architecture; I say beauty since composition is not simply technical know–how; it bears with it the originality of the author ... and it is the mark of identification of every individual novel.

Our eyes and minds tell us this is another of Kundera’s truisms, another observation so wide and plain that it proves impossible to dismantle.  In both Testaments betrayed and The art of the novel, Kundera delves into situations in which novelists that he admires have stayed true to or ventured astray from the unsaid conventions of the novelistic form: that is, of “going to the soul of things” (another chapter heading from The Curtain).  How curious, one may say, that someone famous for his big–picture style would harp on details and gestures and turns of phrase that are, upon cursory glance, insignificant to the structure of the work.  Although he will then claim that any novelist of quality “writes his novel as if he were writing a sonnet,” here to mean attention to detail and form, Kundera himself talks and has always talked in basic terms with nary a metaphor or simile, putting him in the tradition of Tolstoy, Kafka, Gombrowicz, and Broch, all of whom are regular guests in his essays.  He is very happy being compared to these authors, but there are others from whom he would like to keep himself separated:

Towards the end of the 1970s, I received the manuscript of a preface written for one of my novels.  The writer was a preeminent Slavist who, in his introduction, constantly compared me (most flatteringly, of course; at the time no one wished me any harm) to Dostoevsky, Gogol, Bunin, Pasternak, Mandelshtam, and to Russian dissidents on the whole.  Scared, I prevented its publication.  Not because I had any antipathy to these great Russians; on the contrary, I admired them all, but in their company I became someone else.  I will always remember the strange angst that this preface caused me: a displacement into a context that was not my own was for me like living in deportation.

This bizarre refusal is not only a product of his ego or his hatred of Pan–Slavic categorizations, neither of which supersedes his love for the newness of each literary work, but a specific objection to categorization outside of literature on the whole.  And there is an analogous situation: there is something belonging to each writer that he shares with millions of others; something they cannot agree on and alternatively love and despise; it is not a constant with regard to its structure, which may change as the whims of the world change, but ultimately, in the collective memory (for whatever that overused term is worth), it has a particular meaning and induces a particular form of pride in its adherents; it is the myth of one’s homeland, wherever that may be, and, more specifically, the myth of a home in general.  If an author can write about whatever he wants from wherever he wants, then the novel may comprise the author's homeland.  It is the novel that contains every permutation of what life was and could be, and which “goes to the soul of things,” and which becomes how we think of an author.  Kundera is no longer Czech or French, but the composer of nine novels, three essay collections, one book of short stories, and one play.  That he has written in two European languages is a bit of trivia that should remain forever caged in a footnote.

But what then is the titular curtain?  Herein lies the paradox of the world of Milan Kundera, a true internationalist who flouts all attempts at parochialization, who is also a true Czech.  This latter designation has nothing to do with some ridiculous travel guide clichés (e.g., “the widespread consumption of absinthe is indicative of the Czech laid–back attitude to life”), but with taking pride in one’s language and heritage and fashioning something new out of the world of literature (or to use Goethe’s term, which Kundera advocates, die Weltliteratur) that betrays neither your country nor your glorious international ambition. To do that, one must be no less courageous than Alonso Quijada himself:

A magic curtain, woven with legends, is suspended before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote off and ripped through the curtain.  The world then opened before the Knight Errant in all the comic bareness of its prose .... by ripping through this curtain of pre–interpretation, Cervantes set this new art in motion.

What is this new art?  The novel, of course, the only work of literary art not bound by language (as the understanding of poetry is inevitably conditioned by a thorough knowledge of the language) or time and space (like periodicals or historical epics), or personal conviction and historical facts (like philosophy and history).  It remains happily apart from all these strands of human communication while often being more insightful than all of them combined.

That Kundera has never postulated some profound new theory of existence has led many of his detractors to claim that he never really had much to say in the first place (these are usually the same critics who read this famous novel and find, quite rightly, that Kantian thought is still a wee bit more comprehensive).  Yet his aim has never been philosophy but writing novels and essays, which for him are imbricate patterns of the same fabric.  Critics who insist on relying on extraliterary analyses, specifically East–West Cold warring, claim that he does indeed talk about politics and even when he doesn’t, the absence of such diatribes indicates his avoidance of their significance out of the grief of having to live abroad (a prime example of petitio principii).  Over his long career, Kundera has coolly come to accept his fate in the hands of milkmen seeking to squeeze every last drop of humanitarian pathos out of art; but dubbing him apolitical is equally hasty.  He looks at the literary fate of a small nation often overly influenced by larger neighbors as a re–creation (or, simply, creation, as in the case of the work of this author from Martinique whom he discusses at length) of national myths, as he was always “hypersensitive to the destinies of small countries.”  These myths are not in the spirit of the epics of Viking lore, but microdescriptions of personal battles, obsessions, loves, and memories that are particular to that author.  Although he occasionally pretends to be cynical, Kundera has never been a cynical writer, nor has he ever been cruel or sexist (as previously discussed), or distanced himself from the world of commonalities.  He is a citizen of the world, but also very proud of his country, which is the bravest sort of patriotism.  And to think that many critics must have surmised from the title that The Curtain would be another attack on the evils of Communist ideology and practice.

Grigia

She seemed to find it acceptable that beyond these mountains there were people whom he loved more than her, whom he loved with his entire soul.

Unsurprisingly now in retrospect, we first meet the title character of this tale almost two-thirds of the way through.  It is even more appropriate that her given name is not Grigia because she is not a real woman in any tangible or biographical regard, but a sensation associated with a time and place.  We have all had such Romantic fantasies, and we have all elected a local representative to serve our interests for eternity.  What distinguishes Grigia from so many other projects of desire and nostalgia is the omniscient narrator’s acumen of feeling, and the odd, revelatory detail that cambers his visions. 

Our protagonist hovers at that allegedly ideal male age, his mid- to late thirties, in an epoch in which life's physical and mental achievements surrendered to darkness by the onset of our seventh decade.  And what he has hitherto achieved does not seem like much.  He married and had one child, but his love for his family “had become divisible because of the child, like a stone on which water percolates, endlessly driving a wedge further into its midst.”  Not knowing how he will spend the summer alone, he retreats to P., an idyllic Tyrolean town at the invitation of an Italian gold magnate by the name of Hoffingott.  For whatever reason, he accepts the latter’s invitation to stay in a host family rather than a hotel.  And it is there that his heightened sensitivities begin to manifest themselves:

There were three things that he liked about this residence.  The beds of an unspeakably cool softness held by a beautiful mahogany frame; a carpet with an unspeakably confused and tasteless design, if a design that was both utterly unfulfilling and foreign; and a rocking chair made of pipe.

Our protagonist, who has the now-ironic name of Homo and stands unequivocably for Everyman, cannot really be considered an artist.  His mind and soul do sublimate in tandem towards the heavens as he contemplates the beauty of the Tyrolean landscape.  But what he perceives as beautiful is not the immortal elegance of a goddess or a soul, but the fleeting youth of a human being.  If he surrenders to the urges that such youth demands, is he richer or poorer for it?

There are other obstacles.  Our protagonist is the classic outsider – loved by one, mistrusted by all, including by the one who loves him.  His trysts with Grigia involve more than a bit of stealth, especially when her marital status turns out to be more complicated than he would have expected.  For that reason, perhaps, are we warned that "one should not delude oneself that nature is anything less than natural ... earthy, angular, poisonous, and inhuman in everything in which man does not impose his will."   To a creature like Grigia, of course, willpower is something reserved for those who believe they actually control their destinies – the ultimate quandary of any Romantic poet.  Importantly, the crooked development of their liaison is never superseded by some appeal to history: hints are strewn as to what the world has come to, and even to the tides in the affairs of certain men of fortune (every so often we are reminded of Hoffingott and his mines).  But in the end, this is a personal story of personal love, and our narrative retraces wounds and dreams, determined like a shark to get at the meat of the matter:

Once upon a time he might have thought that love, in such an inescapable prison, would be as sharp as bites; but he forgot to think about Grigia at all.  She was lost in him or he in her, even if he could feel her shoulders.  Indeed, his world had been so given over to ecstasy that he knew it and yet could not lay his hand on it.  They did not stir for hours; days could have passed and nights; hunger and thirst lay behind them like a leg of a journey completed; they became ever weaker, ever lighter, ever more closed off from one another; they dammed wide seas and awakened small islands.

That our hero will find himself ever the more isolated from reality is inevitable in such a story that alternates lush, almost superfluous detailings of nature with the most abstract of emotional topography.  That he will find tragedy at the end of his days in P. needs no crystal ball or haruspex.

If I have not mentioned the plot, that is because the plot does little to make itself known, the signature of an artist concerned more with expression than resolution.  Those who have not read Musil are missing out on not only one of the great stylists of the German language, but also one of literature's more curious geniuses.  Musil's style is completely inimitable; at times, in fact, Musil himself cannot sustain its weird lushness.  While computerized minds see Musil's mosaics as indicative of 'the Zeitgeist of that turbulent period' and other half-baked nonsense, what strikes the thoughtful reader is how deftly he draws characters without resorting to the moral evaluation typical of a psychological novel.  Musil reads their thoughts but does not judge them; instead, he allows the reader to judge the characters' visions and understand their world through their eyes, a technique that would fail miserably in less capable hands.  There are numerous examples, but one particularly radiant instance will suffice:

There was one tenderly scarlet-colored flower, and this flower did not exist in any other man's world, only in his; thus had God decreed, wholly as a miracle.  There was one place upon the body that was concealed, and no one was allowed to see it; if the body were not to die, then only one person would. 

Our hero's initial reaction to this epiphany is one of disbelief in the symbols and means of religion.  His heart aches from not being able to see his sick son, and yet he stops responding to his estranged wife's letters, and simply reflects upon what life has brought him to this point, and what it may bring.  His body weakens, as bodies constantly do, and he mistakes the failings of his soul for the creeping shutdown of his organs.  Or maybe it's precisely the other way around.