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“Maria Ivanovna Was Reclining on a Settee”: Gleb Uspenskii’s Search for a New Optics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2017

Anna Schur
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Extract

To Gleb Uspenskii's contemporaries, his preference for short forms like sketches, notes, and fragments masked an artistic fl aw – his inability to produce a novel. The paper reconsiders Uspenskii's generic choices as a deliberate critique of the novel form. This critique refl ected Uspenskii's anxiety about the signifi cance of individual personality and experience overvalued by the novel. Uspenskii's aspiration to transcend the novel's preoccupation with an individual human fate in order to lay bare the conditions shaping the shared destiny of all led him to exchange the novel's “microscopic” optics for a broader, panoramic lens. Such change in perspective dictated several other elements of his poetics: from rejecting the novel's aesthetics of small detail to reconfi guring the traditional character structure.

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Slavic Review , Volume 75 , Issue 4 , Winter 2016 , pp. 825 - 846
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2016

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References

Research for this paper was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend. I am very grateful to Svetlana Inkina for assistance with aspects of this research and to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Slavic Reference Service and to Jan Adamczyk for invaluable bibliographical help. I am also grateful to Harriet Murav, Leo Zaibert, and the anonymous referees for their criticisms and suggestions.

1. Chekhov, Anton, Anton Tchekhov: Literary and Theatrical Reminiscences, trans. Koteliansky, S.S. (New York, 1965), 80.Google Scholar

2. Chekhov alludes to Uspenskii's essay in Sakhalin Island in connection to visiting Pishchikov's hut on his travels around the colony. Chekhov, Anton, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, ed. Bel'chikov, N. F. (Moscow, 1974) 14/15:190–91Google Scholar. For more on Chekhov and Uspenskii, see Semanova, M. L., “Chekhov i Gleb Uspenskii (K voprosu o tvorchestve Chekhova 1880 godov),” Uchenye zapiski (1959): 3–62 Google Scholar; Mondry, Henrietta, Pure, Strong, and Sexless: The Peasant Woman's Body in Gleb Uspensky (Amsterdam, 2006), 123–29Google Scholar.

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4. Mondry, Pure, Strong, and Sexless, 7.

5. O. Aptekman, assistant to B.N. Sinani, Uspenskii's treating psychiatrist in the Kolmov psychiatric hospital, and the Jewish writer S. An-sky (Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport's pen-name designed by Uspenskii) off er examples of this attitude. See Aptekman, O. V., Gleb Ivanovich Uspensky (Moscow, 1922)Google Scholar. On An-sky's relationship with Uspenskii, see Gabriella Safran, “An-sky in 1892: The Jew and the Petersburg Myth,” especially 57–72, in Safran, Gabriella and Zipperstein, Steven J., eds., The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century (Stanford, 2006)Google Scholar.

6. For a useful compilation of responses to Uspenskii's writings by his literary contemporaries, see Sokolov, N. I., ed., G. I. Uspenskii v russkoi kritike (Moscow, 1961)Google Scholar. Also see Volzhskii, A. S., ed., Gleb Uspenskii v zhizni: po vospominaniiam, perepiske i dokumentam (Moscow, 1935)Google Scholar.

7. Mondry discusses Uspenskii's infl uence on such fi gures as Vera Zasulich, Vera Figner, Georgii Plekhanov and Lenin, Pure, Strong, and Sexless, 8; also 26n5–7. Also see “V. I. Lenin o G. I. Uspenskom” in Sokolov, ed., Uspenskii v russkoi kritike, 49–56.

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9. These ideas are expressed in a number of Uspenskii's writings such as “Nakonets nashli vinovatogo,” “Vlast' zemli,” and “Podozritel'nyi bel étage.”

10. On the hybrid nature of Uspenskii's form as a blend of journalism and fi ction, see Barabokhin, D. A., Gleb Uspenskii i russkaia zhurnalistika (1862–1892) (Leningrad, 1983), 137–146 Google Scholar; Sokolov, N. I., Masterstvo G. I. Uspenskogo (Leningrad, 1958)Google Scholar; Bialyi, G. A., Russkii realism: Ot Turgeneva k Chekhovu (Leningrad, 1990), 491–537 Google Scholar; Prutskov, N. I., Gleb Uspenskii (Leningrad, 1971), 47–49 Google Scholar; Korolenko, V.G., “O Glebe Ivanoviche Uspenskom. Cherty iz lichnykh vospominanii” in Stat’i, retsenzii, ocherki (Moscow, 2014), 12.Google Scholar

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12. P. N. Tkachev, “Iz stat'i ‘Nedodymannye dumy,” in Sokolov, ed., Uspenskii v russkoi kritike, 78. Mikhailovsky, too, remarks that Uspenskii's is uninterested in “psychological subtleties.” Mikhailovsky, “ ‘G. I. Uspenskii kak pisatel' i chelovek,” 328.

13. Tkachev, “Iz stat'i ‘Nedodymannye dumy,” 80.

14. Uspenskii, “Ne su'sia!” in his Krest'ianin i krest'ianskii trud, SS 5:50, 51.

15. Uspenskii's complicated attitudes toward Populism have been noted by prerevolutionary, Soviet, and western critics. For representative discussions, see Novopolin, G., Gleb Uspenskii: Opyt literaturnoi kharakteristiki (Kharkov, 1903), 74–75 Google Scholar; Prutskov, Gleb Uspenskii, 56–73, 110–20; Wortman, Richard, The Crisis of Russian Populism (London, 1967)Google Scholar; Mondry, “Introduction” in her Pure, Strong, and Sexless, 7–28.

16. Uspenskii, Krest'ianin i krest'ianskii trud, SS, 5:48.

17. Wortman, Crisis of Russian Populism, 61.

18. For an excellent discussion of Uspenskii's mental illness, its causes, its perceptions by his contemporaries, including his doctors, and its relationship to his writing, see Mondry, Pure, Strong, and Sexless, where Mondry also provides a translation of B. N. Sinani's diary (195–272). For another account of Uspenskii's fi nal years, see Aptekman, Gleb Ivanovich Uspensky.

19. On personality, see G. I. Uspenskii, Ochen' malen'kii chelovek, SS, 2:457; on microscopic specialty, see G. I. Uspenskii, “Trudami ruk svoikh” in Skuchaiushchaia publika, SS, 6:170; On microscopic deeds, see G. I. Uspenskii, “Svoekorystnyi postupok” in Bez opredelennykh zaniatii, SS, 4:511, 512.

20. Mondry, Pure, Strong, and Sexless, 16.

21. Pishchikov was tried in Bolkhov in the Orel province. The documents pertaining to the pre-trial investigation and the trial can be found in Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Orlovskoi oblasti, “Delo o meshchanine Pishchikove, V.K., obviniaemom v zlodeiskom ubiistve svoei zheny, (nachato 13 iunia, 1885, okoncheno 25 sentiabria 1890 goda).” Opis' sudebnykh del Orlovskogo Okruzhnogo suda. Orlovskii Okruzhnoi sud, Ugolovnoe otdelenie, Otdel Dorevoliutsionnykh fondov, fond no. 714, arkhiv 748.

22. The following is a partial list of periodicals that reported on Pishchikov's verdict: Syn otechestva, September 9, 1885; Peterburgskie vedomosti, September 6, 1886, 2; Sovremennye izvestiia, September 6, 1885, 2; Svet, September 6, 1885, 1; Novoe vremia, September 11, 1885, 4. For an extensive coverage of the trial, see Orlovsky vestnik¸ September 5, 1885, 2; September 6, 1885, 3; September 7, 1885, 3; September 8, 1885, 2–3; September 10, 1885, 2–3; September 11, 2–3; September 12, 1885, 2–3; September 13, 1885, 2–3; September 14, 1885, 2–3; September 17, 1885, 2; September 18, 1885, 3.

23. Uspenskii, “Odin na odin,” in Bezvremenie, SS, 6:386. Donna Orwin points out in Consequences of Consciousness: Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy (Stanford, 2007), 180–81, that by overvaluing inwardness, Russian psychological prose had the eff ect of promoting individualism, and even potentially undermining traditional morality.

24. Uspenskii, “Odin na odin,” in Bezvremenie, SS, 6:375–6.

25. Uspenskii, “Odin na odin,” in Bezvremenie, SS, 6:375–6.

26. Uspenskii, “Odin na odin,” in Bezvremenie, SS, 6:377.

27. Uspenskii, “Odin na odin,” in Bezvremenie, SS, 6:381.

28. Uspenskii, “Odin na odin,” in Bezvremenie, SS, 6:377.

29. Uspenskii, “Odin na odin,” in Bezvremenie, SS, 6:373–4.

30. Dostoevskii, F. M., The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts with Epilogue, trans., Volokhonsky, Larissa and Pevear, Richard (New York, 2002), 420 Google Scholar. For the original see Dostoevskii, F. M., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad, 1972), 14:421 Google Scholar.

31. Uspenskii, “Khochesh'-ne-khochesh',” in Novye vremena, novye zaboty, SS, 3:57.

32. Uspenskii, “Ot avtora. Predislovie k pervomu sobraniiu sochinenii,” SS, 9:177.

33. Sokolov, Masterstvo G. I. Uspenskogo, 38.

34. A. I. Ertel', in A. S. Volzhskii, ed., Gleb Uspenskii v zhizni. Ertel' recorded this remark in his diary on February 6, 1884. Tolstoi's wording was probably prompted by a line in the January 1884 installment of Volei-nevolei: Otryvki iz zapisok Tiapushkina in The Fatherland Notes. Uspenskii writes that Volei-nevolei had multiple discarded beginnings, including “Maria Vasil'evna was lying on a setee … one time, it was even ‘half-reclined.’ “ Uspenskii, “Vmesto predislovia,” in Volei-nevolei, SS, 6:8.

35. Gautier, Theophile, “Honore de Balzac,” trans. Waters, Alyson, in de Balzac, Honore, Père Goriot, trans. Burton Raff el (New York, 1994), 226 Google Scholar. For the original see Claude-Marie Senninger, ed., Honoré de Balzac par Théophile Gautier (Paris, 1980), 102.

36. Charles Baudelaire, “Balzac's Genius,” trans. Noah David Guynn, in Balzac, Père Goriot, 225. For the original see Baudelaire, Charles, “Theophile Gautier,” in Pierrot, Roger, ed., Oeuvres completes de Balzac, 26 vols. (Paris, 1968), 465 Google Scholar.

37. On Balzac's use of “necessary superfl uities,” the phrase he uses in Lost Illusions, see Brooks, Peter, Realist Vision (New Haven, 2005), 25 Google Scholar.

38. Uspenskii, “Vypriamila (otryvok iz zapisok Tiapushkina),” in Koi pro chto, SS, 7:247. The comparison to Pygmalion belongs to Mondry, Pure, Strong, and Sexless, 72.

39. Uspenskii, “Vypriamila,” Koi pro chto, SS, 7:247.

40. Uspenskii, “Vypriamila,” in Koi pro chto, SS, 7:253.

41. Uspenskii, “Vypriamila,” in Koi pro chto, SS, 7:250.

42. Uspenskii, “Vypriamila,” in Koi pro chto, SS, 7:252.

43. Uspenskii, “Vypriamila,” in Koi pro chto, SS, 7:254.

44. See, for instance, Mikhailovsky, N. K., “G. I. Uspenskii kak pisatel' i chelovek (1889),” in Mikhailovsky, N. K., Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i (Мoscow, 1957)Google Scholar; Volzhskii, A. S., Dva ocherka ob Uspenskom i Dostoevskom (St.Petersburg, 1902), 11–14 Google Scholar.

45. V. P. Druzin, N. I. Sokolov, “G. I. Uspenskii. Kritiko-biografi cheskii ocherk” in SS, xlvi–xlvii; Prutskov, N. I., “G. I. Uspenskii” in his Istoriia russkoi literatury, vol. 3 of 4, (Leningrad, 1980), 200–1Google Scholar.

46. Mondry, , Pure, Strong, and Sexless, 65–80 Google Scholar.

47. For Zola's description see Chapter 13 of Thérèse Raquin.

48. Gautier, “Honore de Balzac,” 226; for the original see, Senninger, ed., Honoré de Balzac par Théophile Gautier, 101.

49. Gautier, “Honore de Balzac,” 226; for the original see, Senninger, ed., Honoré de Balzac par Théophile Gautier, 102.

50. Gautier, “Honore de Balzac,” 227; for the original, see Senninger, ed., Honoré de Balzac par Théophile Gautier, 102.

51. On Xavier Jouvin's invention of technologies that revolutionized glove-making, see Smith, Willard M., Gloves, Past and Present (New York, 1917), 71–77 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52. Uspenskii, “Vypriamila,” in Koi pro chto, SS, 7:247.

53. Uspenskii “Vypriamila,” in Koi pro chto, SS, 7:252.

54. Uspenskii, “Vypriamila,” in Koi pro chto, SS, 7:247.

55. Gautier, “Honore de Balzac,” 226; for the original, see Senninger, ed., Honoré de Balzac par Théophile Gautier, 102.

56. Gautier, “Honore de Balzac,” 227; for the original, see Senninger, ed., Honoré de Balzac par Théophile Gautier, 103.

57. Gautier, “Honore de Balzac,” 226; for the original see see Senninger, ed., Honoré de Balzac par Théophile Gautier, 102; Uspenskii, “Vypriamila,” in Koi pro chto, SS, 7: 254.

58. For a classic statement of this view, see Lukacs, Georg, Studies in European Realism (New York, 1964)Google Scholar; Lukacs, Georg, “Art and Objective Truth” in Kahn, Arthur D., ed., Writer & Critic, and Other Essays (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; Williams, Raymond, “Realism and the Contemporary Novel” in his The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1965)Google Scholar.

59. Mikhailovsky, “ ‘G. I. Uspenskii kak pisatel' i chelovek,” 333.

60. See, for instance, Barabokhin, D.A., Gleb Uspenskii i russkaia zhurnalistika (Leningrad, 1983), 141 Google Scholar. For additional detail, see sources listed in n10, above.

61. Goriachkina, M. S., Satira Shchedrina i russkaia demokraticheskaia literatura 60–80kh godov XIX veka (Moscow, 1977), 35 Google Scholar.

62. Stepanova, K., “Ocherk kak zhanr opisatel'nyi” in Gruzdev, A. I., Bilinkis, Ia. S., Egorov, B. F., Semanov, M. L., and Skatov, N. N., eds., Zhanrovoe novavtorstvo russkoi literatury kontsa vosemnadtsatogo-deviatnadtsatogo vekov: sbornik nauchnykh rabot (Leningrad, 1974), 48–57 Google Scholar; Markovich, V. M., “O transformatsii ‘natural'noi’ novelly i dvukh realizmakh v russkoi literature XIX veka” in Markovich, V. M. and Schmid, Volf, eds., Russkaia novella: Problemy teorii i istorii, sbornik statei (St. Petersburg, 1993), 113–33Google Scholar, especially 114–18.

63. Uspenskii, G. I., Nravy Rasteriaevoi ulitsy, (Moscow, 1964), SS, 1:70.Google Scholar

64. For a general discussion of Willy-Nilly, see Sokolov, N. I., G .I. Uspenskii: Zhizn' i tvorchestvo, (Leningrad, 1968), 235–40Google Scholar.

65. Uspenskii, “Vmesto predisloviia,” in Volei-nevolei (Otryvki iz zapiskok Tiapushkina), SS, 6:7, 8.

66. Uspenskii, “Vmesto predislovia,” in Volei-nevolei, SS, 6:57.

67. On the prominence of guilt in the psychological structure of Populism, see Wortman, “The City and Countryside,” in his The Crisis of Russian Populism, 1–34. How this psychological drama of Populism is exemplifi ed in Uspenskii's life is the topic of Chapter 3, “Gleb Ivanovich Uspenskii and the Impossible Reconciliation,” 61–100.

68. Uspenskii, “Podrobnosti ‘vozmutitel'nogo sluchaia’—‘Nam samim' nichego ne nado,” in Volei-nevolei, SS, 6:92.

69. Uspenskii, “Vozmutitel'nyi sluchai v moei zhizni.—Opyt opredeleniia ‘podlinykh’ razmerov i podlinnykh svoistv ‘russkogo serdtsa’,” in Volei-nevolei, SS, 6:73, 78.

70. Uspenskii, “Vozmutitel'nyi sluchai v moei zhizni,” in Volei-nevolei, SS, 6:69.

71. Uspenskii, “Vozmutitel'nyi sluchai v moei zhizni,”in Volei-nevolei, SS, 6:76.

72. Uspenskii, “Vozmutitel'nyi sluchai v moei zhizni,” in Volei-nevolei, SS, 6:58.

73. Uspenskii, “Vozmutitel'nyi sluchai v moei zhizni,” in Volei-nevolei, SS, 6:61.

74. Uspenskii, “Vmesto predisloviia,” in Volei-nevolei, SS, 6:7.

75. The Populist debate was part of a broader public discourse on personality whose beginnings in Russia date back to the last decades of the 18th century. See Steinberg, Mark D., Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca, 2002), 63–67 Google Scholar; ord, Derek Off, “ Lichnost': Notions of Individual Identity,” in Kelly, Catriona and Shepherd, David, eds., Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881–1940 (Oxford, 1998), 13–25 Google Scholar.

76. For a discussion of the overlaps and disagreements in Tkachev’s, Lavrov’s, and Mikhailovsky's views on personality, see Walicki, Andrzej, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism (Stanford, 1979), 257 Google Scholar.

77. I rely on Andrzej Walicki's discussion of the Populist debate on the personality principle; see Walicki, , A History of Russian Thought, 222–67Google Scholar, especially 244–49. Walicki notes that although the full delineation of this idea occurs in Tkachev's “What Is the Party of Progress?,” which was not published until 1932, Tkachev's debate with Lavrov was known to his contemporaries from the 1870s onward. Quotation on 247. Also see Billington, James H., Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism (Oxford, 1958), 97 Google Scholar.

78. Quoted in Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, 247. Uspenskii, “Podrobnosti ‘vozmutitel'nogo sluchaia’,” in Volei-nevolei, SS, 6:102.

79. Wortman, Crisis of Russian Populism, 28.

80. Sokolov makes a similar point when he suggests that Living Numbers represents not portraits of individual lives but synthesized images evincing social phenomena expressed by a statistic. See Sokolov, G. I. Uspenskii: Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 205, 215–16. Also see Bialyi, Russkii realism, 526.

81. Uspenskii, “Kvitantsiia,” in Zhivye tsifry, SS, 7:500.

82. Uspenskii, “Chetvert’ loshadi,” in Zhivye tsifry, SS, 7:490. “Something told me that what stands before me is none other than a living statistical fraction,” SS, 7:488.

83. Uspenskii, “Chetvert’ loshadi,” in Zhivye tsifry, SS, 7:486. The meaning of perevorot as an artistic epiphany is discussed by Bialyi,” Russkii realism, 526.

84. In recent years, Victorian studies have seen eff orts to reassess this standard view of the novel's relationship to statistics and to show how statistical ways of thinking invade the novel, both thematically and structurally. See Jaffe, Audrey, The Aff ective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph (Columbus, 2010)Google Scholar; Steinlight, Emily, “Dickens's Supernumeraries and the Biopolitical Imagination of Victorian Fiction,” Novel 43, no. 2 (2010): 227–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Klotz, Michael, “Manufacturing Fictional Individuals: Victorian Social Statistics, the Novel, and Great Expectations ,” Novel 46, no. 2 (2013): 214–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85. Murav, Harriet, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels & the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford, 1992), 58–59 Google Scholar.

86. Uspenskii, “Vozmutitel'nyi sluchai v moei zhizni,” in Volei-nevolei, SS, 6:78.

87. Uspenskii, “Vozmutitel'nyi sluchai v moei zhizni,” in Volei-nevolei, SS, 6:78, 79.

88. Uspenskii, “Vozmutitel'nyi sluchai v moei zhizni,” in Volei-nevolei, SS, 6:66, 67, 71. In an unpublished section of Willy-Nilly, Uspenskii directly alludes to Dostoevskii. Sokolov, G. I. Uspenskii: zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 239–40.

89. Osip Mandel'shtam, “Konets romana,” in Sochineniia, 2 vols. (Ekaterinburg, 2004), 656–62; quote on 658.

90. Viktor Shklovskii, “Literature without a Plot: Rozanov,” in his Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher, (McLean, 1990), 190.