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Turgenev and a Proliferating French Press: The Feuilleton and Feuilletonistic in A Nest of the Gentry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Melissa Frazier
Melissa Frazier*
Affiliation:
Sarah Lawrence College where she teaches Russian language and Russian and comparative literature
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Abstract

Elizabeth Cheresh Allen has addressed Ivan Turgenev's strikingly ambiguous and understated narratives, arguing that Turgenev's "language of litotes" consistently serves other than conventionally realistic ends. V. N. Toporov accounts for Turgenev's "strangeness" in more personal terms. Melissa Frazier's close reading of A Nest of the Gentry suggests the importance of yet another factor: Turgenev's engagement with the feuilleton and the increasingly commercialized literary environment that produced it. Ivan Goncharov's accusation that Turgenev had plagiarized elements of A Nest of the Gentry from his own as-yet-unpublished The Precipice finally also makes the point that Turgenev's "strangeness" in this novel derives from an ambiguous language best described as "not that," not the stolen words and half-truths of a feuilletonistic and largely French press, but something nonetheless not unlike.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 69 , Issue 4 , Winter 2010 , pp. 925 - 943
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2010

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References

1. Turgenev, I. S., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow, 1981 Google Scholar; hereafter PSS), 6:158. Translations from the Russian are mine throughout unless otherwise noted.

2. While Allen readily acknowledges the problematic nature of the term realism, she also carefully outlines the extent to which Turgenev has traditionally been read as “realist,“ starting as early as 1848 with Vissarion Belinskii's praise of his “successful physiological portraits.“ See “The Ramifications of Realism,” the introductory chapter in Allen, Elizabeth Cheresh, Beyond Realism: Turgenev's Poetics of Secular Salvation (Stanford, 1992), 9–38 Google Scholar.

3. Ibid., 100, 34.

4. Toporov, V. N., Strannyi Turgenev (Moscow, 1998), 23 Google Scholar.

5. See Klioutchkine, Konstantine, “The Rise of Crime and Punishment from the Air of the Media,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 88–108 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. In his fine article arguing the importance of a burgeoning press for Fedor Dostoevskii's work Klioutchkine notes that “with the exception of Ivan Turgenev and Lev Tolstoi, successful writers during this period were deeply involved in journalism.” Ibid., 88-89.

7. In A. I. Reitblat's reckoning of maximum honoraria for the most highly paid Russian authors in the second half of the nineteenth century, Turgenev ranks as the highestpaid author at the end of the 1850s and of the 1880s and is tied with Tolstoi for the top position in the 1860s and 1870s. See Reitblat, A. I., Ot Bovy k Bal'montu (Moscow, 1991), 88–89 Google Scholar.

8. In Goncharov's words: “I still don't know what he must have said about me to Auerbach, Flaubert—and, perhaps, to others, that they undertook … whether from his words or from a copy of my notebooks, to write parallel novels (Villa on the Rliine,M-me liovary, and Sentimental Education)!” Goncharov, I. A., Neobyknovennaia istoriia: lstinnye sobytiia (Moscow, 1999), 65 Google Scholar.

9. Turgenev, PSS, 6:50.

10. Azadovskii, Mark, “Fel'etony I. S. Turgeneva,” in Oksman, Iu. G., ed., Fel'etony sorokovykhgodov (Moscow, 1930), 201 Google Scholar.

11. Seeley, Frank Friedeberg, Turgenev: A Reading of His Fiction (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), 85 Google Scholar. Seeley points out the layered narration in three of Turgenev's first five stories, “Andrei Kolosov” (1844), “Three Portraits” (1846), and “The Jew” (1846); he also notes that the influence of Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol’ is evident in other ways in the other two, “The Duellist” (1846) and “Petushkov” (1847). See also Ledkovsky, Marina, The Other Turgenev: From Romanticism to Symbolism (Wurzburg, 1973)Google Scholar.

12. In Povesti Belkina (Tales of Belkin,1831), Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan'ki (Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka, 1831-1832), and Geroi nashego vremeni (A Hero of Our Time, 1840), respectively.

13. For more on the Romantic play of authorship and its connection to the periodical, see Frazier, Melissa, Romantic Encounters: Writers, Readers and The Library for Reading (Stanford, 2007)Google Scholar.

14. Quoted in Iu. G. Oksman, “Neizvestnye fel'etony Goncharova,” in Oksman, ed., Fel'etony sorokovykh godov, 17. Oksman, like Boris Tomashevskii, sees this section in Journal des Debats as the starting point of the feuilleton; Zhurbina makes a sharp distinction between the section in a periodical publication and an actual genre, see Zhurbina, Evgeniia, Teoriia i praktika khudozhestvenno-publitsisticheskikh zhanrov (Moscow, 1969), 207–10.Google Scholar

15. Morson continues, “Originally a journalistic miscellany in which disconnected items of news of the city's cultural life were presented, the feuilleton gradually became tied together by the loose and whimsical transitions of a digressive persona wandering from topic to topic—and sometimes, in the conventional role of flaneur, from place to place as well.” See Morson, Gary Saul, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin, 1981), 16 Google Scholar.

16. Tomashevskii then goes on to compare the Abbe to “our Bulgarin,” see Tomashevskii, B., “U istokovfel'etona,“ in Iu. Kazanskii, Tynianovand B., eds., Fel'eton (1927; reprint, Bremen, 1973), 61 Google Scholar.

17. In this instance Senkovskii's alleged source was in fact Balzac. Note also that the Romantic problem of plagiarism was especially apparent in the more advanced literary culture of Great Britain, where among the more famous offenders we find Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas de Quincey, Sir Walter Scott, and Laurence Sterne. See Frazier, Romantic Encounters, 61-65.

18. Klioutchkine, “The Rise of Crime and Punishment,” 92.

19. As Turgenev explains, in 1845 Dumas had signed a contract with two newspapers, Presse and Constilutionnel, promising each publication nine volumes of novelistic prose each year for five years; he also pledged over that five-year period to refrain from publishing anything anywhere else. In January of 1847 the two newspapers then took Dumas to court, claiming that Dumas had not only failed to produce the requisite amount of words foi” Presse and Co7istitutionnelbut had also published work in three competing publications: Patrie, Stècle, and L'Ésprit publique. After a lawyer for Patrie entered the fray with the revelation that Dumas, according to an earlier contract, owed that newspaper another two novels or 25,000 lines, Steele in turn revealed the existence of yet another prior contract, this one promising another 105,000 lines of prose.

20. I. S. Turgenev, “Sovremennye zapiski,” in Oksman, ed., Fel'elony sorokovykh godov, 265.

21. See ibid., 309. Azadovskii notes that another section of the April feuilleton, “Neskol'ko slov o barone Aleksandre Giro” is an almost “word-for-word” translation of a piece published by Jules Janin in the Journal des Débats. See Azadovskii, “Fel'etony I. S. Turgeneva,” 209.

22. Turgenev, “Sovremennye zapiski,” 262, 265. Émile de Girardin, who launched La Presse'm 1836, was known also for the very successful Musée des Families which he founded in 1833.

23. Ibid., 271, 275 (emphasis in the original).

24. Azadovskii, “Fel'etony I. S. Turgeneva,” 206.

25. Turgenev, PSS, 6:132.

26. Azadovskii, “Fel'etony I. S. Turgeneva,” 206.

27. Ibid., 210.

28. Costlow, Jane T., Worlds within Worlds: The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (Princeton, 1990), 31,43,34,31Google Scholar.

29. Turgenev, PSS, 6:10.

30. Costlow, Worlds within Worlds, 39.

31. Turgenev, PSS, 6:11,12, 85, 12.

32. Ibid., 6:153.

33. Ibid., 6:132.

34. Tony Tanner, , Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore, 1979), 40 Google Scholar.

35. I would note also Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth- Century Literature (Stanford, 1995), where Kevin McLaughlin works to break down a “simple opposition“ (18) between participation and refusal in literary commerce by arguing that these canonical writers imitate the excesses of literary capitalism only to cast them out; in his reading, Balzac and Dickens do not just reflect a newly commercialized literary environment, but also attempt its homeopathic cure.

36. Barberet, John R., “Linking Producers to Consumers: Balzac's ‘Grande Affaire' and the Dynamics of Literary Diffusion,” in de la Motte, Dean and Przyblyski, jeannene M., eds., Making the News: Modernity and the Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France (Amherst, 1999), 198 Google Scholar.

37. Ibid. Given Goncharov's assessment of Turgenev below, it is perhaps not coincidental that “Le Message” anticipates aspects of Nest of the Gentry; note also Leonid Grossman's claim that Turgenev's most successful play, A Month in the Country is lifted from Balzac's La Mardtre. See Grossman, L., Teatr Turgeneva (St. Petersburg, 1924), 67–80 Google Scholar. I am grateful to Ilya Kliger for pointing out the parallels with Balzac's “Le Colonel Chabert“ (1832; 1844), where death is falsely enshrined, not in the periodical press, but in the law.

38. Barberet, “Linking Producers to Consumers,” 198, 193, 195.

39. Ibid., 194.

40. Here I am slightly shifting the emphasis of Costlow's reading. Costlow points out the “implicit parallel of the … novel … between the author himself and M. Jules” as “both writers convert private lives into popular commodities” but argues that Turgenev “distinguishes himself from these gossips in his vision and reticence, and in his separation of himself from worldly perspective“; my focus remains on the parallel. Costlow, Worlds within Worlds, 52, 53.

41. Turgenev, PSS, 6:96.

42. Ibid., 6:103, 124.

43. Ibid., 6:97, 125.

44. Ibid., 6:73, 120.

45. According to the editors of the PSS, this line is crossed out on the manuscript; they loosely associate the change with Goncharov's accusations. Ibid., 6:383.

46. Ibid., 6:112, 110-12.

47. Costlow, Worlds within Worlds, 47.

48. Turgenev, PSS, 6:52, 53, 82, 83.

49. Ibid., 6:65, 112.

50. In abandoning biological continuity, Lavretskii and Liza follow the lead of Marfa Timofeevna with her rejection of men as “goats” and her own nonbiological family made up of Nastas'ia Karpovna, Shurochka, the dog Roska, and Sailor the cat.

51. Ibid., 6:56, 78.

52. Dostoevskii, F. M., Sobraniesochinenii v desiati tomakh (Moscow, 1958), 10:447 Google Scholar.

53. Nabokov, Vladimir, The Gift (New York, 1991), 73 Google Scholar.

54. Allen, Beyond Realism, 107.

55. Reitblat, Ot Bovy k Bal'montu, 88-89.

56. The three were published as “Pis'ma stolichnogo druga k provintsial'nomu zhenikhu,“ see Oksman, ed., Fel'etony sorokovykhgodov, 39-84.

57. Milton Ehre writes: “Though fluent in French, Goncharov rarely employed it in his correspondence and once chided a Russian gentlewoman for writing in its ‘pleasant and polite forms’ instead of the more ‘sincere’ Russian. French was reserved mostly for Turgenev and it gave a special bite to his scorn: ‘Oh, qu'il etait magnifique, celui-la; oh, qu'il est beau—corarae il porte majestueusement sa belle tête! oh, est-il grand, est-il superbe, ce première poete de la Russie!'” See Ehre, Milton, Oblomov and His Creator: The Life and Art of Ivan Goncharov (Princeton, 1973), 58 Google Scholar.

58. For an account of the conflict, see L. Maikov, “Ssora mezhdu I. A. Goncharovym i I. S. Turgenevym v 1859 i 60 godakh,” Russkaia starina 1 (1900): 5-23. The editors of the PSS associate the crossing-out of the line “ona otdalas’ emu” with Goncharov's claim in Not an Ordinary Story to have pointed out to Turgenev the parallels between Liza's and Vera's “falls“; while Goncharov seems to have been particularly bothered by the scene with Marfa Timofeevna, he also accused Turgenev of lifting aspects of Lavretskii, Panshin, Lemm, and Mikhalevich from his work. See Turgenev, PSS, 6:382-83.

59. Maikov, “Ssora,” 15.

60. Ibid., 18,19.

61. Ibid., 21.

62. Quoted in Goncharov, Neobyknovennaia istoriia, 7.

63. Maikov, “Ssora,” 22.

64. Annenkov writes that the two were reconciled in 1864 at the funeral of another member of the “treteiskii sud,” A. V. Druzhinin. See ibid., 23.

65. Toporov, Strannyi Turgenev, 23.

66. Maikov, “Ssora,” 18.

67. Quoted in Mochulsky, Konstantin, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans.Minihan, Michael A. (Princeton, 1967), 277–78Google Scholar (emphasis in the original). The novels Dostoevskii refers to are Crime and Punishment and The Gambler.