of the Sentimentalist and Romantic eras: the “man of nature” escaping the city, the “hero of sensibility” oppressed by society, the noble outlaw, the figures of Faust, Hamlet or Don Quixote. Many
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of these alienated heroes were simply transplanted. During the Realist period, they evolved into distinctly Russian nihilists, utopians, and other idea-driven reformers or eccentrics. From the outset a cutting-edge of parodic reassessment characterized Russian borrowings from Europe. By mid-century, these types had coalesced under the umbrella term “superfluous man,” lishnii chelovek, a phrase coined in print by Ivan Turgenev with the publication of his Diary of a Superfluous Man (1850, in Paris). The idea caught on among Russian critics and was retrofitted to heroes of the Romantic era. To be superfluous meant to be defeated along three parameters: to fail to win the woman one loves, to fail in health (Turgenev’s protagonist is dying of tuberculosis), and to fail to find a productive niche in society. But the Russian idea of “superfluity” is itself curious when measured against many Western norms. Its perspective is largely that of society, not of the individual. It moves, as it were, from the “outside in,” considering the needs of the social body primary and the rights of the misfit almost not at all. If the European Romantic-era misfit was an egoist, outcast, rebel, and proud of his rebellion – proud even to fail in that rebellion, if need be, for the attempt and the quest were all – then Russian variations on the Byronic hero were more contemplative, passive, and resigned. They were less deluded (which is why Onegin and Pechorin thrill us even today with their intelligence), but they were frail. By default, this frailty brought them back into the fold.22 An interesting tension emerges between native heroes (righteous people, fools, wanderers) and these European imports. Traditional Russian culture valued communality and wholeness. As we have seen, however, this culture was also highly tolerant, even protective, of eccentricity: it admired holy fools who spoke their truth to tyrants (or even who spoke gibberish), wanderers who abandoned their homes and goods, Ivan the Fool who was lazy, dunce-like, cruel without cause, and ended up on top of the heap. The Westernized eccentric or outsider on Russian soil was not so fortunate. He was featured but neither pitied nor respected, and usually he did not survive. The “society misfit,” an ambitious, even glamorous category of protagonist in most West European literary traditions, becomes superfluous more quickly in Russia and rarely delivers a wise or unambiguously redeeming word. We limit our discussion here to three Russian variants: Napoleonic, nihilist, and utopian.
The Russian Napoleon myth evolved in several stages, each with its own literary signature.23 For several years after the devastation of 1812, the fallen Emperor continued to be demonized in the popular consciousness as a destroyer, villain, and Antichrist. By the 1820s, national trauma had faded and the cult of Napoleon had begun: in the stifling civil and military bureaucracy of St. Petersburg, a self-made man and merit-based career was an exhilarating, illicit dream.
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Pushkin had been only thirteen when Moscow was occupied and burned, too young (by two years) for military service or exploits against the foe; in his various poems on Napoleon, the poet already saw the Frenchman more as a liberator and democrat than as a scourge. As the myth matured in the 1830s, however, it again darkened. Insignificant clerks in Gogol’s and later Dosto-evsky’s Petersburg tales went mad with Napoleonic delusions. In Dead Souls, Gogol evoked the Napoleon image as farce: when the townspeople groped for some alibi for this cipher-imposter Chichikov, one option was “Napoleon returned, in disguise.” Significantly, the “little Napoleons” who retained their sanity were motivated not by the honorable Romantic goals of pride, honor, egoism, empire, but rather by greed and paltry identity crises of their own making.
This “bourgeoisification” of the Napoleon myth began with Pushkin’s 1833 story “The Queen of Spades.” Germann, gambling hero of that tale whose dark ambitionsare compared toNapoleon’s, does not want military glory, a woman’s love, freedom from lowly birth; he wants a fortune. This mercantilereduction of the myth reached its culmination in Raskolnikov’s self-loathing reflections on the great Frenchman: Napoleon loses an army in Egypt and doesn’t look back, and here I crawl under a wretched pawnbroker’s bed, looking for trinkets! During the mid-1860s, while Crime and Punishment was being serialized, Tolstoy was recreating in his War and Peace the saga of the 1812 invasion (replete with its cardboard Napoleon) – and already Tolstoy was nervous that the wheel might be turning again, that the French Emperor was regaining his aura and would have to be debunked. In several decades, this proved true. The Symbolist generation admired Napoleon anew.
The Napoleonic hero had a cyclical trajectory in Russia, one tied to the mystique of the West and to the nightmare (and the nostalgia) of foreign invasion and heroic self-defense. In contrast, and somewhat paradoxically, the nihilist hero – who doubts and negates everything – was nourished by rumors of positive internal reform. The foundational text here, Turgenev’s Fathers and Children [Ottsy i deti: not, as the familiar translation has it, Fathers and Sons], appeared in 1862, one year after the enserfed Russian peasantry had been liberated by imperial decree. Turgenev’s hero is Evgeny Bazarov, the “New Man.” He is a skeptic, a materialist, a medical man and researcher who, in order to respect himself, “believes in nothing,” “respects nothing,” and “regards everything from a critical point of view.” In place of received belief, Bazarov puts utility: if a tool or an idea works, it is worthy of being affirmed. Only by applying a utilitarian standard could a rational human being escape the disillusionment of the Byronic hero and the delusions of Napoleonism. Although the world might still consider such a nihilistic hero “superfluous” – Bazarov
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does indeed fail in all the ways that Turgenev had laid out a decade earlier, losing the woman he loves, dying before his time, finding no useful role in society – still, Bazarov is convinced that only with his priorities and values can humanity progress. “Nature is not a temple, but a workshop,” he insists, thus placing himself outside the realm of the traditional Russian hero who prefers to rely on righteousness and miracle. Bazarov’s death at the end is a remarkable variation on the plot of Turgenev’s earlier novels, in which a weak man is tested by a strong woman and fails the test. Bazarov falls in love against his will (he doesn’t believe in love), and the woman lacks both energy and inclination to test his devotion. Turgenev was pilloried by the radicals for presenting so negative a view of Russia’s new “sons,” a charge that appalled and embittered the novelist. It is the fathers who are the brunt of my satire, Turgenev insisted in letters to his friends; and as regards Bazarov, “I don’t know whether I love him or hate him.”24
Therather lyricalliteraryimageof thenihilist inTurgenev soondegenerated – or matured – into somethingfar more dangerous and violent.The first attack on the life of the Liberator Tsar Alexander II, by a domestic terrorist organization, occurred in 1866, and it promoted the nihilist from metaphysical portrait to political threat. Political assassinations rose steadily in Russia until the outbreak of the Great War. But in literature, the apogee of the nihilist was reached in 1872 with Dostoevsky’s Demons (although a Nietzschean afterglow of the type suffuses several Symbolist and Decadent novels). In 1913, on the occasion of a dramatization of Demons by the Moscow Art Theatre, Maksim Gorky declared Dostoevsky himself “superfluous” to the needs of the new Russia. In Gorky’s Marxist-Leninist view, Russia had outgrown those Dostoevskian pravedniki, Prince Myshkin and the Elder Zosima. There was also no use for cynical, nay-saying nihilists in the spirit of the Underground Man. “Russians have no need now to be shown Stavrogins,” Gorky wrote in his 1913 essay “More about Karamazovism.”“Theteachingofcourage isneeded,spiritualhealthis needed – action, and not self-contemplation, a return to the source of energy . . . to the people, to civic activity, and to science.”25
Gorkyon Russia’s new optimismisa good bridge to ourfinal exemplary“West-ern” import, the utopian hero (and its anti-utopian shadow). Literary utopia has a lengthy European pedigree, beginning with Sir Thomas More in the early sixteenth century. But utopian thinking remained robust longer in Russia than in the West. Again paradoxically, the eagerness and acuity with which Russian heroes debunked their surrounding reality, and the impatience with which the nihilist discredited all options (practical, impractical,
