The Gift

The audience, on the other hand, was in ecstasy. So many people had piled in that some had to stand in the windows. “They descended like flies on carrion,” snorted Turgenev, who must have felt wounded in his capacity of professed aesthete, although he himself was not averse to pleasing the flies.

As often happens with unsound ideas which have not freed themselves of the flesh or have been overgrown by it, one can detect in the “young scholar’s” aesthetic notions his own physical style, the very sound of his shrill, didactic voice. “Beauty is life. That which pleases us is beautiful; life pleases us in its good manifestations…. Speak of life, and only of life [thus continues this sound, so willingly accepted by the acoustics of the century], and if humans do not live humanely—why, teach them to live, portray for them the lives of exemplary men and well- organized societies.” Art is thus a substitute or a verdict, but in no wise the equal of life, just as “an etching is artistically far inferior to the picture” from which it has been taken (a particularly charming thought). “The only thing, however,” pronounced the discourser clearly, “in which poetry can stand higher than reality is in the embellishment of events by the addition of accessory effects and by making the character of the personages described correspond with the events in which they take part.”

Thus in denouncing “pure art” the men of the sixties, and good Russian people after them right up to the nineties, were denouncing—in result of misinformation—their own false conception of it, for just as twenty years later the social writer Carshin saw “pure art” in the paintings of Semiradski (a rank academician)—or as an ascetic may dream of a feast that would make an epicurean sick—so Chernyshevski, having not the slightest notion of the true nature of art, saw its crown in conventional, slick art (i.e., anti-art), which he combated—lunging at nothing. At the same time one must not forget that the other camp, the camp of the “aesthetes”—the critic Druzhinin with his pedantry and tasteless lambency, or Turgenev with his much too elegant “visions” and misuse of Italy—often provided the enemy with exactly that cloying stuff which it was so easy to condemn.

Nikolay Gavrilovich castigated “pure poetry” wherever he found it—in the most unexpected byways. Criticizing a reference book in the pages of The Contemporary (1854), he quoted a list of entries which in his opinion were too long: Labyrinth, Laurel, Lenclos (Ninon de)—and a list of entries which were too short: Laboratory, Lafayette, Linen, Lessing. An eloquent cavil! A motto that fits the whole of his intellectual life! The oleographic billows of “poetry” gave birth (as we have seen) to full-bosomed “luxury”; the “fantastic” took a grim economic turn. “Illuminations… Confetti fluttering down to the streets from balloons,” he enumerates (the subject is the festivities and gifts occasioned by the christening of Louis Napoleon’s son), “colossal bonbonnieres descending on parachutes….” And what things the rich have: “Beds of rosewood… wardrobes with hinges and sliding mirrors… damask hangings… And over there the poor toiler….” The link has been found, the antithesis obtained; with tremendous accusatory force and an abundance of articles of furniture, Nikolay Gavrilovich exposes all their immorality. “Is it surprising that the seamstress endowed with good looks little by little slackens her moral principles… Is it surprising that, having changed her cheap muslin dress, washed a hundred times, for Alencon lace, and her sleepless nights of work by a bit of gutting candle for other sleepless nights at a public masquerade or at a suburban orgy she… whirling …” etc. (and, having thought it over, he demolished the poet Nikitin, not because the latter versified badly, but because being an inhabitant of the Voronezh backwoods he had no right whatever to be talking about marble colonnades and sails).

The German pedagogue Kampe, folding his little hands on his stomach, once said: “To spin a pfound of wool is more useful than to write a folume off ferses.” We too, with equally stolid seriousness, are annoyed at poets, at healthy fellows who would be better doing nothing, but who busy themselves with cutting trifles “out of very nice colored paper.” Get it clear, trickster, get it clear, arabesquer, “the power of art is the power of its commonplaces” and nothing more. What should interest a critic most is the conviction expressed in a writer’s work. Volynski and Strannolyubski both note a certain odd inconsistency here (one of those fatal inner contradictions that are revealed all along our hero’s path): the dualism of the monist Chernyshevski’s aesthetics—where “form” and “content” are distinct, with “content” pre-eminent—or, more exactly, with “form” playing the role of the soul and “content” the role of the body; and the muddle is augmented by the fact that this “soul” consists of mechanical components, since Chernyshevski believed that the value of a work was not a qualitative but a quantitative concept, and that “if someone were to take some miserable, forgotten novel and carefully cull all its flashes of observation, he would collect a fair number of sentences that would not differ in worth from those constituting the pages of works we admire.” Even more: “It is sufficient to take a look at the trinkets fabricated in Paris, at those elegant articles of bronze, porcelain and wood, in order to understand how impossible it is nowadays to draw a line between an artistic and an unartistic product” (this elegant bronze explains a lot).

Like words, things also have their cases. Chernyshevski saw everything in the nominative. Actually, of course, any genuinely new trend is a knight’s move, a change of shadows, a shift that displaces the mirror. A serious man, moderate, respecting education, art and crafts, a man who has accumulated a profusion of values in the sphere of thought—who perhaps has shown a fully progressive discrimination during the period of their accumulation but now has no desire whatsoever for them to be suddenly subjected to a reconsideration—such a man is much more angered by irrational innovation than by the darkness of antiquated ignorance. Thus Chernyshevski, who like the majority of revolutionaries was a complete bourgeois in his artistic and scientific tastes, was enraged by “the squaring of boots” or “the extraction of cubic roots from boot tops.” “All Kazan knew Lobachevski,” he wrote to his sons from Siberia in the seventies, “all Kazan was of the unanimous opinion that the man was a complete fool…. What on earth is ‘the curvature of a ray’ or ‘curved space’? What is ‘geometry without the axiom of parallel lines’? Is it possible to write Russian without verbs? Yes, it is—for a joke. Whispers, timid respiration, trills of nightingale. Written by a certain Fet, a well-known poet in his time. An idiot with few peers. He wrote this seriously, and people laughed at him till their sides ached.” (Fet he detested as he also did Tolstoy; in 1856, while buttering up Turgenev—whom he wanted in The Contemporary—he wrote him “that no ‘Youth’s’ [Tolstoy’s Childhood and Adolescence] nor even Fet’s poetry… can sufficiently vulgarize the public for its not being able to …”—there follows a vulgar compliment.)

Once in 1855, when expatiating on Pushkin and wishing to give an example of “a senseless combination of words,” he hastily cited a “blue sound” of his own invention—prophetically calling down upon his own head Blok’s “blue-ringing hour” that was to chime half a century later. “A scientific analysis shows the absurdity of such combinations,” he wrote, unaware of the physiological fact of “colored hearing.” “Isn’t it all the same,” he asked (of the reader in Bakhmuchansk or Novomirgorod, who joyfully agreed with him), “whether we have a blue-finned pike or [as in a Derzhavin poem] a pike with a blue fin [of course the second, we would have cried—that way it stands out better, in profile!], for the genuine thinker has no time to worry about such matters, especially if he spends more time in the public square than he does in his study?” The “general outline” is another matter. It was a love of generalities (encyclopedias) and a contemptuous hatred of particularities (monographs) which led him to reproach Darwin for being puerile and Wallace for being inept (“…  all these learned specialties, from the study of butterfly wings to the study of Kaffir dialects”). Chernyshevski had on the contrary a dangerously wide range, a kind of reckless and self-confident “anything-will-do” attitude which casts a doubtful shadow over his own specialized work. “The general interest,” however, was given his own interpretation: his premise was that the reader was most of all interested in the “productive” side of things. Reviewing a magazine (in 1855), he praises such items as “The Thermometric Condition of the Earth” and “Russian Coalfields,” while decisively rejecting as too special the only article one would want to read, “The Geographical Distribution of the Camel.”

Extraordinarily indicative in respect of all this is Chernyshevski’s attempt to prove (The Contemporary for 1856) that the ternary meter (anapaest, dactyl) is more natural to Russian than the binary one (iamb, trochee). The first (except when it is used in the making of the noble, “sacred”—and therefore hateful—dactylic hexameter) seems more natural to Chernyshevski, “more wholesome,” in the way that a bad rider thinks a gallop is “simpler” than trotting. The point, however, was not so much in this as in that “general rule” to which he subjected everything and everyone. Confused by the rhythmic emancipation of Nekrasov’s broad-rolling verse and by Koltsov’s elementary anapaests (“Why asleep, muzhichyok?”) Chernyshevski scented something democratic in the ternary meter, something which charmed the heart, something “free” but also didactic, as opposed to the aristocratic air of the iamb: he believed that poets who wished to convince should use the anapaest. However, this was not all: in Nekrasov’s ternary verse it happens especially often that one-syllable or two-syllable words occur in the unstressed parts of the feet and lose their accentual individuality, while their collective rhythm on the other hand is heightened: the parts are sacrificed to the whole (as for instance in the anapaestic line “Volga, Volga, in spring overflowing” where the first “Volga” occupies the two depressions of the first foot: Volga Vol). All I have just said is nowhere, of course, examined by Chernyshevski himself, but it is curious that in his own verses, produced by him during the Siberian nights, in that terrible ternary meter whose very