Tolstoy, one of his many Russian admirers. Russia's other novelists of the Alex-andriajijgriod also give many literary rejections of Schopenhauer's gloomy' teaching. There is the death-wish figure of Svidrigailov in DostoeyiTcy's' Crime ~??????????, the heroic, ideological suicide of Kirillov in The Possessed. Then: IS IfiF'suTcTdaT^ouble drowning which ends Leskov's pow-erfuLnojyehaot 1^65:Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Turgenev's~~ works abound m suicides;26 and the influence of Schopenhauer is woven in with~ffieTmaw6f the sea in such passages as the darkly prophetic dream of his revolutionary heroine, Elena, just before the hero dies in On the Eve. This novel, which was finished in the same year as Wagner's Tristan and its strange, symbolic Liebestod, begins with Elena imagining herself drifting across a lake
in a boat with some people that she did not know. They were silent and sat quite still. No one was rowing the boat, which moved of its own accord. Elena was not feeling frightened, but she was bored; she wanted to know who these people were and why she was with them.
Out of this boredbm and confusion comes a revolutionary upheaval:
Shejopisd around and as she did so, the lake grew wider, the banks disappeared: andjjow it was''no~ longer ??????? but a heaving seafEIiSa1? unknown companions jumped up, 'ffioTIting and waving their arms. . . . ElenaJeCOgiflZea meir races now: her falher_was among. Iheml Then-»--sort of white hurricane burst upon the waters.
Thus, the aristocracy itself was beinp; consnmed| In an effort to chart the course mat lay beyond, Turgenev turns the water into 'endless snow,' moves Elena from a boat to a sleigh, and gives her a new companion: 'Katya, the little beggar-girl she had known years ago.' Katyais. of course^. a prototype of the new populist saint: a 'humiliated and insulted' figure who retains nonetrIeTess*inherent noMty_and imparts to the aristocratic Elena ?? ^?????????)^^
world'
'Katya, where are we going?' Elena asks; but Katya, like Gogol's troika and Pushkin's bronze horseman, does not answer. Instead, traditional
symbols of messianic deHyerjace.i^xJaefor«4je?.^^
of tEe_dieam:
She looked along the road and saw in the distance, through the blown snow, the outlines of a city with tall white towers and silver-gleaming cupolas. 'Katya, Katya, is that Moscow? But no,' she {yumgnt}, 'that's not Moscow, that is the §olovetsk monastery'; and she knew that in thereTin one of its innumerable narrow cells, sturTy*'ancl crowded to-' gethellike toe cells of a beehive-in mere bmitry Was locked up. '1 must free him.'
Liberationcomes^however, only in death; and, atthjs very ???????-?»^
'a yawnffl^Tgrey abyss suddenly opened up in front of her.' The sleigh I
plunged into it, and Katya's last distant cry 6f'''Elena' proved in reality ?
the voice of her Bulgarian lover,Insarov, the 'true Tsar' of the new Russia, I
its would-be revolutionary deliverer, saying 'Elena, I am dying.'''--J
In the metaphysics of late romanticism, death offers a kind of liberation; and the sea appears more as a place for obliteration than purification. Suggestions of such thinking are present even in Christian thinking. The Spanish martyr and mystic Raymond Lully (one of the most popular of medieval Western writers among Russians) had proclaimed 'I want to die in an ocean of love';27 and Dante's Paradise had likened the peace of God to 'that sea toward which all things move.'28
In Chekhov's 'Lights,' the night lights of a half-finished railroad by the sea are likened to 'the thoughts of man . . . scattered in disorder, stretching in a straight line toward some goal in the midst of darkness' leading the narrator to look down from a cliff at the 'majestic, infinite, and forbidding' sea:
Far below me, behind a veil of thick darkness, the sea kept up a low angry growl. . . . And it seemed to me that the whole world consisted only of the thoughts straying through my head . . . and of an unseen power murmuring monotonously somewhere below. Afterwards, as I sank into a doze, it began to seem that it was not the sea murmuring, but my thoughts, and that the whole world consisted in nothing but me. Concentrating the whole world in myself in this way, I . . . abandoned myself to the sensation I was so fond of: the sensation of fearful isolation, when you feel that in the whole universe, dark and formless, you alone exist. It is a proud, demonic sensation, only possible to Russians, whose thoughts and sensations are as large, boundless, and gloomy as their plains, their forests, and their snow.29
An artist rather than a metaphysician, Chekhov looks_in_the end to
'the expression ??^?'???;?~??11?~????? rather than to the logical con-
clusion of his thoughtsT^neHfiiTOroT'^rather than__
commits suicidef j^''ls^IlieTbby^^elf_^oves froJTl_tteJ?leJoiir?rlatic__, suicidelittne' end of his firsTgreat play, The Sea Gull, through an unsuccess-
un to iew snores
ful suicide in Uncle Vanya, to the elegiac beauty of his last play, The Cherry Orchard, in which there is no attempt at suicide-or any other form of escape from the lingering sadness of late Imperial Russia. Nonetheless, Chekhov's fascination with what he was the first to call 'the Hamlet question' helped keep thoughts of suicide before his audiences.
To some extent drowning was a romantic imitation of Ophelia in Hamlet or of the real-life Byron. But drowning had abo_teen_aii-ijBportaflt
?
form of ritual execution in Old Russia. Pre^hristian beliefsJjadL survived about the need to propitiate jealous~*wite7'^^ritsr^A^s_J^_missing nf^madonna ^ amp;1???~?7?????^?'^those transformed figures of drowned ?| women who became^aTHnd of enchanted ???? maiden ffii the florid pagan mythology of 'Russian romanticism. Perhaps also somewhere at the bottom -of iHaETiay a purer existence than existed on land-perhaps the 'shining city of Kitezh' which was said to have descended uncorrupted to the bottom of a trans-Volga lake at the time of the first Mongol invasion.
A final symbol increasingly connectedwith the sea in the late imperial period waTthat oflne'coming apocalypse. Belief in 'a past 'of 'comffigTSSa is one of the oldest and most universal wajs in which man's poetic
