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NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE: THE IDEA OF A LITERARY TRADITION
1. Tradition as Chimera
2. Tradition as Norm-System and Narrative
PART TWO: SEEKING A TEXT FOR RUSSIAN CULTURE
3. Literary History and National Identity
4 The Redemptive Mission
PART THREE: THE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE OF THE NINETEENTHCENTURY RUSSIAN LITERARY TRADITION
5. The Canonic Moment
6. Beginnings and Endings
Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank all those who listened to conference presentations over many years dealing with the topics of this book and, likewise, my students at the Universities of Calgary (a special shout-out to Douglas Nairn) and Nottingham, with whom I discussed these ideas under such rubrics as “Dualities in Russian Culture and Literature” and “Reading and Writing the Canon.” My undying gratitude as well to university library staff at Toronto, Calgary, and Nottingham (especially the interlibrary loan departments). Special thanks to Inna Tigountsova and to Malcolm Jones, Lesley Milne, and Alexandra Smith for their tireless support of this project and my career in general; to Alexander Burry, who went through my draft and provided encouraging and incisive feedback “at a baneful moment in its fate,” as Pushkin might have put it; and, of course, to Amy Farranto at Cornell University Press for taking me on and snagging my fantasy picks for manuscript readers Caryl Emerson and Gary Saul Morson from whose thoughtful suggestions I have benefited immensely. Thank you to my proofreaders at Cornell for making my text publishable. Any remaining infelicities are my own and can only partially be excused on the grounds that (as the critic Belinsky realized back in 1846) there is “seemingly nothing easier but in fact nothing harder than to write about Russian literature.”
This book is dedicated to the memory of my doctoral supervisor, Lubomír Doležel
Introduction
A Nation Saved by the Word
One of the foundations of modern Russian culture is the idea of literature’s special function not only in formulating national identity but in revealing national destiny. Its readers, in the words of the nation’s preeminent critic Vissarion Belinsky (1811–1848), “ see in Russian writers their only leaders, defenders and saviors.”1 From Belinsky to the present, cultural authorities have recited the credo of literature’s exceptional social significance in comparison with other artistic and intellectual pursuits in Russia, and in comparison with the literary production of other lands. It is a secular icon of the nation’s higher essence, an opus of unparalleled thematic and aesthetic unity, subsuming individual genius under a collective banner of enlightenment, reform, emancipation, and redemption
On the exceptional status of Russian writing, the critic and novelist Nikolai Chernyshevsky declares: “In countries where intellectual and social life is highly developed there is, so to say, a division of labor among the various branches of intellectual activity, of which only one is known to us literature.” The latter, he concludes, “plays a more significant role in our intellectual advancement than French, German and English literature do in the advancement of their own nations; and it bears heavier responsibilities than does any other literature.”2 On the exceptional unity of this collective cultural enterprise, another critic observes that if we consider literature not just as the work of individual artists, “but as a cultural force directing entire
generations along a particular path, as a succession of poetic phenomena passed down from age to age and linked together by one great historical principle, then there can be no doubt that Russian literature exists as a single, well-formed, organic whole.”3
On the exceptional function of this organic unity as an expression of national identity and of the nation’s highest values, we could cite the superlatives of the turn-of-the century historian Semyon Vengerov, for whom literature “is the most remarkable phenomenon of the Russian spirit,” and who echoes Chernyshevsky in asserting: “Nowhere does it appear such an exclusive manifestation of national genius as it does with us. ”4 Or we could turn to the more recent testimony of the Soviet writer Fyodor Abramov (“No one has been such a steadfast custodian of the spiritual and moral foundations of human life as has the Russian writer”) or of the émigré writer Sasha Sokolov, who insists that literature in Russia “is a matter of honor and valor, not to speak of heroism. It is a holy cause. It is the cornerstone of culture.”5
Such encomia echo, from diverse ideological and cultural angles, through the better part of two centuries right down to the present, despite Russia’s post-1991 crisis of faith in writing’s centrality, and the drive beyond its borders toward the destabilization of canons. Thus a study aid for university applicants proclaims: “In truth, no literature in the world has realized its prophetic mission like that of Russia.”6 And in the tradition of tsars and tyrants before him, Vladimir Putin himself takes pains to acknowledge the significance of the nation’s greatest cultural institution: “It is precisely we who, without exaggeration, bear a responsibility before all of civilization for preserving Russian literature, for sustaining its colossal humanistic potential.… Our task is to draw society’s attention to our national literature, to make Russian literature and the Russian language powerful factors in Russia’s global ideological influence.”7
To whatever extent they reflect literary-historical actuality, these attitudes of devotion are truths of the culture’s self-image.8 And as such, they highlight various facets of a conception of artistic greatness and of a national literary tradition that constitutes the focus of this book. To begin with, though, we should note that while the above litany of unblushing superlatives may indeed add up to a “blurb-praise-page for all of Russian literature” (in the words of a skeptical editor), its appeal, at least implicitly, is in each case to the more limited example of the nineteenth century. From the heyday of the national
poet Aleksandr Pushkin in the 1820s and 1830s to the twilight of the great age of the novel (Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy) some fifty years later: this is the period during which and for which the critics’ and historians’ declarations of exceptionality were originally devised and without which their extension to the whole of Russian literary history would be unthinkable.
This especially pertains to the claim of teleological unity, based on the perception of the nineteenth-century tradition as the creation of a select group of writers, most of whom knew one another and took each other’s work for their intertexts “We can say with confidence,” recapitulates Dostoevsky toward the end of his career, “that hardly ever, in any literature, over such a short period, did there appear so many talented writers as in Russia and one after the other, without interruption.” The scholar Donald Fanger expands on the novelist’s affirmation of faith, observing that “the major Russian writers were, broadly speaking, coevals. As such they were intensely aware of participating in a common cultural enterprise; that is, they had designs on their readers (and on themselves) in the name of a Russian cultural identity whose crystallization was still in process. Hence the profound sense of a presence haunting the days of their narrative.”9
These artists flourished over just a half century, before which it was fashionable to complain that the country was bereft of literature altogether and after which no one in the world could have doubts on this score. This includes, first and foremost, the literary historians, for whom the age unfolds at an “ even, measured pace, ” its forms and poetic trends “evolving in regular succession,” its unity manifest in the affinities of its members: “It is a striking feature of Russian literature … that it is, as it were, a single enterprise in which no one writer can be separated from another. Each one of them is best viewed through the many-sided prism constituted by all of them taken together.”10
According to Dmitry Mirsky, the classic English-language historian of the nineteenth-century canon, the genre of the realistic novel that forms the core of this enterprise “must be regarded as one literary growth, with a unity even greater than, for instance, that of the Elizabethan drama ”11 The peak period of this growth, in the years after 1855, is labeled by The Cambridge History of Russian Literature as “the finest quarter-century of achievement that any modern literature has ever witnessed.”12 Readers of such accounts are free to infer the link between unity and artistic worth, which unfolds into a three-way
correlation if we further regard the writers’ shared perception of their national mission as the primary inspiration for the thematic and formal similarities that make Russian literature a “single enterprise.” Thus the overall effect of such claims is to render the nineteenth-century tradition a trinitarian mystery of exceptional unity, exceptional aesthetic value, and exceptional social function.
To be precise, insofar as the yardstick is aesthetic, the greatness of the nineteenth-century tradition is taken as axiomatic by Russian culture today. The picture is muddier where this greatness relates to literature’s sense of its own broader social function. There have always been disagreements about the aims of individual writers, and about the nature and actual impact of the whole tradition’s “prophetic mission,” as cited in these declarations. Dissent becomes particularly vocal when it comes to ideologically concrete expressions of this mission. Still, most formulations including the ones cited are sufficiently soft-focus so as not to jeopardize the overall consensus on the idea of social responsibility, for Russian literature in general and the nineteenth-century tradition in particular. (And the vaguer this idea’s contours, the greater the burden of expectation.)
At issue, it is crucial to note, is not the objective “society-forming” function postulated by sociologically oriented scholars such as Hans Robert Jauss.13 It is not literature’s actual influence, but rather a symbolic intention crystallized within a literary-historical narrative. It is social function as soteriological myth the Russian instance of Northrop Frye’s culturally paradigmatic “myth of deliverance ”14 Writers will somehow change reality, radically, for the better They will somehow show their readers the way to an eschatological realization of national identity and greatness. They will save Russia; then Russia will save the world.
Nor, however, do the writers themselves or their works constitute the main topic of this book. (The question of the actual strategies employed by nineteenth-century Russian authors to deal with the sheer impossibility of their soteriological mission deserves a volume of its own.) Our focus is rather the larger, more amorphous category of literary tradition.
Here, again, we should take pains to clarify our intent, recalling the assumption underlying much recent scholarship that “ anyone concerned with tradition would not be simply showing an interest in a conceptual problem but
demonstrating a commitment to a particular politics in relationship to it.”15 Though we must begin with the theoretical groundwork of considering how the flinty notion of literary tradition and tradition in general has and could be used in scholarly discourse, our main aim is to trace its function within a specific historical context. And our broader focus (assuming such a thing can be visualized in the first place) is on a self-image of Russian culture, created primarily by writers, critics, and literary historians. This is not quite the same as the detached observation of a disinterested scholar though in both cases we might usefully recall the bit from quantum mechanics about what happens to reality when one tries to look at it. Correspondingly, any axiological and ideological prejudices that emerge from the following pages with regard to the nineteenth-century Russian literary tradition and its place in Russian culture should be taken as reflecting, first and foremost, the biases of its original creators.
The nineteenth century was the golden age of nation building, as it was, in Benedetto Croce’s words, “il secolo della storia” literary and otherwise.16 Not only in Russia has national identity been inextricably linked with the integrity of literary traditions.17 Only in Russia, however, does a literary tradition play such an exclusive role in the pursuit of identity or, at least, this is the cultural self-image conveyed by authorities such as the critic Chernyshevsky. Like modern nation-building in general, this special emphasis on literature was inspired by the German romantics and has its historiographic echoes outside of Russia as well.18 To be precise, it originates with Johann Gottfried von Herder, whom we shall meet again in our wanderings “Ein Dichter ist Schöpfer eines Volkes um sich” (“A poet is the creator of a nation around himself”), declares the proto-romantic philosopher, going as far as to insist that “without poetry we cannot even exist ” Thus Herder promoted an “idea of a national and patriotic renewal in which literature, grounded in a common language, is enlisted to support a sense of individual pride and national identity.”19
The very centrality of Russia’s nation-building literary tradition is evidenced by its lack of a specific historical designation. What we shall render here in crude shorthand as the Tradition has been blessed with a legion of titles in literary history For example, Marc Slonim, in a relatively short example of the sort of conservative, narrative literary history that will be of special
interest to us, employs over a dozen different names including the classic era, the Classical period, the era of Great Classics, the Golden Age of the classics, the great tradition in Russian literature, and the great tradition of the Golden Age. 20 Each descriptor here communicates nothing more than a superlative degree of value (aesthetic or otherwise) A rare comment on the fact that such an internationally recognized phenomenon should be so imprecisely labeled comes from Serge Zenkovsky, who finds it amazing, in particular, that the era of the “great Russian realistic novel” was never given any name “other than the purely technical term, the ‘time of realism’ or of ‘critical realism ’ ”21 (This is an opportune moment to establish that the Tradition may be seen as peaking with the “time of realism,” but in its creation historians see the poets as no less crucial than the authors of those novelistic classics with which foreign readers tend to identify Russian literature as a whole.)22
Rather than imply uncertainty in the Canon’s status, the variety of its labels testifies to its solidity. The names bestowed on traditions reflect their historical significance: thus designations after reigning monarchs, cultural figures, or time periods tend to indicate the subsidiary importance of a tradition in a nation’s sociopolitical development. But there is only one “great tradition of the Golden Age” in Russia, and the only further qualifier it needs is “Russian.”
In terms of its nation-affirming role, claims of the Tradition’s uniqueness among other literary traditions, of its supreme aesthetic value, and of its exceptional coherence all amount to the same thing. The uniqueness of the Tradition is a pledge of Russia’s distinct identity; its greatness however measured is the nation’s greatness; its unity is likewise that of Russian culture. A standard method for critics and literary historians to demonstrate these qualities has been to reduce the canon of works and authors to an overarching idea (unique, valuable, coherent), or to a complex of ideas This cannot be anything too specific; otherwise, it would fail to cover the variety of contradictory ideological positions that are actually expressed by the writers. Thus, any successful conceptualization of the Tradition’s national essence ends up as a variation on a classical theme the intentionally vague and paradoxical narodnost’ (“national character,” inspired by Herder’s Volksgeist) that was promoted by writers such as Dostoevsky and critics such as Belinsky (who assigned to Russian literature a cultural function no less exceptional than the role he himself played in promoting this function).
Yet this tautological formulation says nothing about the real parameters of a tradition’s existence even if we consider it as a purely sociopolitical category, ignoring its aesthetic elements. While critics explicitly treat the Tradition as a hierarchy of works and authors united by abstract ideas, its implicit role within the larger process of literary evolution is not that of an idea. The record of the Tradition’s construction and reception, especially in the texts of comprehensive narrative literary histories, tells a far different story, one that turns on the following questions: What is the nineteenth-century Russian literary tradition considered as a cultural construct rather than merely the sum of the contributions of individual writers, and in light of the particular expectations placed on literature in this era? Where (in what texts, metatexts, or configurations of collective consciousness) does it exist? And how does it communicate its values and manifest its essential unity?
This book is divided into three parts with two chapters each. Part 1 is offered in recognition of the fact that whether or not these queries can be answered satisfactorily, there is no point tackling them without some preliminary defining of terms which turns out to be a nontrivial undertaking in the case of the notion of literary tradition (not to speak of tradition in general). It works to understand how this notion might be best employed in a historical-poetic sense though at this point our consideration of the specific Russian context will be no more than implicit. Part 2 discusses elements of this context that have been crucial in creating the tradition of nineteenthcentury Russian literature as a cultural construct, and part 3 builds on this discussion, putting flesh on the theoretical bones of part 1 via a structural overview of the tradition at issue in its function as we have already described it of a symbolic intention within a literary-historical narrative.
The two chapters of part 1 begin with a general overview of the category of literary tradition along with a brief survey of the ways it has been understood in the scholarship of the past century. The approaches considered in chapter 1 can be examined in terms of a range of alternative theoretical orientations: among these is the opposition of literary and extraliterary interpretations of the formation of a tradition. At one extreme we have the strict formalist approach, which analyzes literary groupings as products of the evolution of an autonomous artistic system, without regard for forces operating within the broader social sphere At the other stand those late twentieth-century scholars who view traditions primarily as cultural
expressions of dominant ideological interests the ostensible winners of the “ canon wars ” (though to the extent that both they and their conservative opponents proceeded from a belief in the critical importance of literature and the liberal arts, it is unclear whether either side came out on top).23
As an attempt at a balanced account of both extra- and intraliterary factors in the literary process, the historical poetics of Czech structuralism are taken up in the second half of chapter 1, followed in chapter 2 by a more detailed look at the reception-oriented project of Czech literary historian Felix Vodička and his conception of the various structural units of literature from the individual work to the authorial corpus to genres, traditions, and even national literatures as all equally subject to aesthetic evaluation and reception by readers and writers, critics and historians. The resulting aesthetic “concretizations” (as Vodička terms them, expanding on the notion introduced by Roman Ingarden) are shaped in part by the artistic features of the units involved, in part by extraliterary factors in the reception process, and they in turn influence the course of future literary production.
Such a balanced consideration of extra- and intraliterary factors is precisely what we require for the empirical analysis that is the main subject of this book. Less helpful are the contradictions that beset the (admittedly schematic) historical poetics of the Prague theorists with regard to the necessity of viewing what Vodička calls the “higher literary units” (including traditions) as the product of hidden evolutionary tendencies whether extra- or intraliterary. The extent to which literary culture is influenced not only subconsciously by such impersonal evolutionary forces but by conscious imaginings of what a national tradition could and should be is especially obvious in the case of nineteenth-century Russia. This problem of literature’s consciousness of its own evolution is explored in chapter 2 via an evaluation of the link between tradition and the artistic norm a key concept in the Czech structuralist theory of literary evolution. If, as Vodička claims, tradition like the individual work is subject to the process of aesthetic concretization, it must exist within the consciousness of the writing and reading public Yet the artistic norm, properly understood, must be hidden in the reception process if it is to retain its aesthetic function. Thus by Vodička’s own structuralist criteria, his attempts to equate tradition and norm can only be rejected.
A literary tradition, viewed as a large-scale axiological grouping of works occupying a central position within the national literary culture of a given era, is obviously related to the system of literary norms dominant in that era. To anticipate the terminological discussion of chapter 1, the term tradition, taken without reference to a particular body of artistic creation, may indeed designate nothing more than such a dominant norm-system. However, just as none of the works that make up a literary tradition can be said to reflect the norms of one system alone, so the tradition as a whole must represent a dynamic equilibrium between the competing norm-systems (dominant, obsolescent, or emergent) of its era of production.
On the basis of this conclusion, the second half of chapter 2 will pursue a model for literary tradition that adequately expresses the relationship of tradition to norm-system Historians have tended to describe traditions in terms of an idea or a complex of ideas, ultimately reducible to a complex of extraliterary norms. These are somehow transformed into art for example, via the Belinskian process of “thinking in images,” with its mysterious fusion of artistry (khudozhestvennost’) and ideological content (ideinost’) and consequently represented in canonical lists of works and authors. In the end, such descriptions have more to do with the interpretation (from an extraliterary perspective) of individual works within a tradition than with its actual function in the process of literary evolution as most explicitly and authoritatively manifested in literary historiography. It is our contention that the most promising model for such a function is to be found neither in lists of works nor in collections of norms or ideas, but as an element in the overall narrative structure that all historians, literary and otherwise, impose on their material.
Chapter 3 conducts an investigation of the factors, both domestic and foreign, from the culture of medieval Orthodoxy to neoclassicism and German romanticism, involved in the genesis and development of the modern concept of literature in Russia. Particular attention will be given to the interrelation of belles lettres, national identity, and national history Chapter 4 turns to the myth of literature’s social function its redemptive mission, to affix a more satisfying yet still not unproblematic label. It will cover the expectations placed on Russian writing by critics and by the poets and novelists
themselves, from the fuzzy and utopian to more limited ideological and spiritual goals
Chapter 5 responds to the invocation in part 1 of a narrative structure for literary tradition, illustrating its nineteenth-century Russian model with examples drawn from historiographers of the period. Chapter 6, the final chapter, looks at the overall plot structure of the resulting narrative. What emerges from the analysis of the two chapters in part 3 is less a well-formed narrative progression than a pattern of motifs supporting contradictory storylines. This pattern is not represented in its entirety in any one literaryhistorical text, but is rather a cumulative structure underlying the narratives of the whole historiographic corpus. Again, the varied nature of these individual stories is emblematized by the fact that historians cannot even agree on a specific label for the nineteenth-century body of artistic creation invoked and nurtured by Belinsky as the national literary tradition of Russia. At the same time, the lack of a precise historical designation for what we can do no better here than refer to simply as the Tradition testifies to its cultural centrality and in no way diminishes the critical consensus on the existence of such a tradition or on the essentials of its membership, duration, and cultural significance.
Again, we shall pay particular attention (mainly in part 2) to the extraordinary expectations placed on Russian literature by critics and writers, as illustrated by the series of quotations that preface this introduction. Such statements construct and preserve the myth of the Tradition’s redemptive mission. And again, whatever literature’s actual role in the unfolding of Russian history, the assumptions made about it have shaped not only individual texts but also the construction of the Tradition as an integrated whole. Literary tradition is a “cornerstone of culture” (to recall the comment by Sokolov) but one of a most un-granitelike ethereality. It is as hard to plumb its location as it is to find the address of the larger edifice it supports. At the very least, a tradition is more than the sum of the artistic works assigned to it. In the pages of critics, and after them the historians and textbook writers, its broader form is not only delineated but shaped
Thus the focus in part 3 is on the poetics of old-fashioned, comprehensive, narrative historiography. The question is: Beyond analyzing the canonical works and their intertextual affinities, by what means do historians promote the image of the nineteenth-century tradition as a unity, a repository of
aesthetic value, and the bearer of a redemptive mission? In other words, how do they demonstrate the greatness not only of individual works but (since the whole is greater than the sum of the parts) of the Tradition as a whole?
It may be evident by now that the “greatness” referred to in our title is a matter of perception rather than of measuring actual aesthetic merit or quantifying extra-aesthetic influences on Russian reality. It is a matter of faith. To put it in terms of the secularized Christian symbolism that permeates nineteenth-century literary thought (and which will be a topic of interest in chapter 4), the greatness of the Tradition is a quasi-religious mystery, irreducibly embracing both art and social function along with the crucial factor of cultural unity as the third person in the trinity. This accords with Theodor Adorno’s observation that the “idea of greatness as a rule is bound up with the element of unity”24 The greatness of the literary tradition can be demonstrated with reference to any of the three hypostases, each of which, as in the Christian Trinity, partakes of the essence of the whole without being identical to the other parts.
This last point is relevant to the nineteenth-century cultural context, in which any straightforward correspondence between the Beautiful and the Good has been sundered by Immanuel Kant’s redefinition of aesthetic pleasure as contemplative rather than moral.25 Thus the beauty of a Russian literary work is not, for most critics, vouchsafed solely by the purity of its ideological commitment (or vice versa). The bulk of nineteenth-century Russian criticism is in fact wary of ideological zeal at the expense of the aesthetic function Yet far from making the aesthetic and extra-aesthetic functions of a literary work mutually exclusive, it views them as complementary. Whatever Kant may have had to say about the matter, a critic like Belinsky sees moral virtue in a writer as a warrant of artistic success, trusting (in Victor Terras’s paraphrase) that so long as the poet is inspired by “rational, humanitarian, and progressive ideas,” his creative powers will “be safe to flourish and bear rich fruit.”26 At the same time, Russia’s foremost critic proclaims that “the aesthetic sensibility is the foundation of goodness, the foundation of morality.”27 (Compare Dostoevsky’s confidence that authors should “only worry about artistry; then the idea will emerge of its own accord, since it is the necessary condition of artistry.”)28 To extend the trinitarian metaphor: such a sensibility expresses the heavenly ideal of beauty, the paternal hypostasis, with literature’s concrete expression of goodness and
morality as the begotten, incarnated Logos, sent into the world on its redemptive mission (Of course, the more vociferously utilitarian critics who came after Belinsky in the 1850s and 1860s might disagree with such an order of precedence.)
One more clarification: the “how” of this book’s title is a tip of the inkwell to the Russian formalists Boris Eikhenbaum with his “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ Was Made” and Viktor Shklovsky with “How Don Quixote Was Made” who, along with other usual suspects of Slavonic literary theory (Czech structuralists, Moscow-Tartu semioticians, Mikhail Bakhtin), will figure in chapters to come. Yet, as should also be evident by now, its pairing with the verb became is not the promise of a proper diachronic analysis of the consolidation and reception of the nineteenth-century Russian literary tradition. (Despite the mass of scholarship that has touched on this topic, the need for a thorough study remains, and an approach focusing on the narrative requirements of the historiographic project may be precisely what is needed to differentiate its evolution from that of criticism and to allow for its scholarly treatment as a distinct element in the developing literary culture.)29 This disclaimer has nothing to do with the formalists and their perceived ahistorical bias but rather reflects our chosen emphasis on the conception of a national literary tradition that nineteenth-century Russian writers and critics were imagining as a timeless whole, not only by the decades of its fullest blossoming, but even as they conjured its first buds at the century’s opening.
PART ONE
The Idea of a Literary Tradition
CHAPTER 1
Tradition as Chimera
Its Latin origins already reflect the disjunction between tradition as timeless and as mutable, as a category of history, alluded to at the end of the introduction. Making a distinction that will prove useful for our own analysis, ancient Roman jurisprudence recognized two concepts: traditum and traditio. Both come from the verb tradere, “to hand over, surrender.” In Roman inheritance law, the traditum was a thing of value, handed over with the obligation that its recipient preserve this value. Traditio, for its part, referred to the process of transmission itself.1 Again, the handing over was meant as an act of preservation. However, as T. S. Eliot (a prominent twentieth-century interpreter and defender of the literary version of tradition) puts it, “The word itself implies a movement Tradition cannot mean standing still.”2
The Concept in General
The contemporary sense of tradition made its appearance just two centuries ago at the end of the Enlightenment era, “ as the interior and subjective aspect of the modern concept of history, which emerged concomitantly.”3 One brief definition of fairly recent vintage calls it “ a set of practices, a constellation of beliefs, or a mode of thinking that exists in the present, but was inherited from the past.”4 Elaborating on the actual cultural function of the category, our own version is as follows:
1. Tradition is a symbolic practice or set of practices identified with a cultural group (the traditum); it also refers to the cross-generational transmission and performance of this practice (the traditio) within the group.
2. The referent of the symbolic practice is a shared cultural value, the communication of which, through performance of the practice by group members (or their privileged representatives), promotes collective identity.
3 Performance of the practice reinforces belief in this value through emphasis on the sheer number of such performances over an indefinite time (long enough for the practice’s origins to be attributed to a higher, perhaps divine, authority).
In the modern idea of tradition the thing handed down, even if represented by a physical or textual artefact, has no concrete existence outside the cultural interaction that culminates in the handing down itself.5 Furthermore, the intergenerational transmission of this intangible traditum is a dynamic process It cannot be successful without an element of active interpretation on both sides. Even the minimal interpretative act asking, “Is this indeed the way of yore?” is charged with innovatory potential. The intention may be merely to consolidate and fortify, but there is always the possibility of degradation even betrayal. (Tradition has an etymological doublet in treason, also a type of handing over.)
By adding the qualifier literary (or simply artistic), we shall enter another dimension of hermeneutic intangibility. The traditum is no longer an ornamentum from your avunculus or even, in the modern but straightforwardly anthropological sense, a set of practices inherited from the past Before we address our main object of complaint, though, we need to acknowledge the extent to which the idea of tradition in general (anthropological, theological, artistic, or otherwise) has languished in the historiographic shadows, in the absence of an adequate description of the concept’s evolution 6 As Raymond Williams attests: “Tradition in its most general modern sense is a particularly difficult word.”7 A review of those scholarly fields that have been most active in discussing the idea on its own terms reveals a sweeping dissatisfaction, with some researchers seeing tradition as a “grounding trope” that has already
outlived its usefulness, others attacking it as an “impotent” concept that refers “to everything and therefore to nothing,” and still others reducing it to a synonym for culture or dropping it altogether in the hope of evading its “emotive load.”8
For “emotive,” read “ideological.” We have already quoted Mark Phillips, who, seeking reasons for the scholarly neglect of tradition, cites the assumption on “both ends of the political spectrum” that to show an interest in the concept is to demonstrate “ a commitment to a particular politics in relation to it ”9 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s influential Invention of Tradition (1983) stands as a confirmation of (rather than a remedy for) the “ effective loss of ‘tradition’ as a central term though hardly as a central problem in the vocabulary of the human sciences.” Those scholars who have not yet replaced it with ostensibly less-encumbered concepts such as discourse and memory (or, in its artistic subcategory, by the square peg of the canon) have found it hard, post-Hobsbawm, to think about tradition “except in the deconstructive framework of pseudo-traditionality.”10
Within this framework, the distinction between invented and authentic turns on “the idea that tradition must be both unselfconscious and invariable ”11 This puts any sort of artistic tradition on the “invented” side of the ledger assuming we are not too far into apples and oranges territory for this to be a meaningful observation. After all, authenticity, which boils down to the question of whether something is the unconscious creation of anonymous masses or the conscious invention of identifiable individuals, is not a significant category for the evaluation of a literary tradition in the way it is for evaluating the issue of why the Scots wear tartan.12
Hobsbawm’s side of the ledger favors definite or indefinite articles that is, traditions invented in specific places during specific eras by specific people promoting specific values. In terms of the concept’s evolution, tradition without an article reflects the eighteenth-century neoclassical promotion of Graeco-Roman antiquity as the historical embodiment of a timeless, universal cultural heritage. With the or a, it reflects the subsequent romantic refocus from a single classical heritage to a multiplicity of time-bound national traditions As the latter includes the concrete example of interest to us, we must be sure we can winnow out this historical type of tradition from its more abstract meanings. Again, this is not accomplished so easily in practice,
because of the susceptibility of even the most dispassionate writing on this topic to an evaluative stance A tradition’s supporters will generalize it in order to assert its authority, presenting their specific instance as the most authentic, positive expression of traditionality as a whole. Its opponents may do the same thing for the opposite reason (assuming they have not already tacked the other way and reduced their target to a particularized invention). Attaching absolute value discourages recognition of historical specificity, with the result that the term tradition becomes merely “slipshod usage for a diffuse ‘past’ taken as axiomatic,” as the literary historian Wilfried Barner laments 13 As we have seen, depending on the prejudice of the historiographer, such usage may be less slipshod than sure-footed, aimed at interpreting a tradition’s details in the most flattering, universalizing light.
In the case of the literary historiographer, the interpretative task is complicated by the need to assimilate the mass of critical evaluations of a multifarious traditum. (We shall still need, though, to pin down exactly what it is that is being handed over here.) In considering artistic traditions, we are thus prompted to shift our attention in the direction of hermeneutics. Quoting Phillips once more:
Much of the sociological and anthropological discussion of tradition has been carried on as though tradition primarily concerned the unselfconscious continuance of social institutions and practices, often in nonliterate societies. In contrast, philosophers and literary theorists engaged with questions of hermeneutics think of tradition primarily in terms of traditions of interpretation in religion, philosophy, or literature Textual readings, rather than social customs, provide the model for their theory of understanding. Indeed, for the leading hermeneutical philosopher of modern times, Hans-Georg Gadamer, the “linguisticality of understanding” means that “the essence of tradition is to exist in the medium of language.”14
Phillips agrees that “for our times language provides the best setting for thinking about tradition.” And certainly traditions in literature are before anything else traditions of interpretation: the aforementioned interpretative act implicit in any traditio is intensified in the requirement that any writer who contributes to a literary tradition must first make sense of what has already
been written (from the position of a hermeneutics of faith rather than suspicion, to be sure) However, Gadamer may be of limited use when we want to analyze concrete examples: “And yet at this point, it may seem as if we have gone from one extreme to the other: from the reductive idea of ‘invented tradition’ that is unusable because it trivializes its subject to a philosophical expansion that may in the end be equally unusable because it swallows the whole world. If tradition is generalized to this degree, becoming something embedded in language and present in every hermeneutic act, it becomes increasingly difficult to assign it any specific meaning not already present in the idea of interpretation or communication.”15
This recapitulates our basic argument about traditions with or without articles. Again, ideology is the decisive factor in the generalization of tradition, as notably expounded with regard to Gadamer by the neo-Marxian critique of Jürgen Habermas.16 If the concept plays itself out in critical discourse as if it were “trying to resist conceptualization,” this is only partly because tradition “is one of those terms which, through being too rich in meanings, runs the risk of finally having none. ”17 No less important is the ideological factor, which is also apparent in the way the contemporary meanings of the term infect our assumptions about the nature of these same meanings.
To be precise, we assume that as a concept tradition must itself be traditional.18 Its meanings must be of venerable origin and immune to the vagaries of history. We understand that they are not something to be looked at too closely, lest by merely paying attention, we be numbered among those foolish mortals for whom any tradition “becomes in the end holy and inspires awe, ” recalling the sarcastic fulminations of Friedrich Nietzsche.19 It is all that is most solid, but then has to melt into air; insubstantial, yet a scary monster, an impossible amalgam of disparate parts. Ostensibly, the only reason to lock eyes with the chimera of tradition is to catch a mirror reflection of modernity the proper focus of our hermeneutic concern.20
Theoretical and Empirical Approaches to Literary Tradition
The problems of tradition are also those of its literary subcategory. There are no analyses of the latter that do not deplore the surprising inadequacy of all such previous analyses 21 Literary tradition is no less subject to historical evolution than is the more general category, and its origins are likewise by no means venerable. Peter Uwe Hohendahl writes that the notion “appeared relatively recently in critical discussion; only at a late date did the idea come to be regarded as having a positive value European romanticism discovered the past as past and completed the transition from a received heritage to a conscious, reflective confrontation with tradition. In this sense, the concept of a literary tradition, as it is found in Johann Gottfried Herder or August Wilhelm Schlegel, is no longer traditional but distinctly modern.”22
Hohendahl cites Harry Levin, for whom Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve’s “De la tradition en littérature” marks the concept’s introduction into the critical vocabulary 23 This was the title of a lecture delivered in Paris in 1858, a little late to be appreciated by either Herder or Schlegel not to speak of Belinsky, at the other end of the continent. The critic, who died ten years earlier, had spent the 1840s producing authoritative annual reviews of Russian literature, which did more than any other writings on the subject to “establish a model for Russian literary history” and to shepherd a national tradition into existence.24 Yet none of these reviews mention the word traditsiia nor does it appear anywhere else in Belinsky.
That we ourselves cannot do without the concept of literary tradition is indisputable. Neither, though, can we look it in the eyes, relying on vague, intuitive notions or restrictive definitions inspired by polemical exigency. Perhaps our understandings are too disparate to let us hope that the types of tradition discussed over the past hundred years might possess any common ground. The concept is at once so pivotal and so diffuse in its scope that an attempt to pin it down may seem to have as much chance of success as trying to define literature itself. And yet we keep talking about it, as if everybody knows what it means.
Let us therefore begin with the illustrative definition of tradition cited at the beginning of this chapter. Its characterization as “ a set of practices, a constellation of beliefs, or a mode of thinking that exists in the present, but
was inherited from the past” hinges on the performance of two acts. One, obviously, is the act of inheritance, the traditio Not so obviously, the traditum, even when symbolized by the transfer of a physical or textual artifact, also entails an act, a behavior. Both acts are communicative. As argued in our own extended definition, the message sent (from the senior bearer of the tradition to the junior and hence to the witnesses of their traditional practice) is, fundamentally, an expression of faith in the cultural value that binds together bearers and witnesses. It declares the truth of some proposition that justifies the existence of the group to which they belong, inspiring them in their continued membership. And again, the power of this declaration rests less in any inherent persuasiveness than on the cultural esteem of those who perform it, the aesthetic appeal of their performance, and the belief that the truth in question has been bequeathed unchanged since time immemorial, from its forever-mysterious inception at the will of a presumably divine authority.
An artistic tradition has the communicative function described above, but the participants and performances differ (as does the “time immemorial” bit, especially for modern instances of the category). The witnesses are clearly the art-consuming public. And the traditum, in our contemporary understanding, should comprise the artistic practices and (prima facie) aesthetic values incarnated in a culturally privileged body of past artistic production Correspondingly, the traditio is enacted between the creators of this past production and subsequent artists. Compared to the classical anthropological picture, this intergenerational encounter is indirect. Only occasionally is it described in terms of an actual event for example, a scene of apprenticeship in the sculptor’s or painter’s studio to parallel the tribal teachings of the village elder. For the most part, especially when dealing with recent times, historians will search in vain for enlivening illustrations of the encounters between senior and junior representatives of an artistic tradition. Books are read, diplomas awarded, galleries frequented, salon causeries endured and a single instance of the passing of the traditum is thus diffused over the course of a career.
There is one more point to be made about what it is that is so obliquely passed on. For conservative theorists, it is “characteristic of tradition that there is no accumulation The idea of progress has no legitimate place here, no more than the notion of personal originality.”25 This indeed reflects the
concept’s essence; yet if there can be no accumulation, there certainly can be no such thing as an artistic tradition That is because the artistic traditum is never complete until the whole tradition as something existing in historical time, made by historical individuals rather than some primordial collective has attained its full development. The function of these individuals (the artists) is precisely that of accumulators, not only preservers. Their dual role recalls both that of the anonymous village elder who transmits and preserves the tradition and that of its unknown, divinely inspired originators except that the artists’ authorship is only of a part and not the whole (At the same time, the desire to promote a tradition as a unity, as something that despite its diachronic nature embodies an eternal essence, may prompt its supporters to see each instance of transmission as recapitulating this essence of the whole.)
If we seek a closer match to the village elder, we shall have to turn to the phenomenon of epigonism (another concept that was new in the nineteenth century).26 The epigone is by definition a peripheral figure, but a crucial one nonetheless. These artistic camp followers resemble both witnesses and performers. As witnesses they are super-consumers, publicizing the record of their reception and assimilation of the tradition, thus confirming and extending its authority and promoting its reception by the broader public. As performers they preserve but without accumulating, since their artworks are inspired by the tradition, yet deemed unworthy of belonging to it. They thus confirm that the tradition is not only a passive object of public reception but an active factor within its own creative sphere. In the second place, those epigones who come after the historical end point of the tradition’s development provide the closest analogue to the village-elder model of the handing down without accumulation of a complete traditum. In the third place, to anticipate our further discussion, their negative example confirms the aesthetic and cultural value of the tradition as more than merely the sum of those formal and thematic conventions that an attentive apprentice could learn in the studio without feeling a slightest breath of the divine afflatus.27
As it is the writer’s study and not just any artist’s studio that is of interest to us, we must now narrow our focus. And here we encounter a further hermeneutic complication regarding the tradition’s participants. In contrast to artistic traditions in general, the textual embodiment of the literary traditum uses the same medium as do the extraliterary pronouncements of critics and
historians who promote the tradition. Words and ideas migrate between literary work and critique without the need for intersemiotic translation 28 (Russian writers of the nineteenth century exhibit a special proclivity for taking advantage of this permeable boundary between the inside and outside of the tradition.)
And what about the permeable boundary between a literary tradition and an analogous tradition in the extraliterary sphere? If the values associated with the former are ultimately those of some broader cultural tendency, perhaps there is no point fretting over the precise role of literariness in the narrower category? To proceed, we must avouch the possibility of a tradition within literature that is not entirely the product of outside forces, rather than the logic of its own internal evolution. This will become an issue in chapter 2, when we continue a conversation with a few Czech structuralists, whose acquaintance we shall have to make by the end of this one. As it turns out, the very literariness of the tradition proves central to the model we shall eventually propose for our nineteenth-century Russian avatar.
We began with the dual principles of traditum and traditio. When it comes to literary traditions, nineteenth-century usage often foregrounds the latter, focusing on the handing over of individual practices relating to literary culture (but not necessarily available directly from published texts) or on the oral and textual transmission, across generations of writers, of the whole of literary culture as a collection of such practices.29 Contemporary usage, in contrast, foregrounds the traditum. Now the term literary tradition refers, first and foremost, to a broad grouping of works or authorial corpora based primarily on thematic criteria. This is why late twentieth-century scholars uncomfortable with the category have found it easy to substitute that of the canon, even if (or precisely because) that means erasing the whole traditio side of things.30
In addition, literary tradition may refer to the set of artistic norms and conventions associated with a grouping of works or authors. The question of the primacy of work over norm is not trivial. In chapter 2 we shall see that the degree to which this primacy is recognized within a given scholarly approach ultimately depends on the degree to which the tradition has meaning as a literary, rather than a cultural-historical, category
Critics and literary historians have also applied the term to groupings considered from the viewpoint of formal rather than thematic similarities Historically, there are indisputable correspondences between thematic traditions and those broad categories based primarily on artistic form that is, genres. Empirical studies may at times concentrate on the formal element, relegating the thematic basis to the background. (Thus German historians write of a Gattungstradition [genre-tradition].) Yet if form becomes the main criterion for establishing a grouping, the object of study is properly regarded as a genre rather than a tradition Conversely, thematic similarities play a role in establishing the identity of a genre, but remain secondary to formal criteria.31
For defenders of certain types of literary tradition, the thematic and the formal characteristics are overshadowed by the criterion of exceptional aesthetic value. Perhaps we should avoid lumping such traditions (e.g., the Golden/Great/Classical ages of national literatures, ancient and modern) together with groupings based on specific thematic or formal approaches (periods such as classicism, romanticism, modernism, etc.). There is certainly an epistemological gulf between the prevalent scholarly approach to axiological (i.e., value-based) groupings manifested in the critical reevaluation of canons and old-school studies of thematic/formal groupings (e.g., the German literary-historical engagement with Periodisierung).
Yet the difference between axiological and thematic/formal traditions is only one of emphasis Insofar as it concerns itself with aesthetic value rather than some extraliterary standard (moral, political, etc.), criticism still usually justifies its evaluation of a work by referring to its structural constituents. Though a not-uncommon critical topos is the quietist throwing up of hands before a creation of supreme originality (the full value of which is beyond the grasp of any analysis), even in this extreme case there is always some link made between aesthetic value and the work’s formal or thematic components. And even in the case of a historical period where aesthetic value is associated with innovation, and the tradition is seen as composed of works that have besides their high aesthetic value only their originality in common, it is not difficult to find unifying structural elements. These may be revealed in earlier critical views of the same tradition that predate the emphasis on originality:
such is the case with the tradition of social and psychological realism associated with the genre of the novel
Although we could imagine a tradition for which aesthetic value is demonstrated on the basis of thematic and formal features that differ completely from work to work, no such grouping has ever existed. Conversely, no tradition based on literary structure is without some implication of aesthetic value as a supplementary unifying feature. The very act of singling out a work for scholarly attention almost always hinges on a positive aesthetic evaluation by critics. Thus, there can be no qualitative difference between traditions founded on aesthetic value and those based on formal and thematic elements.
The terms used by historians to refer to the varieties of literary tradition are many: age, canon, epoch, era, generation, movement, period, school, tendency, trend. Equally various are the types of epithet by which they have been qualified. More often than not, these have an extraliterary (ethnic, political, religious, philosophical) origin, confirming that a tradition is as much a reflection of sociopolitical developments as the result of a strictly literary process.32 This observation may be applied to any literary category, but its truth is especially evident in the case of traditions. The artwork exists as both an aesthetic and a historical fact; yet the theoretical demarcation between a fictional text and the history of its reception is clear. With literary tradition we can make no such distinction. While this is also true of genres, the formal criteria on which they are founded lend themselves to definition in ahistorical, aesthetic terms. This makes it easier to view them as immanent literary phenomena. As Walter Jackson Bate affirms, the realization that genres “ are not forever stratified as God-given,” but evolve under the influence of extraliterary forces in the same way as traditions, has entered only slowly and “against immense inner opposition” into artistic consciousness.33
Extraliterary influences on a tradition extend far beyond those factors tangential to the process of literary creation such as the details of authors’ biographies They include any of the social contexts affecting the tradition’s reception through the years or centuries of its existence. The prominence of these contexts in the critical view of a tradition is inevitably proportional to that of the criterion of aesthetic value in its formation. From the extraliterary point of view, this aesthetic value is implicitly or explicitly equated (by
defenders and detractors alike) with ideological values, even as it is justified on the basis of the tradition’s adherence to purely literary conventions Thus literary traditions may be studied with equal validity as artistic or social phenomena. Among the scholarly methods we shall scrutinize in the following section, the first approach is exemplified by the Russian formalists, who interpret the evolutionary dynamics of a tradition in terms of a conflict of artistic devices. The other extreme is represented by those more recent critics for whom the word canon designates a static order determined by a cultural establishment and used to justify a certain political reality
Twentieth-Century Views
Critics of tradition as an ideological fact tend to dispense with general observations about the nature of their object of study. In contrast, the Russian formalists of the 1910s and 1920s, who look at it first and foremost as an artistic phenomenon, favor a heuristic model based on what they see as the immanent laws of literary evolution. This model is strictly opposed to the historical manifestations of literary tradition to which the formalists refer in their empirical studies. Their use of specifically formulated terminology underlines this opposition Literary series, literary system, and so on stand in contrast to historical designations such as Golden Age and romanticism, as well as epigonism, dilettantism, and tradition itself terms too loosely defined and poorly differentiated from empirical categories to play a useful role in theoretical discourse.
Roman Jakobson leads off the attack on the old vocabulary in a scathing 1921 article, followed six years later by Yury Tynianov, the preeminent Russian theorist of literary tradition and evolution, who also pleads for a reevaluation of scholarly metalanguage.34 In particular, Tynianov rehearses a complaint with which we are familiar from the preceding discussion: “A fundamental concept of the old history of literature tradition turns out to be an illegitimate abstraction.”35 Or rather, we should say he is an inaugurator of the twentieth-century tradition of complaining about tradition, because of the way the concept is “left hanging” in the wake of his critique, as M. O. Chudakova writes 36 Admittedly (as we shall see) Tynianov’s interest is less in clarifying the term to make it suitable for the scientific study of literature than
in shifting scholarly focus from tradition to evolution, from “succession” to “struggle”: “It is necessary to speak of succession only for the phenomena of schools, of epigonism, but not for that of literary evolution, the principle of which is strule and replacement. ”37
Tynianov and the formalists made signal progress in rethinking the language of literary scholarship. Not enough, though, for another of our protagonists, the Prague structuralist Felix Vodička, who in 1942 repeats his Russian predecessor’s complaint about the inadequacy of literary-historical terminology.38 Finally, despite the further work of Vodička and his Czech colleagues, the Czech Canadian theorist Lubomír Doležel affirms in 1982 that Vodička’s own vocabulary “remains on the pre-theoretical level. It cannot yield a systematic theory, classification or explanation of literary change This situation has not changed much to the present day, because literary history in general, and historical poetics in particular, have been little interested in analyzing critically their own metalanguage.”39
Although they greatly extended the Russian formalist analysis of the literary process, the efforts of Prague scholars to establish a rigorous theoretical vocabulary in this area are ultimately less satisfying than their results for literary scholarship as a whole. It is understandable, though, that structuralists such as Vodička would find it harder to devise a vocabulary for historical poetics than, say, for the poetics of narrative. In the first place, historical poetics is unable to draw on the wealth of precise linguistic terminology that the Prague school so successfully adapted to the study of literary phenomena on the verbal level.40 It is left with the vaguer expressions of neighboring disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and history.
In the second place, and more importantly, it is impossible to make a welldefined metalanguage for literary history (that scientia infirma, as Ernst Robert Curtius called it) independent of the vocabulary of criticism that forms part of the object of study.41 The historical concepts of tradition and evolution are the collective creation of artists, critics, and the reading public. It is in criticism that their nomenclature is established, if not defined. However, the writing that sets forth this terminology is not isolated from the phenomena it attempts to describe: it cannot help but influence those responsible for the further course of literary evolution
