Samizdat (2017-18)

Samizdat самиздат

Samizdat―Самиздат The Academic Journal of the

Russian Undergraduate Students’ Society of

McGill University Volume V Winter 2018

ISSN: 2369-8497 (Print) ISSN: 2369-8500 (Online)

Staff Editor-in-Chief Jessica Mitchell

Senior Editors

CĂŠleste Pagniello Denis Lakine Michael Frolek-Turner

Assistant Editor

Natasha Ovchinnikova

Layout Editor

Claudia Landowne

Table of Contents Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

ix

Идеальное стихотворение

1

Two Trains Passing in the Night:

5

Jessica Mitchell

Даниил Печанко

National Literary Traditions in Anna Karenina Emma Makin

1918 and 1990:

11

The Swift Death and Long Memory of the Belarusian National Movement Claudia Lonkin

Life During Wartime:

19

The National Identity Narratives of Stirlitz Isabelle Smith

Meat versus Sweets:

Gratuitous Appetites and Gendered Hunger in Anna Karenina and “The Kreuzer Sonata”

27

Juliette Mueller

Introduction to Short Stories

35

The Reunion

36

The Undergraduate

38

The Sandwich

41

Invitation to the Table

44

Professor Lyudmila Parts, PhD.

Marie-Agnès Claverie

Adam Eldred

Emma Makin

Quinta Seon

Pardon Katharine Morrill

47

Resume Papers

The Artist and the Actor: Orpheus, Chorb, Nabokov, and Control of the Story

55

Charles Osler

Christian Brotherhood for (Almost) All Men: Estrangement in the Writings of Leo Tolstoy

57

Meagan Peters

The Holocaust in Lithuania

63

“Tragedies of Mistiming”:

69

Katarina Despain

Generic Subversion and the Need for Change in Eugene Onegin and The Stone Guest Emily Szpiro

Editors’ Supplemental

Борьба Украины за независимость в постсоветском мире

83

Taras Bulba:

91

Селеста Паньелло

The Zaporozhian Father of Gogol’s Russia Jessica Mitchell

Смерть чиновника: пародия Денис Лякин

99

Letter From the Editor-in-Chief

D

ear Reader, Samizdat is a rite of spring for us at McGill’s Slavic Studies Department. This edition, I think, will appear particularly fresh.For the first time in our history, we have included a writer from outside of the McGill Community. Daniil Pechanko--a student at the University of Mogilev--contributed a compelling Russian language fiction piece. Our subjects, too, have exceeded beyond our old bounds. Our history articles are diverse, including a work on Lithuania and the Holocaust by Katarina Despain and Claudia Landowne’s piece on Nationalism in Belarus. Our new editorial section highlights our belief in the richness of all regions of study in the Slavic field: Céleste Pagniello shares her Russian language article about the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, while I threw in an essay I wrote on Ukrainian Cossacks, Westernizing Poles, and Russian literary culture in Gogol’s Taras Bulba. No Slavic topic went unexamined: Isabelle Smith sent us a very intriguing piece on the beloved Soviet icon Stirlitz.

Of course, we continued to showcase strong pieces on classic Russian literature.

This issue’s longest article-- written by by Emily Szpiro-- centres on Pushkin. Profes-

sor Anna Berman’s students Emma Makin, Juliette Mueller, and Meagan Peters wrote some very interesting works on Tolstoy.

Nabokov makes his presence known in a piece by Charles Osler. A new Russian author, our editor Denis Lakin, contributed his own work of Russian fiction.

In a synthesis of new and old (symbolically perfect for 2018, the centennial of the end of the First World War and the hopes of a new world amid the rubble of the old), we have included a section of creative work inspired by Chekhov. Professor Lyudmila Parts asked the students in her “Chekov without Borders” course to write a short story in the style of Chekhov. Although these stories draw inspiration from the master, they consider a subject unavailable to Chekhov himself: the joys, sorrows, and greyness of life as a North American millennial. If you wonder what Chekhov might have thought of these efforts, we offer an answer. Each story includes a critical analysis, pinpointing its “Chekhovian” elements.

I hope you will enjoy this new issue Samizdat.

All the best, Jessica Mitchell Editor-in-Chief

ix

Идеальное стихотворение

О

Даниил Печанко

н долго ждал весну. Всю зиму Поэт провел в своей небольшой квартирке, сосредоточенно смотря в окно. На улице лишь грязный снег и темные безжизненные ветви деревьев, разве они могут подарить вдохновение? Разве может он, Певец прекрасного, найти на этом морозе искру чувства? Люди, завернутые в шерсть, ткань и кожу, несли в себе сквозь ледяную пустыню лишь сосущую пустоту, тоску и нежелание жить на этой проклятой земле. А вот весной… Весной Поэт выйдет на улицу, вдохнет запах пробуждающейся земли и отправится на охоту за вдохновением. Весной вновь появится надежда. Быть может, он, наконец, ухватит ту ниточку человеческого чувства, которая приведет его, гениального Поэта, к созданию идеального стихотворения. Только бы дождаться. Но вот, солнце стало заметно пригревать. Земля почти оголилась, последние горстки грязного снега, забившись в углах с вечной тенью, угрюмо ждали своей участи. Живительный сок побежал по деревьям, весна вступала в свои права. Пора. Он долго бродил по утреннему парку, выискивая подходящих людей. Спортсмены, совершающие утреннюю пробежку, утомленные от бессонной ночи молодые мамочки с колясками, ленивые подростки, которых родители отправили выгуливать собаку, всё не то. «Где же ты?»

– думает Поэт. Ах, а вот и она! Молодая влюбленная девушка ждет своего парня. Как кстати, что он опаздывает. Поэт очарованно наблюдает за ней, но не молодость и красота привлекают его. Он любуется первой любовью, невинной, взаимной. Может ли человек испытывать чувство прекраснее этого? Предвкушая творческий экстаз, он открывает рот и тихо втягивает воздух. Алая сияющая нить отделяется от фигуры девушки и, подгоняемая весенним

ветерком, плывет к Поэту. С закрытыми глазами он втягивает ее, разворачивается и, стараясь не смотреть на девушку, шагает прочь. Он не любит того, что происходит после, он знает, что люди чувствуют в тот момент, когда их чувства заимствуются. Внезапное опустошение, съедающая тоска и нежелание жить. На глазах у девушки блеснули слезы разочарования. Она развернулась и быстрым шагом зашагала прочь от своего бывшего возлюбленного, которого задержала сломавшаяся маршрутка. Всю жизнь он будет винить себя за это опоздание. Какой-то мужчина, проведя несколько дней в поезде, возвращался через парк домой. Его жена и четырёхлетний сын вышли к нему навстречу. «Смотри, вон наш папа возвращается из командировки», – шепнула мать ребенку. Яркая вспышка радости маленького человека на несколько мгновений ослепила Поэта. «Папа!»

– ребенок, расставив руки, побежал навстречу человеку. Медлить было нельзя: раскрыв рот, Поэт потянул в себя золотые пучки радости. Ребенок споткнулся и упал, до крови разбив коленку. Испуганные родители бросились к сыну. Отец, кинув сумки, обнял и поцеловал плачущего ребенка, попытался его успокоить. Поэт несколько секунд колебался, стоит ли? Ну конечно стоит, ведь это ради искусства! Лазурные ниточки отцовской любви, вперемешку с изумрудной жалостью, потянулись к охотнику за человеческими чувствами и эмоциями. Глаза мужчины остекленели, все, что у него осталось – ужасное чувство усталости от долгой дороги. Мать ребенка Поэт не стал трогать, великодушно решив оставить семье хоть что-то. В тени деревьев, поддерживая друг друга, прогуливалась престарелая пара. Жизнь их прожита, искра почти погасла, но светлая ностальгия, словно прозрачный ручеёк, струится сквозь их слабые тела. Вытянуть ее Поэту не так-то легко, люди

очень крепко держатся за то последнее, что у них осталось. Дедушка схватился за сердце и опустился на колени, кажется, он не перенесет этой потери. Поэт, быть может, и хотел бы чувствовать жалость к людям, у которых он отбирал частичку души, но внутри его была пустота. Гениальному творцу, способному создавать изумительные, чарующие произведения, приходилось вытягивать чувства других людей. Ему не было приятно воровать, но и жалости он не чувствовал, только внутренняя пустота его начинала ныть, когда он видел обворованных людей. Не такая уж и большая плата за предстоящий творческий экстаз. Наконец, Поэт возвращается домой. Он практически разрывается от переполняющих его разноцветных потоков, из которых, через несколько мгновений, он начнет ткать своё полотно. Надо только занавесить шторы, зажечь благовония… стол, бумага, всё готово, пора начинать! Из Поэта тонкой сверкающей нитью струились чистые переживания. На бумаге они складывались в замысловатые геометрические фигурки, идеальные формой, безупречные гармонией переплетенного цвета. Охотник, забыв всё на свете, упивался создаваемым его гениальностью совершенством. Эти стихи невозможно было прочесть в привычном понимании слова. Простой человек, увидев текст, написанный не чернилами, но человеческими чувствами и эмоциями, сразу бы понял, о чем он. Не надо было знать специфического алфавита, в этом языке не было законов и правил, символы прочитывались не умом, а сердцем. Зрелище было невероятное. Где-то между строками Поэт ловил опьяняющую мысль: «Идеальное стихотворение! Неужели, спустя столько лет, столько попыток, именно сегодня мне это удастся?!». А ведь произведение выходило и вправду великолепное. С величайшим мастерством творец расходовал собранный ресурс, строка за строкой, символ за символом. Еще немного… точка. Готово. Только что рожденная поэма переливалась цветами. Распахнув шторы, впустив в комнату свет, Поэт аккуратно взял листы и стал внимательно осматривать свое творение. Оно было чудесно. Любой,

даже самый черствый человек, взглянув на эти строки, увидел бы что-то, прекраснее чего нет и быть не может. Никто не смог бы сдержать слез от нахлынувшего на него восхитительного чувства, это произведение могло бы перевернуть мир. Только вот Поэт не был доволен. Чего-то не хватало. «Не то, не то! Оно… оно не идеально!

– он побледнел, глаза налились кровью.

– Опять неудача». Опустошенный, он стал рвать листы. Сияющие строки на падающих обрывках быстро тускнели, теряли цвет и осыпались. Не прошло и минуты – поэмы не стало. «Пустяки. Не впервой. Завтра я попробую еще раз. Завтра у меня всё получится, я создам, я напишу идеальное стихотворение!»

Two Trains Passing in the Night: National Literary Traditions in Anna Karenina Emma Makin

National identity is a pervasive theme in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), from Levin’s disgust at Dolly teaching her children French and “unteaching sincerity,” to the question of Russia’s duty with regards to the Slavic war. However, the notion of national structures and identities also extends to narrative forms in the novel. Since Boris Eikhenbaum’s deeply influential study of Anna Karenina, most scholars interpret the work as the joining of an English family novel and a French adultery novel, wherein the English tradition is exemplified by Kitty and Levin’���������������������������������� s romance, ����������������������� while Anna and Vronsky personify the French model. The relationship between Anna and Vronsky is untenable because they consistently function along different national literary traditions. Specifically, Vronsky attempts to transform his narrative structure from a French adultery novel into an English family novel, whereas Anna attempts to do the opposite. The transition between each national tradition takes place after Anna and Vronsky both fail to complete the respective endings of the English and French traditions at the conclusion of Part IV. Essentially, Vronsky’s family upbringing, passionate discourse, and similarities to Raymon from Indiana (1831) cement his initial position as a character in a French adultery novel, while Anna’s deep connection with family ties, her characteristically English relationship with a meddling aunt, and obsession with English novels demonstrates that she primarily belongs to an English family novel. However, after her religious awakening, Vronsky’s suicide attempt, and their visit to Italy, they transform their own stories into . Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 271. . Liza Knapp, Anna Karenina and Others: Tolstoy’s Labyrinth of Plots (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), 92.

a different national landscape. Thereinafter, Anna prioritizes aspects of French adultery novels such as maintaining her status as mistress, embracing jealousy, and committing suicide, while Vronsky places a premium on particularly English ideas, such as the health of an estate, inheritance, and the needs of the community at large.

Vronsky adheres to the structure and passion of a French adultery novel at the beginning of Anna Karenina. Besides the fact that he spends a considerable amount of time courting a married woman, his entire background is evocative of the French tradition.

For example, Vronsky “had never known family life. His mother in her youth had been a brilliant society woman who, during her marriage and especially after it, had had many love affairs, known to all the world.” Even Vronsky��������������������������������� ’s older brother, “though he had children, kept a dancer, and was therefore indulgent about such things.” Thus, whatever family connections Vronsky has are deeply rooted in adultery. Consequently, Vronsky internalizes this mentality of a French adulterer to the degree that he “did not know that his behaviour towards Kitty had a specific name, that it was the luring of a young lady without the intention of marriage.” The fact that Vronsky has no background in a coherent family setting makes him accustomed to seduction and affairs, and justifies his belonging to the tradition of the French adultery novel.

Vronsky shares several characteristics with the consummate French adulterer Raymon from George Sand’s Indiana. Both Raymon and Vronsky have mothers who do not admonish their affairs to the same extent as would mothers in an English family novel. Raymon’s mother “had the art of excusing him while blaming him, of advis . Tolstoy, 56. . Ibid., 174. . Ibid., 57.

ing indulgence while appearing to entreat it.” Similarly, “Vronsky’s mother, on learning of his liaison, was pleased at first… because nothing, to her mind, gave the ultimate finish to a brilliant young man like a liaison in high society.” Vronsky and Raymon share a set of principles that are easily thrown off by romance. Raymon “was a man of principle who often reasoned with himself, but ardent passions would often sweep him away from his theories.” Vronsky also lives a life structured by clear theories and rules, however, “in regard to his relations with Anna, had he begun to feel that his code of rules did not fully define all circumstances, and to envisage future difficulties and doubts in which he could no longer find a guiding thread.”

Vronsky and Raymon share a passionate and melodramatic discourse that is privileged in French adultery novels. For example, Raymon passionately exclaims to Indiana, “it wasn’t ordinary circumstances that brought us together; it wasn’t chance or a whim, it was fate, it was death, which opened the gates of this new life to me… and now, nothing can tear us apart.”10 Vronsky similarly implores Anna, “I know no peace and cannot give you any. All of myself, my love…yes. I cannot think of you and myself separately.

You and I are one for me. And I do not see any possibility of peace ahead either for me or for you. I see the possibility of despair, of unhappiness…or I see the possibility of happiness, such happiness!”11 Thus, Vronsky��� ’s priorities in life at the beginning of the novel reflect the narrative form of the French adulterer much more than they do an English family man.

While Vronsky clearly belongs to the French adultery tradition at the beginning of the novel, Anna’s narrative reflects the ideals espoused by the English family novel. On her train ride back to Petersburg, Anna imagines herself as a character in an English novel.

When “the hero of the novel was already beginning to achieve his English happiness, a baronetcy and an estate… Anna wished to go with him to this estate.”12 The fact that . George Sand, Indiana, trans. by Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 41. . Tolstoy, 174. . Sand, 36. . Tolstoy, 305.

10. Sand, 57.

11. Tolstoy, 139.

12. Ibid., 100.

Anna pictures her life as a character in an inherently English setting demonstrates how she initially belongs in that national tradition.

Anna is also deeply involved in the family unit, the thread that binds the English family novel together. One of the first things the reader learns about Anna is that “she has a little boy of about eight… and has never been separated from him, and she keeps suffering about having left him.”13 Anna’s sole purpose in visiting her brother’s family is to convince Dolly to forgive Stiva for his infidelity, and thus maintain the family unit. Anna tells her sister-in-law that were she in Dolly’s position, she “would forgive, and forgive in such a way as if it hadn’t happened, hadn’t happened at all.”14 Anna uses the importance of the family to undermine Stiva’s indiscretion, by arguing that “these people may be unfaithful, but their heart and wife are sacred to them. Somehow for them these women remain despised and don’t interfere with the family. Between them and the family they draw some sort of line that can’t be crossed.”15 Anna’s family dynamic is reminiscent of the George Eliot’s family novel, The Mill on the Floss (1860). In Eliot’s ultimate family portrait, the Dodson sisters reserve the right to meddle in various aspects of their nieces and nephews lives, from their education, to their dress, to their romantic suitors. Essentially, “there was in this family a peculiar tradition as to what was the right thing in household management and social demeanour, and the only bitter circumstance attending this superiority was a painful inability to approve the condiments or the conduct of families ungoverned by the Dodson tradition.”16 In a similar fashion, Anna’s aunt proves to be a meddling force in her life, particularly in orchestrating her marriage to Karenin; Anna’s aunt “brought the already not-so-young man but young governor together with her niece and put him in such a position that he had either to declare himself or leave town.17 Following in the cyclical pattern of English family novels, Anna herself is an invested aunt who clearly prioritizes clanship. Upon meeting her nephews and nieces, “she called them all by name, remembering not only the names, 13. Ibid., 63.

14. Ibid., 70.

15. Ibid., 70.

16. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (London: Penguin Books, 2012), 47.

17. Tolstoy, 507.

but the years, months, characters, illnesses of all the children, and Dolly could not help appreciating it.”18 Anna’s numerous similarities with the family-centric characters in The Mill on the Floss demonstrate how she initially belongs in an English family novel.

While it may appear that Anna and Vronsky both adhere to the narratives of the French adultery novel as soon as they consummate their relationship, Anna still prioritizes the values of the English family novel until she gives birth to her daughter Annie. For instance, she still places a great emphasis on her relationship with Seryozha, stating, “I won’t abandon my son, I cannot abandon my son…without my son there can be no life for me even with the one I love, but that if I abandon my son and run away with him, I’ll be acting like the most disgraceful, vile woman- he knows that and knows I wouldn’t be able to do it.”19 In a similar vein, Anna treats her relationship with Vronsky as if it were a marriage as opposed to a mere affair when she tells him that Karenin “doesn’t understand that I’m your wife, that he’s a stranger, that he’��������������� s superfluous.”20 As a result, although Anna does carry on her affair with Vronsky in the first half of the novel, she still approaches this relationship through the lens of a heroine in an English family novel. Anna and Vronsky belong to two different literary traditions that espouse vastly different conceptions of the good life; as a result, their relationship is doomed to fail.

Not only do Anna and Vronsky belong to separate national literary traditions in the first half of the novel; they also function across different narrative structures in the second half of the work. However, in this latter part of Anna Karenina, the literary trajectories of the lovers switch, as Anna becomes the heroine of a French adultery novel, and Vronsky the hero of an English family novel. The transition between these traditions occurs at the conclusion of Part IV, when the lovers fail to fulfill the typical endings of their initial genres. According to Priscilla Meyer, the French adultery novel often concludes with the suicide of one of the lovers.21 Halfway through Anna Karenina, Vronsky “understood 18..Ibid., 67.

19. Ibid., 292.

20. Ibid., 360.

21. Priscilla Meyer, How the Russians Read the French: Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 153.

that he was on the floor, and, seeing blood on the tiger-skin and on his hand, understood that he had tried to shoot himself.”22 Vronsky goes through the motions of the conclusion to a French adultery novel but fails to complete the story. This allows him to take on another national literary structure. Likewise, Anna appears to complete an English family novel ending, wherein she repudiates her adulterous past and initiates a religious awakening in herself and in her husband. Indeed, she compares herself to a martyr and states, “there is another woman in me, I’m afraid of her- she fell in love with that man, and I wanted to hate you and couldn’t forget the other one who was there before.”23 Thus, in the moments before she believes she will die, Anna places a premium on religion, forgiveness, and her marriage to Karenin. In the view of Liza Knapp, and as evidenced by George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), concentration on evangelical repentance and Christian duty is as much a feature of English family novels as is a conclusion with a marriage or birth.24 In contrast, despite the fact that Anna does initiate a conclusion belonging to the English family tradition, she does not die after childbirth, and reneges on her commitment to these “English” values. The couple’s voyage to Italy serves as the liminal space in which the transition between national literary forms takes place, for they spend the majority of time discussing art; thus, their narratives do not really progress in any clear direction.

The fact that the two lovers switch national literary forms at this moment proves detrimental to their relationship, for they never actually embrace the same conceptions about what the future of their romance should be.

Upon his return from Italy Vronsky fully cements himself into the realm of the English family novel. His Vozdvizhenskoe estate is replete with English paraphernalia, from horses, lawn tennis, to an English housekeeper.

Even the contents of Annie’s nursery are “all of English make, sturdy, of good quality, and obviously very expensive.”25 However, Vronsky’s burgeoning taste for all things English is not only reflected in his material possessions.

It is also apparent in his changing priorities.

In the second half of Anna Karenina, Vronsky places a premium on the foremost con22. Tolstoy, 418.

23. Ibid., 412.

24. Knapp, 136.

25. Tolstoy, 618.

cern of English family novels: marriage and inheritance.26 Beyond urging Anna to obtain and divorce and marry him several times, he states, “the main thing is that, as I work, I must be sure that my work will not die with me, that I will have heirs- and that is not the case.”27 As a result, Vronsky’s priorities have evidently transformed from the seduction of Anna, “that which for almost a year had constituted the one exclusive desire of Vronsky’s life,”28 towards legitimizing his relationship on a landed estate.

Similarly, Vronsky also turns his attention to the needs of the community in the second half of the novel. Liza Knapp argues that Anna Karenina shares many similarities to George Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch (1871-2), in that both works address the typically English concern of loving one’s neighbour.29 However, her argument rests on the notion that Levin is the primary arbiter of this neighbourly ideal, as he consistently grapples with the meaning of life and ultimately comes to the conclusion that it rests in making his domestic existence coherent with the community in which it moves.30 Vronsky also adheres to this English dogma of neighbourly concern in the latter half of the novel. For instance, he becomes involved in local government through the Kashin province nobility elections. Besides fulfilling “all the responsibilities of the position of a nobleman and landowner that he had chosen for himself… he had never expected that this business of elections could get him so involved, could so touch him to the quick, or that he could do it so well.”31 Should Vronsky “be married by the end of the three-year term, he was thinking of standing himself.”32 Vronsky’s desire to become a part of the community grounds his latter narrative in the English tradition.

Edwina Jannie Blumberg points to the common interest of Vronsky and Middlemarch’s Dorothea and Dr. Lydgate in philanthropy, as all of these characters work to build local hospitals.33 Although Vronsky’s vision is shortsighted (as his hospital will not include

a maternity wing or cater to infectious diseases), he clearly has a vested interest the concern of the community at large, which is much more consistent with the values of the English novel than those of the French model. Vronsky successfully transforms his life into an English family novel in the latter part of Anna Karenina.

Just as Vronsky cements his position as a hero of an English family novel, Anna becomes deeply entrenched in the French tradition in the second half of Anna Karenina. She abandons the notion of motherhood that is so crucial to the English family novel and begins taking contraceptives. Anna’s reasoning to not give birth again is that if new children “don’t exist, at least they won’t be unfortunate, and if they’re unfortunate, I alone am to blame.”34 This indicates a significant shift in national literary tropes. Moreover, Anna actually prefers to be a mistress after her trip to Italy. While Vronsky continuously asks her to divorce her husband, she refuses for many months, stating, “what wife, what slave, can be so much a slave as I am, in my situation?”35 In the view of Nicholas White, French literature of the nineteenth century highlighted precisely these types of threats to the family structure in order to prove that the family was not indissoluble.36 Anna’s rejection of the family sphere is much more in line with the modernizing French novel than the steadfast family tradition of English novels.

Another aspect of Anna’s outlook that demonstrates her relocation into a French novel of adultery is her consistent jealousy over the actions of Vronsky. A jealousy plot features in practically every major French novel in the nineteenth century.37 The French conceptions of jealousy within this literary era were characterized by possession, violence, excess, anxiety, and obsession, terms that all define Anna’s outlook in the second half of the novel.38 In the final days of her life, Anna “was jealous not of any one woman, but of the diminishing of his love. Having as yet no object for her jealousy, she was

26. Knapp, 83.

27. Tolstoy, 627.

28. Ibid., 149.

29. Knapp, 84.

30. Ibid., 119.

31. Tolstoy, 662.

32. Ibid., 663.

33. Edwina Blumberg, “Tolstoy and the English Novel” Slavic Review 30, v. 3 (1971), 565.

34. Tolstoy, 638.

35. Ibid., 637.

36. Nicholas White, The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 5.

37. Masha Belenky, The Anxiety of Dispossession: Jealousy in Nineteenth-Century French Culture. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008), 17.

38. Ibid., 21.

looking for one. Following the slightest hint, she transferred her jealousy from one object to another.”39 She nurses her anxiety to the extent that she “can’t fall asleep without morphine,” and feels compelled to “demand that he [Vronsky] give his entire self to [her] more and more.”40 41 Anna fully succeeds in transforming her life from an English family novel to a French adultery novel by committing suicide. As previously stated, suicide features prominently in the conclusions of many French adultery novels. Particularly, Masha Belenky notes that jealousy was perceived at this time as a disease that needed to be contained, or cured.42 French novelists would often kill off the lovers in their works. Anna’s suicide demonstrates the violent character of her jealousy over Vronsky, as it seems to her “the only way to restore the love for her in his heart, to punish him and to be victorious in the struggle that the evil spirit lodged in her heart was waging with him.”43 In this regard, her suicide is an act of violence against Vronsky that clearly belongs to the French literary tradition. Once Anna and Vronsky return from the liminal space of Italy, they successfully transform their own stories from the English family tradition into the sphere of French adultery, and vice versa. This jeopardizes their relationship, as they never actually desire the same things out of life beyond a physical connection.

To conclude, Vronsky’s shifting priorities from passion and seduction to inheritance and community, accompanied by Anna’s conversion from a woman deeply rooted in the family ideal to an avowed mistress demonstrates how Vronsky transformed his narrative from the French adultery novel into an English family novel, while Anna achieved the opposite. Ultimately, the fact that these lovers consistently adhere to different national literary traditions destroys their relationship, something Anna understands when she ponders, “we precisely went towards each other before our liaison, and after it we irresistibly move in different directions.”44 Ultimately, one may come to the conclusion that the fate of romantic relationships in Anna Karenina is in part contingent upon the adherence to 39. Tolstoy, 740.

40. Ibid., 640.

41. Ibid., 763.

42. Belenky, 21.

43. Tolstoy, 751.

44. Ibid., 763.

one national literary tradition. Taking this into consideration, Kitty and Levin’s relationship functions well because they consistently comply with the English model, prioritizing the family unit. Nevertheless, the fact that the most successful couple in the novel operates along a foreign literary tradition brings into question what a uniquely Russian literary narrative of desire would look like.

Bibliography: Belenky, Masha. The Anxiety of Dispossession: Jealousy in Nineteenth-Century French Culture. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008.

Blumberg, Edwina J. “Tolstoy and the English Novel: a Note on Middlemarch and Anna Karenina.” Slavic Review. 30.3 (1971): 561-569.

Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. London: Penguin Books, 2012.

Knapp, Liza. Anna Karenina and Others: Tolstoy’s Labyrinth of Plots. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016.

Meyer, Priscilla. How the Russians Read the French: Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy.

Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.

Sand, George. Indiana. Translated by Sylvia Raphael, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.

White, Nicholas. The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

1918 and 1990: The Swift Death and Long Memory of the Belarusian National Movement

T

Claudia Lonkin

he Belarusian national movement of the early 1900s was a weak, underdeveloped organization that managed to form a state only due to the chaotic circumstances of World War I. Ignored by the allies and demeaned by Russia and Poland, Belarusian nationalism failed to hold together its Belarusian People’s Republic for even a year in 1918. However, despite its late start and quick demise, the movement laid the ground for the articulation of Belarusian statehood after the collapse of the Soviet Union and it provided a new generation of Belarusian nation-builders with an all-important national myth. Though the broader political environment no doubt shaped the present form of Belarusian statehood, the legacy of the first Belarusian state cannot be ignored. While the Belarusian People’s Republic did not have the national organization or diplomatic prowess to negotiate for lasting independence at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference or the 1821 Peace of Riga, its aborted attempts at statehood would prove vital to the creation of contemporary Belarus in the 1990s.

1918 Negotiations The territory of present-day Belarus saw a great deal of fighting during World War I. Against all odds, it was actually this chaotic environment that provided the opportunity for the first expression of Belarusian statehood. During World War I, Belarus was “a theater of military operations” under “strict martial law.” Due to extensive fighting and the presence of “a Russian army of 1.5 million men…more than a million civilians had either fled or were expelled deep into Russia… by summer 1915.” This reduced the land, at least in part, to a de-populated, militarized zone. Then, on March 3, 1918, Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ceding the west . Jan Zaprudnik, Belarus: At a Crossroads in History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 65.

ern part of present-day Belarus to Germany, with territories past Minsk and Homiel to “no longer be subject to Russian sovereignty.”

Russia would refrain “from all interference in the internal relations of these territories” and the nature of their governance would henceforth be determined by Germany and Austria Hungary. Belarus remained an occupied territory under the Germans, however the occupation did not prevent the fledgling Belarusian nationalist movement from making its first, important gains.

Belarusian nationalism in the modern sense did not appear until the early 1900s, shortly before German occupation, and even then was not fully-formed by the time of the signing of Brest-Litovsk, as “notions of national consciousness were still new and unknown.” Furthermore, “the nationalist movement…was largely limited to Vilnius and to the educated Belarusian diaspora in intellectual centers such as Saint Petersburg or Moscow.” Institutionally, it manifested itself in the first Belarusian Political Party, the Belarusian Socialist Hramada, and the Belarusian-language newspaper Nasha niva (Our Cornfield). While these may seem like promising beginnings, the Belarusian nationalist movement was further hindered by the demographic reality that “97.4 percent of the urban population consisted of non-Belarusans.” Without a strong urban intelligentsia, the long-term vitality of the Belarusian nationalist movement was very much in question. Yet, intellectually nascent as they were, . “The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, March 3, 1918,” in Historic Documents of World War I (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1958).. . Per A. Rudling, The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906-1931, series in Russian and East European Studies (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), 63. . Zaprudnik, 67.

11

Belarusians still succeeded in forming a state during the midst of German occupation, an act that, while seemingly insignificant by the end of World War I, would come to be essential to their national future.

The Bielarúskaja Naródnaja Respúblika [Belarusian People’s Republic] (BNR) was a short-lived state with unformed policies. Its representative body, the Rada, declared itself the “supreme institution and the sole legitimate representation of the sovereign rights of the Belarusan people, expressed by the Legislative Act of the 25th of March, 1918.”

Of course, the BNR was and would remain under German occupation for the entirety of its existence. Further, the historian Andrew Wilson argues that the BNR “still thought in terms of some kind of confederation with Poland, an alliance with Ukraine or the Baltic States, or German protection.” Had the BNR been allowed to survive through the Paris Peace Conference, perhaps it would not even have elected to remain independent.

Contemporary accounts of the BNR, while at times optimistic, by no means foresaw it as a blueprint for Belarusian nationalism which could survive decades of subsumption to the Soviet Union.

The low standing of the BNR is partially reflected in its treatment by the allied powers, who all but ignored the fledgling state in peace talks. After World War I ended, Belarus was partitioned between Russia and Poland, while similarly nationalistically undeveloped states such as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were given independence. The historian David Marples in particular makes note of the argument that “the Western allies must bear the brunt of the blame for [Belarusian nonindependence, given] their failure to support Belarusian national aspirations and for their polonocentric policies.” However, as Marples acknowledges, to pin all the blame for Belarusian non-statehood on the allies is farcical. Even had most of the territory not been retaken by Russia after Germany’s surrender, the national movement was simply too underdeveloped to garner much, if any, renown. Representatives of the BNR, per . “Charter of the Rada BNR,” Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic. . Andrew Wilson, Belarus: The Last Dictatorship in Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 94. . David R. Marples, Belarus: A Denationalized Nation (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1999), 4.

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haps hoping to take advantage of the relative ignorance of the western Great Powers to ethno-national differences in eastern Europe by which they “might be persuaded to believe that the Ruthenian and Russian were two different races,…submitted [a memorandum] to the Paris Peace Conference on behalf of the ‘White Ruthenian Democratic Republic.’”

It does not appear that this memo, nor the delegation’s presence at the Paris Conference, were noted by any of the allies, exemplifying the lack of international prestige carried by the national movement.

The Soviet Union and Poland, on the other hand, were more aware of the movement, though both states did not seem to hold it in high esteem either. Regarding the attitude of Communist Russia towards Belarusian nationalism, the historian Andrew Savchenko writes that that while “Bolshevik authorities did not mind…[Belarusian] cultural exercises…political discussion was another matter, especially when it was about national self-determination.” While the Soviets clearly did not think Belarusian nationalism so unthreatening as to let its proponents make claims of sovereignty, the fact that they allowed the promotion of Belarusian cultural identity shows that they did not consider the national movement to be an overwhelming threat. In Poland, Joseph Piłsudski was even clearer regarding his opinion of Belarusian nationalism. Piłsudski, once an advocate for resurrecting the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and with it Belarusian national autonomy, had forsworn Belarusian nationalism by 1920, following “what he saw as Belarusian far-fetched political claims coupled with utter ineffectiveness.” At one point the Polish Civil Administration, the organization in charge of Poland’s eastern conquests, which was more consistent than Piłsudski in its contempt of Belarusian nationalism, would compare “the Belarusian national movement to ‘a resourceless child.’”10 By the end of the Polish-Soviet War, Piłsudski had apparently lost all respect for Belarusian nationalism, and saw no future for it in his envisioned Polish state. The dis . Nicholas P. Vakar, “The Name ‘White Russia,’” The American Slavic and East European Review 8, no.

3 (1949): 211. . Andrew Savchenko, Belarus: A Perpetual Borderland (Boston: Brill, 2009), 71.

10. Jerzy Borzęcki, The Soviet-Polish Peace of 1921 and the Creation of Interwar Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 58.

missive attitudes of the Soviets and Piłsudski towards the national movement are further exemplified by their actions during the final year of World War I and the Polish-Soviet War. The end of World War I and Polish-Soviet War provided the opportunity for Russia and Poland to split Belarusian territory with no regard for the BNR, which had been effectively defunct since the withdrawal of German troops. The Russian reconquista of Western Belarus was achieved when, on December 11, 1919 the Red Army, upon entering Minsk, “found [only] some minor members of the Rada,” as most “had already moved to German-occupied Grodno.”11 In the Polish-Soviet War that would soon follow, Minsk would change hands multiple times, before ultimately being ceded to the Soviet Union in the Peace of Riga. Despite the seemingly vital interests of Belarusians in the matter of their future as a state, in keeping with the abysmal diplomatic standards of the time, “no Belarusian representatives were invited to attend the negotiations” of the March 1921 Polish-Soviet Peace of Riga.12 Therefore, in less than three years, the Belarusian national movement had been reduced from state-builders to diplomatically insignificant governors-in-exile.

Early 1990s Negotiations When discussing the return of Belarusian statehood in the 1990s, it is vital to mention the backdrop of the Chernobyl crisis, which deposited the majority of its radioactive waste in present-day Belarus. Marples theorizes that “the crisis of Chernobyl in Belarus [was] exacerbated…by the lack of national state development in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and particularly in the Soviet period.”13 This lack of development slowed the domestic Belarusian response to the disaster. Belarus was reliant on infrastructural and bureaucratic support from the broader Soviet Union and without it

was incapable of responding fully to national emergencies. It follows then that, at least in some respects, Belarus would have fared better in a system structurally more akin to the Soviet model. Such a construct had been attempted in 1991, as a union of federated states, albeit where “each republic…party to the treaty [was considered] a sovereign state” possessing “full range of political power and [autonomy]” as well as a commitment to representative democracy.14 However, attempts to restructure the Soviet Union soon failed, and Belarus moved forward as an independent nation.

Despite being domestically dormant since 1918, and intensely repressed from the start of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, the Belarusian national movement from the start played a significant role in early nation-building. In his 1991 speech to the United Nations General Assembly on behalf of Belarus, Petr Kravchanka made reference to “the traditions of statehood…made manifest in the first quarter of the twentieth century, when the Belarusian state was proclaimed” and referenced Belarus’ “new State symbols, the white-red-white flag and the coat of arms, the Pahonia.” Yet while he declared that Belarus “must achieve real independence and sovereignty,” he also advocated for “cooperation in the establishment of a unified economic space, a new union of sovereign States…to replace the USSR.”15 This brief revival of the old nationalist flag and crest are significant.

Even as Kravchanka indicated a desire for strong economic union with Russia and the former Soviet sphere, he articulated a clear, independent Belarusian identity. Of course, shortly after Aleksandr Lukashenka came to office, nationalists were relegated to the opposition, which led them to develop a more aggressive tone. By 1995, Belarusian Popular Front Leader Zenon Poznyak had pledged to “take [Belarus] out of the CIS if he [won the presidency],” and declared “for sure…

11. Borzęcki, 15.

12. Valentina Utgof, “In Search of National Support: Belarusian Refugees in World War One and the People’s Republic of Belarus,” in Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia 1918-1924, edited by Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell (London: Anthem Press, 2004), 73.

13. David R. Marples, Belarus: From Soviet Rule to Nuclear Catastrophe (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 117.

14. “Daft Novo-Ogarevo Agreement (Union of Sovereign States), June 27, 1991,” in Brzezinski, Zbigniew, Paige Bryan Sullivan, and Center for Strategic and International Studies, Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States: Documents, Data, and Analysis (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 14-15.

15. Petr Kravchanka, Speech, Forty-Sixth Session of the General Assembly, United Nations, New York, September 26, 1991.

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Russia would consider invading Belarus.”16 Whether Poznyak would have been so aggressive as president is unclear, however his and Kravchanka’s remarks lay bare the strong return of Belarusian nationalism in official discourse, which likely would not be nearly so strong or public of not for the failure to reconstruct a federated Soviet Union.

As it became clear that the USSR was gone for good, Belarus established its new position in international relations through the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and the Union State Agreement with Russia. Belarus had declared its sovereignty on July 27, 1990, but its independence was not fully ratified until the formal dissolution of the USSR and formation of the new CIS in December 1991. At this point, with “negotiations to draw up a new Union treaty deadlocked” a “community of independent states, consisting of the republics of Belarus, [the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic], and Ukraine, [was opened] for accession.”17 The CIS was by no means a powerful successor to the USSR, but it kept some semblance of an alliance between the post-Soviet states. Perhaps more significant is the Union State Agreement. In the 1995 multi-question referendum largely seen as having cemented the power of still-President Aleksandr Lukashenko, Belarusians voted in support of “[further] economic integration with Russia,” “equal status of Russian language alongside Belarusian,” and “empowering the president to dissolve the Supreme Council if it violated the Constitution.”18 Thus, the framework was laid for the establishment of the Union State between Russia and Belarus on April 2, 1996.

Though the agreement has never been put into full force, it provides the framework for open borders, significant military collaboration, and a currency union between Russia and Belarus. The CIS and the Union State therefore both define independent Belarus as a firm ally of Russia.

At the time, however the West seemed to have hoped Belarus would claim a more 16. Eve-Ann Prentice, “Opposition Leader Promises to ‘Sever Moscow Ties,’” The Times, February 4, 1995, in Brzezinski, 309.

17. “Declaration on the New Commonwealth, December 8, 1991” in Brzezinski, 45.

18. Embassy of the Republic of Belarus to the United States of America, “Parliamentary Elections and Referendum in Belarus,” May 16, 1995, in Brzezinski 316.

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significant amount of independence. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States reaffirmed “their commitment…to respect [Belarus’] independence and sovereignty… [and] their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against [Belarus, and pledged]…to refrain from economic coercion...[against] Belarus.”19 Furthermore, in 1994, Bill Clinton became the first (and only) American president to visit the state. In 1995, he issued a letter congratulating Belarusians on “the rebirth in 1991 of an independent Belarus,” and specifically connecting the 75th anniversary of the BNR with the present, remarking that “the events of 1918 and 1991 teach us that the yearning for democracy in Belarus cannot be extinguished.”20 These actions, while perhaps just pro-democracy showboating, nonetheless indicate a support for an independent Belarus by the West and an acknowledgement of the national movement it had ignored 75 years previously. Of course, these overtures would not be enough to unseat Russia as Belarus’ dominant ally.

At the height of Russian-Belarusian relations, it was not impossible to imagine that Belarus would become another Russian federation, independent of a revived Soviet Union. Russian efforts towards creating the Union State were spearheaded by “nationalist [lawmakers]” who sought “to see a revival of something like the Soviet Union—or at least a Slavic Union of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine—with Moscow as its center.”21 However, whatever initial enthusiasm for the Union State had existed soon faded, as neither Russia nor Belarus “were committed to critical facets of any merger, such as a monetary union or the renunciation of sovereignty,” argues Marples, especially when considering Russia’s more advanced economic development.22 Thus Russia, though eager to retain some semblance of its former empire, was 19. “Memorandum of Security Assurances in connection with Accession of the Republic of Belarus to the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” Budapest, December 5, 1994.

20. William J. Clinton, Untitled Letter on the 75th Anniversary of the Belarusian National Republic, March 16, 1995.

21. United Press International, “Russians Eye Union with Belarus,” May 19, 1995, in Brzezinski, 316.

22. Marples, Belarus: A Denationalized Nation, 118.

not willing to sacrifice political stability or economic health to do so. Even as the postSoviet sphere has settled, true union has only become less likely.

For historical, geographic, and economic reasons, independent Belarus maintained a strong relationship with Russia which persists to this day. However, even directly following the Belarusian referendum favoring the Union State, the Foreign Minister of Belarus, Uladzimir Syanko still declared that “[Belarusian] sovereignty is not for sale.…Belarus has strong ties with Russia…but I think national consciousness will grow quickly.”23 Commitment to the Union State has only waned as Lukashenko, as he becomes more ingrained, is in equal measure evermore loath to politically subordinate himself. Wilson posits that “both Russia and the West have grown increasingly irritated with [Lukashenko], but for different reasons,” with Russia desiring “every potentially profitable asset in [Belarus]” and a politically “more reliable satrap” and the EU wanting “Belarus to transform its society, and be a joiner not a balancer.”24 Though it might appear as if Lukashenko must commit Belarus to one side or the other, in truth a Belarusian break from Russia has never been feasible. Yet at the same time, the state’s independence is only increasingly cemented.

Conclusion The Belarusian national movement as it existed in 1918 was hardly viable. Barely registered by the Allies and considered weak by the Russians and Poles, the movement only coalesced into the Belarusian People’s Republic through sheer luck of circumstance.

Yet, the memory of the BNR would be recalled in the 1990s, as an independent Belarus was once again forced into being. Though many representatives of this new Belarusian state acknowledged that perhaps a stronger successor to the USSR than the CIS would be the most economically beneficial to the people of Belarus, they did not fight aggressively for reunification with Russia. Instead, they looked to the past and the BNR as, if not a model for statehood, an unfulfilled promise of the potential for an independent Belarusian nation. Even as outright national23. Embassy of the Republic of Belarus to the United States of America, “Foreign Minister of Belarus on the Results of the Referendum,” May 18, 1995, in Brzezinski 316.

24. Wilson, 259.

ism and symbols like the white-red-white flag are subordinated to Aleksandr Lukashenko’s cult of personality, Belarusian independence is all but assured, in no small part thanks to the memory of the Belarusian National Republic as it was evoked during state-building processes in the 1990s.

Bibliography: Borzęcki, Jerzy. The Soviet-Polish Peace of 1921 and the Creation of Interwar Europe. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

Brzezinski, Zbigniew, Paige Bryan Sullivan, and Center for Strategic and International Studies. Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States: Documents, Data, and Analysis. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997.

Clinton, William J. Untitled Letter on the 75th Anniversary of the Belarusian National Republic. March 16, 1995. http://www.radabnr.org/.

Kravchanka, Petr. Speech, Forty-Sixth Session of the General Assembly, United Nations, New York, September 26, 1991.

Marples, David R. Belarus: From Soviet Rule to Nuclear Catastrophe. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

Marples, David R. Belarus: A Denationalized Nation. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1999.

“Charter of the Rada BNR.” Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic. http:// www.radabnr.org/.

“Memorandum of Security Assurances in connection with Accession of the Republic of Belarus to the Treaty on NonProliferation of Nuclear Weapons.” Budapest, 5 December 1994.

Rudling, Per A. The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906-1931. Series in Russian and East European Studies. PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015.

Savchenko, Andrew. Belarus: A Perpetual Borderland. Russian History and Culture.

Boston: Brill, 2009.

“The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, March 3, 1918.” In Historic Documents of World War I. Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1958.

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Utgof, Valentina. “In Search of National Support: Belarusian Refugees in World War One and the People’s Republic of Belarus.” In Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia 1918-1924, edited by Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell, 53-73.

Anthem Studies in Population Displacement and Political Space. London: Anthem Press, 2004.

Vakar, Nicholas P. “The Name ‘White Russia.’” The American Slavic and East European Review 8, no. 3 (1949): 201-213.

Wilson, Andrew. Belarus: The Last Dictatorship in Europe. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.

Zaprudnik, Jan. Belarus: At a Crossroads in History. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993.

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17

Life During Wartime: The National Identity Narratives of Stirlitz

C

Isabelle Smith

old War spy fiction pits ideology against ideology. Yet Yulian Seymonov’s Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973), is remarkably devoid of ideology, especially compared with Western contemporaries such as��������� John le Carr��� é��. ��������������������������������������� Le Carr�������������������������������� é’s novels usually find no meaningful difference in how each country enforces ideology, and both sides come out looking poorly. Seventeen Moments of Spring by contrast contains no agonized speeches or philosophical debates. Stirlitz, the novel’s hero, despite the strain of his work, never contemplates his raison d’������ ê����� tre, never mind questioning it. But, of course, there is no such thing as a non-ideological spy novel.

Stirlitz in all his aliases raises questions about the status of character. As a specifically Russian spy, he treats spying as an art and nurses nostalgia for his homeland. He has a duality that articulates the many contradictions of Soviet life. He has much in common with Bill Haydon of le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), but unlike Stirlitz, Haydon is the novel’s villain. It is said that Haydon believes “that secret services [are] the only real measure of a nation’s political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.”

This paper will examine the novel, the configurations of Stirlitz’s identity, and the unspoken ideological questions they pose.

The Meta Cold War The purpose of modern spy fiction is to think through problems of global politics through the lens of an individual. The conflict in Seventeen Moments hinges not, like so many World War II spy stories, on the atomic bomb, but on alliances. Hitler wishes to take advantage of what he calls the “������������ paradoxical coalition������������������������������������� ” of the Allies, and enters backdoor negotiations to make it seem like Britain and the United States are betraying Russia. At . John le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (New York: Knopf, 1974), 355.

the close of the war Stirlitz is deep undercover in the Nazi intelligence services. His role is to disrupt this disruption of alliances, and keep Germany alone but under Russia’s eye. Russia’s complicated international relations are articulated through him, one man.

Though the Germans’ plan does not “work,” and Germany loses the war soon after, the distrust between the Allies sets the stage for the Cold War. Though set in World War II, at the symbolic level, Seventeen Moments of Spring is a Cold War novel. It is well-documented that the Cold War subtext is what made the novel popular—it is “very much about the time it was written rather than about the historical period in which it is set.” This is partly because it concerns the configurations of enmity between the U.S.S.R. and the West, with Germany as the troubled (and troublesome) mediator. In the Soviet style the novel also ducks outright political questions—it criticizes German war crimes rarely and spouts Soviet rhetoric never. The setting and plot place the novel symbolically in the Cold War, with daily Soviet life as its primary resonance.

The Nazi state stands in for the Soviet state, with Stirlitz as the divided Soviet citizen. The dossier segments used to introduce each Nazi leader, particularly in the TV series (1972), represent the masks of Soviet bureaucracy: the same catchphrases describe every official, “true aryan,” “merciless towards en . Stephen Lovell, “In Search of an Ending: Seventeen Moments and the Seventies,” in The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World, edited

by Diane P. Koenker, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 309. . Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, “The Blockbuster Miniseries On Soviet TV: IsaevShtirlits, the Ambiguous Hero of Seventeen Moments in Spring,” in The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 29, vol. 3 (2002), 267.

19

emies of the Reich,” etc. This creates a “��� ritual, facade��������������������������������� character” of state power, made entirely of propaganda and devoid of anything personal . In addition to the dossiers, this fictional Nazi state represents the Soviet admin through the disgruntled general on the train, and the chaotic bureaucracy. Files and evidence are frequently mislaid or misdirected, causing delays that Stirlitz takes advantage of more than once. He is the mediator of all this—the Nazi state and the metaphorical Soviet state—and he survives by his dual identities.

Problems of Identity One realization of Stirlitz’s concurrent identities is his profusion of names, an important spy fiction trope. As one Centre agent in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy exclaims, “That a man’s wealth should be counted by the number of his names!” Stirlitz himself has three aliases in the book: his real name, Maxim Maximovich Isaev, his undercover German name Max Otto von Stirlitz, and his Centre codename “Justas”; in the series, he also has his smalltown alias, “Herr Bolzen.” This abundance of names, of course, expresses the multiplicity of his identities and roles. But the confusion of names also creates an obscurity of identity. Early on, when the Nazi administration opens their investigation on him, Kaltenbrunner talks to a subordinate on the phone: “‘Not Siblitz but Stirlitz,’ said Kaltenbrunner, chuckling down the receiver, ‘as far as I know there is no one by the name of Siblitz on our permanent staff.’” This minor mistake in his name signifies their misidentification of him—they take him for someone he is not.

But further, ‘Stiblitz’ is a nonexistent person’s name, because the person for whom they take Stirlitz-Isaev is a nonexistent person. This is the question for Stirlitz-Isaev’s undercover identity: is the person he acts as in Germany . Seventeen Moments of Spring, “Episode 1,” dir. by Tatyana Lioznova, written by Yulian Seymonov and Tatyana Lioznova, August 11, 1973. . Mark Lipovetsky, “The Trickster’s Transformations In The Soviet Film Of The 1960s–70s,” in Charms of the Cynical Reason: Tricksters in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010), 220. . Lovell, 310. . Yulian Seymonov, Seventeen Moments of Spring, trans. by Katherine Judelson (London: John Calder, 1973), 59. . Ibid., 23.

20

a “real” person? This is echoed later, when he is photographed in disguise and a witness is unable to identify the photograph. The disguise makes him “unrecognizable.” On the level of identity he is “unrecognizable” to Germans, visible but never identifiable. In a postmodern reading, he would be a signifier only—his true ‘sign’ status remains inaccessible to them. The confusion of names is not only a political question, but a novelistic one as well. Novels are linguistic realizations of characters, and names are the linguistic sign that creates the character. If a name signifies an imaginary character, how much meaning can the name lose before the character becomes nonexistent? And if names are multiple, can characters be multiple? Can one character really “be” multiple characters, or are the characters of Isaev and Stirlitz actually distinct?

The man himself seems to feel they are different people: “When Stirlitz allowed himself to be Isaev, something that happened rarely and then only at night, he used to think along the following lines. What does being a real agent involve? Collecting information, analyzing facts, data and transmitting them to Centre for the political conclusions to be drawn and the decisions to be taken?”10 The implication of Stirlitz “allowing” himself to “be Isaev” is that, in his daily public life, he actually is not Isaev. It would seem that in his undercover role, he believes he genuinely becomes another person. Yet at another point in the novel, he practices acting in front of a mirror. He himself does not know whether his Stirlitz role is acting or being. Similarly, his idea of what makes a good spy in this passage does not correspond to his real behaviour. Stated here, his idea of “being a real agent” involves analysis and rationality, not artistry. This is a work ethic much more in line with his antagonist Müller’s, but his behaviour in other scenes illustrates the opposite.

Stirlitz’s spy persona has more artistic trappings than analytic ones. As mentioned, he practices acting in the mirror; after visiting the museum and viewing the ancient masks, Stirlitz “stand[s] before the mirror in his bathroom for a long time, practising suitable . Ibid., 156.

10. Ibid., 35.

facial expressions, as any actor might have done. Stirlitz believed that the intelligence agent should learn to have complete control over his face: the ancients had mastered that art to perfection.”11 He also plays the piano, draws caricatures, and confesses to Schellenberg that he writes. Though he is meditative and approaches problems meticulously, his improbable escapes are sometimes simple inspiration: “He had not thought the question out in advance; it had taken shape of its own accord and in the given situation, was more suitable than anything else he could have chosen even if he had spent hours wracking his brain.”12 Stirlitz, for all his studiousness, relies on that touch of artistic genius. A good spy is methodical, most spy novels agree, but the secret ingredient in le Carré’s fieldmen is usually “������������������������������������������ instinct���������������������������������� ,” such as describes ������������� Jim Prideaux in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. For Seymonov’s Russian spy, it is something less animal and more elevated.

If the Russian identity is a soulful, artistic one, and Stirlitz is a displaced Russian soul, his artistic propensities are displaced onto his spy role. In an exchange with Schellenberg, Stirlitz’s superior asks, “Is it long since you stopped writing poetry?” to which Stirlitz replies, “I never began in the first place.” Schellenberg “wagged a finger at him and warned: ‘It’s white lies that pave the way to black mistrust, Stirlitz...’ ‘I swear,’ Stirlitz assured him with a smile, ‘That I have tried my hand at writing everything except verses: I have an absolute blind spot when it comes to rhymes...’13 This exchange touches upon his vanished identity. It sounds as though Isaev traded his writer’s craft for Stirlitz’s intelligence tradecraft. In this he may be expressing a concern of Soviet identity: that Russia’s artistic soul has been eclipsed by the political.

But even if Stirlitz gave up a promising career as a writer, he applies his artistry to his espionage duties. This exchange also highlights another distinction from his German colleagueenemies: his artistic use of language.

This dichotomy of rationality-artistry is most clearly realized in the novel’s main opposition, hardboiled police chief Müller and wily agent Stirlitz. Early in the novel, when one of Stirlitz’s colleagues defends him, Müller objects: “Leave epithets like that to the big wigs in the party. We detectives must think 11. Ibid., 127.

12. Ibid., 141.

13. Semyonov, 103.

in nouns and verbs: ‘he met’, ‘she said’, ‘he delivered.’”14 He frames their differences as a difference in language, factual versus imaginative. In one sense this is the German-Russian dichotomy of the novel; but Müller does not know Stirlitz is Russian, and instead equates him to the propagandists of the Nazi party.

This parallel is worth noting. Does Stirlitz hoodwink his colleagues the same way party officials obfuscate with language and propaganda? The relation of Stirlitz and Müller is one of trickster and mark, perhaps not unlike a totalitarian government and its people.

But Stirlitz is not a villain, nor is he otherwise aligned with the Soviet government at the novel’s meta representation of the Cold War. Rather, he lives out the existential plight of Soviet citizens, surviving it via trickery.

In Anatomy of a Spy Thriller, Bruce Merry explains that the trickster spy trope originates with Odysseus, first in the Iliad and then in the Odyssey.15 Stirlitz is certainly readable as an Odysseus figure: he is off in a distant land, well-respected but crafty, and his loyal wife awaits him at home. His Odysseus status also enhances the book’������������������� s concurrent W����� orld War II and Cold War narratives. His role as a deep cover agent is not unlike Odysseus’s Trojan Horse in the Iliad, and at the metaphorical level, the Cold War is comparable to the Odyssey’s postwar period. Lipovetsky also reads Stirlitz specifically as one of the tricksters of 60s and 70s Soviet film alongside Gadai’s Shurik, Erofeev’s Venichka. With the Nazi organization standing in for the Soviet state, Stirlitz expresses the internal conflict of the intelligensia under Soviet rule: he is both those “dissenting (Soviet) intellectuals and those intellectuals who have chosen to play by the system’s brutal rules for the sake of selfrealization.”16 The ‘trickster’ Stirlitz “stands out as the ideal mediator, having succeeded in fusing an SS officer and a secret dissident-intellectual. Both sides consider him their own and are ultimately deceived by him.”17 Stirlitz accomplishes the impossible: subversion of the state and self-realization.

One possible reason for Stirlitz’s resonance is his heroic articulation of the public-private division in Soviet life. His internal life—domestic life, his flashbacks, his wife, 14. Ibid., 64.

15. Bruce Merry, Anatomy of the Spy Thriller (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977), 27.

16. Lipovetsky, 220.

17. Ibid., 221.

21

his ideology and values—is entirely separate from his external life and work. Soviet audiences identify with this predicament, to whatever extent they themselves must conceal themselves to serve the nation or even to remain safe. Soviet audiences can also admire his mediation of the issue: Stirlitz represents “a paradigm for the survival of the honest intellectual in a totalitarian state, striving for professional excellence and basic human decency while hiding his true face from the inhuman state bureaucracy.”18 Instead of suffocating or endangering him, his valences of private and public identity allow him to accomplish his moral goals—which range from helping a mother with her baby carriage to defending the motherland—while maintaining agency. He also mediates the tension of Soviet patriotism and Western curiosity.19 While most Soviet citizens are drawn to the Western other but held back by obligation to the USSR, Stirlitz is able to “try on” Western identity while still serving the interests of the state.

Because Stirlitz must keep his Russian identity a secret, Russian rituals and ideals become entirely personal and domestic.

Russia, never seen on the page and rarely on the screen, becomes remote, a “distant Homeland with the status of myth.”20 Russia is thus projected onto the personally sacred, the domestic and familial. Perhaps the most famous example of this is undercover radio operator Käthe’s cries during labour: she is unable to stop herself from crying out in her native Russian. “Russia is this associated with what is most near and dear, with private life and family, that which is either inaccessible or savoured only behind closed doors and reduced from geographical reality to emotionally charged symbol.”21 This formulation of Russia is Cold War nostalgia: by making it a distant dream, Seymonov idealizes the Russian soul vanished by the Soviet era.

Hero and Villain Stirlitz has an almost perfect, almost contemporaneous Western analogue in Bill Haydon of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, who is based in part on Kim Philby, the famous MI-6 traitor who blew the cover of many British spies including le Carré himself. Released in 1974, 18. Nepomnyashchy, 272.

19. Lovell������ ������������ , 316.

20. Nepomnyashchy, 267.

21. Ibid., 267.

22

four years after Seventeen Moments of Spring, the novel follows George Smiley’s quest to uncover a highly placed Russian mole. Smiley’s role is not unlike Müller’s, except that he succeeds where Müller fails, and the mole, Bill Haydon, fails where Stirlitz succeeds. Bill is a universally admired polymath, aristocratic and charming, a well-known seducer of both men and women, and an amateur artist. Though his role matches Stirlitz’s, his behavior and outcomes are quite distinct.

Haydon’s artistic flair is comparable to Stirlitz’s, but with crucial differences. With its Müller-Stirlitz-esque duel between Smiley and Haydon, Tinker Tailor hinges on the same conflict of analyst and artist. Haydon is known to paint mediocre pictures in his free time. Once he is unmasked, Smiley characterizes him as a performer: “Bill had loved it, too. Smiley didn’t doubt that for a moment.

Standing at the middle of a secret stage, playing world against world, hero and playwright in one: oh, Bill had loved that all right.”22 Tinker Tailor suggests that where a standard spy needs “instinct,” such as Bill uses to describe his friend Jim Prideaux, a double agent needs creative flair—as Seventeen Moments similarly suggests.23 But Bill, for all his flair, is a mediocre artist; perhaps that deficiency of talent is why his performance as a double agent falls short of Stirlitz’��� s.

Though no motive for his treason is ever given, his social status is the most strongly suggested. As part of his Philby resonances, Haydon’s establishment position is what makes his betrayal so despicable. “Was Philby’s treachery worse than others’ because, more than being just a British citizen, he was a member of the class bred to lead the realm?”24 Like Philby, though he lightly rebels through art and scandal, Haydon’s high status defines him. He is a relative of Smiley’s aristocratic wife, and actually has an affair with her to misdirect Smiley; early in the novel, a friend mournfully says, “Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone [...] You’re the last, George, you and Bill.”25 Smiley considers “disillusion with Britain’s insignificance in world affairs” as a motive for Bill’s 22. Le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, 367.

23. Ibid., 262.

24. Tod Hoffman, “Karla,” in Le Carré’s Landscape (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 113.

25. Le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, 113.

betrayal.26 Haydon becomes a disappointed monarch, born to an imperial inheritance that declines before his eyes. If his betrayal is a reaction to England’s decline, his ignoble defeat deals the final blow to that empire. Stirlitz, as his Russian counterpart, succeeds where Haydon fails. That success, then, can be read to represent the continuation of Russian imperialism. The novel’s romanticization of the Russian motherland, implies as much; at the representational level, the “imperial splendor of the Nazi regime replaces the image of the Soviet empire.”27 Stirlitz’s mission is not to destroy Germany by his trickery, but to control it; the novel anticipates and endorses the imperialistic control of East Germany in Stirlitz’s future and Seymonov’����������� s present.

Stirlitz survives by taking on multiple distinct identities, and Haydon operates the same way. The mole that Smiley begins searching for is known as “���������������������������� Gerald,��������������������� ” and the special Soviet source that leads him to it is called “Merlin.” Haydon is defeated when Smiley discovers that Gerald, Merlin, and Haydon are all the same man, collapsing these identities back into one. With this collapse, and Smiley’s description of Haydon’s “performance,” the novel does not endorse a truly multiple person like Stirlitz. Bill Haydon’s only show of guilt is his regret for betraying his friend and implied lover, Jim Prideaux. Smiley reviews their old MI-6 recruitment papers, in which young Haydon gushes about Prideaux: “He’s my other half; between us we’d make one marvellous man.”28 Rather than a division of self, this relationship is a union into one: “The blending of two personalities yields a single ‘������������������� marvel������������� l������������ ous man����� ’: 2 �� = ������������������ 1 in the Platonic sense that halved souls seek their lost partners.”29 This union with Prideaux is a foil to Haydon’s relationship with the Centre. And his betrayal of this union is his one source of guilt—he opts instead to be divided from Prideaux, and to divide himself into multiple selves. There is no such moral failure for Stirlitz, the perfectly divided man.

The Man Without a Dilemma The absence of any moral quandary for Stirlitz is in itself a moral statement. The spy’s role is to defend his nation’s ideology abroad, 26. Ibid., 132.

27. Lipovetsky, 222.

28. Le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, 262.

29. Allan Hepburn, Intrigue: Espionage and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 66.

yet in his role he often violates this very ideology. For le Carré’s characters, this contradiction is the source of their stress; he writes that his books serve to pose “this question: for how long can we defend ourselves—you and we—by methods of this kind, and still remain the kind of society that is worth defending?”30 For Stirlitz by contrast, and the Russian public who loves him, there is no contradiction at all. If Stirlitz is abroad to defend Russian ideals, should not that include their ideal of truth? Yet he does this by living a lie. What does it mean for a nation’s morality if the only man who can defend it must do so by violating it? Is Seymonov revealing a hypocrisy of the USSR, or romantically obscuring one? Le Carré proposes an answer: “For a Communist there is nothing inherently wrong in sacrificing the uncommitted to the course of history [...] To a Western man, there inherently is, but he does it all the same. Western inhibitions spring from the Christian and humanist ethic that the individual is worth more than the collective. In espionage as I have depicted it Western man sacrifices the individual to defend the individual’s right against the collective. That is Western hypocrisy, and I condemned it because I felt it took us too far into the Communist camp.”31 Stirlitz, in his arduous and alienating mission, is making a great sacrifice for the Communist ideal. Perhaps lack of moral conflict stems from that and nothing more: the belief that the individual should sacrifice himself “to the course of history.” And ����������� if the individual is truly dispensable as le Carr����� é so harshly claims, perhaps individual moral violations are dispensable as well. Lying would not represent a violation of Russian ideals because Stirlitz doing it serves “the course of history.” By his lack of moral conflict, Stirlitz embraces an ideology more fully than he perhaps could have in a Smiley-esque philosophical digression. While Haydon is a villain in the Western paradigm, Stirlitz is a hero, in his own entirely Soviet paradigm.

30. John le Carré, “To Russia, With Greetings: An Open Letter To the Moscow Literary Gazette,” Encounter (May 1966): 5.

31. Le Carré, “To Russia, With Greetings,” 5.

23

Bibliography: Hepburn, Allan. Intrigue: Espionage and Culture, New Haven: Yale UP, 2014.

Hoffman, Tod. “Karla.” Le Carré’s Landscape, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001, pp. 111–157.

Le Carré, John. “To Russia, With Greetings: An Open Letter To the Moscow Literary Gazette.” Encounter, May 1966, pp. 3-6.

Le Carré, John. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. New York: Knopf, 1974.

Lioznova, Tatyana. Seventeen Moments of Spring, Gorky Film Studio, 1972.

Lipovetsky, Mark. “The Trickster’s Transformations In The Soviet Film Of The 1960s–70s.” Charms of the Cynical Reason: Tricksters in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture.

Boston: Academic Studies Press. 2010.

Lovell, Stephen. “In Search of an Ending: Seventeen Moments and the Seventies.” The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World, edited by Diane P. Koenker, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. 303-321.

Merry, Bruce. Anatomy of the Spy Thriller.

Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977.

Nepomnyashchy, Catharine Theimer. “The Blockbuster Miniseries On Soviet TV: Isaev-Shtirlits, the Ambiguous Hero of Seventeen Moments in Spring.” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, vol 29, 2004, pp. 257276.

Seymonov, Yulian. Seventeen Moments of Spring.

Translated by Katherine Judelson, London; John Calder, 1973.

24

25

Meat versus Sweets: Gratuitous Appetites and Gendered Hunger in Anna Karenina and “The Kreuzer Sonata”

I

Juliette Mueller

n “An Afterword to ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’” (1889) and many of his other late works, such as The First Step (1892) and “����������������������� Father Sergius��������� ” (1898), Leo Tolstoy mandates control over one’s appetites, both gastronomic and erotic, as necessary for spiritual righteousness. He causally links these two kinds of appetites, declaring that indulgent foods stimulate lust, which is an “animal-like state that is degrading to a human being” because it impedes men and women in their quests for moral purity and spiritual self-perfection. Two of Tolstoy’s late fictional works adopt this argument, rendering food and sex symbolically inextricable. The impassioned, well-fed Pozdnyshev links gustation and sexual impulses in “The Kreutzer Sonata,” declaring that the gentry’s “stimulating superabundance of food, together with complete physical idleness, is nothing but a systematic excitement of desire.” Likewise, in Anna Karenina (1877), which marks the beginning of Tolstoy’s increasingly puritanical views on life and love leading up to his spiritual conversion, the eponymous heroine muses to Vronsky after they have consummated their affair “I’m like a hungry person who suddenly has a full meal put in front of her and doesn’t know where to start.”

In these two texts, sensualism directed at more than one person, like the consumption of certain foods, indicates a superfluous

sexual appetite, and therefore moral debasement. Most prominent among these stimulating foods are meat and sweets, which critics such as Ronald LeBlanc locate on the same symbolic plane. But these indulgences, while linked in Tolstoy’s fiction, are semiotically distinct: sweets, coded feminine, represent idleness and seduction, while meat, coded masculine, stands in for violence, domination, and aggressive lust. Tolstoy erects a hierarchy of indulgences in Anna Karenina and “The Kreutzer Sonata,” so that while the author advocates abstention from both meat and sweets, each bears a different potential for spiritual downfall. In these two texts, meat and sweets respectively stimulate male and female appetites to different effect, so that the consumer and their attendant traits, rather than the victual, ultimately poses the greater threat to mankind’������������������������ s spiritual progression.

Tolstoy’s primary comestible target was meat; it arouses and is sourced from traditionally masculine activities. Meat necessitates killing and stimulates gourmandism and sensuality. The First Step documents these negative opinions on carnism. In this vegetarian treatise, mastery over one’s stomach is the proverbial “first step” to self-perfection.

If a man truly endeavors to lead a pure life, he must eliminate animal flesh from his diet because it necessitates the slaughtering of animals, and “its only effect is to encourage

. Leo Tolstoy, “An Afterword to The Kreutzer Sonata,” in Tolstoy’s Short Fiction, ed. by Michael Katz (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 2008), 64. ����������������������������������������� . Leo Tolstoy, “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in Tolstoy’s Short Fiction, ed. by Michael Katz (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 2008), 148. . Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (London: Penguin Classics, 2013), 619.

. Ronald �������������������������������������� LeBlanc, “Eating ����������������������������� as Pleasure: Tolstoy and Voluptuousness,” in Slavic Sins of the Flesh: Food, Sex, and Carnal Appetite in Nineteenth-Century Russian Fiction (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009), 98-157. . Leo Tolstoy, “The First Step,” in The Lion and The Honeycomb: The Religious Writings of Tolstoy, ed.

by A.N. Wilson, trans. by Robert Chandler (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1987), 96.

27

animal feelings and to increase lust, fornication and drunkenness.” Prior to publishing The First Step, Tolstoy had expressed the same idea through two works of fiction: Anna Karenina and “The Kreutzer Sonata.” In the latter, Tolstoy explicitly links Tolstoy explicitly links the two masculine, ‘carnal’ sins of eating meat and lust through Pozdnyshev’s remarks on the train. “We, who consume two pounds of meat every day, and game, and fish… where does that all go? Into excesses of sensuality.” Pozdnyshev later insists that, had he not been so indulgent, he would not have established a relationship predicated on sexual desire and “nothing of all this would have happened”—that is, he would not have murdered his wife. Tolstoy also infuses his opinions into the plot of “The Kreutzer Sonata,” providing evidence to support Pozdnyshev’s claims about the disastrous connection between lust and carnivorousness.

Flesh is the centerpiece of “The Kreutzer Sonata.” It is a story of libido, murder, and carnism. In this work Tolstoy foreshadows the lasciviousness of Trukhachevsky’s, Pozdnyshev’s wife’s lover, by the violence with which he “crunched the gristle of a cutlet” at the couple’s first dinner with this guest.

Trukhachevsky eventually turns this voracious appetite to Pozdnyshev’s wife, and their shared dinner is superimposed upon their act of adultery. When Pozdnyshev returns home from his trip hoping to catch his wife and this carnivorous interloper mid-coitus, he instead discovers them dining together.10 Attuned to the link between eating and fornicating, Pozdnyshev conflates these two acts—Trukhachevsky has taken Pozdnyshev’s place at the table, a violation he considers as egregious as taking his place in bed. Enraged, Pozdnyshev murders his wife after attempting to murder her lover. Reduced to its bare elements, “The Kreutzer Sonata” can be conceptualized as a kind of Tolstoyan flow chart where meat causes lust, lust causes sex, and sex causes death, both spiritual and literal. The instigating source of temptation (meat) and its final result (death) are united at the story’s end to create an ouroboros of sin that can only be disrupted through fleshly abstention.

The scene where Pozdnyshev murders . Ibid., 103. . “The Kreutzer Sonata,” 148. . Ibid., 149. . Ibid., 183.

10. Ibid., 188.

28

his wife mirrors Tolstoy’s description of the slaughterhouse in The First Step when the “well-fed” (a term Pozdnyshev also applies to his wife) beasts are slaughtered.11 12 In both this slaughterhouse scene and in “The Kreutzer Sonata,” the victims widen their eyes and attempt to flee, only to be pinned down and stabbed to death by brutal men fulfilling societally-sanctioned forms of violence.13 14 Pozdnyshev strips his wife of her clothes, while the slaughterhouse-workers strip the oxen of their skins. If men abstained from crunching on the gristle of cutlets sourced from these slaughterhouses, Tolstoy suggests, women like Pozdnyshev’s wife—and men like Pozdnyshev— would be spared; “nothing of all this would have happened.”15 Anna Karenina serves as a precedent for the ideas regarding meat and masculine eroticism later expressed in “The Kreutzer Sonata.” As in “The Kreutzer Sonata,” the novel is replete with descriptions of the carnivorous Vronsky’s “solid,” “strong,” “white” teeth.16 He uses these teeth to masticate the beefsteak he consumes on two fateful occasions informed by the consequences of his unbridled epicureanism: the morning of the horse race that serves as an allegory for his and Anna’s tumultuous and doomed relationship, and the morning Anna commits suicide.17 Unlike Levin, the moral center of the novel, whom Tolstoy depicts as “tired, hungry, happy” in one scene after walking twenty miles on foot and hunting his own dinner, Vronsky squanders his energy on horse-racing and adultery.

Tolstoy conveys his disdain for men of Vronsky’s ilk by drawing a parallel between Vronsky’s shortcomings and those of the foreign prince he entertains in Part IV of the novel.

Confronted with his hedonistic doppelgänger, Vronsky approaches self-understanding and turns to a bovine metaphor.

His judgements of Russian women, whom he wished to study, more than once made Vronsky flush with indignation. But what made the prince especially burdensome was that Vronsky could not help seeing 11. “The First Step,” 100.

12. “The Kreutzer Sonata,”168.

13. “The First Step,” 100-103.

14. “The Kreutzer Sonata,” 189-191.

15. Ibid., 149.

16. Anna Karenina, 115, 118, 180, 358, 398, 433, 420, 611.

17. Ibid., 174, 746.

himself in him. And what he saw in that mirror was not flattering to his vanity… ‘Stupid ox! Am I really like that?’ he thought.18 Readers may recognize this question as rhetorical— the answer, of course, is “yes.”

For Tolstoy’s men, the adage that you are what you eat is accurate—these carnivorous men emulate animals, succumbing to their base instincts to eat and to copulate.

Consider in this regard Stiva Oblonsky, Anna’s debauched, oyster-guzzling brother, who indulges himself at various restaurants throughout the novel. At the Hotel Anglia in Part I of the novel, he orders a feast of oysters, turbot, roast beef, capon, Cachet Blanc and Chablis.19 During this meal, Levin, with his modest palate and circumspect erotic appetite, expresses his confusion over Stiva’s eating habits and professes his preference for simple vegetarian fare.20 Stiva, who abides by the verse he quotes from Heinrich Heine that valorizes succumbing to “earthly pleasures,” artificially stimulates his appetite and overeats, creating a false hunger to please his senses.21 In fact, he stimulates his appetites twice over at this meal, flirting with the garishly made-up hostess while Levin averts his gaze, repulsed and thinking of Kitty.22 Kitty, Levin’s wife, identifies the link between this kind of gustation and sexual appetite, accusing Levin of falling prey to Anna’s allure after another extravagant dinner with Stiva and a subsequent visit to this fallen woman. “‘You’ve fallen in love with that nasty woman,” Kitty wails. “She’s bewitched you. […] You drank at the club, drank, gambled, and then went… to whom?”23 Indeed, after visiting Anna, Levin is captivated by this “amazing, dear and pitiful woman.”24 He succumbs to Anna’s flirtations because he strays from his typical diet, strengthening the assertion that to be spiritually pure one must abstain from meat.

Anna’s husband observes a connection between what society men consume and what they resemble in both shape and character, likening the meat-eating Vronsky and Stiva to thick, virile, beasts, and wondering 18. Ibid., 355.

19. Ibid., 40.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., 41.

23. Ibid., 703.

24. Ibid., 701.

[…] Whether they feel differently, love differently, marry differently, these other people, these Vronskys and Oblonskys ... these gentlemen of the bed-chamber with their fat calves. And he pictured a whole line of these juicy, strong, undoubting people, who, against his will, had always and everywhere attracted his curious attention.25 Karenin’s question of whether these men “marry differently” and “love differently” should be answered in the affirmative— they philander, rather than couple with monogamous spiritual partners. Pozdnyshev realizes this, which is why he repeats so many times that he and other men like him are swine.

Karenin emphasizes the Vronskys and Oblonskys’ “juicy” bodies, reducing this class of men to a succulent herd, perhaps preparing to be slaughtered, which provokes the question of whether these men themselves are at risk of being ‘consumed’ in the same way they consume others, and if so, by whom. If these men are livestock, who is the butcher?

The First Step offers a potential answer. In this work, Tolstoy highlights the incongruity of “weak” femininity and woman’s appetite for meat. He writes of “a kind, refined young lady” who will devour the corpses of these animals, certain that she is doing the right thing as she makes two contradictory assertions: firstly that she is so delicate… that she cannot survive on vegetable food because her weak organism needs meat; secondly that she is so sensitive as to be unable not only to cause suffering to animals, but even to bear the sight of it.26 In Tolstoy’s late works, women turn the force of these appetites toward the men in their lives, proving themselves to be not kind, refined ladies, but seductresses with insatiable appetites. Interestingly, however, the above description is exceptional. Tolstoy tends to communicate feminine depravity not by depicting women gorging themselves on steaks or filets as in the above excerpt, but rather by whetting their sexual appetites on bonbons and ice creams. In Anna Karenina and “The Kreutzer Sonata,” women do not metaphorically devour men, but rather lead 25. Ibid., 520.

26. “The First Step,” 103.

29

them “to the butcher”—that is, to their spiritual deaths—through seduction. According to Pozdnyshev, women use their sweetness to “bewitch” men; they employ their feminine guile as a force to control men so that the latter “succumbs to her stupefying influence.”27 28 Women are passive sensualists, Tolstoy claims, inviting their own consumption rather than devouring in their own rights.

While Tolstoy primarily targets his vitriol at meat-consumers, less well-documented but also prominent on his list of harmful esculents are sweets, which, he writes, “inflame sensuousness.”29 But where meat is a stand-in for masculine, carnal lust in Anna Karenina and “The Kreutzer Sonata,” sweets underscore a depraved and idle femininity expressed through seduction. The sweets that women consume seep into their beings, rendering them all the more tantalizing to their hungry male counterparts. In Anna Karenina, various characters describe Anna (and FrouFrou, her equine stand-in) as “sweet,” while Stiva likens women to sweet rolls so fragrant they are irresistible.30 31 In “The Kreutzer Sonata,” Pozdnyshev describes his wife as “ripe,” and, as Ronald LeBlanc notes, in an early draft of the story Pozdnyshev describes her as “a sweet, tasty morsel” that he, with his ravenous appetite, enjoyed eating.32 33 Pozdnyshev notes the “ridiculous custom of… vulgar gourmandizing on sweets” as a prelude to sex in his diatribe likening marriage to prostitution.34 Also in “The Kreutzer Sonata,” Pozdnyshev conveys his disgust at the “ladies in low-necked dresses” who “eat sweets” and applaud the salon music—a lethal combination of music (which inflames the passions), seductive clothing, and indulgent food, all characteristic of the idle feminine gentry lifestyle.35 Tolstoy saturates the compulsively flirtatious Anna with sugar. In her final hours, she conjures a veritable dessert menu as she reflects on the actions leading to her demise, flashing to memories of sweet rolls, pancakes 27. “The Kreutzer Sonata,” 160.

28. Ibid., 151.

29. “An Afterword to The Kreutzer Sonata,” 66. ���. Anna Karenina, 51, 57, 82, 125, 169. ������������� . Ibid.,���� ���������� 40. ������������������������� . “The Kreutzer Sonata,” 149. ���������������� . LeBlanc, 134. ������������������������������ . “The Kreutzer Sonata,” 152.

35. Ibid., 181.

30

and ice cream.36 Prior to this fateful carriage ride, Anna registers Vronsky’s disgust at “the sound her lips made” as she drinks her coffee, implying a disgust for the appetite she has indulged and implicated him in.37 Tolstoy recreates this scene in “The Kreutzer Sonata,” when Pozdnyshev conveys his loathing for his wife. He describes her “lifting a spoon to her mouth, smacking her lips and drawing in some liquid,” which he finds to be “the worst possible actions.”38 To Pozdnyshev, these are in fact the worst possible actions, evocative as they are of female seduction. Female appetites, stimulated by sweets in “The Kreutzer Sonata” and Anna Karenina, differ from the violent, masculine hunger on display in these same works. Rather than appetites for flesh, women have appetites for practicing seduction.

Not unlike Vronsky and her brother, Anna lives to satisfy her animal urges. As a consequence, her life is eventually emptied of its meaning and its possibilities for happiness. She employs a gastronomic metaphor to conceptualize this emptiness, acknowledging, during her final carriage ride through Moscow, that while she may no longer know who she is, she does know her “appetites.”39 In her own feminized take on her brother and Levin’s discussion on food and sex, she philosophizes about the nature of human desire, employing a sugary metaphor for her sexual improprieties.

‘I know my appetites, as the French say. Those two want that dirty ice cream. That they know for certain,’ she thought, looking at two boys who had stopped an ice-cream man, who was taking the barrel down from his head and wiping his sweaty face with the end of a towel. ‘We all want something sweet, tasty. If not candy, then dirty ice cream. And Kitty’s the same: if not Vronsky, then Levin. And she envies me. And hates me.

We all hate each other. I Kitty, Kitty me. That’s the truth.40

Significantly, as LeBlanc notes, Anna only begins to employ food imagery after she has acted on her desires, at which point she associates sexual desire with sweet things, like ice cream and candy.41 Like her brother, Anna 36. Anna Karenina, 757, 760.

37. Ibid., 748.

38. “The Kreutzer Sonata,” 166.

39. Anna Karenina, 760.

40. Ibid., 760.

41. Leblanc, 121.

identifies human happiness with a purely physical appetite for food and sex. But this happiness fades quickly. In Anna’s words, “the zest is gone.”42 While her “zest” may have faded, the effects of her seduction linger. Vronsky suffers from a vicious toothache at the novel’s end, which can be read as the result of him indulging the “sweet tooth” he shares with Stiva, who articulates a connection between sweets and seductive women in a conversation with his culinary foil, Levin.

[Stiva] ����������������������������� ‘Here’s what. Suppose you’re married, you love your wife, but you become infatuated with another woman ...’

[Levin] ‘Excuse ���������������������������� me, but I decidedly do not understand how I ... just as I don’t understand how I could pass by a bakery, as full as I am now, and steal a sweet roll.’

Stepan Arkadyich’s eyes shone more than usual. ‘Why not? Sometimes a sweet roll is so fragrant that you can’t help yourself.’43 This exchange not only shows the way that women in Anna Karenina, like sweet rolls, operate as objects of seduction that activate a man’s appetite, but it also highlights the gap that Tolstoy perceived between hunger (a person’s real needs) and appetite (a person’s desires). Levin cannot conceive of why he would be unfaithful to a wife because he is satiated and has no appetite (“full as I am now”), whereas Stiva yearns for more than he can fit on his plate, unable to help himself when a sweet woman tempts him because he does not ‘eat’ according to hunger, but according to appetite.

In Anna Karenina and “The Kreutzer Sonata,” culinary indulgences operate through a gendered binary, where meats are a man’s domain and sweets are the passive, feminine vice, stimulating a woman’s seductiveness and rendering them more tempting to men.

The power to seduce, these works suggest, is part of a woman’s genetic makeup. “A woman is happy and attains all that she can desire,” Pozdnyshev asserts in “The Kreutzer Sonata,” when she bewitches a man.44 He adds that “the chief aim of a woman is to be able to bewitch him.”45 Pozdnyshev employs the same verb here that Kitty had used 42. Anna Karenina, 695.

43. Ibid., 40.

44. “The Kreutzer Sonata,” 160.

45. Ibid.

to describe Anna’s effect upon her husband, underscoring the similarities between Pozdnyshev’s wife and Anna.46 Indeed, Anna confirms Pozdnyshev’s thesis. “If I were an immoral woman, I could make [Kitty’s] husband fall in love with me—if I wanted to,” she says. “And I did want to.”47 Women, in Anna Karenina and “The Kreutzer Sonata,” share in Anna’s desire. If we read Pozdnyshev’s unnamed wife as an archetype, this claim can be applied to womankind as a whole.

Tolstoy’s preoccupation with food and sensuality underscores the struggle between flesh and spirit that animates his prose. In both “The Kreutzer Sonata” and Anna Karenina, meat symbolizes the myriad erotic temptations that men must eschew to attain spiritual fulfillment. The joys of meat, like women and other sensual pleasures, are no substitute for the difficult-to-achieve satisfactions that await in heaven. Steeped in sugar, in Anna Karenina and “The Kreutzer Sonata” women provoke and are the source of man’s downfall, even if a man is predisposed to a woman’s threat because of his diet. Women endeavor to bewitch and wield power over men, which is ultimately more dangerous than the male desire to have sex, because of its deliberate devilishness. According to Tolstoy, it is better to be a swine or an ox than a saccharine devil. The women in Anna Karenina and “The Kreutzer Sonata” lead men to misstep on the road toward salvation, rather than toward the crucial “first step.” They thereby commit the double sins of adultery and spiritual murder, leading men to the metaphorical butcher and condemning themselves in the process.

Bibliography: Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina: A Novel in Eight Parts. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. London: ������� Penguin Classics, 2013.

Tolstoy, Leo. ������������������������������ “����������������������������� An Afterword to The Kreutzer Sonata.��” Tolstoy���������������� ’s Short Fiction. Edited ������� and translated by Michael R. Katz. New York: Norton, 2008.

Tolstoy, Leo. “The Kreutzer Sonata.” Tolstoy’s Short Fiction. Edited and translated by Michael R. Katz. New York: Norton, 2008.

46. Anna Karenina, 640.

47. Ibid., 340.

31

Tolstoy, Leo. “The First Step.” In The Lion and The Honeycomb: The Religious Writings of Tolstoy, edited by A.N. Wilson. Translated by Robert Chandler. San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1987: 96106.

LeBlanc, Ronald. ������������������������� “Eating as Pleasure: Tolstoy and Voluptuousness.” In Slavic Sins of the Flesh: Food, Sex, and Carnal Appetite in Nineteenth-Century Russian Fiction. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009. Project MUSE: 98-157.

32

33

Introduction to Short Stories Professor Lyudmila Parts, PhD.

A

nton Chekhov once wrote in a letter to a friend: “All I have written will be forgotten in 5-10 years, but the paths I laid are safe and sound - this is my only achievement.” He was wrong on the first count – nothing he wrote has been forgotten, and absolutely right on the second. The paths Chekhov opened for the short story have determined the development of the genre throughout the 20th century. Writers routinely cite Chekhov as an influence and welcome critical remarks on “the Chekhovian” in their texts. To be called, as Raymond Carver and Alice Munroe have been, “our Chekhov,” is to achieve ultimate success as a writer. “I am, after all, one of perhaps ten American writers who are known as the American Chekhov,” says John Cheever, and hastens to diffuse the presumption of his statement with a joke. One does not call oneself a Chekhov in earnest -- one does not call oneself a genius.

But it is almost obligatory to talk about one’s debt to Chekhov, one’s admiration and deep personal connection, as Hollis Summers did: “I know him best through his letters. They were written to me.” This sense of personal affinity, impossible for instance with Dostoevsky or his characters, is based in almost

equal measure on Chekhov’s biography and personality, and on his revolutionary innovation in method.

The course Chekhov and 20th c. Short Story was conceived with this premise in mind: that the modern short story is all – to a great extent – Chekhovian. We investigated the aspects of Chekhov’s text that transformed the very nature of the genre: what constitutes an event in literature, and which themes and kinds of characters belong in a short story. In addition to Chekhov’s stories we read a great many short stories by 20th c. Russian, Canadian, American, and British writers, including Ivan Bunin, Katherine Mansfield, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, William Boyd, and Alice Munro. It became clear to me that the students in this class had become so well versed in the art of the short story that the logical next step was to ask them to write one. And they did! Five of the stories are included here together with the analysis by the authors (something you do not usually get in a short story collection). These stories are all absolutely different and absolutely wonderful, and, like all great contemporary short stories – to a great extent – Chekhovian.

35

The Reunion

T

Marie-Agnès Claverie

he heat wave of July 11th stifled sound and movement - no one was outside, nor did it seem like anyone was inside.

On the sixth floor of the Stanbee’s apartment complex, Mel’s own room buzzed with the sound of mosquitoes entering and exiting her window. The sunlight clashed with the orange light of her fridge. Since early morning, she had left the fridge door open by perching a watermelon on top of a dictionary and phonebook. The humming of the fridge began to pitch a higher note of frustration.

Mel sat on the floor, in the middle of her bare room, mediating her current dilemma.

It seemed, to her, like an awful date to hold a reunion lunch. There seemed a terrible motive in wanting to see all the girls, to rehash nostalgia as an attempt to pass time, and to discuss current accomplishments and failures for the allotted time of an hour. What would it accomplish, anyway, seeing these women whom she spoke seldom with online and less in real life? And…

She opened her eyes to observe the divided stacks of bills in front of her. She recited the purpose of each stack, from left, middle, right before closing her eyes again.

Having lunch at Baroney’s seemed a little ludicrous. Mel counted the names of other restaurants they could go to. The banging on her own door marked seven other possibilities.

“Melissa, dear, why? Why sit on the floor, when you have a perfectly good table, a perfectly good chair, why?”

Madame O, as she liked to be called, waddled into the room, white fat grocery bags swinging from her arms. A divorcée, she had moved into Stanbee’s about a month after Mel. One glance at her neighbour and the sudden tut that escaped the Madame’s mouth marked the beginning of their relationship. It turned out that Madame O had six children, all boys. A lot of unresolved energy went into her attention of the twenty-six years old, and Mel took it silently. It seemed rude to let all of her energy go to waste. And, it felt nice.

Her coddling seemed genuine and heartfelt.

Madame O threw down her bags at the feet of the table and sat in the one chair.

36

“Come and look at this, Melissa, looked at these pretty pictures my grandkids drew for me. They’re so cute, so innocent. Reminds me of my own children, when they were young.

Don’t you,” Madame O sighed, “don’t you wish you could just freeze time?”

Melissa stood up and approached the table. Madame O had arranged the pictures in a flurry, behind the glass vase of dried sunflowers. She leaned in to peer over the crayon scribbles. Red, yellow, and orange lines seem to explode beyond the means of the white page.

“But then, that would mean I would be stuck with that nonsense bag of dicks, and” her bracelets jingled as she searched her pockets. Where are they, Madame O muttered under her breath, where are they?

“Screw ‘em,” she hissed out, exhaling smoke. She stared at the small flame of her lighter for some time before inhaling and throwing the lighter on the table. “The only good thing about going back would be my bangin’ body.”

“Y’know, I was babysitting for Eddy last night, and, the idiot-the idiot! I don’t wanna say I told you so, but - didn’t I tell him not to marry her? I told him, didn’t I?” Madame O’s chortling made Mel smile. It was vindictive and snarky, but it always signalled her resignation. “Moms always know best, y’know.

Maybe he takes after me, huh? Marrying for love and not comfort. At least he’ll have the memories...I sure fucking do.”

Both women stayed still, contemplating their own thoughts. Mel nudged out one of the drawings, making out the traces of four faces, a family.

Madame O stood up, flicking her cigarette into the vase. “Sheesh, Melissa, quit it with this heat.” She walked over to the kitchen, closing the refrigerator door. The watermelon made the lightest thud in the background of rattling bracelets. Madame O then bustled to the faucet, putting a stop to the slow dripping of water. Then, to the window, where she snarled at the sun as she closed the window and pulled the curtains in a frisk fashion. She returned to the table and picked up her grocery bags. Both women looked at

each other in the dark.

“Come with me, Mel, it’ll be cooler at my place.”

Melissa turned back and picked up her money from the floor. Carefully, she counted the bills before folding them up and storing the money in her back pocket.

She had, it turned out, summoned up her strength and made up her mind.

The Reunion: Analysis This narrative was written inspired by Chekhov’s use of kazalos (it seemed) and okazalos (it turned out that). This formal construction, embedded within Chekhov’s narratives, allows for the story of discovery to take place. Vladimir Kataev describes the story of discovery as a narrative “about a shift in someone’s consciousness, about a discovery that destroys a previously held, superficial conception of life.” Kataev argues that this epistemological approach reveals how the author is interested in the conception of the phenomena of knowledge and self-conception. By combining kazalos and okazalos within a story of discovery, I hoped to create a short story that echoes Chekhov’s voice through my protagonist’s own dilemma.

The verb ‘to seem’ allows readers to be clued into the superfluous construct of Mel’s dilemma. The stifling atmosphere overtakes her physical presence as she refutes further within her mind, debating whether or not to meet old school friends at an expensive restaurant that she cannot afford. Noise (ex. with the mosquitoes, the humming of the fridge, the banging of the door, Madame O’s talk, her jingling bracelets, etc.), the heat, and colour (ex. the sunlight, the orange light of the fridge, the dried sunflowers) were used to create an audio and visual companion to cement the protagonist’s muted absence and to create “the physical sensation of being surrounded by forces that are hostile to the natural aspirations of human beings.”

Madame O’s buoyant personality allows readers to witness Mel’s interaction with another character, whose presence helps to contrast their different personalities. This confrontation, I hope, portrayed a “mutual misunderstanding [where] failure to under ������������������� . Vladimir Kataev, If We Could Only Know! An Interpretation of Chekhov (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 12. �������� . Ibid., 14. �������� . Ibid., 151.

stand the other person comes about because each person is absorbed with his own ‘problem,’ his own ‘truth,’ or his own ‘false conception.’” A misleading form of communication takes place between the two women, though the theme of nostalgia and time resonate within them both. Kataev points to the fact that no individual knows the real truth.

The truth about friendship and relationships are interpreted in two different ways, as seen through the perceptions of Mel and Madame O. Mel struggles to find the motivation to return to see people who seem stuck in the past. The financial component appears another incentive not to go, but the appearance of Madame O and her grandchildren’s drawings galvanizes her to rethink her dilemma. I thought it would be appropriate for Mel to see something as pure and innocent as children capturing important people on paper to help her realize that money cannot quantify nor equate memories and friendships. Yet, money does relay an inescapable reality that is concrete and, in Mel’s case, pressing. It’s a trifling scene, but the effect, I find, showcases the nuanced way in which some individuals formulate and experience their life. Though Madame O may be preaching a different life philosophy, Mel draws on some of her thoughts and orients them to her reality.

In conclusion, I hoped to establish Chekhov’s ambiguous tone with Mel’s final actions. I used okazalos (“it turned out”) as the concluding sentence of the narrative.

This shift does not explicitly state what her future actions entail. Mel has made a revelation, but in “a conditional sense, not in the way that Tolstoy or Turgenev used them.”

Whether or not Mel has made a decision to meet up with her friends remain a mystery, one that the reader may decide for him/her/ their self.

Bibliography: Kataev, Vladimir. If We Could Only Know! An Interpretation of Chekhov. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002.

���������� . Kataev, If We Could Only Know!, 154. �������� . Ibid., 151. �������� . Ibid., 19.

37

The Undergraduate

I

Adam Eldred

t was half past ten in the evening.

Jackson Yales, who had the face of a serial killer, flew out of the library, and twirling the top of his black hair in his fingers, began the long walk home. It was lightly snowing. He was starving.

His friends had gotten home hours ago.

Liam was sitting low to the ground on a car seat they found in the street, flipping through a book of poetry. Michele was lying on the couch, computer on her chest. She had a double chin from looking down at it. Her feet had shoes on them, crossed on top of a pillow. Duncan was asleep in his room. The door opened and Jackson, framed by falling snow and the streetlight, looked crazed.

“There’s the buddy!” cried Liam in the ironic habit they had of talking like their parents. He looked up from his book, saw Jackson, wide-eyed, covered with snow, and burst out laughing.

Jackson came into the living room and revealed himself to be sensitively lost in thought, not plotting murder. Still, when Michele looked up and saw him staring at the floor, playing with his hair, not acknowledging any of them, she also burst out laughing.

He looked up at her, laughed very briefly, and returned to his thoughts.

“Well. . . It’s been a day at the library for me, kids!” He said, snapping out of it somewhat.

He slammed into his room and started rustling, probably throwing around the clothes that covered his floor, looking for something with urgency.

“He’s on one,” Michele said. It was typical for one of them to be “on one”, meaning moved, preoccupied, intellectually or artistically energized.

He came out with a duffel bag in one hand and an armful of dirty clothes in the other. He sat on the edge of the couch and started cramming the clothes into the bag.

Michele made room for him. He didn’t notice. He had left the light on in his room, and the door open.

“We’re so glad you’re here!” Michele said, as if he were her five-year-old who had just joined the company of adults after a nap.

38

“I was on the third floor of McLennan for like six hours today,” he said. “I’m going to Nicaragua.”

Jackson jumped up and retrieved his computer from his room. He sat back down.

“What did you learn?” Liam said. He hadn’t spoken much all day, so words felt strange coming up his throat. They sounded sarcastic.

Jackson shot up, grinning. “What did you learn! What have you been doing all day!” He tore the book from Liam’s hands, who looked up at him with a little smile. “You’ve just been laying around here? What! What is this!” He flipped through the book and tossed it back to Liam. “And you!” He turned to berate Michele.

“Don’t be mean! Don’t be mean!” She said laughing.

He grabbed her computer. “What are you––hacking! Flirting!” He threw it back.

“Get up! Literally do anything!”

“Oh, he’s hungry!” Liam said.

“Have you had anything to eat, kiddo?”

Michele said.

“No,” Jackson said, as if this were the correct way to live. He sat at the edge of the couch, twirling his hair––not as vigorously as before. His hand fell from his hair to his computer, as if it were thinking about opening it, but it soon came back to its twirling.

Then Jackson snapped and opened his computer to a screen of innumerable windows.

Michele was back doing whatever it was she was doing online. Liam was sort of looking around, waiting for the outburst to be over before he could return his half-attention to his book.

It began. “Okay. Yeah––this is like––it’s like biodiversity offsets,” Jackson looked at Liam over the computer, clapping his hands.

“Like Canadian corporations that literally think of indigenous populations like piles of feathers and arrows… Read it.” He passed his computer over to Liam with one hand.

Liam put a dainty finger to the mouse pad. “Wait where do you want me to read?”

“The part that I’ve highlighted. In blue,” Jackson said.

Liam squinted.

“Read it out loud,” Jackson said.

Jackson got up and got a half-full orange Vitamin Water from the fridge. Michele reclined again and watched Liam read: “Also within the framework of the EIA, extractive industries attempting to compensate for ecological damages have created biodiversity offsets.”

Liam looked to Jackson who was chugging the Vitamin Water in huge gulps, nodding wide-eyed.

“While these conservation measures intend to achieve a net gain of ecosystem function; they fail to account for any indigenous cultural loss...”

“Like literally don’t give Judy Jack Shit about the natives.” Jackson said loudly. “…The no-net-loss objective biodiversity offsets assume reduces ecosystems’ intricate amalgamation of special evolutionary, historical, social, and moral contexts to a singular techno-scientific one.”

“Literally insane. Give it back,” Jackson said. Liam handed the computer to him.

Jackson sat down again. They all stared around in silence for a minute. Most likely, Liam and Michele didn’t know what to say.

Liam read from his book, “A man came out of the dead land and just stood and shook with desire, pools of time in his hand, stirring all he had.” It was unclear whether or not this passage was randomly chosen.

Jackson sank back into the couch, finally comfortable. He slammed the computer shut, and closed his eyes.

“You’re going to Nicaragua,” Liam said.

Jackson opened his eyes. “Yeah…I have to go to Tallulah’s tonight. I just needed to come home and get my stuff. I’ll see you both tomorrow. “ “Bye,” said Liam and Michele.

Jackson shot up and put on his coat that fell down to his knees. He always said it was like a tank, that it could take him anywhere.

He walked into the street toting his duffel bag. Snow was already getting into his black hair before he closed the door behind him.

The Undergraduate: Analysis The Chekhovian theme I was trying to play off of was an awareness of the passing of time, and the question of whether one is living one’s life correctly––getting all they can out of it while still doing good. Jackson comes out of the library invigorated by the sensation that he has found something to give himself to. The detail of his face looking

like that of a serial killer is intended to encapsulate this sense of directness and almost passionate perusal, verging on violence, and also to initiate a disturbance in the reader––a sense that something is sinister in being so singularly directed, even for an evening. I think this creates an interesting contradiction to his humanitarian interested in the mines of Latin America.

When Jackson enters the living room, Michele is laying on the couch, feet crossed and head on her chest. What I think is the impression of this detail is that she seems to be entirely comfortable in her own experience.

Liam is “flipping” through a book of poems.

He is comfortably on the surface of immensity, flipping from one poem to the next, enjoying them on the surface as objects, not caring to excavate them. I think all this exists in the word “flipping”. It is unclear whether or not Liam has formed his own framework for living that is so full-proof he is unaffected by the article on Canadian mining, or if he is comfortable in the perpetual confusion of trying to find a direction for one’s life and wants to complicate Jackson’s suddenly simplistic and singularly-driven energy. Either way, the character functions to disrupt the clarity Jackson has found. This is essentially Chekhovian––all that is certain about some detail or character is that they serve to disrupt clarity or to complicate one’s attempt at living. Liam’s flipping through a book of poetry, landing on a passage about time, death and desire, complicates the precision of Jackson’s blue highlighted passages of academia.

What principally revealed itself to me about Chekhov’s stories, as I was writing mine, is that in short fiction with this sort of pacing, each word has a certain weight and this gives inadequacy to the adjective. The second to last sentence originally read, “Defeated, he walked into the street”. My original intent was for the story to end in an emotional state that inferred his disappointment.

Reading the story over, however, I realized the adjective was inadequate. Any adjective that attempted to describe Jackson’s feelings at the end of the story would be inappropriate. If I had consistently used this type of emotional adjective throughout the story, to provide the reader with broad identifiable shapes, mapping out various emotional plots, I could have used the word “disappointed” in the last sentence work. As it is, however, as void of adjectives as possible in an attempt to mirror Chekhov, the actions and details 39

function autonomously to create their own impressions, and for a writer to manipulate them by labeling them with adjectives is a misstep. Chekhov’s moments are so complex because he allows details and actions to associate freely, as actual details and actions do, to form their own impression.

My experience with the Chekhovian event is that, though the action may be undetectable, and the characters and the reader may be unchanged, some sort of movement is still happening and the reader is given the opportunity to lend it his or her full attention. In Chekhov, the characters move on, and the reader is unknown to them; they wake up tomorrow not knowing that yesterday was literary. The characters walk out of frame, and the reader closes the book (having opened it only fifteen minutes earlier) and looks up. Nothing is different––except the lingering pleasure of having savoured some moment of alternate reality for all its worth.

This can become a habit, and––back in the real world in which he or she is constantly moving toward death––the reader can’t help but notice the humane charm of an arrogant Political Science student. Chekhov’s writing itself seems to be an answer to his characters’ question ‘how do I live my life?’, and my attempt to imitate Chekhov ended up serving as an answer to Jackson’s confusion.

40

The Sandwich

I

Emma Makin

t was a muggy summer Tuesday. Tomato sandwich in hand, Cathy strolled into work at her usual hour, just in time for the onslaught of morning customers. She liked working at the café. She liked the routine, liked the caffeine, and most of all liked the regular cast of characters who would walk through the revolving door like clockwork. There was Big Business Ben, who always spoke on the phone while he ordered his double espresso, screaming that someone at his office was being intransigent. “Intransigent” was his favourite word. There was Mr. Moustache, the man with the perpetual cold who would sniffle through his vanilla latte order. He always came into the café at 2:16pm.

There was Harry and Sally, the couple who broke up once a month in the middle of the café so as not to make a public scene. To top it all off, there was Proust, the struggling screenwriter who spent hours in the corner booth working on his “masterpiece”. He only ever ordered water.

Cathy felt as though she knew every one of these regular customers; she enjoyed gradually incorporating them into her daily itinerary. If you were to ask her coworkers, they would tell you that this is something much easier said than done. Cathy liked to do things a certain way, you see. She had a tried and true method for preparing every order, knowing the exact ratio of sugar and milk for any given beverage. She insisted upon counting change out loud for the customer so as to maintain a certain level of transparency. She even had a routine on her lunch break. Cathy would eat her tomato sandwich on the bench behind the café, finish the Sudoku that she had started the night before, and keep tabs on what films were being screened at the Majestic Theatre across the street. That week they were showing “Groundhog Day”.

Something peculiar happened on that muggy summer Tuesday, however. Mr. Moustache came in 2:16pm as usual, sniffled his way through his order, as usual, and waited for his drink, as usual. Cathy meticulously counted out his change, prepared his drink, and left it on the counter where she always put it, between the cactus and geranium. As

she was writing down the next customer’s order, she heard a gruff voice saying, “Excuse me, ma’am, but this isn’t what I ordered”. It was Mr. Moustache.

“Pardon?” Cathy asked, perplexed.

“I ordered tea. This is a latte”, he grumbled, wiping his nose with a monogrammed handkerchief.

Cathy felt her stomach drop. How had she gotten his order wrong? He had ordered a latte every week for as long as she could recall. How long must that have been? Five years? No, it couldn’t be that long. Cathy suddenly felt faint, and for a moment had difficulty breathing. She threw her apron on the counter, meekly told her coworker she was ill, and ran frantically out of the coffee shop with tears in her eyes. On her way through the revolving door she stumbled into Big Business Ben, accidentally knocking his phone out of his hand.

“Intransigent!” he screamed.

“What about my latte?” Mr. Moustache exclaimed, exasperated.

Cathy was back at the coffee shop one week later, with a slight tan and a nose ring.

None of the customers noticed the change (she made their coffee as per usual), but her coworkers remarked that she seemed like an entirely new person. When it was time for her lunch break, Cathy pulled a ham sandwich out of her bag.

The Sandwich: Analysis My intent while writing this story was to incorporate elements that Chekhov routinely employed throughout his works, from his themes, to his details, to the nature of his events and characters. For one, the predominant themes of my story are social types and disillusionment. Much like Chekhov’s treatment of doctors, merchants, and peasants, my story also deals with the expectations people have of certain modern social types, particularly the class of people who regularly frequent coffee shops. Indeed, one of Cathy’s chief enjoyments is to make snap judgments on her clientele based on their coffee order, behaviour, and presumed occupation. Subsequently, she does not even take the trouble 41

to learn any of their real names. Moreover, Cathy herself develops the Chekhovian theme of social types, as she functions as a contemporary response to his 19th century neurotics. The second major theme in my story, disillusionment, is also a recurring theme in Chekhov’s works. Whereas Cathy struggles to learn that her vision of the good life is actually deleterious, so too does Kovrin discover that his life’s work is mediocre in “The Black Monk”, Ragin realize that his perception of sanity is flawed in “Ward No. 6”, and Nikitin become conscious of the fact that his marriage is banal in “The Teacher of Literature”.

Furthermore, the nature of the event in my story is also characteristic of Chekhov’s early works. Much like the trivial events that constitute the event in “Death of a Government Clerk” (a sneeze) or “In the Cart” (seeing a woman on a train), Cathy in my story has an epiphany about the way she lives in response to something so minute as mixing up a coffee order. After her mistake, she begins to grasp the fact that her routines prevent her from living in the moment, and that her life is mundane. As such, the event in my story corresponds to the Chekhovian technique of “maximizing the minimum.” Nevertheless, it is worth noting that after the event, Cathy does not make any major changes beyond taking a vacation, piercing her nose, and eating a different type of sandwich. Though she very well may have adopted a more spontaneous outlook on life, Cathy still works at the same café and is likely to return to her old habits. I attempted to highlight this ambiguous future by incorporating Chekhov’s seemingly favourite phrase, “she seemed like an entirely new person”. Ultimately, this approach is Chekhovian as it creates the impression that an event did not even occur, something Chudakov describes as redressing the balance within the story.

Just as my choice of event and themes are emblematic of Chekhovian short stories, so too are the details I included. Several of . Cathy �������������������������������������� Popkin, The Pragmatics of Insig-

nificance (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1993), 27. . Alexander Chudakov, “Randomness: Chekhov’s Incidental Detail” in Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories, ed. by Cathy Popkin (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), 559.

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Chekhov’s stories include references to theatrical productions that carry significant symbolic meaning. For example, in “The Lady with the Little Dog”, the production playing at the theatre where Gurov and Anna reunite is “The Geisha”, an operetta whose plot mirrors their own affair and functions to extend the liminal space of their relationship outside of Yalta. Similarly, in “The Sweetheart”, Olenka and her first husband put on productions of “Little Faust” and “Orpheus in the Underworld.” This detail reflects the notion that Olenka is a frightening character, sucking the life out of men and dragging them into hell much like Faust and Orpheus. In my story, I likewise included a detail relating to theatrical productions by referencing the Bill Murray film “Groundhog Day”. The movie centers on a man who relives the same day over and over again, which is significant as that is precisely the way Cathy lives, perpetually repeating the same routine. To emphasize the notion that Cathy’s life is stuck as a result of her compulsions, I also included the detail of the revolving door as the entrance to the coffee shop. Indeed, just as a revolving door goes around in circles, so too does Cathy not move forward with her life as she sees the same people every day, eats the same sandwich every day, and makes the same drinks every day.

Finally, my choice of character was also an attempt to reflect Chekhovian techniques.

In the view of Charles E. May, what is so distinct about Chekhov’s stories is the fact that he tends to express the complex inner state of his characters solely through the depiction of concrete realities. Consequently, what the reader learns about the character of Cathy in my story is entirely external. I only briefly delve into Cathy’s mindset once she mistakes Mr. Moustache’s order, generally relying on her tangible actions to illuminate her mental state before and after the event. Notably, the only indications that Cathy has undergone a change of heart after she comes back to work are alterations in her appearance and eating habits. In short, in my story “The Sand . Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories, ed. by

Cathy Popkin (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), 423. . Ibid., ����������� 405. . Charles ������������������������ E. May, editor, The New Short Story Theories (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994), 202.

wich”, I endeavoured to implement various elements that recur in Chekhov’s stories such as the themes of social types and disillusionment, a trivial event with large consequences, significant details related to theatrical productions, and the depiction of characters in a minimalist and external manner. Despite the fact that my story pales in comparison to his very worst work, it now numbers among the infinite stories that have been and will continue to be inspired by the genius of Anton Chekhov.

Bibliography: Chekhov, Anton. Selected Stories. Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Cathy Popkin. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.

Chudakov, Alexander “Randomness: Chekhov’s Incidental Detail” in Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories. Norton Critical Edition.

Edited by Cathy Popkin. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.

May, Charles E. editor, The New Short Story Theories. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994.

Popkin, Cathy. The Pragmatics of Insignificance.

Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1993.

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Invitation to the Table

F

Quinta Seon

ather was out back cutting the overgrown lawn. Mother was following after the staff, as they prepared for dinner. She wore her heavily-heeled boots under her dress for the evening, that banged like a gavel in a crowded court. Lena brooded by the window of her bedroom, staring down at the lawn and thinking of how her parents looked so smug. The guests would soon be arriving to their fresh-looking lawn and to the cook’s grilled shrimp with truffle oil that smelled up to Lena’s bedroom. She watched her father wipe the grass from his blade onto the backs of his hands. Lighter clunks downstairs signaled the arrival of the first awaited.

A quick peek over the edge of the stair railing confirmed that she had indeed heard her uncle’s imposing laugh and the patter of his dreadful children’s feet. She dared not to step a toe onto the creaky wooden stairs. When she was back in her room, she tried to tress her hair, but soon realized she would have to descend the stairs after all to have someone help. The noise of the stairs and her galoshes gave her away instantly, and her mother hammered into the foyer.

“Lena, no,” she said, wide-eyed.

Lena knew to go back up stairs immediately but not quite why. Soon, someone breezed through her room, laid out and outfit, and gave her a stern look before continuing on with their housework. She removed her galoshes and put on the starchy dress, with a little pink cross on its collar. By time she had changed out of her outfits, downstairs was much louder— someone was playing loud music over the hub-bub of dinner plates. The stairs yawned and her shoes dragged against the floor as she made her way to her empty plate in the crowded room. Her precocious uncle made jumbled pronunciations, quickly followed by the stern-sounding chuckles from the men at the table. She watched the glean of her pristine, gold-rimmed china, as the shadows of the evening and candle light deepened around her.

It was only when she heard mentions of education and dull murmurs from the women that she had hardly noticed sitting around her, that she started to hear the conversation. The 44

words resonated; she could hear the stiffening of the ladies starched dresses, perking up to attention. The men him-ed and haw-ed, as her uncle’s voice presided over them.

“But,” her uncle posited with raised eyebrows and wine glass, “women’s education would educate women.”

A wail emanated from the nurse’s quarters. Between their hims and haws, the men barely heard Lena when she responded yes.

Her uncle’s eyes locked onto her for a moment, and then he laughed. Her parents exchanged a glance, but her uncle continued, saying the words it seemed like her parents would never say. Motioning to staff with snaps like fire crackers, her uncle had a few shrimp dropped onto her plate, and later she was served tea from the samovar. Her uncle thought it befitting of any young lady with the hopes of marrying an educated man to attend lessons— although considerations must be taken for her delicate age— short lessons, so as not to exhaust the young lady— and an excellent teacher, of course— of decent stature— a private tutor...

Just the evening before, she had sat on the rug of the salon, as mother read, and father sat at a desk scratching furiously into his journals. Lena knew her alphabet and how to read a few words, but the dancing cursive that stained her father’s papers intrigued her.

Lena’s mother was teaching her to read slowly when the staff properly completed their tasks and time permitted. They did not usually live at their dacha for this long and with so many staff, and father usually was not so quiet and focused on his journals. Lena had taken many walks of the overgrown yard and watched the summer colors deepen into fall from her favorite vantage up in the apple trees. Her father would be hiding away in his office or out minding the lawn, and her mother would be following the staff as they hurried from task to task, trying to complete the things that mother would sometimes do herself at home. That night she stood and ran her fingers along the spines of heavy novels near papa’s desk. She was mildly satisfied that she could make a tapping noise without ever lifting her finger off the books. For a while

she listened to this and the intermittent taps upon glass of her father’s stylo. Thinking of how in the city she would often meet her friends coming home with their satchels and dirty blue fingers, she stuck out her own onto the edges of her father’s damp papers. Both her parents became cross with her— she had dirtied her fingers and smudged the papers.

They grew even angrier when she wailed that she would like to go home—and to school with her friends! She hardly listened to her parents’ stern words as they peeked out from behind their books and journals. All she knew is that they were saying no— out of complete spite!

After dinner it was settled that her uncle would become her tutor. Her parents spluttered over their tea, as he regaled the guests with the importance of educating the young female mind. Women, you see, could be just as intelligent as men if they applied themselves.

Lena picked at her bitter tasting shrimp as the party wound down. At the end of the night, her uncle leaned on the shoulders of his driver, and his children leaned on the hip of their nursemaid as they left through the foyer.

Despite it being much past her normal bedtime, Lena pounded up the stairs to her room with vigor. After she crumpled her dress onto the floor, she jumped up into bed and tucked herself in up to her chin. She lay eyes open as the house grew gradually darker— the crack under her door lost its golden glow and the true dark silence of the night set in. After a while she started to see those dull colored red spots that often showed when the eye wearied from the day. She imagined forms in their vague shapes— an inkwell, a book, a stylo— so many shapes that she hardly noticed falling asleep.

In fall her lessons began on a Thursday afternoon. Uncle would stand near the jet black chalkboard installed in the nursery and deliver a speech, which would contain all the necessary learning for the day, and he would return once again that week and twice again the next week... Often he would pause his monologue for emphasis and would say things such as: “To write a letter, one must first learn to write!”

“Sums are the summing of two or more numbers!”

“Learning to sew will help you mend!

Invitation to the Table: Analysis One of Chekhov’s stories, Grisha, portrays the wonder, innocence, and intelligence of a child. It catalogs Grisha’s first ever day outside, after which he excitedly comes home, feverish and babbling to his mother, who quiets him with a spoon of castor oil.

The ending is unexpected and humorous because of the contrasting perspectives of his mother/Grisha’s and their subsequent misunderstanding. It is after this story that I modelled Invitation to the Table. I describe details like mother’s heels, the creaking of the stairs, and Lena’s silence, which may initially seem trivial, to describe Lena’s unique perspective as a child. Similarly, I employ an “Ippolit Ippolitich”-like character trope, Lena’s uncle, to create a contrasting “adult perspective”. When Lena’s uncle decides that he will begin to tutor her, she may expect a dramatic change to her boring life. Her boredom after she begins her lessons, as she is plagued by her uncle’s banal pronunciations, places her in a similar situation to the babe given castor oil. In this essay, I will analyze how silence, sound imagery, and character tropes develop a Chekovian story in event and theme.

To emulate Grisha and create a “bubble” of wonder around Lena’s perspective as a child, I used sound imagery and silence. A few instances, like the contrasting sounds of her mother’s heels/ Lena’s galoshes and the salon scene, illustrate this well. Lena notices her mother’s heels banging against the floor and drawing attention to her, whereas Lena describes her own shoes as “...giving her away (to the people in the house) ...”. Lena’s interactions with her mother create a divide between perspective of woman and child—commanding attention versus disappearing into the background. For the scene in the salon, everything is silent except for Lena tapping her fingers against the books and her father tapping his stylo against his inkwell. Father is a nondescript writer, who cuts the grass and generally is in his own “bubble”, writing. The concordant sounds here serve as a comparison of the two, child and adult, both existing in different detailed fantasies.

Lena’s silence helps to creates a unique sensory view of what she sees, knows, and what seems to be. In a story like Grisha, there is a lack of communication between child and carers because of his young age. I liked the way this created misunderstandings, and had the readers make their own assumptions 45

about the adults and what they were really like. As much as possible, I wanted Lena’s perspective to be like a “roving-camera” view that sees the world as plainly as possible— like Grisha’s fresh eyes. Her thoughts still bias the narration, “knowing” her parents are spiteful and smug, but she picks up on many details that the other characters probably would not (i.e. the sound of the stairs, the little pink cross, the blue fingers of the schoolboys).

Her silence helps create a child’s frame of mind: picking up on small details and drawing conclusions from them. For example, she notices the damp ink on her father’s journals, remembers the school boys, and then draws the conclusion that she will go to school as well Likewise when Lena speaks, saying “yes” (indirectly), it is very little to add to an adult’s conversation— besides what she “knows” she wants and needs.

I would argue that these elements together create a distinct perspective that sets the stage for a story of discovery. Kataev writes that in this kind of story, “... Its hero...[is] absorbed in everyday life, [and] is given some kind of [trifling] jolt...[whereupon] [l]ife appears in a new light” . Previously absorbed in the sights and sounds of childhood, Lena suddenly remembers about the boys’ inksoaked fingers (trivial event), and then realizes that there is a life outside of her bored, isolated world, where she could be educated.

This realization of division between what she thinks, she knows, and what is (to the reader), however, “...presents [her] with new problems” .

One of those new problems is her uncle. I created him to reflect a character trope, like the Ippolit Ippolitich from The Teacher of Literature, that Chekhov often uses in his stories. In The Teacher of Literature, Ippolit is a voice of reality for the main character, who is caught up in his thoughts of how his life should be . Both Ippolit and uncle function not only as a beacons of truth but also bearers of bad news. Before, Lena is unable to decipher how banal upper-middle class life is, but as she begins her lessons with uncle, not much changes. Lena’s discovery of the adult . Vladimir Kataev, If We Could Only Know! An Interpretation of Chekhov (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 12. . Ibid., ���������� 19. . Cathy Popkin, The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 289.

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world and education—although a discovery—will not likely change her boredom and dissatisfaction with banal middle-class life.

Lena’s seeming-but-mistaken problems develop a Chekovian non-event, which Cathy Popkin explains аs “minimizing of the maximum”. A story that “...build[s] toward a... significant event...[that] then turns out to be singularly non-eventful....” . Popkins in Chekhov: Reinventing Events uses Teacher of Literature to show how this conspires. Nikitin’s wedding, like Lena’s lessons, are events they foolhardily, desperately want. Once achieved, the readers hear only indirectly about them. Nikitin writes of his marriage in his diary. Lena, whose thoughts come out of the narration in the last paragraph, describes nothing of her first lesson but bemoans, “...[uncle] would return [for lessons] once again that week and twice again the next week...”. Although the reader has seen both Lena’s perspective and the inferred perspectives of the adults all along, Lena only now realizes there is little difference between them. She thought she wanted lessons once she realized she could further understand the world, and now she knows that reality. Whether it was what she really wanted or expected, she must live with the consequences, which is where the theme of the story emerges: without understanding the broader context of the world, it is difficult to know what one truly wants/needs.

Bibliography: Kataev, Vladimir. If We Could Only Know! An Interpretation of Chekhov. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002.

Popkin, Cathy. The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.

Popkin, Cathy. “Grisha”, “Teacher of Literature.” In Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories.

New York: W.W Norton & Company, 2014.

. Ibid., ���������� 33.

Pardon

T

Katharine Morrill

he birds, as always, were warbling prettily amongst each other in the professor’s front yard, obscured from view by the misshapen, ugly tree with tangled branches that Olya had come to associate with the rest of the affair surrounding the house and its inhabitant. Making her way up the sidewalk, she remembered entertaining a brief desire to cut the tree down and burn it, to silence the birds; the professor, after all, deserved it, did she not? Although the tree, evidently, stayed put, Olya remained furious and refused to forgive the professor for the deceit that had surrounded the production of her dissertation. Over a year had passed, yet she was wracked with guilt and had, on many occasions, composed the professor’s number only to abandon each attempt before the final digit. Indeed, Olya simply did not know what to say, whether to plead for forgiveness – she had produced a widely successful dissertation which had been lauded by the entire faculty and yet had still, apparently, disappointed her beloved advisor – or to part with the venomous indictment of the professor’s treatment of her she had meticulously prepared and subsequently kept to herself, a speech rehearsed and revised countless times, yet never delivered.

Olya had passed the house many times since her departure from the small college town. On this day, however, the professor happened to be outside in the driveway of her modestly charming brick home, an event which had not been foreseen. It seemed as if the professor had not changed one bit; every detail, including the navy wool jacket which Olya herself had even borrowed once, was exactly as it had appeared to her in the vestiges of her mind.

At once, Olya felt the sentiments she had tried in vain to repress rise to the surface. For over a year she had entertained a strong desire to speak her mind to the professor, and a long-awaited chance to do so had seemingly presented itself to her. Olya’s voice called out, her legs propelled her up the street, and her arms for some reason threw themselves around the professor; in turn, her own slight frame was encased in a familiar

embrace. Breaking away at last, she inhaled.

It was time.

“Why do you hate me so?” she wanted to ask. “Why on earth would you spend such a long time working with me and then change your mind, abandon me and my dissertation?

I have been so miserable, and it is entirely your fault. How dare you do such a thing, and to me of all people?” This was only a small portion of the many things to be expressed.

The professor had, you see, managed to cause Olya a great deal of unhappiness.

Words flowed, indeed; however, they were not the words Olya was desperate to say. Instead, facetious and formulaic strings of pleasantries floated, seemingly out of nowhere, between her perfectly lacquered lips, dangling in the air before rapidly fading into oblivion. Nothing of importance, of course, was spoken of. Neither party seemed to mind. The red lips lifted at the corners, assured the professor that things were splendid at the new university, that all was indeed well.

Meanwhile, Olya listened to the exchange quietly. She heard herself whisper goodbye, and then, bitterly disappointed, ducked her head and continued resolutely along the street, heels resonating loudly against the cold ground.

The following day at dinner, Olya held the thin stem of a wine glass between white fingers, tired eyes trained on the smooth surface of the liquid. She remembered that the professor had been smiling on the sidewalk, a smile familiar and at one time very dear to her. Suddenly, it became clear to Olya that she was no longer angry, nor did she wish to feel guilty about her work any longer. There would be other dissertations, of greater importance besides; other professors, perhaps even other wool jackets to borrow. Happiness finally settled over her, and in that moment the weight of the past began to lift from her shoulders. Mistakes had been made, yet an entire future lay ahead of Olya, filled with promise. What a smile it had been, how comforting, how bright!

Closing her eyes, Olya smiled back at the image of the professor wavering behind her eyelids, and felt that she had, at last, forgiven her.

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Pardon: Analysis The theme of communication, and the problems ensuing from failed attempts to express oneself to others, is central to Chekhov’s works. Indeed, according to Murdoch, a central element of Chekhovian drama (although Murdoch’s essay focuses on Chekhov’s plays, I propose that the notions he presents are central to the Chekhovian short story as well, and will make use of his work accordingly) is “the failure amongst educated people – and therefore at least superficially articulate people – to communicate in any real sense.” Stories such as “The Name-Day Party” (1888) rely heavily upon instances of failed communication to produce an effect. I will discuss my attempt to write a story which at least partially captures the essence of Chekhovian communication and its relation to the Chekhovian event, and will explore how my writing, particularly the manner in which the effect of the story relies on Olya’s shift in perception, was influenced by Chekhov’s epistemological perspective as discussed by Kataev, and by his use of detail.

Chekhov’s “The Name-Day Party” develops in the context of, and indeed culminates in, a spectacular failure of communication; intent on convincing her husband to share his secrets with her, Olga Mikhailovna instead accuses him outright of hating her “for being richer [than he]”, thereby hurting him deeply and accomplishing nothing in the way of encouraging him to confide in her. It is this sense of an inability to communicate properly using words, and the ensuing false nature of interactions between affected individuals, which I wished to capture and make the focal point of my story.

Referencing Murdoch’s aforementioned exploration of problems of communication in Chekhov’s works, my characters, as a professor and a university student, are precisely the sort of “at least superficially articulate people” common in Chekhov who should be able to express themselves competently, yet for whatever reason cannot. The student, . B. Murdoch, “Communication as a Dramatic Problem: Büchner, Chekhov, Hofmannsthal, and Wesker,” in Revue de Littérature comparée 45, no. 1 (2013): 52. . Anton P. Chekhov, “The Name-Day Party” in Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories (New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2014), 177. . Murdoch, “Communication as a Dramatic Problem,” 52.

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Olya, is demonstrated as being acutely aware of the emotional complexity of her situation – this is shown in the opening paragraph and in the moment before she begins to speak to the professor, as she briefly introduces the things she would like to say. However, just as many Chekhovian characters (Olga Mikhailovna, for example) demonstrate a consistent inability to communicate effectively, Olya’s conversation with the professor fails to accomplish any interpersonal development, and leaves her “bitterly disappointed”.

Whereas Chekhov’s characters “are by no means inarticulate,” communication still fails; this is the intended essence of the dynamic between my two characters.

Furthermore, the apparent pardoning of the professor at the end of the story is brought about by Olya’s recollection of the professor’s smile rather than verbal interaction between the two characters. I manipulated the narrative in such a manner, in part, as a response to Cathy Popkin’s discussion of the event in Chekhov. Popkin states that “[Chekhov’s events] are composed of incidents unlikely to be perceived as eventful – matters ostensibly too trivial to constitute a major disruption.” The ‘event’ in my story, the memory of the smile and the subsequent pardon, not only highlights an instance of failure to communicate verbally, but also intends to resonate with Popkin’s claim. It may furthermore be considered as belonging to the first category of events Popkin establishes: maximizing the minimum. Similar to the manner in which Chekhov’s Cherviakov “lies down on the couch and dies” after sneezing on a superior at the theatre, my Olya decides to pardon the professor and abandon a great deal of unhappiness due to a simple smile which may or may not, in fact, have held any meaning. Whereas the problems of communication are established during the conversation, the subsequent paragraphs offer the event of the recalled smile bringing about forgiveness, an alternative (and perhaps only temporary) resolution of sorts accomplished through non-verbal means.

Kataev identifies Chekhov’s perspective as epistemological in nature; he defines “the possibility of different conceptions…the na . Ibid., 46. . Cathy Popkin, The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 25. . Cathy Popkin, The Pragmatics of Insignificance, 28.

ture of illusion, delusion, and false opinion” as central to the author’s works. I alluded to this by focusing on Olya’s perception, employing terms discussed by Kataev such as “[n]either party seemed to mind”, “…a widely successful dissertation which…had still, apparently, disappointed her beloved advisor”. According to Kataev, Chekhov does not develop “the poetry of acquiring final truths”; rather, his is “the poetry of the endless searching for answers to questions to which no answer is given (and none perhaps exists).” My protagonist neither acquires nor expresses any truths, final or otherwise; the structure of the last sentence (“…[Olya] felt that she had, at last, forgiven her.”) is of pivotal importance to my text because it relies on Olya’s feelings of forgiveness, her newly acquired perception of the situation, rather than her discovery of a concrete answer to the problems outlined in earlier paragraphs.

Chekhov’s last prose work, “The Bride” (1903), is written using the perspective described by Kataev. Whereas Chekhov’s Nadya “moves on to a new perception of the people around her,” the effect of the last sentence relies on the inclusion of “as she thought,” which maintains the emphasis on perception, despite Nadya’s revelations. , 10 A similar juxtaposition of revelation and perception is crucial to the intended effect of my story. In addition, I chose the title “Pardon” because Olya’s pardoning of the professor is not only the culmination of the story but also the aspect which highlights the epistemological elements of the story (how things seem to Olya, how she interprets that which occurs, how her perception dictates her emotions).

The final element of the Chekhovian short story from which I drew inspiration is Chekhov’s use of detail. As discussed by Chudakov, Chekhov’s details are not necessarily related to “elements of character…or . Vladimir Kataev, “Questions Without Answers: Making Sense of the World,” in Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories (New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2014), 567. . Ibid., 567. . Vladimir Kataev, If We Could Only Know! An Interpretation of Chekhov (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 22.

10. Anton P. Chekhov, “The Bride,” in Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories (New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2014), 497.

the development of the action.”11 Rather, they serve to highlight “incidental” as well as “essential” components of “external, tangible appearance and surroundings”, with the effect of establishing a “non-hierarchical image of the world.”12 Whereas details such as the wool jacket in my story have a meaning which is related to the plot (the jacket serves as a symbol of whatever bond existed between Olya and the professor), others such as the birds in the yard, the appearance of the professor’s home, and the glass of wine are not meant to enhance the reader’s understanding of Olya’s problems of communication or the epistemological developments undergone by my protagonist; rather, they represent an endeavour to establish the tangible atmosphere of the world of my story, in the manner of Chekhov.

Bibliography: Chekhov, Anton P. “The Bride”. Trans. Carol Apollonio. In Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories.

Ed. Cathy Popkin. New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2014.

Chekhov, Anton P. “The Name-Day Party”.

Trans. Ann Dunnigan. In Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories. Ed. Cathy Popkin.

New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2014.

Chudakov, Alexander. “Randomness: Chekhov’s Incidental Detail”. Trans. Edwina Jannie Cruise and Donald Dragt. In Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories. Ed. Cathy Popkin. New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2014.

Kataev, Vladimir. If We Could Only Know! An Interpretation of Chekhov. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002.

Kataev, Vladimir. “Questions Without Answers: Making Sense of the World”.

Trans. Harvey Pitcher. In Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories. Ed. Cathy Popkin. New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2014.

11. Alexander Chudakov, “Randomness: Chekhov’s Incidental Detail,” in Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories (New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2014), 553.

12. Ibid., 554, 562.

49

Murdoch, B. “Communication as a Dramatic Problem: Büchner, Chekhov, Hofmannsthal, and Wesker”. Revue de Littérature comparée. Vol. 45, No. 1, pp. 40-60.

ProQuest, 2013. Accessed 08.12.2017. https://search.proquest.com/openview/.

Popkin, Cathy. The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.

50

51

The Artist and the Actor: Orpheus, Chorb, Nabokov, and Control of the Story

T

Charles Osler

he relationship between an author and his (or her) protagonist is typically not one of animosity, but collaboration, with the protagonist being entirely in author’s control. However, in a story where the protagonist attempts to take artistic control of his own life, a conflict between the two parties, that the author will inevitably win, is necessary. The role of the artist and his artistic influence on his own life is one explored in Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Return of Chorb” in which the protagonist, the titular Chorb, models his relationship with his deceased wife on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in order to infuse a sense of artistic value into his wife’s seemingly random death. In his attempts to reconstruct his wife Chorb, a fictional character, tries to control the narrative of his own fictional life, thereby putting him in direct opposition with Nabokov, the work’s author. Nabokov plays with Chorb’s implied decision to model himself on Orpheus, momentarily returning Chorb’s wife to him, in Eurydician flashes of silence and darkness.

In this Nabokov demonstrates that Chorb’s attempt to impose artistic frameworks onto his life fail because Nabokov, as the work’s true artist, is the only figure that can control the work.

To give his wife’s life and death the artistic merit he craves, Chorb models himself on Orpheus, attempting to narrativize his own life as a work of art. Chorb views himself, like Orpheus, as an artist who has lost the woman he loves to death and, in response, turns to art as a means of recapturing her. While Orpheus, who was a musician, used music, an auditorily focused art as his medium, Chorb focuses on the image of his wife, attempting to recall her little visual cues that brought him joy. Immediately following her death, he passes “in reverse... all the spots they had visited together,” (Nabokov 148) in an attempt to recreate the events of the “near past” so that “her image would grow immortal and

replace her.” (149). For Chorb, the act of reconstructing his wife is primarily a visual one.

He sees “her little boots” (148), “her hand… moving -- to pluck a leaf from a bush” (148), “her small face… and her wide eyes” (149) and these images of his wife please him. The more elusive feeling of “her irrational presence,”( 149) which comes to him at night is “unendurable”(149) to Chorb. Chorb wants desperately to see his wife, but desires visual control over her, as he feels his role as the artist should be one of active creation. Moments of discomfort arise, not when his wife is absent, but when her presence is “irrational”(149) in terms of the artistic framework he attempts to impose.

In believing his role as the artist should be an active one, Chorb often destroys successful reconstructions of his wife that naturally arise throughout the work and are linked to his own inaction. His experience with the prostitute, one of his closest ‘encounters’ with his dead wife, is one of relative passivity on his part: “Her sleep lasted not more than an hour: a ghastly deep-drawn howl roused her. It was Chorb screaming. He had woken up sometime after midnight, had turned on his side, and had seen his wife lying beside him. He screamed with visceral force. The white specter of a woman sprang off the bed.” (Nabokov 153) In his confusion, Chorb sees his wife in bed with him, momentarily achieving his goal of reconstructing her visually, but his howl forces the specter of his wife to detach itself from the sleeping prostitute. In trying to participate, via his oral objection, Chorb destroys the brief moment of his wife’s return, which was achieved through his own inaction. His howl acts as an inversion of the Orpheus myth, in which Orpheus’ decision to look at Eurydice causes her to return to the 53

underworld. In the original myth visual confirmation destroys the oral, while in the story oral objection destroys the visual. Loss, in the story, is particularly tied to light and sound as the brief moments of Chorb’s wife’s return occur only when a character experiences a moments lacking in visual clarity and these moments are often broken by oral interjections before visual clarity can be achieved.

In the case of waking the prostitute, Chorb first sees his wife, then screams, banishing her specter, but it is not until the prostitute turns “on the light”(153) and he “uncovered his face”(153), that Chorb is fully able to recognize the prostitute.

Only by submitting to his ordeal, as opposed to controlling or interjecting, can Chorb’s fictional life achieve any sort of artistic value. Acts of submission are uncomfortable to Chorb as he wishes to be the artist when in fact Nabokov, as the work’s author, makes it clear that he is the one who dictates when Chorb’s wife can and will reappear and in what fashion. Nabokov controls the necessary conditions for recognition and misrecognition that interplay and briefly allow the characters to perceive a living wife of Chorb even after her death. Chorb can only act as Nabokov’s instrument and not an agent in his own right. The most masterful case of this comes at the story’s conclusion when the Kellers insist on seeing their daughter in the hotel room with Chorb. The Kellers, who have been told their daughter is sick, not due to some masterful scheme on Chorb’s part, but because he told the maid this as “it was easier to utter” (148), believe the prostitute to be their daughter and insist on being taken up to see her. They are left in a state of shock upon entering the room, both described with visual obscurants that allow for the perpetuation of misrecognition: Mr. Keller “an amazed old gentleman”(154) and “the tear-stained face of a stout”(154) Mrs. Keller “with a veil on her hair.”(154).

The Kellers perceptions are left obscured at the story’s conclusion as the lackey notes that after the Kellers and Chorb are left alone in the hotel room “They don’t speak” (148).

In this final evocation of the wife, Chorb allows his life, which is a piece of fiction to follow its natural course, the course that the author Nabokov intends, and does not interject or explain his situation. In ending upon silence, Nabokov leaves Chorb successful in his task to reconjure his wife, but denies him the sense of control as an artist he craves, es54

sentially leaving Chorb and the prostitute as actors meant to deceive the Kellers.

As the author, Nabokov is the God of his fictional work and-- by allowing Chorb to attempt to briefly rebel against this law-Nabokov only more fastidiously establishes himself as the all-powerful being in the work.

The interplay between author and protagonist, demonstrate a futile, but ever-present desire for life and art to imitate one another.

In looking to the Orpheus myth Chorb, who believes himself to be real, attempts to use art to dictate his own life. Nabokov allows this but perverts it for Chorb, allowing him to be an agent in the revitalization of his wife, but only inadvertently and for an audience that he despises.

Bibliography: Nabokov, Vladimir. “The Return of Chorb.” in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Vintage International, 2008. 147155.

55

Christian Brotherhood for (Almost) All Men: Estrangement in the Writings of Leo Tolstoy

A

Meagan Peters

s a child, Tolstoy and his siblings played a game called ‘ant brothers.’ In this game, the children would build a fort out of kitchen chairs and a shawl. Once inside that fort, they would cuddle together and imagine that they were in a perfect world, where everyone was united by feelings of love. This desire to experience a brotherhood of men on earth would remain with Tolstoy for the rest of his life. In 1897, Tolstoy published his infamous treatise on aesthetics “What Is Art?” In this work he reveals his belief that all art should infect its audience with feelings of unity, ultimately promoting a Christian brotherhood of men. In this essay I will argue that Tolstoy was unable to produce such a work, because his worldview was fundamentally one of estrangement, and separation from the world. Through analysis of the feelings of estrangement present in Tolstoy’s semi-autobiographical work “A Confession,” and his later fictional work “Master and Man,” I will argue that Tolstoy was unable to communicate feelings of brotherly unity on earth, because his actual philosophy was that such unity was only possible in death.

In “What Is Art?” Tolstoy reveals his views on what art is, how it functions, and what its ultimate ethical purpose should be.

To Tolstoy, art is essentially a means for the transference of feelings. Consequently, the qualification for something to be deemed art is its ability to ‘infect.’ ‘Infection’ is the process wherein someone receives “through his sense of hearing or sight another man’s expression of feeling” and is then “capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it” (What is Art? 121). Moreover, in order for a work of art to be good and ethical, it must help bring about “brotherhood among men” (231) by infecting feelings grounded in the unity of all people. Ultimately, art’s purpose should be to free “our personality from its separation and isolation” (228) and unite it with others. I aim

to argue, through analysis of Tolstoy’s works “A Confession” and “Master and Man,” that this feeling of universal brotherhood was not possible for Tolstoy to communicate, because he was himself unable to experience it.

Evidence of Tolstoy’s estranged worldview can be found in his somewhat autobiographical work “A Confession,” which was published in 1882. In “A Confession” Tolstoy recounts the story of his spiritual awakening.

He essentially divides his life into two segments: before and after his finding of faith.

When recalling the time before his finding of faith, Tolstoy is quick to identify feelings of estrangement. He describes his initial search for God as “a feeling of fear, orphanage, isolation in a strange land, and a hope of help from someone” (A Confession 58). After dropping out of university, and then spending some time in the army, Tolstoy moves to St. Petersburg in order to establish himself as an author. Soon, Tolstoy begins to view his fellow writers in St. Petersburg as morally corrupt, and distances himself from them.

When recalling his interactions with “those men” (8) Tolstoy posits that “it was terribly strange” (8). He admits that, at the time, he considered “all men lunatics” except himself (9). He next tries to find unity in the family, but soon experiences the same feelings of dissention. Of a later experience Viewing an execution in Paris, Tolstoy writes: “I knew it to be unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is my heart and I” (10). This is the inception of Tolstoy’s lonely belief that he, alone, is the possessor of real moral truth.

Although Tolstoy is forthcoming about the fact that he experienced feelings of estrangement from life before his finding of faith, he seems to hold the belief that his spiritual conversion replaced these feelings with ones of unity. However, reading “A Confession” one can detect evidence of Tolstoy’s estranged 57

worldview even after his spiritual conversion.

Halfway through “A Confession,” Tolstoy describes his realization that “only in faith can we find for life a meaning and a possibility” (46). After this revelation, Tolstoy turns to Russian Orthodoxy, which for a while instills him with the feelings of brotherly communion he has long been searching for. Of this time, Tolstoy writes: “fulfilling the rites of the Church, I humbled my reason and submitted to the tradition possessed by all humanity. I united myself with my forefathers: the father, mother, and grandparents I loved... I united myself also with the millions of the common people whom I respected” (84). However, this refuge from feelings of estrangement does not last for long. Soon, Tolstoy begins to find faults in Russian Orthodoxy, and experiences a need to distance himself from it. Reflecting on this experience, Tolstoy writes: “with all my soul I wished to be in a position to mingle with the people, fulfilling the ritual side of their religion; but I could not do it. I felt that I should lie to myself and mock at what was sacred to me, were I to do so” (83).

Disappointed in Russian Orthodoxy, the young Tolstoy then turns to the Russian peasants as an exemplar of unity. He writes that for “all humanity to be able to live, and continue to live attributing a meaning to life, they, those milliards, must have a different, a real, knowledge of faith” (68). Tolstoy’s obsession with the Russian peasant will last until his death, but this idealization is inextricably tied to feelings of estrangement. Due to Tolstoy’s class and education, he is never able to perceive himself as part of “those milliards.” Although Tolstoy continues to idealize the peasants, his individualistic concept of morality eventually lead him to partially denounce even this community. He states: “though I saw that among the peasants there was a smaller admixture of the lies that repelled me than among the representatives of the Church, I still saw that in the people’s belief also falsehood was mixed with the truth” (95). Clearly, Tolstoy’s finding of faith does not instill him with feelings of unity.

The reason for Tolstoy’s estranged worldview can also be found within “A Confession.” Early in the work, Tolstoy writes that he once held the belief that unity was only possible in death. He presents this philosophy as one that he has since abandoned, however, as I will discuss further on, his later 58

work seems to suggest that he carried this philosophy to the grave. In “A Confession” Tolstoy quotes many great thinkers before him who have had this conception of death.

Socrates said that, “we approach truth only inasmuch as we depart from life” (42), and Schopenhauer declared that “the passage into Nothingness is the only good in life” (42). After quoting these men, Tolstoy writes: “what these strong minds said has been said and thought and felt by millions upon millions of people like them. And I have thought it and felt it… Happy is he who has not been born: death is better than life, and one must free oneself from life” (35). While Tolstoy presents this as a view that his spiritual conversion has since amended, his later work “Master and Man” suggests that this philosophy, and the feelings of estrangement from life that it entails, remains with him.

Tolstoy’s short story “Master and Man” was published in 1895, thirteen years after “A Confession.” This short story proves that Tolstoy did not actually forgo his philosophy that feelings of unity between all could only be achieved in death. In the short story, Tolstoy sets up a parallel between two characters: Vasily Andreevich Brekhunov, a wealthy landowner, and Nikita, one of Vasily’s laborers. One can read Vasily as representing a Tolstoy-like figure. He is a wealthy landowner, and possesses feelings of estrangement and isolation similar to those Tolstoy experienced.

Nikita, likewise, can be read as representing Tolstoy’s idealized Russian peasant population. The story is set in the dead of winter.

Vasily must quickly travel to a nearby town in order to acquire some property, and takes Nikita along. On the way, the two travelers get lost and end up in the wrong town. The offer is extended to them to stay the night, and, although it is getting cold and late, Vasily decides that they must push on. The two once again become lost, and are forced to camp out in the midst of a snow storm. In the end, Vasily freezes to death, but before doing so manages to preserve the life of Nikita. For most of the story, Vasily’s extreme self-centeredness estranges him from all other forms of life. On the contrary, Nikita experiences feelings of unity with the world. While Vasily lives in a state of solipsism, Nikita is in constant communion with the story’s other characters, animals and nature. Although Vasily is ultimately able to transcend his estranged worldview, and experience feelings of unity, this does not happen until he is in the process

of dying. It is essential that the vast difference between these two characters is only bridged in death. This confirms Tolstoy’s lifelong philosophy that, for those who are not born a Russian peasant, death is the only chance of unity.

Vasily’s estrangement from life is evidenced in his interactions with the other characters in the story. Vasily only thinks of others economically—always as a means to an end, and never as equals. His sense of self is thoroughly individualistic. He believes he is “not like others” (Master and Man 202), and when it comes time to embark on his business trip, intends to go alone. When his “unloved” (223) wife suggests that he should take Nikita along, Vasily first ignores her, and only concedes to her suggestion when she mentions that he has money on him that he must protect. Even when conceding, Vasily speaks the words “unnaturally, as he usually did when speaking to buyers and sellers” (199). Vasily’s relationship with the rest of his family is no better— he always thinks of his son “as his heir” (199). The wealthy man’s blinding selfcenteredness extends to the relationship that he has with his peasants. Although he constantly underpays Nikita, he is so blinded to his servant’s destitute clothing and need for money, that he is able to think of himself as the man’s benefactor (196). Likewise, when joking with Nikita about the peasant’s family, Vasily is “so pleased with his jest that it did not even enter his head that the remark might be unpleasant to Nikita” (201).

Throughout their journey, communication between Vasily and Nikita is repeatedly unsuccessful. Upon seven occasions one of them either utters “what?” or completely fails to hear what the other has said. Correspondingly, when Vasily and Nikita encounter another sled filled with a group of peasants, and Vasily calls to them asking who they are, all he hears in reply is “From A-a-a…” (207).

Furthermore, while taking brief refuge in the village that they happen across, Vasily is three times advised to stay the night because of the storm’s increasing ferocity. Vasily, however, is deaf to this warning, and decides to charge on for the sake of business. Finally, after becoming stranded, Vasily commits the ultimate act of selfishness— he decides to try to save himself and leave Nikita to die. Thinking of Nikita, Vasily asks, “What’s his life worth? He won’t grudge his life, but I have something to live for” (225). Vasily is so estranged from the world that he cannot even recognize the value

in another man’s life.

Vasily experiences similar estrangement from the animals and nature within the story. He views animals, like he does people, in economic terms. This is evidenced by one of his favourite occupations being horse-trading (202). Because of the little respect he has for animals, Vasily incorrectly values his own non-existent intuition over the intuition of his horse, Mukhorty, when they have lost the path. As they travel around lost, Vasily “shook the reins, and the good obedient horse responded, now ambling, now trotting, slowly in the direction in which he was sent, though he knew that he was not going the right way” (216). Later, when Vasily abandons Nikita and departs alone on Mukhorty, “the horse kept making towards the right, and Vasily Andreevich kept guiding it towards the left” (228). Of course, it is Mukhorty who knows the right direction in which to travel, but Vasily cannot experience enough fellowfeeling with the animal in order to sense this.

Vasily is not only unable to experience any fellow-feeling with the animals in the story, he is also estranged from nature. Whenever Nikita and Vasily lose the road, it is Nikita who must search for it again. Furthermore, without Nikita to guide him, Vasily twice mistakes a patch of wormwood for a town (227, 228). Vasily’s estrangement from animals and nature represents his inability to feel connection with anything outside the limits of his own ego.

Nikita, in contrast to Vasily, experiences life in a state of unity with all of God’s creations. Where Vasily selfishly dehumanizes those around him, Nikita is fundamentally selfless. He loves and respects everyone as if they were a continuation of himself. Selflessly, Nikita chooses to not live at home so that his wife can have relations with a cooper (196). He also gives his wife all of his wages without raising an objection (196). When Vasily questions Nikita about this arrangement, the peasant states: “that’s their business, Vasily Andreevich. I don’t pry into their affairs” (201). His one concern is not for himself, but for his child— he says that the arrangement is fine as long as she “doesn’t ill-treat our boy” (201). While there is an absence of love between Vasily and his family, love is present between Vasily’s family and Nikita. Upon seeing Nikita, Vasily’s son runs up to him and cries “Uncle Nikita! Uncle Nikita!” (198), making Nikita feel “radiant with joy” (198).

Nikita even extends this familial relationship 59

to Vasily, who he serves as he would his “own father” (197). While Vasily would prefer to traverse the journey alone, Nikita is a believer in teamwork. He saddles Mukhorty with the aid of the cook’s husband, and then sends the man to fetch some straw and druggart.

Upon the man’s return, Nikita says: “Thank you, dear man. Things always go more quickly with two working at it” (198). Later, when the peasant family advises Vasily and Nikita to spend the night in the village, Nikita is able to listen to them, and thus wishes to remain the night (214). However, being “accustomed to not get his own way” (214) he swallows his will and goes anyway.

Nikita’s unity with the world extends beyond just his human relationships. He also experiences kinship with animals, nature, and even objects. He speaks to Mukhorty as if “to someone who understood the words he was using” (197). He asks him: “feeling lonely, feeling lonely, you little silly?” (197).

This question reveals Nikita’s intuitive ability to understand even the feelings of animals.

Moreover, their communication is reciprocal.

After a drink of cold water, the horse sighs, and gives a loud snort. From this, Nikita understands that Mukhorty does not want anymore water. “If you don’t want any more, you needn’t drink. But don’t go asking for any later”, Nikita utters “quite seriously and fully explaining his conduct to Mukhorty” (197). Upon being asked to join Vasily on his journey, Nikita cheerfully accepts without a moment’s thought of himself, his only concern being that “they must feed the horses while I’m away” (199). When lost and trying to find the road, Nikita’s respect for Mukhorty leads him to correctly assert that they “must let the horse find its own way” (208).

Later, once stranded, while Vasily’s first action is to calm himself with a cigarette, Nikita looks after the un-harnessing of Mukhorty, “talking to him all the time to encourage him” (219). Mukhorty is not the only animal that Nikita has such respect for. At the peasant home that the pair happen upon, there is a barn full of animals and “Nikita talk[s] to them all” (209). Nikita’s harmonious relationship with God’s animals is so deep that he is even sometimes described in their terms. At one point he is described as feeling “tired as a horse” (226). Nikita lives in such a state of unity with the world that he can even confer with inanimate objects— early on in the work Nikita addresses his girdle, saying “now you won’t come undone!” (200). Finally, while 60

Vasily is estranged from his surroundings, Nikita lives “in touch with nature” (225). He is the one who must always locate the road for the pair, and is often able to determine where they are based on indications from nature. For example, Nikita identifies that they are “on the Sakharov lands” because he sees some potato vines showing from under the snow (203).

In the end, as he dies, Vasily is able to transcend his estranged worldview and experience Nikita’s sense of unity with the world.

As Vasily lies atop Nikita for hours, “unconscious of the passage of time” (231), the impressions of his life begin to blend together “into one nothingness” (232). In death, the vast difference between Vasily and Nikita is bridged. While dying, Vasily has a vision wherein God asks him to come lie down atop of Nikita, and Vasily joyously responds “I’m coming!” (232). This is exact phrase that Nikita utters earlier, when coming to Vasily’s aid after having fallen in a ditch (217). Vasily’s utterance of the phrase while now coming to Nikita’s aid, marks the beginning of the pair’s unity. As he lies dying, Vasily experiences the feeling that “he was Nikita and Nikita was he, and that this life was not in himself but in Nikita” (232). Death means the annihilation of Vasily’s ego. As he reflects on the worries that plagued him throughout his life, it is hard for him to understand “why that man, called Vasily Brekhunov, had troubled himself with all those things with which he had been troubled” (232). It is essential that this shift to unity does not occur until Vasily is in the process of dying. This confirms the worldview Tolstoy posits in “A Confession”, that feelings of unity, for men such as himself, are only possible in death.

Ultimately, ‘ant brothers’ would never be any more than a game. Although striving for most of his life to promote the realization of a Christian brotherhood, Tolstoy perhaps never actually felt this unity himself. His experience of life was fundamentally one of estrangement, and thus Tolstoy was unable to fulfil the admirable function of art that he posits in “What Is Art?”. Tolstoy’s works “A Confession” and “Master and Man” reveal that the source of this estrangement was Tolstoy’s lifelong philosophy that unity could only be achieved through death. Although hindering Tolstoy from infecting his audience with feelings of unity, this sense of estrangement was not necessary a liability. His position of otherness from the world is probably

what made Tolstoy such a keen observer, and fantastic author.

Bibliography Morson, Gary Saul. Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in “War and Peace.” Stanford University Press, 1988.

Tolstoy, Leo. “Tolstoy’s Short Fiction.” Tolstoy, L. ed. and Rev. Trans. M. R. Katz, Notes and Queries 39, no. 1 (1992): 13839. doi:10.1093/nq/39.1.138.

Tolstoy, Leo. A Confession and Other Religious Writings. Translated by Aylmer Maude and Louise Maude. Lawrence, KS: Digireads.com, 2010.

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The Holocaust in Lithuania

I

Katarina Despain

n this essay I will argue that the Soviet occupation of Lithuania from 1940 to 1941 fuelled pre-existing nationalistic and anti-Semitic beliefs that encouraged ethnic Lithuanians to actively engage in one of the greatest slaughters of the Holocaust. I will make this argument in three ways. First, I will detail Lithuanians’ beliefs prior to the Second World War, and how these beliefs affected the Jewish community.

Second, I will explain how pre-war attitudes developed under Soviet occupation.

Third, I will explain how the language developed during the Soviet occupation encouraged Lithuanians to actively participate in killing Jews under the Nazi regime. Then, I will detail ethnic Lithuanians participation in the genocide. I will use the diary of Avraham Tory, a Lithuanian Jew, as a primary source to example these stages. Finally, I will concede that some Lithuanians helped Jews; unfortunately, Lithuanian aid to Jews was relatively insignificant, especially when compared to its neighbour, Poland.

Nationalism and Jews in pre-Second World War Lithuania Lithuanian nationalism arose in the nineteenth century. It aimed for a national identity based on a common linguistic community eventually realised in the form of a state.

The Lithuanian form of nationalism specifically rested on a narrative of victimisation.

Lithuanian history had been characterised by its position between two regional powers: Poland and Russia. From the creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the sixteenth century, Lithuanian autonomy would diminish in the face of the superior powers of the Polish and Russian Empires.

Under the influence of Poland and Russia, Lithuanians felt a lack of clear national . Michael Macqueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction: Agents and Prerequisites of the Holocaust in Lithuania,” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no. 1 (1998), 27. , Ibid. , Ibid. . Ibid, 28.

belonging. Some Lithuanians believed that Poles had stolen their history when Poles began to dominate the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. A rhetoric of self-victimisation took hold of Lithuanian historical thought.

The self-understanding as victims played a part in Lithuania’s interaction with minorities, specifically Jews, because nation building during the first half of the twentieth century set the precedent for extermination of large ethnic groups. .

A significant number of Jews lived in Lithuanian society. Before the Second World War, more than 200,000 Jews lived in Lithuania. Approximately six to seven percent of Lithuania was Jewish.10 The country’s capital, Vilnius, was for most of its history Wilno, a majority Polish and Jewish city.11 Wilno was internationally known as the Jerusalem of the North, and it was the centre of intellectual, spiritual, and aristocratic Jewish life in Eastern Europe.12 Jewish Lithuanian intellectuals included the philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Aron Gurwitsch, the painters Chai’m Soutine and Arbit Blatas, the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, the violinist Jascha Heifetz, and the art critic Bernard Berenson.13 However, while Jews lived in Lithuanian society, they were not integrated into it. Most Jews only spoke Yiddish, and if they spoke a second language it was Russian or Polish.14 Thus, they were not connected to the linguistic community that formed the Lithuanian . Robert Van Voren, Undigested Past: The Holocaust in Lithuania (Rodopi, 2011), 161-162. . Macqueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction,” 27. . Van Voren, Undigested Past, 167. ������������� . Van Voren, Undigested Past, 61. �������������������������������� . Nick Bravin, “���������������� ����������������� Baltic Ghosts,��”� Washington Post, Newsweek Interactive, LLC, May/June 2009, 163.

10. Van Voren, Undigested Past, 31.

11. Macqueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction,” 31.

12. Bravin, “Baltic Ghosts,” 163.

13. Leonidas Donskis, “The Vanished World of the Litvaks” (2005), 81.

14. Macqueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction,” 29.

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nation.15An initial understanding of difference in identity grew in the interwar periods.16 Ethnic Lithuanians and Jews lived side-byside, ignorant of each other’s cultures.17 This distance allowed for anti-Semitism, which would lead to the eventual dehumanisation of Jews in the Holocaust.18 Anti Jewish thought had existed in Lithuania for centuries.19 Just prior to the Second World War, anti-Semitism was rampant. It cast Jews as “defective” and stereotyped them as “lewd”, “sly”, “dangerous” and “parasitic”.20 As time passed, anti-Semitism developed. In December 1917, during the peace of BrestLitovik, an economically exhausted Russia surrendered one-fourth of its European Empire and granted independence to many countries, including Lithuania.21 The establishment of a state in 1918 helped fuel Jewish exclusion from the idea of a Lithuanian state.22 Additionally, anti-Semitism in Lithuanian became racialised as it was influenced

by Social Darwinism.23 Social Darwinism used Charles Darwin’s ideas about evolution to argue that the natural superiority of whites justified domination over other peoples.24 The Soviet Occupation Some ethnic Lithuanians initially respected the Soviet occupation, which lasted from 1940-1941.25 The momentum of their control began in March 1938 when Polish forces took Wilno. Although Wilno had long been a majority Polish city, this action that deeply upset ethnic Lithuanians who recognised the social and historic significance of the city.26 Soviet troops invaded Lithuania in 1940, claiming it had been illegitimately detached from Russia after the First World War when Lithuania gained independence.27 15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Van Voren, Undigested Past, 165.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid, 167.

20. Ibid.

21. Elbourne, “Ideologies of Change”.

22. Macqueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction,” 29.

23. Van Voren, Undigested Past, 35.

24. John Merriman, A History of Modern Europe Vol. II (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 843.

25. Bravin, “Baltic Ghosts,” 163.

26. Ibid.

27. Merriman, A History of Modern Europe, 1067.

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Though Lithuania had remained neutral at the start of the Second World War, the Soviets invaded and offered Wilno to Lithuania, politicians and military officials consented to Russian rule.28 Colonel Butkevičius, the commander of the Eighth Infantry Regiment was one example.29 He and other officers provided Soviet tanks with fuel.30 However, as time passed, ethnic Lithuanians began to view Soviet occupation as particularly damaging to ethnic Lithuanians.

The Soviets created a new, Communist social order.31 They repressed Lithuanian culture, deported thousands of Lithuanians to Siberia, and murdered Lithuanian independence fighters in order to maintain power.32 Soviets oppressed both ethnic and Jewish Lithuanians. They called all bourgeois “enemies of the people”.33 The Soviets crushed Jewish institutions and forced Jews into a new social order that integrated them with the larger Lithuanian society.34 This new order upended the previously established divide between Lithuanians and Jews, forcing the two groups to interact in a new way.

Ethnic Lithuanians began to mistakenly perceive the Soviet occupation as JewishThey called the new political society a “Jewish government” because Jews made up seven-and-a-half percent of the population but sixteen percent of the Lithuanian communist party.35Positions of power showed a different story. City and minister rulings were proportionally to population.36 For example, seventy-seven percent of city secretariats (leaders) were Lithuanians, nineteen percent were Russians, and four percent were Jews.

37 These numbers resembled the ethnic make-up of the country.38 Another example was Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD), a repressive organisation created 28. Macqueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction,” 32. �������������� . Van Voren, Undigested Past, 165. ��������� . Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Bravin, “Baltic Ghosts,” 164.

33. Macqueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction,” 32.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid, 33.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

by the Soviet Union.39 Lithuanians perceived the NKVD as an exclusively Jewish organisation. However, it was made up of one-hundred-and-forty-eight Russians, one-hundredand-eleven Lithuanians and twenty people categorised as ‘other’ (including Jews).40 On June 14th, 1941 the NKVD arrested and deported 35,000 people to the Soviet Union.41 Lithuanians perceived this as an exclusively ethnically Lithuanian tragedy, but approximately only half the people deported were ethnically Lithuanian while the other half was Russian and Jewish.42 No Lithuanians regarded the Soviets’ inherent suspicion of Jews or to the relatively large number of Jews Soviets deported to Siberia.43

Ethnic Lithuanians formed a rhetoric that equated Jews with the Soviets, adopting the Nazi belief linking Communism with Judaism.44 Sharing this language and insensitivity led to demonization, exclusion and the eventual murder of Lithuanian Jews.45 Because Lithuanians assumed Jews to automatically be pro-Communist, unhappiness with Soviet control was taken out on the Jews. 46 Lithuanians believed Jews lacked loyalty, patriotism, and civic-mindedness.47 The anti-Semitic outburst arose to hide the guilt Lithuanians felt by collaborating with the Soviets.48 They called the Soviet occupation a “genocide” against ethnic Lithuanians in which Jews participated.49 This rhetoric inspired the rise of oppressive, anti-Semitic institutions, such as institution was the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF), an underground organisation that resisted Soviet rule.50 LAF and similar groups conspired with the Nazi party to “drive out the 39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. Idem, 34.

42. Ibid.

43. Norman Naimark, “The Nazis and ‘The East’”: Jedwabne’s Circle of Hell,” in Slavic Review 61, no. 3 (2002): 479.

44. Donskis, “The Vanished World,” 80.

45. Ibid, 83.

46. Van Voren, Undigested Past, 168.

47. Donskis, “The Vanished World,” 80.

48. Macqueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction,” 35.

49. Donskis, “The Vanished World,” 80.

50. Macqueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction,” 33.

Jews along with the Red Russians”.51 To do so, LAF launched anti-Semitic propaganda.52 They called the Soviet occupation a “JudeoBolshevik conspiracy” and “a plot of the Jewish bankers and communists”.53 Soon after the commencement of Soviet occupation, Lithuanians perceived Jews as enemies, conspiring with Soviets to wreck Lithuanian independence. The Soviet occupation enhanced Lithuanians’ pre-established attitudes of victimisation and anti Judaism.54 These ethnically exclusive nationalistic tendencies would remain and dominate during the German period of control over Lithuania.

The German Invasion Germans occupation of Lithuania began with Operation Barbarossa in June of 1941.55During this German occupation, Germany incorporated Lithuania into the Reich Commissariat Ostland (Reichskommissariat Ostland), a German civilian administration that covered the Baltic States and western Belorussia.56 While Lithuanians wanted liberation by Germans from the Soviets, Jews by and large feared the regime change. Nazis began to massacre hundreds of thousands of Jews in the summer of 1941.57 By the early fall, they decided to eliminate the Jewish nation completely.58 German Nazis were not alone in this destruction; ethnic Lithuanians largely contributed to the genocide. Lithuanians thought Jews deserved the Holocaust, because Jews allied with Soviets to fight the Nazis.59 Thus, Lithuanians collaborated with the Nazis to get revenge for the Soviet genocide of the local population.60 Shortly before and after the arrival of German forces, the Lithuanians carried out violent riots against the Jews. Hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Lithuanians voluntarily participated in the 51. Ibid.

52. Donskis, “The Vanished World,” 84.

53. Ibid.

54. Bravin, “Baltic Ghosts,” 164.

55. Macqueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction,” 34.

56. “Lithuania,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, January 29, 2016.

57. Naimark, “The Nazis and ‘The East,’” 476.

58. Ibid.

59. Bravin, “Baltic Ghosts,” 164.

60. Donskis, “The Vanished World,” 80.

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Holocaust.61 Together, Lithuanians and the Nazis destroyed the Jewish population in three phases.62 First was the terrorisation phase, which lasted from June to August 1941, in which Lithuanians and Germans joined forces to scare Jews.63 During this period, ethnic Lithuanians joined with detachments of German Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units.64 Additionally, city and rural police, known as Saugumas, participated in the round-up, ghettoisation and killing of Jews.65 Some police who had fled to Germany during the Soviet occupation returned to Lithuania to help.66 Those who had stayed and assisted Soviets were purged.67 One example of this phase was the invasion of Kaunas where combined Lithuanian-German forces shot 3,764 Jews.68 Avraham Tory’s diary, originally written in Yiddish chronicled his experience in the Kovno ghetto during this phase of Jewish extermination. On June 22nd, 1941 he discussed the moment Germans attacked Red Army frontier guards and crossed into Lithuania.69 He said Lithuanian thugs threatened Jews.

These Lithuanians told him “Hitler will be here before long and finish you off ’”.70 Not only that, but people attacked Jews. The “attackers were members of Lithuanian ‘partisan’ gangs… acting on the instructions of… indigenous local Nazis”.71 Second was the concentration phase, which lasted from July to August 1941.72 During this phase, permanent ghettos were established and guarded by police.73 German 61. Bravin, “Baltic Ghosts,” 163.

62. Macqueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction,” 39.

63. Ibid.

64. “Lithuania,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

65. Macqueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction,” 39.

66. Ibid, 38.

67. Ibid.

68. Ibid, 39.

69. Tory, Avraham, Martin Gilbert, and Dina Porat. Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 3.

70. Ibid, 4.

71. Ibid, 5.

72. Macqueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction,” 39.

73. Ibid, 40.

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officials implemented segregation. Jews with useful skills were given permits that allowed them to live in special areas of ghettos.74 On July 7th, 1941 Avraham Tory also explained this phase. He said, “The Lithuanians have announced that they no longer wish to live together with the Jews; they demand that the Jews be segregated in a ghetto”.75 He recalled that a general announced, “There is an intense hatred towards the Jews among the Lithuanians, because all the Jews are Bolsheviks. After all, Lenin himself was a Jew”.76 When someone told the general Lenin was not Jewish, he replied, “Then he was related to the Jews by marriage; but Stalin most certainly is a Jew”.77 Third came the mass extermination phase, which lasted from August to the end of the war.78 By August 1941, Germans and Lithuanians had shot most Jews in rural Lithuania, and by November 1941, they also massacred most of the Jews in larger cities.79 According to the diary of Kazimierz Sakowicz, Lithuanians participated in the murder of 50,000 to 60,000 Jews in the Ponary forest outside Vilnius.80 However, 40,000 Jews survived.81 These survivors lived in the Vilna, Kovno, Siaulial, and Svencionys ghettos, until Germans sent them to concentration camps abroad before leaving Lithuania in the fall of 1944.82 Thus, the extermination of Jews happened at a rapid and urgent scale because ethnic Lithuanians participated in the genocide.

Some Lithuanians aided Jews. According to the Jewish Museum of Vilnius, 3000 Lithuanians helped Jews during the Second World War.83 Additionally, Israel honoured 800 Lithuanians with the title of “Righteous Among Nations” for risking their own lives to help save Jews.84 However, data shows 74. Ibid.

75. Tory, Surviving the Holocaust, 10.

76. Ibid, 11.

77. Ibid.

78. Macqueen, “The Context of Mass Destruction,” 40.

79. “Lithuania,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

80. Bravin, “Baltic Ghosts,” 165.

81. “Lithuania,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

82. Ibid.

83. Van Voren, Undigested Past, 106.

84. Ibid.

that rescuing Jews was the exception.85 There was no evidence of public protest regarding Lithuanians killing Jews.86 Nor was there evidence of Lithuanians trying to help Jews in an organised fashion.87 As a point of comparison, many more Poles helped Jews, through organisations and privately.88 Lithuanians stayed silent as Nazis and their own countrymen murdered Jews.89 To many Lithuanians, Jews were foreigners, and certainly not worth fighting for.90 Conclusion This essay argued that the Soviet occupation of Lithuania from fuelled pre-existing nationalistic and anti-Semitic beliefs that prompted Lithuanians to actively engage in one of the greatest slaughters of the Holocaust. Anti-Soviet and anti-semitic sentiment combined with Nazis language of dehumanisation, encouraging Lithuanians to actively oppress and murder the Jews. The efforts and attitudes of the Lithuanians and the Nazis resulted in one of the most devastating slaughters of the Holocaust.

Merriman, John M. A History of Modern Europe. Vol. II. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.

Naimark, Norman M. “The Nazis and ‘The East’”: Jedwabne’s Circle of Hell.” Slavic Review 61, no. 3 (2002): 476-82.

Tory, Avraham, Martin Gilbert, and Dina Porat. Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Van Voren, Robert. Undigested Past: The Holocaust in Lithuania. Rodopi, 2011.

Bibliography: Bravin, Nick. “Baltic Ghosts.” Washingtonpost.

Newsweek Interactive, LLC, May/June 2009, 163-65.

Donskis, Leonidas. “The Vanished World of the Litvaks.” 2005, 80-85.

Elbourne, Elizabeth. “Ideologies of Change and Challenges to the Restoration Settlement.” Class lecture, Modern European History from McGill University, Montreal, QC, February 16, 2016.

“Lithuania.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. January 29, 2016.

Accessed March 21, 2016. https:// www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/ar ticle. php?ModuleId=10005444.

Macqueen, Michael. “The Context of Mass Destruction: Agents and Prerequisites of the Holocaust in Lithuania.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no. 1 (1998): 2748.

85. Ibid.

86. Ibid.

87. Ibid, 107.

88. Ibid.

89. Ibid, 106.

90. Ibid, 107.

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“Tragedies of Mistiming”: Generic Subversion and the Need for Change in Eugene Onegin and The Stone Guest Emily Szpiro As for what I am doing, I am writing, not a novel but a novel in verse—a devil of a difference. It’s in the genre of Don Juan. There’s no use even to think of publishing; I am writing the way I feel like writing. n this 1823 letter, Alexander Pushkin describes his plans to write his “novel in verse” entitled Eugene Onegin, a story that famously depicts the plight of the eponymous character. Pushkin, already a well-established poet in Russia, was responding to the shift in the literary climate that began asking for prose, not poetry, and he was thus beginning at this point in his career to venture into other forms. He articulates here his generic inspiration in Lord Byron’s epic reworking of the Don Juan tradition, a notable muse considering Byron’s highly anomalous characterization of Don Juan. Rather than following the plotlines of Tirso de Molina, Molière, or Mozart, Byron presents a Don Juan story in which he kills no one, is rarely the instigator of sexual encounters, and entertains no fatal dinners. Byron alludes to the traditional story of Don Juan through the shared name, but he subverts these expectations throughout his unfinished masterpiece. Byron’s atypical Don Juan is useful for considering Eugene Onegin and, additionally, Pushkin’s own rendition of the Don Juan story in his play The Stone Guest. Like Byron’s Don Juan, the characters of Eugene Onegin subvert the plotlines to which they initially appear to belong.

Through their reading habits, the characters establish a predilection for certain genres and

I

. Alexander Pushkin, The Complete Works of Alexander Pushkin: Letters 1815-1826, vol. 10, ed. Iain Sproat (Norfolk: Milner and Company Limited, 1999), 141.

act in accordance with these novelistic expectations, with Onegin as the Byronic hero and Tatyana presenting herself as the sentimental heroine. However, both characters show parallel patterns of change that result in a reversal of their literary genres, and their respective fates ultimately assert the differences between their anticipated generic endings and their actual ones. Through this reading of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin’s subsequent “little tragedy” The Stone Guest can be read as a failure of the Don Juan figure, as he, too, does not develop according to the traditional pattern of his predecessors. The two texts, therefore, display a shared line of thinking regarding the need for change and development and reflect Pushkin’s own anxiety surrounding his career.

It is relevant, when considering these two stories, to consider the period in which Pushkin was writing. As aforementioned, the literary climate of Russia in the 1820s and 30s was changing and opened the possibility for Pushkin to enter into new forays.

These new forays concerned novels, which, by the beginning of the nineteenth-century, were the most widely read genre in Russia.

In Hilde Hoogenboom’s analysis, she writes that novels saturated the literary market, with over ninety percent of these books being foreign. Such a reliance on foreign literature is understandable given that Russia’s own liter . Wendell M. Aycock, “Pushkin and the Don Juan Tradition” in The Contexts of Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, vol. 1, eds. Ulrich Goebel and Peter I. Barta (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1988), 85. . Hilde Hoogenboom, “Sentimental Novels and Pushkin: European Literary Markets and Russian Readers,” Slavic Review 74, no. 3 (2015): 560. . Ibid., 553.

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ary scene was still relatively nascent (particularly with regards to novelistic endeavours), and the status of literature in Russia likely inspired Pushkin to begin tailoring his career both to meet market demand and to add to his country’s own productions. The influence of foreign literature on Pushkin is undeniable. His own letters confess to such an influence and scholars like James Falen note that a fascination with Byron deeply entrenches much of his work. While Pushkin pays homage to these foreign sources of inspiration, he undoubtedly expresses an anxiety to create something new. In his “A Novel in Letters,” for example, a character expresses the importance of “embroidering new patterns on an old canvas.” This need to use the old and established to form something new is a helpful way of considering Pushkin’s career, especially at this important transitional period as he began to move away from poetry and into the world of novels. Eugene Onegin and The Stone Guest can, therefore, be seen as attempts to move from one phase of his career to another and, more significantly, as projects in which he employs the familiar only to subvert it and thereby create something new.

One way in which Pushkin engages with these older traditions is through the use of books in Eugene Onegin. Books and their generic implications most obviously influence Tatyana, the female protagonist of the “novel in verse.” Caryl Emerson, in her analysis of Tatyana, describes her predominant characteristic as detachment from the reality of her surroundings. The narrator’s comments on Tatyana affirm this description, as the narrator portrays her as a “stranger” among her kin and depicts her childhood as one of solitude and self-isolation in which she “sit[s] all day / In silence” (2.25). Her peculiar detachment from her surroundings serves as the main impulse informing her deep attachment to the literary world. Books serve as an alternative to the daily “milieu” from which she shies away and which she feels can never give her . James Falen, “Introduction” in Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, trans. James E. Falen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), xvi. . Alexander Pushkin, “A Novel in Letters” in Complete Prose Fiction, trans. Paul Debreczeny (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), 55. . Caryl Emerson, “Tatiana” in A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature, ed. Sona Stephan Hoisington (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 10.

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the happiness she desires, and so in her early youth onwards she reads “romances” and “the fictions and the fancies / Of Richardson and Rousseau” to surpass the quotidian realm (2.49). Her vicarious reading of these sentimental romances allows her to escape her alien environment but also renders her into a sentimental heroine herself, as she seems to channel the figures of her beloved novels. Paul Debreczeny notes how her melancholic withdrawal, her deep connection with the natural world, and her silent reflections place her alongside the women in this literary tradition. These “sentimentalist scraps” of her personality do not appear as wholly disingenuous, but because the narrator so quickly introduces the reading habits of Tatyana, they mediate the reader’s understanding of Tatyana, just as they mediate her understanding of herself. 10 Tatyana’s isolation and subsequent reliance on books, therefore, serve as the motivation behind her sentimental behaviour and characterization.

The effect of these readings is that they inform her sensibilities and expectations regarding life. Most significant is the effect these books have on her ideas of love, as she longs to encounter a man who realizes her romantic daydreams.11 The narrative only alludes to this desire, as Tatyana herself never vocalizes it. This allusion comes through the narrator’s digression on Tatyana’s mother, as there appears to be a genetic inheritance between her unnamed mother and the female protagonist. The mother, who is “simply mad” for Richardson (2.29), initially follows a typical sentimental trajectory in which she resents her fiancé and instead “pine[s]” for a man whose “heart and soul and mind” are more preferable (2.30). There is a novelistic conceit in this pursuit, as the man she adores—“this Grandison” (2.30)—is comically modelled on an actual Richardson character, Grandison. The mother remains with her husband and “settle[s] down” with him (2.31), but she still indulges in the behaviour she pulls from books. She writes quotations from “sentimental verses” (2.33), speaks French, and adopts . Walter N. Vickery, Alexander Pushkin (New York: Twayne Publishers Inc., 1970), 122. . Paul Debreczeny, “Literature and the Formation of the Self ” in Social Functions of Literature: Alexander Pushkin and Russian Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 22.

10. Emerson, “Tatiana,” 10.

11. Vickery, Alexnader Pushkin, 122.

“foreign affectations” (2.33). Eventually even these novelistic behaviours filter out of her life and she becomes the distinctly non-sentimental “paragon of practicality.”12 Tatyana’s mother’s initial approach to love—in which she desires to abandon her betrothed in order to pursue the lover for whom she actually possesses feelings—is quintessentially sentimental, and her conscious attempts to emulate the heroines in her novels suggest that her reading habits deeply influence her actions and her ideas regarding love. In the mother, therefore, the reader can simultaneously read Tatyana, and though the narrator carefully distinguishes Tatyana’s deep and sincere reading of these books from her mother’s knowledge of these stories through hearsay, the mother still presents a model of the kind of heroine that Tatyana appears to emulate. Tatyana’s longing for romance, filtered through her books and genetically inherited from her mother, is therefore evident in her bookish characterization.

Tatyana’s reliance on books to interpret matters of love further reinforces her status as a sentimental heroine. The most revealing incident occurs when she falls in love with Onegin. A subsequent “secret exultation” takes hold of her (3.7), and the narrator succinctly notes: “Until at last her fate was granted: / She fell in love” (3.7). The narrator continues after this declaration in poetic, sentimental fashion, describing her “heart’s sweet agitation,” her choked “maiden breast” and her anticipating soul (3.7). Her love for Onegin results in her transformation on the page, as the narrator linguistically treats her like a sentimental heroine by adorning her actions with the language of these novels. Tatyana’s subsequent reliance on “tender novels” in helping her to understand her love for Onegin reinforces this change (3.8). These so-called tender novels are, once again, sentimental novels: “The lover of Julíe Wolmár, MalékAdhél and de Linár, / And Werther… / And Grandison…” (3.8). This catalogue of novelistic references reveals the kind of books that Tatyana relies upon to interpret her love for Onegin, and the linking of Grandison again suggests a connection between her mother’s earlier imitation of a heroine’s traits and Tatyana’s more subtly implied adoption of these behaviours. As she reads, she “Perceives herself as heroïne” by placing herself into the role 12. Debreczeny, “Literature and the Formation of the Self,” 24.

of Clarissa, Julia, or Delphine, and she adopts their “borrowed lovers” and makes their joy and pain her own (3.10). The narrator, again, asserts that this love for Onegin is “deep and true” (3.25). However, her experience of love through books arouses suspicion. As Milla Fedorova aptly notes, the epigraph at the beginning of the third chapter, which is a line in Malfilâtre’s poem Narcissus, or the Island of Venus, is spoken by Echo and appears, due to the repetition of “elle était,” in the form of an echo.13 The introductory echo implies that Tatyana’s love is, likewise, an echo of the love in her novels, and it is possible to understand Tatyana not only as an amalgamation of these sentimental novels, but also as one who actively relies on books to adjust her behaviour and perspective on life.

It is, perhaps, rather fitting that the novelistic Tatyana falls in love with another literary type. Onegin is, as T.E. Little aptly describes, a “bored, disillusioned Byronic hero.”14 For the first half of the nineteenthcentury, Byron was the dominant influence in Russia, and while Pushkin’s 1823 letter reveals this Byronic muse, it is also within Onegin that the reader can locate this inspiration.

15 Several references are made to Byron that reinforce the connection between Onegin and his fictional influence. He is “Like Byron’s Harold” with their shared habit of getting “lost in trances” and with his “sombre heart” (1.38). The narrator also describes him as “Child Harold-like” (4.44), which again solidifies Onegin’s connection to a literary Byronic hero. Like Childe Harold, Onegin is, as Little implies, a figure for whom life provides little enjoyment or pleasure. His “old ennui” underscores his every act (6.1), he possesses an “emptiness that plagues his soul” (1.44), and life in general seems to leave him “wearied” (1.36). There is something almost apathetic to this severe boredom; within the first lines, he describes the process of caring for his ailing uncle as a “deadly boredom” (1.1).

His distaste for life consequently renders him somewhat alien to his society, despite being a superficially fashionable and sociable man.

13. Milla Fedorova, “The Lover of Julie Wolmar: The New Heloise and Tatiana’s Dilemma,” The Slavic and East European journal 53, no. 2 (2009): 172-173.

14. T.E. Little, “Pushkin’s Tatyana and Onegin: A Study in Irony,” New Zealand Slavonic Journal 1 (1975): 20.

15. Vickery, Alexander Pushkin, 34.

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Just as Harold himself recognizes that he is “the most unfit / Of men to herd with man; with whom he held / Little in common” (3.12), so too does Onegin recognize his incompatibility with mankind. He always stands apart from the “droning music,” the “press intense,” and the “hubbub loud” (1.28), even while presiding over it. After his traumatic duel with Lensky, this exile becomes literal, as he intentionally leaves the social world for an unspecified period of time. This exile again is reminiscent of familiar themes and storylines in Byron plays and poems, and Sona Stephan Hoisington draws parallels between Pushkin’s work and the familiar Byronic plotlines of a disenchanted hero abandoning society and, upon encountering a beautiful girl in a simpler setting, being unable to return or acknowledge her love.16 Onegine’s Byronic behaviours thus trace him to a fictional type, akin to how Tatyana’s sentimental affectations link her to a literary genre.

While less apparent than Tatyana’s explicit sentimental resources, Onegin’s Byronic traits can also be traced to the actual literary texts he reads. Though the Byronic parallels are evident in Onegin’s personality, his library best reveals his connection to the literary trope. According to Debreczeny, it was common in nineteenth-century Russia to model one’s behaviour on literature, and Pushkin himself was no stranger to adopting “literary masks” as it suited him.17 Debreczeny notes that it is, therefore, rather ironic that Onegin is so obviously emulating literary models despite lacking the same reading habits as Tatyana.18 Indeed, he is not quite as avid a reader as she is, as the narrator notes that he “desert[s]” his books after becoming disillusioned with them (1.44). Nonetheless, he still undergoes a period in which he “read[s] and read[s]” (1.44), and it is the aftermath of this literary burst that Tatyana investigates when she enters his library. Tatyana’s readerly tendencies lead her to his bookshelves in an attempt to understand him, and she notes that they reveal that the author he holds in highest regard is “The bard of Juan and Giaour” (7.22). Byron naturally appears as one of the few books escaping Onegin’s earlier condem16. Sona Stephan Hoisington, “Eugene Onegin: An Inverted Byronic Poem,” Comparative Literature 27, no. 2 (1975): 138.

17. Debreczeny, “Literature and the Formation of the Self,” 21.

18. Debreczeny, 24.

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nation of literature, but it is also novels that portray the “modern man” and his “endless bent for deep reflection” and his “cold, embittered mind” that Onegin preserves (7.22), and thus it is the Byronic hero in his many literary skins that Onegin admires. Tatyana more obviously relies on novelistic models to guide her than he does, but her “attentive eye” notes the places in these books where his fingernails press into the lines or where he writes “pencil marks with special care” (7.23), and it is “on those pages” that Tatyana finds “Onegin’s soul reflected” (7.23). Her commentary suggests that Onegin, like Tatyana, fashions himself after the text itself. Whereas Tatyana actively employs books to interpret the events of her life, Onegin uses the books to emulate Byronic disillusionment. This emulation is evident through “Lord Byron’s portrait” that hangs on the walls of his library (7.19), and this quasi-idolatrous treatment of the author—his author, in a way—reveals his identification with the Byronic model. Yet as she reads his soul through Byron’s works, Tatyana cycles through her earlier interpretations of him as a “dangerous and sad pariah,” a “work of heaven or of hell,” an “angel,” and a “proud fiend” (7.24), and then bathetically questions: What was he then? An imitation?

An empty phantom or a joke, A muscovite in Harold’s cloak, Compendium or affectation, A lexicon of words in vogue Mere parody and just a rogue?

(7.24) The “empty phantom” of Onegin—like the “emptiness that plagues his soul,” or the “empty shell” of his home (7.17)—suddenly appears as a kind of narrative confession of his superficial adoption of the Byronic trope.

He merely wears “Harold’s cloak,” just as Tatyana—like her mother before her—wears the conventions of the sentimental heroine.

Tatyana’s final question of whether or not he is simply a “lexicon of words in vogue” best summates the spirit of the period and of this literary identification occurring in the aristocracy, as it questions whether Onegin’s Byronic disillusionment is genuine or, instead, an imitation of popular texts. What is clear at the end of Tatyana’s visit to Onegin’s library, however, is that he uses the literary representation of the Byronic hero as the source of inspiration for his own behaviour. A shared reliance on the actual reading of literature in assembling an understanding of themselves

thus reveals a significant parallel between Onegin and Tatyana.

Over the course of the novel, the parallelisms between the hero and the heroine become increasingly apparent, and the effect is an apparent reversal of their respective literary models. The most cogent point of overlap between the two is their mutual writing of a letter. Tatyana writes hers first, and, as Debreczeny suggests, the letter is deeply characteristic of the sentimental novels that she reads.19 Her declaration of love is particularly reminiscent of these tropes: The heavens chose my destination And made me thine for evermore!

My life till now has been a token In pledge of meeting you, my friend; And in your coming, God has spoken, You’ll be my guardian till the end… (“Tatyana’s Letter”) Her fatalistic approach to love and her assertion of a lifelong pledge to Onegin puts her in the tradition of the novels she reads.

Debreczeny accuses her sentimental “pledge” of faith, her declaration of eternal and preordained love, and her notion of Onegin as her “guardian” as being “ludicrous clichés” of these traditions.20 Tatyana even prophesies her death in novelistic fashion, as she notes: “I’m so alone…And I must die without a moan” (“Tatyana’s Letter”). In this anticipation of her death, she establishes her fate as being the same as those of the heroines in her novels, and the characters in the works of authors like Rousseau are inevitably “destroyed” and meet untimely, unhappy endings.21 Only love can save her from this fate, as she “wait[s]” for Onegin’s “decision” to “revive” her (“Tatyana’s Letter”). The letter itself is significant, as Clarissa, Julie, Delphine, and many of the other novels Tatyana worships are all in the epistolary form. This form thus suggests a genuine expression of love— as the narrator professes to the materiality of the letter and leaves it unchanged—and yet simultaneously reveals another sentimental affectation. Onegin’s failure to respond to this letter, however, suggests that he does not coexist in the same genre. He cannot fit the mould of the sentimental hero and cannot respond; therefore, it is significant when he 19. Debreczeny, 26.

20. Debreczeny, 26.

21. Vickery, Alexander Pushkin, 122.

later does write her a letter.

Onegin’s letter immediately draws a connection to Tatyana’s, both through form and content. Both are written in paragraphs that resist following the pattern of the ‘Onegin’ stanza and instead are freely rhymed and grouped together in loose stanzaic paragraphs.22 The departure both letters provide from the regular form links the hero and heroine together, but the content of Onegin’s letter is also uncannily similar to hers. Like Tatyana, he appeals to fate. He claims that the “die is cast” and that he inevitably must “surrender to [his] fate” of loving her (“Onegin’s Letter”). Akin to Tatyana’s plea for his love to save her from solitude, he reneges his desire for “freedom” from mankind by claiming that this estrangement “torment[s]” him rather than providing him respite from life (“Onegin’s Letter”), and this change suggests a move away from the Byronic model towards Tatyana’s form of sentimentalism. The language he employs to characterize his love for her is also reminiscent of the emotions Tatyana undergoes when loving Onegin. He describes the “anguish” of love as a “burn,” a “thirst,” and a “tumult in one’s heart” (“Onegin’s Letter”), and these feelings mirror those Tatyana experiences when she “trembles” and “burns” for him with her “aching” soul (3.389). As Hoisington suggests, this passionate confession of love is contrary to what should happen in a Byronic poem.23 Whereas his earlier stoicism and harsh rebuttal of Tatyana is characteristic of the Byronic hero’s inability to love humanity, his love for Tatyana deviates from the “Byronic norm.”24 Although Hoisington argues that this change in Onegin establishes Pushkin’s work as an inverted Byronic poem, Onegin’s drastic change from the isolated and disillusioned hero to the passionate lover denotes a more significant generic shift, as he becomes the sentimental hero for whom Tatyana initially longs. His reading habits reflect this change. After his love for Tatyana develops, he begins to read a variety of books, notably Rousseau and Madame de Staël, both of whom Tatyana lists among her favourite authors. He reads these books to uncover the “heart’s dark secrets” and to read tales of “letters in a maiden’s hand” (8.36), aspects which are reminiscent of the senti22. Ibid., 121.

23. Hoisington, “Sentimental Novels and Pushkin,” 138.

24. Ibid., 139.

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mental genre. Although he reads other books, the inclusion of these kinds in particular suggests the development of a more sentimental literary model for Onegin to follow. His letter, therefore, which complements Tatyana’s clichéd letter through language and intent, marks a generic shift in him.

The reversal of generic roles becomes most apparent during the final encounter between Tatyana and Onegin. In Tatyana’s early meeting with Onegin, in which he rejects her, she scarcely speaks while he delivers his devastating and Byronic sermon on his renunciation of marriage and romantic love.

He describes his inability to share his “baneful, sad existence” and his unworthiness of her “virtues” (4.13-4), and Tatyana listens “in full submission” to his preaching (4.17).

Her silent and somewhat “gauche” interactions with him parallel the Onegin that the reader witnesses at the end of the long poem.

25 When he appeals to Tatyana and confesses his love for her, he is the one who is now taciturn and clumsy. Tatyana, by contrast, is eloquent in describing her “weary tinselled life” (8.46). Dubious of his affections and resigned to her unhappy life, she appears much changed to her former, sentimental self. She even seems to wish that he, too, would revert to his Byronic mannerisms, as she longs for his “words harsh and chill” and “Stern censure in [his] former fashion” in contrast to his sentimental and “offensive show of passion” (8.45). It is Tatyana instead who acts as the old Onegin did, whereas he adopts her former affectations, and even her use of language seems to parallel the language he employed during their first encounter.

Tatyana duplicates Onegin’s lamenting description of a world in which they could be together and he could be “as happy…as [he] could!” when she declares: “happiness was ours…so nearly!” (4.13, 8.47). John Bayley implies that Tatyana adopts this worldweary persona in order to grapple with the same social exhaustion and unhappiness that Onegin possesses at the beginning, and that the two change places as a result.26 Debreczeny furthers this notion by suggesting that Tatyana has “caught up” with the fashionable literature of her period; namely, the literature of Byron that so captivated 25. Vickery, Alexander Pushkin, 121.

26. John Bayley, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 263.

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Russia during Pushkin’s life. 27 She becomes a Byronic heroine, one who undergoes a traumatic experience and subsequently lives the remainder of her life without love, and what this Byronic change most significantly indicates is a departure from the anticipated ending of the sentimental novel. 28 Tatyana is not destroyed by love, but rather indicates an acknowledgement of values outside of love, like fidelity and honour. Onegin, rather, appears as the destroyed party, as Tatyana leaves him alone and heartbroken. Bayley suggests that the end of the novel thus signifies that Onegin and Tatyana never understand each other, and Vickery labels this failure a “tragedy of mistiming.” 29, 30 As these are the only two interactions the characters directly have, the parallel Byronic language coupled with the common thread of the other character’s silence affirms that the two never exist within the same generic plotline.

Even their mutual failure to respond to the other’s sentimental letter—another kind of paralleled silence—heightens this notion of failed understanding. The reader thus sees a final change in both Tatyana and Onegin, but it comes far too late, as the two reverse genres and once again cannot reach the other.

Another “tragedy of mistiming” is Pushkin’s The Stone Guest, in which Don Juan fails to repent before meeting an untimely demise. Eugene Onegin, which Pushkin began writing years before he published The Stone Guest, displays certain shared lines of thought that suggest it acts as a theoretical precursor to Pushkin’s reworking of the Don Juan tradition. Onegin, for example, possesses many qualities typically attributed to the Don Juan figure. He is the “youthful rake” in town (1.2), a kind of “London dandy” (1.4), and the digression the narrator provides on Onegin’s background colours his “views on morals” as “ever mellow” (1.3). The Don Juan figure often possesses the qualification of the fashionable, caddish figure, like Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and his lax morality inevitably contributes to his damnation, such as Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan perpetual delay of his salvation with the line “Plenty of time 27. Debreczeny, “Literature and the Formation of the Self,” 26-27.

28. Ibid., 27.

29. Bayley, A Comparative Commentary, 263.

30. Vickery, Alexnader Pushkin, 121.

for that.”31 The quality that most delineates Onegin as a potential heir to the Don Juan lineage is his earlier talent in seducing women, as the “art of ardour” and “love itself ” is his primary pleasure in life (1.8). Although these days of seduction are not the focus of Pushkin’s tale and Onegin himself no longer pursues women with any “zest” (4.10), the narrator takes apparent pleasure in describing Onegin’s youthful “genius” (1.8). The narrator weaves a depiction of his artistry as one in which he can “Conceal his hopes,” “Compel belief,” “Seem cast in gloom,” “Appear so proud,” and “summon[ ]” tears (1.10), all in accordance with what the situation demands.

The language emphasizes the deceptive disguise of these acts, as Onegin appears exploitive, performative, and inventive in his acts, but rarely genuine, and such disguised performances so often appear in the stories of Don Juan. This characterization does, naturally, cause many critics to question the truthfulness of his final change, for if he is a Don Juan, then his love for Tatyana is merely sequential and cyclical, as Don Juan loves all women with “the same passion.”32 Clarence Manning, for example, argues that Onegin is simply a “disillusioned Don Juan” who merely plays the cynic and, rather than a tragic figure of mistiming, is a villainous figure who murders Lensky cold-bloodedly in a duel and cruelly leaves the young Tatyana heartbroken.33 Such assumptions would warrant more authority if Onegin’s story bore more parallels with the story of Don Juan, and so despite the similarities between both characters, his Byronic differences and anomalies are more significant. The commonalities can nonetheless help to consider Onegin as a precursor to Pushkin’s more direct approach to the Don Juan tradition.

His re-imagining of Don Juan, initially, follows many of the familiar patterns of the tradition (patterns to which Byron’s retelling certainly does not adhere). Principally, Pushkin’s Don Juan is—unlike Byron’s—one who 31. Tirso de Molina, “The Playboy of Seville or Supper with a Statue,” in Three Classic Don Juan Plays, trans. Adrienne Schizzano Mandel and Oscar Mandel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 7.

32. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Random House, 1955), 51.

33. Clarence Manning, “Russian Versions of Don Juan,” PMLA 38, no. 3 (1923): 485.

seduces women and kills other men. This plot is the most obvious parallel, as Pushkin’s Don Juan, like others, receives divine punishment from the man he murders after the deceased’s statue delivers him to hell. Moreover, the behaviouristic commonalities between the Don Juan of The Stone Guest and the traditional Don Juan figure are also notable. After evoking the image of his late lover Inez, Don Juan laments her loss, to which Leporello notes: “Well, so, after her came others” (1.61). Don Juan agrees, and Leporello adds: “And while we’re still alive, there’ll be still more” (1.62).

Don Juan must agree to this point also. He is, as with his predecessors, one whose motivations lie with women. Women are indeed what inspire him to return to Spain out of exile, as he longs for the women of Spain after over-indulging his taste for foreign women. His reputation as a seducer, iterated by the other characters, perhaps best solidifies his connection to the Don Juan tradition.

Don Carlos calls him a “godless scoundrel” (2.148), and Doña Anna notes that she hears that Don Juan is an “eloquent” and “cunning tempter” (4.504-5). When Don Juan prompts a monk to answer his question of who killed the Commander, the monk responds: “The shameless, / Godless profligate, Don Juan” (1.77-8). Leporello notes with glee that “Don Juan’s fame / Has penetrated even a peaceful monastery” (1.79-80), and this debauched reputation acts as a conscious reference to the myth of Don Juan itself. There is not much evidence initially to support a different reputation, and he appears to be the scoundrel others accuse him of being. When he attempts to seduce Doña Anna—atrociously doing so by the grave of her husband—he engages in quintessential Don Juan rhetoric.

He describes himself as an “unlucky man” and a “victim of a hopeless passion” (3.301), and he reverentially beseeches her to aid his “suffering” (3.351). This kind of language is reminiscent of Mozart’s Don Giovanni’s appeal to Zerlina to “soothe the pains of [his] innocent love,” and Don Juan’s decadent descriptions of Doña Anna appear as the familiar language the Don Juan figure employs to seduce women.34 The plot, Don Juan’s reputation, and his impassioned seduction of 34. Lorenzo Da Ponte, “The Punished Libertine or Don Giovanni: A Comic Drama in Two Acts,” in Three Classic Don Juan Plays, trans. Adrienne Schizzano Mandel and Oscar Mandel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), 1.3.

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Doña Anna all serve to assert a shared lineage between the Don Juan tradition and Pushkin’s rendition of the figure.

Despite these similarities, there are—like Byron’s Don Juan—several departures between Pushkin’s Don Juan and the classic incarnations of the trope. Despite the shared name, overarching plotline, and seductive tendencies, Pushkin’s character is decidedly unlike his predecessors. Traditionally, the Don Juan trope generally gives all women a somewhat universalizing quality. Camus describes Don Juanism as one in which his love, being equal to all women, renders women effectively the same: “If he leaves a woman it is not absolutely because he has ceased to desire her...but [because] he desires another.”35 This lack of distinction is clear in incarnations of Don Juan like Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in which he possesses a list of his many conquests. Leporello lists these women, who are “of every rank, of every shape, of every age,” and he summates that any woman will suffice “as long as she wears a skirt.” 36, 37 This monolithic approach to women is not seen in Pushkin’s Don Juan, who has different feelings for different women. His relationship with Laura is far less grave and sincere than his idolization of Doña Anna, and this distinction is clear through their playful banter.

He asks how many times during his exile she has cheated on him, to which she responds: “What about you, skirt-chaser?” (2.245). This kind of dialogue never appears in his more grave seduction of Doña Anna. In this scene, Laura even appears as a more typical Don Juan figure than him. She tells Don Carlos that she cannot love “two [men] at once” (2.177), and when he asks her to think of the future, she responds, in a fashion reminiscent of Tirso de Molina, “Why should / I think of that?”

(2.187-8). Don Juan, by contrast, remembers the women distinctly. Oscar Mandel notes a difference between the older, “Classical” representations of Don Juan, which assume that his motivation for seducing women is the pleasure he derives from the experience, and the “Romantic” vision of Don Juan as one who seeks the second lover because of “fatal disappointment” over the first.38 Pushkin’s Don Juan truly does seem to seek new 35. Camus, The Myth of Sispyhus, 53.

36. Da Ponte, “Don Giovanni,” 1.2.

37. Ibid., 1.2.

38. Oscar Mandel, The Theatre of Don Juan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963): 8.

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lovers because of their individual and novel qualities rather than their similarities, as his depiction of the sullen, sickly appeal of Inez differs from Laura’s vivacity or Doña Anna’s sublime beauty. Pushkin thus attempts to create a distinctly unique Don Juan who seduces not because he wants to indulge in his lust, but rather because he seeks something unique from each of these women.

One of the most significant alterations that Pushkin makes to the Don Juan story is related to his use of disguise. Vickery notes that the “traditional Don Juan” uses darkness and disguise to achieve what he desires, but to Pushkin’s Don Juan, contrarily, these tactics seem inherently “alien” to his nature.39 The gradual disrobement of Don Juan’s disguises effectively materializes this rejection of deceit. Leporello hints at Don Juan’s failure to effectively disguise himself at the beginning of the story, when Don Juan incredulously asks, “Who’s going to recognize me?”

Leporello begins to list several people who will easily see through his disguise, such as a “watchman,” a “gypsy girl,” a “street-musician,” and a “swaggering lord” (1.8-10). Admittedly, Pushkin’s Don Juan wears disguises, but this initial suggestion of failure introduces his inability to disguise himself truly, as the previous versions of Don Juan do. He first dons the disguise of an unnamed monk in order to approach Doña Anna, but he finds he cannot contain the “grievous secret” that he is not truly a man of the cloth (3.330). Nonetheless, when Doña Anna asks for his name, he claims it is “Diego de Calvado” (3.361).

Later, however, Don Juan confesses that he can no longer hide behind a false name to disguise his “terrible and bloody secret” (4.459), and he reveals: “I am not Diego, I am Juan” (4.476). Wendell Aycock fittingly calls this a “stripping away of disguises” by which Don Juan increasingly reveals himself to Doña Anna.40 Don Juan’s confession to her at every juncture about his need to reveal his “secret” strengthens Peter Cochran’s claim that Don Juan’s very conscience forbids him from seducing Doña Anna unless he abandons these false disguises.41 This 39. Vickery, Alexander Pushkin, 95.

40. Aycock, “Pushkin and the Don Juan Tradition,” 93.

41. Peter Cochran, “The Mainstream Juans, and Byron’s Juan,” in Aspects of Byron’s Don Juan (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 180.

failure of disguise, first noted by Leporello and eventually realized through his gradual revelatory process, reinforces that Pushkin’s Don Juan differs from past tradition. He cannot don disguises to reap what he desires but must instead be loved for his actual self.

Although Doña Anna’s love for him grows long before his final revelation, he cannot fully accept it until she knows the truth—that he is the “wretched man” that she is honour bound to despise as her husband’s murderer (4.467). This abandonment of his disguise, even though his revelation undermines his attempts to seduce Doña Anna, signifies that Pushkin’s Don Juan, unlike his predecessors, is not one who unabashedly employs disguise to achieve his own ends.

His gradual abandonment of disguise also exposes another notable departure from the tradition, as Pushkin’s Don Juan changes as a result of his love for Doña Anna. While his adoration of her does appear to be characteristic of the more quintessential Don Juan trope, his later behaviour towards her reveals a more genuine and singularly loving aspect.

His disrobing of disguise is significant, but so too is his earnest insistence that he truly loves “not a single one” of the other women prior to her (4.508). He claims: “In loving you, I’ve come to love the good” (4.501). This declaration is notable, for the Don Juan figure rarely proclaims a love of virtue but more often an eternal love of earthly pleasure. Doña Anna is understandably dubious of this sentiment.

She reminds him of his reputation and asks: “And I should believe / That Don Juan really loves for the first time / That he doesn’t want to add me to his victims!” (4.509-11).

Don Juan convincingly argues against this notion by noting that his openness only undermines his attempts to seduce her. Doña Anna eventually believes his sentiment of love and virtue and bestows him both a kiss and a promise for a subsequent meeting, but it is immediately after this promise that the Commander’s statue finally comes to claim his soul. He dies with her name in his mouth, and Vickery declares that it is the greatest irony of the play that Don Juan, never truly loving before and finally grasping virtue and redemption through his love for Doña Anna, dies at this moment.42 Leo Weinstein notes that the play leaves the reader with the question of whether of not Don Juan would re42. Vickery, Alexander Pushkin, 98.

main faithful to Doña Anna had he lived.43 A resounding ‘no’ could answer this question if Pushkin’s Don Juan adhered to the expected qualities of the Don Juan myth, but the variations this Don Juan shows between his expected womanizing and unrepentant behaviour and his more genuine self-revelation and love subverts these expectations. Indeed, Weinstein notes that his final declaration to Doña Anna does appear to be a “sincere confession of love found at last.”44 Akin to Eugene Onegin, Pushkin’s The Stone Guest is a “tragedy of mistiming” in which generic subversion occurs belatedly. Like Onegin, Don Juan finds the ideal woman, falls in love, and redeems himself, but all too late.

Pushkin thus, around the same pivotal period of his career, published two stories in which the characters are unable to adhere to the plotlines and generic expectations they initially either create for themselves, as in Eugene Onegin, or are expected to follow, as in The Stone Guest. Onegin and Tatyana break past their initial generic moulds and Don Juan subverts his own genre, but none of these characters can achieve happiness. Onegin and Tatyana recognize their feelings whilst the other is incompatible and unable to return these emotions, and Don Juan receives his divine punishment regardless of his change.

Despite their lack of resolution, the changes they undergo are not negative. Tatyana, for example, by adopting some of Onegin’s Byronism, does not completely abandon her sentimental traits but rather sees the importance of life outside of love and, unlike the heroines of her novels, she continues to live.

Onegin, too, by taking on some of the characteristics of the sentimental hero, finally experiences more than simply Byronic disillusionment through his genuine experience of love and admiration for Tatyana. Don Juan, like Onegin, undergoes a change by virtue of his love for Doña Anna that allows him to see the value of her virtue, something that distinguishes him from his predecessors. These changes, though belated, are still significant.

Pushkin’s writing of these two stories when he did, during a literary shift away from poetry towards prose, is reflective of the anxiety and anticipation of these changes. He recognizes in both his work and in society itself a 43. Leo Weinstein, “The Romantic Don Juan,” in The Metamorphoses of Don Juan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), 92.

44. Weinstein, “The Romantic Don Juan,” 92.

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need for change, and a need to create something new and to “embroider[ ] new patterns” in older traditions.45 This desire to create novelty while acknowledging the old, something evident in Tatyana, Onegin, and Don Juan’s subverted endings, mirrors Pushkin’s own aspirations to create something new—and a desire not to wait too long for this development. Although he cites Byron as an influence in his 1823 letter, Pushkin later in life denied his Byronic muse, claiming: “Nobody esteems [Don Juan] more than I do…but it has nothing in common with Onegin.”46 Perhaps this subverting of a former model is a quality not only of his characters but also of Pushkin himself, and expresses a need to grow beyond the ideals of one’s youth and to develop a new, more complex vision of life.

Bibliography: Aycock, Wendell M. “Pushkin and the Don Juan Tradition.” The Contexts of Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. Vol. 1. Edited by Ulrich Goebel and Peter I. Barta. New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1988.

85-95.

Bayley, John. Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.

Byron, George Gordon. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1867. 38-131.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O’Brien.

New York, Random House, 1955.

Cochran, Peter. “The Mainstream Juans, and Byron’s Juan.” Aspects of Byron’s Don Juan.

Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. 144-88.

Da Ponte, Lorenzo. “The Punished Libertine or Don Giovanni: A Comic Drama in Two Acts.” Three Classic Don Juan Plays.

Translated by Adrienne Schizzano Mandel and Oscar Mandel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963. 105-33.

45. Pushkin, “A Novel in Letters,” 55.

46. Alexander Pushkin, Pushkin on Literature, ed.

Tatiana Woolf (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 138.

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Debreczeny, Paul. “Literature and the Formation of the Self.” Social Functions of Literature: Alexander Pushkin and Russian Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. 21-76.

Emerson, Caryl. “Tatiana.” A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature. Edited by Sona Stephan Hoisington. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995. 6-20.

Falen, James E. “Introduction.” Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse. Translated by James E. Falen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Fedorova, Mills. “The Lover of Julie Wolmar: The New Heloise and Tatiana’s Dilemma.”

The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 53, No. 2, 2009. 171-87.

Hoisington, Sona Stephan. “Eugene Onegin: An Inverted Byronic Poem.” Comparative Literature, Vol. 27, No. 2, 1975. 136-152.

Hoogenboom, Hilde. “Sentimental Novels and Pushkin: European Literary Markets and Russian Readers.” Slavic Review, Vol. 74, No. 3, 2015. 553-74.

Little, T.E. “Pushkin’s Tatyana and Onegin: A Study in Irony.” New Zealand Slavonic Journal, No. 1, 1975. 19-28.

Mandel, Oscar. The Threatre of Don Juan.

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963.

Manning, Clarence. “Russian Versions of Don Juan.” PMLA, Vol. 38, No. 3, 1923.

479-93.

Molina, Tirso de. “The Playboy of Seville or Supper with a Statue.” Three Classic Don Juan Plays. Translated by Adrienne Schizzano Mandel and Oscar Mandel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971.

Pushkin, Alexander. “A Novel in Letters.”

Complete Prose Fiction. Translated by Paul Debreczeny. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983. 50-61.

---. Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, translated

by James E. Falen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

---. Pushkin on Literature. Translated and edited by Tatiana Wolff. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 199.

---. The Complete Works of Alexander Pushkin: Letters 1815-1826. Vol. 10. Edited by Iain Sproat, et al. Norfolk: Milner and Company Limited, 1999.

---. “The Stone Guest.” The Little Tragedies.

Translated by Nancy K. Anderson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. 6894.

Vickery, Walter N. Alexander Pushkin. New York: Twayne Publishers Inc., 1970.

Weinstein, Leo. “The Romantic Don Juan.”

The Metamorphoses of Don Juan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959. 78-94.

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Selection of Supplemental Works from the Editors

By Nessa Gnatoush [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Борьба Украины за независимость в постсоветском мире

Н

Селеста Паньелло

а протяжении истории отношения Украины с окружающими её странами и собственной независимостью были в лучшем случае сложными. После распада Советского Союза в 1991 году Украина боролась с коррупцией во внутренней политике, а также с вмешательством со стороны других стран, особенно России. Фальсифицированные выборы, война и разделение мнений граждан способствовали сложному политическому климату страны и усложняли поиск её идентичности. Эта борьба продолжается и по сей день. В этом эссе будут описаны события, которые привели к нынешней ситуации в Украине, а также будет рассмотрено, как ситуация складывается сегодня. После нескольких лет протеста отделение Украины стало смертельным ударом для Советского Союза. Когда Борис Ельцин взял на себя руководство СССР, сменив Михаила Горбачева в результате государственного переворота, Украина немедленно начала планировать покинуть Советский Союз. Действия Ельцина включали в себя принуждение Горбачева изменить структуру советской администрации таким образом, чтобы сделать Россию самым могущественным членом союза. Конечно, это было не идеально для других республик, особенно для Украины. На следующий день после того, как Ельцин официально взял под контроль Советский Союз, украинское правительство провело голосование по вопросу независимости, где против независимости проголосовали только . Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 319.

два депутата. Хотя независимость была объявлена 24 августа 1991 года, только 1 декабря того же года был проведён референдум, в котором 92 процента участвовавших украинцев проголосовали за независимость. Каждая область Украины проголосовала за отделение от Советского Союза, причем самый высокий процент был на западе страны в Тернопольской области (98%), а самый низкий процент был в Крыму (56%). Это было гораздо более позитивным ответом, чем ожидалось. В тот же день, что и референдум, состоялись первые свободные президентские выборы в истории Украины. Леонид Кравчук, бывший председатель Украинской Советской Социалистической Республики, в то время занимавший должность председателя Верховной Рады, был избран с 61,6 процента голосов и с большинством в каждой области Украины, за исключением Галиции, в которой одержал победу Вячеслав Чорновил, бывший заключенный ГУЛАГа. Этот референдум и выборы привели к международному признанию Украины как суверенного государства. Канада и Польша были первыми странами, которые сделали это 2 декабря 1991 года, и на следующий день новый президент России Борис Ельцин сделал то же самое. . Chrystyna Lalpychak, “Historic vote for independence,” The Ukrainian Weekly, last modified September 1, 1991. . Chrystyna Lalpychak, “Over 90% vote yes in referendum; Kravchuk elected president of Ukraine,” The Ukrainian Weekly, last modified December 8, 1991. . Paul D’Anieri, Understanding Ukrainian Politics: Power, Politics, and Institutional Design (New York: Routledge, 2015), 79. . Plokhy, The Gates of Europe, 321.

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Президентство Кравчука было не очень успешным, особенно в экономическом секторе. Были очевидные трудности в руководстве новым независимым государством, и Кравчук не смог преодолеть многие из них. Уровень инфляции достиг тысячи процентов, и как ВВП, так и объем промышленного производства сократились наполовину всего за несколько лет. Кравчук не знал, что делать, и признал это в 1993 году. Он сказал, “Если бы я полностью знал, что делать, я бы сказал об этом правительству, местным представителям и организаторам экономики.” Его администрация была полна коррупции и приватизации, и из-за этого он уступил на выборах 1994 года Леониду Кучме, его премьер-министру, чья платформа указала на самые большие недостатки администрации Кравчука. Будучи премьер-министром, Кучма часто критиковал действия Кравчука и постоянно искал большей власти. Их отношения были напряжёнными, но передача власти была мирной и конституционной, что стало успехом для демократии в Украине. Президентство Кучмы длилось 10 лет, в ходе которых отношения Украины с Россией улучшились, но свобода прессы была почти отменена. Одной из проблем, к решению которой он хотел немедленно приступить, была экономика страны. Его план, в основном приведённый в действие Виктором Ющенко, являвшимся тогда главой Национального банка Украины, заключался в сокращении бюджетного дефицита, повышении ВВП и реформе налогообложения, но потребовались годы, прежде чем был замечен какой-либо эффект. Другим важным вкладом администрации Кучмы стало создание в 1996 году новой конституции, но это было омрачено многими скандалами, в том числе “Кассетный скандал”, где один из его телохранителей выпустил аудиокассету, на которой была . Verena Fritz, State-Building: A Comparative Study of Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007), 113. ������������������� . Vladimir Lytvyn, Ukraina: Politika, Politiki, Vlast’ (Kyiv: Alternativy, 1997), 275. . Kataryna Wolczuk, The Moulding of Ukraine: The Constitutional Politics of State Formation (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2001), 117119. . Fritz, State-Building, 123.

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зафиксирована информация о многочисленных преступлениях. Украинский президент предположительно дал согласие на передачу радарных комплексов “Кольчуга” правительству Саддама Хуссейна, а также отдал приказ об убийстве журналиста Георгия Гонгадзе. Сам Кучма утверждал, что записи были изменены, чтобы исказить его слова. Несмотря на это и угнетающее состояние политического климата в Украине, Кучма оставался на своём посту в течение максимального количества лет.10 В 2004 году были заложены основы нынешней напряжённости между Украиной и Россией. После окончания президентства Кучмы были проведены другие президентские выборы. На этих выборах было два кандидата на пост президента: Виктор Янукович, который хотел приблизить Украину к России, и Виктор Ющенко, который хотел, чтобы Украина укрепляла отношения с Западом и вступила в Европейский Союз. Период избирательной кампании был жестоким, и контролируемые государством СМИ исключили Ющенко из их освещения событий, поскольку Янукович был избранным преемником Кучмы. Планы по фальсификации выборов в случае поражения Януковича были обнародованы заранее, а за несколько месяцев до выборов Ющенко даже госпитализировали из-за отравления. Даже президент России Владимир Путин принял участие в избирательной кампании, посетив Киев, чтобы поддержать Януковича.11 В итоге Янукович победил на выборах, однако Ющенко и его сторонники считали, что выборы были сфальсифицированы. После протестных выступлений по всей стране, в том числе на площади Независимости в Киеве (“Майдан Незалежності” на украинском), Верховный суд Украины отменил результаты и решил провести другие выборы. На вторых выборах Ющенко выиграл с 52 процентами голосов и был назначен президентом. Этот конфликт был назван “Оранжевая революция”, потому что оранжевый был цветом партии Ющенко. Конфликт закончился мирным путем 23 января 2005 10. “Court clears Kuchma of Gongadze murder charges,” The Kyiv Post, last modified December 14, 2011.

11. D’Anieri, Understanding Ukrainian Politics, 96-98.

года, когда Ющенко был назначен третьим президентом Украины.12 Однако Ющенко провёл в должности президента только один срок, поскольку его популярность резко сократилась после его избрания. Уровень популярности, которого он достиг как в Украине, так и за рубежом в 2005 году, мог бы, по словам его бывшего начальника штаба Олега Рыбачука, позволить ему внести любые изменения, которые он хотел. В его кампании эти изменения включали снижение коррупции, аресты преступников и приближение Украины к Европе. К сожалению, Ющенко скоро потерял из виду свою цель, сражаясь со своим премьер-министром Юлией Тимошенко.13 После Оранжевой революции президент потерял право выбирать своего премьерминистра, поэтому Тимошенко, избранная парламентом, стала препятствием для Ющенко. Их отношения были напряжёнными и превратили украинскую политику в фарс, отчуждая Европейский Союз, к которому страна хотела присоединиться. Это характеризовало большую часть президентства Ющенко, которое более всего запомнилось его одержимостью Тимошенко.14 Их постоянные конфликты делали его настолько непопулярным, что в 2010 году стало очевидно: он не будет избран на второй срок. По этой причине он отказался от своих полномочий в пользу победителя выборов между Януковичем и Тимошенко. Янукович, пророссийский кандидат, уже участвовавший в выборах за 5 лет до этого, выиграл с 49 процентами голосов и стал четвёртым президентом Украины.15 Президентство Януковича стало началом серьёзных проблем в Украине. Сначала он поддержал присоединение Украины к Европейскому Союзу, и его администрация даже имела соглашение с ЕС. Это соглашение позволило бы Украине присоединиться к Европейскому Союзу, если 12. Andrew Wilson, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 153154.

13. Gregory Feifer, “Unloved but Unbowed, Ukraine’s Viktor Yushchenko Leaves Office,” Radio Free Europe, last modified February 24, 2010.

14. Plokhy, The Gates of Europe, 335.

15. Andrew Osborn, “Ukraine election: Viktor Yanukovych claims victory,” The Telegraph, last modified February 10, 2010.

бы правительство изменило некоторые из своих законов. Янукович оказал давление на парламент, чтобы внести необходимые изменения, и Украина была почти готова подписать соглашение в 2013 году.16 К сожалению, российское правительство начало рассматривать соглашение Украины с ЕС как угрозу и изменило законы об импорте из Украины. Президент России Владимир Путин также сделал несколько предупреждений, как государственных, так и частных, украинским властям, советуя им не вступать в ЕС. Украина не только боялась России, но и сама экономика Украины сильно пострадала, и вскоре правительство перестало готовиться к соглашению с ЕС.17 Несмотря на это, подготовка возобновилась, и в ноябре 2013 года Янукович принял участие в саммите ЕС в Вильнюсе, где он собирался подписать соглашение. Соглашение не было подписано, и украинцы организовали протестные выступления по всей стране, чтобы показать Януковичу, что они хотели, чтобы он подписал его.18 Во главе со студентами и молодыми людьми с большими надеждами на будущее своей страны, толпы собрались на “Майдане Незалежност����� i���� ” в Киеве, чтобы выразить своё недовольство правительством. Эти демонстрации были названы “Євромайдан”, или “Евромайдан” на русском, и продолжались до конца февраля 2014 года, когда они привели к украинской революции месяц спустя. На украинском языке эта революция называлась “Революція гідності”, или “Революция достоинства” на русском.19 Украинская революция была серией жестоких столкновений между протестующими, полицией и ОМОНом в столице, что привело к свержению президента Януковича. Десятки тысяч украинцев протестовали на улицах Киева против действий Януковича, и, к сожалению, многие погибли за свободу своей страны. Сначала полиция и ОМОН во время беспорядков использовала только резиновые пули и водяные пушки, но 22 января 2014 года были расстреляны три демонстранта, и впервые 16. Taras Kuzio, Ukraine: Democratization, Corruption, and the New Russian Imperialism (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2015), 98.

17. Kuzio, Ukraine: Democratization, Corruption, and the New Russian Imperialism, 104.

18. Plokhy, The Gates of Europe, 338.

19. Ibid., 339.

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за более чем столетие демонстранты были убиты украинским правительством. 20 Насилие ухудшилось до конца февраля, когда демонстранты и полиция столкнулись перед зданиями парламента. Обе стороны стреляли друг в друга, и к концу этой перестрелки погибли 67 демонстрантов, а также 13 полицейских. Сотни были ранены или умерли из-за травм.21 Революция оказала влияние на украинскую политику, и Янукович, который бежал в Россию, был единогласно подвергнут импичменту. Он получил убежище в России и разыскивается за измену в Украине. 22 После этого в политической системе Украины произошли многие изменения, в том числе формирование нового правительства, восстановление прежней конституции и президентские выборы через несколько месяцев.23 Украинцам нужен был новый президент, и был избран Петро Порошенко, который сыграл ключевую роль в протестах Евромайдана. Опытный политик, Порошенко также владел каналом 5 ТВ, который с начала конфликта занимал про-оппозиционную позицию. Он часто был рядом с демонстрантами Евромайдана и помогал привлечь больше людей на главную площадь Киева. После победы на президентских выборах с 54 процентами голосов он путешествовал по всей Украине, в том числе в Крым и в Донбасс, чтобы попытаться объединить страну, несмотря на трудности.24 Он по сей день продолжает борьбу против России и пытается, при поддержке Запада, найти решение конфликта между двумя странами. К сожалению, не все согласились с целями Евромайдана и украинской революции. В Крыму преимущественно этнически русское население протестовало против нового украинского правительства, и граждане Севастополя хотели назначить российского мэра.25 Споры продолжались до начала марта, когда президент 20. Serhy Yekelchyk, The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 108.

21. Yekelchyk, The Conflict in Ukraine, 109.

22. Ibid., 112.

23. Plokhy, The Gates of Europe, 339.

24. Kuzio, Ukraine: Democratization, Corruption, and the New Russian Imperialism, 116.

25. Marvin Kalb, Imperial Gamble: Putin, Ukraine, and the New Cold War (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2015), 158.

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России Владимир Путин отдал приказ мобилизовать российские войска в Крыму и отрезал полуостров от материковой части Украины. Концепция объединения всех русскоговорящих в одной стране известна как “Новая Россия” и была придумана Путиным для оправдания его аннексии Крыма. Полуостров имеет большое значение в истории России. Он стал частью Российской империи в 1783 году, а затем был частью Российской Советской Федеративной Социалистической Республики до 1954 года. Затем он была передан Украинской ССР по приказу Никиты Хрущева, решение, которое многие россияне считают сегодня ошибкой. Крым оставался частью Украины после падения Советского Союза, хотя почти 60 процентов его населения является этнически русским.26 При обсуждении событий марта 2014 года с президентом США Бараком Обамой, Путин отрицал свою причастность к событиям в Украине, но аннексия была осуждена международным сообществом.27 Это привело к международной дискуссии о том, какие соглашения были нарушены Россией. Хотя действия России не были законными, в Крыму был проведён референдум, и 95 процентов опрошенных граждан поддержали аннексию.28 Референдум и конфликт привели к ещё большим проблемам, на этот раз в Восточной Украине. Области Донецка и Луганска, где население в основном говорит по-русски, хотели референдума, подобного тому, что был в Крыму. Многие сепаратисты живут в этих областях, и они хотят либо быть независимыми от Украины, либо присоединиться к России, как Крым.29 Это была основной причиной продолжающейся войны в Донбассе, в результате которой погибли десятки тысяч украинцев и русских, и которая заставила миллионы украинцев покинуть свои дома.30 Начавшись демонстрациями, конфликт перерос в вооружённое столкно26. Hall Gardner, Crimea, Global Rivalry, and the Vengeance of History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 30.

27. Kalb, Imperial Gamble, 159.

28. Plokhy, The Gates of Europe, 340-341.

29. Kalb, Imperial Gamble, 164.

30. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Report on the human rights situation in Ukraine 16 August to 15 November 2017” (United Nations, 2017), 7.

вение между украинским правительством и сепаратистами Донецкой и Луганской Народных Республик, когда российское правительство незаконно отправило вооружённых наемников и войска через границу в Украину в августе 2014 года для поддержки сепаратистов. С начала конфликта было более десяти перемирий, но каждый раз обе стороны почти сразу заявляли об их провале.31 К сожалению, у конфликта нет конца, и вряд ли обе стороны придут к соответствующему соглашению. Ни международное сообщество, ни две вовлеченные страны не смогли найти выход. Война особенно беспокоит Украину, которая через боевые действия осознала, что её вооруженные силы не могут дать отпор мятежникам, если их поддерживают гораздо более крупные российские силы. Таким образом, борьба Украины за независимость продолжалась со времен распада Советского Союза. Вмешательство России было влиятельным и продолжает гарантировать, что Украина не найдёт свою идентичность как страна, не обретёт мир и не займёт устойчивую позицию в международном сообществе. Ситуация осложняется из-за общей истории и языка стран, но в любом случае война не должна быть ответом. Мы можем только надеяться, что и Россия, и Украина смогут найти компромисс, который устроит обе стороны, поскольку в противном случае война не закончиться никогда и Украина никогда не сможет стать суверенной и независимой страной, которой она заслуживает быть. Библиография: D’Anieri, Paul. Understanding Ukrainian Politics: Power, Politics, and Institutional Design.

New York: Routledge, 2015.

Feifer, Gregory. “Unloved but Unbowed, Ukraine’s Viktor Yushchenko Leaves Office.” Radio Free Europe. Last modified February 24, 2010. https://www. rferl.org/a/Unloved_But_Unbowed_ Ukraines_Viktor_Yushchenko_Leaves_ Office/1967436.html/.

Fritz, Verena. State-Building: A Comparative Study of Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007.

31. Plokhy, The Gates of Europe, 342-345.

Gardner, Hall. Crimea, Global Rivalry, and the Vengeance of History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Kalb, Marvin. Imperial Gamble: Putin, Ukraine, and the New Cold War. Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2015.

Kuzio, Taras. Ukraine: Democratization, Corruption, and the New Russian Imperialism. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2015.

Lalpychak, Christyna. “Historic vote for independence.” The Ukrainian Weekly. Last modified September 1, 1991. http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/1991/359102.shtml/.

---. “Over 90% vote yes in referendum; Kravchuk elected president of Ukraine.”

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Lytvyn, Vladimir. Ukraina: Politika, Politiki, Vlast’. Kyiv: Alternativy, 1997.

No Author. “Court clears Kuchma of Gongadze murder charges.” The Kyiv Post. Last modified December 14, 2011. https://www.kyivpost.com/article/ content/ukraine-politics/court-clearskuchma-of-gongadze-murder-charges118929.html/.

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Report on the human rights situation in Ukraine 16 August to 15 November 2017.” Available from https://reliefweb.int/sites/ reliefweb.int/files/resources/UAReport20th_EN.pdf/.

Osborn, Andrew. “Ukraine election: Viktor Yanukovych claims victory.” The Telegraph. Last modified February 10, 2010. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ worldnews/europe/ukraine/7184349/ Ukraine-election-Viktor-Yanukovychclaims-victory.html/.

Plokhy, Serhii. The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. New York: Basic Books, 2015.

Wilson, Andrew. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Wolczuk, Kataryna. The Moulding of Ukraine: The Constitutional Politics of State Formation.

Budapest: Central European University Press, 2001.

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Yekelchyk, Serhy. The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

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89

Taras Bulba: The Zaporozhian Father of Gogol’s Russia

T

Jessica Mitchell

he Cossack cannot die. Since its literary creation in the Romantic Era, the mythic Cossack has been a perennial fixture of Russian literature. The Cossack character eclipses the boundaries of genre, style, and historical epoch, appearing in the works of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Babel, and Gogol. The variety and resilience of the Cossack hero in literature is mirrored by the Cossack figure in popular culture, as epitomized by the Cossack brigades in contemporary Russia. This enduring appeal stems from the Cossack’s position as a liminal figure; though imagined as a Slavic and Orthodox, the Cossack inhabits the borderlands of Greater Russia and its cultural centres. The ambiguous position of the Cossack to Russian civilization thus creates an intriguing hybrid of the exotic Other and the “true” Russian.

In addition to physical distance, temporal space obscurs the place of the Cossack in the Russian cultural schema. In this paper, I will examine the Cossack as a shade of the Russian proto-self in Gogol’s Taras Bulba.

The novella’s protagonist embodies the Cossack hero: exotically primitive, brutally masculine, and vitally alive. His son, Andrii, represents the missing link between the medieval Cossack’s eventual descendants-- Gogol’s culturally advanced Russian audience.

A Family Plot It is no coincidence that Taras Bulba focuses on a family drama. Set at an unspecified point in the Middle Ages, the novella recounts the intergenerational divergence and continuity between a father, Taras, and his two sons, Ostap and Andrii. The family plot at the novella’s center strengthens a larger metaphor about the birth of the Russian and . Judith Deutsch Korblatt, The Cossack hero in Russian literature: a study in cultural mythology. . Ellen Barry, “The Cossacks Are Back. May the Hills Tremble..” . Nikolai Gogol, Taras Bulba and Other Tales. . This reflects by use of a translation of the 1842 edition, rather than the 1835 original.

his childhood formation in the Zaporozhian Secz. The novel begins with the archetypal Cossack hero and ends with a son who has developed past primitivism.

Taras the father exudes Cossack heroism and brutality. At times, Taras’ character appears admirable, gallant, and joyful. The narrator establishes that Taras is “distinguished for his uprightness of character” (8).

Caring little for money, he dispenses it at will.

He “draws the sword for the glory of Christianity” and defends innocents from new taxes and other oppressions (9). He often yields to the impulse of dance and carouse (24).

Although he drinks heavily, he remains alert, “forgetting nothing” (9).

Taras is not always capable of such presence of mind and good will. “Terribly headstrong,” Taras often acts unreasonably and cruelly (6). He terrorizes his wife, manipulates his fellows at the Secz, and breaks his oaths as a man and a Christian with impunity. Along with his Cossack brothers, Taras perpetuates grave acts of destruction. On the way to Dubno, Taras and his fellows decimates “a magnificent abbey” full of innocent monks, nuns, and Jews (45). Cossacks pass through the countryside, leaving “women’s breasts cut open, the skin flayed up to the knew, and the victim then set at liberty” (44).

The narrator assures the reader that Taras’ meaner Cossack traits are necessarily archaic. Taras is “one of those characters which could only exist in that fierce fifteenth century” (6). He belongs to “ the band of old-fashioned leaders” (8). As if Taras’ violence did not speak for itself, Gogol reiterates that “our hair would stand on end these days at the horrible traits of that fierce, half-civilized age” (44). His simple beliefs and tastes, likewise labelled an “outgrowth of his epoch” (27). An embodiment of the Cossack idea, Taras symbolizes the primitivism pre-modern Rus, a noble savage roaming the steppe.

The age differentiation between father and his offspring reflects their metaphorical role. At his first appearance, the novella’s 91

hero is called “old Taras” (1). The narrator refrains from describing Taras’ physical presence, except for his “grey head” and pot belly (14). As the novella ends, Taras exclaims “Oh old age, old age!” before he passes from life into folktale (133). Taras’ antiquity is thrown into focus by exaggerated descriptions of his sons’ youth. They are “a couple of stout lads… their firm, healthy faces covered with the first down of manhood, down which had,as yet, never known a razor” (1). Although they are past twenty when the novella begins, the narrator gives them the physical attributes of young teens. Whatsmore, wearing the skirts of monastic order which educated them, they port the androgynous frock of young children. Characters within the work call them lads, boys, and children (3). Whether twenty somethings, adolescents, or mere children, Taras’ sons are the fresh blood of a new generation--the heirs to the old Cossack hero. Anticipating his end, “old” Taras initiates his boys into the Cossack brotherhood at top speed (29).

At the Secz, Ostap and Andrii grow into men, learning and diverging from the ancient ways of their father. Ostap takes after Taras, with some qualifications. He is remarkably strong obstinately brave (29). He gives his life to the “Cossack cause” with the same outward abandon as Taras. Unlike his rancorous father, Ostap secretly harbours tender feelings for his mother. “kind hearted, after the only fashion that kind-heartedness could exist in such a character at such a time” (16). His emotional life remains more or less hidden at the death of his brother; though “sorry,” he asks only that Taras give him “an honourable burial” (107).

Andrii, the younger son, differs radically from the Cossack model of his father. In every way, his humanity is more fully realised than that of either his father or his brother.

The narrator tells us that Andrii exercised “more developed feelings” than his father, certainly, and Ostap, whose emotional life is stunted and vexed (16) by his father’s expectations. Andrii possess “a soul accessible to greater sentiments” (16). Because Andrii can feel, he rescues the beautiful Polish maiden and those closest to her from a senseless, untimely, agonizing death. To Taras, it signifies the ultimate betrayal of his “faith and soul”(74). Most scholarship on Taras Bulba likewise interprets Andrii’s choice to save the girl as a moment of tragic downfall. This reading relies too heavily on Taras’ singular 92

beliefs rather than the overall message of the text. The narrator’s characterisation of Andrii’s choice illustrates that Andrii the son he has faith and soul, a crucial difference distinguishing him from the cruel men who came before him.

Fulfilling his vocation as a defender of Orthodox Christianity throughout the novella, Andrii acts out the transition from pagan savagery and nominal Orthodoxy to genuine Christian action. Although all Cossacks enter the Secz with a profession of faith, they “would not harken aught” to the fundamental rites of the Church (27). No one in the novella exhibits an understanding of the basic Christian tenant of mercy except for Andrii (27). Andrii faithfully keeps the oath he made to the holy cross, contrasting with Taras’ disrespect for his own oaths (53, 35). Upon entering Dubno, Andrii, “moved by pity,” gives bread to a starving man and expresses his shock at the city’s desolation (60).

When Andrii renounces his father, comrades, and country to his beloved, he notably never abandons his Orthodox beliefs (67). He simply “cannot see” the Catholic altar-- if eyes are a window to the soul, this is as clear an indication as any that Andrii has not abandoned the Orthodox creed (62).

In his last act of Christian virtue, Andrii meekly allows his father to murder him, “his eyes fixed to the ground… the young lamb” sacrificed(107). Earlier on in the story, the Polish girl places a diadem on his head, foreshadowing his eventual martyrdom and her essential role in it (18). As well as this general motif of Christian martyrdom, Andrii’s acceptance of death at the hands of his family mirrors the specifically Russian story of Boris and Gleb, the first saints canonized in Kievan Rus. As if a mere parallel were not explicit enough, one of the few named Cossacks is called Gleb (77). This scene likewise contrasts with the the first scene of the novella, when the two older men of the family turn on each other over a very mild insult, renouncing their familial ties and falling to “heavy blows on ribs, back, and chest” (2).

The story of the Cossack begins with “mad brawling” and ends with a young man-- no longer a Cossack-- giving his life out of love.

‘Twas Beauty Killed the Beast Of course, Andrii’s love is not wholly spiritual. Andrii was born with a poet’s soul in a time unconducive to poetry. Driven by “passionate impulse,” Andrii cannot find full

satisfaction in a life wholly composed of war and drinking (16). A longing for beauty separates Andrii from the other Cossacks. While the other, presumably loveless, Cossacks fall into a mass of warriors, Andrii distinguishes himself through thought and deed. As he gallops the the Secz, his mind’s eye composes a montage of the Pole’s lovely face (19). On the same journey, Taras thinks only of the Cossack group and his own youth spent fighting and carousing; to him, all paths lead back to the Secz (16). Through the deathly tunnel into Dubno, Andrii “gazes out of wonder worked by light” (58). He does not die a “good Cossack,” nor does he fade away into the “hints of longs and lyrics, no longer sung” (4, 25).

Instead, Andrii becomes a tragic hero, killed and immortalized for his ability to choose a path different than that of his father and his fellows.

That new path includes romantic love unknown in Zaporozhye. In Andrii’s fatherland, women are rarely seen and never appreciated (123). His mother lives in misery as a “withered” drudge, often insulted and pummeled (10). She prepares food, and then returns to her hut to cry over her “purely maternal love” (10). Within this dynamic, Taras appears oddly hyper-masculine and sexless, a misogynist to the letter. In addition to beating and berating his wife, he leaves her “unkissed” (8). Among his Cossack band, “lovers of women alone could find naught” (27); the landscape of their steppe is equally “virginal” (27). The mythic Cossack dwells in the timeless childhood of humankind, an oddly innocent “sea of dissipation”(28).

Leaving the sterility of his homeland, Andrii finds his match and muse in a woman from the West. In Kiev, Andrii falls in love with a Polish girl-- the narrator never mentions any similar romance or infatuation with a Russian lady during his eight years in the city, despite the city’s largely Russian population.

A relatively settled and comfortable life grants the Western woman the agency to be more than a “misplaced object” (10). Remarkably, the Polish girl speaks for herself. When Andrii rescues her, she delivers the longest, most linguistically complex address in the novella (66). Andrii’s mother, in contrast, wails incomplete phrases, and finds herself unable to “utter a single word” as her boys go off to war (12).The Polish girl embodies the freedom of . The distinction between Russia and Ukraine in the novella will be discussed shortly.

a more advanced society, exuding vivacity accessible in Zaporozhye only to men. Like the Cossack in his carouses, she “laughed heartily and amused herself...with a thousand foolish pranks” (18). She is also fierce; she looks at Andrii with “piercing eyes,” “approaches him boldly” then finally “orders him” under her bed (18). In her joy and assertiveness, she can rival any Cossack.“Grand-souled” and gleeful all on her own, she holds far more appeal than the “pitiful, deserted” women in Zaporozhye (10,68).

Yet in contrast with Cossack simplicity, she represents sublime, cultivated beauty. Her physical features are beyond compare. Instead of the “boney hands and feeble breast” of the Cossack woman, the Polish maiden claims the “bosom, neck, and arms moulded in the proportions which mark fully developed loveliness”(63, 98). Her face, framed by a luxuriant mass of hair, conveys an “irresistible, inexpressible charm” (63). Her dress appears both impractical and gorgeous. She wraps herself in “transparent muslin;” to the rude Cossack mind, see-through clothes would seem a troubling oxymoron (18). Like her countryman, she “shines like the sun” (76). Just as she inspires Andrii to perform an act of Christian mercy, she initiates him into the realm of outward beauty, baptising him with Western finery and glittering gold (18). Though Andrii “cuts a ridiculous figure” in Western accoutrements, he begins his transition from a primitive into a feeling man in the Polish girl’s bedroom (18).

Despite his love of beauty and its earthly representatives, Andrii cannot embody the complete evolution of the Cossack into a modern Russian self. In “that half nomadic corner of Europe..laid waste and burned to the quick, ”Andrii, a feeling individual, cannot survive (6). The historic environment of Taras Bulba similarity mutes Andrii’s artistic voice: “Andrii knew not what to say; he wanted to say everything. He had in his mind to say it all ardently as it glowed in his heart-and could not. He felt something confining his mouth; voice and words were lacking... and was angry with his Cossack nature” (63).

After saving the girl with life giving bread, he briefly receives the gift of expression. He . If homophobia is the litmus test of equality in contemporary Russia as I. Kon argued, I would posit that the treatment of women fulfilled a similar function in the (fictitious) early age depicted in Taras Bulba.

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“penetrates straight to the depths” of his beloved’s heart with “frank, sincere, simple” words(65). Here Andrii foretells the union of Western inspiration and Russian soul. Dying, Andrii’s face fleetingly exhibits the “magnificent beauty” of Cossack origins softened by something new (107). One more expression of the Russian cultural sublime immerges in Andrii’s wake: the novel itself.

By inventing and writing down this Cossack tale, the narrator silently champions Andrii’s path away from the Secz. No true Cossack would bother reading, much less writing a literary work. Neither personal nor collective history holds any use for them; the Cossack “spits upon the past, giving himself recklessly up to freedom and good-fellowship of men of the same stamp as himself ” (26).Given the overall emphasis of the group over the individual in Russian thought, most scholarship on Taras Bulba condemn Andrii’s individuality and aestheticism. Through the act of writing, Gogol assures his reader that he does not really vilify Andrii’s love of beauty. Art cannot negate the value of art. In a manner antithetical to the Cossack, the narrator--alone--writes down a story about a distant epoch that had little immediate relevance to his life in the nineteenth century.

The lush aesthetic of the novella borrows heavily from the western Romantic tradition. The narrator of Taras Bulba describes at length the physical qualities of Ostap, Andrii and the Polish beauty. Delighting in his locales, his eye ligners on the medievally decadent walled city and “the wilderness of the steppe” (21, 62). Indeed, who but an aesthete could turn such a phrase as this: “mist rose more densely; each flower, each blade of grass, emitted the fragrance of ambergris... broad bands of rosy gold were streaked across the dark blue heaven as if with a giant brush” (20). While drawing inspiration from the Cossack past, the narrator shows his Western education, making allusions that vary from classical antiquity to the Dutch painter Gerrit Dou (5,58). The Cossack hero himself made one of his earliest appearances in a poem by Sir Walter Scott. Through its erudite, fanciful narrator, the novella exemplifies the Russian Self, heir to them all--the Cossack, his son’s poetic longing, and a beauty from the West. . See sources; each secondary source used makes mention of this argument. . Judith Deutsch Korblatt, The Cossack hero in Russian literature: a study in cultural mythology.

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Whence and Whither the Cossack Hero?

Of course, the Cossack as a proto-Russian metaphor only derives meaning from the narrator’s choice to blur national lines. In reality, Zaporozhye lies squarely in present-day Ukraine. In Taras Bulba, the narrator uses the concepts of “Russia,” “Zaporozhye,” and “Ukraine” interchangeably. The Cossacks have a “Russian nature” (7). Zaporozhye is called Russian soil multiply times (95-6, 1012, 129, 135). I see two primary reasons--one historical, the other creative-- for this choice.

More practically, the Gogol wrote for Russians at a time when Ukrainian identity was an imprecise, dangerous concept. The Russian imperial government subjected the novella to substantial cuts between its original 1835 edition and its more widely circulated rewrite, published in 1842. Censors would have bulked at any hint of Ukrainian nationalism. The unity of Ukrainians and Russians likewise reflects Gogol’s personal views and the Pan Slavic idea that rose to prominence in his lifetime.10 Written in Russian rather than Ukrainian, the novella was mostly read by ethnic Russians in Greater Russia and reviewed by Peterburgian critics like Belinski.11 The narrator appeals to this largely Russian audience, anointing them with the blood of an already celebrated heroic character.

Secondly, from a literary standpoint, the establishment of a shared origin and common cultural practices (real, created, and imagined) contributes to a more impressive narrative; the Cossack becomes a crucially important historical figure. The narrator dubs him the heir to the ancient lineage of Constantinople, a descendant of Rus, and father of the Third Rome (95).Repeated allusions to the coming age bolster the historic role of the Cossack.

By fighting the Poles and “roving Tartars,” the Cossack defends the Orthodox Church from abandonment and ruin (44). Indeed, mentioning that the Cossack saved all of Christendom from the doom of the Mongol Horde, the narrator castes the Cossack as a world hero (7).

As the Cossack wages his final battle, he prophesies the future glory of his descendants. One Cossack, knowing his wound is . Judith Deutsch Korblatt, The Cossack hero in Russian literature: a study in cultural mythology.

10. The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica.

“Pan-Slavism.”

11. Judith Deutsch Korblatt, The Cossack hero in Russian literature: a study in cultural mythology.

mortal, cries, “may the holy Russian land stand forever!” (101). Another shouts, “may the Russian land rejoice forever!” (102). Each dying Cossack gives a similar speech. Before breathing his last, Taras rousingly assures his Cossack brothers that “a czar shall arise from Russian soil, and there shall not be a power in the world which shall not submit to him” (135). The ancient Cossack meets his “glorious end” in battle for the holy Christian cause and the Russian nation (89). If one accepts the narrator’s premise, the Cossack did not fight in vain: the Russian and her church persevere, thanks to his efforts.

Surrounded by “threatening neighbours,” the brutal Cossack appears to be the modern Russian’s most likely ancestor from that age of “eternal terrors”(6). The Western contribution to the Russian identity ends at inspiration. Cossack dialog emphasises the religious enmity dividing Russia and the West-while Russians are Orthodox, Westerners are “Catholic unbelievers” (95). Poles, as representatives of the West within the novella (along with their French engineer), err on the side of affected superficiality. “Haughty nobles,” they lord their power over Orthodox Christians (78). Perhaps worst of all, Polish soldiers equip themselves richly rather than buy alcohol (76). Surely such a people could not have spawned the Russian, with his singular fondness for drink (7). Knowing this Russian trait, the Polish nobles collude with Jews to squeeze the Cossacks dry.

While the Poles ooze superiority, the Jews appear comically vulgar. Yankel, Taras’ snivelling (and unwilling) sidekick, will do anything for money: “the eternal thought of gold twines like a snake” around his heart (123). Because of his avarice, he cannot even spend money. He and his wife live in a “dirty, ill-kept little house, the small windows blackened with unknown dirt...a heap of refuse lay before the door (112). Their religion seems equally disgusting; enveloped in a dirty prayer shroud, Yankel spits, “according to the forms of his creed” (113). Russian readers of Taras Bulba could not have seen even a shadow of themselves in the lofty Lyakh or a base Jewish caricature. Cossacks may have been crude, but they did exhibit certain traits valued in the Russian cultural schema.

For this Russian culture to reach a viable state of development, the Cossack had to go. As Andrii’s story indicated, Russian art required a Western muse. The Cossack, immune to beauty, cannot tolerate anything

beyond the small scope of his barbaric existence. Taras swears to gruesomely torture the Polish girl-- “her beautiful shoulders and bosom, white as fresh-fallen snow upon the mountain-tops would have been crushed to earth and her lovely body torn to pieces” (834). Circumstance presents this fate, so Taras defiles other women, equally innocent and beautiful: he “spared not the black browed gentlewomen, the brilliant, white-bosomed maiden...snowy white hands were raised to the heaven from amid fiery flames, with piteous shrieks...but the Cossack paid no heed” (132). Just as Taras murdered his own son, he “lances children” and burns them in a grand bonfire (132). He performs the Kupala fertility ritual in cruel reverse; the ancestor smites the new generation. The live Cossack is anathemic to the dedicated spirituality that would define Russian culture and the development and beauty that would characterize its artistic sensibility. One Cossack prays that“they who come after us than may live better than we have lived” (104). Breathing his last, he himself fulfills this wish. Once the Cossack destroyer has yielded, the Russian creator can be born.

The Cossack did not die. He planted “the grain of Russian feeling that will assert itself someday”(96). That grain, watered with blood and brandy and tended by a Western hand, would grow into a sophisticated, gorgeous body of high culture. Through the 19th century, the Cossack lived on, in the chronicles, tales, and souls of his descendants. Of course, ethnic Cossacks still inhabited Ukraine and Russia when Taras Bulba was written. Rather than ruin his metaphor for historic creation the Russian Self, Gogol relied entirely on old stories and imagination.12 Cossack primitivism, it would seem, could not be justified without a worthy end.

Bibliography: Barry, Ellen. “The Cossacks Are Back. May the Hills Tremble.” The New York Times. March 16, 2013. Accessed December 11, 2017. http://www.nytimes. com/2013/03/17/world/europe/cossacks-are-back-in-russia-may-the-hillstremble.html.

12. Judith Deutsch Korblatt, The Cossack hero in Russian literature: a study in cultural mythology.

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Chary, Frederick B. Slavic Review 55, no. 4 (1996): 907. doi:10.2307/2501257.

Deutsch, Judith. “The Zaporožian Cossacks of Nikolaj Gogol: An approach to god and man.” Russian Literature 22, no. 3 (1987): 359-77. doi:10.1016/03043479(87)90032-9.

The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica.

“Pan-Slavism.” Encyclopædia Britannica. October 15, 2013. Accessed December 11, 2017. https://www.britannica. com/event/Pan-Slavism.

Gogol, Nikolai. Taras Bulba and Other Tales.

Translated by C. J. Hogarth. Everyman’s Library. London: Dent & Sons, 1962.

Grabowicz, George G. “Three Perspectives on the Cossack Past: Gogol’, Ševčenko, Kuliš.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 5, no. 2 (1981): 171-94. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/41035904.

Grimstad, Knut Andreas. “’No Sissy Stuff!: The En-gendering Significance of Polishness in Gogol’s “Taras Bulba”.” New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 2002, 115-27.

Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch. The Cossack hero in Russian literature: a study in cultural mythology. Madison (Wis.): University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

Yoon, Saera. “Transformation of a Ukrainian Cossack into a Russian Warrior: Gogol’s 1842 “Taras Bulba”.” The Slavic and East European Journal 49, no. 3 (2005): 430-44. doi:10.2307/20058302.

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Смерть чиновника: пародия

С

Денис Лякин

идел я и слушал оперетту «Корневильские колокола». Совершенно не впечатляло. Я даже не обращал внимания на сюжет. Как бы громко не кричали ноты, я все думал о своем. Нет, Вы, конечно не подумайте, что я бескультурный невежа! Ничего подобного. Я ценю Искусство – высшее проявление человеческого гения. Да, гения! Именно оперетты воплощают эту гениальность. Они трогают сердца, смешат народ, но не вбивают ему в голову всякие глупые идеи. Ох, уж эти оперы! Запретить бы их раз и навсегда. Один вред приносят. Не верите? Эх, господа, господа, какие же вы наивные! Прям комично. Вспомните «нашего» Глинку. Кто же захочет жениться, посмотрев Руслана и Людмилу? Нашли невесту, устроили свадьбу и тут же ее похищает… ну, как сказать… старичок размягченный временем… мужчина униженный старостью… короче Вы поняли. А у нас таких много на Руси! Вот народ и не жениться. Как Глинке такая идея пришла в голову? Нет, чтобы полезное Отечеству написать! Например, почтить память великого русского поэта и патриота Пушкина и создать оперу по одному из его произведений. Вот это Искусство, вот это польза! А этот Глинка предпочел пакостить и пугать народ. Без свадеб нет продолжения рода, а без продолжения рода, конец Отчизне. Недаром он у немцев обучался! Предатель… Однако, все эти пустяки уже давно всем известны. Я то совсем об ином размышлял. Задумался я о справедливости… внезапный философский припадок, видите ли Вы. Всю жизнь отдал я служению Родины, всю жизнь посвятил Ее защите, и судьба меня за все это вознаградила зеркальной, всеохватывающей, полномасштабной лысиной! Ни одного волоска не пощадила. Как же так? Я, естественно, знал и до оперетты, что я обиженный судьбой. Но

по дороге к театру, встретил я старого бродягу. Он валялся в грязи и противно благоухал на весь квартал. Он словно олицетворял все ненужное и лишнее в обществе. Но какие волосы у него были! Густые, пышные, державные! Где же справедливость? Где она, милые мои? Да, да, воскрешение мертвых, страшный суд, вечная жизнь, и пятое, и десятое. Но я же воскресну лысым! Предстану пред судом божьим лысым! И когда я вознесусь в Царство Небесное, сияющее солнце будет вечно отражаться на моей голове, напоминая всем что я ЛЫ-СЫЙ! Меня эти мысли терзали, не давали покоя, мне хотелось просто встать и уйти. Но вдруг… и тут позвольте мне остановиться на мгновение, ведь это но вдруг, о котором столько написано, представляет собой опаснейший для литературы момент. Написав эти слова, авторы могут поддаться искушению и их прокомментировать. Они, например, могут заявить, что жизнь полна внезапностей. Идея на первый взгляд простейшая, но, если правильно ее рассмотреть, она – глубоко парадоксальна! Внезапность – свойство неожиданного происшествия. Однако, неожиданность внезапности исчезает при написании таких комментариев. Ведь фраза жизнь так полна внезапностей предупреждает читателя о наступающих внезапностях и они становятся ожидаемые. Какая же может быть ожидаемая внезапность? Тут весь смысл теряется. Нет, лучше иногда промолчать. Итак, меня терзали мысли о несправедливости жизни, когда, вдруг, человек, сидевший за мной, чихнул и обрызгал мою лысину. Неужели он читал мои мысли? Он неловко наклонился и извинился быстро и нелепо. Я его успокоил, сказав, что все это мелочи, хотя сам начинал волноваться. А он опять стал наклоняться ко мне и извиняться. Ну, 99

точно, он прочел мои мысли и издевался надо мною. Нечисть! Как это вообще возможно? Он что? Всю свою оставшуюся жизнь так будет издеваться надо мною? Нет покоя в мире сем лысому человеку.

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