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Of Time and Eternity: The Nineteenth-Century Russian Writers
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20215 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1992 |
6,845 Words |
| Author
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Walter Poznar
Walter Poznar is professor of humanities at Saint Leo College,
Florida. He has published numerous articles on higher
education and literature. |
"But we in our green youth have to settle the eternal questions first of all. That's what we care about. The young in Russia talk of nothing but the eternal questions now . . . I am trying to explain as quickly as possible my essential nature, that is what manner of man I am, what I believe in, and for what I hope, that's it, isn't it?" (Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, Part Two, Book V, Chapter III)
Some years ago the British writer and critic V.S. Pritchett asked: "What is it that attracts us to the Russian novelists of the nineteenth century?" What Pritchett was voicing was the obvious truth that the Russian writers touch and move us with immediacy, a sense of freshness and vitality that we do not always find in Western literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The great characters and events in Russian literature retain a reality and a relevance that are reaffirmed when we reread Tolstoy. Dostoevsky, and the others. Students respond to Russian writers as they typically do not to most Anglo-Saxon writers. Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Goncharov, and Turgenev evoke so strong a sense of reality that readers with no particular passion for literature accept without qualification their vision of life. Some tentative answers to Pritchett's question may provide us with some understanding of why so much of the pessimistic literature of this century has failed to engage our deepest sympathies, our most profound sense of life.
One of the most obvious characteristics of Russian fiction in the nineteenth century is the astonishing way in which characters talk about themselves and others. In his book on Turgenev, The Gentle Barbarian, Pritchett writes: "It is the nature of Dostoevsky's genius to show that when one of his characters appears his whole life and all his relatives seem to be hanging out of his talking mouth. When Russians soliloquize they are never alone." This need to reveal the self, its passions, its aspirations, its fears, its anger, is so pervasive in Russian fiction that its dramatic quality accounts in part for the compelling nature of conversation and debate in so many Russian works. Characters expose themselves so flagrantly that we are forced to listen to them, to observe them. In the opening chapter of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, three strangers on a train engage in personal conversations hat establish firmly the outline of each personality. In Oblomov, we listen to interminable conversations between Oblomov and Stolz, Oblomov and Olga, conversations in which character is explored in meticulous detail. Such conversations are not limited to a few Russian writers but occur almost universally.
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