The Gift (35 page)

The preoccupation with enlightenment, however, had now been formed in him for the rest of his life, and from 1853 to 1862 his journalistic activities were thoroughly imbued with an aspiration to feed the lean Russian reader with a diet of the most variegated information: the portions were huge, the bread supply inexhaustible, and nuts were provided on Sundays; for while stressing how important were the meat dishes of politics and philosophy, Nikolay Gavrilovich never forgot the sweet either. From his review of Amarantov’s
Indoor Magic
it is clear that he had tried out this entertaining physics at home, and to one of the best tricks, namely “carrying water in a sieve,” he added his own amendment: like all popularizers, he had a weakness for such
Kunststücke;
nor must we forget that hardly a year had passed since by agreement with his father he had finally abandoned his idea for perpetual motion.

He loved to read almanacs, noting for the general information
of the
Contemporary
subscribers (1855): “A guinea is 6 rubles and 47½ kopecks; the North American dollar is 1 silver ruble and 31 kopecks”; or else he would inform them that “telegraph towers between Odessa and Ochakov have been built from donations.” A genuine encyclopedist, a kind of Voltaire—with the stress, true, on the first syllable—he unstintingly copied out thousands of pages (he was always ready to embrace the rolled-up carpet of any chance subject and unfold the whole of it before the reader), translated a whole library, cultivated all genres right down to poetry, and dreamed to the end of his life of composing “a critical dictionary of ideas and facts” (which recalls Flaubert’s caricature, that
“Dictionnaire des idées reçues”
whose ironic epigraph—“the majority is always right”—Chernyshevski would have adopted in all seriousness). On this subject he writes to his wife from the fortress, telling her with passion, sorrow, bitterness, about all the titanic works which he will still complete. Later, during all the twenty years of his Siberian isolation, he sought solace in this dream; but then, one year before his death, when he learned of Brockhaus’s dictionary, he saw in it its realization. Then he yearned to translate it (otherwise “they would stuff it with all sorts of rubbish, such as minor German artists”), deeming that such a work would be the crown of his entire life; it turned out that this, too, had been already undertaken.

In the beginning of his journalistic pursuits, writing on Lessing (who had been born exactly a hundred years before him, and a resemblance to whom he himself admitted), he said: “For such natures there exists a sweeter service than service to one’s favorite science—and that is service to the development of one’s people.” Like Lessing, he was accustomed to develop general ideas on the basis of particular cases. And remembering that Lessing’s wife had died in childbirth, he feared for Olga Sokratovna, about whose first pregnancy he wrote to his father in Latin, just as, a hundred years before, Lessing had done.

Let us shed a little light here: on the twenty-first of December, 1853, Nikolay Gavrilovich intimated that according to knowledgeable women his wife had conceived. Her labor was difficult. It was a boy. “My sweety-tweety,” cooed Olga Sokratovna over her first-born—very
soon, however, becoming disenchanted with little Sasha. The doctors warned them that a second child would kill her. Still, she became pregnant anew—“somehow in expiation of our sins, against my will,” he wrote plaintively, in dull anguish, to Nekrasov.… No, it was something else, stronger than fear for his wife, that oppressed him. According to some sources, Chernyshevski contemplated suicide during the fifties; he even seems to have drunk—what an awe-inspiring vision: a drunken Chernyshevski! There was no use hiding it—the marriage had turned out unhappy, thrice unhappy, and even in later years, when he had managed with the aid of his reminiscences to “freeze his past into a state of static happiness” (Strannolyubski), nevertheless he still bore the marks of that fateful, deadly heartache—made of pity, jealousy and wounded pride—which a husband of quite a different stamp had experienced and had dealt with in quite a different way: Pushkin.

Both his wife and the infant Victor survived; and in December, 1858, she again almost died, giving birth to a third son, Misha. Amazing times—heroic, prolific, wearing a crinoline—that symbol of fertility.

“They are intelligent, educated, kind, I know it—while I am stupid, uneducated, bad,” Olga Sokratovna would say (not without that spasm of the soul termed
nadryv
) in reference to her husband’s relatives, the Pypin sisters, who with all their kindness did not spare “this hysteric, this unbalanced wench with her insufferable temper.” How she used to fling the plates around! What biographer can stick the pieces together? And that passion for moving … Those weird indispositions … In her old age, she loved to recall how on a dusty, sunny evening at Pavlovsk, in a phaeton with trotter, she had overtaken Grand Duke Konstantin, suddenly throwing off her blue veil and smiting him with a fiery glance, or how she had deceived her husband with the Polish émigré, Ivan Fyodorovich Savitski, a man renowned for the length of his mustaches: “Raffy [
Kanashka
, a vulgar nickname] knew about it … Ivan Fyodorovich and I would be in the alcove, while he went on writing at his desk by the window.” One feels very sorry for Raffy; he must have been sorely tormented by the young men who surrounded his wife and were in different stages of amorous intimacy
with her. Mme. Chernyshevski’s parties were particularly enlivened by a gang of Caucasian students. Nikolay Gavrilovich hardly ever came out to join them in the parlor. Once, on a New Year’s Eve, the Georgians, led by the guffawing Gogoberidze, burst into his study, dragged him out, and Olga Sokratovna threw a mantilla over him and forced him to dance.

Yes, one pities him—and nevertheless … Well, he could have given her a good thrashing with a strap, sent her to the devil; or even portrayed her with all her sins, wails, wanderings and innumerable betrayals in one of those novels with which he occupied his prison leisure. But no! In
The Prologue
(and partly in
What to Do?
) we are touched by his attempts to rehabilitate his wife. There are no lovers around, only reverential admirers; nor is there that cheap coquetry which led men (whom she called
mushchinki
, an awful diminutive) to think her even more accessible than she really was, and all one finds is the vitality of a witty, beautiful woman. Dissipation becomes emancipation, and respect for her battling husband (some respect she did feel for him, but to no purpose) is made to dominate all her other feelings. In
The Prologue
the student Mironov, in order to mystify a friend, tells him that Volgin’s wife is a widow. This so upsets Mme. Volgin that she bursts into tears—and likewise the heroine of
What to Do?
, representing the same woman, pines among giddy clichés for her arrested husband. Volgin leaves the printing office and hurries to the opera house where he carefully scans through a pair of binoculars one side of the auditorium, then the other; whereupon tears of tenderness gush from under the lenses. He came to verify that his wife, sitting in her box, was more attractive and more elegant than anyone else—in exactly the same way as Chernyshevski himself in his youth had compared Nadezhda Lobodovski with “women’s heads.”

And here we find ourselves again surrounded by the voices of his aesthetics—for the motifs of Chernyshevski’s life are now obedient to me—I have tamed its themes, they have become accustomed to my pen; with a smile I let them go: in the course of development they merely describe a circle, like a boomerang or a falcon, in order to end by returning to my hand; and even if any should fly far
away, beyond the horizon of my page, I am not perturbed; it will fly back, just as this one has done.

And so: on May 10, 1855, Chernyshevski was defending at the University of St. Petersburg the dissertation with which we are already familiar, “The Relations of Art to Reality,” written in three August nights in 1853; i.e., precisely at that time when “the vague, lyrical emotions of his youth that had suggested to him considering art in terms of a pretty girl’s portrait, had finally ripened and now produced this pulpy fruit in natural correlation with the apotheosis of his marital passion” (Strannolyubski). It was at this public debate that “the intellectual trend of the sixties” was first proclaimed, as old Shelgunov later recalled, noting with discouraging naïveté that the president of the University, Pletnyov, was not moved by the speech of the young scholar whose genius he failed to perceive.… The audience, on the other hand, was in ecstasy. So many people had piled in that some had to stand in the windows. “They descended like flies on carrion,” snorted Turgenev, who must have felt wounded in his capacity of professed aesthete, although he himself was not averse to pleasing the flies.

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

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

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

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

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