Tag: Nadezhda Kvoshchinskaya

“Asya” by Ivan Turgenev

I’ve never liked Turgenev. What I mean is that I’ve never been particularly impressed by him. Among the major Russian writers of the 19th century he bears the fewest marks of the land of his birth. This is fair enough, for a man who corresponded with Theodor Storm and Gustave Flaubert, and spent much of his life in Europe rather than Russia. But it doesn’t change the fact that I’ve always found Turgenev boring. Unlike Dostoevsky, ideas don’t seem to interest him, and though he tries to write passionate characters he can’t actually write characters who ideas seem to interest them either. In On the Eve, we have a classic Turgenev tale of a revolutionary who forgets about his convictions when love appears. Fathers and Sons is not much better.

If I were feeling charitable, I’d say Turgenev’s stories are mostly about the failures of an ideological way of living. His characters are shown, time and again, to fail to achieve their goals because of their own hesitations and inaction. They think they believe something, but it always turns out that they don’t quite know themselves. It’s either love spoiling the young revolutionary, or his own weakness of will. Either way, hesitancy leading to quiet failure is the common thread in Turgenev’s work. No character really feels strongly enough to actually do anything, so opportunities are always being missed and everyone ends up sad. In “Asya”, the novella which I finished this week, the formula is little changed.

“Asya”: an Introduction to the Plot

“Asya” was completed in 1858 and shows Turgenev’s Europeanness rather plainly by being set in Europe. Our narrator and the two other principal characters are Russians, but the action takes place somewhere along the Rhine in the German lands. N. N. is our narrator, and “Asya” is ostensibly a recollection by an older and wiser N. N. of a time in his youth – “First Love”, another Turgenev novella, has a similar structure. Our hero is about twenty five at the time of his story, carefree and travelling “without any goal or plan”. He enjoys observing others, and he has recently attempted a tryst with a widow only to get rebuffed. But we shouldn’t worry for the sake of N. N.’s soul – he says himself that the wound she left “wasn’t very deep”.

In any case, he winds up in the town of Z., on one bank of the Rhine. On the other is another town, L., which can be reached by ferry. Neither of them is on the track usually beaten by Russians holidaying in Europe. Having nothing else to do, one day N. N. heads over there, and to his surprise comes across two other Russian tourists, a seventeen-year-old girl by the name of Asya, and her brother, who goes by Gagin. Gagin is a bad artist but a friendly fellow, and the two men strike up an acquaintance. Asya, however, is a wild thing – and Turgenev is constantly comparing her to a wild animal, or a child – and the narrator isn’t quite sure what to make of her. At one moment she’s enthusiastic and buoyant, at another she dresses demurely and shuns contact. One thing N. N. is certain of, however – she’s not Gagin’s real brother.

Well, he’s right. He overhears her making a confession of love to her “brother”, but it turns out she’s not actually his secret lover – as we might suppose – but actually his half-sister. She was born to one of the servants employed by Gagin’s father shortly after his wife died. Gagin for a long time never knew his sister’s identity, and her mother kept her out of the big house where the aristocrats lived. However, once her mother dies Gagin’s father took Asya into his own house, and on his deathbed he admits to Gagin that she’s actually his sister. So anyway, that’s how the two of them got to know each other.

Gagin and his sister go to Petersburg soon after, and he puts her into a boarding school – after all, he can’t keep her with him. Then, he decides he’s sick of work and wants to travel, so the two of them head to Europe for a wander, as you do.

Social Monster or Victim – Who or What is Asya?

The Russian name “Asya” is a shortened version of quite a lot of names. I know an Anastasia who uses that name, and an Arsenia. Turgenev’s Asya is, however, an Anna – which is quite unusual. It is a simple example of her rather confused, mixed identity. She is half aristocrat, half peasant – not just by parentage, but also by the amount of time she has spent in each milieu. If she stayed in Russia she would immediately be identified as not belonging, but in Europe there’s a little more leeway for her, a chance to determine her own identity. Turgenev plays up her unnaturalness by comparing her to a “little beast” and a “boy” on various occasions. N. N. notices in Asya something unnatural, though he’s unable to put his finger on what until Gagin tells him.

Asya is playing a role – she is trying to be the aristocrat she isn’t, and the effort is draining. Just like Maslova in Tolstoy’s Resurrection, because Asya is the product of two social groups she struggles to sit easily in either of them, causing great spiritual strain – like Maslova, she also struggles with having had an absent mother in her life. N. N. once comes across her reading a French novel and complains of her taste, not realising what her reading means to her: “She wanted to be no worse than other ladies, and so she gave herself to books”. Later, she desperately asks him “Tell me what I should read! Tell me what I should do!”

Youth, Love, and a Complete Inability to Do Anything

Unsurprisingly, after a few days together both Asya and N. N. fall hopelessly in love with each other. Asya, a girl who “doesn’t experience emotions by halves”, arranges a rendez-vous between them. They meet, but N. N. has already spoken with Gagin about it, and he comes prepared to play a role himself. She wants him to marry her, and he refuses. He doesn’t even say what he feels for her. Shortly afterwards, she and Gagin disappear, never to be seen again.

The narrator’s reluctance to marry her stems from his class prejudices, from the need for respectability. It also stems from his word of honour, given to Gagin, that he wouldn’t let his emotions get the better of him. But once Asya has gone he realises his love for her and feels that it is stronger than anything else. However, he had missed his opportunity, and he will never have another such chance again. He grows old, feeling sad and regretting what he lost.

Honour, class, are apparently left worthless when love has escaped our grasp. But Turgenev’s novella tells us all this with enough irony to keep us guessing. First of all, we might think of the structure – why is N. N. telling this story? He says at the end “that I didn’t feel sad about her for too long”, that probably she’d have been a bad wife. At the beginning of his story he talks of youth as like a “biscuit that we think is hearty bread”, and says that like flowers we should never bloom too long. But I think his words are ultimately a kind of self-deception. The man is alone, living on his memories, and perhaps worth feeling sorry for. As he says, “happiness has no tomorrow”, and he missed his “today”.

Location and Literature

“Asya” doesn’t strike me as a particularly complex story, but there are a few things going on behind the scenes that are interesting enough to mention. I quite like the idea of the two towns, separated by the river. The crossing from one end to another is a nice visual metaphor for what happens to N. N. as he enters Asya’s world. I also like the way Turgenev uses literary references in “Asya”. We have Gretchen (Goethe’s Faust), Tatyana (Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin), and the Lorelei myth, which has featured in lots of poems by various Germans including Goethe and Heine. The Tatyana one is quite interesting. Asya says “I would have liked to be Tatyana” – a woman who loved a man who didn’t love her back, and then rejected him once he did. The comparison with Pushkin’s heroine ties Asya to her homeland (something N. N. remarks on elsewhere, saying she’s the most Russian creature he’s ever seen), but it also makes her a little immature for wanting to be a tragic heroine. Although N. N. is mostly to blame for the failure of the relationship, Asya herself is not without fault for her decision to appoint mysterious rendez-vous and make overly harsh demands of N. N. – her final note said if he’d said he’d loved her she would have stayed. So much for second chances or taking things slowly!

This tragic nature makes us think the story will end with a melodramatic death scene. Indeed, there’s a frightening moment when N. N. goes searching around the town for her, and it seems certain she’s about to take her own life (as Lorelei did, by jumping into the river). It turns out that she didn’t, and just went home instead. While Turgenev can’t escape traditional descriptions of women or boring men he is at least wise enough to know that not every story involving a girl needs to end with suicide.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt Turgenev was a sensitive soul. He wrote some beautiful nature passages which I had to force myself to analyse in my first year at university, but in some sense that’s about it. His characters are limp and forgettable. I don’t actually remember Fathers and Sons, though I’ve read it twice. I only remember Bazarov because he’s significant in Russian literary history, not because he actually shines in his own story. “Asya” was very okay. While it’s true I was surprised by it in a few places, at the end of the day it’s just another story about two young people who fall in love and end up unhappier for their trouble. There are a few interesting ideas in here, but not really enough to make this story particularly exciting. In the end, “Asya” is as limp as its narrator. And that’s just doesn’t make for an awesome reading experience.

Still, it’s a nice story to have in my mental repertoire. There are some worthwhile comparisons to be made between Asya and Lelenka in Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya’s “Boarding School Girl” – both are almost the same age, and both of them are faced with the challenges of forming their own identity against the identity that society wants to force upon them. But Turgenev is not particularly interested in the Woman Question, and anyway I can’t write about him on that topic in my exam because he’s not a woman to begin with.

If you’re out here looking for some Turgenev to read that’s not Fathers and Sons, I’d recommend Rudin over “Asya”. It’s not too long but it’s much more interesting. But if you have nothing else to read except “Asya”, then be my guest. After all, if you’re dying of thirst then even the lukewarm bottle of water you left out on the table overnight will do for a drink.

Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya – “The Boarding School Girl”

Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya is the second woman writer of Russia’s 19th century who I’ve read, the first being Karolina Pavlova. (I wrote about Pavlova’s novel, A Double Life, here). Where Pavlova produced a flawed but original novel about the life of a young aristocratic girl who falls prey to the schemes of the men and older women surrounding her, using satire and mixing poetry and prose in a way that has more in common with the German novellas of the early 19th century than Russian literature, Khvoshchinskaya is not particularly stylistically original at all. Her stories make use of the 19th century’s staple: drab and workhorse realism.

In spite of her uninspiring prose, what Khvoshchinskaya brings to the table is a commitment to shining a light on the struggles that the average woman in Imperial Russia faced. In her task she is rather more subtle than Pavlova, whose anger often undermines the effectiveness of her arguments, and in many ways she anticipates Chekhov. The difference between them is that Khvoshchinskaya focuses on women’s suffering specifically, at least in “The Boarding School Girl”.

Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya herself. Like the Brontës, there were multiple Khvoshchinskaya sisters, all of them writers.

The Boarding School Girl

The first thing to have in mind when reading Khvoshchinskaya is that like the Brontë sisters, she too used a male pseudonym – V Krestovsky. What that meant in practice is probably that there was some pressure on her to self-censor to appear more “manly”. “The Boarding School Girl” begins with what might be such an attempt. The story’s first scene, in spite of its title, is occupied by two young men – Veretitsyn, and Ibraev. They are in a small administrative centre, somewhere deep inside Russia. Veretitsyn has been there for over a year – they are walking in his garden – while Ibraev has just arrived, to take up an important administrative position at the head of some department. Veretitsyn, we soon learn, is almost the opposite. He is watched by the police, a certified “dangerous influence”, and in exile. But they are old friends and want to catch up.

Towards the end of the meeting they notice a girl through the bars of Veretitsyn’s garden fence, walking in her own garden with a book and studying hard. In spite of Veretisyn’s assertion that “I don’t want her to be happy”, he decides to go and speak to her. And thus begins the acquaintance that sets in motion the events of “The Boarding School Girl”.

Our Heroine: Lelenka

Our heroine is Lelenka, a girl of about sixteen. She is introduced to us not by her physical characteristics, but by her mental ones – she has a good memory, and is a hard worker. Her eyes are not beautiful, but “clear and direct”. And indeed, Khvoshchinskaya predominantly uses a kind of anti-description of her, opposing her to typical women and, indirectly, to men’s typical definition of them. Lelenka’s look “was not coquetry: her calm gaze did not challenge, didn’t seek out a conversation; she did not even close her book”. She speaks a little with Veretitsyn through the bars of the garden wall – a prominent symbol for her lack of emancipation, and then she goes home.

They meet again later. We are perhaps expecting a romance to come of this. After all, Veretitsyn, the exiled revolutionary, fits neatly into a class of characters known as “superfluous men” who populated Imperial Russian literature since either Eugene Onegin (Eugene Onegin) or Pechorin (A Hero of Our Time), depending on who you ask. The most recent prominent example for Khvoshchinskaya would probably have been Rudin, in Turgenev’s novel of the same name, published in 1855. Superfluous men are intelligent, but ineffectual. They speak well but they are unable to commit to any of the radical ideas they espouse. As a result they either die bleakly, live bleakly, or are redeemed by a poorly-written angelic woman.

Veretitsyn acts as a kind of alternative teacher for Lelenka to those at school. He reveals to her the artificiality of her life, and puts into her head the idea of freedom by making her aware of how little of it she has: “You are a wonderful, obedient, kind daughter: you are only acting according to your duty” (emphasis mine). She should instead live for herself. Veretitsyn is just playing around – he’s terribly bored, and Lelenka is a pleasant distraction. When he gives her Romeo and Juliet to read the tone of his thoughts is derisive: “well, let her educate herself!” he thinks. It is a “violent joke”.

But for Lelenka herself, his words are not such a joke. She realises that she has indeed never been doing anything for herself. The usual translation of the title of the story, “The Boarding School Girl”, is not perfect because Lelenka does not actually board at school, but goes there every morning, accompanied by a servant from her household. “The School Girl” is probably better. Either way, the emphasis is on education. Lelenka is constantly learning in the story, but not only at school. After speaking with Veretitsyn she realises her education has consisted simply of memorising things, never of thinking for herself.  

An Unhappy Family

We see her lack of choice in her domestic life. “Raised in fear”, the children of her family know only the route to their school and back. At home she is told by her mother “sew, sew, or read a book”. But she starts to recognise her parents’ hypocrisy, the way that they are constantly “puffing themselves up” (the Russian word “важничать” comes directly from the word for “importance”) in spite of their lowly position and poverty. Lelenka, however, only recognises her unfreedom – she has little power to remedy it. She flunks her school exams, completely pointlessly, as an act of rebellion. But that’s all she can do. Khvoshchinskaya makes use of passive constructions in Russian to show her lack of agency, for example “All of these clothes were placed upon Lyolya”.

Her parents decide without consulting her that, as she’s now sixteen, she must get married. In addition to parents, social constraints are another layer of restraints placed upon women in the 19th century in Russia. At one point her mother is bartering concerning the price of the dowry for Lelenka – a kind of concrete reduction of Lelenka from human being into an object with a price attached. At another, a friend of her mother’s asks her if she speaks French and asks to listen, even though the friend doesn’t even understand it. Lelenka is told “you just need to submit, submission is what’s needed”, and that “you need to thank god for sending you someone to take care of you”. God is the final tool for keeping Lelenka in her place.

The Revolutionary and his Protégée

Veretitsyn was just having fun with Lelenka. He had no idea that his words could have had an effect on her. But she discovers freedom: “Let them make of me a woman in the kitchen, a worker… but I’ll not be a slave”. When Veretitsyn hears that she has failed her exams he is shocked and changes tack. He now starts defending the system he had earlier criticised. “You understand that people need to live with each other; that’s why we have laws, and rules, and convention”. But it is too late. Lelenka knows that Veretitsyn has “spoiled [her] character”, but she can do nothing but continue down that path. She thinks for herself – “Will I really have children one day? Will I really live just as they do?”

The answer is no. Veretitsyn, giving her Shakespeare, opened her mind to a new way of existence, one dominated by passion and personal interest. The description of reading (in French) is filled with joy – words were now “understandable without the slightest effort, everything just translated itself in her mind, in her heart, not from the words but from some kind of feeling clearer and more rich than words themselves”. Veretitsyn, unable to liberate himself from cynicism, successfully liberates Lelenka from her own circumstances.

In Petersburg

The second-to-last chapter ends with Lelenka being told that she has to marry. She refuses, but we don’t expect her to manage to hold our forever. The final chapter, taking place eight years after the events of the rest of the story, seems at first to confirm this. We are taken to the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. Khvoshchinskaya gives us a panoramic view of the people here – ladies and serious men. The descriptions focus on tight, restricted clothing. But instead we are taken not to a “lady” but to a “female artist”: it is, of course, Lelenka. There she meets among the visitors Veretitsyn, and she invites him home to chat.

A lot has changed. She is no longer Lelenka (a diminutive, showing her immaturity), but Elena. When Veretitsyn offers to carry her artist’s things she refuses, and when they stand by the banks of the Neva there is no longer a fence separating them. They are now, at last, equals. We learn that after hearing about the marriage Lelenka fled to her aunt’s, in Petersburg, and there she started going to a new educational establishment. The teachers there noticed her talent for painting, and helped her to develop it. She now has complete independence, financially as well as in every other sense – she knows three foreign languages, does translations and paintings. “I am free”.

Veretitsyn has declined where Lelenka has grown: “with the years one gets quieter”. He disagrees with her, calls her and her generation egotists. For him, it is enough that things get slowly better. She has permanently rejected love as a “yoke” and now lives for herself. When the story ends, we hear the “rustle of a pen upon paper” as she works. The sound “rustle” in Russian is normally associated with dresses, but Lelenka is not like those others. With that simple word choice, we see how far she’s come.

Conclusion

“The Boarding School Girl” is at its most interesting in this final chapter. The earlier portions catalogued Lelenka’s unfreedom, but here Khvoshchinskaya is really going against the patriarchal grain by ultimately showing that freedom is not only possible for women, but actually enjoyable. However, I’m not convinced by it. I guess it’s just the stodgy reactionary in me, but Lelenka’s freedom is marked by an unacknowledged loneliness that will only get worse as time goes on. She may be young and free and happy now, but I can’t see it lasting forever.

Freedom is as much a yoke as love is, and I find some merit in Veretitsyn’s view too, that Lelenka’s work is “just another source of opium”. In the end, Khvoshchinskaya herself doesn’t really take a side. Lelenka certainly has grown up – and that this is a good thing nobody can reasonably deny – but the endpoint she thinks she’s reached may only be the first step on a more challenging journey to full maturity. But that continuation of her story, unfortunately, was not written.

A good short article with extra information on the story is here.