Tag: Russian Literature

Negative Character Growth in Chekhov’s Ionych

I have been reading Chekhov again. Chekhov is one of those writers who brings me such joy, and this is because he knows how to write. He reminds one that it is possible to write well, something not all writers, and certainly not all Russians, do. I wanted to write about “The Lady with the Dog”, and had even started a plan to that end, but I was so struck by “Ionych” (the next story I reread) that I felt I had to begin with it. “Ionych” is fascinating because it is a story about negative growth. The country doctor, Dmitry Ionych Startsev, falls in love with a young lady, is teased and rejected by her, and then decides to become a thoroughly unlikeable person as a result, leading him eventually to reject her himself when she realises much later that she had made a mistake in turning him down.

Negative growth is interesting because we are generally used to characters growing in positive directions. Our villains turn good, our good get better. Where mistakes are made, they are the result of bad character – of cowardice, or anger. But stories rarely show how entire lives can become mistakes, and how good people can become bad. That’s why it’s worth looking at “Ionych” in more detail.

The Plot

Dmitry Ionych Startsev is a country doctor who has recently arrived in the vicinity of the town of S. An educated man, as doctors generally are, Ionych is welcome in what little society there is in S., though his countryside practice means he rarely has time to visit the town. The society in S. is very limited, as is always the case in Chekhov’s provincial towns. The highlight, however, is the Turkin family – husband and wife, and their daughter Ekaterina, who is also known as Kotik (Kitty). Mr Turkin speaks in a very mannered way and tells funny anecdotes, his wife writes novels and reads them aloud to guests, and Kotik plays the piano. All this means that they are able to put on entertaining evenings for the inhabitants of their town. 

Eventually, Ionych manages to find the time to visit them. He is particularly entranced by Kotik, with the “innocent child’s expression on her face and the smooth, thin waist”. Though there is some family tension, for Kotik wishes to go to a conservatory to improve her playing and her mother decidedly does not desire this, and some of the usual dreadful treatment of young girls that we are probably used to if this is not our first time reading 19th century Russian literature (Kotik is barely allowed out of the house, so that she is protected from any and all “bad influences”), still the evening is generally marked by peace and pleasantness for Ionych.

When Kotik’s mother develops migraines, Ionych is called into the town more often, spending plenty of time with the family. Perhaps the migraines are even a ploy to weld Kotik and Ionych together, because if she were married she would never be given the opportunity to leave her husband to study elsewhere. Whatever the case, Ionych is in love with dear Kotik. One day, however, Kotik decides to tease him, giving him a note requesting a moonlit meeting in a local graveyard. Ionych shows up; Kotik does not. But though he is annoyed, Ionych experiences a kind of Romantic revelation of the world’s beauty in the graveyard. When he next meets his love, Ionych proposes; Kotik rejects him. Indeed, she rejects him precisely because she wants the freedom that not being his wife would bring. The problem is not one of emotions. But either way, Ionych is defeated.

Four years pass. Ionych, who had begun his story walking around the countryside, now owns a practice both there and in the city; he has a large, expensive carriage too. At the same time, he has drawn away from people – he finds them stupid and boring. And they, in turn, have started calling him a “puffed-up Pole”, though he is not Polish. In short, where once he was poor and liked, now he is rich and disliked. Kotik, meanwhile, has aged into Ekaterina, and returns from the conservatory each summer, though Ionych avoids her. At home, she already feels a kind of stranger and ill at ease.

But eventually they meet, once more the handiwork of Kotik’s mother. This time is both a repetition and a rejection of what came before. “He remembered his love, his hopes and dreams, which had so worried him four years ago – and he was embarrassed at them”. Kotik’s mother reads again, Kotik’s father says the same idiotic phrases, and Kotik herself plays the piano – nothing has changed. But emotionally, everything is about to fall apart.

She looked at him and was obviously waiting for him to invite her into the garden, but he remained silent. “Oh how good that I didn’t marry her”, thought Startsev.

What a terrible thought to read. But it gets worse, for Kotik invites him into the garden herself. She admits that the conservatory had failed her, for all the young ladies she knew were able to play the piano, and she was nothing special. She tells him how she thought of him while she was in Moscow, how ideal he was. But he does not propose. He thinks of his money, back at home, and the flame she had rekindled in him is snuffed out. Everything annoys him. He goes home and never sees the family again, ignoring their messages to him.

Later still Ionych drives about town “like a Pagan God”, so rich is he. People call him Ionych, rather than his full name. He has become his name – and not the personal, familiar, Dmitry. Yet although he is lonely, bored, and finds everything distasteful and uninteresting, nothing changes. He does not realise that he has made a mistake. Meanwhile, over at the Turkins, nothing has changed either, except that everyone is a little older. Ekaterina has become Kotik again, and no doubt will stay like that, sad and unmarried, the rest of her life.

Negative Growth

This is the story of Ionych’s decline into caring only for his money. We might ask whether Ionych always showed signs of badness and a quickness to judge – one thing the narration (in Ionych’s voice), notes early on about Kotik is that she is “probably pure”. But this is I think insignificant, because everyone has a little bad in them, but few have that badness gain strength over the course of their life as Ionych does. To encounter an example of negative growth in Ionych is therefore a kind of surprise. Just as in real life, we rarely encounter negative growth in fiction. Characters, especially main characters, tend to become wiser, learning from their mistakes. However secular we are, we like to see redemption take place for the evil, and manifestations of grace.

But badness can get worse. We often talk about regrets as something bad, and certainly they are when they consume a life and distract it from the present. But regrets can also make possible the righting of past mistakes. Without the interiority that regrets imply, we cannot hope to grow. Ionych ends up shutting himself down once those four years have passed. Kotik briefly makes him think of the past, but his embarrassment leads him to destroy his interiority to protect himself. This also destroys her hopes of another proposal. At the end of the story it is the narrator who tells us that Ionych is lonely, because Ionych cannot do it himself. In fact, he is probably not even aware that it might be the case.

Experiences change us. Ionych’s walk in the graveyard shows that he had a developed sense of imagination, but his rejection means that he fully embraces a terrible, limited, materialism. As a story, “Ionych” tells us about the consequences of not paying attention to ourselves and the people we are becoming. Oftentimes experiences, especially those involving rejection, are difficult to bear. We always try to make the most of them, of course, but often this can lead to us distorting ourselves in ways that are unhealthy. With no love, we decide to focus on work, for example. We lose one “success” for another, but don’t realise that the relative values of each success are vastly different. Ultimately, “Ionych” is above all a warning of the consequences that befall anyone who does not remain watchful of who they are and who they are letting themselves become.

Ionych can be read in English here: http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1292/

Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin

Alexander Pushkin is held by his countrymen to be their greatest writer, something which always strikes Westerners as unusual. The main problem is that Pushkin was primarily a poet, and poets, particularly Russian ones, are exceedingly difficult to translate and still harder to translate well. Yet Pushkin did write prose. His novel The Captain’s Daughter, and his short story “The Queen of Spades”, are among his best-known prose works. Another is the cycle of short stories, The Tales of Belkin, which I finished recently. While I can’t deny Pushkin’s verve for verse, his prose is rather more – if you’ll forgive the pun – prosaic.

What is particularly interesting about these five stories is more how we see in them the seeds out of which grew the magnificent prose that for so many exemplifies Russian literature. A saying often attributed to Dostoevsky is that Russian writers “all came out of Gogol’s “Overcoat””. But Gogol’s story in turn came out of these tales.

For all their significance as trailblazers, though, that’s not to say that these five stories can’t stand on their own.

The Editor’s Introduction

The Tales of Belkin, as its title indicates, purport not to be Pushkin’s own work at all, but rather that of the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin. The stories are introduced to us by Pushkin himself, acting as an editor (he did run a magazine for some time). This brief introduction, though, has much to say. Most of it is given over to a letter from one of Belkin’s friends, in which he describes the late author. Belkin was a young man, “humble and honest”, who let his estate in the country go to seed and died something of a recluse with many unfinished manuscripts lying around.

The letter-writer and editor note that the tales were all reportedly told to Belkin by someone else, and these names are given in a footnote by Pushkin. This, alongside the description of Belkin himself “average height, grey eyes, reddish hair, straight nose”, and the inclusion of a real date to the letter “Nov 16, 1830”, has the effect of giving The Tales of Belkin an extra dash of realism. We feel their author is a real person because he is treated like one. Many of the stories themselves feature a narrator as a character, who is then told the main story by someone else. This is quite a democratic approach, because many of these extra storytellers are from the lower ranks of society and it gives them a voice. It anticipates Turgenev’s Collection A Sportsman’s Sketches, where the approach is used to great effect.

“The Shot”

“The Shot”, the first of The Tales of Belkin, contains one of the classic examples of a duel in Russian literature, slotting in neatly next to Evgenii Onegin, A Hero of Our Time, and that squib in Fathers and Sons. Our narrator, an officer, is beguiled by Silvio, a Russian with a distinctly non-Slavic name. Silvio is an excellent shot, and though he is not an officer but simply a nobleman living nearby, he spends much of his time with the officers. They, for their part, enjoy such traditional pleasures as carousing and shooting each other in duels. One evening Silvio suffers an embarrassment at the hands of another officer, for which he should have called him to a duel, but Silvio declines at great cost to his honour. Our narrator is confused by this, thinking that Silvio is possibly a coward. But then Silvio tells him his own story.

It turns out that Silvio cannot fight in a duel because he needs to get revenge on another man, and this requires Silvio to take care of his own life. The incident in question happened when Silvio was in the army. A newcomer turned out to be equal to Silvio in popularity and talent, and Silvio felt threatened, eventually finding an excuse to duel him. Alas, he was fighting a Russian of the new generation: “His indifference made me lose my temper. What was the point, I thought, of taking his life when he didn’t seem to give a damn what I did?” Silvio let the man live, but he was determined to get his revenge. He waits until he hears the man has married, then he goes to his country estate with the intention of finally shooting, this time against an opponent who has a reason to fear death.

It works. He does not hit his opponent, for his goal was simply to regain his lost honour. His rival survives, but shaken and embarrassed in front of his new wife. One thing that’s particularly interesting about “The Shot” is the way that it plays with our notions of truth. Not only is the narrator himself a character, but he hears the story in two halves. The first comes from Silvio, while the second part, detailing Silvio’s ultimate revenge, comes from the rival himself. The overall effect is to make us wary of trusting anyone by drawing our attention to the biases out of which our understanding of truth is necessarily built. With that said, I’m not sure how much I enjoyed the story itself, however much its ideas of honour and its narrative complexity are important for the later tradition, particularly with Lermontov, for instance.

“The Blizzard”

“The Blizzard” is another of The Tales of Belkin which seems particularly interested in narrative itself. Our heroine, Maria, has been “brought up on French novels” and has a rather overdeveloped imagination as a result. She and her lover, a poor soldier, are forbidden to meet by their parents, but together they hatch a plan to elope, relying on their parents to accept them once they are legally married. Alas, it does not work out. The night they are supposed to marry there is a terrible blizzard, and Vladimir, her husband-to-be, gets lost on the way to the church. Maria, meanwhile, reads in everything an ill omen as she heads there herself. Pushkin constantly switches perspective between the two lovers, before finally shifting forward to the next morning at Maria’s house, where she seems to wake up as if nothing had happened.

But it is not so. Maria falls ill from her failure to marry Vladimir, and her parents meanwhile forbid him to set one foot within their house ever again. Vladimir, dejected, returns to the army and fights against the French, who at this point are advancing on Russian territory (we are in 1812). We lose track of him, and then hear that he has died. But Maria, with a Romantic constancy, refuses to marry anyone else, and holds onto everything of Vladimir’s that she can lay her hands on. However, one day she meets Burmin, a Hussar, and they get on swimmingly. Yet for some reason, though time passes, he does not propose to her. At last, she pressures him into explaining himself, and he says that he’s already married. Now, finally, Burmin gives us the missing piece, explaining what actually happened in the church on the night Maria was awaiting Vladimir.

It is ridiculous. But the story is more interesting than it seems. On one level, it’s a magical “everything turns out okay” kind of ending. But it’s complicated by Pushkin’s shifting of perspectives, consciously manipulating the reader’s knowledge and setting limitations on it. Most importantly, it’s complicated by the way that Burmin himself does not recognise the woman he somehow married. While I don’t doubt she would have been wearing a veil at the time, it is still rather ominous. At least it seems so to me.

“The Undertaker”

“The Undertaker” is a rather unusual story, the most fantastical of the stories of The Tales of Belkin. Our hero is a grumpy old undertaker who has recently moved into a new house. Unlike, as Pushkin notes, the undertakers of Shakespeare or Walter Scott, his own is humourless. But that’s not to say the text is without humour, because Pushkin’s undertaker’s pleasure at hearing about other people dying, and his disappointment when they don’t, is all part of the comedy. One day the undertaker is invited by a German shoemaker to a birthday dinner, and there the old man drinks far too much. Made uneasy by a comment one of the Germans had made – that we should toast our clients and invite them to a party – he suggests he will indeed invite the dead back and goes home.

To his horror the dead do turn up. They seem in a good-enough mood, but unsurprisingly the undertaker is rather shocked by their presence. He ends up pushing a skeleton out of anger, and at this point the dead turn against him. At this point he faints, or rather “loses the presence of his soul”, and wakes up. The experience of death lends itself to a psychological reading quite easily. The undertaker has repressed his ambivalent feelings towards his clients – people whose deaths make him glad, though they should not – and these feelings burst out in a bad and drunken dream. The effect of this is immediate. We have a sense that the undertaker has awoken a changed man – his final words are to call in his daughters for tea, perhaps thereupon to make amends for treating them badly until then. We can only guess, for the story ends there.

This little story – it’s the shortest of all the Tales of Belkin – is still packed with things to think about. At its heart is that simple but rather unanswerable question which has always plagued Russian writers – how should we live? It takes a bad dream to jolt the undertaker out of his bad existence. Perhaps for Pushkin’s readers, it may take only this story.

“The Station Master”

Of all The Tales of Belkin perhaps my favourite was “The Station Master”. It tells the story of a station master, a man who was in charge of a station on a road where tired horses could be exchanged for fresh and food and rest sought, a little like an inn. The story is focused on questions of sympathy. It begins humorously, with an epigraph from Prince Vyazemskii (a poet) about how these station masters are little dictators within their realms, before Pushkin himself lists the difficulties and frustrations of using their services, including the pointless complaint we write optimistically in their feedback booklets. (How little, I thought, has changed!). But then Pushkin suddenly stops us to say: “if we really get into their position properly, then instead of frustration our hearts will be filled with an honest sympathy for them”.  

We are introduced to a particular station master, whose daughter, Dunya, is his helper. He is extremely proud of her – touchingly so – and guards her fiercely. The daughter’s attractiveness is irresistible to the narrator, and he kisses her before he leaves. A few years later he comes by the same road and expects to see her again. Instead, he finds a changed place, an inn “without flowers in the windows, where all around there was a feeling of carelessness and decay”. The station master himself is still there, but his daughter has vanished, and without her he has fallen into ruin. He tells the narrator how she disappeared – kidnapped and married by an officer passing through – and how his own attempts to get her back from her new home failed.

Dunya, alas, was happy there, though we have a feeling that her position is unstable, as it always was for the many girls who left the provinces for the city during those days, and were reliant upon the goodwill of whoever had seduced them, for class differences meant that a marriage was unlikely. In the inn, the narrator draws our attention twice to a cycle of paintings showing the story of the Prodigal Son from the Bible, and once the station master refers to Dunya in similar terms.

Yet one of the ways that Pushkin plays with his readers is to frustrate their expectations. The narrator leaves the station for the second time, and the next time he passes through the area he finds the man already long dead. He manages to locate his grave and there is told by a local about a noblewoman who once visited it, coming on a wonderfully rich carriage and with children in tow. It is no doubt Dunya herself. Though we are disappointed that no reconciliation between father and daughter took place, still Pushkin surprises us by showing that her own story at least has a happy ending.

In focusing so much on questions of sympathy and rank, “The Station Master” is an obvious inspiration for Gogol’s short stories, particularly “The Overcoat”. But it stands on its own. I cared for the characters and their fates, and that’s perhaps all that matters.

“The Noblewoman-Peasant”

“The Noblewoman-Peasant” is the final story of The Tales of Belkin. It tells the story of a romance between a noblewoman and a nobleman whose fathers are at odds with one another. Liza cannot meet Aleksei because as a noblewoman, she has no reason to go to his house without her father’s permission, and so she contrives a plan to bump into him in the countryside, dressed up as a peasant (so that nobody, least of all Aleksei himself, can suspect she is a noblewoman). It is an idiotic scheme, but Pushkin reminds us that it is not unbelievable for a country girl, whose entire knowledge of the world is from silly novels.

Liza successfully meets Aleksei, who himself is forced into a role – he doesn’t want to startle the peasant girl he thinks he’s caught by suggesting he’s a nobleman, so he pretends to be the nobleman’s assistant. Liza, meanwhile, has to contend with the fact that sexual mores among peasant girls aren’t quite the same as among noblewomen, and has to break character to tell Aleksei politely that she won’t be going to bed with him in the bushes. But this remark, delivered in the perfect Russian of a noblewoman, only piques Aleksei’s interest still further. They meet again, and again, and fall in love – even though both, faking their identities, know that the relationship can go no further.

But then, amazingly, their fathers make up and the two youths are supposed to meet. Even worse, the fathers decide the children would be a good match. Liza does not wish to reveal her deception, so she once more adopts a fake role, dressing herself up unrecognizably in a hideous dress, covering herself with makeup, and refusing to speak any language other than French. Liza survives the meeting, but Aleksei’s love for her peasant alter-ego grows unstoppable. The “Romantic idea” of marrying a peasant comes to absorb him, and he makes ready to propose. Luckily, this story does end happily, and just as madly as it began.

But under even this comic exterior, there’s a lot going on. As Aleksei’s father pressures him to marry Liza we have a sense of the generational conflicts that will be especially prominent in the 1860s, with works like Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Meanwhile, though there’s a slight irony to its description of noblewomen in the countryside, Pushkin nevertheless demonstrates the difficult boredom of life there for them, practically trapped in their rooms and with nothing to do but read and gossip.

Conclusion

The Tales of Belkin are a cycle of short stories, and one thing that I looked for while reading them was points of connection between them, beyond their own imaginary author. It is not easy to say what they are all about, at least once one discards such broad and probably useless generalisations like “the meaning of life”, or “love”, and so on. Instead, I think the clue might be in the editor’s introduction. The stories are all about imagination. The undertaker’s imagination changes his life for the better, while Liza’s idea of dressing up as a peasant, however risible, ends up getting her exactly what she wants. I admit that it is not a fool proof suggestion, but it seems to work for most of the stories. Pushkin is interested in the ways that we tell stories, in narrative strategies, and imagination is part of that.

Taken separately, these stories are simply stories, but taken together The Tales of Belkin are in some sense an exploration of the ways we tell stories, and what their value can be. Either way, they’re worth reading if you come across some Pushkin lying around.

“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.