The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The Napoleonic hero had a cyclical trajectory in Russia, one tied to the mystique of the West and to the nightmare (and the nostalgia) of foreign invasion and heroic self-defense. In contrast, and somewhat paradoxically, the nihilist hero – who doubts and negates everything – was nourished by rumors of positive internal reform. The foundational text here, Turgenev’s Fathers and Children [Ottsy i deti: not, as the familiar translation has it, Fathers and Sons], appeared in 1862, one year after the enserfed Russian peasantry had been liberated by imperial decree. Turgenev’s hero is Evgeny Bazarov, the “New Man.” He is a skeptic, a materialist, a medical man and researcher who, in order to respect himself, “believes in nothing,” “respects nothing,” and “regards everything from a critical point of view.” In place of received belief, Bazarov puts utility: if a tool or an idea works, it is worthy of being affirmed. Only by applying a utilitarian standard could a rational human being escape the disillusionment of the Byronic hero and the delusions of Napoleonism. Although the world might still consider such a nihilistic hero “superfluous” – Bazarov

56 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

does indeed fail in all the ways that Turgenev had laid out a decade earlier, losing the woman he loves, dying before his time, finding no useful role in society – still, Bazarov is convinced that only with his priorities and values can humanity progress. “Nature is not a temple, but a workshop,” he insists, thus placing himself outside the realm of the traditional Russian hero who prefers to rely on righteousness and miracle. Bazarov’s death at the end is a remarkable variation on the plot of Turgenev’s earlier novels, in which a weak man is tested by a strong woman and fails the test. Bazarov falls in love against his will (he doesn’t believe in love), and the woman lacks both energy and inclination to test his devotion. Turgenev was pilloried by the radicals for presenting so negative a view of Russia’s new “sons,” a charge that appalled and embittered the novelist. It is the fathers who are the brunt of my satire, Turgenev insisted in letters to his friends; and as regards Bazarov, “I don’t know whether I love him or hate him.”24

Therather lyricalliteraryimageof thenihilist inTurgenev soondegenerated – or matured – into somethingfar more dangerous and violent.The first attack on the life of the Liberator Tsar Alexander II, by a domestic terrorist organization, occurred in 1866, and it promoted the nihilist from metaphysical portrait to political threat. Political assassinations rose steadily in Russia until the outbreak of the Great War. But in literature, the apogee of the nihilist was reached in 1872 with Dostoevsky’s Demons (although a Nietzschean afterglow of the type suffuses several Symbolist and Decadent novels). In 1913, on the occasion of a dramatization of Demons by the Moscow Art Theatre, Maksim Gorky declared Dostoevsky himself “superfluous” to the needs of the new Russia. In Gorky’s Marxist-Leninist view, Russia had outgrown those Dostoevskian pravedniki, Prince Myshkin and the Elder Zosima. There was also no use for cynical, nay-saying nihilists in the spirit of the Underground Man. “Russians have no need now to be shown Stavrogins,” Gorky wrote in his 1913 essay “More about Karamazovism.”“Theteachingofcourage isneeded,spiritualhealthis needed – action, and not self-contemplation, a return to the source of energy . . . to the people, to civic activity, and to science.”25

Gorkyon Russia’s new optimismisa good bridge to ourfinal exemplary“West-ern” import, the utopian hero (and its anti-utopian shadow). Literary utopia has a lengthy European pedigree, beginning with Sir Thomas More in the early sixteenth century. But utopian thinking remained robust longer in Russia than in the West. Again paradoxically, the eagerness and acuity with which Russian heroes debunked their surrounding reality, and the impatience with which the nihilist discredited all options (practical, impractical, pragmatic, corrupt) fed their tolerance of “re-utopianization.” For if every alternative was always

Heroes and their plots 57