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“First Love Is Exactly Like Revolution”: Intimacy as Political Allegory in Ivan Turgenev's Novella Spring Torrents
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 December 2021
Abstract
This article tackles the allegorical mode of Russian realism using Ivan Turgenev's novella Spring Torrents (1872) and its political implications as a case study. We argue that this deeply intimate story of love and moral fall can be read in the context of the “social imaginary” which, in Turgenev's manner, is wrapped in motives and symbols correlating to “revolutionary” and “reactionary” discourses. The article shows how this projection emerges in the narration without direct political discourse by means of allegory. It is this mode that ties together the intimate and the natural and gives Turgenev's novellas a political dimension, which is obvious in his novels but latent in the novellas, thus opening them up to various sociological interpretations. Employing various theoretical readings of allegory, we explain how allegory is built upon and around the subjectivity of Turgenev's characters, implying concepts such as sexuality and the unconscious that had not yet been coined as such but directly influenced future European fiction.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Footnotes
This study was implemented in the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University) in 2020. We are grateful to Andrey Fedotov, Boris Maslov, and anonymous reviewers of the Slavic Review for their valuable comments and suggestions.
References
1. See a review of critics’ opinions: Turgenev, Ivan, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem: v 30 tomakh (Mosсow, 1981), 8: 510–11Google Scholar.
2. M.B. Rabinovich, “I.S. Turgenev i franko-prusskaia voina 1870–71 gg.,” in M.P. Alekseev, ed., I.S. Turgenev. Voprosy biografii i tvorchestva (Leningrad, 1982), 99–108.
3. Ivan Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem: V 30 tomakh / Pis'ma 11, 1871–1872 (Moscow, 1999), 18: 185; Ralph E. Matlaw, “Turgenev’s Art in Spring Torrents,” The Slavonic and East European Review 35, no. 84 (December 1956): 157.
4. See: V[ladimir] M[arkovich] Markovich, “Povesti Turgeneva o ‘tragicheskom znachenii liubvi,’” in V.M. Markovich, O Turgeneve. Raboty raznykh let (St. Petersburg, 2018), 469–86.
5. Some scholars believe that Masoch could have influenced Turgenev’s works. See: L. Poluboiarinova, “A teper΄ eshche i Turgenev!” Istoki, osnovaniia i kliuchevye parametry retseptsii russkogo klassika v Avstrii, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg, 2019), 110–11; Michael Finke, “Sacher-Masoch, Turgenev, and Other Russians,” in Michael C. Finke and Carl Niekerk, eds., One Hundred Years of Masochism: Literary Texts, Social and Cultural Contexts (Amsterdam, 2000), 119–38.
6. See Pavel Annenkov’s opinion in his letter to Turgenev on December 14 (26), 1871: “I still don’t understand how he could become her minion after having experienced such pure love. It turns out to be tremendously impressive in the novella—true! Yet tremendously disgraceful for Russian nature. Maybe that is exactly what you meant but then how to explain this marvelous picture of his fascinating relationship with Gemma, without even a drop of this putrid poison?” Ivan Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem: v 30 t. (Moscow, 1981), 8: 506; (our translation).
7. James L. Rice, “Turgenev’s Mother and Other Problems of ‘First Love,’” in Simon Karlinsky, James L. Rice and Barry P. Scherr eds., O Rus! Studia litteraria slavica in honorem Hugh McLean (Berkeley, 1995), 249–60.
8. For example, the Russian symbolists favored this “intimacy.” See: L. Pild, “Turgenev v vospriiatii russkikh simvolistov (1890–1900-e gody)” (PhD diss., University of Tartu, 1999); Marina Ledkovsky, The Other Turgenev: From Romanticism to Symbolism (Würzburg, 1973), 125–38.
9. On symbolization in Russian novel see, for example: V. M. Markovich, “I.S. Turgenev i russkii realisticheskii roman XIX veka” [1982] in V.M. Markovich, O Turgeneve: Raboty raznykh let (St. Petersburg, 2018), 141–221; on allegory in The Precipice see: Ilya Kliger, “Resurgent Forms in Ivan Goncharov and Alexander Veselovsky: Toward a Historical Poetics of Tragic Realism,” The Russian Reivew 71, no. 4 (October 2012): 655–72; A. Bodrova and S. Gus’kov, “Literatura na sluzhbe imperii, imperiia na sluzhbe literatury: K interpretatsii finala romana ‘Obryv,’” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 164 (2020): 177–94.
10. In our understanding of Turgenev’s novels, we draw on the V.M. Markovich’s monographs “Chelovek v romanakh Turgeneva” [1975] and “I.S. Turgenev i russkii realisticheskii roman XIX veka” [1982] reprinted in: V.M. Markovich, O Turgeneve. See also: Elizabeth Cheresh Allen, Beyond Realism: Turgenev’s Poetics of Secular Salvation (Stanford, 1992); Jane T. Costlow, Worlds Within Worlds: The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (Princeton, 1990).
11. Ivan Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem: v 30 t. (Moscow, 1981), 8: 472–73.
12. Such a picture becomes even more complicated if we remember that Turgenev was not consistent in using generic terms in the 1850s when he was searching for his novelistic style and maneuvering between critics’ opinions. See: M.S. Makeev, “’Bol΄shaia povest’ vmesto romana: Eshche raz o sisteme zhanrov turgenevskoi prozy 1850-kh godov,” Spasskii vestnik 22 (2014): 99–105.
13. Ilya Kliger, “Scenarios of Power in Turgenev’s ‘First Love’: Russian Realism and the Allegory of the State,” Comparative Literature 70, no. 1 (March 2018): 42. The same interpretative logic has informed Boris Maslov’s allegorical reading of Turgenev’s novel Smoke, see Boris Maslov, “‘Zhilishche tishiny preobratilos΄ v ad’: O sud’be starorezhimnykh poniatii v Novoe vremia,” in Iu. Kagarlitskii, Dmitrii Kalugin, and B.A. Maslov, eds., Poniatiia, idei, konstruktsii: Ocherki sravnitel΄noi istoricheskoi semantiki (Moscow, 2019), 347–56. Maslov mentioned Spring Torrents as a similar case and analyzes it in: Maslov, “Gnezda klochnei i rokovye retsidivy: K istoricheskoi poetike realisticheskikh siuzhetov” in Margarita Vaysman, A. Vdovin, Ilya Kliger, and Kirill Ospovat, eds., Russkii realizm XIX veka: Obshchestvo, znanie, povestvovanie (Moscow, 2020), 542–45.
14. See: Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt am Main, 1963).
15. Hans Robert Jauss, “The Poetic Text within the Change of Horizons of Reading: The Example of Baudelaire’s ‘Spleen II,’” in Hans Robert Jauss and Timothy Bahti, eds., Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis, 1982), 175, 180.
16. In his recent article about Nikolai Gogol΄’s The Old-World Landowners, Kirill Ospovat shows how important allegory was in transition from Romanticism to Realism in the 1830–40s. See: Kirill Ospovat, “Realism as Technique: Mimesis, Allegory, and the Melancholic Gaze in Gogol΄’s ‘Old-World Landowners,’” in Yaraslava Ananka and Magdalena Marszałek, eds., Potemkinsche Dörfer der Idylle: Imaginationen und Imitationen des Ruralen in den europäischen Literaturen (Bielefeld, 2018), 219–48.
17. Although Fredric Jameson does not study the genesis of this type of novel, his works remain a good starting point for reflection: Fredric Jameson, “La Cousine Bette and Allegorical Realism,” PMLA 86, no. 2 (March 1971): 241–54; Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” in Social Text no. 15 (Autumn 1986): 65–88.
18. Ivan Turgenev, Spring Torrents, trans. Leonard Shapiro (Harmondsworth, 1980), 145. Further quotations are from this edition with page numbers in brackets.
19. A.B. Muratov, Turgenev-novellist (1870–80-e gody) (Leningrad, 1985), 7–15.
20. Although the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann had already described it in the late 1860s and early 1870s.
21. Our classification of temporalities in Turgenev’s prose differs from the three-part (mundane–archetypical—cosmic) plot scheme proposed by Iurii Lotman, see Iurii M. Lotman, “Siuzhetnoe prostranstvo russkogo romana,” in Iurii Lotman, O russkoi literature: Stat΄i i issledovaniia, 1958–1993 (St. Petersburg, 1997), 728–29.
22. A semantically close word révolte (indeed, “a revolt”) formed part of fixed phrases that described psychological states and reactions, such as la révolte des passions (“a riot of passions”) or la révolte des sens contre la raison (“a revolt of passion against reason”). See in one of the most authoritative dictionaries of the time: N.P. Makarov, Polnyi frantsuzsko-russkii slovar΄, 11-e izdаnie (St. Petersburg, 1904), 933. On the origin of the word, see: R. Koselleck, C. Meier, J. Fisch, N. Bulst, “Revolution,” in Otto Brunner, ed., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 5 (Stuttgart, 1984), 653–788.
23. See also: T.B. Trofimova, “Turgenev i Dante (k postanovke problemy),” Russkaia literatura no. 2 (2004): 177.
24. It is hard to discard the idea that the Roselli family business has symbolic meaning. The bakery is an ambivalent allusion, firstly, to the words attributed to Marie-Antoinette, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” (Let them eat brioches), which played a crucial role in the French Revolution mythology, and secondly, to the problem of hunger among the lower classes at that time. In this case, the bakery is an ironically literalized metaphor.
25. Political inclinations also play a role in those episodes in which the members of the Roselli family have to keep a secret. In one of them, Pantaleone, who has to keep silent about Sanin’s upcoming duel, reassures him sagely: “In reply, the old man. . .whispered twice ‘Segredezza!’” (48). In another, Sanin asks Emil to deliver a letter, and he assumes “a purposeful and mysterious expression” (73). In both cases, the characters mimic the family tradition playing out the conspiratorial behavior of Giovanni Roselli.
26. See: “Suddenly her legs swayed beneath her. From round the corner. . .appeared the figure of Herr Klueber. He saw Gemma and he saw Sanin—and then gave a kind of inward smirk.. . .he walked towards them with an air of bravura. Sanin was momentarily disconcerted. But then he glanced at the Klueber face. . .and the sight of this pink, common face suddenly threw him into a rage. Sanin stepped forward. Gemma seized his arm. . .and looked her former betrothed straight in the face. Klueber narrowed his eyes, hunched his shoulders, stepped quickly aside. . .” (85).
27. See more about this invariable trope that “the protagonist is held up at his beloved and then runs from her” in Turgenev’s prose in Jane T. Costlow, “Dido, Turgenev and the Journey toward Bedlam,” Russian Literature 29, no. 4 (May 1991): 395–408.
28. See: A.B. Muratov, Povesti i rasskazy I.S. Turgeneva 1867–71 godov (Leningrad, 1980), 50–55; James Woodward, “Polemics and Introspection in Turgenev’s Vesnie vody,” in Peter Thiergen, ed., Ivan S. Turgenev: Leben, Werk und Wirkung, Herausgegeben von Peter Thiergen (Munich, 1995), 234–35.
29. Woodward, “Polemics and Introspection in Turgenev’s Vesnie vody,” 234.
30. “. . .the red cotton of the peasants’ clothes, the girls’ bead head-dresses, the young grass on the common pasture. . .” (115).
31. See.: “Maria Nikolaevna spoke all the time in Russian, in a remarkably pure Moscow form of speech, but as spoken by the lower classes, not gentry” (110).
32. Jean Starobinski, Action and Reaction: The Life and Adventures of a Couple (New York, 2003), 322–51.
33. See: “. . .he. . .did not want to think of anything, whistled from time to time—and was very pleased with himself”; “he didn’t even attempt to try to fathom what was happening inside him—bedlam, and there’s an end on it!” (41, 66).
34. M.L. Gofman, “Veshnie vody,” in Literaturnaia ucheba, 3 (May 2000): 155–57 [First published: Vozrozhdenie, no. 77 (1958)]; A. Gladilova, “Stil΄ ‘Veshnikh vod΄ I.S. Turgeneva,” Russkaia rech΄ no. 2 (1971): 26–32. Sometimes scholars even see different genre models in the two parts of the novella. See: Harold K. Schefski, “Novelle structure in Turgenev’s Spring Torrents,” Studies in Short Fiction 22, no. 4 (Fall 1985): 435.
35. “Weak people never make an end themselves—but keep waiting for an end”; “When weak people talk to themselves, they are fond of using forceful turns of speech” (129, 136). See also Matlaw, “Turgenev’s Art in Spring Torrents,” 160.
36. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, 2001), 186.
37. Spring Torrents is a text about trauma, but it does not allow us to know whether the author was traumatized. We analyze not the psychology of Turgenev, but the novella’s poetics.
38. On the Russian serfdom as a cultural trauma see: “Ot redaktsii,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 5 (2016): i-iv (special issue on serfdom in Russia). On the slavery as a collective trauma see: Eyerman, Ron, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge Mass., 2001), 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39. Rogger, Hans, “America in the Russian Mind: Or Russian Discoveries of America” Pacific Historical Review 47, no. 1 (February 1978): 27–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Saraskina, L.I., “Amerika kak mif i utopiia v tvorchestve Dostoevskogo” in Teoriia khudozhestvennoi kult΄ury (Moscow, 2011), 13: 195–211Google Scholar.
40. “But she referred to herself as ‘good fellow’ who could not bear any ceremony: it was in these very terms she had described herself for Sanin’s benefit. And at the same time, here was the ‘good fellow’ walking beside him softly like a cat and leaning slightly against him, looking up at him. What is more, the ‘good fellow’ was cast in the image of a young female creature who simply radiated that destructive, tormenting, quietly inflammatory temptation. . .” (116); “Wild forces are now at play. Here is no Amazon putting her steed to the gallop—a young female Centaur gallops along, half-beast and half-goddess. The placid and well-bred German countryside lies amazed at the trample of her wild Russian Bacchanalia” (140).