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Speaking the Sorrow of Women: Turgenev's “Neschastnaia” and Evgeniia Tur's “Antonina”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
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In a letter of 1868 to Pavel Annenkov, Ivan Turgenev spoke of "Neschastnaia," the story that he had just finished writing, as "moia posledniaia dochka."' Authorship and paternity are conflated in this phrase, as are story and heroine: The melancholy Russian has given birth to a daughter.
Turgenev's statement of affiliation both hints at and obscures the genealogical truths of a story that takes familial complexity and silence as its explicit topic. "Neschastnaia" is a story which is about the silence surrounding a young woman's true place in a patriarchal household; its heroine is at once bound by and excluded from filial relationship. Beyond such explicit thematics, however, there lies another genealogical story in which Turgenev himself takes part. This second story concerns the legitimacy of Turgenev himself as much as that of his heroine; it touches on the genesis of Turgenev's own art and his relationship to women writers of the 184Qs. It is a story suggested by the thematics of paternity and legitimacy and also by the very structure of Turgenev's narrative.
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References
1. “Liubeznyi Annenkov! Vchera poluchil vashe pis'mo i raduius', chto moia posledniaia dochka vam ponravilos'.” Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 28 vols., vol. 7 Pis'ma (Moscow-Leningrad: Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1960-1968), 239 (16/28 November 1868). All subsequent citations from Turgenev's works and letters will be cited according to this edition and noted in the body of my essay.
2. Lev N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii ipisem (Moscow-Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literature, 1928-1958)60: 324-325.
3. S. Turgenev v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1983), 396.
4. Eva Kagan-Kans discusses Turgenev's “sensual” and “innocent” women in Hamlet and Don Quixote: Turgenev's Ambivalent Vision (Paris: Mouton, 1975). More recently, Barbara Heldt has discussed the representation of women in Turgenev and throughout the Russian canon in her important A Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987).
5. Beletskii, Aleksandr, “Turgenev i russkie pisatel'nitsy 30-60-kh gg.,” in Brodskii, Nikolai L., Tvorcheskii put’ Turgeneva (Petrograd, 1923), 141.Google Scholar
6. Like so much else in the realm of nineteenth century women's writing, this question awaits archival work and sensitive reading. While Beletskii's essay is invaluable—and unique—he nonetheless appears to repeat persistent cliches about women's writing, as in his contention that it was “natural” for women writers to flourish in an epoch of romanticism. See Beletskii, “Turgenev i russkie pisatel'nitsy,” 141.
7. One of the difficulties confronting the scholar who attempts to reread these women writers is their relative inaccessibility; most of their works are available only in nineteenth century journals or, occasionally, separate editions. Elena Gan and Mariia Zhukova are, however, both included in a recent Soviet anthology of women writers from the first half of the nineteenth century: Uchenova, Viktoriia, ed., Dacha na petergofskoi doroge (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1986.Google Scholar
8. The story is published in Uchenova, Dacha.
9. Beletskii, “Turgenev i russkie pistal'nitsy,” 144-147.
10. Ibid., 139 and 140.
11. The editors of volume 5 of the Soviet Academy edition of Turgenev's works share Beletskii's assumptions of influence (see Turgenev, PSS 5: 635).
12. On Tur's relationship to Nadezhdin, see “K biografii Professora N. I. Nadezhdina” in Russkii arkhiv (1885) no. 8: 573-585.
13. Grossman, Leonid P., Prestuplenie Sukhovo-Kobylina (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1928), 34–70 Google Scholar; “N. I. Nadezhdin i E. V. Sukhovo-Kobylina (Evgeniia Tur),” Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshcheniia (February 1906): 272-303.
14. The words are those of Tur's son, quoted in Koz'mina, B., “Pis'ma Ogareva k E. V. Salias de Turnemir,” Literaturnoe nasledstvo 61 (1953): 799 Google Scholar. On the connection between economic necessity and women's writing in nineteenth century Britain, see Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of Their Own (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977)Google Scholar, chap. 2, “The Feminine Novelist and the Will to Write,” esp. 47-57.
15. Such ambivalence toward writing women is particularly evident in Dym, also written during the years of Turgenev's crisis after Ottsy i deti. The nature of Turgenev's relationship to women writers in this period of his career is the subject of my ongoing work.
16. See, for example, L. N. Nazarova, “K voprosu ob otsenke literaturno-kriticheskoi deiatel'nosti I. S. Turgeneva ego sovremennikami (1851-1853 gody),” Voprosy izucheniia russkoi literatury XI-XX vekov (Leningrad, 1958).
17. The terms of Turgenev's discussion are neither original nor unique. In the Russian tradition, Turgenev is directly indebted to Vissarion Belinskii for his characterization of women's writing as unmediated and lacking in ironic distance: See “Sochineniia Zeneidy R-voi” in Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1953-1959), 7.670. For a discussion of British critics’ denigration of women writers along similar lines, see Elaine Showalter, “The Double Critical Standard,” in A Literature of Their Own, 73-99.
18. Evgeniia Tur, Antonina: Episod iz romana, in Kometa, ed. Nikolai M. Shchepkin (Moscow, 1851), 257-426. Page citations from Tur's novel will refer to this edition.
19. Tur published an essay on Charlotte Bronte in Russkii vestnik ( “Miss Bronte, ee zhizn’ i sochineniia” [1858] no. 24), in which she discusses both Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of the writer. Tur's essay closes with a barbed attack on (unnamed) critics who defend “ob” ektivnost'” in art. In defending women's passionate involvement with their writing Tur seems to be obliquely responding to Turgenev's criticism of just such “excess.” For another Russian woman writer's use of the “sentient orphan” figure, see Elena Gan, Naprasnyi dar (St. Petersburg, 1843).
20. See, for example, discussion of the story by Marina Ledkovsky Astman, in Marina Ledkovsky, The Other Turgenev: From Romanticism to Symbolism (Warzburg: Jal, 1973), 109-111.
21. On Turgenev's movement toward lyric compensation in the face of worldly defeat, see my discussion of Dvorianskoe gnezdo in Jane Costlow, Worlds within Worlds: The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 72-81.
22. This metaphor for creation has been brilliantly examined as it occurs in English literary tradition by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), esp. 3-16. The authors argue that the power of the pen has been associated in the English tradition with the power of the penis—an association that implicitly denies women the power of literary creation.
23. “la sam raskaivaius’ v torn, chto napechatal etot otryvok … i ne potomu, chto schitaiu ego plokhim—a potomu, chto v nem vyrazheny takie lichnye vospominaniia i vpechatleniia, delit'sia kotorymi s publikoi ne bylo nikakoi nuzhdy. la vsegda, kak Vam izvestno, staralsia byt', po mere vozmozhnosti, ob” ektivnym v torn, chto ia delal; a tut takaia'sub “ektivshchina, ’ chto beda!” (Pis'ma, 12: 1, 322) (emphasis in the original). Turgenev's chagrined reappraisal of “Dovol'no” was elicited by the possibility of its republication by Mikhail Stasiulevich, to whom this letter was addressed.
24. Nikolai Stankevich, Perepiska (Moscow, 1914), 245-258. The editors of volume 10 of the Soviet academy edition of Turgenev refer to the Stankevich episode as a central source for “Neschastnaia” (5ochineniia, 10: 457-458). Curiously, they neglect Tur's influence, which the editors of volume 5 of the same edition had found so convincing.