<bkr>Priscilla Meyer, How the Russians Read the French: Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy</>
<bkf>Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, xiv + 277 pp.</>
<bkr>Lyudmila Parts, The Chekhovian Intertext: Dialogue with a Classic</>
<bkf>Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008, vii + 223 pp.</>
The issues that an older form of comparative literature used to examine under rubrics like
sources and influences, interart relations, or cultural intermediaries now appear, as we know,
under the broad, even all-encompassing concept of intertextuality. When it emerged in the 1960s,
this term had a dual French and Slavic ancestry, as indicated by its associations both with the
ascendancy of Roland Barthes and with the rediscovery of Mikhail Bakhtin, with interest in
Bakhtin furthered by two Franco-Slavs, Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov. The books
reviewed here carry on the latter tradition with their distinctive but complementary approaches to
the intertextual study of several nineteenth-century Russian classics.
Priscilla Meyer and Lyudmila Parts both begin by paying some attention to Alexander
Pushkin, the great inaugural figure in Russian literature. Gogol shares this opening role for
Meyer, who with Stephen Rudy once translated a valuable collection of essays on Dostoevsky’s
fascinating intertextual connections with that author by Russian formalists like Iuri Tynianov,
Viktor Vinogradov, and A. L. Bem, figures whose achievement has been obscured by their
contemporary Bakhtin’s popularity in the West. But then, as the titles of Meyer’s and Parts’s
books indicate, their discussions diverge, with one dealing with three leading novelists in the
period from 1840 to 1880 while the other considers the short story writer and playwright who
dominated the turn of the last century. What the titles do not indicate is that in deference to
canonization at home and abroad as well as to the need for focus, coverage emphasizes a smaller
number of masterworks: A Hero of Our Time, Crime and Punishment, and Anna Karenina in
Meyer’s book, and “Ward Number 6,” The Cherry Orchard, and “The Lady with the Little Dog”
in The Chekhovian Intertext. In launching their arguments, both critics draw not only on Bakhtin
from the Russian school but on Tynianov and, more recently, on Iuri Lotman, while Parts also
takes insights from French intertextualists like Barthes and Michael Riffaterre. Harold Bloom’s
theories, which deal mainly with literature in English and which rely on a vocabulary of
influence rather than intertext but do so with considerable originality and force, also get some
notice.
Meyer plunges her readers back into Russia’s transnational, bilingual literary culture of the
early nineteenth century, one that still lingered into the 1860s and 1870s when Dostoevsky and
Tolstoy, who had grown up in that earlier world, wrote their famous novels. In particular, she
draws attention to the Revue étrangère de la littérature, des sciences et des arts, an underresearched journal that reprinted a selection of writings in the original French for distribution in
Russia. It thus could serve as a conduit between French literature, especially Balzac, and various
developments on the Russian scene from the 1830s on into the 1860s.
Meyer also emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between subtexts and intertexts. She
prefers the former term because it allows critics to pinpoint specific interactions between writers
and texts, often ones with a polemical edge, rather than leading them to deal with the broader but
more diffuse and at times quite speculative “climates of cultural opinion” which can mark the
study of intertextuality. As a result much of her book presents readers with a detailed and
carefully correlated examination of passages and situations from French writers that very
probably had an impact on key features in the three Russian novels. At times Meyer highlights
relationships with classics from the French tradition, most notably Père Goriot and Madame
Bovary, but just as often she considers subcanonical works like George Sand’s “L’Orco,” Jules
Janin’s “L’âne mort,” or the younger Alexander Dumas’s L’Homme-femme.
At this point it might seem that How the Russians Read the French is mainly concerned with
how authors absorb and transform their readings, in the spirit of John Livingston Lowes’s
famous study of Coleridge’s sources for “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
But Meyer also has a broader cross-cultural thesis, namely that as the Russians encountered
French texts they were conscious of confronting an older, more highly developed literature that
in its contemporary phase tended to promote a socio-cultural vision with which the Russians took
issue. In this regard Lermontov’s situation differed from the one faced by Dostoevsky and
Tolstoy, who resisted the “desacralization” (3) of the written word that they found in the French.
This process in turn reflected larger trends in France’s increasingly materialistic society, drawn
toward the promise of positivistic science. But for A Hero of Our Time, as an early Russian novel
written in the wake of France’s own somewhat belated romanticism (see Meyer’s impressive
outline of Lermontov’s sense of the various options, 38-39), the issue was to evaluate these
foreign models against both the realities of Russian society and an incipient Russian tradition for
fiction established by Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin. In other words, what for Lermontov is still a
relatively narrow literary problem (the rise of the Russian novel at a time that was moving from
romanticism to realism) becomes in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy a broader cultural and ideological
one involving social change, religion, and the proper role for science. But in either case the
Russians were responding to “France” as a prestigious but distrusted foreign model whose
concerns with such literary themes as “the Romantic hero, prostitution, adultery” (33) they
needed to rework in their own fiction.
Meyer acknowledges that other cultures had similar roles on the Russian literary scene at the
time, especially the German and English. She holds up Robert Belknap’s The Genesis of “The
Brothers Karamazov” as the example of an alternative approach that studies influences from a
variety of cultures as they converge on a single major work. She can thus concede that a sheaf of
diverse influences might have come into play in the instances where her analysis singles out the
French strand. Indeed, even her own approach requires that she allow for just such multiplicity in
one key way. As a counterweight to the French, all three of her novelists hark back for support to
other “native” or long-familiar texts. In Lermontov’s case this maneuver led back to Pushkin; but
for Dostoevsky and Tolstoy the corrective text was the Bible, although they too drew some
inspiration from Pushkin. With the last two writers Meyer can point to the fact that for a period
during his Siberian exile in the 1850s Dostoevsky’s only permitted reading was the Bible.
Similarly, Tolstoy’s religious crisis and conversion immediately after completing Anna Karenina
had roots that reach back to formulations much earlier in his work.
As a result of this textual interaction, Meyer concludes, “The French material, admired for its
artistry and deplored for its ‘depravity,’ dissolves into the Russian authors’ moral vision” (22021). Whether the “synthesis” indicated by these words was quite so smooth or unproblematic,
readers of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy will undoubtedly continue to debate, bearing in mind the
open-endedness posited by Bakhtinian dialogism or the irredeemably tragic element that Shestov
finds in both these writers. Nonetheless, in addition to its many scrupulously detailed findings
and its mastery of an impressive corpus of literary and scholarly materials, How the Russians
Read the French has the great merit of demonstrating the need to allow for a Scriptural countercurrent to stem the influx of disturbing French motifs in these great novels—a Napoleonic
invasion of sorts on the cultural front.
Whereas Meyer’s intertextual approach is retrospective, in that it seeks to identify French
subtexts that would later be reworked in Russian novels, Parts’s approach is prospective. It looks
ahead from three key achievements of Chekhov’s to assess his standing among some post-Soviet
writers active in the 1990s, most notably in stories by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Vyacheslav
P’etsukh, and Tatyana Tolstaya. Except in her conclusion, suggestively titled “Chekhov without
Borders,” which briefly discusses English-language writers like Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol
Oates, and William Boyd, she does not consider cross-cultural issues or even the mechanics of
author-to-author transmission like Meyer. That is because for generations Chekhov was
canonized by the Soviet state while also being mythologized by the intelligentsia, who somewhat
arbitrarily (81-82) liked to see him as an emblem of themselves. Taken together, Parts argues,
these processes result in two kinds of intertextual aura, based on a distinction between the
institutional sanction of the canon and the less official cultural myths that grow up around certain
writers. At times canon and myth can be at odds, for example with Pushkin in the last decades of
the tsars, where a monumental figure revered by the nation, who in fact was little more than a
name, clashed with an incipient modernist, whose every word demanded scrutiny. But with
Chekhov these two facets could overlap during the Soviet period, given the intellectuals’ often
confused relationship to the state’s ideology, though what the canon might see as an indictment
of Romanov Russia could also be read more subversively as a prophetic insight into the Soviet
status quo.
In addressing these issues, the first couple of chapters in The Chekhovian Intertext draw
heavily on recent research into Pushkin’s changing image (especially as crystallized in the 1899
and 1937 anniversary celebrations) to set the stage for a similar sense of “centennial return” with
Chekhov. At this point several hundred-year chronologies come together in a neat and seemingly
overdetermined fashion: not only does Chekhov bring the century of Great Russian Literature
that began with Pushkin to an end, but the turn-of-the-century zenith of his career coincides with
the centennial of Pushkin’s birth, while in turn the centennial for this outburst of Chekhov’s
creativity chimes with the end of the first post-Soviet decade. Worth mentioning as well is
Chekhov’s oft-repeated formula of muted optimism, “life will be better, in a hundred years.”
There is much of interest in Parts’s survey of this intertextual landscape, for instance a survey
of the Russian inability to accept Chekhov’s description of The Cherry Orchard as a comedy.
But when she turns to specific texts in the second half of the book, her method becomes
subtextual, to hark back to Meyer’s distinction. Stories with titles like “Ward No. 7,” “The Lady
with the Dogs,” and “Uncle Senia” make their Chekhovian resonances crystal clear, though
Parts’s probing and nuanced readings show how many allusions and ironies remain to be teased
out beyond the “take notice” signal flaunted in the titles. If, after 1989, intellectuals can no
longer have the same faith in Russian literature’s supreme value, still the artfulness with which
writers use intertextual practices to condense and deepen the meaning of their stories attests to
that literature’s continued power. At the very least this situation depends on the wide diffusion of
Chekhov’s works in bookstores, theaters, and schools during the Soviet period, which continues
to ensure recognition and reception. Thus, unlike Meyer, Parts can be confident that not only
were her writers intimately familiar with the Chekhovian subtexts that they echo or take issue
with but that at least some of their readers would respond at some level to the way they handled
these subtexts.
But is such study of a Russian writer in his Russian context really comparative? The answer
is a threefold “Yes.” As already seen, the distinction between canon and myth makes a useful
addition to the theory of intertextuality, which is so basic to our field; while Parts’s concluding
remarks on Chekhov’s fortunes among English-speaking writers introduce an explicitly crosscultural element. But it is also true that for a writer like Chekhov, with a major international
reputation in both narrative and drama, the nature of his reception at home deserves to be better
known. In a century that, contrary to his own vague hopes, brought the end of two regimes as
well as two major wars and Stalinism, Russian literature and society underwent more than the
usual degree of change. This is a tumultuous situation that itself merits comparative treatment,
thus raising an important question for our field, that of a comparatism within a single literature
and language. Even more important, as Parts indicates by juxtaposing this Russian Chekhov with
her snapshots of Anglo-Chekhovians, the Russian response over the past century has been more
complex and searching than the ones current elsewhere. Such a situation does not always occur
with writers who achieve such prominence in the West or the world, and it is a complexity with
which Chekhov’s admirers from abroad should become better acquainted. This book’s excellent
and thought-provoking account of the Russian “dialogue with a classic” provides just such a
much-needed cross-cultural corrective.
<rau>John Burt Foster <#> George Mason University </rau>
<bmh>Works Cited</>
<bib>Belknap, Robert. The Genesis of The Brothers Karamazov: The Aesthetics, Ideology, and
Psychology of Text Making. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990. </bib>
<bib>Meyer, Priscilla and Stephen Rudy, eds., intr., and trans. Dostoevsky and Gogol: Texts and
Criticism. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979.</bib>
<bib>Lowes, John Livingston. The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927.</bib>
<bib>Shestov, Lev. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche. Introd. Bernard Martin. Trans. Bernard
Martin and Spencer E. Roberts. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969.</bib>
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