Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

  Ivan Turgenev is best known, to readers worldwide and, on the evidence of her essays, to Gordimer as well, as the author of Fathers and Sons (1862). This novel, which brought it home to the Russian public that a phase in Russian history had ended and a new one, however ill understood, was about to begin, was immediately surrounded with controversy. Fathers and Sons was a talking-point everywhere in Russia, among not only the intelligentsia but the entire literate population. The author received anonymous threats. He was on the one hand congratulated (sometimes by people he loathed) and on the other denounced.12 Isaiah Berlin writes: ‘No one in the entire history of Russian literature, perhaps of literature in general, has been so ferociously and continually attacked, both from the Right and from the Left.’13

  Turgenev was taken aback by the intensity of these responses. To his credit, however, he did not overplay the part of the naïve innocent. From when he embarked on the book he was aware that he was entering dangerous territory, and he measured the risks carefully. One colleague after another was asked to read the manuscript; he modified it repeatedly, on the basis of sometimes conflicting advice.14

  What Turgenev could not foresee was that the debate about the right to insurrection, played out between the fictional characters Bazarov and Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov in the fictional year 1859, the year in which the novel is set, would take on a new complexion when read and actualised in the context of Russia after May 1862, when demonstrations and arson had broken out in St Petersburg, ushering in a wave of radical violence and terrorism.15 The question of whether Turgenev was for or against Bazarov was now unavoidably translated into the question of whether Turgenev was for or against revolution, or, at a slightly more sophisticated level, into the question of what Bazarov stood for.

  In other words, Fathers and Sons was overtaken by history almost as soon as it appeared. Against his own wishes, Turgenev was interjected into the contemporary political scene as the disseminator of a specific if cryptic political message. The protestations of the author himself (in private letters and later in his memoirs) that the message, if message there were, could be deciphered only according to the conventions and procedures of literary criticism were understandably brushed aside. A stand-off developed, with Turgenev insisting that Bazarov was a character in a fictional action from which he could not be abstracted, and opinion around him insisting that Bazarov was the actualisation of a political figure, ‘the Nihilist’.

  To complicate matters, Turgenev, in reflecting on his authorial intentions, was not consistent. Part of the time he claimed that he was behind Bazarov in all respects except in Bazarov’s attitude toward art, implying that he approved of his politics.16 He also claimed for Bazarov a revolutionary or at least insurrectionary lineage: ‘I wanted to create [in Bazarov] a strange sort of counterpart to Pugachev.’17 At other times, however, he claimed that Bazarov simply grew, according to a process that only artists would appreciate, a process in which the conscious will is subordinated to the imperatives of the work itself.18

  At some higher level of synthesis, these two claims may not be incompatible. Turgenev himself, however, never articulated a position that would subsume both. Alexander Herzen’s comment is apt: ‘Turgenev was more of an artist in his novel than people think, and for this reason lost his way, and, in my opinion, did very well. He wanted to go to one room, but ended up in another and a better one.’19

  It is in large measure out of this record of resistance on Turgenev’s part – first, to pressures from the Left to write a novel with a hero who would be positive, revolutionary, effectual (unlike Rudin in Rudin), and Russian (unlike Insarov in On the Eve), then later to pressures from the Right to betray his novel by publicly interpreting it as an attack on the young radicals – that the legend grew of Turgenev the artist, faithful only to the inner voice of his artistic conscience, and in that sense above politics.

  How far can the claim be sustained that Turgenev was above politics? More pointedly, what aspect does the politics of being above politics take on in Fathers and Sons?

  As a young man, Turgenev studied philosophy in Germany. His mind was not notably abstract, but insofar as he had an articulated philosophy of art, it came to him from German idealist philosophy. When he made pronouncements about art and literature, they tended to be couched in idealist terms: art is disinterested; the great artist is a seer or prophet, aloof from the everyday world.20

  Whether Turgenev’s practice as a novelist exemplifies his theory is another question. His various self-presentations as an artist drawn unwillingly into a political role are similarly to be read with a degree of caution. The works by which he is remembered are, after all, embedded in the great social and political issues of his day; furthermore, over his not always consistent protests, they were read by his public not as freestanding artworks but, in Richard Freeborn’s words, as ‘fragmented reflections of, and personal comments upon, the development of Russian society and the ideological attitudes of the intelligentsia during the forties, fifties and sixties’.21

  Here Fathers and Sons is very much the key book. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to understand the growth of the myth of Turgenev as a hero of writing without considering Bazarov in his successive stages: Bazarov as a character in a novel, Bazarov as a figure constructed in the popular imagination, and Bazarov reworked in what I will call the Bazarov paratext.

  Bazarov is one in a series of Turgenev heroes, men of real gifts, energies and sensitivities which they can find no way to use in the Russia of their day, rural Russia in particular. (They are matched or paired with a series of Turgenev heroines, girls of passion and intelligence who can equally find no way of living into womanhood without reducing themselves to doll size.) The fate of these heroes, as they cast about for actions commensurate with their potential, is both tragic and comic – in Turgenev’s term, Quixotic.

  The fact that their lives end futilely or absurdly implies an indictment on Turgenev’s part of the stagnancy and repressiveness of Russian life; he here continues a critique of Russian backwardness that goes back to Chaadayev.

  Bazarov is the most driven and therefore the most poignant of this line of heroes. He is seen by Turgenev with a mixture of Cervantean amusement and Aristotelian pity and terror. Specifically, Bazarov is made to fall in love so that he may learn that the passions are not under the control of the utilitarian calculus of pleasure and unpleasure; and he is made to die, full of the bitterest regret, fighting to the last, so that he may learn what it means to be merely an animal, merely part of nature, which is ironically the lesson he tried to teach the benighted Kirsanovs at the beginning of the book.22

  In the process of loving and dying, Bazarov is taught what life is really about; his own modern, up-to-date, radical-utilitarian reduction of humanity is put in place by a greater, older, starker, more classical reduction. His ‘I revolt!’, which in the beginning imagines that its object is merely the political and philosophical structures which constrain the self, is revealed (to him) to be only one instance of the futile ‘I revolt!’ of living beings against their mortality.

  There is a double tragedy in the fate of a Bazarov: universal in the grief it evokes that such a gifted and passionate being should have to die so young; Russian in that a certain chain of causality, a chain whose abstract links are Russian backwardness, Russian social stagnation, Russian political repressiveness, leads to a country doctor cutting himself with an infected scalpel. This doubleness of the tragedy – on the one hand universal and apolitical, on the other denunciatory and socio-political – makes the ‘message’ of Fathers and Sons hard to encapsulate, and contributes to the myth of Turgenev as the even-handed, Olympian artist.

  But we cannot collapse Turgenev’s novel into the striking figure of Bazarov alone. A reading that begins and ends with Bazarov will simply repeat the inadequacies of the readings of 1862. Bazarov is part of an action, an evolving structure of relationships. This action starts with two young men, two sons, cockily deriding the backw
ardness of the generation of the fathers, and promising (or threatening) to overturn the world of the fathers. It ends with one of them, son of a country doctor, dying in the occupation of country doctor, and the other about to step into the shoes of his father on the ancestral estate. Thus fate in Fathers and Sons enters the action not only as mortality on the one hand or the inertia of rural life on the other, but also as family tradition, as the slow but inevitable metamorphosis of sons into fathers.

  This generational version of destiny – with its master-metaphor the evolution of rebellious son into complacent father – is profoundly anti-utopian; as Kathryn Feuer points out, it is the aspect of Turgenev’s thought to which Chernyshevsky responds most urgently when, in What Is To Be Done?, he tries to persuade his readers that the biological, economic and dynastic bonds between the generations (to say nothing of bonds of affection) can be replaced with a range of affective relations between peers. The success of What Is To Be Done? in recruiting young people to the revolutionary cause surely lay in its implicit claim that comradeship is enough for human beings, that the bonds between the generations – between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters – can easily be snapped.23

  III

  It is inconceivable that the Fathers and Sons I have been describing, a Fathers and Sons read with an ear to what it actually says about fathers and sons, could after 1976, the year of the uprising that began in the high schools of Soweto, be advanced to young, politically aware, black South African intellectuals as a model to be imitated.

  Why then should Gordimer ever have considered Turgenev relevant to South African experience and instructive to the South African writer? To answer this question we need to place Turgenev and readings of Turgenev, including Gordimer’s reading, in the broadest historical context.

  The failure of the revolutions of 1848, over much of Europe, and the harsh repressions that followed, meant the eclipse, in Russia, of optimism about a steady evolution toward a Western-style liberal democracy. The generation of the intelligentsia that came to maturity in the 1860s was humbler in its social origins than the patrician liberals of the 1840s, more radical in its politics, impatient with the mumbo-jumbo of individual rights, utilitarian in its attitude toward the arts. Bazarov is the type of this generation; in the realm of fiction, he is its finest flower.

  Among old-fashioned Russian liberals, writes Isaiah Berlin, there began to grow up, after 1848, a justifiable sense of unease.

  Made more painful by periods of repression and horror, [this] became a chronic condition – a long, unceasing malaise . . . [Their] dilemma . . . became insoluble. They wished to destroy the regime which seemed to them wholly evil. They believed in reason, secularism, the rights of the individual, freedom of speech, of association, of opinion, the liberty of groups and races and nations, greater social and economic equality, above all in the rule of justice. They admired the selfless dedication, the purity of motive, the martyrdom of those, no matter how extremist, who offered their lives for the violent overthrow of the status quo. But they feared that the losses entailed by terrorist or Jacobin methods might be irreparable, and greater than any possible gains; they were horrified by the fanaticism and barbarism of the extreme Left, by its contempt for the only culture that they knew, by its blind faith in what seemed to them Utopian fantasies, whether anarchist or populist or Marxist . . . Caught between two armies, denounced by both, they repeated their mild and rational words without much genuine hope of being heard by either side . . . Many suffered from complex forms of guilt: they sympathized more deeply with the goals upon their Left; but, spurned by the radicals, they tended to question . . . the validity of their own positions . . . Despite all its shortcomings, the Left still seemed to them to stand for a more human faith than the frozen, bureaucratic, heartless Right, if only because it was always better to be with the persecuted than with the persecutors.24

  If the plight of Berlin’s Russian liberals seems to echo the plight of liberal white South Africans in the 1960s and 1970s, that is only partly because the South Africa of those times eerily reiterated the Russia of Nicholas I. The other reason for the echo is that Isaiah Berlin, as a liberal, left-leaning intellectual caught in the vice of the Cold War, between revolution and repression, is here in effect writing himself into the Russian nineteenth century, in order to claim an historical lineage and draw strength from it. In so doing he points a way in which comparably lonely South African liberals, caught up in a provincial sideshow of the Cold War in which parodies or perversions of Cold War dogmas seemed to confront each other, could see themselves in a kind of prospective retrospect as the great-grandchildren of the Russian liberal progressives, the class whose stand now, in the 1990s, seems to have been vindicated by history, the class that might have saved Russia and brought it into the modern world had they not been too pitifully few.

  In particular, in describing the complex and highly ambivalent feelings of Russian liberals toward Russian radicals, Berlin captures much of Nadine Gordimer’s attitude toward South African Leftist radicals, at least prior to 1975 or 1976: siding instinctively with them while reserving her position on the cleansing power of violence, sympathising with their ardour and dedication while resisting their indifference towards what they saw as the museum of the past, yet all the while doubting her own right to reserve her position, or even to have any position at all.

  A complex set of overlays, then; and not simplified by the fact that to both Berlin and Gordimer the key text of nineteenth-century Russian liberalism is Fathers and Sons, which, otherwise than in 1862, arrives packaged with an authorial paratext in certain ways more powerfully present behind Gordimer’s pages on Turgenev than is the novel itself. By the paratext I mean the various letters, memoirs and prefaces in which Turgenev defended himself against charges from the Left that his novel was an attack on Leftist radicals, in the process producing an authorial reading which saves him from these charges by the strategy of in certain senses removing him from responsibility, presenting him as servant and voice of what he calls the truth.

  IV

  If Gordimer has any theory of the novel (and one can be a perfectly good writer without having a theory of writing), it is one put together from, on the one hand, certain Marxist critics prominent in the 1950s (Lukács, Ernst Fischer, Sartre, with Camus as a counterweight); and on the other the doctrines of the aestheticist, anti-naturalist wing of European realism and early Modernism: Flaubert, Henry James, Conrad.

  Since Gordimer’s practice is only rarely the playing out of a theoretical programme, it is not important that it is hard to reconcile these two bodies of theory. What she extracts from her masters is more a theory of the artist than a theory of the novel: a theory of the special calling of the artist, of his/her special gifts and the special responsibilities these entail. For this theory of the artist, the paratext to Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons is a key document.

  Gordimer has throughout her career held to the belief that the artist has a special calling, a talent which it is death to hide, and that his art tells a truth transcending the truth of history. Though this position has become increasingly old-fashioned, Gordimer has, to her credit, remained tenaciously faithful to it. At the same time, however, she has been concerned to give her work a social justification, and thus to support her claim to a place inside history, a history which she herself has to some extent been successful in shaping, as, in her fictional œuvre, she has written the struggle of Africa against Europe upon the consciousness of the West.25

  To substantiate her sense of her own writing as a form of political action, she has at times invoked a Romantic Marxism according to which false or bourgeois art, the art of the disintegrated consciousness with no vision of the future, is opposed by true art – that is to say, the art of the true artist: an art that emerges from a dialectic between artist and people (or, as she later calls it, a dialectic between relevance and commitment); an art whose goal it is to transform society and reunite what has been put asunder.26

/>   In certain periods of history – in South Africa in its revolutionary phase, for instance – the artist may thus have his subject dictated to him by the people without needing to feel any ‘loss of artistic freedom’. Between artist and people there ought to exist at such times a ‘dynamic of collective conscience’ to which the artist should be sensitive.27

  It is not necessary to follow further the twists and turns of Gordimer’s thinking as, in a series of forays into a philosophical discourse over which her control is at best uncertain and which she anyhow, and avowedly, does not trust, she seeks to reconcile fidelity to a transcendental vocation with fidelity to the people and to history. My purpose has been to point out how Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, and the texts surrounding it, were taken up by Gordimer, and later abandoned, in her engagement with her times.

  In the reading I have given her, Gordimer in 1975 saw in the plight of Turgenev – the liberal progressive who was overtaken, in his middle years, by the march of a revolution to which he gave, however reluctantly and ambivalently and intermittently, his emotional assent while at the same time expressing his horror at its methods, but who preserved a sacred space in his novels where he did not lie to himself, and defended the right to existence of such sacred spaces – an example, mutatis mutandis, of and to herself, an example, furthermore, from which she, in her lone (as she conceived of it) and embattled position in South Africa, could draw sustenance and even honour.28

  After 1976 the ground shifted. In the new, charged atmosphere, Turgenev was set aside (too politically cautious? too comfortable in his exile?). The question of whether European models were still viable in Africa was subsumed under a more complex, more personal, more urgent question: how to continue to manage a double discourse in which she could claim for the artist the role of both lone Shelleyan visionary and voice of the people, without being driven to accept a hierarchy of high art and popular art, one standard for herself and like-minded Eurocentric writers, another for black African writers. To judge from the essays collected in Writing and Being (1995), the answer has not yet been found.29