Gogol: Exploring Absence. Negativity in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature by SvenSpiekerReview by: Robert A. MaguireSlavic Review, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Autumn, 2003), pp. 628-629Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3185860 .

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628 Slavic Review

Though the book's chapter titles are focused on major literary figures, it is the psycho- logical diagnosticians who remain most vividly in the reader's memory, and I will therefore focus chiefly on these theorist-therapists. Chapter 1, "Gogol, Moralists, and Nineteenth- Century Psychiatry," deals most extensively with Vladimir Chizh, whose "pathography of Gogol was closely tied to the moral project of nineteenth-century psychiatry" (23). Politi- cally and morally conservative, though not actively religious, and thus favoring what looked like the "scientific" approach of Cesare Lombroso's "criminal anthropology," Chizh not only compared Lombroso to Charles Darwin and stressed that crime is hereditary but even insisted that the "born criminal" is an "evolutionary throwback"; he further thought that Fedor Dostoevskii's Memoirs from the House of the Dead supported hereditary determinism with reference to the latter's fellow prisoners. Biological determinism relates to this theo- rist's diagnoses elsewhere in a more general way: for Chizh, Pliushkin in Nikolai Gogol"s Dead Souls was "the type of senile dementia" (36), while Gogol' himself "suffered and died of melancholia" (38).

In Chapter 2, "Dostoevsky: From Epilepsy to Progeneration," Nikolai Bazhenov, a thinker with populist sympathies who also analyzed patients' pictorial art, is cited as em-

phasizing that "the effect of illness depended on the scale of the person": it was not only epilepsy but also "great suffering of the soul"-even a "religion of suffering"-that con- tributed to Dostoevskii's immense achievement as intuitive psychologist (70). Like a frag- ile but perfect Stradivarius violin, a genius might be vulnerable to nervous disorders, but in contrast to the claims of Lombroso and Max Nordau that such vulnerability signaled "degeneration," Bazhenov preferred to speak of a step forward, a "progeneration" (73), in the advance of human insight.

In Chapter 3, "Tolstoy and the Beginning of Psychotherapy in Russia," we hear Niko- lai Osipov claiming that Leo Tolstoi's novels contain "excellent descriptions of psycholog- ical questions and their 'psychotherapeutic' cure" (100). Influenced by the experience- philosophy of such neo-Kantians as Wilhelm Dilthey, which favored attention to the total

person, Osipov recommended as an ideal the kind of emotional support that helped Natasha Rostova recover from grief in War and Peace. Osipov's philosophy of limited inter- vention recalls the Kutuzovian outlook in that novel.

Chapter 4, "Decadents, Revolutionaries, and the Nation's Mental Health," shows var- ious theorists attempting to account for the increased foregrounding of madness in Rus- sian literature, as in Vsevolod Garshin's story The Red Flower. Chapter 5, "The Institute of Genius: Psychiatry in the Early Soviet Years," contrasts two "dreamers": Lev Rozenshtein, who advocated the centralized dispensary "prophylactics" of "mental hygiene" (150), and

Grigorii (Girsh) Segalin, who attempted an equally ambitious "aesthetic medicine" (162) or "europathology" (166; from "eureka") to distinguish sane from pathological genius. Sirotkina has proved that "the rich history of the genre of pathography reflects the rich cultural meaning of psychiatry" (180).

MARTIN BIDNEY

State University of New York, Binghamton

Gogol: Exploring Absence. Negativity in Nineteenth-entury Russian Literature. Ed. Sven

Spieker. Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica, 1999. iv, 216 pp. Bibliography. Index. $24.95, paper.

Most of the big issues that strike any thoughtful reader of Nikolai Gogol' were formulated a century and a half ago: "realist" or "fantasist," "two Gogol's" (artist and ideologue), the

interplay of Russian and Ukrainian elements, the peculiarities of style, connections be- tween the fiction and the personal life-a proper enumeration would require a page or more. But with a few exceptions-notably Stepan Shevyrev and Andrei Belyi-it took another hundred years for these issues to engage the energies of first-rate critics. What be-

gan as a swell some twenty-five years ago has now built to a flood. The thirteen essays gathered here are by different hands from four different coun-

tries and represent some of the best recent writing on Gogol'. The organizing theme is "ab- sence." It is a familiar theme. But I know of no other book in which it is followed so imag-

628 Slavic Review

Though the book's chapter titles are focused on major literary figures, it is the psycho- logical diagnosticians who remain most vividly in the reader's memory, and I will therefore focus chiefly on these theorist-therapists. Chapter 1, "Gogol, Moralists, and Nineteenth- Century Psychiatry," deals most extensively with Vladimir Chizh, whose "pathography of Gogol was closely tied to the moral project of nineteenth-century psychiatry" (23). Politi- cally and morally conservative, though not actively religious, and thus favoring what looked like the "scientific" approach of Cesare Lombroso's "criminal anthropology," Chizh not only compared Lombroso to Charles Darwin and stressed that crime is hereditary but even insisted that the "born criminal" is an "evolutionary throwback"; he further thought that Fedor Dostoevskii's Memoirs from the House of the Dead supported hereditary determinism with reference to the latter's fellow prisoners. Biological determinism relates to this theo- rist's diagnoses elsewhere in a more general way: for Chizh, Pliushkin in Nikolai Gogol"s Dead Souls was "the type of senile dementia" (36), while Gogol' himself "suffered and died of melancholia" (38).

In Chapter 2, "Dostoevsky: From Epilepsy to Progeneration," Nikolai Bazhenov, a thinker with populist sympathies who also analyzed patients' pictorial art, is cited as em-

phasizing that "the effect of illness depended on the scale of the person": it was not only epilepsy but also "great suffering of the soul"-even a "religion of suffering"-that con- tributed to Dostoevskii's immense achievement as intuitive psychologist (70). Like a frag- ile but perfect Stradivarius violin, a genius might be vulnerable to nervous disorders, but in contrast to the claims of Lombroso and Max Nordau that such vulnerability signaled "degeneration," Bazhenov preferred to speak of a step forward, a "progeneration" (73), in the advance of human insight.

In Chapter 3, "Tolstoy and the Beginning of Psychotherapy in Russia," we hear Niko- lai Osipov claiming that Leo Tolstoi's novels contain "excellent descriptions of psycholog- ical questions and their 'psychotherapeutic' cure" (100). Influenced by the experience- philosophy of such neo-Kantians as Wilhelm Dilthey, which favored attention to the total

person, Osipov recommended as an ideal the kind of emotional support that helped Natasha Rostova recover from grief in War and Peace. Osipov's philosophy of limited inter- vention recalls the Kutuzovian outlook in that novel.

Chapter 4, "Decadents, Revolutionaries, and the Nation's Mental Health," shows var- ious theorists attempting to account for the increased foregrounding of madness in Rus- sian literature, as in Vsevolod Garshin's story The Red Flower. Chapter 5, "The Institute of Genius: Psychiatry in the Early Soviet Years," contrasts two "dreamers": Lev Rozenshtein, who advocated the centralized dispensary "prophylactics" of "mental hygiene" (150), and

Grigorii (Girsh) Segalin, who attempted an equally ambitious "aesthetic medicine" (162) or "europathology" (166; from "eureka") to distinguish sane from pathological genius. Sirotkina has proved that "the rich history of the genre of pathography reflects the rich cultural meaning of psychiatry" (180).

MARTIN BIDNEY

State University of New York, Binghamton

Gogol: Exploring Absence. Negativity in Nineteenth-entury Russian Literature. Ed. Sven

Spieker. Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica, 1999. iv, 216 pp. Bibliography. Index. $24.95, paper.

Most of the big issues that strike any thoughtful reader of Nikolai Gogol' were formulated a century and a half ago: "realist" or "fantasist," "two Gogol's" (artist and ideologue), the

interplay of Russian and Ukrainian elements, the peculiarities of style, connections be- tween the fiction and the personal life-a proper enumeration would require a page or more. But with a few exceptions-notably Stepan Shevyrev and Andrei Belyi-it took another hundred years for these issues to engage the energies of first-rate critics. What be-

gan as a swell some twenty-five years ago has now built to a flood. The thirteen essays gathered here are by different hands from four different coun-

tries and represent some of the best recent writing on Gogol'. The organizing theme is "ab- sence." It is a familiar theme. But I know of no other book in which it is followed so imag-

This content downloaded from 62.122.76.45 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:28:26 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews Book Reviews 629 629

inatively through so many aspects of Gogol"s life and works, so well grounded in the his- tory of literature, philosophy, and religion, and so illuminated with a variety of critical ap- proaches.

However one defines "absence," it depends on an explicit or implicit presence. Mixail Vajskopf, glossing the famous "Rus! Rus!" passage in Chapter 11 of Dead Souls, shows how the negative characterization of Russia is essential to the hope-inspiring belief in a "positive" Russia of the future. Boris Gasparov argues that Gogol"s sense of alienation from Ukraine enables him to become more authentically Russian, and eventually "Ukrainian" too. Michael Holquist extends the idea of "alienation" to Gogol' as "a figure of longing for a unity and wholeness [the Sacred] whose unrealizability results in the obsessive emphasis on gaps, differences, and incommensurabilities in the author's writing" (129). Absence as "demonism" is the topic of two essays. Mikhail N. Epshtein finds it present everywhere in Gogol', even in the so-called lyrical digressions, where we sense an underlying void. Christopher Putney, in a tour-de-force, shows how demonism saturates "Ivan Fedorovich Shpon'ka," all appearances to the contrary.

Four of the authors investigate the paradox that Gogol' deploys a staggering arsenal of verbal means to depict or suggest absence and to handle deep personal psychological problems. For Renate Lachmann, Gogol' resolves the paradox through recourse to the fantastic and the grotesque. Natascha Drubek-Meyer sees "Vij" as marking the beginning of Gogol"s rejection of "grotesque imagery and rhetoric," which for him registered "ex- treme traumatic experience" and increasingly became a "theater of memory which trans- formed the artistic world of his own artistic texts into a frightening space of (personal) memory" (180). Iurii Lotman contemplates Gogol"s dilemma that truth, though the pro- claimed purpose of his own art, is inevitably a "lie," because it cannot be rendered verbally and because words deceive. Boris Groys defines the theme of Dead Souls as "the crime of soul-murder," which found support in Aleksandr Pushkin's view of poetry as pure lan- guage, detached from "personality," "soul," and any "correspondence to the extraliterary reality of ideas," thus confirming Gogol"s "suspicion that there is nothing beyond lan- guage" (141).

The paradox of verbalized absence eventually brought Gogol' to artistic silence and death. Sergei Goncharov examines an early and more positive version of silence, in a reli- gious context, in the Dikan'ka stories. Sven Spieker, addressing the essays in Arabesques, ar- gues that for Gogol', an understanding of the "hidden idea" (or "presence," we might say) of art-object depends on the "absence of all perception (seeing, hearing)" (14), notably in nonverbal arts like painting and architecture, and thus in effect denies the very me- dium in which Gogol' himself worked. Two other essays posit "silence" as a function of the "sublime." Mikhail Yampolsky investigates the mechanism by which Gogol' turned "low" into "high" (or "sublime"). For Susi Frank, Gogol' deemed "sublime subject matter" es- sential to all good art, but understood that it was obscured in his own fiction, and used his nonfictional writings as "metatextual" commentaries on the fiction and as a means of cre- ating the sublime experience in the reader that would otherwise have been missed.

It may be churlish to complain about the back matter: the pages cited in the index are almost always wrong, and the references are sometimes inaccurate or incomplete. What is important is that all the essays are interesting and provocative, further evidence of the vigor and excitement that inform Gogol' studies today.

ROBERT A. MAGUIRE Columbia University

The Poetics ofAfanasy Fet. By Emily Klenin. Bausteine zur Slavischen Philologie und Kultur- geschichte: Neue Folge, Reihe A: Slavistische Forschungen, vol. 39. Cologne: B6hlau Verlag, 2002. xiii, 410 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Figures. Tables. C 49.90, hard bound.

Emily Klenin's new book is, remarkably, only the third full-length study to be published on Afanasii Fet in English, and the first in more than twenty-five years. This situation in itself renders the book's appearance an important event for Anglophone scholars of Russian

inatively through so many aspects of Gogol"s life and works, so well grounded in the his- tory of literature, philosophy, and religion, and so illuminated with a variety of critical ap- proaches.

However one defines "absence," it depends on an explicit or implicit presence. Mixail Vajskopf, glossing the famous "Rus! Rus!" passage in Chapter 11 of Dead Souls, shows how the negative characterization of Russia is essential to the hope-inspiring belief in a "positive" Russia of the future. Boris Gasparov argues that Gogol"s sense of alienation from Ukraine enables him to become more authentically Russian, and eventually "Ukrainian" too. Michael Holquist extends the idea of "alienation" to Gogol' as "a figure of longing for a unity and wholeness [the Sacred] whose unrealizability results in the obsessive emphasis on gaps, differences, and incommensurabilities in the author's writing" (129). Absence as "demonism" is the topic of two essays. Mikhail N. Epshtein finds it present everywhere in Gogol', even in the so-called lyrical digressions, where we sense an underlying void. Christopher Putney, in a tour-de-force, shows how demonism saturates "Ivan Fedorovich Shpon'ka," all appearances to the contrary.

Four of the authors investigate the paradox that Gogol' deploys a staggering arsenal of verbal means to depict or suggest absence and to handle deep personal psychological problems. For Renate Lachmann, Gogol' resolves the paradox through recourse to the fantastic and the grotesque. Natascha Drubek-Meyer sees "Vij" as marking the beginning of Gogol"s rejection of "grotesque imagery and rhetoric," which for him registered "ex- treme traumatic experience" and increasingly became a "theater of memory which trans- formed the artistic world of his own artistic texts into a frightening space of (personal) memory" (180). Iurii Lotman contemplates Gogol"s dilemma that truth, though the pro- claimed purpose of his own art, is inevitably a "lie," because it cannot be rendered verbally and because words deceive. Boris Groys defines the theme of Dead Souls as "the crime of soul-murder," which found support in Aleksandr Pushkin's view of poetry as pure lan- guage, detached from "personality," "soul," and any "correspondence to the extraliterary reality of ideas," thus confirming Gogol"s "suspicion that there is nothing beyond lan- guage" (141).

The paradox of verbalized absence eventually brought Gogol' to artistic silence and death. Sergei Goncharov examines an early and more positive version of silence, in a reli- gious context, in the Dikan'ka stories. Sven Spieker, addressing the essays in Arabesques, ar- gues that for Gogol', an understanding of the "hidden idea" (or "presence," we might say) of art-object depends on the "absence of all perception (seeing, hearing)" (14), notably in nonverbal arts like painting and architecture, and thus in effect denies the very me- dium in which Gogol' himself worked. Two other essays posit "silence" as a function of the "sublime." Mikhail Yampolsky investigates the mechanism by which Gogol' turned "low" into "high" (or "sublime"). For Susi Frank, Gogol' deemed "sublime subject matter" es- sential to all good art, but understood that it was obscured in his own fiction, and used his nonfictional writings as "metatextual" commentaries on the fiction and as a means of cre- ating the sublime experience in the reader that would otherwise have been missed.

It may be churlish to complain about the back matter: the pages cited in the index are almost always wrong, and the references are sometimes inaccurate or incomplete. What is important is that all the essays are interesting and provocative, further evidence of the vigor and excitement that inform Gogol' studies today.

ROBERT A. MAGUIRE Columbia University

The Poetics ofAfanasy Fet. By Emily Klenin. Bausteine zur Slavischen Philologie und Kultur- geschichte: Neue Folge, Reihe A: Slavistische Forschungen, vol. 39. Cologne: B6hlau Verlag, 2002. xiii, 410 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Figures. Tables. C 49.90, hard bound.

Emily Klenin's new book is, remarkably, only the third full-length study to be published on Afanasii Fet in English, and the first in more than twenty-five years. This situation in itself renders the book's appearance an important event for Anglophone scholars of Russian

This content downloaded from 62.122.76.45 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:28:26 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions