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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
In an 1881 letter to his would-be Russian translator, Walt Whitman described his sense of a mystical resemblance—improbable yet undeniable—between Russian and America, two nations traditionally regarded as not merely geographically but also culturally marginal to the great nations of Europe:
You Russians and we Americans;—our countries so distant, so unlike at a first glance … and yet in certain features, and vastest ones, so resembling each other. The variety of stock-elements and tongues to be resolutely fused in a common Identity and Union at all hazards— the idea, perennial through the ages, that they both have their historic and divine mission—the fervent element of manly friendship throughout the whole people, surpassed by no other races—the grand ‘expanse of territorial limits and boundaries—the unform'd and nebulous state of many things, not yet permanently settled, but agreed on all hands to be the preparations of an infinitely greater future— the fact that both peoples have their independent and leading positions to hold, keep, and if necessary fight for, against the rest of the world—the deathless aspirations at the inmost centre of each great community, so vehement, so mysterious, so abysmic—are certainly features you Russians and we Americans possess in common.
I am grateful to Evgenii Bershtein, Anna Chodakiewicz, Jenny Franchot, Nan Goodman, Dale Petersen, Cathy Popkin and David Shengold for their kind assistance. This research was generously funded by the American Council for Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council for Russian and East European Studies.
1. Walt Whitman to Dr. John Fitzgerald Lee, 20 December 1881, Walt Whitman, the Correspondence, Vol. 3: 1876-1885, ed. Edwin Havilland Miller (New York: New York University Press, 1964), no. 1084. Although the poet unaccountably addresses him as if he were, Lee was not Russian; nor did he succeed in translating Leaves of Grass.
2. American characterizations of Russia and its inhabitants have been collected in Anschel, Eugene, ed., The American Image of Russia, 1775-1917 (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1974 Google Scholar; and Hasty, Olga Peters and Fusso, Susanne, eds., America Through Russian Eyes, 1874-1926 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988 Google Scholar. For contemporary Russian commentary on America, see Nikoliukin, Alexandr, ed., A Russian Discovery of America, Carlile, Cynthia and Katzer, Julius, trans. (Moscow: Progress, 1986 Google Scholar. One might also Slavic Review 51, no. 4 (Winter 1992) consult the primary and secondary bibliographies appended to Dieter Boden's helpful study, Das Amerikabild im russischen Schrifttum bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter, 1968), 194-204. Of related interest are travel accounts as, for example, A Russian Looks at America: The Journey of Aleksandr Borisovich Lakier in 1857, Arnold Schrier and Joyce Story, trans, and eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); and Prince, Nancy, A Black Woman's Odyssey Through Russia and Jamaica: The Narrative of Nancy Prince (1850; rpt. New York: Marcus Wiener, 1990)Google Scholar. Prince witnessed the Decembrist uprising and subsequent punishment.
3. For the centrality of the jeremiad to American religious and literary expression, see Bercovitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978 Google Scholar. Whitman's specific concern in Democratic Vistas was that, if the cultural vacuum in the United States continued, Americans would succumb to the temptation of false literary forms produced by “a class of supercilious infidels “: “the coteries, the artwriters, the talkers and critics of the saloons, or the lecturers in the colleges” (491). To these, Whitman opposed the still undiscovered “infant genius of American poetic expression” (491). See Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, reprinted in Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. James E. Miller, Jr. (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1959), 455-501.
4. Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America, ed. Mayer, J.P., trans. Lawrence, George (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1969), 412–13.Google Scholar
5. On the Russian and American histories of a rhetoric of national mission, see Cherniavsky, Michael, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961 Google Scholar; and Tuveson, Ernest Lee, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968 Google Scholar. Both Cherniavsky and Tuveson point out the similarity of the Russian and American discourses of national mission but dismiss it as superficial. Both do so, however, on insufficient grounds: Tuveson, for example, effectively denies the history of Russian messianic thought, characterizing it as “backward-looking” based upon his reading of a single (translated) text, the fifteenth-century “Tale of the White Cowl.” See Tuveson, 133-36.
6. John de Crevecoeur, J. Hector St., Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Stone, Albert E. (New York: Penguin American Library, 1981 Google Scholar; and Dostoevsky, Fedor M., “Knizhnost’ i grammatnost',” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1981), 19: 5–66 Google Scholar. The Soviet edition of Dostoevsky's complete works will hereafter be referred to in the notes as PSS. A contextualizing account of the debate to which Dostoevsky's article contributed is provided in 19: 230-52. Page references to these editions will henceforth appear parenthetically in the text.
7. Evidence for the fictionality of this scene is provided by Philbrick, Thomas, St. John de Crevecoeur (New York: Twayne, 1970), 47–48 Google Scholar. For a speculative account of Crevecoeur's arrangement of the chapters of the Letters, see Grabo, Norman S., “Crevecoeur's American: Beginning the World Anew,” in The William and Mary Quarterly 48 (April 1991): 159–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and esp. 166.
8. The centrality of slavery in American thought during this period, despite its relative early confinement to African-Americans in the southern states, is examined in Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975 Google Scholar. Its centrality in “classic” American literature is eloquently demonstrated in Morrison, Toni, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
9. The topos of the search, of course, serves to underscore the profundity of the abyss separating the peasant from the noble class, despite the proximity of their lives. Dead Souls (1842), arguably, demonstrates that Gogol’ found the aristocratic desire to possess the peasant, and the inadequately understood sources of this desire, immensely funny. More somber accounts of such encounters appear, for example, in Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches (1852) and Dostoevsky's “The Peasant Marei” (1876). The tension present in this topos between the peasant's unelicited, circumstantial materialization before an entitled narrator and the latter's conscientious seeking-out of the former is explicitly thematized in Dostoevsky's 1861 Notes from the House of the Dead. For a landmark comparative study of Russian and American slavery, see Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).
10. The peasant's consciousness—his hypothetical reactions to elite stereotypes of the workings of the peasant mind—does provide more of an explicit focus for Part II of “Knizhnost’ i grammatnost'.” For information on Dostoevsky's journal, Vremia, in which the article appeared, see Nechaeva, Vera S., Zhurnal M.M. i F.M. Dostoevskikh, “Vremia,” 1861-1863 (Moscow: Nauka, 1972 Google Scholar; and Frank, Joseph, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986 Google Scholar. The masculine pronoun is used to refer to the peasant as a matter of convenience, and to the author as also a matter of fact: the plight of female authors, both Russian and American, during this period is the subject of a growing body of scholarship which cannot be adequately engaged in this essay.
11. Although the argument might be made that the problem was greatly exacerbated in the Russian case because of the absence of a Russian literary language, one should not overlook the concerns of those like Noah Webster who sought a way to reenact linguistically America's repudiation of British ties. For a summary view of the Russian problem, with excerpts from key primary texts, see Rudolf Neuhauser, The Romantic Age in Russian Literature: Poetic and Esthetic Norms which appears as volume 92 of Slavistische Beitrage (Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1975): 22-37. On Webster and his project, see David Simpson, The Politics of American English, 1776-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), esp. chapters 1 and 2.
12. Alternatively, cultural absence could be considered with profound ambivalence, as described in Donald Fanger's brilliant account of “radical possibility” in The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). Fanger's book is highly suggestive for students of American cultural marginality. Evidence for the degree to which Americans contemplated the fact of cultural absence is abundantly present in collections of eighteenth and nineteenth century critical essays as, for example, Spiller, Robert E., ed., The American Literary Revolution, 1783-1837 (New York: New York University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; and Ruland, Richard, ed., The Native Muse: Theories of American Literature (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972)Google Scholar. On American interest in German romantic nationalist thought and its mediation through the English romantics, see Henry A. Pochmann's extremely thorough study, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences, 1600-1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957).
13. The joint impact of these internal and external processes of marginalization differentiates Russian and American anxieties concerning the formation of a national culture from contemporary European efforts to achieve an ideal coherence of national experience.
14. For an historical account of this polemic in nineteenth century Russia, see Fanger, Donald, “The Peasant in Literature,” in Vucinich, Wayne S., ed., The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), 231–62Google Scholar; Serman, I. Z., “Problema krest'ianskogo romana v r, usskoi kritike serediny XIX veka,” in BBursov, .I. and Serman, I.Z., eds., Problemy realizma russkoi literatury XIX veka (Moscow: Akademiia Nauka, 1961), 162–82Google Scholar; and Rose Glickman, “An Alternative View of the Peasantry: The Raznochintsy Writers of the 1860s,” Slavic Review (December 1973): 693-704. For a contemporary discussion of the problem of the unliterary nature of peasant life, see “Romany i rasskazy iz prostonarodnogo byta v 1853 g.,” in P.V. Annenkov, Vospominaniia i kriticheskie ocherki: sobranie statei i zametok, 1849-1868 (St. Petersburg: Tip. M. Stasiulevicha, 1879), 2: 46-83. Ample evidence for the American preoccupation with these two aspects of the cultural marginality problem is available in the Spiller and Ruland collections cited above.
15. Thus, in the American case the gently satiric portrayal of the common people in, for example, Washington Irving or Philip Freneau, as well as the more anxious representations in the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown or Crevecoeur, yield in the 1830s to Emerson's serious attempt to link the possibility of a native poetry to an obscure and even wordless existence, beginning with the essays “Nature” (1836) and “The American Scholar” (1837), and culminating with “The Poet” (1842-44). The quoted phrase appears in a review entitled “Nathaniel Hawthorne” probably written by Evert Duyckinck in the journal of the literary nationalist group known as Young America, Arcturus 6 (May 1841): 330.
16. Although in the United States, the fact of slavery could not wholly account for this abyss between the cultural elites and the common people, it undeniably existed. Even the protoromantic Edward Tyrell Channing, for example, suggested that a novelistic study of true American character would have to exclude members of the “lower class” as mere “individuals, whose influence is scarcely felt amongst ourselves, and whose peculiarities would give strangers very little knowledge of the effect of our institutions or pursuits upon our opinions and character.” See Channing's 1819 review of Charles Brockden Brown reprinted in Ruland, ed., Native Muse, 118-30. Even after the democratization of the American literary profession was completed (certainly by 1840), the class abyss remains implicit: one discerns it in Emerson's direct address to the common man/poet (in “The Poet “) who is by Emerson's own definition too simple to understand his words; in Hawthorne's early efforts to collect village folktales; in Stowe's famous claim that “God,” rather than direct contact with the slaves, had enabled her to write the story of Uncle Tom; and in Whitman's self-conscious visits to the bars of New York and the Civil War hospitals in order to come into intimate contact with the people. If in Russia the problem of a division between the educated elites and the prostonarod'e cannot be encompassed by the category of class alone (as the rise of the intelligentsia, or raznochintsy, demonstrates), so in America considerations of class must be refined to encompass distinctions which clearly structured nineteenth century social life. For a recent attempt to do so, see Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984), chapter 3.
17. See for example Dmitri Pisarev's critique of the anthropological approach in “Narodnye knizhki,” Sochineniia: Stat'i i retsenzii, 1859-1862 (Moscow: Gosizdat khud. lit., 1955) 1: 56-74, and esp. 58-61. For an extensive analysis of Dostoevsky's objections to regarding the people as “ethnographic material,” see Nancy Ruttenburg, “Melville and Dostoevsky: Theorists of the Lie” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1988), 49-198.
18. Dostoevsky's observation, “Prostota vrag analiza,” referred to the cultural elites’ over-simplified assessments of the common people which, he complained, often led them into the most “fantastic” formulations. See “Neskol'ko zametok o prostote i uproshchennosti,” PSS 23: 143. Edward Tyrell Channing made a similar complaint in “On Models in Literature,” North American Review 3 (July 1816) 202-9, where Harvard's Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory warns his readers against that species of “simplicity” imbibed from “masters and schools. “
19. That a national literature was imagined as the source of authentic national identity is particularly clear in Walter Channing's “Essay on American Language and Literature,” North American Review 1 (September 1815) 307-14. Given the absence of such a literature in America, a situation Channing attributes to American “slavery” to the language of England, he can only conclude: “Unfortunately for this country, there is no national character, unless its absence constitute one …. “
20. This is essentially Fanger's assessment of Gogol''s achievement in The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, cited above.
21. The warring characterizations that Dostoevsky cites as originating with various ideological camps within the ranks of the educated elites are contained within the passionate letter he wrote to his brother Mikhail on 30 January/22 February 1854, upon his release from hard labor. See PSS 28: 1, 169-72.
22. Dostoevsky also referred to the authenticity of his life among the people in the hard-labor camp, implicitly as opposed to the fundamentally scholarly or philanthropic attempts of other members of the privileged class, in his Diary of a Writer, PSS 26: 152.
23. Dostoevsky articulated this necessity for the elite classes to “turn into” or “toward” the common people several times after his return from hard labor. See, for example PSS 20: 20, and 21: 133, 134. Notes from the House of the Dead, of course, constitutes his great study of the complexities of this problem.
24. In so doing, Dostoevsky added his voice to an already lively debate on the significance of Pushkin to the national-culture project. For an historical account of this debate, see the collection of essays edited by B.P. Gorodetskii et al., Pushkin: Itogi i problemy izucheniia (Moscow-Leningrad: Akademiia Nauka, 1966), and esp. the third chapter which covers the 1850s and 1860s written by V.B. Sandomirskaia and B.P. Gorodetskii, 50-77.
25. The seemingly digressive argument concerning the importance of Pushkin's Onegin to the national identity project is revealed here as precisely tailored to display to the maximum advantage the contours of Dostoevsky's own experience as a Russian writer.
26. Dostoevsky had insisted elsewhere, in his Diary of a Writer, on the necessity of the common people deferring to the experience of the elite class. See PSS 22: 44, 45.
