Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-2lccl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-29T10:19:25.892Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Lermontov's Shtoss: Hoax or Literary Credo?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

John Mersereau Jr.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the early months of 1841, when Lermontov was briefly in Petersburg on leave from the Caucasian front, he played a practical joke on his literary friends by solemnly convening them for a reading of a new novel and presenting them instead with a short and unfinished tale of the supernatural. The circumstances surrounding this episode were chronicled by Countess E. P. Rostopchina, herself a popular author of the period:

Once he declared that he would read to us a new novel entitled Shtoss, the reading of which he calculated would take at least four hours. He insisted that we gather early in the evening and that the doors be locked against outsiders. All his wishes were fulfilled, and about thirty selected persons assembled.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , June 1962 , pp. 280 - 295
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1962

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 , No. 9, 1882, p. 619.

2 (Moscow and Leningrad, 1957), VI, 623.

3 Ibid., pp. 669 and 863.

4 Ibid., p. 623.

5 Retinger, J. H., he Conte fantastique dans le romantisme français (Paris, 1908), p. 50.Google Scholar

6 Nilsson, N., Gogol et Pétersbourg (Stockholm, 1954), p. 31 Google Scholar.

7 Hoffmann was known in literary circles in Russia before his works were translated into French or Russian. In his memoirs A. I. Delvig says that in 1828 Mickiewicz regularly entertained the company gathered at the home of the poet A. A. Delvig with his improvisations in the style of Hoffmann. See 1820-1870(Moscow and Leningrad, 1930), I, 106. Stender-Petersen mentions a number of the early translations of Hoffmann: See “Gogol und die deutsche Romantik,” Euphorion, 1922, p. 640.

8 See (Dorpat, 1927). This will be found in Vol. XIII of Acta et Commentationes Universitatis Tartuensis (Dorpatensis) (Tartu, 1928).

9 Stender-Petersen, op. cit., p. 637. Ludwig Tieck, however, appears to have been more important than Hoffmann for Gogol's Ukrainian cycle, as Stender-Petersen so conclusively establishes.

10 Gorlin, M., N. V. Gogol und E. Th. A. Hoffmann (Berlin, 1933)Google Scholar.

11 (Kiev, 1914), p. 108.

12 ibid., p. 109. Lermontov's unfinished and unsuccessful historical novel, Vadim, was his first prose narrative and was written before his twentieth year. Shtoss was his last prose work and followed the creation of the literary classic, A Hero of Our Times. In view of Lermontov's achievement before he wrote Shtoss, Rodzevich should have examined that work more carefully before concluding that it should be relegated to the scrap pile along with the immature Vadim.

13 Lermontov knew the 1835 edition of the work, where the hero is called “Chertkov.“ The revised version of 1842 shows many differences, especially in the second part.

14 See Gorlin, op. cit., p. 38.

15 An incidental note: The area around the intersection of Burgher (Meshchanskaia) and Joiner (Stoliarnaia) streets (since renamed Grazhdanskaia and Przheval'skaia) is rich in literary history. Gogol and Mickiewicz both lived there, as did Dostoevsky. Raskolnikov presumably lived in a house on the corner of Burgher and Joiner streets, which is just a stone's throw from the old Hay Market. See A. (Leningrad, 1931), p. 103.

16 Stender-Petersen, op. cit., p. 644.

17 Ibid., p. 646.

18 Gorlin, op. cit., p. 9.

19 ibid., pp. 10-11.

20 ibid., p. 11.

21 See notes to Shtoss, VI, 670.

22 For a discussion of peripheral characters in Gogol, see Nabokov, V., Nikolai Gogol (Norfolk, Conn., 1944), pp. 43 ffGoogle Scholar.

23 Nilsson, op. tit., p. 32.

24 43-44 (Moscow, 1941), pp. 553-54.

25 (Moscow and Leningrad, 1961), p. 200.

26 The criticism of The Portrait implicit in Shtoss echoed an earlier evaluation by Belinsky, who in an article of 1835 in The Telescope had stated: “The Portrait is an unsuccessful experiment by Mr. Gogol in the fantastic manner.” The basis of Belinsky's criticism was that Gogol had introduced the fantastic elements unskillfully, destroying their very fantastic essence by describing them too naturalistically. See (Moscow, 1953), I, 303.