Pushkin’s Legacy: The Dostoyevsky-Turgenev Debate, Essay Example

The Research Problem:

The dissertation intends to research the debate concerning the historical reception of the work of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin by two of the foremost Russian writers of the nineteenth century: Fyodorov Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky and Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev.

The Dostoyevsky-Turgenev debate entails two unique appropriations of Pushkin’s enormous legacy, most acutely presented at the Pushkin celebration of 1880, where Turgenev and Dostoyevsky were both keynote speakers. Turgenev and Dostoyevsky offer radically different interpretations of Pushkin’s legacy in their addresses.

In the case of Dostoyevsky, he appropriates Pushkin as a “prophet”, emphasizing that Pushkin denotes a profoundly Russian character and genius, one that is consistent with the Eastern Christian Orthodox heritage of Russia. Accordingly, for Dostoyevsky, Pushkin is both a particular and universal historical phenomenon: particular, insofar as Pushkin emerges in the particular context of Russia; universal, insofar as Pushkin, as representative of the Russian Orthodox tradition, bears a universal dimension to his work, to the extent that Dostoyevsky interprets Orthodoxy as the only possibility for the unity and brotherhood of all people.

Turgenev, on the other hand, links Pushkin to the general flowering of national consciousness that occurred in the nineteenth century, coupled with the notion that Pushkin embodied the ideals of the Enlightenment. In this regard, Turgenev’s approach is to think of Pushkin as Russia’s first truly European intellectual: the works of Pushkin bring Russia closer to Europe.

The research problem attempts to analyze the terms of this debate, studying the key tenets underlying both interpretations. Such interpretations will then be traced back to their possible original sources in Pushkin’s work. Accordingly, we need to ask questions concerning the general tension between the Slavophile and Western oriented thinkers in Russia, particularly in terms of how they appropriate the work of Pushkin to make their respective cases. Furthermore, we will ask whether such appropriations of Pushkin’s were legitimate. In other words, we will inquire whether such interpretations by definition can be viewed as reducing the artist and his work to a particular ideological and historical framework. Concomitantly, we endeavour to demonstrate that these appropriations can be understood in artistic and not only political terms. That is to say, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky can be read as utilizing Pushkin as a certain literary or fictional character in their respective addresses. This entails that the particular interpretations of Pushkin which Dostoyevsky and Turgenev advance can be viewed as continuations of the personages from their own novels

The hypotheses to be tested involve looking at the interpretations of Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, with the intent of unravelling the logic underlying their respective claims. The contribution of the dissertation can be viewed as (1) an evaluation of the particular reception of Pushkin according to both political/ideological grounds and artistic grounds – that is, considering how Pushkin may be said to be utilized to support a certain political/ideological stance, (2) and how Pushkin may be understood as becoming an fictional character himself in the debate between Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, a character consistent with the literary figures within both author’s works.

Context of the Research Problem

The research problem as stated possesses a very specific context. Firstly, it deals deeply with the content of Dostoyevsky’s and Turgenev’s respective speeches at the Pushkin memorial celebration of 1880. These two texts are crucial to the context of the research problem. Of course, the texts of Pushkin are also crucial, insofar as both of these commentaries can be viewed as variants of literary criticism and the interpretation of Pushkin’s work. According to the views of Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, the context of this problem falls within the general distinction between Westernism and Slavophilism within Russian thought. Thus, this problematic is not only indicative of an academic context, in which the literary merits of an author may be debated, but also evinces a greater political context, in which the respective positions established by Dostoyevsky and Turgenev represent two internal ideologies within Russia. Much of the academic literature in the English language has emphasized the political aspect of this debate, noting that the two sides represent political appropriations. For example, Marcus C. Levitt’s Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880, as the title of the monograph makes clear, examines the Pushkin memorial in a dual literary-political context. However, much of the academic literature has not taken the content of this debate outside of its political implications – that is, a direct analysis of what Turgenev and Dostoyevsky are saying and thereinafter attempting to understand the legitimacy of their respective claims. Of course, this can be attributed to problems with the accuracy of methodology and the necessary heterogeneity of literary criticism and interpretation – the attempt to say that Turgenev or Dostoyevsky offer the image of the “correct” Pushkin would be an obvious transgression of some of the fundamental problems of any hermeneutics. In this regard, we believe our contribution to existing research can be understood as adding to the literature on the Turgenev-Dostoyevsky debate concerning Pushkin, which is not extensively covered in Anglophone texts. Moreover, we are unaware of any existing academic literature that approaches Dostoyevsky and Turgenev’s interpretations of Pushkin as continuations of the characters Dostoyevsky and Turgenev create in their works, which indicates the potential novelty of our research.

Method

In order to develop these ideas, three main methodological steps are to be taken. Firstly, it is necessary to recapitulate Dostoyevsky’s and Turgenev’s respective positions. Our key texts in this step of the methodology will be the speeches of Dostoyevsky and Turgenev made at the 1880 Pushkin celebration, alongside the reception of these speeches in the secondary literature, such as Levitt (1989) and Cassedy (2005). In recapitulating Dostoyevsky’s and Turgenev’s speeches, we will emphasize their own convictions in order to best develop their own unique personal and political contexts from which they approach Pushkin. In other words, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev approach Pushkin as a writer approaching another writer. Hence, one could say that Pushkin becomes for both not only a political figure, but also a literary character, a character that embodies their respective world-views, such as i.e., Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. In essence, in summarizing their respective speeches, we could methodologically read these texts as if Pushkin were a character in one of their novels.

To make an evaluation of the validity of the claims of both authors concerning Pushkin requires a reading of Pushkin’s work itself. The greatest methodological problem in this regard will therefore be hermeneutic: we are required to interpret Pushkin through the eyes of Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, which already presupposes a second hermeneutic tension insofar as we are required to not only understand Pushkin, but also Dostoyevsky and Turgenev. In this regard, the preferred methodology is to concentrate on some key motifs from Dostoyevsky and Turgenev’s Pushkin speeches and then attempt to find these motifs in the works of Pushkin himself. Of particular importance in this regard are the precise textual references to Pushkin that Dostoyevsky and Turgenev make in their respective speeches. (i.e., Dostoyevsky refers to Pushkin’s works  The Gypsies, Evgeny Onegin, The Bear, whereas Turgenev refers to Onegin. This would allow us a clearer picture of how Turgenev and Dostoyevsky approach Pushkin differently, not only in terms of the texts they both reference, but to particular texts to which they ascribe an importance. At the same time, this will allow us to delimit the texts we examine from Pushkin, by approaching only texts from Pushkin that are mentioned in Turgenev and Dostoyevsky. Accordingly, this means that our methodology confers a profundity to Dostoyevsky and Turgenev’s interpretations, using them as guiding threads in an exploration of Pushkin’s work.

By framing the problem in this manner, we will be able to utilize the secondary literature in a rigorous manner. Namely, we will focus on secondary texts that a) directly address Dostoyevsky and Turgenev’s thoughts on Pushkin, b) discuss the Pushkin celebration in general. This methodology will allow us to make informed choices in literature without compromising the rigour of our investigation.

Sources

Bayley, John. Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary. Colombia, NY: CUP Archive, 1971.

Bethea, David M. The Pushkin Handbook. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.

Cassedy, Steven. Dostoevsky’s Religion. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Cracraft, James and Daniel Bruce Rowland. Architectures of Russian Identity: 1500 to the Present. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Dobrenko, Evgeny. “Pushkin in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture.” In ed. A Kahn, The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Dream of a Queer Fellow and The Pushkin Speech. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1960.

Frank, Joseph. Dostoyevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1855-1871. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Hunter, Shireen, Thomas, Jeffrey L. and Alexander Melikshivili. Islam in Russia: The Politics of Identity and Security. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2004.

Jackson, Robert Louis. Dialogues with Dostoyevsky: The Overwhleming Questions. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.

Kujundži?, Dragan. The Returns of History: Russian Nietzscheians after Modernity. SUNY Press, 1997.

Levitt, Marcus C. Russian Literary Celebration and The Pushkin Celebration of 1880. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Martin, D.W. “The Pushkin Celebrations of 1880: The Conflict of Ideals and Ideologies.” In: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 66, No. 4, 1988.

Pevar, Richard. “To Find the Man in Dostoyevsky.” In: The Hudson Review, Vol. 55, No. 3, 2002, pp. 495-503.

Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich. Collected Works. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1955.

Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich. The Essential Turgenev. Evanston, IL: Northewestern University Press, 1994.