Manifesting the Hero

Manifesting the Hero

Today our heroine is a book by the respectable Andrei Leonidovich Zorin, our domestic philologist and professor. The book is called “The Emergence of A Hero” and first it tells of Anrei Ivanovich Turgenev, a little known and short lived character from the turn of the 19th century, who is known to history as the author of his Diaries. For Zorin, The Diaries were not an end in themselves – it’s not an academic work; but it’s a book that illustrates how traditions of the correct expression of emotions were being planted on Russian soil. It’s hard to believe that up to the middle of the 18th century, people didn’t really know how to even cry at a loved one’s funeral, they didn’t know how to do it because they didn’t have the correct book from which they could have gleaned all these beautiful Western patterns of behavior. Catherine the Great had imported a little of them at first, and then Nikolay Karamzin so industriously took the import operation to another level, having toured Europe and discovered there many interesting things, which in turn have sprouted in Turgenev’s Diaries. These fashionable imported models of correct behavior: models for admiring nature, models for being touched by the beauty of your loved one, models for loving your children, and many others, and how these correct models of behavior were planted in the Russian soil – this is what makes up this most fascinating book.

“The Emergence of A Hero” is a popularization of Zorin’s scientific work on the study of the history of emotions: how people had felt what they thought they felt and how they have expressed it in different forms. Studying the history of emotions presumes them to be, or to put it more gently, presumes their outward expression to be, a social construct. So different, since we are used to thinking that our feelings come from Mother Nature, who whispers something to us, and then our heart prompts us. There is intelligence, and there are feelings. There is the brain, and there is the heart. Somehow, the brain is considered a social body part and the heart is considered a natural body part. Let me remind you that this is a fairly new concept, and a concept is exactly what it is – it’s not something that had just sprung from the earth, but they were formed by someone. Our European culture, of which is of course Russian culture is a part, had formed concepts of man having emotions, of man having a right to emotions, of there being something precious and important in emotions and of that they could and should be expressed. Feelings have a certain expression enacted through a collection of socially acceptable forms, or to be more precise, socially possible forms. I say possible because when we are going to read Zorin’s book and those works of art that relate to the time period he describes, we are going to see a large number of emotions which are expressed in a way that result in completely socially unacceptable things – like suicide. Nonetheless, in literature, suicide is judged and condemned, and at the same time glorified. Meaning that having read The Sorrows of Young Werther, a certain number of young people did indeed end their lives – that’s a fact. That having read about the misfortunes of forbidden love, maybe some of our fellows decided to cheat on their husbands when they got the chance – that’s probably also true. Honestly, in the foreword to that one novel that is in many ways a foundational part of the formation of European understandings about emotions, “Julie”; or, “The New Heloise” by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a key person of this whole story, and soon I’ll say why key and why we don’t like him, he wrote that novelists always get criticized for corrupting the morals and for giving bad examples: “And to that I want to say the following: a chaste girl does not read novels. This novel has a rather frank title so that it cannot be read by mistake. So if she had started to read it, and continued to read it, then let her not complain later that she had been corrupted, because that’s how she was already.” Such is the argumentation the author gives before the collective Roskomnadzor.

So, this is what I liked about Zorin’s book: the introduction, that you might find boring, I found to be the most interesting part. It provides the methodological framing about the things that are the reason why we must read these wonderful stories and what that tells us. Zorin is also interesting not just for his Turgenev, but also for describing the time of Catherine’s reign, and skipping over all the little stories of Paul’s mischief, right up to the early reign of Alexander – the period when certain forms of behavior were revealed to the Russian society and had remained dominant thereafter. Zorin identifies the formats of feeling emotions inside, and expressing them outside. These are the formats:

First format is reading. You, individually, alone with a book, in a certain setting, are reading a book and are feeling it. Whether you are reading to yourself, reading aloud, you are reading and crying, you are reading and writing down your impressions – these are all patterns of emotional expression. In the literature of that time, often the main character is also a reader – that’s what philologists call a book within a book.

Second format – the theater. You go to the theater, where you are presented with a play. You, having watched enough of the play, are experiencing emotions, right there in the theater, also worrying, crying and applauding, and then according to the models of what you have seen, you build your life. One of the stories Zorin tells is about how two people have watched different plays and as a result have misunderstood each other in real life. Again, how often do you see in Russian and European literature, and set in the time we’re talking about and later, that the main character goes to the theater? At theater, there are always two shows – one on stage and one in the auditorium. You come to look at people and to be seen yourself. Lots of examples come to mind. In War and Peace, they often come for the opera/ballet – Natasha arrives from the country, goes to the theater and there sees the song and dance, the combination that was popular at the time. At the same time she sees Hélène in her box, she sees Anatole paying her a visit, then in the lobby she first sees Kuragin, then Dolokhov – what a show! Anna Karenina goes to the theater and everyone neglects her there, because she is a fallen woman who positioned herself outside of society, which is by the way a very similar scene that I think Tolstoy had read in Balsac’s “Beatrice” where the heroine also foolishly goes to the theater where everyone avoids her and she ends up in this shameful void. That’s the second form of learning about and expressing your feelings is the theater.

The third is the court. Courtly life is a play, in the middle of it is the sovereign. The standard for court life in that period was Versailles, of course, and Louis XIV, who, while not being alive for a long time at this point, nonetheless had established this pattern. Yes, the court is a place of work, but it’s also where there are various intrigues and events tied to emotions. And there you hide you emotions, and at the same time show them. There are emotions that you must show, like the emotion of loyalism where you show delight at the sight of the sovereign. Again: “He fell hard, got up well - was honored with the most august smile” like in “The Misfortune of Being Intelligent”. This is it’s own theater and the people inside are the actors.

And the fourth are the scenes from social life. It is the ball, first and foremost. Not just the ball, but also visits, guests, receptions, parties – the ball is simply the most important of them all. It is also a play, which could be part of a courtly life if it happens in high society, or it could be an imitation of courtly life, if it’s a ball at a private person’s. It’s the time of explanations, the time of scenes of jealousy: “I was madly in love with balls: There’s no better place for confessions and for the delivery of a letter.” from “Yevgeniy Onegin”. Again literary examples abound: Natasha Rostova’s first ball – an unfortunate event where Kitty discovers that her so-called fiance is in love with another and her dreams of a quick marriage are dashed. Now that is a ball. All of this, let me repeat, as forms of expressing emotion and as forms of public theatrics get founded in Russia at that time when the Russian society forms and educates itself. These people that Zorin describes read books go to the theater, some of them are from the court, or occasionally come to the court and live in an educated society.

Another interesting thing that exists both in Zorin and what is very evident in Russian sentimentalist prose is that it shares a poorly defined border with Russian romantic prose, because Russian culture developed rapidly and at an accelerated pace, like a hothouse plant, and due to this rapid growth, periods ended up overlaying one another: classicism, sentimentalism, romanticism - it was common for these periods to be the stages of development of a single author’s creative expression, provided they lived long enough. In Russian sentimentalist stories, what was the important part? What Zorin describes in the life of the educated, rich, courtly and court adjacent – this cult of emotions, is adjacent to the cult of nature and the cult of authenticity. As always, this cult did not spread from the bottom up, but from the top down. It came from the court of Marie Antoinette, at the time a young queen, the court where she could live like she was a shepherd girl. Why did everyone all of a sudden want to pretend to be shepherd girls, shepherds and to poeticize their life?

This is the oldest trope dating back to Theocritus, the ancient poet that invented his “Arcadia”. And whomever saw the real Arcadia can attest to how lifeless that place is. People were mocking Theocritus in his own time, how only a feeble knowledge of geography could have localized a paradise on Earth in Arcadia. Nonetheless, “Arcadia” became the idyllic place where half-naked shepherds and shepherd-girls play and indulge in simple human pleasures, living a clear unadulterated life that those more rich and more educated are completely deprived of. (Of course, they can reproduce it for themselves for not insignificant sums of money: “Oh, how expensive is all this simplicity!” to quote Anna Karenina one more time and to completely mix all our time periods.)

So after Classicism, and it’s cult of subjugating emotions to reason, and as a sort of a counter-reaction to the Enlightenment with it’s cult of rationality, prudence and progression from barbarism to civilization, there arrives the cult of nature which declares man to be born good, with all faults being derived from the city, from civilization, from self cultivation and from culture. This is where I must curse Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom I consider the most harmful thinkers in the history of humanity and the father of Fascism. I will attempt to explain why. Him, and Voltaire are two diametric opposites who hated each other. Or, to be more precise, Rousseau hated Voltaire, but Voltaire laughed at him (I love Voltaire). Now, we should not moralize either of their private lives, because the 18th century was a century of wisdom and insanity, which, to our modern eye was the age of the wildest, how should I say it – not perversity, but everything that you can imagine that’s surprising and wondrous in the way a person can live their private life, you will find it there. For us it’s hard to understand from reading sentimentalist literature, but it’s sometimes useful to remember what those people were doing in real life. However, Rousseau was that kind of man who, having grown up from the culture of Enlightenment, the culture of rationality, had denied that culture. Who had, opposite to Hobbes’ school that considered the natural state of man to be a war of all versus all, living a life that’s nasty brutish and short, Rousseau, however, considered the natural to be beautiful, that a noble savage is the way he was born because in his heart there’s virtue and love that was given to him by God the Creator. And it is civilization that gives him pride, jealousy, and encourages him develop vices. But by returning to the loins of nature, man can somehow rid himself of his flaws and his virtues will all blossom. Such is the direct connection to the culture of emotions and the era of sentimentalism. Rousseau, a utopian who dissolved the individual in the collective and denied civilization, can be traced right to our very own Lev Nokolayevich Tolstoy. Tolstoy also discussed how the government is pernicious, not as an institution, but as a practice of people ruling over people. However, he quickly realized that if we do not want this government that brings violence, we must also rid ourselves of cities, universities, literacy and plow the land with our own hands, like Rousseau. What is Fascistic in that, and I don’t even mean that in the derogatory sense, but in reference to it’s intellectual provenance, is the counter-Enlightenment line in European culture, a line that’s equally strong as the Enlightenment, that inherits from Rousseau, considers that if we were to return to nature, we would arrive to something good. But if we continue to encourage “degenerate art”, we would weaken and our barbarian vitality would be lost. These concepts aren’t far – one grows from the other. Therefore, when a person sheds tears over the fate of Poor Lisa, the peasant who we contrast with the perverse city, let’s take a pause to remember that it’s civilization that created that person. And the feeling of awe at the sight of the purity of peasant life is a cultural and social construct, not something that springs forth from the human heart. The human heart ever only produces the desire to eat and to not let others do the same. That’s about it, everything else are add-ons that come from civilization.

To qualify Rousseau, he was actually speaking from an old and honorable tradition that goes back to, at least, the Romans, who in any difficult life situation would remember their ancient comrades. To the Romans, the word “new” was a condemnation, and to “pursue new things” was a euphemism for a government coup – for them, the older, the better!

To return to our ‘paisanas’, and it was more often the case that a story would be about a simple woman than a simple man, she was of course completely imaginary, appearing from the heads of sentimentalist authors like Athena from the head of Zeus. However, she is really very important because she is the progenitor of our attitudes towards “lesser” people. Because the idea that peasants can love meant that they too are people, which was a new realization, especially for a country that practiced serfdom. This was recognized in their own time – a special kind of comedy about fluffy sheep and blissful peasants for a society that knew the real thing. And really, the most interesting story in sentimentalist literature isn’t the story of the characters, but that of the formation of Russian literary language: how people learned to describe, to express thoughts and feelings, and how the unconscious elegance in phrasing spontaneously erupts among borrowed French tropes. And in it, we realize the Russian language as pliable, rich and expressive, that we will see later from Pushkin, like his shadow appears on those pages. You see it in Karamzin, who imported the whole lot of sentimentalist themes and forms from Europe, who constantly refers to Western examples: now comparing himself to Stern’s heroes, now to Florian’s – all important names are dropped. As if after every emotional act, there’s a citation: “see also: Florian”. He is asserting that he is admiring nature the right way. Likewise, Karamzin’s imitators always cite Karamzin, that they didn’t invent everything themselves, but read it in a Karamzin novel, that it’s their foundation and there’s no need to think that they did not understand. However, the next generation, they write without citations – they have internalized the patterns that were foreign to Karamzin. For this third generation, it’s fully their own – they no longer remember that at one point, this was all foreign. I like this observation and find it very calming because it shows how truly alien patterns sprout just fine in our soil. This kills dead the concept that we have some inscrutable and unique way that somehow keeps leading us down dark corners of homophobia. This kills dead the idea that there’s our own, and then there’s an alien other that will never take root. Nonsense – it all takes root.

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