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Between Ideology and Desire: Rhetoric of the Self in the Works of Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Nikolai Dobroliubov

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Konstantine Klioutchkine
Konstantine Klioutchkine*
Affiliation:
Pomona College
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Abstract

Departing from the familiar scholarly focus on the ideological content of works by intelligentsia forerunners, this article examines the record of everyday life in their private and public writing. Konstantine Klioutch kine argues that their obsessive focus on ordinary experience indicated that articulating mundane desires was as important to the two writers as expressing progressive views. As professional journalists, Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Nikolai Dobroliubov organized their experience primarily by way of writing. Accordingly, the article explores rhetorical procedures accommodating both ideology and desire in their influential account of themselves as prototypical new men.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , Summer 2009 , pp. 335 - 354
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2009

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References

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27. Ibid., 1:545-46.

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33. Dobroliubov, Sobranie sochinenii, 4:321. For a discussion of Aleksandr Herzen's objections to Dobroliubov's view of the Oblomov type, see Kuhn, “Dobroliubov's Critique of Oblomov,” 103.Google Scholar

34. Dobroliubov, Sobranie sochinenii, 4:334-37.

35. See, e.g., ibid., 8:403, 546 and 9:351, 364. Kuhn, “Dobroliubov's Critique of Oblomov,“ 103-4,106-7. Lermontov's ironic metaphor of the ardent heart under a rough coat (inwardly passionate yet outwardly reserved) served Dobroliubov as a model; he trained himself to shape his behavior accordingly. See, e.g., Chernyshevskii's testimony supported by citations from Dobroliubov's diary. Chernyshevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10:55.

36. Dobroliubov's repeatedly identified with Chulkaturin in his diary and letters. In the entry for 8 January 1857, he wrote: “Kakoe neveroiatnoe skhodstvo nashel ia v sebe s Chulkaturinym … mne kazalos', chto so mnoi rano ili pozdno sluchitsia takaia istoriia“ (Sobranie sochinenii, 8:517). Indeed, a story highly similar to Chulkaturin's took place in Dobroliubov's own life some three years after the above identification; ibid., 9:402-6 (letter to 1.1. Bodriugov of 22 February 1860).

37. Dobroliubov, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:100, 107. Dobroliubov refers to Chulkaturin (lishnii chelovek, 6:100) as the primary example of the type but does not mention his name directly.

38. Ibid., 6:500.

39. Ibid., 6:500, 503.

40. Ibid., 6:490-503.

41. Ibid., 6:117-18.

42. Ibid., 6:129-33.

43. Ibid., 6:153. For a comparison with standard portraits of masturbators, see Laqueur, Thomas Walter, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York, 2003), 64–66 Google Scholar.

44. Chernyshevskii had previously made these points in a brief obituary of Dobroliubov published in the November 1861 issue of Sovremennik. Chernyshevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7:849-55.

45. Chernyshevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10:55.

46. Ibid., 10:57.

47. Ibid., 10:59. Chernyshevskii does not mention Griinwaldt by name. The noble lady is E. A. Kurakina, in whose house Dobroliubov served as a tutor. Dobroliubov's role remained unknown to the reader, though, and Chernyshevskii implied that Dobroliubov was a social equal in the house.

48. Ibid., 10:59. For Dobroliubov's original, unedited text, see Dobroliubov, Sobranie sochinenii, 9:507-8, 514-17, 553-56 (diary entries for January-February 1857).

49. See, e.g., Randolph, House in the Garden, 161-65.

50. Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, 173-79.

51. Ibid., 218-21.

52. Quoted ibid., 212. For a reading similar to Herzen's, see Fedor Dostoevskii's parody of What Is to Be Done? in his Crime and Punishment (1866), especially in Lebeziatnikov's visions of communal life and of women within it. Dostoevskii, Fedor, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad, 1972-1988), vol. 6, pt. 5, chap. 1 Google Scholar.

53. For an explication of the figure of turning in the formation of subjectivity, see Butler, Psychic Life of Power.

54. Dobroliubov, Sobranie sochinenii, 7:251.

55. Ibid., 7:248-54.

56. Ibid., 9:344, 351, 359-61, 383-85.

57. Klioutchkine, Konstantine, “Between Sacrifice and Indulgence: Nikolai Nekrasov as a Model for the Intelligentsia,” Slavic Review 66, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 45–62 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58. Skabichevskii, A. M., Literaturnye vospominaniia (Moscow, 2001), 292 Google Scholar.

59. Turgenev, I. S., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos'mi tomakh (Moscow, 1960-1967), 12:53 Google Scholar. Nadezhdin's life closely approximated that of Dobroliubov. Both wrote diaries and poetry. Both had a close friend with whom they seldom met but to whom they wrote their most intimate letters; in Dobroliubov's case, this was Ivan Bordiugov. The language of Nadezhdin's intimate letters closely resembled diat of Dobroliubov's.

60. Ibid., 12:214.

61. Staniukovich, K. M.,/Wwo«sobraniesochinenii, 12 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1906-1907), 2:91, 127 Google Scholar.

62. Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, D. N., ed., htoriia russkoi literatury XIX v., 5 vols. (Moscow, 1908-1910), 4:137Google Scholar.

63. For the role of the melodramatic mode in nineteenth-century literature, see its benchmark analysis by Brooks, Peter, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, 1976)Google Scholar.