The woods of childhood: Forest and fairy tale in Pavel Zasodimskii's nature writing

Russian Review

Volumn 64, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 281-298

  Ogden, J Alexander ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 62649088692     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9434.2005.00361.x     Document Type: Article

References (97)

1. Sobranie sochinenii P. Zasodimskogo (Vologdina), 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1895), 1:561. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine.
2. On these tendencies see, respectively, Andrew Baruch Wachtel, The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (Stanford, 1990);
3. Christopher David Ely, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 2002);
4. and Jane Costlow's current work on the cultural history of Russian forests, part of which has appeared as "Imaginations of Destruction: The 'Forest Question' in Nineteenth-Century Russian Culture," Russian Review 62 (January 2003): 91-118. I would like to thank Professor Costlow for her comments on an earlier draft of my work on Zasodimskii.
5. Quoted phrases are from Zasodimskii's obituary in Pravda (1912),
6. quoted in A. P. Spasibenko, Pisateli-narodniki (Moscow, 1968), 234;
7. N. I. Sokolov, "Pisateli-narodniki," in Istoriia russkoi literatury: Literatura 70-80-kh godov XIX veka (Moscow, 1956), 1:355;
8. and Viktor Gura, Iz rodnikov zhizni (Vologda, 1964), 164, 165.
9. Contemporary opinion was similar: reviewing Zasodimskii's Sobranie sochinenii, Mikhail Protopopov found Zasodimskii's "fundamental idea" in "fervent sympathies for the working masses" ("Pisatel'- optimist," Russkoe bogatstvo, 1895, no. 9:105).
10. Aleksandr Skabichevskii, considering the same collection, praised Zasodimskii's honesty but not his artistry: Zasodimskii's work, like that of all narodnik writers, is striking for "the complete absence of any artistic embellishment. ... Before you are only the authentic, bare facts, strung together without the slightest originality or grace, like bagels on a rope" (slovno baranki na mochalu) (Novoe slovo, 1896, no. 4:57 [2d pagination]).
11. Gura, Iz rodnikov zhizni, 164;
12. N. I. Prutskov, "Narodnicheskii roman," in Istoriia russkogo romana v dvukh tomakh (Moscow, 1964), 2:439.
13. On Zasodimskii's life and works, and for a complete bibliography, see J. Alexander Ogden, "Pavel Vladimirovich Zasodimsky," in Russian Novelists in the Age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, ed. J. A. Ogden and Judith E. Kalb (Detroit, 2001), 380-88.
14. M. Gor'kii, Istoriia russkoi literatury
15. quoted in Spasibenko, Pisateli-narodniki, 48.
16. On the peasants' response to the khozhdenie and the resulting intelligentsia preoccupation with peasant life see Richard Wortman, The Crisis of Russian Populism (Cambridge, MA, 1967), 18-34 and passim.
17. See Wortman, Crisis of Russian Populism.
18. On populist ethnography see V. K. Arkhangel'skaia, Ocherki narodnicheskoi fol'kloristiki (Saratov, 1976).
19. Franco Venturi also treats ethnography in Roots of Revolution (New York, 1964).
20. and Cathy A. Frierson, Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia [New York, 1993]).
21. See the discussion of Khronika sela Smurina in Frierson, Peasant Icons, 156-57.
22. See "P. V. Zasodimskii i fol'klor," in Arkhangel'skaia, Ocherki narodnicheskoi fol'kloristiki, 93-121.
23. Zasodimskii got his literary start in Grigorii Blagosvetlov's journal Delo, which in highlighting ethnography reflected the general urgency felt in the 1860s and 1870s to learn more about the life of the narod (see I. M. Kolesnitskaia, "Etnografiia i fol'klor v zhurnale Delo [1866-1880],
24. " Russkaia literatura i narodnichestvo [Leningrad, 1971], 156-83).
25. Thus, for example, "Lesnoe tsarstvo" was abridged to emphasize the work's ethnographic commentary and to exclude much personal and anecdotal material as well as many of the nature and landscape passages discussed here. Chapters 2, 4, and 5 (the chapter entirely devoted to the Zyrian forests) are completely absent; others are abridged (P. V. Zasodimskii, "Lesnoe tsarstvo," Russkie ocherki, ed. B. O. Kostelianets and P. A. Sidorov [Moscow, 1956], 2:613-40).
26. Russian populism as a whole merits further exploration in this context: not for its contributions to socialist thought or the formation of revolutionary organizations, but, instead, for its impact on ideas of nature and travel. As noted briefly by one contemporary (sympathetic to populism if not to aesthetic detail), only "a few [narodnik] writers allowed themselves to stoop to landscapes," but, of those that did, he singles out Levitov, Zlatovratskii, and Zasodimskii (Skabichevskii, in Novoe slovo).
27. Critics have often referred to elements of "romanticism" in populism, but, as Andrzej Walicki notes, within Marxist and Soviet criticism the term most frequently lacks substance, meaning simply "a criticism of capitalism from the point of view of a backward-looking petty-bourgeois utopia" (Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists [Oxford, 1969], 21).
28. Thus, seen negatively, populist writers "idealize and romanticize reality" (Sokolov, "Pisateli-narodniki," 353-54),
29. but when praised, they instead promote "authentically realist depiction of reality" (Mariia Goriachkina, Khudozhestvennaia proza narodnichestva [Moscow, 1970], 8).
30. In positing "nature writing" as a coherent aspect of these works, I draw upon the definition proposed by Robert Finch and John Elder ("Introduction," The Norton Book of Nature Writing [New York, 1990], 19-28): it is "a recognizable and distinct tradition" and "a literary form in its own right" (p. 19). Zasodimskii's work exhibits many of the features seen by Finch and Elder as characteristic of nature writing: a view of nature as a haven and escape, attempts to integrate human life "into a beloved landscape" (p. 20), the combination of scientific inquiry with a humanistic warmth and emotion, a proprietary localism, a sometimes playful attitude toward the landscape, a fascination with but also ambivalence toward evolution and its implications, and a central place for "the personal element - that is, the filtering of experience through an individual sensibility" (p. 26).
31. The continuing relevance of Zasodimskii's writing about place is highlighted by the slight but utterly modern form of fame attained by "Lesnoe tsarstvo," which is featured in full on the web server of the Komi Republic (〈http://www.komi.com/library/f_kingdom/bl.htm〉). The web version reprints the article in its first published form (Slovo, 1878, nos. 10, 11), which omits a few brief passages that are included in the Sobranie sochinenii version from which I quote.
32. Iz vospominanii culminated more than two decades of intermittent work on these memoirs; Zasodimskii published sections separately starting in the early 1880s.
33. Zasodimskii's productive career in children's literature also demonstrates interest in childhood experience. See A. P. Babushkina, Istoriia russkoi detskoi literatury (Moscow, 1948), 426-30.
34. Iz zhizni lesnoi storony," Sobranie sochinenii 2:242.
35. Compare similar passages from "Lesnoe tsarstvo" and Grekh: "The Zyrians have hidden behind their slumberous forests as if behind a stone wall" (Sobranie sochinenii 1:549);
36. P. Zasodimskii, Iz vospominanii (Moscow, 1908), 5.
37. Again, these sentiments are closely echoed in "Lesnoe tsarstvo" (Sobranie sochinenii 1:561).
38. Wachtel, Battle for Childhood, 120.
39. Iz vospominanii, 4-5.
40. Sobranie sochinenii 1:543.
41. The term Belaia Arapiia, common in folk legends, and spread in works by Turgenev and others, "became synonymous with the legendary, unknown country of fantasy tales" (N. S. Ashukin and M. G. Ashukina, Krylatye slova [Moscow, 1996], 28-29).
42. Edward Shils, "Society and Societies," The Constitution of Society (Chicago, 1982), 61.
43. Among cultural critics, for example, see Michel de Certeau's attention to creative "popular" resistance to messages received from the cultural and political authorities in his The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984).
44. Michael Pollan, A Place of My Own (New York, 1997), 105.
45. Iz vospominanii, 41-43.
46. Compare "Na bol'shoi doroge," Sobranie sochinenii 2:279.
47. Iz vospominanii, 231.
48. Ely, This Meager Nature, 148 and 151-52.
49. Vologdin [Zasodimskii], "V Zyrianskom kraiu," Detskoe chtenie, 1879, no. 1:63.
50. Zasodimskii's assessment is no exaggeration of the region's forests; he notes in "Lesnoe tsarstvo" that only 1/200 of the 14,289,068 desiatins (15,575,084 hectares) of land in Ust'sysol'sk uezd are inhabited, and all the rest are forest (Sobranie sochinenii 1:566).
51. Compare Ely's discussion of the typically Enlightenment vidopis' genre in the eighteenth century (This Meager Nature, 35-36),
52. and Otto Boele's treatment of the bird's-eye view in literature (The North in Russian Romantic Literature [Amsterdam, 1996], 24ff).
53. Costlow, "Imaginations of Destruction," 100.
54. Ivan Bilibin, "Narodnoe tvorchestvo russkogo Severa," Mir iskusstva 11 (1904),
55. quoted in Ivan Bilibin (London, 1981), 184.
56. and Anne Odom, ed., The Art of the Russian North (Washington, 2001).
57. As if frustrated at his inability to capture fully the forest majesty in "Lesnoe tsarstvo," Zasodimskii wishes he could import Shishkin: "At every step - a picture. ... If only we could get Shishkin here, I thought: he'd find himself subjects here!" (Sobranie sochinenii 1:563).
58. See Costlow's consideration of Shishkin ("Imaginations of Destruction," 107-8);
59. also Ely's discussion of these paintings (This Meager Nature, 185-88).
60. Iz vospominanii, 115
61. Wortman, studying the psychology of other narodniki, notes that this strongly-sensed gulf between childhood and adult life was a common feature of many of them: a Pomialovskii hero agonizes "Where is my childhood?," and "Zlatovratskii's longing for the 'foundations' was a nostalgia for his own lost past and his writings were the account of his lifelong search for his original innocence" (Crisis of Russian Populism, 6, 103).
62. based on Zasodimskii's "Nashi literaturnye nravy i dela," in Russkaia zhizn', no. 17 (19 January 1894).
63. See F. F. Fidler, comp., Pervye literaturnye shagi: Aftobiografii sovremennykh russkikh pisatelei (Moscow, 1911), 215.
64. Sobranie sochinenii 1:570, 572.
65. On "The Controversy about Progress" see Walicki, Controversy over Capitalism, 29-56.
66. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (New York, 1981), 65. Chapter 5 of "Lesnoe tsarstvo" seems consciously modeled on "Forest and Steppe": like Turgenev, Zasodimskii structures this section of his work around the varying look and feel of the forest in different seasons and times of day, and both authors make extensive use of the second person to place readers in the landscape.
67. Turgenev, too, becomes a guide and intermediary: "Give me your hand, dear reader, and come with me," he says at the beginning of another sketch (Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem [PSS] [Moscow, 1963], 4:199).
68. On the way Turgenev's narrator entices the reader into nature see Iu. A. Pechenina, "Priroda glazami rasskazchika," Russkaia rech', 1987, no. 5:95.
69. Alec Paul, "Russian Landscape in Literature: Lermontov and Turgenev," in Geography and Literature: A Meeting of the Disciplines, ed. William E. Mallory and Paul Simpson-Housley (Syracuse, 1987), 122.
70. Elizabeth Allen surveys treatments of Turgenev as romantic in Beyond Realism: Turgenev's Poetics of Secular Salvation (Stanford, 1992), 36.
71. See also Kenneth N. Brostrom, "The Heritage of Romantic Depictions of Nature in Turgenev," in American Contributions to the Ninth International Congress of Slavists, ed. Paul Debreczeny (Columbus, 1983), 2:81-95;
72. and Peter Brang, "Turgenev and the -isms," Russian Literature, 16, no. 4 (1984): 305-22.
73. Jonathan Bate, "Foreword," in The Green Studies Reader, ed. Laurence Coupe (London, 2000), xvii.
74. See also Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA, 2000);
75. and his study of the "historical continuity of a tradition of environmental consciousness" in Romantic Ecology (London, 1991).
76. Brostrom, "Heritage of Romantic Depictions," 81.
77. Turgenev, PSS 4:386.
78. Sobranie sochinenii 2:585, and 1:561, respectively.
79. In addition to examples cited below see, too, the village simpleton Iashka Korol' in Grekh, considered a holy fool, who hides in the woods and talks with "invisible beings" (Sobranie sochinenii 2:579).
80. Zasodimskii casts the forest dwellers as quintessential romanticized primitives. As one scholar on the primitive notes, the needs of the observer "determine the value and nature of the primitive. The primitive does what we ask it to do" (Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives [Chicago, 1990], 9).
81. Sobranie sochinenii 2:251, 245.
82. "Lesnoe tsarstvo," ibid. 1:544.
83. Compare Rousseau's influence on Turgenev (L. Skokova, "Chelovek i priroda v Zapiskakh okhotnika Turgeneva," Voprosy literatury, 2003, no. 6:341-42).
84. Franco Venturi calls the "going to the people" movement itself "a collective act of Rousseauism" (Roots of Revolution, 503,
85. quoted in Walicki, Controversy over Capitalism, 88).
86. Walden, and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. and intro. Brooks Atkinson (New York, 1965), 615.
87. The issue of humanity's place in nature was actively discussed in this period. Translations spread knowledge of such American works as Man and Nature by George Perkins Marsh (1801-82) (1865,
88. translated as Chelovek i priroda, 1866)
89. and Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature by Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95) (1863,
90. translated as O polozhenii cheloveka v riadu organicheskikh sushchestv, 1864).
91. Ecological writing today tends to favor the idea of human integration into nature, overcoming a "wilderness ethic" that sees humanity and nature as irreconcilably opposed and "which is based on the assumption that the relationship of man and nature resembles a zero-sum game" (Michael Pollan, Second Nature [New York, 1991], 178).
92. Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory (New York, 1995) is predicated on the fact that "even the landscapes that we suppose to be most free of our culture may turn out, on closer inspection, to be its product" (p. 9), and that our views of the natural world are the product of culture and are shaped by our perception.
93. See in particular his section on forests, "Wood," 21-242.
94. Leslie O'Bell, "The Pastoral in Turgenev's 'Singers': Classical Themes and Romantic Variations," Russian Review 63 (April 2004): 279.
95. A. Khir'iakov, "Pavel Vladimirovich Zasodimskii" [obituary], Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh, 1912, no. 5:111.
96. Skitalets [Zasodimskii], "Pis'ma s rodiny," Russkoe bogatstvo, 1880, no. 10:43. Zasodimskii rather paradoxically chooses to sign these letters as "Wanderer" rather than "Vologdin. "
97. The most characteristic distinguishing feature of a romantic work, in the opinion of one scholar, is that in it, "the realm of the ideal is always observed as precarious - liable to vanish or move beyond one's reach at any time. ... [B]orderlands and liminal territories ... are Romantic places because they locate areas of contradiction, conflict, and problematic alternatives" (Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology [Chicago, 1983], 72-73).