Turgenev’s Romanticism

The most accurate label for Romanticism would seem to be a revolt of the spirit. This revolution exceeded the mind and broke out into a socio-political reality in the form of the French revolution in Europe. This violent and destructive movement, however, does not epitomize the idealism felt by those artists that were labeled the Romantics. The romantic poet’s raison d’tre was passionate imagination and the idealism of the individual.

Romanticism represents to Bazarov in Fathers and Sons, an archaic philosophy that should be regarded with disdain and contempt. Bazarov is the radical nihilist that holds the present institutions of society corrupt and deserving of destruction. This position, while believed by Bazarov to be Romanticism’s antithesis, can be likened to the Romantic’s position of disgust of the mechanistic city life. Yet while the Romantics’ solution is to escape into the purifying powers of nature, Bazarov’s idée fixe is to change the present situation and not to escape. Though Bazarov advocate some kind of purifying action within society the Romantics repudiate society to find their bliss in nature.

Turgenev

Another aspect of Romanticism is passion. This passion usually was manifest in strong emotion in self-expression; sensitivity, sentimentality, melancholy, and the disdained lover are “airs” assumed by the Romantic. Bazarov, while basically unassuming and stolid, he nevertheless is driven by his ideology. While Bazarov might not share the Romantic’s passion, he does, however, share his drive.

The Romantics looked to the lost past and the exotic for, at least, their idiom of expression. The remote and mysterious is best represented in A Hero of Our Time‘s distinct locales: the midst of nature in “Bela,” the gothic and crepuscular in “Taman,” and the idyllic surroundings “Princess Mary.” Turgenev’s surroundings, in contrast, are realistic, not ideal or exotic. Nature does, however, remain omnipresent in Fathers though it is far from exotic and idyllic; bleak, barren fields, voided surroundings, and disease leave no room for the Elysian Fields. This stark contrast is evident between Pavel and Bazarov and their duel. All of the romantic and ideal notions of the former are annihilated when he is wounded in the leg. There is nothing romantic in the reality of the duel though there was in its conception — Pavel’s romanticism is, in affect, shattered.

While the Romantic sentiment was undoubtedly sincere at its outset, it went too far. This is most evident by the affected character of Lensky in Eugene Onegin. Lensky has assumed the romantic persona very much like Goethe’s young Werther. If his emotions are sincere one would never know for all the layers of fluff he has adopted from the real romantics. This romantic affectation assumes a different degree with the characters of Eugene Onegin and Pechorin. Withdrawn and melancholy, these imaginative Byronic heroes are more of a threat than the basically harmless Lensky and even Grushnitsky. These men are capable of shrewdly manipulating others for their personal amusement; this results in the deaths of Lensky and Grushnitsky who were both swept up by the romantic game that suddenly became all too real.

The Romantics were primarily artists with prodigious imaginations, imaginations that allowed them to grasp the Platonic form of Beauty and manipulate it to their creations on earth. This kind of power is overwhelming and could lead, which it most often did, to a solipsistic God complex. They are creators, seen by themselves as transcending the banal and mundane to form their own worlds. This becomes dangerous because the Romantic, like God, is beyond good and evil, i.e. amoral. Pechorin, creative victim of perpetual ennui, amuses himself by creating efficacious situations no matter what happens within. Onegin, while getting himself burned in the end, is also capable of this destructive creativity.

While Romanticism is considered passé and archaic by many, its influence transcends it chronological boundaries. It inspired the individual passion to succeed and showed the world that their is something beyond our everyday mundanity. While the Romantics are ridiculed by Bazarov and his followers, and can be taken too far, it was, and is, an integral element to the evolving world conception of Beauty. Keats is still correct: “Beauty is Truth, and Truth is Beauty / That is all yea know on earth, and all yea need to know.”

Levin’s Rightness

Levin, in his relations to the other characters in Anna Karenina, seems to exemplify goodness, or at least the potential for righteousness  — for Tolstoy. Anna, while, according to Nabokov, was loved by Tolstoy, obviously lacked a certain characteristic, or quality, that kept her from righteousness and led her down the wrong track. Like Anna, both Vronsky and Karenin are deficient in qualities that are integral, at least to Tolstoy, to leading a satisfying (one has the feeling that Levin is not “happy” by the close of AK) life. This satisfaction is the harvest of understanding one’s relationship to the universe and an acceptance of that position.

By observing the characters that fall within the grasp of Tolstoy’s epigraph, perhaps an idea of right and wrong can be surmised. As Dostoevsky observes in his essay “Russian View of Guilt and Crime,” that the laws that govern the human soul are so obscure and mysterious that, “as yet, there can be neither physicians nor final judges,” but there is only God who says “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” Only God knows humanity’s ultimate destiny, only He knows and can ultimately judge. As humans, holding the scales and measures, if we fail to see this simple fact we will become the marks of God’s vengeance. Boris Eikhenbaum opines that “man himself is guilty if he does not follow the call of life,” i.e. faith in the judgment, and therefore the guidance, of God.

Tolstoy

Anna’s wrong, in relation to the epigraph, seems to be that her guidance in life was solely love. She, in trying to justify her adulterous actions, states that she is a “live woman, in need of love — I am alive, and cannot be blamed because God made me so, that I want to love and live.” Clearly Anna has a valid point, yet she errs in putting her love for Vronsky above anything else, thus usurping any loftier guidance with her sensual love of Vronsky. While this might be Anna’s hamartia, she plainly possesses, at least in Book One of the novel, many redeeming traits, e.g.: she is unwilling to deceive, “Anything is better than lies and deception!” and she has the strength enough to practice this belief. Society represents one odious deception which casts Anna from its midst with contempt, with the same disdain that Anna holds for the poshlust of society she is obdurate in her position though it is total estrangement.

Anna’s view of Christianity is perhaps tainted, along with her view of society, because of its representative of Karenin. Anna begins to equate Christianity and society with her husband, and the more contempt and loathing she feels toward him the greater are her execrable feelings for the latter two. At one point, she says of Karenin, “of course he is always in the right, he is a Christian, he is magnanimous! Yes, a mean, horrid man!” therefore a mean, horrid society exemplified by Karenin. Karenin eventually becomes a victim of this society. Through the agency of Countess Lydia Ivanovna, Karenin fades into obscurity; one can almost see the death of another Ivan Ilych, for Karenin is absent in the last third of the novel.

Another destined for an obscure demise is Vronsky. Vronsky is the conqueror who is conquered by the novel’s end. The Europeanized dilettante, Vronsky had no direction in his life at all, “unconsciously seized now on politics, now on new books, now on pictures.” Like the unintentional breaking Frau-Frau’s back, Vronsky did the same to Anna — he loved all equally, and all that he touched he killed. Caught between pretension and passion, Vronsky seemed never to discover a direction for himself other than that of Europe.

Levin, the true Russian, ostensibly had all he desired, yet there was something lacking for him which brought to the surface thoughts of suicide. He was not happy with his loving wife or his large estate — there was something wanting. A hint of epistemological envy is disclosed in Levin’s musings over his dying brother: “something was becoming clear to the dying man which for Levin remained as dark as ever.” Levin was envious of that understanding “which the dying man now possessed and which he might not share.” His lack of understanding haunts Levin until the last pages of the novel when he discovers “this feeling has also entered imperceptibly through suffering and is firmly rooted in [his] soul.” This direction, or feeling, cannot be understood intellectually, but “was only possible by a strict fulfillment of the law of goodness which is revealed to every man . . . what I know, I know not by my reason but because it has been given to me, revealed to me, and I know it in my heart by faith in the chief thing which the church proclaims.” Levin’s understanding is, what the Buddha called, an upaya, or vehicle, by which one can use to understand the truth. Levin’s epiphany is Levin’s alone and it seems to be right in his relationship to the order of things. “My God, I thank Thee!”

Other aspects of righteousness in Anna Karenina are also important. The figures of Kitty, Koznyshev, and Varenka hold views that are relevant to understanding and how to live one’s life. Yet Tolstoy chose to highlight Levin’s musings and his revelation rather than those of these secondary characters. To close with an irony, one of Oblonsky’s favorite sayings is “things will shape themselves.” This almost aphorism in the hands of Oblonsky seems less poshlustian when seen in relation to the epigraph; for no matter in which direction we choose to aim our lives we ultimately will meet with a final judgment larger than our insignificant ministrations. Hopefully, like Levin, our souls will have found their ways.