"Dream at Sea": Tiutchev and Pascal

"Dream at Sea": Tiutchev and PascalAuthor(s): Richard A. GreggSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Sep., 1964), pp. 526-530Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2492687 .

Accessed: 10/06/2014 10:20

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Slavic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.126 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 10:20:07 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2492687?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


"DREAM AT SEA":

TIUTCHEV AND PASCAL

BY RICHARD A. GREGG

Sometime in the decade between 1826 and 1836 Tiutchev wrote a poem entitled "Son na more" ("Dream at Sea"). A literal English translation would read as follows:

Both the sea and the storm rocked our skiff; Sleepy, I was abandoned to the full caprice of the waves. The two infinities were within me, And willfully they played with me. Around me, like cymbals, resounded the cliffs. The winds replied, and the waves sang. I flew deafened in a chaos of sounds. But above the chaos of sounds my dream was swiftly borne. Sickly bright, magically mute, It blew lightly over the sounding darkness. In the rays of my fever it unfolded its world: The earth shone green, the ether grew bright, Labyrinthine gardens, palaces, columns, And myriads of silent crowds seethed. I recognized many faces unfamiliar to me. I saw magic creatures, mysterious birds. Across the peaks of creation I strode like a god, And under me the world shone motionless. But through all the dreams, like the wail of a magician, I heard the roar of the ocean's abyss, And into the quiet domain of visions and dreams Burst the foam of the roaring waves.

The only existing commentary on this remarkable poem has been made by Professor Ralph Matlaw, who in an article entitled "The Polyphony of Tiutchev's Son na more"l has, among other things, noted the debt which the thought and imagery of these lines owe to German romantic philosophy. Having observed that the major dichotomy of the

MR. GREGG is assistant professor of Russian literature at Columbia University. 1 The Slavonic Review, XXXVI (Dec., 1957), pp. 198-204. D. Cizevskii ("Tjutcev und

die deutsche Romantik," Zeitschrift fur slavische Philologie, IV [1927], 299-323), D. Stre- mooukhoff (La Poe'sie et l'id'ologie de Tiouttchev [Paris, 1937], pp. 27-71 passimn), and V. Setschkareff (Schellings Einfluss in der russischen Literatur der 20er und 30er Jahre des XIX Jahrhunderts [Leipzig, 1939], pp. 99-106), have all considered the influence of Schel- ling's philosophy on Tiutchev-Setschkareff in some detail. Until the appearance of Pro- fessor Matlaw's article, however, no attempt had been made to link either the imagery or the "ideology" of "Dream at Sea" to Schelling.



"Dream at Sea": Tiutchev and Pascal 527

sea and the dream, and the lesser dichotomies of depth and height, chaos and order, sound and sight, sickness and normality, which they subsume, are essentially romantic in conception, Professor Matlaw goes on to suggest that the "action" of the poem rehearses that part of Schel- ling's Naturphilosophie which posits a chain of being from inert matter to the conscious soul, culminating in the genius of the artist, which, in characteristically romantic fashion, can alone perceive and harmonize the unconscious forces of the universe. According to such a view the sea would be roughly equivalent to the world of matter, from which emerges the human consciousness and, ultimately, the poet's imagina- tion (the dream), which first builds its own vision of a "higher" truth, and then in the final triumphant lines succeeds in uniting the real and the ideal, as the foaming seas (reality) mingle with his vision of the supernal truth (the dream).

Now this is a succinct and reasonable exegesis, with which we never- theless find ourselves in sharp, if not quite total, disagreement. And the root of our quarrel with Professor Matlaw is his premise that Tiutchev was, as he puts it, "working within the confines of Schelling's philosophy."2 It is our opinion that Tiutchev, who had repudiated Schelling to his face and denigrated him on more than one occasion behind his back,3 did no such thing; and that literally applied to his poetry such a critical premise will produce what one can only call Procrustean results.

We might begin our discussion by examining the first four lines. In English they read: "Both the sea and the storm rocked our skiff; / Sleepy, I was abandoned to the full caprice of the waves. / The two infinities were within me, / And willfully they played with me." Now

2 Ibid., p. 199. 3 Schelling arrived in Munich in 1827, and Tiutchev, who served in the Russian lega-

tion there from 1822 to 1835, soon became personally acquainted with the philosopher. The two met and conversed frequently thereafter. A. S. Aksakov (Biozpao6i6R Oeaopa H6ano6w'ta Tomnmea [Moscow, 1886], p. 319) quotes an interesting reminiscence of the poet's brother-in-law Baron Pfeffel, according to which Tiutchev, seeking to rebut Schel- ling's rational interpretation of the Christian religion, once told the philosopher: "Vous tentez une oeuvre impossible. Une philosophie qui rejette le surnaturel, et qui veut tout prouver par la raison, doit fatalement deriver vers le materialisme pour se noyer dans l'atheisme. La seule philosophie compatible avec le christianisme est contenue toute entiere dans le catechisme. I1 faut croire ce que croyait Saint Paul, et apres lui, Pascal, plier le genou devant la Folie de la Croix, ou tout nier."

Other evidence of Tiutchev's hostility to Schelling is not wanting. In his political article "La Russie et la Revolution" (1848) Tiutchev said of German philosophy in general that it was "destructive" and had "completely dissolved all Christian belief, and developed in this void the revolutionary sentiment." llowoe co6panie cotuneniiu 0. H. Tlomite6a, ed. II. B. BIbKOBT (St. Petersburg, 1913), p. 346. Moreover I. S. Gagarin, who probably knew Tiutchev better than any Russian during the poet's German years, flatly denied that Fiutchev was to any significant degree influenced by German philosophy (see Stremoou-

khoff, op. cit., p. 44). Finally, from Varnhagen von Ense we know that Tiutchev in 1843 spoke in a "sharply deprecating" way about Schelling and expressed surprise that Schelling's lectures in Berlin should have had any success. (See S. Jacobsohn, "Ein unbe- kanntes Gedicht von Fedor Tiutchev," Zeitschrift fuir slavische Philologie, V (1929), 409.



528 Slavic Review

since Professor Matlaw has (quite rightly, we feel) raised the question of philosophical sources, we should point out that these lines contain a well-known phrase from a moralist whom Tiutchev admired greatly and quoted more than once in his poetry. This phrase is the "two infinities" of line 3, and its source is the famous opening passage of Pascal's Pensees, where man is described as unable to comprehend either the infinitely small or the infinitely large, and therefore obliged in his helplessness to turn to God.4

Tiutchev's capacity to glean words and phrases for his poems from various sources is well attested.5 Moreover, it is certain that he knew this particular section of the Pensees extremely well, perhaps-consider- ing his prodigious memory-by heart. As we proceed with our analysis of the poem let us therefore bear the "original" passage in mind, re- ferring to it if, and when, significant correspondences appear. The con- frontation will, we think, be illuminating.

As the poem opens the poet finds himself in a small, narrow boat, which is collectively owned; and this-"our"-boat (by which Tiutchev presumably meant to indicate the boat of all of us) is floating in a wide and stormy sea, rocked and jostled by the elements. Turning to the first "article" of the Pensees, we find that Pascal describes man's lodg- ings on earth in a similar paradox of exiguity and inclusiveness: "Ce petit cachot, ou l'homme se trouve loge, j'entends l'univers."6 And the similarity grows when shortly thereafter we find him writing of the human predicament: "Nous voguons sur un milieu vaste, toujours in- certains et flottants, pousses d'un bout vers l'autre. Quelque terme oiu nous pensions nous attacher et nous affermir, il branle et nous quitte."7

Pursuing our analysis, we will note that the two infinities appear after Tiutchev has introduced the sea and the boat, and before his detailed description of the storm. In other words they form an integral part of that seven-line preface which opens the way for the dream. And just as the poet's sleepiness, the storm, the waves, and the chaos of sounds all participate in releasing the dream, so, we must assume, do the "two infinities." But how exactly? To learn this it will help if we recall the original sense and purpose of the expression, which, as a familiar phrase from the most celebrated passage in modern Christian apologetics, Tiutchev evidently assumed the reader would recognize.

Now Pascal's use of the expression was dictated by just one motive: to define man's inherent limitations and demonstrate his need for divine aid. The two infinities, he insisted, can never be grasped by the human mind, since this is the prerogative of God alone: "Les extremi-

4 Pascal, Pensdes, ed. E. Havet (Paris, 1852), pp. 1-23. 5 Tiutchev's habit of finding poetic inspiration in the verse of others was so ingrained

flat the "formalist" critic Iurii Tynianov even argued that "to a great measure Tiutchev's poetry is poetry about poetry." Apamuemu u uoeamopu (Leningrad, 1929), p. 363.

6 Pascal, op. cit., p. 5. 7 Ibid., p. 13.



"Dream at Sea": Tiutchev and Pascal 529

tes se touchent et se reunissent 'a force de s'etre eloignees... en Dieu et en Dieu seulement."8 This is interesting; for the poet in his sleepy, stultified, or diseased condition (Tiutchev's vocabulary suggests in turn all of these states) claims to possess these very infinities. And the result of his quasi-divine possession is a quasi-divine revelation: before him unfolds a vision of a beautiful, magic, and heretofore unknown creation across which the poet himself strides like a god.

The poet has, it would seem, become Prometheus. In his supreme audacity he has tried to escape from the sea of incertitude which is our normal unhappy lot (Pascal: "L'etat qui nous est naturel, et toutefois le plus contraire 'a notre inclination"),9 ascend the supernal heights, and know the unknowable. His "fever" (line 11) is the fever which con- sumed Pascal when the latter wrote: "Nous br'ulons de desir de trouver une assiette ferme. . . pour y edifier un tour qui s'eleve 'a l'infini;"'10 and Tiutchev's vision is this very dream-tower, the beautiful but pre- carious product of an abnormal state of mind, destined eventually to fall prey to reality. As Pascal tersely put it: "Mais [i.e., despite our efforts to reach the infinite] tout notre fondement craque, et la terre s'ouvre jusqu'aux abimes."1"- So it is with Tiutchev. No sooner has he compared himself to God, than the hallucination begins to crumble: again the "roar of the ocean's abyss" (evidently an echo of Pascal's "abimes") impinges on his consciousness; and a moment later the poem ends, as the reality of the raging sea itself breaks in on the vision.

On the basis of these observations are we then to suppose that Tiutchev, for the duration of one poem at least, repudiated Schelling and accepted Pascal as his master? Such a view is scarcely more accept- able than the one it replaces; first, because it would help perpetuate the misconception we are trying to dispel, namely, that Tiutchev is par excellence a poet of other philosophers' ideas; second, because the presence of romantic elements in the poem seems indisputable to us. For if the poem is (as we have tried to show) a good deal more than "pure" Schelling, it is also (as Professor Matlaw's parallels indicate) something more than "pure" Pascal. In the last analysis we must- taking our cue from the Pense'es-realize that the extremes of Schelling and Pascal touch and reunite in Tiutchev and Tiutchev alone.

Our detour into the byways of philosophical sources thus brings us back to the essential question: what is the total experience that Tiutchev is trying to project? Bearing in mind that all poetry, and especially visionary poetry of this sort, conveys more than it denotes, and that consequently no one exegesis can ever be final, we wish to propose the following interpretation. As the poem opens the poet has already allowed himself to be lulled by the clamorous and too insistent demands of reality (the winds, waves, etc.) into an inert and passive state. But in exchange for this abdication of responsibility he has re-

8 Ibid., p. 11. 9 Ibid., p. 13. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid.



530 Slavic Review

ceived the gift of supernatural knowledge (the possession of the two infinities). The source of this knowledge is unclear as yet, but its magic is potent, as the splendor of the vision testifies. In this connec- tion it is interesting to note that the columns, labyrinthine gardens, palaces, and magic creatures which the poet beholds belong to a magical and pagan world, rather than a mystical and Christian one, and that the dream is an apotheosis of the self (the first person pronoun echoes nine times throughout the poem), which culminates, not in a vision of God, but in a claim to resemble him.

Et inde irae: for at this moment the hermetic seal of the dream is broken by the ocean's roar, which, in the poet's confused state of mind, sounds like the "wail of a magician." Now what magician is this, and why should he be wailing? Obviously Tiutchev can only mean the donor of the magic by which the poet has enjoyed his brilliant hallucination; and he is wailing because, like Goethe's sorcerer in the famous ballad, his magic has been abused and the floodgates opened. More specifically, we may identify him with the romantic philosopher, who- as Tiutchev had once solemnly told the greatest of all romantic philosophers, Friedrich Schelling-would threaten the integrity of Christian faith by corrupting dogma with reason, that is, by making God's secrets accessible to man.12 Such a trend, Tiutchev had predicted, could only produce atheism or, as he was later to call it, "la deification de l'homme par l'homme."'13 And "Dream at Sea" has not been properly under- stood, unless we realize that it is, among other things, a parable of the romantic apotheosis of man and of its fatal consequences.

12 See note 3. 13 Quoted by Aksakov, op. cit., p. 187.



Documents

"Dream at Sea": Tiutchev and Pascal