Space and the Journey. A Metaphor for All Times

Russian Literature XXIX (1991) 427 - 438 North-Holland

SPACE AND THE JOURNEY. A METAPHOR FOR ALL TIMES

ROBERT L. JACKSON

Je weiter man nach dem Osten vordringt, je langatmiger die Linien der Hiigel und Ebenen, je lauter das Stillstehen der Zeit, desto deutlicher verspiirt man in der ein- zigen Unendlicbkeit der russischen Ebene den Atem der Ewigkeit. (Fedor Stepun)

The singularity of Cechov has long been a subject of discussion and de- bate. He is both an end and a beginning, a break and a bridge to something new; this is certainly true with respect to the art of Cechov; it is also true of his approach to fundamental problems and to his vision of life. Questions of ethics and religion, ecology and space were not new to Russian literature in Cechov’s times, but they were reexamined and redefined by him in unique ways. cechov’s artistic formulation of the problem of Russian space - the problem of Russian man and nature - and his raising of this problem to heights of historical and philosophical speculation is certainly one of his greatest achievements. Cechov’s epic prose work, ‘The Steppe. A Story of a Journey’ (‘Step’. Istorija odnoj poezdki’, 1888) is of particu- lar interest in this connection.

In ‘The Steppe’ &.chov comes to grips with the negative myth of Rus- sian space - space perceived as a metaphor for the formless, the faceless, the soulless. By negative myth I do not mean wrong or false. A myth is never false: it is always rooted deeply in the realities of existence, in the hopes and fears of a people; by negative myth I understand an unchal- lenged truth. In ‘The Steppe’ Cechov affirms the fundamental values of Russian man and nature in the bleakest of conditions. He has taken the

1991 - Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)

428 Robert L. Jackson

negative myth of Russian man and nature and challenged it. In revealing that landscape in all its tragic beauty he has expanded the myth to embrace the full truth of Russian man and life.

In his brilliant ‘Digression’ (Vstep’, 1832),1 a harsh and bitter statement on Russian history, character and geography, the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz gave expression to the negative myth of Russian space. He compared Russia to “an empty land, white and open like a page ready for writing” (“kraina pusta, biala i otwarta, Jak zgotowana do pisania karta”), ready to be charted out by God or the devil. He went on to say, gloomily, that “every face is like their country / Empty, open and a savage plain” (“Lecz twarz kaidego jest jak ich kraina /Pusta, otwarta i dzika rownina”). [. . .] “Every face is a monument to their nation” (Ye kaida twarz jest pomnikiem narodu”). The ‘god’ of Russian literature, Aleksandr PuSkin, took up Mickiewicz’s challenge in The Bronze Horseman (Mednyj vsad- nik, 1833). In his narrative poem PuSkin not only mythologizes Russian history, but - and herein lies the historic significance of this great poem - like his godlike, albeit fiendish protagonist Peter who founds a city upon a waste - he, PuSkin, writes upon the ‘empty’ page of Russian life and history; that is, The Bronze Horseman is not only myth and history be- come literature, but literature and myth transformed into history. Through his profound cognitive imagery PuSkin not only charted the course of much of Russian literature and historiophilosophical thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, but fundamentally altered it. The human face of Rus- sian man - man created in the image and likeness of God - was forever stamped upon the chronicle of Russian history.

The negative myth finds expression again in Petr caadaev’s first gloomy ‘Philosophical Letter’ (1836).2 The Russian thinker bewails the emptiness of Russian history and culture. Like Mickiewicz, he links the tragic problem content of Russian history with Russian space. The do- minant fact of Russia is its geography: space, emptiness, what he calls “a flat calm” (“d’un calme plat”).s Russia’s very immensity is for him a sign and signal of its historical non-entity. “Pour nous faire remarquer, il nous a fallu nous Ctendre du detroit de Behring jusqu’a l’Oder”.4 The journey and the journeyer for caadaev are but metaphors for wanderings in a void.

Regardez autour de vous. Tout le monde n’a-t-i1 pas un pied en l’air? On dirait tout le monde en voyage [, . .]. Point mCme de foyer domestique; rien qui attache [. . .] tout s’en va, tout s’ecoule sans laisser de trace ni au-dehorn ni en vous. Darts nos maisons, nous avons l’air de camper, dans nos families, nous avons l’air d’hrangers; dans nos villes nous avons I’air de nomades, plus nomades que ceux qui paissent dans nos steppes.5

Space and the Journey 429

Cechov himself, fifty years later, was to pose the problem of Russian space in a no less brutal way than Mickiewicz and Caadaev. In his letter of February 5, 1888 to the aging Russian writer, D.V. GrigoroviC - a letter written at a time Cechov was working on ‘The Steppe’ - Cechov places the problem of Russian space in a broad historical and cultural framework. GrigoroviE had recommended to Cechov the theme of the suicide of a seventeen year old boy in an attic. cechov replied that the theme was an appealing one, “but that to take it up would be an enormous responsibility. To this question that has been tormenting everybody one would need an agonizingly powerful answer”.6 In a second letter to GrigoroviC, Cechov expands in a breathtaking way upon GrigoroviC’s theme:

I don’t know whether I have understood you. The suicide of a young Russian, in my opinion, is a specific phenomenon not known to Europe. The entire energy of the artist must be directed at two forces: man and nature. On the one hand, physical weak- ness, nerves, early sexual maturity, a passionate thirst for life and truth, dreams about activity as broad as the steppe, anxious re- flexion, a poverty of knowledge side by side with a broad sweep of thought; on the other hand - a boundless plain, a severe climate, a grey, stem people with its painful, cold history, the Tartar yoke, officialdom, poverty, ignorance, the dampness of the capitals, Slavic apathy, etc.. . . Russian life hits Russian man like a twenty ton hammer so that not even a damp spot remains.7

GrigoroviC had raised the problem of a suicide in an attic. cechov had other views on the geography of the Russian suicide. His letter continues:

In Western Europe people perish because they are too cramped and suffocated to live; but with us this happens because there is too much space [Ait’ prostomo] [. . .] There is so much space that the little man lacks the strength to orient himself [. _ .]. That’s what I think of Russian suicides.*

Striking in Cechov’s remarks is not only his shift of the problem of the Russian suicide from the attic to the steppe, that is, out of the stuffy cham- bers of an urban Philistine or intellectual, but his conception of space, too much space, disorienting space as a central problem of Russian man and history. Historically, Cechov’s “little man” is not the recently urbanized Akakij AkakieviC, DevuSkin or Gervjakov, but the Russian peasant living on a boundless plain. The urbanized peasant, to be sure, had a vivid mem- ory of the steppe. Who can forget Makar DevuSkin’s last hysterical letter without address in Poor FoUr (Be&ye Ijudi, 1846) to the ill-fated Varvara who had married Bykov and now is heading for the steppe-country.


But do you really know what awaits you there where you are going, my dear? You probably don’t know. so better ask me! The steppe is there, my precious one, the steppe is there, the plain bare steppe, bare as the palm of my hand! There you will find feeling- less peasant women, the ignorant peasant, drunkards. There at this time the leaves have fallen OR, them it is rainy, there it is cold - and you are going there!

(&3 BbI 3HZR JlSi TOJIbKO,9TO TaM TaKOe,KJ'Aa BbI eAeTe-TO, MaTOm? B~I, Moxe’r 6ana, 3Tor0 He 3Hiil?Te, TaK MeHa crqxk Cri’re!Tarvf~enb,~~~MOn, TaMClWTb9UCTSLII,I-OJIiUICTellb, BOTK~KMOII~AOH~I-OJIU! TaMxolDiT 6a6abecsyucruenn~, Aa Myxm HtX36pa3OBaHHbI~, rrbmwa x0m-r. TaM Tenepb JIZTbHC AepB OCbIXTilJIHCb,TaM AOXUCH,TaM XOJIOEHO - a BbI ryna ene-re!)

Kyaa B~I enex? [. . .] BH ryna ene-re! [. . .] TaM, TaM, TIM, TIM, TaM,TiWd,TaM!

Man and nature, history and the steppe, the ‘little man' and space: Ge- chov’s outlook on these questions in his letter to GrigoroviC is certainly a grim one. No less grim is he in his story ‘Good Fortune’ (‘Scast’e’, 1887), published before ‘The Steppe’. The three human characters in this story of the steppe are equated with three thousand sheep who stand silently and passively in the steppe, heads lowered, meditating about something. Of the sheep, the narrator writes:

Their thoughts, prolonged and weighty, evoked only by rumina- tions about days and nights, probably had struck them dumb and oppressed them to the point of insensibility.

At sunrise the three thousand sheep awaken and, reluctantly and from a lack of incentive, as the narrator puts it, start to nibble at the low trampled grass around them. Looking at the lone Mt. Saur-Mogila in the distance, the narrator remarks:

If you make your way to the top of the Mogila, then from it you will see a plain as even and boundless as the sky, you will see elegant estates, huts of Germans and Molokany. villages; the sharp-eyed kalmyk will even see a city and railroad trains. Only from hem is it clear that in this world, besides the silent steppe and centuries-old burial mounds, there is another life which is not con- cerned with buried fortune [zarytoe sCast’e] and sheep’s thoughts.


Steppe and town, steppe and city stand in sharp opposition to one another in ‘Good Fortune’. The steppe/city equation will not be dissolved in the steppe, but it will yield in importance to another equation formed of the positive and negative elements in the steppe itself, that is, the steppe itself will be raised to the position of a universal symbol and metaphor.

‘Good Fortune’, a superb story, may in one way be viewed as a sketch for a larger canvas, ‘The Steppe. A Story of a Journey’. The movement from ‘Good Fortune’ to the steppe is a qualitative one, involving a vastly more complex design and outlook on the steppe than we find in the first story. Nonetheless, the view of the steppe as a world prima facie uncon- genial to man and to Russian historical development - though not necessar- ily to itself - is strongly developed in Cechov’s epic prose-poem, particu- larly in its early chapters. There the motifs of an enervating, gruelling, spiritually deadening existence find ample expression.

The first ambiguous images of EgoruSka’s town - the white prison- church, the black forge, the green cemetery and the brick factories spewing out their hellish black and red smoke - are quickly replaced in the opening chapter by the silent, incommensurable steppe. The departing EgoruSka weeps (as he will weep at the end of ‘The Steppe’) as he stands on the threshold of a new journey. “Never mind”, says Father Christophor. “Ni- Cego, brat Egor, nicego.. . Nicego, brat, prizyvaj Boga”. Precisely. NiCego. NiCto. An apparent void. “A silence fell upon everything”. Out of this silence stretches a broad, endless plain. “EdeS’edeS i nikak ne razberes’, gde ona nacinaetsja i gde koncaetsja” (“You go on and on, and you simply can’t figure out where [this plain] begins and ends”). This is the first of a number of references to the almost cosmic character of the steppe, a place that seems without defined coordinates of space and time. “It was as if [the carriage] were going backwards and not forwards, the travelers saw the same thing as they did before midday”, observes the narrator later on.

The steppe images in the first chapter all give a sense of disorientation, helplessness, purposelessness. David Maxwell has shrewdly noted Cechov’s repeated and deliberate use of the core verb ‘machat” with its connotation of giving up, abandoning something.9 The windmill, “which from the distance resembled a little man waving his hands about [razma- chivajuSCego rukami]“. Then a second image:

A kite is flying over the very earth, smoothly flapping its wings [vzmachivaja kryl’jarni], and suddenly stops in the air, as though pondering the boredom of life, then shakes its wings and like an armw zooms over the steppe; and one does not understand why it is flying and what it needs. And in the distance the windmill waves [maset] its wings.


Like the kite, EgoruSka himself - he is being sent off to school - has only a vague impression of going “somewhere” (kuda-to).

And now the boy, not understanding where he is going or why, sat on the coachman’s seat with Deniska, holding on to his elbow so as not to tumble off, and was bouncing like the teapot on the top of a samovar.

Cechov presents the steppe in part through the eyes - through the naive and primal vision - of the nine-year old EgoruSka. Many of the boy’s central impressions are pregnant with the questions: Why? Whereto? With what purpose and what need?; and redolent with the implied answer: ‘somewhere’ and nowhere. The vision of EgoruSka suggests a sense of a world without defined coordinates of time and space, and, beyond that, a sense of a world unshaped by purpose, a world, perhaps whose ends are immanent, in nature. For EgoruSka, however, there is too much space and time; the little man is bouncing like a teapot. Nicego.

Other dark and troubling images accumulate in chapter one: The “white skull or boulder”, a “grey stone pile” (kamennaja baba), with its allusion to an ancient idol or simply to people petrified by time. The “kamennaja baba” is followed, appropriately by a girl on a passing wagon: “A girl, sleepy and overcome by heat” (“devka - sonnaja, izmorennaja znoem”). Appropriately, too, at this juncture, there looms the “lonely poplar”, and the question: “Is this beautiful creature happy?’ (“Scastliv li &tot krasa- vet?“) [...I “Who planted it and why it is here, God knows”. Then there appear six peasants with their whistling scythes: vzzi, vzzi! - scythes that seem to carry the same somber message of the steppe. And as the carriage passes, a woman stands motionless.

The appearance of six huge and raging sheepdogs toward the end of the chapter suggests the inflamed and maddened rebellion of the spirit against a grinding and desolate and aimless existence. The chapter that opens with a reference to a carriage of pre-flood status, ends with the image of “an Old Testament figure” standing immobile.

Space and time merge in the steppe, and time itself seems to stand still. “And time stretched out endlessly, just as though it had congealed and stopped. It seemed as though a hundred years had passed since morning.” We are seemingly in a clockless primeval world where man and civiliza- tion have been reduced to artifacts, the product of archaeological digs.

The sky itself mirrors the steppe:

If you look for a long time at the blue sky without turning your eyes away, then for some reason your thoughts and soul merge in a consciousness of loneliness. You begin to feel yourself inexor-


ably alone, and everything that you formerly considered close and related to you becomes endlessly distant and of no value. The stats which have been looking from the sky for thousands of years, the incomprehensible sky and fog itself, indifferent to the short life of man, oppress the soul with their silence when you confront them directly and try to fathom their significance. The thought comes to mind of that loneliness which awaits each of us in the grave, and tbe essence of life seems desperate, terrible.

These last impressions of the sky (the upturned steppe itself) are clear- ly not those of the nine-year old EgoruSka, though they appear to be part of his stream of consciousness; the observations are bracketed between passages describing EgoruSka lying on his back and gazing at the starry night sky. There is no artistic flaw here. These may not be the conscious impressions of EgoruSka, yet the sky and steppe are precisely impressing themselves upon him, entering his being. Cechov’s intention is clear: out of the interaction of man and nature, man and his environment, emerge pat- terns of behavior and response, mental attitudes, a state of mind that ulti- mately finds expression in language, in historical consciousness, in notions about the meaning of life, or of its meaninglessness. “Has history made us as we are?” Turgenev asked in a letter to Countess Lambert in 1862. “Are there elements in our very natures that we see around us?“‘* Cechov ponders the same questions in ‘The Steppe’; his use of the em- bryonic ‘little man’, his employment of EgoruSka’s vision, is central to Cechov’s meditation on the meaning of Russian space.

Thirty four years after Cechov’s ‘The Steppe’, sixty years after Turge- nev’s reflections on the interaction of history, land and Russian character, Maksim Gor’kij, in his bitter indictment in 1922 of the Russian peasantry, took up these questions with a vengeance:

The [Russian] peasant has only to go past the bounds of the village and look at the emptiness around him to feel in a short time that this emptiness is creeping into his very soul. Round about lie boundless plains and at their center - insignificant tiny man, cast onto this dull earth for penal labor. And man is filled with a feeling of indifference that kills his ability to think, to remember his past, to work out his ideas from experience.’ 1

As we have seen, Cechov did not sidestep the question of the terrify- ing interaction of Russian man and space. He did not, however, like Go+- kij, draw nihilistic conclusions about Russian man and space. Neither did he attempt, like the Russian philosopher Fedor Stepun, to idealize the steppe, that is, to invert the theory of the emptiness and so-called formless- ness of the Russian peasant soul by declaring that Russian ‘antipathy to


form’ (Formfeindlichkeit), emerging from a solitary and passive landscape, “is also a religious attitude toward the world”. “The whole meaning of saintliness”, writes Stepun, “is to have no face of one’s own and to will no destiny of one’s own but to be only a window through which God looks into the world and men look up to God.“‘* Cechov, like Turgenev, admired yet in the end did not and could not embrace this spirituality that proclaims its own nothingness. ls No, Cechov’s philosophy of the steppe, or, put the other way around, his philosophy in his ‘The Steppe’, is complex and paradoxical. The inauspicious birthground of the Russian little man is also the birthground of a philosophy of life that draws strength and sustenance from a confrontation with the terrible and problematic aspects of Russian historical existence. “Is there a pessimism of strength?” asks Nietzsche in a preface to 27re BH of Tragedy. “An intellectual predilec- tion for the hard, gruesome, evil, problematic aspect of existence, prompt- ed by well-being, by overflowing health, by the fullnessof existence?“14

The passage on the sky is a crucial one in ‘The Steppe’. It is also a statement on the steppe. This land, this plain, this universe of the steppe, without anything to bind or define it in historical, utilitarian or Euclidian terms, may evoke a nihilism of the spirit. Yet it is man who creates meaning and value. The perception of solitude is itself a recoil against solitude, a triumph over it. The song of the steppe, the “quiet, unhurried, mournful song that resembled a lamentation”, the song that seemed to embody the plaint of the drought-ridden steppe grass, reaffirms man’s connection with his bleak and inhospitable world. The song that EgoruSka hears - and it echoes throughout Russian literature - is linked with the oasis and with water. The song is revivifying even as it speaks of physical exhaustion and suffering. It speaks of the capacity to survive and revive, and of what cechov calls nature’s “passionate thirst for life” (“strastnaja Zatia 2izni”).

The transitional moment in &chov’s ‘The Steppe’ - that moment when attention essentially shifts from the action of nature upon man to the cre- ative action of man upon his environment - occurs in the middle of chapter four. The moment is a magical one, a moment of artistic transmutation of elements. In a passage central to the entire work, the steppe, at night, emerges in all its living potential and reality; too, it emerges as an object of human, that is, poetic contemplation, as a subject of legend, as a world made meaningful, indeed humanized, through human history and habita- tion, loneliness and suffering through the action, finally, of poetry itself:

On one drives for another hour... By the roadside you come across some silent old tumulus [molcalivyj starik kurgan] or stone pile [kamennaja baba] set up by God knows whom, some night bird silently flies over the earth, and little by little there come into mind those legends of the steppe, wayfarers’ stories, old folk tales


and everything that one oneself had been able to see and appre- hend in one’s soul. And then in the tumult of the insects, in the suspicious looking figures and tumuli, in the blue heaven, in the moon light, the flight of the night bird, in everything that one sees and hears one begins to sense the triumph of beauty, youth, an awakening of powers and the passionate desire to live; the soul responds to the splendid, stem mother-land, and wants to fly over the steppe with the night bird. And in the triumph of beauty, in the surfeit of happiness one feels a tension and anguish, as though the steppe acknowledges that it is alone, that its wealth and inspiration are perishing in vain for the world, her praises unsung and un- needed by anybody, - and through the joyful hum one hears its anguished, despairing call: a bard! a bard!

Tprr! Greetings, Pantelej! Is all well? Thank God, Ivan Ivanyc! Have you fellows seen Varlamov? No, we have not.

In this paean to nature it is not just the peasant Pantelej who is intro- duced as a bard of the steppe; it is also Cechov. The “wealth and inspiration” of the steppe have not been lost; its song, full of beauty and tragedy, has been heard, and sung again. What is noteworthy in this pivotal passage is that the narrator identifies the steppe with the “stem motherland” (suro- vaja rodina), that is, with Russian history. The appearance of Pantelej and his companions - it is at this moment that EgoruSka is tranferred from his uncle’s carriage to their wagon train - signifies a turning point in the story: a movement from the self-centered, albeit energetic world of journeying merchants, landlords and innkeepers; from the supreme solitude of the inn on the steppe where Solomon excoriates Christian and Jewish venality, from the burial mounds of the past (the “molCalivyj star& kurgan”, the “kamennaja baba”); from all this - to the journeyers from the simple Rus- sian people (Dymov, Kirjucha, Emel’jan and others). The appearance of these travelers on the road of Russian life signals not only the merging of destinies of both steppe and people, but a transformation of them.

Next day the road itself appears to EgoruSka as an unusually wide kind of track, several tens of yards in width. “Who drives along such roads?’ wonders EgoruSka. “Who needs such space? It is incomprehensible and strange”. And EgoruSka conjures up legendary giant heroes, great horses, and racing chariots such as one finds in drawings in the Holy Scriptures. “And how these figures would fit the steppe and road if they only exist- ed!”

Who needs such space? The question poses again the problem, or dilemma, of Russian space; that space which is daunting to the little man;


that space which, it seems, only poetry, legend and myth can people; that space which in the final analysis is only really familiar, comprehensible and grand to the poet; for only the poet can unlock its secrets; only the poet can find in the journey through space and time the measure of a great people; only the poet can recognize in space and in the journey the supreme metaphor of human existence.

The double title of Cechov’s story, ‘The Steppe. A Story of a Jour- ney’, certainly provides us with the clue to the author’s artistic and philosophical design. Crucial to that design is the fact that a journey bisects the steppe. The steppe is perceived in the aspect of ‘a story of a journey’. This is the story of EgoruSka’s journey, but it is a journey in which all Russia participates. It is this journey through space, a journey that is real, but also allegorical, that provides Cechov’s work with its epic structure, its dy- namic character, its aspect of human comedy.

In ‘Good Fortune’ one must climb Mt. Mogila, that is, one must get out of death valley, in order to get a view of a world of movement, change and development. In ‘The Steppe. A Story of a Journey’, the journey itself provides that element of movement, change and development; it is the point of view from which we survey the steppe and world in all its rich and problematic content. Cechov interrupts the grandiose daydreams of EgoruSka about legendary figures on the broad track of the steppe with the reminder that “along the whole length of the road were telegraph poles with two wires”. These wires, however, like everything else, disappear into the “violet distance”. In short, the city in Cechov’s vision in his epic work is part of man’s historical destiny; the city with its electricity, its railroads and factories, in Cechov’s symbolic design does not constitute an end goal, the promised land; that is clear alone from the red and black smoke belching from factory chimneys at the beginning of the journey.

EgoruSka starts out from a steppe town and ends in a city. These points of arrival and departure, however, are unnamed; they are way sta- tions in EgoruSka’s journey of life, the outer limits of a BiZdungsroman that strictly speaking has no beginning and no end. EgoruSka sets off for an ‘education’. Yet his journey is his education. In one sense all we can say is that he is going ‘somewhere’; in a certain sense he is, like Varla- mov, “circling about, circling about”. The unsophisticated, always recep- tive vision of EgoruSka captures the lack of orientation of the little man in Russian space; yet on the highest plane of Cechov’s vision it surely expresses Cechov’s last word on the human condition.

‘The Steppe’ concludes with the words: “A kakova-to budet eta zizn?“, that is, what kind of life lies ahead for EgoruSka? We may surmise from all that EgoruSka has experienced on the first stage of his journey that his future will be beset by difficulties. As at the beginning of his journey, so now as he sets forth into “a new unknown life”, he is in tears. Yet the


future, as Cechov perceives it in the steppe, is forever open. If we violate the esthetic universe of Cechov’s epic with speculation on a finite ending, we violate the philosophical premise of the work - that “life”, as Aleksandr Blok puts it, is “without beginning and without end”. With ‘The Steppe’ the problem of Russian suicide is forever postponed. Russian man, like universal man, must forever adapt to disorienting space and to uneasy movement through it. In the final analysis, (jlechov has provided Russian literature with a modern esthetic of ‘space’, one that may be disorienting but one which, like the universe of Einstein of Picasso, is not without deeper law. Cechov has taken the negative myth of Russian space and Russian wanderings in a void and perceived in it a larger myth of universal movement through a time that is not a flow and a space that is not unbending. This may be Cechov’s deepest intuition in the steppe.

Yale University

NOTES

1

7 8 9

10

11 12

13

Mickiewicz’s ‘Digression’ is part of a longer dramatic work entitled Fore- fathers ’ Eve (Dziady), Part III. The central, dramatic section of Forefathers ’ Eve, Part III, was written in tbe spring of 1832 ln Dresden. LettresPhikxophiques (ed. by Francois Rouleau). Paris. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 49. A.P. Cechov. Polnoe sobranie sotiinenij i pisem v 30 tomach. Pis’ma. Vo12. Moskva 1975: 17. Ibid., 190. Ibid., 190. David Maxwell. ‘A System of Symbolic Gesture in Cexov’s Step”. Slavic andEast European Journal, Vol. 17, No. 2. 1973: 147. I.S. Turgenev. Polnoe sobranie soCinenij i pisem v 20 tomach. Pis’ma, Vol. 4. Moskva-Leningrad 1962: 238. M. Gor’klj. Orusskom krestljanstve. Berlin 1922: 8-9. “Demgegeniiber ist der game Sinn der Heiligkeit, kein eigenes Ant&z zu tragen und kein eigenes Schicksal zu wollen, sondem nur ein Fenster zu sein, zu dem Gott in die Welt binein und die Menschen zu Gott binaufschauen.” Fedor Stepun. Das Antlitz Russlands und das Gesicht derRevoiution. Bem- Leipzig 1934: 10-11. Cf. Turgenev in his letter to Polina Viardot of December 19, 1847. Apropos of Calderon’s Devotion de la CNX and its philosophy, Turgenev writes:


Cette foi immuable, triomphante, saris l’ombre ou mCme d’tme r& flexion, vous tcrase a force de grandeur et de majestt!, malgre tout ce que cette doctrine a de n?pulsif et d’atroce. Ce dam de tout ce que constitue la dig&d de l’homme devant la volonu5 divine, l’indiff&ence pour tout ce que nous appelons vertu ou vice avec laquelle la g&ce se tipand sur son Clu - est encore un triomphe pour l’esprit humain; car 1’Ctte qui pm&me ainsi avec tam d’au- date son propm n&m s’eleve par cela meme a 1’Cga.l de cette Divi- nite fantastique, dont il se reconnait &e le jouet. Et cette Divinite - c’est encore l’oeuvre de ses mains. Cependant, je prt%z Pro- m&he, je pn?l&e Satan, le type de la tivolte et de l’individualid. Tout atome qui je suis, c’est moi qui suis mon maii: je veux la verite et non le salut; je l’attends de mon intelligence et non de la gtice.

polnoe sobranie soCinemj i pisem v 20 tomach. Pislma, Vol. 1. Moskva- Leningrad 1961: 279. See my discussion of Turgenev’s remarks in my article, ‘Turgenev’s “The Inn’: A Philosophical Novella’. Russian Literature XVI (1984). 418-419.

l4 F. Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner(translated with commentary by Walter Kaufman@. New York 1967: 17. (“Gibt es einen Pessimismus der St&ice? Eine intellektuele Vomeigung fiir das Harte, Schauerliche, Bose, Pmblematische des Daseins aus Wohlsein, aus iiberstrti- mende Gesundheit, aus Fiille des Daseins?‘).

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Space and the Journey. A Metaphor for All Times