The Troubled Frame Narrative: Bad Listening in Late Imperial Russia

The Troubled Frame Narrative:Bad Listening inLate Imperial RussiaGABRIELLA SAFRAN

“Hell … as absolute lack of being heard.”Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text”

You find your seat in a train compartment and start listening to your fellowtravelers. One says, “Seventy-one!” and the others burst into laughter. Anothersays, “Fifty-five!” and his fellow passengers guffaw. A third says, “Twelve!” andthe rest chuckle. You ask the man sitting next to you to explain, and he says,“We’ve been traveling together for days, and we all know each other’s jokes sowell by now that we’ve given them each numbers. Now we just have to call outthe number instead of telling the joke.” You decide to join in. “Twenty-five!”you offer. Silence. “Forty-two!” you try. Again silence. A last effort: “Ten!” Noreaction. “Help!” you say to your neighbor. “What’s wrong?” He shrugs andsays, “You know, it’s all in the timing.”

The joke about the numbered jokes exists in multiple variants, set at a comedians’ conventionin the Catskills, a Soviet gulag, or a junior high. The punchlines include “You have toknow how to tell a joke”; “That one in mixed company?” or the absurd, “They heard thatone already.”1 Each variant addresses a fundamental problem of story-telling: the possibilitythat the audience will be unreceptive, casting the story-teller into Bakhtin’s hell, among theunlistened-to.

I am grateful to the following people who read or listened to versions of this article and offered suggestions:Caryl Emerson, Gregory Freidin, Monika Greenleaf, Gavin Jones, Michael Kahan, Ari Kelman, Stephen Lovell,Alex Ogden, Kathleen Parthé, Cathy Popkin, Rose Réjouis, Anna Schur, Val Vinokur, the anonymous reviewersfor this journal, and the participants in a faculty workshop at New York University and a panel at the Associationfor Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies conference, both in November 2011. I also thank Lovell andParthé for letting me use their unpublished writing, and Vincent Barletta, Richard Bauman, Sarah Benor,Cynthia Coburn, Miyako Inoue, Adrienne Lo, John Rickford, and Izaly Zemtsovsky, for helping me find myway into linguistic anthropology.

1Comedians’ convention, Thom Piliouras of Peekskill, NY, around 1978; mixed company, Izaly Zemtsovskyand Elena Minyonok in May and July 2011; “They heard that one already,” Rachel Marshall in August 2011;middle school cafeteria, Guys Read: Funny Business, ed. Jon Scieszka (New York: Walden Press, 2010),vii–viii.

The Russian Review 72 (October 2013): 556–72Copyright 2013 The Russian Review

The Troubled Frame Narrative: Bad Listening in Late Imperial Russia 557

The problem of the unreceptive listener looks different to different disciplines. Sincethe 1980s, sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have argued that what people saydepends on their audience; as Alessandro Duranti shows, the audience functions as the co-author of an utterance, part of “a partnership that is necessary for an interaction to besustained.”2 Thus scholars of living speech investigate interruption, indirection, argument,attention-getting (or the “failed launching” of a narrative when attention is not granted, asin the numbered joke joke), and all the other ways in which speakers and listeners negotiatethe floor and the meaning in words.3 While some scholars look for cross-cultural patterns,folklorists agree that many story-listening practices vary from one time, place, and communityto another.4 And each community has expectations about what is tellable, or listenable,meaning worth an audience’s attention without transgressing taboos. Stories can be heardduring a “story-telling solo,” the performance of a single, perhaps virtuosic, teller, or a“story-telling round,” when each member of a group takes turns telling and listening.5 Butcultural change can make a given story-listening practice disappear. The joke about thenumbered jokes stages a break in the round, and you and your neighbor, as you attempt todiagnose the problem, are the analysts trying to understand the rules governing listening inthis community (you are the anthropologist; he is your native informant).

Where anthropologists describe story-listening practices, for the most part focusingon oral performances, literary theorists look at written texts: they can observe listeners’choices in their reactions to stories in the frame narrative, where interactions between ateller and a listener appear at the beginning, sometimes at the end, and occasionally in themiddle of a story.6 The frame narrative is familiar from medieval and early modern vernacularprose: the Thousand and One Nights, the Canterbury Tales, the Decameron.7 In the languageof Gérard Genette, frame narrative features an “intradiegetic narratee,” a listener inside thenarrative (or “diegesis”). The intradiegetic narratee differs from us, the “extradiegeticnarratee,” the reader outside the text. The intradiegetic narratee is a fictional character,the sympathetic or unsympathetic audience of a fictional intradiegetic narrator. The

2Alessandro Duranti, “The Audience as Co-Author: An Introduction,” Text: An Interdisciplinary Journalfor the Study of Discourse 6:3 (1986), special issue, The Audience as Co-Author, 243.

3Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps, Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling (Cambridge, MA,2001).

4Dennis Tedlock, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (Philadelphia, 1983); Charles L. Briggs,“Learning How to Ask: Native Metacommunicative Competence and the Incompetence of Fieldworkers,”Language in Society 13 (March 1984); Shirley Brice Heath, Ways With Words: Language, Life, and Work inCommunities and Classrooms (New York, 1983); William Labov and Joshua Waletzky, “Narrative Analysis:Oral Versions of Personal Experience,” in Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts: Proceedings of the 1966Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, ed. June Helm (Seattle, 1966).

5Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “The Concept and Varieties of Narrative Performance in East EuropeanJewish Culture,” in Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, ed. Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer(Cambridge, England, 1974), 287, 290–95.

6Some scholars draw on both literary-critical and anthropological ideas: thus Gary Saul Morson findsprooftexts in Russian realism for his contention that listening is an active rather than a passive process, onethat involves choice and has moral value. See Morson, “The Reader as Voyeur: Tolstoi and the Poetics ofDidactic Fiction,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 12 (Winter 1978), 465–80; and idem, “Anna Karenina”In Our Time: Seeing More Wisely (New Haven. 2007), 93.

7Cf. Wolfgang Kayser’s “epic situation,” described in Kåre Johan Mjør, Desire, Death, and Imitation:Narrative Patterns in the Late Tolstoi (Bergen, 2002), 29.

558 Gabriella Safran

twentieth-century Genette sees the intradiegetic narratee as an archaic, off-putting device:“We, the readers, cannot identify ourselves with those fictive narratees any more than thoseintradiegetic narrators can address themselves to us ... the existence of an intradiegeticnarratee has the effect of keeping us at a distance, since he is always interposed between thenarrator and us.”8 The numbered joke joke, then, turns on the distance between theintradiegetic narratee and the listener outside the text. We are equally mystified by theexperience of the listener inside the joke and by the numbered jokes themselves.

While linguistic anthropologists look at spoken language and literary critics focus onwritten texts, cultural historians are interested in processes of change over time. Our joke’sprotagonist—“you”—is a speaker for whom the reactions of the listeners are a cipher, asinaccessible as the content of the numbered jokes. Until recently, historians have found thereactions of listeners—the experience of listening—to be similarly inaccessible. Until theinvention of sound recording technologies, the voiced reaction of audiences, appreciativeor hostile, left little trace. In the past decade, though, historians have been working toretrieve the experience of listening and identifying moments of change that parallel thenumbered joke joke, when listening became more difficult as a result of political, social, ortechnological shifts.9 Although most historians of listening work on the Francophone andAnglophone worlds, late Imperial Russia, with its rapid technological change and its shiftinglandscape of social interactions, offers rich ground for the study of changing listeningpractices and their manifestations in literature. The decades after the Great Reforms of the1860s, which freed the serfs and introduced an oral, adversarial legal system, saw the riseof new modes of producing and receiving information and entertainment.10 In theaters andbookshops, lecture halls and courtrooms, people of varied classes learned, often withdifficulty, new ways of speaking and listening. Slaveholders value quiet obedience, andthe link between listening and power under serfdom is still audible in Russian: the verb“to obey” (slushat'sia) is the reflexive form of the verb “to listen” (slushat'), and an“obedient” (poslushnyi) person is one who listens—but the Emancipation, the law courts,the entertainment market, and the new communication technologies unsettled thesewords’ meanings.11 Whether amateur or paid, state-sponsored or radical, the ethnographiesof the empire’s peoples that appeared in ever greater amounts after the reforms can beseen as a reorientation of the ear: those who were once silently “poslushnye” are now thelistened-to.

8Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, 1980), 260.9Sophia Rosenfeld, “On Being Heard: A Case for Paying Attention to the Historical Ear,” American Historical

Review 116 (April 2011); Bruce Johnson, “Voice, Power, and Modernity,” in Talking and Listening in the Ageof Modernity: Essays on the History of Sound, ed. Joy Damousi and Desley Deacon (Canberra, 2007), 116;Veit Erlmann, “But What of the Ethnographic Ear?” in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, andModernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (New York, 2004), 17.

10Stephen Lovell, “How Russia Learned to Listen: Radio and the Making of Soviet Culture,” Kritika:Explorations in Russian and Eurasia History 12 (Summer 2011); idem, “Glasnost' in Practice: Public Speakingin the Era of Alexander II,” Past and Present 218 (February 2013): 127–58; Kathleen Parthé, “Inventory: TheHistory of Civic Speech in Russia” (unpublished manuscript).

11Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 2001), esp. 20–46.


Russia’s rapid economic modernization paralleled the relatively late vernacularizationof the literary language and the quick shift in literary forms. Russian literature’sself-conscious “latecomer” status may account for the relative abundance in its nineteenth-century prose of frame narratives, a genre that already looked archaic in Western Europe.12

The changing relationship of listening to literature tracks other processes of social change.Nineteenth-century writers such as Alexander Pushkin and Fedor Dostoevsky were perceivedas mediators for a vanishing oral tradition.13 By staging listening and its mediation, theframe narrative corresponded to one role that literature played for its readers.

If the first decades of the nineteenth century saw Russian literature adapt the vernacularforms of Western Europe, then the post-reform period saw a new development. At somepoint around 1875, Russia’s most prominent writers were motivated to experiment withdepictions of listening as unexpectedly painful and interrupted by background noise. Evenwhile Russian writers were imagined as empathetic listeners to “the voice of the people,”these authors were inspired by the notion of antipathetic listening. Indeed, empathetic andantipathetic modes of listening coexist synergistically in their texts, as they undoubtedlydid in the lives of the elites.14 I propose that their efforts be recognized as a new literarysubgenre, the frame story whose intradiegetic narratee is unsympathetic, unwilling, or listenswith difficulty, or the troubled frame narrative for short. This genre includes, among otherexamples, Dostoevsky’s “The Meek One” (1876), Anton Chekhov’s “Drama” (1887), LevTolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata” (1889), and tales by Nikolai Leskov, Isaac Babel, and theYiddish writer Sholem Aleichem.15 This paper uses tools borrowed from linguisticanthropology, literary theory, and cultural history to examine the troubled frame narrative.First, I describe the felicitous frame narrative, in which the intradiegetic narratee listenshappily to a speaker whose words and societal position satisfy his expectations.16 Second,I explain how the Great Reforms, the growth of market relations in entertainment, and newtechnologies altered Russians’ listening experiences in ways mirrored in the troubled framenarratives. Third, I offer a close reading of “The Meek One,” “Drama,” and “KreutzerSonata.” Working from the assumption that literary fiction has something to tell us about

12Charles Isenberg, Telling Silence: Russian Frame Narratives of Renunciation (Evanston, 1993), 2.13That Pushkin was inspired by the words of his nanny is widely accepted. On Dostoevsky’s use of folklore

see Linda Ivanits, Dostoevsky and the Russian People (New York, 2008).14On the tension involved in shifting modes of listening to another recently emancipated people see Jon

Cruz, Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (Princeton,1999). Cf. Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power(New Haven, 2005); and Dale E. Peterson, Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African AmericanSoul (Durham, 2000).

15F. M. Dostoevskii, “Noiabr'. Glava pervaia. Krotkaia. Fantasticheskii rasskaz,” in his Polnoe sobraniesochinenii v 30 tomakh (PSS) (Leningrad, 1982), vol. 24; A. P. Chekhov, “Drama,” in his Polnoe sobraniesochinenii i pisem v 30 tomakh (PSS) (Moscow, 1985), vol. 6; and L. T. Tolstoi, “Kreitserova sonata,” in hisSobranie sochinenii v 22 tomakh (SS) (Moscow, 1982), vol. 12. On Yiddish writers’ antipathy to the spokenlanguage see Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century(Syracuse, 1973), and idem, “Folklore and Anti-Folklore in the Yiddish Fiction of the Haskala,” in Miron, TheImage of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination (Syracuse, 2000).

16I have borrowed the notion of felicitous or unfelicitous communication acts from J. L. Austin’s How To DoThings with Words (Cambridge, MA, 1962).


the history of language, I argue that texts contain traces of historically specific listeninggenres as well as speech genres.17 I am inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin’s observation that“each epoch, each literary trend and literary-artistic style, each literary genre within anepoch or trend, is typified by its own special concepts of its reader, listener, public, orpeople. A historical study of changes in these concepts would be an interesting and importanttask.”18 Following Bakhtin, I look at the literary development that I have noticed in thecontext of changes in the culture of listening.

NARRUTOPIA

Charles Isenberg refers to the community of story-listeners who appreciate each others’words as a “narrutopia”; our joke about numbered jokes, then, depicts an observer excludedfrom narrutopia.19 In the early frame narratives, the narrutopia is intact and the intradiegeticnarratee listens happily. Boccacio’s Decameron exemplifies the story-listening round. Sevenyoung ladies and three young men flee the plague in 1348 Florence for nearby estates,where they eat, drink, and listen to stories. Each participant tells one story per day for tendays, a total of one hundred stories. The listeners respond to the stories with enthusiasm,even when—as in the case of the daring Dioneo—they are off-color. They describe story-listening as a “respite” from the troubled city and a “diversion for the preservation of ourhealth and lives.”20 The even older Arabic compilation (which may draw on South Asiansources), the Thousand and One Nights, depicts solo story-listening. King Shahrayar,disappointed in the wife whom he caught with another man, has decided to marry a newvirgin each night and kill her in the morning, so as to preclude betrayal. Shahrazad, hisvizier’s wise daughter, offers to marry him so that she can save her country’s women. Eachnight the king listens to her tell a story and leave off at a cliffhanger, and each morning hepostpones her execution until the end of the story. After what the title calls 1001 nights(though the text contains under 300), Shahrazad tells Shahrayar that she has borne himthree sons, and she pleads for her life, which the king grants. In the Thousand and OneNights, the Decameron, and our joke about jokes, the numbering of the narratives makes itevident that they are finite; listening to them is an event limited in time. The association ofstory-listening with the passage of time links it to health and life, which are also time-bound and fleeting.

Russian literature in the first half of the nineteenth century offers a variety of framenarratives. Robert Belknap sees them as rapidly retracing the literary evolution that occurredslowly elsewhere:

17Bauman and Sherzer, “Introduction,” Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, xiii-xiv; AlastairFowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, MA, 1982),151.

18Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W.McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1994), 98. See also Miyako Inoue, “The ListeningSubject of Japanese Modernity and His Auditory Double; Citing, Sighting, and Siting the Modern JapaneseWoman,” Cultural Anthropology 18:2 (2003).

19Isenberg, Telling Silence, 15.20Giovanni Boccacchio, Decameron, trans. J. G. Nichols (Richmond, 2008), 633.


Russian prose in the 1820s and 1830s ... recapitulated the long and intricate historyof the proto-novel in Europe, moving from collections of individual tales, likeKaramzin’s, or the Gesta Romanorum (c. 1300), to tales linked by a narrativesituation, like Marlinskii’s Evenings on the Bivouac (1823) or Boccacio’sDecameron (1360s), through tales linked by a single narrator like Belkin orMalory’s narrator (1485), to tales linked by a single hero, like Lermontov’s AHero of Our Time (1841) or Don Quixote (1605, 1615).21

The listener’s reaction is not voiced in most Russian Romantic frame narratives. The framein Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin precludes it by claiming that someone other than the narratorwrote down the stories. Although Nikolai Gogol’s Evenings on a Farm near Dikankabegins with a preface extolling the story-tellers, these tales lack individual listeners. Mostintriguing are the linked stories of Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time. The author hears thefirst from a virtuoso solo teller, while he eagerly appropriates the later tales, written byanother. The hero often refuses to listen, rejecting some interlocutors in favor of others,but there is no suggestion that listening itself has become impossible.

Complete frames surround one of Belknap’s examples, Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky’s Evenings on the Bivouac, tales of Napoleonic War-era Russian officers, suchas “Night in the Encampment” and “Second Night in the Encampment” (1823), whereRussian officers gather around a campfire somewhere in France, drinking and listening tostories.22 When Prince Ol'skii asks for a glass of mulled wine, he is told, “you have to payfor this glass with an anecdote,” and he answers that he’ll happily do so: “I’m made entirelyout of anecdotes.”23 His comical tale of a visit beyond enemy lines to cadge food from theFrench demonstrates his ability to use words to get what he wants. Another officer thentells a sad story about a love affair, and the listeners are moved. “Second Night” is set ona stormy night, on the eve of the famous battle of St. Dizier (March 26, 1814). The officerLidin explains how he stages a road accident so that he would be invited to travel next tohis beloved in a coach, then an artillery officer tells how a Frenchwoman saves his life. InBestuzhev-Marlinsky’s stories, as in the Decameron, the listened-to word is equated to andis a means of attaining food, drink, health, love, and life.

Do these frame narratives reflect actual story-listening practices? It is only in thetwentieth century that scholars have begun to analyze spoken narratives and their specifictraditions; there are no systematic studies of the story-listening practices of Russian officersin the 1810s, to which we might contrast systematic analyses of the ancient South Asianstory-listening practices that informed the Thousand and One Nights or the story-listeningpractices of fourteenth-century Florence. More recently, folklorists have worked tounderstand the structure of tales, epic stories, and other third-person oral narratives. In theRussian context, the best known effort is Vladimir Propp’s 1928 Morphology of the Folktale;

21Robert Belknap, “Novelistic Technique,” in The Cambridge Companion to Russian Literature: The ClassicRussian Novel, ed. Malcolm V. Jones and Robin Feuer Miller (Cambridge, England, 1998), 235.

22Other “Evenings” series of stories from the first decades of the nineteenth century include Gogol’s famousVechera na khutore bliz Dikanke (1831–32) and less known examples such as Anna Bunina’s Sel'skie vechera(1811), Mariia Zhukova’s Vechera na Karpovke (1837–38), Ivan Raevich’s Dosuzhnye Vechera (1839), andVechera na sviatkakh: Sobranie russkikh povestei (1833); the title was also used for periodicals.

23A. A. Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, “Vecher na bivuake” and “Vtoroi vecher na bivuake,” in his Sochineniia vdvukh tomakh (Moscow, 1981), 1:78.


recalling the train passengers and their numbered jokes, Propp created a quantitative systemto organize what he saw as the finite elements of the Russian fairytale. The first-personnarrative about realistic topics—the category to which our troubled frame narratives wouldbelong if they were folklore—attracted little attention from Propp’s generation. In 1934the Swedish folklorist Carl Wilhelm von Sydow defined such stories as “memorates,” buthe denied that they possessed a structure worth analyzing or any “poetic character.”24 Inthe 1970s and 1980s, though, folklorists began to revisit the memorate, pointing out thatsince this genre was perceived as uninteresting, it had been listened to in a perfunctory wayand collected in truncated form: those sections most relevant for this study—the “phatic”moments at the beginning and end, where the teller works to gain the listener’s attentionand demonstrate that a story is worth the attention of an audience—were not availablefor analysis.25

A still relevant work in this context is that of William Labov and Joshua Waletzky,who in 1966 published a paper analyzing six hundred narratives collected from uneducatedAmericans.26 Labov and Waletzky were intrigued by how a teller holds a listener’s attention,and they noticed that some narratives did this more successfully than others. They identifiedsix elements of successful oral narratives: an Abstract that summarizes the story; anOrientation that sets the scene; a Complication, where events occur; an Evaluation, wheresomething is explained or revealed; a Resolution, where the revelation achieved in theEvaluation leads to some action; and a Coda, where the story is made relevant to the momentof narration. While Labov and Waletzky made no claims that their analysis applied to anypopulations other than those that they studied, the features they find in their oral narrativesdo appear in other uninterrupted tale performances (including the Thousand and One Nights,the Decameron, and Bestuzhev-Marlinsky), suggesting that when authors depict a story-telling solo performed to willing listeners inside a community with shared expectationsabout narrative, these texts are formally consistent across space and time.

BAD LISTENING

What happens when listening conditions change? In the Russian Empire and beyond,listening got harder in the 1870s, when the world, it appears, became louder. Hillel Schwartzdates the rise of a new soundscape precisely to the decade when the troubled frame narrativeappeared in Russia.

To people between 1870 and the First World War, the most amazing new elementsin modern society were keenly aural in their impact and influence: the playerpiano, the gramophone, the telephone, the radio, the subway train, the elevated

24Linda Dégh and Andrew Vászonyi, “The Memorate and the Proto-Memorate,” Journal of American Folklore87 (July–September 1974); Von Sydow, Selected Papers on Folklore (Copenhagen, 1948).

25Dégh and Vászonyi, “The Memorate and the Proto-Memorate,” 233–34; Timothy R. Tangherlini, “ItHappened Not Too Far from Here ...’: A Survey of Legend Theory and Characterization,” Western Folklore 49(October 1990): 373; Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin, eds., Rethinking Context: Language as anInteractive Phenomenon (Cambridge, England, 1992).

26Labov and Waletzky, “Narrative Analysis”; Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black EnglishVernacular (Philadelphia, 1972), chap. 9.


train, and, during the Great War, the loudspeaker and high-powered, extremelyloud artillery. Nor should I neglect the drill press and electrical lathes that madepossible all the other clacking, clicking, and crackling noises from mass-producedmachines rather suddenly pervading the home, the office, and the publicthoroughfare: washing machines and vacuum cleaners, typewriters and officeprinting machines, automobiles and motorcycles. In this “Age of Noise,” as peoplebegan to call it, hearing was crucial in order to make one’s way in the world andto keep from being run over when crossing the street or the train tracks.27

As people felt that the world had become too loud, they began to refuse to listen. The earbegan to seem to need protection from the noises technological change had generated.New built environments contributed to the problem. Georg Simmel writes that urbanizationand modernization, and the concomitant stimulus overload experienced by city-dwellers,resulted in “an incapacity ... to react to new sensations with the appropriate energy.”Overwhelmed by the sounds of others, the modern urbanite struggles to shut them out inorder “to remain audible ... to himself.”28 Sophia Rosenfeld observes that people soughtrefuge from this loud world. “As uninvited sound began to be seen as disruptive ... noiselevels and kinds of noise became new ways of distinguishing among classes, races, ages,religions, sexes, and occupational groups. Silence ... became a commodity, a form of luxuryavailable only at the right price.”29

Local political changes, like global technological changes, generated noise; as Schwartzargues, the intensity of new human interactions between newly more equal classes (andgenders) felt like sound too loud to tolerate.30 The constitutional protection of free speechwhen the French Revolution began in 1789 “was experienced,” Rosenfeld reminds us, “asa visceral explosion of human-produced sound” that produced calls for regulation andlimitation.31 The link between political liberalization and sound is particularly evident inRussia, where the term “glasnost',” literally “voiceness,” was used by the government andintellectuals under Nicholas I and Alexander II (as well as in the late Soviet period) tosignify the free exchange of opinions. The new voicings generated by the Great Reforms inRussia led to unsatisfying listening. When the 1861 Emancipation proclamation was readaloud, some of the newly liberated listeners, confused, upset, and distrustful that the newarrangements would work in their favor, rebelled.32 Even when the peasants understoodthe proclamation, they could produce oral reactions that felt excessive. Daniel Field citesa memorable description of Luker'ia, a serf who reacts to the news that she will no longerhave to gather mushrooms and berries for her mistress by crying out, “Now I’m free!” andgiving “the finger (a greasy finger) in the direction of the manor house;” other peasants

27Hillel Schwartz, “The Indefensible Ear: A History,” in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull andLes Back (New York, 2003), 491–92.

28Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” adapted by D. Weinstein from Kurt Wolff (trans.), TheSociology of Georg Simmel (New York, 1950), 414, 422.

29Rosenfeld, “On Being Heard,” 323.30Schwartz, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond (New York, 2011), 21.31Rosenfeld, “On Being Heard,” 327.32Michelle Viise, “Filaret Drozdov and the Language of Official Proclamations in Nineteenth-Century Russia,”

Slavic and East European Journal 44 (Winter 2000).


apologized for her lack of verbal (and gestural) restraint.33 On higher levels of society, the1860s and 1870s saw Russians begin to enter public debates. Listening to their attempts,intellectuals criticized each other for their lack of fluency and cast aspersions on thosefrom different classes (the merchants found the aristocrats too talkative; the nobles thoughtthe merchants ineloquent); the conservative minister Pobedonostsev dismissed thesegovoril'ni (talking-shops) in principle.34

Three years after the serfs were freed, Alexander II introduced legal reforms includingpublic proceedings, justices of the peace, juries (containing men of various estates), and aprofessional bar. The public responded with fascination to the public trials and their radicallynew listening practices. They crowded into the courts to hear the proceedings and avidlyread about legal affairs in the newspapers. More often than the authorities would haveliked, trials ended in acquittal, even when the defendant was obviously guilty. As the finalbook of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov demonstrates, writers were compelled by asetting where one person explained himself at length, and others listened and then, basedon what they heard, judged the speaker—a judgment given an official force that the opinionsof ordinary people could never have had before the reforms.35 Even while they enforcedthe law that those who were once silently obedient “poslushnye” now needed to be heard,the regime’s representatives wanted to limit the power of their voices. One St. Petersburgjustice of the peace fined a peasant defendant two rubles for speaking unclearly.36 Havingput the new courts in place, the regime, disturbed at the high acquittal rates, limited the newsystem by restricting the population eligible to serve on juries, and elite Russians themselvesincreasingly avoided jury duty, indicating that the new listening practices troubled both anincreasingly conservative regime that did not want recently emancipated poor peasants tohave the authority to judge others, and elites seeking to avoid the duty of listening attentivelyto non-elites.37

The Great Reforms placed the empire’s subjects into new circumstances where theyhad to listen in new ways across class lines. Many welcomed the changes, such as theliberated Luker'ia crowing at the manor house or the intellectuals giving political speechesin local government assemblies. But even those who agreed with them found unsympatheticlisteners. The negotiation of new norms of speaking and listening was difficult butunavoidable. The professions that grew in the post-reform period, such as law, medicine,and journalism, all required listening attentively to one’s erstwhile superiors or inferiors.The new profession of stenography, which facilitated the work of the lawyers and thejournalists, was based in training in listening and introduced a new kind of professionallistening across gender lines (the stenographers were often women). As Russian Orthodox

33N. V. Sakharov, “Iz vospominanii o V. A Artsimoviche,” in V. A. Artsimovich, Vospominaniia-kharakteristiki(St. Petersburg, 1904), cited in Daniel Field, “The Year of Jubilee,” in Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881, ed.Ben Eklof et al. (Bloomington, 1994), 41.

34Parthé, “Inventory”; Lovell, “Glasnost' in Practice.”35Harriet Murav, Russia’s Legal Fictions (Ann Arbor, 1998), 55–91; Richard Wortman, The Development of

a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago, 1976), esp. 283.36Joan Neuberger, “Popular Legal Cultures: The St. Petersburg Mirovoi Sud,” in Russia’s Great Reforms,

238.37Alexander K. Afanas'ev, “Jurors and Jury Trials in Imperial Russia, 1866–1885,” in Russia’s Great Reforms.


priests began to define their work as pastoral care, they needed to listen to their parishioners,who had to listen in their turn. Professionals in entertainment or information were especiallyconcerned by the possibility of unsympathetic responses. As Jeff Brooks shows, the rise ofliteracy after the Emancipation made it possible for peasants to articulate literary tastes thatdiffered from those of the intelligentsia.38 The broadening of the theater audience had asimilar effect: Paul du Quenoy demonstrates that popular audiences preferred comedy andmelodrama to the serious “idea plays” that intellectuals liked.39 The widening of theentertainment market in the late imperial period created new contact zones and audiencesand gave people the opportunity to listen across class lines—or to refuse to do so.Internationally, technological change, mass-market entertainment, and the desire not tolisten were connected: as coach travel gave way to trains, passengers wanting to avoidconversation bought newspapers and novels on the train or in the station’s new bookstores.40

It is not surprising that some of Russia’s writers, who were part of that new entertainmentmarket, began to thematize difficult or unpleasant listening—and that the seemingly archaicform of the frame narrative gave them the space to do so. John A. Robinson notes thatpeople who want to avoid listening can behave as we saw in the numbered joke joke: “Thelistener exerts decisive control over the occurrence of narration in most informal interactionsfor, by a variety of means, he or she can prevent, abbreviate, or terminate story-telling byother participants.”41 Some canonical Russian frame texts from the last quarter of thenineteenth century vividly depict circumstances in which narratees prevent, abbreviate, orterminate story-telling. The examples of the troubled frame narrative that I have found areset in contact zones where new kinds of listening happen.42 For example, Nikolai Leskov’s“Night Owls” (1891) features an intradiegetic narratee who spends the night in a hotel withthin walls where the voices of his neighbors keep him awake. He is awaiting an audiencewith John of Kronshtadt, a priest known for his unconventional speaking and listeningpractices (he faced his parishioners during services, inserted his own words into the liturgy,and listened to confessions en masse).43 In Sholem Aleichem’s “At the Doctor’s” (1904), adoctor pushes a ceaselessly complaining patient out the door. At the beginning of thecentury, the few doctors in the country were foreigners employed by the court or by noblefamilies; by its end, Russian doctors worked in the military and in urban and rural hospitals;

38Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton,1985).

39Paul du Quenoy, Stage Fright: Politics and the Performing Arts in Late Imperial Russia (University Park,PA, 2009), 200–203.

40Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century(Berkeley, 1977), 73–76; Nicholas Faith, The World the Railways Made (London, 1990), 245–48; Iurii Leving,Vokzal-Garazh-Angar: Vladimir Nabokov i poetika russkogo urbanizma (St. Petersburg, 2004), 140–45; LeahGarrett, “Trains and Train Travel in Modern Yiddish Literature,” Jewish Social Studies 7 (Winter 2001).

41John A. Robinson, “Personal Narratives Reconsidered,” Journal of American Folklore 94 (January–March1981): 73.

42Mary Louise Pratt uses this term to “refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple witheach other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.” See her “Arts of the Contact Zone,”Profession (1991): 34.

43N. S. Leskov, “Polunoshchniki,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 11 tomakh (Moscow, 1956–58), vol. 9. Seealso Nadieszda Kizenko, “Ioann of Kronshtadt and the Reception of Sanctity, 1850–1988,” Russian Review 57(July 1998): 330, 331, 332.


new ways of listening were part of their work.44 In another Sholem Aleichem monologue,“A Piece of Advice” (1904), a writer bursts out screaming at a young man who has come toask him whether he should divorce his wife, an interaction that reflects the access that theperiodical press—which grew in Russian from the 1860s, and in Yiddish from the late1890s—opened up between writers and readers.45 Sholem Aleichem mocks the modernnotion to which he owed his livelihood: that a writer’s words matter for his readers.Presumably he, like other writers of his era, compelled by the literary marketplace tounderstand that his audience might refuse to listen to him, occasionally indulged in thefantasy of refusing to listen to his readers.

TROUBLED FRAMES

When late-nineteenth-century writers depict the refusal to listen by a person who is orimagines himself to be in a court of law or the office of a doctor, a writer, or a clergyman,they are looking for humor or pathos in the frustration engendered by their era’s new genresof listening. While novels often contain moments of troubled listening, I focus on a seeminglyarchaic short literary form, at least theoretically listenable-to at a sitting, that can thus drawmore attention to the act of listening than is possible with a longer work. A close reading ofthree troubled frame narratives shows how Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy carried outthis experiment. “The Meek One,” “Drama,” and “Kreutzer Sonata” are set in variouscontact zones (the first begins in a pawnbroker’s shop, the second is set in a writer’s study,and the third in a train car), but each gestures toward the paradigmatic zone of hard listening,the courtroom. Unlike the homosocial narrutopia of Bestuzhev-Marlinsky’s officers, thesestories feature cross-gender listening: each depicts an aural encounter between a man anda woman in an enclosed space that concludes with the woman’s death. Dostoevsky’s andTolstoy’s canonical texts are usually read as views into the workings of a man’s psyche; bysetting them in the context of the history of listening, I am arguing that we turn our attentionto how literary characters experience the world through their senses. In this I follow recentcritics of Russian realism who have shifted their attention from the psyche to the mechanicsof perceptions, particularly sight.46 I also follow Walter Benjamin’s example in drawingnotice to the ways in which material possibilities for making art influence literary texts.47

44Sholem Aleikhem (Sholem Rabinovich), “Baym Doktor,” in his Ale Verk fun Sholem-Aleykhem (NewYork, 1925), vol. 25. See also Michael Finke, Seeing Chekhov: Life and Art (Ithaca, 2005).

45Sholem Aleikhem, “An eytse,” Ale Verk, vol. 25. See also Louise McReynolds, The News under Russia’sOld Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton, 1991); Nathan Cohen, “The YiddishPress and Yiddish Literature: A Fertile but Complex Relationship,” Modern Judaism 28 (May 2008).

46Sharon Lubkemann Allen, “Reflection/Refraction of the Dying Light: Narrative Vision in Nineteenth-Century Russian and French Fiction,” Comparative Literature 54 (Winter 2002); Finke, Seeing Chekhov; IlyaKliger, “Anamorphic Realism: Veridictory Plots in Balzac, Dostoevskii, and Henry James,” ComparativeLiterature 59 (Fall 2007); cf. Cathy Popkin, The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, Zoshchenko, Gogol(Stanford, 1993); Michael S. Gorham, Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics ofVoice in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb, 2003).

47Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, ed.Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1969), 97.


Dostoevsky’s “The Meek One,” which first appeared as the November 1876 issue ofhis Diary of a Writer, has three layers of tellers and audiences.48 The outermost frame is theDiary itself, a series of statements and stories by Dostoevsky. In the next frame, theintroduction to “The Meek One” asks the reader to accept the narrative of a namelesspawnbroker, whose controlling behavior toward his young wife has provoked her suicide,as a fantastical stenographic transcription of his words as he sees her body lying onthe table.

Of course, the process of the story continues several hours, with breaks and jumpsand in a contradictory form: now he speaks to himself, now it is as though he isdefending himself to an invisible audience, some kind of judge. It’s just how italways is in reality. If a stenographer could have been listening in (podslushat')and writing everything down, it would have come out rougher, not as neat as itappears here, but it seems to me that the psychological structure would perhapsstay the same. This notion of the stenographer who writes everything down (afterwhich I would have reworked the transcript) is what I call fantastic in this story.49

The husband’s monologue contains a third framed narrative. After he hears his wife sing toherself with no thought of him, he suddenly begins to tell her that he loves her and that hewants to sell his business and take her to Boulogne. In reaction to this narrative ofreconciliation, she jumps through the window to fall four floors to her death.

Dostoevsky insists that the pawnbroker’s speech in “The Meek One” is “just how italways is in reality,” and it does resemble actual memorates. The stenographed speech tothe invisible judge contains all six elements that Labov found in the stories he collected.The innermost narrative—his words to his wife after he hears her singing—contains noneof them. While the pawnbroker speaks effectively to the invisible judge, keeping hisaudience’s attention as Labov’s story-tellers did, he is less effective when speaking to hiswife. Rather than constructing his words to her as a listenable story, he overwhelms herwith confusing words and gestures. “I took her by the hand and I don’t remember what Isaid to her, that is, what I wanted to say, because I could not even speak right. My voicebroke and did not obey me (ne slushalsia). I didn’t even know what to say; I just sighed.”50

He kisses her feet; when she withdraws them, he kisses the ground they touched. She hashysterics, then cries. He keeps speaking:

I did not leave her all evening. I kept telling her that I would take her to Boulogneto swim in the sea, right now, this instant, in two weeks, that she had such acracked little voice, I heard it recently, that I would close my pawnshop, sell it toDobronravov, that everything would begin anew, the important thing was goingto Boulogne, Boulogne! She listened and was frightened. She got more and morefrightened.51

This pattern repeats as he tells her that his shame about having avoided a duel made himwant to torment everyone, and he had married her to torment her; in response, she tries to

48Isenberg, Telling Silence, 50–64.49Dostoevskii, PSS 24:6.50Ibid., 27–26.51Ibid., 28.


comfort him, then cries. He tells her that he had heard her defend him during a secretmeeting with his acquaintance from the army who attacked him for not dueling; she burstsout crying. Finally, she tells him that she feels she is a criminal, and asks his pardon, and heresponds by kissing her. After he leaves to get passports, she jumps out of the window,holding her icon.

Of course, this story is not just about determining the limitations to listenability; it isa compelling view into the mind of a tormented man who cannot help tormenting thosearound him.52 Part of what compels us is how the pawnbroker’s words ring true—because,I would argue, they accord with general speech and listening dynamics. Among thepawnbroker’s many blind spots is the fact that not every kind of utterance is acceptable inevery circumstance: as discourse analysis has determined, “tellability emerges as a productof contextual negotiation.”53 Dostoevsky’s pawnbroker is trying to establish intimacy withthe wife whom he worked so hard to distance since their marriage, and her tears signal heropposition to his words and the relationship they demand.54 Her emergence literally throughthe window-frame is an effective termination of his narrative that draws attention to herrenunciation of the role of intradiegetic narratee.55 Whereas story-listening is associated inour early frame narratives with health, love, and life, here it is linked to hatred and death, tothe absence of forgiveness or absolution.

The introduction makes the story a product of a mediated listening based in stenography,a new technology that changed experiences of sound. (It changed Dostoevsky’s ownexperience when he hired and then married one of the first stenographers trained in Russia.)Throughout, the story thematizes speaking and listening. The pawnbroker speaks and listensunconventionally, proposing marriage not in a tender tone or in a private space but at thegate, in front of the servant Luker'ia. In the first days of their marriage, she tells him abouther childhood, and he “douses it right away with cold water. That was my idea. I answeredraptures with silence.” Soon, she too becomes silent: “She opened her big eyes, listened,looked, and was silent.” Listening silently in their “silent rooms,” she resembles thestenographer or the judge from whom he demands attention.56 “No, listen, if you are goingto judge a man, then you must judge knowing the case. ... Listen.”57 Terms for silenceappear 49 times over 30 pages of text.58 (Terms for listening and hearing appear 32 times.59)The silence separating husband and wife is reinforced through material objects such as themetal bed he buys her. It is in this silence that her song, an unexpected sound not meant forits listener, startles him so. By triggering his outburst about the trip to Boulogne, this sound

52Édouard Dujardin, in The Bays are Sere and Interior Monologue, trans. and intro. Anthony Suter (London,1991), 92, 113, 118, 120; cf. Gleb Struve, “Monologue intérieur: The Origins of the Formula and the FirstStatement of Its Possibilities,” PMLA 69 (December 1954): esp. 1111n.14.

53Neal R. Norrick, “The Dark Side of Tellability,” Narrative Inquiry 15:2 (2005): 325.54Ibid., 326–30.55Michael Holquist, Dostoevskii and the Novel (Princeton, 1977), 148–55. “Frame” (ramki) is used for

stories and pictures in Russian.56Dostoevskii, PSS 24:26.57Ibid., 13.58Молчание appears 11 times, молча 15, молчать 11, молчаливый 2, умолкать 2, примолкать 1,

исподтишка 2, тишина 4, неслышный 1.59Слушатель appears 1 times, подслушать 1, выслушать 3, (по)слушать 13, (по)слушаться 2,

(у)слышать 11, вслух 1.


leads to the singer’s death. If story-telling functions in the Thousand and One Nights as away for a speaker whose words bring life to teach a listener to speak life-giving words inhis turn, then the husband’s refusal to listen in “The Meek One” prepares his wife for herrefusal to listen when she jumps out of the window.

In the fifteen years after Dostoevsky published “The Meek One,” other writers returnedto the theme of unhappy listening. Chekhov’s 1887 story “Drama” features a famous writer,Pavel Vasil'evich, and a woman writer, Murashkina. Murashkina appears at PavelVasil'evich’s home and insists on seeing him so that she can hear his opinion of her newplay.60 Pavel Vasil'evich, who finds that hearing others’ work gives him “the impression ofa cannon mouth directed right at his face,” weakly offers to look at it, but she insists onreading it aloud immediately.61 Pavel Vasil'evich’s mind wanders as he listens to the play,which combines progressive clichés (young people build schools and hospitals) withmelodrama (parents force children into unwanted marriages). He notices that his wife’sportrait has spots left by flies, and he makes the sound of dogs catching flies. He hearsmeaningless sounds: “Tru-tu-tu-tu. ... Tru-tu-tu. ... Zhzhzhzh ...” As he struggles to stayawake, he sees Murashkina fade into the gray air of his study, so that only her movingmouth can be seen, then become small as a bottle.62

Murashkina again began to swell. ... Looking around wildly, Pavel Vasil'evichrose up, cried out in an unnatural voice from deep in his chest, grabbed a heavypaperweight from the desk and found himself using all his strength to hitMurashkina in the head. ...

“Bind me, I have killed her!” he said a moment later to the servant who hadrun in.

The jury acquitted him.63

This story plays with sound to enact Pavel Vasil'evich’s listening experience. Theimage of Murashkina shifts, and her sounds are equally unstable. The flies (mukhi) that fillthe listener’s mind echo the first syllable of her name, as do the torment (muka) he feels andthe dim eyes (mutnymi glazami) he directs at her.64 (Her name, from the root murashka[“ant”], reinforces the insect theme.) His final attack on her has the logic of an instinctiveswipe at an irritating bug. (His experience as a trapped listener and her transformation intoa kind of buzzing fly are brilliantly portrayed in German Livanov’s 1960 film.) As in “TheMeek One,” the intradiegetic narratee rebels after others flout social norms of listening andspeaking, inside a distorted soundscape. People speak and are silent in startling ways;listening has become difficult.

Tolstoy loved to hear Chekhov’s “Drama” read aloud and to repeat the final line: “Thejury acquitted him.”65 Two years after Chekhov published it, Tolstoy wrote his 1889

60Chekhov, PSS 6:224, 226. See also Yuri Corrigan, “Chekhov and the Divided Self,” Russian Review 70(April 2011); and John Freedman, “Narrative Technique and the Art of Story-telling in Anton Chekhov’s ‘LittleTrilogy,’” South Atlantic Review 53 (January 1988).

61Chekhov, PSS 6:226.62Ibid., 227, 228, 229.63Ibid., 229.64Ibid., 227, 228, 229.65Ibid., 669.


“Kreutzer Sonata,” about another man acquitted of the crime of killing a woman in alandscape of troubled listening.66 The primary intradiegetic narratee is a train traveler whohears his fellow passengers discuss marriage and sex. One man reveals himself asPozdnyshev, whose murder of his wife had made him notorious. The other passengersleave the compartment, and Pozdnyshev tells the narratee the story of his marriage, hiswife’s acquaintance with a violinist, the performance by his wife and the violinist ofBeethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata,” and the murder. While the story is conventionally interpretedin the context of the “woman question,” a few scholars have noticed how it depicts listening.67

Listening in this story is frustrating: the travelers speak in whispers and make noise as theymove, and the train rumbles loudly over the tracks. Pozdnyshev emits “strange noises, likethroat-clearing or a laugh begun and then broken off.”68 Two passengers avoid his wordsby moving to another compartment, and another escapes by going to sleep. Pozdnyshevrecognizes their need to leave, saying to the narratee, “Perhaps it is unpleasant for you to sitwith me, knowing who I am? Then I can go.”69 His words link his violence against his wifeto his recital of his experiences. After attacking, he comes to his wife’s bedside and says,“Forgive me” (Prosti menia). A few lines later, he concludes his encounter with the narrateenot with the expected farewell, “Proshchaite,” in answer to the narratee’s “proshchaite,”but with the word he used to his wife, “prostite” (forgive).70 The unexpected formulasuggests that his narrative is a hostile act akin to that perpetrated on his wife.

This suggestion is reinforced by the episode when Pozdyshev hears his wife and theviolinist play the Kreutzer Sonata. Soon after, incomprehensible emotion fills him. Heexplains this with the theory that artists infect audiences with their own feelings, an ideaTolstoy defended a decade later in What Is Art? If the listener cannot act on his borrowedemotions, he remains agitated until he has discharged them. “If they play a military march,the soldiers march and the music has worked; if they play a dance and I dance, then themusic worked; if they play a mass and I take communion, then the music also worked, butotherwise there will just be irritation, without that thing that must be done to relieve it.That is why music is sometimes so frightening, so horrifying.”71 The archaic experiences

66Citations from Tolstoi, “Kreitserova sonata,” SS, vol. 12.67Peter Ulf Møller, Postlude to the Kreutzer Sonata: Tolstoi and the Debate on Sexual Morality in Russian

Literature in the 1890s, trans. John Kendal (New York, 1988); Tamar Yacobi, “Authorial Rhetoric, Narratorial(Un)Reliability, Divergent Readings: Tolstoi’s Kreutzer Sonata,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed.James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (New York, 2005); J. M. Coetzee, “Confession and Double Thoughts:Tolstoi, Rousseau, Dostoevskii,” Comparative Literature 37 (Summer 1985): 193–232; Amy Mandelker,Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoi, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel (Columbus, 1993), 21–30.On listening see David Herman, “Stricken by Infection: Art and Adultery in Anna Karenina and KreutzerSonata,” Slavic Review 56 (Spring 1997); Dorothy Green, “The Kreutzer Sonata: Tolstoi and Beethoven,” inTolstoi’s Short Fiction, ed. Michael Katz (New York, 1991), 437; Caryl Emerson, “Tolstoy and Music,” in NewAngles on Tolstoy: Essays on the Occasion of the Centennial of his Death, ed. Donna Tussing Orwin (Cambridge,England, 2010); and Marie Sémon, “La musique de la Sonate à Kreutzer,” and Wladimir Troubetskoy, “Tolstoï,Schopenhauer et la musique dans la Mort d’Ivan Ilitch et la Sonate à Kreutser,” both in La sonate à Kreutzer.Cahiers Léon Tolstoï, no. 6 (1992).

68Tolstoi, SS 12:123.69Ibid., 132.70Ibid., 196.71Ibid., 179–80.


of listening in military, dance, or religious settings are part of a functioning system, buthearing chamber music in a drawing room, an experience Pozdyshev presents asquintessentially modern, betrays a soundscape out of whack. After the performance,Pozdnyshev leaves for the provinces. When he reads a letter from his wife, mentioning ameeting with the violinist, he recalls hearing the music. Jealousy and anger fill him and hedecides to return to Moscow posthaste. In the train, his agitation grows: “That eight-hourtrain trip was something horrible. ... The railroad excites people so much.”72 Pozdnyshevtries to distract himself with conversation and ends up in a third-class carriage listening toa Jew’s anecdotes, but like the characters in the numbered joke joke, he is unable to respond.73

Under the influence of the chamber music performance and the train travel, he kills hiswife. Telling his story, Pozdnyshev again drinks tea, smokes, and travels in a bumpy train,and he again grows agitated. That Pozdnyshev relieves his agitation on this occasion throughstory-telling strengthens the link between his words and his act of murder. The musicperformance and the train, both symbols of modernity, lead to excitement, excessive speech,and violence. If we accept the metaphor of art as infection, then Pozndyshev may havebecome a carrier. The term “sounds” (zvuki) is used for Pozdnyshev’s strange noises andfor the piano, the trigger of his agitation. In “The Meek One” and “Drama” the spokenword brings death, and in “Kreutzer Sonata” the modern experience of listening is at theroot of destruction. As in “Drama,” the story’s title is the performance that unhinges itsmain character.

These three stories gesture toward the new ways of listening that arose after the GreatReforms. While their main characters belong to approximately the same class, each refersto listening across class boundaries (Tolstoy’s story starts with a cross-class discussion)and speaks across gender boundaries. The stories mention new technologies such asstenography and the railroad, as well as the press. Each story’s frame refers to the newlegal genres of speaking and listening. The pawnbroker in “The Meek One” imagines he isdefending himself before a judge (in Russia at the time, he could have faced a trial forinstigating suicide); both “Drama” and “Kreutzer Sonata” refer to the protagonist’sacquittal.74 Each text rehearses the legal rituals of speaking and listening. As ShoshanaFelman points out, Tolstoy’s story compensates for an inadequate trial:

Tolstoy’s own literary, legal case consists already in a repetition, since its verystarting point is the hero’s reenactment of the legal trial (his reopening of thecriminal proceedings’ failed search for the truth) through the narrative of theconfession that, in turn, undertakes to repeat or to narrate again (to recapitulate,once more) the story that could not be heard in the proceedings and that failed tobe communicated, or transmitted, to the court.75

72Ibid., 184.73Ibid., 186. See also Herman, “Stricken by Infection,” 31–33.74Susan Morrissey, “Patriarchy on Trial: Suicide, Discipline, and Governance in Imperial Russia,” Journal

of Modern History 75 (March 2003), 28–31.75Shoshana Felman, “Forms of Judicial Blindness, or the Evidence of What Cannot Be Seen: Traumatic

Narratives and Legal Repetitions in the O. J. Simpson Case and in Tolstoi’s The Kreutzer Sonata,” CriticalInquiry 23 (Summer 1997): 767.


Her observation echoes Belknap’s comment that Dostoevsky’s heroes produce “unrepentant,”subversive confessions that do not lead to absolution.76 Whereas Felman and Belknap seethe confession as a failed speech genre, I suggest that what unites these stories is a failureof listening that precludes the possibility of absolution.

The appearance of the troubled frame narrative in the 1870s invites us to wonder whywriters might become drawn to stories of unhappy listeners. This situation may havefascinated each of my writers differently: one could look for biographical parallels betweenthe pawnbroker and Dostoevsky (who wrote by dictating, like his hero, to a stenographer),or Chekhov’s writer and Chekhov (who was known for his kindness to aspiring writers,especially women), or Pozdnyshev and Tolstoy (in whose relationship with his wifecommunication, or its excess, played a role). But I prefer to look at the similarities amongthese writers, all of whom lived in a world where social and technological changes hadmade listening more important and harder, and all of whom knew that readers could refuseto listen. I have argued that this new genre may emerge from changes in Russian speakingand listening practices. This genre’s birth may also help us understand why the writers ofthis generation created skaz, the literary representation of non-standard speech, which wouldbe defined by Boris Eikhenbaum in 1918.77 The encounter with the voice of the Other inCivil War-era Russia inspired writers such as Babel and Zochshenko to produce fictionillustrating the power of the words of soldiers and workers—but as Eikhenbaum knew, theoriginators of skaz were Leskov and Dostoevsky in the 1870s and 1880s, who took Gogol’soral, unreliable narrators and added ambivalent narratees. If Russia’s writers, like theprotagonist of the numbered joke joke, were trying to find themselves in a confusing newsoundscape, then the troubled frame narrative is an experiment in refusing to listen, and itscousin, the skaz narrative, is an effort to transform the irritating voice of the other—andone’s own experience of troubled listening—into art.

76Robert L. Belknap, “The Unrepentant Confession” in Russianness, ed. Robert Belknap (Ann Arbor,1990), 122.

77B. M. Eikhenbaum, “Illiuziia skaza” (1918), in his Skvoz' literature: Sbornik statei (Gravenhenge, 1962).

Documents

The Troubled Frame Narrative: Bad Listening in Late Imperial Russia