Canadian Slavonic Papers

An Autobiography, is an Autobiography, is an AutobiographyAuthor(s): A.F. ZweersSource: Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 34, No. 4 (December1992), pp. 487-492Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40869435 .

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Review Article

A.F. Zweers

An Autobiography, is an Autobiography, is an Autobiography

In volume 34, nos. 1-2 (1992) of Canadian Slavonic Papers, Donna Orwin published a comprehensive review of A.B. Wachtel' s The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (1990), asserting that "the style and structure of the book are clear. The author moves skillfully from close textual analysis to textual history, literary biography and on to social history and politics. He has a broad knowledge of European and Russian literary history. He knows the criticism and builds upon it without unnecessary repetitions" (p. 175). In the Slavic and East European Journal (vol. 35, no. 3 [1991]) an equally positive appraisal appeared, the critic (M. Ehre) again expressing an appreciation for the book's solid structure and the refreshing approach to an old subject.

Wachtel should indeed be lauded for the courage he displays in tackling material which has been masticated over many times. His main thesis is that the concept of a happy childhood found in Tolstoy's Childhood (1852) inspired a variety of writers - among them Aksakov, Belyi, and Bunin - to write their own happy accounts about this period of life. In contrast Gorky, who belonged to a different stratum of Russian society, attacked the Tolstoyan view and responded by creating in his Childhood a type of anti-childhood. Wachtel sets himself two goals: to reformulate the formal concept of autobiography and, in the process, to provide fresh insights into the socioeconomic myth of a happy childhood as it was manifested in Russian society proper until 1917, and in Russian émigré literature up to 1930. Wachtel' s proposals are doubtless worthy of scrutiny. My own feeling is that a closer examination of his study must lead to the conclusion that the formal aspect of the works he investigates is misrepresented. For that reason the alleged impact of the famous first lines of the fifteenth chapter of Tolstoy's Childhood on subsequent "Childhoods" is not convincing.

In stressing the division between autobiography proper (where author and narrator are one and the same person) and the autobiography (where the two are not identical), Wachtel takes his cue from Philippe Lejeune's definition of the geme: "A retrospective narration in prose by a real person about his or her own life. It emphasizes the individual life and, in particular, the development of one's

Cänadan Savoie Papers/Revue car^^ XXXIV, no. 4, Decerrber1992

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488 A.F. ZWEERS

personality."1 Thus, in cases where author and narrator are not identical, the "autobiographical pact" is broken and the reader perceives the resulting literary work as fiction. Wachtel proposes a hyphenated term: pseudo-autobiography. By introducing an independent narrator, the author does not retell his own life story but is, nonetheless, in a position to stuff his pseudo-autobiography with as much autobiographical material as he wants. However, eslewhere Lejeune defines the matter in a more complex manner. With reference to Sartre, he writes: "When he [Sartre] depicts his life in 1926, in 1939, in 1954-1963, or whether he talks about it in 1974, that life isn't the same anymore: every time it is stretched out, enriched, and displaced. Nonetheless, every time it starts with a reflection of childhood in a minor which may be assumed to be the same, but is in reality, certainly, not."" Thus, although Lejeune posits the demand of a real person looking back on his past, he is, simultaneously aware that a person does not remain the same with the passage of time. Consequently the particular rendition of the narrator of his or her emotional and spiritual development must be considered the decisive factor in an autobiographical work. Whether the narrator is identical with the author or created by the latter and therefore fictitious is a matter of external reference which lies outside the framework of the autobiographical text itself. But in both categories, the reader encounters a narrator who looks back on his or her past and there is nothing pseudo about it. For that reason Wachtel' s term must be considered misleading.

It can be argued that rejecting the term pseudo-autobiography is simply a matter of splitting terminological hairs. But, in addition, Wachtel introduces three types of voices: the narrator's, the protagonist's, and the author's. The latter' s voice is especially problematic since Wachtel himself states that "the author exists in a space/time continuum that has nothing to do with that of the world depicted in the text" (p. 21). But, later on, with specific reference to Tolstoy's Childhood, he writes: "It is the author's voice that organizes the text as a whole, that links external elements from the real world with the internal logic of the fictional fabula, and that makes generalizing comments beyond those of which Irten'ev is capable" (p. 30). Thus, on the one hand, Tolstoy's Childhood is a pseudo-autobiography and the author's voice is outside its realm; on the other, when Irten'ev is deemed incapable of making comments, that voice is suddenly heard. According to Wachtel, this situation occurs, for instance, when we read: "Vanity is the feeling most incompatible with true grief but, at the same time, the feeling is so deeply imbedded in human nature that it is very rare that even

1 A.B. Wachtel, The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (Stanford, 1990) 16. Subsequent quotations are indicated by the page number in brackets, following the text. 2 Quoted in G. Gusdorf, Auto-bio-graphie. Lignes de vie 2 (Paris, 1991) 458.

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AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, IS AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. . . 489

the strongest grief can drive it out" (p. 33). It is interesting that the statement about vanity uttered within the framework of the work of art is almost an exact replica of Tolstoy's diary entry from March 20, 1852. But does this mean that, when one comes across a passage like this, the pseudo-autobiograpical situation disappeares into thin air and yields to an authentically autobiographical one? And furthermore: why should a passage of a fictional work with striking resemblance to a text written by the author himself be singled out? The average reader is, after all, fully entitled to assume that there exists a certain degree of parallelism between fiction and the writer's authentic experience. But that assumption can be based equally well on a precocious remark made by the child Irten'ev as on the formulation of a general wisdom made by the adult Irten'ev, which also happens to coincide with the author's diary entry.

From a formal point of view there is one narrative voice - i.e., the grown-up Irten'ev's. Tolstoy's artistic achievement consists in enabling that narrator to move freely back and forth between various roles. In my own analysis of the literary devices employed in Tolstoy's trilogy, I distinguish between the following major categories: (1) passages in which the narrator aims at evoking the child's world with as little interference as possible; (2) passages depicting childlike experiences which are accompanied by unchildlike, adult commentary; (3) passages expressing the grown-up narrator's experiences, resulting from reflection on his past; and (4) passages in which the narrator formulates some general views that are only indirectly related to the content of the story. Such is the case, for instance, with the famous opening lines of the fifteenth chapter of Tolstoy's Childhood: "Happy, happy irretrievable childhood years! How can one not love, not cherish its memories?"3 Wachtel suggests that the author's own voice is heard in this exclamation and that it inspired both renowned authors (e.g., Aksakov, Belyi, and Bunin) and less illustrious ones to write their own accounts of happy childhood. It is sufficient to quote the sentence that follows the exclamation and concludes the paragraph to prove that the passage is uttered not in the author's but in the grown-up narrator's voice: "These memories refresh and uplift my soul and form the source of my greatest pleasures."4 Moiu in moiu dushu and menia in dlia menia obviously refer to the narrator Irten'ev and the passage is an integral part of the narrative. Using Eikhenbaum's terminology, the opening lines can be labelled an otstuplenie which is only indirectly linked to the story's content for it has no independent life. There are additional reasons why the passage is part of the tale: part one of Childhood ends with chapter fourteen ("Departure"), relating how the children's stay at the

3 L.N. Tolstoi, Sóbrame khiidozhestvennykh proizvedeiiii, I (Moscow, 1948) 56. 4 Tolstoi, Sobrante khudozhesivemiykh proizvedenii, I (Moscow, 1948) 56.

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490 A.F. ZWEERS

countryside comes to a close. The preparations for the journey are depicted from the narrator's point of view, as are Nikolen'ka' s alternating sentiments: great expectation and impatience on the one hand, and sudden grief, on the other, brought on when he hears his mother's voice and sees her trembling lips and tear-filled eyes. He tries to catch a fast glimpse of her when driving away from the estate; but shortly afterwards - once away from home and completely absorbed by the movements of the side horse and the undulating rye fields (the tears on his face still wet) - he is already oblivious of the painful parting with his mother.

It is against the background of the preceding chapter that the exclamations about the happy childhood years should be read. The razluka was a sad and difficult moment after all, but it seems that the narrator wants to convey to the reader the marvelous capability of children to be entirely caught up by one emotion, to shake it off, and then be caught up by a different one.

In this connection, Tolstoy's acknowledgment in Reminiscences (1903) that his childhood was happy but that he, regrettably, depicted it insincerely in his first literary endeavour is by far the most convincing proof that Nikolen'ka Irten'ev's childhood was not especially happy. However, had Tolstoy, as an up- and-coming writer, decided to describe a thoroughly happy childhood, his book would have probably been boring and second-rate. The literary text, however, shows Nikolen'ka' s childhood as alternately thrilling, baffling, shocking and incredibly sweet. Thus, for obvious reasons, the message contained in the two lines about the happiness of childhood, cannot be considered representative of the entire work. The surprisingly far-reaching influence of the Tolstoyan myth on subsequent authors, as discussed by Wachtel, constitutes an interesting case of literary impact. But the question must be raised whether these authors understood Tolstoy's Childhood uncritically as the description of a purely happy time or were deeply touched only by the enchanting opening lines of the fifteenth chapter. In either case, fiction turns out to have given rise to non- fictional descriptions of childhood memories. In the phrase "My childhood was happy, joyous: it was passed in an atmosphere of deep motherly love, and was filled with the most tender attention ..." (p. 90), which Wachtel quotes from V.N. Davydov's Rasskaz o proshlom, the "my" refers to Davydov himself (born in 1849). But if we assume that the child Davydov was not as hypersensitive, impressionable, and precocious as the fictitious and not-so-joyful Nikolen'ka, then there is nothing mythical about his account of happy childhood experiences.

Unfortunately, lack of space prevents me from commenting in detail on Aksakov's The Childhood Years ofBagrov's Grandson, Gorky's Childhood and Belyi's Kotik Letaev. I want to discuss briefly, however, Ivan Bunin's The Life

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AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, IS AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. . . 491

of Ar seri ev because we are in the fortunate position that this author commented on his own work in even greater detail than Tolstoy did on his.

After the second installment of The Life of Arsen* ev appeared in

Sovremennye zapiski, the critic Aleksandr Bakhrakh wrote that it was still too

early to evaluate properly the autobiographical fragments that had appeared so far. The remark infuriated Bunin to the point that he retorted in Poslednie novosti (16 June 1928), saying that the publications were not autobiographical fragments but "books" (the name he gave to his chapters) about the life of Arsen'ev, which no critic had the right to identify with the life of Bunin. "It is

possible that there are indeed many autobiographical details in The Life of Arsen'ev/ But artistic criticism has no business whatsoever to talk about them."

Referring to these same lines, which he quotes from Baboreko, Wachtel concludes: "The 'artistry' of the novel lies in Bunin's ability to create ... a work so true to itself that the reader could take it for an autobiography" (p. 189). Here Wachtel contradicts himself because just prior to this passage he claims that Arsen'ev avoids writing a normal autobiography since that would have inhibited him from making generalizing statements. It is allegedly the writer of a pseudo- autobiography who should try to generalize. But Wachtel' s division as such is

confusing: What kind of difficulties can arise when general statements are included in a nonfictional autobiography as long as the author recalls having formulated them in the course of his life? As far as the fictional autobiographies of Tolstoy and Bunin are concerned, the dissimilar nature of their respective generalizations proves that their content depends on the treatment of the heroes'

past experiences. It naturally follows that, given the grown-up Irten'ev's striving to depict the psychological development of his former self against the

background of life on a country estate, his generalizations pertain to observations about general human characteristics. The grown-up Arsen'ev's

attempt consists in depicting the development of self as a future writer against the background of Russian history and literature. As could have been expected, the scope of the generalizations in Bunin is broader than in Tolstoy. This difference is independent of the works being fictional autobiographies. On the other hand, what can be called the intimate approach by the grown-up Irten'ev results from his endeavour to evoke the child's world with as little interference as possible on his part, especially in passages of Childhood. This tendency is absent in Bunin since the grown-up Arsen'ev's artistic method consists in re-

experiencing the child's emotions and expressing them in a poetic fashion. The

young hero's first memory is, for instance, rendered as follows: "My very first

memory is something insignificant, evoking doubt. I remember [says the grown- up Arsen'ev] a large room, lit up by the preautumn sun, its dry brightness above

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492 A.F. ZWEERS

a slope which is visible through the window to the South . . . "* At the end of the following paragraph it even turns out that Bunin's and Tolstoy's narrators are at loggerheads about the value of childhood memories. Doubtless, with Tolstoy's famous line in mind, the grown-up Arsen'ev remarks: "Golden, happy time! No, that time is not happy but sickly sensitive, and pitiful."6 Already on the basis of this exclamation it is impossible to view The Life of Arsen'ev as the continuation of the Tolstoyan myth. However, Wachtel' s major shortcoming is his failure to distinguish between the literary devices employed by Tolstoy and by Bunin to render fictitious childhood memories.

5 I.A. Bunin, Sobrante sochinenii v deviati tomakli, VI (Moscow, 1969) 9. ö Bunin, Sobratiie sochinenii v deviati toma k li, VI (Moscow, 1969) 9.

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