Doubting the West: Negotiations with Eurocentrism in Dostoevsky's The Gambler and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina - Peter Lang Publishing
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Doubting the West: Negotiations
with Eurocentrism in Dostoevsky’s The Gambler
and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
John Burt FOSTER, JR.
George Mason University
I
For comparatists familiar with Russian literature, the critiques of
Eurocentrism in recent decades that set the stage for this volume on
“Old Margins and New Centers” bear a strong resemblance to issues
that were widely discussed in nineteenth-century Russia. By the 1840s
two groups known as the Westernizers and the Slavophils had coalesced
among the literati and the intelligentsia. The first group held that Russia
could only hold its own among the world’s civilized nations by imitating
Western Europe, while the other upheld of the value of distinctive
Russian traditions that would be threatened by such copying. Each
attitude reflected a basic fact about Russian history. On the one hand,
the nation had been isolated from the West and left to its own devices
during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But around 1700, spurred
by Peter the Great, it had welcomed contact with Western Europe with
the goal of emulating its successes, especially in the military sphere but
also, more hesitantly, in intellectual life. The analogies with postcolonial
debates over whether to maintain indigenous African, Asian, or
Caribbean traditions versus assimilating or appropriating the culture of
the European colonial power are clear.
With this background in mind, I propose to revisit the fictional
presentations of the West as seen by Russian visitors in two works by
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. With Dostoevsky my text is his 1866 short
novel The Gambler, set entirely in Europe, which was the companion to
Crime and Punishment in a ruinous two-book publishing contract that
was itself a desperate gamble on Dostoevsky’s part. With Tolstoy I will
consider the chapters with European settings in Parts Two and Five of
his 1878 novel Anna Karenina, which take place first in Germany and
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then in Italy.1 These works repay attention because they show Russians
in the process of directly experiencing Western Europe, usually for the
first time. Indeed, because travel to the West had been difficult for
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, at least in their young manhood,2 this factor of
direct experience has special significance. More generally, the lack of
enough immediate contact of this kind helps explain why, like so much
cross-cultural exchange generally, Russian images both positive and
negative of the West could so easily become abstract or ideological.
There are also good methodological reasons for giving precedence to
fictional accounts of Russians visiting Western Europe. Though neither
Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky fully identified with Slavophils or Westernizers,
their discursive statements on issues of cultural orientation run the risk
of producing sweeping overgeneralizations, in the manner of Spengler’s
Decline of the West or of Samuel Huntington’s often criticized “conflict
of civilizations” thesis.3 Even their fiction, when it treats these issues in
a domestic setting, can oversimplify.
For example, the student Raskolnikov’s “theory” of historical
greatness in Crime and Punishment leaps rapidly from Newtonian
physics to Napoleon’s military exploits before it culminates in his plot
to murder the old pawnbroker (258-66; III.5).4 This rapid sequence of
intellectual short-circuits vividly dramatizes the dangers of theoretical
abstraction, as Dostoevsky intended. However, to the extent that the
narrative also encourages readers to identify this habit of mind with the
West—Raskolnikov is living in Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great
to serve as Russia’s window on the West—Dostoevsky has indulged in a
grand generalization of just the kind his novel seeks to condemn. With
Tolstoy, as Isaiah Berlin has memorably argued, a fox-like capacity for
eloquent specifics undercuts his hedgehog urge to generalize (1-3). Still,
within Anna Karenina, the belated spread of railroads in Russia, which
are linked in the heroine’s nightmares with a peasant weirdly babbling
in French, lurks in the background as an ominous novelty from abroad
(e.g., 361, 765; IV.3, VII.31). Anna’s attraction to her future lover
Vronsky deepens when she meets him on a railroad platform while
1
These two sets of episodes in Anna Karenina first appeared in serial form in April
1875 and April 1876 respectively.
2
Dostoevsky, of course, was confined to prison and then in Siberian exile from 1849
until 1861. Tolstoy, who was freer to travel during this period, served in the Russian
army from 1851 to 1856. He did make one trip to Europe in 1856-57.
3
For a wide-ranging survey of such broad generalizations, especially as they lead to
doubts about or condemnations of the West, see Buruma and Margalit.
4
Due to the many English translations of Dostoevsky, citations here and elsewhere
will include their unit, chapter, and/or section after giving page numbers from the
translation listed in the Works Cited.
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traveling back to Petersburg from Moscow (102-03; I.30), and much
later, propelled by resentful irritation with herself and him, she will
throw herself beneath the wheels of another train (768; VII.31).5
Influences from the West have turned baleful.
Fictional visits, therefore, can impose a reality check on the writers’
images of other cultures. Yet in The Gambler and Anna Karenina these
directly experienced “facts on the ground” initially seem to provide
distinctly idiosyncratic representations of the West. Though
conveniently for comparatists both visits begin in German spas, these
locales where health cures and the sobering spectacle of serious illness
clash jarringly with the leisured ways of polite society and (at least in
Dostoevsky) with a chance to gamble could be criticized as atypical
enclaves. For Russians at that time, of course, a German setting of some
sort made good sense, given how often they had to pass through
Germany, their immediate neighbor to the west, even if that country was
not their final destination. However, though the dozen years between
Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoy’s novels witnessed major changes in
Germany, that history receives scant attention.6 This may be because the
two authors’ fictions mainly reflect trips of their own taken in the early
1860s before the ascendancy of Bismarck, from July 1860 to April 1861
in Tolstoy’s case and for ten weeks in the summer of 1862 with
Dostoevsky.7 For Russians, the truly riveting events in those years were
domestic ones, namely the great reforms promulgated in 1861. They
included the abolition of serfdom, the introduction of a modern legal
system, and the encouragement of elective government at the local level.
Because these changes sought to bring Russia closer to European norms,
they gave an even sharper profile to debates about Russia’s relationship
to the West.
In a wider sense, of course, the international clientele that flocked to
these German spas indeed made them suitable microcosms for Europe,
in the manner of the Swiss sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s Der
5
Again, due to the many English translations, Tolstoy citations will follow the practice
outlined with Dostoevsky (see note 4).
6
Kitty’s father speaks in passing of German pride in military victories that must refer
to Bismarck’s wars with Denmark, Austria, and France (233; II.35), while
Dostoevsky’s narrator criticizes the dominance of a capitalist mentality, but only in
the context of family businesses (196-98; IV).
7
The German spas that provide the main setting for these works were located near
Frankfurt, namely at Wiesbaden with Dostoevsky (called Roulettenburg in The
Gambler) and at Soden with Tolstoy. Tolstoy also refers to Baden and Kissingen as
well as Karlsbad (then in Austrian Bohemia), while Dostoevsky’s narrator mentions
visits to Homburg and Baden.
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Zauberberg, which they may well anticipate.8 This point is particularly
true for Dostoevsky, whose cast of non-Russians includes French,
English, and Polish characters as well as Germans. A similar mix can be
discerned in Tolstoy, but his novel focuses more exclusively on the
Russian travelers and expatriates who frequented the spas and who also
have a major role in Dostoevsky. In any case, the spas are not the only
European venue to figure in these novels. The Gambler opens with a
vivid account of the young Russian narrator’s attempt to get a visa to
Rome and ends with his brief, hectic foray into the Parisian demi-
monde, in scenes reminiscent perhaps of Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères
des courtisanes. When Tolstoy’s multi-plot novel sends the reader to
Italy, it introduces a second set of Russians who dabble in the visual
arts. If Dostoevsky’s pleasure-seeking Paris completes a downward
spiral that began at the spa, Tolstoy’s Italy opens up an ambitious new
perspective on issues involving Russia’s cultural relations with the
West.
Neither Dostoevsky nor Tolstoy stresses the potential clash at the
spas between thoughtless distraction and an unavoidable spectacle of
human mortality, in the spirit of Mann’s sanatorium and the life/death
dichotomy of humanity as a “Sorgenkind des Lebens.”9 Instead, each
author focuses on one of these opposing visions: frenzied gambling in
Dostoevsky and health crises in Tolstoy. Who can forget the imperious
Russian grandmother in The Gambler, confined to a wheelchair yet
absolutely certain of winning at roulette if she always wagers on the
zero—which of course is all that remains at the end? Tolstoy’s
counterpart would be the artist Petrov, barely able to stand due to his
tuberculosis, but so eager to ingratiate himself with a young lady that
when he staggers he repeats the movement to make it seem intentional
(230; II.34). At the basis of these images, of course, lie Dostoevsky’s
compulsive gambling habits on his own trips to Europe and Tolstoy’s
memories of his tubercular brother Nicholas’s failing health.
On a more subliminal level, though, the sharp contrasts that
characterized the spas do seem to have registered on the authors.
Gambling in Dostoevsky escalates to the level of a serious illness, with
the narrator transfixed by the thrill of risking absolutely everything at
8
Though his wife’s cures in tuberculosis sanatoria undoubtedly contributed a great
deal to Mann’s ideas for Der Zauberberg, by the time he wrote the novel he was also
familiar with both Anna Karenina and The Gambler. The novel’s international range
includes Russian characters as well as two “Russian tables” in the sanatorium’s
dining hall.
9
“life’s problem child,” a phrase associated with the protagonist Hans Castorp in Der
Zauberberg (372). The phrase then becomes a leitmotif, culminating with World War
I (866, 871).
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roulette: “truly, there’s something peculiar in the feeling when, alone, in
a foreign land . . . and not knowing what you’re going to eat that day,
you stake your last gulden, your very, very last!” (329, XVII). Kitty, the
main character in Tolstoy’s German chapters, finds that even though she
is not suited to be a sister-of-mercy, her experiences with the needs of
people sicker than herself has tempered her previously naïve
identification with the social elite: “she was not so carefree and light-
hearted as before, but she was at peace” (236; II.35). With her own
health restored, she can return to Russia a more serious and mature
young woman, ready, much later, to support her husband at his dying
brother’s bedside.
II
The Gambler is more obviously critical of the West than the
corresponding scenes in Anna Karenina. Snobbery and especially
corruption flourish among an array of cartoon-like characters that
includes an impossibly haughty German Baron and Baroness, a second-
Empire French speculator and con artist, an upwardly mobile Parisian
courtesan, several treacherous Poles, and—for good measure—a
Russian general who has been cashiered for embezzlement but manages
to pass in the West for a wealthy big shot. Gambling enters the story as
the metaphor for intoxication with easy money, for an obsession with
the status and feelings of power that money brings, and for the threat to
Russians, especially ones with the youthful narrator’s unruly passions,
of suddenly embracing this way of life. In a sharp, melodramatic
contrast to these misguided souls, the novel’s Englishman is a
businessman who, though hampered by shyness, is a benevolent outsider
in a Dickensian style.
The novel’s most striking and culturally suggestive scenes, however,
involve two scandals provoked by the young narrator, a tutor in the
disgraced general’s household. In one, he loses patience with the delay
he is experiencing in getting a visa to Rome, then ruled by the Pope.
When he learns that the cleric who is supposed to validate this document
has been socializing in a back room, he threatens to burst in and “spit
into the Monsignore’s coffee.” To a horrified aide, the narrator explains
himself by screaming, in French: “je suis hérétique et barbare” (177, I).
In a later scene, to win a bet with Polina, a young woman in the
general’s household whom he wishes to impress, he walks up to the
Baron and Baroness and, though a mere tutor who lacks a formal
introduction, he proclaims, “J’ai l’honneur d’être votre esclave.” When
the husband, stunned, replies “sind Sie rasend,” the narrator drawls a
“Jawohl” that offensively mimics a Berlin accent he overheard on first
arriving in the West several weeks earlier (210-11, VI).
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The verbal violence of these scenes obviously vents the young man’s
feelings of insecurity during a first trip abroad, especially once he
encounters hostility due to Russia’s suppression of the 1863 Polish
uprising. The narrator both acknowledges this blame and seeks to fend it
off by identifying, far too insistently, with negative Western attitudes
toward Russia. Indeed, many of his words may simply repeat scurrilous
epithets from the journalism of the day, garnered from the French
newspaper he had been reading just before his outburst at the Papal
embassy. In the content of what he says, he repeats the epithets; but in
his strident tone he seeks to refute them by violating the proprieties.
Thus, by proclaiming himself a “heretic and barbarian” to an authority
figure from Rome, he combines a Catholic rejection of Russian
Orthodoxy as heresy with a dismissive term the Roman Empire might
have used for Scythian hordes on its northeastern frontier. Yet, even as
the narrator’s words mimic a hostile retort to his threat to spit in a
prelate’s coffee, the sheer egregiousness of the threat communicates his
scorn for such labels as well as his underlying conviction that he is
worth more than any of these negative stereotypes.
With the German aristocrats, when he replaces the conventional
“serviteur” of well-bred speech with “esclave,” he undermines a polite
gesture by hyperbolizing an already hyperbolic turn of phrase.10 The
greeting has many implications, for on one level it displaces onto these
strangers the narrator’s seemingly extreme, even masochistic devotion
for the young woman with whom he made the bet, while on another it
implies that as a Russian he must slave-like want to imitate all things
Western. More subliminally, as a continuation of his ironic
identification with Western stereotypes in the earlier scene, these words
fuse a conventional liberal accusation against Russian absolutism—that
it turns Russians into slaves—with a reminder from a more distant past
that in several Western languages the words for slave and Slav have a
common etymology.11 In a further irony, even as the narrator shouts out
these “civilized” Western accusations against Russians, he reveals a
10
Interestingly, a related expression also appears, with a very different resonance, at the
beginning of War and Peace. The speaker is Tolstoy’s polished courtier Prince Vasili
as he engages in salon-style conversations with a Petersburg hostess (3, 6). He mixes
French and Russian, “Je suis votre vernyj rab” [I am your faithful slave] (Voina 7,
12), and readers soon learn that the Russian words may come from a report written
by a serf, for whom the expression would be literally true (6). Since this part of
Tolstoy’s novel had appeared separately in 1865, with the title The Year 1805, the
language in this scene from The Gambler could conceivably involve a direct polemic
with Tolstoy.
11
The connection becomes especially clear in German and English. See also
Longinović, who points to a parallel etymology that connects “Serb” with the Latin
“servus” (157).
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quite expert knowledge of the West. He can speak both French and
German, and has the capacity to be so spectacularly rude only because
he knows the rules for good manners.
Thus if Crime and Punishment implied that influences from the West
could prompt Russian students to concoct murderous theories and if the
German spa in The Gambler could be treated as a microcosm for the
West’s snobbery, corruption, and pretense, the narrator’s scandalous
tirades conjure up a more intricate cultural confrontation. Placed
between Russia and the West, this young man vociferates against a
culture that he has only recently been able to experience first-hand,
while at the same time he reveals the extent of his own mastery of its
mores and languages. As the novel progresses, however, and he falls
ever deeper under the spell of gambling, this discrepancy between his
combative attitude and his actual identity shrivels. At moments, to be
sure, the very energy of the narrator’s gambling mania or his rapid
indifference to the pleasures of Paris can seem to be hopeful signs. In
that case, his claims of heresy and barbarism could be understood, in
loosely Slavophil terms, as symptoms of Russia’s freshness and energy
when confronted with Western decadence.
On balance, however, even though in typical Dostoevsky fashion the
novel ends on a razor’s edge between decisive change and irremediable
inertia, the impression dominates of a negative example. The West has
conquered, abominably. After the narrator achieves his greatest success
at roulette, Polina, whom he believes he loves, realizes that he has
turned into the same money-obsessed wretch as the conniving
Frenchman who has betrayed her. Throwing his winnings in his face,
she flees his room (301, XV).
In the wake of the reforms in the early 1860s, The Gambler raises
doubts about Russia’s further Westernization. Unlikely as a German spa
might be as a site for testing this view, the deeper motives that rise to
the surface of money, status seeking, and ultimately thirst for power
support this verdict. These are the motives that guide the characters’
relations with each other and, especially, that mark the narrator’s mood
after his greatest success as a gambler: “My only sensation was of some
terrible pleasure—luck, victory, power—I don’t know how to express
it” (297, XIV). Even more problematic, however, had been the
ambiguous psychological state that he briefly glimpsed while placing his
last bet. His delight at attracting everyone’s attention in the casino
abruptly veered off in a new direction, turning into an utter submission
to the spinning roulette wheel: “suddenly, indeed without any challenge
to my vanity, I was overcome by a terrible thirst for risk. Maybe, having
gone through so many sensations, the soul was not sated but only
exacerbated by them, and demanded more sensations, ever stronger and
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stronger, to the point of utter exhaustion” (296, XIV). Beyond the spa’s
other enticements lies a new, addiction-like slavery that presages the
narrator’s final lethargy and inertia. Wherever the West might be headed
on its own, the narrator’s fate raises doubts about what that culture’s
impact might be on outsiders like the Russians. What will the future
hold if his exasperated urge to belong to this other culture can escalate
so rapidly into a frenzied abandonment of his distinctive character, in
the end leaving him with nothing?
III
Tolstoy’s German spa, unlike Dostoevsky’s, seems to lack a casino. It is
mainly a place where the formalities of proper etiquette clash with the
realities of disability and serious illness. Upon their arrival, the
Shcherbatsky family, which has come abroad for Kitty’s health after
Vronsky deserted her in favor of Anna, fits easily into an international
aristocratic society that “crystallizes” (214; II.30), in Tolstoy’s
metaphor, around a German princess. The words “Furst” and “Fürstin”
ring with authority as the episode opens, but there is no apparent need to
mention money, in contrast to its all-consuming role in The Gambler.
However, status anxiety remains an issue, and in this regard Anna
Karenina’s princely counterparts to Dostoevsky’s German Baron and
Baroness soon give way to Madame Stahl, a Russian expatriate and
invalid confined to a wheelchair. Her German-sounding name, which
was not unusual among Russians as a result of Catherine the Great’s
reliance on her fellow countrymen to staff the imperial bureaucracy,
comes from her estranged husband. But even though she might be a
native Russian, Madame Stahl has lived abroad for years, where she has
cultivated a reputation for piety and good works and—far from parading
as a heretic—has welcomed both Catholic and Protestant spiritual
advisers. Connected as well to high society in Petersburg, Madame Stahl
is doubly Westernized according to this novel’s cultural co-ordinates.
Kitty’s mother, with a Europeanized susceptibility to rank that led her to
prefer the aristocratic and vaguely Anglophile Vronsky as her
daughter’s suitor, is initially miffed by her inability to be admitted to
this woman’s society.
The coveted introduction eventually does arrive, but in an
unconventional way. Kitty becomes eager to befriend Varenka, a
youngish woman who was substituted at birth for Madame Stahl’s
stillborn baby and then was orphaned by the death of her father, a cook
in the Imperial household. Varenka now serves as Madame Stahl’s
unpaid companion-nurse in addition to being her adopted daughter.
Whenever possible, she also does charity work among the sick and
needy people at the spa; and this selflessness attracts Kitty, who has
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come to distrust the ways of high society after her misfortune in love.
When her mother allows Kitty’s admiration for Varenka’s kindness to
outweigh the young woman’s questionable social status, her
condescension is rewarded: she inadvertently gains access to Madame
Stahl. In a typically Tolstoyan manner, sincerity possesses an
infectiousness that overcomes the jagged facets of social crystallization.
Further nuances in this intercultural comedy of manners emerge from
the portrayal of Kitty’s father, who unlike his wife tilts away from
Europe and towards what is described as Russian good nature. Anna
Karenina avoids the melodramatic contrasts of The Gambler, however,
so that although Tolstoy’s general observations are often problematic,
the narrator can comment provocatively on the husband’s and wife’s
different ways of overreacting to the West. In their paired responses, a
psychology of cultural insecurity that alongside Dostoevsky seems
relatively muted also hints at a lack of balance in Slavophils and
Westernizers alike. The wife, as we have seen, exaggerates by trying to
conform to the norms of European good society; but despite her efforts,
Tolstoy adds, she could not help remaining “a typical Russian lady”
(227; II.34). Meanwhile, the husband prefers to emphasize a distinctive
Russianness, but does so at the expense of what he in fact shares with
Europeans. This suppressed connection with the West surfaces quite
pointedly at his own meeting with Madame Stahl, when he chooses to
address her—a fellow Russian, no less—“extremely courteously and
pleasantly, in that excellent French which so few speak nowadays” (231;
II.34).12
Usually, though, Kitty’s father prefers to resist the spa’s proprieties,
but as he does so he exhibits a contagious good humor poles apart from
the aggressive outbursts of Dostoevsky’s narrator. As a result, when he
impulsively arranges an outdoor luncheon at his lodgings, his German
landlord and even the servants join in happily despite the inconvenience.
The father also pokes fun at the pretentious titles with which he is
greeted by the local shopkeepers, who do not realize that his title of
“prince” does not confer as high a rank in Russia as it does in Germany.
A reminiscence of this jovial scene, witnessed with envy by a sick
German doctor (232; II.35), may linger on in Mann’s vignettes of
sociable Russians in Der Tod in Venedig (e.g., 377, 402).
This episode culminates with the father disabusing Kitty of her
admiration for Madame Stahl’s piety. She welcomes her illness, the
father explains from prior acquaintance with her, because reclining in a
wheelchair wrapped in blankets hides her unattractive legs (231; II.34).
12
In the original, however, the words that follow appear in Russian, unlike War and
Peace, which reproduced this dying tradition of Franco-Russian bilingualism.
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Her religion he has previously dismissed by connecting it to the Russian
fad for Pietism (229; II.34). The alluring truth that Kitty believed she
had glimpsed in Madame Stahl’s religious feelings vanishes once she
learns their name and history; so does the “heavenly light” of her eyes,
once she realizes that it coexists with the ignoble need to hide her legs.
Even without her father’s intervention, Kitty had begun to notice the
inconsistencies in Madame Stahl’s attitude toward Varenka, who at
times is treated more like a scolded servant than a cherished daughter.
The spirituality of this Russian expatriate has boiled down to social
vanity enhanced by her access to Western models.
At the same time, though, Kitty’s friendship for Varenka acts to
qualify this satirical malade imaginaire image of Westernized pretense.
Perhaps as a result of her undefined social status, Varenka’s actual
practice of pious values like the ones merely affirmed by Madame Stahl
seems genuine. Kitty reflects, in admiration: “What gives her this
strength to disregard everything, to be so calmly independent?” (221;
II.32). Varenka’s ability to be so self-possessed is all the more striking
because she has lived in the West for most of her adult life, is clearly
more Europeanized than Dostoevsky’s narrator, and is even more
dependent on a capricious and unworthy employer cum guardian. Thus,
even as Tolstoy’s harsh portrait of Madame Stahl raises doubts about
following Western models, his horror of stereotypes—at the heart of
Shklovsky’s concept of ostranenie or “making it strange” as a key to his
work (6-9)—leads him to provide a pointed counterexample.
Whereas Italy surfaced only briefly in The Gambler, in the narrator’s
fracas over a visa to Rome, that country is an actual destination in Anna
Karenina. It is where Anna and Vronsky decide to travel once their
clandestine affair changes into an open relationship following Anna’s
near death from childbed fever. Quickly bored with sightseeing—an
inexplicable pleasure of the English, the narrator comments (465;
V.8)—they settle down in an anonymous Italian town, and Vronsky tries
his hand at painting. These chapters focus on the couple’s visit to the
studio of Mikhailov, a Russian artist who eventually paints Anna’s
portrait. In contrast to the spa episode, often passed over by
commentators even though it prepares for the crucial chapters on the
death of the hero Levin’s brother, this portrait along with the
descriptions of several other Mikhailov paintings create a series of
ekphrastic mises-en-abyme for the entire novel. The rich array of
interpretive options that result yields numerous suggestive insights into
Tolstoy’s goals and assumptions.
For the purposes of this essay I need to ask what is implied by
Tolstoy’s choice of a painter as his alter ego, given that Mikhailov’s
portrait of the heroine could itself be called “Anna Karenina.” At first
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glance this conceit might seem to acknowledge Tolstoy’s own
indebtedness to Western traditions of novel writing. A Russian painter
who has gone to Italy to immerse himself in that country’s visual art
corresponds to the writer for whom Russian literature’s very existence
depended upon Peter the Great’s decision to bring his empire closer to
the West. But there are key distinctions. For one thing, painting is
accessible to illiterates, and in the years before Anna Karenina Tolstoy
had been occupied precisely with teaching illiterate peasants to read. So
even though Mikhailov operates within a very different framework of
urban exhibition halls, commissioned portraits, and wealthy patrons, his
art is available to onlookers in a way that printed words cannot be.
Moreover, given the importance of icons in Orthodox Christianity,
the visual arts in a broad sense can be seen to be native to Russia, unlike
the alienated situation of literature when Tolstoy started writing, late in
Nicholas I’s repressive reign. Indeed, in a long historical perspective
like the ones evoked in the outbursts of Dostoevsky’s narrator, this
episode fleetingly acknowledges that Italian art can be interpreted as the
efflorescence of a cultural heritage in which Russia once had a part and
to which it is still allied. Thus Vronsky develops a surprising interest in
the Italian middle ages, to the point that he “even began wearing his hat
and a wrap thrown over his shoulder in a medieval fashion” (466; V.9).
This strong identification with figures he must have noticed in Italian
paintings from a time when some of them are clearly indebted to
Byzantine mosaics chimes with the thesis advanced by Golenishchev, a
former schoolmate of Vronsky’s with whom the couple has been
socializing during their trip abroad. According to this expatriate art
historian and culture critic, Russia needs to think of itself as an heir to
Byzantium (462; V.7). Although this heritage could be understood in a
variety of ways,13 the fact that in Anna Karenina it suggests an affinity,
however vague given Vronsky’s inability to sustain interest in either
Italy or painting, is thought-provoking. In contrast to The Gambler’s
stress on Russia’s separation from Catholicism and the Roman Empire,
these references to medieval Italy and to Byzantium hint at what
Russian icons might have in common with the development of Western
painting. Given this alternative history, the impressions of European
cultural imposition, exclusivity, or supremacy found in both the
Madame Stahl episode and The Gambler recede before a potential for
13
Consider, for example, Konstantin Leontiev (1831-91), who at this time held
Byzantium up as a hierarchical, authoritarian model for Russian culture, in
opposition to contemporary Europe. Vronsky’s and Golenishchev’s involvements
with Italy suggest, by contrast, a possible convergence between the two regions. See
Nankov for a present-day mystification exploiting the links between Byzantine art
and the origins of Western painting.
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via Victoria University of Wellington108 Old Margins and New Centers
cultural exchanges that involve more nuanced interactions and
evolutions that elude rigid prioritizing.
Moreover, Mihailov’s role—as a painterly alter ego in whom a more
widely accessible visual culture replaces novelistic literacy—points
ahead toward Tolstoy’s later development. I have in mind his rejection
of Anna Karenina some two decades later in What is Art?, because that
novel was too narrowly concerned with a specific class-based milieu
instead of working towards more universal forms of narrative (243-46;
XVI). By this point the doubts about Eurocentrism that surface during
the Shcherbatskys’s visit to Germany, qualified though they may be by
Tolstoy’s resistance to stereotypes and to sharp dichotomies between
cultural regions, had evolved past the Slavophil-Westernizer debates.
Perhaps encouraged by Russia’s place at one margin of Western culture,
the author had begun to look outward at the world as a whole rather than
continuing to debate the consequences of Russia’s cultural indebtedness
to Europe. In this new role Tolstoy anticipated the globalism of today.
Ironically, however, some recent critics of Eurocentrism have
dismissed Tolstoy’s literary career as basically European in orientation.
Witness the North American controversy that erupted in the 1990s in
response to Saul Bellow’s sloganistic challenge, “Show me the Zulu
Tolstoy.”14 At the time this phrase was held to betray Western cultural
chauvinism, in a scenario that elevated Tolstoy to the status of the
Eurocentric classic whose mastery drives home the literary nullity of the
non-Western world. But as the discussion here has shown, it would have
made more sense to recognize a certain affinity between the Zulus and
both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, given their shared placement in societies
at one edge or another of Europe’s expanding influence. Their
experiences differed, to be sure, in their basic nature and in when they
occurred. Still, it would be a strange error if, in the cultural reshuffling
that is taking place in our globalizing age, the result would be to
remarginalize these once marginalized Russian classics by aligning
them, a century and a half later, so seamlessly with the West.
IV
Over the years comparisons between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky have
relied on many criteria, both literary and intellectual, and have come to
many conclusions. This essay does not claim to add to this tradition, if
only because neither The Gambler nor the European episodes in Anna
Karenina represent the full sweep of its author’s best work. However,
both Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s commitment to fiction writing did alert
them to the complex interplay both of sympathy and identification and
14
For more on this episode, see Foster’s article.
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via Victoria University of WellingtonNegotiations with Eurocentrism in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy 109
of generalities and particulars in fully realized narratives. As a result,
neither of their works, and especially Tolstoy’s, can come down hard, in
the manner of thesis-driven fiction, on either side in the cultural debates
between Slavophils and Westernizers. But even as Anna Karenina and
The Gambler reassess Russia’s relationship with the West through the
lens of concretely imagined fictions, they do illustrate one key
distinction in people’s responses to large cultural differences.
Vladimir Nabokov, as a Russian novelist much closer to the West
than either of his great predecessors, identifies the basic issue, albeit in a
manner hostile to Dostoevsky. In his novel Despair,15 which also
focuses on Russians in Germany, at a time when they came as exiles
rather than travelers or expatriates, the narrator identifies Dostoevsky as
“our national expert in soul ague and the aberrations of human self
respect” (98). Insecurities both collective and personal—ones that range
in scope from nation to self—indeed can heighten and even exaggerate
the felt significance of cultural differences. Tolstoy, though he
recognizes the power of such insecurities, diminishes their impact by
allowing for the varied and often contradictory responses of individuals
with differing attitudes and experiences. As Berlin noted, Tolstoy (often
in spite of himself) possessed the gift of seeing many things in their
uniqueness much more clearly than any one big thing. This outlook
results in a richly nuanced but more distanced perspective on cultural
differences, one that is necessarily neglected in The Gambler, with its
focus on an agitated first-person narrator. In some cross-cultural
situations, as Dostoevsky’s character shows with almost delirious force,
neither the self-assured aloofness of a Nabokov nor even, despite its
undoubted merit, a Tolstoyan identification with variety and
multiplicity, will be able to prevail over the totalizing projections of
aggravated self-consciousness.
Works Cited
Berlin, Isaiah. The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of
History. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953.
Buruma, Ian and Avishai Margalit. Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its
Enemies. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky. New York: Knopf, 1992.
15
Nabokov explains this novel’s complicated publishing history, “The Russian text of
Despair . . . was written in 1932, in Berlin. The émigré review Sovremennye Zapiski,
in Paris, serialized it in the course of 1934, and the émigré publishing house
Petropolis, in Berlin, published the book in 1936 (xi).
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via Victoria University of Wellington110 Old Margins and New Centers
—. The Gambler. The Double and The Gambler. Trans. Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky. Introd. Richard Pevear. New York: Everyman’s
Library, 2005. 171-329.
Foster, John Burt, Jr. “‘Show Me the Zulu Tolstoy’: A Russian Classic between
‘First’ and ‘Third’ Worlds.” Ed. Edith Clowes and John Foster. Forum on
Slavic Identities. Slavic and East European Journal 45.2 (2002): 260-74.
— and Wayne J. Froman, eds. Thresholds of Western Culture: Identity,
Postcoloniality, Transnationalism. London: Continuum, 2002.
Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order. New York: Touchstone, 1997.
Longinović, Tomislav A. “Yugoslavism and its Discontents.” Ed. Foster and
Froman. Thresholds of Western Culture. 146-58.
Mann, Thomas. Der Tod in Venedig. Sämtliche Erzählungen. Frankfurt/Main:
Fischer, 1972. 353-417.
—. Der Zauberberg. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1970.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Despair. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Nankov, Nikita. “Cultural Co-ordinates of a Bulgarian Art-Hoax: A Tragedia
dell’arte.” Ed. Foster and Froman. Thresholds of Western Culture. 170-85.
Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Device.” Theory of Prose. Trans. Benjamin Sher.
Introd. Gerald R. Bruns. Elmwood Park IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1990. 1-14.
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
New York: Viking, 2001.
—. Voina i Mir. Bk. 1. Sobranie Sochinenij v Dvadtsati Tomakh. Vol. 4. Ed. N.
N. Akopovoj, N. K. Gudziia, N. N. Guseva, and M. B. Khrapchenko. Moskva:
Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1961.
—. War and Peace. Trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude. Ed. George Gibian. 2nd
ed. New York: Norton, 1996.
—. What is Art? Trans. Aylmer Maude. London: Oxford UP, 1962.
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