Faust and Yakov Pasynkov
by Ivan Turgenev
These two short, strongly
autobiographical novels abound in missed opportunities or chances taken and
pushed tragically to their limits. Turgenev’s piquant voice saves these stories
from being just Slavic versions of German romanticism, but their melancholy and
occultish atmosphere does owe a great deal to Goethe, one of Turgenev’s
greatest literary mentors.
Turgenev did much to bring western literature and, in particular, Goethe to Russia, translating Goethe’s Faust in 1844. As Hugh Aplin notes in the book’s introduction “More than any other of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century, Turgenev was, by instinct and experience, a European.” His love of German culture and romanticism came from his years studying the Berlin University. At one time, he claimed to have memorized the first part of Goethe’s Faust. Later, however, Turgenev moderated his enthusiasm for the sometimes stifling German romantic themes of egotism and individualism. Still, Turgenev always retained a respect for the movement and its aspiration to move beyond the conventions of the literary establishment.
Turgenev wrote the epistolary Faust while living at Spasskoye, his mother’s estate in Orel Province. There, he met Maria Tolstaya, Leo Tolstoy’s sister. As he would do repeatedly throughout his life, Turgenev “formed an attachment.” (The most curious and long-lived attachment Turgenev formed was being one of a ménage à trois that included mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot and her impresario husband Louis Viardot.) Maria, it seems, expressed an “indifference to poetry” that Turgenev picked up in Vera, the love interest in Faust.
The letter writer, Pavel Alexandrovich B, meets a girl he describes as a “virgin of the imagination,” a young woman who has never experienced novels or art. Pavel is one of the Russian author’s many “superfluous men,” a group consisting of learned and perceptive men, usually writers or poets, who observe and record but contribute little of perceivable value to modern life. Turgenev’s portrayal of such men should be read with tender irony as they were no doubt variations on an autobiographical theme.
Faust incorporates one of romanticism’s key themes, obsession, a leitmotif that appears here alongside another romantic favorite, ghosts. Initially, Pavel Alexandrovich is haunted by the past on his return to the country home of his youth. The servants, the garden, the rooms—all evoke nostalgia, causing his youth to loom up almost as another character in the story.
Where Pavel Alexandrovich has education and worldly experience to moderate his poetic imagination, however, the young woman he meets, Vera, has no such reserves. She is unspoiled to such a degree that she doesn’t even recognize a lie. Her life has been utterly controlled by her mother and if mamma says there are ghosts, then Vera believes it. Her imagination is undeveloped to such a degree that she is completely unable to experience empathy for others or self-direction.
When her mother dies, Vera is defenseless and begins to see her mother’s ghost in the garden holding out her arms to her daughter. She falls ill and soon dies unable to cope with the dangers from which she had been protected by her mother. Vera’s death returns her, in effect, to her mother’s protection once again.
Pavel Alexandrovich is left to muse on the “incomprehensible interference of the dead in the affairs of the living.” His conclusion is the story’s epigraph “deny yourself—take life seriously, not as an amusement with other people as playthings.”
Yakov Pasynkov is told in retrospect as a group of friends exchange stories over a long lunch. One of the group relates the tale of Pasynkov, an unassuming man who died believing he had never been in love. After Pasynkov’s death, this friend learns that this was not true. Pasynkov was in fact loved by not one but two devoted women. The story leaves the friend with the impression that Pasynkov possessed the noblest heart he had ever encountered.
Yakov Pasynkov is also strongly steeped in German romanticism. Clearly autobiographical, Pasynkov is further influenced (as Turgenev was) by Schiller and Schubert; he is an idealist keen for truth and beauty. With this character, Turgenev explores the notion that “the actual achievement of a many is arguably of less significance than the nature of his aspirations and the manner of his life.”
Aplin notes that Turgenev took this idea from Goethe and developed it off and on throughout his fiction and at length in the lecture “Hamlet and Don Quixote” (1860). The fear behind this idea seems to be that an artist may die before he can fulfill his potential, leaving behind a body of work that will be misinterpreted by future generations as unrealized or incomplete. On the other hand, others may look at the works of an author such as Turgenev and feel that no matter what he left undone, it would be more than most of us could produce in several lifetimes.
© Leann Davis Alspaugh All rights reserved.
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