A Month in the Country
By Ivan TurgenevTranslated Richard Nelson, Richard Pevear, and Larissa VolokhonskyTheater Communications Group, 2015The Russian experience has always made for literature both emotionally moving and intellectually stimulating to an extraordinarily high degree. It is no wonder (and certainly no secret) that the masters of Russian literature, particularly from the 19th century, make up so much of the Western canon. And it is precisely the predisposition to universality that obscures the potential oddity of Russian literature’s place in Western culture, given the question of whether Russia is part of the West at all. For a clear lens through which to view this demand, the beguilingly refined works of playwright and novelist Ivan Turgenev provide critique and admiration of both Russian tradition and the values founded in Western Europe’s Age of Reason. His delicate, incisive play, A Month in the Country, which does just this, has found new life in the hands of renowned translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who continue their thirty-odd-volume streak of reminding English readers of the greatness—and relevance—of the best Russian literature. They are joined on this occasion by Richard Nelson, who, in addition to his own large catalogue of plays, produced A Month in the Country at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2012.A central animating tension in 19th century Russia was the varied response to the 18th -century modernizing reforms of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. These included a move toward constitutionalism and the implementation of a series of ranks in government service, which sought to mitigate the pure nepotism of the aristocracy. These liberal advancements were accompanied by strict censorship, imperial expansion, and an unrelenting grip on the serf system, and so did not grant the kind of freedom we now take as given. But they were nevertheless sufficiently radical—if only in implication—to effectively rend the country’s intellectual life in two.On one side were the Slavophiles, a diverse range of mystics, writers, religious thinkers, and politicians who, despite their many differences, adhered to the opinion that Russia was a country of unique origin with a self-contained destiny which could only be diluted by Western influence. Most famous now among these were, in their own ways, the novelists Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.Opposing this view were the zapadniks, or Westernizers, who embraced the reforms and sought a greater identification with the rest of Europe, particularly France, Germany, and England. This way of thinking found favor amongst the upper classes, who enjoyed the elegant dress, amusing opera, and refined sensibility of the West, even if those brash young men interested in the scientific and political Enlightenment upset their affinity for a particularly soft brand of Russian mysticism.But the Westernizers were not exclusively society women and vulgar scientists. Many were drawn not only to the West’s freedom and prosperity, but also to the vibrancy and depth of its artistic and philosophical traditions. Chief amongst this brand of admirers was Turgenev, many of whose works explore the possible outcomes of Western influence in a style less like that of his fiery compatriots and more like the realism of his friends Flaubert and Henry James.Born in 1818 to a wealthy family, Turgenev spent his early years studying philosophy, history, and literature in the capitals of Europe. He spent time in the universities of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin. He read Hegel, was personally acquainted with the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and received early encouragement from Westernizing critic Vissarion Belinsky. During the difficult final years of Nicholas I, Turgenev emigrated to Paris (along with most of Russia’s intelligentsia), where befriended Flaubert. The two shared literary tastes and a disdain for radical politics, and it was this companionship (as well as a hostile Russian readership, exasperating censors, and a life-long affair with opera singer Pauline Viardot) that kept Turgenev in Paris—and away from Russia—for much of his later life.The reign of Nicolas I was notoriously reactionary, with a special zeal censorship. This created a suffocating environment, with every writer fearing for his life should he say the wrong word. And justifiably so: the young Dostoevsky’s participation in a liberal reading group was enough to have him sentenced to death, though the sentence was famously commuted to four years hard labor at the moment the future novelist stared down the firing range. Turgenev himself was given a month in prison and two years exile on his estate in part for publishing an obituary for Gogol, in part for 1852’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, a collection of short stories which, in addition to influencing virtually every subsequent Russian writer, played a significant role in turning public (that is, aristocratic) opinion against serfdom. With both his idyllic hunting days and the abuse he suffered at the hands of his domineering mother in mind, Turgenev crafted these stories with a remarkable light touch, the themes of degradation and death balanced by pastoral beauty and an almost noble vitality.A Sportsman’s Sketches established Turgenev as among the greatest of Russian writers, an impression which, despite the disdain of increasingly Slavophilic contemporaries such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, has remained vivid. In fact, a century and a half in the future, that disdain seems ever-stranger for so perceptive a chronicler of the increasingly troubled interaction between Russia and the West.A Month in the Country was published in 1855 after five years of battling with censors and was not performed until 1872, when it and its author had already achieved international fame. The story takes place in the early 1840s over the course of several days on the estate of an oblivious aristocrat named Arkady Islaev. The play centers around his wife, Natalya, who is seven years his junior and unspeakably bored. Mikhail Rakitin, a friend of the house and six years Arkady’s junior, is desperately in love with Natalya. Though she does not return his affection, she humors him for lack of anything better to do. The action begins just prior to the introduction of a young, handsome tutor who has come for the summer, and with whom Natalya (along with her ward, Vera) will fall in love. Before his arrival, in a pattern familiar to any reader of 19th century literature, the estate residents and their assorted acquaintances spend their time playing cards and bitching at each other. Prominent in this crowd is the cynical physician, Shpigelsky:
Natalya: Doctor. How are you?Shpigelsky: I like that question very much…It means you’re in good health. How are things with me?A decent doctor is always healthy, unless he just up and dies… (Laughs)Natalya: Sit down. I am in good health, actually… but I’m out of sorts…and that’s a kind of ill health.Shpigelsky: (Sitting down by Natalya Petrovna) Let’s see about your pulse… (He feels her pulse) Ah, nerves, nerves… You don’t walk enough, Natalya Petrovna…you don’t laugh enough…that’s what…Mikhail Alexandrych, why are you staring? I could always prescribe you some drops.Natalya; I have nothing against laughing…(With some animation) Now you, doctor…you’ve got a wicked tongue, I like that about you, and I respect it!... Tell me something funny, Mikhail Alexandrych keeps philosophizing today.Shpigelsky: (Glancing furtively at Rakitin) Obviously it’s not only the nerves suffering—the bile’s also rising a bit…
Sitting just below the surface of this repartee are the social and spiritual conditions which were so hotly contested in Turgenev’s time. The boredom, the sarcasm, the spite—what comfort the upper classes enjoy is marred by a deep emptiness at the center of their lives. They are entrenched in their wealth and suffering from a sclerosis no doubt connected to the fact that while they lounge, generations of serfs live and die in bondage.These are the conditions to which both the Slavophiles and the Westernizers were responding, and which gave rise to two types of men Turgenev helped to characterize throughout his work.The first of these were the superfluous men, a role prefigured by Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Lermontov’s Pechorin in A Hero for Our Time, and given name by Turgenev’s own Diary of a Superfluous Man. Highly educated, wealthy, often charming and attractive, these young men nevertheless lived in spiritual isolation, cut off from meaning with no war or love worth fighting and dying for. In A Month in the Country, Rakitin’s superfluity leaves him unprepared for his love of Natalya, and so he spends his days racked with anxiety:
Rakitin: […] Ah, how ridiculous they are, people with only one thought in their head, one purpose, one occupation in life…Like me, for instance. What she said is true: you observe little trifles from morning till night, and turn into a trifle yourself… It’s all true. But I can’t live without her.
The second type were known as nihilists, a term coined by German theologian Friedrich Jacobi but popularized by Turgenev’s masterpiece, the novel Fathers and Sons. These were men convinced of the uselessness of traditional values (though most did not carry this to the extremity with which we now associate the term) and advocated a radical egalitarianism, often accompanied by a devotion to science. In Fathers and Sons, Turgenev gave us Eugene Barazov, a medical student, as the prototypical nihilist, whose views are shaken when he falls in love. A Month in the Country’s nihilist role is played by the doctor, Shpigelsky. Through the lens of his scientific reverse-snobbery, he watches the aristocrats amongst whom he mingles with a scornful eye. There is simply nothing they can do to earn his respect, since they are all the unwitting products of a morally and intellectually bankrupt culture. In the initial battles with the censors, the doctor’s long speeches took the heaviest cuts, though to modern eyes there may not seem much politically dangerous about a skeptical view of love and marriage:
Shpigelsky: […] Since when do only intelligent people get married? In other things, maybe, but in marriage a fool’s entitled to his share. You say I got myself involved in it…I didn’t. Here’s a how it happened: a friend asks me to put in a word for him…What, should I refuse…I carry out my friend’s errand. The answer is, “Thank you very much. Kindly don’t trouble yourself anymore…” I understand and I don’t trouble anymore. Then suddenly I’m sought out, encouraged, so to speak…I go along. Indignation! Is it my fault?
The action of the play—that the “bored beauty,” as Natalya was called in a review of a recent performance, falls in love with Balyaev (who is himself a mixture of nihilist and superfluous man) and wrecks everyone’s life trying to make the incipient affair work—is predictable. An unsympathetic audience, fed up with the English and French comedies of manners that inspired Turgenev, might dismiss the play as just another zepadnik intellectual trying to Westernize Russia. And that, to a certain extent, is Turgenev’s point. His taking-up of Western style was anything but an escape from his native land. It was how he engaged with the soul of Russia and, with the stakes continually raised by political and cultural developments, it was how he tried to help save the country from itself.The extraordinary fire that burns through the Russian experience gives a wonderful light, but it also has the potential to raze the country to the ground. Any alternative, in the form either of a return to Slavic roots or an embrace of Western Enlightenment, will introduce only more trouble in the hands of rash men and women. Thus the speaker to be heeded in A Month in the Country is not any of the characters, but the playwright himself: cautious, sensitive, and, perhaps above all, realistic.____Jack Hanson‘s previous reviews & poetry for Open Letters can be found here.
