A great literary history can improve the thinking level of a country's overall literature. By measuring by the three dimensions of literary talent, knowledge and historical knowledge, the better Millsky is, the worse other literary history is.
Big work of literature, learning and history: Mirsky's "History of Russian Literature"
Author | Jiang Ruoshui
This article was originally published in "Only Reading 08·Roamer"
How to say it? I am like a confident patient, and I have been obsessed with Russian literature for a long time and hopelessly. That's what Nabokov said about Edmund Wilson back then. I don't know a single big word in Russian, and Wilson at least learned some Russian. But Nabokov said that it is not serious to Wilson want to complain about the translated "Yevgeny Onegin" he wrote and annotated. I am now giving Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky's "History of Russian Literature", of course it is not serious. But to me, Russian literature is not knowledge, nor even faith, it is just a disease. There are so many people in the world who are sick with me. This is why we always think of Russia, regardless of whether it is a reason or not. Cooche's novel "The Chronicles of the Age of the Age" is about other things, but at the end, I would like to express my gratitude to my Russian mother for the infection she gave us. Nie Gannu read Shen Congwen's short story "Husband" written by life in western Hunan, and said, "It's really great, Russian sorrow!" Another friend of mine wrote a poem on a night in a rural village in England, saying that it was foggy and the moon was like a withered longing, "with Russian-style suffering." All of these things show that Russian literature is nothing but a disease.
Milsky and I met too late. He spoke Russian literature so well, and every sentence was in my mind, and every sentence happened to me. I was like a person walking on the night road found the lamp, and a person seeing the doctor found the right doctor. His two volumes of the English original work of "History of Russian Literature" - "History of Russian Literature: From the Earliest Times to the Death of Dostoyevsky, 1881) and "Contemporary Russian Literature, 1881 - 1925" were published in 1926 and 1927. It has long been the first choice for British and American college students to study Russian literature. The Chinese version was translated by Liu Wenfei in 2013 and was published by People's Publishing House. Unfortunately, several generations of Chinese readers have missed it. For these generations, although Russian literature is a compulsory course in their emotional education, it is also a self-study course because there are no reference books, because all reference books are nothing more than a package of comments about Russian classic writers from Belinsky to Lenin, and all literary history is a compilation of these comments. "The most sober realism" and "a mirror of the Russian revolution", such headless cases and false propositions are just like Chernyshevsky's saying "beauty is life", and saying it means not saying it. So, for many years, for Russian literary masters, I have never read only works, not reviews, let alone literary history. The first time I read "History of Russian Literature" was Mirsky's, which is enough to be grateful that I had a high starting point. Oh, the starting point for starting again in more than thirty years.
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Read Mirsky's two volumes, like swimming with this duke in the Russian literature gallery, listening to him walking around, giving you comments one by one. Unlike ordinary soul-sense readers, Millsky always occupies a transcendent position, drives away facts, sticks to thinking closely, and faces powerful or weak texts. He analyzes, refines, summarizes, and carries out, and treats every writer and every part carefully and fluently. He was confident and mobilized huge resources, but he was light on his weight and did not rely on other people's comments as circumstantial evidence. He could hardly even have citations - "Summarizing it in his own language may be an offense, and citing several fragments would be a detriment to it." (II.1.2).So he was able to rely on nothing and point directly to the source of his heart:
The relationship pattern between Tajiyana and Onegin was often reproduced in Russian novels. However, Pushkin's classic attitude, namely, sympathy for men without compassion and respect for women without reward, never reappeared. (I.4.4)
Tolstoy was Freud's pioneer, but the amazing difference between artist Tolstoy and scientist Freud is that this artist obviously has less imagination than that scientist, and is more realistic and objective and calm. Compared to Tolstoy, Freud is a poet and a folk storyteller. (I.8.1)
As a playwright, Gorky was just a bad student of Chekhov. The term “bad” is purely redundant, because the playwright Chekhov could not have a good student. (II.3.2)
This new world of Merezhkovsky and its mysterious connection and enantiosity are extremely attractive to those readers who drink the positivist light ale with idealistic colors. (II.4.3)
Milsky commented on Belinsky in this way: "He can always point out almost without error that whoever has real talent and knowledge in his contemporaries has nothing to do with fiction, who is important and who is only second-rate." He also called Xu Turgenev: "He is actually the leader of Petersburg literature, and his judgments and decisions have legal effects."Milsky's judgment and decisions are extremely precise and have legal effects.
Milsky (1890-1939)
Russia has formed the literary and ideological wonders of thought due to abnormal social and historical development. Writers and works generally have the characteristics of "overload of thought" and "moral overload". Few people emphasize the form and skills of literature. Even if Gogol and Tolstoy are first-class masters of skills in world literature, they do not discuss skills very much. According to Mirsky, the literary theory of the three tycoons of Belinsky, Chernishevsky and Dubrolubov only regards literature as a map, photograph, and preaching text of social life, and lacks aesthetic dimensions. Their contempt for work and skills and their desire for expression of ideas poison Russian literature, so much so that Shklovsky would say hatefully: "I hate Belinsky and all other murderers who killed Russian literature (fortunately they did not succeed)." Nabokov regarded Tolstoy and Dostoevsky's works as reading materials in adolescence, saying that they were beneficial to the growth of their thoughts, but in fact they were very dissatisfied with this atmosphere.
Milsky's literary history introduces aesthetic considerations beyond the social criticism tradition of Russian literary theory. He often makes precise analysis of the structure and rhythm of his work, which is convincing. For example, the whole chapter of "War and Peace" about historical philosophy is confused and critics are criticized, but Mirsky dispels our doubts in one sentence: "These theoretical chapters add an indispensable depth of field and intellectual atmosphere to the huge picture of this great novel." The relatively simple appearance of Chekhov's novel makes it easy for everyone to take its formal skills lightly, but Mirsky points out the secret of the musical tone for us:
His novels are both fluid and meticulous. He constructed the story with very complex arcs, but these arcs were estimated with the most precise estimate. His novel is composed of a series of dots, based on which he can draw clear lines in the chaos of consciousness. Chekhov is good at tracing the initial stages of the emotional process, and he can point out the initial signs of deviation, but to the common people's eyes, the newly emerging curve still seems to intersect with the straight line. The slight touch that was difficult to attract readers' attention at first, but could suggest the direction of the story. Since then, it has been repeated as the main theme. With each repetition, the deviation of the arc becomes more and more obvious, and eventually parted ways with the original straight line. "The Literary Teacher", "Jonech" and "The Woman with a Puppy" are both perfect examples of this emotional arc. (II.2.9)
It can be seen that Mirsky looked at his object in a straight line, saying one thing, two things, and saying one thing is the same.With meticulous analysis and strong rationale support, his conclusions always seem to be so useful to his master, but they are firm and difficult to move. You might as well quote another comment about Chekhov, which can also show the careful gaze brought to him by Mirsky's comparative vision, which also constitutes a major feature of this literary history:
, like Stendhal and French classic writers, is different from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Proust. Chekhov studies "universal people" as a kind of people. But unlike those classic writers, like Proust, he focuses on the smallest details, the "trivial" and "small details" of the soul. Stendhal appeals to the "integral" of psychology, and he tracks the main line of conscious and creative life in psychological life; Chekhov focuses on the "differential" of consciousness, focusing on his unconscious, involuntary, and secondary forces that melt and destructively. (II.2.9)
Milsky has a strong sense of style and is extremely sensitive to language. He can touch the texture of the text and feel the astringency, smoothness, looseness, tightness, clearness and turbidity of the sentences. For example, Baladinsky's poems have a certain "fragile sense", which is an extreme contrast with Pushkin's elastic tension; Gogol's prose is "dense and full" and "full of real spoken words"; Belinsky's writing is "bad", and he is responsible for the terrible looseness and messy Russian news style; Turgenev has no sense of words, and the language only reaches an extremely limited contract with him, and does not provide services beyond the daily reality of the 19th century; Tolstoy's later prose culture is as pure as that, and it is an authentic "Purgatory prose". Given that this literary history is aimed at Western readers who are ignorant of Russian, he specifically introduced the standard of "translationality" to test the language texture of Russian writers. Gogol is too complicated. "His prose is hopeless to be translated. It is difficult to translate and may be better than any Russian prose." (I.5.8) The opposite example is:
Chekhov's Russian is also a big weakness. His Russian language has no color, lacks personality, and he has no keen sense of words. No Russian writer as important as him would use a language that lacks color and anger. This makes Chekhov very easy to translate. Of all Russian writers, he was least worried about the betrayal of the translator. (II.2.9)
Gorky's language is also "neutral", and its words are only symbols, but no independent inner life. Except for certain mantras, they can be considered as translations from any foreign language. (II.3.2)
Asking for literary talent from a literary history is equivalent to asking for beauty from a judge, but Millsky's meticulous thinking is like an old official's verb, his lyrics are light and as light as a woman's outing in spring, and his Chinese writing is colorful everywhere, and a kind of humor appears from time to time, which makes people understand it. Take the example of Blok in Volume 2 Chapter 5, Section 9:
He has the natural nobility of a fallen angel, and everyone who knows him can feel a certain noble quality in him. He is very handsome and can be regarded as an excellent example of the so-called "Nordic bloodline" today. He is the intersection of multiple traditional lines, he is both Russian and European, not to mention that he is also a mixed race.
This is a nebula of words, which is only language music in the eyes of lay readers. It best echoes Weilren's rule, that is, "music, first of all, music." Later, in the play "Stranger Girl", Blok asked a poet (apparently a self-deprecating portrait) to read a poem he wrote to a guy in a restaurant. After listening to it, the guy commented, "I don't understand, but it's quite exquisite!" Not a few soulmates, Blok's early admirers' attitude was generally consistent with this guy.
What made "Twelve" a great long poem is not its intellectual symbolism, what is important is not what it means, but what it is. Bloch's musical talent reached its peak in this work. From the perspective of metric structure, this work is a "rare miracle".
You can't see such exquisite comments in Chinese literary history works, and you can freely express yourself.Perhaps Qian Zhongshu's "Selected Notes on Song Poems" can give us the same reading pleasure, but Mirsky has to perform the drama of Taiwan for several days, and his system determines that he can gallop across a vast territory, with the tone being broken and suddenly continuing, and the theme changes are the same, just like a symphony. For example, when I read Mirsky's two special verses on Dostoevsky, it was clearly like listening to an eloquent music. What I get from the analysis of his ideological novel and the comparison with Tolstoy is beyond the sum of the monographs of Merezhkovsky and George Steiner. "Huainanzi" says that the most respectful things in the middle and the ranks of the ranks are considered, and the differences are different, and each one should be given. "So, one person is obtained, so one hundred people." Yes, a Millsky can match a hundred things.
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Blessed are those who have this two-volume book by Mirsky as a starting point. This book is full of insights and is extremely original. Although ordinary readers can see the beauty of Russian literature through it, those who are well-educated can also gain valuable inspiration from it. The so-called residual cream is left with many people who are beggars. Let me give you two examples below.
I think Mirsky's interpretation of Gogol is the starting point of Nabokov's book "Nicolagh Gogol". And his interpretation of Herzen was the starting point of Isaiah Berlin's book "The Russian Thinker".
Gogol was a realist writer and a genius who ruthlessly exposed and sarcastic satirical Russia's bureaucratic system and social life at that time. This has become a consensus and common sense. However, Nabokov said, if you want to find anything about Russia, if you are interested in "concepts", "facts" and "information", please stay away from Gogol. "It is as futile to find a true Russian background in "Dead Souls" as trying to generate a concept about Denmark based on the small event of Elsino in the thick fog." Even the text describing the scenery of the Russian land cannot be considered as true. "This is Gogol's personal Russia, not Ural, Altai, and Caucasian Russia." Because Gogol created a zoomed four-dimensional world, an irrational inverted dream, and the result of pure imagination. In short, Gogol is a fantasy writer and a non-realist.
Gogol (1809-1852)
This is really a subversive view, which is equivalent to telling you that the deer in front of you is actually a horse. But let’s wait, Nabokov’s 1944 book “Nicolo Gogol” (translated by Liu Jialin, 2010 edition) has long been the first to be heard in the first volume of Mirsky’s literary history, Chapter 5, Section 8:
Gogol is both a realist and a non-realist. The reality in his eyes is not the reality itself.
Gogol's works are not objective satire, but subjective satire. "The Imperial Envoy" and "Dead Soul" are satirical of the self. If it is called a satirical of Russia and humanity, it is also a reflective self-described as a reflection of the self.
It is obvious that Nabokov expressed Mirsky's view of balancing in an extreme way, but the patent of Gogol's "non-realistic" should still be attributed to Mirsky. Mirsky praised Gogol for shaping characters entirely based on his imagination, giving subjective comicality, light and precise brushstrokes, and the depiction of an unexpected reality can dwarf the visible world. These words have been rewritten and expanded by Nabokov. For example, Millsky discovered:
The main feature of Gogol's talent is its very sharp and vivid vision. The outside world in his eyes is not consistent with what we usually see. What he saw was a world transformed by romanticism. Even if he witnessed the same details as we did, those details would change proportions in his eyes, showing a completely different meaning and size.
Nabokov also used modern physics concepts such as "four-dimensional" and "space curvature" to repeat Mirsky in a colorful way. Mirsky said that Gogol likes to exaggerate the characteristics of the characters and then simplify them into geometric patterns, and Nabokov brought out non-European geometry in one stroke.So, when he said that after reading Gogol, our eyes would be Gogol, and I believe that he would think of Gogol's wonderful compound eyes outlined by Mirsky.
Even Nabokov talked about the "vulgar" issue of Gogol's performance in "Nicolo Gogol" for more than ten pages, which came from Mirsky. When Nabokov said, "Russia can express a common disadvantage in a ruthless word, and the other three European languages I happen to master do not have this special word", and this word is "poshlost". Perhaps he had long forgotten that Mirsky had already written Gogol without bothering:
The level he focused on in reality was a Russian concept that was difficult to translate, namely "poshlost", and the best translation of this word may be moral and spiritual "self-satisfied inferiority".
He is a great taboo breaker, a great forbidden zone destroyer. He made vulgarity occupy the throne that was once occupied only for sublime and beauty. Historically, this is the most important aspect of his creation.
When Nabokov talks about the "unrelated details" of Gogol's novels, I believe that it must have been inspired by the "superfluous details" that Mirsky often mentioned.
As for Isaiah Berlin's book "Russian Thinker" received favor from Mirsky, Gerald Smith (G. S.Smith's sentence has revealed the secret of heaven: "Mirsky's analysis of Herzen's enlightenment liberalism undoubtedly had an impact on Isaiah Berlin's own interpretation of Herzen, and Berlin's interpretation of Herzen is the basis of his interpretation of Russian thought."
Book Film
Indeed, Lu Jiande once said: "The real protagonist in the book "The Russian Thinker" is Herzen, who Berlin has always admired." This book has a translation of Peng Huaidong, Yilin Publishing House in 2001. The most important article "The Glorious Ten Years" and "Herzen and Bakunin on Personal Freedom", which all have the essence of the short theory of Herzen in Volume 1, Chapter 7, Section 3 of the History of Russian Literature. Mirsky believed that Herzen occupies an equally important position in political history, intellectual history and literary history. No history of Russian thought cannot without exploring many of Herzen's ideas:
The core of his thoughts is always freedom rather than equality, and few Russians are as strongly aware of the freedom of personality and the rights of human beings as strongly as Herzen.
His thoughts are mainly historical thoughts, and he understands history as a spontaneous, non-presupposed, immeasurable force... He discovered the "creative" in the formation process, believing that every future new is the passage that refutes all fatalistic thoughts and the role of all external ideas that guide human history belongs to the most wonderful words he wrote.
is OK, this has set the tone for Berlin's "Russian Thinker". It seemed that he had just talked from his supervisor and suddenly realized that he knew where his paper was going. His quotations, analysis and proofs, his sorting out free humanistic traditions, his criticism of the progressive philosophy of determinism, and his evaluation of Herzen's wisdom, his wisdom fairness and his profound historical intuition can be seen to be excellent in Mirsky. Berlin did not give thanks to Millsky in the article, which was a great negligence.
Berlin wrote "Tolstoy and Enlightenment", which began with a quote from Nikolay K. Mikhaylovsky's article "Tolstoy's Left and Right Hand" (1875), saying that it made a wonderful defense for Tolstoy from both ideological and moral aspects, and analyzed an internal conflict in his concepts. Berlin Qian said that his comments below were just "extended comments" of Mikhailovsky. This humble demeanor would fascinate everyone, but his first sentence was not honest enough, saying that this was "an article that had been forgotten by the world in the mid-1870s."Who said he forgot? The first and last two volumes of Millsky's literary history, and the two special sections about Tolstoy mentioned this "smart critic" and "extremely keen critic", who can discover the true revolutionary foundation of Tolstoy's worldview and foresee his subsequent ideological development. In the section "The Chiefs of the Radicals", Mirsky also specifically mentioned Mikhailovsky and his article on Tolstoy: "He foresaw the essential anarchist foundation of Tolstoy's thoughts with amazing judgment, which derived Tolstoy's later sociological theories." (I.7.4)
Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Specific Tolstoy's writing techniques, I only need to use Berlin and Mir to write. A passage of Sky's text juxtaposition allows readers to distinguish the intertextual relationship between them:
Tolstoy's genius is to be able to reproduce things that are difficult to value and to accurately understand: cleverly capture the individual's complete and difficult to write personality, and the spirit appears like a god, which leads readers to realize that the object is the current true nature, rather than just seeing a simple description; in order to create this situation, he uses metaphors that can condense a certain empirical characteristic, and avoid general words, so as to avoid missing individual differences - "vibration of feelings" because it is favorable to the commonality of things - so that special experiences are inseparable from similar cases. (Berlin: "The Hedgehog and the Fox")
, a technique of carefully dissecting and exploring atoms, was called "disfamiliarization" by Sklovsky. The connotation of this method is that it never calls complex things by a generally accepted name, and it always decomposes a complex behavior or object into many indivisible components. It only describes objectively, and does not name names. This technique stripped away the labels attached to life and social customs from the surrounding world, showing its "non-civilized" appearance, just as Adam saw on the first day of creation, or a born blind man who had first learned the world. (I.8.1)
Nabokov and Berlin both benefited from Mirsky, and the latter earned a lot, but the two have different evaluations of the history of Mirsch literature. Nabokov highly praised: "Yes, I admire Mirsky's work very much. In fact, I think this is the best Russian literary history written in all languages, including Russian." But Berlin praised and wrote: "Mirsky's judgment is very personal, and the historical facts he proposed are often inaccurate." "He is not a organized critic, and there are a lot of omissions in his works." Professor Smith retorted: How could it be? Millsky is perfect. When I read this, what I think of is the scheming of this person that Lu Jiande talked about in his articles about Berlin in "The Benefits Behind Thoughts".
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A great literary history can improve the thinking level of a country's overall literature. English and American students have Mirsky’s foundation, so their thinking on Russian literature cannot be mediocre. Chinese literature lacks such a literary history. Although there are thousands of books in the market, there are fewer people who have not become ghosts, household registration books, and bookkeeping accounts. I looked through the three huge volumes of "History of Chinese Literature in Colombia" that I just published, and found that Wang Yuyang had talked about seven pages, but Lao Du only had two pages, and he felt that the new ghost was big and the old ghost was small, which was very unreliable. Xia Zhiqing, whose academic community has highly praised the "History of Modern Chinese Novels", quoted Qian Zhongshu's "Siege" and could lead to six and a half pages in one breath, while Lu Xun's "New Story" was sent out six and a half lines. Donald Davie commented that Millsky's two-volume "History of Russian Literature" is sharp, profound, interesting and tolerant, with excellent structure and proper proportions, and is a model for literary history writing. If we look at all kinds of literary history based on this standard, it is really the pink and colorful ones of the six palaces. In short, by measuring the three dimensions of literary talent, knowledge and historical knowledge, the better Millsky is, the worse other literary history is.
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