Abstract
This article considers aspects of the social imaginary underlying early Russian realist thought and narrative by exploring two canonical novels from the 1840s, Ivan Gončarov’s Obyknovennaja istorija and Aleksandr Gercen’s Kto vinovat?, in light of Vissarion Belinskij’s activist reception of Hegel’s political philosophy. The Russian texts are read symptomatically against their western counterparts as illustrating the intriguing transformations that dominant European models of narrative and sociality undergo as they migrate to Russia.
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Notes
Belinskij was understood in this way both by his contemporaries and by later scholars. See, for example, Čiževskij (1939, 159). Špet (1991) constitutes an exception, since he is less interested in the correctness of Belinskij’s interpretations than in their national and historical symptomatics. See especially pp. 143–44. Vadim Shkolnikov’s essay in this volume also offers a more sophisticated interpretation of Belinskij’s engagement with Hegel than tends to be adopted in standard accounts.
In Kliger (2011) I invoke the same cast of characters to make a different but related point about the early years of Russian realist thought and writing. That essay focused on the role of the reception of Hegelian aesthetics and philosophy of history in the formation of the realist imagination in Russia. Here, I hope to offer a complementary analysis centering on political philosophy and the fictional modeling of the social world.
I draw the term “social imaginary” from Taylor (2004, 23–30).
A discussion of civil society as the negation of Hegelian Sittlichkeit within Sittlichkeit itself can be found, for example, in Cohen and Arato (1992, 91–102).
This roughly corresponds to the section in the Phenomenology on self-consciousness with its movement from the assertion of absolute independence (self-certainty) and struggle to the death to the consciousness of dependence on the other and mutual recognition.
Belinskij does mention obščestvo later in the article with the apparent sense of “civil society.” In passing he even mentions “estate” and “guild” (cekh), but it is significant here that instead of gradual aggregation towards collective institutions and meanings, Belinskij’s atomized individuals collapse back onto immediate feeling of unity with others through love. In other words, Belinskij knows what civil society really is in Hegel; he simply has little use for it.
Writing from abroad, Nikolai Stankevič asks Timofej Granovskij to convey this message to Belinskij and Mikhail Katkov, who, in his view, misunderstand Hegel’s concept of Wirklichkeit by taking it to refer to the simply given, to “exterior being,” or empirical immediacy. See Mann (1969, 235).
Given the underlying social imaginary that blends the Hegelian logics of family and state into a kind of sacred substantiality of spirit, it becomes easier to understand Belinskij’s tendency for stark teratological figurations of dejstvitel’nost’. Thus, he casts it as “an invisible, hundred-armed giant;” “a colossal and hostile ghost;” repeatedly in his personal letters as “a fiend armed with iron claws and iron jaws;” and, in more abstract terms, “the fatum of the ancients.” With all of these, only two options are available: one either reconciles with them or one is crushed.
This sort of imagery is of course very common in Hegel’s writing. Perhaps the best known of them is the vision in the Preface to the Phenomenology of the movement of truth as a Bacchanalian revel, which is in its essence nothing but simple repose (Hegel 1976, 27).
I should note that the elder Aduev is, in addition to being a high-ranking civil servant, also an owner of a factory. However, the novel consistently assimilates the manufacturer’s position to that of the bureaucrat. In other words, the factory here is important insofar as it provides a useful metaphor for the machine-like workings of state administration: “And day by day, hour by hour, today, tomorrow, for ever and ever, the bureaucratic machine goes on working smoothly, never resting, as if there were no such thing as human beings—only wheels and cogs” (Gončarov 2001, 82).
For a classical discussion of the salon as a prominent integrative institution of civil society as well as a particularly fecund socio-symbolic ground for the development of modern fiction, see Habermas 1991, 27–51.
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Kliger, I. Hegel’s political philosophy and the social imaginary of early Russian realism. Stud East Eur Thought 65, 189–199 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-014-9188-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-014-9188-z