Sacrificial Plotlines
In 1850, a rich nobleman, Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin, who divided his time between translating Hegel and womanizing in high quarters, got rid of his French mistress. He brought her from Paris to Moscow, lived with her for a number of years and was reasonably attached to her, but at this point he had other liaisons. The French woman was found on the road, beaten by an iron bar and with her throat slashed. Although Sukhovo-Kobylin blamed his servants and bribed the police, the authorities suspected him. The investigation lasted for seven years, after which all suspects, including the master and his serfs, were acquitted. To this day, this story has attracted scholars, who have been invariably divided in their judgments as to who is to blame (Murav 1998; Seleznev and Selezneva 2002). Under police investigation Sukhovo-Kobylin began writing comedies; he worked on his trilogy, which made him famous, for 30 years. In the first comedy, a rich bride is seduced by a rogue and barely survives. In the second, her father sells his wealth in order to save her from the police, and dies. In the third, a police officer plays a werewolf, imitating death and resurrection. From the 1850s to the 1880s, the female character stepped back from the cycle, allowing the corrupted, entirely irrational men around her to annihilate themselves without any help from her. With a dark irony, the epigraph to the trilogy is taken from Hegeclass="underline" "If you look rationally at this world it will look rationally at you."
In novelistic fiction as opposed to historical non-fiction, the relationship between the Empire and the people was intrinsically connected with the relationship between men and women. Two romantic and colonial themes, the Russian woman as tragic sacrifice and the Russian peasant as noble savage, became crucial elements for the national imagery. Great writers developed these themes, or rather these themes made great writers. Almost invariably, Russian literature depicted men and women, on the one hand, and those from high culture and those from the people, on another hand, as creatures of a fundamentally different nature.
The Contact Zone of the Novel
In her comparative study of travel writings, Mary Louise Pratt introduced a helpful concept of the contact zone, "the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict" (1992: 6). I argue that the classical Russian novel was such a contact zone, where historically and culturally separated men and women played out their conflictual relations. In his treatment of the historical poetics of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin identified, among other "persistent" chronotopes, the chronotope of the road. In Bakhtin's classification there are two lines of development in the travel noveclass="underline" in the first, the road takes the hero "through his own native country, and not some exotic alien world"; in the second, "an 'alien world,' separated from the native country by sea and distance . . . has an analogous function to that of the road" (Bakhtin 1975: 392-4). In both cases, Bakhtin argued, the hero is aware of the exotic nature of what is taking place, but in the first type of novel this is a "social exotic," whereas in the second it is a natural or ethnographic exotic associated with overseas travel.
The first, internal type of novel is represented by Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, the second, external by Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. All the Russian examples given by Bakhtin, from Radishchev to Nekrasov, belong to the internal type. The travel in social space, between classes, is as fruitful for the novel as the travel in geographical space, between continents. The road takes on the capacity of estrangement. It makes the everyday feel exotic and the boring, foreign and interesting. These ideas are connected to another of Bakhtin's typological innovations, the "idyllic chronotope." Utopia is located in distant islands; the idyll is located in local depths. Literature, Bakhtin wrote in 1937, has created idylls "from the time of Antiquity right up until recent times"; literary scholars, however, had failed to understand or evaluate this fact, "as a result of which all perspectives on the history of the novel are distorted." Bakhtin briefly surveyed the "sublimation of the idyll" in Rousseau, the "return of the idyll" in Tolstoy, and the "demise of the idyll" in Flaubert, arguing that "in Russian literature the chronological boundaries of this phenomenon are of course shifted to the second half of the nineteenth century." At this time, the novel was overwhelmed by "the idyllic complex" and Bakhtin concentrates on its chief character: "The 'man of the people' in the novel is often of idyllic provenance" (1975: 384).
Developing Bakhtin's argument somewhat further, I observe that in the Russian novel, the Man of the People is usually counterpoised to the Man of Culture. Each lives, by definition, in a different milieu, but they encounter one another in the idyllic chronotope - the contact zone of the novel. They are brought together by their occupation or by chance, but most often by "the road." In the plots of the novel, these two character-types, the Man of Culture and the Man of the People, engage in multiple relations, from mortal rivalry to redeeming brotherhood. One character-type is historical, another idyllic. Usually, the Man of Culture firmly belongs to his own time; in contrast, the Man of the People has transhistorical but national features. Endowed with the capacity and desire to move through cultural space, the Man of Culture penetrates the atemporal space of the Man of the People. And there, more often than not, he remains forever.
Love between man and woman is the eternal subject of the novel. However, the French-American literary theorist Rene Girard (1965), who was, like Bakhtin, initially inspired by Dostoevsky, argues that in the novel, erotic desire requires a mediator. To tell the story of love, the novel usually depicts three characters rather than two. The competition between two men for a woman gives rise to a paradoxical effect of mediation. They wish to get rid of one another, but instead they create mutual dependencies that sometimes make the reader suspect that the object of their passion, the woman, does not matter at all. This relationship between the rivals is interpreted in different texts as mystical, political, or even erotic. Girard explains this triangular structure in general terms, but I am mostly interested in its specific modification in the Russian nineteenth-century novel.
In Rene Girard's theory (1965, 1995), if a society is unable to achieve peace through law and the courts, it falls back on ancient mechanisms of sacrifice, as collective participation in an act of violence. Historical societies progressed by substituting human sacrifices with animal sacrifices and, then, actual sacrifices with symbolic ones. What happens in a secular society where religious rites are increasingly irrelevant but the court system is still underdeveloped? One can expect an uncontrollable growth of violence and development of various means of its symbolic substitution. Making another step, we can speculate about the novel itself as a mechanism of substitutional sacrifice. Here, it is not humans who die for the sake of the collective, but their representations. Along with drama and opera, which used similar mechanisms, the novel was the nineteenth-century method of choice for sacrificial matters. In the next century, the cinema would take this place. To be sure, not every novel ends with a corpse, but many do. And corpses had gender.