This appeared in: Ulbandus Review 5 (Fall, 1987): 123-59, without the Introduction. Note: minor changes have been made to this version.

PARADOXES OF ORGANIC CRITICISM

(LETTERS TO F. M. DOSTOEVSKY)

A. A. Grigor'ev

Introduction, Translation and Notes by Marcus Levitt

Introduction

Apollon Aleksandrovich Grigor'ev's "Parodoxes of Organic Criticism” ranks with the best of Russian nineteenthcentury literary criticism and reveals its author as one of the most tragic figures in a tradition fraught with passionate truthseekers. Grigor’ev’s swan song as a critic, “Paradoxes" is last and perhaps the best of his "programmatic articles" of the last ten years of his life, in which he triedfollowing Belinsky's exampleto reevaluate the entire course of Russian literary development. In the form of two letters to Fedor Dostoevsky, "Paradoxes" appeared in the novelist’s thick journal Epokha in the May and June issues of 1864.1 A few months later, on September 25, 1864, Grigor'ev died, suddenly, after release from debtor's prison, where he had done several short stretches during the last, troubled years of his life. He was 42.

After the demise of M. P. Pogodin's Moskvityanin in the midfifties, Grigor'ev had an extremely difficult time as a critic, both in finding a journal for which he could write, and reorienting himself in the literary politics of the Emancipation period. Moskvityanin's socalled "molodaya redaktsiya'" which Grigor'ev headed, had championed the cause of a national literary tradition. They challenged such "natural school" critics as I. I. Panaev who denied the existence and feasibility, indeed the desirability, of a peculiarly "Russian" literature.2 Grigor'ev had made bold to proclaim the young playwright Nikolay Ostrovsky as Russia's "new word," that is, an affirmation and proof of national elements in literature. But it wasn’t hard for even such relatively sympathetic critics as A. V. Druzhinin to call Grigor’ev to task for his extravagant assertion.3

Belinsky once wrote to Gogol that

Now you are the only one we have, and my moral existence and love of creative literature are closely bound up with your fate; if you did not exist I would bid farewell to both the present and future of our country's creative life. I would live only in the past. . . 4

Now, in the last period of his life, Grigor'ev found himself in the very position that Belinsky had so dreaded: a critic without an author. As Grigor’ev himself often insisted, critical theories alone, without the ultimate authority of art to inspire and validate them, are doomed, "a lost cause." Grigor'ev refused to use art as platform or pretext for his own views, a critical modus vivendi for which he bitterly reproached Belinsky’s epigones, the radical social critics. Together with tracing the history of the current malaise in Russian literature and criticism, he took the unhappy alternative Belinsky had suggested: he looked to the past, and, looking back, saw all roads leading to Pushkin, who emerges as the great hero of Russian culture in Grigor'ev's late writings.

As for a place to publish, Grigor'ev did find a niche in collaboration with the Dostoevsky brothers and the young philosopher N. N. Strakhov on Vremya and Epokha. But their new doctrine of "pochvennichestvo," or "a return to the soil" and to national roots, met with little sympathy in the face of the growing polarization within the intelligentsia that characterized the period immediately following the liberation of the serfs.5 Grigor'ev grew more and more despondent, and in "Paradoxes" he paints a rather pessimistic and even selfdefeating portrait of himself as "a voice crying out in the wilderness," as an Isaiah, convinced of the truth of his ideas yet tragically unable to make even his closest collaborators like Dostoevsky really understand.6

"Paradoxes" represents a valuable document for understanding Dostoevsky’s development in the sixties. As chief critic on Dostoevsky’s journals, Grigor'ev's ideas clearly must have had an impact on the novelist’s own views, even if we concede that Dostoevsky's basic intellectual and aesthetic preferences had been formulated before his return to Petersburg and his collaboration with Grigor'ev in 185964. It was precisely this period that saw the emergence of the "new" Dostoevsky, author of the major, ideological novels. That Grigor'ev addressed these open letters to Dostoevsky implies their closeness, yet at the same time the letters also betray Grigor'ev's acute sense of isolation. The most common evidence cited to prove Grigor'ev's influence on Dostoevsky are his outspoken views on Pushkin; Dostoevsky's famous "Pushkin speech" of 1880 may be seen as a reworking and "messianization" of Grigor'ev's ideas.7 Like Grigor'ev, Dostoevsky looked back to Pushkin as proof of the existence of a specifically Russian, national culture. Yet there are many other of Grigor’ev’s ideas from "Paradoxes" that later show up in Dostoevsky's notebooks and in the Diary of a Writer of the seventies, especially after Strakhov published a volume of Grigor'ev's articles (including this one) in 1876.8

But the importance of "Paradoxes" goes far beyond its value either as a supplement to Grigor'ev's biography or as proof of his possible influence on Dostoevsky. As literary criticism it measures up to that of any of his contemporaries. Furthermore, it contradicts the (false) textbook notion of a simple progression from Belinsky to ChernyshevskyDobrolyubovPisarev; Grigor’ev claims Belinsky for the "organicists."9 The article also helps to place the involved Russian debates over art within the broaderand often ignoredEuropean and American context.

Like many critics of the first half of the nineteenth century, Grigor’ev strove to present an allembracing philosophy by means of his literary criticism. For the German romantic tradition that culminated in the early Hegel and Schelling, the artist's aesthetic cognition was the only true way to integral truth.9 By the mid 1840s, Belinsky in his "left” Hegelian" phase had begun to reject aesthetics as the primary mode of understanding, subordinating artistic to social and political concerns, and paved the way for the "destruction of aesthetics" of the 60s. Grigor'ev, on the other hand, together with Carlyle, Hugo, Emerson, Coleridge, and others with whom he claimed solidarity, remained loyal to Schelling, whom Grigor'ev unequivocally embraces in "Paradoxes" as his master.10 Grigor'ev just as unequivocally repudiates "rightwing" Hegelianism a crucial distinction that the radicals, and most later Russian and Soviet commentators, have failed to make, associating Grigor'ev with that ultimate whippingboy of Russian literary polemics, "art for art's sake." From this perspective, “Paradoxes" represents a significant link in Russian philosophy. It bridges the gap between the early Slavophiles and later idealist thinkers, including Dostoevsky, and is one of the most philosophically coherent repudiations of the selfassured but far less sophisticated social criticism of his day.

Finally, as a striking example of criticism as polemic, "Paradoxes of Organic Criticism" plunges the reader into the turbulent literary waters of the 1860's. Grigor'ev manages to comment on practically every major critic of the day and many minor ones. But more than that, "Paradoxes" is a unique experiment in selfdefinition, in which the practical demands of writing and presenting a logically consistent argument contradict the underlying a priori assumptions about the "organic," developing, only semiconscious (and hence incomplete and imperfect) nature of reality, or at least, of man's perception of that reality. A purely conscious approach, however clear and logically consistent, is doomed by the unconscious, organic complexity of that reality. Grigor'ev admits (p. 125) that he must express himself in "fragments that have no visible, wellstructured connection with the whole." These connections exist, but it is beyond us (beyond everyone, except perhaps the artistgenius) to see and understand them. The critic "reads" reality as he reads a work of art: by his sympathetic connection with the universe, by his intuitive connection with the whole. Like Nietzsche, Grigor'ev shuns the "seductive clarity" of neat, abstract systems; he rejects the title of "theoretician"; like Nietzsche, he must find alternative ways to express his thoughts; he must use indirect means, strange, invented terms, "paradoxes."

In this lies, no doubt, part of the reason why Grigor'ev's writing repelled many of his contemporaries, yet the "kaleidoscopic" nature of his thought (as he called it) may spell a certain attraction for those stifled by the deadly predictability and selfsatisfied seriousness of the social critics. It also spells the main challenge for the translator. He must choose at every turn between preserving Grigor'ev's endless sentences, strung out along a chain of "ands" and semicolons (as confusing in Russian as they would be in English), and cutting the dizzying successions of clauses down into more digestible, albeit less Grigor'evian, chunks. Any translation represents a compromise. I have tried to reproduce, within the limits of comprehensibility, the feel of Grigor'ev's prose, its gangling ungainliness, its flightiness, its discomfort with the limited expressiveness of words themselves (which Grigor'ev opposes to the unlimited, ungraspable expressiveness of reality). Hence, his seemingly pedantic urge to qualify every verb by presenting it in every possible tense (e.g., "the views which I have considered, and still do consider now," and no doubt will continue to consider...!). "Talented books" sounds strange in Russian and in English. These are, says Grigor'ev, "lounging" (khalatnye) articles. One could translate this with the French "deshabille," of which the Russian may have been a calque, but that would miss the homey, unfettered, slightly uncouth, comeasyouare yet selfconscious air that Grigor’ev maintains throughout. Grigor'ev thus almost insists on our indulgence, and a translator must hope that the reader will extend her or his charity that much further!

The citations from Hugo in the following translation follow Grigor’ev’s Russianized version. The most significant change Grigor'ev made in the French (or, perhaps, as seems more likely, demanded by the censor) was to address Hugo's passionate monologue to "Life" rather than to God. Following each passage from Hugo's William Shakespeare I have noted, in brackets, the part (in upper case Roman numerals), book (in Arabic numerals) and section (in lower case numerals) of Hugo's work.11 The translation follows the text in Sochineniya Apollona Grigor'eva, vol. 1 (of one), N.N. Strakhov, ed., St. Petersburg, 1876), pp. 614643. Since the original preparation of this manuscript the Russian text of "Paradoxes" has been republished in Apollon Grigor’ev, estetika i kritika, A.I. Zhuravleva, ed., (Moscow: "Isskustvo,” 1980). I am indebted to Zhuraleva for some of the information in my notes. Two pages of "Paradoxes," translated by Ralph Matlaw, appear in the appendix to his critical edition of Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 1969), pp. 23031; this was not consulted.

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. V.S. Krupitsch maintains that "Paradoxes" "must be considered merely as an introduction o the critic's intended exposition of the theoretical application of organic criticism." See his "Introduction" to Apollon Grigor’ev, Sochineniya (Villanova, Pa.: Villanova Univ. Press, 1970), p.xxxi. V. S. Nechaeva suggests that there may have been a third letter that was never published (Zhurnal M. M. i F. M. Dostoevskikh "Epokha" 18645 [Moscow: "Nauka," 1975], pp. 1578).

The best general study of Grior'ev's criticism is Robert T. Whittaker, Jr.'s "Apollon Aleksandrovič Grigor'ev and the Evolution of 'Organic Criticism,'" Diss. Indiana University 1970. See also: George C. Jerkovich, "Apollon Grigor'ev as a Literary Critic," Diss. Univ. of Kansas 1970; B. F. Egorov, "Apollon Grigor'evKritik," Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo universiteta vyp. 98 (1960), pp. 194246, and vyp. 104 (1961), pp. 5883 (a revised version was published as the introduction to A. A. Grigor'ev, Literaturnaya kritika, ed. B. F. Egorov [Moscow:1967]); Jurgen Lehmann, Der Einfluss der Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus in der russischen Literaturkritik des 19. Jahrhunderts: Die "organische Kritik" Apollon A. Grigor'evs (Heidelberg: Winter, 1975); and Wayne Dowler, Dostoevsky, Grigor'ev, and Native Soil conservatism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), which contains a useful bibliography.

2. On Grigor'ev and Moskvityanin see: Wayne Dowler, "The 'Young Editors' of Moskvityanin and the Origins of Intelligentsia Conservatism in Russia," Slavonic and East European Review 55: 3 (July 1977), 31027; and I.S. Zil'bershtein, "Apollon Grigor'ev i popytka vozrodit' 'Moskvityanin,'" pp. 567580 in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 86, F. M. Dostoevsky (Moscow: "Nauka," 1973).

3. Even many years later, in 1859, Dobrolyubov ridiculed Grigor'ev's "new word," in his famous article "Temnoe tsarstvo" (Sovremennik , kn. VII and IX). But as we see from "Paradoxes" itself, Grigor'ev stuck by his guns. Dostoevsky, we should note, came to share Grigor'ev's view of Ostrovsky. He noted in 1861 that "we have already said many times that we believe in his [Ostrovsky's] new word..." F. M. Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: "Nauka," 1978), XVIII, 60. See also Dowler, Dostoevsky, Grigor’ev, pp. 67 and 127. Ralph E. Matlaw, in the introduction to his translation of Grigor'ev's autobiography (My Literary and Moral Wanderings [N.Y.: E. P. Dutton, 1962], pp. xxxviixxxviii), asserts that Ostrovsky was the "single writer Grigor'ev grossly overestimated."

4. Letter of April 20, 1842. V. G. Belinsky, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: "Khud. Lit.," 197682), IX, 515.

5. On Vremya, Epokha and "pochvennichestvo," see, together with the works cited in note one: Ellen Chances, "Literary Criticism and the Ideology of Pochvennichestvo in Dostoevsky's Thick Journals Vremya and Epokha," Russian Review 34: 2 (April 1975), 15164; V. Kirpotin, Dostoevsky v shestidesyatye gody (Moscow: "Khud lit.," 1966); V. S. Nechaeva, Zhurnal M. M. i F. M. Dostoevskikh "Vremya" 18611863 (Moscow: "Nauka," 1975); Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in NineteenthCentury Russia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); and V. V. Zenkovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy, trans. George Kline (N. Y.: Columbia Univ. Press, 1953), I, chapter 14.

6. One specific grounds for strife was M. M. Dostoevsky’s dissatisfaction with Grigor'ev's frequent positive references to the Slavophiles in his articles. See Apollon Grigor'ev, Vospominaniya, ed. R. V. IvanovRazumnik (MoscowLeningrad: Academia," 1930). pp. 380 and 4412. Dostoevsky defended himself and his brother Mikhail (who died on June 10, 1864) against Grigor'ev's complaints in his notes to several of the critic’s letters, printed as part of Strakhov's recollections of him (Epokha no. 9, 1864, pp. 155; reprinted in Vospominaniya, pp. 51827). It is characteristic of Grigor'ev's sense of desperation at this time that he would magnify what was essentially a tactical question (defending the Slavophiles openly, the Dostoevsky brothers feared, would alienate the journal's potential supporters) into one over fundamental values. While Grigor’ev probably made Dostoevsky more aware of the Slavophiles' contribution to Russian thought, they both shared fundamental objections to Slavophilism, in the first place to its disparagement of Russian letters.