Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the Nineteenth Century by Gabriella Safran (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the Nineteenth Century by Gabriella Safran Derek Offord Safran, Gabriella. Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the Nineteenth Century. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2022. xii + 288 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $49.95; $32.99 (e-book). Gabriella Safran's wide-ranging and imaginative monograph 'is a book about writers in the mid-nineteenth-century Russian Empire listening attentively to, recording, and repeating the words of people unlike themselves', [End Page 152] often Slav peasants but in some cases neither peasants nor Slavs (p. 1). The writers in question conceived of this listening in various ways: as a means of hastening the abolition of serfdom, or informing readers about the empire's population, or expressing faith in the unity of that population, or preserving an endangered past, or signalling their own virtue, or enriching the Russian literary language with vernacular and dialect forms. They believed that the results of their investigations would be unsatisfactory if they went about their listening in the wrong way. After all, writers might record speech inaccurately if they listened carelessly or unsympathetically, or they might misrepresent the significance of the words they heard if they did not take account of the context in which the words were spoken. Those to whom they listened, for their part, might distrust these representatives of another social stratum and therefore not speak frankly to them. In whatever way it was done, all this 'listening across social lines' (p. 2) indicated curiosity or concern on the part of a privileged minority about their relationship with the largely illiterate and enserfed common people. By raising the possibility that their records of popular speech might be inadequate, writers entered into rivalry with one another, either directly or through their fictional proxies. Fedor Dostoevskii, for example, was sure that he was better than other writers (Nikolai Leskov was a case in point) at listening to lower-class people and using their words. In the competition to win plaudits, writers might gain an advantage by performing as a certain type of listener, adopting one of the dozen or so modes of listening that Safran identifies. At the positive end of the spectrum, there is a 'prophetic' mode (hearing 'a divine message that others cannot') and a choral mode ('matching one's voice to those of a community to which one belongs'). At the negative end, there is a 'suspicious' mode (listening 'to one's enemies and uncovering their plots') and a 'mocking' mode (hearing 'the ridiculous thing one anticipated and getting people to laugh', p. 21). Safran explores the subject of listening to and recording popular voices by examining many writers and writings of several kinds. She begins with a chapter in which Russia in the age of Nicholas I (1825–55) is characterized by its detractors — especially Petr Chaadaev and the Marquis de Custine — as shamefully silent. In chapter two she considers another foreign traveller, the Prussian aristocrat Baron von Haxthausen, who was used by the Slavophiles to reinterpret the apparent silence that Chaadaev and Custine had observed. Although he was plainly an outsider, Haxthausen allowed himself to become a 'choral' listener who shared the feeling of the Slavophiles that the Russian people lived in a harmonious community, abjuring individual ambition. In chapter three Safran finds an example of 'omnivorous listening'. (The term seems infelicitous, referring as it does to different sensory perceptions.) [End Page 153] Vladimir Dal´, the child of German-speaking parents, tries to define himself as an exemplary listener by collecting prodigious quantities of data on the Russian vernacular which he published in the 1860s in his Proverbs of the Russian People and his still-respected four-volume Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great-Russian Language. In chapter four Safran turns to Dmitrii Grigorovich, who, in the popular stories on rural life he published in the 1840s, also attempted to establish credentials as a recorder of peasant language. In chapter five she discusses Ivan Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter and in chapter six the collection of heroic poems (byliny) that Pavel Rybnikov recorded in Olonetsk province. In chapter seven we find Dostoevskii harvesting vocabulary from the...