The Decline of a Dynast: From Power to Love in Aksakov's Family Chronicle

Abstract

A A lthough the generic peculiarities of Family Chronicle have been the main focus of its investigators,1 thematics-to use the convenient neologism-has not been entirely neglected. Thus, commentators are likely to remind us that the largerthan-life proportions of old Bagrov enhance the central theme of the patriarch; that his voyage eastward rehearses the pioneering thrust which informs many narratives of exploration; or that the segments dominated by Aleksei and Sof'ia Nikolaevna embody the themes of urbanization and domesticity. Loosely tying up these (and other) strands is the comment of a recent scholar that the central conflict of the work as a whole is the incursion of modernity ... on the old way of life.2 To some these truths may seem like truisms. They lie, as it were, on the surface of the text. But this very stricture helps, I think, to define the nature of the narrative. For, with its clear, unhurried, expansive, and richly detailed evocation of an earlier age, Family Chronicle is an unusually pure example of that mimetic mode which Erich Auerbach, in his classic study, called Homeric. Everything-or almost everything-in these pages is, in Auerbach's words, direct, visible, leisurely, copiously related, and fully externalized-a world, as it were, without shadows.3 And it is precisely this manner of relation (applied to the blind Aksakov reciting the heroic exploits of bygone years, the word Homeric seems oddly apt) that, according to the critic, lacks polyvalence (a multiplicity of meanings) and, as a consequence, defies, or at least discourages, interpretations.4