Abstract

From the initial publication of Pesn' torzhestvuiushchei liubvi in 1881, contemporaries commented that this story was strikingly unusual among Ivan Turgenev's works in both its distant historical and its exclusively non-Russian setting.2 Some criticized the author's decision to abandon contentious contemporary issues, while others welcomed it, but almost all noted the artistry and elegance (u3HmHocmb) that permeated the entire work. Some contemporary critics, such as Vladimir Chuiko and Arsenii Vvedenskii, commented specifically on its links with the works of Gustave Flaubert. Nikolai Leskov even began a story (Bogin'ka Run'ke) in which a reading of PTL provokes a lively discussion during which all the protagonists agree that Turgenev outdid Flaubert in the versatility of the passionate play of feeling in the clash between intense passion and the innocence of a gentle love [...].3The recurring references to Flaubert did not-and do not-require extraordinary perspicacity. Turgenev dedicated the work to the memory of his closest friend among French writers (he had begun the work in late 1879 and Flaubert was to die not long afterwards, on 8 May 1880). Furthermore, at the time of the first publication the association of Turgenev's name with that of Flaubert would have been relatively fresh for Russian readers. In 1877 Turgenev had published his translations of two of Flaubert's Trois contes [Three Stories], La Legende de saint Julien l'Hospitalier [The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller] and Herodias. It had been their aesthetic qualities above all that had attracted him to these stories,4 and it is clear from a letter to Turgenev written while he was still working on the stories that this had also been a primary consideration for Flaubert:My Histoire d'un coeur simple will, undoubtedly, be finished towards the end of August? After that, shall tackle Herodias But how difficult that is! my God, it's difficult! more get into it, the more realize that. It seems to me that French prose writing can achieve a level of beauty that is beyond our imagination! Do you not find that our friends have little concern for Beauty? And yet it is the only thing of importance in this world!5Turgenev was inordinately proud of his Flaubert translations, and they were the only ones that he subsequently chose to include in collections of his own works. He was very conscious of the difficulties that they presented for the translator- and indeed for the Russian language itself. To Stasiulevich he declared,[...] there is nothing in my entire literary career in which take greater pride than do in this translation. It was a tour de force-to make the Russian language grapple with the French language-and not to come out the loser. Whatever the readers might say-personally am pleased with myself and pat myself on the head.6Unusually for a writer who more commonly denigrated his own work, he remarked, I can say without boasting that know of no one who could have done a better job than [...].7Even if the list of candidates for authors and works that have been proposed as having links with PTL is exceptionally long (and a tribute to the range of Turgenev's reading and cultural erudition),8 the specific association with the two Flaubert stories he translated does merit particular attention. Although he greatly admired Flaubert's Art, not all of Flaubert's artistic methods were necessarily compatible with Turgenev's own artistic goals. comparison between the Flaubert stories and PTL can show which aspects of those methods he chose to emulate, how he used them, and the consequences of those decisions for our understanding of this singular work.The three Flaubert stories were not initially conceived as a trilogy; indeed, their individual origins go back to different periods in Flaubert's life. Nonetheless, as published-in the order A Simple Heart, The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller, and Herodias9-they constitute (not a few scholars suggest) Flaubert's perception of the decline of Christianity in the contemporary bourgeois world by way of its flowering in the Middle Ages to its dynamic roots in the deserts of Galilee. …

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