Vladimir Odoevskii and Romantic Poetics: Collected Essays by Neil s> Cornwell (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS I45 The book is very well produced, with only a few misprints.These are, for the most part, non-crucial, but it is a pity that the famous line 'Pod nebom Afrikimoei' and the important adjective 'beznravstvennyi'should be among them (pp. I64, 215). There are substantialnotes, but no bibliographyas such. Two importantEnglishworkson Onegin do not seem to have been consulted, those by A. D. P. Briggs(Cambridge, I992) and SallyDalton-Brown(London, 1997), which contains by far the most comprehensiverecent bibliographyon Onegin. Apart from a predilection for 'privileging'and 'foregrounding',the author writes in a brisk, no-nonsense style, without ever remotely approaching the pellucid brevity of Pushkin's own critical writings, of which a number of examplesareprovided.At herbest, the authorprovidessomepithy, eminently quotable insights into both Tat'iana and Onegin. Of Onegin's behaviour in Chapter 4 we read: 'His problem is not that he fails to fall in love with Tat'iana,but that in hispresentcircumstanceshe is incapableof fallingin love at all' (p. I29). However, when Tat'ianafinallyrejectshis overtures,he is not, in Hasty'sview, a 'loser',but a man capableof revitalizationand regeneration. The insights into Tat'iana's character are too numerous to mention but are perhaps best exemplified by the last of them (p. 215): 'Tat'iana begins as a name, grows into a heroine who counters convention but accommodates tradition,and is finallyacknowledgedas the author/narrator'sown muse'. Department ofEuropean Studies andModern Languages D. M. PURSGLOVE University ofBath Cornwell, Neil. Vladimir Odoevskii andRomantic Poetics.Collected Essays.Berghahn , Providence, RI and Oxford, I998. ix + I74 pp. Notes. Bibliography .Index. ?28.oo; $39.95. THEpublication of Neil Cornwell's V.F. Odoyevsky: His Life,TimesandMilieu (London, I986) helped to put the neglected figure of Odoevskii on the map. The extraordinarydiversityof cultural,philosophicaland mysticalinterestsof this renaissance man fully justified a study which was in large measure biographicaland in which, as Cornwell admitshimself, literarycriticismwas 'perforceconfined to a summaryof hisliterarycareerand [... .] a surveyof the main characteristicsof hisprose fiction'(p. vi). However in the yearssince the publication of this studyCornwell has done much to redressthe balance with a number of articlesand essayson aspectsof Odoevskii'sliteraryoutput. It is these which are gathered together in the present collection of nine essaychapters . Some are also based upon introductory apparatus to editions of Odoevskiieditedby the author.The essaysand articleson which thecollection is based span sixteen years (I979-95) and testify to Cornwell's enduring interestin the writer. Perhaps Odoevskii's abundance of talents and interests have served to unfocus him for Russian literary historians;however he also presented his contemporarycriticswith an evaluativechallenge, forwhile '[t]o some he was saintly, to others [he was] a figure of ridicule' (p. 3). He may also have been the victim of culturalbad-timing:his Russkie nochi sawthe light only in I844 by 146 SEER, 79, I, 2001 which time 'Odoevskii'sbrand of romanticismwas already seen as passe. . (p. 6). As Cornwell shows, however, in a chapter devoted to the subject ('BelinskyandV. F. Odoevskii')the luke-warmreactionof Belinskii,and more particularlyhis successorsto Odoevskii'swork(perhapsbecause of perceived Slavophile content) was another serious impediment to canonical eminence. Yet the present collection clearly demonstrates that Odoevskii's works have intrinsic literary merit; he was also in the vanguard of innovation in romanticism and the Gothic. Cornwell is not exaggerating when he styles Russkie nochi'a key source book [. . .] for Russian romanticism' as well as 'a quintessentialworkof Russianliterature'(p. 7). ChapterThree isdevoted to Odoevskii'sromanticism,but some of the most interestinginsightsinto the idiosyncraticand paradoxicalnature of the latter (initsbroaderdefinition)areto be foundin ChapterSix ('UtopiaandDystopia in RussianFiction:the Contributionof V. F. Odoevskii').Here we are shown a writer who combines 'the artistic theory of Schelling and the practice of Hoffmann' (p. I24), and whose dystopian Slavophile prophecies of a West doomed by Malthusianover-populationand Benthamiteself-interestcombine with a very modern 'cosmicworld-view'(p. 127). Cornwell'streatmentof the closely allied area of the Gothic (ChapterEight)is usefulfor its reflectionson the place of the latter in Russian literary history and the significance of its frequentcategorizationasa subsetofromanticism.Ifthereisa RussianGothic then Odoevskiiisprobablyits most impressiveexponent (p. 146). One of the most interestingfeaturesof this collection is that its authoruses Odoevskii's work to innovate paradigms of more general application. The...