Robie Macauley
THE SUPERFLUOUS MAN
«If the belly didn't prod, we'd all die of bedsores."
- RussIAN
PROVERB
Only in a political sense is the Iron Curtain new; in a
certain intellectual way it has always existed. During the nineteenth
century Westerners were likely to take Russian authors as a kind of
ambassadorial mission from some heart of darkness. When they
turned out to be not only intelligible but unusually gifted, the after–
dinner speeches of welcome shone with eloquence. Henry James's
essay on Turgenev was one of the first and
his
quotation from Renan
reveals a whole attitude. "No man," said Renan of Turgenev, "has
been as much as he the incarnation of a whole race: generations of
ancestors, lost in the sleep of centuries, speechless, came through him
to life and utterance."
First Turgenev, later Tolstoy, then Dostoevsky traveling origin–
ally on the false passport of a prophet, finally Chekhov, become the
chosen envoys to the West. A great many lesser writers who also
had something to say (Leskov, Saltykov-Schedrin, Andrey Bely and
Ivan Goncharov, for example) either never achieved diplomatic
status or were refused their visas altogether.
So we grew to know Russia through her greatest genius, but
now that the borders are closed to such artist-spokesmen, it may be
time to try to reassess Russian writing of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries by its catholic and generic functions rather than
by the interpretative and descriptive ones.
Renan forgot that Turgenev, though a
Ru~an,
was
also
a
European and that the two figures that haunted him-and haunted
his
successors as well-were not Prince Igor or Saava Grudtsyn, but
Hamlet and Don Quixote.
It
is through such symbols as the latter
two that the artist generalizes and the generalization
is
what finally
matters, becoming as it does no longer Spanish or Russian or Eng-
