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ОглавлениеON THE INFINITY OF THE NOVEL. ART HAS NEITHER BEGINNING, MIDDLE, NOR END. EPILOGUES ARE CLOYING LEFTOVERS. ART DEALS ALWAYS AND ONLY WITH LIFE.
My first question, Viktor Borisovich, is not so much about what you’ve written as it is about what you haven’t written. Why is it that in these last two decades, which have seen such a massive revival of your activity as a literary critic and historian, you’ve never—or certainly very rarely—commented on the themes or problems of contemporary Soviet literature?
I’m guilty, I admit. I don’t work much on contemporary literature. To tell the truth, I haven’t been crazy about what I have read. But, I repeat, the fault is mine. I hope to take on this task, at least in part, to remedy this lack, in my next book, which will have a great title, taken from Tolstoy: Energy of Delusion. The fact is that new, contemporary material will always pile up and then slip away, whereas the classics don’t go anywhere, they endure. Please, you be the interpreter of my excuses for the Italian public, but this time too I’m going to limit myself to talking about literary material that’s generally known, that has become the patrimony of all humankind. One author who I worked a lot on, for example, is Boccaccio. My book also came out in Italian. What did I want to say, and what do I still stand by today? Essentially this: art derives from the fact that man is marked by contradictions. And in art these contradictions can be resolved more or less favorably, but completely favorably—that’s impossible. You know why I can’t bear to read Dante’s Paradiso? Because I believe that, normally, novels cannot be finished. Look at the beginning of Aristotle’s Poetics: “A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.” With that, of course, I agree. But let’s try to apply this concept to art. Let’s take our literature, Russian literature. It struggles to comprehend the world, and the world has no end. In War and Peace, Pierre’s nephew Nikolenka has a dream. Right at the end of the novel. He dreams of him and Pierre at the head of an enormous army made of white lines fluttering in the air like spiderwebs. Glory is before them, the same as those threads. At a certain point, the threads begin to go slack, to tangle. And Nikolenka and Pierre come upon Uncle Nikolai Ilyich Rostov standing there in a menacing pose and saying: “I loved you, but Arakcheev has given me orders, and I’ll kill the first one who moves forward.” What does the boy see? He sees the future, his own future. In the dream the boy is already the man of Dostoyevsky’s era, of the Petrashevsky Circle. Art always projects itself into the future. Let’s take, finally, the end of Crime and Punishment: Raskolnikov is in the penal colony, he doesn’t like the prisoners who, in turn, are hostile to him, but a change starts to take place in him and his transformation is itself a potential novel. Exactly analogous to that is the end of Resurrection: the story of Nekhlyudov’s transformation also contains another novel. But that novel was not written. That’s why I say that there are no novels with an ending. A novel can come to an end, but it has no ending. Thackeray said that every time he wrote a novel he wished that the valet who shined his shoes would take care of the ending for him. And Tolstoy writes: “My God! Who’ll finish the novel now!” And he says that because finishing his novel would mean knowing the future, and we don’t know the future. Eugene Onegin isn’t finished. Friends tried to convince Pushkin to finish it, but he didn’t. And why? Push-kin is going through the post-Decembrist repression. As he’s writing Onegin many of his friends are already dead, or far away, in exile. Pushkin can only send them a few coded messages. He can write, citing the epigraph to “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai”:
But those to whom, as friends and brothers,
My first stanzas I once read—
‘Some are no more, and distant . . . others.’
As Sadi long before us said.
Without them my Onegin’s finished.
But in the case of Onegin it was also a kind of self-censorship . . .
Of course. In fact, what would Onegin’s fate have been? In all likelihood he would have become a Decembrist. Everyone knows that some of Pushkin’s verses are in code, and there’s a clear allusion to Decembrism, that “storm” which Tolstoy said had spread over Russia like a magnet, attracting all the iron from the heaps of trash. In his notebooks, Pushkin drew the hanging of the Decembrists, and next to the drawing he wrote: “I could have. . .” It was only chance that kept him out of the revolt. When the emperor asked him, “Where would you have been?” Pushkin, as an intelligent, courageous man, replied: “On the square.” And Onegin would have been there too. And Pushkin drew all this. He drew the Peter and Paul Fortress, with Onegin and Pushkin looking out at the Peter and Paul Fortress.
And yet Tatiana’s refusal in some way constitutes the “ending” of the novel.
Tatiana, love—these are marginal things. Pushkin couldn’t finish Onegin. It got swept up in history. History can extend the novel just as it can obstruct it. Otherwise it would be absolutely impossible to understand, for example, why the masterpieces of Homer have no ending. There was no censorship, there wasn’t even a written text, there was nothing to erase. At the end of The Iliad and The Odyssey there’s nothing but talk of the future. In general, I think, talking about a beginning, middle, and end has nothing to do with art. We can also listen to a writer much closer to us than Homer, the great Chekhov, who says: when you begin writing, when the work is ready, tear out the first two or even five pages and never read them again. He also says: every time, the hero dies or leaves in the end. But that isn’t a true ending. Tolstoy writes that he can’t finish his novels. Why? Because if the character dies, it’s interesting to see how the others survive him, but then the attention would shift to these others. If he leaves, it’s the same thing. And if he marries, that’s where the real story begins, the real conflict. Tolstoy wrote fourteen beginnings for War and Peace. But the novel has no end, because the fact that Natasha has grown old, that she’s no longer so alluring, the fact that Pierre will most likely be deported and she will most likely follow him, all this isn’t an end—the true ending is Russia, the unknown future of Russia.
So on the one hand, the impossibility of knowing the future makes it so that a writer can’t “finish” his novels; on the other, it seems like the great novels you’ve been talking about contain some sort of prophecy of the future.
The fact is that the writer “predicts” the future, but doesn’t know what his role in that future will be. He struggles with the future, he’s afraid for himself . . . You see, he has to be very naïve to delude himself into believing he can bring something to a conclusion. And I myself, with all the love I have for novels, I prefer to doze off before the denouement. About epilogues—Thackeray wrote that they’re like the lump of sugar left at the bottom of the cup. That’s it—the conclusion, in the novel, is a cloying additive. It only appears to conclude things. For example, how do the great books end, the great tragedies of Dickens? Abruptly and by chance the man rediscovers his place in society and in life. The illegitimate son is acknowledged by the father, or the hero marries, or receives his inheritance, or leaves for Australia, but it’s just a convention. And the fact that Othello kills Desdemona, yes, of course, that’s the end: it’s Desdemona’s death, it’ll be Othello’s death. But that isn’t the resolution to the theme of fidelity and love.
So for you, the novel—or poem, or play—is a place where the contradictions of life cannot be resolved.
That’s precisely it, they can’t be. When I read Kafka, who parodies the irresolvability of the contradictions of life . . .
In what sense does he parody it?
He exaggerates it.
You like Kafka, no?
I love Kafka. I love Remizov. I love this writer that almost nobody knows, Olga Forsh, who wrote novels and stories based precisely on this impossibility of a final denouement. But that’s another subject. For example, take The Cherry Orchard. All classic novels have the figure of the devoted servant. We Russians knew him from the works of Walter Scott, Pushkin’s, and Tolstoy’s too, though to a lesser extent. But Chekhov ends his play in a very odd way. The serf Firs, alone in the house, says: “They’ve forgotten me.” What does that mean? He too will get out. He won’t be locked in forever. But one of the threads of that type of comedy has been forgotten. The master has one story, the servants another. The fact that in Chekhov the play doesn’t end with Lopakhin’s marriage, in other words, with a happy ending, is in itself surprising, compared to classic stories. But even more surprising is that Chekhov concludes with a man locked in, and he emphasizes it, and how—the sound of a string breaking, silence, then the sound of the axes cutting down the trees in the orchard . . . When an era ends, time sighs, and forms age. You see, we Russians, and you Italians too, we’ve all lived through an unfinished novel. And I don’t know how a novel could end, just as I don’t know what will happen in the world, what the future of Europe will be. The only thing I know is that one must always invent new endings.
Insofar as the novel has no end, does it therefore reject the idea of death?
Art always and only deals with life. What do we do in art? We resuscitate life. Man is so busy with life that he forgets to live it. He always says: tomorrow, tomorrow. And that’s the real death. So what is art’s great achievement? Life. A life that can be seen, felt, lived tangibly, a life that one can renounce, just as Othello does, forsaking his dreams of love and glory.
