Review: Ivan Turgenev's Rudin (1856, Russian) · 1:55am Mar 23rd, 2014
Ivan Turgenev, Rudin (1856, Russian)
Novels about the "superfluous man", the intellectual who couldn't act effectively, were trendy in Russia in the 1850s. Rudin is admirable, ambitious, learned, talented, and noble-hearted, yet unoriginal in his thoughts and ineffectual in everything that he does. The novel seems intended to show how enticing a flashy, copycat intellectualism can be, and why it is useless.
It doesn't really do that, though. We see that Rudin is enchanting, yet not original or creative, and lacks conviction in his beliefs sufficient to act on them. But the novel fails to argue that these three qualities go together, or to clarify which of them is responsible for Rudin's failure. You could call that a flaw, but I call it realistic ambiguity.
Stylistically, it's very 19th-century: Third person omniscient, long paragraphs, lots of adjectives, a mixture of showing the simple things and telling the complicated internal thoughts. 19th century novels that are later translated into English are sometimes easier for me to read than novels written in English in the 19th century, because the translator unintentionally takes some of the stuffiness out of it. I don't know if it's thanks to the translation (done in 2012 by Dora O'Brien), but I found Rudin easy and pleasant to read.
Rudin is a man nearing middle age, still unmarried, regarded by all who meet him as brilliant, yet who never has any great success in anything he does, due to—something. He has a chance at love, and turns it down due to practical considerations. I quickly realized it was a cautionary tale about how not to be like me, and I read it quickly, hoping for some advice or inspiration to help me stop being Rudin.
But this is a novel, not a self-help book, so there's no such simple advice. At various times we're told that Rudin's failure is due to his inability to persevere and follow through, his cowardice, his bravery, his shallowness, his idealism, his social naivete, or his always overreaching his abilities. Perhaps Turgenev even meant that idealism is just the perfect storm of all those other flaws. The novel is about Rudin and his tragic flaw and its consequences, but you can't pin down just what his flaw is.
That's a good thing. Turgenev may have had his own opinion about what Rudin's flaw was, but he didn't force that onto his character, and created something realistic enough that even the answers he never thought of are hinted at. That, after all, is one reason to write a novel rather than an essay.
The Rudin archetype comes down to someone whose head is in the clouds so much that he cannot accomplish anything on earth. Does this bit of folk wisdom reflect reality?
Perhaps it did in Russia in the 1840s. Yet Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a head-in-the-clouds intellectual, and we don't consider him ineffectual. Worse than ineffectual, possibly; but not ineffectual. Turgenev may have thought that the contrast between Rousseau and the French Revolution, and highly-pragmatic Ben Franklin or George Washington and the American Revolution, confirmed rather than refuted his thesis. If so, his thesis must be complicated to include highly-effective and influential "superfluous men".
Today, examples of this archetype might include Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Craig Whatsisname of Craigslist, and Steve Wozniak of Apple. The "superfluous man" character type is less likely to succeed, but more likely to succeed spectacularly. We need these "superfluous men".
We can even see this in the last chapter, with a little imagination: Rudin dies on the barricades in the unsuccessful June 1848 Paris uprising. Perhaps Turgenev meant to show that Rudin finally acted on his convictions. Or perhaps he only meant to show his unselfish and idealistic nature, or his uselessness and inability to succeed. But we can hardly blame Rudin for the failure of the 1848 revolt. It's just the opposite: People like Rudin are the ones who cause such things to succeed, when they succeed.
The problem is that Turgenev had to show Rudin failing in life, and everyone else in the story succeeding. The novel's world, therefore, is one in which every person has complete control of their fate, and success or failure depends only on one's character. We see that Rudin must fail over and over again, and die alone; everyone else inevitably succeeds at finding themselves married (if they want) with comfortable livelihoods. This is odd for a novel set in Russia in the 1840s, when slavery was still legal, in which all of the characters have roles and lives that were set for them at birth.
When Turgenev simplified his world by making it deterministic, he abstracted away one of the crucial elements to be considered: Chance. Courage and conviction is needed, in love and business; but so is luck. Is it really better, as the novel suggests, to do a boring thing safely and well enough than to aim for the stars? When is it better to settle, and when to hold out for more? Answering that question requires weighing the payoff against the chances, and there is no chance in Turgenev's world.
But this is a general failing of novels. We always see a single outcome in a novel, not a distribution of outcomes. Novelists, and humans in general, find probabilistic truths hard to deal with. The ambiguity of Rudin's death might be Turgenev's way of doing that--it was useless, but at another time might not have been. Rudin didn't answer my questions, but it gave me a lot to think about for 50,000 words.
I might use Rudin as an example the next time somebody tells me ambiguity is good in general. Rudin is clear about what happened, about what mistakes Rudin made, and about what overall issue it's addressing. It's ambiguous about why he made those mistakes, what the right thing to do would have been, and whether idealism is good, bad, or what. The novel's clarity on all other points is what lets us focus clearly and in detail on the important things, which have just enough ambiguity to be relevant to real life. The ambiguity isn't an artistic gimmick; it's the confusion that still remains after the author has tried to clarify as much as he can. Ambiguity isn't good in itself; it's a sign that an author has tackled a topic worthy of a novel and not oversimplified it.
Something I learned in college while studying Hamlet: the term "tragic flaw" is a slight mistranslation of the Greek hamartia, which is closer to "tragic mistake." Think Oedipus giving in to road rage and killing that old dude in the chariot. In Hamlet's case, it's mistaking the guy behind the arras for Claudius and winding up killing Polonius instead. In both cases a single mistaken act sets in motion the whole train of events that will result in tragedy.
4.bp.blogspot.com/-t9SJNs7oLqs/TjQgVhsUHFI/AAAAAAAAA7g/ZP3BcfhkOYE/s1600/green-eggs-and-hamlet.png
"To sleep, to dream: now there's the rub.
I could drop a toaster in my tub."
So perhaps you were simply looking in the wrong place: at character instead of events. Not that hamartia doesn't have an element of character to it: the mistake has to be something the person in question could believably do.
In bookstores and libraries I keep passing racks and racks of well-intended books that want to make me a different person. Leave well enough alone, I silently admonish them.
Is there even payoff in his world? What happened to his successful characters? Are they content having "succeeded" at the cost of their curiosity and ambitions?
The whole idea of payoff and success is a bit flawed as described here. Success matters for those that live their success, but that's clearly not the case for Rudin. Rudin doesn't "succeed", he always pursues.
He should care more about the payoff of pursuit, with or without success*.EDIT: I lied. It makes no sense to say "He should care about X". At the same time, you can't evaluate whether or not he succeeded without knowing what he cares about.
EDIT2: Curse you and your distaste for deleted posts. I'm going to pretend I never posted this.
1947689 In this novel it's clear that it's about Rudin's flaws.
My take on "hamartia" is that it was translated as "tragic flaw" because "tragic flaw" makes sense now that people don't worry about fate and the Gods so much. In ancient Greece, people genuinely worried over the question of how much the gods controlled them. The fatal mistake that Oedipus makes is tied up Gods and prophecy. Christianity, even Calvinism, has never emphasized fate as much, I think. It emphasized individual responsibility, and so tragedy had to become based on a personal error / flaw / sin.
Nowadays, we have a new brand of tragedy which is something like fate, but less personal: control by the social and economic systems that we live in. So we can have tragedies like Kafka's "The Trial", in which there is no stake and no flaw in the protagonist, only in the system.
1947768 I don't think you should delete that comment, but I don't mind if you delete comments on my posts. I just don't like person A deleting a post, thereby deleting person B's comments.
1947941
This is a true thing about us moderns but when you put it so concisely I can't but be struck by how silly we are.
Saying "I don't believe in Jove, so I'm not afraid of Fate" is like saying "I don't believe in Thor, so I'm not afraid of lightning." Because while Valhalla isn't a thing anymore lightning still is, and you* should be afraid of it. In fact as an electrical engineer I can tell you you should be fucking terrified of it. Jealous god looking to whack anybody who catches his eye? Not an unhandy metaphor (no worse than "centrifugal force.")
And Fate's even scarier because you can't just go inside when it happens. Worse yet is that it's already happened--and we personally have done rather well out of it. Why are we here, well-fed and well-housed, having a pleasant conversation on a Sunday morning? Hard work and self-discipline? Maybe, but mostly because we had the good fortune to be born sane, whole and not-bad-looking to parents that loved us and raised us as well as they were able, which was pretty well indeed. What had we to do with that? If things hadn't been that way, what could we have done to change how they shaped us?
"That's not Fate, that's socioeconomics!" That's not Zeus, that's Jove.
No wonder we tell ourselves stories about free will. Makes the world seem less frightening.
*Generic "you." Not "you, Bad Horse." While Bad Horse should also fear lightning I'm pretty sure he already has the good sense to do so.
1947941
At this point I'm wondering; are there examples of stories where everything is defined by a character's virtues, and can those stories be any good?
1948963 Arguably The Idiot by Dostoyevsky.
Or maybe My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic?
1948992
Well, but in My Little Pony the main engine of most plots is arguably their day to day interactions, which get complicated by their flaws, such as stubbornness or vanity...then again, it depends entirely on the episode. Food for thought.
Maybe Sherlock Holmes would be a better fit for the concept, except that overwhelming analytical capability seems like more of a neutral trait.
And Superman, too: the whole conceit behind his character is that he's morally sound and has to face off opponents who aren't.
1948963
Also, everything Charles Dickens ever wrote. Including his grocery lists and unpublished Thackery/Bulwer-Lytton crossover fanfic.
(What, you didn't know about that?...)
1949328
I am now scared of Charles Dickens.
Tonight, I'm going to check under the bed just in case he's there.
*me. At least, so far; I'm not ruling out changing, not yet. But it sounds like clearly I need to read this book.
1948992
Derpy Nickerlaiovitch Mishkin?
Rarity Fillypovna?
I've found, in my time hanging out with people from MIT, Harvard, and the venture capital / startup world, that the better-off and more successful one is, the more one believes that success is the predictable result of good genetics plus hard work, and the less one believes in chance. Even people who "won the lottery" by getting rich off stock options.