Article

Name: “Words-signals” of Nihilism and “The Precipice” by I. A. Goncharov

Authors: K. Yu. Zubkov

St. Petersburg State University; Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract: The idea of the close connection of Russian literature of the 1860s and journalistic and newspaper polemics on socially significant topics has long been a common place in historical and literary studies. In most cases, however, this statement, although fair, boils down to the fact that the works of some writers are characterized as politically biased and connected with the writer’s beliefs or the program of a literary “party”. In the article, I argue that even writers who tried to avoid direct statements on political issues could not help but feel the strong influence of the journalistic polemics that determined the use of separate words and expressions: the very language of Russian prose of this period was largely influenced by the expressions used in popular articles, published in ‘thick’ journals. I analyze a very specific discourse, which was formed in Russian prose and journal articles of the 1860s and used to discuss nihilism. This discourse included maximally abstract concepts (“words”, “deeds”, etc.), and reinterpreted scientific terms (“organism”), as well as symbolic or metaphorical expressions (“thunderstorm”, “precipice”). It was not intended to convey a specific political position (it was used both by the “nihilists” themselves and their opponents), but set certain limits to the perception of social processes: for example, it was impossible to talk about “nihilism” and not talk about a fundamental gap between the past and the present, in word and deed, and so on. I will consider the novel “The Precipice” (1869) by I. A. Goncharov as a primary source. I’m going to read some of its key episodes against the background of disputes about nihilism. Although the nihilism is not the most important topic of Goncharov’s novel, most contemporaries immediately identified the novel as ‘antinihilistic’. Goncharov usually identified himself as a proponent of ‘objective’ art, but still could not avoid using elements of ‘nihilistic’ discourse in his work. Considering both journal articles and fictional works by various authors of 1860s I pay close attention to the works by D. I. Pisarev, published on the pages of the journal “Russian word”, which Goncharov as a censor had to know. Since my goal is to analyze the polemical discourse of the 1860s, rather than the personal positions of individual authors, I use fragments from the speech of the narrator and the heroes of fictional prose of this period along with the journalistic texts: the interest is not how much the quoted fragments express the author’s position, but how relevant topics and problems could be used in actual polemics.

Keywords: I. A. Goncharov, history of literature, history of novel, nihilism, literary polemics, antinihilistic novel

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