Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the Nineteenth Century 9781501766343

Table of contents :
Contents
Note on Translation and Transliteration
Introduction
1. Ringing
2. Singing
3. Nesting
4. Crossing
5. Paper Making
6. Dreaming
7. Insulting
8. Laughing
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Citation preview

RECORDING RUS­S IA

RECORDING RUS­S IA

T R Y I N G TO L I S T E N I N T H E N I N E T E E N T H ­C E N T U R Y

G abriell a S afran

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2022 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu. First published 2022 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca Librarians: A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 9781501766329 (hardcover) ISBN 9781501766343 (pdf ) ISBN 9781501766336 (epub) Cover image: Illustration for Turgenev’s “The Office” by Petr Sokolov. From Zapiski okhotnika I. S. Turgeneva v akvareliakh Petra Sokolova (Saint Petersburg: Izd. Fon Bool’, 1891–1892).

To my ­family of word enthusiasts: Michael, Eva, and Frieda Kahan, and my parents, William and Marian Safran.

Слово, что воробей, вылетит, не поймаешь. A word is like a sparrow—it flies away and you ­can’t catch it. —­Vladimir Dahl, Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great-­Russian Language, from the entries on “Sparrow” and “Word”

C o n te n ts

Note on Translation and Transliteration  ix

Introduction

1

1. Ringing

23

2. Singing

47

3. Nesting

73

4. Crossing

103

5. Paper Making

126

6. Dreaming

147

7. Insulting

165

8. Laughing

192

Conclusion

214

Acknowl­edgments  221 Notes  225 Index  275

N ote o n Tr a nsl ati o n a n d Tr a nsl i te r ati o n

All translations into En­glish are mine ­unless indicated other­wise. Individual Rus­sian words and short phrases are transliterated into Latin letters; ­whole sentences and verses are given in Cyrillic. I use a modified version of the Library of Congress transliteration system (without diacritics). In the text (but not the notes), I endeavor to make names easier to read by using Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Dahl, and “-­sky” instead of “-­skii” at the ends.

ix

RECORDING RUSSIA

Introduction

Listening is not easy. This is a book about writers in the mid-­nineteenth-­century Rus­sian Empire listening attentively to, recording, and repeating the words of ­people unlike themselves, often Slavic peasants but sometimes nonpeasants or even non-­Slavs. They sometimes presented this listening as action ­toward freedom for the serfs; as a way to inform readers about the empire’s population; as an expression of their faith in Christian unity or their own virtue; as an attempt to preserve an endangered past; or as a step ­toward better writing in a more vibrant literary language. At the same time, t­ hese writers, and their critics, saw their tasks of listening and recording as likely to be done wrong. Writers might get distracted or listen unsympathetically; they might rec­ord and circulate something inaccurate, unrepresentative, or defamatory; they might fail to understand the words they hear or not grasp what they mean in context; ­those they listened to might fear them and not speak frankly; they might appear to be illegitimate vehicles of the words they convey; and they might produce bad writing, in an awkward or unclear language. This picture is familiar: nineteenth-­century Rus­sian intellectuals are famous for feeling that ­there was something wrong about their relationship to the narod, the ­people. Generations of commentators have described this anxiety as an expression of writers’ radical beliefs. I conduct a methodological experiment by looking at texts, p­ eople, and ideas that specialists in Rus­sian lit­er­a­ ture and history know, but drawing on ideas from sound and media studies 1

2 I n t r o d u c t i o n

and from linguistic anthropology. I examine a series of autobiographical or fictionalized accounts of listening across social lines by foreign visitors to Rus­ sia and by Rus­sian writers. I notice that when they tell stories about listening and recording by themselves or their fictional stand-­ins, ­these writers draw attention to sound and its transmission and to paper and its uses, and they tend to compare one person’s successful listening to another’s less successful listening (though often ­these rival listeners are two facets of a single person). In ­these scenes, the technical aspects of listening and recording, their po­liti­cal and ethical significance, and their practical and aesthetic import are interconnected. I draw on ­these observations to argue that t­ hese writers, even as they responded to the circumstances of the Rus­sian Empire, w ­ ere also members of a global mid-­nineteenth-­century media generation who competed to display their mastery of modern modes of hearing and recording. They sometimes wrote as though the sounds they heard and recorded w ­ ere pure objects awaiting capture, like the wild birds some of them hunted for plea­sure; I also explore moments when they recognize the spoken words of “the p­ eople” as per­for­mances, produced in the moment and meant to draw attention. Take Ivan Turgenev’s 1847 story “The Office” (Kontora), part of his cycle Notes of a Hunter (Zapiski okhotnika), which juxtaposes several listeners. The first-­ person narrator, a landowner, is out hunting when he is caught in the rain. He naps in the office on a neighboring landowner’s estate and awakens to hear, through a crack in the wall, as a clerk, Nikolai Eremeich Khvostov, himself a serf, abuses and manipulates a series of petitioners. The hunter continues listening, but lies back down and pretends to be asleep when anyone comes to check. The final petitioner is a barber-­surgeon, a serf who wants to marry another serf, but the clerk spitefully prevents the marriage. Turgenev’s friend, the radical critic Vissarion Belinsky, thought the story was one of Turgenev’s best; he praised Turgenev for approaching the “­people” from a new ­angle and “acquainting us with ­people of vari­ous statuses and ranks.” His judgment initiated a tradition of categorizing “The Office,” like the collection to which it belonged, as a denunciation of arbitrary and corrupt estate management and of serfdom itself.1 In France, where Turgenev lived much of his adult life, his friends believed the rumor that reading Notes of a Hunter convinced Tsar Alexander II that the serfs needed to be emancipated.2 The idea of the power of his writing and the import of the choice of a person such as himself to listen attentively to “the ­people” and to write about them fit into their image of Rus­sia as Eu­rope’s last bastion of serfdom, a place where ethical ­people w ­ ere censored, but where one person’s brave outcry might reach its target and liberate the oppressed. Even as it critiques serfdom, this story dwells on listening and recording as skills practiced by clerks. Its writer knew something about offices: Turgenev’s

Introduction

3

­ other had a kontora (a term that entered Rus­sian from German and literally m means “counting-­house”) on her estate near Orel, and Turgenev himself had worked in his early twenties in the St. Petersburg office of Vladimir Dahl, an imperial official and lexicographer whose dictionary integrated standard words with dialect terms gathered around the empire.3 When Turgenev’s hunter enters the office, he meets a young clerk who shows off his handwriting in a calligraphed complaint about noise that combines non-­standard language with officialese: You are ordered immediately upon receipt to find out who walked through the Aglish [Aglitskii, an archaic variant of the word for “En­ glish”] garden last night, u ­ nder the influence of alcohol, with inappropriate songs, and woke up and disturbed the French governess, Mme. Engenie [presumably Eugenie] . . . . You are ordered to investigate the above in full and immediately inform the office.4 This document, numbered 209 and bearing an enormous official seal, is signed by the estate-­owner herself and addressed to the steward, who, as the clerk explains, is illiterate, which means that it must be read aloud to him. The picture of clerks elaborately documenting drunken nighttime singing makes the kontora and the practices that it fosters of recording sound on paper seem absurd. From that ­angle, the story appears to be a criticism of the heartless bureaucratic listening of the clerk and his minions, in f­avor of the empathetic listening of the eavesdropping hunter: if this story stages a moral contest, then the hunter who does not write (at least in our presence) is the winner.5 This bifurcation, though, ignores the hunter’s similarity to the clerk. Turgenev uses the same Rus­sian verb to describe their actions, prislushat’sia (or prislushivat’sia), meaning a kind of attentive, self-­aware listening by someone who is ­doing their best to take in every­thing they hear.6 Even as he made fun of the clerk’s exhaustive transformation of sound into words on paper, Turgenev, like the hunter who was his stand-in, was ­doing something similar. And Turgenev too came in for critique. Although he praised the story in print, Belinsky wrote to a friend that he was worried that Turgenev might get carried away by his enthusiasm for “onomatopoetic [zvukopodrazhatel’noi, literally sound-­imitating] poetry.” He found Turgenev’s use of regionalisms, especially the term zelenia, distasteful “nonsense”: “he oversalts (peresalivaet) in using Orel dialect words.”7 Zelenia, which means the first shoots of a crop, appears when one petitioner says a sentence that I translate, using a Scots term that prob­ ably startled the nineteenth-­century London ear much as zelenia startled Belinsky’s St. Petersburg ear, “Remarkable braird this year, sir, d­ on’t you say?” (Удивительные, можно сказать, зеленя в нынешнем году-­с).8 Though he knew the word was spoken in the Orel region, Belinsky thought it should not

4 I n t r o d u c t i o n

Figure 1.  Petr Sokolov, illustration to Ivan Turgenev, “The Office.” Zapiski okhotnika I. S. Turgeneva v akvareliakh Petra Sokolova (St. Petersburg: Izd. Fon Bool’, 1891–1892). Scanned from Iu. P. Pishchulin, Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev. Zhizn’. Iskusstvo. Vremia (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1988), 150.

be used in writing, and especially not in the author’s voice.9 In complaining that zelenia made Turgenev’s story taste too salty, Belinsky indicated his preference for a nationally accessible literary language, less adulterated by regional oddities.10 Turgenev, in Belinsky’s estimation, was at risk of using other ­people’s language inappropriately, and, like the clerks in the kontora, getting carried away by the desire to show off his abilities at verbatim recording—­putting too many words on paper, indiscriminately, to no one’s benefit. The illustration to Turgenev’s story made by Petr Sokolov in 1891–1892 responds to its thematization of office supplies and its pre­sen­ta­tion of listening as a contest between the hunter and the clerk. The fourth wall of the two rooms is missing; it appears that we are looking at a stage set and the listeners are performers anticipating the audience’s judgment. In a simply furnished room on the right, a thin man speaks as a stout man b­ ehind a desk listens impassively; paper and feather pens appear on his desk, and paper fills the cabinets ­behind him, is piled on top of them, and, following the filing system that was used in Dahl’s office, hangs on hooks on the wall. In a room richly decorated with oil paintings and a glowing samovar on the left, a man whose face we cannot see listens attentively through the wall. The scene conveys dramatic

Introduction

5

irony, since we know he is listening, but the men he hears do not. The heads of the three men form a line that bisects the image, and the white shirt of the man on the left picks up the color of the paper on the right. For a person like Turgenev himself, informed about the rural paper industry, this could serve as a reminder that paper was the product of rags made from such clothing even as it ties the hunter to users of paper. In this book, I look closely at such scenes of writers, or p­ eople like them, listening to “the ­people.” ­These scenes thematize rivalry with other listeners, the modernity of the subject’s listening skills, communication technology, and at times, as in “The Office,” all three. In the rest of this introduction, I introduce my cast of characters as a media generation, I explain what I mean by attentive listening as a per­for­mance, and I end by listing thirteen ways to identify the winners of the listening contests that ­these texts stage.

Penitent Noblemen as a Media Generation The c­ ouple of dozen subjects of this book include a se­lection of famous writers, such as Lev Tolstoy and Fedor Dostoevsky, the collector of epic songs Pavel Rybnikov, and less-­well-­known belletrists and folklorists, as well as a few foreign visitors such as the Marquis de Custine; they also include some of ­these writers’ fictional characters. In travel narratives, folkloristics, prose fiction, and popu­lar collections of “scenes,” ­these writers (like many ­others) depicted listening across social lines. They understood that they w ­ ere attempting something new as they tried to listen attentively to, and use the words of, ­people unlike themselves. My proj­ect is a group biography that focuses on their shared experience of a shift in social attention and media use; it is an ethnography of t­ hese ethnographers. My primary subjects are men, but they sometimes delegated the work of recording to ­women; the reverse occurred more rarely.11 ­These writers, many of whom knew each other, w ­ ere members of Turgenev’s generation defined broadly, meaning that they ­were mostly born in the first third of the ­century (the foreign travelers ­were born a bit e­ arlier). They started to publish a­ fter the 1825 Decembrist revolt, a failed coup led by military officers agitating for reform or abolition of the monarchy, and before the end of 1861, the year of the imperial edict of emancipation. They came of age ­under Tsar Nicholas I, when literate ­people discussed the freeing of the serfs who belonged to the state or to individual landowners and who constituted the majority of the empire’s ethnic Rus­sian population. When emancipation would happen, u ­ nder what terms, and what the results would be preoccupied Rus­sian society during ­these writers’ youth, as its aftermath concerned them l­ater.

6 I n t r o d u c t i o n

The idea of a person trying hard but nonetheless listening inadequately to the “­people” evokes the classic image of pre-­revolutionary Rus­sian intellectuals as tormented by the awareness of their own privilege, and thus it is worth some space to explore why that image was so convincing once, and why it is less so now. Historian Cathy Frierson sees midcentury writers’ fascination with rural ­people as inspired by a fantasy of “redemption through rapprochement with the peasantry” that by the late 1880s would end with the abandonment of intellectuals’ hopes of societal reconciliation.12 Her term, “redemption,” evokes the Christian notions of unity that animate some of the heroes of this book, and it echoes a phrase that came into use a few de­cades ­after Turgenev published “The Office,” when ­people began to say “penitent nobleman” (kaiushchiisia dvorianin) to describe gentry who worried about their own complicity in the abusive system he had described.13 This term was pop­u­lar­ized by the critic Petr Boborykin in an 1885 article in French, “The Cult of the ­People in Con­temporary Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture.” He wrote that only in Rus­sia did writers think of “the ­people” as “a new source of social renewal for the class of educated ­people.”14 He attributed this not to the Europe-­wide reverberations of Herderian Romanticism, but to the interaction between two specifically Rus­sian intellectual camps of the 1840s: the Westernizers who argued for reform along the lines of the revolutionary regimes in France and the United States, and the Slavophiles who argued that any change needed to be inspired by local history and Orthodox spirituality.15 The two sides disagreed on many t­ hings, but, he argued, Rus­sian intellectuals’ expression of obligation ­toward the peasants demonstrated the penetration of Slavophile instincts into Westernizing ideology. Boborykin wrote that “the revolutionary youth felt like criminals relative to the masses; a unique type developed, the penitent young nobleman, who arrived at the complete negation of all his rights, all his influence, even just as a s­ imple member of the educated class.”16 In translating a Rus­sian participle that could mean “remorseful” or “repentant” as “penitent,” he made t­ hese ­people seem to be performing a religious ritual, and he decried this trend as a national “illness” or “crisis” that had infected them with mysticism. He described the cult of the p­ eople as an unfortunate Rus­sian obsession. Boborykin contributed to a French tendency to critique the Rus­sian Empire as fostering despotism and in­equality and thus creating the conditions for communism, and also to a tradition of attacking Rus­sian thinkers for bringing into the po­liti­cal sphere a self-­flagellating fervor better confined to religious spaces.17 The critic Nikolai Mikhailovsky asserted that what­ever Boborykin said, he, Mikhailovsky, was the one who had originated the term, in an 1876–1877 set of sketches, whose narrator identifies himself as a “penitent nobleman” and

Introduction

7

asks, “How can you not repent if your conscience torments you? Perhaps it torments you over nothing, wrongly, it’s still tormenting. This is a fact.”18 Mikhailovsky makes penitence appear to be not an illness but a rational reaction for serf-­owners who pause to think about the h ­ uman cost of their own comfort. He explained that while ­there had been individual “penitent noblemen” e­ arlier, such ­people appeared “en masse” in Rus­sia in the 1840s, and by the 1870s their attitude was even more common—­and logically so.19 Boborykin pathologized the “penitent noblemen,” but Mikhailovsky normalized them, as did his con­temporary Alexander Pypin, who saw the increasingly dark depictions of rural life in Rus­sian prose over the nineteenth ­century as realist and noted that writers w ­ ere moving, logically, from insisting on the humanity of serfs during the campaign for emancipation to closely examining the newly ­free majority population of the empire.20 Boborykin’s and Mikhailovsky’s foregrounding of ideology continues in the scholarship on the Rus­sian intelligent­sia, who would also be described, throughout the twentieth c­ entury, as penitent, as owing a debt to the “­people” from whom they ­were cut off, and as reflexively opposed to the authorities.21 It also continues in the scholarship describing midcentury folklore collectors as seeing the tales and songs they gathered as data about the attitude of the “common p­ eople” to the authorities, and arguing about ­whether folklore offered evidence of undying traditions and a harmonious national past, or, rather, of peasants’ admiration for bandits and rebels who challenged the monarchy.22 Another school of thought, starting in the 1970s, is skeptical about seeing the writings of a few writers as speaking for an entire generation. Michael Confino argues that the “­people of the 40s” w ­ ere not so much penitent noblemen agonizing about the narod as energetic, optimistic state servants.23 ­Later historians have shifted their focus from the ideology of a few p­ eople to the ordinary lives of many; they examine the ways that ­people of all sorts exercised agency over their own identities. They point out that the “estate” system of categories that formally divided Rus­sian subjects was consolidated only in the early nineteenth ­century and was never stable; they draw attention to non-­Russian ethnicities with their own classification systems and to the raznochintsy, ­people “of diverse origins” who did not fit neatly into any estate.24 Reading through provincial files, they find p­ eople responding creatively to the imperial rules, such as peasants who change their l­egal identities and Jews who correct local officials’ mis-­ spellings of their names (or deliberately introduce new mis-­spellings), in both cases often trying to protect their sons from the draft.25 The imperial bureaucracy too emerges in more recent scholarship as savvy officials jockeying for power as they work to bring legislation and administrative practices into line with their ideas.26 ­These historians show that the thick files in imperial archives

8 I n t r o d u c t i o n

consist of papers that p­ eople of vari­ous statuses used to realize their ambitions. And in opposition to the idea of midcentury writers as proto-­dissidents, recent scholarship points out that even in the area where they are ­imagined as most opposed to the state—­the censorship—­they in fact cooperated with, and staffed, government offices of information control.27 They ­were not powerless, like the beaten-­down clerk in Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” but rather thoughtful bureaucrats who cared about ­doing their jobs well. Even as it takes writers’ doubts about their own interactions with “the ­people” seriously, this study reexamines them in the spirit of the more recent historiography. It is alert to writers’ recognition of the “­people” not as a passive, homogeneous collective body, awaiting the rescuer who w ­ ill give them voice, but as diverse, creative individuals with agency. It follows scholars of lit­er­ a­ture who, in the past de­cade, have asked how it m ­ atters for mid-­nineteenth-­ century Rus­sian prose that its producers w ­ ere imperial administrators: Alexander Etkind notices that they wrote and thought about colonial rule, Irina Reyfman notices that they wrote and thought about status and hierarchy, and I notice that they wrote and thought about office supplies.28 That office supplies ­were tied to status is evident in Sergei Zarudnyi’s satirical “Letter from an Experienced Bureaucrat of the 40s to a Young Colleague Entering Ser­vice,” where he urges his addressee to attend to paper as a material object: “Always take home a briefcase full of papers, and although at home you may work on something ­else, say that you are working on cases.”29 Zarudnyi’s experienced bureaucrat, like Turgenev and his characters, talks about paper ­because it is something he notices. As the media scholar Göran Bolin explains, “media generations” take on identities through their collective encounters with new technologies and forms.30 The mid-­nineteenth-­century writers, then, ­were members of a media generation that was constituted by new kinds of interactions with paper, as well as with other changing communication technologies and techniques. In the Rus­sian Empire as elsewhere, the mid-­nineteenth ­century saw a decline in the use of bells for urban communication and the beginnings of electromagnetic telegraphy. Other changes—­ such as mechanically produced and cheaper paper, a faster, mechanized postal system, and stenography—­transformed communication and prompted fantasies of its perfectibility, as though ­humans could attain the ability to speak over any distance and to remember every­thing. ­Because ­these technological changes occurred across the world, it is worthwhile, in analyzing the Rus­sian situation, to look at how historians of nineteenth-­ century communication describe their effects elsewhere. They notice that talking about media technology is a way for ­people to express their dreams about more satisfying interactions with other p­ eople, and their frustration when real­ity does

Introduction

9

not conform to them. As telegraphy developed in the 1840s, John Durham Peters writes, ­people began to describe even their face-­to-­face interactions with each other in technical terms, referencing electric signals along wires.31 Lisa Gitelman and Miyako I­ noue show in their work on the United States and Japan respectively that the creation of the phonograph and the spread of stenographic systems emerged from and fostered the desire to capture the spoken word completely, accurately, verbatim, a development that p­ eople reacted to with both excitement and anxiety.32 Paper could provide a way to conceptualize both the desire for perfect recording and the fear of too much data: the more paper ­people encounter, the more they think, and write, about its unreliability. As its production was mechanized, writers such as Thomas Carlyle, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Herman Melville began to figure paper si­mul­ta­neously as insubstantial and as a flood of material in which one could drown.33 The demonization of paper is sometimes connected to the idea that it is an instrument of oppression. Indeed, the state was the most impor­tant customer for paper factories, and rapid paper production served leaders who wanted to document every­ thing about their subjects; writers’ increased attention to poor ­people displayed the rise of new kinds of observers who defined themselves as focused professionals, able to discipline their impressions and generate renditions of them to feed the insatiable appetite of the modern state—as well as the market—­ for ­human data.34 Ben Kaf ka argues, though, that to equate paper with power is wrong. Instead, he points out that “paperwork is unpredictable, and . . . ​this unpredictability is frustrating” for administrators and administered alike. “Full of surprises,” paperwork is what we think about as we attempt “to reconcile our theories of the state’s power with our experience of its failure.”35 Heavy, subject to misfiling and loss, paper serves the dream that the world is fully knowable and that p­ eople fit neatly into categories, but paper also displays the fragility of that fantasy. Globally, mid-­nineteenth-­century virtuosic listeners, doctors with their stethoscopes, journalists with their shorthand systems, and government bureaucrats with their filing cabinets, demonstrated their expertise at new practices of hearing, transcribing, and organ­izing information. During the lead-up to the Civil War in the United States, abolitionists understood themselves as listening carefully to the silence of Southern plantations and grasping that it signaled oppression, even as Southerners diagnosed the hubbub of industrialized Northern cities as disorder.36 Members of the rising m ­ iddle class in postrevolutionary France defined themselves as careful, restrained listeners, in offices as in opera ­houses, as opposed to careless ancien régime aristocrats.37 Carlyle showed off the delicacy of his ear when he tried to build a soundproof

10 I n t r o d u c t i o n

study to shield himself from the noise of London.38 The novels of Dickens, who had worked as a court stenographer, display what appeared to be (but ­were not) accurate renditions of the vernacular language of the poor.39 Folklorists’ collection of songs and stories can be understood as prompted by the proliferation of writing, which inspired ­people to value the oral.40 In German-­speaking territories, the ­Brothers Grimm collected folktales and created a dictionary and Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano compiled folksongs; in the British Isles, “peasant poets” such as Stephen Duck and John Clare attracted patrons and readers, John Jamieson produced a Scots dictionary, and Robert Burns wrote poems with Scottish words; in Finland, Elias Lönnrot compiled the Kalevala epic out of the short heroic songs he gathered. How to do this right, though, was not obvious. Johann Gottfried von Herder urged his readers to follow his example and gather folksongs, but he recognized that transcription to his own standards was difficult. He told his readers that folksongs should be printed as they ­were voiced, “without being made palatable. They would not be changed so they are acceptable to the judgment of religion or classical taste, but rather remain as they are. . . .”41 ­Later, though, he admitted ruefully that at times “it was necessary for me . . . ​to make certain changes in the structure of verses . . . ​in order to make it pos­si­ble for us to hear and understand them, which according to my approach meant that I mutilated them.”42 Historians of anthropology point out that when folklorists transcribe songs or tales, they draw attention to their own status and abilities.43 But they cannot impose order definitively: the ethnomusicologist Ana María Ochoa Gautier argues about Colombia that even as philologists draw on local vocalizations selectively to create repre­sen­ta­tions of national language and ­music as unified, predictable, and more au­then­tic than actually spoken variants, their writing reveals something about the poorer “­people” to whom they listen, whose sounds are “a formation and a force” that penetrate into the world of the literate.44 In Rus­sia, the collectors of the 1830s, such as Petr Kireevsky and Nikolai Iazykov, strug­gled as Herder did to decide what it would mean to transcribe accurately. Folklorists of this generation wanted to find “au­then­tic” texts that they ­imagined as miraculously preserved relics of an ancient past, evidence not so much of the fluency of their tellers as of the genius of some long-­ago creators. In that spirit, they tried to rec­ord from illiterate elders in remote villages and ­were skeptical about stories or songs heard from literate younger ­people on city streets or fairgrounds. Some twentieth-­century Rus­sian and Soviet folklorists, though, moved away from t­hose assumptions. Mark Azadovsky, a member of the Rus­sian “Performer School” of folkloristics, noted that a per­for­mance of a folk tale by a person such as Nataliia Vinokurova, whom he recorded in Siberia,

Introduction

11

contained multiple layers: not only a plot common to other renditions of that tale, but ele­ments motivated by local conditions and the teller’s own status, profession, gender, experience, and artistic impulses. His analy­sis suggests that folklorists, as they listened, should attend to their interlocutors’ position and their performative choices. Like Gautier, he held that philological transcriptions contained evidence about the con­temporary lives of the “common ­people.”45 As we ­will see, some of the nineteenth-­century discussions of listening to “the ­people” that I examine h ­ ere anticipate Azadovsky’s ideas. Midcentury technological shifts such as the mechanization of paper production occurred globally, but their effects could differ from one place to another. I refer to shifts such as ­these as “cultural tectonics,” meaning large-­scale, far-­ reaching economic and intellectual changes that are not confined to a single country. ­These include urbanization and industrialization, the rise of nationalisms and democracy, and the end of chattel slavery; as with geological tectonics, t­ hese changes may produce results as varied as earthquakes, volcanoes, and mountain ranges.46 Thus I do not assume that patterns of listening and media use in Paris, Tokyo, or Bogotá corresponded to ­those in St. Petersburg, or in the Rus­sian provinces; at the same time, I do not exoticize Rus­sia and assume that it was inevitably dif­fer­ent, and I include Eu­ro­pean travelers in the same study as the Rus­sian writers with whom they socialized. Inspired by Stephen Lovell’s examination of public speaking in Rus­sia, I do my best to draw on the rich historiography of Rus­sian science and technology while offering cross-­border comparisons.47 Instead of taking Rus­sian difference for granted, I ask how such exceptionalism is constructed and whom it serves: in this case, wondering who benefits from the notion that communication happens in Rus­sia in quiet communal ways, unlike in Western Eu­rope. It is when we look away from such ideologically laden binaries that we notice the everyday experiences midcentury Rus­sians shared with ­people of their class elsewhere. Thus upper-­class midcentury Eu­ro­pe­ans would have recognized Turgenev, like the hunter in “The Office,” as a virtuosic modern listener from his style of hunting. In the 1840s in Rus­sia as in Western Eu­rope, ­people like Turgenev rejected old elite practices, in which servants and dogs flushed out animals. Instead, they relied on—­and showed off—­their own ability to watch and listen to prey.48 Bolin observes that generations are defined through the stories they repeat about their use of media.49 Such a story about Rus­sian mid century writers’ use of paper appears in Aleksei Pisemsky’s 1869 novel, ­People of the 40s, whose hero, the poor nobleman Pavel Vikhrov, observes and writes about peasants.50 When his fiction attracts governmental attention, he is punished by being sent to work in an office in a distant province. (Something like this happened to Dahl, Alexander Herzen, and Rybnikov.) When Vikhrov annoys his superior, he is assigned

12 I n t r o d u c t i o n

an onerous case that requires g­ oing through eight volumes of files, so much paper that the soldier who brings it to him has to carry each tome separately; Vikhrov heroically reads the ­whole ­thing and discovers that one more witness must be interviewed.51 To show how good Vikhrov is at listening and using other ­people’s words, Pisemsky points out that other ­people are worse, such as a young man at a party who imitates “a drunk department guard too and even a merchant from Shchukin h ­ ouse, but it all turned out terribly untalented, not funny, and you could see it was all borrowed, not his own.” Vikhrov is also irritated by a Jewish composer who says proudly that he has “managed to listen attentively (prislushalsia) to some Rus­sian melodies,” but does not understand the lyr­ics.52 As we ­will see, Pisemsky consistently saw writers of non-­ethnic-­Russian origins as inadequate listeners to Rus­sian voices.53 Pisemsky, who was himself recognized for his ability to convey peasant speech, shows that ­whether he is working for or irritating the regime, Vikhrov is better than his rivals at listening to and recording other ­people’s words. By making the hero of ­People of the 40s both a virtuosic listener and a conscientious interpreter of bureaucratic interviews, Pisemsky shows that modern sound mediation was crucial to how midcentury writers saw themselves.

Listening as Per­for­mance Pisemsky and his characters, like the other real and fictional subjects of this book, evaluated each other’s abilities to hear and reproduce other ­people’s words completely and convincingly. They experienced attentive listening as a per­for­mance, in the sense that the anthropologist Richard Bauman means when he asserts that e­ very community has its own ways for individuals to signal to their audience: “This is per­for­mance. I’m on! I invite you to watch and listen closely and I ­will impress you, entertain you, move you. I invite you as well to judge just how skillful, effective, and moving a display I can accomplish.”54 While Bauman describes the production of the oral word, its reception can be evaluated in the same way. This was apparent to Plutarch, who points out that “a hearer . . . ​is a participant in the discourse and a fellow-­worker with the speaker,” and a person listening to a lecture needs “to sit upright without any lounging or sprawling . . . ​to maintain a pose of active attention.”55 The per­for­mance of listening happens both at the moment of audition and ­later, when p­ eople retrospectively draw attention to it.56 Midcentury Rus­sian authors understood their own written language as bearing the traces of moments of successful recycling of spoken words. They ­were the inheritors of an eighteenth-­century proj­ect of modernization, when

Introduction

13

the tsars sponsored the creation of a secular polyfunctional standard (or “literary”) Rus­sian language that would be usable for artistic, bureaucratic, judicial, and other purposes, in place of the awkward chancellery register and Western languages.57 This new language entailed the increasing integration of spoken words into writing. While the mid-­eighteenth-­century poet Mikhail Lomonosov defined three acceptable writing styles with varied proportions of vernacular ele­ments, at the end of the c­ entury, Nikolai Karamzin challenged this doctrine, hoping to create a single style for the written and spoken language, containing carefully selected colloquial expressions that would be appealing but not vulgar. It was then that Rus­sian writers began to distinguish between their own spoken language and what they understood as the “speech of the common p­ eople” (prostorechie).58 What this study focuses on is not the changes that p­ eople such as Lomonosov and Karamzin introduced, but rather how p­ eople talked about what they did—­not how language actually evolves, but what linguists call “metapragmatics,” meaning how p­ eople evaluate their own and each o ­ thers’ communicative practices. As Susan Gal and Judith Irvine explain, in depicting a specific interaction as worth thinking about, language users create a “site,” a “sphere of relevance and action,” in which that event can take on meaning.59 Scholars use the term “language ideology” to explain the connections between how ­people talk about language and what they believe about themselves, other ­people, and society in general, and linguists explore the ways that observations about a single moment of communication can be “scaled up” to express feelings of difference and belonging.60 The subjects of this book w ­ ere drawn to the notion that p­ eople who share a language feel connected to each other, but they also noticed when speakers’ or writers’ attempts to show that they shared the language of other ­people instead revealed difference and social distance. The argument that shared language underlies connection was made influentially by the po­liti­cal theorist Benedict Anderson. He asserts that language has, historically, united ­people—­that “print-­languages laid the bases for national consciousness,” ­because it was only with the circulation of newspapers and books in standardized vernacular languages that p­ eople started to understand themselves as belonging to the same national communities as ­others who read and spoke the same languages.61 The linguists Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook, less certain of the dream of unification, argue that Anderson depicts languages as being more stable than they actually are. Standardized languages do not precede modern national senses of belonging, they note; rather, “languages and nations are co-­constructed dialectically,” meaning that nations endow the dominant language in their territories with a sense of permanence.62

14 I n t r o d u c t i o n

In a spirit that anticipates Anderson, some of the foundational works on the history of literary Rus­sian, written ­under Stalin by Viktor Vinogradov, make writers’ refinement of that language appear to be the triumphant affirmation of a Rus­sian verbal art that united the nation.63 A ­couple of generations ­later, the historical linguist Viktor Zhivov questioned the language ideology that centers on canonical writers’ creation of the literary language; he argued that scholars should write less about that and more about the variety of ­people who used that language.64 In the mid nineteenth c­ entury, this increasingly included new readers, often mi­grants to cities; whereas the writers and readers of the early nineteenth c­ entury ­were mostly gentry, the midcentury witnessed the rise of a “middling class” of readers of vari­ous backgrounds.65 In spite of ­these urban developments, the sense of division between rural spoken registers and the written language was still palpable. Rus­sia’s emancipation proclamation was written in difficult-­to-­understand high-­style language, and when it was read aloud to the serfs, they found it hard to follow.66 Lovell opens his study of Rus­sian oratory with this moment, which he calls the “last blast of the unmitigated high-­to-­low discourse” of an ­earlier period.67 The subjects of this book, like Makoni and Pennycook, sensed that national identity was built on the shifting ground of a language in flux, and so did the Rus­sian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who celebrated the multiplicity and instability of language. “Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work; alongside verbal-­ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted pro­cesses of decentralization and disunification go forward.”68 The linguistic anthropologist Asif Agha explains how fiction can reinforce this sense that dif­fer­ent kinds of ­people speak in dif­ fer­ent ways, making the “multilanguagedness” that Bakhtin delighted in a literary phenomenon, a product of the novels that he loved.69 Inspired more by Makoni, Pennycock, and Bakhtin than by Anderson, this study focuses on writing that highlights disunification and multilanguagedness and makes a writer’s use of other p­ eople’s words seem jarring, as Turgenev’s zelenia was to Belinsky. Writers made their own and other’s experiences of listening into “sites” that could take on meaning. Thus Karamzin explained his ideal linguistic style when he urged another writer to use pichuzhechka (­little bird) to refer to a bird, ­because he could tell that this rural vernacular word was suitable for writing; he wrote that when he had “heard it (slykhal)” from “good villa­gers,” it had awoken in his soul “two pleasant ideas: freedom and rural simplicity.” He found ptichka (the current Rus­sian diminutive for “bird”) less appropriate for a poem, ­because it “recalls a cage and thus unfreedom.”70 Karamzin is claiming ­here to

Introduction

15

be a detached observer and a possessor of excellent taste, able to judge ­others’ words and determine their usefulness, with no difficulty or special effort. If bringing spoken words into the written language is something like capturing songbirds, then Karamzin pre­sents himself as a person who does both well, in a way that evokes freedom, as opposed to t­ hose who do both badly, in a way that suggests captivity. His comment recalls the saying from Dahl’s dictionary that I use as my epigraph: “A word is like a sparrow—it flies away and you c­ an’t catch it.” This meta­phorical warning to speak cautiously is effective ­because it reflects our sense that both birds and spoken words may elude our grasp. Herzen gestured t­ oward the tie between words and birds in noting that although Turgenev’s narrator in Notes of a Hunter is purportedly a­ fter birds, he actually captures landowners—or, more precisely, their stories.71 The writer most celebrated as the creator of literary Rus­sian is Alexander Pushkin. A member of the generation ­after Karamzin (but still before the midcentury cohort that I focus on in this book), Pushkin urged readers to evaluate their own (and his) listening using dif­f er­ent standards. From his mid-­twenties, he saw borrowing folklore and vernacular words as a way for writers to improve their writing, and although he often found t­ hese ele­ments in written sources, he urged other writers to access them directly, via attentive listening.72 He wrote in 1828, “Listen carefully (vslushivaites’) to the speech of the common p­ eople (prostonarodnoe narechie), young writers—­there you ­will learn a lot that cannot be found in our journals.”73 And in 1830, he wrote in reference to an eighteenth-­century Italian writer, “Alfieri studied Italian at the Florence bazaar: it would not be bad for us to sometimes listen attentively (prislushivat’sia) to Moscow communion bread bakers, who speak a remarkably pure and correct language.”74 The verb prislushivat’sia (or prislushat’sia), which Turgenev would use for the attentive listening of both his hunter and his clerk, adds to the verb slushat’, to listen, the prefix pri, indicating motion ­toward an object, and the reflexive suffix; vslushivat’sia is formed similarly, but with the prefix v, meaning motion into a space. Like other languages, Rus­sian possesses a variety of words designating dif­ fer­ent kinds of hearing and listening, many of which w ­ ere used metapragmatically by Pushkin’s generation and then by the midcentury writers. They used podslushat’ (or podslushivat’), to eavesdrop, both approvingly and disapprovingly. Pushkin’s friend, the poet Petr Viazemsky, warned that while a writer who listens to old nannies might borrow some folk expressions, at the same time “you’ll get your fill of hearing (naslushaesh’sia) a lot of ignorant stuff (mnogo bezgramotnosti).” The verb naslushat’sia means to hear more than one needs or even wants; the na prefix and reflexive ending designate a class of

16 I n t r o d u c t i o n

verbs characterizing an action done to completion or excess.75 Viazemsky described Pushkin’s listening in the terms I associate with Karamzin’s, writing that actually Pushkin “rarely listened attentively (prislushivalsia)” to communion bread bakers and that he was unusual in possessing a “delicate and discriminating ear” that allowed him to pick out the most beautiful vernacular words.76 His comment underscores the many ways that attentive listening could be defined. Writers of Pushkin’s generation and the midcentury admired verbatim listening and a “discriminating ear” that could identify the most euphonious word. They wanted the literary language to be both authentically tied to specific oral utterances and beautifully clear to readers everywhere. Although ­these goals could come into conflict, they drew on them all as they wrote metapragmatically about their own and o ­ thers’ listening. Thus Belinsky, who criticized Karamzin b­ ecause he did not “listen attentively (ne prislushivalsia) to the language of the common ­people,” also, as we saw, disapproved of Turgenev’s use of what he heard as the excessively regional zelenia.77 Pushkin himself liked verbs that make listening appear to be not the discriminating decoding of a signal from a distance, but rather a bodily experience, undertaken by a listener who pushes in, leans t­oward, or other­wise physically approaches a source of sound. This kind of attentive listening requires the subject to try hard to learn something; it may not succeed. Both prislushivat’sia and vslushivat’sia tend to be used ­after forms of the verb “to begin”: not having listened attentively, one begins to do so, registering the shift in one’s own be­hav­ior. Nataliia Shvedova’s classic grammar describes verbs with the pri prefix and the reflexive suffix as “making perception the object of perception.” Prislushat’sia can also mean “to get used to certain sounds, to stop paying attention to them.”78 The pioneering nineteenth-­century neuroscientist Ivan Sechenov makes ­these two kinds of meanings—to attend carefully to something in such a way that perception itself becomes the object of one’s perception, and to become so used to it that one stops noticing it—­sequential parts of a single narrative in his description of prislushivanie, a noun that he derives from prislushivat’sia and that one could translate as “attentive listening.” “Aural attention, prislushivanie, is a phenomenon of learned involuntary action,” he writes, and then gives the example of a language student, presumably Rus­sian, who at first cannot follow spoken En­glish at all, but a­ fter a month of listening, decodes automatically.79 In urging his fellow writers to listen attentively to the “common ­people,” then, Pushkin, it appears, was suggesting that they model themselves on him by making their own perception the object of their perception. He experimented in other ways with a kind of listening that ­people noticed. He had been exiled in 1824 to his ­family’s estate of Mikhailovskoe for writing mock-

Introduction

17

ing epigrams about his superior officer and expressing unorthodox religious beliefs in a letter that was opened by the police, and he wrote to a friend that he spent his time t­ here listening to the tales of Arina Rodionovna Matveeva, the estate’s h ­ ouse­keeper, in the eve­nings (“only with her am I not bored”); he transcribed seven of them into a notebook a friend had given him as a birthday pre­sent.80 Pushkin used his time in the countryside to play with both his literary and his sartorial styles. From the early-­eighteenth-­century vestimentary decrees of Peter I, a nobleman of Pushkin’s status would normally be seen in public only clean-­shaven and in European-­style clothes. Pushkin, though, went to the market fair wearing a peasant-­style shirt with a ­belt and a wide straw hat. ­Because Pushkin was close to some of the Decembrist rebels and had a reputation as a free-­thinker, Alexander Boshniak, a botanist, novelist, and sometime spy, was asked to evaluate him as a security risk. Boshniak heard Pushkin’s neighbors describe his unusual outfit and learned that he shook hands with peasants he knew and, ­after he went riding, sometimes told his servant to let his h ­ orse wander, “saying that e­ very creature has the right to freedom.” Boshniak concluded in the report he filed, though, that Pushkin was not singing protest songs or “trying to incite the ­people.” He recognized Pushkin’s be­hav­ior as performative, explaining that his clothing choices simply indicated his “desire to draw attention with his eccentricities.”81 Pushkin’s sartorial decision could be understood, according to Ma­ya Kucherskaia, ­either as a Byronic affectation or as reflecting “the desire to mark an internal kinship with the ­people.” In a study of mid century folklore collectors who wore folk clothing, she distinguishes among three motivations: a po­ liti­cal one, to signal their connection to “the p­ eople”; a practical one, to blend in with residents of the countryside and make collection easier; and a theatrical one, as a gesture that evoked the carnival mumming practices of Christmas and Maslenitsa (Butter Week, leading up to Lent), when p­ eople wear clothes associated with a dif­fer­ent class or gender.82 However, ­people may not always have been able to distinguish among ­these dif­fer­ent motivations, as indicated by Boshniak’s need to explain that Pushkin’s be­hav­ior was theatrical, not po­liti­cal. As we ­will see in this book, writers’ tendency to criticize each other for engaging in “masquerade” indicates that the specter of the theatrical haunts evaluations of the be­hav­ior of ­people who may have thought of themselves as ideological or practical cross-­class-­dressers. Daniel Green observes that radicals throughout the c­ entury strug­gled to ensure that their choice to wear peasant clothing would be “taken seriously and not interpreted as a form of masquerade.”83 The sociolinguist Ben Rampton names be­hav­ior such as Pushkin’s “crossing,” meaning per­for­mances by ­people who attract attention by using words

18 I n t r o d u c t i o n

and other social cues such as clothing that are out of sync with their social position.84 ­People “cross” when their use of other ­people’s style prompts discussions about their legitimacy and turns their own claims about who they are into an incident that can be scaled up, or what Rampton calls “a focal object of play, contemplation and dispute.”85 As Boshniak recognized, by wearing clothing associated with other ­people Pushkin prompted discussion. Discourse about cross-­class cross-­dressing parallels metapragmatic discussions of writers’ use of vernacular words. Vinogradov saw their use of the speech of peasants and the urban poor as po­liti­cal, meant to “de­moc­ra­tize” the literary language by aligning it with the tastes of a broader segment of the population.86 Roman Jakobson, in more practical terms, stressed the aesthetic function of the introduction of novel ele­ments into a literary text and depicted rural language, including the onomatopoetic play that Belinsky disliked, as such a source of artistic innovation for Turgenev.87 Bakhtin insisted that good novels orchestrate a multiplicity of linguistic registers, even as, more than Vinogradov or Jakobson, he recognized the theatrical frictions that can be engendered by one person’s use of another’s words. “The word . . . ​exists in other ­people’s mouths,” and when a writer chooses to use it, it may not “submit . . . ​ to this seizure and transformation into private property; many words stubbornly resist, ­others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them . . . ​it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the w ­ ill of the speaker.”88 ­These words, in their quotation marks, draw attention: they resemble “crossing” writers, in folk clothing, who seem out of place and may be accused of masquerading. At times, critics suggested that writers who used other ­people’s words ­were ­doing something wrong, pretending to occupy a social position that they did not. In the early twentieth ­century, Rus­sian critics tended to judge writers who used peasant language and literary forms as e­ ither imitative (if they w ­ ere not of peasant origin) or au­then­tic vehicles of folk voice (if they could be categorized as peasants).89 Bakhtin, though, consistently celebrated literary works that juxtapose multiple linguistic registers, no ­matter who wrote them and ­whether or not their words “submit” to “the one who appropriated them.”90 Like Pushkin, he depicted all words as available to any verbal artist who takes the trou­ble to listen: both embraced the entertainment provided when verbal artists “cross” by using other ­people’s words. Bakhtin’s enthusiasm about such writers may be the product of his own immersion in the prose of an e­ arlier ­century: overall, nineteenth-­century critics w ­ ere less likely than twentieth-­ century ones to worry that non-­peasant writers who wrote about peasants ­were ­doing something inauthentic. But as I demonstrate ­here, midcentury

Introduction

19

writers’ critical descriptions of their own and each ­others’ practices of listening to and using o ­ thers’ words suggest that some of them w ­ ere beginning to feel uneasy about it. Accusations that ­people are ­doing something wrong, behaving falsely and even profiting illegitimately, when they circulate sounds they have heard from ­others anticipate twenty-­first-­century discussions of cultural appropriation and the attendant shifts in laws around intellectual and artistic property.91 Postcolonial and decolonial critics examine ways that wealthier p­ eople listen to or imitate poorer ones, and they excoriate privileged listeners for their condescension, selectivity, posturing, and attempts to claim innocence in relation to the perpetration of vio­lence of which they are the beneficiaries.92 In this vein, intellectual historians look back at nineteenth-­century listeners and argue that folklorists such as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm perpetuated in­equality by hardening the distinction between rich and poor, and they critique white abolitionists whose fetishizing of African-­American m ­ usic, their “ethnosympathy,” masks their complicity in the oppression of Black ­people.93 Nonetheless, dreams of perfect listening and the ethical use of other ­people’s words live on. Gayatri Spivak argues in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” that even though no one has enough in common with other ­people to speak on their behalf, even though oppressed p­ eople cannot voice the prob­lems that they share, intellectuals must still try to understand their needs and interests and do their best to represent them.94 Poignantly, the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu still speaks for the possibility of good listening, even while criticizing sociologists and anthropologists who listen in a condescending or distanced way—­and, like the subjects of this book, he connects ethical listening to specific techniques of taking in other ­people’s language.95 He describes ideal ethnographic practice as “active and methodical listening” and “total availability to the person being questioned, submission to the singularity of a par­tic­u­lar life history—­which can lead, by a kind of more or less controlled imitation, to adopting the interviewee’s language, views, feelings, and thoughts.” Such an interview, he asserts, “can be considered a sort of spiritual exercise that, through forgetfulness of self, aims at a true conversion of the way we look at other p­ eople.”96 For Bourdieu, a listener who transcribes phonetically and adopts an interviewee’s language is succeeding at a task at which o ­ thers have failed. Pushkin urged other writers to lean in and listen attentively to the “common p­ eople,” and then to use their words, as though they could all do it. He did not sound concerned that using other ­people’s words might make him seem inauthentic; rather, it was a way to get attention, to take delight in masquerade, the impulse that, as Boshniak recognized, also prompted him to don

20 I n t r o d u c t i o n

his straw hat for the fair. L ­ ater writers sound less confident, less like Pushkin (or Bakhtin) and more, like Bourdieu, concerned that not every­one could listen correctly. Listening to the “common p­ eople” of the Rus­sian Empire became, for them, a way to test their virtues and their loyalties, to criticize themselves, as penitent noblemen w ­ ere famous for d­ oing, and at the same time, like other members of the global midcentury media generation, to display their virtuosity at pro­cessing sound. Thus in writing about listening across social lines, they per­sis­tently referred to communication technology and depicted listeners as rivals to each other (or to their own less admirable sides); perhaps recognizing that they themselves ­were masquerading, they constantly accused each other of ­doing so. Meanwhile, some of them began to suspect that the words and verbal art of the “common ­people” ­were not stable objects waiting to be gathered up by writers—no ­matter how virtuous and virtuosic—­but per­for­mances constructed in the moment by p­ eople as creative as themselves.

Thirteen Ways to Win a Listening Contest If listening to and using other p­ eople’s words is a per­for­mance allowing writers to get attention—­and invite metapragmatic commentary—­then this allows them, and their critics, to imagine contests where one listener can be compared to another. Contests are understood differently in dif­fer­ent realms: economists evaluate how big a bribe p­ eople ­will offer, and biologists evaluate what makes some male birds’ songs especially attractive to females. Their theories consider the costs that contestants incur and how they relate to potential gains, assuming that contestants expend resources irreversibly in competing for a single prize. The attention of the writers described in this book was drawn to ­people engaging in contests of a dif­fer­ent kind, such as singing competitions and insult ­battles, which resemble listening contests in that resources are not expended irreversibly, the stakes are relatively low, and all contestants might gain publicity that they can parlay into further success.97 If listening across social lines is a kind of creative contest where the onlookers choose the winner, then the contestants can use dif­fer­ent techniques to impress their audience. The verbs p­ eople use for listening point to ways it can be done. In addition, one can define modes or genres of listening, which resemble speech genres. Michel Chion, who writes about sound in film, defines modes of listening that are especially relevant for that medium, and in order to describe the mid-­nineteenth-­century writers’ world, I name some of the ways that they conceptualized one kind of attentive listening as better than

Introduction

21

another.98 Chion’s listening modes are the first four in this list, and the next nine are mine (I explain each of them at greater length in the chapters):

Acousmatic. Listening when the source of sound is not vis­i­ble. Semantic. Listening and decoding a message. Causal. Determining the source of a sound by listening. Reduced. Listening to sound on its own, without decoding it or seeking its source. *** Suspicious. Listening to one’s enemies and uncovering their plots. Prophetic. Hearing a divine message that ­others cannot. Percussive. Hearing a metallic sound in the night and realizing that death is nigh. Choral. As one listens, matching one’s voice to ­those of a community to which one belongs. Omnivorous. Recording every­thing one hears; not categorizing sounds. Unmediated (vs. mediated). Taking in sound in a bodily way, unlike ­those who rely on mediation. Hypnogogic. Hearing an otherworldly message on the edge of sleep. Technologically marvelous. Using seemingly magic techniques or devices to hear and rec­ord more completely than ­others. Mocking. Hearing the ridicu­lous ­thing one anticipated and getting ­people to laugh. Midcentury writers described ­people who use ­these ways of listening to demonstrate the superiority of one listener to another. In the first two chapters, a French and a German traveler and their local friends imagine the Rus­sian Empire as a quiet testing ground for listening, a place whose silence allows p­ eople to probe their ability to connect with o ­ thers. Some of them posit that the state’s suspicious mode of listening, and the cold of the North, might freeze sound into inaudibility, so that hearing it nevertheless, in the prophetic and percussive modes (which complement each other), demonstrates the listener’s virtue and skills. O ­ thers valorize Rus­sia’s ­imagined silence, depicting it as a tranquil space where choral listening shows who belongs. While ­these writers gesture ­toward old forms of urban communication using bells and cannon shots, or the newly in­ven­ted electromagnetic telegraph, the next chapters dwell on paper, an old technology that was being used more and more. Chapters 3 and 4 center on Vladimir Dahl and Dmitry Grigorovich, two c­ hildren of mi­grants who w ­ ere accused of recording other ­people’s words indiscriminately; Dahl used the rhe­toric of omnivorous listening to defend himself, while Grigorovich’s critics attacked

22 I n t r o d u c t i o n

him as too reliant on his notebook and his listening as thus too mediated. Chapters 5 and 6 look at writers who ­were able to avoid such critiques: Turgenev, who depicted the paper he wrote on as an organic part of the countryside and his own listening as thus unmediated, and Rybnikov, who described himself as hearing the epic singers of the far north hypnogogically. Dostoevsky, the subject of chapter 7, boasted of his access to stenographers’ technologically marvelous listening even as he borrowed the mocking listening tactics of his fellow Siberian prisoners. And in chapter 8, the comic writer Ivan Gorbunov parodies some of the modes of listening on which e­ arlier writers relied, even as he demonstrates that the winners of listening contests can be the lower-­class p­ eople who are conceptualized in e­ arlier chapters as the listened-to. Like Turgenev’s “The Office,” ­these texts show that when writers talk about how they and their characters listen, and the technology they use to rec­ord, they are also anticipating other ­people’s judgment.

C h a p te r   1

Ringing

Ringing or s­ ilent, bells lend themselves to meta­ phor. In a memoir he started writing in 1852 about the Rus­sian Empire he had left in 1847, Alexander Herzen recalls the nobleman Petr Chaadaev dismissing Moscow as a place of frustrated silence, where “they take e­ very foreigner to look at the ­g reat cannon and the ­g reat bell. The cannon that cannot be shot and the bell that broke before it was rung. What a remarkable city, where the local attractions are notable for their absurdity; or perhaps this big bell with no tongue is a hieroglyph that signifies this enormous mute country.”1 As Herzen’s audience was well aware, Chaadaev had traveled in Eu­rope from 1823 to 1826 and on his return home had written a set of letters (in French) where he asserted that Orthodox Rus­sia was cut off from the world history he identified with Catholic Eu­rope; he described Rus­sian ­faces as having a “mute air,” unlike f­aces in other nations, where “the name of Christ is pronounced” and opinions move history forward.2 The work had circulated in manuscript u ­ ntil, surprisingly, the Moscow Telescope got a Rus­sian translation of the first letter past the censor in 1836. ­After it came out, the publisher, Nikolai Nadezhdin, was exiled to Ust’-­Sysol’sk in Siberia, and Chaadaev was declared mad and confined to his apartments. Chaadaev’s writing and his biography illustrate the notion of Rus­sians as forcibly silenced, which lends drama to the effort to hear: Herzen’s anecdote evokes authorities who punish their critics, and it prepares his readers for heroic accounts of ­people who 23

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listen against the odds, ­whether to an individual voice or to bells sounding at last. The instrument Chaadaev mentioned, the Tsar Bell, had been forged in 1737, u ­ nder Empress Anna Ioannovna, as a replacement for a sixteenth-­century Kremlin bell that had broken in 1701. The biggest bell in the world, it was cast in a pit specially dug on the Kremlin grounds. It was raised out of the pit to be decorated, but the supports holding it in place burned, it fell, and a section broke off. The bell remained in the pit for almost a ­century; at an estimated 433,356 pounds, it was too heavy for Napoleon to bring it back to France ­after conquering Moscow, as he had hoped. Fi­nally in 1836, the engineer and architect Auguste Ricard de Monferrand lifted the bell out, and it was placed on display. Eventually a chapel was constructed inside the bell.3 Nicholas I made the Tsar Bell a symbol of his empire, while Herzen’s account of the s­ ilent bell and cannon makes them a symbol of Chaadaev and of a p­ eople ­imagined as would-be listeners condemned to silence by a suspicious government. The listening contest I examine in this chapter is between two aspects of a foreign traveler, Astolphe-­Louis-­Léonor, the Marquis de Custine: the empathetic self that he sees as truly French and Catholic, and the heartless one that he identifies with Rus­sia. Like the concept of the “penitent nobleman,” it displays religious meanings of attention to someone e­ lse’s voice.4 Inspired by folklore and by the ideal of Christian unity, Custine and his Rus­sian acquaintances tell tales of Rus­sia as a frigid testing ground for ­people to demonstrate that they can hear against the odds. Their stories let us situate ste­reo­types about Rus­sian silence in the global media environment of the midcentury, when new cultural tectonic patterns meant that around the world metallic instruments ­were falling out of use for urban communication, even as they still echoed in the mind’s ear. Herzen’s recollection of Chaadaev’s comment evokes three kinds of narratives, which this chapter treats in turn. First, I discuss Custine’s depiction of himself as responding to the Rus­sian soundscape with prophetic listening, meaning that he hears a divine voice that o ­ thers do not. Second, I look at tales of Northern silence—­where frozen words wait to thaw and be heard—­that figure in Eu­ro­pean imaginings of Rus­sia. And third, I examine texts where the metallic ringing sounds of bells or cannons, in the percussive mode, compel p­ eople to think about death and their own guilt.

Prophetic Listening One of the most famous foreign visitors to the Tsar Bell was Custine, who spent three months of 1839 in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, and

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Yaroslavl. His Rus­sia in 1839 came out in 1843 and became an international best-­ seller that went through nineteen editions by 1855 in French, En­glish, German, and Danish.5 Seen as an exposé of Nicholas I, an example of widespread French hostility to Rus­sia, or a typical Romantic travel narrative that dwells on the traveler’s emotions, Custine’s book has been extensively studied.6 Although Custine’s criticism of Rus­sia is sometimes cited (triumphantly or angrily) as a judgment of that country that transcends its moment, Véra Milchina, the editor of the authoritative edition of his book, is surely right that he was not a seer but a writer who reproduced the opinions of his era, both t­ hose of other French commentators and of Rus­sians such as Chaadaev who complained about their own government.7 Like other travel writers at that time, Custine saw his task as to juxtapose the country he visited and his own country as divergent possibilities for ­human socie­ties and cultures. In the wake of the revolution and the Napoleonic wars, French travelers in the midcentury felt a par­tic­ul­ar need to redefine their country’s position; thus Custine’s travelogue, like Tocqueville’s Democracy in Amer­i­ca (1835–1840), figures a rising continental power as a po­liti­cal and cultural model for post–­ancien régime France to accept or reject.8 In evaluating Rus­sia, Custine presented himself as a test subject whose sensations demonstrate the effect of a given location and mode of government on h ­ uman beings. He anticipated midcentury Rus­sian writers’ competitions over listening to “the ­people” by structuring his memoir as a months-­long listening competition between his better and worse selves, in which he gradually learned to attend to o ­ thers’ words; he frames the turning point as the triumph of his true French Catholic self over a temporary Rus­sian self. In tying Catholicism to the listening he admired and Rus­sia to the refusal to hear, Custine followed the lead of other writers who drew on the biblical contrast between prophets who attend to the voice of God and t­ hose who turn away from it.9 At the same time, in stressing Rus­sia’s silence, he advertised an ability to listen that made him superior to other writers; his religious and po­liti­ cal rhe­toric underlies a professional claim. Custine was born in 1790, during the French Revolution, and raised by his ­mother, the famous beauty Delphine de Sabran. His f­ather and grand­father ­were liberal aristocrats who sympathized with the revolution but w ­ ere guillotined during the Terror. In 1824, Custine became the center of a scandal when he was discovered, senseless and partially naked, on the road between Versailles and Saint-Denis, having been beaten by a group of soldiers ­after allegedly propositioning one of them.10 In the wake of that crisis, Custine immersed himself in religion, travel, and lit­er­a­ture; he also defied convention by setting up a h ­ ouse­hold with his En­glish lover, Edward Sainte-­Barbe. Having been

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acclaimed for his writing about travel to Spain, he turned to Rus­sia, hoping to create as definitive a depiction of its autocratic system—­which he initially admired—as Tocqueville was producing of American democracy. Custine prepared to write about Rus­sia by extensive reading and speaking with Rus­sians in Paris. He spent time in the Rus­sian aristocratic circles in Paris where Chaadaev had also moved, and he hints that he met him in person in Rus­sia; certainly he knew Chaadaev’s writing.11 Once he boarded the steamer from Lübeck to St. Petersburg, he heard some of Chaadaev’s ideas voiced by another Rus­sian nobleman, Petr Kozlovsky. A diplomat and secret convert to Catholicism, Kozlovsky was known for his broad connections, his fluency in Eu­ro­pean languages (French, En­glish, German, Italian), his Polonophilia, and his undiplomatic tendency to speak his mind.12 Custine was delighted at the ease with which he and the Rus­sian prince fell into conversation, and concluded that b­ ecause in Rus­sia, unlike E ­ ngland, nobility was simply a mark of birth and could not be given as a reward for ser­vice (he was wrong about this), Rus­ sians maintained a naturally uncalculating way of speaking with each other. When Custine expressed t­ hese ideas, Kozlovsky reacted with surprise, saying, “You belong to neither your country nor your time: you are an e­ nemy of the word as a po­liti­cal tool.” Custine agreed that he distrusted public speeches, ­because they played to ­people’s love of beautiful words, but Kozlovsky defended the spoken word in spiritual terms: “Nonetheless, every­thing is in the word: the entire man and something superior to him is revealed in speech: the word is divine!” Custine responded that a government that depends on oratory to persuade the ­people submits to the petty desires of the crowd, while effective leaders, such as Napoleon, rule through the deed rather than the word. Kozlovsky answered that in Rus­sia Custine would see the disadvantages of this tyrannical method of government: history had left Rus­sia out of the Eu­ro­pean development that taught men to valorize their own word of honor, and as a result, “Serfdom . . . ​has degraded the h ­ uman word in Rus­sia to the point that it is considered only a trap: our government lives by the lie, b­ ecause the truth frightens the tyrant as well as the slave. No ­matter how ­little one speaks in Rus­sia, one speaks too much. . . .”13 While Kozlovsky tied the specter of self-­censorship to serfdom, he also gestured t­ oward a more recent administrative change. In the wake of the December Revolt, Nicholas had created a new police office, the Third Section of His Majesty’s Own Chancellery, to anticipate and suppress revolutionary activities: its agents used surveillance, perlustration, denunciation, and interrogation to find out who harbored antigovernment ideas. They listened, and read, in a suspicious mode, and this prompted p­ eople to speak, and write, carefully. The Third Section also monitored attacks on Rus­sia’s reputation published else-

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where and attempted to improve the image of the imperial government by sponsoring content in publications at home and abroad.14 Custine sometimes bemoaned the lack of such censorship in France. T ­ here, he complained, “the false echoes of opinion, the newspapers, wanting to keep their readers at any price, ­will push for disruption, if only to have something to tell for another month. They ­will kill society in order to live on its corpse.”15 Custine’s sexual attraction to men made him vulnerable, and he was horrified to see journalists ­free to publicize shocking be­hav­ior in order to increase newspaper profits. During a visit to E ­ ngland, he had watched a scandal unfold a­ fter the Bishop of Clogher was discovered in bed with a soldier, and he had mused that “an entirely ­free press threatens the individual’s ­every action. . . . ​Misdemeanors, the strangeness of which should itself ensure secrecy, are described and published with no regard for pure and refined souls.”16 In Rus­sia, he hoped to find that the absence of a f­ree press had preserved the true freedom that he dreamed about. His memoir recounts the story of his disappointment. The silence he found in Rus­sia was not liberating, as he had ­imagined, but constraining; it made it harder for honorable ­people to live according to their own moral code. Over the course of the book, Custine condemned ever more harshly the ways in which, as Chaadaev had written and Kozlovsky had told him, the Rus­sian gentry, as much as the serfs, was subject to a servitude that made them unable to speak their minds. Throughout his memoir, Custine depicts himself as learning to listen for what ­people who had been prevented from speaking wanted to say, and he repeatedly described himself as hearing—­even though he did not know Russian—­what ­others could not. Viewing the Mikhailovsky Palace, where Paul I had been assassinated in 1801, Custine thought, “If men keep ­silent in Rus­sia, the stones speak, and in a pitiful voice.”17 Viewing the Peter and Paul Fortress, where prisoners ­were kept, e­ very sound he heard seemed a cry.18 He found hidden meanings in Rus­sians’ silence: “This p­ eople . . . ​does not dare to laugh except with their eyes; but, their words being suppressed, their glance, animated by silence, takes the place of eloquence.”19 Even without the language, he felt that he could interpret peasant songs. Hearing the songs of Volga boatmen, he wrote, “I heard only a vague plaint; my heart understood its meaning.”20 He insisted that folk harmonies had po­liti­cal meanings: “If I ­were emperor, I would not be satisfied by forbidding my subjects to complain, I would also forbid them to sing, which is a disguised way to complain.”21 Images of silence recur throughout the book. In St. Petersburg, customs officials did their work like machines animated by another’s w ­ ill, and Custine reflected, “speech would be unnecessary for t­ hese creatures of the state.”22 The fortifications at Kronshtadt ­were eerily quiet: “no voice came out of that tomb.”23

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St. Petersburg struck him as populated by chess pieces, set in motion by the Tsar: “silence presides over life and paralyzes it. . . . ​When Peter the ­Great . . . ​ applied a military hierarchy to the entire administration of the empire, he turned his nation into a regiment of mutes and declared himself the col­o­nel.”24 He marveled at coachmen’s s­ ilent control of their h ­ orses: “You can go through Petersburg for hours without hearing a single cry.”25 The fact that the Vetche Bell in Novgorod no longer rang testified, for him, to the stifling of dissent in that city (this had happened in 1570, when Ivan the Terrible, paranoid about threats to his rule, massacred churchmen, merchants, and o ­ thers).26 Custine’s insistence on the politics of silence sounds absurd when he attributes peasants’ enthusiasm about seesaw games to the fact that it is “a ­silent plea­sure” and the calm of the Nizhny Novgorod fair to the discipline imposed by the emperor.27 Custine dwells on the silence of the court as the product of a monarch who “has an extreme fear of criticism, or simply of frankness.”28 Even telling the emperor that he sounds sick would be imprudent. “Every­one born Rus­sian or living in Rus­sia takes as their motto to be ­silent on all ­matters without exception; nothing is said h ­ ere, one keeps quiet about every­thing; secret conversations would be very in­ter­est­ing, but who would permit them?”29 Custine heard silence in written as well as spoken form. During a fête soon ­after his arrival, a sudden storm in the Finnish Gulf destroyed the small boats in which party guests ­were traveling to the palace at Peterhof. Dozens, or even hundreds, ­were drowned. Discussion of the event was discouraged, and the press was not permitted to analyze it. “Imagine the thousands of accounts, the discussions, the proposals of all sorts, the conjectures, the cries that such events would occasion in any other country. . . . ​­Here, nothing!!! A silence more frightening than the tragedy itself! . . . ​If they speak about serious and therefore dangerous t­ hings, it is in whispers and in privacy.”30 Increasingly, Custine spent his time in Rus­sia carefully observing himself to see ­whether he could hear such whispers with sympathy—­and like Pushkin’s neighbors in Mikhailovskoe, he understood the treatment of ­horses as a proxy for the treatment of other h ­ umans. On August 6, having been in Rus­sia for two months, he describes his horrified realization that he had lost the capacity for empathy, as indicated by an episode when he failed to urge his coachman to be kind to a young servant who was worried about a foal that had broken loose and was chasing a­ fter its m ­ other, the mare harnessed to the carriage. He realized that although he believed himself more civilized than the Rus­sians “whose customs I observe with a severe attention,” at the “first chance to commit a small act of useless ferocity,” he “succumbed to temptation; the Pa­ri­sian acts like a Tatar!” He blamed the Rus­sian environment. “In France, where we know to re­spect life, even animal life, if my coachman had not

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thought to save the foal, I would have ­stopped him myself to call out to the peasants, and I would not have continued on my way without making sure the animal was safe: ­here, I contributed to his destruction by a pitiless silence.”31 At the end of the book, Custine expresses pride in regaining his ability to intercede for the defenseless, as demonstrated by his agitation on behalf of Louis Pernet, a visiting Frenchman who had been arrested for reasons that Custine did not know. The French consul unmoved by Pernet’s situation had become, Custine wrote, “almost Rus­sian.”32 Fi­nally, Custine succeeded in informing the French ambassador, and the attention with which he listened (and his promise to intervene) put Custine’s conscience “at peace.”33 (Pernet himself would be rather annoyed by the way that Custine would describe him and his situation in Rus­sia.34) In the final chapter of the memoir, Custine writes cautiously of what seems to have been a meeting with Chaadaev. Without mentioning him by name, Custine describes him as a “nobleman by birth and character” who had dared to argue for the superiority of Catholicism to Orthodoxy, who on the topic of religion “thought what I think and dared to say it,” and who, punished by the declaration that he was ill, had become a “martyr to the truth.”35 Custine did not leave Rus­sia determined to describe the country as negatively as he eventually would. He wrote to Victor Hugo in October 1839 that he was confused by what he had seen: “I have written up my voyage, but I ­will not publish it. I was treated too well to say what I think, and I cannot write in any other way.”36 Three years ­later, though, Custine published his book, having de­cided to emphasize what he saw as the negative qualities of Rus­sia over the positive ones. The admission that he had had second thoughts indicates that he suspected his account of his trip to Rus­sia was not quite fair. His description of the insincerity of Rus­sian society might be read as a deliberate choice to take offense at what his hosts thought was normal politeness.37 He exaggerated the horrors of life in Rus­sia, making it appear that abuses perpetrated by Ivan the Terrible, such as the suppression of Novgorod, continued into the nineteenth ­century. By stressing the gap between what Rus­sians said and what he believed them to be thinking, Custine may have been disingenuous—­but this choice gave his work narrative continuity: the center of the account became his own position as a listener who moves from naïveté to knowledge about himself and the world. By repeatedly drawing attention to sound, Custine told the story of his own education as a listener. Over the course of the book, he becomes aware of the disadvantages of feudal-­style speech and grows reconciled to new modes of cross-­class communication. He learns not only how to hear quiet sounds but also how to grasp the truths they hide. Having come to Rus­sia as an aristocrat and an aesthete, suspicious of the crowd and the press, Custine portrayed himself as leaving Rus­sia newly interested in the suppressed voice of “the p­ eople”

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and in his own ability to attend to it—an ability that he links to his French identity and his Catholic faith. In depicting himself as becoming a better listener in Rus­sia, Custine was in tune with other ­people writing in French at the time about Rus­sia, listening, and Catholicism. Increasingly from Napoleon’s defeat to Rus­sia in 1812 through the Crimean War of 1853–1856, the French saw Rus­sia as their e­ nemy and described it as oppressive to its own subjects as well. French writers on Rus­sia focused on cruel tsars, oppressed Poles, and suffering Siberian exiles (they especially liked the Decembrists’ wives who followed their husbands into exile).38 In Pa­ri­sian salons during the Bourbon Restoration of 1815–1830, when the church regained some of the power it had lost during the Revolution, aristocratic Rus­sian émigrés and ­people like Chaadaev who ­were close to the Decembrists interacted with Pa­ri­sians who ­were reimagining Catholicism in the wake of the Revolution and the fall of Napoleon. Suspicion of Rus­sia among French thinkers continued ­after the establishment of the July Monarchy in 1830. The French tended to be sympathetic to the cause of fellow Catholics, such as the Poles. A ­ fter the 1830–1831 Polish revolt, some Polish intellectuals fled to Paris, among them the poet Adam Mickiewicz. In 1832, he self-­published a long poem, Books of the Polish P­ eople and the Polish Pilgrimage (Księgi narodu polskiego i pielgrzymstwa polskiego), which cast the Rus­sian suppression of the revolt in biblical language as the conquest of Liberty by Slavery and the murder of a messiah who, like Christ, would rise again. Mickiewicz used sonic meta­ phors, describing Polish martyrs and pilgrims as the source of words and parables that require adequate listening. Although the survivors of the revolt in the Rus­sian Empire maintain a strategic silence, they pray for liberty. Detractors of the revolt have a “voice . . . ​like the sound of empty windmills where the grain of faith is gone, which make noise but feed no one.” One should attend instead to “­those who preach the word of liberty and suffer prison and blows.”39 Mickiewicz ­imagined Liberty as punishing ­those nations that did not listen to the Poles: She [Liberty] ­will say. . . . ​“You see that I was attacked by brigands, and I called out to you for arms to defend myself and a handful of gunpowder, and you gave me a newspaper article.” But that nation ­will answer, “When did you call me?” and Liberty w ­ ill answer, “I called from the mouth of t­ hose pilgrims, and you did not hear me; go, then, into slavery, where the knout whistles and the ukazes [decrees] clank.”40 This association of Chris­tian­ity with freedom and listening with salvation appealed to one of the most striking French Catholic intellectuals of the early

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1830s, the priest ­Hugues Félicité Robert de Lamennais. Custine read Lamennais, and Kozlovsky had converted to Catholicism ­under his influence.41 The sonic meta­phors that Mickiewicz used echoed ­those Lamennais had employed in the 1810s to argue against slavery, when he associated abolitionism with speaking: “Ancient philosophy . . . ​never dreamed of raising its voice in f­ avor of humanity . . . ​no phi­los­o­pher . . . ​called for the abolition of slavery.”42 Lamennais came to feel that only with full liberty would the p­ eoples of Eu­ rope embrace Catholicism, and he supported rebellions among the Catholics in Poland, Ireland, and Belgium.43 His ally Charles-­Forbes-­René Montalembert translated Mickiewicz’s Books of the Polish ­People and the Polish Pilgrimage into French. It was published in 1833 prefaced by an essay opposing monarchy and concluding with a poem by Lamennais, “Hymn to Poland,” which recycled Mickiewicz’s sonic meta­phors and his identification of Poland with Christ. To further the cause of liberty, Lamennais urged his readers to strain their ears to hear muffled Polish laments in the empire’s silence: “What do you hear in the forests? The sad murmur of the wind . . . ​a cross . . . ​marks the spot where the sun rises, and in the eve­ning one hears soft, mysterious voices nearby.”44 Lamennais amplifies Mickiewicz’s depiction of a Rus­sian silence that should prompt prophetic listening. While it is hard to tie down Chaadaev’s doctrinal beliefs, his writing bears traces of the ways that French Catholic thinkers such as Lamennais referred to the senses. In Eu­rope, he wrote in his letters, history was voiced by all Catholics at once: “each year on the same day at the same hour in the same words all of them si­mul­ta­neously raised their voices to the Supreme Being to celebrate His glory in the greatest of His good works: what an admirable concert, a thousand times more sublime than all the harmonies of the physical world!”45 In contrast with this unifying sound of Christian praise, Chaadaev excoriated the Rus­sians for silently condoning the increasing severity of serfdom even as slavery was, he believed, diminishing in Catholic territories: “Would that the orthodox church would . . . ​say why it did not raise its motherly voice against the detestable vio­lence committed by one part of the nation against the other.”46 He described the Rus­sian gentry as condemned to self-­censorship by their dependence on slavery, “thinking one t­ hing and d­ oing another.”47 Chaadaev heard Eu­rope as harmoniously loud, Rus­sia as shamefully quiet. Chaadaev associated the notion of Christians unified in a single moment of shared experience with Catholicism, but the ele­ments of postrevolutionary Catholic thought that appealed to him echo older sources, such as Augustine’s description of unity as a correlate of grace.48 Chaadaev’s arguments against serfdom w ­ ere inconsistent, as was his agreement with Lamennais.49 He shared some but not all of Mickiewicz’s ideas about Catholicism, and he

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did not openly support the Polish cause.50 The association that Herzen drew between Chaadaev and a forced silence, though, accurately reflects his depiction of landowners such as himself as condemned by their reliance on serfdom to think one t­ hing while ­doing another.51 Chaadaev brought home from Paris not only an attraction to Catholicism but also a tendency to use sonic meta­phors to reject old-­regime values. Mickiewicz used similar meta­phors to convey to a French audience that attending to Polish voices meant listening for the voice of God. Custine could have been exposed to such images of prophetic listening in Rus­sia in the writings of Lamennais, Mickiewicz, or Chaadaev, and if he did meet Chaadaev during his Rus­sian visit, their conversation could have strengthened that association.52 If Mickiewicz and Chaadaev used Christian terminology to define ­those who hear the oppressed of the Rus­sian Empire as worthy of salvation, then Custine claimed to have beaten his own worse, “Tatar” self at a contest of prophetic listening.53 His memoir conveyed to Eu­ro­pean readers that the Rus­sian silence made it pos­si­ble to distinguish between prophets and ordinary ­people, or between remarkable observers and communicators, such as himself, and less good writers.

Frozen Words The idea of a distinctive Rus­sian soundscape that allowed viewers to distinguish between heroes and ordinary ­people existed long before Nicholas’s Third Section and in­de­pen­dently from the contrast between Catholicism and Orthodoxy; Custine’s pronouncements on Rus­sia confirmed older literary and folkloric depictions of the north in general and Rus­sia in specific as a place where sound and listening work in distinctive ways. From the eigh­teenth ­century onward, some Eu­ro­pean thinkers defined Rus­sia as a counterpart to themselves, an example of a relevant alternative po­liti­cal system. They saw it, as the historian Martin Malia argues, as despotic first in an “enlightened” fashion (­until 1815) and then in an “Oriental” way, or perhaps, as Ezequiel Adamovsky proposes, first as “a space of the pos­si­ble” and then (from Diderot) as “a space of absence.”54 I contribute to the historiography of eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century Eu­ro­pean ideas about Rus­sia by bringing it into conversation with sound studies. The meanings of sound in a given time and place reflect environmental as well as social ­factors, and cold places r­eally do sound dif­fer­ent from warm ones: paradoxically, both quieter and louder. Sparsely populated spaces near the earth’s poles can seem especially quiet, with fewer animals and plants to make noise and fewer buildings off which sound can echo. At the same time, frigid air at the earth’s surface makes sound waves refract back to the ground, which is why on a chilly night, a

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train can be audible from farther away than on a warm day. In citing Chaadaev equating Rus­sia to a bell that cannot ring, then, Herzen evoked our bodily knowledge of cold silences that are pregnant with sound. The imaginative force for Custine of the equation of Rus­sia, silence, and cold is evident when his narrative departs from what he could actually have heard. Although he traveled in summer, he ­imagined St. Petersburg in winter, when “silence takes back its old right to the frozen marshes.”55 Custine echoed eighteenth-­century French writers who connected Rus­sia to cold, tyranny, and delayed sound. For example, Montesquieu proposed that while the coddled residents of warm places are easy to enslave, cold climates make ­people strong, brave, honest, and insistent on freedom. While he agreed with his contemporaries that Muscovite rule was despotic, he asserted that the Rus­ sians, toughened by the cold, would inevitably demand liberty.56 Custine echoed him when he wrote that loud revolt would break out in Rus­sia some day: “nations are mute only temporarily . . . ​once speech is returned to this muzzled ­people, we ­will hear so many disputes that the astonished world ­will believe itself back at the confusion of Babel.”57 Rousseau (who understood Rus­sia as having been civilized too quickly and thus doomed to subjugation) also linked climate to speech. He held that warm southern places foster musical languages, in which f­ ree ­people convey their emotions fluently, while cold northern places generate oppressive civilizations and “deaf, rough, articulated, loud, monotonous” languages, with dull oratory.58 What­ever we might think of Montesquieu’s and Rousseau’s beliefs about climate and speech, we can agree that spoken words appear to take on new form in the cold. Mikhail Kheraskov’s 1770s epic poem Rossiiada (The Rossiad) echoed both Rousseau and Montesquieu in linking winter and despotism, both of which he ties to the Muscovites’ Tatar enemies in Kazan (while hinting at some disagreement with the Rus­sian imperial regime that he served).59 As winter kills living ­things, he notes, it also transforms speech visually: ­ here spoken words are seen Там зримы в воздухе вещаемы слова, T   in the air But all is frozen, nature is all Но все застужено, натура вся мертва . . .   dead . . . ​ Winter spreads out her Оттоле к нам Зима державу   empire to us from ­there,   простирает, Devours grass in fields, В полях траву, цветы в долинах   flowers in valleys,   пожирает, And sucks plants’ vital sap. И соки жизненны древесные   сосет.60

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­ hese vis­i­ble words are, of course, the condensation of speakers’ breath that T forms when the temperature falls below about 45 degrees Fahrenheit. By following his description of them with the assertion that all is frozen and nature is dead, and rhyming “dead” (mertva) with “words” (slova), Kheraskov suggests that cold transforms language itself. The notion of vocalizations that take on material form in the cold seems to have inspired one of Kheraskov’s contemporaries, the German nobleman Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen, who migrated to the Rus­sian Empire as a mercenary in 1737. He fought the Turks as a Rus­sian cavalry officer, married a noblewoman from Riga, then returned to his estates in Bodenwerder, where he entertained his neighbors with fantastic tales about his Rus­sian escapades. Rudolf Erich Raspe, a writer and scientist, reworked Münchhausen’s tales for a German comedy magazine before he published The Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen in En­glish in 1785.61 ­Later writers and translators added more episodes, and versions of the collection circulated throughout Eu­rope, including soon in Rus­sia. (The baron himself was horrified at the international reputation that he then developed as a teller of tall tales, power­ful enough to give his name to the medical condition of lying to doctors about having the symptoms of an exotic disease.) One winter day, so the story goes, Münchhausen was traveling down a narrow Rus­sian lane. He asked his coachman to give a signal on his horn to warn other travelers, but no m ­ atter how hard the man blew, no sound came out. Soon the baron’s coach was blocked by one coming the opposite direction. Nothing daunted, the baron placed his coach on his head, jumped over a nine-­ foot hedge, and deposited it in a field. He came back for the two ­horses and extricated them in the same way, carry­ing one on his head, the other ­under his arm. Fi­nally, they arrived at an inn, where the coachman hung his horn near the fire. Suddenly the two men heard “tereng! tereng! teng! teng!,” and realized why the coachman’s horn had been ­silent. “His tunes w ­ ere frozen up in the horn, and came out now by thawing, plain enough, and much to the credit of the driver; so that the honest fellow entertained us for some time with a variety of tunes, without putting his mouth to the horn—­The King of Prus­ sia’s March—­Over the Hill and over the Dale—­with many other favorite tunes; at length the thawing entertainment concluded.”62 Other travelers too told stories about sounds in cold places that freeze and then thaw, all perhaps inspired, like Kheraskov, by the vis­i­ble condensation of breath. This ancient folkloric motif is cata­logued in the Aarne-­Thomson tale type index (as number 1889F). Plutarch, who cared about listening, associated it with the storyteller Antiphanes of Berge. In his ancient Greek version, Antiphanes describes “a certain city in which, b­ ecause of the cold, all the words

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froze as soon as they ­were uttered, and then ­later as the words thawed in the summer the p­ eople heard what they had conversed about during the winter.”63 Plutarch framed the story as a meta­phor for the gradual pro­cess of learning, noting that sometimes p­ eople only realize the wisdom of something long a­ fter they have heard it. With and without this moral, the story appears repeatedly in Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture. Rabelais’s Pantagruel, passing by the Frozen Sea a­ fter a ­battle, finds frozen words of dif­fer­ent colors that, once he warms them in his hands, speak in a language that he does not know; a big one sounds like a gun and o ­ thers like neighing ­horses.64 Münchhausen was not the first to associate frozen words with Rus­sia: Baldassare Castiglione’s sixteenth-­century etiquette guide, The Courtier, includes a tale of an Italian merchant who asks Muscovite merchants on the far side of the frozen Dnieper how much they want for their furs, but when they call out a response, their words freeze. A fire is kindled on the ice in the ­middle of the river, and the words melt and become audible (but it turns out the price is too high).65 Compared to Castiglione’s story, Münchhausen’s relied on the real logistics of Rus­sian travel. From the sixteenth c­ entury, travelers to Muscovy relied on a system of post roads, punctuated e­ very forty kilo­meters or so by stops where they could rest at inns and take on fresh ­horses and ­drivers. This system, inherited from the Mongols, allowed administrators, information, and travelers to move between the capitals and the empire’s edges. Travelers such as Custine sat in enclosed carriages ­behind the coachmen, or iamshchiki, near enough to listen to them, and they used ­these captive subjects to illustrate their ideas about Rus­sians as a ­whole.66 In 1854, Gustave Doré’s History of Holy Rus­sia revisited the tales of fantastic northern listening. This visually brilliant French war­time pamphlet gives shape to Custine’s and Münchhausen’s conceits about sound in Rus­sia. Since Custine’s Rus­sia in 1839 was an international bestseller, it is not surprising that a de­cade a­ fter it appeared, an ambitious young artist would mine it for images that would appeal to readers. Not yet having gained renown for his illustrations of Rabelais, the Bible, and Don Quixote, Doré was inspired by the anti-­Russian feeling in France during the Crimean War to produce what is sometimes called the first comic book: The Picturesque, Dramatic, and Caricatural History of Holy Rus­sia, Following the Chroniclers and Historians Nestor, Nikan, Sylvestre, Karamzin, Ségur, ­etc.67 It pre­sents a mocking history of Rus­sia, beginning with the descent of the first Rus­sians from a bear and a porpoise (or perhaps a penguin). Although Doré advertised a connection to medieval Rus­ sian historians, he relied heavi­ly on Custine. Like ­later comic book artists, Doré used inventive graphic techniques to make sound vis­i­ble. In depicting a ­battle fought during the reign of Ivan the

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Figure 2.  “Satiated by all ­these marvels, Ivan fi­nally ordered that the retreat be sounded; but it began to freeze so strongly that the fanfares froze in the air.” Gustave Doré, Histoire dramatique, pittoresque et caricaturale de la Sainte Russie (Paris : J. Bry Ainé, 1854), 69.

Figure 3.  “A Traveler, recently arrived in Rus­sia, finding, like M. Custine, that in St. Petersburg the surveillance is such that the walls have ears.” Doré, Histoire de la Sainte Russie., 141.

Terrible, he drew angular shapes emerging from horns to show that the sounds had frozen, and he illustrated Custine’s claims about Rus­sians’ fear of voicing their thoughts with an image of walls that literally have ears. Although it was a signal achievement in the development of the comic book, Doré’s History of Holy Rus­sia sold badly at the time. The artist would continue to experiment with the techniques he had developed in that book in his ­later, more successful work. Specifically, he returned to the depiction of distinctive Rus­sian sound in his illustrations for the 1865 French edition of Münchhausen’s tales, where he drew the frozen horn. Doré’s visual experiments with depicting Rus­sian silence demonstrate the enduring appeal of the Eu­ro­pean fantasy of Rus­sia as a place where listening was tested and hearing deferred. If it is advantageous for writers to display their talents at focusing and decoding relative to ­those of their competitors, then the appeal of this notion went beyond the po­liti­cal import stressed by Her-

Figure 4.  The postilion’s frozen horn, Doré, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (London: Cassell, Petter and Galpin, 1865), 72.

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zen, Chaadaev, Mickiewicz, and Custine. Frozen words make p­ eople think about communication itself. As Plutarch noticed, the tale of the frozen sounds is an allegory for the fact that listening may not be immediate, uniform, reliable, or taking place u ­ nder laboratory conditions; rather, it can be delayed, variable, likely to fail, and place-­and platform-­specific. Stories about frozen sounds confirm that listening to another person does not mean the perfect transmission of a set message, but rather the beginning of a story whose ending is unknown.68 It is something that can be done well or badly. At the same time, such stories provide a meta­phor for writing itself, which captures sound—­ immaterial and fleeting—in tangible form, and at some ­later point releases it. ­These stories make the recording of sound, the activity that unites the Subjects of this book, appear as exciting a tale as ­those of Münchhausen.

Percussive Listening I­ magined as ­silent, Rus­sia appears to be a stage where one listener’s ability to pro­cess sound can be contrasted with another’s. In describing Rus­sian listening for a Eu­ro­pean audience, storytellers such as Custine and Münchhausen make no mention of what was technically distinctive about that soundscape. They do not describe the specific tuning and mounting system of Rus­sian church bells, or distinctive ele­ments of Rus­sian bell history (such as the famous whipping of the Uglich Bell in 1591 as part of the punishment of that town for rebellion against the tsar regent).69 Instead, they use a vocabulary that aligns the metallic sounds heard ­there, and their percussive message of doom, with ­those heard elsewhere. In this way, they claim a Rus­sian exceptionalism that serves the purpose of comparison; they make the Rus­sian empire seem to be an extreme example of phenomena pre­sent elsewhere, rather than a complex place not easily reduced to simply the counterpart or opposite of other places. This is also the case with Alexander Herzen’s use of sonic meta­phors. The illegitimate child of a rich Rus­sian landowner and a German ­woman, Herzen, who grew up trilingual, detailed in his memoirs his growing aversion to excessive power in his own ­family as in the Rus­sian Empire. ­After a series of arrests and periods working as an imperial bureaucrat in the provinces, he inherited his ­father’s fortune and left, in 1847, for France, where he witnessed the 1848 revolution, and then E ­ ngland, where he lived ­until 1865. He died in Paris in 1870, never having returned to Rus­sia. From Eu­rope, writing in French and Rus­sian, he criticized the Rus­sian government and urged the emancipation of the serfs. He used his inheritance to found the Rus­sian ­Free Press and to publish periodicals, including the journal Kolokol (The Bell), which was

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widely read in Rus­sia even though it was officially proscribed; government officials u ­ nder Alexander II ­were among its readers and even (­under pseudonyms) its contributors.70 Not an uncritical reader of Custine, Herzen knew that Rus­sia was by no means s­ ilent. He had lived in Moscow, heard its bells, and attended its talkative salons; he knew that the empire included more densely populated southern territories that could not be equated with some polar wasteland. Nonetheless, he circulated images of Rus­sia as being distinctively quiet, reproducing the Eu­ro­pean meta­phor of Rus­sian silence as po­liti­ cal oppression, and following Hegel, he drew a connection between “Eastern” silence and despotism.71 Herzen consistently used meta­phors of bells, ­whether ringing or ­silent.72 Herzen equated po­liti­cal criticism to the breaking of silence when he used sonic meta­phors to recall his reading of Chaadaev’s 1836 letter. He agreed with ­little that Chaadaev wrote; he had no sympathy for his Catholicism and increasingly dismissed him as a mystic, but he still sympathized and socialized with him.73 In his diary before he left Rus­sia and in print a­ fter he had emigrated, he consistently described Chaadaev not as a thinker but as a source of sounds. In Chion’s terms, Herzen described Chaadaev’s vocalizations in a reduced rather than a semantic mode, as sound rather than meaning. In 1842, he depicted him as a producer of undecodable otherworldly noise. “This is a voice from the grave, a voice from the world of death and destruction. This voice is strange to us.”74 Two years ­later, Herzen attributed the meaninglessness of Chaadaev’s words to his geo­g raph­ic­ al location: “the painful northern atmosphere distorts [­people] into an insignificant life of l­ittle debates, an empty waste of oneself with words about unnecessary ­things, a false exchange for real work and words.”75 ­After migration, Herzen began to depict Chaadaev’s words in more stirring, but still reduced, terms, experimenting with dif­fer­ ent ways of explaining their effect. He wrote in 1849 as though reading Chaadaev was a startling sensory experience, “One thinker threw a few pages into the world and wherever ­there ­were readers in Rus­sia they produced a jolt like an electric shock.”76 The next year, he offered a new sonic meta­phor. “Chaadaev’s letter was heard like the sound of a summoning trumpet: the signal had been given.”77 Only in the final version of Past and Thoughts did Herzen print the famous sentence that would become his lasting verdict on Chaadaev’s 1836 publication. “It was a shot ringing out on a dark night; ­whether something was sinking and calling out of its own destruction, ­whether it was a signal, a cry for help, news of the dawn, or news that it would not come—­whatever the cause, it was time to wake up.” ­Because Rus­sia was “­silent and unused to in­de­pen­ dent speech,” he wrote, this letter had more force.78 With his comparison of

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the essay to a shot heard in the night, something like the cannon shots used in St. Petersburg to signal flooding, Herzen insisted that Chaadaev’s writing should be understood as a nonverbal tocsin. All his metaphors—­the letter as an electric shock, a trumpet call, or a shot—­figured it as acting on ­people ­whether they wanted it to or not. This listener experiences sound as percussive, penetrating into the body and demanding attention. Returning to the comparison of Chaadaev’s letter to a loud sound, Herzen emphasized the physicality of listeners’ responses. In a final meta­phor, he tied the percussive mode of listening to the prophetic, depicting the prophet’s voice not—as Mickiewicz and Lamennais had—as a quiet sound from which one might turn away, but rather as a voice that could not be ignored. “A part of Rus­ sia, long cut off from the ­people, suffered in silence. . . . ​Every­one had something they wanted to say, but still every­one was ­silent; fi­nally a person came and said, in his own way, what it was. . . . ​Chaadaev’s ‘Letter’ was a merciless cry of pain. . . . ​For a minute every­one, even the sleepy and beaten-­down, startled up at the prophetic voice.”79 Herzen h ­ ere equates the vocalization of a prophet with the experience of hearing a ringing sound in the night. In this way, he reminds his readers that the biblical and classical prophets are ­those who cannot not hear the divine voice, who are compelled to listen. By describing Chaadaev’s voice as ringing out at night, Herzen gave it the transcendent power of acousmatic sound. Herzen figures himself as compelled to respond to a startling situation. With his meta­phor of the letter as a shot in the night, he imagines an immediate transmission of words from writer to reader. If criticism could be voiced and heard in Rus­sia only ­under duress, then Chaadaev and his reader, or listener, heroically break through the silence. Chaadaev was criticized for his ambition and “irritated desire for theatrical effects,” but Herzen felt that he should be defended.80 By focusing on his own perception of the letter, Herzen demonstrated that writing it was an act that affected p­ eople powerfully. Like the Tsar Bell itself, Chaadaev emerges in Herzen’s writings as a magnificent but silenced instrument. Audible, at least to Herzen himself, despite the barrier of censorship, Chaadaev inspires ­others to listen in the hope that they might hear his voice affirming liberty in a tone as loud as a shot or a bell. Writing about Rus­sia from E ­ ngland de­cades ­after the events he described, Herzen prompted the kind of delayed listening that he described. In his writing, the sound Chaadaev was meant to produce is delayed, but not forever, like the frozen sounds of Rabelais and Münchhausen. T ­ hose who train themselves to listen would be shocked awake. In his writing about Rus­sian politics, Herzen drew on a global vocabulary of sounds. In the announcement for Kolokol, he cited the Latin phrase inscribed on church bells, “Vivos voco,” “I summon the living.” His readers would have

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recognized this as a borrowing from Friedrich Schiller’s 1798 poem “The Song of the Bell” (Das Lied von der Glocke).81 That poem, which narrates the casting of a bell in concert with a ­human life, indicates that what­ever the semantic meaning of a ringing sound, it conveys the inevitability of death: And as the ring in ears is passing Sent by her mighty sounding play, So let her teach, that naught is lasting, That all t­ hings earthly fade away.82 Other writers of the period also described bell sounds, what­ever they ­were intended to communicate, as awakening the conscience and making ­people think of death.83 François-­René de Chateaubriand’s 1802 Genius of Chris­tian­ ity evoked the ability of the French church bells, temporarily silenced by the Revolution, to arouse anger at the new regime. It is . . . ​a fairly marvelous ­thing to have found a way, with a single hammer strike, to give birth in one minute to the same sentiment in a thousand dif­fer­ent hearts, to have forced the winds and the clouds to carry ­human thoughts. . . . ​How many times, in the calm of night, has the ear of an adulterous spouse not been surprised by agonized ringing sounds, like the slow beating of a ­dying heart! How many times have they not reached the atheist who, in his impious eve­ning hours, dared, perhaps, to write that t­here is no God! The pen falls from his hand; in dread, he hears the death knell, which seems to say to him: Is ­there no God? Oh! May such noises frighten the sleep of our tyrants!84 The metallic voice of a bell, Chateaubriand thought, makes hearers recognize their mortality; it shocks them awake into a feeling of guilt ­toward the ­people they have wronged. This discourse went beyond Eu­rope. Rus­sian writers too described night-­ time bells that prompt awareness of death. Before Chateaubriand, Gavriil Derzhavin’s 1779 poem “On the death of Prince Meshchersky” begins with the clang of a clock pendulum communicating the inevitability of death. Voice of time! Ring of metal! Your frightening voice   distresses me; Your groan summons, it   summons me, It summons—­and draws me to   the grave.

Глагол времен! Металла звон! Твой страшный глас меня смущает; Зовет меня, зовет твой стон, Зовет—­и к гробу приближает.85

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Fedor Tiutchev’s 1829 poem “Insomnia (the monotonous striking of the clock),” similarly describes a listener reminded of mortality by the metallic voice of a clock at night. Only rarely, completing The sad rite at midnight, The funereal voice of metal At times mourns for us!

Лишь изредка, обряд печальный Свершая в полуночный час, Металла голос погребальный Порой оплакивает нас! 86

Across the Atlantic in the United States, the 1820 Missouri Compromise—­ which allowed Missouri to be admitted as a slave state but only if Maine entered as a f­ree state—­meant that slavery would neither die out in the South nor become l­egal throughout the country, and this raised the specter of civil war. Thomas Jefferson wrote that “this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.”87 A more precise American parallel to Herzen’s comments about Chaadaev and the Tsar Bell appears in mid-­nineteenth-­century writing about a dif­fer­ent broken eighteenth-­century bell. What is now known as Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell was first cast in 1752 in ­England. Its biblical inscription, “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land and unto all the Inhabitants thereof ” (Leviticus 25:10), testifies to the commitment of Isaac Norris II, the speaker of the Pennsylvania legislature who commissioned it, to the Quaker virtue of tolerance. ­Because the original bell cracked the first time it was rung, two Philadelphia brass found­ers recast it, twice, and eventually produced a usable instrument, which was hung in the State House (now In­de­pen­dence Hall). It rang frequently for its first fifty years, then more rarely. In 1843, a crack appeared when it was rung for Washington’s birthday; the In­de­pen­dence Hall superintendent attempted to fix it so that it could be rung for the same occasion in 1846, but at that point it fractured dramatically and became useless as a producer of sound. However, it was already taking on other roles. In 1835, a New York antislavery society had begun to call it “the Liberty Bell,” and in 1839 Boston abolitionists named their publication The Liberty Bell and featured images of it and poems about it. Their choice in naming their journal anticipated Herzen’s 1855 decision to name his antiserfdom newspaper The Bell. In 1847, ­after it had cracked, the radical journalist George Lippard wrote “The Fourth of July, 1776,” a fictional story about an old man who rings the Liberty Bell to mark the signing of the Declaration of In­de­pen­dence. Echoing Chateaubriand, Lippard described the Philadelphia bell as terrifying wrongdoers throughout the world—­especially when it sounded at night—­and inspiring slaves to liberate themselves.

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­There is a terrible poetry in the sound of that State House Bell at dead of night, when striking its sullen and solemn—­One!—­It rouses crime from its task, mirth from its wine-­cup, murder from its knife, bribery from its gold . . . ​­there was a day when the echo of that Bell awoke a world, slumbering in tyranny and crime! Yes, as the old man swung the Iron Tongue, the Bell spoke to all the world. That sound crossed the Atlantic—­pierced the dungeons of Europe—­the work-­shops of ­England—­the vassal-­fields of France. That Echo spoke to the slave—­bade him look from his toil—­and know himself a man. That Echo startled the Kings upon their crumbling thrones.88 The next year, the Philadelphia authorities removed the cracked bell from the tower and put it on display in the Assembly Room of In­de­pen­dence Hall.89 Comparison of Lippard’s description of the Liberty Bell and Herzen’s passage about the Tsar Bell reveals the cultural tectonic patterns under­lying media and depictions of silence and sound in the United States and Rus­sia. Both the Liberty Bell and the Tsar Bell drew renewed attention in the 1830s; both ­were put on public display a­ fter they had become voiceless; and both inspired writing that insisted on the liberating potential in the sounds they had been designed to produce. This transatlantic coincidence reveals an international shift in attitudes t­ oward communal and individual listening. As the history of both instruments demonstrates, a ­century ­earlier, broken bells had been routinely melted down and recast (or their valuable metal was recycled). In the mid nineteenth ­century, though, old bells and their sounds became si­mul­ta­neously objects of patriotic nostalgia and themes of radical rhe­toric. In Rus­sia, other old bells ­were also valued as evidence about the past, such as the Kievan bells uncovered in the 1820s and 1830s during archeological excavations on the sites of the Desiatinnaia Church and the Church of St. Irene.90 In France too, the campanarian movement arose from the 1840s: enthusiasts sought out old bells in church towers and thrilled at their sonorities, heard as tenuous links to a swiftly vanis­ hing past. They worked to preserve them and resisted their recasting.91 The notion that b­ ecause the Rus­sian Empire was distinctively cold and s­ ilent, a single whisper or a metallic ringing could attract attention in a way unlikely elsewhere, appealed to Custine, Herzen, and other writers on Rus­sia, precisely ­because the h ­ uman ear actually works in similar ways globally at a given period. Early-­nineteenth-­century ­people, who experienced the silence of an era before combustion engines, startled awake to metallic ringing sounds, but as cities grew bigger and denser, they became louder, and their inhabitants became less

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impressed by sudden night-­time noises. The international growth of interest in old bells in the m ­ iddle of the ­century suggests an unease about the shifting world of sound. Bells ­were still used in small towns to convey information to the population, but urbanites expressed opposition to them. The scattered complaints about bell ringing in France in the 1830s increased by the 1860s, when ­people who lived in cities, with electric lighting that allowed them to stay up late at night, began to defend their right to uninterrupted morning sleep.92 As the ­century moved ­toward its end, city ­people felt the increasing need to escape the reverberating sounds of densely populated places. The display and cele­bration of ­silent bells in the United States and Rus­sia in the 1840s suggests that even as the ­actual auditory experience of communal listening became less appealing, the memory of that experience motivated attempts to reproduce it in printed words, a remediation meant to evoke emotion in a crowd as effectively as Lippard’s bell, whose “terrible poetry . . . ​awoke a world, slumbering in tyranny and crime.” The silence of t­ hese bells drew attention to the sounds that they had once produced. In the United States as in Rus­sia, the perception of sound was a social phenomenon, a product of the natu­ral and built environment, po­liti­cal events, and ste­reo­types. In both places, sound was connected to discourse around unfree ­labor. As the Rus­sian Empire before the emancipation of the serfs was heard by its critics as s­ ilent, so the slave-­holding U.S. South was heard as too quiet. In the de­cades leading up to the Civil War, hearing the South as s­ ilent helped abolitionists, and then Northerners more broadly, to realize that they w ­ ere unlike Southerners, just as Southerners’ aural revulsion from the loud sounds of Northern cities solidified their separatism. As Mark Smith writes, “Sounds, noises, and silences took on tactile qualities that proved real, substantive, and palpable for po­liti­cal elites from both sections. . . . ​The heard world was a power­ful but clumsy proxy for a host of ideas about self and identity.”93 Northern abolitionists heard the loud sounds of their industrial cities as evidence of the virtues of democracy and the efficiency of a f­ree class of modern wage laborers, as opposed to the ominous silence that they heard in the South, where the quiet of the plantation was punctuated by the “groans of slavery.”94 For both Herzen and Lippard, opposition to chattel slavery was tied to broader concerns about unfreedom. Herzen describes the entirety of Rus­sia, not only serfs, as mute, and Lippard, a ­labor activist who disliked middle-­class abolitionists’ exclusive focus on the suffering of Southern slaves, ties “the work-­ shops of E ­ ngland” to the toiling slave.95 The similarity indicates that neither man’s attitude ­toward sound can be seen simply as a form of abolitionism.96 Both described the forced silence of slaves as tied to the silence of p­ eople of

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their own class, and both fantasized about a magical bell ringing that could awaken and provide a meta­phor for the voice of ­people like themselves. The purpose of this chapter has not been to evaluate the difference between ­actual freedom in the Rus­sia of Nicholas and elsewhere in the ­middle of the nineteenth ­century, when revolutionary and emancipatory movements put pressure on regimes throughout the world. Certainly Chaadaev was wrong that Rus­sia was unique in its tolerance of unfreedom. The Rus­sian state had imposed bondage on local peasants even as serfdom was abolished in Western Eu­rope, a historical difference that underlay the consensus of early modern travelers that the Rus­sians ­were, in the title of Marshall Poe’s book on the topic, “a ­people born to slavery.”97 However, from the sixteenth ­century through the eigh­teenth, as the contiguous Rus­sian empire developed systems that increased laborers’ work and ­limited their freedoms, the overseas empires of ­England, France, Spain, and Portugal enslaved ­people who had been trafficked from Africa. Distinctively in the United States, the number of enslaved ­people grew in the first half of the nineteenth c­ entury, and slaves w ­ ere systematically abused in order to make the cotton plantations of the Deep South maximally profitable.98 When he insisted that the Orthodox Church was distinctive in its tolerance for serfdom, Chaadaev turned a blind eye to the fact that u ­ ntil 1848, France still tolerated the slave trade in its colonies; Chateaubriand defended slavery explic­itly.99 In the realm of colonial history, it was in 1830, even as Lamennais criticized the Rus­sians for suppressing the Polish revolt, that the French invaded Algeria, attempting to rebuild the overseas empire that they had largely lost with the Haitian revolution and Napoleon’s defeat. In terms of secret policing, the Third Section had midcentury analogues elsewhere in Eu­rope.100 Chaadaev’s equation of censorship and unfreedom is unconvincing, given that American citizens who enjoyed constitutional protections for f­ ree speech took up arms to defend slavery.101 Rather than telling us something about real liberty, or real bells, in Rus­sia, this reexamination of some canonical mid-­nineteenth-­century material demonstrates that p­ eople spoke about sound, listening, and media in ways that relate to the construction of loyalties in a global environment. This discussion addresses not ­actual po­liti­cal systems, but media and meta­phors. The use of similar meta­phors by Lippard and Herzen shows that the association of slavery with silence inspired midcentury writers to imagine commanding a resonant, bell-­like voice. Both of t­ hese radical journalists ­were drawn to the notion of loud sounds that amplify the message they conveyed in newspapers (and Herzen used this meta­phor when he titled his journal The Bell). But while Herzen points out, accurately, that the Tsar Bell never rang,

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the Liberty Bell did ring. The notion of bells voicing the emotions of an angry ­people was the product, in the United States, of the conventions governing bell-­ringing leading up to and during the American Revolution and the interpretation of revolutionary episodes of bell-­ringing in the era’s print media.102 The difference between the meanings of bells for Herzen and Lippard indicates that the available vocabulary for thinking about sound and communication depends si­mul­ta­neously on global change and on local ­factors. Herzen, like Münchhausen, figures the Rus­sian soundscape as simply s­ ilent, the bell as always having been broken, but like Lippard, he demonstrates that dysfunctional technologies can still be ­imagined as conveying po­liti­cal messages; both writers stress the heroism of ­those, like themselves, who attend to them. The sound of a shot to which Herzen equated Chaadaev’s letter, like the Liberty Bell struck by Lippard’s bell-­ringer, reaches many ­people at once ­after a self-­appointed representative of “the ­people” commandeers the authorities’ media. In the writing of both Herzen and Lippard, a nonfunctional eighteenth-­ century bell conveys a message about freedom, or its lack. This parallel indicates the global attraction of the idea that words on paper could possess the capacities of a bell or a cannon shot to act on ­people’s emotions, even against their ­will. This is the fantasy of percussive listening, which complements the fantasy of prophetic listening; writers draw on both to imagine themselves as winning listening contests, in which they demonstrate their special abilities. The notion of Rus­sian silence, too, had a transnational appeal. ­Whether they conceptualize it as religious, meteorological, or po­liti­cal, the subjects of this chapter urge us to admire the listener who hears what p­ eople are saying in spite of it.

C h a p te r   2

Singing

How did Rus­sian writers react to Eu­ro­pean ste­ reo­types of Rus­sia as a testing ground for listening, where the voice of the ­people was ­either hushed or heard at last? Some, such as Herzen, reproduced ­these ste­reo­types when they ­were useful to them; o ­ thers rejected them. Imperial officials, some in the Third Section, orchestrated a series of refutations of Custine’s book that ­were published in France, in French; one book-­length German response called the marquis’s memoir a “Münchhausiad,” an elaborate, Münchhausen-­style lie.1 Other writers reacted in a more complex way: not by negating the idea of an exceptional Rus­sian soundscape, but by reappropriating and revalorizing it. Like Custine, they described a kind of listening at which their per­for­mance was superior to that of ­others. In response to stories about a silence broken by a percussive, metallic, ringing signal of alarm, or stories of a prophetic whisper heard only by believers, they told stories of a dif­fer­ent kind: stories about the kind of listening practiced by choral singers who adjust to each other’s tones and for whom sound is a manifestation of community. Even more than the percussive and prophetic modes, choral listening is reduced rather than purely semantic, taking in sound rather than decoding meaning. And whereas sound that emanates from one person and reaches one or many listeners can be heard in a prophetic or percussive mode, sound as the product of negotiation among p­ eople who are already linked into a network is heard in the choral mode. The per­for­mance of choral listening, 47

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then, privileges belonging. It allows writers to make claims about having access to the voice of a ­people that is defined by its connectedness. Choral listening could happen in spoken-­word, nonmusical contexts. For example, Aleksei Khomiakov began his 1845 essay, “Foreigners’ Opinions about Rus­sia,” with a veiled allusion to Custine: “­Every Rus­sian, on returning from travel abroad, asked his stay-­at-­home friends w ­ hether they had read what Lord so-­and-so, the marquis of so-­and-so, such-­and-­such a bookseller, or doctor so-­ and-so wrote about us?”2 ­These foreigners’ misguided opinions of Rus­sia, Khomiakov asserts, are the product of the situation of the traveler, who, motivated by his “egoistic smugness,” is cut off from h ­ uman community. “He observes the life of other p­ eople, but he lives on his own, for himself; he goes through society, but he is not a member of society; he moves among ­peoples, but he does not belong to any of them. He receives impressions, he enjoys every­thing that is con­ve­nient, or good, or excellent—­but he himself does not inspire sympathy or work for the common cause that is continually being accomplished by every­one around him.”3 Khomiakov was criticizing Custine as a bad observer. Like Bourdieu, Khomiakov suspected that good observation of other ­people requires belonging to the group one hears and sees, or at least working with them and inspiring their sympathy; bad listening is the mere reception of impressions with no real emotional connection. That kind of connection, Khomiakov believed, was the birthright of Rus­sian speakers, whose literary language was close to the spoken language and thus affirmed the tight links binding the nation.4 None of ­those memoir-­writing lords, marquis, and doctors could truly hear what Rus­sians said to them, or to each other. Khomiakov was a Slavophile, a member of a small group of Moscow friends who combined fluency in Western Eu­ro­pean languages, immersion in modern technology, a dedication to freedom of speech that put them at odds with the imperial government, and a retrograde taste in clothing with a culturally conservative, religiously inflected nationalism. An erudite cosmopolitan and a ferocious debater, Khomiakov (1804–1860) in­ven­ted a rotary steam engine, patented in ­England, that he displayed at London’s ­Great Exhibition in 1851, touting its ­silent motor; he corresponded about theology, in excellent Victorian En­glish, with a group of conservative Oxford theologians, and as a result one of them, William Palmer, attempted to convert from Anglicanism to Eastern Orthodoxy; Khomiakov took homeopathic cures; he was fiercely anti-­ Semitic; he outlined an elaborate vision of world history as a strug­gle between the agricultural nations (the “Ira­ni­ans”) and the conquering ones (the “Kushites”); and he defended a nominally traditionalist but fundamentally modern vision of Orthodox theology.5 He believed that individuals are ­free only when they belong to a community and are guided by its norms, which they experi-

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ence not as constraints but as the sustaining ele­ments of a common consciousness.6 Whereas Custine’s criticism of Rus­sian silence relied on the idea that individuals want to express their individual thoughts, but are prevented from ­doing so by external and internal censorship, Khomiakov’s notion of cognition as an attribute of a loving community suggests that meaningful listening occurs only inside a group that speaks and hears together; he saw Rus­sians as such a group.7 Like Custine in his insistence on the influence of Catholicism on his practices of observation, and like the p­ eople who used the phrase “penitent noblemen” to describe some of the midcentury writers, Khomiakov understood the question of how writers listen to p­ eople unlike themselves as a religious one. He believed that Custine had misunderstood Rus­sians’ willingness to criticize their own country. They do this not ­because their country is inferior but ­because they practice humility (smirenie), a quality for which Orthodox Christians pray. He described Rus­sian travelers to Eu­rope as choosing to admire what they see, with “a kind of joyful feeling in that voluntary humility.” Perhaps thinking of himself, he notes that Rus­sian travelers may “have earned praise and renown in foreign countries; but they always respond to the expression of that renown with genial doubt, themselves not believing in their own success.” He contrasted ­these h ­ umble Rus­sians to “the En­glish traveler, who shrouds the ugliness of his personal pride in some kind of holiness of national pride.”8 By claiming Rus­sian speech culture as based in the Christian virtue of humility, Khomiakov suggests that the silence that Custine perceived as imposed by despotism was actually the product of a dignified choice. Given the misunderstanding of p­ eople such as Custine, Khomiakov urges his readers to be less h ­ umble about Rus­sia’s quiet spiritual development. Even as Khomiakov framed his revalorization of Rus­sian quiet as a rejection of Western standards, he found allies among the En­glish. For instance, Carlyle inserts a paean to Rus­ sian silence in his 1843 Past and Pre­sent, a book-­length rant about the superiority of the past to the pre­sent: “Commend me to . . . ​the ­silent Rus­sians . . . ​are they not even now drilling, ­under much obloquy, an im­mense semi-­barbarous half-­ world from Finland to Kamtschatka, into rule, subordination, civilization . . . ​ speaking no word about it; quietly hearing all manner of vituperative Able Editors speak! While your ever-­talking, ever-­gesticulating French, for example, what are they at this moment drilling?”9 Rus­sian quiet as a negative model to avoid appealed to some mid-­nineteenth-­century Western Eu­ro­pean thinkers; Rus­sian quiet as a positive model to emulate, evidently, appealed to ­others. Khomiakov’s sensitivity to Eu­ro­pe­ans’ opinions of Rus­sia reflects his position as a member of the empire’s wealthiest class, ­people whose immersion in Western culture made them something like tourists in their own country.

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Bourdieu writes sensitively about the way that postcolonial intellectuals “reappropriate” the culture of their home country, much as Khomiakov reappropriated what he understood as a Rus­sian culture of quiet modesty. Bourdieu describes ­people from a dominated culture as first attaining an education in the dominant culture, then reclaiming their culture of origin, “through a victory over cultural shame . . . ​a veritable socio-­analysis that one is never sure to have accomplished to the full.”10 With his attention to shame, Bourdieu recalls Khomiakov’s concern that Rus­sians are too ­humble. Khomiakov was drawn to quiet—­precisely the concept that Custine used to denigrate Russia—­ when he came to Rus­sia’s defense; social scientists observe that when a dominant group uses a slur to label a lower-­status group, if members of the lower-­status group start using that slur themselves, they both feel and appear more power­f ul, and the slur itself comes to seem less negative: scholars call this dynamic “reappropriation.”11 The slur in this case would be Custine’s assertion that the Rus­sians are unusually quiet, and some Rus­sian intellectuals, like Khomiakov, found a way to claim this quality proudly. They ­were aided in ­doing so by the rich Rus­sian vocabulary for va­ri­e­ties of silence, which distinguishes the usually positively valenced tishina, the absence of sound, from molchanie and bezmolvstvie, the absence of speech.12 In reclaiming Rus­sian silence as speaking volumes, Khomiakov was behaving typically for a certain kind of nationalist. As Patrick Hogan argues, “reactionary traditionalist” nationalists “seek to maximize the differences between in-­g roup and out-­g roup culture” and thus reduce the culture they are defending to a narrow set of norms, which they see as au­then­tic. Anticolonial activists, then, purge the indigenous tradition of “any properties or practices that overlap with ­those of the colonial culture.” At times, they “begin with ste­reo­ types about indigenous culture that themselves assert a dichotomy between the indigenous culture and the colonial culture. For example, faced with a colonial ste­reo­type that Africans are communal and interactive, nonrational, in touch with nature, and so forth, some African nationalists may assert that Africans are indeed communal and interactive (not individualistic, like Eu­ro­pe­ ans), nonrational (unlike the logic-­bound Eu­ro­pe­ans), and so forth.”13 Even though the Slavophiles belonged to the elite of a power­f ul empire, their status did not prevent them from sounding like postcolonial thinkers, using the kinds of arguments made by ­people ­eager to liberate their country from the po­liti­cal and economic control of another power.14 (While the Slavophiles articulated some proto-­postcolonial ideas, they never questioned the status of the Rus­sians as the potential colonial rulers of Eurasian p­ eoples and places; they did not deconstruct colonial power or their own positionality.)

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This chapter investigates depictions of listening by ­people in Khomiakov’s circles, including Baron von Haxthausen, a Rhenish thinker who was invited to travel through the Rus­sian Empire in the hopes that he would produce a more sympathetic book than other foreigners, such as Custine, had written. The imperial government supported his travel financially and logistically, subsidized the German publication of his book and its translation into French, and rewarded him with a gold tobacco case and a diamond ring.15 The qualities that Custine had criticized became for Haxthausen, as they had for Khomiakov, a source of national distinctiveness, and he wrote his travel memoir in that spirit of what we now call reappropriation. This chapter shows that the claim to listen better to “the p­ eople” than one’s rival—­a claim that was at the center of Custine’s self-­presentation—­would be echoed by the Slavophiles who disdained him; they reappropriated his notion of Rus­sian silence and thereby changed the rules of his listening contest so that they could win, even as the government rewarded the German Haxthausen for championing Rus­ sia against its French critics. I address, first, ­these ­people’s attraction to the philosophy of Schelling and their evocations of telegraphy; second, Haxthausen’s cele­bration of Rus­sian silence; and, third, the position of listening and transcription in the Slavophiles’ arguments about the owner­ship of culture.

Schelling and Sound Haxthausen and his Rus­sian friends all read Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854).16 His ideas w ­ ere especially popu­lar in Rus­sia in part ­because while Hegel had questioned ­whether the Slavs in general or the Rus­ sians in specific w ­ ere a world-­historical nation, Schelling—­Hegel’s opponent from around 1807—­offered what felt like a more pro-­Russian alternative. He valorized ideas of organic unity and antirationalism that his Rus­sian readers saw as tied to Rus­sia and its historical mission. In the early 1820s, members of the Lovers of Wisdom (Liubomudry), a Moscow youth circle to which Khomiakov was close, embraced a Schellingianism that agreed that the ultimate truth cannot be expressed in rational terms.17 In the world that Schelling described, every­thing is connected to every­thing ­else, and ­people who are attuned to the spirit of the universe and its harmonious manifestations can merge with the world soul. ­Whether he was writing about nature, art, or language, Schelling returned to the notion of the individual as striving to understand the Absolute (or the divine) and join into some kind of organic unity. He believed that sound can help ­people embrace the

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cosmic ­whole. In Philosophy of Art, he proposed that m ­ usic allows listeners to grasp the universe. “Through art, divine creation is presented objectively, for both rest on the same imagining of the infinite ideal into the tangible. . . . ​ ­Music manifests, in rhythm and harmony, the pure form of the movements of heavenly bodies. . . . ​­Music soars through space to weave an audible universe out of the transparent body of sound and tone.”18 Schelling believed that language too could give listeners access to the Absolute. He wrote in section 73 of Philosophy of Art, “The ideal unity, as the resolution of the par­tic­u­lar into the universal, of the concrete into the concept, becomes objective in speech or language.”19 The spoken word, then, like nature and ­music, brings us into sensory contact with the organic w ­ holeness of the universe. This idea drives Schelling’s nonreferential conception of language.20 Language is, for Schelling, equivalent to existence; it is what God uses to create the world and thereby to affirm His own existence, and ­those same qualities of creation inhere in the sound of spoken words. He saw voiced language as a symbol that does not need to be decoded so much as experienced. In a universal way that does not vary from one language to another, “vowels are . . . ​the immediate breath of the spirit . . . ​consonants are the body of language. . . . ​ Language is not that accidental. T ­ here is a higher necessity in the fact that sound and voice must be the organ that expresses the inner thoughts and movements of the soul.”21 Abstract though they may sound, Schelling’s mystical ideas expressed concrete listening practices in early-­nineteenth-­century Eu­rope, when p­ eople, especially German speakers, thought of listening to ­music as a way to grasp the harmony of the universe. ­Because it is in­de­pen­dent from words, instrumental ­music seems to allow listeners to understand what lies beyond ordinary language.22 Inspired by Schelling’s notion that art gives access to what words cannot represent, ­music critics developed an ideology of connoisseurship that fostered focused listening to symphonies in public concert halls, with the understanding that dedicated listeners w ­ ere thereby accessing feelings that could not be expressed in words.23 Schelling’s notion of art that allows audiences to appreciate unity in diversity was linked to the idea of an ideal state composed of a nation linked through a shared language and feelings. In German-­speaking lands, per­for­mances by choral socie­ties, like concerts of instrumental ­music, provided occasions for performers and listeners to express nationalist po­liti­ cal sentiments that ­were discouraged by the authorities.24 For Schelling’s readers, the belief that a concentrated kind of listening could connect one German speaker to o ­ thers did not contradict the notion that that same focused listening could allow one to feel linked to the universe as a w ­ hole, including non–­German-­speaking ­humans, plants, animals, and the landscape. The con-

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nection between national identity and the quiet murmuring of the forests appealed to nineteenth-­century Rus­sian writers who took what we could anachronistically call an eco-­nationalist stance in celebrating their country’s large and sparsely populated spaces.25 Konstantin Aksakov explored Schellingian ideas about language in an ecstatic mode. He had grown up as the oldest son of a deeply Orthodox gentry ­family of writers, first on an estate in Orenburg province, and from his late teens on another estate in the village of Abramtsevo, outside of Moscow. His ­father, Sergei Aksakov, wrote celebrated memoirs; his ­mother, Olga Semenovna née Zaplatina, herself the d­ aughter of a Rus­sian general and a Turkish war captive, gave birth to 14 c­ hildren. Konstantin’s f­ amily and his biographers saw him as a brilliant student but an impractical dreamer. Entranced by Slavophile ideas, he, like Khomiakov, would defy the sartorial regulations governing men of his class and wear a beard and “Rus­sian” rather than Eu­ro­pean clothes, meaning what they called a murmolka (a fur or velvet hat with a flat crown) and a heavy peasant coat.26 Although he wrote copiously about peasants, he did not seek out encounters with a­ ctual peasants by taking on administrative work in the provinces—­something for which his more practical younger ­brother Ivan, who did so, chided him. Aksakov’s Schellingian understanding of listening emerges in his 1838 review of a new grammar by Belinsky, to whom he was then close.27 In his review he formulated a vision of language as an incarnation of folk identity, a “mysterious connection that links p­ eople together.” P ­ eople who speak the same language experience “an inner sympathy, a kinship of souls, by which ­people of a single nation combine sounds into certain harmonious accords and use them to express their inner and outer ideas.” Aksakov saw language not as a pragmatic, learnable semiotic code but as the living expression of the national soul: “­every word in language is alive: it is linked by uncountable unbreakable threads to the other words of the language and it lives as an essential member in its enormous ­family that expresses in itself the ­family of the folk.”28 Aksakov’s ideal listener perceives ­every word as though it ­were poetry, with a “sad, sweet plea­sure” and a sense of “infinity opening itself out before him.” For that listener, “language has lost its dead form.” That person is not served by language “as by an instrument” but experiences it as “a living, moving ­whole, made up of many words and particles, suffused with a single life, closely tied by a single rational link of relationships conducted by all the sounds and echoes.”29 For Aksakov, language is an organic phenomenon that is both unified and multiple. Like some kind of marvelous science-­fiction creature, it combines the purposefulness of one person with the variety of many. He uses musical meta­phors to describe that unity in diversity, comparing words and

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individual h ­ umans to notes that together create chords. The ideal listener, then, perceives not single words but the entirety of the language and grasps the “spirit of the p­ eople,” in which one can be immersed by listening. Aksakov’s review of Belinsky’s grammar concludes with a utopian assertion about the listening of the f­ uture as a way out of the Tower of Babel. Speaking, for him, is something like choral singing: “the Word has a musical ele­ment that is not at all accidental but necessary, that rationally expresses the meaning of the word . . . ​the folk feels its inner kinship in this musical ele­ment of its language. When ­people of a single nation speak together, they are located in the sphere of their familiar ­music . . . ​comprehensible sounds, equally accessible to both [speaker and listener], are in the air between them and connect their souls harmoniously.” What about ­people of dif­fer­ent nations: can they join in this chorus, or does starting out with the wrong native language mean one is forever excluded from the community of, say, Russian-­speakers? Aksakov was of two very dif­fer­ent minds. On the one hand, he found speaking a non-­native language absurd, calling it “so unnatural, so violent, and fi­ nally also funny when p­ eople of one nation abandon the familial sphere, the sounds that they understand naturally, and choose another language to convey their thoughts.” On the other, he suspected that all languages w ­ ere the same, meaning that the same “laws of the m ­ usic of the ­human Word” applied to all of them. Should that be true, then one could attain “the secret of the combination of thought and sound in the Word,” and “all languages, even ­those that one does not know, ­will suddenly become clear and comprehensible, and one ­will come to understand their meaning by the sounds of the words . . . ​they w ­ ill sound not like meaningless babble, no—­but like living harmonious accords that express [through their m ­ usic] the meaning that lies in them.” Aksakov admitted that this was a hypothesis that was difficult to prove for the moment.30 In offering his hypotheses about a f­ uture when p­ eople ­will understand languages that they do not know, Aksakov displays the uncompromising ideals for which he was known. His cheerful combination of nationalist and universalist rhe­toric about language and his utopian belief that eventually ­people ­will not need to learn languages in order to understand them bear traces of his Schellingianism.31 In his l­ater writing, Aksakov found examples of such marvelous listening in Rus­sian history. In his master’s thesis about Lomonosov, he argued in rhapsodic terms that language bears the soul of the ­people and that Rus­sian in par­ tic­ul­ ar contains slumbering forces waiting to be awoken. While at the start of the eigh­teenth ­century, Rus­sian may have seemed crippled by the split between the vernacular and the written language derived from Church Slavonic, Lomonosov, followed by Pushkin, succeeded in combining t­hese two registers

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and creating a power­ful synthetic language that, Aksakov thought, could unite the ­people and the gentry.32 In a draft essay that would be published posthumously, he used similar terminology to describe the Muscovite-­era institution of the Assembly of the Land (zemskii sobor), a body that advised the tsar. “The community is a moral chorus, and as the voice is not lost in a chorus, but, matching the general tone, is heard in harmony with all the voices, in the same way the individual is not lost in the community, but, refusing its own exceptionality in ­favor of the general harmony, it finds itself in a higher, purified form in harmony with similarly repudiated individuals.”33 Aksakov pre­sents singing and listening as part of the moral choir—­what I call “choral listening”— as an alternative to the evils of seemingly rational majority rule, which he believed threatens freedom: only when the p­ eople work through consensus and play a purely consultative function to the ruler is their freedom preserved. (He removed the meta­phor of the choir from an essay he published ­later on the same topic.34) He would associate this kind of listening with peasant dancing and singing, the Greek chorus, and the peasant commune as a ­whole.35 The opposition between the idea of networked choral listening in Konstantin Aksakov and the notion of one-­to-­many percussive listening that emerges in the writing of Chateaubriand, Lamennais, and Chaadaev aligns with other attacks on Catholicism by Slavophile thinkers, who tended to see the authority of the pope as tyrannical. (In an 1856 essay, the Slavophile thinker Ivan Kireevsky wrote scornfully of Catholics that they ­were expected “not to think, to understand the liturgy, to read the Holy Writ” but only “to listen [slushat’], not understanding, and obey [slushat’sia], not reasoning.”36) The intellectual historian Peter Christoff understands what he calls the “choric princi­ ple” as constituting Aksakov’s “most impor­tant single contribution to Slavophil ideology.”37 He links this concept to the notion of sobornost’, a formulation of unity (or catholicity) that was central to Slavophile thought; literally “cathedralness,” a shared sound space communion, this is sometimes translated as “conciliarity.”38 While Christoff is undoubtedly correct that Aksakov’s depiction of choral listening is tied to sobornost’, intellectual history is enriched and complicated when ideas are situated in their material and sensory contexts. Aksakov’s depictions of listening, then, ­were not only a manifestation of his religious philosophy; his ideas about listening also developed in a specific media environment. Even though Aksakov presented his ideas about the harmonious communion of ­people as an attribute of the Muscovite era of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they had something in common with the modernity of the 1840s, when new possibilities and fantasies about communication abounded. A crucial, albeit seemingly banal shift occurred in Britain with the

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­ reat Post Office Reform of 1839 and 1840, when standardized stamps w G ­ ere issued for letters sent anywhere in the British Isles, meaning that ­people no longer had to enter into contact with a post office clerk to send ­every letter. Analogous reforms followed in Rus­sia in 1843, 1845, and 1848.39 With t­hese changes, ­people gained the ability to send messages across g­ reat distances mechanically and silently, rather than through negotiation with a h ­ uman intermediary. ­People wanted to communicate even faster than the mail allowed, so an optical telegraph was developed u ­ nder Napoleon and first used in France in 1793. It functioned effectively to convey messages across long distances through semaphore signals displayed at the tops of towers that w ­ ere constructed in a network, each some six miles from the next. An optical telegraph line was built between St. Petersburg and Shlisselburg in 1824 and used ­until 1836. Nicholas I funded additional lines that remained in use through around 1850.40 However, this kind of telegraph did not work at night or in bad weather, which prompted inventors to try to create electromagnetic telegraphs that could send messages along wires at any time, ­under any conditions. ­These new modes of communication via electrical wires through a network caused ­people to fantasize about perfecting even in-­person, unmediated interactions and attaining the kind of communion that Schelling i­ magined among ­humans and all other ele­ments of nature and that Aksakov associated with the universal musical language of the f­ uture.41 Schelling’s ideas about nature may have inspired some of the early experiments with electromagnetism by Hans Christian Ørsted and Michael Faraday.42 Such experiments ­were undertaken by Rus­sian scientists as well: a pioneering electrical telegraph was created by Baron Pavel Schilling von Canstatt, a Rus­sian diplomat, friend of Pushkin’s, pioneer of Rus­sian lithography, and scholar of Asian languages.43 Schilling displayed a prototype of his telegraph in 1832 and accepted an offer from Nicholas I to build a full-­size one, which he tested in 1836 at the St. Petersburg Admiralty, sending a signal five kilo­meters through a line that was partly ­under w ­ ater. During ­those same years, Samuel Morse developed the recording electric telegraph, which he demonstrated in 1838; meanwhile, another telegraph system was set up in Britain.44 ­After Schilling’s death in 1837, his work was continued by his friend and collaborator, Moritz Hermann (Boris Semonovich) Jakobi, who built a telegraph line from Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo.45 Jakobi was a friend and a scientific collaborator of the writer and phi­los­op­ her Prince Vladimir Odoevsky, a member of the Moscow circles of Khomiakov, Herzen, and Chaadaev, and a fellow Schellingian. In fact, the telegraph appears in Odoevsky’s unfinished utopian novel, The Year 4338 (4338-­i god), fragments of which he published in 1835 and 1840. The book’s hero, a Chinese exchange student in St. Petersburg, describes magnetic telegraphs set

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up among the ­houses of friends for easy communication; while the optical telegraph had been developed for military intelligence, this was a fantasy about magnetic telegraphs as a medium for sustained conversations among p­ eople in a single community.46 Aksakov, like Khomiakov, belonged to the same Schellingian circles as ­these Rus­sian inventors, and his vision of language mixes the material and the mystical in a way that recalls the discourse around the telegraph. On the one hand, in his review of Belinsky’s grammar, he described language as possessing rational links that are also threads (niti), and t­ hese relationships are conducted (provedeny) in a way that appears physical. On the other, he believed that language functions as a “living, moving w ­ hole,” as opposed to an instrument. Although he rejected a mechanistic vision of language, he did so in terms that recall the new mechanisms of his era, in par­tic­u­lar the new networks of communication that fascinated and troubled him. (Two de­cades ­after writing his review of Belinsky’s grammar, in crisis ­after his ­father’s death, he developed what his b­ rother Ivan called “an entire theory about the danger of telegraphs”—­ although he understood that he could not avoid using them.47) When he describes language as a network that allows sounds to reach certain listeners who can receive the mysterious transmissions ­because they are attuned to the spirit of the p­ eople, Aksakov sounds like one of his era’s inventors.

The Most Complete Tranquility Aksakov’s concept of choral listening found a sympathetic audience in a foreign visitor to whom he became close in the winter of 1843–1844.48 August Freiherr von Haxthausen (1792–1866) was a Rhenish nobleman, a traditionalist Catholic, and a Romantic thinker. Like Aksakov, he was a broad reader and idealistic thinker who never married. He and his ­brothers and ­sisters wrote poetry and collected and published folklore; two of his s­ isters gathered stories for the B ­ rothers Grimm—­who ­were ­family friends—­trying to preserve the dialect accurately.49 In the wake of the Napoleonic invasion of his region and the abrupt administrative changes that it brought, Haxthausen studied law and argued that socie­ties must be guided by custom. Speaking in opposition to the individualism and social upheaval set in motion by the French Revolution, he urged his fellow noblemen to immerse themselves in the details of peasant life so as to be able to hold the old communities together. He started by investigating the economic conditions in the districts near his home, and his research attracted the attention of the crown prince, who gave him a commission to study the traditional legislation of all the Prus­sian provinces. In ­doing that

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work, he found, in the areas of Prus­sia that had once been Slavic, the traces of a farming commune, the Gemeinde, a form of social organ­ization that, he believed, once mediated between the peasant and society, and thus created justice and decent living situations for all without requiring the individualism that he disliked. Like other conservative German thinkers of his generation, he was a Russophile who fantasized that the community-­oriented values whose loss he lamented in his own country still thrived in the Rus­sian empire.50 Haxthausen’s own Prus­sian state support dried up in 1842, but an essay that he wrote approving of a modest effort at land reform undertaken by the government of Nicholas I brought him an imperial invitation to survey traditional economic structures in Rus­sia.51 Haxthausen’s friend, Count Peter von Meyendorff, the Rus­sian ambassador to Berlin, was delighted, but Count Alexander von Benckendorff, head of the Third Section, was troubled by Haxthausen’s impulses t­ oward emancipation. In a compromise, the authorities eventually gave Haxthausen the invitation and four hundred pounds of paperwork with information about Rus­sia, which traveled along with him, as well as assigning him a helper to make sure ­there ­were no delays with his h ­ orses and a translator who also reported to the government on his activity. Haxthausen’s guides w ­ ere instructed to “imperceptibly . . . ​ remove every­thing that might give this foreigner a reason for t­ hose incorrect and inappropriate conclusions that can easily result from ignorance of the customs and folk way of life of our society.”52 From mid-­May of 1843 u ­ ntil the end of October Haxthausen was on the road. He then stayed in Moscow ­until April 1844. Meyendorff, a writer from a power­ful Baltic noble f­amily, introduced him into Moscow society, where he met Chaadaev and Herzen, with whom he remained in contact for many years. At the salon of the Russian-­and German-­language poet Karolina Pavlova (née Jänisch), he met Slavophiles such as Khomiakov, Ivan Kireevsky, and Yury Samarin.53 He became especially close to Konstantin Aksakov (who, in his mid-­twenties, was more than two de­cades younger than Haxthausen) and to Pavlova and her husband Nikolai. During his Moscow months, Haxthausen discussed his proj­ect at length with t­ hese men and w ­ omen. Traces of Slavophile ideas permeate his memoir; Herzen writes that Aksakov took credit for refining Haxthausen’s idea of the Rus­sian agricultural commune, the mir, an idea that appealed to Herzen as well.54 In exchange, Aksakov may have borrowed from Haxthausen the Schellingian meta­phor of the idealized auditory experience of rural Rus­sia as that of listening to a choir. (Since both men, si­ mul­ta­neously in 1847, started writing about the Rus­sian countryside in a way that applied Schellingian ideas to real­ity, depicting the per­for­mance of choral listening, it is not obvious which of them influenced the other; perhaps they understood each other wordlessly.)

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Not surprisingly, Haxthausen found what he and Aksakov ­were both looking for in Rus­sia: evidence of the continued existence of the Gemeinde, or the peasant commune, the mir. This form of collective owner­ship, Haxthausen reported, allowed peasants to redistribute land periodically based on families’ needs and abilities, and to negotiate effectively with each other and with the gentry. ­These negotiations, he believed, w ­ ere led by respected community elders; the unity of the mir, then, paralleled that of the traditional peasant and gentry patriarchal f­ amily and the empire itself, whose ruler was a f­ ather to his ­people. The mir took responsibility for feeding peasants who could not feed themselves; no one went hungry. Haxthausen took a de­cade to write up the three-­volume account of his travels, in German and French.55 The last French volume, with his final corrections, came out in 1853. A ­ fter the death of Nicholas I, Haxthausen used his ideas about traditional Rus­sian agricultural forms to design a ­legal structure for the emancipation of the serfs. He presented a proposal to the new tsar, Alexander II; he wrote a set of essays on the topic; and he worked closely with G ­ rand Duchess Elena Pavlovna and o ­ thers on the details of the emancipation.56 Some of Haxthausen’s observations about collective land owner­ship in Rus­ sia are at odds with the pre-1861 archival data. Although Rus­sian peasants did redistribute land periodically, this pro­cess was not always perceived as just and often generated ­legal complaints; land could be paid for during or ­after the pro­cess, and peasants did not always get access to the land formally assigned to them. The pro­cess was not always led by elders but often by younger men; peasants in general did their best to avoid work for the mir. In fact, no one in the mir wanted to feed the hungry. Peasant families ­were not uniformly headed by ­fathers; 25 to 50 ­percent of h ­ ouse­holds ­were led by ­women. Given the need to earn money through mi­grant ­labor in urban industries, adult peasant men ­were often absent (they would return temporarily to work at harvest time). Rus­sian peasant communities, like t­hose elsewhere in Eu­rope, w ­ ere stratified and conflictual, not sheltered oases of communalism but rather integrated into national and international economies. The archives do not confirm the Slavophiles’ and socialists’ shared ideal of agricultural communes, their peasants all bound by noncapitalist and group-­oriented be­hav­iors that differed fundamentally from t­ hose of urbanites. With the emancipation, though, a collective body representing the peasants on the model of the mir was written into Rus­sian legislation, so that, paradoxically, it now appears to have always existed.57 Although Haxthausen cannot necessarily be trusted as a witness about peasant social structures, his memoir offers a rich account of his own sensory impressions during his travels. He enjoyed his travels much more than Custine did. While Custine’s Rus­sia was full of badly run h ­ otels, unpleasant provincial

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gentry, inedible food, bumpy roads, and bug-­infested beds, Haxthausen’s was a network of comfortable homes of friendly ­people, all ­eager to make sure he experienced what­ever pleasures their region had to offer.58 But in spite of their dif­fer­ent experiences, Haxthausen saw and heard much as Custine did, beginning with their attention to their own coachmen. Both travelers ­were struck by what seemed to them exotic gender divisions: the custom of peasant men leaving the villages to work in the cities meant that one saw, and heard, fewer w ­ omen 59 than men in urban streets. Lower-­class men ­were more likely to be at hand for them to observe than ­were lower-­class w ­ omen, and so both memoirs return to the visual and aural impressions they made. Both travelers found Rus­sian men extremely handsome but Rus­sian ­women badly dressed.60 Both heard Rus­sian male voices as possessing a distinctive, beautiful deep timbre, which Custine called “sweet” and Haxthausen “soft.”61 Both ­were struck by the quiet tones of negotiations among Rus­sian merchants.62 Even though t­here w ­ ere plenty of peasant ­women in the countryside, Custine and Haxthausen heard more male than female choruses, presumably ­because Rus­sian peasant song repertoires (as with traditional ­music elsewhere) are gender-­specific, and outsiders always have more access to per­for­mance by p­ eople of their own gender.63 Both travelers remarked on the audible and vis­i­ble ethnic diversity of the country, including Germans, Jews, and colorfully dressed Caucasian merchants at big market fairs, and both drew attention to the empire’s many Christian sects, which they saw as challenging the authority of the state and the Orthodox Church.64 Haxthausen experienced all t­ hese sensory impressions much more positively than Custine. Haxthausen reacted with sympathy to the merchants in Rybinsk who avoided the modern new stock market building. “They prefer, as in the past, the calm of the traktir (the inn), where, seated around a ­table, teacup in hand, they make their commercial arrangements and conclude their deals while speaking in each other’s ears.”65 When he had to hire a boat in Nizhny Novgorod, Haxthausen was approached by a noisy group of boatmen offering their ser­vices, but once he began serious negotiations with one of them, he was impressed that the ­others immediately quieted down, and he concluded: “It is impossible not to marvel at the extreme politeness and perfect sophistication that rules among the Rus­sian lower classes.”66 In a Tatar tea­house, Haxthausen also noticed a peaceful silence: “The Tatar, such a big talker in the street and in his store, does not open his mouth in the tea­house, where he goes to rest and not to speak, as p­ eople do in Eu­rope.” When Roma musicians or storytellers came in to perform, ­people listened “in the deepest silence, smoking and lending their ears!”67 Although neither Custine nor Haxthausen claimed to know Rus­sian, Haxthausen learned enough to declare himself charmed by ele­ments of the spoken

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language. He heard a difference between the melancholy sound of peasant songs and the “gay, carefree, lively, light” impression of their talk. He admired the Rus­sian voice. “It is soft and agreeable to the ear, ­whether in moments of gaiety or anger, ­whether he is singing or arguing. When the peasant urges his ­horses on, one hears none of the hard and guttural sounds of ­peoples of Germanic or Romance origin; what emerges is always, as though through a veil, the melancholy intonation, the plaintive accent that I mentioned.”68 Haxthausen loved Rus­sian diminutives. His traveling companion said to a peasant w ­ oman, “Proshchai, matushka [Goodbye, dear ­mother],” she answered, “Proshchaite, golubchiki [Goodbye, dears, literally ‘­little doves’],” and Haxthausen thought, “what politeness and what a gracious response from a s­ imple peasant w ­ oman: would you ever hear anything like that from the mouth of a rural w ­ oman in Germany, or such a gracefully poetic expression?”69 He had similar reactions to hearing his coachman speaking to his ­horses. To a mare, he said “Dear ­little m ­ other, do not leave me in the road; soon you w ­ ill have fresh grass and golden oats,” and to a stallion, “Good ­little ­brother, do not shame me; think of your honor and your reputation; what ­will p­ eople say if they find out that you have gotten stuck in the mud?” Haxthausen noted that “this dialogue, with its infinite variations and most gracious diminutives, lasted during the entire trip.”70 In a Schellingian spirit, he understood that the peaceful communication he admired among the ­people he saw in the Rus­sian Empire also extended to animals. Haxthausen was moved by the silence he experienced in religious ser­vices. In a Tatar mosque near Kazan, he admired “the most complete tranquility” of the ser­vice. “This mute adoration by a mass of men, united in their belief and faith, prostrating themselves before a supreme Being and addressing to him their prayers of repentance or hope, ­will always make a deep impression, even on the most indifferent foreigner.”71 He uses almost the same words to describe a church of a priestless branch of the Old Believers, a group of Christians who had split off from the Orthodox Church in response to seventeenth-­ century reforms: “The most complete tranquility reigns in the church b­ ecause the sectarians pray in silence with ­g reat fervor.”72 And he hears of a sect of Christians who choose to spend their lives mute; no ­matter how government officials might torment them, “they bear it all with the most sublime stoicism, without emitting the smallest complaint or offering even one word.”73 Rus­sians’ distinctive quiet did not prevent them from speaking effectively when they chose to do so, nor from respecting a good orator. Haxthausen wrote about Kapustin, leader of the pacifist Dukhobor sect, whose “eloquence subjugated every­one’s spirit.”74 He reported that he had heard of annual Easter-­ time discussions of religion in front of Moscow’s Uspensky Cathedral, between Orthodox and sectarians. The p­ eople regulated their own be­hav­ior

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without police intervention: “The most perfect order and the most complete tranquility reign constantly. The p­ eople themselves take the role of the police and know how to suppress words that are a bit too lively.”75 In a Dukhobor village in Bogdanovka, Haxthausen believed he was hearing that famous sectarian eloquence for himself. He knew his hosts w ­ ere speaking about religion, and, he writes, “although my ignorance of Rus­sian did not allow me to understand the meaning, I was nonetheless astonished at the fa­cil­i­ty and the aplomb with which the sectarians expressed themselves and the intelligence that glowed in the eyes of the two orators. . . . ​Each time that they must have been touching on princi­ples of a high order and the fundamental beliefs of their doctrine, they did it with a truly admirable deftness, reserve, and tact. They expressed themselves with a profusion of meta­phors, allegories, plays on words, which would have done honor to the keenest dialectician.” Haxthausen took no notes—­and of course he did not actually understand the words the orators spoke—­but he reported that the conversation was “a singular mixture of truly sublime thoughts and the crudest, most material applications, especially when, descending from the sphere of abstractions, they arrived at the practical or at real life.” Having heard it, he “fi­nally understood how an extreme mysticism could lead to atheism!”76 The extravagant claim that a listener, even one with access to a translator, can recognize specific verbal devices uttered in an unknown language evokes the cross-­linguistic linkage of sound and sense that Schelling and Aksakov had theorized, even as it displays the baron’s remarkable self-­confidence. Haxthausen’s description of the province of Yaroslavl strikes the same notes. The landowner Hahn (from a f­ amily of Baltic German nobility that would produce the mystic Helena Blavatsky, who founded Theosophy) offered to have his peasants “improvise” a communal meeting so that Haxthausen could listen. He had the elders make a circle in the ­middle of the street, and the commune gathered around. “Once every­one was in place, they began a fairly animated deliberation that my ignorance of the Rus­sian language prevented me from understanding, but someone was kind enough to translate it. It had to do with some par­tic­u­lar issues of the commune and some light disagreements raised by peasants against each other.” The elders made a decision that was approved by Hahn, the president. “During the ­whole discussion,” Haxthausen marveled, “the most perfect order and the most complete tranquility reigned among the peasants. The debate was animated; precise and clear; every­one produced his opinion with propriety, unembarrassed and with the greatest politeness, waiting to begin speaking u ­ ntil the person before had finished explaining his idea. Their be­hav­ior t­ oward the president spoke in his ­favor: they w ­ ere confiding, benevolent, and respectful, but not servile or fawn-

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ing.”77 This episode, near the beginning of the first volume, conveys the sensory impressions that Haxthausen associated with the mir: order, re­spect, and empathy, audible in the speakers’ quiet tones, characterize interactions among the peasants and t­ hose between the serfs and their owner. It might seem puzzling that Haxthausen was so confident in his aural assessment of Hahn’s peasants’ improvised meeting. Not only did he not know Rus­sian, but he also knew that the meeting had been staged for his benefit. Hahn’s peasants may not have had any business to discuss, but b­ ecause their owner had ordered them to put on a meeting for the benefit of his foreign guest, they did so, as obediently as serf theatrical troupes performed plays, operas, and concerts to entertain their masters and their guests. Haxthausen had found it eerie to watch a serf play in Nizhny Novgorod and to realize that unfree actors could portray princes and boyars on stage and be greeted with applause. “What a singular contrast must they not find between this temporary role and their habitual situation, between the forgetfulness produced by artistic inspiration and their true condition? To have the right to be actors, to ply the freest, the most in­de­pen­dent of all the arts, they w ­ ere obligated to pay their owner an obrok [quit-­rent] as demanded for a trade, to give a punctual tithe on their intelligence!”78 But he does not sound at all skeptical about Hahn’s serfs’ per­for­mance at the mir meeting. The episode testifies to the power of his urge to hear the communal harmony that he had expected. Herzen, who reviewed Custine’s and Haxthausen’s books together and saw both as impor­tant, recognized that each writer was self-­deceptive. “Nothing could be more opposed to the brilliant and light marquis de Custine than the phlegmatic Westphalian agronomist, erudite, of old stock, and the most benevolent observer in the world.” Each of t­hese travelers, as Herzen pointed out, listened selectively. Custine heard only courtiers: “Once in the sphere of the court, Custine does not leave it; he does not leave the antechambers and is astonished to find t­ here only valets; he requests information only from the ­people of the court. ­These ­people know he is a writer, they fear his chatter, and they deceive him. Custine is indignant, he is irritated, and he blames the Rus­sian ­people. He goes to Moscow, he goes to Nizhny Novgorod, but everywhere he is in Petersburg; everywhere the atmosphere of Petersburg surrounds him and gives all the objects that pass before his eyes the same color.” Where Custine was only in Petersburg, Haxthausen was only in the peasant commune. Although he also admired it (and would come to see it as the basis of peasant freedom), Herzen took Haxthausen to task for idealizing the commune and ignoring its darker side: “If not for the complete absorption of the personality in the commune, then that autocracy that Custine speaks of with such justified horror would not have been able to form.”79

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Although Herzen is right in pointing out Haxthausen’s unwillingness to hear anything negative about the mir, the baron was consistent. His certainty about his impressions of Hahn’s peasants’ meeting and the Dukhobors’ discussion of religion reflects his understanding of ethnographic listening. Custine had presented his own listening to Rus­sians as an individual effort. Each encounter tested his ability to interpret the evidence of his senses, an ability that emerged from his personal history and unique sensitivities. In contrast, Haxthausen presented listening as a collaborative proj­ect, something accomplished by a group, almost like a choir. He had no compunctions about integrating his translators’ words into his own reactions to a given sound. He performed his listening in an omnivorous way, demonstrating his eagerness to collect as much as pos­si­ble, without being too critical of one’s sources. As he traveled through the Rus­sian Empire, Haxthausen met more collaborators. His hosts in the provinces w ­ ere local officials, and he quickly found a common language with them. His interlocutors w ­ ere very comfortable in German, and some ­were native speakers. In Kazan, he met Karl Fuchs, a professor and rector at Kazan University, and his wife, Alexandra Andreevna (née Apekhtina), a poet and ethnographer. Alexandra Fuchs had spent time living among two local non-­Slavic ­peoples, the Cheremis and the Chuvash (the Cheremis, now referred to as the Mari, speak a Uralic language; the Chuvash speak a Turkic language). Haxthausen’s description of the region draws heavi­ly on their conversations and on her German-­language publications, which he cites.80 With the help of Fuchs and o ­ thers, he included translations of long folkloric texts, including a collection of sayings about the virtues of the mir.81 The notion of ethnographic listening as a collaborative enterprise undertaken in an omnivorous spirit coheres with the idea that its goal is not so much to capture any individual utterance as it is to understand an entire system. Haxthausen’s reports on the sounds of the Rus­sian Empire indicate that he perceived individual songs, sayings, or statements as meaningful insofar as they provided evidence of a pattern. Haxthausen wanted to gather folklore, understood on the model of language as a structured set of units, each existing in multiple variants; he was not motivated to capture the unique expression of the ideas of a single person. This view of his own listening practices underlies the seeming naïveté of his reports of his impressions of peasant speech. B ­ ecause the locals who brought him into the Dukhobors’ ­house in Bogdanovka assured him, presumably, that the debate he heard involved meta­phors, allegories, and clever word-­play, and b­ ecause they had convinced him that the sectarians w ­ ere wonderfully persuasive orators, he understood the debate he heard as one among many examples of Dukhobor rhetorical per­for­mance, and he was confident that his purely sonic, nonsemantic impression of the speakers’ oral

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virtuosity—­combined with his translator’s summary of the proceedings—­was sufficient for him to judge them confidently. In the same vein, b­ ecause Hahn, one can assume, told Haxthausen that the improvised mir meeting he witnessed was typical in its orderly calm, Haxthausen had faith in his aural impressions of the meeting. Near the end of his memoir, Haxthausen echoes Khomiakov when he insists on Rus­sia’s unusually homogeneous language. What makes Rus­sia dif­fer­ent from other Eu­ro­pean nations, he argues, is the size of its population—­especially the Rus­sian speakers—­and the relative uniformity of their religion, way of life, and language. The vari­ous German dialects are not mutually comprehensible, but Rus­sian, though spread over a broader expanse, is more consistent, and even Belarusian and Ukrainian are closer to it than Swiss German or Dutch are to other German dialects.82 By using the notion of a historically and geo­graph­ic­ ally consistent Rus­sian language to insist on Rus­sia’s historical significance, Haxthausen demonstrated his agreement with the Slavophiles. Aksakov’s and Khomiakov’s ideas about sound and listening can shed light on the baron’s ideas, particularly his paradoxical appreciation of conversations in a language he could not understand. If transcultural listening is, as Aksakov suggests, a mystical sonic pro­cess that can be accomplished by ­those who have special gifts of perception, then the baron’s claim of a sonic connection to the community he was studying makes sense. That is, he believed that he should have the ability to recognize and enjoy the aural impression of “most complete tranquility” among Tatars, provincial Old Believers, Moscow sectarians, and Hahn’s peasants. When we recognize Aksakov’s fantastic claim about universal listening as a Schellingian conceit, we can situate him with Haxthausen in the world they and Khomiakov shared. All three used the intellectual tools at their disposal to think about how noblemen could reimagine societal relations in the context of the liberation of the peasants that had already happened in Prus­sia and that they all hoped would happen in Rus­sia. They wrote about their own listening in a Schellingian mode that testifies to their desire to claim a connection to Rus­sianness, and to something more universal. The depictions of choral listening examined in this chapter situate the notion of Rus­sian communalism in a broader context. For Herzen, the concept of the peasant commune that Haxthausen and Konstantin Aksakov shared signified that Rus­sia possessed a distinctive economic tradition of communal owner­ship and negotiation.83 Even while, as we saw in the last chapter, Herzen recirculated the conceit of despotic Rus­sian silence that appealed to French writers, he also agreed with the Slavophiles, to whom he had once been close, about the significance of the mir; like other ­people of the nineteenth ­century

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or any other era, he did not limit himself to a single genre of listening or a single consistent ideology. Meanwhile, for theologians inside and outside Eastern Orthodoxy, the concept of harmonious communication inside the peasant commune meant that Rus­sia possessed a distinctive spiritual tradition of communal re­spect and self-­abnegation. ­These ideas rely on the belief that Rus­ sia is exceptional. From the perspective of the global history of listening, however, the notion of Rus­sia’s distinctive, beneficent silence rhymes with the conviction of landowners in the American South that their plantations ­were peaceful and quiet, in contrast with loud Northern cities.84 As discussed in the last chapter, American enslavers, like Rus­sian estate-­owners and their allies, experienced social changes aurally. Southerners too claimed quiet sounds proudly as a marker of a spiritual and economic superiority over their too-­loud rivals: Northerners, for the Americans, and West Eu­ro­pe­ans, for the Rus­sians. In performing and valorizing choral listening, then, Rus­sian thinkers, and their foreign friends, demonstrated their similarity to other nineteenth-­century ­people even as they asserted Rus­sia’s uniqueness.

Owner­ship and Belonging In claiming that good listening occurs inside communities and in forms that are consistent over time, Haxthausen sounded like Khomiakov in his attack on the travelers who write about Rus­sia but have no real emotional connection to it. He also sounded like Aksakov, with his ecstatic fantasies of resonating with the harmonies of folk language and understanding it in a way that transcends sense. How could this work, given that Haxthausen was himself a traveler? Could he ­really have believed that he was capable of listening as an insider, experiencing the same emotions as the locals and thus appreciating tranquility, or power­ful rhe­toric, with the same enjoyment as they did? Or w ­ ere his repeated invocations of his own inclusion in a moment of choral listening a kind of wishful thinking, a conjuring up of a perfectly functioning community of which he could be part, analogous to the equally visionary imaginings of nationalistically minded Rus­sian gentry such as his Slavophile friends? Khomiakov, Aksakov, and Haxthausen all depict the experience of listening in a paradoxical way. Listening is both something you can do only if you belong to the same group as the p­ eople you are listening to and at the same time something you can do by virtue of being ­human. What ­people hear both delimits group belonging and means something bigger and more universal than what we usually identify as languages. This aligns with Schelling’s depiction of sound and the sound-­related habits that ­people who read him ­adopted.

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He too prompted twin, seemingly contradictory, visions: that in listening to ­music or words, one senses that one belongs to a nation (such as the community of German speakers), and to humanity or nature itself. Group belonging, then, is both national (or linguistic) and species-­wide. Given that his friend Khomiakov criticized foreign travelers such as Haxthausen himself as inadequate listeners to Rus­sians, it is not surprising that Haxthausen was concerned that he might not be accepted among the ­people he was describing—­that he might be perceived, to speak anachronistically, as a cultural appropriator. His memoir touches gingerly on the question of his status, as a Prus­sian subject and a German speaker, relative to his Rus­sian subject ­matter. He notes that Rus­sians feel “a more or less pronounced antipathy to Germans,” which is not returned: “the Germans do not have the least antipathy for the Slavic ­peoples; instead, they feel an undeniable affection for them.”85 In his awareness that ethnographers such as himself may not seem to be legitimate observers, he had much in common with the landowners he met on his trip who had migrated from German-­speaking places to the interior of the Rus­sian Empire and served in its government. Some of them spent their ­free time as well as their work time observing the locals and recording what they heard. Haxthausen understood that Rus­sians did not always take kindly to Germans claiming scientific authority over them.86 Germans had worked as Rus­sian administrators and had dominated the Imperial Acad­emy of Sciences since its foundation at the beginning of the eigh­teenth ­century, but by the mid nineteenth c­ entury, tensions w ­ ere rising between Rus­sians and the German heirs to the tsars’ strategy for building Rus­sian science by importing foreign experts. Indeed, the writing of Haxthausen’s Rus­sian acquaintances shows that he remained an outsider in the eyes of the natives. At the h ­ ouse of friends, Elizaveta Alekseevna Drashusova, a writer and salon hostess who was close to the Slavophiles, wrote that she met “the unusually intelligent but terribly comical baron Haxthausen, a German traveler, with German indefatigability stenographing every­thing in­ter­est­ing that he heard.”87 Drashusova’s simultaneous dismissal of his “German indefatigability” and his method of writing as “terribly comical” suggests that his obviously mediated listening is not as legitimate as some other kind of listening, which would be less mediated, less comic, less German, and presumably more Rus­sian. One of Haxthausen’s most helpful interlocutors was Vladimir Dahl, who wrote a letter urging another friend to help him, explaining, “The Ministry is giving him all pos­si­ble information and help; it is hoped that he ­will write a sensible book—­when a German travels, then as you know, t­ here’s no getting away without a book.”88 Dahl gave Haxthausen access to his folklore archives

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and wrote down Rus­sian sayings for him about the mir and the folk understanding of community.89 Although he was the butt of Drashusova’s and Dahl’s amused remarks about Germans, Haxthausen’s own writing anticipates comments such as theirs. Even as he depicts listening omnivorously, as something that can be done according to ethnographic conventions by any qualified person, he lauds specific groups of listeners in the Rus­sian Empire for a tranquility that he depicts in essentializing terms. Haxthausen was not that dif­fer­ent from Khomiakov. Both men w ­ ere fluent in multiple Eu­ro­pean languages; university-­educated, interested in philology, economics, and science; religious; thinking of themselves as conservative but voicing their views in distinctly modern terms. Khomiakov was an inventor, and Haxthausen too was intrigued by new technologies. In a memo he wrote urging that the government of Alexander II emancipate the serfs without delay, he evoked the speed of new media: “We live in an epoch when thoughts and ideas do not wait years and centuries to be fully developed and disseminated. Spread by the press, steam, and electricity, they sweep Eu­rope like lightning from one end to the other.” If ideas move as fast as electric current, then Rus­sia could not hope that its peasants would remain ignorant of the liberation of ­peoples elsewhere.90 (Haxthausen’s sense that communication along wires was incompatible with serfdom was shared by Herzen, in whose elegant but Orientalizing phrasing, Nicholas’s simultaneous support of technological pro­g ress and censorship was an “example of autocracy armed with all that freedom had devised; slavery and vio­lence supported by what science had found . . . ​like Genghis Khan with a telegraph, steam engines, railroads.”91) Given their similarities, one might won­der ­whether Khomiakov could claim to understand Rus­sian peasants any more than Haxthausen could. He had ­little in common with them, and his insistence on the value of Rus­ sian serenity appears arbitrary, given that his own education had given him non-­Russian values, ideas, and experiences. Rus­sian nationalism is distinctive in that the intellectuals who first defined it felt that they themselves did not fully belong to the nation, ­because their westernized education had cut them off from it.92 As Konstantin Aksakov wrote, “We are armed against ourselves, and we ourselves, of course, are our own worst enemies. . . . ​The ­battle, the true ­battle between East and West, Rus­sia and Eu­rope is in ourselves and not on our borders.”93 The limitations to Rus­sian writers’ certainty that they could listen any better than the foreigner Haxthausen are illustrated by the events that prompted the final break between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles. In December 1844, Nikolai Iazykov, a folklore collector and Khomiakov’s brother-­in-­ law, was just back from medical treatment in Germany; although e­ arlier he

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had been enthusiastic about German culture, he returned in a state of irritation.94 He circulated four manuscript “invective” poems: three attacked Chaadaev, Herzen, and the history professor Timofei Granovsky, and the fourth, “K ne-­nashim” (To Not-­Ours), attacked the Westernizers in general: The voice of the ­people—­God’s   voice—­ That’s not what gives you  courage; It’s foreign, strange, savage   to you. To you our best tales Sound funny, senseless; The feats of our ­g reat  forefathers Say nothing to you; Your pride despises them.

Народный глас—­он Божий глас,—­ Не он рождает в вас отвагу: Он чужд, он странен, дик для вас. Вам наши лучшие преданья Смешно, бессмысленно звучат; Могучих прадедов деянья Вам ничего не говорят; Их презирает гордость ваша.95

Like Lamennais, Mickiewicz, and Custine, Iazykov scaled up from his depiction of a specific scene of listening to larger arguments about identity and belonging. The accusations that Khomiakov had leveled at foreign travelers—of scorn, pride, and alienation from the Rus­sians they described—he directed at the Rus­sian opponents of Slavophile teachings. This angry poem shows that the concept of “the voice of the ­people” mattered for the heroes of this chapter. This phrase has been used to express both belief and hesitation about communication. It was first employed primarily for skeptical listening to ­people one suspects are wrong: the God of the Hebrew Bible (1 Samuel 8:7) uses “the voice of the ­people” to refer to misguided ­people who are rejecting Him, and medieval Eu­ro­pean churchmen used the phrase “the voice of the p­ eople is the voice of God” (in Latin, “Vox populi vox Dei”) with equal dismissiveness; one should not trust the crowd. In the eigh­ teenth ­century, though, Western Eu­ro­pean radicals began to use the phrase approvingly.96 They introduced the modern notion, central to the thinking of demo­crats, nationalists, and socialists, that some par­tic­u­lar set of ­people constitute or represent The ­People and that their words express The ­People’s Voice. Nineteenth-­century Rus­sian writers used the expression “the voice of the ­people” (­whether the Latin “vox populi” or the two Rus­sian terms, “glas naroda,” a phrase of Old Church Slavonic origin with liturgical overtones, or “golos naroda,” a more stylistically neutral phrase), with or without “the voice of God,” to express an array of attitudes ­toward this modern conceit.97 From the 1810s and with par­tic­u­lar enthusiasm in the early years of the reign of Nicholas

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I, some used it approvingly, to describe p­ eople who voice loyalty to the monarch or certainty about a military victory.98 ­Others used it more skeptically, to express doubt about the judgment of the crowd and ­whether a given speaker represents the ­People anyway.99 Dahl included it in his dictionary among some seventy-­five other sayings about communal speech, some of which make the voice of the p­ eople seem wise, ­others not. Haxthausen, who had copied the Rus­sian version of the saying from Dahl, used the Latin version in a somewhat skeptical tone in his memoir, in a section in his final volume about the position of Rus­sia in the context of Eu­ro­pean history, as part of a discussion of the difficulty of creating a fair system for voting: “Popu­lar sovereignty was publicly recognized as axiom and dogma. But when it came to applying t­hese princi­ples to social life, the parties separated in ­every way. The seductive old maxim of ‘vox populi, vox Dei’ was put at the head of all the programs, but each party has its par­tic­u­lar way of explaining the idea of populus.”100 In 1835, Ivan Kireevsky’s ­brother Petr used the phrase in a joking way when he wrote to Iazykov that he needed to leave the countryside and come visit: “Long ago it was affirmed in a single voice that you could not have any business to do in the village: and the voice of the p­ eople is the voice of God (глас народа глас божий).”101 While Kireevsky in 1835 wrote about the voice of the ­people ironically, his erstwhile addressee Iazykov in 1844 sounded serious in his accusations of the Westernizers for their indifference— or, worse, their laughter—at this sound. Iazykov’s addressees took ­these accusations seriously.102 Herzen, who blamed Khomiakov for inciting Iazykov to write the poems, considered a duel; it also appeared pos­si­ble that Granovsky and Petr Kireevsky would fight one.103 Iazykov, who would die within two years of a painful spinal condition, had touched a nerve: the question of who was “ours” and who “not-­ours,” who could listen to the “voice of the ­people” adequately and who not, affected not just foreigners but Rus­sian subjects. The angry reactions provoked by Iazykov’s invective share a theme: they accuse him of poor taste. Karolina Pavlova, who had exchanged friendly poems with Iazykov since 1829, broke off relations with him, even though he assured her that he had not intended to offend her. In 1846, she wrote a poem full of archaic Slavonic vocabulary explaining her reaction.104 To curses and abuse Нет на проклятия и брани I have no answering verse. Во мне отзывного стиха. I have no feeling but sorrow Во мне нет чувства, кроме горя, When the familiar voice of a Когда знакомый глас певца,  singer

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Shamelessly repeating blind  passions Pours hatred into hearts. And I am deeply indignant When he whose song was pure Sends his sacred muse to the   market-­square (ploshchad’) Having put swear-­words into   her mouth.

71

Слепым страстям безбожно вторя, Вливает ненависть в сердца. И я глубоко негодую, Что тот, чья песнь была чиста, На площадь музу шлет святую, Вложив руганья ей в уста.105

Dmitry Sverbeev used similar phrasing in describing Iazykov’s invective poem to A. I. Turgenev, calling it “market-­square swearing” (ploshchadnaia bran’).106 Both Pavlova and Sverbeev accuse Iazykov—­who had accused his enemies of listening in a disrespectful way—of a dif­fer­ent kind of disrespectful listening and misguided recycling of folk words. Iazykov presented himself as a defender of Rus­sian tales, but they complain he was reproducing a dif­fer­ent folkloric genre, swear-­words and insults. The historian of folkloristics Alexander Panchenko explains the felt difference between ­these two kinds of folklore, distinguishing between “Folklore 1 (F1),” or “oral popu­lar culture that is not controlled or sanctioned by the cultural elite,” and “Folklore 2 (F2),” which is “texts approved by society, officially and/or conventionally designated as folklore, and recorded in or on special data media, such as wax cylinders, CDs, academic and popu­lar publications of folksongs and folktales, scholarly essays and books and so on.”107 His expansion of folklore beyond the canonized genres recalls Azadovsky’s attention to the Siberian tale-­teller’s performative choices that do not align with ­others’ renditions of the same texts. (Of course, the distinction Panchenko draws is fluid in practice, since recording and publishing, as Azadovsky did with Vinokurova, can give even the most lowbrow utterance official status.) In the case at hand, whereas Pavlova and Sverbeev thought folklorists should rec­ord and reproduce high-­status folk genres, or F2, Iazykov was instead imitating coarse street abuse, or F1. For Pavlova and Sverbeev, he was using other ­people’s words badly, picking up on the wrong material, to his own dishonor and that of his nation.108 While he accused his enemies of listening mockingly to the voice of the ­people, they responded in kind, by accusing him of careless register-­mixing—­fostered, it would seem, by indiscriminate listening. The picture of the Slavophiles, like their opponents, as performative speakers and listeners, carefully strategizing and negotiating, deciding how to pre­ sent themselves at each moment, coheres with the argument that they ­were entirely modern p­ eople drawn to new communication technologies. Ironically,

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while the Slavophiles thought of themselves as conservatives and of the Westernizers as radicals, the modes of communication with which Herzen associated Chaadaev—­the sound of a bell or a shot—­were already becoming archaic, while the image of communication occurring silently among networked individuals, which sounds like Aksakov’s utopian vision of language, evokes the postal reforms and the nascent telegraphy of their own era. The notion of Rus­ sian speakers’ perfect tranquility allowed Haxthausen to do many t­hings at the same time: to claim that the Gemeinde still thrived in the form of the mir, to describe himself as capable of becoming a temporary aural member of that collective, and to posit that midcentury p­ eople might reclaim the virtues of the old ways—if only they could listen carefully enough. The idea that by listening one could forge a connection with something larger than oneself—­a nation or Schelling’s Absolute—­made sense to the generation of the 1840s. In a world where messages travel along networked wires, ­people yearn to control their network completely. For the central characters in this chapter, it made sense to think of the prob­lems of social change and disintegration, the disappearance of what they saw as old, healthy forms of community, as solvable through focused modern listening.109 This listening fostered the notion of Rus­ sian voices as muted and tranquil, inviting to the attentive ear. At the same time, the valorization of tranquility prompted p­ eople to reflect on who could claim to be ­really Rus­sian, who could claim to have won the contest to truly hear the Rus­sian ­people’s voice.

C h a p te r   3

Nesting

When Vladimir Dahl listened attentively to other p­ eople’s words, he left traces on pieces of paper of all kinds: poor and high-­quality stock; bound notebook pages and loose sheets; folded or cut into cards or strips, which he called “straps” (remeshki), for recording sayings; quickly handwritten or cleanly copied by him and ­others; printed, edited, and reprinted; censored, issued in a l­imited set of copies for state purposes, or published for all to read in newspapers, journals, and thick multivolume books; stored hanging from strings, lying flat in boxes, standing in card cata­logue drawers, or sewn together in folders kept by the imperial government. Although he worked as a naval officer and a doctor as well as a civil servant and he wrote poetry, plays, stories, and science textbooks and essays, Dahl is remembered as a collector of words and folklore, the author of Sayings of the Rus­sian ­People, published in 1862, and the four-­volume Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great-­Russian Language, published 1863–1866; both are still used t­ oday. Dahl’s thought combined the mystical and the practical: he understood his government work, his experiments with homeopathy, the Spiritualist séances he or­ ga­nized, and his lifetime of writing down the words and expressions he heard as all part of a linked set of investigations of the world of living phenomena, which encompassed both the paper he wrote on and the nests ­after which he named his dictionary entries. By performing an omnivorous kind of listening—­ aimed at taking in and transcribing maximal data—in the hopes that it might 73

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eventually prove useful, he tried to demonstrate his own loyalty to a regime that sometimes doubted him. In an intellectual environment where “Rus­ sianness” was opposed to “Germanness,” this child of fluent German speakers was always ready to dismiss ­others as too German as he defined himself as an exemplary listener to Rus­sian speakers. Dahl was born in November 1801 to a Lutheran f­amily in Luganskii Zavod, in eastern Ukraine. His m ­ other was a multilingual Rus­sian subject of German, French Huguenot, and Swiss extraction whose own ­mother had published translations from German into Rus­sian; his Danish f­ather had received a German theological education and then a medical degree. Their son, brought up speaking French, German, and Rus­sian, studied in a naval school and served for five years in a Black Sea port. In 1826 he left the navy and learned Latin to enroll in medical school in the German-­speaking city of Derpt (now Tartu, Estonia). He took his final exams early to enlist for the Russo-­Turkish War. Dahl also served in the Polish campaign of 1831 as an army doctor, d­ oing his part to put down the rebellion with which Mickiewicz and Lamennais sympathized, and received a medal for an engineering feat: building and then destroying a bridge and thereby preventing the Poles from crossing a river. He spent the next two years in St. Petersburg, working as a physician (he performed cataract operations) and making friends in literary circles (including the poets Pushkin and Vasily Zhukovsky), whom he impressed with his funny stories and imitations. In 1833 he accepted the offer of a friend, Adjutant General Vasily Perovsky, to work in Orenburg, at the Central Asian edge of the Rus­sian Empire, where the Rus­sians ­were jockeying with the British for influence over the Khanate of Khiva. Dahl gathered local statistics and tried to ­free Rus­sians who had been sold as slaves in Khiva. Meanwhile, he studied Tatar with a local mullah, learned about local folklore and zoology, and set up a museum. He wrote one report about the local sect of Castrates and another one investigating the allegations that Jews killed Christian ­children to consume their blood (and concluding that one sect among them indeed did so). He and his first wife, a Baltic German, named their first son Lev-­Arslan (Lion-­Lion), like a dictionary entry juxtaposing Rus­sian and Tatar. He spent from 1841 to 1849 in St. Petersburg, working ­under Lev Perovsky, the ­brother of his old boss, at the Interior Ministry, organ­izing the Imperial Geo­graph­i­cal Society, and welcoming visitors to his home on Thursdays. From 1849 to 1859, he was an administrator in Nizhny Novgorod, the central-­Russian city known for its trade fair. Only a­ fter that did he move to Moscow and devote himself to his dictionary and its revisions ­until his death in 1872.1 As an officer, doctor, and administrator who traveled throughout the Rus­ sian Empire and participated in its expansionist military adventures, Dahl had

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many opportunities to hear speech that differed from his own. He responded by trying to understand and retain unfamiliar words. Like Custine and Haxthausen, he began by listening to his coachman. In March 1819, he was travelling from St. Petersburg to Moscow, through Novgorod province, on his way to Nikolaev. It was cold, and he was shivering in his new midshipman’s uniform. His coachman turned to him and said “zamolazhivaet,” then explained, when Dahl asked, that the term meant “pasmurnet’”—­that is, that it would get cloudier (it is unclear ­whether he thought this meant it would get warmer or colder). The seventeen-­year-­old midshipman took out a notebook and wrote the new word down.2 For the next fifty years, he continued to rec­ord words from soldiers, patients, and the residents of the unevenly pacified borders of the empire he administered. A week before his death, he asked his ­daughter to note down four new words that he had heard from the servants.3 Working in Orenburg exposed him to Rus­sian words of Turkic origin and working in Nizhny allowed him to hear the multilingual cacophony of the fair.4 A mimic and an ­eager language student, Dahl delighted in assuming an alternative, provincial identity, vis­ib­ le in his clothing, as well as audible, when he chose, in his speech. He wore a camel-­hair Circassian coat in Orenburg instead of his uniform, gave his son a Tatar name, and claimed with his literary pseudonym to be a Cossack from Lugansk.5 (He was ­really from Lugansk, but he was not a Cossack.) Dahl wrote constantly, sometimes in German but usually in Rus­ sian: first verse and comic one-­act plays; then stylized folktales that let him ventriloquize the voices he heard. He produced both popu­lar and scholarly articles on medicine, philology, biology, and other scholarly topics. He generated published and unpublished collections of other p­ eople’s words, from folktales to glossaries to stories of ­people’s experiences. In ­every genre, he was alert to the tension between speakers’ distinctive verbal repertoires and the conventions of literary Rus­sian.6 Dahl’s writing frequently got him into trou­ble with the authorities and motivated his moves from one part of the empire to another. As a young officer in Nikolaev, accused of writing satirical verses about his commanding officer, Admiral Greig, he was court-­martialed and convicted to be reduced in rank, then cleared on appeal but transferred to Kronshtadt, near St. Petersburg. A tale he wrote in 1832 about a soldier who is punished unjustly but then marries a ­woman with magic power upset an official, who found that it contained “mockery of the government and complaints about the painful situation of soldiers.” Dahl was arrested, though once his well-­placed friends, including Zhukovsky, intervened, he was released ­after less than a day. The affair unnerved him, boosted his literary reputation, and motivated his move to Orenburg. In St. Petersburg in 1848, he was accused of sneaking a “hint at the alleged

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regular inaction of the leadership” into a story. The incident prompted him to burn some of his notebooks and leave for Nizhny Novgorod.7 In his writing about his listening and his use of o ­ thers’ words, Dahl set up contests in which he could demonstrate his superiority to p­ eople who heard the world in more rigid ways. His vitalist thought, meaning his sense that every­thing is alive, including words, prompted him to call his dictionary entries “nests,” a term that he was the first to use but that would become common in Rus­sian lexicography. In using it, I argue, Dahl responded to two of the notions about Rus­sian listening explored ­earlier in this book: to the stories of frozen northern sounds that need to be warmed up before they can be heard, and to the Slavophile conviction that listeners need to belong to a group in order to hear them correctly. Dahl sympathized with some Slavophile ideas, but the nation-­building proj­ect that he undertook with his lexicography was based on omnivorous listening that could be done by anyone, rather than choral listening that could be accomplished only by ­those who w ­ ere already tuned in. This chapter addresses Dahl’s own omnivorous listening, the politics of his categorization of proverbs, his discussion of nests, his use of paper, and fi­nally the suspicious listening of ­those who disagreed with him.

Omnivorous Listening In St. Petersburg in 1832, Dahl published his first book, a collection titled Rus­ sian Tales, from the Oral Folk Tradition, Transmitted into Writing, Adapted to Daily Life and Decorated with Current Sayings by Cossack Vladimir Lugansky: First Five. In the introduction, he urged his readers—­speaking in the folksy style of “Cossack Lugansky”—to follow his own example by recording vernacular speech and publishing it, a proj­ect he presented as a ser­vice to the country. Good ­people! Old and young, c­ hildren on wooden h ­ orses, old p­ eople with sticks and props, girls, Rus­sian brides! Go, old and young, and listen (slushat’) to wonderful, fanciful tales, listen to true and in­ven­ted Rus­sian stories! If you know Rus­sian skoropis’, sit and write them down, rewrite them seven times in a clean draft, keep ­silent, ­don’t miss a single word! ­Every sheet makes thirty-­two wrappers for our beautiful young ladies’ curls; take up arms, valiant sons of the fatherland, and may we not disgrace our land! . . . ​Write, brave ardent ones, write and print verses in ­Albums, in Almanacs, so that soon ­Mother Rus­sia ­will begin exporting scrap paper from your drafts overseas to other countries! (Люди добрые! старые и малые, ребятишки на деревянных

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кониках, старички с клюками и подпорками, девушки, невесты Русские! идите стар и мал слушать сказки чудные и прихотливые, слушать были-­небылицы Русские! А кто знает грамоте скорописной великороссийской, садись пиши записывай, набело семь раз переписывай, знай помалчивай, словечка не роняй! Из каждого листа выходит тридцать две обертки на завитки нашим барышнямкрасавицам: ополчитеся, доблестные сыны отечества, да не посрамим земли своея! . . . ​Пишите молодцы задорные, пишите и печатайте вирши в Альбомы, в Альманахи, так скоро из матушки России пойдет вывоз черновой бумаги за море в чужие краи!)8 This introduction combines extravagantly folksy expressions and syntax with oddly specific technical instructions. It urges readers not just to gather folklore but to transcribe in skoropis’—­a simplified form of Cyrillic handwriting used in offices from the f­ourteenth ­century; nineteenth-­century handwriting developed from it. It then tells readers to make seven copies, with an awareness that this w ­ ill generate rough drafts, scrap paper that can be exported. This speaker has a pair of scissors and points out in a jocular way that each page of scrap paper can be cut up into precisely thirty-­two curling-­papers. (Perhaps, since curling-­papers are thin strips long enough to tie, he would cut the pages in half one way and in sixteen strips the other way). Dahl’s instinct to give readers precise instructions for the use of paper in collecting tales was typical of his moment. The collection of Rus­sian folklore was already well underway. Foreign travelers had collected stories and songs beginning in the sixteenth c­ entury; Rus­sians began to collect byliny (epic songs) and other songs in the eigh­teenth ­century, and more in the first de­cades of the nineteenth c­ entury.9 Writers who saw folklore as the inspiration for modern poetry did not always see collecting it as requiring any specific skills or care. For instance, in the winter of 1816, Zhukovsky asked his gentry friends to help him collect tales and traditions that he could draw on in his poems. “­Don’t laugh,” he urged Avdotia Kireevskaia (­later Elagina) and her ­sister. “You ­don’t need to take trou­ble with the writing; just rec­ord the content.”10 This would change in the years ­after Pushkin returned from Mikhailovskoe, as Rus­sian folklorists followed and refined his listening practices. In 1830, ­after learning that Pushkin was planning to publish a collection of folksongs, Petr Kireevsky asked his own servant to write down ­those he remembered. Over the next three de­cades, he and Iazykov gathered songs, tales, rituals, and sayings for a large-­scale collection. In 1834, when Kireevsky transcribed songs himself in Novgorod, he followed Pushkin’s example by wearing peasant clothes (and prompting police suspicion). ­Later folklore-­collectors would do

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the same.11 Like Zhukovsky, they asked friends and relatives, especially female ones, to help them collect. Nikolai Gogol, who had kept a special notebook to write down folksongs since high school, copied texts from other collectors and recruited his ­mother, ­sister, and aunt to transcribe songs and stories, and to write descriptions of customs, rituals, and peasant dress, which they sent to St. Petersburg (along with some ­actual items of clothing) to help him in his writing.12 Increasingly, ­these ­people saw collecting folklore as something one could do well or badly. Whereas Zhukovsky had told Kireevsky’s m ­ other in 1816 that she did not need to go to special effort to transcribe rural stories, Kireevsky and his fellow collectors in the 1830s and 1840s tried to systematize ways to work with nonstandard words on paper. Pushkin had underlined dialect words to draw attention to the difference from the literary language; the botanist Mikhail Maksimovich had already published, in 1827, a collection of Ukrainian texts that he carefully transcribed in a new orthography that displayed the differences from Rus­sian.13 Kireevsky’s archive contains a set of ten rules for transcribing texts: when to introduce line breaks, how to indicate the end of an item, what size paper to use, and how big a margin to leave.14 One of the reasons for the time it took him to prepare his songs for publication was his hesitation about how to or­ga­nize them—­alphabetically, by genre, historically?15 In 1838 he and Iazykov, trapped together in Simbirsk for two months by impassable roads, formulated what they called a “Song Proclamation,” the first document of its kind in Rus­sia. T ­ here they urged p­ eople to transcribe what they heard even when they had doubts about it. “You have to first transcribe the [spoken] words, then verify them from the singing (s golosa), ­because ­people who are used to singing songs usually remember them better when they sing than when they speak them. Songs sung among the folk should be transcribed word for word, with no omission or analy­sis, without paying attention to their content, brevity, awkwardness, or even apparent nonsense.”16 Many folklorists ­were themselves performers, as was Kireevsky, who played guitar and sang the songs he collected, and this affected their collecting.17 The “peasant poet” Aleksei Kol’tsov wrote that though he transcribed songs with “precise words, g­ oing from one word to another,” he knew that in per­for­ mance, lines ­were repeated or sung over each other and additional nonsense sounds ­were added.18 He explained that the way to collect songs was to drink and sing with your interlocutors. “And I’m a ­g reat singer! (я петь большой мастак!) If anyone heard, t­ hey’d laugh their heads off.”19 Even as Kol’tsov made fun of himself, he showed off his access. Over the ­century, folklorists would become increasingly committed to collecting from ­people unlike themselves, working collaboratively by sharing transcriptions and focusing on a

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specific place, and like Kol’tsov they would display their own encounters with in­for­mants in addition to the folklore itself.20 With his use of folklore, Dahl too demonstrated his access. In his first collection of stories, he created a new narrative style that showed off the words and phrases he had recorded, and he urged other writers to follow his example. In so d­ oing, he participated in an ongoing conversation about imitation and national originality. In the 1820s, Rus­sian writers such as Pushkin responded to the accusation that they ­were blindly imitating French literary models. They argued about how to achieve narodnost’, meaning the possibility of identifying Rus­sianness in literary texts.21 They discussed ­whether identifiably national art relies on language itself, the choice of themes, or a national style that was more difficult to tie down.22 As we saw in the Introduction, Pushkin had urged other writers to listen to the “common ­people” as a way to improve their style. Dahl, who was born only two years a­ fter Pushkin, also saw language as key for narodnost’, asserting that Rus­sian had too many loan words from French and German, and needed to find indigenous words to replace them. He experimented with this task, but wrote in 1839 that choosing new words required sensitivity to “the spirit of our language”: “Almost never should one invent words, and it’s completely wrong to combine and sew two or three together into one; that goes against the spirit of our language and succeeds very rarely.”23 In 1837, Dahl saw Zhukovsky, who was traveling through Orenburg as part of the tsar’s retinue (he tutored the royal ­children). The royal visitors ­were treated to a display of Kirghiz and Bashkir gymnastics and h ­ orse­manship, and Zhukovsky recorded local words in his notebook: “Musician—­kuraichi; instrument—­kurai or chebluzga. Iurlauchi—­singer.”24 Dahl tried out on him a sentence he had crafted, using Cossack terms (for which I have substituted cowboy slang in my translation) to describe a chase on ­horse­back: For instance, I’d write, “The Cossack saddled his ­horse as quickly as pos­ si­ble, sat his comrade who had no riding ­horse b­ ehind him on the croup, and chased the ­enemy, keeping him always in view, so that when the circumstances w ­ ere right he could attack him.” (Казак оседлал лошадь как можно поспешнее, взял товарища своего, у которого не было верховой лошади, к себе на круп, и следовал за неприятелем, имея его всегда в виду, чтобы при благоприятных обстоятельствах на него напасть.) You might ask, is this good, is it well written? I can testify based on the many ­people I showed this example to that they all said it was fine—­you can live with it, you d­ on’t have to cross any of it out. But I’d rather write this way instead: “The Cossack saddled up lickety split,

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sat his h ­ orse­less amigo on the anquera, and kept the ­enemy in eyeshot so he could strike once they pulled even.” (Казак седлал уторопь, посадил безконнаго товарища на забедры и следил неприятеля в назерку, чтобы при спопутности на него ударить.)25 Zhukovsky was unimpressed and said that you could only use that kind of vulgar language in speaking to Cossacks, and even then only about ­matters they knew well.26 Like Karamzin on pichuzhechka, or Belinsky on zelenia, Zhukovsky was assuming that good writers listen with a discriminating ear, picking out the most beautiful and comprehensible vernacular terms. In this exchange, Dahl defended a more verbatim, omnivorous, undiscriminating notion of good listening. At other moments, though, Dahl too would argue for the value of the discriminating ear that distinguishes which regionalisms could be permitted in the written language.27 Perhaps b­ ecause it forced him to confront some of the contradictions in his own understanding of the relationship among oral registers and writing, Dahl kept thinking about that conversation. He wrote to Zhukovsky the next year in a passive-­aggressive tone. Although he had told him he would send him material to use for ballads, he now said he had realized that he could not, b­ ecause he understood that truly conveying the spirit of folklore, meaning ­every detail of folk life, would be impossible in a letter. “I started writing it several times but what came out was an excessively long novella and yet far from every­thing necessary and useful was included. . . . ​ Maybe I’m mistaken, maybe I’ve been overcome by narodnost’ mania, but by God, I cannot do this work halfway.”28 Given the two men’s conversation ­earlier, Dahl appears to be competing with his friend, hinting that Zhukovsky was, unlike himself, ­doing narodnost’ only halfway. To use the terminology of linguistic anthropology, he was “scaling up,” seeing their Orenburg conversation as a site of impor­tant meaning. ­After Zhukovsky died, Dahl claimed that his spirit visited him at a séance to remind him about that exchange.29 ­Whether or not that r­ eally happened, it is clear that Dahl was still reflecting on the conversation three years ­after it occurred. He wrote to Mikhail Pogodin, the editor of the Slavophile-­leaning journal Moskvitianin (The Muscovite), about his unsuccessful attempt to convince Zhukovsky “that we should learn the language from the p­ eople and not from books.”30 Pogodin answered, “Zhukovsky is a German and has no concept of the Rus­sian language produced from the mouth of the folk; in other words, he ­can’t enrich it by mining that inexhaustible mountain. His virtue is that he uses the inherited capital as well as he can.”31 Pogodin, it seems, agreed with Iazykov that ­people prove their national belonging in the way they use

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words. It may seem paradoxical to think of Zhukovsky, the child of a Rus­sian landowner and a Turkish war captive, as “German” (a term used for foreigners in general) and Dahl, the child of a Baltic German and a German-­speaking Danish émigré, as “Rus­sian,” but Pogodin’s phrasing indicates that for him, as for Iazykov, ­these categories ­were more performative than essentializing, and Dahl too consistently described national identity as something one could claim by using language—­speaking, writing, listening—in one way rather than another. He responded to the notion that Rus­sians needed to model what they wrote on texts in other languages by saying, “Write the way that a gifted foreigner, if he happened to be Rus­sian, would write, but ­don’t follow right ­after him, step by step—­break your own path instead.”32 The oxymoronic image of a foreigner who happens to be Rus­sian indicates the fluidity of t­ hese categories in Dahl’s mind. While Pogodin (himself the child of serfs) used ethnicizing insults freely, Dahl’s use of that vocabulary was more complicated. He told Pogodin that he was disturbed by other writers’ denigration of the French, which he saw as a distraction from the real work of renewing the Rus­sian literary language: “­You’ve also gone abroad, and not for nothing; your notes ­don’t have that vulgar, officious abuse of the French, that unbearable boasting: ‘we, we, we Rus­sians ­will make short work of you all!’ ”33 In 1842, Pogodin published Dahl’s “A Word and a Half about T ­ oday’s Rus­ sian Language.” T ­ here Dahl asserted that Rus­sians “strive forcefully for narodnost’” in vari­ous ways, but they often fail. Recycling Pogodin’s insult against Zhukovsky, he categorized ­these writers as r­ eally German, not Rus­sian: “­These are Rus­sian Germans, Rus­sians in name but not Rus­sians by education and language, who suddenly take it into their heads to slap something together to indulge the taste for narodnost’.” With their kneejerk attacks on the French and their “kvas” (vulgar) patriotism, they only repel readers. Rus­sians need to understand that they are ­going through a pro­cess that other languages had already experienced: the German literary language once had too many Latinisms; the Turkish literary language still relies on terms from Persian and Arabic. The way to make pro­g ress is not to attack the French but to listen to peasants and transcribe their words, as he had done with his 1832 stories: “what’s impor­ tant is not tales themselves, but the Rus­sian language.”34 Dahl used vitalist terms in describing his efforts to renew the language: “It is impossible to remake, to remold a language in a dif­fer­ent pattern without cutting it off from the sap at its root. The language would die, it would lose every­thing that gave it the right to call itself a separate, in­de­pen­dent language.”35 Speaking in terms that recall Schelling, he described language as a living ­thing with a spirit, not inert data to be coldly dissected. For the rest of

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his ­career, Dahl would continue to write about language in t­ hese terms. It is alive; it should be propagated, not theorized; the ­people who recognize this are Rus­sian, and ­those who deny it are only “Rus­sian Germans.” As the historian Nathaniel Knight explains, the categories of “German” and “Rus­sian” took on the meanings Dahl evoked in the 1840s. Dahl was among the found­ers in 1845 of the Rus­sian Geo­graph­ic­ al Society (hence RGS). Some of the ethnographers at the RGS assumed their purpose was to study all the p­ eoples of the empire and to create general knowledge; this group had ties to the Acad­emy of Sciences, dominated by foreign scholars, which published in French and German. Another faction assumed that the Rus­sians themselves w ­ ere the most impor­tant topic of ethnographic research, the purpose of which was to create knowledge useful in administering the empire, especially in introducing reforms, most crucially the abolition of serfdom. This group of “enlightened bureaucrats” had ties to Perovsky’s Interior Ministry and wanted to publish in Rus­sian. By 1848, the “Rus­sian faction” had won out, and with it a model of ethnographic research that still retains influence in Rus­sian scholarship. While the “German” faction understood ethnographic data as grist for their theoretical mill, the “Rus­sian” faction understood it as valuable in itself. The “Rus­sians” relied on questionnaires sent to the provinces and filled in by provincial intellectuals; they generated detailed descriptions of local conditions that ­were published in RGS journals. The result was that “Rus­sian” ethnography would be defined as the empirical collection of data and the postponement, or even rejection, of analy­sis and theorization. In fact, both the “German” and “Rus­sian” factions of the RGS w ­ ere inspired by German phi­los­o­phers. While the leaders of the “German” side had learned from the Kantians at Göttingen University to think about universal questions of cognition, the “Rus­ sian” side was more influenced by Schelling and Herder and their interest in the nation.36 As Knight explains, “Ethnography, in this sense, involved the production of autonomous repre­sen­ta­tions of the narod. Standing on their own, ­these repre­sen­ta­tions expressed the regional or national character of the populations described, but taken together they merged into a broad canvas representing and symbolizing the content of the empire as a ­whole.”37 Given that much of the anthropological theorization of the nineteenth c­ entury, inspired by Eu­ro­pean imperial expansion overseas, relied on essentializing ideas of racial supremacy, it is not surprising that Rus­sian thinkers—­g iven both their own sensitivity about their difference from Western Eu­rope and the distinctive conditions of a contiguous empire formed over centuries—­found Western ethnographical thought distasteful. At the same time, in spite of the differences between the racial thinking in Rus­sia and Western Eu­rope, Rus­ sian imperial officials had no doubt about their superiority to the p­ eoples to

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the East and South. Dahl himself was confident that p­ eople speaking Persian, Mongol, and Turkic languages should belong to the Rus­sian empire and that words from their languages should thus naturally be found in the Rus­sian language, but French and German words should be excluded.38 The ideology of the RGS underlies Dahl’s self-­presentation, and its attitude ­toward ethnographic information aligns with his omnivorous listening style. What­ever his own background, he could perform “Rus­sianness,” and reject “Germanness,” by listening inclusively and exhaustively. His proj­ect of recording peasant words and his rejection of theory made him “Rus­sian;” ­those who disagreed with him, then, had to be “German.” Dahl performed the role of the omnivorous observer alert to the world’s vital forces in spheres well beyond lexicography.39 He described his experiments in homeopathy in similar terms to t­ hose with the Rus­sian language. Homeopathy, the treatment of medical symptoms with highly diluted amounts of materials known to produce the same symptoms, was in­ven­ted by Samuel Hahnemann, a physician from Dresden. In Organon of the Healing Art (first published in 1810), he asserted that while older ideas about effective treatment ­were based on self-­aggrandizing speculation, his relied on systematically observing the ­human body and withholding premature theorization.40 Hahnemann wrote with perhaps justifiable scorn about the still reigning humor theory of disease and insisted that the physician’s duty was not to offer theories about the origins of illness, but to treat vis­ib­ le symptoms. Dahl had been exposed to homeopathy in Derpt by teachers who w ­ ere for the most part skeptical. ­After attacking it in two essays, he changed his mind and wrote in 1838 to Odoevsky that homeopathy appealed to him b­ ecause unlike other medical systems, it accepted the evidence of the senses. Having experimented first on himself and then on his ­family and patients, he had realized that the diluted solutions worked—­and that the system’s found­er’s refusal to articulate a theory explaining why made the idea only more convincing.41 ­Later in his life, Dahl demonstrated more opposition to theory and embrace of observation as he tried to communicate with the dead. He became fascinated in his late forties and fifties by the mystical writings and practices that appealed to many intellectuals of his era.42 He read Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-­century Swedish Enlightenment phi­los­o­pher who believed that ­after death ­human souls may communicate with living ­people, and he strove to follow Swedenborg’s path to revelation by holding séances in his home.43 Dahl collaborated with Alexander Aksakov (Konstantin Aksakov’s cousin) on the translation of Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations by the American Spiritualist Robert Hare, a chemistry professor and an adherent of “Scientific” Spiritualism, a movement in­ven­ted in 1848 by a pair

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Figure 5.  Spiritoscopes with Latin and Cyrillic letters, from Robert Hare, Opytnye isledovaniia o spiritualizme, trans. Aleksandr Aksakov (Leipzig: Franz Wagner, 1866), xl, translation of Robert Hare, Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations (New York: Partridge, 1856).

of s­ isters in upstate New York who claimed to be in communication with the spirit of a murdered peddler.44 This brand of spiritualism relied on ­table tipping and automatic writing, using a medium or contraptions such as “spiritoscopes,” machines with disks that had letters written around their edge, which rotated around a fixed arrow (or the arrow rotated around the disk). The medium would set the disk or the arrow in motion, and the spirits would communicate by stopping it at the desired letter. The omnivorous attitude of Spiritualists such as Dahl was evident at the séances where he and his friends took minutes on the utterances of the spirits, then carried out investigations to see ­whether the ­people they reported to be had r­ eally existed. When he took notes at the séances that he described as chancelleries, Dahl acted on the midcentury passion for transforming all the world’s sounds into written evidence.45 In the United States too, governmental officials ­were drawn to Scientific Spiritualism, even as it appealed to feminists and abolitionists interested in challenging the existing social order.46 Peters notes that séances w ­ ere perceived in the mid-­nineteenth-­century as of a piece with the era’s new communication technologies, similarly promising, albeit not consistently delivering, better contact. “Spiritualism, the art of communication with the dead, explic­itly modeled itself on the telegraph’s ability to receive remote messages.”47 As with the telegraph’s use of electricity, Spiritualist

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methods of contacting the dead ­were understood as a way to draw on something that had always existed. Spiritualists ­were certain that the spirits of the dead had always been pre­sent among the living, awaiting the invention of devices that would allow them to be heard. The combination of an urge to speak with the dead and the creation of a modern piece of information technology such as a vernacular dictionary was typical of the era. Listening for the voices of the dead informed Dahl’s vision of his dictionary as a way for p­ eople to restore life to their language and thereby to resurrect the voice of a threatened culture. As Peters writes, it was in the 1840s that new technologies, such as the uniform postal rate, telegraph, and camera, gave rise to the concept of “communication” even as they gave p­ eople new words to talk about the fear of solitude. Spiritualism raised, but did not solve, the question of w ­ hether the dead could send messages to the living; it “explored the trou­bles and utopias of communication across the gaps,” and it appealed to t­ hose troubled by ­those gaps, such as Dahl.48 In gathering the words that he would include in his dictionary, Dahl hoped to prompt his readers to make contact with the spirit of the Rus­sian language, much as Spiritualists hoped to make contact with the dead. By the time he published it, Dahl sounded more sympathetic than he had once been with Zhukovsky’s point that regional words w ­ ere not easily usable by a literate Muscovite: “Could one r­ eally write in the peasant speech of Dahl’s dictionary, which gives off an odor, perceptible at a distance, of tar and raw vodka, or at least kvas, musty sheepskin and bath­house birch twigs? No, you ­can’t write in a coarse, uneducated language; every­one who has tried to do it has shown that, including perhaps the dictionary-­maker himself.”49 Dahl presented the dictionary as a tool that would permit the user to perceive what he called the “spirit” of Rus­sian. He included words and phrases from around the empire “not so they can necessarily be included in the written language but so they can be studied, known, and discussed, so the very spirit of the language can be studied and assimilated, so ­people can gradually develop their own educated language from it.” He hoped to help his reader sense how to generate new words: “When the sense permits it you can construct the word you need from the verb, according to the consistent rule; where such a construction is opposed to the spirit of the language or to the sense itself, our language stubbornly rejects it, and if it is forced [iznasilovan, literally raped] it produces cumbersome words, repulsive to our hearing and sense, with no power or meaning.”50 This dictionary, then, is meant to begin the gradual transformation of the reader’s own language; it is a technical device for contacting an invisible spirit.51 Dahl understood the world as occupied by multiple living systems: the ­human body, the Rus­sian language, and even the dead spoke to him, and he

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systematically recorded what he heard and saw. Implicitly and explic­itly, he compared language to other living t­ hings, whose connection was apparent to ­those who avoided too-­quick analy­sis.52 While of course the ideas that convinced him—­homeopathy, Spiritualism, or his own Herderian linguistic nationalism—­were all theories, he felt that they ­were the atheoretical responses of an observer who truly looked and listened. In performing his omnivorous listening, in collecting the words of the living, the results of his homeopathic experiments, and the knocking sounds of the dead, Dahl demonstrated his skills and his value to the country.

“Politics Is a Rotten Egg:” Categorization Having filled up 180 of the notebooks he reserved for proverbs with some 30,000 sayings, Dahl acted on similar impulses when he sorted what he had collected into categories and tried to publish the result as a book.53 His first attempt to print the collection in 1853 ran into bureaucratic obstacles: although the relatively liberal ­Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich tried to shepherd it into print, the censor opposed it. It would be permitted by the Moscow censor in 1858, u ­ nder a new regime, and printed only in 1862. The controversy over its publication prompted Dahl, his critics, and his defenders to articulate their ideas about listening, transcription, and the cata­loguing of folklore.54 He addressed the question of ordering in 1853 in a note to Konstantin Nikolaevich. A ­ fter explaining that since 1819 he had been collecting material that was likely to die out soon in Rus­sia as it had in Eu­rope, Dahl wrote, “I de­cided to or­ga­nize this enormous store not alphabetically but by meaning: this task is almost beyond my powers, it required many years, and nevertheless it is still far from the necessary state of order and completion.”55 (The topics into which Dahl would or­ga­nize the volume included ­human characteristics such as “bravery” or “pride,” kinds of ­people such as “peasant ­woman” or “king,” places such as “forest” and “courtyard,” and many o ­ thers.) He linked his rejection of alphabetical order to the size of his task, connecting, as the RGS “Rus­sian” faction tended to, the national significance of ethnography of the Rus­sians to the pre­ sen­ta­tion of maximally copious and untheorized data; he “scaled up” from the technical question of ordering to larger issues of national values. This argument made sense to the ­grand duke, who wrote that it would be beneficial to publish this “collection of Rus­sian proverbs and sayings, or­ga­nized according to their meanings and not alphabetically, as u ­ ntil now proverb collectors had done.”56 ­Others ­were less enthusiastic. Two members of the Acad­emy of Sciences, Alexander Vostokov, a prominent philologist, and Archpriest Ioakim Kochetov,

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a professor at the St. Petersburg Theological Acad­emy, wrote reports about the manuscript, voicing objections that ranged from the evidently po­liti­cal to the more technical. Although both recognized the work that had gone into it, they found much to criticize, including the categorization system. Kochetov would have preferred to see the material or­ga­nized by genre rather than topic, which led to repetition and inconsistency: sometimes a single saying appeared ­under several categories, and sometimes a single category contained sayings with opposing meanings. In addition, he felt that items citing Holy Writ should be excluded b­ ecause they w ­ ere not r­ eally folklore.57 The collection could be published, he thought, if it ­were reor­ga­nized in a more “systematic” way.58 Vostokov too disliked the repetition and the inclusion of items he felt ­were not truly folklore, sayings translated from Latin or citations from known historical figures, such as the military commander Alexander Suvorov’s bon mot, “Politics is a rotten egg—if you break it carelessly, it produces only a bad smell.”59 The censor Iu. Shillovsky explained that the book could not be published, due to the disconnect between the categories and the contents, the mixing of Holy Writ with folklore, and the grouping of religious items with ones that might make p­ eople laugh.60 Dahl and his allies responded to ­these attacks by questioning the princi­ples of categorization on which they w ­ ere based. Baron Modest Korf, a member of the government’s advisory committee on publishing, and director of the Imperial Public Library, asserted that the collection should be praised rather than criticized for its apparent lack of systematic ordering. He wrote, “I dare think that it would have been better not to systematize what was collected: the s­ imple folk lexicon should live in that simplicity in which it flowed out and took root in the tradition, without artificial divisions, without attempts at systematizing it by meanings that it often does not ­really possess.”61 Dahl himself answered his critics guardedly in 1853 and at greater length in the introduction to the collection that he fi­nally published in 1862. In response to the criticism that he had included items that ­were not folklore, he explained (anticipating twentieth-­century folklorists) that he considered items folkloric if he heard them used orally, by ­those he considered to be “the folk.” On ordering, he noted that the common alphabetical system for proverb collections relies on arbitrary components. French and German collections that sort according to a keyword rather than the first word run the risk of separating proverbs that have the same significance although they have none of the same words. Take the proverbs, “A goat runs in the mountains, and a ram runs in the mountains,” “Where the h ­ orse has his hoof, the crab has his pincer,” and “Snipes on pipes, honeybees on timpanis” (literally, “Ducks on flutes, cockroaches on drums,” which rhymes in Rus­sian) (Козел по горам, и баран по

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горам. Куда конь с копытом, туда и рак с клешней. Утки в дудки—­ тараканы в барабаны.) All mean, roughly, “To each his own.” Rather than categorizing them u ­ nder “goat,” “ram,” “horse,” “crab,” or “duck,” Dahl asserted, they should all be classified u ­ nder something like “changeability,” “example,” or “imitation.”62 To the complaint that proverbs contradict each other, he asserted that this reflects the complexity of the world: “If one proverb says that the task fears the craftsman and another adds that sometimes the craftsman fears the task, then both are right: tasks are not all the same, and craftsmen are not all the same.” As for repetition, he admitted that sometimes he had edited poorly, but often a single proverb simply belonged to two categories—­sometimes with dif­fer­ent meanings in dif­fer­ent contexts.63 Dahl’s skepticism about classification systems makes him sound like a postmodernist, concerned that the attempt to create mutually exclusive categories that completely encompass the world risks effacing items that do not fit them neatly. When such systems give rise to widely used standards, the arbitrary choices under­lying them become invisible.64 Dahl was not alone, though, in critiquing p­ eople’s habits of categorization. Even while Victorians obsessed over “pure” breeding and saw mixing (of “blood,” genders, class) as morally and physically corrupting, plenty of nineteenth-­century ­people pushed against t­ hese certainties and expressed skepticism about the ways that some p­ eople sorted the universe.65 Dahl signaled this skepticism about naturalists’ categorization in his essay “Zoology,” where he wrote, “ge­ne­tic division is not certain and unquestionable, but depends on our perspective and the degree of our knowledge.”66 Nothing—­neither birds nor words—­can be definitively classified.

Words in Nests If language was alive, where could Dahl keep the words and phrases he gathered? In describing his collection of sayings and his dictionary, he juxtaposed what he saw as arbitrary ordering systems with other systems that he saw as more natu­ral. Writing in 1845, he used vitalist terms: “our word ­will be just a ­little Rus­sian word, as they say, an orphan that it would be impossible not to shelter. Let’s pass the hat to meet the need, for the orphans’ happiness, and ­we’ll each put in a penny and invite o ­ thers to do the same.”67 Like a m ­ other bird creating a structure of found objects to protect her eggs, Dahl de­cided to keep his words in “nests,” his idiosyncratic term for the entries in his dictionary. The term recalls the conceptualization discussed in the Introduction of both birds and spoken vernacular words as objects that, if not captured quickly,

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might dis­appear. It also evokes the legends that Castiglione and Münchhausen circulated, in which sounds in Rus­sia need to be warmed up in order to be audible; Dahl’s image of words as orphans that need shelter similarly figures language as vulnerable to the cold. He had similar ideas about his dictionary and his proverbs; in both cases, he “scaled up” from the seemingly technical question of ordering to larger issues of national vitality and belonging. In 1851, he told the philologist Nikolai Grech that he had already de­cided to or­ga­nize his sayings by meaning, while with the dictionary, he was trying to find a con­ve­nient system where “­under ­every word that expresses some general idea you can find all the related words (odnoslovy) with vari­ous derivations and connotations, and also all the words to signify subordinate concepts.”68 By 1857, he had found a name for his lexicographic ordering system: he wrote to Alexander Vel’tman that the dictionary “­won’t be ordered by roots, but all t­hose of the same nest (odnognezdnye) are ­housed together.”69 ­These words, like the animal inhabitants of nests, seem to be living creatures. Dahl uses similar imagery in the foreword to explain how he de­cided to structure his dictionary. The idea of offering an alphabetical list, with headwords followed by definitions, was unappealing. “What need does such a dictionary fulfill? A dead list of words is no help or comfort.”70 Dahl found alphabetical dictionaries useless. “Such a dictionary is not handy. How could I use it, how could I summon out of it and dig up all the trea­sures hidden between two covers?”71 ­After some experimentation, Dahl designed a structure he found satisfying. The entries consisted of semantically connected words beginning with the same few letters. “No one, for instance, would doubt that stoiat’ [to stand], stoika [a stand], and stoialo [pedestal, base] are birds of a single nest.” Looking at ­these words together reveals the “unchanging rules of the formation of words in links, in a chain, in clusters.”72 An ideal dictionary would highlight t­ hese connections. “­Wouldn’t it make ­these relationships clearer, ­wouldn’t we more easily reclaim the spirit of the language, which we have lost, given this nest or ­family structure of the dictionary, which the reader now sees before him?”73 Each nest contains words linked by what Dahl saw as their “obvious ­family connection and most close relationship;” t­ hese nests appear alphabetically. Dahl made no claim that this “obvious,” apparently audible relationship indicated a historical connection among words, and he felt that in any case readers should care more about finding usable words than knowing their origin.74 Each nest also contains sayings containing the word. The conceit of the dictionary entry as nest makes the Rus­sian language described in the dictionary appear natu­ral, though in fact, like other language revivalists and standardizers, Dahl alternated between celebrating and effacing

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the linguistic diversity he encountered.75 Although he had written a lengthy essay describing the dialects of the empire, he does not consistently give words’ place of origin, nor their local pronunciation; he “corrects” the phonetics of his words to that of Moscow, thus making Rus­sian appear more phonetically homogeneous but lexically richer.76 He spoke about the p­ eoples of the empire in the same way, describing them as wanting (with some irritating exceptions) to Russify. As he performed Rus­sianness through his omnivorous listening, so most other ­people who ­were not ethnic Rus­sians, he suggested, perform Rus­ sianness, even as they enrich their vocabulary, like Dahl himself, by incorporating the words they hear around them.77 Dahl’s goal was in part prescriptive—to encourage readers to use the words he had collected—­and thus he produced something quite dif­fer­ent from the descriptive Rus­sian dialect dictionary that had been published in 1852, Vostokov’s Attempt at a Regional Great-­Russian Dictionary.78 This dictionary contains only dialect words, alphabetized, and includes the place where they w ­ ere heard (including Rus­sia’s North American territories). Dahl’s dictionary, in contrast, combines standard and dialect words. Of the nearly 115,000 words in Vostokov’s 1847 Acad­emy of Sciences Dictionary of the Church Slavonic and Rus­sian Language, he rejected some 15,000 as awkward, un-­Russian, obsolete, or useless, then added 20,000 from other dictionaries and between 70,000 and 80,000 from his own notes on spoken language.79 And like other nineteenth-­century language reformers who dreamed of attaining a perfect fit between spoken and written language, Dahl designed his own system of phonetic orthography for his dictionary.80 Although it is now common in Slavic lexicography, Dahl was apparently the first to use the term “nests” to describe etymological entries.81 As A. N. Tikhonov, himself a nesting lexicographer, explains, two previous dictionaries of Rus­sian had grouped words by (approximately understood) etymological origin rather than presenting them strictly alphabetically.82 The 1789 Dictionary of the Rus­sian Acad­emy, edited by Princess Ekaterina Vorontsova-­ Dashkova, groups words of similar origin together in a modified alphabetical order: as Dashkova explained, “I endeavored to delve into their origin . . . ​and I ordered them according to their rank of derivation.”83 (The subsequent 1806– 1822 edition of this dictionary would reject ­these etymological groupings in ­favor of a more conventional alphabetical system.84) Filipp Reif ’s 1835 Russian-­ French Dictionary, in Which the Rus­sian Words Are Situated by Origin, calls its etymological groupings “families.”85 For a person fluent in Rus­sian, the wealth of expressions and sayings in Dahl’s dictionary is exciting, but non-­native readers tend to find it difficult to use, ­because the everyday terms that they look for are located deep inside

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densely typeset entries, introduced by headwords whose link to the word one is looking for is not always immediately evident. For instance, nemets (German) and ruskii (Rus­sian, which Dahl preferred to spell with one s, since he disapproved of doubled consonants) are in the articles introduced by the headwords nemoi (naturally deprived of speech) and Rusak (a Rus­sian person).86 The logic of Dahl’s system is evident in the entry for “nest”. NEST (gnezdo). neut. Vari­ous kinds of dwelling or place where animals raise their young. A wolves’, snakes’, nightingales’ nest; a hornets’, bumblebees’ nest. Animals’ nests are called a den (logovo), a litter (vyvodok), a bears’ den (berloga); a nest in a tree, as for instance a martens’ or squirrels’. . . . ​ The nest is w ­ hole but the birds have flown away. All to their places like nightingales to their nests. . . . ​In his own nest even a crow ­will peck out a kite’s eyes. They burned the woods and the ­little nightingale cries over his nest. Death has already woven her nest in him. No magpie fouls its own nest. Only a foolish bird does not love its own nest. Laziness has woven a nest in his bosom. The profit and the bill are birds of the same nest. No praise to a falcon that attacks a nest. . . . ​A bird does not weave a nest at Annunciation; if it weaves one, it goes on foot all summer. The cuckoo has no nest ­because it wove it during Annunciation. | A dwelling, an abode of any kind; a hangout, a refuge, an assembly, a settlement. That ­little village is a thieves’ nest. He moved or wove his nest in a foreign land. | A ­family. My nest is the gang. A nest of huts, standing close, two huts set close. Our huts are set in a nest. The ducks’ nest, the Pleiades constellation. Ducks’ nests, the plant Anchusa officinalis, bugloss. . . . ​Gnezdovina, fem. A nest, meaning a hole or depression to insert something. . . . ​Gnezdovoi, related to, belonging to, forming a nest and so on. . . . ​Gnezdoobraznyi, gnezdovidnyi, nest-­like. Gnezden’, gnezdnik or gnezdar’, masc. bird taken from a nest. . . . ​| Gnezden’, someone who still sits in a nest, at home, or who nests. Gnezdnikovyi, gnezdarnyi, related to a gnezdar’. Gnezdov’e, a chosen or favorite place for a nest or aerie. Gnezdit’sia, to weave or built a nest; to s­ ettle down, take shelter, choose a haven; esp. used with the prefixes pri, u. Gnezdilishche, neut. place where someone or something nests; a shelter, a hangout. . . . ​Gnezdovienie, gnezdovitie, neut. birds’ nest-­building. Gnezdov’iun, better gnezdovoi masc. a night moth Phalaena Tortrix. Spruce-nester, Ph. Trt. hercyniana. Gnezdode(i)r masc. Someone who takes or pulls down birds’ nests. Gnezdodirnyi, related to pulling down birds’ nests.87 Dahl’s decision to group gnezdo, gnezdov’iun, and gnezdodirnyi into a single entry rather than listing them separately in alphabetical order displayed the listening practices that allowed him to claim a connection to rural and provincial

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speakers of Rus­sian. His choice of the term gnezdo as the name of his entries is consistent with the significance of nests in the Rus­sian folk culture that he studied. The sayings he included in the gnezdo nest indicate that the ­people whose words he recorded understood nests as spaces that vulnerable small t­hings cherish b­ ecause they are safe t­ here. They depict nests as arising without ­human interference, making the nest-­style dictionary entry seem natu­ral, as opposed to the arbitrary order of the alphabet. Dahl wrote at greater length about nests in other publications. For instance, in “Birds and Animals,” he relates the folk belief that the cuckoo is punished for sinning by being deprived of a nest; she makes her sad cooing sound b­ ecause she has no shelter. “Spring comes and she makes no nest; she lays her egg in another bird’s nest; another m ­ other feeds her chick, and she cannot see how her chick is—so she flies around and weeps.”88 He linked some of the sayings in his gnezdo entry to the natu­ral world as well as to peasant culture. In On the Beliefs, Superstitions, and Ste­reo­types of the Rus­sian Folk, he explained that the belief that birds who build nests during the spring festival of Annunciation (March 25, or April 7 according to the old calendar) ­will lose their wings and can be caught by hand stems from the fact that some birds molt in the spring and do temporarily lose the ability to fly.89 The saying extends the Orthodox prohibition against working on feast days to the animal world and equates ­humans and birds, much as Dahl did when he claimed lexicography as a kind of nest-­building. As a zoologist, Dahl’s attention was drawn to creatures with a nest and ­those without one. In “Community and Cohabitation of Animals,” he described places where animals “live and multiply as a community in one nest, looking ­after each other and working, one could say, in mutual responsibility, maintaining a common h ­ ouse­hold.”90 Animals of dif­fer­ent species sometimes live together, parasitically or symbiotically. He concludes that essay with a paean to ­those that do so happily: “­These examples are remarkable in that they are of the friendly, seemingly arbitrary cohabitation of animals that are entirely dif­fer­ent species, clearly foreign to each other, but still needing mutual help!”91 In his zoological as well as his lexicographic writing, Dahl saw nests as homes for creatures with or without a ge­ne­tic connection. The meta­phor of Dahl’s dictionary entries as nests shows that he knew about the structures and functions of the nests that are built by birds and other animals. Like Dahl, birds sometimes gather material for their nests from sources far away from the place where they construct them. Some birds are willing to use components to build their nests that are unlike ­those used before by their species, ­because like Dahl, they care less about history (or etymology) than functionality. Nests produced by “entanglement construction” are made

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through what looks like the unsystematic pro­cess of dropping sticks into a fork in a tree; in time, the notches in the sticks interlock, ­after which the bird insulates it. This pro­cess produces an object that resembles Dahl’s dictionary in that it appears unsystematic, although it is in fact structured and stable.92 The lexicographer himself, then, is like a bird who gathers disparate objects in order to create a structure that offers protection for his proj­ect of linguistic renewal.

Paper The notion of nests as a technology that preserves words from being forgotten draws attention to the structural similarity between some nest forms—­ which can be woven from thread, twigs, spider silk, or even fabric—­and paper, especially paper made from rags.93 It suggests a relationship between Dahl’s philological work and the material apparatus he used to accomplish it. Indeed, as Paula McDowell argues about eighteenth-­century Britain, folklore appeals in times and places where rising literacy and the expansion of print commerce prompt discomfort about rapid change; the increased production of paper in the Rus­sian Empire of the 1830s, along with the rapid growth in the publication of books and journals, might help explain the rise in interest in folkloristics.94 The physicality of paper, its wovenness, its tie to the natu­ral world, and recent shifts in paper manufacturing are all highlighted in Dahl’s dictionary definition, which begins as follows: PAPER (bumaga), fem. Cotton paper, cotton fabric, cotton, the seed fluff of the Gossypium plant, the cotton plant; | material to be spun, threads of that cotton. | A letter or note, writing paper, or rags (linen or cotton) beaten into fluff and divided into sheets. To writing paper (pischaia bumaga) belong the following papers: postal, drawing, stamped, wrapped, blotting or filter, sugar and so on. By type of manufacture paper can be ladled (by hand) or machine-­made; the first kind is g­ oing out of use. Beaten paper, already used, soiled through writing, soaked again, beaten into vari­ous products: snuff-­boxes, toys and so on. Board paper, cardboard, pasteboard. | Paper in general is used to name all kinds of business letters, official and private. To do something on paper, in writing, not orally. To clean the paper, for the sake of order. Right in fact, guilty on paper. A scrap of paper drags (a person) to court. Glue for paper, a needle for a shirt.95 The secondary headwords that appear ­later in boldface associate bumaga with paper money, the l­egal system, and bad writing (bumagomaratel’, “paper-­soiler,”

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is a bad writer). This entry links paper to the cotton plant, vari­ous goods, the ­legal system, and the money economy. The idea that the dictionary, like the paper on which it was printed, is created from multiple small vulnerable objects emerges in an episode in Dahl’s life as a collector, during the Russo-­Turkish War, when his collection of dialect words had grown so big that it had to be transported separately. The transport camel carry­ing it dis­appeared, and he grieved, “orphaned,” he wrote, “by the loss of my notes. . . . ​My conversation with soldiers from all the places in broad Rus­sia had given me rich sources for the study of the language, and all that had perished.” Fortunately, the Cossacks caught the camel and restored the notes to him, though his orderly, who had been with it, was never seen again.96 According to Dahl’s d­ aughter, the episode inspired him to weave his notes into a dictionary, in order to prevent another such tragedy.97 Again, the language the lexicographer uses to describe the loss of his words equates them to a h ­ uman, a parent whose disappearance leaves him “orphaned.” Vasily Lazarevsky, who worked for Dahl in his St. Petersburg Interior Ministry office in the late 1840s, wrote that the staff consisted of ­people who had beautiful handwriting themselves but w ­ ere exceptionally good at reading other ­people’s bad handwriting. At home, Dahl “cut up and strung his dictionary material”; most likely, this means that he used an organ­ization system known since the seventeenth c­ entury, whereby pieces of paper are strung chronologically on a wire or string for ­f uture reference; Sokolov depicted this system in his illustration of Turgenev’s “The Office.” (It is due to this system that the En­glish term “file” comes from the French “filer,” to string.)98 From 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., the office staff pro­cessed packages of local words sent from distant places, often by high school principals. The words would be rewritten at the office on ribbons of paper that w ­ ere then strung on strings and sorted by region. “­There w ­ ere periods when all the scribes worked only on that and transcribing tales, proverbs, superstitions, and so on, quantities of which w ­ ere sent 99 to Dahl from everywhere.” As in the introduction to the five stylized stories he published in 1832, Dahl sounds ­here like a person with a pair of scissors who experiences paper not as a disembodied writing surface but as an object of specific dimensions, subject to manipulation. The surviving card cata­logue used for his dictionary produces a similar impression. The six long wooden boxes now stored at the Rus­sian State Library Manuscript Division each contain some 4,000 cards cut out of paper. Each card is about 10 × 12 cm (although the first few are slightly smaller). ­These cards ­were evidently cut by hand, first from one kind of high-­quality paper, then from another, and they w ­ ere transcribed by the same or a similar hand. Each lists first the definition, then a dialect word (­there are no cards h ­ ere

Figure 6A.  “Mash malt with the dredge that remains when it is poured out when brewing beer or home-­made beer (braga)—­Drób’—­Penz.” Card cata­logue for Dahl’s dictionary, OR RGB, f. 473 k. 2 ed. khr. 5 No. 4265.

Figure 6B.  “Kvas dregs—­Drobà—­Pskov, Velikoluts., Torop.” Card cata­logue for Dahl’s dictionary, OR RGB, f. 473 k. 2 ed. khr. 5 No. 4273.

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for standard literary words such as bumaga or gnezdo), then the location or locations where that word was heard. The similarity of t­hese cards suggests that they w ­ ere not submitted by a provincial high school principal; rather, they must have been copied by one of Dahl’s scribes, or by himself, from the disparate materials that he and o ­ thers had gathered. The fact that several locations are listed for many of the terms, as on card 4273, indicates that one of ­these cards may replace multiple older sources. ­Because the cards do not have holes in them, we know they ­were not strung on strings. Card cata­logues constituted a dramatic shift from the information-­ organization technologies that preceded them. Unlike files stored on strings, their components can be easily rearranged, allowing for additions and deletions. And unlike the idiosyncratic collections of excerpts that individual scholars accumulate, this system can be compiled and consulted by multiple users. The card cata­logue was first described in 1548; Eu­ro­pean and North American librarians used it from the late eigh­teenth ­century to respond to the explosion of books ­under their charge; and in the early twentieth ­century, the American Melvil Dewey began to market standardized cards and storage containers for business purposes. Before Dewey, ­people created their own cards and boxes. The cards need to be about the same size for the system to function; cards shorter than ­others in a box are not vis­i­ble and thus cannot be used.100 Card cata­logues are arranged according to some princi­ple—­alphabetically, chronologically—­and the term by which they are sorted ordinarily appears at the top of the card and in the same place for each card. (­Those who have used paper card cata­logues in libraries recall seeing the author’s name in the top left corner of each card.) The cards in Dahl’s boxes at the Rus­sian State Library, though, bear the traces of multiple pos­si­ble ordering systems. They are currently placed in the boxes alphabetically by the word defined. However, the definition appears above the word, which sometimes appears quite far down, as on card 4265. This choice made filing more difficult. Location comes last. The cards, then, indicate that Dahl possessed detailed information about region, even though he did not consistently convey it in the dictionary. They display the same tension between ordering by meaning and ordering alphabetically that we saw in Dahl’s letters. Dahl’s cards embody, I propose, a kind of nest. Birds’ nests, as Dahl knew, are composed of many small objects, woven together in a way that may appear unsystematic but offers shelter. The dictionary, too, rejects some lexicographic systems, but Dahl understood it to provide shelter for its word-­orphans, who need protection from oblivion. Like paper, like nests, the dictionary was a combination, woven together from organic fragments. With his consistent references to plants and animals, Dahl reinforced the idea of a connection between a given

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Figure 7.  The nine cards in the card cata­logue for Dahl’s dictionary for words starting with “drob-” (fraction, shot, small t­ hing). OR RGB f. 473 k. 2 ed. khr. 5 No. 4265–4274. I am grateful to Ol’ga Teptaeva, Liubov’ Shevtsova, and Tina Volchkevich at the Rus­sian State Library Manuscript Division for agreeing to my whimsical request that they scan them in the shape of a nest.

nation and language and the landscape associated with it. While dictionaries in a sense freeze a single usage of a word in place—­standardizing language and reducing change—­Dahl’s concept of nests indicates that his dictionary does the opposite; it responds to the legends of northern sound freezing into inaudibility by keeping words warm, alive, and in use.

Suspicious Listening As soon as Dahl began to express his ideas about bringing more provincial vernacular ele­ments into the Rus­sian literary language, p­ eople started to criticize him. He responded to Zhukovsky’s criticism in his 1842 “Word and a Half,” and when that article prompted more critiques, he wrote “Nedovesok,” literally “underweight object” but figuratively meaning a small continuation or

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postscript. ­There he summarized the objections he had heard: that his plan was extreme; that folk language is coarse, regionally varied, and less appropriate than old written sources as a model for Rus­sian; that Rus­sian needs foreign borrowings and should model itself on more developed foreign languages; that language evolves on its own, and one should not try to pull it into the past or reform it in other ways.101 While acknowledging the legitimacy of some of t­ hese complaints, he insisted that if his readers would only expose themselves to the Rus­ sian language of places other than St. Petersburg, attend to the spirit of the language, and experiment with the new words they heard, they would be able to improve the language collectively. In addition to the complaints he faced about the impracticality of his plans to reeducate Rus­sian speakers, Dahl was attacked for what he did with other ­people’s words. When he tried to publish his proverb collection in 1853, the reviewers ­were upset not only by his cata­loguing system but also by his exhaustive mode of taking in and conveying information. Kochetov admitted with a mix of awe and disappointment that “Mr. Dahl has attentively eavesdropped (podslushival) among the Rus­sian ­people, [recording] all proverbs, sayings and by-­words, all lullabies, spoken and sung catch-­phrases, all the phrase-­mongers’ witticisms and riddles, all the jokers’ humorous tongue-­twisters and nonsense rhymes, all the sectarians’ stupid and dangerous beliefs, all the superstitious ­people’s signs and fancies, even all the wizards’ and witches’ incantations and whisperings (все пословицы, присловия и поговорки, все колыбельные, сказочные и песенные прибаутки, все остроты и загадки краснобаев, все забавные скороговорки и пустоговорки балагуров, все глупые и вредные догматы раскольников, все приметы и причуды суеверов, даже все заговоры и пошепты колдунов и колдуний).” He concluded: “It is truly a pity that Mr. Dahl has gathered such a variety of subjects in one book ­under the title, Sayings of the Rus­sian P­ eople.”102 Kochetov believed that this material was au­then­tic, but this did not mean it should be heard, recorded, and printed. “No doubt, the folk uses all ­these expressions; but the folk is stupid and babbles all sorts of nonsense. Should intelligent ­people ­really rec­ord and print every­ thing that stupid p­ eople babble? The folk’s stupidity ­will pass away with education, but what’s printed stays forever and ­will serve as a memorial to our time, to the shame of the nation.”103 The censor Shillovsky agreed that the collection was too undiscriminating to be printed. The inclusion of the folklore of sectarians and prac­ti­tion­ers of folk magic and healing, in close proximity to Holy Writ, “could offend readers’ religious feelings.”104 As with the complaints about Dahl’s ordering system, Baron Korf spoke up in his defense. While he agreed that the collection should not be made available to the general reader, he insisted that its inclusiveness made it useful for

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scholars and that it should be published in a l­imited run and distributed to major libraries. “For the philologist, the historian, the ethnographer, the theologian, Mr. Dahl’s collection represents an unpre­ce­dented, valuable store­house to study our country’s language and life, folk wisdom and also folk prejudices and superstitions.”105 Again, Dahl made similar observations in his own self-­ defense: that the value of the collection lay precisely in its inclusiveness, and removing material that some found offensive would limit the worth of what remained. He drafted a response to the censor that ended ironically, with the note that he would offer to provide a copy of the collection to the Acad­emy of Sciences, “if I did not fear the accusation that I would corrupt its innocent morals.”106 Once Dahl was allowed to publish his collection, he continued his self-­ defense in the introduction, insisting no folklore was too profane to publish. He said that he had included anything that one could read aloud “in a com­ pany that has not been corrupted by finickiness, or excessive discernment and thus touchiness.” “To the pure, every­thing is pure. Blasphemy itself, if we encounter it in folk sayings, should not frighten us: we gather and read proverbs not just for fun and not as moral lessons but for study and inquiry: thus we want to know every­thing ­there is.”107 In performing and defending his own maximally inclusive omnivorous listening, Dahl attacked his critics for their suspicious listening, their over­eagerness to define other ­people’s words as posing some kind of threat. Of course, Dahl himself was often a suspicious evaluator of o ­ thers’ words; he listened to ­others suspiciously when he produced dictionaries, made for state use and not for publication, of the argots of groups whom the government suspected of sectarian tendencies.108 He did his work as a civil servant, when requested, in a punitive way, as when he filed denunciatory reports about the Castrates and the Jews.109 However, he was deeply disturbed when he was suspected of disloyalty himself. On one such occasion, he wrote in a letter of self-­defense, with evident anguish, “Should I be listening with quiet humbleness to accusations that are insulting to the loyal citizen and subject? Should I give up the best part of my noble name, of my honor?”110 His superiors expected him to respond to their suspicions with a quiet, obedient listening and censorship of his own words. But he resisted. Similar phrasing appears just as poignantly in the writing of a figure similar to Dahl: the poet and novelist Ivan Aksakov, Konstantin Aksakov’s b­ rother, was also a conscientious bureaucrat who sometimes produced literary work that his superiors found inappropriate for a government employee.111 He did not censor himself in his letters, ­because he found it hard to believe that the secret police ­really would take the time to read his correspondence.112 They

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did, though, and he was arrested in March 1849 for reasons including what he wrote to his ­family. The police found an edition of the poetry of Mickiewicz in his home. In the written responses that Aksakov supplied to questions from the Third Section, he explained that he read Mickiewicz purely for his poetry; he attacked Catholicism and imitation of the West, praised Orthodoxy and loyalty to the tsar, and asserted that he felt a sense of guilt before the Rus­sian folk and a sense that “we should repent” (nam . . . ​sleduet pokaiat’sia). The tsar was pleased with t­ hese answers, but Aksakov would remain u ­ nder surveillance ­until 1857.113 In spite of the arrest, Lev Perovsky at the Interior Ministry recruited Aksakov to investigate the Old Believers.114 Aksakov’s arrest resulted from his written words, but affected his speaking. He wrote to his ­family from Yaroslavl’ about his experience gathering information. I am u ­ nder police observation . . . ​all high society knows about this. . . . ​ This explains my strange reception. . . . ​You can imagine the strange interpretation that all my words might undergo. I mention a door . . . ​and ­people think, “No, ­you’re joking, so that’s where you are pointing? What a mist ­you’ve called up,” and so on. I already had proof of this, so I de­cided to say nothing, or at least as ­little as pos­si­ble.115 Conscious that his words might be misinterpreted, Aksakov kept ­silent. Ironically, the misinterpretation Aksakov describes suggests that even as he complained that the authorities suspected him of wrongdoing, his provincial interlocutors thought that he suspected them of something. He cites the phrase “­you’re joking, so that’s where you are pointing? What a mist y­ ou’ve called up” from Gogol’s play The Inspector General (Revizor), where it is spoken by a provincial official who thinks that a passing conman is a government inspector traveling incognito and decodes all the conman’s comments accordingly. And Aksakov was in fact a government inspector. ­After explaining that suspicious listening had silenced him, Aksakov observes that the same had happened to the Old Believers he was investigating: “The local Old Believers are especially vile; none of them admits to being a dissenter, they all pretend to such a degree that you could make the m ­ istake of thinking them the most zealous Orthodox.”116 His words indicate that he was frustrated to find the Old Believers, whom he had been ordered to expose, speaking—­like himself—­ carefully in anticipation of accusation. His irritation about the suspicious listening environment in which he functioned parallels Dahl’s experience. While the archbishop and the censor attacked Dahl for listening too inclusively and amplifying dangerous folk voices, critics on the other side of the po­liti­cal spectrum attacked him for listening to the poor in an insufficiently sympathetic way. In 1861, Nikolai Chernyshevsky wrote about the two-­volume

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Pictures of Rus­sian Life Dahl had just published: he argued that Dahl’s knowledge of words and sayings, enormous though it may have been, was of no real use, “neither to him nor to his reader.” Dahl was confident that the facts he reported ­were impor­tant, but Chernyshevsky dismissed them as “a pile of inessential details.” A ­ fter scornfully summarizing some of Dahl’s stories, Chernyshevsky ended his essay by observing that “had Mr. Dahl looked for the meaning in his knowledge, he would not have listened his fill (naslushalsia) to so many jokes and would not have memorized so many sayings.”117 Chernyshevsky’s cousin, the historian Alexander Pypin, was somewhat dismissive of Dahl in the lexicographer’s lifetime and much sharper in his 1890 History of Rus­sian Ethnography: he saw Dahl as representing the generation of the 1830s—­educated p­ eople who tried to cover over the gulf between themselves and the folk with a “cult of narodnost’” and pointless imitation. They try to act like the folk, argued Pypin, but they do it superficially, fetishizing customs that the folk no longer practices, without realizing that t­hese ­were “in­ven­ted mea­sures that do not emerge from life; that this kind of external borrowing of habits (such as clothing) without a change in real relationships would be a masquerade, almost making fun of the folk (or a source of amusement for them).” Although the ethnographers of this generation claimed to love the folk, Pypin wrote, in fact they ­were functionally spies who turned their in­for­mants in to the authorities.118 Pypin’s criticism of Dahl aligns with the official Soviet critique of this lexicographer, who was seen as so retrograde that his dictionary could be republished only during the Thaw period ­under Nikita Khrushchev.119 It anticipates ­later arguments that the work of philologists and folklorists naturalizes oppressive hierarchies and thus perpetuates inequalities.120 Kristin Vitalich defends Dahl against such criticism: “Pypin unfairly accuses him and his school of writers of not caring about the betterment of the lot of the p­ eople they so carefully described.”121 In fact, she argues, he feared change, and voiced concern about the peasants, in ways that ­were similar to Tolstoy’s writings. In a sense, though, Pypin was right. The evidence presented in this chapter indicates that even though Dahl may well have cared about the peasants, he was not trying to reform the relationships between educated p­ eople such as himself and the folk. He was, instead, masquerading, borrowing words, and sometimes clothing, getting attention like Pushkin in his hat and sash at the market fair, aware of the humor that can result when p­ eople use language that does not seem to belong to them. He wanted to demonstrate, not that he was helping the “common p­ eople,” but rather that he was a conscientious servant of the empire, affronted by any questioning of his loyalty, more useful than the suspicious censors and other “German”-­type thinkers who ­limited what he could publish and forced him to be ­silent. His per­for­mance of listening foregrounded not ethics,

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but rather the skills of an expert user of the era’s technologies and techniques for working with words; he wanted ­people to notice his comprehensive, purportedly atheoretical, omnivorous approach and the unorthodox categorization systems that he in­ven­ted to contain the results. Dahl’s inclusive listening meant that he defined folklore more broadly than the censors—­and ­others too complained that his view of folklore was too broad. Azadovsky cites Pypin’s critique even as he acknowledges the tremendous value of Dahl’s work. He accuses Dahl of reproducing lower-­status urban folklore, what Panchenko calls F1, rather than higher-­status rural lore, or F2. Of the stylized tales Dahl published in 1832, Azadovsky writes, “The main tone of t­ hese five tales is the exaggerated, flowery, rhymed doggerel chanting of the raeshnik [street performer], far from the style of folk storytellers.”122 The raek was a kind of peepshow, a box with colored backdrops, displayed at mid-­ nineteenth-­century Rus­sian fairs. The raeshnik would invite viewers to look at it for a small fee. As he turned the crank and revealed dif­fer­ent backdrops, the raeshnik narrated the show in funny, rhyming language, as in an example recorded in Moscow in 1883: Step up, step up, / your pockets—­lock them up/ and your eyes—­clear them up! . . . ​/ And I, a merry entertainer, / A famous big-­city clown, / With my own jolly pa­norama: /I turn the pictures all around / Keep my public spellbound / And earn nickels a mound! (Подходите, подходите, / Да только карманы берегите / И глаза протрите!.. / А вот и я, развеселый потешник, / Известный столичный раешник, / Со своею потешною панорамою: / Картинки верчу-­поворачиваю, / Публику обморачиваю, / Себе пятачки заколачиваю!..)123 The introduction to Dahl’s 1832 stories recalls the style of the raeshnik, with its appeal to the audience, its use of rhyme, and its exclamation marks. T ­ hese parallels show that Dahl did traffic in humor and reproduce the low-­status urban folklore of fairground entertainment. And in material terms, his folklore collections offered something like a raek, a set of nested views of the Rus­sian language and the p­ eople who made it.

C h a p te r   4

Crossing

Why does one person become the public face of some be­hav­ior, even though other p­ eople are also ­doing it? Even though other writers used notebooks to rec­ord the vernacular words they heard, critics portrayed the writer and visual artist Dmitry Grigorovich (1822–1900) as an example of mediated listening, someone whose reception of other p­ eople’s words seemed awkward and comical, unlike the unmediated listening of ­people who w ­ ere ­imagined as being r­ eally at home among their interlocutors; and even though other Rus­sian writers had foreign-­born parents or grandparents, Grigorovich’s French ­mother became a symbol of his permanent foreignness. The sociolinguist Ben Rampton, as we recall, gives the name “crossing” to moments when the use of other ­people’s obviously borrowed words prompts discussions about the speakers’ legitimacy and turns their own claims about who they are into “a focal object of play, contemplation and dispute.”1 In the mid-1840s, when some Rus­sian writers and folklore collectors ­were experimenting with increasing the use of vernacular words—­stylistic markers of access to ­people unlike themselves—in print, Grigorovich attracted attention for “crossing” in his novellas about peasants, and he became the subject of mockery and discussions of nativeness, foreignness, and excessive notebook-­writing. His critics directed a volley of metapragmatic attacks on his use of language; they ­imagined contests between him and other listeners to, and users of, peasant words, usually casting him as the loser. 103

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Grigorovich was always a magnet for attention. Like Dahl, he was the child of a mi­g rant to the Rus­sian Empire. His grand­mother and m ­ other had immigrated from France, and his ­mother married a Rus­sian man, a retired hussar who managed another nobleman’s estate and who died when Grigorovich was eight. In childhood, he spoke French with his ­mother and grand­mother and Rus­sian with local p­ eople. He went to a French boarding school in Moscow and lost his French accent in Rus­sian only ­after starting engineering school, where he became close to Fedor Dostoevsky, with whom he l­ater shared a room. (Neither enjoyed their studies, but Dostoevsky graduated as an engineer, while Grigorovich flunked out.) He referred to his own Francophone upbringing with pride and wrote that his French blood gave him endurance; he told ­people that his grand­father was a French aristocrat who had died on the guillotine, though in fact his ­mother was born years ­after the Terror.2 His Pa­ ri­sian accent in French won him job offers and the admiration of Eu­ro­pean visitors, including Alexandre Dumas père.3 Dostoevsky’s ­brother Andrei remembered him as a remarkable mimic, the poet Afanasii Fet found him a hilarious raconteur, and the memoirist Avdotia Panaeva recalled, “He spoke like a Frenchman and had a talent for amusingly relating vari­ous true and untrue anecdotes about all his friends.”4 Grigorovich told funny stories about other ­people, and ­people enjoyed telling stories about him. T ­ hese made their way into the reactions to his peasant-­ themed stories, the first of which was the novella The Village (Derevnia). Like other writers of the Natu­ral School, a realist movement that aimed to depict the lives of the poor, Grigorovich produced fiction that bordered on reportage. He drew for this novella on his notes on how peasants spoke near his ­mother’s home in the village of Dulebino, near Moscow, and his characters used vocabulary associated with that rural location. Published in December 1846 in Otechestvennye Zapiski (Fatherland Notes), this dark novella was the first such naturalistic portrayal of rural life in Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture, coming out one month before Turgenev’s first story in Notes of a Hunter. It initiated a decades-­long critical tradition of evaluating Grigorovich as a listener to, and transcriber and imitator of, folk language. This tradition often made fun of him. While some ­people praised the novella as a path-­breaking, honest description of serf life, ­others—­including many of his own friends—­dismissed Grigorovich as a tourist, meaning a fundamentally foreign observer who writes down what he sees in his notebook and reproduces it in his fiction but has no genuine connection to the ­people and places he describes. (Denigration of some travelers as mere tourists was common in nineteenth-­century travel writing.5) The prominence of foreigners in the early history of Rus­sian folkloristics may have intensified the need Grigorovich’s critics felt to defend their own

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native status. Midcentury Rus­sian folklorists ­were reminded of this history with the 1840 discovery in an Oxford archive of transcriptions of historical songs in 1619 by, or for, the En­glishman Richard James, whose republication might have felt like the thawing of words frozen more than two centuries ­earlier.6 And foreigners remained interested in Rus­sian folklore in the nineteenth c­ entury, such as William Ralston Shedden-­Ralston, a British collector who visited Turgenev. The reviews and comments Grigorovich inspired in journals and memoirs shed light, not just on Grigorovich himself, but also on what it meant to listen to “the p­ eople” in his era and his literary circles. The anthropologist Mary Douglas points out that jokes arise only when and where they are relevant: “a joke is seen and allowed when it offers a symbolic pattern of a social pattern occurring at the same time.”7 The concern that listening to rural voices might be unintentionally funny, then, could arise at a moment when life had taken on the characteristics of a joke, in that writers w ­ ere trying to rec­ord provincial language and suspecting that in d­ oing so they might be making themselves ridicu­lous, appearing foreign and awkward. Of course, when ­people seriously write down t­hings said by other p­ eople who are not taking themselves and their words too seriously, it is likely that they ­will seem funny. That is why, as we recall, Zhukovsky urged Avdotia Elagina not to laugh at his request that she rec­ord folktales for him; it is why Drashusova made fun of Haxthausen for stenographing every­thing that he heard in the Moscow salons where he was a guest. The Reverend Edward Casaubon in George Eliot’s 1871–1872 novel Middlemarch, a scholar of my­thol­ogy, exemplifies a literary type that I call the comic philologist, a detached academic observer whose excessive attention to words correlates to a lack of emotional connection to the p­ eople around him. In telling funny stories about listening, foreigners, and notebooks, mid century Rus­ sian writers demonstrated that not every­one who tried to listen to the peasants empathetically was perceived as succeeding. By flaunting his own Frenchness, Grigorovich made himself an easy target for other writers’ urge to find and mock someone who had even less access to rural vernacular than they did. For mid-­nineteenth-­century writers such as Grigorovich, listening to, recording, and citing provincial language was a social activity. Although they may have transcribed songs or stories while in the provinces, they performed and discussed them in the city. The entertainment at literary salons could include reading and discussing published texts or participants’ draft manuscripts, singing, and piano playing. ­Running or attending a salon was one way for ­women to affect intellectual life, and the most impor­tant Moscow salon for folklorists was that of Avdotia Elagina, where Petr Kireevsky sang and accompanied himself on the guitar, and Pushkin, Iazykov, and both Kireevsky

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b­ rothers discussed their extensive collection of folk songs.8 Gogol and the Ukrainian folklore collector Mikhail Maksimovich spent time at the Moscow homes of the Aksakov f­amily, where guests gathered around the piano and sang songs from Maksimovich’s collection.9 In the mid-­and late 1840s, as Kireevsky worked on his folksong collection in Moscow, a group of writers in St. Petersburg discussed writing that drew on peasant speech in a dif­fer­ent genre. The circle of writers who attended Avdotia Panaeva’s salon included Grigorovich, Turgenev, the poet Nikolai Nekrasov, and briefly Dostoevsky (who ­stopped ­going a­ fter Turgenev teased him). For over a de­cade, Panaeva, her husband Ivan Panaev, and Nekrasov lived as a ménage à trois while they worked together to edit the journal Sovremennik (The Con­temporary). Panaeva, who is remembered now primarily for her memoirs, wrote fiction and fashion reporting for the journal, negotiated with writers, or­ga­nized the finances, and proofread.10 Her recollections of her guests’ discussions of the literary use of rural language and themes foreground questions of audience reaction, both ­those of the subscribers to Sovremennik and the censors. Panaeva recalls a scene in her home in the early 1850s, “when with e­ very new poem of Nekrasov’s his fame grew, and all his poems, forbidden by the censor, ­were memorized by young ­people.” Vasily Botkin urged Nekrasov to stop writing poetry about “coarse real­ity.” “Stop singing about the loves of coachmen, field workers, and all t­hose rubes (derevenshchina). This is a fake that grates on the ear.” While young p­ eople who do not r­ eally understand poetry may like it, Botkin admitted, more sophisticated ­people do not. Nekrasov responded that ­people can only write about what moves them. “Since my lot from childhood has been to see the Rus­sian peasant’s suffering from cold, hunger and cruelty of all kinds, I take the topics of my verse from their world, and I’m surprised that you deny ­human feelings to the Rus­sian folk! They feel love and jealousy about w ­ omen just as strongly, their love for their c­ hildren is just as ­wholehearted as ours!” Upset, he said, “­People in fash­ion­able society ­don’t need to read my poems, I’m not writing for them.” Botkin answered, “So, my dear friend, ­you’re writing for the Rus­sian peasant—­but he’s illiterate!”11 Panaeva describes ­these writers as holding the transcribed provincial word not to the standard of accuracy, but to three dif­fer­ent standards. Botkin asserted the primacy of good taste and the need to avoid coarseness and not offend the sensibilities of readers from “society.” Nekrasov countered that writing must reflect emotional truths, such as his own sympathy with the peasants and the peasants’ emotions of love and jealousy. A third standard stressed the logistics of publication. Both the illiteracy of the presumed audience and the decisions of the censorship made Nekrasov’s poems unsuitable to print.

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From the perspective of ideology, Grigorovich’s rural prose, like Nekrasov’s poems, was read as a set of attacks on serfdom and a denunciation of the brutality of rural life. By criticizing Grigorovich, his opponents articulated a defense of some aspects of rural culture and, in some cases, an exclusivist vision of Rus­sian nationalism. Grigorovich’s writing and the reactions it prompted, though, do not only express writers’ po­liti­cal opinions; they also provide detailed evidence for understanding the performative nature of their competition for nativeness and the relationship of ­those claims to humor and to media. Rampton’s concept of “crossing” provides vocabulary for the analy­sis of Grigorovich’s prose and the critics’ reactions to it. Rampton notices how ­people deploy the linguistic resources at their disposal to amuse or insult their interlocutors, who respond ­either by approving a speaker’s ability to use other ­people’s language and their implicit claims about who they are, or by dismissing ­those claims as inauthentic. Unlike t­ hose linguists who look only at spontaneous oral language, he notices that the oral and the mediated, and the spontaneous and the artful, exist along a spectrum.12 Linguists such as Rampton who are interested in a performative approach tend to research ­people whose use of language is deliberately attention-­getting, such as comedians and teen­agers.13 ­Because Grigorovich was such an entertaining speaker who sometimes behaved like an adolescent (Panaeva wrote that “he was still so young—­ not so much in age as in character”), it makes sense to understand him as crossing, claiming a connection with Rus­sian peasants in way that made his claims of Rus­sianness into, in Rampton’s words, “a focal object of play, contemplation, and dispute.”14 This chapter argues that p­ eople mocked Grigorovich as a tourist with a notebook for many reasons: his own demonstrative foreignness, his thematizing of epistemological uncertainty in his own writing, and, especially, Rus­sian writers’ need in the midcentury to find examples of inadequate listening to “the p­ eople” and to distinguish themselves from ­those rivals. In what follows, I look first at Grigorovich’s own writing; second at critics’ reactions to it; and third at the ways in which writers who ­were engaged in “crossing” used examples other than Grigorovich to express their anxiety over being something like comic philologists.

Writing The Village Grigorovich was highly aware of all the ways that ­people, including himself, listened badly. He often wrote about the mechanics of listening and how performers move their audience’s emotions. In 1843, age 21, he produced a

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description of St. Petersburg organ grinders, their instruments, and the economy that allowed them to eke out a living. Usually mi­g rants from Italy, ­these street entertainers worked in Eu­ro­pean, American, and Rus­sian cities in the nineteenth c­ entury. Some urbanites complained that their melodies w ­ ere off tune and repetitive and that they would play in a single location u ­ ntil they ­were bribed to leave, but in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where ­there w ­ ere fewer organ grinders than in New York, London, or Paris, they elicited more sympathy.15 Nekrasov accepted Grigorovich’s “Petersburg Organ Grinders” for Petersburg Physiology, a collection of stories by Natu­ral School writers. That sketch drew attention not to the organ grinders’ flawed sounds but to listeners’ insufficient sympathy. Grigorovich described an organ grinder who “listens for the smallest cry or call, and as soon as he encounters a welcoming look . . . ​puts his organ down and begins to play the best piece in his repertoire.” When he senses his instrument is out of tune, he adjusts it, and occasionally a win­dow opens and a coin twisted into a piece of paper “falls at his feet to reward him for his work; but often, very often, he exhausts his repertoire in vain and slowly departs, sad, downcast, without complaint or murmur.”16 The organ is squeaky, but even worse is Petersburgers’ indifference to the ­music and the street musician’s plight. The organ grinder listens in a focused way—­Grigorovich uses the verb prislushivat’sia, the ear trained on the source of sound, striving to catch it—­but the p­ eople who live in the city put ­little effort into hearing him. While the organ grinder adjusts his instrument to improve the sound, Grigorovich hoped to adjust his readers’ ears to make them more generous. Emboldened by the success of his organ grinder sketch, Grigorovich de­ cided to write about the countryside and went to his ­mother’s home in Dulebino to gather material. This was the year a­ fter Dahl had published his call for writers to gather “orphan” words, and Grigorovich did just that. “Knowing Rus­sian folk language only from the few books I managed to read, I diligently began to study it seriously, spending hours at the mill speaking with p­ eople who had brought grain to be ground, chatting with our peasants, trying to listen for the shape of their speech, writing down expressions that seemed especially characteristic and picturesque. The first chapters of the novella The Village took unbelievable effort.”17 In this memoir about writing this novella, as in his own self-­presentation, Grigorovich emphasized his foreignness and the diligent effort he put into mastering dif­fer­ent registers of Rus­sian. He used prislushat’sia to describe his earnest listening to peasants, as he had the organ grinder’s listening to his instrument. Grigorovich wove the harvest of his listening into The Village, which recounts the short sad life of the peasant w ­ oman Akulina, from the death of

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her ­mother, a cowherd, through childhood abuse by her foster f­amily, into a loveless arranged marriage, and culminating in an early death from exposure. ­People in Akulina’s world harm each other constantly through their speech and actions, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not. The narrator explains ironically how the peasant ­women dividing up Akulina’s ­mother’s clothing determine who w ­ ill take the baby. “No ­matter how much ­these unfortunate ­people argued, they could not decide anything (they had a strong feeling of justice), and thus they came to the general conclusion that they should leave it to fate and cast lots—­a method, as we know, used in villages to resolve e­ very kind of conundrum.” The result is patently unjust, with Akulina g­ oing to a cowherd who already has six of her own ­children.18 This foster-­mother, Domna, punishes Akulina arbitrarily and makes her watch animals in the cold. The unhappy Akulina never expresses her feelings to ­others but takes plea­sure in her time alone in nature and her occasional interactions with wandering beggars. Even this joy is reduced when Domna’s husband Karp, a worker at a calico factory and a mean drunk, moves back home and sets up his mill in the hut, and Akulina is forced to be his helper. Akulina’s life changes again a­ fter the barin, the owner of the village, and his wife move back for financial reasons. As with Grigorovich’s own parents, the wife comes from elsewhere and needs to have local customs explained. The two communicate in a mix of French and Rus­sian. Bored one day, they see Akulina with her yoke and the barin calls her over so that his wife can see her, saying, “you w ­ on’t believe, ma bonne, how entertaining (zabavny) t­ hese ­people can 19 be!” They ask Akulina if she would like to get married, and although she does not answer, the barin proposes arranging her engagement, as a good deed. His wife agrees: “I’ve wanted for a long time to see a village wedding; they say that ritual is remarkably special.”20 Thus when the blacksmith Silantii asks the barin for money to pay the dowry so that his son can marry a girl the f­amily has selected from a nearby village, the barin says he must marry Akulina instead. The groom, his f­amily, and Akulina are horrified, but they obey. The barin and his wife find the wedding dull, but they perk up when the village youth dance in front of the manor ­house, and they throw them cookies and nuts. During and a­ fter the wedding Akulina cries frequently. While bridal laments are a Rus­sian folkloric genre and the notion that a ­woman would be unhappy to leave her parents to become the lowest-­ranked worker in her new husband’s ­family is logical, Akulina’s grief is especially motivated. Her new husband Grigory has been spoiled by his parents and aunts and by his experience working in a factory. Akulina’s in-­laws had hoped for a strong, lively daughter-­in-­law from a wealthy f­amily and are furious to be stuck with the sad orphan Akulina. The barin and his wife summon the ­couple and discuss Akulina’s mood.

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The wife notices: “God, she looks unhappy!” (Mon Dieu, qu’elle a l’air malheureuse!..), but the barin asserts that she is just ritually voicing the emotions required by tradition: “­Didn’t you know that for them a new bride has to cry for a week? It’s obligatory. . . .” (c’est de rigueur).21 This exchange between the barin and his wife returns to the theme of inadequate listening that Grigorovich had raised in his organ grinder sketch. It suggests that just decoding semantically may not mean understanding; literate, educated, well-­meaning ­people who think that they are good observers of the peasants may in fact not be. Although he does not sound hesitant in his memoir about his ability to trust the evidence of his ears, Grigorovich’s fiction reveals his hesitation about the empiricist approach that underlay the writing of the Natu­ral School, the idea that observation leads inevitably to knowledge.22 The moral universe that Grigorovich depicts is not easily categorizable e­ ither: unlike some of his contemporaries, Grigorovich did not depict landowners in a black-­and-­white way but rather as p­ eople who, like o ­ thers, 23 are flawed. In The Village as in “Petersburg Organ Grinders,” Grigorovich portrays ­people whose earnest attempts to listen to the world around them may not bring understanding. To every­one’s surprise, Akulina soon gives birth to a healthy d­ aughter, Dun’ka, whom she loves. Her in-­laws, though, keep beating and abusing her as her foster ­family had. She responds by hiding her emotions even more. While ­until this point in the text Grigorovich had not depicted her speaking, she now deliberately becomes mute. Although ­earlier she had tried to mollify her in-­laws by hard work and humility, she decides to flout them by no longer reacting to them at all. “Noting that the indifference with which she tried to bear it increased their anger, Akulina put all her effort into seeming even more calm and indifferent. Even more: she vowed to remain s­ ilent with every­one in the h ­ ouse and never to pronounce a single word in front of them ­under any circumstances, even if it cost her life.”24 Four years into her marriage, Akulina becomes sick. The estate man­ag­er’s wife (perhaps a figure modeled on Grigorovich’s ­mother) cures her, but her in-­laws send her to dry lentils in the cold. She begins to freeze and she wraps her coat around her ­daughter. The estate man­ag­er’s wife finds Akulina and she fi­nally speaks. In the last scene, Grigory goes out in a snowstorm to bury Akulina. Dun’ka runs a­ fter him, ignoring his order to return home; it seems likely that she ­will soon die too. The story showcases the nonliterary words that Grigorovich could have recorded at the mill. Among Akulina’s m ­ other’s clothes divided up ­after her death is a poneva (the wool skirt of a married peasant w ­ oman) and koty (thick leather shoes), words for local realia. Grigorovich also uses local words that have literary equivalents, as when the peasants express their feelings in nakhlo-

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buchki (scoldings). Before Domna punishes the seven-­year-­old Akulina for losing one of the ducks ­under her care, she asks, “So watching them was nesliubno?,” using a dialect term for “unappealing.” The barin too uses a Kursk-­ area expression when he chides Silantii for complaining about his son’s engagement: “Что ты мне белендрясы-­то пришел плесть?” (Why have you come to me to weave nonsense?)25 In this rural speech culture, spoken words can have a disturbing power. The danger of thoughtless speech motivates a story that Akulina hears about a ­woman who curses her crying baby, “devil take you,” dreams that a w ­ oman in white has come, and awakens to find him strangled by the rope holding his cradle. Domna and another peasant ­woman begin to fight about ­whether she has the right to punish Domna’s child for playing with her bast shoe, and then stop, frightened by the danger of their own words: “Oh, y­ ou’re such a dog . . .” —­Ах ты, собака этакая . . . “Eat it yourself  . . .” —­Сама съешь . . . “May you choke on bast —­Чтоб тебе подавиться лаптями-­то . . .   shoes . . .” “Domna, d­ on’t lead us into —­Эй, Домна, не доводи до греха; у тебя sin; you have a mouth and   уста, у меня другие.26   so do I.” When the thoughtless words of the barin and his wife lead to Akulina’s unhappy marriage and her death, their speech too has a deadly result. Grigorovich brought Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist to his m ­ other’s ­house to use as a model for his own writing.27 He was inspired by the sentimentality of Dickens and also by the use of dialect. In Oliver Twist and elsewhere, Dickens tended to have morally pure characters speak standard En­glish and to reserve dialect for ­others. The register that this former court stenographer most commonly depicted was that of the London poor, and he used “eye-­dialect,” phonetic spelling that makes pronunciation seem especially distant from the standard. The criminals in Oliver Twist speak in thieves’ cant, dictionaries of which had been published in ­England from the late sixteenth ­century. While nineteenth-­century En­glish fiction had used this register before, Dickens was the first to feature it in a publication aimed at families.28 He avoided blasphemous and obscene words and he often had his characters define their more obscure words in the text.29 ­After 1837, when he first published Oliver Twist, Dickens was becoming popu­lar in translation. Midcentury Rus­sian writers noticed his attention to the poor, realism, humor, and ability to convey emotions.30 While Grigorovich could have read the 1841 French translation of the novel by Ludovic Bénard,

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he was more likely to have had access to the Rus­sian translation by A. Gorkovenko, published in Otechestvennye Zapiski that same year, and he mimics Gorkovenko’s strategy with dialect.31 Bénard responded to much of Dickens’s nonstandard En­glish with nonstandard French, but Gorkovenko rendered almost every­thing in standard Rus­sian. Only when Dickens draws attention to dialect by having his characters give a gloss does Gorkovenko offer a dialect rendition in Rus­sian. Take the moment when Oliver, who has run away and walked for seven days, meets the Artful Dodger, a charming young pickpocket and speaker of thieves’ cant, who ­mistakes Oliver for a fellow criminal who had been punished by being forced to spend seven days walking on a treadmill. “Hullo, my covey, what’s the row?” said this strange young gentleman to Oliver. “I am very hungry and tired,” replied Oliver: the tears standing in his eyes as he spoke. “I have walked a long way. I have been walking t­ hese seven days.” “Walking for sivin days!” said the young gentleman. “Oh, I see. Beak’s order, eh? But,” he added, noticing Oliver’s look of surprise, “I suppose you ­don’t know what a beak is, my flash com-­pan-­i-on.” Oliver mildly replied, that he had always heard a bird’s mouth described by the term in question. “My eyes, how green,” exclaimed the young gentleman. “Why, a beak’s a madgst’rate; and when you walk by a beak’s order, it’s not straight forerd, but always agoing up, and nivir a coming down agin. Was you never on the mill?”32 Gorkovenko rendered this as follows: —­Что с тобою, любезный? сказал странный джентльмен Оливеру. —­Я очень устал и очень голоден, отвечал Оливер, со слезами на глазах.—­Я все шел пешком, семь дней был в дороге. —­Семь дней в дороге! сказал юный джентльмен. О, понимаю. Цапля послала? Но, прибавил он, смотря с удивлением на Оливера:—­ты, кажется, не знаешь, что такое цапля, дружок? Оливер смиренно отвечал, что это, кажется, птица. —­О, как же ты прост, дружок! вскричал юный джентльмен.—­ Цапля—­значит судья, и если ты идешь по приказанию цапли, то уже назад не воротишься; надо идти вперед. Ты никогда не был на мельнице?33

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(“What’s up with you, good fellow?” the strange gentleman said to Oliver. “I am very tired and very hungry,” Oliver answered with tears in his eyes. “I’ve been walking, I was on the road for seven days.” “Seven days on the road!” the young gentleman said. “Oh, I understand. The heron sent you?” But he added, looking at Oliver in surprise, “it seems, my friend, you ­don’t know who the heron is?” Oliver meekly answered that this seemed to be a bird. “­You’re such a simpleton, my friend!” the young gentleman cried. “The heron means the judge, and if you go when the heron sends you, then you ­can’t turn back; you have to keep ­going forward. Have you never been at the mill?”) Gorkovenko conveys dialect terms but standard pronunciation, the strategy Dahl had ­adopted for the repre­sen­ta­tion of provincial words in his dictionary. In The Village, Grigorovich too conveys provincial words (poneva, nesliubno) both for peasant realia and words that have a literary equivalent, but uses primarily Moscow phonetics and spelling for his characters’ speech. (The next year, in his novella Wretched Anton [Anton-­Goremyka], still inspired by Dickens, he would depict thieves’ cant.) Dickens read his fiction aloud at public one-­man per­for­mances, and in Grigorovich’s circles too, fiction was read at public events and private gatherings. Dostoevsky recalled about the 1840s that when two or three ­people came together, “­they’d sit and read and it might last all night.”34 Grigorovich experienced his fiction as a kind of script, an opportunity to perform and to shine.35 Once he finished writing The Village, he returned to St. Petersburg and wanted to read it to Nekrasov. Disappointed when Nekrasov said he was too busy to listen, he left the manuscript. He waited two months and called on Nekrasov repeatedly to find out his novella’s fate. He suggests that Nekrasov did not read it: “­whether he was in a bad mood or I had just annoyed him with my pestering, he returned the manuscript to me, saying that he found it unsuitable for publication in Sovremennik.” Grigorovich was upset ­because he could not believe that his organ grinder sketch had been better than this story, whose sentimental effect he experienced himself. “As well as the novelty of the depiction of peasant life, the novella had scenes taken live from nature—­scenes that simply had to move the reader: not for nothing in describing them did I enter a ner­vous state and tears come to my eyes.” That same eve­ning, at the home of his friends, the Beketovs, Grigorovich met Valerian Maikov, who worked at Otechestvennye Zapiski. He told Maikov and his hosts about his disappointment, and they urged him to read the story out loud to them. “The b­ itter emotion

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filling my heart sounded in my voice; I read ner­vously, with an animated voice, emphasizing the moments that seemed the most successful. Perhaps for this reason the novella had an unexpectedly good effect on the listeners.”36 Maikov took the manuscript, promising to publish it, and it came out in the December 1846 issue of Otechestvennye Zapiski. Dostoevsky, in a letter to his ­brother calling Grigorovich’s story “remarkably good,” took some of the credit for getting it placed.37 Grigorovich relates the episode as a verdict on his own per­for­mance as much as on the text.38

Comedy, Mediation, Foreignness Grigorovich’s crossing in The Village prompted critical comments and articles that reflected on the logistics and politics of reproducing rural language, even as they played with, contemplated, and disputed the author’s identity. Maikov’s offer to publish the novella was followed by approval, and an invitation, from Dahl himself. As Grigorovich wrote, “He had gathered trea­sures in this area and one could learn something. . . . ​He willingly gave me the opportunity to use this material at his h ­ ouse: he sat me down in his study and for hours on end I copied out every­thing that seemed to me especially characteristic.”39 His notebook contains a trace of that moment of copying, a dialogue that shows that what struck Grigorovich in Dahl’s archive was an encounter with workers as abused as Dickens characters. (I have used Western Frisian, a Germanic language close to En­glish, to stand in for the workers’ Belarusian.) Dahl’s conversation with a Разговор Даля с Белорусским   Belarusian digger.   Землекопом. “What are you paid?” “Ik bin fiede.” [I’m fed.] —­Что Вам плотят? “Do they give you money?” —­Кормюць. “De hearen nimme it.” —­Ну а деньги дают?   [The lords take it.] “But do you bring anything —­Панья бяруць.  home?” “Neat.” [Nothing.] —­Ну а домой-­бы что принесете? “What do you mean, —­Ницаго. nothing—do you have a —­Как же ничего—­женa, чай, дети есть   wife and c­ hildren?”   у вас? “Ik doch.” [I do.] [unclear] —­Есць. (Госциха) [unclear] “Do they have bread?” -­Ну а хлеб у них есть?

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“Nee.” [No.] “What do they eat?” “Neat.” [Nothing.] “What do you mean,   nothing, w ­ ill they die?” “Sy sille stjerre.”   [­They’ll die.]

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—­Нетуци. —­Что ж они едят? —­Ницаго. —­Как ничаго, стало так и помрут? —­Памруць.40

Dahl also recommended Grigorovich to ­others. He wrote a letter introducing him to the literary critic Stepan Shevyrev: “In Grigorovich you ­will find a warm, good, and pure young man. He very much wants to meet you.”41 Dahl wrote to Grigorovich about a writing proj­ect that involved searching for evidence in the archive of the Ministry of Internal Affairs: “make a vow not to make yourself a monument (neither perpendicular nor horizontal) of bad Rus­ sian, or even to distort it in a foreign mode. Make a vow that this composition ­will have not a single non-­Russian word, except ­those that ­were taken long ago and that we have completely assimilated.”42 Grigorovich’s use of regional language made him appear legitimate to Dahl. And Grigorovich may have sympathized with Dahl’s association of lexicography with the construction of nests. His archives at the Institute of Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture and Art in St. Petersburg contain a two-­sided pencil drawing on paper of a life-­size egg, cut out, neatly titled “Egg” (Iaitso), as though it ­were an unusually-­shaped lexicographic index card, dated June 1, 1853, and inserted in a very small envelope. This puzzling drawing was made at the wrong time of year to be part of an Easter greeting; no other objects in the archive have the same date. ­Because Grigorovich made it during the period when he transcribed some of Dahl’s notes into his own notebook, it might be a response to that writer’s interest in nests. While Dahl’s reaction to the use of rural Rus­sian in The Village was positive, the critics’ responses ­were mixed. Like Dahl, they moved from evaluating Grigorovich’s language to judging the author himself—­his skills, his loyalties, and even his f­ amily background. Belinsky’s early review in Sovremennik emphasized the accuracy of Grigorovich’s reproduction of ele­ments of village life: “He demonstrated ­g reat skills of observation and knowledge of the issue and was able to display both in s­ imple, true, faithful images with remarkable talent.”43 Other critics w ­ ere upset about what they saw as a slander of the Rus­sian countryside. For instance, Iurii Samarin responded angrily to Grigorovich’s story, Belinsky’s review, and the entire Natu­ral School. He argued that even though Alexander Nikitenko, the editor of Sovremennik, had written that the Natu­ral School in princi­ple opposed caricatures of rural life, he nonetheless published Belinsky, who approved of Derevnia, which Samarin called caricature:

Figure 8A.  Dmitry Grigorovich, “Egg,” 1 June 1853. IRLI, f. 82 No. 38. See B. N. Kapeliush, “Rukopisi i perepiska D. V. Grigorovicha. Nauchnoe opisanie,” Ezhegodnik Rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo doma (Leningrad: Nauka, 1969), 21.

Figure 8B.  Dmitry Grigorovich, “Egg,” 1 June 1853. IRLI, f. 82 No. 38, reverse.

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“One cannot retell its content,” he wrote, “­because it consists entirely of details. It gathers and brightly displays every­thing coarse, offensive, and cruel that one could find in peasant customs.”44 In response to Samarin’s review, Belinsky pointed out that though Samarin did not like the details Grigorovich chose to convey, even he admitted that they ­were accurate: “You yourself said that in his first novella he displayed every­ thing coarse, offensive, and cruel that one could find in peasant customs. If one could find it, that means it was not in­ven­ted but taken from life, meaning it is truth, not slander. . . . ​What right do you have to ask an author to notice and depict not the side of real­ity that strikes his eyes, that he discovered and studied, but the side that interests you?”45 This is a discussion about what it means to observe and rec­ord correctly: Belinsky argued for the legitimacy of Grigorovich’s perception, but Samarin, anticipating Bourdieu, argued that observation has a subjective side and thus what he interpreted as Grigorovich’s lack of sympathy made him inadequate. Other critics questioned Grigorovich’s taste and suggested that he had gone too far in incorporating rural language into a written text, which made his writing—­and any oral per­for­mance of it—­unintentionally funny. Panaev at first found the nonstandard words in the novella comical and read passages out loud to his friends in a mocking way, but when he heard that Belinsky had been defending the story against Samarin’s attack, he felt compelled to change his evaluation along with his verbal per­for­mance of the story. Turgenev, clearly amused, recorded the incident in a memoir. “­There was only one way out for Panaev: to continue to read aloud sections of The Village, but now praising them—­and that is what he did.”46 Panaev’s reaction to Grigorovich’s story, insofar as we can reconstruct it from Turgenev’s memoir, is prompted by doubt not about Grigorovich’s ability to rec­ord precisely but about his judgment in using the words he recorded in print. He holds Grigorovich, not to the standard of accuracy, but to that of good taste, the standard that Botkin had used to critique Nekrasov’s peasant poems and Karamzin to critique the word ptichka. The responses to Grigorovich’s mediation of rural speech do not break down neatly according to the familiar division of Westernizers vs. Slavophiles. Critics associated with vari­ous ideologies wondered w ­ hether his novellas reflected too g­ reat a dependence on recording or a too-­foreign attitude t­ oward Rus­sia. Panaev had given in briefly to Belinsky’s praise of Grigorovich, but in 1852, ­after Belinsky had died, he again described Grigorovich’s recording of rural words as funny. He published a satire about Grigorovich as a man with a notebook who seems out of place in the countryside. “Whenever he encountered a peasant, ­woman or man, he ­stopped them, examined them in detail,

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asked them about something and immediately entered in his notebook every­ thing he had noticed, heard and examined.”47 In 1854, Pavel Annenkov too, also writing in Sovremennik, criticized Grigorovich and his notebook. The language in Grigorovich’s Fishermen (Rybaki), he wrote, had been written down in the wrong way: “On the surface it is folk language, with all its devices, but you feel that this language was not overheard but composed. Sometimes phrases peep through that w ­ ere clearly thought up by the author to express some kind of abstract thought, inserted into the mouth of a peasant. In its construction and surface this phrase is perfectly peasant-­style, but you hear in it the author’s hand and even the pro­cess of its construction.”48 Where Grigorovich had used prislushat’sia in describing himself training his ears on the words of the peasants at the mill, Annenkov complained that Grigorovich’s language was bad ­because it was not podslushan, not overheard. He opposed writing that was too obviously, technically, writing, since “the author’s hand” can be heard moving across the page. The very pro­ cess of deliberate written mediation seemed to Annenkov to delegitimize Grigorovich and his art. Other critics associated with Sovremennik also complained about the excessively written quality of Grigorovich’s depiction of peasant speech. Although Nikolai Dobroliubov praised Grigorovich in his 1853 article about the novella Chetyre vremeni goda (Four seasons), he observed that some of his peasants spoke unconvincingly: “Petrusha and Parasha’s conversations, and Dar’ia’s laments, are the author’s composition; a few folk words cannot transform the ­whole cast of the utterance, which in ­these places does not at all resemble s­ imple peasant speech.”49 Nikolai Chernyshevsky moved from a comment on Grigorovich to direct accusations of excessively deliberate listening at other writers publishing fiction on peasant themes. In an 1855 review, he praised Grigorovich for his commitment to peasant well-­being and his avoidance of marked renditions of rural dialect, while criticizing other writers for creating peasant characters whose words are distorted beyond recognition: “And it would be a mercy if they only distorted normal words and did not reject them completely, replacing them with expressions never heard among the Rus­sians, borrowed from the Dictionary of Regional Expressions.” Such writers, he complained, feel absurdly proud about demonstrating their unusual knowledge of Rus­sian. Grigorovich, in contrast, cares more about the peasants than about his own image. “Mr. Grigorovich does not amaze by his familiarity with rural p­ eople, he does not find it necessary to show off his knowledge. . . . ​Mr. Grigorovich does not amuse himself and the public with his collection of strange words and strange customs.”50 In attacking writers who borrow words from a dialect dictionary to wow readers with their expertise—­comic philologists who rely on books

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to understand real­ity—­Chernyshevsky, like Annenkov and Panaev, sounds skeptical that good listening is a mechanical pro­cess of gathering specific words and mediating them with paper and pen. Instead, it requires a genuine and self-­ effacing commitment to the peasants. Although Chernyshevsky’s social-­reform approach to lit­er­a­ture is ordinarily contrasted with Annenkov’s aestheticism, the two reacted similarly to Grigorovich. Yet another group of critics complained, not about Grigorovich’s technology, but about his foreign blood. Some critics attacked both si­mul­ta­neously. Apollon Grigor’ev, who may have been jealous of Grigorovich (as he was of Turgenev), responded in this mode in Moskvitianin to Fishermen.51 He called Grigorovich “not a person at home in the world he describes, freely arranging types and the language, but a passing guest, a traveler, unquestionably observant, fairly gifted, but, like all guests, noticing only the strange or striking: in his language we see a mosaic composition and not the ­free speech of the folk.” Grigor’ev moved from attacking Grigorovich to criticizing other p­ eople who describe the Rus­sian countryside although they do not belong t­here. “Mr. Grigorovich and o ­ thers clearly transcribe the language in notebooks, forgetting that they are only noting down surface aspects, random t­ hings—­and its freedom, its tie to the language of the past, and higher truth escape them. In a word, all t­ hese describers are just passing guests. They should be duly respected as intelligent, observant guests, but why have they been promoted to hosts, and constantly asked to take on tasks for which they are unsuited, when they have their own ­matters to attend to?”52 For Grigor’ev, Grigorovich, a Rus­ sian subject, born in Rus­sian, with a Rus­sian ­father, was ­really a foreigner, and this was revealed by his reliance on his notebook. Grigorovich interpreted this attack as referring to his ­mother’s French origins. “Apollon Grigor’ev even brought up my m ­ other’s nationality in print . . . ​to prove that this novel does not and could not have anything Rus­sian in it, and that no m ­ atter how hard I try, my French blood makes me unable to comprehend the Rus­sian soul.”53 Grigorovich sounds surprised ­here that Grigor’ev insisted in print that the prob­lem was his blood, but this critic was not the only person to think this way. Grigorovich wrote that the circle of the playwright Aleksandr Ostrovsky saw his vivacity as a mark of the lack of seriousness to be expected from a person with a French m ­ other. Dostoevsky wrote a comment in his own notebook in the 1870s expressing skepticism that his old roommate, as a foreigner (albeit one who sometimes appeared Rus­sian), could understand the Rus­sian ­people. “Mr. Grigorovich, having presented himself as a foreigner who studies the Rus­ sian peasant. That foreigner to Rus­sian folk life who has been for some time taken for a Rus­sian.”54 Most vehemently, Aleksei Pisemsky asserted that Grigorovich had no right to describe the countryside. ­After Pisemsky published his

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own novella, Plotnich’ia artel’ (Carpenters’ guild), he told Grigorovich he should stop writing about peasants: “What right do you gentlemen have to do this? Leave it to us: it’s our business, I’m a peasant myself!”55 (Pisemsky was legally a member of the gentry, albeit from a relatively poor f­amily.) Pisemsky even wrote to Ostrovsky that he had threatened Grigorovich physically “for all his literary whoring around” (за весь его литературный блуд) when he ran into him in a bookshop.56 Grigorovich had run away and told Ivan Goncharov that Pisemsky was a pig who did not know how to behave in public, though he avoided a public confrontation.57 Other writers gossiped with relish about this incident, where both Grigorovich and Pisemsky played such broadly caricatured roles: Grigorovich as the effeminate Frenchman, Pisemsky as the boorish Rus­sian. Annenkov wrote to Turgenev that when Pisemsky was drunk, as he often was, he had begun to attack Grigorovich, and in the bookstore, he had told Grigorovich he should write in French instead of Rus­sian.58 Pisemsky would continue to defend Rus­sian culture against non-­ethnic-­Russians in his writing (as when Vikhrov, in ­People of the 40s, objects to the Jewish composer who borrows Rus­sian folk melodies), as well as in person. In ­doing so, he and the other critics who complained about Grigorovich’s French blood continued Khomiakov’s strategy of identifying some ­people as foreigners and dismissing their listening to Rus­sian voices as inherently inadequate. The criticism of Grigorovich shows how high the stakes are when p­ eople use language that is not perceived as belonging to them and how quickly viewers scale up in that context from an individual situation to a larger set of meanings. Verbal artists’ performative crossing leads to equally performative evaluations of their legitimacy. If they succeed at demonstrating their taste and their loyalty, they can find allies. If they fail, they risk seeming ridicu­lous, technologically inept, or alien. The echoes and similarities in the attacks on Grigorovich in Sovremennik and Moskvitianin demonstrate that by attending to sound, media, and the social world in which art is produced, we can see patterns that transcend familiar ideological divisions. The development of ­these attacks over time shows the gradual tightening of the ­imagined connection between bodily parentage and Rus­sian loyalty. Iazykov, in his attacks on “not-­ours” for laughing at Rus­sian folklore, targeted his opponents for their attitude, not their blood. When Dahl, complaining about Zhukovsky’s lack of appreciation for vernacular Rus­sian, called him a “German,” the epithet had nothing to do with Zhukovsky’s biological parentage. ­Those who critiqued Grigorovich’s insufficient Rus­sianness, however, pointed to his a­ ctual French ­mother and ignored the seriousness of his attempts to transcribe rural words. The attacks on Grigorovich demonstrate the ricochet effect of mockery: crit-

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ics moved quickly from complaining that he was disrespectful to peasants to behaving disrespectfully to him. Their compulsion to out Grigorovich as a foreigner whose access to the Rus­sian ­people was inadequate suggests that in order for ­these writers to feel confident in their own access, they needed to show they w ­ ere better than some rival.

Not Being a Comic Philologist For Rus­sian writers who wanted to criticize someone e­ lse for “crossing” less effectively than themselves, the attention-­getting, extravagantly French, self-­ critical Grigorovich was an attractive target—­but he was far from the only one. Other writers too w ­ ere notebook users, rural-­language recorders, long-­ distance travelers throughout the empire if not abroad, all of them potentially ridicu­lous. Even the most respected ones w ­ ere vulnerable to criticism that they ­were comic philologists. In an article in Dnevnik Pisatelia (Diary of a Writer) titled “What Language Should the F ­ ather of a Fatherland Speak?” Dostoevsky wrote, “I knew one Rus­sian writer who made a name for himself who not only learned Rus­sian, not knowing it at all, but even studied the Rus­ sian peasant—­and then wrote novels about peasant life. Such comic cases have often occurred ­here, sometimes on a very serious scale: the g­ reat Pushkin, at his own admission, also had to reeducate himself and studied the language and the folk spirit as well from his nanny Arina Rodionovna.”59 Dostoevsky’s former roommate is surely the Rus­sian writer he referred to first. In comparing him to Pushkin, Dostoevsky admitted their similarity, before asserting that Pushkin, fortunately, had had the advantage of childhood exposure to Rus­sian peasant language. The comparison that Dostoevsky proposes between Pushkin and Grigorovich is a logical match, since the two men had much in common. Both Pushkin and Grigorovich grew up speaking mostly French with their families, but both had formal high school educations that included Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture; for both of them writing primarily in Rus­sian was not the choice that their own parents would have made. Both w ­ ere charming ladies’ men; both descended from mi­grants to the Rus­sian empire whom they liked to think of as of noble birth; both lived now in the provinces, now in St. Petersburg. In distinguishing between them, Dostoevsky joined other writers of his generation who celebrated Pushkin’s access to peasant language as organic, even bodily. Annenkov, who complained that you could “hear the author’s hand” in Grigorovich’s Fishermen, speculated about ­whether Pushkin had learned his Rus­sian from Arina

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Rodionovna or from his grand­mother, Mariia Alekseevna Gannibal; ­either possibility testified to his childhood connection to the language and distinguished him from Grigorovich, with his French ­mother and grand­mother.60 Critics ­imagined Pushkin and the serf Arina Rodionovna, like the Rus­sian communities celebrated by Haxthausen and Khomiakov, as connected through organic ties that allowed for perfect communication, mediated by nothing more than the h ­ uman body.61 Petr Bartenev, following Pushkin’s ­sister, wrote that “Arina Rodionovna told fairy­tales masterfully, poured out proverbs, sayings . . . ​she had a ­great influence on her nursling.”62 She “pours” or “strews” her sayings, and Pushkin is her “nursling,” which suggests that she conveyed her folklore to him in a physical way, without his choice. Dostoevsky wrote in 1863 that in spite of the cultural influence of Eu­rope on Rus­sia’s literate classes, they had not become Eu­ro­pean, thanks to Arina Rodionovna’s gift of the Rus­ sian language to Pushkin. “Many Rus­sian ­children are brought to be educated in France; what if some other Pushkin w ­ ere brought ­there and t­here he had neither Arina Rodionovna nor Rus­sian speech from the cradle? But Pushkin was a genuine Rus­sian!”63 If Pushkin heard “Rus­sian speech from the cradle,” then he had not chosen to listen to Arina Rodionovna. Ivan Aksakov used the conceit of bodily contact with the source of sound in equating Pushkin’s listening to Arina Rodionovna to breast-­feeding: “As though he had fallen on the breast of M ­ other Earth, he eagerly drank in, in her stories, the pure stream of the folk speech and spirit!”64 ­People who celebrate one listener’s access to sound as unmediated tend to condemn other listeners for their too-­obvious, awkward use of media technology. Aksakov makes Arina Rodionovna the poet’s wet nurse, her words a kind of breast milk; their interaction is mediated by nothing so banal as paper and ink.65 In real­ity, Pushkin and Grigorovich had access to peasant language in similar ways. Pushkin, like Grigorovich, was a notebook-­user. His Mikhailovskoe notebooks contain drafts of poetry and prose, as well as drawings and numbers. Sometimes Pushkin turned his notebook sideways to draw a picture; sometimes he cut off a piece of paper. When he started to rec­ord Arina Rodionovna, he turned the notebook over and began working from the back. In comparison with his other writing in the notebook, his transcriptions of her words are neat, uninterrupted by doodles. While his creative writing is full of crossings-­out, the transcriptions are almost entirely clean. He separated the items he recorded with a ­little vertical line. The notebook shows that listening for him was systematic and physically mediated, as it had been for Grigorovich.66 The scholarship on Pushkin’s use of folklore tends to focus on his time in Mikhailovskoe; while some analyses celebrate his accurate knowledge of folk

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rituals and customs, o ­ thers question the notion of the writer’s aural communion with the peasants and note that he accessed folklore at least partially via written sources.67 While Pushkin did undoubtedly access folklore in part from books, to his contemporaries in the 1820s and 1830s this would not have seemed to delegitimize his use of it, or his connection to the peasants. The idea that even folklore collectors who seemed to be following the protocols for transcribing what they heard still might not have true access to what they heard, and that other p­ eople’s transcriptions might be inadequate, would arise l­ ater in the ­century. Kireevsky’s “Proclamation” suggests that anyone who followed his protocols could successfully transcribe folksongs. Alexander Afanas’ev, an armchair folklorist who published stories that had been gathered by Dahl and o ­ thers, asserted that transcription was neither difficult nor impor­tant. “Knowing twenty or thirty superstitions, that many songs and sayings, even from the mouth of the folk, is no ­g reat contribution!” He continued in the same vein, “How much work is it to gather a few manuscript collections, a few printed collections, to copy sayings from them, to make an alphabetical index, to ask p­ eople you know to gather sayings, to transcribe sayings yourself whenever you can—­how ­g reat, worthwhile, and valuable is this mechanical ­labor?”68 Afanas’ev’s lack of interest in transcription aligns with his belief that folklore is decayed myth: each text and transcript are, for him, only fragments to be used in the eventual reconstruction of an ancient w ­ hole whose import is international. Other folklorists disagreed with Afanas’ev, outlining all the ways that collectors could fail to rec­ord the necessary information. In a more detailed way than Kireevsky had, Amvrosii Metlinsky, a collector of Ukrainian song, following the ethnographic program of the Rus­sian Geo­graph­i­cal Society and a commission for the description of Kiev province, gave rules for collecting. In transcribing a song, you should first ask the singer to tell you the words so you can write them down, then ask the singer to sing it so you can correct anything that does not fit your transcription, then read it to the singer and ask if anything is wrong, then ask the singer for explanations of anything unclear. You should rec­ord the singer’s name, nickname, age, rank, occupation, and where they learned the song. “In general in transcription you should be precise in ­every detail: transcribe ­every letter as it is pronounced by the singer or storyteller; put accents on syllables where they go; explain incomprehensible words and expressions according to the observations of the singers and ­others; and explain names, titles, e­ tc. with the same kind of observations.”69 In Metlinsky’s spirit, midcentury collectors insisted they had faithfully conveyed what they heard.70 They sometimes referred to themselves in the introductions to their collections in the third

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person or signed them with their function rather than their names, as “Writer” (pisatel’), “Collector” (sobiratel’), or “Compiler” (sostavitel’).71 This suggests that what ­matters is not who one is but that one rec­ords correctly. A few folklorists, though, posited that some p­ eople ­were above the rules. Pavel Iakushkin wrote in 1865 that while in princi­ple folklorists should publish all the variants of a song that they can find, “intact and inviolable,” Kireevsky himself at times constructed his own version out of dif­fer­ent variants: “only P. V. Kireevsky could do this, given his g­ reat knowledge of the sources, his most excellent aesthetic sensitivity, and the abundance of his materials. . . . ​Not every­one could permit himself such a technique.”72 Still other writers asserted that good listeners to the folk w ­ ere ­those with the right loyalties. Writing in 1858, Dobroliubov responded to Afanas’ev’s first volume of folktales with irritation at what seemed to him a focus on details but a lack of interest in peasant life as a w ­ hole. He complained about a “defect that is somehow unpleasantly evident in all our collections. That defect is the complete absence of the princi­ple of life (zhiznennoe nachalo).” He rejected transcriptions that conveyed Belarusian dzv and tsv sounds and Ukrainian eɦe and ɦo sounds, recorded provenance, and included multiple variants, but did not explain what this folklore means for its tellers. “Pulling a fact from living real­ity and putting it on a shelf next to dusty folios, or classifying some fragmentary, accidental facts based on schoolboys’ logical divisions destroys that vitality that lies in the fact itself when it has been connected to the real­ity that surrounds it.” Offering the right kind of information meant attending to the situation in which the folklorist heard a specific song or story.73 As Bourdieu would l­ater argue, Dobroliubov felt that correct listening requires correct emotions. Attitudes such as Iakushkin’s and Dobroliubov’s underlie the attacks on Grigorovich for being a tourist; foreigners’ listening, for them, reveals their emotional disconnect from Rus­sia. Writers mocked each other for assuming that using a few items of rural vocabulary legitimized a depiction of rural life. Already in the 1820s, Pushkin had made fun of ­people who think that vocabulary is sufficient to create a legible national character in works of lit­er­a­ture. They “see narodnost’ in words, that is, they rejoice that ­people who are expressing themselves in Rus­sian use Rus­sian expressions.”74 In the same vein, in 1851 Boris Almazov, in a lightly masked review of Ostrovsky’s play It’s a ­Family Affair—­We’ll S­ ettle It Ourselves (Svoi liudi—­sochtemsia), lampooned a Slavophile who goes into ecstasies over the play’s use of the dialect term uzhotka (“­later” or “go away and ­don’t bother me”). As the Slavophile says, ridiculously, “­There are words and expressions in the language that, taken separately, make no impression on you; but e­ very true Rus­sian cannot hear them without a sweet trembling and tears of tender emotion. The

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word ‘uzhotka,’ which appears in the new comedy, is one of them.”75 Although he published in dif­fer­ent venues and occupied dif­fer­ent ideological positions from Almazov, Dobroliubov too made fun of writers’ fetishizing of individual vernacular words as betraying the writer’s disconnect from life.76 In 1860, he wrote scornfully of the literary trends of a half-­decade e­ arlier, when the literary repre­sen­ta­tion of peasant speech had relied on the mechanical substitution of rural words for literary ones, as though peasants had the same emotions as gentry. “Usually heroes and heroines in peasant stories w ­ ere burning with love, tormented by doubt, disappointed,” he wrote, just like the Romantic protagonists in fash­ion­able stories about the gentry. “The w ­ hole difference was that instead of ‘I love you passionately; at this moment I would be happy to give my life for you’ (я тебя страстно люблю; в это мгновение я рад отдать за тебя жизнь мою), they said, ‘I have such a hankerin’ for yer, I’m fixin’ to die for yer’ (я тея страх как люблю; я таперича за тея жисть готов отдать).”77 (I have attempted to convey Dobroliubov’s exaggerated rural speech with exaggerated Southern speech.) Real peasants, Dobroliubov asserted, are not just gentry who talk like country bumpkins; in order to write about them effectively, one needs to explore their lives and ideas—­and to make his point, he in­ven­ted a funny example of egregious writing. Grigorovich’s contemporaries felt that his listening was too mediated, and they listened to him mockingly. They mocked inept mediation of other ­people’s words not only on paper. For example, Annenkov complained in 1854 that he did not believe in the main character of Aleksei Potekhin’s story “Krest’ianka” (Peasant W ­ oman), a peasant girl raised among landowners: “The author gathers all the other characters around this one who constitutes an electric wire between opposing points.”78 This character is a dysfunctional telegraph, and Annenkov’s skepticism about her is like p­ eople’s criticism of Grigorovich as a dysfunctional notebook user.79 However they mediated the rural language they borrowed, midcentury writers ­were vulnerable to criticism. Like ­people “crossing” at other times and places, they took risks when they borrowed language that did not seem to belong to them. Their use of this language prompted play, contemplation, and dispute about their own Rus­ sianness. In the 1840s, when Grigorovich wrote The Village, his readers took the occasion to distinguish themselves from him and other inadvertently funny travelers and notebook users, from the comic philologists that they knew they might be as well.

C h a p te r   5

Paper Making

If crossing exposed Grigorovich to so much criticism, then how could Turgenev do something similar and gain approval, as though he ­were the winner of the contest that Grigorovich lost? In January 1847, a month a­ fter Grigorovich published The Village in Otechestvennye Zapiski, Turgenev published “Khor’ and Kalinych” (Khor’ i Kalinych), the first story in his collection Notes of a Hunter, in Sovremennik. Like Grigorovich, Turgenev depicted a rural, provincial setting, populated by peasants, some of whom are very poor, and by gentry, some of whom are intrigued by the peasants’ words and be­hav­iors. And like Grigorovich, Turgenev faced questions about his use of rural words and his attention to brutal aspects of life in the countryside. Some ­people also attacked him for insufficient loyalty to Rus­sia, not b­ ecause of his ancestry but ­because he would spend most of his adult life in Western Eu­rope. But, I argue, Turgenev forestalled the kind of sustained critique that Grigorovich faced by having his gentry listener perform listening in a more unmediated way, by making paper itself appear more organic and local, and by staging much of the listening in darkness, giving it the mystique that Chion associates with acousmatic sound. Turgenev and Grigorovich ­were not badly matched. Both ­were tall, handsome, charming men who spoke excellent French. Born in 1818, Turgenev was three and a half years older than Grigorovich. His ­father too died when he was young (age 14), and he too was brought up largely by his m ­ other, though 12 6



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on a large estate (his m ­ other’s ­family was very wealthy). As a teenager, he began writing poetry, stories, and reviews. He studied at Moscow University, and then to please his m ­ other entered state ser­vice and worked in the Ministry of Internal Affairs ­under Vladimir Dahl for about a year and a half, from 1842 to 1844. He interacted with Dahl, then, a few years before Grigorovich did, also as a kind of student. (Turgenev tended to come to work late and soon left the position. ­Later the two men became closer.1) Unlike Grigorovich, Turgenev had been tutored in Rus­sian as a child; his ­family had a serious commitment to that language. And unlike Grigorovich, Turgenev attracted the negative attention of the government for his writing: he spent eigh­teen months in 1852–1853 exiled to his estate in the Orel region southwest of Moscow. More than Grigorovich, Turgenev moved in the world of the Eu­ro­pean literati and understood how foreign travelers might see Rus­sia. Like Custine, he was formed by his relationship with an extravagant m ­ other, an ancien régime figure who fully accepted the social hierarchies of a monarchy. (She rejected her older son, Turgenev’s ­brother, for marrying beneath his class.) Turgenev refused some of his m ­ other’s ideas but nonetheless resembled her; he too was a spoiled, unconventional connoisseur of beauty. Both m ­ other and son ­were in some ways gender-­ambiguous: having been raised by a man, Turgenev’s ­mother loved to play cards and seemed mannish, while Turgenev’s high, feminine-­sounding voice contrasted with his large masculine body. A passionate opera fan, Turgenev had not been given m ­ usic lessons as a child, perhaps ­because his ­mother’s adoptive ­father had died during her ­music lesson, when no one could hear him call for help.2 Where Grigorovich had a French ­mother, Turgenev had close friends who lived in France: the French writer Louis Viardot and his wife, Pauline Viardot-­ Garcia, a Spanish-­French opera singer with whom Turgenev became obsessed from his first encounter with her when he was 25 and she was 22. Viardot had come to fame for her per­for­mances of the solo passages in Rossini operas and was associated for audiences with the attentive listening to classical ­music, productive of g­ reat emotion unlinked to specific images, that developed from the 1830s.3 Having heard Viardot perform in The Barber of Seville during her 1843 tour in Rus­sia, Turgenev met her husband and then was introduced to her. He spent from 1847 to 1850 in France, where he continued writing Notes of a Hunter, spent lengthy periods at the Viardots’ ­house, Courtavenel, and frequently attended the Paris opera. He read Eu­ro­pean writers such as George Sand and Berthold Auerbach who described the countryside, and the Viardots encouraged him to make the most of his aural access to Rus­sia’s rural spaces.4 Like Custine and Haxthausen, Pauline’s husband Louis Viardot was a travel writer; he used his time in Rus­sia during Pauline’s tours to learn about the

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country. In 1844, he wrote a guidebook to Rus­sian and German museums, and in 1849, he published Hunting Memories (Souvenirs de chasse), which dwelled on his visits to Rus­sia in 1844 and 1845.5 Louis and Turgenev collaborated in 1845 and 1846 on translations of the writing of Gogol, Pushkin, and Mikhail Lermontov from Rus­sian into French. In 1848, Louis suggested to Turgenev that they co-­write a French novel about love and the oppression of the Rus­sian serfs, according to a romantic plot that Louis had concocted ­after reading the first volume of Haxthausen’s account of his visit to Rus­sia. He envisioned their book containing “a crowd of local descriptions, details about manners, customs, laws, administration, history, culture, ­etc.” The goal would be to “acquaint one with the situation, the life of the Rus­sian peasants.” This suggestion may have encouraged Turgenev in writing Notes of a Hunter (and he also appears to have borrowed a literary device from a more famous travelogue, Tocqueville’s Democracy in Amer­i­ca).6 The impulse may also have come from Pauline, who collected folk songs in the Berry region of France for her friend Sand to use in her novels: songs she gathered appear in Sand’s Jeanne (1844) and The Dev­il’s Pool (La mare au diable, 1846).7 In a letter to Pauline about “The Singers” (Pevtsy), one of the Notes of a Hunter stories, Turgenev situated himself in an internationally minded ethnomusicological com­pany, writing that his own description of a rural singing contest made him think of Homer and notice that “the childhood of all p­ eoples is similar.” He told Pauline that he tried to describe his characters “à la Teniers,” then interjected, “darn! What big names I cite all the time!—­You know, it’s ­because we poor two-­penny writers need crutches to help us walk—­By the way, I’m looking for a musician to note down the golosiénié [to transcribe the melody] for me and I’ll send it to you as soon as it is ready.”8 Turgenev was an especially sensitive and ironic observer of other ­people’s listening: we saw that he noticed and mocked the way that Panaev read Grigorovich’s novella out loud first mockingly and then approvingly, and he was amused by his peasants’ misunderstanding of the En­glish folklorist William Ralston Shedden-­Ralston’s earnest recording of the terms for items in their huts.9 ­Here he trains that ironic ear on himself, first telling Pauline that he had thought about Homer when listening to the song contest and conveying it à la Teniers, linking it to the seventeenth-­century Flemish artist David Teniers the Younger, then making fun of himself for his own self-­aggrandizing per­for­mance of listening. Even more than Grigorovich, Turgenev has the reputation of an opponent of serfdom. Since its appearance in Rus­sian and soon ­after in translation in Western Eu­ro­pean languages, Notes of a Hunter has been celebrated as power­ ful po­liti­cal statement. Ernest Charrière, the first French translator of the



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series, compared it to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin but found it less didactic and thus more persuasive than Harriet Beecher Stowe’s landmark abolitionist novel. Charrière attributed the effect of Turgenev’s stories to his ability “never to let the author appear,” so that readers become absorbed in their impressions and feel that they have arrived at their evaluation of the situation entirely on their own.10 As we saw in the Introduction, the impressions of a person like the author are conveyed in this series by the hunter, who travels through the countryside, periodically pausing to shoot birds and chat with locals, some of whom are serfs and convey their experiences of abuse. While he does not condemn serfdom explic­itly as an institution, his reactions to what he sees and hears, as Charrière notes, prompted readers to do so. The Notes of a Hunter stories differ from Turgenev’s most poignant story about an abused serf, the 1852 “Mumu,” in which an enormous, fantastically strong deaf-­and-­dumb serf, Gerasim, is forced by a cruel mistress to drown the dog he loves, a­ fter which he leaves Moscow for his village and devotes himself to agricultural l­abor. Gerasim uses sign language to communicate with other serfs, but his thoughts are obscure to the narrator; Gerasim resembles a fairy­tale character, such as the bogatyr’, the hero of Rus­sian epics, whose actions are vis­i­ble but whose motivations are unclear. The story concludes with him as a topic of oral lore: “­Those are the rumors about the bogatyr’-­like strength of the mute one.” (Такова ходит молва о богатырской силе немого.)11 The world of “Mumu” involves no writing; the only paper in it is the old mistress’s playing cards. In this story, the peasants’ inner world is as obscure as sign language is to a person who does not know it. By not even attempting to transcribe it, Turgenev gives Gerasim the kind of ­silent dignity that Khomiakov celebrated and Grigorovich’s Akulina claimed, even as he avoids the seeming artificiality of ­those narrative devices (letters, discovered manuscripts, eavesdropping) that explain the narrator’s privileged access to the characters’ inner worlds in the prose of the 1830s.12 In Notes of a Hunter, he finds a dif­fer­ent way to justify his transcription of his characters’ thoughts and thereby his critique of serfdom: he makes the production of paper and thus writing itself seem a natu­ral part of the countryside. This chapter addresses listening and paper making in three stories from Notes of a Hunter, “Khor’ and Kalinych,” “The Singers,” and “Bezhin Meadow” (Bezhin lug). In all three, Turgenev’s hunter-­narrator thinks about his tenuous aural access to peasant voice. The first includes the purchase of rags to make paper; the second involves a song contest won by a paper factory vatman; and in the third a paper smoother describes a domovoi (house spirit), who manipulates the tools in a paper factory. I argue that Turgenev’s careful descriptions of hand paper making at a time when paper was increasingly being produced

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through an automated process—in stories about listening to “the p­ eople” in the dark—­anticipate and respond to the critics’ valorization of unmediated listening.

In the Paper Factory Turgenev knew the paper industry as a producer as well as a consumer. The village of Turgenevo, where Ivan and his ­brother and sister-­in-­law retreated in the summer of 1850 when a dispute with his ­mother caused them to leave Spasskoe-­Lutovinovo, contained a paper factory that had been founded by his ­father. Turgenev told Pauline Viardot that July: “They made me a l­ittle room in the spacious building of the paper factory, not functioning now.”13 One memoirist asserts that Turgenev wrote his first works on paper produced t­ here.14 Paper was, of course, widespread in the 1840s and 1850s. Developed in China two millennia e­ arlier, it was traded in Samarkand and adapted in the Arab world and then in Eu­rope, used by the literate and the illiterate for writing, decorating walls, wrapping purchases, and playing cards. In Rus­sia, merchants and landowners established paper mills near dense population centers in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries, using peasant l­abor. Although manufacturers in some countries used wood pulp from the 1840s, Rus­sian paper was made of locally acquired rags u ­ ntil the early 1880s, meaning that Turgenev could have written about peasants on fi bers that had once touched peasant bodies. ­These rags would be reduced to fi bers suspended in a water-­based pulp; ­people made paper by using a framed screen to remove one thin layer of paper pulp at a time and then waiting for it to dry. The history of the adoption of En­glish and French paper making technology in the Rus­sian Empire, like the creation of a polyfunctional literary language and the adoption of Eu­ro­pean literary genres, demonstrates the significant role of the imperial government, the ties between modernization and prestige, and the importance of St. Petersburg as a laboratory for Westernization. From the early eigh­teenth ­century onward, the imperial state dedicated funding and issued regulations and tariffs meant to improve the quality and guarantee the supply of local paper.15 In the early nineteenth c­ entury, French, British, and American papermakers tinkered with continuous (or “Fourdrinier”) paper machines that produced long sheets, so vatmen no longer had to dip each sheet out of the pulp by hand; this development made paper cheaper and more omnipresent. Paper use in ­those countries was much higher than in the Rus­sian Empire: 2.2 pounds of paper per person w ­ ere produced in ­England in 1803, and 4 pounds per person in France in 1819, but in



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1815, the Rus­sian Empire produced only 0.25 pounds per person.16 Tsar Alexander I was impressed by the continuous paper machine he saw in 1814 at the pioneering paper mill in Hertfordshire, ­England, and came home to establish the Imperial Paper Factory in St. Petersburg. By 1824, Rus­sian paper was being produced mechanically, as announced in a supplement in Sankt-­Peterburgskie Vedomosti (St. Petersburg News) that was printed on the paper in question. ­There was always tension between the government mandate to support the paper industry as a ­whole and individual factory ­owners’ desire to corner the market. By the early 1840s, paper factories outside the capital ­were beginning to use continuous paper machines, often tended by foreign mechanics. Demonstrating the connection between paper making and literary developments, the cover of the first eleven issues of an 1841 anthology of Natu­ral School sketches, Our ­People, Copied from Life by Rus­sians (Nashi, spisannye s natury russkimi), includes a line in all caps and a large font advertising that its paper came from the recently established Gobert and Vargunin factory; the editor Alexander Bashutsky was inspired by the 1840 The French Painted by Themselves (Les Français peints par eux-­mêmes), but this French model did not advertise its paper source.17 Increased demand for paper prompted a rise in the number of hand paper mills through 1852, but then ­those factories, which relied on serfs to dip sheet a­ fter sheet, started to close, and mechanized factories began to dominate the industry.18 The pro­cess of switching to mechanized production was difficult. For example, the o ­ wners of the Pleshcheevo paper factory in the Yar­ oslavl region started researching Fourdrinier machines in 1833, ordered one, and brought in foreign specialists to run it, only to see one a­ fter another take to drink and abruptly die. A ­ fter they got the machine to work in 1840, they saw production go up but prices go down.19 The Turgenevo paper factory, which never mechanized, closed by 1861.20 A person who followed the St. Petersburg news and was informed about the paper industry could have predicted in 1850 that the Turgenevo factory would not last without mechanization; Turgenev may have suspected as much.21 In his 1877 novel Virgin Soil (Nov’), he would describe Sipiagin, a nobleman who strug­gles to run a paper factory, tries to hire the mechanic Solomin away from a cloth factory, and complains about new machines. Solomin tells him that noblemen should not run factories anyway; their factories always end up in merchant hands.22 This comment might echo Turgenev’s ­brother’s frustration about the difficulty of adapting as the paper industry moved ­toward mechanization. In Notes of a Hunter, though, ­there is no mention of the continuous paper machines that w ­ ere being installed in paper factories in the Rus­sian countryside at the time.

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Nonetheless, Turgenev’s stories share ele­ments of the midcentury Eu­ro­pean writing that expresses anxiety about the mechanization of the paper industry. As the media historian Lothar Müller argues, the more paper circulates, the more ­people express anxiety about it. In the wake of the continuous paper machine, Eu­ro­pean and American writers described paper si­mul­ta­neously as flimsy and as a destructive flood. What Thomas Carlyle called the “Paper Age” stressed the illusionary; in Honoré de Balzac’s Illusions perdues (1837–1843), paper making attracts profiteers; Charles Dickens, in Bleak House (1852–1853), likens a paper-­ logged court case to the moldering hoard of an illiterate ragman; and Herman Melville, in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855), depicts foolscap production as deadening work.23 Rus­sian writers too combined depictions of the destruction of paper and ­people. For instance, in the third section of Nekrasov’s 1869 poem Who Lives Well in Rus­sia? (Komu na Rusi zhit’ khorosho), the barin Veretennikov transcribes folklore in his notebook—­dutifully asking p­ eople to sing songs five times in a row to be sure he gets them right—­but is interrupted when a peasant grabs his pencil and accuses him of slandering rural ­people; the interaction prompts the locals to tell him about Iakim, who, when his hut caught fire, pulled off the pictures he had attached to his wall but neglected to rescue his life savings.24 The anecdote displays the absurd proliferation of rural paper. The availability of raw material is a limiting f­actor for any kind of manufacturing, and for Rus­sian paper making ­until the 1880s, that material was rags. In the eigh­teenth c­ entury, the state rewarded ­those who recycled ropes and sails for paper and imposed a tax that was collected in rags for paper.25 An 1842 imperial law book contains a statute forbidding the export of rags, and an 1868 one allows for rags and other raw materials for paper to be brought into the country without duty.26 Quality too was at issue. The fine white rags used for high-­quality Eu­ro­pean writing paper ­were expensive: throughout the ­century ragmen operated according to a hierarchy from white rags with no seams, which could be used for the finest paper, down to ropes, strings, and canvas, which could only be used for cigarette paper.27 In Turgenev’s stories, the paper factory and its workers are tied to a range of experiences and emotions, positive and negative: to the notion of a powerfully appealing peasant verbal art, and si­mul­ta­neously to depictions of this rural industry as a force leading to sickness and abuse. Thus Khor’, a wealthy peasant who hosts the hunter for a few days, suggests that the ragman’s purchasing of rags and hemp prompts peasant men to beat their wives. Paper factories, he explains, hire “ea­gles” to buy rags; peasant w ­ omen “sneak out” to meet t­ hese men; and “for a few copper coins the w ­ oman gives the ‘ea­gle’ not just extra rags but often even her husband’s shirt and her own poneva.” They



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even decide to “steal from themselves” and get cash for any hemp fi ber that they have harvested. Their husbands, though, try to keep control of this commerce: “at the slightest suspicion, the most distant rumor about the appearance of the ‘ea­gle’ they quickly and energetically take corrective and defensive mea­sures.”28 The hero of “The Singers” is “Yakov, called ‘the Turk’ ­because he was ­really the child of a Turkish war captive . . . ​in his heart an artist in all senses of the word, and by profession a vatman in the merchant’s paper factory.”29 His face is described as deathly, frighteningly pale at the start and end of his singing, and his voice betrays illness. In “Bezhin Meadow,” the face of the young paper smoother Iliusha expresses a “dull, unhealthy anxiety,” and his voice, like Yasha the Turk’s, is hesitant.30 Turgenev’s depiction of Yasha the Turk and Iliusha as delicate anticipates Melville’s “Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids,” written a­ fter the author’s January 1851 visit to Carson’s Old Red Mill in Dalton, Mas­sa­chu­setts. At a New ­England paper factory on a cold winter day, his narrator sees w ­ omen 31 workers with f­aces “pale with work, and blue with cold.” Paper mills polluted rivers, places where rags ­were sorted smelled noxious, and paper factory workers, constantly exposed to cold ­water, ­were unhealthy. They had a short life expectancy, which one historian puts at u ­ nder 30 years. Tuberculosis was common, and the constant loud sounds of the mill may have given them ner­ vous illnesses.32 Turgenev, then, agrees with Melville that paper workers are sickly, but he makes them artists nonetheless. He is also relatively kind to his ragman. In Dickens’s Bleak House, the ugly rag dealer Krook spontaneously (if improbably) combusts, as if the noxious rags he pro­cesses and the court papers into which they are transformed thus betray their insubstantiality.33 Turgenev’s “ea­gle,” though, is healthy, even seductive. In a broader sense, where Dickens and Melville give a dark picture of an industry undergoing painful evolution, Turgenev makes the situation seem more static. The paper industry he describes may be destructive to its workers’ bodies, but it is linked to their beautiful per­for­mances. Melville draws attention to the social difference between the ­people who supply rags and the workers who pro­cess them. Turgenev, though, stresses that the rags used in the factories come from local p­ eople, which makes paper appear organically linked to the countryside and the peasants. That the hand paper mill belongs in the countryside is obvious when Iliusha, in “Bezhin Meadow,” describes hearing a domovoi in the factory at night. Asked to spend the night ­there, the young workers had just lain down when they first heard steps overhead, then ­water rushing over the mill wheel, then steps down to where they lay. The door swung open, but no one was ­there. “Suddenly, we saw, by one of the vats the paper mold [the mesh frame for

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dipping out paper] moved, lifted up, dipped in, moved on and on through the air, as though someone was rinsing it, then it went back to its place. Then at another vat a hook moved off the nail and went back onto the nail; then it was as though someone went to the door and suddenly coughed, as though he was trying to get something out of his throat, like a sheep, so loud.” Terrified, the boys piled into a heap. At the end of Iliusha’s story, Pavel asks, “So why did he cough?” and Iliusha answers, “I ­don’t know; maybe from the damp.”34 This domovoi mimics the vatman, manipulating the mesh frame as though intending to dip fi bers from the pulp to make a sheet of paper, and coughing as though he, like the workers, is developing tuberculosis. In imagining a paper factory with a vatman-­like domovoi, Turgenev makes that space folkloric. Whereas imported continuous paper machines required foreign mechanics, Turgenev makes paper making by hand seem indigenous in ­these stories, as in his account of paper factory workers who performed on his estate: “Workers from my ­brother’s paper factory came from 15 versts away and performed some kind of outlaw drama that they themselves had written. You ­couldn’t imagine anything more hilarious—­a factory worker played the role of the chief ataman. Someday I’ll describe it in detail.”35 Such folk per­for­mances by factory workers are described in other midcentury memoirs.36 As we saw in chapter 4, Grigorovich’s critics complained about an excessive use of paper, which they conflated with foreignness as they attacked him for what they saw as his misrepre­sen­ta­tion of the Rus­sian countryside. Turgenev avoided this kind of attack by making his paper seem local. In depicting paper making as the work of sickly indigenous artisans who are also verbal artists, Turgenev brought together two ways of thinking. On the one hand, he took part in the Eu­ro­pean trend of linking the paper industry to death; on the other, he suggested that the rural papermakers he encountered participated in an unmediated and nonmechanized kind of communication. Walter Benjamin asserts that mechanical reproducibility prompts p­ eople to long for the aura of the au­then­tic, even as they enjoy the sense of completeness and immersion offered by modern reproduction technologies.37 Turgenev’s attention to paper making by hand at a time when automation was beginning elsewhere in Rus­sia evidences this kind of nostalgia for the handmade at the start of the age of mechanical reproduction. It links him to Rus­sian antiquarians who, just when paper making began to be mechanized in the 1830s, started using the watermarks on hand-­made paper to date documents.38 Turgenev fetishizes the increasingly retro medium of hand-­made paper in an ever more pronounced way over the three stories. His taste for handmade paper speaks to his linguistic proj­ect of expanding the literary language carefully and artis-



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tically by adding rural words, a pro­cess recalling individual artisans’ creation of paper from local rags. Turgenev’s hunter resembles the philologists who in the 1840s and 1850s ­were understood as regulating the Rus­sian language.39 Like the ragman and the vatman, unwilling to turn the pro­cess over to a machine, he carefully selects ele­ments of rural life to recycle in his art.40

All Ears In describing listening as well, Turgenev insists on the value of perception by a sensitive individual over a more automated pro­cess; biographers depict him as a focused listener who thirsted for beautiful sound.41 He wrote about listening ecstatically to a reading of Mikhail Kheraskov’s Rossiiada (Rossiad). “I listened (slushal)—it was not enough! I took it in—­not enough! I turned all ears—­not enough!—­and classically: I devoured—­still not enough! I swallowed—­ and still not enough! I choked—­good.”42 He again advertised his passion for listening when he described hearing Zagoskin’s Iurii Miloslavskii read aloud: “I c­ an’t describe for you the absorbing and absorbed attention with which we listened (slushali); once I jumped up and started to hit a boy who started speaking in the ­middle of the story.”43 The passion for listening that he expresses ­here would not have sounded unusual to ­others of his generation; Herzen too wrote about his memories of hearing folksongs in his childhood and the “thirst” of the soul.44 Turgenev wrote similarly about listening to instrumental ­music while in the countryside. He wanted the wife of his man­ag­er Tiutchev to play the piano, but she was not always willing. Her husband, he complained, “only likes ­music moderately—or rather he likes it, as most ­people do, for something other than what is ­music in it.” Turgenev felt that no one listened as well as he did. “Most literary ­people seek only literary impressions in ­music—in general they are bad listeners and bad judges. . . . ​No one ­here has this musical hunger that torments me.” He was particularly irritated by Tiutcheva’s s­ ister, “a very ­limited, very sentimental, very self-­satisfied young person,” who got on his nerves “with her ecstasies, which invariably begin with the first note—­and which she seems to pass out warm and ready like hotcakes (galettes du Gymnase).”45 In this letter to Viardot, Turgenev aligned himself with the listening culture of her fans. Other listeners, he felt, get cheap, predictable emotions, like hotcakes, from the sounds that give him more complex feelings. Again, he resembled Herzen, who in his 1845–1846 novel Who Is to Blame? (Kto vinovat?) compared folksong listening to opera listening. “May God grant Viardot and

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Rubini that they be heard with such pounding of the heart with which I many times heard some prolonged (protiazhnaia) and endless song of a barge-­hauler guarding the barges at night.”46 This way of thinking about the value of focused, emotional listening was characteristic of opera goers in the 1830s. Whereas in the 1810s the attention of the audience at the Paris opera was drawn to the other spectators, some sitting in boxes on the stage, from the 1830s their attention shifted to the ­music itself. The French bourgeoisie who came to power ­after Napoleon understood their own virtues as tied to their ability to focus, unlike the aristocracy whose position in society had relied on their genealogy, and they confirmed their superiority through their quiet attentiveness to arias such as Viardot’s at concerts.47 The change in attitudes ­toward listening accompanied shifts in the experience of opera g­ oing. By the late 1830s engineers could control the new gas lighting in theaters well enough to lower the h ­ ouse lights, thus drawing attention t­ oward the stage.48 Louis Véron, the new director of the Paris Opera, redesigned the building to make it less visually luxurious but to accommodate more listeners. The architecture of operatic listening shifted transnationally. In the St. Petersburg Bolshoi Theater in the 1840s, ­people knew the best acoustics ­were enjoyed by the audience in the cheap seats in the top rows of the theater, although their view of the stage was blocked by the ­great chandelier. (Some fans heard even better, and missed seeing the stage at all, by bribing a theater watchman to let them listen from the theater’s attic.) As the literary historian Julie Buckler writes, when opera goers who could afford an expensive ticket chose to listen from the “paradise” in the upper rings, their “operatic ‘slumming’ represented the ultimate sign of good taste, theatrically signaling a devotion to m ­ usic uncontaminated by social motives.”49 Meanwhile, a new repertoire by composers such as Rossini drew attention to the m ­ usic itself, heard not as an imitation of natu­ral sounds but as a phenomenon deserving attention on its own. ­These audiences w ­ ere attuned to their own deep musical experiences; they derived a rare plea­sure from beautiful sounds and knew that in ­doing so they showed they ­were better than less attentive listeners.50 Herzen recollects hearing the moving songs of barge-haulers at night, and the experience of opera goers hearing Viardot singing Rossini in a darkened hall may have been so power­ful partially ­because ­people react strongly to sounds heard in darkness. The musicologist Brian Kane argues that acousmatic listening should be understood as a historically situated strategy, “deployed in order to grant auditory access to transcendental spheres . . . ​a way of listening to essence, truth, profundity, ineffability, or interiority.” He argues that nineteenth-­century acousmatic listening is tied to the birth of Romanticism



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and the architectural reforms of the concert hall. The imposition of a veil between sound and its source can function in per­for­mance to separate “the initiated from the uninitiated” and to give listeners the impression that they are hearing something divine.51 The stories in Notes of a Hunter that feature paper makers also privilege listening that occurs in darkness. In “Khor’ and Kalinych,” when the hunter arrives at Khor’s hut, he finds the peasant’s words confusing: “Khor’ sometimes expressed himself in a puzzling way, prob­ably out of caution.” The next day, though, Khor’s attitude changes, perhaps, the hunter speculates, ­because he had spent the night u ­ nder the peasant’s roof. He notes: “Speaking with Khor’, for the first time I heard a Rus­sian peasant’s ­simple, intelligent speech.”52 He had learned to listen to peasants with the same attention as Turgenev himself when he listened to Viardot sing. Having been in Khor’s h ­ ouse in the dark lets the hunter hear him better, and in l­ater stories in the cycle, occluded vision again allows him to hear peasants speak frankly.53 Two 1847 stories use acousmatic listening to reveal the abuses of serfdom. In “Ermolai and the Miller’s Wife” (Ermolai i mel’nichikha), the hunter stops for the night outside a mill and dozes off as his companion Ermolai bakes potatoes in the fire. “A light restrained whispering woke me,” he reports, but he pretends to be asleep and hears Ermolai flirt with the miller’s wife.54 From their conversation and his l­ater inquiries, he learns that the miller’s wife was a h ­ ouse serf for a despotic mistress who prevented her from marrying the man she loved and sold her. Similarly, as we saw in the Introduction, in “The Office,” the hunter listens acousmatically to the clerk who prevents the serf ­couple from marrying. Perhaps thinking of his eavesdropping hunter, Turgenev drew a man lying in bed in the margin of one draft of the story, at a moment like the one that inspired Sokolov’s illustration. Feigned sleep lets the hunter grasp the power dynamics of serf life, and dimmed lighting lets him appreciate peasant art; Turgenev often depicted sounds heard in darkness as particularly appealing.55 He loved folk songs and often referenced them.56 In “The Singers,” his hunter goes into a village tavern on an unpleasantly hot and bright summer day. “The sunlight flowed in a liquid yellow stream through the dusty panes of two small win­dows and, it seemed, could not conquer the usual darkness of the room: all the objects ­were lit sparingly, as though in spots.” In the dim tavern, a singing contest begins when a contractor sings a cheerful dance tune with ornamentation. The audience is delighted. Two men, Obaldui and Morgach, sing along and call out encouragement: “The Dev­il! . . . ​Take it away, rascal! Take it away, pull it out, you asp! Pull it out more! Heat it up more, y­ ou’re such a dog, you cur! . . . ​Herod take your soul!”57

Figure 9.  Doodle of sleeping man in Turgenev’s manuscript of “The Office.” “Kontora,” RNB RO, f. 795 (I. S. Turgenev) ed. khr. 4. L. 2 (P. 5).



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His rival Iasha’s song produces a dif­fer­ent effect. His voice is otherworldly. “The first sound of his voice was weak and unsteady and seemed to come not from his chest but from somewhere far away, as though it had flown by accident into the room. That trembling, ringing voice acted strangely on all of us; we looked at each other, and Nikolai Ivanovich’s wife stood up sharply.” Iasha’s voice draws attention to the singer’s emotions and ­those of the listeners: “we all had a sweet and eerie sense.” When writing to Viardot, Turgenev described this story and his heroes as evidence for the similarities of all folk cultures, but the hunter suggests that Iasha’s ability to convey emotion is inherently Rus­sian.58 The scene of the song contest has been read and staged as a master text of a Romantic Rus­sian nationalism.59 “A Rus­sian, true, warm soul sounded and breathed in it and it pulled you by the heart, pulled you right by its Rus­sian strings.” To describe Iasha’s voice, the hunter uses images linked to the expansive landscape: “from ­every sound of his voice ­there wafted something native and boundlessly wide, as though the familiar steppe w ­ ere opening out before you, ­going ­toward the endless distance.” The hunter begins to cry and sees the innkeeper’s wife crying as well.60 The men’s reactions also betray their emotion: they drop their eyes, turn away, sob openly, or release tears silently. The contractor tells Iasha that he has won and leaves. The vibration in Iasha’s voice moves the listeners, each of whom feels separately affected by the sounds. Whereas Obaldui and Morgach had responded to the contractor by calling out and singing along, the ­silent listening that Iasha’s song produces indicates his art has a stronger effect. The hunter in the dim tavern listens to peasant songs with Turgenev’s ears, trained in the Paris and St. Petersburg opera ­houses. His description of the singing contest juxtaposes two modes of listening: the loudly participatory listening to the contractor, and the quietly emotional listening to Iasha. T ­ hese modes parallel the two kinds of listening at the Paris Opera: the unrestrained old-­regime listening of the early nineteenth c­ entury, and the self-­conscious listening of the 1830s and 1840s, which displays the listener’s self-­control. In both cases, sound that produces an audible effect in a group is contrasted to sound that produces a more subtle effect in each person separately. The contrast parallels the two modes of listening that Turgenev describes in his letters, which juxtapose his own tormenting hunger for m ­ usic to the too-­easy ecstasies that other, worse listeners advertise cheaply, like hotcakes, for mass consumption. “The Singers” concludes in the darkness, where the hunter hears the voices of two peasant boys, one calling for the other to come home and be beaten by their ­father. Turgenev made a note on his manuscript to continue exploring peasant voices in the dark. “Describe how boys drive ­horses into the wasteland for the night.—­Fires.”61 He carried this out in “Bezhin Meadow,” where

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the hunter gets lost and then finds a campfire with a group of peasant boys who had driven a group of h ­ orses to pasture. He lies down near the boys, pretends to be asleep, and hears them tell frightening stories about local spirits and deaths. The stories give the hunter an aesthetic plea­sure that he shares with the boys. In the dark, the hunter becomes invisible to the boys, and once they have forgotten about him, he can participate fully in their story-­listening. The boys’ stories all involve acousmatic listening. In the dark, Gavrila the carpenter hears a rusalka, a w ­ ater spirit, with a sad, toad-­like voice; Ermil the dog keeper hears a sheep he caught by a drowned man’s grave speak with a ­human voice; Grand­mother Ul’iana, who is sitting on the church threshold, hears dogs bark before a dead boy comes in view on the road; Kostia hears a sound from a pit that could be the soul of a drowned person, frogs, or a forest spirit; and as we saw, Iliusha hears a domovoi in the paper factory. The hunter too hears frightening sounds in the dark: the “strange, sharp, sickly cry” of a heron and the convulsive barking of dogs, perhaps pursuing a wolf.62 ­After hearing ­these stories, Pavlusha goes to the w ­ ater, where he hears the voice of Vasia, a boy who had recently drowned, calling him. He returns to the boys, saying that he knows he ­will die soon too: “you ­can’t avoid your own fate.”63 At the end of “Bezhin Meadow,” the hunter notes that he had recently heard about Pavlusha’s death. With this sentence (which the censor removed from the story’s first publication), he indicates that he accepts the boys’ folkloric aural logic, according to which night-­time sounds may indeed be communications from another world. In the opera ­house, as they heard Viardot sing Rossini in the dark, her fans gained access to their own least expressible emotions. Acousmatic listening works a similar magic for the peasant boys as they hear the voices of the dead, and for the hunter as he hears the voices of peasants. In chapter 1, we saw Lippard, Chateaubriand, Derzhavin, and Schiller describe the acousmatic sound of a bell ringing at night and compelling its listeners to think about death, guilt, freedom, and tyranny; they understood their own emotions in the terms I identified with percussive listening. The opera singer’s voice, like that night-­time sound of a striking bell, also moves listeners powerfully in a way that is not purely rational. Its effect is physical and si­ mul­ta­neously spiritual.64 The otherworldly sound of the bell tells listeners about absolute, terrifying truths. The voice of the opera singer prompts a larger, more complex range of emotions, which may be dif­fer­ent for each listener. In the stories of Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter, the hunter listens in darkness or dimmed lighting to the voice of peasants, and he experiences a range of emotional responses, from the cheery to the awestruck. As in chapter 1, listening in darkness heightens the sense of access to new experiences and emotions—to the voice of the p­ eople, which, like the voice of the bell, may also



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be the voice of God. At the same time, the repeated mentions of paper as a material substance, the product of peasants’ rags and laboring peasant bodies, make this listening experience itself seem more immediate and bodily. Both the acousmatic sound and the thematizing of hand-­made paper make the hunter’s listening appear unforced, unmediated, and native.

Pro­cessing Language, Pro­cessing Hemp This book has reflected on the ways in which intellectuals in mid-­nineteenth-­ century Rus­sia imagine listening to other ­people’s words as difficult, a notion that inspires per­for­mances of listening in multiple genres. We have seen them think about w ­ hether the barrier between intellectuals and “the p­ eople” can be traversed by the ringing of a bell, the quiet voices of the members of the mir, or the diligent transcription of details in a notebook. I have been arguing that the media-­technology details that come to ­these writers’ minds when they talk about listening across a social barrier suggest that their situation is similar to that of other ­people around the world—­that, in spite of the myth of Rus­sia’s silence and the concomitant myth of its intellectuals’ heroic listening, neither is exceptional. Thus Turgenev’s depiction of the hunter’s ear straining in the darkness to overcome its cognitive, social, and physiological limits anticipates Peters’s argument that the promise of mid-­nineteenth ­century technology to eliminate the barriers between ­people prompted distinctive ways of thinking about h ­ uman interactions. As he asserts based on English-­and German-­language sources, the fantasies of connection engendered by the new technologies of the 1840s, what felt like a surfeit of new ways to speak, only heightened the agony of solitude and the yearning for ­union.65 The use of low-­status speech in a literary text generates distinctive technical prob­lems. Theoretically, a writer could simply transcribe speech and use that as a model for literary dialogue, but as we saw with Belinsky’s rejection of zelenia and Zhukovsky’s annoyance at Dahl’s use of Cossack language, readers might not approve. Writers respond to the challenge posed by the simultaneous urge to convey the sound of the world in full and the possibility of readerly irritation by experimenting with conveying dif­fer­ent ele­ments of low-­status speech: pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax.66 Turgenev has his characters use regional terms for natu­ral and geo­graph­i­cal phenomena, which are defined in footnotes, along with a few nonstandard pronunciations of common words, even while the series as a w ­ hole starts with a breezy acknowledgement that it does not conform precisely to what the hunter has heard: “The reader w ­ ill permit me 67 not to convey his [Polutykin’s] stutter.” In “Singers,” the spelling conforms to

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Moscow phonetics, rather than the distinctive accent of the Orel area, which Turgenev and his readers knew that p­ eople such as Khor’ and Kalinych would use. This choice followed a convention that valued easier reading over the fully accurate repre­sen­ta­tion of sounds.68 In “Bezhin Meadow” more than in “Singers,” the peasants use regional terms and a few nonstandard pronunciations. For instance, Fedia, the peasant boy from a wealthier f­amily, uses predvidénie nebesnoe (defined in a footnote with “This is what our peasants call an eclipse”), Pavlusha says shti instead of shchi (cabbage soup) and Iliusha uses otkenteleva for otkuda (from where) and evto for eto (that).69 Even though Turgenev’s use of distinctive phonetics and vocabulary was restrained compared to, say, Dickens, not all readers approved. Ivan Aksakov wrote to him in 1852 to complain that his stories had too much of the specific and local. “Grigorovich, wanting to bring the Rus­sian peasant in general onto the stage, forces him to speak in the dialect of Riazan, you in that of Orel, Dahl in a salad made from all the dialects (vinegretom iz vsekh narechii). Wanting to capture Rus­sian speech, you capture local dialect.” Where Belinsky complained about zelenia being too salty, Aksakov complained about Dahl’s use of regional words as being something like a mixed salad. While he was in f­ avor of aligning the literary language with rural ­people’s speech, Aksakov spoke for maintaining the standards of taste that rejected anything too regionally specific. “I think it’s pos­si­ble to have Rus­sian peasants speak Rus­sian peasant speech without that pathetic distortion of words, without the vari­ous grimaces that make up local particularity.”70 If the goal of Turgenev’s writing had been to reaffirm the ideal of a unified Rus­sian language spoken across the empire, something that Haxthausen, Khomiakov, and Konstantin Aksakov celebrated, then his use of Orel words threatened that impression of homogeneity. Of course, the repre­sen­ta­tion of a unified national language may not actually have been Turgenev’s (or Grigorovich’s) goal, given that both of them explic­itly refer to the regional quality of their characters’ speech. Ivan Aksakov, however, believed that that goal was the right one, and in accusing Grigorovich, Turgenev, and Dahl of excessive specificity, he was, I think, gesturing ­toward something I examined in chapter 4: the notion that excessive mediation or mechanical recording delegitimized writers’ hearing. Aksakov knew that the writers he criticized had accurately recorded the speech of one region of Rus­sia (or, for Dahl, many regions), but he felt that their precise transcription only hampered their creative task. His observation indicates that even though he had no French parents, Turgenev was at risk of being attacked, as Grigorovich was, as a bad listener. In addition to his depiction of the hunter’s listening as acousmatic and paper as local, he eluded ­these attacks through a range of textual strategies.



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He did not always spell out peasants’ speech. In “The Singers,” four lines of the contractor’s song are transcribed; they elicit a reaction from Morgach and Obaldui; and the song and the reactions include colloquial phrases. In contrast, Iasha’s language is described, but not transcribed. We learn the title of his song, but none of the lyr­ics. The reactions his song elicits in listeners are also nonverbal. This strategy suggests that peasant sounds that move listeners in individual ways cannot, or should not, be recorded in a way that would allow them to be repeated. Perhaps such transcription would make the songs and the singers appear ridicu­lous; it would break the solemn mood created by Iasha’s song and destroy the atmosphere in which deep emotion can be felt. But even while Turgenev showed restraint in conveying specific rural sounds in his fiction, he endeavored to transcribe them for other uses, as when he promised to send Viardot a transcription—or golosiénié, a Rus­sian word that he inventively transliterated from Cyrillic to Latin letters—of the melodies, as well as the words, of Rus­sian peasant songs. Turgenev’s careful avoidance of transcription at certain moments indicates that he understood the Natu­ral School writers’ task of conveying unvarnished real­ity to be epistemologically if not aesthetically problematic. Grigorovich had signaled his epistemological doubts in his text, and Turgenev too expressed skepticism that he could succeed in representing the world correctly. The stories in Notes of a Hunter ­were read as a set of physiological sketches, meaning accurate repre­sen­ta­tions of “types” of ­humans existing among the peasants, and Turgenev agreed that this was what he had been ­doing, writing at the end of 1852, “I’ve spent enough time trying to pull the movable essences—­triple extracts—­out of ­human characters, so as to pour them into ­little jars—so smell it, my respected readers—­open it up and smell it—­doesn’t it truly smell like a Rus­sian type? That’s enough, enough!”71 If Iasha was to be understood as a Rus­sian type, a literary character extracted somehow from real p­ eople, then many of Turgenev’s readers approved of him. But they w ­ ere not certain that the w ­ hole story was correct in its typologizing. Ivan Aksakov, who thought the story one of Turgenev’s best, complained about its final scene, where the hunter returns to the tavern and sees a drunken party. “One could do without the final scene of drinking in the tavern.”72 Turgenev defended himself and the story to Aksakov: “I see the tragic fate of the tribe, a ­g reat social drama, where you see peacefulness and the refuge of the epic.” He added in a ­later letter, “The tragic side of folk life—­not only our folk—­every one—­escapes from you, even though our songs themselves speak of it loudly!”73 Beyond Rus­sia, in the dramatic years around 1848, the question of how and ­whether writers could convey the voice of the ­people appeared especially

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urgent. In revolutionary France, George Sand was thinking at the same time about the new election system that was established ­after the king had abdicated, with universal (male) suffrage, and about the difficulty of conveying dialect in literary texts. On the eve of the April elections, fearing that the conservatives would come into power, she wrote that if the election results dissatisfied the p­ eople of Paris, this would be “a false national repre­sen­ta­tion.”74 As she thought about the po­liti­cal repre­sen­ta­tion of the electorate, she was also thinking about the written repre­sen­ta­tion of the vernacular. In Journal des Débats, serially from December 31, 1847, to early February 1848, she had published a novella, François the Foundling (François le Champi) about a transgressive love affair between a rural ­woman and the foundling whom she adopts. ­There she experimented with regionalisms. She discusses her strategy in the “avant-­propos” that took up the entirety of the first installment, which recounts a conversation with a friend about her frustration that rural folklore, though superior to highbrow art, cannot be translated into Paris French.75 “Rustic songs, stories, tales paint in a few words what our lit­er­a­ture knows only how to amplify and disguise.” The interlocutors conclude that in order to describe the countryside accurately, one would need to create a new language. “If I make the man of the fields speak as he speaks, we would need a translation for the civilized reader, and if I make him speak as we speak, I create an impossible being, who seems to have the kinds of ideas that he does not.”76 Sand’s own biography involves contact across class: her ­father was from an aristocratic ­family, while her maternal grand­father sold canaries and goldfinches on the street. Sand was raised by her paternal grand­mother, but remained conscious of her own lower-­class roots.77 She wrote three novels that experimented with rural language and reflected the experiences of her own rural childhood—­ The Dev­il’s Pool (1846), François the Foundling (1847–1848), and The ­Little Fadette (La Pe­tite Fadette) (1849)—­which she gathered ­under the title Eve­nings with the Hemp Beater (Les veillées du chanvreur). This refers to the pro­cess of refining hemp, which Sand herself remembered from her childhood at her grand­mother’s ­house in the province of Berry, when, she wrote, “what managed to trou­ble my mind was the eve­ning tales when the hemp beaters came to mill.”78 Hemp was one of the raw materials used for paper in the nineteenth c­ entury, and Sand’s descriptions of it function in a similar way to Turgenev’s descriptions of paper making. H ­ umans have cultivated hemp since the start of agriculture, harvesting a strong fi ber, unlikely to stretch, to make ropes, textiles, and paper. ­There are traces of hemp cultivation in the region around Lake Ladoga as early as the eighth ­century, suggesting that the heroes of the epic songs of the Rus­sian North could have been wearing clothing made from local hemp.79 The pro­cess of extracting usable fi bers from hemp plants by hand is ­labor intensive. In late



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summer, the plants are bound together and dampened; during this “retting” period, the surface of the stalks decays. They are dried, then broken to expose the fi bers, which are then passed through a series of increasingly fine combs to produce a thin thread f­ree of wooden bits, which can be made into paper or spun and woven into fabric. In France, and throughout Eurasia, hemp cultivation was profitable for farmers in the first half of the nineteenth ­century. ­Because it was pro­cessed only once a year, with special equipment, a hemp beater would visit farms in early autumn. In the appendix to The Dev­il’s Pool, Sand describes late-­ September eve­nings when the hemp beater and local laborers broke up the retted stalks. They used a wooden device that chopped up the plant without cutting the fi bers and made a distinctive sound: “that dry jerky sound of three quick blows. Then t­ here’s a silence; that’s when the hand is moving to pull the bunch of hemp back so that it can be beaten at another spot. And the three blows start again; that’s the other arm acting on the lever.” Dogs, hearing this unusual night-­ time sound, would howl.80 Meanwhile, the hemp beater told stories. In the preface to François the Foundling, Sand returns to night-­time storytelling and fi ber pro­cessing. She describes hearing a story from a hemp beater who told tales ­until 2:00 a.m. Her interlocutor urges her to retell it as though she had on her right a Pa­ri­sian speaking standard French and on her left “a peasant before whom you did not want to say a phrase, a word that he could not understand.” This task would be frustrating: “you have to speak clearly for the Pa­ri­sian, naively for the peasant. One ­will complain that you lack color, the other that you lack elegance.” The interlocutor, though, would understand her story as an experiment, “trying to find out how art that is still for every­one can enter into the mystery of primitive simplicity and communicate to the spirit that charm that is ubiquitous in nature.”81 With her image of the speaker, the Pa­ri­sian, the peasant, and her interlocutor together, Sand suggests that ­people who speak dif­fer­ent registers of a given language might be able to understand each other if they share physical space. She ties that resolution to night-­time, darkness, and the pro­cessing of hemp fi bers that could be used for clothing or paper (or recycled into paper ­after becoming fabric82). In the Eve­nings with the Hemp Beater novels, she reflects on the relationship between oral storytelling and writing, and between writers such as herself and nonwriters such as her own m ­ other, while relating writing itself to manual ­labor. Her descriptions recall the way mid-­ nineteenth-­century writers transcribed peasant words on rag paper.83 Turgenev knew Sand through the Viardots and admired her work.84 He wrote to Pauline in January 1848 with enthusiasm about François the Foundling. “Perhaps she mixes in a few too many peasant expressions: that makes the story seem affected from time to time. Art is not some kind of daguerreotype, and an expert as good as Mme Sand ­doesn’t need ­these whims of a slightly jaded

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artist. But you see clearly that she’s tired of ­those socialists, communists, Pierre Leroux and other phi­los­o­phers; that she . . . ​is diving delightedly into the Fountain of Youth of naïve down-­to-­earth art.”85 It is reductive to categorize Turgenev’s stories simply as statements about peasant oppression, and he saw Sand’s novel as a refreshing alternative to political-­philosophical discussions that addressed the difference between classes from a more abstract perspective. Even while he observed that she used too many peasant expressions for his taste, in his own fiction, he employed the same strategy. Sand justified her use of rural language with reference, not to new technologies such as the daguerreotype, which appeared to reproduce ­every detail of life, but to archaic ones such as hand-­processed hemp. Also writing in the late 1840s, Turgenev too created a narrator who performs listening across class lines in a scene characterized by physical co-­presence in darkness and the pro­cessing of fi ber. For both writers, archaic fi ber-­based industries—­ beating hemp and making paper by hand—­offer a script for a listening per­for­ mance that, it seems, integrates the literate person in the rural soundscape. At the end of chapter 1, I argued that the depictions of night-­time bell-­ ringing by Herzen in Rus­sia and Lippard in the United States demonstrate the similarities between ­these environments. Although the Rus­sia of the 1840s was vilified, or celebrated, as a bastion of silence, while the United States was equated with ­free speech, intellectuals in both places found that the ringing of bells—­a technology that was already becoming superannuated—­provided appealing language to express concerns about the gaps between social groups. In this chapter, the pro­cessing of fi bers that could be used for an old-­fashioned communication technology, hand-­made paper, provides ways for writers in Rus­sia and elsewhere to reflect on the linguistic difference between the literary language of the capital and rural dialects, and to imagine the creation of a mutually comprehensible register. The Rus­sian literary language is sometimes described as existing in a disembodied, abstract way, but the stories in Notes of a Hunter remind us that the repre­sen­ta­tion of peasant voice required paper, as well as ink, printing presses, and a postal system. Following Benjamin, media historians argue that the development of communication technologies is no smooth progression t­ oward ever better and fuller transmission, but rather a story of strange turns and unexpected outcomes; they draw attention to the ways in which media are embodied and what they convey is always partial. In describing rural p­ eople pro­cessing fi bers to make fabric or paper, and in situating the per­for­mance of story listening in the dark, Turgenev and Sand gesture t­ oward the impossibility of perfect communion, or perfect reproduction of other ­people’s words, as they describe the imperfect, textured products of rural industry.

C h a p te r   6

Dreaming

One method to distinguish oneself from other listeners is to claim that one has heard the truth, as mystics do, in one’s dreams. Pavel Rybnikov, a young folklore collector who had been exiled to Olonets province near the Arctic Circle, fell asleep outdoors one night in May 1860 by the edge of Lake Onega. He awoke to hear someone singing what he recognized as the bylina of Sadko the merchant, the tale of a musician who plays his stringed gusli by the edge of a northern Rus­sian lake and is rewarded by the Sea King who emerges from the ­water. The byliny (the singers called them stariny, literally “old t­ hings”) are medieval heroic songs that Rus­sians believed had died out by the end of the eigh­teenth c­ entury, though in fact, they w ­ ere preserved among the Old Believers. Rybnikov jumped up and asked the singer, Leontii Bogdanovich, to repeat his song. Rybnikov wrote the words down in his notebook, then found other skaziteli (epic singers) and other songs; in the next few years, he published over 200 byliny and won the prestigious Demidov Prize in philology. Rybnikov’s story frames his hearing of Bogdanovich singing the song of Sadko through his sleep as a miraculous discovery of the still-­living voice of the Rus­ sian ­people of the past; it exemplifies “hypnogogic” listening, when p­ eople hear what seems to be an otherworldly message in their sleep. This story, though, is incomplete. Rybnikov had actually encountered the byliny and begun to publish them months before he fell asleep that night by the lake. Through his interactions with other folklorists, he learned how to 147

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narrate his experience of listening to make it a good story that allowed him to take on some of the heroism of the bylina characters. In this chapter, I first tell the story of Rybnikov and the development of his story of listening. Then, drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s idea of the contrast between the traditional and the organic intellectual, I relate his account of night-­time eavesdropping to his work as a government bureaucrat during his time in exile. The third part of the chapter describes the rise of the concept of hypnogogic perception in other countries in the midcentury. Epic singers in other times and places, as they compete for attention with other performers, claim some of the status of the heroes whose stories they relay. I show that when Rybnikov told his story about hearing Sadko, who heard messages in his dreams, he claimed to be a hero of a similar kind: his encounter with the byliny was not the impersonal conveying of a tradition but a per­for­mance as creative and distinctive as ­those of Sadko and Leontii Bogdanovich.

Awoken by Strange Sounds Rybnikov was a twenty-­eight-­year-­old Muscovite from a ­family of merchants who had once been Old Believers. A de­cade ­earlier, he had graduated with a silver medal from a gymnasium where he stood out for his mastery of En­ glish, French, German, Greek, and other languages. He tutored other students, since his ­father had died when he was young and his ­mother needed the money. ­After his graduation, two wealthier Rus­sian men hired him as a translator to accompany them during four years of travel in Eu­rope. Rybnikov returned and enrolled in 1854 in the philology department at Moscow University; t­ here his teachers admired his translations from Latin and his essays about Rus­sian lit­ er­a­ture. Rybnikov studied languages and lit­er­a­tures in university, but in his ­free time, he read po­liti­cal philosophy. In his rented room, he hosted the meetings of a group called Vertep (den or dive), where p­ eople discussed Ludwig Feuerbach’s and Ernest Renan’s materialist reinterpretations of Chris­tian­ity and Herzen’s London publications. Attendees included Khomiakov, who was several de­cades older than most of the ­others and did not share all their views, but enjoyed their com­pany. In or before May 1858, a w ­ oman who knew the cousin of one of the Vertep members sent the police an anonymous denunciation in French warning that the group was a dangerous “secret society” intending to create a republic in Rus­sia. The head of the police, Prince V. A. Dolgorukov, reported the situation to Moscow Governor-­General Zakrevsky, asserting that the society had the support of wealthy Old Believers, and Rybnikov and other Vertepniks ­were put ­under police surveillance.1 The affair was linked to the

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status of Old Belief in the last years of the reign of Nicholas I, when the minister of internal affairs, Dmitry Bibikov, oversaw a range of new mea­sures to suppress it, b­ ecause it appeared especially threatening at a time when intellectuals valorized national unity as they anticipated the end of serfdom.2 Rybnikov graduated from university in 1858, and that winter he went south, to the Chernigov region, to work as a journalist for Vestnik Promyshlennosti (Herald of Industry) and to collect folksongs.3 His in­for­mants included Old Believers, who had historically responded to the government’s persecution by moving to the empire’s borderlands. Even as Rybnikov listened to the Chernigov Old Believers and transcribed their songs, other ­people ­were listening to him suspiciously and remembering his words, ready to take them down so they could tell the police. The police had put a tail on him, who filed reports that allowed Zakrevsky’s office to note on January 21 that Rybnikov had met local sectarians and convinced them that, with his beard, long peasant-­ style jacket, and red silk shirt, he was an Old Believer himself, from the priestless Pomortsy sect.4 Rybnikov was arrested February 12, 1859, in Petersburg, and hearing of his arrest, his hostess burned his papers.5 The authorities de­ cided to send him to the far north.6 To explain this decision, they cited his discussions with Chernigov Old Believers and his hosting of student meetings in Moscow, which had “prompted suspicion due to the conversations that their participants carried out.”7 In early March, he was deposited in Petrozavodsk, in the Olonets region, some 300 miles from the Arctic Circle; ironically, he had been placed in another location in the periphery of the empire to which Old Believers had fled.8 News moved quickly through Rybnikov’s circles, reached London, and on September 1, 1859, Herzen published in Kolokol the rumor that Rybnikov had been punished for dressing like a peasant. In exile, Rybnikov continued to listen to and rec­ord other ­people’s words. He published a collection of proverbs based on his work in Chernigov in 1859, citing Haxthausen.9 Dangerous radical or not, as a literate man, he was still useful to the state, and he knew it. He wrote to the Olonets provincial government in May asking for a position, and by June he was employed in the chancellery of the local governor; in November, as a clerk for the provincial statistical committee, he was assigned the rank of a Collegiate Secretary.10 He received regular promotions, which ­were recorded in the local newspaper, Olonetskie Gubernskie vedomosti (Olonets Provincial News). In 1866, he would be transferred to Kalisz, in the Congress Kingdom of Poland, as a vice governor.11 The editors of the local paper ­were happy about Rybnikov’s arrival in Petrozavodsk. This weekly newspaper, like ­others throughout Rus­sia’s provinces, had been authorized by a government statute in 1837. In order to improve the transmission of information from the central government to the provinces and

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back, to strengthen the economy, and to educate the population, the administration of Nicholas I had instructed provincial administrators to print regular newspapers, make them available at an accessible price, and send them to other provinces and to the center. The provinces responded as ordered: while ­there ­were only three provincial Rus­sian newspapers in 1831, forty-­six ­were published in 1838.12 ­These newspapers all had an official section, with information relating to bureaucratic ­matters, and an unofficial section, with articles about local events and ­people. While only a minority of each province’s inhabitants read t­ hese newspapers, they offered recognition to local writers—­ who could include ­people exiled for po­liti­cal reasons, such as Rybnikov and, ­earlier, Herzen—­and they fostered a sense of regional identity. They demonstrated and reflected the suffusion of the paper-­mediated word in the provinces well beyond their readers. For instance, the 1864 issues of the Olonets newspaper featured notices about the loss of documents ranging from passports and tickets to entire books, discussion of peasant literacy and the opening of schools and libraries, and an article noting that the post office was now pro­cessing twice as many items as it had thirty years ­earlier.13 The byliny sung by rural ­people interested some Petrozavodsk intellectuals and offered perfect content for the newspaper, whose editors had been interested in folklore since its founding.14 One of their first collectors was the poet Alexander Balasoglo, who had been punished in 1849 for taking part in the Petrashevsky discussion circle in St. Petersburg (along with Dostoevsky); he was exiled and became a civil servant in Petrozavodsk, but had a psychological breakdown and was hospitalized and then sent south. A Petrozavodsk schoolteacher, Fedor Doze, preserved Bolasoglo’s manuscripts, published some of them, and inspired his students to collect local folklore.15 Other Petrozavodsk intellectuals, including N. F. Butenev, the head of a mining plant in Olonets, sought out and recorded the skaziteli. In Petrozavodsk, as he wrote to Ivan Aksakov, Rybnikov met Butenev and other byliny collectors and read their transcriptions.16 Perhaps his experience publishing the Chernigov proverbs inspired him to print the songs. Butenev gave Rybnikov copies of t­ hose he had recorded, and Rybnikov published them, along with ­those of four other local ­people, in Olonetskie Gubernskie Vedomosti, over several months in 1859 and early 1860.17 Alexander Ivanov, a self-­educated local ethnographer who was the editor of the unofficial section of the newspaper, demonstrated the value of Rybnikov’s efforts for regional pride in a notice he published on 2 April 1860, about a year ­after Rybnikov had arrived in Petrozavodsk.18 “With heartfelt delight we hasten to inform our readers that the monuments of folk poetry collected in our area by P. N. R-­v that we have been printing in the last year have attracted the special attention of research-

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ers into Rus­sian narodnost’.” T ­ hese texts demonstrate that such “creations of the fantasy of the folk” had survived in a more complete form in Olonets province than elsewhere, and once published, he predicted the collection would “occupy a vis­i­ble position in our scholarly lit­er­a­ture.” The notice concluded with an appeal to readers to send in their own collected folksongs (but not stories or poems of their own composition).19 This note frames the listening of Rybnikov (slightly anonymized as R-­v) omnivorously, as part of a collective effort. In asking readers to contribute their collections, the editor suggested that any literate person could adequately rec­ord (though not produce) folklore. What was distinctive about Rybnikov’s work, apparently, was not his access to the folk but the scale of his efforts. Rybnikov already knew that some ­people ­were still singing byliny, and he tried to find them, at first unsuccessfully, so that he could implement the proj­ect that Ivanov had laid out.20 From 1860 to 1865, he collected over 200 byliny from about 38 singers, mostly men but also some ­women, 30 of whom he recorded himself.21 As an official statistics gatherer, Rybnikov fi­nally found an occasion to travel around the countryside and listen to locals in May 1860, when he heard Leontii Bogdanovich sing the bylina of Sadko the merchant. With the help of vari­ous co-­editors, Rybnikov would publish the Olonets province byliny in a four-­volume edition from 1861 to 1867.22 The first volume, co-­edited by the Moscow folklorist Petr Bessonov, came out in 1861 at a Moscow press. It was dedicated to the Moscow Society of Lovers of Rus­sian Verbal Art (Obshchestvo liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti) in memory of Aleksei Khomiakov, and began with a note by Khomiakov’s son and Bessonov about how much Khomiakov had appreciated Rybnikov. The collection was or­ga­nized by song topic, including four versions of the Sadko song.23 Rybnikov’s was the first edition of byliny to systematically identify the tellers, by name when pos­si­ble and at least by place. The stakes of the first volume w ­ ere high: if the epic songs w ­ ere still sung in the far north, this indicated that Rus­sia could boast a living epic tradition, making it the kind of world-­historical nation that Romantic thinkers celebrated. ­Because the notion of a national epic was so appealing, writers sometimes constructed them. Thus while Ossian, a 1760 cycle of epic poems that the Scottish writer James Macpherson claimed to have collected in Gaelic and translated himself, was popu­lar, its authenticity was increasingly disputed in the nineteenth c­ entury. Scholars w ­ ere more willing to accept the validity of another epic associated with Olonets province: the Kalevala, which the Finnish doctor and folklorist Elias Lönnrot had sewn together from shorter Finnish heroic songs, feeling that he was restoring a lost unity to the text. Rybnikov’s first volume, then, was greeted with mixed excitement and skepticism by Rus­sian philologists such as Izmail Sreznevsky, the dean of the

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Historical-­Philological School of St. Petersburg University, a scholar whose own ­career exemplifies larger shifts in the ways Rus­sian folklorists thought about listening to the folk from the 1830s to the 1870s. From 1833 to 1838, Sreznevsky had published Zaporozhian Antiquity (Zaporozhskaia starina), a six-­ volume compilation of Ukrainian historic songs, purportedly transcribed from folk singers, with commentary that together constituted a narrative of Ukrainian history. The collection was initially praised, but readers eventually noticed that the author had in­ven­ted some of it and that his grasp of Ukrainian was shaky. In the l­ater 1850s, Sreznevsky’s students, such as the Ukrainian folklorist Mykola Kostomarov, critiqued him for falsifying his sources.24 As he moved into an academic ­career, he grew anxious about excluding fabrications from the canon and became embarrassed about his own early publication.25 Having seen Rybnikov’s volume, Sreznevsky wrote to two p­ eople in Petrozavodsk who seemed trustworthy to inquire ­whether they found Rybnikov and his finds legitimate. D. V. Polenov, a corresponding member of the Acad­ emy of Sciences, told Sreznevsky that Rybnikov had gotten better results than other collectors b­ ecause he was “of purely Rus­sian origin” (presumably unlike Balasoglo and Doze, with their non-­Slavic last names). Rybnikov, said Polenov, knew byliny himself from childhood, he traveled by boat instead of on the post road, and he used what is now called the “snowball” method of asking in­for­mants to refer other in­for­mants; ­these techniques helped him win the trust of the skaziteli. And V. I. Modestov, a high school teacher, told Sreznevsky that Rybnikov’s collection demonstrated its authenticity through the “freshness of the folk language and the precision of the maintenance of the smallest local variations of byliny in language and content.” He testified that he had observed Rybnikov transcribing texts himself. Visiting his apartment, he heard Koz’ma Romanov, a ninety-­year-­old who had been blind from birth, singing a bylina. Rybnikov had already recorded his per­for­mance of that bylina, so he followed along in his notebook and checked it against Romanov’s words, and looking over his shoulder, Modestov could see that the transcription was accurate. The experience moved him: “The singing old man was ­really extremely in­ter­est­ing. The voice (the tune), unlike anything I had ever heard, the old man’s living faith in each word of his song so refreshed my soul that it was a pity to leave such bliss.” At some times, Modestov noted, Romanov hesitated and Rybnikov prompted him; at ­others, Romanov felt his listeners needed more information, and supplied it. Sreznevsky concluded from his research that Rybnikov could be trusted.26 Sreznevsky also wrote to Rybnikov himself with questions and suggestions, and Rybnikov responded eagerly. Although his own delicate situation as an exile u ­ nder surveillance may have made him careful in quizzing his interlocu-

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tors for details about their lives, he told Sreznevsky that he was trying to gather information about the singers and what the genre meant to them.27 He explained his relative success in convincing rural ­people to sing for him by relating an encounter with a singer who had told another collector that he knew nothing. Rybnikov asked him what “starina” he could sing, and the singer said, “I know just a ­little . . . ​I sing mostly verses.” Rybnikov asked, “So you ­don’t know Dobryniushka or Mikhail Potyka son of Ivanovich. That starina begins like this . . .” The singer said, “No, I ­don’t remember ­those, better than that I’ll start the one about ‘Vasilii Ignatevich.’ ” He started and Rybnikov sang along.28 In stressing his ability to sing along with his interlocutors, Rybnikov insisted that he was an effective listener to the singers b­ ecause he was able to convey how much he was like them, in spite of his government position and formal education. The claim anticipates Bourdieu’s assertion that identification with one’s interlocutors makes one a better ethnographic listener. Rybnikov told Sreznevsky that he was writing an account of his ethnographic work, which he would publish with the next volume of his collection. Indeed, the third volume, edited by Rybnikov himself in Petrozavodsk with local funding, had a “Notice” (Zametka) where he described his own pro­cess of collection in the spirit of Bourdieu.29 Verbal communication, he indicated, requires the right kind of transportation. B ­ ecause he left the post road, the route associated with Rus­sian ethnography for centuries, and traveled by village roads and on the ­water, he could see more of the peasants’ daily life and be freed from “officialness (ofitsial’nost’).” He explained: “We know how hard it is for a barin, especially an official, to get accurate information from the folk. His rank, his travel papers, and his w ­ hole means of travel create no trust. The peasant suspects that the official has some kind of issue ‘touching on’ him (kasatel’noe), and even if he has nothing ‘touching on’ him, the official’s person, his ideas, his habits make him foreign.” Rybnikov reflected on what it meant to wear peasant clothes, as Pushkin had done at the fair, but he insisted that was not just some kind of masquerade-­like per­for­mance. “Of course dressing up and imitation ­won’t help. But it makes sense to wear Rus­sian clothes, and that helps us understand the Rus­sian peasant way of life.” The real issue was not clothes, but empathy. “You need to re­spect the religious beliefs of the folk, the peculiarities of their way of life, the hard work of the farmer, the worker and the craftsman, and to abandon your intellectual prejudices and gentry manners. Then the peasant w ­ ill accept even a person with a university degree as his ­brother, and ­will happily tell him what­ever is needed.”30 Having donned his peasant clothing and left the post road, Rybnikov traveled by boat twelve versts (a l­ittle over twelve kilo­meters) from Petrozavodsk on the Onega to Cape Shuinavolok. T ­ here he lay down on a sack near a campfire

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and fell asleep. “I was awoken,” he wrote, “by strange sounds. I had heard many songs and sacred verses, but I had never heard this melody. It was lively, capricious, and cheerful, now faster, now breaking off. The tune sounded old-­ fashioned, forgotten by our generation. For a long time, I did not want to wake up and listen to the separate words of the song, so pleas­ur­able it was to be ­under the power of this entirely new impression.” Rybnikov looked up and saw the grey-­haired, white-­bearded singer, squatting by the fire, turning from one listener to another and sometimes laughing. He began another song, and Rybnikov realized that it was the bylina about Sadko the merchant. He jumped up, urged the singer to repeat his song, and wrote it down. He asked if he could sing ­others, and the singer, Leontii Bogdanovich from the village of Seredka in Kizhi volost’, promised to do so.31 Rybnikov submitted his volumes for the Demidov Prize, a prestigious honor that came with a substantial monetary award.32 When he was awarded the prize, he wrote to tell Sreznevsky of his delight.33 In the official citation for the award, Sreznevsky wrote that he found the “Notice” in the third volume especially in­ter­est­ing; he also praised the quantity of byliny published, the consistency and reliability of transcription, the effort it required for Rybnikov to find his in­for­mants, and his use and explanation of regionalisms. Not surprisingly, he especially liked the ele­ments of the “Notice” that he had encouraged Rybnikov to include, with its “very curious data, thus far unique, about the ­people who sing the byliny, the transmission of the byliny from one generation to another, the p­ eople’s sense of connection with the byliny, the places where the byliny are more prevalent and so on.”34 His praise—­and Rybnikov’s ability to publish this Old Believer lore—­testifies to the liberalization of censorship in the early 1860s, when, as we saw, Dahl could fi­nally print his sayings; it was also in 1862 that the autobiography of Archpriest Avvakum, a founder of Old Belief, could be published. The publication of the Olonets province byliny did not end with Rybnikov’s 1861–1867 edition. Another folklorist, Alexander Gil’ferding, retraced Rybnikov’s steps in the summers of 1871 and 1872 and heard many of the same singers he had. Gil’ferding died of typhoid during his second summer of collection, but the texts he collected w ­ ere published in 1873 by the Acad­emy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, categorized by singer. In 1909–1910, Aleksei Gruzinsky reedited and published Rybnikov’s collection, removing Bessonov’s hundreds of pages of explanatory notes and reor­ga­niz­ing the collection according to singer. More folklorists traveled to the Onega region to rec­ord byliny in the twentieth ­century, and new editions of Rybnikov’s byliny came out, putting the “Notice” at the start and thus introducing the collection with the tale of the listening folklorist.35 The real­ity of Rybnikov’s collaboration with multiple

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other collectors, the general awareness of the byliny in Petrozavodsk, the local transcribers whose work went into the volumes—­all of that was effaced, and what remained was the image of the collector on the lake shore at night, hearing the song of Sadko through his dream.

Organic Intellectual, Virtuosic Recorder Rybnikov was in a paradoxical situation. Arrested for be­hav­ior that included collecting proverbs from Old Believers, he was exiled to the far north, where he served the government that had punished him. His duties extended to his trip to collect songs from more rural Old Believers. He could be dismissed as claiming to want to help rural p­ eople but in fact only helping the government control and persecute them, which would echo the critique that Pypin made of Dahl and his generation of folklorists as government spies. In the “Notice” that he wrote with Sreznevsky’s encouragement, though, Rybnikov tries to forestall such critiques and demonstrate that his listening was not suspicious but omnivorous and that he heard the peasants not, or not only, as a bureaucrat, but also as their ally. Rybnikov himself prob­ably felt uncomfortable about his ambiguous, though not unusual, position as both an exile and an official. His 1859 collection had included antigovernment proverbs. He wrote ­there, “What has now attracted such strong general attention, the authorities’ self-­interest and arbitrariness, has always threatened the lower class, and of course it had to threaten them, given the rule that ‘the p­ eople’s neck is thick, it can bear anything’ (мирская шея толста, все вынесет), and in fact it could bear it.”36 As a provincial official, he would eventually be assigned the duty of listening to reports from the chief of police about the local exiles, including, absurdly, himself.37 He hints in his letters at his strug­gles with his own position and his sympathy with the peasants. At the end of 1859, he wrote of the poverty he saw in the smoke-­filled huts of peasants who labored in the cold and ate bread made with sand. “­Today he paid his taxes and tomorrow he turns in his son or b­ rother to the draft, the next day he has to answer before a judge for cutting wood for heating. Before him lies eternal bowing down to the power­f ul and perhaps prison for crossing himself the old way and saying ‘Esus’ (Isus) instead of ‘Jesus’ (Iisus).”38 The recent persecution of Old Believers must have intensified Rybnikov’s own sense of connection to, and sympathy with, the locals. He told Bessonov he was glad that his bureaucratic assignment to pro­cess requests gave him the opportunity to help local ­people. “I was repaid a hundredfold for my work when I heard peasants trustingly telling me their needs and grievances.

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If I c­ ouldn’t always satisfy the petitioners right away, or at all, at least I could calm them down or show them another path, or convince them to abandon the case and agree to a peaceful settlement.”39 In voicing his sympathies with the Old Believers and his complaints about the abuses suffered by local p­ eople, Rybnikov expresses a dif­fer­ent sense of his own position than Dahl had. Dahl was ner­vous about how his writing exposed him to the danger of arrest or exile, as when he wrote to Pogodin, hinting at the exile of Nadezhdin for publishing Chaadaev’s letter. “­Don’t you know that ­there is no information that you could publish without being afraid—­how can I explain—­you’ve heard about Ust’-­Sysol’sk?”40 But as Pypin noted, Dahl did not seem concerned about the punishment his work might incur for the ­people he studied; he expressed no concerns about filing damning reports about Jews or sectarians. In contrast, Rybnikov suggests that the system that employed him was wrong in its dealings with ­these rural ­people—­and that by freeing himself from ofitsial’nost’, he might not only pass among the peasants but also be a kinder listener than the p­ eople who had turned him in. To understand Rybnikov’s sensitivity to the politics of listening, we can draw on the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between “traditional” and “organic” intellectuals. On the one hand, he describes traditional intellectuals, whom he identified with the Catholic clergy, who, he asserts, believe themselves to be in­de­pen­dent of the state but in fact work to make the cultural hegemony that supports the elites currently in power appear natu­ral. On the other, he defines organic intellectuals who work for social change. “One of the most impor­tant characteristics of any group that is developing ­towards dominance is its strug­gle to assimilate and to conquer ‘ideologically’ the traditional intellectuals, but this assimilation and conquest is made quicker and more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds in si­mul­ta­neously elaborating its own organic intellectuals.” Gramsci knew that intellectuals function differently in dif­fer­ent times and places and believed the distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals might be less sharp in Rus­sia than elsewhere.41 Gramsci’s distinction is difficult to apply in practice, since individuals, when you look at them closely, often combine attributes of the traditional and the organic intellectual.42 Gramsci might have accounted for this prob­lem with his assertion that the organic intellectuals inevitably recruit the traditional ones to their side.43 Even without fully agreeing that ­people can be divided into ­these categories, or sharing Gramsci’s confidence that history is progressing ­toward revolution (and that this is a good ­thing), we can use his terminology to understand Rybnikov’s situation. When he dressed as a peasant, left the coach road, and reminded his interlocutors of his f­ amily’s Old Believer background,

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Rybnikov linked himself with the “­people” instead of with the official sphere that paid his salary, and thereby defined himself as an organic rather than a traditional intellectual, a more appealing figure. With the success of his “Notice,” where he seemed to fi­nally attain unmediated aural access to the skaziteli while sleeping by the lake, he demonstrated that the per­for­mance of certain modes of listening might itself exercise a “power of attraction” over other Rus­ sian intellectuals. At the same time, Rybnikov was, in fact, listening as a civil servant, with the same instincts t­ oward text as t­ hose who worked for the system that had arrested and exiled him. His impulse to publish all the byliny, with a thoroughness that recalls the omnivorous approach of the Rus­sian Geo­g raph­i­cal Society, reflects the mid-­nineteenth-­century textuality of verbatim, the urge to transform all sound into written evidence. Rybnikov used paper and writing to rec­ord as completely as pos­si­ble. In an article in the local newspaper, he drew attention to paper as a material t­ hing when he compared the consumption of paper playing cards in Olonets to the number of subscriptions to journals, suggesting that his own information-­oriented use of paper was preferable to ­others’ purely entertainment-­oriented use of it.44 He presented himself as a completely reliable producer of accurate transcriptions of byliny, as opposed to the p­ eople he had hired: “I gave a lot of money to seminary students and volost’ clerks and rural scribes and from them I get ­little, or garbage. Another scribe just swindled me and sent six stariny that he copied word for word from Kirsha Danilov. In general you can rely only on what you transcribed yourself or what was transcribed before your eyes.”45 This kind of awareness of the limitation of transcription fostered mid-­ nineteenth-­century p­ eople’s desires for ever more perfect systems for shorthand and phonetic writing, which, as Gitelman explains, peddled the fantasy “of navigating a course between the legible repre­sen­ta­tion of aural experience and some more perfect, legible reproduction of the same ­thing.”46 But “total notation,” as Dennis Tedlock observes, is a “purely hy­po­thet­ic­ al goal.”47 Ethnographers, like oral historians, court reporters, linguists, and o ­ thers who transcribe oral language, use conventions to transform the sounds speakers produce into a document that can be used for the purposes at hand.48 By following spelling rules and by transcribing in ways that do not account for shifts in volume, pitch, rhythm, or timbre, they all represent oral language incompletely. Similarly incomplete are sound recording, which goes some degree to capturing volume, pitch, rhythm, and timbre, but not gesture, and video recording, which reduces dimensionality and elides information about context. Furthermore, what looks like good transcription to some p­ eople might look like poor taste to ­others, as demonstrated by Belinsky’s objection to Turgenev’s

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zelenia and Ivan Aksakov’s criticism of Turgenev, Grigorovich, and Dahl for too accurately reproducing rural vernaculars in their writing. Not surprisingly, then, in spite of his confidence that he was better than other bylina collectors, Rybnikov did not transcribe accurately e­ ither. Examination of his archive shows that on paper, he would write down just the beginnings of lines, mechanically indicate the repetitions of entire sections instead of noting variation, abbreviate words, ignore the sound cues indicating the ends of lines, systematically leave out certain ele­ments (the introduction of direct speech, direct appeals to the hero), and sometimes resort to plot summary; he would then re­create a bylina on his own from this rough draft. L ­ ater bylina collectors who followed him to the far north developed other methods, including assigning one student to rec­ord the beginning and one the end of each line, or one the beginning, one the m ­ iddle, and one the end. They disagreed with Rybnikov, and with each other, on ­whether it is better to rec­ord just one telling of a bylina or multiple tellings by an individual skazitel’, to try to transcribe ­every sound phonetically or to privilege comprehensibility. They eventually used gramophones, and then cassette tape recorders, but the goal of complete accuracy and immersiveness through new and better technologies or techniques kept retreating.49 If the fantasy of perfect transcription is that it allows a person to reproduce an aural experience bodily, though, then Rybnikov might in fact have been closer to it than o ­ thers. Even from his imperfect notes, he constructed persuasive versions of the byliny. His sketchy archival notes suggest paper and pencil ­were not his only tools; rather, we could assume that he—­a language prodigy—­used them as an aide-­mémoire for his own work as a bodily storage and reproduction device. If it is true, as he apparently told his Petrozavodsk friends, that he had learned to recite heroic songs in childhood, then he knew how to absorb the byliny, and when he set out to produce a final copy from one of his archival rough drafts, he generated the text for the occasion as a skazitel’ would. His depiction of his own listening valorizes not accurate reproduction but rather the ability to perform convincingly when needed; like Grigorovich and Dostoevsky, he was a skilled oral performer. The valorization of writers’ oral per­for­mance in his world draws attention to the seemingly unmediated or bodily reproduction of sound, rather than exclusively to mediation on paper. What Rybnikov peddles, then, to use Gitelman’s term, is his own virtuosic ability to listen and reproduce a sonic art form. He draws attention to himself as an especially native vehicle for ­others’ singing. In a sense, Rybnikov anticipates Bakhtin’s notion of the speech act that occurs only in dialogue. Although his published collection of byliny pre­sents the texts in an isolated, entextualized form, his “Notice” asserts that each was generated

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as part of a conversational interchange between similarly dressed and located interlocutors, each able to repeat the other’s words. Like the preface to George Sand’s François le champi, it highlights co-­presence. If the goal, as Gitelman argues, is not just repre­sen­ta­tion but “a more perfect, legible reproduction” of the bylina, then Rybnikov’s insistence on his full access to each song’s context and his own ability to recite promises a transcription that is especially immersive and complete. When he described his own ability to reproduce the byliny, as when he emphasized his sympathy for the peasants, Rybnikov made himself appear to be a person connected to the skaziteli, what Gramsci would call an organic intellectual, someone who was as sympathetic and in-­place as Bourdieu felt that effective ethnographic listeners should be.

Sadko, the Rich Merchant Although Rybnikov’s listening was omnivorous, he depicted it as hypnogogic. In constructing both his subject and himself as a listener, he claims that he listened to Bogdanovich for the first time at night, with his eyes closed. ­Earlier in this book, I discussed other such moments of acousmatic listening, when Herzen and Lippard depict the metallic sound of a gunshot or a bell in the night, and when Turgenev’s hunter hears boys tell spooky stories around a campfire. H ­ ere as elsewhere, that kind of eavesdropping makes p­ eople feel that the bound­aries between themselves and the person who generated the sound have dis­appeared. Michel Chion writes that the cinematic experience of hearing a sound whose source we cannot see makes us feel in our own body the vibration of the body of the other.50 Such unseen voices can function as omniscient narrators who set the scene, as terrifying threats in horror films, or as indications that the ordinary bound­aries separating one person’s psyche from another’s have broken down; invisibility gives them power. In using such invisible voices, film makers draw on the power of the acousmatic; Rybnikov did the same t­ hing. This kind of experience, when ordinary bound­aries vanish, interested intellectuals of Rybnikov’s era. While Herzen, Lippard, and Turgenev depict listening in the dark by a person who is awake, Rybnikov insists that he heard, at first, in his sleep. In linking his ethnographic listening to his own state between sleep and waking, he participated in a mid-­nineteenth-­century literary conversation about such privileged perception. Edgar Allan Poe, writing in 1846, drew attention to the beauty and fascination of what he called ­these “shadows of shadows,” perceptions that come to p­ eople on the edge of sleep. They “arise in the soul (alas, how rarely!) . . . ​and at t­ hose mere points of time

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where the confines of the waking world blend with ­those of the world of dreams. I am aware of t­ hese ‘fancies’ only when I am upon the very brink of sleep.”51 In German ­these images are Halbschlaf bilder (half-­sleep-­pictures).52 In 1848, the French scholar Alfred Maury (who influenced Freud) named them “hypnogogic hallucinations.” I adopt Maury’s term for the listening genre that Rybnikov performed in his “Notice.” Maury’s description of hypnogogic hallucinations references an ethnographic encounter with Rus­sia. He described images appearing before his eyes repeatedly in the early stages of sleep, as he wakes up and then goes back to sleep. One such episode occurred as he read The Steppes of the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus, the Crimea, and Southern Rus­sia (Les Steppes de la mer Caspienne, le Caucase, la Crimée et la Russie méridionale), which had just been published by a French husband and wife, Xavier and Adèle Hommaire de Hell. He finished a paragraph and closed his eyes. “Right away, passing before my eyes fast as lightning, came the image of a man in a brown robe and cowl, like a monk from Zurbarán’s paintings. That image reminded me that I had closed my eyes and ­stopped reading. I immediately opened my eyes and began to read again. The interruption was so short that the person I was reading to did not notice it.”53 Maury’s choice of that book to illustrate hypnogogic hallucinations links a tenuous, dreamlike listening to Rus­sia’s provinces; it participates in the transnational conversation about Rus­sia’s distinctive soundscape. The specific bylina that Rybnikov hears tells the story of a hero much like himself, who also begins his story with an unexpected encounter at the edge of a northern lake. The song that Leontii Bogdanovich sang belonged to a category of byliny set in Rus­sia’s watery north, the Novgorod cycle, which dates to the thirteenth and ­fourteenth centuries. The longer versions of the epic begin with Sadko, not yet a rich merchant but only a poor musician, frustrated that he has not been invited to a feast. He plays his gusli, a string instrument, on the shores of Lake Il’men’, the w ­ aters rise, and the Sea King—­who had been listening unseen—­emerges and thanks Sadko for his m ­ usic by arranging for him to trick his rich neighbors. On the Sea King’s instructions, Sadko offers the Novgorod merchants a wager, betting that he w ­ ill cast a net into the Il’men and pull out a golden-­finned fish. Three merchants take him up on it, Sadko catches fish with gold fins, and he acquires their wealth. Then the merchants challenge Sadko to buy up all the goods in Novgorod, and three days in a row, he sends his men to buy every­thing they can find, but each night more goods arrive. Sadko admits that he cannot stop the flow of goods into the city and becomes a rich trader. He forgets about the Sea King ­until his ship is becalmed on the sea. Understanding that the ocean is demanding a ­human sacrifice, Sadko has his men cast lots, and it becomes clear that he is the desired sacrifice, so, hold-

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ing his gusli, he is cast into the waves. T ­ here the Sea King chides him for his lack of tribute and ­orders him to perform. Sadko plays, the Sea King dances, and deadly storms arise. Sadko is informed of the storms in a dream, which instructs him to break his strings and fall ­silent. The Sea King offers to give him a wife, and, again following the dream’s instructions, Sadko lets the first three hundred maidens offered to him pass by and selects Chernava. He goes to sleep on his wedding night without having sex with her, and when he awakens, he is on the bank of the river Chernava, near Novgorod; he returns to his wife, his ships come home, and he decides (wisely) to stop traveling. Leontii Bogdanovich’s version of the Sadko bylina begins with a dark night’s sleep and then the three days of trying to buy all the goods in Novgorod: ­ here lived Sadko the T   merchant, the rich trader, He lay down to sleep on a   dark night, He got up in the morning   early-­early; He said to his warriors, his   brave ones, “Oh you, brave warriors! Take countless gold coins And buy all the goods in  Novgorod ­Don’t leave goods for a single  coin.” And his warriors ­were  obedient, They took countless gold  coins, They bought all the goods in  Novgorod.

Ай жил Садкó-­купец, богатый гость. Лег он спать на темную ночь, Выставал поутру раным-­рано, Говорил к дружине ко хороброей: «Ай же ты, дружинушка хоробрая! Берите-­ка бессчетной золотой казны И выкупите весь товар в Нове-­граде, Не оставьте товару ни на денежку». А дружина его была послушлива, Брала бессчетной золотой казны, Выкупала весь товар в Нове-­граде.

Bogdanovich continued the song through the two days of buying goods, Sadko’s summons from the ship to the Sea King, the per­for­mance, and the dream. He ended with the Sea King returning Sadko to his ship and Sadko g­ oing home, where his wife tells him he should stop traveling.54 Rybnikov’s story about hearing Leontii Bogdanovich, like the bylina about Sadko the rich merchant, shows that at some moments, sound has the ability to cross barriers and magic results. Sadko’s gusli-­playing on the edge of an enormous lake summons the Sea King, helps him deceive the rich merchants

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of Novgorod, brings him wealth, and threatens the world with destruction, ­until he learns in his sleep how to go home. Rybnikov’s story too involves enchanting sounds heard on the edge of a northern lake, unexpected night-­time encounters, travel, deception, and the protagonist’s shift in social status. Like Sadko, Rybnikov is willing to leave the comfort of his ordinary society. His story too plays out ­under the unnerving half-­light of the summer white nights for which the Rus­sian north is famous, when the bound­aries between the real and the i­ magined, the waking and dreaming worlds, feel especially permeable. Like Sadko, Rybnikov is both a story teller and a story listener, and he too is rewarded. The Sadko story inspired Rus­sian folklore scholars to produce a range of interpretations. Some believed that surviving texts such as the byliny ­were evidence of ancient myths common across many h ­ uman cultures about interactions between the gods of the sun, the moon, or the thunder. Sreznevsky wrote “On the Ancient Slavs’ Worship of the Sun,” and an impor­tant example of this “mythological school” is Afanas’ev’s Poetic Views of the Slavs about Nature (Poeticheskie vozzreniia slavian na prirodu). Rybnikov too began his time in Petrozavodsk seeking traces of the pre-­Christian past. He told Konstantin Aksakov that under­lying the stories he was collecting ­were ­human interactions with nature, and that Rus­sian folklore contained the same patterns as German or Indian legends.55 ­Later folklorists cared less about patterns that linked legends across time and space, and more about why a given story was told in a given place. Alexander Veselovsky argued that literary genres grow from rituals and folk games and that the sources of Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture came from Byzantium. He applied this approach to Sadko, pointing out that the hero who throws himself into the sea recalls the biblical Jonah and that the name “Sadko” may have come from the Hebrew “Tsadok” (“righ­teous”; Bessonov agreed). Veselovsky saw the bylina as a combination of a story about the building of a Novgorod church and a ­Middle Eastern story about a Jonah figure; he explained the tale’s appearance in the far north as a consequence of the Jewish and Judaizing presence in Novgorod in the thirteenth–­fifteenth centuries and the role of Jewish merchants in the international circulation of tales.56 If he is correct, then Rybnikov, by associating himself with this par­tic­ul­ar bylina, linked himself to e­ arlier travelers from the south. The Sadko story also attracted the attention of Vsevolod Miller, who pointed out that Lake Il’men’ itself, an enchanting string player, and a sea god who can change the weather all feature in the Finnish Kalevala, which relates events that occurred in the area where Rybnikov traveled.57 ­These interpretations draw attention to the singer. Veselovsky insisted that folklore is transmitted by specifically located ­people, and that the ways ­people

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make verbal art in the pre­sent draw on the ways p­ eople used words to impress their neighbors and influence the gods in the past. Ideas such as his have resurfaced in twentieth ­century scholarship. For instance, the Homer scholar Richard Martin asserts that the Iliad emerges from ­earlier genres: “Homeric speeches are in fact stylized versions of pre-­existing, already stylized verbal art forms such as lamenting, rebuking, boasting.”58 The anthropologist Michael Herzfeld understands this kind of per­for­mance as being about masculinity: when epic singers take on the voices of their heroes, they are boasting, using their verbal prowess to compete with other men.59 Martin understands Homer as identifying with his hero, Achilles, much as epic singers in other times and places pre­sent themselves as mouthpieces for, or even versions of, the characters whose deeds they voice. “This is poetry meant to persuade, enacted in public . . . ​in a context where authority is always up for grabs and to be won by the speaker with the best style . . . ​the Iliad, a poem about contest, was created for a contest, of the type we see described in a number of texts.”60 Sadko does a lot of boasting, using his words and his gusli to dominate other men. The skazitel’ Leontii Bogdanovich is also boasting, claiming some of Sadko’s power, and in placing this par­tic­u­lar epic at the center of his “Notice,” Rybnikov claimed some of Sadko’s power too. He sometimes identified with the epic singers, writing: “­These retellings made a remarkably strong impression on me, already an old skazitel’, as the peasants say, who has heard so many byliny in his time.”61 This book has explored ways that mid-­nineteenth-­century Rus­sian writers depict their own listening (and listening by their fictional proxies) as a contest. In so d­ oing, they have something in common with epic singers in other countries, whose songs, which would be canonized as nationally significant (or F2), reworked lower-­status folklore (or F1) such as boasting.62 Much of the scholarship on Rybnikov disputes his position in the intellectual-­ political landscape of his own time and ­later: given on the one hand his ties to Khomiakov and Bessonov and on the other his reading of Feuerbach and Renan at the Vertep meetings, should he be understood as a Slavophile or as a Westernizer? Gruzinsky and the Soviet scholars pre­sent him as more radical, while more recent late-­and post-­Soviet scholarship, following Shliapkin, takes his nationalism seriously.63 Both schools of thought have copious evidence at their disposal, demonstrating the difficulty of assigning this writer to a single po­liti­cal camp or another; like his contemporaries, he was attuned to multiple ideas that themselves ­were connected. ­Because the inheritors of the Westernizer and Slavophile agendas w ­ ere all anxious about communication between classes, Rybnikov is an appealing standard-­bearer for both of their c­ auses. The debate over Rybnikov’s ideology touches on the degree to which he cared about individual performers. His early edition or­ga­nized by song topic

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makes it appear that he saw performers as mere vehicles for folklore. Gil’ferding’s edition that or­ga­nized the byliny by singer draws more attention to the artists, as do Rybnikov’s ­later publications. When folklore collectors emphasize the artist over or in addition to the text, they anticipate the Rus­sian performer-­focused school of folkloristics, whose roots can be seen in the nineteenth ­century.64 While Dahl brushed away the very notion of recording his sources’ names, by the ­later part of the ­century, such “passportization” started to ­matter; thus in urging Rybnikov to identify his sources, Sreznevsky was repeating criticism he himself had received for neglecting to do that in the past.65 Rybnikov, it seems, became increasingly interested in the individual singers whom he recorded.66 In June 1866, he told Miller that one should read all the byliny of a given skazitel’ together to see “what is general and characteristic for each skazitel’, not just the folk aspects, but the individual ones.”67 Azadovsky, though, argues that he consistently cared about the “real circumstances in which folklore lives its life . . . ​the concrete carriers of folklore, their everyday life . . . ​the personality of the skazitel’,” rather than conceptualizing it in the spirit of the Romantics as “the ancient wisdom of the ­people.” For this reason he had always intended to publish his byliny categorized by singer, but his editors prevented it.68 If Azadovsky is right, then it makes sense that Rybnikov, who so carefully reworked the story of his own listening, anticipating judgment, was drawn to the story of Sadko, in which a performer reacts to his audience. In any event, the increased focus on performers in his pre­sen­ ta­tion of the byliny made his research look legitimate. If the singer had truly been ­there on the lake shore, then Rybnikov had too, and the byliny ­were real. Rybnikov accomplished his scholarly task and won recognition by continuing the ethnographic work for which he had been punished four years e­ arlier. If his account of listening to Bogdanovich has the magic overtones of the song of Sadko, that is hardly surprising: his own transformation from a trouble-­ making student to a prize-­winning scholar is as fantastic as Sadko’s, and the epic songs he found by Lake Onega—­evidence that the ­People still sang—­ were no less valuable for him than the golden-­finned fish Sadko catches in Lake Il’men’.

C h a p te r   7

Insulting

Not every­one agrees with Plutarch that attentive listening means demonstrating re­spect and restraint. Take Fedor Dostoevsky, who was confident that he was better than other writers at listening to lower-­ class ­people, recording them, and using their words. Paradoxically, even as he attacked other writers for dressing up as peasants when they ­were r­ eally just foreigners, he was drawn to lower-­class verbal art that mixes speech registers and recalls masquerades. He created listening contests that display both the technologically marvelous listening practiced by the stenographer he married and the aggression and humor that are audible when ­people listen mockingly and use startling language to insult each other for fun. Dostoevsky had more experience than some other writers with the ways in which the tensions between landowners and serfs could turn violent. He was born in November 1821; his ­father was a doctor who worked at a Moscow hospital for the poor. His ­father was of clerical stock and his ­mother from a merchant f­ amily, but in 1828, a promotion gave his f­ ather the l­ egal status he needed to purchase an estate near Moscow, including two villages, Darovoe and Cheremoshna, and the peasants who lived ­there. Dostoevsky’s ­mother died in 1837, and his f­ather moved to the estate, where Katerina, an orphan serf who had served in the f­ amily’s Moscow home, became his concubine; he left the teenage Fedor in engineering school in St. Petersburg. It was a bad set of years in the Moscow region, with drought, fires, and poor harvests. The 165

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impoverished estate could not produce enough food for the ­people or fodder for the ­horses. Dostoevsky’s widowed ­father was lonely; he talked to himself, and he drank. Perhaps due to his relationship with Katerina or due to his abuse of his peasants, evidence indicates that they de­cided to kill him and did so in June 1839, when Dostoevsky was seventeen. Fearing that if the peasants ­were punished by being sent to Siberia, the Dostoevsky c­ hildren’s inheritance would lose its value, the neighbors helped the peasants cover up the crime, but Fedor and his b­ rother Mikhail appear to have learned the truth, although unlike their younger ­brother Andrei and some of the peasants’ descendants, they never wrote or spoke openly about it.1 Dostoevsky’s next encounter with poor ­people’s anger at wealthier ­people is even better documented. In his late twenties, as a young St. Petersburg writer who was already attracting attention, he attended meetings of the Petrashevsky Circle, a discussion group that focused on the works of Charles Fourier, Pierre-­ Joseph Prou­dhon, and other French socialist thinkers. During the time of heightened state security following the 1848 revolutions, the Ministry of Internal Affairs investigated the Petrashevsky Circle, and Dostoevsky and other members of the group ­were arrested.2 ­After eight months of imprisonment in the Peter and Paul Fortress and a mock execution, Dostoevsky learned his sentence had been commuted from death to Siberian exile. He spent four years in kátorga (hard ­labor) at a prison camp near Omsk, then another six as an army private in Semipalatinsk, in what is now Kazakhstan. He was released in 1859, returned to St.  Petersburg, and in 1861 began to publish Notes from the Dead House (Zapiski iz mertvogo doma), an autobiographical novel based on his time in katorga, in the journal Russkii Mir (Rus­sian World). Its narrator is Gorianchikov, a literate man charged with killing his wife. Aside from the shift from a po­liti­cal crime to a crime of passion, he has much in common with Dostoevsky, especially his fascination with and estrangement from the other prisoners. Dostoevsky and his novel participated in the consolidation and spread of a standardized written language throughout the empire. The prison that united ­people from geo­graph­i­cally dispersed locations, like the justice system that brought them t­here, emerged from attempts to impose a single consistent set of rules, a single ­legal language; it was a contact zone where ­people of dif­fer­ent origins and estates could listen to each other.3 The prisoners themselves, relatively literate men, w ­ ere intrigued by each o ­ thers’ language, and Dostoevsky was sensitive to their verbal interactions. In the pro­cess of communicating, performing, and insulting each other, they—­much like the empire—­generated their own norms, and their language, like all standard languages, generated its own antistandards, markers of class or ethnic distinctiveness. Dostoevsky wove the novel’s linguistic tapestry from many threads. He depicted Polish as well as

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Rus­sian gentry as speaking standard Rus­sian but conveyed the distinctive vocabulary and pronunciation of ­others, including peasants, Caucasian Muslims, and a Jew. In writing it, he relied not only on his memory but on notes he took starting in 1852 or 1853. Although he was forbidden to write in prison, he transcribed phrases and sayings he heard from the other prisoners on paper that was kept for him by A. I. Ivanov, a medic at the prison hospital in Omsk. E ­ ither in the prison hospital itself or ­later in Semipalatinsk, he transferred t­ hese notes to a notebook, which contains 486 numbered items (and one unnumbered one).4 The intimacy and length of Dostoevsky’s time as an ethnographer among Rus­sian peasants in the confined, homosocial katorga environment allowed him to hear ­things that Haxthausen, Dahl, Grigorovich, Turgenev, and Rybnikov prob­ably did not. While other midcentury writers ­were criticized for describing peasants in a maudlin tone, stressing their position as victims (and the writers’ own exemplary empathy), Dostoevsky was in a position to understand p­ eople of rural origin as responding violently, creatively, and competitively to their own situation. He saw that abuse and entertainment could be connected, as in the name-­calling contests—­what linguists call “ritual insults”—­that he documented and then reproduced in his novel.5 This chapter argues that the performative mode of the ritual insult exchange structures Dostoevsky’s writing about how intellectuals listen to and rec­ord other ­people’s words. In what follows, I first address the playful, competitive recording of lower-­ class language in Dostoevsky’s pre-­katorga years and its extension in his descriptions of the prison. Second, I reflect on Dostoevsky’s depiction of the ritual insults that he recorded in his notebook and his novel, and I draw on the work of the linguist Asif Agha to analyze how Dostoevsky and the other prisoners “enregistered” the speech patterns of specific groups, creating and circulating verbal ste­reo­types through their mocking listening. The stenographic systems that courts and newspaper reporters would employ from the 1860s onward ­were part of the expansion of the use of the literary language to more readers as well as of the growing sensitivity of language users to the standard and the available antistandards. In the third section, I consider the writer’s fantasies about stenography as a disembodied, technologically marvelous form of mediation, and in the fourth I analyze a ritual insult contest of a sort that Dostoevsky engaged in in print with another writer, Nikolai Leskov, inspired by the question of which of them might be a better stenographer of the speech of priests. This polemic displays the ways that Dostoevsky, even as he transcribed lower-­class words, also borrowed a lowbrow verbal art form that subverts the fantasy of writers as perfect vehicles for the voice of the ­people.

Figure 10A.  The first page of Dostoevsky’s prison notebook. F. M. Dostoevskii, Sibirskaia tetrad’, OR RGB, f. 93 I 2.5 LL1-2.

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Figure 10B.  Second and third pages of Dostoevsky’s prison notebook. Note the neat regular handwriting, the numbering, and the pattern of ink blotches that shows how it bled through.

Finding Gold In St. Petersburg in the 1840s, before he was sent to katorga, Dostoevsky associated with young writers such as Grigorovich who displayed their ability to observe the city and its inhabitants. He had already been recording folksongs and legends in 1839, and his use of working-­class urban slang in his novella Poor Folk (Bednye liudi, 1846) suggests that he could have been recording such expressions too.6 Dostoevsky’s b­ rother Mikhail, also an aspiring writer, kept such a notebook, which he labeled “Phrases and expressions overheard among the folk.”7 Dostoevsky sometimes depicted collecting words as Dahl had, suggesting that words are living t­ hings that want shelter: they “beg to be put on paper,” he wrote in 1846 and again in 1861.8 The prison notebook and Notes from the Dead House both provide detailed material to examine how Dostoevsky responded to ­these words’ plea. Analy­ sis of its paper, ink, and handwriting indicates that in prison, Dostoevsky prob­ ably recorded prisoners’ expressions initially on other paper, and transcribed

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them into what is now known as his prison notebook only in 1855, a­ fter he was released. Some scholars, though, insist that he wrote in the notebook itself in prison, and perhaps hid it in his copy of the New Testament.9 The notion that Dostoevsky’s paper connected him in a bodily way with that space and the prisoners’ words aligns with the critical school that sees evidence in Dead House of his increasing commitment to Chris­tian­ity. This kind of religious reading emerges strongly in response to one of the novel’s chapters, which thematizes listening in a striking way: “Akul’ka’s Husband,” in which the narrator, who is in the sick ward, listens in the darkness as one prisoner tells another how he killed his young wife. The name of Dostoevsky’s Akul’ka echoes that of Grigorovich’s Akulina, also an abused and almost entirely ­silent peasant ­woman.10 Like Turgenev and Rybnikov, Dostoevsky depicts a member of the gentry as able to hear the truth about the peasants only in the darkness and on the edge of sleep.11 As we have seen elsewhere in this study, acousmatic and hypnogogic listening provides access to sounds that seem unattainable. Some critics stress Akul’ka’s forgiveness of the man who slandered her and find her death redemptive, noting that it precedes the novel’s depiction of spring and Easter and suggesting that it functions analogously to the death of Jesus by generating hope for forgiveness for h ­ uman sins.12 Another school of critics attends less to Dostoevsky’s Christian convictions and more to his power­ful depiction of a violent world where moral meaning is elusive.13 Even while Dostoevsky sometimes used vitalist, spiritual vocabulary to describe language, at other moments he depicted listening to “the ­people” in a more competitive tone. As we have already seen, taking notes on poor p­ eople’s speech, using t­hose sounds in writing, speaking them aloud, and evaluating the results was a form of sociality in his circles. A ­ fter he was released from prison and saw his b­ rother for the first time, Fedor read Mikhail se­lections from his prison notebook. He reminded him about that in an 1859 letter where he predicted success for his new novel, since it would have, as well as unusual characters and touching scenes, “folk speech with a special katorga coloring (I read you some expressions that I wrote down in place).”14 Dostoevsky saw himself as competing with writers who did not have the kind of access to the “­people” that he had gotten in prison. ­After his time in katorga, he often criticized other writers for their inability to collect folk language effectively. We saw in chapter 4 that while he had admired Grigorovich’s The Village in 1846, ­after his prison experience he became increasingly critical of his former roommate, eventually deciding that he was r­ eally only a foreigner who had no legitimacy as a describer of Rus­sian peasants. This was part of a set of larger shifts in Dostoevsky’s attitudes about ethnicity and media. In “Bookishness and Literacy” (Knizhnost’ i gramotnost’) in 1861, he approvingly quoted an essay by

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N. F. Shcherbina, who criticized writers who produce unconvincing stylizations of folk speech in writing that is meant to attract a newly literate audience. Shcherbina had written, “Our p­ eople are smart and see immediately who is coming to them not simply but with some trick in mind; in their eyes this looks something like gentry dressed up as peasants and collecting folksongs.”15 Dostoevsky echoed ­these comments about gentry dressed up as peasants in an 1876 article where he criticized Westernizers such as Granovsky, whom he relegated to “that crowd of our ‘experts on the folk’ and even some of our writers about the folk who have remained for their w ­ hole lives just foreigners who studied the Rus­sian peasant.”16 Dostoevsky’s criticism of Grigorovich as a foreigner who would never adequately listen to and transcribe peasant words was part of a post-­katorga skepticism that he directed at ethnic Rus­sians as well as the descendants of mi­grants. Of course, if the writers he critiqued w ­ ere all “crossing,” performatively using language that did not belong to them and perhaps even wearing clothing meant to draw attention, then Dostoevsky, in reacting to their per­for­mances critically, was following the rules of the game. Dostoevsky’s sense of himself as a rival to other writers who listened to peasant words coheres with the folk genres that he noticed. Unlike the midcentury folklorists who ­were attracted more to high-­status folk genres such as epics, or ­those easily reframed for middle-­brow per­for­mance such as tales and songs, Dostoevsky was intrigued by low-­status small genres.17 We saw with Rybnikov that ­people who collect epics sometimes figure themselves as epic heroes of a sort, and other collectors are also drawn to ­those forms that best fit their own performative instincts. Dostoevsky was attracted by folklore that displays rivalry. He remembered other prisoners’ stories and retold them memorably. His friend A. P. Miliukov wrote, “You had to hear the storyteller’s expressive language and see his lively mimicry to understand the impression he made on us.”18 He was interested in ­children’s insults, in obscenities, and in chastushki, a genre of short rhyme that is often po­liti­cal or obscene.19 In prison, he saw that aggression and entertainment ­were connected, especially in the folkloric genre of the insult. ­After Dostoevsky completed his prison sentence in January 1854, he wrote to his b­ rother Mikhail about what he had endured in terms that tie the prisoners’ hostility to him, and his own fear of them, with the possibility of plea­ sure. He described the “katorga ­people” as “crude, irritated, and embittered,” angry at ­people such as himself. “Their hatred of the nobility surpasses all bound­aries, and for that reason they greeted us, the nobles, with hostility and a spiteful joy at our misfortune. They would devour us if they ­were allowed.” Entirely vulnerable, Dostoevsky and the other gentry prisoners faced an “infinity of all pos­si­ble insults.” The other prisoners said to them, “You noblemen, iron beaks (zheleznye nosy), have pecked at us. You used to be the lord,

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you tormented the peasants, and now ­you’re worse than the last, ­you’ve become our ­brother—­that’s the melody that was played out for four years. A hundred and fifty enemies could not tire of persecution; it was their plea­sure, their entertainment, their occupation.”20 While he spoke frankly about the hatred between himself and the other prisoners, Dostoevsky also displayed his mastery of their words and his understanding that in responding to anger creatively, a person can entertain ­others and thereby take some control of a seemingly uncontrollable situation: as Azadovsky would do in evaluating his Siberian tale-­teller, he recognized ­these ­people as creators of a verbal art that drew on their situation and their own aesthetic impulses. Dostoevsky had recorded the prisoners’ mocking description of the noblemen in prison as “iron beaks” in his notebook, and he reused it in his letter. The concept of tormentors as ­people with metal beaks who peck at their victims may have come from the prisoners’ experience with mumming, a masquerade entertainment associated with Christmas and Maslenitsa, when ­people dressed up as traditional characters that typically include a fat merchant, a Jew, a soldier, a corpse, a priest, a beggar, and certain animals, including a bear and a crane. In one account of this activity in the Pskov region, boys who dressed as a crane would hold a stick with a hook and use that as a bird’s beak, with which they would hit girls ­until they threw nuts and candies on the floor for the mummers to gather.21 If the prisoners ­were thinking of mumming when they called the gentry “iron beaks,” then they ­were identifying t­ hose ­people as somehow in disguise, having donned a costume that concealed their real identity and made it permissible for them to behave badly. Dostoevsky associated this expression with a per­for­mance when he compared the insult to a melody and described insulting itself as the prisoners’ entertainment, and when he reproduced their words for his ­brother and in his prison novel, Dostoevsky tried his hand at the same sort of entertainment, adapting the folkloric genres he had observed for his own purposes. In the same letter to Mikhail, Dostoevsky stressed the value of his own impressions. He came to understand that he had ­things in common with the lower-­class prisoners, and that he could find plea­sure in his interactions with them. “Even in the katorga among criminals, over four years I fi­nally discovered ­humans. Would you believe it: t­ here are deep, strong, beautiful characters, and it was such a joy to find the gold ­under the rough surface. And not just one, not two, but several. Some ­were impossible not to re­spect, ­others ­were decidedly beautiful.” Fi­nally, he described the research he had accomplished in prison and the ways in which his experience would help him in the ­future: “I’ve brought so many folk types and characters out of katorga! I grew used to them and thus, it

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seems, I know them fairly well. So many stories of tramps and robbers and that ­whole dark, miserable way of life! It’s enough for entire volumes. . . . ​If I ­didn’t get to know Rus­sia, I did get to know the Rus­sian p­ eople well, perhaps as well as few ­others. But that’s my ­little bit of self-­pride! I hope it can be forgiven.”22 If listening to and coming to know the peasants is a contest, then Dostoevsky knew that he had won. And in celebrating his victory, he would adapt a model from folklore, the exchange of ritual insults, which his hero Gorianchikov encounters on his first morning in katorga.

The Customs of the Prison In drafting Notes from the Dead House, Dostoevsky made frequent use of his prison notebook. Of the 487 items in the notebook, at least 134 (more than a quarter) contain words that appear in the novel. While the narrator’s speech is in unmarked standard Rus­sian, many of the prisoners use distinctive words and expressions borrowed from the notebook. The use of notebook items clusters in ten scenes in the book that depict multiple prisoners’ voices.23 The second of ­those scenes occurs on Gorianchikov’s first morning in prison, when he watches two prisoners exchange insults. It begins when a tall, thin, dark prisoner shoves a short and fat one, saying, “Where are you g­ oing, scum-­face? Wait!” The short one responds, “What are you yelling about! H ­ ere you pay money for waiting; you, beat it! Look at this elongated monument (monument)! ­Brothers, he ­doesn’t have any fartikul’tiapnost’ (style).” The narrator sees that “fartikul’tiapnost’ produced a certain effect: many ­people laughed. That was just what the fat one, who evidently was something like a volunteer comedian in the barracks, expected.” The tall prisoner responds disdainfully, “Rollicky ­little Biriul’ cow! Look how he’s gorged on the prison bread! He’s happy that he’s bringing a dozen piglets to end the fast.” The fat one becomes angry and suddenly cries, “So what kind of bird are you?” “The bird kind!” “What kind?” “That kind.” “So what kind?” “That kind, in a word.” “So what kind?” The narrator watches the outcome with fascination. “They fixed their eyes on each other. The fat one waited for an answer and clenched his fists, as though he was ready to fight right then. I r­ eally thought ­there would be a fight. It was all new to me, and I looked on with curiosity. But afterwards I learned that all t­ hese kinds of scenes ­were remarkably innocent and ­were performed, as in a comedy, for the general plea­sure; it almost never led to a fight. All that was rather characteristic and displayed the customs of the prison.” The tall prisoner, calm and dignified, senses “that p­ eople w ­ ere looking at him and

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waiting to see ­whether he would shame himself with his answer; that he had to maintain re­spect, to show that he was r­ eally a bird, and to show what kind of bird exactly. He squinted at his rival with unshakable scorn, trying, for greater humiliation, to look at him somehow over his shoulder, from above, as though he was scrutinizing a bug, and slowly, clearly, he said, ‘Kagan!’ ” At the announcement that he was the mythical Kagan bird, “a loud explosion of laughter rewarded the prisoner’s cleverness.” The fat prisoner, seeing that he had lost the contest, roars, “­You’re a scoundrel, not a Kagan!”24 The interaction displays the enduring power of double-­act comedy from vaudev­ille onwards, with two contrasting comedians (one fat and one skinny, one tall and one short, one straight man and one funny). This scene recycles seven notebook items: 75, “akh, you scum-­face”; 115, “­here you pay money for waiting”; 66, “Monument!”; 137, “he d­ oesn’t have any ‘farikul’tiapnost’’ ”; 71, “they brought a Biriul’ cow”; 86, “he’s bringing a dozen piglets to end the fast”; and 90, “ ’So what kind of bird are you?’ ‘That kind!’ ‘What kind?’ ‘That kind.’ ‘What kind, F. Y. M.?’ ‘Kagan.’ ‘­You’re a scoundrel, and not a Kagan.’ ”25 This scene exemplifies the genre that sociolinguists call ritual insults, meaning an informal per­for­mance in which two participants exchange a series of increasingly outrageous, absurd, linguistically inventive insults, referring to their opponent’s appearance, parents, be­hav­ior, and other attributes. Observers egg them on and comment on their originality and cleverness. Rarely does a ritual insult competition devolve into vio­lence; the point is not to wound one’s opponent but to entertain the audience and display one’s wit. The absurdity and improbability of ­these insults distinguish them from insults that might actually hurt the target’s feelings, as does the structure of the interaction, where an insult is followed not by a defense against it but by another even more absurd insult. While ritual insults in Rus­sian have only recently attracted scholarly attention, they exist cross-­culturally and are common in near-by Germanic (including Yiddish) and Scandinavian contexts.26 Known as “the dozens,” “sounding,” or “signifyin’,” they have been studied in African-­American and African cultures.27 The African-­American writer Richard Wright may have been thinking of this scene when he called Dead House “an autobiographical novel depicting the lives of exiled prisoners in Siberia” who “lived in crowded barracks and vented their hostility upon one another. It made me remember how Negroes in the South, crowded into their Black ­Belts, vented their hostility upon one another, forgetting that their lives ­were conditioned by the whites above them.”28 Among the exchanges that Rampton studies as examples of “crossing,” ritual insult ­battles feature prominently; his subjects are especially impressed by the ways that ­people wield other ­people’s language to insult.

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This kind of insult relies on a mocking mode of listening, when listeners anticipate funny speech, as when a Jewish prisoner, Isai Fomich, arrives at the prison. Laughter broke out around him and prison jokes about his Jewishness. Suddenly a young prisoner squeezed through the crowd, holding his oldest summer trousers, dirty and torn, along with his prison foot-­rags. He sat by Isai Fomich and clapped him on the shoulder. “So, friend, I’ve been waiting for you for six years. Look ­here, how much w ­ ill you give me for ­these?” He laid out the rags. Isai Fomich . . . ​suddenly roused himself and began to fin­ger the rags. He even held them up to the light. Every­one waited to see what he would say. . . . “A silver ruble no, but seven kopecks sure.” And t­ hese ­were the first words Isai Fomich spoke in prison. Every­one rolled with laughter.29 ­ hese listeners are expecting to hear something specific. As Asif Agha explains, T once a social group is understood as speaking distinctively, ­people listen for evidence of their speech style, which they circulate to comic effect. Agha’s explanations of the ways p­ eople use words borrowed from other ­people’s registers help explain the ritual insults that Dostoevsky observed in prison. “Enregisterment”—­the identification of certain aspects of someone’s speech as an indication that they belong to a specific group—­involves the simultaneous analy­sis of what Agha calls “signs in many channels,” which could mean a speaker’s phonetics and vocabulary, but also his or her gestures and clothing. When a person reproduces some of the signs associated with a given group, but not o ­ thers, this can generate what Agha calls “the phenomenon of the ‘fatal breach’ . . . ​relegating the person to a less au­then­tic status (a social climber, a parvenu) in the judgment of ­others.” Inconsistency in the use of such signs can also be deliberate on the part of a speaker who chooses to communicate irony or sarcasm. Agha observes that such deliberately mixed signs are aimed at creating confusion that is “a characteristic feature of strategies of veiled aggression cross-­culturally.”30 The mixed signals that Dostoevsky witnessed, then, w ­ ere meant to display aggression and to entertain. To use Agha’s terminology, the fat prisoner is amusing the crowd and displaying aggression ­toward the tall one by using terms that gesture mockingly ­toward the vocabulary of educated ­people, such as monument (which is funny b­ ecause it compares the convict to an inanimate object, and ­because it is a high-­style, European-­sounding word), as well as fartikul’tiapnost’, a colloquial term, rarely used in lit­er­a­ture, that may derive from partikuliarnost’ (having to do with something private, not official) or from fart, “luck” in thieves’ argot.31 The tall man

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responds with an equally funny and confusing retort when he claims to be the mythological Kagan bird.32 This claim evokes the association in Rus­sian folklore of birds with knives, as in the riddle, “The Gagan bird flies / Holds a sturgeon in its mouth / On the end of its tail / ­Human death” (Летит птица Гагана, / Несёт в роте осетра, / По конец хвоста—­/ Человечью смерть).33 When he calls the fat prisoner a cow and a pig and compares himself to a Kagan, he suggests that he is the knife who ­will slaughter this animal. Both prisoners are making absurd statements that they know their audience w ­ ill not believe. In d­ oing so, both of ­these men, who themselves appear to belong to the same ethnic and class group (as comedians in a pair act usually do), borrow language associated with ­people (or animals) other than themselves, and thus display aggression and impress their fellow convicts. (The tall convict, apparently the straight man, also wins the ritual insult contest.) And Dostoevsky himself borrows from the convicts in his novel by citing their words selectively and in a context that he controls. His writing is a kind of crossing, in that he gains the approval of his own audience by demonstrating his ability to play with someone ­else’s words. The incident demonstrates that the phenomenon of imitating the speech of class-­others went both ways in midcentury Rus­sia: in a contact zone such as the Siberian katorga, educated and uneducated ­people listened to each other and produced amusing per­for­mances by imitating each other. The part of the dialogue that ends with Kagan reproduces item 90 from Dostoevsky’s prison notebook, with the exclusion of the last retort and the obscenity ­after the penultimate question, where he wrote the initials that I have translated as “F. Y. M.” (е. т. м. ), standing for “fuck your ­mother” (eb tvoiu mat’).34 Such obscenities undoubtedly played a large role in the convicts’ verbal per­for­mance and one–­upmanship: the elaborate use of obscenities is a distinctive form of Rus­sian folk art.35 Dostoevsky, while avoiding explicit obscenities, used hints and innuendos to draw attention to places in his texts where such ele­ments could have been.36 When he described the insult contest between the fat prisoner and the tall prisoner in his novel, even though he removed the obscenities that had accompanied the real dialogue on which it was based, he reminded his readers that such contests belonged to a culture of obscene verbal art that many of them would have known. The notebook itself and Dostoevsky’s use of it indicate that he was carefully sorting through the noise of the prison to find the signals that interested him, the gold under­neath the rough surface of the prison’s sounds. While he filtered out obvious obscenities, Dostoevsky also filtered for phonetics. In the prison notebook as in the novel, most of the prisoners, like the characters in Grigorovich and Turgenev and the words in Dahl’s dictionary, use Moscow phonetics. Dostoevsky’s literary repre­sen­ta­tion of nonstandard speech does

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not correspond to the phonetic diversity of ­actual speech but reduces it to a set of easily recognizable tropes. Like Dickens, he circulates effective tropes of social personhood that pre­sent distinctive speech as a means of entertainment. When prisoners use words with nonstandard pronunciation, t­ hose are puns that could amuse listeners and readers, such as sil’nokatorzhnyi (strongly punished) instead of the official term ssyl’nokatorzhnyi (punished by exile), or nevalid (not-­valid) instead of invalid.37 Dostoevsky harvested usable semantic items from lower-­class speech. When depicting the speech of prisoners whose native language is not Rus­ sian, Dostoevsky distinguishes phonetically between characters whose language appears assimilable into Rus­sian and t­ hose who remain more foreign. Thus he treats Muslims from the Caucasus as he treats the Rus­sian peasants: they are depicted as speaking with standard phonetics but some distinctive lexical items, such as when the Daghestani Alei says Isa for Jesus.38 Some Turkic words, such as maidan (for the rug and other objects needed for prisoners to play cards) and baigush (for a person who has nothing), are explained in the text, but their origin is not explic­itly acknowledged.39 Most of the Polish prisoners are educated gentry like Dostoevsky, and he speaks French with one of them, but their spoken words are conveyed as standard Rus­sian, even in the case of Zh-­ kii, whom Gorianchikov describes as speaking very poor Rus­sian.40 Thus even while the real ­people on whom ­these characters ­were based prob­ably spoke nonstandard Rus­sian, that phonetic difference did not seem worth reproducing for Dostoevsky, any more than he felt the need to reproduce the regional accents of Rus­sian prisoners, or obscenities. He pre­sents the speech of Isai Fomich, in contrast, as phonetically distinctive; it is an antistandard whose recognizability highlights the existence of the standard. Agha notes about the dropped H in Uriah Heep’s pronunciation of “ ’umble” in Dickens’s David Copperfield (whereas he is depicted as pronouncing H in a standard way in other words), “The trope links an image of social personhood neatly to a single word, one that is repeatable, humorous, memorable, and hence capable of widespread circulation.”41 Similarly, Isai Fomich uses some Ukrainian words and substitutes Ukrainian or Polish consonants for Rus­ sian ones. He introduces himself with a pronunciation that substitutes ts for ch, as in “Isai Fomits.” Gorianchikov retells an exchange between Isai Fomich and other prisoners in which the Jew uses Ukrainian terms such as nekhai bude (let it be) as well as ma for “I have.” “You damned scab!” “Let it be a scab.” “Scabby Yid!”

Парх проклятый! —­Нехай буде парх. —­Жид пархатый!

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“Let it be so. Scabby, but rich: —­Нехай буде такочки. Хоть   I have money.”   пархатый, да богатый; гроши ма. “You sold Christ.” —­Христа продал. “Let it be so.” —­Нехай буде такочки. “­Great, Isai Fomich, good —­Славно, Исай Фомич, молодец! Не   job! ­Don’t touch him,   троньте его, он у нас один!—­кричат   he’s our only one!” the   с хохотом арестанты.   prisoners yelled, laughing. “Hey, Yid, you’ll get the whip, —­Эй, жид, хватишь кнута, в Сибирь   you’ll go to Siberia.”   пойдешь. “I’m already in Siberia.” —­Да я и так в Сибири. “­They’ll send you even —­Еще дальше ушлют.  farther.” “And w ­ ill the Lord God be ­ —­А что там пан бог есть?  there?” “­He’ll be ­there.” —­Да есть—­то есть. “So let it be; if ­there is the —­Ну нехай; был бы пан бог да   Lord God and money,— гроши, так везде хорошо будет.42  ­then it’s fine everywhere.”   This exchange relies heavi­ly on two notebook items, 91 (which consists entirely of the exchange I have translated from “You damned scab!” to “Let it be so.”) and 92 (which consists of the exchange from “Hey, Yid, you’ll get the whip . . .” to “if ­there is the Lord God and money.”). In recycling ­these entries in his novel, Dostoevsky made Isai Fomich’s speech slightly more phonetically standard, replacing shcho (for “what)” with chto. While Isai Fomich’s speech is the most phonetically and grammatically distinctive, the text features two other references to antistandards, with members of linguistic minorities who speak distinctively. Luka Kuz’mich, a Rus­sian from Ukraine, tells a story about a Ukrainian and conveys his speech in Ukrainian, which corresponds to Dostoevsky’s note 183. And Baklushkin describes the love affair that led him to prison: stationed as a low-­ranking officer in the town of R, presumably in the Baltic region, he fell in love with a German washer­ woman, Luisa, but she was also pursued by a rich German clockmaker, Schultz, whom she de­cided to marry. Baklushkin went to Luisa’s home, found Schultz ­there, and threatened to shoot him. Schultz told Baklushkin that he would not shoot him b­ ecause he would be severely punished, and Baklushkin, feeling that he had been dared, responded by shooting him. Schultz’s speech is phonetically distinctive: he uses vi instead of vy for “you.”43

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What unites the unnamed Ukrainian, Schultz, and Isai Fomich is the assertion that they and their situations are funny. Luka Kuz’mich introduces the sad story of the Ukrainian’s despair at leaving his f­amily ­behind with “­there was an incredibly funny khokhol [a derogatory word for Ukrainian].”44 Gorianchikov asserts that both Jews and Germans in general are funny. Isai Fomich is described as making every­one laugh, both deliberately and inadvertently: “He was as inoffensive as a chicken, and seeing the general sympathy for him, he even swaggered, but in such a ­simple and comic way that he was immediately forgiven.”45 He is funny, Gorianchikov notes, as Iankel’, a Jewish character in Gogol’s novel Taras Bul’ba, is funny: “absolutely every­one, without exception, laughed at him. He was the only one we had, and I cannot even remember him now without laughing. Whenever I looked at him I would remember Gogol’s ­little Yid Iankel, from Taras Bul’ba, who would get undressed to go to bed with his Yid-­woman (zhidovka) in some kind of cupboard and would immediately become terribly similar to a chick.”46 Similarly, Baklushkin introduces his account of Schultz’s death by telling Gorianchikov that it was a “terribly funny story.”47 ­Later, Gorianchikov observes that “all p­ eople do to Germans is to laugh at them; the German represents something deeply comic to Rus­sian peasants.”48 Scholars have considered Dostoevsky’s statements about Isai Fomich in the context of his well-­known xenophobia, especially evident in his 1870s Diary of a Writer, and have compared his mockery of that character to his ­later more hostile depictions of Jews.49 Without denying the value of this work, I suggest that we take seriously Gorianchikov’s assumption that Jews, like Germans and Ukrainians, are understood as appropriate targets of laughter and may even, like Isai Fomich, at times willingly play a comic role.50 This assertion is borne out by the popu­lar genre of comic sketches published in the midcentury Rus­ sian Empire, in which peasants, Jews, Germans, and Ukrainians are portrayed as speaking in a funny way (but Poles and Daghestanis are not).51 A precursor of ­these comic sketches is the work of Gogol, and indeed Gorianchikov uses Gogol’s Taras Bul’ba as evidence that Jews are funny. Put another way, the prison population recognizes the convention that made Jews, Germans, and Ukrainians, whom Rus­sians may perceive as local ethnicities, funny. Peasants w ­ ere heard as funny too. Thus, the prisoners recognized and rewarded comic crossing that used their language. No such convention existed for Poles or Daghestanis. Dostoevsky’s novel, thus, reinforced the convention that one could listen to Jews, Ukrainians, and Germans, as well as peasants, in a mocking way. Agha’s term “enregisterment” names the widespread agreement that a specific social group speaks in a distinctive way and explains the world of sound

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that Dostoevsky depicts in Dead House. ­Because the katorga functions as a contact zone where multiple ways of speaking coexist, it provides for repeated “microsocial encounters” between prisoners, who may come to agree about the existence of a certain register (e.g., t­ hose from the Far East, who had never met a Jew before, may become part of the social domain of the register, agreeing with Gogol and the authors of the comic sketches that Jewish voice is funny). In that sense, the novel can be read as both tracing the expansion of social domains of dif­fer­ent registers and itself expanding ­those domains. The comic experiments by lower-­class prisoners in distorting or misusing elite words, such as monument, can be understood in Agha’s terms as moments of “role alignment” when the prisoners negotiate the upper-­class register, w ­ hether “symmetrically,” by imitating it, or “asymmetrically,” by ­doing something dif­ fer­ent. Similarly, Dostoevsky’s experiments in using vari­ous kinds of lower-­ class language, associated with peasants, Jews, Ukrainians, and Germans, can be understood as his own role alignment relative to ­those registers. Dostoevsky perceives the difference between the antistandard speech of peasants, Ukrainians, Germans, and Jews, and the standard literary language; he aligns asymmetrically with out-­groups such as Jews, Ukrainians, and Germans, ­those to whom his narrator listens mockingly, while, like other intellectuals such as Turgenev and Dahl, he aligns more symmetrically with the peasants. Agha argues that the large-­scale enregisterment of En­glish Received Pronunciation or the speech style of ­people like Uriah Heep is pos­si­ble in the nineteenth-­century environment of affordable, widely-­circulating books and newspapers, which developed in the Rus­sian Empire as well as E ­ ngland. Dostoevsky’s popu­lar writing, such as Dead House, exemplifies this kind of publication.

Fantastic Stenographers In October 1866, Dostoevsky was in a difficult situation. He had taken out a loan, using the copyright of his own works as collateral. If he did not produce a new novella, The Gambler (Igrok), in a month, he would lose the right to earn money on his own previous writing (including the very successful Dead House). His friends offered to help him write, but he dismissed that idea as dishonorable; he was willing, though, to take their advice and hire a stenographer. It was only the year before that the Rus­sian government had or­ga­nized a contest to select an appropriate method for Rus­sian stenography and then sponsored courses in the two winning methods, with the goal of producing a cohort of stenographers who could be employed in the new court system that was instituted as a result of the judicial reforms. Both winning methods w ­ ere based

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on German stenographic systems: Pavel Ol’khin used the Gabelsberger system, and I. Paul’son and Ia. Messer used the Stolze system.52 One of ­these inventors, Ol’khin, possessed a surprising mix of skills and interests, enormous energy, and, like some of the other characters in this book, a mixed heritage. His ­father, who was born in what is now Latvia, had converted from Judaism to Rus­sian Orthodoxy and changed his name (from Olschvang); his ­mother was from a German-­Swedish ­family. As a convert, his ­father could move to St.  Petersburg, where he became a bookseller and the editor of the Sankt-­ Peterburgskie Vedomosti (St. Petersburg News). Pavel Ol’khin, born in 1830, studied medicine and eventually became the editor of a journal, Vokrug Sveta (Around the World); he wrote books about anatomy, photography, geography, and printing.53 It makes sense that p­ eople involved in other spheres of science would be attracted to the stenographic idea of bringing writing up to the speed of speech. In 1858, the general and military historian Mikhail Ivanin wrote that Rus­sia needed a stenographic system, b­ ecause other­wise impor­tant ­things would be lost: “works of genius, eloquent sermons, happy improvisations, clever and lively discussions.” Ordinary writing, produced so much more slowly than ­people spoke, could not “satisfy the activities and demands of our age.”54 An 1885 history of stenography uses more ecstatic terms to describe writing that moves as fast as electricity, flowing ­water, and life itself. “In our era of bubbling life, when h ­ uman genius, having wrapped the world in endless electric wires and cut up most of the earth with the most perfect means of communication, defeated time and space themselves, only the generally accepted writing, with its slowness, does not correspond at all to that quickly flowing stream of life, and why is the writer eternally somehow riveted to his letters? . . . ​Meanwhile the thoughts in his head flow incomparably faster!”55 The standardization proj­ects of the Rus­sian Empire—­like ­those of other nineteenth-­century states—­meant reducing the differences produced by geo­graph­i­cal, cultural, and linguistic distance. Stenography would help with that pro­cess. Ol’khin understood his new writing system as a way to teach ­people to hear the quick flow of thought. While uninformed ­people, he complained, worried that learning stenography would make students forget spelling, grammar, and handwriting, in fact it creates a more disciplined listener. A person who has learned stenography well grasps the difference between the more and less impor­tant t­ hings a speaker says, and this is reflected in the stenographic transcript. He quoted William Gawtress, the early-­nineteenth-­century inventor of an En­glish shorthand system, who wrote that stenography teaches its prac­ti­ tion­ers to distinguish original thoughts from trivial, uninteresting clichés. In addition, ­people who know stenography can write down all of their own thoughts, without worrying that any would be lost.56

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The mid-­nineteenth-­century ­people attracted to stenography, in Rus­sia as elsewhere, included w ­ omen who saw it as a way to gain skills and a c­ areer. Anna Snitkina, a twenty-­year-­old Petersburg ­woman, was among them. Learning the system was hard: of the three hundred p­ eople in his first two groups of students, Ol’khin felt that only thirty–­twenty-­four men and six ­women—­were successful.57 Snitkina at first fell ­behind, but Ol’khin offered to help her learn his system by correspondence over the summer: she sent him two to three pages of stenography twice a week, and he corrected her ­mistakes; meanwhile, her ­brother dictated to her, and she transcribed his words for an hour ­every day. She attributed her own success to the considerable time she put into learning outside of class. Becoming a stenographer meant not only memorizing Ol’khin’s signs; over time, like other stenographers, she created her own signs to supplement the standard ones. As with other stenographers, her system worked providing that she herself was able, soon a­ fter transcribing, to transform her notes into a legible text; ­because each of them develops their own signs, stenographers are not ordinarily able to decode each ­others’ work.58 When Ol’khin was asked to recommend one of his students to Dostoevsky, he chose Snitkina.59 As an enthusiastic reader of his work, she was thrilled, and she was delighted by the evidence that Ol’khin saw her as better than the other students. She told another student, Alexandra Ivanova, who was “not at all stupid, remarkably bold and sharp-­tongued and very capable,” about the job, then feared Ivanova might somehow try to steal it.60 Dostoevsky and Snitkina ­were linked by their understanding of their own superior ability to listen and write; while Dostoevsky frequently suggested that he was better than other intellectuals at listening to and recording peasants, Snitkina got confirmation, with Ol’khin’s choice, that she was better than Ivanova and the other students at taking down spoken Rus­sian. For three weeks, Dostoevsky dictated The Gambler to Snitkina; she spent a few hours during the after­noons transcribing his words in shorthand, then wrote them out in the eve­nings at her home. She would bring him what she had written out e­ very day and he would edit it. Working together, the two of them completed the novella and delivered it to the publisher by the due date, and Dostoevsky retained his copyrights. Eight days ­later, he proposed to Snitkina, and the two w ­ ere married in February 1867; Ol’khin’s son Konstantin carried the icon during their wedding.61 It was ­after they began this marriage that Dostoevsky produced his four best-­known novels. Snitkina is credited, in the writer’s myth, with the positive transformation of him and his c­ areer and the control of his debilitating addiction to gambling. In her memoirs, Snitkina describes her early interactions with Dostoevsky as demonstrating her ability to control language, meaning the words that she and

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he said. She had de­cided e­ arlier that if she worked in private homes, she would establish relations with her clients “on a business-­like tone, avoiding familiarities, so that no one would have the impulse to say anything unnecessary or frivolous.” When she spoke with Dostoevsky the first time, she did not smile at all, and, she wrote, “he very much liked my seriousness.”62 Once the two began to work on their joint writing proj­ect, their collaboration affected the development of the text. Thus in her first diary account of working with Dostoevsky, Snitkina describes how she and he disagreed about what he had dictated. “Having dictated a bit, he proposed that I read what was written and ­stopped me from the first words. At first t­here ­were the words, ‘We w ­ ere in Paris,’ or something like that. ‘What’s that, “in Paris”? Did I say, “in Paris”? It c­ an’t be! I said to you: “in Roulettenburg”.’ I answered that ‘in Paris’ was said to me, other­wise why would I have written that; he asked me to correct it.”63 ­Later, in her memoirs, Snitkina changed her account of this incident. She wrote that Dostoevsky asked her to read what she had written, then s­topped her, asking, “What is that, ‘returned from Roulettenburg’? Did I r­eally talk about Roulettenburg?” “Yes,” she said, “you dictated that word.” “It c­ an’t be!” “Excuse me,” she asked, “is t­here a city with that name in your novel?” “Yes. The action takes place in a casino town that I called Roulettenburg.” “If it’s t­ here,” she said, “then you undoubtedly dictated that word, other­wise where could I have gotten it from?” “You are right,” Fedor Mikhailovich admitted. “I got confused.”64 In both her initial account and her revision, Snitkina’s transcription of Dostoevsky’s words is more reliable than what the author himself remembered saying: she hears him, in a sense, better than he hears himself. In the memoir, she shows that what she heard—­but he did not remember saying—­corresponded better to the final literary work. In this way she claimed a crucial role in his writing.65 The picture of her stenographic work that Snitkina provides in her memoirs indicates that with her startling new craft, she could affect Dostoevsky’s language, discipline his words, keep him from saying anything she did not want to hear, and meanwhile, rec­ord on paper thoughts that he was not himself aware of having. Dostoevsky kept collaborating with Snitkina and thinking about stenography for the rest of his life. He admired the technique and suggested to his niece that she study it.66 Like Snitkina and like Ol’khin, he fantasized that it was a way to achieve a perfect transcription, not only of the spoken word, but even of a person’s thoughts. Even while one might imagine that his experience writing with the help of Snitkina’s stenography would have made it clear to Dostoevsky that this new technique did not in fact guarantee perfect reproduction of sounds, he continued to suggest that it possessed an uncanny ability to convey not only a person’s words but even thoughts that ­were not expressed verbally.

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The notion of stenography as a technologically marvelous mode of listening, able to convey what he would refer to as the “gold” of the unspoken word, emerges in the introduction to Dostoevsky’s November 1876 Diary of a Writer story, “The Meek One” (Krotkaia). He begins the story by explaining that t­ here was “something fantastic ­here, precisely in the form of the story itself, which I feel the need to clarify in advance.” The protagonist, he explains, is a husband whose wife had just committed suicide by throwing herself out of the win­dow. Her body lies on the ­table before him as he paces the room, speaking his thoughts aloud “as though he addresses an invisible listener, some sort of judge,” as he gradually comes to understand his own guilt in prompting her death. Spoken, or only thought, his words reveal a psychological truth: “If a stenographer had heard him and written down what he said, the result would have been somewhat rougher, less polished, than what I have, but it seems to me that the psychological order would perhaps be the same.” Dostoevsky explains that “That idea of the stenographer who writes every­thing down (­after which I would have cleaned up the transcript) is what I call fantastic in this story.” In using this device, he knew he was imitating Victor Hugo, who, in “The Last Day of a Condemned Man,” assumed, improbably, “that the condemned man was able (and had the time) to take notes not only on his last day but even his last hour and literally in his last minute.” This device allowed Hugo, Dostoevsky thought, to create “the most real and the truest work of all that he wrote.”67 In defending his choice to convey the husband’s words as though they had been transcribed by a stenographer who, unnoticed by him, preserved all the sounds he made, Dostoevsky evokes an acousmatic effect. The invisibility of the fantastic stenographer facilitates perfect listening h ­ ere as in the midcentury concert hall with its lowered lights. The notion that all of a person’s thoughts could be transcribed is, Dostoevsky notes, both unbelievable and capable of producing the effect of something completely true, in “The Meek One” as in Hugo. “The Meek One” describes a wife who is emotionally abused by her husband and ultimately kills herself; it consists of the spoken words of a man who only gradually comes to admit to himself that he has caused the death of an innocent ­woman, a guilt obvious to the listener. The fantasy of the privileged listener who discerns the truth that a person speaks about himself but cannot himself hear recalls the listening practices at the basis of psychotherapy, or of ethnography. The fantastic stenographer in “The Meek One,” then, functions as an uncanny technical supplement to the ordinary ear that makes true understanding pos­si­ble. “The Meek One” reveals the traces of Dostoevsky’s work with Snitkina not only in the character of the fantastic stenographer but also b­ ecause the text

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as a w ­ hole resembles a stenographic transcript.68 Having become dependent on his wife for his own writing, Dostoevsky fantasized about having the access to the h ­ uman mind that she seemed to possess, even as he ­imagined the stenographer as disembodied (or at any rate invisible). In real­ity, as he knew, stenography is practiced by specific individuals, each with their own idiosyncratic system of signs. Stenographic transcription only worked if the same person who listened and transcribed then decoded the transcript, a pro­cess that depended on bodily and cognitive continuity. It is the distinctiveness of each stenographer’s personal system that made decoding the many stenographic manuscripts in Dostoevsky’s archives so hard; the stenographer Tsetsiliia Poshemanskaia, the first person to try, told a journalist in 1970 that ­doing so was “prison-­camp” (katorzhnyi, from katorga) ­labor.69 The fantasy of this technique as disembodied, though, parallels other ways that ­people have ­imagined new communication technologies as frictionless cures for our current imperfect attempts to understand each other.

Oversalted Prose In addition to his fantasy of the disembodied stenographer, Dostoevsky wrote as though stenography would help with the transcription of nonstandard speech, an argument he drew on in a kind of ritual insult contest that he and another writer, Nikolai Leskov, carried out in 1873. Like Dostoevsky, Leskov was one generation removed from the clerical estate; his f­ather too had de­ cided not to become a priest. Leskov was known for his stories about the lives of clerics and his funny, inventive language, in which half-­educated characters use malapropisms based on upper-­class terms. Writing ­under the pseudonyms “Psalm-­Singer” and “­Father Kastorsky,” Leskov had criticized Dostoevsky for an inaccurate statement about the historical roots of the outfits worn by church choristers and for publishing, in Grazhdanin (Citizen), another writer’s story suggesting that a married man could become a monk. In an article he titled “Mummer” (Riazhenyi), Dostoevsky responded that Leskov’s belief that he was the reigning literary expert on church ­matters led him to find fault unnecessarily with other writers’ discussion of the topic. Dostoevsky points out that “­Father Kastorsky” misquoted him and exaggerated his m ­ istakes. The choir outfits in question may not be ancient, but they do date from the eigh­teenth ­century, and the story about the monk was based on a recent incident. Dostoevsky moved from describing the content of Leskov’s attacks on him to describing his listening technique. He argued that Leskov’s letter—­and, by implication, his prose—­was marred by an excessive use of marked language,

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which demonstrated that in his effort to depict the distinctive clergy register (or antistandard), he produced “oversalted,” unrealistic language. This is the same term Belinsky used to criticize Turgenev’s use of zelenia, but unlike Belinsky, who did not question ­whether ­people such as the merchant might genuinely have used that word, Dostoevsky clarified that the prob­lem was inaccuracy—­that the proportion of “salty,” nonstandard language was higher in Leskov’s repre­sen­ta­tion of clerical speech than in the a­ ctual speech. He accused “Mr. Mummer” of speaking “in essences.” That is, as an “ ‘artistic writer,’ who provides types and marks off for himself some literary specialty (say, presenting merchants, peasants, and so on),” he “goes around his ­whole life with a pencil and notebook, eavesdrops and writes down characteristic l­ ittle words; in the end he gathers up a few hundred characteristic ­little words. Then he begins a novel, and as soon as a merchant or cleric starts to speak, he starts to choose out his speech based on what is written in the notebook.” This technique makes readers “laugh and praise him,” thinking the work is “written down word-­for-­word from nature, but it turns out that it’s worse than a lie, precisely ­because the merchant or soldier in a novel speaks in essences, that is, in a way that no merchant and no soldier ever speaks in real­ity.” ­Really, “he would say the phrase that you wrote down from him as the eleventh ­after ten phrases. The eleventh l­ittle word is characteristic and startling, but the ten words before that ­were nothing much, as with every­one. But in the writing of the typicalist artist he speaks entirely in characteristic ele­ments, based on what’s written down, and it comes out untrue.”70 Using the same term that Turgenev had used when he was annoyed with his own work in Notes of a Hunter, Dostoevsky criticized Leskov for producing “essences” rather than art, for being a “typicalist” whose characters speak a disproportionately distinctive language. “­Every word is a typicality! From this kind of chaos, naturally, you get a false and disproportionate typicality.”71 The prob­lem, according to Dostoevsky, has to do with Leskov’s pencil and notebook technique, which produces a kind of filtering, whereby only the most unusual words are recorded, and the writer uses so many of ­those that the effect is unrealistic, or too salty. With his attack on ­people who think they have solved a complex prob­lem through a ­simple technical fix, he reprised the criticism of Grigorovich for too much use of his notebook; this is a complaint about obviously mediated writing. It echoes Dostoevsky’s complaints about photography, which he similarly accused of conveying only irrelevant detail rather than what is crucial.72 Given his concern about such mechanical methods of recording, his enthusiasm about stenography is surprising. (The critic Dmitry Pisarev, logically, saw photography and stenography as examples of the same kind of prob­lem, saying, “The photo­g raph is an entirely objective

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picture, the eyewitness account recorded by a stenographer is a totally objective story, the barrel organ is totally objective ­music; attaining that kind of objectivity means destroying all the emotional ele­ment of poetry and with that killing poetry, art, even science, even all the movement of thought.”73) Leskov explained to a journalist that he did employ the method that Dostoevsky accused him of using. Over time, he had learned how to represent the registers of dif­fer­ent groups. “It’s fairly hard to learn the language of each representative of the many social and personal situations. That folkloric (narodnyi), vulgar, mannered language in which many pages of my works are written was not created by me but overheard among peasant men, the half-­educated, phrase-­mongers (krasnobai), holy fools, and the self-­righteous.”74 Insofar as Leskov agreed he had recorded words precisely, he claimed his work with them as art, not transcription. As he wrote in a letter, “Getting this language . . . ​is not easy but very hard, and only a love for it can prompt a person to take on this kind of mosaic work.”75 Of course, the technique that Dostoevsky was criticizing is the one that he himself had used in Dead House, for which he certainly loaded up the speech of his characters with distinctive words (and in some cases phonetics) taken straight from his notebook. And, ­after criticizing Leskov, Dostoevsky stepped back to admit that a writer might not, in fact, be able to do without a pencil and notebook, although one should guard against using them too mechanically: “Writing down ­little words is good and useful and you ­can’t manage without that; but you c­ an’t just use them mechanically. It’s true that t­here are gradations even among ‘transcriber-­artists’; some are more talented than ­others, so they use the l­ittle words circumspectly, appropriately for the era, the place, the educational level of the character, and in the correct proportion. But they ­can’t avoid essentialism. The valuable rule that the spoken word is silver and the unspoken one is gold has been among the habits of our artists already for a long time.”76 Whereas Dostoevsky had boasted to his ­brother that he was able to capture the gold of the good nature of his fellow prisoners—­and then moved on to speak proudly about the many stories he had brought out of the prison— in his response to Leskov, he associated gold not with the written word but with the unwritten, unspoken one. In “Mummer,” Dostoevsky opens up but does not answer questions about what it might mean to convey other ­people’s words accurately. He assumes that writers want to convey something accurate about the social world rather than just to play with words. If the pencil and notebook technique is flawed, but unavoidable, and words are better when not spoken anyway, then the sort of Realist writing that both Dostoevsky and Leskov practiced would have been at a dead end. Essentialism (essentsioznost’)

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was something that Dostoevsky both criticized and thought of as unavoidable. An uneducated person who needs to use high-­style language displays, he agreed, “a certain imprecision in the use of words whose meaning he, say, knows, but he does not know all the nuances of their use in the conceptual sphere of another estate.” As an example, he cited Leskov’s insertion of such phrases into the speech of his “­Father Kastorsky,” but asserted that they ­were exaggerated: “ ‘he represented the most vociferous sexton’ . . . ​The last word, most vociferous, is already too crude.” Dostoevsky claimed to have found “a ­whole load” of such exaggerations, “incredibly crudely fished out of the notebook.”77 It would seem, then, that Dostoevsky understood Leskov as trying to reproduce spoken language accurately. At the same time, Dostoevsky signaled his understanding that Leskov was using clerical language not just as part of a desire to document but as part of a per­for­mance meant to gain attention. In titling his attack on Leskov “Mummer,” he referred to one folkloric per­for­mance tradition, even as he returned to another one: the ritual insult contest that he had observed in katorga.78 In terms of its structure and content, “Mummer” has ele­ments in common with that contest. It begins with a conventional defensive response to a negative review, but Dostoevsky then moves into an attack on Leskov that recalls his other assertions that he was better able than other writers to manipulate other ­people’s words. Leskov’s imitation of clerical speech, he wrote, was unconvincing; it revealed its artificiality. “I recognized you, Mr. Mummer, by your style.” He unmasked Leskov as not Kastorsky or Psalomshchik but rather Riazhenyi: “You are a mummer, just like at Christmastime.”79 This seems like a repetition of the insults he had flung at Granovsky and Grigorovich—­that intellectuals who try to rec­ord other ­people’s words are gentry, or even foreigners, masquerading as peasants, imitating the naïve folkloristic techniques of a half-­century ­earlier. Mumming, though, is a ritual activity, something like ritual insults. In calling him a “mummer,” Dostoevsky recognizes Leskov as d­ oing something authentically folkloric even as he conveys folk language in an inauthentic way. He recognizes Leskov as not a dressed-up foreigner but a person celebrating a Rus­sian holiday in a traditional way. He suggests that peasants too imitate ­others; such per­for­mance is traditional. Leskov, in imitating clergy language badly, was d­ oing something like the fat prisoner and the tall prisoner in Siberia, showing off his own access to other ­people’s language for effect, and Dostoevsky was responding in kind, in the genre of the ritual insult. In unmasking him, he absurdly insults Leskov’s body: “I see your long nose from ­here.”80 He emphasizes that he and Leskov are rivals, each trying to outdo the other in play with someone ­else’s language, and that Leskov is not so much criticiz-

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ing Dostoevsky’s writing about churchmen in a disinterested way as defending his own turf. “It’s, so to speak, Darwinism, a fight for survival. D ­ on’t dare, 81 say, set foot on our field.” Leskov would respond to Dostoevsky’s insults in kind. In 1886, he wrote about hearing Dostoevsky tell a lady to learn from her kufel’nyi peasant, meaning her kitchen servant; the Rus­sian word for “kitchen” is kukhonnyi. “Prob­ ably, wanting to imitate the servant’s pronunciation, Dostoevsky said precisely ‘kufel’nyi’ and not ‘kukhonnyi.’ ”82 The writer who truly taught the gentry how to learn from the servants, though, Leskov wrote, was not Dostoevsky (who at that point was dead) but Tolstoy, in Death of Ivan Ilich (Smert’ Ivana Il’icha). ­There, though, he noted that Tolstoy avoided the temptation to make fun of low-­status language: he wrote “kukhonnyi” and not “kufel’nyi.” In this article, Leskov made the same criticism of Dostoevsky that Dostoevsky had made of him: that he over-­used folk expressions, oversalting his prose with them.83 ­These two writers’ attacks on each ­others’ use of the Rus­sian language ­were a metapragmatic duel conducted over years: their engagement in a kind of ritual insult contest may reflect their general orientation t­ oward invective and verbal attack.84 Even as he insulted his rival, Dostoevsky kept dreaming of accurate reproduction. As other writers of his cohort experimented with listening across class lines, Dostoevsky, in his response to Leskov, asserted that stenography could help writers avoid the arbitrary selectivity of the pro­cess that creates circulable units such as Uriah Heep’s “ ’umble,” and could make ­people listen more honestly and carefully. “For instance, I have never encountered a priest, in my ­whole life, even the most educated one, who completely lacked all the characteristic details of speech that relate to his estate. ­There is always something, even if it’s just a drop. But if one ­were to stenograph his speech verbatim and then print it, then maybe in some highly educated priest who had been in society for a long time you ­wouldn’t find any characteristic ele­ments.”85 Dostoevsky ­here suggests that a stenographic account of a priest’s speech would lack “characteristic ele­ments” ­because ­these ele­ments ­were absent in the speech itself, but, ­really, this absence would have been an artifact of stenography itself, ­because as Ol’khin confirms, stenographers w ­ ere trained to filter out the “trivial,” nonstandard speech ele­ments that Dostoevsky and Leskov heard in the speech of priests. So even though Dostoevsky spoke from intimate experience with stenography, the faith that he sometimes expressed in the one-­to-­one relationship between the spoken and transcribed sound was misplaced. His belief that stenography could preserve phonetic difference, though, is consistent with midcentury fantasies about this new technique well beyond Rus­sia. As Lisa Gitelman notes, stenography, like nineteenth-­century

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phonetic alphabets, offered the promise of precision and completeness, but phonetic transcription does not permit the seamless learning of language; one might think one is recording correctly, but when one tries to use one’s notes to speak—to move from the page back to the spoken word—­one is not necessarily understood.86 Miyako ­Inoue, in her discussion of stenography in Japan, observes the paradox at the heart of the ideology, which developed in Japan as well as in the En­glish and Rus­sian empires, that shorthand provided a completely accurate trace of the spoken word. In fact, as Gawtress suggests, stenographers made choices constantly about how to represent speech. Stenography fostered language standardization; while Dickens’s exposure to shorthand appears to have made him into a kind of sound-­recording machine, attuned to differences, his system in fact made him better at ignoring idiosyncratic phonetics.87 Provincial Rus­sians feared that stenographers would expose their uncultured spoken language, but actually they tended to smooth it out and bring it closer to the norm.88 In Japan too, as modernizers institutionalized a standard language based on the colloquial, stenographers systematically excluded “certain parts of speech as ‘non-­language,’ including ‘wrong’ usage, ‘wrong’ particles, unclear endings, excessive honorifics, self-­repair, repetition, individual speech habits, prolixity, syntactic errors.” They censored dialects as “incomprehensible and frivolous” and they argued that stenography would inspire speakers to standardize their own language. “Stenographic practice . . . ​worked like a filter that sorted out what counted as language and what did not.”89 While stenography offered the fantasy of perfectly accurate transcription—­a fantasy that Ol’khin boasts of and that Snitkina’s memoirs suggested she could realize— in fact, it imposed new filters that reduced language variation. This book has traced mid-­nineteenth-­century Rus­sian writers’ anx­i­eties about their ability to listen to and rec­ord other ­people’s words. When compared with his contemporaries, Dostoevsky stood out due to his experience and depiction of peasant attitudes ­toward gentry as aggressive. While other intellectuals sometimes wrote as though peasant verbal art ­were somehow pure and benign, existing apart from the competitive, morally impure world of the intellectuals themselves, Dostoevsky recognized his prison-­mates as verbal artists much like himself, also jockeying with o ­ thers to display their creative use of other p­ eople’s words. Writers’ fascination with, and attempts to reproduce, a folk language sometimes prompted accusations of too much mixing, as though writers ­were at risk of succumbing to the force of low-­class speech ways. Thus, as we saw, Karolina Pavlova accused Iazykov for the abusive tone of his poetic invective, and Pypin accused Dahl of inadvertently making his readers laugh. The ­people who voiced ­these criticisms knew that

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laughter was a more likely result of register mixing than any solemn sense of connection. Dostoevsky, though, seemed more willing to accept that in reproducing vernacular words, one might also experiment with poor ­people’s entertainment forms, such as mumming and even insults; he appreciated and collected the folkloric genre of the ritual insult, and he drew on it in his own ­later competition with other intellectuals over who listened best. This was especially evident in an exchange he had on a Petersburg street in 1873. He wrote in Diary of a Writer about following six drunk workmen on a dusty summer Sunday eve­ning and hearing them carry out an entire conversation consisting in a single obscene word, pronounced with vari­ous intonations to express vari­ous meanings. Dostoevsky felt the need to join in. “Have mercy,” he yelled out suddenly from the midst of a crowd. “­You’ve gone only ten paces and repeated (the aforementioned) six times! This is a disgrace! A ­ ren’t you ashamed?” Every­one fell ­silent and stared, and then the youn­gest worker turned to him and yelled, “So why’d you say it a seventh time yourself, if you’d already counted us saying it six times?” The ­people within hearing laughed.90 Dostoevsky’s narrator in his prison novel only listens to the prisoners’ ritual insult contest. H ­ ere, he depicts himself as feeling compelled to repeat the word he had heard and thereby participate in a verbal contest, which, as the audience’s laughter makes clear, he loses to the young worker. The episode happened during the same years when he was celebrated for his literary readings. Listeners found him better than other writers at prompting an emotional reaction; for instance, Semyon Vengerov wrote that while Turgenev read excellently, he “did not make ­people forget themselves or transport them into the heights,” but when Dostoevsky read, “the listener . . . ​completely forgot his ego and was entirely u ­ nder the hypnotic power of this haggard, nondescript old man, piercingly staring somewhere in the distance, his eyes burning with a mystical fire.”91 With obscenities as with poetry, Dostoevsky used oral per­ for­mance to compete with other men and impress an audience. What­ever the contest, he wanted to be the winner: ­whether by reproducing other ­people’s words more accurately than his rivals who relied too mechanically on their pencils and notebooks or, like his fellow prisoners who cared nothing for accuracy or re­spect, by getting ­people to laugh.

C h a p te r   8

Laughing

Only rarely does listening go one way. Even as Münchhausen, Custine, Haxthausen, and Dahl took notes on the sounds made by their charmingly folkloric coachmen, they w ­ ere listened to in turn, with more or less attention. Some writers, in the period a­ fter emancipation, ­imagined p­ eople like ­these coachmen listening in a mocking way, and coming out the winners in encounters that juxtapose them to more urban, more educated p­ eople such as their passengers. One example is “At the Posting Station,” a monologue performed by Ivan Gorbunov, a comedian who was descended from serfs. It starts with a conversation among the stationmaster and the ­drivers at a posting station (where travelers switch ­horses and ­drivers) and then moves to an exchange between a passenger and a driver on the road. “Coachmen, hey, coachmen! The tarantas [four-­wheeled carriage] has arrived. . . .” “Get up, whose turn is it? . . . (ch’ia chereda-­to?)” “Mikita’s . . .” “Mikitka! You hear! . . . ​Mikitka, you smooth devil (gladkii chert)! The tarantas has arrived . . .” “Coming (Sichas)!” “But how ­will you go now?” “What do you mean?” 19 2

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“At night?!” “So?” “So?” “On the hills?” “So you’ll screw up the tarantas! . . .” “You say I’ll screw it up! I’ve been driving for fifteen years, and you say I’ll screw it up! . . .” (Пятнадцать годов езжу, да вляпаешь!..) “Your honor! ­Here on the seventh verst in the direction of Ozeretskoe ­there are hills, they are marked by the postal departmen’, so ­there ­shouldn’t be any confusion” (от поштового епартаменту обозначено, чтоб сумления не было). . . . “­Pardon me, your honor, I’ve been driving for fifteen years . . .” “He’s putting them on the withers . . .” “I put it on! Did you oil it, huh (chtolicha)?” “It’s oiled . . .” “Be so good as to be seated, your honor! Hey, you, my l­ ittle doves! . . .” “Look carefully . . .” “­Pardon me, sir, I’ve been driving for fifteen years. Coachmen, of course, work together with the stationmaster. . . . ​The stationmaster is just good for lighting a samovar, for using . . . ​Tpru!” “What?” “­Here’s that very hill!” “Careful!” “­Pardon me, sir, I’ve been driving for fifteen years. You n ­ eedn’t have any doubts (Не извольте сумлеваться) . . . ​Tpru!” “Watch out!” “It’s just slick ­after the rain . . .” “Hold on!” “God, do you ­really think that ­after fifteen years I ­don’t know the road . . .” (The tarantas falls over.) “What w ­ ere you ­doing, devil take you!! . . .” “Well, what do you know? Ev’ry time at that same place (Кажинный раз на этом месте). . . .”1 Who is in charge h ­ ere? The passenger, trying to slow down the coachman? The garrulous coachman, who presumably knows, ­after fifteen years of driving, that the tarantas ­will tip over at the hill and his passenger ­will fall out? Or the comedian himself, imitating the coachman’s vernacular and the ner­vous passenger’s more standard language for a chuckling audience? This scene can

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be read as a parody of the ethnographic encounters in which Custine, Haxthausen, and Dahl attend to the words of their coachman. H ­ ere the passenger is trying to get the attention of the coachman, who is not listening to him. Instead of showing the writer’s access to the ­People, this scene foregrounds the passenger’s powerlessness. The memorable phrase at the end—­“ev’ry time at the same place”—­hints at the coachman’s hostility to his fare. No isolated bit of folk language to be recorded as Dahl recorded his coachman’s zamolazhivaet, it is passive-­aggressive and funny. In this scene, Gorbunov offers a view of the ­People as not a passive source of ethnographic data but an active participant, who speaks past his interlocutor, shows off, and gets a laugh—­who listens, or chooses not to. Frierson explains that writers’ fascination with the peasants and their dreams of reconciliation and social unity would die out by the late 1880s “on a note of discouragement, bitterness, and pessimism.”2 While thousands of educated young Rus­sians went to the countryside to educate or radicalize the peasants during the 1870s, especially in the summer of 1874, sometimes wearing peasant clothing, they did not achieve their goals; the “­Going to the P ­ eople” movement is remembered as demonstrating the intellectuals’ lack of understanding of or connection to rural places and their residents.3 In place of the ­earlier dream of the “narod,” the ­later Populist writers Frierson concentrates on, such as Gleb Uspensky and Fedor Reshetnikov, described the peasants as victims and exploiters, neatly categorizable men and w ­ omen. As Helen Stuhr-­Rommereim points out in her study of this cohort of writers, they depict scenes in which poor ­people try to tell their sorrows to a somewhat wealthier person—­but instead of listening sympathetically and perceiving the truth in acousmatic form, as Turgenev’s hunter does, that listener is more likely to fall asleep and miss the end of the story.4 The Populists, though, ­were not the only writers in the post-­Reform period to describe p­ eople of a dif­fer­ent class from Turgenev’s hunter. This book takes a dif­fer­ent path from Frierson’s and Stuhr-­Rommereim’s work by moving from Turgenev and Grigorovich, not to Uspensky and Reshetnikov, but instead to Gorbunov’s scenes, not to provincial misery, but to big-­city streets. Gorbunov was a popu­lar writer of collections of humorous stories, or “scenes from folk life.” In the 1880s, Anton Chekhov would publish his funny early stories in magazines aimed at an audience with the same taste as that of Gorbunov.5 ­These texts provide a view of the taste and sense of humor of ­people like Gorbunov and Chekhov: p­ eople of peasant background, mi­g rants from rural to urban places, factory and shop workers, some of them students with hopes of becoming professionals.6 The writing that ­people of this sort produced and consumed indicates that the dream of listening to and using other

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p­ eople’s words would end not only in frustration and a recognition of the per­ sis­tence of poverty, but also in laughter. This chapter argues that one reaction to the fantasies of perfect communication and verbatim recording across social lines was a parody of some of the technologies and modes of listening that enabled ­those dreams. It draws on texts that cast doubt on the notion of a clear line separating the writer and the folk and on the assumption that one can define certain locutions as the verbal art of “the p­ eople,” collectible and categorizable by professional listeners. It also questions the repre­sen­ta­tion of contests to listen better as occurring between writers, rather than understanding the producers of folk art as themselves contestants, and sometimes winners. In what follows, I first look at texts from the 1870s in which Turgenev and Dostoevsky return to the kinds of listening scenes that they had described ­earlier, but no longer with confidence that the peasant voice is available for their understanding and appreciation. I then turn to Gorbunov, who published his comic sketches repeatedly in the 1860s and 1870s, looking at his self-­presentation as a child of serfs and how his biography demonstrates the instability of estate bound­aries. His comic scenes depict authority and status as up for grabs, showing urban crowds of ill-­educated ­people who refuse to listen peacefully to more literate p­ eople; his depictions of cannons and cannon shots suggest the decline of communication systems in which one person can convey a message clearly to many. He parodies the awed percussive listening and the ecstatic opera listening that we saw in e­ arlier chapters, and in a double-­talk per­for­mance that echoes the scenes of listening by foreigners with which I began this book, Gorbunov makes the dream of technologically marvelous communication seem funny.

Turgenev and Dostoevsky Again Both Turgenev and Dostoevsky returned in the mid 1870s, now in their fifties, to their own e­ arlier moments of listening to other p­ eople’s words, but now the p­ eople to whom they listen have more control than previously. Like Gorbunov’s monologue about the coach, Dostoevsky’s “Peasant Marey” (Muzhik Marei) and Turgenev’s “Knocking” (Stuchit!) register tensions between poorer ­people’s amusement and wealthier ­people’s comfort. First, in 1874 Turgenev added a new story to the Notes of a Hunter cycle. In “Knocking,” the hunter asks the peasant Filofei to drive him to Tula in the m ­ iddle of the night to buy more shot. He falls asleep on the journey and wakes up to find the carriage in the m ­ iddle of a river, the h ­ orses submerged up to their backs. Filofei explains that the lead h ­ orse is smelling the w ­ ater to figure out how to cross

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safely, and so, remarkably, he does. Once they are on dry land, the hunter falls asleep again, but Filofei awakens him to say that that he can hear a knocking sound and bells from a distant carriage. Filofei can tell from ­these sounds that the wagon has iron-­shod wheels, that it is empty of goods, and that it has “bad ­people” in it, coming t­ oward them. Eventually, the hunter too hears the sounds and becomes ner­vous. The wagon, carry­ing six drunken men with knives vis­ i­ble in their boots, catches up with the hunter and Filofei and moves ahead of them. It cuts them off at a bridge, and they prepare to die. Then one of the passengers, a “­g iant,” addresses the hunter in “factory-­worker slang:” “Honorable gentleman, we are coming from a respectable l­ittle feast, from a wedding (с честного пирка, со свадебки); that is, w ­ e’ve married off our fine one (molodtsa); tucked him in (ulozhili) right; ­we’re all young folk, bold heads—­ there was a lot to drink, and nothing to sober up with; w ­ ouldn’t you be so kind, w ­ ouldn’t you give us just a tiny bit of money—­just enough for a kosushka (0.3 liters) for each of us? We’d drink to your health, we’d remember your honor; and if you ­don’t have pity on us—­well, we ask you not to stay angry!” The hunter gives the men money and feels grateful to have escaped vio­lence. ­Later he learns that that same night, on that same road, a merchant had been robbed and killed, and he begins to won­der w ­ hether the factory worker’s words to him had been in a kind of code: “­Weren’t our bold chaps returning from that ‘wedding,’ and ­wasn’t that the ‘fine one’ that they, in the expression of the g­ iant joker (shutnik-­velikan), had tucked in?”7 “Knocking” reuses the ele­ments of “Bezhin Meadow”—­the hunter listens to peasants in the darkness—­but the import of the sounds he hears is dif­fer­ ent. In “Bezhin Meadow,” as we saw, the hunter derives a private plea­sure from the sound of the boys’ voices. They talk about their interpretations of the spooky t­ hings they hear, but he knows he is safe. In “Knocking,” the hunter and Filofei work together to interpret night-­time sounds that are a puzzle with two pos­si­ble solutions: ­either the factory workers are not “bad ­people” at all, or they are murderers who had already killed someone e­ lse, as the hunter surmises at the end of the story. Gleb Uspensky heard Turgenev read the story aloud, with an ominous rhythm, at the Viardot home.8 This account of a night-­ time encounter across social lines recalls Gorbunov’s comic monologue about the tarantas; indeed, the hunter refers to the ­g iant as a joker (shutnik) and Turgenev called the tale “a funny story (anekdot) from my hunting days” with “no par­tic­u­lar meaning.”9 A ­couple years ­later, Dostoevsky also returned to his pre-­emancipation experiences of listening to the peasants and to interclass tension and communication. In “On Love for the Folk. A Crucial Contract with the Folk,” in the

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February 1876 issue of Diary of a Writer, he fantasizes about a merger between Rus­sia’s educated classes and its peasant masses. He begins by acknowledging the seeming contradiction between the view he had expressed the month before that the Rus­sian masses ­were “coarse and uneducated, committed to darkness and depravity,” and a posthumous article by Konstantin Aksakov (who had died in 1860) published that same month, arguing that “the Rus­sian folk has already been enlightened and ‘educated’ for a long time.” In fact, he insisted, ­there was no contradiction: he believed as much as Aksakov had in the virtues of the peasants. “You need to be able to pull the beauty in the Rus­sian of the common ­people out of alien barbarity. . . . ​A true friend of humanity, whose heart has been moved even once at the suffering of the folk, w ­ ill understand and forgive the extraneous sediment of dirt in which our p­ eople is buried, and ­will be able to find the diamonds in that dirt.”10 He had told his ­brother in 1854 that he had found the gold in his fellow convicts, he had written in 1873 that a writer could capture words worth silver with a notebook and pencil, and in a similar vein, he asserted in 1876 that a sympathetic member of the educated classes could mine for diamonds among the peasants.11 Now, though, Dostoevsky tied his messianic vision of interclass harmony to an apocalyptic image of destruction. He called on educated ­people to “bow before the p­ eople’s truth and recognize it as truth . . . ​like prodigal c­ hildren who have not been home for two centuries but who have returned.” But they should do this only on the condition “that the p­ eople has to accept much of what we have brought with us. We cannot completely obliterate ourselves, even before any kind of truth of the p­ eople; let what is ours remain with us, and we w ­ ill not give it up for anything on earth, even, in the last resort, for the happiness of unification with the ­people. If not, let us both perish separately.”12 Whereas Aksakov had used terminology that recalls Schelling’s depictions of the merger of individual consciousnesses to argue that the gentry needed to embrace the virtues of the Rus­sian peasants, Dostoevsky cautioned that u ­ nless the peasants accepted parts of the culture of the educated, the nation would be destroyed. He acknowledged interclass hostility in a way that was foreign to Aksakov. Both Dostoevsky’s vision of unity and his acknowledgement of hostility resurface in “The Peasant Marei,” also written in February 1876. It was the second day of the Easter holiday in prison, and the prisoners w ­ ere celebrating loudly, in a way that Dostoevsky found repellant. “­There w ­ ere many drunk ­people, cursing, fights breaking out ­every minute in ­every corner. Ugly, nasty songs, maidans with card games u ­ nder the bunks, some prisoners already beaten half to death for ­running amok . . . ​knives had already been bared a few times—­ all of that, over the two days of the holiday, tormented me to the point of feeling

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ill. I could never tolerate drunken folk revelry, and especially not h ­ ere.” Dostoevsky left the barracks, walked outside, and met one of the Polish prisoners, “M-­cki,” who had also escaped for the fresh air. “M-­cki” said to him, “je hais ces brigands” (I hate ­these criminals), and Dostoevsky immediately went back into the prison that he had left a quarter hour ­earlier, “like a halfwit.” 13 M-­cki’s words, he wrote in 1876, still torment him; he hears them in his sleep. Having returned to the prison, he lay down on his bunk, pretended to be asleep, and remembered an incident from his childhood. At age nine, he had wandered away from his f­ ather’s estate h ­ ouse, and he thought he heard a call: “A wolf is coming!” Terrified, he ran ­toward Marei, his ­father’s serf, who was plowing. Marei comforted him, made the sign of the cross over him and reassured him that t­ here was no wolf. Dostoevsky concludes this essay by celebrating the special humaneness of the Rus­sian peasant: “Only God, perhaps, saw from above what a deep and enlightened humane feeling and what delicate, almost feminine gentleness can fill the heart of some crude, brutally ignorant Rus­sian serf, who was not expecting freedom—­who had no clue about it yet. Say, i­sn’t that what Konstantin Aksakov had in mind when he spoke about the ­g reat education of our ­people?” The memory of Marei’s surprising gentleness inspired, as Dostoevsky recalled in 1876, a transformation in how he saw, and heard, his fellow prisoners: “when I got off the bunk and looked around, I remember, I suddenly felt that I could see t­ hose unhappy ­people with a dif­fer­ent gaze and that suddenly, by some kind of miracle, all the hatred and spite dis­appeared completely from my heart. I walked on, looking at the f­ aces I met. That shaven and punished peasant man, his face branded, drunk, yelling out his drunken, hoarse song, a­ fter all, this is also, perhaps, that same Marei; ­after all, I cannot look into his heart.”14 This scene echoes an episode in Dead House. T ­ here the prisoners are demonstrating against the prison authorities, but when Gorianchikov tries to join them, they rebuff him and call him “iron beak.” He joins the Jew and the Polish prisoners, who also are not part of the demonstration, and the Pole Mirecki says to him, “je hais ces brigands,” but Gorianchikov does not respond.15 In “The Peasant Marei,” the first-­person narrator, no longer concealed ­under the mask of Gorianchikov, remembers Mirecki’s words, but this time he is repelled by them and returns to the prison that he had left. ­There, amid the convicts’ loud cele­bration, he recalls another upsetting sound, the aural hallucination of the wolf, and his recovery from that fear, thanks to Marei. Some Dostoevsky scholars argue that the explicit indication in “Marei” that the prison experience was redemptive is implicit in Dead House; they interpret the story as an avowal of Dostoevsky’s peasant-­centered nationalism and his conviction that the educated need to be redeemed through contact with rural ­people.16 For this book,

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it ­matters more that Dostoevsky associates his sense of redemption with the realization that he can tolerate the sound of the peasant prisoners’ loud cele­bration. The evolution of Dostoevsky’s depictions of interclass listening follows the same pattern as Turgenev’s. Before emancipation, Turgenev wrote stories in which a nobleman listening in darkness hears the beauty of peasant songs and stories, but in “Knocking” the sound of the peasant in darkness is ominous. With “Peasant Marei,” his own 1870s addendum to his pre-­emancipation account of listening to peasants, Dostoevsky too described acousmatic listening to a distant sound that might be a threat. In both stories, the fear proves unwarranted: the workers Turgenev’s hunter meets do not attack him, and the child Dostoevsky had only i­magined the cry about the wolf. Both stories juxtapose a frightening noise in the distance—­the cry about the wolf and the sound of the wagon wheels—to the disturbing sound of lower-­class revelry: the drunken workers on the wagon, and the kind of prison sounds Dostoevsky had filtered out of his notebook, “ugly, vile songs.” Both texts end with the gentry narrator reflecting on his fear of a distant sound and the unnerving encounter with the real sounds of p­ eople not of his class. Dostoevsky concludes that his memory of Marei means that he must return to the prison building, although he cannot look into his fellow prisoners’ hearts or know their real motivation. Turgenev concludes with his hunter’s inability to decode the “­g iant joker’s” words. In t­ hese texts of the 1870s, both writers are more hesitant than they had been before about the ability of t­ hose like themselves to collect, convey, or understand the words of the “­people.”

Ivan Gorbunov Ivan Gorbunov took a satirical tone when he depicted interactions between literate ­people such as Turgenev and Dostoevsky and less literate urban folk such as the factory workers and the prisoners, making their mutual misunderstanding appear more comic than tragic. Gorbunov was born to freed serfs in the village of Vanteevo (or Ivanteevka), in the Moscow region; his birth was recorded at a church near the Kopninskaia paper factory.17 This village had contained the first documented Rus­sian paper mill, established at some point before 1576; such early attempts did not produce much paper or ­free the country from reliance on imports.18 Ivanteevka had a paper factory from the ­middle of the eigh­teenth c­ entury, powered by the Ucha River. It changed hands numerous times and in the late 1830s was sold to the merchant I. Shchukin, ­under whom it expanded; its success suggests that it ­adopted the continuous

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paper machine. Gorbunov’s grand­father was literate and worked in the paper factory; his son, Gorbunov’s f­ather, became a clerk for Shchukin and then a man­ag­er at the Glazunov paper and cardboard factory in Moscow.19 Ivan studied with the local priest, then at the Nablikov commercial-­vocational school in Moscow. This history indicates that Gorbunov’s f­ amily was among the late imperial Rus­sian subjects who crossed the lines separating the estates. As a writer who was the educated son of a factory man­ag­er and the grand­son of serfs, Gorbunov made it difficult to be certain that the “­people” ­were entirely dif­fer­ent from the intelligent­sia. While most of the subjects of this book performed in amateur theatricals and read lit­er­a­ture out loud, Gorbunov used t­hose same skills to become a professional actor. He and Amalia Kviatkovskaia, a Baltic German ­woman, had a ­daughter, Tatiana, who also became an actress. Four years a­ fter her birth, Gorbunov and Kviatkovskaia married, and Kviatkovskaia eventually converted to Orthodoxy.20 Gorbunov began his acting ­career in Moscow’s Malyi Theater, then moved to St. Petersburg’s Aleksandrinskii Theater, where he played dozens of roles, many from the plays of Alexander Ostrovsky, to whom he was close. Gorbunov was best known for his per­for­mances during theatrical entr’actes and in private homes of his own funny monologues and sketches, which he published in 1861 as Scenes from Folk Life (Stseny iz narodnogo byta).21 He republished the 1861 collection in 1868, while his older b­ rother Orest, confusingly, published his own Scenes from Folk Life in 1867.22 In the 1870s, both Gorbunovs’ collections reappeared numerous times, along with dozens of other editions of similar scenes from folk life by other writers.23 ­These routines ran the risk of offending peasants. In Anton Chekhov’s 1882 story “A Liberal Dear” (Liberal’nyi dushka), the characters discuss ­whether to perform a comic scene referencing Jews, Germans, or Armenians at a benefit concert, and conclude that they cannot, ­because ­people would be offended. One observes, “we could take something from Rus­sian folk life . . . ​ something from Gorbunov . . . ​­Great stuff! A delight! But we c­ an’t: His Excellency says it’s ‘mockery of the folk’! He’s partly right, but . . . ​terrible times, just between us!”24 Perhaps to forestall the critique that he was mocking the folk, Gorbunov made sure that p­ eople knew about his peasant background, deliberately creating the impression that it made him stand out among his friends. The publisher Aleksei Suvorin remembered that “Gorbunov always concealed his origins,” but among the stories he retold was one that insisted that no m ­ atter how much he socialized with gentry, they, like Suvorin, recognized his lower-­ class roots.25 His friend, the l­awyer Anatoly Koni, remembered him talking about ­going hunting with Nekrasov and some friends. “He went to open some

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preserves, and when Nekrasov, hungry and impatient, called out, ‘Hey, Vaniusha, hurry up!,’ then one of the beaters, seeing his ­simple Rus­sian face, ran up to him and in a tone of command said, ‘Y’hear, Van’ka,—­make lively, y’see the masters are asking!’ ”26 In retelling this moment, Gorbunov suggested that, as a peasant, he had the right to tell what might seem to be derogatory jokes about peasants. This tactic worked on observers such as the theater critic Alexander Kugel’, who found Gorbunov an exemplary representative of the narod: “The mixture of artlessness and slyness ­under the mask of an affected indifference and a false air of conciliatoriness, and at the same time the intelligence in ­every seemingly idle word, in ­every intonation . . . ​all this was so amazingly national (narodno), so Rus­sian, so exceptionally original.”27 Gorbunov is a paradoxical figure. He listened, and he was listened to; he was a writer who wrote down his own compositions, but other p­ eople also collected and recorded their own memories of his scenes. He was close to Count Sergei Sheremetev, who led a court choir, and at the Sheremetev home he performed his stories to an audience including the royal f­ amily and aristocratic visitors. ­After Gorbunov died, Sergei’s son Pavel Sheremetev put together Echoes of I. F. Gorbunov’s Stories (Otzvuki rasskazov I. F. Gorbunova), a collection of over 100 pages of his own and ­others’ transcriptions from memory of Gorbunov’s per­for­mances.28 As with Dahl, Rybnikov, and Dostoevsky, Gorbunov’s ventriloquizing of ­others’ voices has allowed scholars to pre­sent him as both a social critic friendly to radicalism and an Orthodox conservative with Slavophile leanings.29 He was well-­known, admired by Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, and his characters’ turns of phrase became familiar.30 In Dostoevsky’s ­Brothers Karamazov, the devil who visits Ivan quotes him: “a man would fall ‘heel-­over-­headed’ (vverkh tormashki), as the actor Gorbunov says.”31 Bakhtin interprets that interaction as evidence of the ways that ­things that appear irreconcilable are combined in Dostoevsky’s “carnivalized” novel, and observes in a footnote that “all ­these cosmic magnitudes are mixed together h ­ ere with ele­ments of the most immediate present-­day real­ity (‘the actor Gorbunov’) and with details of local setting and everyday life.”32 Gorbunov, then, signifies “immediate real­ity,” which includes popu­lar humor. Gorbunov’s “scenes from folk life” are presented as a slice of life, rather than a carefully composed work of lit­er­a­ture. The collections of such scenes that he and o ­ thers published in the 1860s and 1870s contain prose, drama, ethnography, and jokes. Compared to the Natu­ral School sketches associated with the flâneur who strolls through the city tracking his own reactions to what he sees, ­these scenes show less of the observer’s emotions. Such scenes ­were published in the inexpensive humor magazines that arose in the 1870s in Rus­sia as elsewhere (Strekoza [Dragonfly], Budil’nik [Alarm clock], and Oskolki

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[Shards], which w ­ ere similar to Punch, Amusant [Funny], and Fliegende Blätter [Flying leaves]). U ­ nder titles such as “­little scenes,” “pictures,” “­little pictures,” “stories from everyday life,” “splashes and drops,” “crumbs,” and “multicolored pictures” (stsenki, kartiny, kartinki, bytovye rasskazy, bryzgi i kapli, kroshki, pestrye kartinki), they describe a setting and some characters, then move to humorous dialogue. Kenneth Lantz calls them “miniature vaudev­illes,” where language provides much of the comedy: “Magazine writers used the substandard speech of uneducated Rus­sians or foreigners for easy but crude humor, or created situations in which characters applied specialized terminology (military or medical jargon, for example) in an incongruous context.”33 The magazines, and ­these scenes—­often printed with comic illustrations—­were aimed at the growing reading public, literate workers with some money to spare for entertainment. Outside ­these magazines, collections of short stories, plays, dialogues, and monologues u ­ nder the rubric “scenes” appeared in multiple languages in the mid nineteenth c­ entury. En­glish ones advertised snippets of real­ity, with scenes from “real life,” “Christian history,” or “the Belgian revolution,” or scenes from texts.34 George Eliot called her first work of fiction Scenes of Clerical Life. French publications too used the title for short prose works about historical moments or exotic locales such as the United States or life at sea.35 The titles appealed to the listeners whom I have been discussing h ­ ere: Louis Viardot published Scenes of Arab Customs (Scènes de moeurs arabes) in 1834, and an 1858 translation of Turgenev stories into French was titled Scenes of Rus­sian Life (Scènes de la vie russe).36 Such scenes w ­ ere easy to read aloud, and Gorbunov’s contemporaries recognized his per­for­mances as similar to ­those of Henry Monnier (1799–1877), an actor, lithographer, and author of City and Country Scenes (Scènes de la ville et de la campagne, 1841) and Paris Scenes (Scènes parisiennes, 1857).37 Monnier’s comical interactions between pert servants and lazy masters influenced Balzac, as Gorbunov’s work inspired the canonical prose writers of his time.38 Although not all the scenes of Gorbunov and the other Rus­sian writers of the 1860s and 1870s occur in cities, they feature the kinds of interactions that happened in rapidly urbanizing spaces between an ill-­informed newcomer and a representative of city ways: a teacher, a ticket seller for a modern form of transportation such as a train or steamship, a shop clerk, a policeman, or a judge. While the collections published in the 1860s featured peasants and merchants, in the early 1870s they began to include non-­Russian ethnicities: Jews, Ukrainians, Armenians, Germans, Tatars, and Roma as well as factory workers and barge-­haulers (burlaki).39 They draw on ste­reo­types: peasants and factory workers are drunk and rowdy, Jews and Armenians greedy and devious,

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Ukrainians sly and lazy. W ­ hether the rube is a peasant, a Jew, or a Ukrainian, he (or, less often, she) is equally confused by the non-­negotiability of the rules of modern life, not grasping that steamships and trains have set schedules, that a teacher has a specific right answer in mind, and that judges base their decisions on a code of law. Gorbunov, like the ­people he described, is a slippery character, hard to place. On the one hand, he claimed to be one of “the ­people” himself. On the other hand, like Pushkin, Dahl, Grigorovich, Turgenev, Rybnikov, and Dostoevsky, he contributed to the literary proj­ect of recording the “voice of the p­eople.” Sheremetev insisted that Gorbunov loved to speak with ­people on the street and that the depictions of nonstandard language in his scenes testified to his unusual powers of observation.40 And on the third hand, his mocking tone and virtuosic hyperfluency recall lowbrow entertainers, this book’s antiheroes, such as the purveyors of street abuse to whom Pavlova compared Iazykov, the foolish cabdriver and inadvertent comedian to whom Chernyshevsky and Pypin compared Dahl, and the mummer to whom Dostoevsky compared Leskov. By devoting attention to Gorbunov and his characters, I hope to move beyond the midcentury writers’ anguished picture of a world in which p­ eople like themselves endlessly try, but fail, to hear the “­people” adequately, and beyond their assumption that the language and verbal art of the urban “common p­ eople” are less appealing than ­those of rural ­people.41 Gautier argues that when we notice sound and recording we can understand more about non-­ elite experiences. She proposes understanding the nineteenth c­ entury “as a contested site of dif­fer­ent acoustic practices, a layering of contrastive listenings.”42 Attention to what Gautier calls “the dif­fer­ent practices through which . . . ​listenings have been historically inscribed,” in highbrow lit­er­a­ture, spoken-­word per­for­mances, and the cheap urban press shows that hearing was not just about the skills or ethics of writers, with the peasants producing the collectible vocalizations preserved in canonical midcentury prose. Lowbrow comic publications and per­for­mances by p­ eople such as Gorbunov suggest how new mi­grants to cities i­ magined that they and their neighbors might have sounded. This kind of art lets us see something about how urban ­people adapted the spoken and literary language for their own purposes.

Percussive Listening Again Whereas Herzen and Lippard depicted metallic ringing sounds that could awaken ­people and compel them to recognize their own sin and mortality, Gorbunov depicts a world where metallic sounds do not have that kind of

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effect. This is apparent in his memoirs about the mid-1850s, when he and Pisemsky w ­ ere known as the best readers in St. Petersburg. An anxious misanthrope from an impoverished branch of an ancient gentry ­family—he wrote that his grand­father was illiterate, wore bast shoes, and plowed the land himself—­Pisemsky had poor French and spoke Rus­sian with a provincial accent. He disliked liberals, ­women, and foreigners; in chapter 4, we saw him attack Grigorovich in a bookstore for having a French m ­ other. ­People of the 40s, discussed in the Introduction, was one of his dark and funny novels and plays about peasants, merchants, and corrupt provincial officials. In his teens and twenties, he performed in home theatricals and read aloud Gogol’s stories and his own, giving each of the characters a distinctive voice and mannerisms.43 In April 1855, Pisemsky was invited to the home of the publisher Andrei Kraevsky to read his new story, “The Carpenters’ Guild” (Plotnich’ia artel’), and he brought Gorbunov along. Pisemsky was recognized for producing, in this story and ­others, unpre­ce­dentedly convincing renditions of rural speech styles. “Neither before nor since has anyone conveyed folk speech better than Pisemsky; ­after him it became impossible to imagine a return to Grigorovich’s paysans,” the critic Arkady Gornfel’d wrote, following Pisemsky himself in positing Grigorovich as his rival.44 “Carpenters’ Guild” shows off this ability, with its gallery of rural figures, each of whose words are followed by the narrator’s tart evaluations. It was a plea­sure to voice; Maxim Gorky would take it to the marketplace and read it aloud.45 As we have seen elsewhere, the distinction between Pisemsky’s rural and standard speech is largely lexical and grammatical; to judge by the spelling, the characters mostly use standard Rus­sian phonetics, although the narrator sometimes comments on their pronunciation (which Pisemsky prob­ably reproduced when he performed the text). The assembled guests at Kraevsky’s included Grigorovich and the writer Ivan Goncharov, who remembered Pisemsky’s per­for­mance as “not reading but high theatrical art: e­ very character came out alive, with his own tone, gestures, individuality. Complete artistic plea­sure, every­one was in unspeakable bliss, aside from one philologist who did not like the reading ­because he felt that such unkempt peasants should not be allowed into lit­er­a­ture.” ­After Pisemsky, Gorbunov himself read some of his own scenes from folk life and was “welcomed as a literary authority.”46 ­These writers’ reaction suggests that Gorbunov’s reading created the impression that he could speak about the “folk” with greater confidence than they could. Nicholas I had just died, and the official theaters ­were closed during the period of mourning. Private literary readings w ­ ere permitted, though, and Pisemsky and Gorbunov ­were invited to perform around the city. Their fame

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reached the highest circles, and they ­were asked to entertain G ­ rand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, an admiral of the fleet and a liberal voice during the reign of his b­ rother Alexander II; as we saw in chapter 3, he had done his best in 1853 to help Dahl publish his collection of proverbs. Rus­sia was fighting the Crimean War, and the ­g rand duke was stationed on the battleship Riurik, at the naval base of Kronshtadt, the fortifications protecting access to Petersburg from the sea. Although the primary battlegrounds w ­ ere far to the south, on the Black Sea, the French and British had ships stationed in the Baltic Sea, isolating the country’s capital. Pisemsky was ner­vous, wondering ­whether the ­enemy fleet would be vis­i­ble. The two men boarded the small steamship that would bring them to the Riurik. The ­g rand duke was busy when the two writers arrived, so they toured the Riurik and looked through a spyglass at the ­enemy’s ships, where they could see that ­people ­were drying laundry. At twenty-­seven, the ­g rand duke was two years older than Gorbunov and six years younger than Pisemsky; the three contemporaries liked the same kind of humor. Konstantin Nikolaevich had already read Pisemsky’s “Carpenters’ Guild” and told the writer he was looking forward to hearing his famously “masterful” reading. The three men sat down on the deck, tea was served, and, as Gorbunov recalled, the reading began: “At first Pisemsky started to read shyly, weakly, but soon he got control of himself and ‘from his lips words sweeter than honey’ poured out. His Highness ­stopped the reading several times to express his satisfaction to the author. The story was almost over when suddenly . . . ​a muffled cannon shot! . . . ​Pisemsky flinched and paled. Then another . . . ​a third . . . ​a fourth . . .” Pisemsky thought it was a bombardment and asked naively, “Have they started?!” He was reassured, “It’s the salute. A steamship is approaching the ­enemy from the sea.” Gorbunov recalled: “The cannonade continued, and Pisemsky went back to reading only ­after it had ended, but he started two notes lower than before, since he had been so struck by the unexpected event.” Gorbunov then recited his own repertoire, and the writers sailed back at eleven at night.47 In terms of his own ­career, Pisemsky performed as well as he needed for the ­grand duke. With his ­brother the new tsar, Konstantin Nikolaevich felt that the empire needed to end serfdom and to interact with the empire’s population in new ways, based on accurate information about its skills and way of life. With the proximate goal of selecting better naval recruits, in the fall of 1855 he would commission Pisemsky and seven other writers to travel through the empire and gather information about the “folk way of life” in the riverine regions that seemed likely to produce men who would be comfortable on a boat. In his instructions to ­these writers, the g­ rand duke defined himself as fostering what I

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call omnivorous listening.48 He told one of the writers, Sergei Maksimov, that he wanted not “some kind of official reports, but something more like articles for the Morskoi Sbornik (Naval collection), like the excellent articles of Mr. Goncharov.”49 When he invited him to read “Carpenters’ Guild” on the Riurik, then, Konstantin Nikolaevich was auditioning Pisemsky as a provider of information about the country. Pisemsky passed, showing that he could listen and transcribe artfully, and the g­ rand duke hired him to travel through the lower Volga region and the borders of the Caspian Sea. Pisemsky would write about his conversations with his coachmen and his own feelings during his travels, including his fear of a sea voyage.50 Even though Pisemsky passed the ­grand duke’s test, his voice betrayed his weakness. As Gorbunov tells it, when Pisemsky read for the g­ rand duke, his voice shifted, as though it had been re-­tuned to match the cannon itself, and this betrayed his fear about being so close to a potential battlefield. It may have also conveyed ner­vous­ness about his royal listener. The anecdote demonstrates that learning to function in a new environment means mastering new codes to interpret sound, and p­ eople who are trying to adapt can find themselves exposed as Pisemsky was, their difficulties revealed by a sudden slip of the ear or tongue. By recoiling at the sound of the cannon, Pisemsky demonstrated not only that he was, reasonably, ner­vous about a b­ attle erupting, but also that he was a newcomer to St. Petersburg. From the early eigh­teenth ­century, Peter the ­Great, who disliked the bell ringing that filled the air in other Rus­sian cities, used cannon shots to tell the population about crises or cele­brations. ­Later tsars perfected this language, using the cannon to announce the beginning and end of the day, births in the royal ­family, and the ruler’s arrival in the city. Cannons warned of Petersburg’s regular floods by shooting first e­ very hour, then e­ very half hour, then, when the Neva reached seven feet above normal, in double shots e­ very fifteen minutes.51 ­These loud sounds of Petersburg would have startled Rus­sians from other places, ­people such as Pisemsky, who would not be used to the clanging metal carriage wheels, factory whistles, and rumble of weapons, let alone the cannon signals from the Peter and Paul Fortress. Pisemsky’s shock at the sound of the cannon on the Riurik, then, was a natu­ral reaction for a provincial who had not yet learned the city’s distinctive militarized code of official communication. In the first chapter of this book, we saw Herzen reference this code by using a night-­time cannon shot as a meta­phor to explain the stirring effect of Chaadaev’s letter; h ­ ere, Gorbunov pokes fun at a person who cannot decode this sound. In his anecdote, this sound does not have the universally stirring effect associated with percussive listening in Herzen’s writing. Gorbunov returned to this topic in a stage routine where an urban crowd reacts to the sight of a cannon.

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“Boys, what a cannon!” “Yes!” “You could just die, it’s so big (Уж оченно, сей час умереть, большая)!” “Big!” “So what if right now (tepericha), f ’r instance, you loaded up that cannon and fired it . . .” “Yes!” “ ‘Specially, loaded it with a cannon ball.” “A cannon ball is g­ reat, but if you used a bonba, guys, that would be better.” “No, a cannon ball is better.” “A bonba ­will go farther.” “It’s the same, a cannon ball or a bonba.” “You idiot, the dev­il! A cannon ball is a separate case, and a bonba is a separate case (Чай ядро особь статья, а бонба особь статья).”52 As Gorbunov’s audience knew, making sounds with the cannon was a governmental privilege. In retelling a scene when ­people in the street fantasize about loading one up with a cannonball or an explosive shell (something that was indeed shot from cannons in the nineteenth ­century), Gorbunov made the city’s communication system seem unstable, as though anybody at all might start to issue official messages. Gorbunov’s scenes from urban life showcase similar episodes of listening when a street crowd is attracted by an unusual object or event. Someone has set up something meant to get attention—­a hot-­air balloon, a tightrope, a telescope so ­people can observe an eclipse, a poster advertising an opera—­and passers-by respond with theories about the unfamiliar device or about the entertainment and the entertainers’ motivations. Often they are suspicious. At the end of “Hot-­ Air Balloon,” the tailor who had been hired to fly in the balloon is taken to the police station, as voices in the crowd ask, “How can you fly without the authorities?” (Как это возможно без начальства лететь?)53 In “Eclipse of the Sun,” the telescope owner and amateur astronomer is arrested, apparently for using technical language: “You’ll understand when it’s on the disk (v diske).” “Sir, you’ll answer for that!” “For what?” “For your bad word . . .54 New ­things and words, such as “disk,” trigger the crowd’s excitement and anger.

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The voices we hear seem to belong to newcomers to the city who may never have seen a hot-­air balloon, tightrope, telescope, opera, or cannon, and they listen to explanations of them with skepticism. ­These humorous scenes center on miscommunication, miscomprehension, and, as suggested in the cannon episode, misfire. Like Dahl and Turgenev, Gorbunov practices a kind of ethnography; his writing rec­ords encounters across social lines that are designed to provide systematic information about a population. More than in the texts I analyzed in ­earlier chapters, though, the “ethnogging” in ­these scenes is multidirectional.55 Gorbunov’s reader or listener evaluates and categorizes the urban crowd while that crowd evaluates the words, actions, and devices proffered by foreigners, educated p­ eople, and the authorities. This crowd responds actively: they fantasize about shooting a cannonball or a bomb from the cannon, they succeed in preventing the tailor from ­going up in the balloon, and they have the astronomer arrested for using words they do not know (perhaps they think disk is obscene). The encounter between the city ­people and the purveyors of new words and sounds, then, is fraught with risk; the educated urbanites, like the passenger in “At the Posting Station,” may be tumbled out of their secure position. Gorbunov and his readers lived at a moment when new kinds of entertainment and forms of media w ­ ere becoming available, especially in cities. In some of his writings, Gorbunov celebrates the rise of literacy and the way that ­these changes reduced the power of a tyrannical older generation. In his play The Petty Tyrant (Samodur), the merchant Danilo Grigor’ich recognizes his loss of power over the course of the play, and he blames the newspapers. He is nostalgic for “the old days,” when “­they’d play pipe-­organs at the cross-­roads or show a peepshow.” Now, though, “at the crossroads they jump on you, like dogs, with ­those newspapers,” which describe “entertaining incidents” of public drunkenness that make “­children not fear their parents. A son s­ houldn’t know what his ­father does. But now ­he’ll read it in the newspapers. . . . ​Look what it says about D ­ addy, they say: so I can do it too, and let’s write it up.”56 As Gorbunov’s tyrant observes, the newspapers of the 1870s reported on the ­trials that had begun in the new court system, following the ­legal reforms, and the newspapers and the courts, both open to the public, similarly undermined the patriarchal power system. Thus The Petty Tyrant ends with the servant girl Aleshka anticipating the plea­sure of seeing her master tried in court. “Petr Savich, when w ­ ill he be on trial? I’ll go again (laughs). I just love it.”57 When Gorbunov, as the educated, urbanized descendent of serfs, performed his scenes, he could have been heard as representing any one of the sides in his dialogues, or none of them. He voiced si­mul­ta­neously educated p­ eople’s fear of and scorn for the folk, urban workers’ and merchants’ skepticism about

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the intelligent­sia, and workers’ mockery of each other. His readers prob­ably understood him to be condemning the crowd’s instinct to have p­ eople arrested for ­doing anything new, but his per­for­mances ­were not l­imited to that meaning. To categorize him as simply mocking his subjects flattens out his humor. ­These scenes produced plea­sure in their listeners, and a certain kind of plea­ sure is evident inside them as well. The speakers in the cannon scene enjoy the fantasy of loading it up and shooting it as each one eagerly proposes his theory of what is best to shoot. Gorbunov’s audience, we can assume, shared their plea­sure even while making fun of their ignorance, their one–­upmanship, and their use of the folky term bonba instead of the more correct Rus­sian word, bomba. Even though the spectators end up calling the police on the tailor who agrees to go up in the hot-­air balloon and the amateur astronomer who invites them to observe the eclipse, they are drawn to ­these new entertainments. With their attention to the ways in which new words are heard, distorted, and ­adopted, Gorbunov’s urban scenes invite their audience to revel in the superiority of t­hose who do understand, in the pleasures of nonsense, and in the absurd, tenuous kinds of understanding that can emerge from mishearing. Gorbunov’s scenes parody the power­ful percussive listening that we saw in Herzen and the ecstatic, acousmatic opera listening that Turgenev experienced. Mid-­nineteenth-­century comedians throughout Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca liked to mock new consumers of urban cultural forms such as the opera, as Gorbunov did in his 1872 monologue, “Traviata.” La Traviata, Giuseppe Verdi’s 1853 opera, tells the story of the courtesan Violetta’s relationship with a bourgeois man, her agreement to break up with him in order to preserve his f­amily’s respectability, and her death from tuberculosis. She was perceived as immoral in ­England and the United States, but in the Rus­sia of the 1870s writers tended to depict her as morally pure but unfairly judged by bourgeois society.58 In Gorbunov’s sketch, a merchant decides on a whim to buy opera tickets for himself and a clerk. In his retelling, the tragedy fades, and the characters’ actions are cartoonish and unmotivated. At first they seem happy: “We came in and sat down, and t­ hose ‘talian (tal’ianskie) actors ­were g­ oing. So ­they’re sitting at the ­table, eating and singing that life is just ­great, you ­can’t ask for better.” When Alfredo tells Violetta, played by the diva Adelina Patti, that he loves her, and she hesitates, the merchant understands this as typical female uncertainty. “So she says, be so kind as to go where you need, and I’ll sit and think about my life, ­because that’s what ­women do, we always have to think ­things over. . . .” Alfredo’s ­father asks her to leave his son, and she writes him a letter that the merchant calls a privelegiia, a privilege in the ­legal sense: “Be so kind, dear sir, she says, and now I’ll write him a privelegiia saying he ­shouldn’t come to me, ­because I ­can’t stand foolishness.” The merchant and

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clerk go out into the corridor to eat an apple, and by the time they get back, Violetta is explaining to Alfredo that she loves him but she has to die: “In spite of it all, I ­really love you! ­Here’s my patrait (patret) so you remember me, but as for me, by the way, I have to die . . . ​She sang for another half hour or so and gave her soul up to God.”59 The monologue makes both the merchant and the opera funny. The merchant’s confidence that he has understood the Italian and his assimilation of Violetta and Alfredo’s lives to his own (they like food, they write a privelegiia), shows his ignorance of operatic convention. At the same time, the plot of La Traviata is cartoonish, and ­there is something absurd in the idea of opera per­ for­mances occurring in Rus­sia in Italian, a language that the audience does not understand. In War and Peace and then What Is Art?, Gorbunov’s con­temporary Tolstoy would also lampoon opera as incomprehensible and wasteful. His depiction of Natasha Rostova as a naïve opera viewer who watches an opera without understanding its conventions recalls Gorbunov’s merchant. Gorbunov’s parody of opera listening, like opera itself, was a transnational phenomenon. Nineteenth-­century opera troupes, who needed to appeal to a broad audience, circulated their m ­ usic and prompted a kind of trickle-­down effect whereby opera tunes, plots, and words resurfaced in new contexts and genres.60 The notion of the opera text as sacred, the opera as needing to be performed in full in the original, arose only in the l­ater part of the c­ entury. Common adaptations of operas included burlesques, parodic stage per­for­ mances that riffed on the original script but wove in other issues.61 A comic monologue about a Lisbon worker’s enthusiasm for another opera that Verdi wrote in the early 1850s, Il Trovatore, has much in common with Gorbunov’s monologue about La Traviata. The title of Paulo Midosi Júnior’s burlesque, Sr. José of the Cloak Attending a Per­for­mance of the Roaster (O sr. José do capote assistindo a uma representação do Torrador), points to Sr. José’s mishearing of the term trovatore (troubadour) as the more familiar Portuguese word torrador (roaster). Premiered in 1855, this twenty-­minute monologue was popu­lar for two de­cades, perhaps ­because it expressed si­mul­ta­neously working-­class ­people’s desire to master middle-­class manners and gain upward mobility, and their scorn for ­those very manners, including habits of attending opera and behaving ­there in a subdued way. Highlighting mistranslation, the story of Sr. José exemplifies a way of listening to m ­ usic that contrasts with the intense focus with which Turgenev and ­others listened to Pauline Viardot singing the operas of Rossini and sensed that they w ­ ere gaining access to their own deep62 est emotions. Not only in “Traviata” but throughout his comedy, Gorbunov too depicts this sort of creative mistranslation. While the street audience of the astrono-

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mer is threatened and threatening in their misunderstanding of disk, the merchant gets, and gives, plea­sure through his light-­hearted misinterpretation of the Verdi opera. If writers born at the start of the nineteenth ­century such as Pushkin and Dahl understood cross-­class listening as a way for cosmopolitan literate p­ eople to collect the words of rural ­people so they could draw on them to create verbal art, then Gorbunov depicted the opposite pro­cess, whereby recently rural ­people use the words and sounds of city p­ eople for their own artistic purposes.

Double-­Talk This book starts with a conversation among Eu­ro­pean travelers and their local friends that engages with the conceit of Rus­sia’s silence. It continues with Rus­sian folklorists and prose writers competing over who can listen best to ­people less Westernized than themselves, and it ends with rural ­people, some of whom have migrated to cities, listening to urbanites with a mix of fascination and skepticism. In the ­earlier chapters, ­people dream of fi­nally listening adequately, breaking down the barriers of origin, education, and class that make one person unable to hear another. They depict their listening as prophetic, percussive, choral, omnivorous, unmediated, and technologically marvelous, as responding to the surveillance of a suspicious regime by grasping messages on the edge of sleep. ­There is something funny, though, about their hopes of being perfect vehicles for other p­ eople’s words. When p­ eople listen, when they speak back, and when they report on their interactions, they do so creatively, and the subjects of this book recognized the potential for humor that underlies conversation across, and even inside, social bound­aries. It is hard not to smile at Custine’s and Haxthausen’s belief that they could understand what ­people said in Rus­sian, although they did not know the language. Even as Konstantin Aksakov voiced the Schellingian idea that someday ­people would learn the secret that would make all languages comprehensible to every­one, he found it funny that p­ eople speak non-­native languages. As we saw in chapter 3, Dahl writes about trying to use Cossack language for his own purposes even as he admits with rueful humor that “every­one who has tried . . . ​including perhaps the dictionary-­maker himself ” has shown the difficulty of writing in a vernacular “which gives off an odor, perceptible at a distance, of tar and raw vodka, or at least kvas, musty sheepskin and bath­house birch twigs.” The comedy engendered when p­ eople use other ­people’s words is evident in Dostoevsky’s prison account and in much of Leskov’s writing. Even while t­ hese ­people yearn

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for ­human unity, and even as they display the modernity of their skills of listening and transcription, they also enjoy the creativity of their own and o ­ thers’ mishearing. This is especially evident in Koni’s recollection of Gorbunov’s fluent American double-­talk as he described a dinner he attended in 1866, welcoming a del­e­ ga­tion of American naval officers led by Gustavus Vasa Fox.63 Although the En­glish Gorbunov knew was l­imited to “ladies and gentlemens,” he was able to generate the convincing sound of En­glish speech as he reproduced the visitors’ speeches. He began as “Captain Fox,” who says, “Ladies and gentlemens!” then speaks “in a serious tone, with controlled energy, with pauses and parenthetical remarks, growing louder at the end, when he made a toast.” Gorbunov then impersonated a young naval lieutenant, who also says, “Ladies and gentlemens!” then generates a flow of “quick, lively, cheerful words . . . ​uninterrupted, interspersed with questions, answers, joyful exclamations, and with a strong finish, inevitably provoking applause from t­hose at the feast, even though most of them, of course, did not understand what exactly this guest with his typically American ­little beard had said, but they felt that he had been speaking from the heart and that he himself was a ‘nice fellow’.” In Gorbunov’s rendition, ­these speeches fill the dinner guests with enthusiasm. “In this mood, every­thing seems pos­si­ble, all the real limitations of real­ity become blurred and confused, and then real­ity, that is, the clear awareness of space and time, dis­appears.” The Rus­ sians respond, “American sirs (Gospoda amerikane)! We are such friends now! If they command—at our expense—­a bridge across the Antlantic ocean (Antlanticheskii okean)—in three days! Perfectly done!”64 As Gorbunov demonstrated his uncanny ability to re-­create En­glish sounds, he showed that for the audience of the real dinnertime talks by the American visitors, the meaning of the sounds they made did not m ­ atter. While Belinsky dismissed Turgenev’s penchant for sound imitation as nonsense, Gorbunov flaunted his nonsensical imitation of En­glish sounds. He both mimicked and made fun of formal oratory, including the speech genre of the after-­dinner talk, as well as his own ignorance of En­glish. Like other entertainers who engage in crossing, he draws attention by using words—or word-­like sounds—­ that do not belong to him, and as Koni attests, his audience approved as warmly as the audience in his monologue responded to the speeches of the American officers, which they did not, of course, understand. Koni’s memoir about Gorbunov’s double-­talk per­for­mance contains many of the same ele­ments as the other listening scenes examined in this book: the listener, Gorbunov, and the speaker, Fox, are separated by a social and linguistic divide; the listener tries to respond with sympathy, to feel and demonstrate a connection to the person he hears. He wants to retain and reproduce the

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words he hears, and, as far as his audience can tell, he does both t­hings. Of course, when Custine castigates himself for not listening to the servant who is worried about the foal, when Grigorovich rec­ords the story of the abused peasant ­woman and recycles it in The Village, and when Rybnikov hears the epic song of Sadko, ­these are serious explorations of communication that convey the difficulty of listening across social lines. Gorbunov’s double-­talk, in parodying this sort of scene, lets us understand that some of the other per­ for­mances of listening and using other p­ eople’s words that I have examined also have ele­ments of double-­talk, in that they too display verbal fluency in the absence of full comprehension. Although “penitent noblemen” strug­gled, famously, to meet the ethical challenges posed by the barriers between themselves and the P ­ eople, the double-­talk scene shows that one could treat the issue of cross-­class communication more lightly. The members of the verbatim generation showed off how well they could listen to and use o ­ thers’ words. Gorbunov’s double-­talk showed that he did not need stenography or any other new techniques to reproduce sound perfectly—or, at least, so it appeared. In performing it, he could make fun of himself, his audience, the dream of complete recording, and the fantasy of the modern technology that promises that every­thing can be sped up and brought close.

Conclusion

This book returns to an old, even hackneyed, topic in the study of Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture: nineteenth-­century writers’ desire to hear and borrow the “voice of the ­people.” Some, from Boborykin and Mikhailovsky in the nineteenth c­ entury through more recent scholars such as Frierson, stress its po­liti­cal aspect, exploring what they see as Rus­sian writers’ distinctive sense of guilt about their relative privilege and their desire for expiation and unity with the folk. ­These commentators stress the writers’ urge to de­moc­ra­tize their means of expression and simply to know more about the peasants. Other analysts stress the historical-­linguistic side of this proj­ect, tracing the development of the Rus­sian literary language as a productive history of writers’ adaptation of vernacular registers, in the interest of better communication and more striking verbal art. While ­these explanatory frameworks are impor­tant, they offer l­ittle room for the social world that t­ hese writers shared and the technologies that connected them to p­ eople in other countries. In opposition to an intellectual tradition that has presented Rus­sia as isolated and exceptional, I identify the mid century writers as members of a transnational media generation linked by the decline of bells and cannon shots as a means of communication, the beginning of telegraphy, the spread of stenography, and, most impor­tant, the omnipresence of the cheap paper that fueled the dream of verbatim. Local and visiting writers competed and collaborated in the proj­ect of listening to Rus­sia, which they sometimes depicted as a place 21 4

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of silence and thus a perfect testing ground for pro­cessing sound. Drawing on ideas from sound and media studies and from linguistic anthropology, I notice ­these writers’ predilection for scenes in which they or their fictional counter­parts listen to, rec­ord, and reuse other ­people’s words, which they described as contests that entertain viewers and allow them to judge the contestants’ skills and to evaluate their connection to the p­ eople whose words they borrow. In the early 1880s, as the younger members of the mid-­nineteenth-­century cohort, born around 1830, reached their fifties, they revisited the concerns of their youth. At times, Count Lev Tolstoy played with non-­gentry style in a way that could be seen as crossing. He began what the literary scholar Thomas Newlin describes as his “decades-­long cross-­class drag act” as a seventeen-­year-­ old, when he sewed himself a robe that could be buttoned up during the day and unbuttoned to serve as a blanket at night, and he irritated his ­family by wearing it. Into old age, he regularly wore peasant clothing, prompting shock, amusement, and mockery from both nobles and peasants.1 Meanwhile, like other writers of his generation, he kept notebooks of other p­ eople’s words (his ­family’s peasants’ expressions, Chechen songs he heard when serving as an army officer in the Caucasus), and he argued that Rus­sian writers needed to adopt such language.2 In March 1872, he wrote to his friend Nikolai Strakhov, “no French, German, or En­glish person who is not mad would think to pause in my place and won­der ­whether t­here was something false in t­hese devices, this language in which we write and I have written; but a Rus­sian who is not mad must won­der and ask himself ­whether to keep writing.” He ­imagined rejecting conventional writing for stenography and then proposed reforming the language by bringing it closer to the peasant vernacular: “This con­temporary language and devices of ours are repellant, and unwilling dreams draw me to another language and devices (which happen to be that of the ­people). . . . ​The language that the ­people speak, which has sounds to express every­thing a poet could ever want to say, is beautiful to me. Furthermore, that language—­and this is the most impor­tant ­thing—is the best poetic regulator. Take it in your mind to say something superfluous, pompous, morbid—­the language w ­ ill not allow it.”3 A “regulator” was a technical device that kept nineteenth-­century clocks accurate and delivered the right amount of steam to engines; ­here as with his reference to stenography, Tolstoy used modern concepts to articulate his dreams about communication across class bound­aries. At some points, though, the distance between himself and the “­people” seemed unbridgeable by any technology. Finding himself in Moscow, he de­ cided to learn about urban poverty by volunteering for the census of January 1882 and asking to be assigned an area with especially poor ­people.4 Even

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before the work started, he described p­ eople such as himself deliberately setting out to listen to the poor and write down what they heard as putting themselves on display, ­doing something that could, rightly, prompt criticism. “To go about taking the census as thousands of ­people are d­ oing now is to look at oneself closely in a mirror.” What one finds ­there, he anticipated, would be bad. “The census-­taker enters a lodging ­house; in the basement he finds a man ­dying of hunger, and he politely asks: profession, name, birthplace, occupation, and a­ fter a l­ittle hesitation as to ­whether he is to be entered in the list as alive, he writes him in and goes on. And this is how 2000 young ­people ­will proceed. This is not good.” Tolstoy wrote about how the census work could be done in an ethical way through a shift in the census-­taker’s self-­presentation. “What’s needed is first of all to renounce the conventions of our life at least for a moment: one must not fear dirtying one’s shoes and clothes, not fear bedbugs and lice, not fear typhus, diphtheria and smallpox; one must be able to sit with a person in rags on a cot and speak with him heart to heart so that he feels that the person he is speaking with re­spects and loves him. One must not pose and admire oneself.” He i­magined that census work, if properly done, would inspire seamless communication between ­people of dif­fer­ent classes. “This work is the loving communication of h ­ umans with ­humans and the breaking down of the barriers that p­ eople have erected between themselves.”5 Tolstoy wrote a short memoir about the Moscow census, and during the following de­cade he worked on a long essay, What Then Must We Do? (Tak chto zhe nam delat’?), about how ­people such as himself might live morally in a world with terrible poverty. As he groped ­toward his radical solution—­the renunciation of wealth and privilege and the adoption of what he idealized as a peasant lifestyle of agricultural l­ abor and do-­it-­yourself craftsmanship—he returned to the scene of literate volunteers asking poor p­ eople to give an account of themselves, and he continued to find it troubling. He had told two of his aristocratic friends about his experience as a census-­taker, and they had de­cided to join him in an expedition to count the impoverished inhabitants of the Rzhanov rooming h ­ ouse. My society acquaintances had dressed specially, in some sort of hunting jackets and tall travelling boots, in a costume in which they rode and went hunting and which, in their opinion, was appropriate for an excursion to a night-­lodging-­house. They brought special notebooks and remarkable pencils. They w ­ ere in that peculiarly excited condition in which p­ eople set off on a hunt, to a duel, or to war. The most apparent ­thing about them was the stupidity and falseness of their position, but all the rest of us ­were in the same false position.6

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­ very ele­ment of this scene displays Tolstoy’s self-­criticism and his criticism E of his yet more grotesque rivals, with their high boots and remarkable pencils. Echoing the critics who mocked folklorists who don ele­ments of rural outfits as masquerading, Tolstoy made fun of t­ hese ­people for imagining that they could make themselves appear legitimate inhabitants of an unfamiliar social space by changing their clothing. At the same time, like the attacks on Grigorovich’s use of his notebook, his memoir sharply dismisses the fantasy that with the right up-­to-­date media p­ eople can eliminate social barriers. Like the Rus­sian writers of the previous decades—­and, undoubtedly, like p­ eople in other times and places as well—he depicts adequate listening and recording across social lines as a prob­lem with both technical and moral aspects, which w ­ ere tied to each other. The same year as the Moscow census, a story by Tolstoy’s eventual ally Leskov raised dif­fer­ent questions about how writers listen and rec­ord. Most of the listening contests I examine are between similarly situated contestants: as Tolstoy competes with his society acquaintances, Dahl competed with Zhukovsky, Pisemsky with Grigorovich, and Dostoevsky with Leskov over the use of other p­ eople’s words in writing, while Dostoevsky’s fat prisoner and tall prisoner compete in an oral game of ritual insults. A funny 1882 episode involving Leskov, however, stages something more like what we saw in Gorbunov: a contest across social lines.7 In Leskov’s best-­known story, “The Lefthander” (Levsha), published in Ivan Aksakov’s journal Rus’ (Rus­sia), a clever Rus­sian smith is shown an amazing mechanical En­glish flea, a miniature that dances if it is wound up; instructed to one-up the En­glish inventor, he manages to put tiny shoes on the flea, which stops it from dancing. This story of a contest between Rus­sian and En­glish craftsmen was perceived by some as an affirmation of Rus­sian superiority and by ­others as a lampoon on Rus­sian nationalism. Leskov published it with a foreword that called it a familiar legend. He claimed that he had heard it from “an old gunsmith” from the metal-­ working town of Tula who lived in Sestroretsk, outside St. Petersburg. “He willingly recalled old times (starina), very much respected the monarch Nikolai Pavlovich, lived ‘by the old faith,’ read pious books and raised canaries.”8 This narrator’s distinctive speech justifies the categorization of “The Lefthander” as an exemplary work of Rus­sian skaz, a term for narration in an oral-­sounding voice, clearly not that of the author, that the Rus­sian Formalists would develop; their name for this genre is the subtitle that Leskov gave this story. His narration abounds in funny neologisms, in­ven­ted words that distort and confuse French or German words with Rus­sian words, such as melkoskop, based on mikroskop (microscope), but with the Latin root “micro” replaced with the Rus­sian root melko (small), or buremetr, based on “barometer,”

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but with the Greek root baros (weight) replaced, logically enough, by the Rus­ sian word buria (storm). One might call this phenomenon “folk calques,” in that the folkloric narrator calques, by breaking down words of foreign origin into their roots and substituting a Slavic root for at least one of them, or we could name them “hobson-­jobsons,” meaning the assimilation of words heard in one language to words and forms known in another language (­after the Anglo-­Indian mishearing of the call “Hassan! Hussain!”—­a lament for the grand­sons of Muhammad—as the names of two nineteenth-­century comic figures). In any event, the gunsmith appears to have heard or read high-­class words such as “microscope” and wanted to use them in his own speech, but remembered them slightly wrong. The irascible Leskov was always feuding with the critics, and the story prompted a backhanded compliment in the newspaper Delo (Business): “Leskov’s authorial participation in the ‘tale’ (skaz) (we ­don’t think that his explanation [in the foreword] was just a manner of speaking) is l­imited to s­ imple stenography. And you have to be fair to Mr. Leskov: he’s an excellent stenographer.” The reviewer declared himself convinced that the gunsmith was a real person whose story Leskov had recorded. “Reading the ‘tale,’ you can see the storyteller before you, a seasoned old workman, now retired, an enthusiast of pious books and canaries, respected by all.” The reviewer was not convinced by all the neologisms: “The word ‘kleveton’ [gesturing ­toward kleveta, slander] instead of ‘feuilleton’ stands out as the author’s invention, one not without wit.”9 The ironic tone hints this reviewer knew perfectly well that Leskov had in­ven­ted the ­whole story. The Delo reviewer’s dismissal of “­simple stenography” echoes some of the other comments we have seen critics make about what seems to them the too-­ mechanical recording and reproduction of vernacular words in lit­er­a­ture: Belinsky’s rejection of Turgenev’s use of zelenia and his “sound-­imitating poetry,” the critics’ mockery of Grigorovich as a man with a notebook. We saw Tolstoy in 1872 and Dostoevsky in 1876 fantasizing about a marvelous stenography that could capture thoughts better than any earthly writing. The 1882 Delo review of “The Lefthander,” though, dismisses stenography as a mere mechanical skill, no more marvelous than any other way of writing on paper. Historians of science are familiar with this dynamic, where new, more mechanical means of reproduction at first seem to offer a more correct understanding of the world than what had been available previously, but then ­those techniques or technologies are dismissed as less persuasive than other, more individual and artistic ways of presenting the world.10 Leskov himself wanted it both ways: he wanted to claim his repre­sen­ta­tion of distinctive voices as both mechanically accurate and individual and artistic. In

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response to the reviews of “The Lefthander,” he published a “literary explanation” insisting, “I in­ven­ted this w ­ hole story in May of last year, and the lefthander is a character created by me.”11 He removed the foreword from subsequent printings, but it resurfaced in 1894, in the last edition of his lifetime; l­ater editions have tended to put it in the notes. As we saw in chapter 7, though, Leskov also at times claimed to be precisely a careful recorder who overheard the words he used in his writing from p­ eople who w ­ ere unlike himself but who ­were themselves distinctive users of language: “the half-­educated, phrase-­mongers, holy fools, and the self-­righteous.” This kind of formulation indicates that p­ eople like his fictional frame narrator, a half-­educated workman of his own invention, ­were also creators of innovative verbal art, not passive members of a homogeneous collective “­people,” but individual performers worth competing with. Leskov’s story, and the Delo review of it, explore ways in which mid century Rus­sians could hear, rec­ord, and reuse sounds. They raise but do not definitively answer the question of ­whether the writer should be credited as the inventor of the tale, and they display the gunsmith’s position as a creator of a kind of modern sound art that, like Leskov’s own story, and like the shod flea that it discusses, brings together local and foreign material and techniques. The gunsmith seems to be an archaic figure, an Old Believer who rejects Orthodoxy, but he is in addition a canary-­breeder, as Leskov notes and the reviewer repeats. The depiction of the user of folk language as also a bird fancier evokes some of the avian images we have seen previously: Karamzin urging a poet to use pichuzhechka, a term for bird that evoked “pleasant ideas” when he heard it spoken by a “good villa­ger”; Turgenev’s hunter, who pursues game birds but finds himself eavesdropping on a paper-­filled office; Dahl’s notion of the dictionary entry as nest. In ­these cases, both birds and words are understood as au­then­tic, naturally occurring phenomena, awaiting the hunter, or the philologist, who w ­ ill notice, hear, collect, and reuse them. The gunsmith’s canaries are a dif­fer­ent kind of ­thing. The “Rus­sian canary” popu­lar in nineteenth-­century cities was a novelty, a cross between yellow canaries that originate from the Macronesian islands and local birds such as the siskin, yellowhammer, and linnet. It was bred in the countryside: the first major canary hatchery was established in the 1820s in Polotnianyi Zavod in Kaluga, where the ­family of Pushkin’s wife Nataliia Goncharova owned a paper factory, and by the ­middle of the ­century, peasants in four provinces ­were rearing ­these birds for sale in the cities in the autumn. They made the canaries more appealing to urban customers by caging them next to local birds, whose songs they would learn to reproduce.12 ­These birds, and their songs, are not pure objects, untouched by time, signifying their place of origin, awaiting capture; they are the products of recent history, deliberate manipulation,

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and movements across borders. Like the gunsmith’s neologisms, they bear the traces of their recent manufacture, and like the steel flea with its tiny shoes, they are not neatly Rus­sian or foreign. At the same time, the canaries in St. Petersburg in the 1880s, like paper, and peasant mi­grants, and writers, or gunsmiths, who moved from the provinces to the capitals, w ­ ere premechanical recording devices, vehicles for the transportation of sound between rural and urban places.13 Like the words in “The Lefthander,” t­hese canaries align with the Performance School concept of folklore as the product of specific ­people making their own creative choices as they work with the materials they have at hand. When Belinsky and then Dostoevsky compare the excessive use of dialect to oversalting, and when Aksakov compares Dahl’s writing to a salad, they advocate for a literary language that would sound unified and unadulterated. In Gautier’s terms, they imagine a pure way of writing that cleanly effaces “the multiplicity and singularity of its construction” and the arbitrariness of the choice of spoken words that went into it.14 At times, midcentury writers also imagine media that could capture spoken language completely and thus facilitate its perfect transformation into verbal art. Leskov’s “Lefthander,” though, suggests that every­thing is multiple, imperfect, and impure—­that it is salad all the way down. His story stages a contest between craftsmen, something like the listening contests I have investigated ­here and the song or insult contests that they reference, but the gunsmith’s canaries, like the argument about Leskov’s transcription methods, demonstrate the difficulty of definitively separating the provincial carriers of folkloric verbal art from its cosmopolitan collectors, seemingly legitimate from evidently illegitimate listeners, tradition from innovation, natu­ral sounds from artificial, Rus­sian from foreign, perfect from flawed recording, words that should be written from t­ hose that should stay oral. Even when writers think they have found, identified, and domesticated someone ­else’s word, they may not have the control over it that they think; like a sparrow, it may fly off.

A ck n o w l e d gm e n ts

This is a book about the mid-­nineteenth-­century Rus­sian Empire written in twenty-­ first-­century Silicon Valley, and my ideas about listening, per­for­mance, media, and access to other ­people’s words owe something to their time and place of birth. My vantage point makes me highly aware of the unpredictability of technological development, the materiality of media itself, the succession of media generations, and the fact that even as new media forms change our view of the world, they change the ways that we are seen. As I finished my manuscript during the Coronavirus pandemic, the divided rooms in Sokolov’s illustration of Turgenev’s “The Office” looked to me like the boxes in which ­people appeared on my computer screen, in a format that made me ner­vously aware that as I listened remotely to my colleagues or students, I was being watched, and I performed. Now, in April 2022, as I correct my page proofs, the media-technological aspects of this book feel less significant, the political aspects more so. I am mourning all the victims of the Russian invasion of Ukraine—not only those who have been killed or fled the violence in Ukraine, and the dissidents and protestors in Russia on whom the Putin regime has cracked down, but also the post-Soviet hopes for openness, freedom, and peace. While I cannot know now what the geopolitical situation will be once this book is published, I fear the return of a polarization between Russia and “the West” that recalls the Cold War and, a century before that started, the reign of Nicholas I, during which the writers I examine here came of age. I fear that now as then, autocratic Russian leaders will insist that Russia is naturally silent, communal, traditional, in opposition to the garrulous, libertine “West”—and that populists in other countries will find it expedient to echo that Russian line, whether in admiration or horror, agreeing that the world can be so neatly divided. I hope that this study of fictional and nonfictional scenes of listening and recording will show readers that the notion of an essentialized Russianness, in opposition to an essentialized “West,” was constructed in dialogue precisely with, and by, Western travelers, Russian subjects whose parents were migrants, and Russians who traveled to Europe. I also hope this book will provide evidence that the Eastern Slavs have never been unquestioningly united and quietly obedient, speakers of a single, unified language, as the Slavophiles once fantasized and the current government would wish; even the history of folklore and its collection, I suggest, is a story of creative, individual verbal artists. Finally, I hope this book will remind readers that the media that divide us also unite us—that the inhabitants of the mid-nineteenthcentury Russian Empire had much in common with other nineteenth-century people, and with us, too.

221

22 2 A c k n o wl e d gm e n ts

This book is inspired in part, by the conversations I have been privileged to participate in about the ethics of artists’ cultural borrowing. I am so grateful to Michael Alpert, with whom I co-­produced a compact disk of ­music associated with S. An-­sky and who made me start thinking about how performers reflect on their adaptation of folk styles for new audiences and evaluate themselves relative to each other. I learned a ­g reat deal by watching him and other traditional musicians who specialize in Jewish and Slavic ­musics, including Alicia Svigals and the members of Kitka and the Nightingale Trio, as they presented in my Stanford classes and responded to my students’ questions about how they understand their own position relative to their sources. I owe a debt to my Folklore and Lit­er­at­ure students for all their thought-­provoking comments and papers addressing this question, ­every quarter that I taught the class. I am grateful for the help I have gotten from specialists in Rus­sian studies. Grisha Freidin read at least a dozen drafts and argued with me about them generously over lunch in Berkeley restaurants. I have had wonderful conversations with Kevin Platt and Bruce Grant over almost as many years about how to combine methodologies from literary criticism and anthropology. Jason Cieply, Caryl Emerson, Lazar Fleishman, Yuliya Ilchuk, Jessica Merrill, Norman Naimark, Kevin Platt, and Svetlana Zenkevich read the entire manuscript and provided invaluable advice. Edyta Bojanowska, Heather Coleman, Irina Erman, Emily Finer, Jennifer Flaherty, Moritz Florin, Luba Golburt, Daniel Green, Rima Greenhill, Bella Grigoryan, Martha Kelly, D. Brian Kim, Nancy Kollmann, Mark Lipovetsky, Anna Lordan, Steven Lovell, Boris Maslov, Nick Mayhew, Benjamin Musachio, Margarita Nafpaktitis, Alexander Nakhimovsky, Alex Ogden, Laura Olson, Kathleen Parthé, Lynn Patyk, Thomas Roberts, Sasha Senderovich, Alexey Vdovin, Ilya Vinitsky, Michael Wachtel, Paul Werth, and Marina Zilbergerts read parts of the book and offered ideas. I had helpful conversations with Valery Dymshits, Monika Greenleaf, Inessa Medzhibovskaya, Elena Minyonok, William Nickell, Donna Orwin, Olga Petri, Julia Verkholantsev, Kirill Zubkov, and, at the very start of this proj­ect, Viktor Zhivov. I am grateful to the ­people who responded to sections of this book at panels at AATSEEL, ASEEES, at the Stanford Humanities Center, New York University, the Rus­sian studies kruzhok at the University of Pennsylvania, Prince­ton, Yale, Harvard, Ohio State University, the Realism conference at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and the “Funny Dostoevsky” conference, and in Luba Golburt’s Berkeley class on nature poetry. My Stanford lit­er­a­ture students have constantly, and brilliantly, questioned my ideas; I feel very lucky to have worked with them. This proj­ect has pushed me to try to understand many t­ hings that w ­ ere not covered during my education in Slavic languages and lit­er­a­tures, and I would like to thank all the ­people who helped me with this task (while making it clear that they are not to blame for any of the ways I undoubtedly got it wrong). In addition to reading the entire manuscript twice (and some sections more times), the extraordinarily kind Bruce Grant suggested reading in anthropology and helped me find my way into that field. In order to learn more about linguistics and linguistic anthropology, I had the privilege of sitting in on Stanford classes with Jonathan Rosa, Ramón Martinez, and John Rickford. Richard Bauman, Niloofar Haeri, Miyako I­noue, Tanya Luhrmann, Sarah Ogilvie, Jonathan Rosa, and, not long before his tragic death, John Bernard Bate gave me comments on sections of the book. I had helpful conversations with Sarah Benor, Adrienne Lo, Maria Sidorkina, and Sharika Thiranagama. I learned about media studies from Fred Turner, who gave me reading suggestions over many years and then read

A c k n owl e d gm e n ts

223

the entire manuscript. John Durham Peters, Ben Peters, and John Willinsky read sections of it, I got media-­studies advice from Paul DeMarinis and Tom Mullaney, and I began to see the field in a more systematic way by sitting in on Xiaochang Li’s inspiring class. I got help understanding sound studies, musicology, and ethnomusicology from Robert Beahrs, Margaret Frainier, Denise Gill, Bonnie Gordon, Heather Hadlock, Kay Shelemay, and Justin Tackett, all of whom read chapters. Jeremiah Lockwood gave me ­g reat reading ideas. I learned a ­g reat deal from the Yiddish leyenkrayz discussions he led on khazones and from teaching in “Worlds of Sound” with Heather Hadlock, Sean Hallowell, Ari Kelman, Ameer Loggins, Tiffany Naiman, Kirsten Paige, Anna Schultz, and Elise Stickles. Steve Knopper gave me reading suggestions just when I needed them. Friends and colleagues in lit­er­at­ ures other than Slavic, including Janet Beizer, Denise Gigante, Sepp Gumbrecht, Daniel Hernandez, Gavin Jones, Richard Martin, Kathryn Starkey, and Lisa Surwillo helped me calibrate my ideas for a comparative audience. Working with Mahinder Kingra at Cornell University Press has been delightful; I am grateful as well for the friendly reception from Roger Haydon, the advice from the anonymous readers of the manuscript, the copyediting work Jay Boggis, the virtuosic proofreading of Boris Shoshitaishvili, production help from Mary Ribesky, and the index expertly produced by the felicitously named Enid Zafran. Anne Christine Burke helped with the research on the secondary lit­er­a­ture, and Adrien Smith got me copies from the Leninka with tremendous speed. Margarita Nafpaktitis at Stanford and Nikita Eliseev at the Rus­sian National Library helped me track down sources. I am grateful to the staff in the Institute of Rus­sian Lit­er­at­ ure and Art (IRLI), the Rus­ sian State Archive of Lit­er­a­ture and Art (RGALI), and the manuscript rooms of the Rus­sian National Library and the Rus­sian State Library. My friends and f­ amily have been remarkably tolerant as I have told them about this seemingly endless proj­ect. Joanette Sorkin read the entire ­thing; I was fascinated by her comments about how it spoke to her experiences as a psychiatrist listening to many other ­people’s words. Eva Kahan read a section of it and helped me reformulate some of the ideas, and Michael Kahan not only lived through a blow-­by-­blow development of the book as I tinkered with it over more than a de­cade, but read through it repeatedly, improving the style and making the comparisons to American history less naïve. Mountain View April 2022

N ote s

Archive Abbreviations

IRLI OR RGB RGALI RNB RO

Institute of Rus­sian Lit­er­at­ ure, or Pushkin House, St. Petersburg Rus­sian State Library, Manuscript Division, or Pashkov House, Moscow Rus­sian State Archive of Lit­er­a­ture and Art, Moscow Rus­sian National Library, Manuscript Division, St. Petersburg

Introduction

1. V. Belinskii, “Vzgliad na russkuiu literaturu 1847 g.,” Sovremennik 7, No. 1 (1848); Thomas P. Hodge, Hunting Nature: Ivan Turgenev and the Organic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 81; see Rimvydas Silbajoris, “Images and Structures in Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketchbook,” Slavic and East Eu­ro­pean Journal 28, No. 2 (Summer 1984): 182, for an example of a critic who finds the story so obviously po­liti­cal that it is not worth analyzing. 2. B. Faurie, “Turgenev v dome Viardo: Vospominaniia Batista Fori,” ed. N. A. Leont’evskii, 489–502, I. S. Turgenev, Novye materialy i issledovaniia, Literaturnoe Nasledstvo 76 (Moscow: Nauka, 1967): 499, 502 n.42; cf. Patrick Waddington, “Some Salient Phases of Turgenev’s Critical Reception in Britain, Part II: 1870–1883,” New Zealand Slavonic Journal 1981, No. 1, 21. 3. I. S. Turgenev, “Sobstvennaia gospodskaia kontora,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 30 tt (henceforth PSSP) (Moscow: Nauka, 1978) 3:474. 4. Turgenev, “Kontora,” PSSP 3:143. 5. Turgenev seems to be depicting listening as better than writing, a distinction of orality from literacy that inspired literary theorists in the 1980s: Walter Ong idealized the voice, Jacques Derrida insisted that writing allows play and freedom—Jonathan Sterne labels paeans to the voice the “audiovisual litany.” Disability studies critique this binary, noting that speech and writing are interdependent and we cannot separate the information we get from our dif­fer­ent senses. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016); Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1991); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice: Deafness, Language, and the Senses—A Philosophical History (New York: Macmillan, 1999), 6; cf. Jonathan Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 13; Christopher Cannon and Matthew Rubery, “Introduction to ‘Aurality’ and ‘Literacy,’ ” PMLA 135, No. 2 (2020): 351. 225

22 6 NOTES

TO PAG ES 3–7

6. Turgenev, “Kontora,” PSSP 3:144, 145. 7. V. Belinskii to P. V. Annenkov, 15 February 1848, in Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 13 tt. (Moscow: AN SSSR 1953–1959) (henceforth PSS), 12:467. 8. Turgenev, PSSP 3:145. ­Here and elsewhere in this book, I draw on multiple En­glish registers and other languages to convey the jarring effect of Rus­sian register-­mixing. 9. “Zelenia” appears in a footnote to an 1848 story. Turgenev, “Smert,’ ” PSSP 3:198. 10. Critics defended this word choice. V. I. Chernyshev, “Russkii iazyk v proizvedeniiakh I. S. Turgeneva,” Izvestiia Akademii nauk SSSR, otdelenie obshchestvennykh nauk 1936, No. 3, 481; V. V. Vinogradov, Ocherki po istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka XVII–­ XIX vv (Leiden: E. I. Brill, 1950), 424; M. P. Starenkov, “Iazyk i stil’ ‘Zapisok okhotnika’ I. S. Turgeneva,” cited from http://­i​-­s​-­turgenev​.­r u​/­books​/­item​/­f00​/­s00​/­z0000008​ /­st003​.­shtml. 11. I thank Aleksey Vdovin for sharing his unpublished book (working title, “Konets idillii: Rasskazy iz krestianskogo byta v russkoi kul’ture do otmeny krepostnogo prava [1789–1861]”) that describes how Marko Vovchok (Mariia Vilinskaia) used transcriptions of peasant speech made by her husband. 12. Cathy A. Frierson, Peasant Icons: Repre­sen­ta­tions of Rural P­ eople in Late Nineteenth ­Century Rus­sia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 9, 195. Cf. Alexey Vdovin and Kirill Zubkov, “New Approaches to Repre­sen­ta­tions of Peasants in Rus­sian Lit­er­ a­ture. Introduction,” Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture 119 ( January–­February 2021): 10. 13. “Redemption” also recalls the vision of Christian unity inspiring media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong. Jonathan Sterne, “The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality,” Canadian Journal of Communication 36 (2011). 14. P. Boborykine, “Le culte du ­peuple dans la littérature russe contemporaine,” Revue Internationale (Florence) 6 (10 June 1885): 721. 15. Philip Pomper, The Rus­sian Revolutionary Intelligent­sia (Arlington Heights, IL: Davidson, 1993), 122–126; Daniel Field, “Peasants and Propagandists in the Rus­sian Movement to the P ­ eople of 1874,” The Journal of Modern History 59, No. 3 (September 1987). 16. Boborykine, “Le culte du peuple,” 723, 729, 731. 17. Ezequiel Adamovsky, Euro-­Orientalism: Liberal Ideology and the Image of Rus­sia in France (c. 1740–1880) (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), chap. 6. For a bibliography of the “penitent nobleman,” see D. E. Letniakov, “Dvorianstvo kak uchastnik revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia: rossiiskie osobennosti,” Politiko-­filosofskii ezhegodnik 5 (2012). 18. N. K. Mikhailovskii, V Peremezhku, Sochineniia (St. Petersburg: Russkoe Bogatstvo, 1896–1897) 4:221, 226. 19. N. K. Mikhailovskii, Literaturnye vospominaniia i sovremennaia smuta (St. Petersburg: V. M. Vol’fa, 1900), part 4. 20. Aleksandr Pypin, Istoriia russkoi etnografii (St. Petersburg: M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1890–1892), 2:361. 21. M. L. Gasparov, “Intellektualy, intelligenty, intelligentnost’,” Russkaia intelligentsiia: Istoriia i sud’ba (Moscow: Nauka, 1999), 12; Marc Raeff, Origins of the Rus­sian Intelligent­sia: The Eighteenth-­Century Nobility (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966). 22. M. K. Azadovskii, Istoriia russkoi fol’kloristiki (Moscow: Izd. Ministerstva prosviashcheniia RSFSR, 1958), 1:chapter VII, esp. 419. 23. Michael Confino, “On Intellectuals and Intellectual Traditions in Eighteenth-­and Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sia,” Daedalus 101, No. 2 (Spring 1972): 125–128. Other schol-

NOTES TO PA G E S 7– 9

227

ars understand the nobles’ “penitence” as generated by the frustration of attempts to construct a Rus­sian national identity. See Marlene Laruelle, Rus­sian Nationalism: Imaginaries, Doctrines, and Po­liti­cal Battlefields (London: Routledge, 2019); Vera Tolz, Rus­sia (Inventing the Nation) (New York: Oxford, 2001); Olga Maiorova, From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Rus­sian Nation through Cultural My­thol­ogy, 1855–1870 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). 24. Gregory L. Freeze, “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Rus­sian Social History,” The American Historical Review 91, No. 1 (February 1986): 21, 28–29; Michael Confino, “The ‘Soslovie’ (Estate) Paradigm: Reflections on Some Open Questions,” Cahiers du Monde Russe 49, No. 4 (October-­December 2008). 25. Catherine Evtuhov, Portrait of a Rus­sian Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth-­Century Nizhny Novgorod (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh, 2011); Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Structures of Society: Imperial Rus­sia’s “­People of Vari­ ous Ranks” (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994); Alison Karen Smith, For the Common Good and Their Own Well-­Being: Social Estates in Imperial Rus­sia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 7, 184–185; Eugene Avrutin, Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Imperial Rus­sia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 61–68. 26. W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Rus­sia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825–1861 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1982); Thomas Marsden, The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Rus­sia: Bibikov’s System for the Old Believers, 1841– 1855 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 27. Avram Reitblat, “Pisateli i III otdelenie,” Kak Pushkin vyshel v genii: Istoriko-­ sotsiologicheskie ocherki (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2001). 28. Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Rus­sia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011), especially on Dahl and Leskov; Irina Reyfman, How Rus­sia Learned to Write: Lit­er­a­ture and the Imperial ­Table of Ranks (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017). 29. Sergei Zarudnyi, “Pis’mo opytnogo chinovnika sorokovykh godov mladshemu sobratu, postupaiushchemu na sluzhbu,” Russkaia starina 1899, No. 12, 543–546. 30. Göran Bolin, Media Generations: Experience, Identity and Mediatised Social Change (New York: Routledge, 2017), 45. Compare Karl Mannheim, “The Prob­lem of Generations,” in Essays, ed. Paul Kecskemeti, 276–320 (London: Routledge, 1952); V. V. Bocharov, Antropologiia vozrasta (St.  Petersburg: Izd. S-­ Peterburgskogo universiteta, 2001); N. V. Krugova, “Rossiia: Sud’ba pokolenii,” Vestnik SPbU 6, vyp. 3 (2007). 31. John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5, 89, 139, 268; cf. Yohei Igarashi, The Connected Condition: Romanticism and the Dream of Communication (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020). 32. Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 25; Miyako ­Inoue, “Stenography and Ventriloquism in Late Nineteenth C ­ entury Japan,” Language and Communication 31 (2011); and “Word for Word: Verbatim as Po­liti­cal Technologies,” Annual Review of Anthropology 47 (2018). See Daniel E. Collins, Reanimated Voices: Speech Reporting in a Historical-­Pragmatic Perspective (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Com­pany, 2001), esp. 50ff, on verbatim recording in early Muscovite trial transcripts. 33. Lothar Müller, White Magic: The Age of Paper (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014).

22 8 NOTES

TO PAG ES 9–11

34. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth ­Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Sterne, Audible Past. 35. Ben Kaf ka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (New York: Zone Books, 2012), 9–12. Cf. L. E. Shepelev, Chinovnyi mir Rossii XVIII- nachalo XX v (St. Petersburg: Isskustvo, 1999), 47–49. 36. Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 37. Johnson, Listening in Paris. 38. John M. Picker, “The Soundproof Study: Victorian Professionals, Work Space, and Urban Noise,” Victorian Studies 42, No. 3 (Spring 1999/2000). 39. Ivan Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. chap. 3. 40. Paula McDowell, The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); cf. Haun Saussy, The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 41. Johann Gottfried Herder, “From Alte Volkslieder/Ancient Folk Songs” (1774), trans. Philip V. Bohlman, in Herder and Bohlman, Song Loves the Masses: Herder on M ­ usic and Nationalism, 25–43 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 38. 42. Herder, “From Volkslieder and Stimmen der Völker in Liedern/Folk Songs and Voices of the ­People in Song” (1778/1779 and 1807), trans. Bohlman, in Song Loves the Masses, 50–70, 59. 43. Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of In­equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4-5, 222–223. 44. Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-­Century Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 4–5, 20. 45. M. Azadovskii, “Predislovie,” Skazki Verkhnelenskogo kraia (Irkutsk: Izd. Vostochno-­Sibirskogo otdela russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva, 1925), esp. xxxv–­ xliii; T. G. Ivanova, Istoriia russkoi fol’kloristiki XX veka: 1900-pervaia polovina 1941 g. (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2009), 186–192. Dana Prescott Howell, The Development of Soviet Folkloristics (New York: Garland, 1992), 20-34, 157-160, 170-173, 266-268. 46. I am grateful to William Nickell for thinking through this idea with me. 47. Stephen Lovell, How Rus­sia Learned to Talk: A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). This study joins works such as Peter Brang, Zvuchashchee slovo: Zametki po teorii i istorii deklamatsionnogo iskusstva (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2010), in investigating the mediation of the spoken word from a sound-­studies perspective in nineteenth-­century Rus­sia (Rus­sian ­music in the nineteenth c­ entury is a well-­studied but dif­fer­ent area). More scholars take a sound-­ studies approach to the mediation of the spoken word in the Rus­sian twentieth ­century, such as Oksana Bulgakowa, Golos kak kul’turnyi fenomen (Moscow: NLO, 2015), and Lilya Kaganovsky, The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1928–1935 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018). 48. Hodge, Hunting Nature, 7, 46, 71, 73. 49. Bolin, Media Generations, 121–127. 50. A. F. Pisemsky, Liudi sorokovykh godov, in Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Pravda, 1959) (henceforth SS) 4:185ff, 195, 265–266, 281, 5:48ff, 78–81, 379.

NOTES TO PA G E S 12– 13

229

51. Pisemsky, SS 5:296. 52. Pisemsky, SS 5:433–438. Using this verb in this same scornful spirit, A. A. Bestuzhev described p­ eople who “once a year listen attentively (prislushivaiutsia) to folk language at a street per­for­mance (v balaganakh) and are delighted with themselves for fishing up some banal expression, and parade about with it, pleased as Punch (s pisanoi torboiu);” he compared this to his own lengthy war­time experience with soldiers and their language. A. Bestuzhev to the Polevoi b­ rothers, 1 January 1832, in “Pis’ma Aleksandra Aleksandrovicha Bestuzheva k N. A. i K. A. Polevym, pisannye v 1831–1837 godakh,” Russkii vestnik 1891, No. 3, 320, cited from bestuzhev-marlinskiy.lit-info.ru/bestuzhev-marlinskiy/letters/letter-39.htm. Cf. V. V. Vinogradov, Iazyk Pushkina (Moscow: Academia, 1935), 398. 53. Richard Wagner expressed similar ideas in “Jewishness in M ­ usic,” also published in 1869. See Ruth Hacohen, The ­Music Libel Against the Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). On the parallels to and afterlife of Wagner’s ideas in Rus­sia, see James Loeffler, “Richard Wagner’s ‘Jewish ­Music’: Antisemitism and Aesthetics in Modern Jewish Culture,” Jewish Social Studies 15, No. 2 (Winter 2009), esp. 13–14. Also see Loeffler, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Rus­sian Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), chapter 1. 54. Richard Bauman, “Per­for­mance,” in A Companion to Folklore, ed. Regina F. Bendix and Galit Hasan-­Rokem, 94–118 (Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2012), 101. Cf. Erving Goffman, The Pre­sen­ta­tion of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh: Social Sciences Research Center, 1956); Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997). 55. Plutarch, Moralia, vol. 1, trans. F. C. Babbitt (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1927), paragraphs 3, 4, 13, and 14. 56. Michael Herzfeld argues that all anthropologists’ writing is performative. Herzfeld, “On Mediterraneanist Per­for­mances,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 1, No. 1 (1991): 141–147; cf. Margaret Kenna, “An Ironic Mirror: Michael Herzfeld on Greece, Anthropology and the Anthropology of Greece,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 1, No. 1 (1991); Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-­State (New York: Routledge, 2005), 24, 48. 57. V. M. Zhivov, Language and Culture in Eighteenth-­Century Rus­sia, trans. Marcus Levitt (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2008). 58. Vinogradov, Ocherki, 207. Azadovskii, Istoriia russkoi fol’kloristiki, 1:247. 59. Susan Gal and Judith Irvine, Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 224–225. 60. Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, ed. Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Cf. Kathryn E. Graber, Mixed Messages: Mediating Native Belonging in Asian Rus­sia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 205. 61. Benedict Anderson, ­Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006), 44. 62. Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycock, “Disinventing and (Re)constituting Languages,” Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 2, No. 3 (2005): 140; Jonathan Rosa and Christa Burdick, “Language Ideologies,” The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society, ed. Ofelia García, Nelson Flores, and Massimiliano Spotti, 103–123 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 109.

23 0 NOTES

TO PAG ES 14–16

63. V. V. Vinogradov, Iazyk Pushkina; Stil’ Pushkina (Moscow: Nauka, 1999); and Ocherki. On Vinogradov, see Jonathan Brooks Platt, Greetings, Pushkin! Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Rus­sian National Bard (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 132ff. 64. V. M. Zhivov, Istoriia iazyka russkoi pis’mennosti (Moscow: Russkii fond, 2017), 1132–1138. 65. Yelizaveta Raykhlina, “Rus­sian Literary Marketplace: Periodicals, Social Identity, and Publishing for the ­Middle Stratum in Imperial Rus­sia, 1825–1865” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2018); M. N. Kufaev, Istoriia russkoi knigi v XIX veke (Moscow: Pashkov Dom, 2003), 30, 94–138; Jeffrey Brooks, When Rus­sia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popu­lar Culture, 1861–1917 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1985). 66. Daniel Field, “The Year of Jubilee,” in Rus­sia’s ­Great Reforms, 1855–1881, ed. Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova, 40–57 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 67. Lovell, How Rus­sia Learned to Talk, 17. 68. M. M. Bakhtin, “Slovo v romane,” Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul’tur, 2012), 3:25. Translation from M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 272. 69. Asif Agha, Language and Social Relations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 24–26; Ken Hirschkop, Cambridge Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), on “Heteroglossia: Novelistic or Everyday.” 70. Karamzin to Dmitriev, 22 June 1793, on “Zhavoronok,” Pis’ma N. M. Karamzina k I. I. Dmitrievu, ed. Ia. Grot and P. Pekarskii (St. Petersburg: Tip. Imp. Akad. Nauk, 1866), 39. 71. A. I. Herzen, “O romane iz narodnoi zhizni v Rossii” (1857), Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tt (Moscow: Akad. Nauk, 1954–1955) (henceforth SS) 13:177. 72. Michael Wachtel, “Pushkin’s Turn to Folklore,” Pushkin Review 21 (2019), 147 n. 101 and elsewhere, discusses the po­liti­cal implications in the Soviet period of scholars’ observations that Pushkin accessed folklore from written sources and sometimes even from non-­Russian ones. 73. A. S. Pushkin, “Otvet na stat’iu v zhurnale ‘Atenei,’ 1828,” Sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh (Moscow: GIKhL, 1959–1962) (henceforth SS) SS 6:286. 74. A.S. Pushkin, “Oproverzhenie na kritiki i zamechaniia na sobstvennye sochineniia,” SS 6:348. Cf. Wachtel, 117. 75. P. A. Viazemskii, Staraia zapisnaia knizhka, ed. L. Ia. Ginzburg (Leningrad: Izd. pisatelei v Leningrade, 1927), 233; N. Iu. Shvedova, Grammatika sovremennogo russkogo literaturnogo iazyka (Moscow: Nauka, 1970), 600. 76. Viazemskii, “Iz stat’i ‘Vzgliad na literaturu nashu v desiatiletie posle smerti Pushkina,’ ” Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1998), 132. Cf. Vinogradov, Iazyk Pushkina, 333–334. 77. He wrote this of Karamzin in 1834. Belinskii, “Literaturnye mechtaniia,” PSS 1:57. 78. Shvedova, Grammatika sovremennogo russkogo literaturnogo iazyka, 386. 79. I. M. Sechenov, Refleksy golovnogo mozga (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1942), 82. On prislushivanie in late Tolstoy see Anna Lordan, “Every­thing Depends on Where

NOTES TO PA G E S 17– 19

231

Consciousness Is Directed: Narrative, Attention, and Experiences of Form in Tolstoy” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2017), chap. 4. 80. A. S. Pushkin to Dm. Maks. (Dmitrii Shvarts), 9 December 1824, A. S. Pushkin, SS 9:127. “Third Masonic notebook,” published in A. S. Pushkin, Rabochie tetradi (London: St.  Petersburg Partnership Consortium, 1995–1997), IV:PD 836:49ob.–58ob; R. V. Iezuitova, “Rabochaia tetrad’ Pushkina PD, No. 836 (Istoriia zapolneniia),” Pushkin: Issledovaniia i materialy (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991) 14:121–147. 81. Aleksandr Boshniak, “Raport” to de Vitt, August 1 1826, cited from B. L. Mozdalevskii, Pushkin i ego sovremenniki (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 1999), 80-83. 82. M. A. Kucherskaya, “Wearing Folk Costumes as a Mimetic Practice in Rus­sian Ethnographic Field Studies,” Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 47, No. 1 (2019): 132–133. Kucherskaya provides a bibliography of instances, 127, 135–136. 83. Daniel Green, “Clothing,” forthcoming in Tolstoy in Context, ed. Anna Berman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). 84. Ben Rampton, “Language Crossing and the Redefinition of Real­ity: Implications for Research on Code-­Switching Community,” Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies, paper 5 (1997), 2, 8; Rampton, Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents (New York: Longman, 1995); Asif Agha, “The Social Life of Cultural Value,” Language and Communication 23 (2003). 85. Rampton, “Language Crossing,” 10, 14. 86. Vinogradov, Ocherki, 305. 87. Roman Jakobson, “Supraconscious Turgenev,” Language in Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987). This is a translation of his 1921 “Zaumnyi Turgenev.” 88. Bakhtin, “Slovo v romane,” 47; translation cited from Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 294. 89. J. Alexander Ogden, “The Impossible Peasant Voice in Rus­sian Culture: Stylization and Mimicry,” Slavic Review 64, No. 3 (Autumn 2005), 523–525, 532; Ogden, “Peasant Listening, Listening to Peasants: Miscommunication and Ventriloquism in Nekrasov’s ‘Komu na Rusi zhit’ khorosho’,” Rus­sian Review 72, No. 4 (October 2013), 598ff. 90. Cf. Ogden, “The Impossible Peasant Voice,” 530. 91. Kembrew McLeod and Peter Dicola, Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); “Cultural Appropriation without Cultural Essentialism?” Social Theory and Practice 42, No.  2 (April  2016); James O. Young, “Art, Authenticity, and Appropriation,” Frontiers of Philosophy in China 1, No. 3 (Sept. 2006); Lenore Keeshig-­Tobias, “Stop Stealing Native Stories,” in Borrowed Power: Essays on Appropriation, ed. Bruce H. Ziff and Pratima V. Rao, 71–73 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997). 92. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Meta­phor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 1, No. 1 (2012). 93. Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity, 222–223; Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016); Jon Cruz, Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1999).

23 2 NOTES

TO PAG ES 19–25

94. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-­Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 66–111 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Cf. George Lipsitz, “ ‘The Shortest Way Through’: Strategic Anti-­Essentialism in Popu­lar ­Music,” in Dangerous Crossroads: Popu­lar ­Music, Postmodernism, and the Politics of Place, 49–68 (New York: Verso, 1994), 62. 95. Pierre Bourdieu, “Structures, Habitus, Practices,” in The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, 52–65 (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1990), 52. 96. Bourdieu, “Understanding,” in The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Con­ temporary Society, ed. Pierre Bourdieu et al., trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson et al., 607–626 (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1999), 609, 614, 623. 97. Robert D. Tollison, “The Economic Theory of Rent Seeking,” Public Choice 152, Nos. 1–2 (2012); Sophie L. Mowles and Terry J. Ord, “Repetitive Signals and Mate Choice: Insights from Contest Theory,” Animal Be­hav­ior 84, No. 2 (2012); Susan B. A. Somers-­Willet, “Slam Poetry and the Cultural Politics of Performing Identity,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 38, No. 1 (Spring 2005). 98. Michel Chion, Audio-­Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 25–34; Michel Chion, Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 1. Ringing

1. A. I. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tt (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1954–1955) (hence SS) 9:146–147. 2. P. Ia. Chaadaev, “Lettre Première,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i izbrannye pis’ma (Moscow: Nauka, 1991) (henceforth PSS), 1:92, 95, 103. 3. Edward V. Williams, The Bells of Rus­sia: History and Technology (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton, 1985), 148–164. 4. Re the implied contest between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, see the concept of “competitive piety,” in Elisheva Baumgarten, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, ­Women, and Everyday Religious Observance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 8. 5. Astolphe de Custine, La Russie en 1839, ed. Véra Milchina and Alexandre Ospovate (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015), 592; Julien-­Frédéric Tarn, Le Marquis de Custine, ou les malheurs de l’exactitude (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 532. 6. Carl Thompson, “Nineteenth-­Century Travel Writing,” in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, ed. Nandini Das and Tim Youngs, 108–124 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 111; C. W. Thompson, French Romantic Travel Writing: Chateaubriand to Nerval (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Michel Cadot, La Russie dans la vie intellectuelle française (1839–1856) (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1967), 173– 223; Véra Milchina, “La Russie en 1839 du marquis de Custine et ses sources contemporaines,” Cahiers du monde russe 41, No. 1 (2000); Irena Grudzinska Gross, The Scar of Revolution: Custine, Tocqueville, and the Romantic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Milchina and Ospovate’s La Russie en 1839 and La Russie en 1839, ed. Michael Parfenov (Arles: Actes Sud, 1990) both have useful notes. On French travel writing on Rus­sia, see Charles Corbet, L’opinion française face à l’inconnue russe, 1799–

NOTES TO PA G E S 25– 29

233

1894 (Paris: Didier, 1967); Ezequiel Adamovsky, Euro-­Orientalism: Liberal Ideology and the Image of Rus­sia in France (c. 1740–1880) (New York: Peter Lang, 2006); Martin Malia, Rus­sia ­Under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horse­man to the Lenin Mausoleum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 7. Milchina, Introduction to Custine, La Russie en 1839, 31. 8. Thompson, French Romantic Travel Writing, 10; Adamovsky, Euro-­Orientalism, 106. 9. On Catholic critiques of Rus­sia, Gross, The Scar of Revolution, 32–34. 10. George F. Kennan, The Marquis de Custine and His Rus­sia in 1839 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1971), 4–7. 11. Cadot traces Custine’s interactions with Rus­sians in La Russie dans la vie intellectuelle, 173–223. Cadot, “Čaadaev en France: quelques remarques préliminaires,” Revue des études slaves 55, No. 2 (1983): 268–269; V. A. Mil’china, A. L. Ospovat, “Chaadaev i markiz de Kiustin: otvetnaia replika 1843 g.,” Rossica romana, No. 1 (1994). 12. On Kozlovsky, see Wacław Lednicki, Rus­sia, Poland, and the West: Essays in Literary and Cultural History (New York: Roy, 1954), 96; L. F. Struve, Russkii evropeets: Materialy dlia biografii i kharakteristiki D. B. Kozlovskogo (San Francisco: Delo, 1951). 13. Custine, La Russie, 122, 125–126. 14. Charles Ruud and Sergei Stepanov, Fontanka 16: The Tsar’s Secret Police (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1999), 21–22; on the fear that discussion groups contained informers, Custine, La Russie, 1056n. Cf. A. Reitblat, “Pisateli i III otdelenie,” Kak Pushkin vyshel v genii: Istoriko-­sotsiologicheskie ocherki (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2001); Charles A. Ruud, Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Rus­sian Press, 1804–1906 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982). 15. Custine, La Russie, 129. 16. Astolphe de Custine, Mémoires et voyages (Paris: François Bourin, 1992), 213, cited in Anka Muhlstein, A Taste for Freedom: The Life of Astolphe de Custine, trans. Teresa Waugh (New York: Helen Marx Books, 1999), 182. 17. Custine, La Russie, 185. 18. Ibid., 191. 19. Ibid., 291. 20. Ibid., 684. 21. Ibid., 715. 22. Ibid., 160. 23. Ibid., 161. 24. Ibid., 182. 25. Ibid., 292. 26. Ibid., 803. 27. Ibid., 506, 751. 28. Ibid., 210. 29. Ibid., 211. 30. Ibid., 349. 31. Ibid., 519–520. 32. Ibid., 797. 33. Ibid., 804. 34. Ibid., 1108–1111. 35. Ibid., 852–854.

23 4 NOTES

TO PAG ES 29–32

36. Letter to Victor Hugo, 19 October 1839, private collection, cited in Francine-­ Dominique Liechtenhan, Astolphe de Custine: Voyageur et philosophe (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1990), 135. 37. For the opposite reaction, see A Lady, The En­glishwoman in Rus­sia: Impressions of Society and Manners (London: John Murray, 1855), chapter 4. 38. Gross, Scar of Revolution, 17–20; Corbet, L’opinion française face à l’inconnue russe. 39. Adam Mickiewicz, Chefs-­d’oeuvre poétiques (Paris: Bossard, 1924), 397, 398, 433. 40. Ibid., 431. 41. Cadot, La Russie, 64, 182; Custine, La Russie, 906n. 42. Félicité Robert de Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion (Paris: Tournachon-­Molin et Seguin, 1818) 1:460. 43. Peter N. Stearns, Priest and Revolutionary: Lamennais and the Dilemma of French Catholicism (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). 44. Adam Mickiewicz, Livre des Pelerins Polonais (Paris: Eugene Renduel, 1833), 175. 45. Chaadaev, PSS 1:95, 100. G. Florovskii, “Eto bylo religioznoe zapadnichestvo (fragment iz knigi Puti russkogo bogosloviia),” in P. Ia. Chaadaev: Pro et Contra, 464–467 (St. Petersburg: Izd. Russkogo Khristianskogo Gumanitarnogo Instituta, 1998), 465. On Chaadaev, see Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sian Thought, trans. Hilda Andrews-­Rusiecka (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975); Philosophical Works of Peter Chaadaev, ed. Raymond McNally and Richard Tempest (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991); Raymond McNally, Chaadaev and His Friends: An Intellectual History of Peter Chaadaev and His Rus­sian Contemporaries (Tallahassee, FL: Diplomatic Press, 1971); Robin Aizlewood, “Revisiting Rus­sian Identity in Rus­sian Thought: From Chaadaev to the Early 20th ­Century,” The Slavonic and East Eu­ro­pean Review 78, No. 1 ( January 2000). 46. Chaadaev, PSS 1:112. 47. Ibid., 1:111. 48. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 311. 49. Richard Tempest, “Madman or Criminal: Government Attitudes to Petr Chaadaev in 1836,” Slavic Review 43, No. 2 (Summer 1984): 286; Elizabeth Blake, Dostoevsky and the Catholic Under­ground (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 10– 11; Charles Quenet, Tchaadaev et les lettres philosophiques: contribution à l’étude du mouvement des idées en Russie (Paris: H. Champion, 1931), 82–83; Raymond McNally, “Significant Revelations in Chaadaev’s Letters to A. I. Turgenev,” Studies in Soviet Thought 32, No. 4 (November 1986): 329. 50. Mark O’Connor, “ ‘Adveniat Regnum Tuum’: Chaadaev, Mickiewicz, and the Kingdom of God on Earth,” Studies in Soviet Thought 32, No. 4 (November 1984). Lednicki, in Rus­sia, Poland, and the West, argues that Chaadaev was a closet Polonophile; G. P. Struve, in “Who Was Pushkin’s Polonophil?” Slavonic and East Eu­ro­pean Review 29, No. 73 (1951), disagrees. 51. Isaiah Berlin, “Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty,” Rus­sian Thinkers (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 107. Chaadaev, PSS 1:111. 52. On Mickiewicz’s influence on Custine, see Cadot, La Russie, 224–225; Custine, La Russie, 1028n, 1039n, 1044n, 1050n.

NOTES TO PA G E S 32– 39

235

53. Thompson, French Romantic Travel Writing, 358. 54. Malia, Rus­sia ­under Western Eyes; Adamovsky, Euro-­Orientalism, especially chaps. 2 and 3. 55. Custine, La Russie, 199. 56. Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, in The Complete Works of M. de Montesquieu (London: T. Evans, 1777) 17:352. 57. Custine, La Russie, 467–468. 58. Rousseau, “Essai sur l’origine de langues,” Oeuvres complètes (Paris : Gallimard, 1959–), 5:381, 394, 400, 407–410. 59. I owe this reading to Boris Maslov; I am grateful to him for showing me his draft, “Feeding upon the Double-­Headed Ea­gle: A Zhivovian Reading of Kheraskov’s Rossiad.” 60. M. M. Kheraskov, “Rossiiada. Poema epicheskaia,” Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1961), 215–216. 61. Rudolf Erich Raspe, The Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1785) (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1989). On the Rus­sian publications (from 1791), see A. V. Blium, Karatel’ lzhi ili knizhnye prikliucheniia Barona Miunkhgauzena (Moscow: Kniga, 1978), 50. 62. Raspe, The Travels, 38–40. 63. William F. Hansen, Ariadne’s Thread: A Guide to International Tales found in Classical Lit­er­a­ture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 146. 64. François Rabelais, Gargantua et Pantagruel, Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Seuil, 1973) 4:729–730. On other versions of the tale see Hansen, 146–147; Otto Weinreich, Antiphanes und Münchhausen. Das antike Lügenmärlein von den gefrornen Worten und sein Fortleben im Abendland (Vienna: Hölder-­Pichler-­Tempsky, 1942), 45–122. 65. Count Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Leonard Eckstein Opdycke (New York: Scribner’s, 1903), 133. Rus­sian versions include Stepan Pisakhov’s 1924 stylized folktale “Morozheny pesni” (Frozen songs) and Vladimir Sorokin’s 1999 novel Goluboe salo (Blue lard), which uses Rabelais as an epigraph. 66. See John W. Randolph, “The Singing Coachman, or the Road and Rus­sia’s Ethnographic Invention in Early Modern Times,” Journal of Early Modern History 11, Nos. 1–2 (2007); Randolph, “Performing Obligation,” in Rus­sian Per­for­mances: Word, Object, Action, ed. Julie Buckler, Julie Cassiday, Boris Wolfson, 33–41 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). 67. Histoire pittoresque, dramatique et caricaturale de la Sainte Russie d’après les chroniqueurs et historiens Nestor, Nikan, Sylvestre, Karamsin, Ségur, e­ tc. (Paris: J. Bry Ainé, 1854); David Kunzle, “Gustave Doré’s History of Holy Rus­sia: Anti-­Russian Propaganda from the Crimean War to the Cold War,” The Rus­sian Review 42, No. 3 ( July 1983). 68. Anette Hoffmann, “Introduction: Listening to Sound Archives,” Social Dynamics 41, No. 1 (2015), 73; Michel Chion, Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 31; Thomas Hinton, “Paroles gelées: Voices of Vernac­ ular Authority in the Troubadour Vida Corpus,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 22 (2011); Douglas Kahn, Noise, ­Water, Meat: History of Voice, Sound, and Aurality in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 206. 69. Williams, The Bells of Rus­sia, xv. 70. N. Ia. Eidel’man, Tainye korrespondenty “Poliarnoi zvezdy” (Moscow: Mysl’, 1968). On Herzen see Alexander Herzen, A Herzen Reader, ed. Kathleen Parthé (Evanston,

23 6 NOTES

TO PAG ES 39–43

IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012); Aileen M. Kelly, The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 71. Ana Siljak, “Between East and West: Hegel and the Origins of the Rus­sian Dilemma,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, No. 2 (April 2001): 342. 72. For more bell meta­phors, see Herzen, SS 12:357–358, 13:7–12, 16:30–31, 19:241. 73. N. N. Stepanov, “Gertsen i Chaadaev,” Obshchestvennaia mysl’ v Rossii XIX veka, ed. V. S. Diakin and A. N. Tsamutali (Leningrad: Nauka, 1986). 74. Herzen, 10/22 September 1842, diary, SS 2:226. 75. Herzen, 17 September 1844, diary, SS 2:383. 76. Un Russe [Herzen], “La Russie,” Voix du peuple, 16 and 26 November and 10 December 1849, SS 6:180. 77. Herzen, “O razvitii revoliutsionnykh idei v Rossii,” SS 7:221–223. On the link of horn sounds in eighteenth-­century poetry with martial themes, see Joachim Klein, “Truba, svirel’, lira i gudok (poetologicheskie simvoly russkogo klassitsizma),” Puti kul’turnogo importa. Trudy po russkoi lit­er­at­ure XVIII veka (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2005), 219–224. Similarly, Pavel Annenkov wrote that Belinsky’s letter to Gogol’ “was heard throughout intellectual Rus­sia like the voice of a trumpet.” P. V. Annenkov, Zamechatel’noe desiatiletie (Moscow: GIKhL, 1960), chap. 35. 78. Herzen, SS 9:139. Compare “Byloe i dumy,” Poliarnaia Zvezda 1 (1855): 158. 79. Herzen, SS 9:140. 80. Viazemskii to A. I. Turgenev, 28 October 1836, Ostaf ’evskii arkhiv kniazei Viazemskikh (St.  Petersburg: S.  D. Sheremeteva, 1899–1913), 3:341–342; Yuri Lotman, “Dekabrist v povsednevnoi zhiz’ni,” Besedy o russkoi kul’ture (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 1994), 346–349; Richard Tempest, “The Secret of Troppau: Chaadaev and Alexander I,” Studies in Soviet Thought 32, No. 4 (November 1986); Stepanov, “Gertsen i Chaadaev,” 96. 81. On Herzen’s style and sound, see Parthé, “Introduction,” A Herzen Reader, xviii–­xxiv. 82. Translation from Marianna Wertz, “Friedrich Schiller’s ‘The Song of the Bell,’ ” Fidelio 14, No. 1–2 (Spring–­Summer 2005): 45. 83. Bernhard Siegert, in “Mineral Sound or Missing Fundamental: Cultural History as Signal Analy­sis,” Osiris 28, No. 1 (2013), argues that this discourse was due to acoustic qualities that distinguish bells from other Western instruments. 84. François-­René vicomte de Chateaubriand, Génie du christianisme (Paris: Hachette, 1872), 438-439. This is typical of the era, per Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-­Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 288–293. 85. G. Derzhavin, “Na smert’ kniazia Meshcherskogo,” Ody (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1985), 371. 86. F. I. Tiutchev, “Bessonnitsa,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v shesti tomakh (Moscow: Rossiiskaia Akademiia Nauk, 2002) 1:75. 87. Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2018), ed. J. Jefferson Looney, 15:550. 88. George Lippard, Washington and his Generals, or, Legends of the Revolution (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1847), 393.

NOTES TO PA G E S 43– 48

237

89. The move happened in 1852. Gary B. Nash, The Liberty Bell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 1–76. 90. Williams, The Bells of Rus­sia, 36–37. 91. Corbin, Village Bells, 293–295. 92. Ibid., 302ff. 93. Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 14–15. 94. Ibid., 157–158. 95. Timothy Helwig, “Denying the Wages of Whiteness: The Racial Politics of George Lippard’s Working-­Class Protest,” American Studies 47, No. 3–4 (Fall–­Winter 2006). 96. Peter Kolchin, “Some Controversial Questions Concerning Nineteenth-­Century Emancipation from Slavery and Serfdom,” Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in ­Legal Bondage, ed. M. L. Bush, 42–67 (New York: Longman, 1996), 50. 97. Marshall Poe, “A ­People Born to Slavery”: Rus­sia in Early Modern Eu­ro­pean Ethnography, 1476-1748 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 50, 64–66, 224, 225. 98. Peter Kolchin, Unfree ­Labor: American Slavery and Rus­sian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014). 99. Sue Peabody, “­There Are No Slaves in France”: The Po­liti­cal Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Lawrence C. Jennings, French Anti-­Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802–1848 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 4, 128–129. 100. Robert Justin Goldstein, Po­liti­cal Repression in 19th ­Century Eu­rope (London: Croom Helm, 1983). 101. Jonathan Daly argues that imperial Rus­sia’s reputation for distinctive repressiveness was undeserved ­until the twentieth ­century, in “Po­liti­cal Crime in Late Imperial Rus­sia,” The Journal of Modern History 74, No. 1 (March 2002), 96. 102. Deborah Lubken, “Joyful Ringing, Solemn Tolling: Methods and Meanings of Early American Tower Bells,” The William and Mary Quarterly 69, No. 4 (October 2012). 2. Singing

1. Véra Milchina, introduction, in Astolphe de Custine, La Russie en 1839, ed. Milchina and Alexandre Ospovate, 9–33 (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015), 15–19. Wilhelm von Grimm, Marquis von Custine und sein Werk: Russland im Jahre 1839. Eine kritische Beleutung (Leipzig: Theodor Thomas, 1844), 5, 6, 17; Florian Gassner, in “Becoming a Western Nation: German National Identity and the Image of Rus­sia,” in The East-­ West Discourse: Symbolic Geography and its Consequences, ed. Alexander Maxwell, 51–71 (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2011), identifies this author as one of the B ­ rothers Grimm, but the biographical details ­here make that unlikely. For critiques of Custine broken down by nationality, see Michel Cadot, La Russie dans la vie intellectuelle française (1839–1856) (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1967), 226–242. 2. A. S. Khomiakov, “Mnenie inostrantsev o Rossii,” O starom i novom. Stat’i i ocherki (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1988), 83.

23 8 NOTES

TO PAG ES 48–50

3. Ibid., 85. 4. Ibid., 87, 94, 101, 91, 97, 98. 5. Laura Engelstein, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Rus­sia’s Illiberal Path (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 113, 114, 115; Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sian Thought, trans. Hilda Andrews-­Rusiecka (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 189–190, 200; Susanna Rabow-­ Edling, Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 133. On the encounter with Palmer, see Leon Litvack, John Mason Neale and the Quest for Sobornost (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). On the steam engine, see Peter K. Christoff, A. S. Khomiakov on the Agricultural and Industrial Prob­lem in Rus­sia (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1964), 144; A. S. Khomiakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Kushnerev, 1914), 3:appendix; Paul Valliere, “The Modernity of Khomiakov,” A. S. Khomiakov: Poet, Phi­los­o­pher, Theologian, ed. Vladimir Tsurikov, 129–144 ( Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Seminary Press, 2004). 6. Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, 198–199. 7. Ibid., 204, 205. 8. Khomiakov, “Mnenie inostrantsev o Rossii,” 86. 9. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Pre­sent (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 163. 10. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, “The Odyssey of Reappropriation,” Ethnography, Special Issue: Pierre Bourdieu in the Field 5, No. 4 (December 2004): 618, 619. 11. Adam D. Galinsky, Cynthia S. Wang, Jennifer A. Whitson, Eric M. Anicich, Kurt Hugenberg, and Galen V. Bodenhausen, “The Reappropriation of Stigmatizing Labels: The Reciprocal Relationship Between Power and Self-­Labeling,” Psychological Science 24, No. 10 (October 2013). 12. Romantic poets valorized tishina. See Sofya Khagi, Silence and the Rest: Verbal Skepticism in Rus­sian Poetry (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013); Sarah Pratt, Rus­sian Metaphysical Romanticism: The Poetry of Tiutchev and Boratynskii (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984); Jason Cieply, “The ­Silent Side of Polyphony: On the Disappearances of ‘Silentium!’ from the Drafts of Dostoevskii and Bakhtin,” Slavic Review 75, No. 3 (Fall 2016); M. N. Epshtein, Slovo i molchanie: Metafizika russkoi literatury (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 2006). On tishina and pokoi, see Boris Maslov, “ ’Zhilishche tishiny prevratilos’ v ad’: o sud’be starorezhimnykh poniatii v Novoe vremia,” Poniatiia, idei, konstruktsii: ocherki sravnitel’noi istoricheskoi semantiki, ed. Iu. Kagarlitskii, D. Kalugin, B. Maslov, 327–373 (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2019), 344, 369. Ilya Vinitsky argues the silence in Tiutchev’s famous poem “Silentium” implied song in “Molchat’! Kogo Tiutchev prizyval sobliudat’ tishinu v stikhotvorenii ‘Silentium!’,” Sil’nye teksty, accessed July 2, 2021, https://­gorky​.­media​/­context​/­molchat​-­kogo​ -­tyutchev​-­prizyval​-­soblyudat​-­tishinu​-­v​-­stihotvorenii​-­silentium​/­​?­f bclid​=I­ wAR1eHlJ59​ _­1​_­XEMdjWoyVkWMvpeog2mDjcbaM1XTWU0vgxQm0hNhDI0dtWk. 13. Patrick Colm Hogan, Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science, and Identity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009), 42–43; Janet G. Vaillant, “Dilemmas for Anti-­Western Patriotism: Slavophilism and Negritude,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 12, No. 3 (September 1974). 14. Ilya Gerasimov, Sergey Glebov, and Marina Mogilner, “The Postimperial Meets the Postcolonial: Rus­sian Historical Experience and the Postcolonial Moment,” Ab Impe-

NOTES TO PA G E S 51– 55

239

rio 2 (2013): 102. Cf. Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Rus­sia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011), 141. 15. P. O. Morozov, “Baron Gakstgauzen i ego sochinenie o Rossii,” Istoricheskie materialy iz arkhiva Ministerstva gosudarstvennykh imushchestv 1 (1891), 203–204, 207. 16. Paul Honigsheim, “Schelling und seine Stellung in der Geschichte der Völkerrannäherung: Zu seinem 100. Todestage,” Die Friedens-­Warte 52 (1953/55): 248; Z. V. Smirnova, “Filosofiia rannego slavianofil’stva i Shelling” and A. I. Abramov, “Shelling v filosofskikh iskaniiakh russkogo romantizma,” in Filosofiia Shellinga v Rossii, ed. V. F. Pustarnakov, 396–427 and 428–476 (St. Petersburg: Izd. Russkogo Khristianskogo Gumanitarnogo Instituta, 1998); Victor Terras, “Schellingianism,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig (New York: Routledge, 1998), 521. On Schelling and Rus­sian folkloristics, see M. K. Azadovskii, Istoriia russkoi fol’kloristiki (Moscow: Izd. Ministerstva prosviashcheniia RSFSR, 1958) 1:217ff. 17. Isaiah Berlin, “A Remarkable De­cade,” in Rus­sian Thinkers (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 138. 18. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling (Stuttgart and Augsburg: J. G. Cotta, 1856–1861), 5:386, 5:501– 503, trans. and cited in Mark Evans Bonds, ­Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2006), 20. 19. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, ed. and trans. Douglas W. Scott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 101–102. 20. Daniel Whistler, Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language: Forming the System of Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 39. 21. Schelling, Philosophy of Art, 101–102. 22. Bonds, ­Music as Thought, xv, 8. 23. Ibid., 30, 44. 24. Ibid., 82. 25. Jane T. Costlow, Heart-­Pine Rus­sia: Walking and Writing the Nineteenth-­Century Forest (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). 26. Peter Christoff, K. S. Aksakov: A Study in Ideas (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1982), 101; R. P. Poddubnaia, Konstantin Sergeevich Aksakov (Samara: Ofort, 2017), 70–81; E. I. Annenkova, Konstantin Aksakov: Vesel’e dukha (St. Petersburg: Rostok, 2018). 27. On Belinskii’s attitude to Schelling, see Victor Terras, Belinskij and Rus­sian Literary Criticism: The Heritage of Organic Aesthetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 9–11, 58, 175–176. 28. K. S. Aksakov, “O grammatike voobshche (po povodu grammatiki g. Belinskogo)” (1838), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Katkov i Ko, 1875), 2:3. 29. Ibid., 2:4. 30. Ibid., 2:20–21. 31. Christoff, K. S. Aksakov, 195; Dmitrii Chizhevskii, Gegel’ v Rossii (Paris: Dom Knigi, 1939), 194ff. 32. Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, 297. 33. K. S. Aksakov, “Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk zemskikh soborov,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: P. Bakhmeteva, 1861), 1:291–292.

24 0 NOTES

TO PAG ES 55–57

34. Aksakov, PSS 1:298–306. 35. Christoff, K. S. Aksakov, 283, 333, 354, 368. 36. I. V. Kireevskii, “O neobkhodimosti,” Kritika i estetika (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1998), 320. 37. Christoff, K. S. Aksakov, 258. More skeptical are Sergey Horujy, “Slavophiles, Westernizers, and the Birth of Rus­sian Philosophical Humanism,” trans. Patrick Lally Michelson, in A History of Rus­sian Philosophy, 1830–1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of ­Human Dignity, ed. G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole, 27–51 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 42, 45; cf. Tolstoy to N. Strakhov, 22, 25 March 1872, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: GIKhL, 1937) (hence PSS), 61:277–278. 38. For cele­brations of sobornost’, see V. I. Kholodnyi, A. S. Khomiakov i sovremennost’: zarozhdenie i perspektivy sobornoi fenomenologii (Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt, 2004); “Introduction,” Aleksei Khomiakov: The Mystery of Sobornost’, ed. Artur Mrówczyński-­Van Allen, Teresa Obolevitch, and Paweł Rojek (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2019). For historical analyses, see Elena Tverdislova, “Sobornost’ as a Linguistic, and Therefore Religious, Trap,” in Aleksei Khomiakovi, 63–90; Engelstein, Slavophile Empire; A. A. Teslia, “Istinno russkie liudi”. Istoriia russkogo natsionalizma (Moscow: Pangloss, 2019); Paul Robinson, Rus­sian Conservatism (Ithaca, NY: Northern Illinois University Press, 2019). 39. V. V. Mel’nikova, Iz istorii razvitiia pochtovo-­telegrafnoi sviazi v krae v XVIII—­pervoi chetverti XX v (Volgograd: Volgogradskoe nauchnoe izd., 2004), 36; A. C. Wilson, “A Thousand Years of Postal and Telecommunications Ser­vices in Rus­sia,” New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 1989–1990, 140; John Randolph, “Communication and Obligation: The Postal System of the Rus­sian Empire, 1700–1850,” in Information and Empire: Mechanisms of Communication in Rus­sia, 1600–1850, ed. Simon Franklin and Katherine Bowers, 155–184 (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2017), 169, 182. 40. Valery Shilov, Vladimir Kitov, and Yaroslav Nazarov, “Optical Telegraphy in Rus­ sia: 1794–1854,” HISTory of ELectro-­technology CONference (HISTELCON), 2012 Third IEEE (5–7 September 2012). 41. John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5. On American Protestant fantasies of world-­wide unification by means of telegraphy, see Jenna Supp-­Montgomerie, When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2021). 42. L. Pearce Williams, “Kant, Naturphilosophie, and Scientific Method,” in Foundations of Scientific Method in the Nineteenth ­Century, ed. R. Giere and R. Westfall, 3–22 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973); Michela Massimi, “Philosophy and the Chemical Revolution ­after Kant,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. K. Ameriks, 182–204 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000), 201 n2. 43. A. V. Iarotskii, Pavel L’vovich Shilling, 1786–1837 (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1963). 44. Nina A. Borisova, “Shilling’s Pioneering Contribution to Practical Telegraphy,” IEEE EUROCON Proceedings, 2009. 45. Wilson, “A Thousand Years,” 146; William L. Blackwell, Beginnings of Rus­sian Industrialization, 1800–1860 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2015), 400. 46. V. F. Odoevskii, 4338-­i god (Moscow: Ogonek, 1926), letter No. 4. 47. Ivan Aksakov to his ­family, 30 September 1860, in I. S. Aksakov, Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov v ego pis’makh (Moscow: M. G. Volchaninova, 1888–1896) 3:495.

NOTES TO PA G E S 57– 60

241

48. On the relationship between Haxthausen and K. Aksakov see Christoff, K. S. Aksakov, 279ff; A. I. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tt (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1954–1955) (henceforth SS), 3:chap. 3 S. A. Vengerov, “Peredovoi boets slavianofil’stva. Konstantin Aksakov,” Sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg: Prometei, 1911) 3:78. 49. Wilhelm Schoof, “Jakob Grimm und die Anfänge der deutschen Dialektgeographie,” Zeitschrift für Mundartforschung, 30 Jahrg. H 2 (December 1963); S. Frederick Starr, “August von Haxthausen and Rus­sia,” The Slavonic and East Eu­ro­pean Review 46, No. 107 ( July 1968); Starr, “Introduction,” August von Haxthausen, Studies on the Interior of Rus­ sia, trans. Eleanore L. M. Schmidt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). See the bibliography in the avtoreferat of O. A. Avdeeva’s 1998 Moscow dissertation, Avgust fon Gakstgauzen i ego trudy o Rossii, 40-­e–60-­e gody XIX veka, https://­www​.­dissercat​.­com​ /­content​/­avgust​-­fon​-­gakstgauzen​-­i​-­ego​-­trudy​-­o​-­rossii​-­40​-­e​-­60​-­e​-­gody​-­xix​-­veka. 50. Peter Jahn, Russophilie und Konservatismus. Die Russophile Literatur in der deutschen Öffentlichkeit 1831–1852 (Stuttgart: Klett-­Cotta, 1980), 191–203. 51. See Starr, “Introduction,” xviii. For a chronology and map of the journey to Rus­sia, see Peter Hesselmann, August Freiherr von Haxthausen (1792–1866), Sammler von Märchen, Sagen und Volksliedern, Agrarhistoriker und Russlandreisender aus Westfalen (Regensberg, Münster: Universitätsbibliotek Münster und Verlag Regensberg Münster, 1992), 74–129. 52. Morozov, “Baron Gakstgauzen,” 200, 201; N. M. Druzhinin, “Krestianskaia obshchina v otsenke A. Gakstgauzena i ego russkikh sovremennikov,” Ezhegodnik germanskoi istorii 1968, 30; Starr, “Introduction,” xviii–­xix. 53. V. I. Semevskii, Krestianskii vopros v XVII i pervoi polovine XIX-­ogo veka (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1888), 2:428–443. 54. Herzen, SS 9:163. 55. Le baron Auguste de Haxthausen, Etudes sur la situation intérieure, la vie nationale et les institutions rurales de la Russie (Hanover: Hahn, Librarie de la cour, 1847–1853), 1:205. I rely on this French edition, which Haxthausen regarded as the best (Haxthausen 3:iii), contra Starr, “Introduction,” xliii. The original is August Freiherr von Haxthausen, Studien über die innern Zustände, das Volksleben und insbesondere die ländlichen Einrichtungen Russlands (Hanover: In der Hahn’schen Hof buchhandlung, 1847–1852). 56. “Ob otnoshenii gospodskikh prav v Prussii,” “Ob otnoshenii i vykup pomeshchichikh prav v Avstrii,” Russkii Vestnik 1857, No. 12, cited in Starr, “August von Haxthausen,” 578; Martina Stoyanoff-­Odoy, Die Grossfürstin Helene von Russland und August Freiherr von Haxthausen: Zwei conservative Reformer im Zeitalter der russischen Bauernbefreiung (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1991). 57. T. K. Dennison and A. W. Carus, “The Invention of the Rus­sian Rural Commune: Haxthausen and the Evidence,” The Historical Journal 46, No. 3 (2003): 582; Tracy Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Rus­sian Serfdom (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011); contra Steven Hoch, “The Serf Economy and the Social Order in Rus­sia,” in Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in ­Legal Bondage, ed. M. L. Bush, 311–347 (New York: Longman, 1996). 58. Custine complains about the rudeness of local gentry, La Russie, 452–453, 682. 59. Custine, La Russie, 204; Haxthausen, Etudes 1:40. 60. Custine, La Russie, 203–204; Haxthausen, Etudes 1:55. 61. Custine, La Russie, 684; Haxthausen, Etudes 1:205.

24 2 NOTES

TO PAG ES 60–68

62. Custine, La Russie, 742; Haxthausen, Etudes 1:137–138. 63. Haxthausen, Etudes 1:224–225. 64. Custine, La Russie, 742; Haxthausen Etudes, 1:299ff, 1:306–308n; Alexander Etkind, “Whirling with the Other: Rus­sian Pop­u­lism and Religious Sects,” The Rus­sian Review 64, No. 4 (October 2003), 571ff. 65. Haxthausen, Etudes 1:137. 66. Ibid., 1:295. 67. Ibid., 2:357. 68. Ibid., 1:205. 69. Ibid., 1:211. 70. Ibid., 1:204. 71. Ibid., 1:433–434. 72. Ibid., 1:337. 73. Ibid., 1:308–309. 74. Ibid., 1:373. 75. Ibid., 1:319–325. 76. Ibid., 1:382. 77. Ibid., 1:83. 78. Ibid., 1:271. 79. Herzen, “La Russie,” SS 6:159-162. 80. Haxthausen, Etudes, 1:405, referring to Alexandra Fuchs, “Briefliche Nachrichten über die Tschuwaschen und die Tscheremisen des Gouvernements Kasan,” Archiv für wissenschaftliche Kunde von Russland, ed. A. Erman, No. 1 (1841). 81. Haxthausen, Etudes 1:368, 1:370, 2:48, 3:131. 82. Ibid., 3:211–214. 83. Druzhinin, “Krestianskaia obshchina,” explains t­ hese arguments. 84. Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 19–39. 85. Haxthausen, Etudes 3:14–15. 86. Loren R. Graham, “Science in Rus­sia: Foreign and Domestic Influences,” Comparative Education Review 12, No. 3 (October 1968); Susanna Rabow-­Edling, Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 8, 9. 87. “Vospominaniia E.A. Drashusovoi (1842–1847),” Rossiiskii arkhiv 2004, 184. 88. G. A. Kratz, “Gakstgauzen i Karolina Pavlova. Po neizdannym materialam,” Rossiia i Zapad: Dialog kul’tur 1998. 89. Letter from V. Dahl to Chivilev, 11 April 1843, in Gottfried Kratz, “V. I. Dal’ und August von Haxthausen—­Materialien in der Handschriftenabteilung der Universitätsbibliothek Münster,” in Bibliothek in vier Jahrhunderten: Jesuitenbibliothek, Bibliotheca Paulina, Universitätsbibliothek in Münster 1588–1988, ed. Helga Oesterreich, Hans Mühl, Bertram Haller, 223–264 (Aschendorff Münster, 1988), 238, 253, 255. Haxthausen 3:131. 90. Haxthausen, “Promemoria den Fürsten Gortschakoff nach Kissingen gesandt,” one copy in the Archivstelle beim Erzbischöflichen Generalvikariat, Paderborn, another in RGIA (Rus­sian State Historical Archive), f. 1160, 81 LL. 383–384. Cited in Starr, “Introduction,” xxxix.

NOTES TO PA G E S 68– 70

243

91. Herzen, “Pis’mo Imperatoru Aleksandru II,” SS, 13:38. 92. Vera Tolz, Rus­sia (Inventing the Nation) (New York: Oxford, 2001), 15–16. 93. K.  S. Aksakov, Pis’ma k Popovu  A. N, kn. Obolenskomu  D.  A., Obolenskomu M. A.: Kopii, in RO IRLI, f. 3 op. 8 ed. khr. 18 L. 12, cited in Annenkova, Konstantin Aksakov: Vesel’e dukha, 174. Cf. Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Rus­sia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011), 61. 94. D. V. Abasheva, “N. M. Iazykov i nemetskaia kul’tura,” Po tsarstvu i poet. Materialy vserossiiskoi nauchnoi konferentsii “N. M. Iazykov i literatura pushkinskoi epokhi” (Ulianovsk: Srednevolzhskii nauchnyi tsentr, 2003). 95. N. M. Iazykov, “K Ne-­nashim,” in “Prilozheniia” to M. I. Zhikharev, “P. Ia. Chaadaev. Iz vospominaniia sovremennika,” Vestnik Evropy 5, No.  9 (September  1871), 43–44. 96. The phrase was first used by the En­glish churchman Alcuin of York in 739. Alain Boureau, “L’adage vox populi, vox dei et l’invention de la nation anglaise (VIIIe–­XIIe siècle),” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 47, No. 4–5 (1992). 97. I have used the Rus­sian National Corpus, accessed December 2019–­February 2020, http://­ruscorpora​.­ru​/­old​/­en​/­index​.­html; A.  K. Birikh, V.  M. Mokienko, and L.  I. Stepanova, Slovar’ russkoi frazeologii. Istoriko-­etimologicheskii spravochnik (St.  Petersburg: Folio-­Press, 1999), 115; A. M. Babkin and V. V. Shendetsov, Slovar’ inoiazychnykh vyrazhenii i slov upotrebliaiushchikhsia v russkom iazyke bez perevoda (St.  Petersburg: Kvotam, 1994) 3:1319; M. I. Mikhel’son, Khodiachie i metkie slova (Moscow: Terra, 1994), 73. 98. N. M. Karamzin, Zapiska o drevnei i novoi Rossii (1811) (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), 55. Among the examples in the Rus­sian National Corpus of this usage in this sense are N. A. Polevoi, Povest’ o Simeone suzdal’skom kniaze (1828); M. N. Zagoskin, Iurii Miloslavskii, ili russkie v 1612 godu (1829); F.  V. Bulgarin, Dmitrii Samozvanets (1830); A.  A. Bestuzhev-­ Marlinskii, Pis’ma iz Dagestana (1831); M. N. Zagoskin, Askol’dova mogila (1833); N. A. Polevoi, Kliatva pri grobe Gospodnem (1832); R. M. Zotov, Rasskazy o pokhodakh 1812 goda (1836); A. F. Vel’tman, Svetoslavich, vrazhii pitomets Divo vremen Krasnogo Solntsa Vladimira (1837); I. I. Lazhechnikov, Basurman (1838); N. A. Bestuzhev, Russkii v Parizhe 1814 goda (1831–1840); N. A. Polevoi, Ioann Tsimiskhii (1841); I. I. Skobelev, Rasskazy russkogo invalida (1838–1841); N.  I. Grech, Zapiski o moei zhizni (1849–1856); I.  I. Lazhechnikov, Neskol’ko zametok i vospominanii po povodu stat’i “Materialy dlia biografii A.  P. Ermolova” (1864). Confusingly, A.  B. Lebenson and V. Tugengol’d, Kol Hamon Khogeg, t. e. glas torzhestvuiushchego naroda (Vilno: Romm, 1841), uses not the positive Hebrew am, “the ­people,” but the more negative hamon, “the crowd,” to affirm Jews’ loyalty. See N. I. Nadezhdin, “Evropeizm i narodnost’, v otnoshenii k russkoi slovesnosti,” in Literaturnaia Kritika. Estetika (Moscow: Khud. Lit., 1972) F. Buslaev, Istoricheskie ocherki russkoi narodnoi slovesnosti i iskusstva: Russkaia narodnaia poeziia (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1861), 405. On the relation between Official Nationality and folkloristics, see M.  K. Azadovskii, Istoriia russkoi fol’kloristiki (Moscow: Izd. Ministerstva prosviashcheniia RSFSR, 1958), 1:239ff. 99. Gogol’ and Dostoevsky used it to describe manipulation. N. V. Gogol’, Taras Bul’ba (1842 edition), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 14 tt (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1937– 1952) 2:75; F. M. Dostoevskii, Besy, PSS 1972, 10:404. 100. Haxthausen, Etudes 3:205.

24 4 NOTES

TO PAG ES 70–75

101. Petr Kireevskii to Iazykov, 8 January 1835, in Pis’ma P. V. Kireevskogo k N. M. Iazykovu, ed. M. K. Azadovskii (Leningrad: Akad. Nauk, 1935), 70. 102. M. K. Azadovskii, “N. M. Iazykov,” Stat’i o lit­er­a­ture i fol’klore (Moscow: Khud. Lit., 1960), 482–488. 103. Christoff, K. S. Aksakov, 79–80. 104. Ian K. Lilly, “N. M. Iazykov as a Slavophile Poet,” Slavic Review 31, No. 4 (December 1972), 804; Lilly, “Druzheskie stikhotvornye poslaniia N. M. Iazykova: k izucheniiu literaturnogo byta 1820–1840-­x godov” (MA thesis, Monash University, 1971), 127–137. 105. Karolina Pavlova, “N. M. Iau (Net! Ne mogla ia dat’ otveta),” Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii (Leningrad: Soveskii Pisatel’, 1964), 133–134. 106. See Vladimir Murav’ev, Moskovskie slova i slovechki (Moscow: Izograf, 1997), 187–188. 107. Alexander Panchenko, “Rus­sia,” in A Companion to Folklore, ed. Regina F. Bendix and Galit Hasan-­Rokem, 426–441 (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2012), 427; cf. Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). 108. On “Homo Increpans,” who blurs class bound­aries on purpose, see E.  V. Potemkina and I. V. Ruzhitskii, “Homo Increpans: brannaia leksika v rechi personazhei F. M. Dostoevskogo i N.S. Leskova. Stat’ia pervaia,” Stephanos 3, No. 35 (May 2019): 87. 109. James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 23–24; Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise: from Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2011), 215. 3. Nesting

1. This account relies on G. P. Matvievskaia and I. K. Zubova, Vladimir Ivanovich Dal’, 1801–1872 (Moscow: Nauka, 2002); N. L. Iugan, “V. I. Dal’ v obshchestvenno-­ kul’turnoi zhizni svoego vremeni,” V. I. Dal’. Biografiia i tvorcheskoe nasledie. Biobibliograficheskii ukazatel’, ed. N. L. Iugan and K. G. Tarasov, 11–188 (Moscow: FLINTA/ Nauka, 2011); P.  I. Mel’nikov-­ Pecherskii, “Vladimir Ivanovich Dal’. Kritiko-­ biograficheskii ocherk P. I. Mel’nikova (Andreia Pecherskogo),” in Vladimir Dal’ (Kazak Luganskii), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, XVI–­LXXII (Moscow: Stolitsa, 1995) (henceforth PSS), vol. 1. 2. V. Porudominskii, Dal’ (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1971), 33–34; A. I. Bairamukova, Slovar’ V. I. Dalia. Metapoetika i metalingvistika (Stavropol’: Izdatel’stvo stavropol’skogo universiteta, 2009), 74–82. 3. Istoriia russkoi leksikografii, ed. F. P. Sorokoletov (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1998), 287. 4. Matvievskaia and Zubova, Vladimir Ivanovich Dal’, 51; Porudominskii, Dal’, 291ff. 5. Matvievskaia and Zubova, Vladimir Ivanovich Dal’, 54. 6. Matvievskaia and Zubova, Vladimir Ivanovich Dal’, 55–56. See “Rasskaz vyshedshego iz khivinskogo plena astrakhanskogo meshchanina Tikhona Ivanova Riazanova,” Vladimir Dal’, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v prizhiznennykh publikatsiiakh, https://­philolog​ .­petrsu​.­ru​/­vdahl​/­texts​/­texts​.­htm (henceforth PSSPP), 3.

NOTES TO PA G E S 76– 80

245

7. Matvievskaia and Zubova, Vladimir Ivanovich Dal’, 29, 188; M. Kankava, V. I. Dal’ kak leksikograf (Tbilisi: Tsonda, 1958), 60. 8. Vl. Luganskii, Russkie skazki, Piatok pervyi (St. Petersburg: A. Pliushara, 1832), 4; PSSPP, 2. 9. Mark Azadovskii, “Fol’kloristika XVIII v.,” Istoriia russkoi fol’kloristiki (Moscow: Izd. Ministerstva prosviashcheniia RSFSR, 1958). 10. “Podlinnye cherti iz zhizni V. A. Zhukovskogo,” Russkii arkhiv 1864, No. 4, 468– 469, cited in G. I. Parilova and A. D. Soimonov, “P. V. Kireevskii i sobrannye im pesni,” Materialy iz arkhiva P. V. Kireevskogo, Literaturnoe nasledstvo 79 (1968), 16. 11. A. D. Soimonov, “P. V. Kireevskii i sobrannye im pesni,” Materialy iz arkhiva P. V. Kireevskogo, 30–31, and Soimonov, “A. S. Pushkin,” Materialy iz arkhiva P. V. Kireevskogo. 12. I. R. Monakhova, “Ukrainskie i russkie narodnye pesni v zhiz’ni Gogolia,” in N. V. Gogol’ i slavianskie literatury, ed. L. N. Budagova, 163–190 (Moscow: Indrik, 2012); S. A. Krasil’nikov, “Istochniki sobraniia ukrainskikh pesen N. V. Gogolia,” cited from http://­gogol​-­lit​.­ru​/­gogol​/­kritika​/­krasilnikov​-­istochniki​-­sobraniya​-­ukrainskih​-­pesen​ -­gogolya​.­htm; Taras Koznarsky, “Kharkiv Literary Almanacs of the 1830s: Shaping Ukrainian Cultural Identity” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2001). M. K. Azadovskii, Istoriia russkoi fol’kloristiki, 1:255ff, 2:28ff. 13. Soimonov, “Fol’klornoe sobranie P. V. Kireevskogo i russkie pisateli,” Materialy iz arkhiva P. V. Kireevskogo, 133. 14. Parilova and Soimonov, “P. V. Kireevskii i sobrannye im pesni,” Materialy iz arkhiva P. V. Kireevskogo, 46–47. 15. Ibid., 49, 68. 16. A. D. Soimonov, “Pesennaia proklamatsiia’ P. V. Kireevskogo,” Sovetskaia Etnografiia 1960, No. 4, 148. Azadovskii, Istoriia russkoi fol’kloristiki, 1:335. 17. Soimonov, “Fol’klornoe sobranie,” 128, 146; Azadovskii, Istoriia russkoi fol’kloristiki, 337–338. 18. A. B. Kol’tsov to Kraevskii, 28 July 1837, Kol’tsov, Sochineniia (Moscow: Pravda, 1984), 204; I. M. Kolesnitskaia, “A. B. Kol’tsov,” Materialy iz arkhiva P. V. Kireevskogo, 286. 19. Kol’tsov, letter to Kraevskii, 16 July 1837, Kol’tsov, Sochineniia, 202; Soimonov, “Fol’klornoe sobranie,” 141. 20. Linda Ivanits, “Folklore in the Debates of the Westernizers and Slavophiles,” Folklorica 16 (2011): 89, 104–105; Azadovskii, Istoriia russkoi fol’kloristiki, 335, 338; Dana Prescott Howell, The Development of Soviet Folkloristics (New York: Garland, 1992). 21. David L. Cooper, Creating the Nation: Identity and Aesthetics in Early Nineteenth-­ Century Rus­sia and Bohemia (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010), 36, 166, 170. 22. B. Tomashevskii, “Pushkin i narodnost’,” Pushkin (Moscow: Izd. Akad. Nauk SSSR, 1961), 106–155. 23. Dal’, “Russkii iazyk” (1839), PSSPP, 4. 24. V. A. Zhukovskii, 1837 diaries, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 20 tt. (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 1999) 14:59. Cf. Iu. Kurochkin, Ural’skie nakhodki (Sverdlovsk: Sredne-­Ural’skoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1982), 234–239, 262–263. 25. Dal’, “Poltora slova o nyneshnem russkom iazyke” (1842, but listed online as 1841), PSSPP, 41. 26. Kurochkin, Ural’skie nakhodki; Porudominskii, Dal’, 333–335.

24 6 NOTES

TO PAG ES 80–84

27. V. V. Vinogradov, Ocherki po istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka XVII–­XIX vv (Leiden: E. I. Brill, 1950), 324–325. 28. Dal’ to Zhukovskii, 30 May 1838, IRLI 28.028, cited from “Rukopisnoe nasledie V. I. Dalia,” http://­philolog​.­petrsu​.­ru​/­vdahl​/­rukopis​/­rukopis​.­htm (henceforth RN). 29. Ia. K. Grot, Vospominanie o V. I. Dale (S izvlecheniem iz ego pisem) (St. Petersburg: Tip. Imp. Akad. Nauk, 1873), 6–7. 30. Dal’ to Pogodin, 19 Nov. 1840, in “Perepiska V. I. Dalia i M. P. Pogodina,” ed. A. A. Il’in-­Tomich, Litsa: Biograficheskii al’manakh 2 (1993), 293. 31. Pogodin to Dal’, early December 1840, Litsa, 2:302–303. 32. Dal’, “Nedovesok k stat’e: Poltora slova o nyneshnem russkom iazyke” (1842), PSSPP, 96. 33. Dal’ to Pogodin, 4 March 1841, Litsa, 2:313. 34. Dal’, “Poltora slova,” PSSPP, 3–4, 7, 22, 17, 35. 35. Ibid., 22. 36. In this they resemble the Slavophiles. Boris Gasparov, “La linguistique slavophile,” Histoire Epistémologie Langage 17, No. II (1995), 135–136. 37. Nathaniel Knight, “Science, Empire, and Nationality: Ethnography in the Rus­ sian Geo­g raph­i­cal Society, 1845-1855,” in Imperial Rus­sia: New Histories for the Empire, 108-142 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998), 128. 38. Edyta Bojanowska, A World of Empires: The Rus­sian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Dal’, “Russkii iazyk” (1839), PSSPP, 1. 39. Bairamukova emphasizes the tie between Dal’s philological and natural-­history work and notices the vitalism of the nest structure itself. Adzhua Izmailovna Bairamukova, Lingvoentsiklopedizm Vladimira Ivanovicha Dalia (Stavropol’: Severo-­K avkazskii federal’nyi univ., 2013), 217. 40. Samuel Hahnemann, Organon of Homeopathic Medicine (New York: W. Radde, 1843), 9. 41. Dal’ to Odoevsky, 1838, published as “O Gomeopatii,” PSSPP, 3, 42. 42. Mel’nikov, “Vladimir Ivanovich Dal’,” LXXV; cf. Pypin, Istoriia russkoi etnografii, 354–355. Ilya Vinitsky, Ghostly Paradoxes: Modern Spiritualism and Rus­sian Culture in the Age of Realism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), xiv–­xvi; Vinitsky, “Lord of the Words: Vladimir Dahl’s Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great-­Russian Language as a National Epic,” in The Whole World in a Book: Dictionaries in the Nineteenth C ­ entury, ed. Sarah Ogilvie and Gabriella Safran, 190–217 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 43. Porudominskii, Dal’, 306; Jane Williams-­Hogan, “The Influence of Emanuel Swedenborg and the New Church on the Spiritualist Movement,” The Spiritualist Movement: Speaking with the Dead in Amer­i­ca and around the World, ed. Christopher M. Moreman, 63–84 (Denver, CO: Praeger, 2013). 44. Ilya Vinitsky, Ghostly Paradoxes, 29; Maria Carlson, “No Religion Higher than Truth”: The History of the Theosophical Movement in Rus­sia, 1875–1922 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1993), 23. 45. N. V. Berg, “V. I. Dal’ i P. V. Nashchokin,” Russkaia starina 28 (1880): 613. 46. R. Ger [Hare], Opytnye issledovaniia o spiritualizme, trans Aleksandr Aksakov (Leipzig: Franz Wagner, 1866), xviii. On feminism, see John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 96.

NOTES TO PA G E S 84– 89

247

47. Peters, Speaking into the Air, 94–95. On the séance as a telegraph system, see F. M. Dostoevskii, “Dnevnik pisatelia,” January 1876, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–1990) (henceforth PSS 1972), 22:32–37; Vinitsky, Ghostly Paradoxes, 131ff. 48. Peters, Speaking into the Air, 5–6, 94, 101. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 293– 294, 311. 49. Dal’, “Naputnoe slovo” (read at the Obshchestvo Liubitelei Ruskoi slovesnosti on 21 April 1862), Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikoruskogo slovaria (Moscow: M. S. Vol’f, 1880), ii. 50. Dal’, “Naputnoe slovo,” vii, ix. 51. Kristin Leigh Vitalich, “Lexicographic Doxa: The Writing of Slavic Dictionaries in the Nineteenth C ­ entury” (PhD diss., UCLA, 2005), 140. 52. Dal’, “Nedovesok,” 83, 85, 86, 89. 53. Porudominskii, Dal’, 292. 54. This case is preserved in “O napechatanii Sobraniia poslovits V. Dalia,” IRLI, f. 137 (K.R.), No. 145. Sections are published in M. Shakhnovich, “Kratkaia istoriia sobiraniia i izucheniia russkikh poslovits i pogovorok,” Sovetskii fol’klor: Sbornik statei i materialov 4/5 (1936); T. G. Ivanova, “V. I. Dal’ i velikii kniaz’ Konstantin Nikolaevich (k istorii publikatsii ‘Poslovits russkogo naroda’),” Ezhegodnik Rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo doma na 2000 god (2004); V. Chicherov, “Sbornik Vladimira Dalia ‘Poslovitsy russkogo naroda,’ ” Polovitsy russkogo naroda (Moscow: GIKhL, 1957). 55. Dal’ to Konstantin Romanov, “Nizhnyi, 1853,” IRLI, f. 137, No. 178, L. 6–7. Cited from Ivanova, “V. I. Dal’,” 38. 56. Konstantin Romanov to A. S. Norov, 30 July 1853, in Ivanova, “V. I. Dal’,” 39. 57. Kochetov’s report, L. 30–31, 33-33ob, cited from Shakhnovich, “Kratkaia istoriia,” 366. 58. Kochetov’s report, L. 39, cited from Shakhnovich, “Kratkaia istoriia,” 367. 59. Vostokov’s report, at L. 41ob–42ob, 44, cited from Shakhnovich, “Kratkaia istoriia,” 365. 60. Shillovskii’s report, 29 October 1853, cited from Ivanova, “V. I. Dal’,” 51–52. 61. Baron Korf to Konstantin Romanov, 25 November 1853, cited from Ivanova, “V. I. Dal’,” 59. 62. Dal’, “Naputnoe,” Poslovitsy russkogo naroda (Moscow: GIKhL, 1957), 27–28. 63. Ibid., 29. 64. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting ­Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 65. Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 66. A. Postel’s, V. Dahl, and A. Sapozhnikov, Zoologiia s atlasom iz 52 listov (St. Petersburg: Tip. Shtaba voen.-­ucheb. zavedenii, 1852), 19; A. I. Bairamukova, “Lingvoentsiklopedizm V. I. Dalia v svete ego sistemnoi leksikografii” (avtoreferat for PhD diss. Makhachkala, 2015), at http://­cheloveknauka​.­com​/­lingvoentsiklopedizm​-­v​-­i​-­dalya​-­v​ -­svete​-­ego​-­sistemnoy​-­leksikografii 67. V. Luganskii (Dal’), “Russkii slovar’,” Illiustratsiia 1845, No. 1, 14. 68. Dal’ to N. I. Grech, 24 March 1851, “Istoricheskie materialy,” ed. M. Sukhomlinov, Drevniaia i Novaia Rossiia (1876), 1:98.

24 8 NOTES

TO PAG ES 89–90

69. Dal’ to Vel’tman, 13 June 1857, cited from Iu. M. Akutin, “Perepiska V. I. Dalia s A. F. Vel’tmanom,” Izvestiia Akademii nauk SSSR. Seriia literatury i iazyka 35, No. 6 (1976): 531. 70. Dal’, “Naputnoe slovo,” vii. 71. Dal’, “Naputnoe slovo,” viii. 72. Dal’, “Naputnoe slovo,” viii. 73. Dal’, “Naputnoe slovo,” viii. 74. For some absurd etymologies in nineteenth-­century dictionaries, see Jonathan Green, Chasing the Sun: Dictionary-­Makers and the Dictionaries They Made (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), 289–290. 75. Heinz Kloss, “ ‘Abstand’ Languages and ‘Ausbau’ languages,” Anthropological Linguistics 9, No. 7 (October 1967). 76. On Dal”s adaptation of regional forms to the orthography of the literary language, see Vinogradov, Ocherki, 324–325, 426–433. This de-­emphasis of regional difference anticipates Alexander Nakhimovsky, The Language of Rus­sian Peasants in the Twentieth C ­ entury: A Linguistic Analy­sis and Oral History (Boulder, CO: Lexington Books, 2020). 77. On this phenomenon in Eastern Ukraine, where Dal’ grew up, see Dal’, “O narechiiakh ruskogo iazyka” (1852), in Tolkovyi slovar’ (1880), lxvii–lxviii. 78. Opyt oblastnogo velikorusskogo iazyka i dopolnenie k opytu oblastnogo velikorusskogo slovaria (1852) (St. Petersburg: Izd. Sankt-­Peterburgskogo Univ., 2008) (reprint). 79. S. A. Myznikov, in “Nachalo russkoi dialektnoi leksikografii,” Opyt oblastnogo velikorusskogo iazyka, xi–­xii, agrees with Dal”s criticism of Vostokov; Istoriia russkoi leksikografii (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1998), 286–297. 80. He anticipated the 1918 reforms, avoiding ѣ, replacing воз, из, and раз in prefixes with вос, ис, and рас, spelling words of foreign origin phonetically, and reducing doubled consonants. 81. L.  V. Ratsiburskaia, “Slovoobrazovatel’nye gnezda, soderzhashchie slova s unikal’nymi affi ksami, v slovare V. I. Dalia,” in Vladimir Dal’ i sovremennaia filologiia, 298–301 (Nizhnyi Novgorod: Nizhegorodskii Gos.-­Ling. Univ., 2001), 1:301, compares Dal”s dictionary to A. N. Tikhonov’s 1985 Slovoobrazovatel’nyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka (Moscow: Russkii iazyk, 1985). Tikhonov uses the term “word-­formation nest dictionary” (гнездовой словообразовательный словарь) as though it ­were widely accepted, but his examples all date to the 1970s or ­later, such as his Problemy sostavleniia gnezdovogo slovoobrazovatel’nogo slovaria sovremennogo russkogo iazyka (Samarkand: Samark. Gos. Univ., 1971), 1. See P. A. Soboleva, “Sinonimiia v slovoobrazovatel’nom gnezde,” E. L. Ginzburg, “Preobrazovaniia slovoobrazovatel’nykh gnezd. Sinonimiia odnokorennykh,” and I. V. Al’tman, “Gnezdo i slovo,” all in Problemy strukturnoi lingvistiki. Sbornik nauchnykh trudov, 3–13, 14–34, 43–52 (Moscow: Nauka, 1988). 82. A. N. Tikhonov, “Dalevskii sposob gnezdovaniia odnokorennykh slov i russkaia leksikografiia,” in V.  I. Dal’ i Obshchestvo liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti, ed. R.  N. Kleimenova, 159–172 (St. Petersburg: Zlatoust, 2002), 161, 163. Vitalich notes that “For Dal’ . . . ​only Rus­sian words could ‘nest.’ ” Lexicographic Doxa, 134. 83. E. R. Dashkova, “Predislovie,” Slovar’ Akademii rossiiskoi 1789–1794 (Moscow: MGI im. E. R. Dashkovoi, 2001) (facsimile edition), x. The 1997 InterDokumentation Co. mi-

NOTES TO PA G E S 90– 98

249

crofiche of this volume refers to it as the Slovar’ Akademii rossiiskoi po korennomu poriadku raspolozhennyi, drawing attention to the “root-­order” of the entries in that edition. 84. See the Slovar’ Akademii rossiiskoi po azbuchnomu poriadku raspolozhennyi (St. Petersburg: Pri Iperatorskoi akademii nauk, 1806–1822). 85. Filipp Reif, “Predislovie,” Russko-­frantsuzskii slovar’, v kotorom russkie slova raspolozheny po proiskhozhdeniiu, ili etimologicheskii leksikon russkogo iazyka (St.  Petersburg: N. Grecha, 1835), ix. 86. V. I. Dal’, Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikoruskogo iazyka (Moscow: A. Semena, 1863– 1866), 2:1145 and 4:103. Jan Badouin de Courtenay, editor of the 1903–1909 edition, reordered some words alphabetically, especially a­ fter letter N. Jan Badouin de Courtenay, “Predislovie k pervomu vypusku,” Vladimir Dal’, Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikoruskogo iazyka, ed. I. A. Boduen-­de-­Kurtene, IV–­XI (St. Petersburg: M. O. Vol’f, 1903–1909), 1:v–vi, and “Posleslovie k 3-­emu ispravlennomu i dopolnennomu izdaniiu Slovaria Dalia,” 4:ii. 87. Dal’, Tolkovyi slovar’ (1880 ed.), 1:362–363. 88. “Ptitsy i zveri. Narodnaia skazka o zhivotnykh v perepisi V. I. Dalia” (no date), IRLI No. 27.504, L. 4; 5. 89. Dal’, “O pover’iakh, sueveriiakh i predrassudkakh russkogo naroda,” PSSPP, 120. 90. Dal’, “Obshchezhitie i sozhitel’stvo zhivotnykh” (1866), PSSPP, 1. 91. Ibid., 9–10. 92. James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould, Animal Architects: Building and the Evolution of Intelligence (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 161–162, 167, 188. 93. Naturalists’ vocabulary highlights nests’ similarity to cloth: “tailorbirds” sew them together, and other birds “felt” a lining. James and Carol Gould, Animal Architects, 163, 200–219. 94. Paula McDowell, The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in 18th-­Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 95. Dal’, Tolkovyi slovar’ (1880 ed.) 1:141. 96. Dal’, “Naputnoe slovo,” iv n. 97. Matvievskaia and Zubova, Vladimir Ivanovich Dal’, 24–25. 98. Ann Blair and Peter Stallybrass, “Mediating Information 1450–1800,” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William B. Warner, 139–163 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Heather Wolfe, “Filing, Seventeenth-­Century Style,” Folger Shakespeare Library site, https://­collation​.­folger​.­edu​/­2013​/­03​/­filing​-­seventeenth​ -­century​-­style/ 99. V. M. Lazarevskii, “Moe znakomstvo s Dalem,” Russkii Arkhiv 1894, No. 8, 549. 100. Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines: About Cards and Cata­logues, 1548–1929 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 101. Dal’, “Nedovesok,” 81–82. 102. Kochetov’s report, IRLI, f. 137, N. 145, L. 29ob-30. Cited from archive ­because some words are missing in Shakhnovich, “Kratkaia istoriia,” 365–366. 103. Kochetov’s report, IRLI, f. 137, N. 145, L. 35ob. Cited from archive ­because some words are incorrect in Shakhnovich, “Kratkaia istoriia,” 366. 104. Shillovskii, cited from Ivanova, “V. I. Dal’,” 51.

25 0 NOTES

TO PAG ES 99–102

105. Korf to Konstantin Romanov, cited from Ivanova, “V. I. Dal’,” 60. 106. Dal”s draft response to the censors, 17 November 1853, cited in Chicherov, “Sbornik Vladimira Dalia,” xxv. 107. Dal’, “Naputnoe,” Poslovitsy, 7. 108. V. D. Bondaletov, V. I. Dal’ i tainye iazyki v Rossii (Moscow: Flinta, 2004). On suspicious listening, see Stephen Lovell, How Russia Learned to Talk: A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 21–23. 109. Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Rus­sia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011), 162, 164. Semen Reznik, in Zapiatnannyi Dal’. Mog li sozdatel’ “Tolkovogo slovaria zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka” byt’ avtorom “Zapiski o ritual’nykh ubiistvakh”? (St. Petersburg: Filologicheskii fakul’tet SPBGU, 2010), believes Dal’ did not write that Jews commit ritual murder, but Aleksandr A. Panchenko, in “Vladimir Dal’ i krovavyi navet,” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, No.  111 (May  2011), shows that he prob­ably did. 110. Dal’, “Vladimir Ivanovich Dal’ avtobiograficheskaia ego zapiska. 1841 g,” PSSPP, 6-7. 111. Irina Reyfman, How Rus­sia Learned to Write: Lit­er­a­ture and the Imperial T ­ able of Ranks (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), 176, 220. 112. I. S. Aksakov, Letter to ­family, Feb. 21 1849, Pis’ma k rodnym, 1844–1849 (Moscow: Nauka, 1988), 472; S. V. Motin, Rossiiskii slavianofil na pravookhranitel’noi sluzhbe. I. S. Aksakov—­sotrudnik ministerstva iustitsii i ministerstva vnutrennykh del Rossiiskoi imperii (Ufa: Ufimskii IuI MVD Rossii, 2017), 90. 113. Dopolnenie. , in Aksakov, Pis’ma k rodnym, 1844–1849, 497–508; Motin, Rossiiskii slavianofil, 90–99. On Ivan Aksakov studies (ivanaksakovedenie), see Motin, 19–22. Recent publications stress Aksakov’s Slavophile and eventual Pan-­Slavic ideas, while N. I. Tsimbaev, I. S. Aksakov v obshchestvennoi zhizni poreformennoi Rossii (Moscow: Izd. Moskovskogo univ., 1978), 32ff, draws more attention to his early disagreement with Slavophilism. 114. Thomas Marsden, The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Rus­sia: Bibikov’s System for the Old Believers, 1841–1855 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 93, 102– 103; I. S. Aksakov, Pis’ma k rodnym, 1849–1856, ed. T. F. Pirozhkova (Moscow: Nauka, 1994), 179 and 186. 115. I. S. Aksakov, letter to parents, 17 June 1849, Pis’ma k rodnym, 20. 116. Ibid. 117. N. G. Chernyshevskii, “Kartiny iz russkogo byta, Vladimira Dalia. 2 t. Spb. 1861,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: GIKhL, 1959) 7:983–984, 986. 118. Aleksandr Pypin, Istoriia russkoi etnografii (St. Petersburg: M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1890–1892), 1:416, 417. 119. M. K. Azadovskii, Istoriia russkoi fol’kloristiki, 2:18–25. 120. Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of In­equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 198– 199, 216, 219. 121. Vitalich, Lexicographic Doxa, 183-184, 186. 122. Azadovsky, Istoriia russkoi fol’kloristiki, 20. 123. Narodnyi teatr, ed A. F. Nekrylova and N. I. Savushkina (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1991), 203, 513.

NOTES TO PA G E S 103– 107

251

4. Crossing

1. Ben Rampton, “Language Crossing and the Redefinition of Real­ity: Implications for Research on Code-­Switching Community,” Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies, paper 5 (1997), 10, 14. 2. I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 30 tt (henceforth PSSP) (Moscow: Nauka, 1978) 13:326; Michael Pursglove, D. M. Grigorovich: The Man Who Discovered Chekhov (Brookfield, VT: Avebury, 1987), 1–2, 184. 3. Pursglove, D. M. Grigorovich, 66–67. 4. A.M. Dostoevskii, Vospominaniia (St.  Petersburg: Andreev i synov’ia, 1992), 119; A.A. Fet, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Pravda, 1983), 290; A. Ia. Panaeva, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Khud. Lit., 1972), 224. On Grigorovich, see Pursglove, D. M. Grigorovich; V. P. Meshcheriakov, D. V. Grigorovich, pisatel’ i iskusstvoved (Leningrad: Nauka, 1985); L. Lotman, “Posleslovie,” in D. V. Grigorovich, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 705–723 (Moscow: GIKhL, 1959). 5. C. W. Thompson, French Romantic Travel Writing: Chateaubriand to Nerval (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 121. 6. N. A., “Velikorusskie pesni iz zapisok bakkalavra Richarda Dzhemsa,” Pamiatniki i obraztsy narodnogo iazyka i slovesnosti, Pribavlenie k izvestiiam Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk po otdeleniiu russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti (St. Petersburg: Tip. Imp. Akad. Nauk, 1852), 5–10; F. Buslaev, Russkaia poeziia XVII veka (Moscow: Univ. Tip., 1852), 39; P. K. Simoni, Velikorusskie pesni, zapisannye v 1619–20 gg. dlia Richarda Dzhemsa (St. Petersburg: Tip. Imp. Akad. Nauk, 1907), iv. On the phonetic reliability of transcriptions by foreigners, A. L. Nalepin, Dva veka russkogo fol’klora: Opyt i sravnitel’noe osveshchenie podkhodov v fol’kloristike Rossii, Velikobritanii i SShA v XIX-­XX stoletiiakh (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2009), 206. The James recordings w ­ ere produced in Arkhangel’sk, like Stepan Pisakhov’s “Morozheny pesni” stories three centuries ­later. 7. Mary Douglas, “The Social Control of Cognition: Some ­Factors in Joke Perception,” Man 3, No. 3 (September 1968): 366, 368. 8. Lina Bern­stein, “­Women on the Verge of a New Language: Rus­sian Salon Hostesses in the First Half of the Nineteenth ­Century,” Russia-­Women-­Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren, 209–224 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 215–218. 9. O. M. Bodianskii, “Dnevnik,” Russkaia Starina 1888, No. 11, 409, cited in Monakhova, “Ukrainskie i russkie narodnye pesni,” 185. 10. Jehanne Gheith, An Improper Profession: W ­ omen, Gender, and Journalism in Late Imperial Rus­sia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 57–60. 11. Panaeva, Vospominaniia, 314–315. 12. As Susan Gal observes, studying language ideologies “allows for the integration of what, in more traditional terms, would seem to be dif­fer­ent ‘levels’ of social phenomena.” Gal, “Multiplicity and Contention among Language Ideologies: A Commentary,” 317–331, in Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, ed. Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) 318. 13. Shalini Shankar, “Speaking Like a Model Minority: ‘FOB’ Styles, Gender, and Racial Meanings among Desi Teens in Silicon Valley,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 18, No. 2 (2008); Kathryn A. Woolard, “Changing Forms of Codeswitching in Catalan Comedy,” Catalan Review 9, No. 2 (1995); Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, “Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Linguistic Approach,” Discourse Studies 7, No. 4–5 (2005): 587–588.

25 2 NOTES

TO PAG ES 107–112

14. Panaeva, Vospominaniia, 140. 15. John Zucchi, The ­Little Slaves of the Harp: Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-­ Century Paris, London, and New York (Montreal: McGill-­Queens University Press, 1992). 16. D. V. Grigorovich, “Peterburgskie sharmanshchiki (Rasskaz),” in Izbrannye sochineniia (Moscow: GIKhL, 1959), 15. 17. D. Grigorovich, Literaturnye vospominaniia, ed. G.G. Elizavetina (Moscow: Khud. Lit., 1987), 103. 18. Grigorovich, “Derevnia,” Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 27. 19. Ibid., 47. 20. Ibid., 49. 21. Ibid., 68. 22. Greta Matzner-­Gore, “Dmitry Grigorovich and the Limits of Empiricism,” The Rus­sian Review 77 ( July 2018). 23. A. I. Zhuravleva and V. N. Nekrasov, “Grigorovich v russkoi lit­er­at­ ure,” in D. V. Grigorovich, Sochineniia v 3 tt (Moscow: Khud. Lit., 1988), 1:26. 24. Grigorovich, “Derevnia,” 73. 25. Grigorovich, “Derevnia,” 27, 28, 32, 51. V. V. Vinogradov, in Ocherki po istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka XVII–­XIX vv (Leiden: E. I. Brill, 1950), 326–328, follows V. I. Chernyshev, “Russkii iazyk v proizvedeniiakh I. S. Turgeneva,” Izvestiia Akademii nauk SSSR, No. 3 (1936), 478–479, in finding this language unconvincing. 26. Grigorovich, “Derevnia,” 31. 27. Grigorovich, Literaturnye vospominaniia, 97. 28. Steven Michael, “Criminal Slang in Oliver Twist: Dickens’s Survival Code,” Style 27, No. 1 (Spring 1993): 44, 60 n.4; see G. L. Brook, “The Language of Dickens,” cited from escholar​.­manchester​.­ac​.­uk. 29. This may happen more when the user of cant senses the listener’s sympathy. Michael, “Criminal Slang,” 43. 30. I. Katarskii, Dikkens v Rossii: seredina XIX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1966); H. Gifford, “Dickens in Rus­sia: The Initial Phase,” Dickensian 63 (1967), 120–122; Nina Diakonova, “Dickens in Rus­sia: A Survey,” in The Reception of Charles Dickens in Eu­rope, ed. Michael Hollington, 79–85 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); N. A., “Smes’,” Moskvitianin 4, No. 2 (1849): 15–18. 31. Charles Dickens, Olivier Twist, ou l’orphelin du dépôt de mendicité, trans. Ludovic Benard (Paris: Gustave Barba, 1841); Charlz Dikkens, Oliver Tvist, no trans. listed, Otechestvennye Zapiski 1841, No. 9–12. 32. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Fred Kaplan (New York: Norton, 1993), 62. 33. “Oliver Tvist,” Otechestvennye zapiski 1841, No. 9, 202–203. Benard’s French translation in Olivier Twist, ou l’orphelin du dépôt de mendicité, 142–143, is as follows: Eh bien, vieux! De quoi qu’il en r’tourne? Je meurs de faim et je suis très fatigué, répondit Olivier, les larmes aux yeux; j’ai fait une longue trotte: j’ai marché pendant sept jours. Pendant sept jours! dit le jeune homme. Ah! je divine.—­Par ordre du bec. Hein?—­Mais, ajouta-­t-il, remarquant la surprise d’Olivier; je pense que tu ne sais peut-­être pas ce que c’est qu’un bec, mon jeune camarade? Olivier répondit ingénument qu’il avait toujours entendu dire qu’un bec était la bouche d’un oiseau.

NOTES TO PA G E S 113– 118

253

En v’là un jobard! S’écria le jeune homme:—­Le bec, c’est le magistrat.—­Marcher par ordre du bec, c’ n’est pas aller tout droit; mais toujours grimper, sans jamais redescendre.—­n’as-tu jamais été sur le moulin? 34. F. M. Dostoevskii, “Dnevnik pisatelia,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–1990) (henceforth PSS 1972), 25:29. 35. See comparisons between readers in Peter Brang, Zvuchashchee slovo. Zametki po teorii i istorii deklamatsionnogo iskusstva v Rossii, trans. Mariia Sokol’skaia and Peter Brang (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2010), 66–68. 36. Grigorovich, Literaturnye vospominaniia, 99–100. 37. F. M. to M. M. Dostoevskii, 17 September 1846, PSS 1972, 23:126. 38. Kronid Panaev, I. I. Panaev’s b­ rother, wrote that when Grigorovich read “Anton Goremyka,” he and Avdot’ia Panaeva cried and I. I. Panaev and Nekrasov w ­ ere stunned. Kronid Panaev to D. V. Grigorovich, TsGALI, f. 138, op. 1, ed. khr. 121, L. 39ob, cited (no date) in V. P. Meshcheriakov, D. G. Grigorovich, pisatel’ i iskusstvoved (Leningrad: Nauka, 1985), 40–41. 39. Grigorovich. Literaturnye vospominaniia, 116. 40. Grigorovich, 1848 notebook, RGALI, f. 138 op. 1 ed. khr. 38 L. 5-5ob. 41. Dahl to Shevyrev, 29 March (no year), RNB RO, f. 850 (arkhiv Shevyrev S. P) N. 221. 42. Dahl to Grigorovich, 9 January (no year), RGALI, f. 138 op. 1 ed. khr. 73, L 1ob. 43. V. Belinskii, “Vzgliad na russkuiu literaturu 1846 goda,” Sovremennik 1847, No. 1, 20. 44. Iurii Samarin, “O mneniiakh ‘Sovremennika’ istoricheskikh i literaturnykh,” in Russkaia estetika i kritika 40kh—50kh godov XIX veka, 151–191 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1982), 164. 45. V. G. Belinskii, “Otvet Moskvitianinu,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 13 tomakh (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1956) 11:251. 46. Ivan Turgenev, “Literaturnye i zhiteiskie vospominaniia,” PSS 11:30. The incident is discussed in Vinogradov, Ocherki po istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka, 328. 47. “Novyi poet” (Panaev), “Literaturnyi maskarad nakanune novogo (1852) goda,” Sovremennik 1852, No. 1. Cited from V.L. Komarovich, “D.V. Grigorovich i ego literaturnye vospominaniia,” in Grigorovich, Literaturnye vospominaniia, V–­XXXII (Leningrad: Academia, 1921), xix. 48. P.V. Annenkov, “Po povodu romanov i rasskazov iz prostonarodnogo byta,” Sovremennik 1854, No.  2, in “Sovremennik” protiv “Moskvitianina”. Literaturno-­ kriticheskaia polemika pervoi poloviny 1850-­x godov, ed. A.V. Vdovin, K.Iu. Zubkov, A.S. Fedotov, 360–385 (St. Petersburg: Nestor-­Istoriia, 2015), 365. 49. N.A. Dobroliubov, “Chetyre vremeni goda. Pov. D. Grigorovicha. Posv. N.S. Bakhterevoi (Sovremennik, 1849, No. 12, s. 225–286),” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: GIKhL, 1934) 1:597. 50. N. Chernyshevskii, “Zametki o zhurnalakh. Avg. 1856,” Zametki o sovremennoi lit­er­a­ture 1856–1862 gg. (St. Petersburg: Izd. M.N. Chernyshevskogo, 1894), 96. Grigorovich thought he was targeted in Chernyshevskii, “Novye povesti, rasskazy dlia detei,” Sovremennik 1855, No. 3, which mocks writers who show off their knowledge of specific dialect words. Lidiia Lotman observes that Dobroliubov and Chernyshevskii mocked the same ele­ments of Grigorovich’s story, but she finds “Derevnia” rich with folkloric

25 4 NOTES

TO PAG ES 119–123

speech and imagery. L. M. Lotman, “Grigorovich,” Literatura 1840-­x godov, Istoriia russkoi literatury: V. 10 tt (Moscow: Izd. AN SSSR, 1941–1956) 7:601. Zhuravleva and Nekrasov also find the language convincing, “Grigorovich v russkoi lit­er­at­ ure,” 21. 51. Zhuravleva and Nekrasov, “Grigorovich v russkoi lit­er­a­ture,” 24. 52. A. Grigor’ev, “Biblioteka dlia chteniia. Ianvar’ i fevral’,” Moskvitianin 1, No. 2 (Feb., 1855): 107–108. 53. Grigorovich, Literaturnye vospominaniia, 122. 54. Dostoevskii, “Zapisnaia tetrad’, 1876–1877 gg.,” PSS 1972, 24:207. 55. Grigorovich. Literaturnye vospominaniia, 122. 56. A.F. Pisemskii to A.N. Ostrovskii, 15 February 1857, Sobranie sochinenii v 9 tomakh (Moscow: Pravda, 1959) 9:577. 57. Pisemskii to Ostrovskii, 15 February 1857. 58. Trudy Publichnoi biblioteki SSSR imeni Lenina, III (1934), 67. Cited in the notes to the Pisemskii letter, Ibid. 59. Dostoevskii, “Dnevnik pisatelia, July–­August 1876,” PSS 1972, 23:80–81. 60. Pavel Annenkov, “Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin v Aleksandrovskuiu epokhu. Po novym dokumentam,” Vestnik Evropy 1, No. 2 (February 1874): 537. Cited in Steven A. Grant, The Rus­sian Nanny, Real and ­Imagined: History, Culture, My­thol­ogy (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2012), 30–31. Pavel Annenkov, Materialy dlia biografii A. S. Pushkina (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1984), 11. 61. Petr Bartenev, in “Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. Materialy dlia ego biografii,” Moskovskie Vedomosti 1854, No. 71, 4, 5, claims that Arina Rodionovna had been freed, but Iurii Druzhnikov, “Niania v venchike iz roz,” Duel’ s Pushkinistami (Moscow: Khronograf, 2001), argues that she remained a serf who would not have been called by her first name and patronymic; the common use of this name reveals the folklorization of her image. 62. Bartenev; O.S. Pavlishcheva, “Vospominaniia o detstve A.S. Pushkina,” in A.S. Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, 43–52 (Moscow: Khud. Lit, 1974), 1:44. 63. F.M. Dostoevskii, “Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh,” in PSS 1972, 5:51. 64. I.S. Aksakov, “Rech’ ob A.S. Pushkine,” Sochineniia (Moscow: Volchaninov, 1886– 1887) 7:821. 65. On the association of male literacy with breast milk, see Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). He assumes the subject’s ­mother, wet nurse, and reading teacher are all the same person. Cf. Khodasevich’s 1917/1922 poem, “Ne mater’iu, no tul’skoi krest’iankoi/ Elenoi Kuzinoi ia vykormlen.” 66. Pushkin, Rabochie tetradi, vol. IV, PD 836, 58ob-49ob. 67. On the more celebratory side, see O. N. Grechina, “O fol’klorizme ‘Evgeniia Onegina’,” Russkii fol’klor XVIII. Slavianskie literatury i fol’klor (Leningrad: Nauka, 1978), 19; and Iu. M. Lotman, Roman A. S. Pushkina “Evgenii Onegin.” Komentarii (Leningrad: Prosviashchenie, 1980), esp. 274. On the more skeptical, see Grant, 15–38; Druzhnikov “Niania”; Michael Wachtel, “Pushkin’s Turn to Folklore,” Pushkin Review 2019; Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, trans. and commentary Vladimir Nabokov (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1964) 2:452–454, 361. 68. A.N. Afanas’ev, “Obzor russkoi istoricheskoi literatury v 1851 g.,” Otechestvennye Zapiski 1852, No. 1, 47, cited in A.L. Toporkov, “A.N. Afanas’ev v polemike s N.G. Chernyshevskim?,” Iz istorii russkoi fol’kloristiki 8 (2013), 388.

NOTES TO PA G E S 123– 128

255

69. A. L. Metlinskii, “Prilozhenie,” Narodnye iuzhnorossiiskie pesni (Kiev: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1854), iv. 70. E. P., Narodnye belorusskie pesni (St. Petersburg: Eduarda Veimara, 1853), iii; P. V. Shein, Russkie narodnye pesni (Moscow: Katkov i Ko, 1870), ii; Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp, The Rus­sian Folktale, ed. and trans. Sibelan Forrester (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2012), 50–57. 71. Ruskoje Wesele opysanoje cherez J. Lozinskoho (Peremysly: Władycznoj gr. Kat., 1835); Shein, Russkie narodnye pesni; V. I. Simakov, Sbornik derevenskikh chastushek Arkhangel’skoi, Vologodskoi, Viatskoi, Olonetskoi, Permskoi, Kostromskoi, Iaroslavskoi, Tverskoi, Pskovskoi, Novgorodskoi, Peterburgskoi gubernii (Iaroslavl’: Tip. K. F. Nekrasova, 1913). 72. Narodnye russkie pesni iz sobraniia P. Iakushkina (St. Petersburg: A. A. Kraevskogo, 1865), 4. Azadovskii notes that Kireevskii did this very carefully. M. K. Azadovskii, Istoriia russkoi fol’kloristiki (Moscow: Izd. Ministerstva prosviashcheniia RSFSR, 1958) 1:338–339. 73. N. A. Dobroliubov, “Narodnye russkie skazki . . .” (1858), Sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: Gos. Izd. Khud. Lit., 1961–1964) (henceforth SS), 3:235–236. 74. A. S. Pushkin, , Sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh (Moscow: GIKhL, 1959–1962) 6:267–268. 75. B. N. Almazov, “Son po sluchaiiu odnoi komedii,” Russkaia estetika i kritika 4050-­x godov XIX veka, ed. V. K. Kantor and A. L. Ospovat (Moscow: Isskustvo, 1982), 230, 249. 76. For a depiction of Dobroliubov as an organicist critic who had much in common with his enemies on the right, see Victor Terras, Belinskij and Rus­sian Literary Criticism: The Heritage of Organicist Aesthetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 245–254. 77. N. A. Dobroliubov, review of S. T. Slavutinskii, “Povesti i rasskazy,” SS 6:51. 78. Annenkov, “Po povodu romanov i rasskazov iz prostonarodnogo byta,” “Sovremennik” protiv “Moskvitianina,” 367. 79. Annenkov’s belief that no one could describe serf lives realistically echoes Hegel’s idea that art requires freedom and self-­consciousness. “Sovremennik” protiv “Moskvitianina,” 754. 5. Paper Making

1. Iu. G. Oksman, “I. S. Turgenev na sluzhbe v ministerstve vnutrennykh del,” Uchenye zapiski Saratovskogo gos. Universiteta, vyp. filologicheskii 56 (1957): 172–173. 2. Varvara Kolontaeva, “Vospominaniia o sele Spasskom,” Istoricheskii vestnik 22, No. 10 (1885): 4. 3. James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 220. 4. V. A. Lukina, Tvorcheskaia istoriia “Zapisok okhotnika” I. S. Turgeneva (St. Petersburg: Pushkinskii Dom, 2006), 15, 27. 5. Louis Viardot, Les musées d’Allemagne et de Russie: guide et mémento de l’artiste et du voyageur (Paris: Paulin, 1844); Souvenirs de chasse (Paris: Paulin et le Chevalier, 1849). 6. Louis Viardot to Turgenev, 19 January 1848, in Alexandre Zviguilsky, ed., Correspondance Ivan Tourguéniev—­Louis Viardot. Sous le sceau de la fraternité, Cahiers Ivan Tourguéniev,

25 6 NOTES

TO PAG ES 128–131

Pauline Viardot, Maria Malibran 2000, No. 24, 75 n.1, 76; Dmitrii Panchenko, “Turgenev i Tokvil’ ob ekonomicheskoi roli nesvobody,” Log­os 29, No. 6 (2019). 7. Leslie O’Bell, “The Pastoral in Turgenev’s ‘Singers’: Classical Themes and Romantic Variations,” Rus­sian Review 63, No. 2 (April 2004): 291; Simone Vierne, “George Sand, Pauline Viardot et la chanson populaire,” Hommage à George Sand, Cahiers Ivan Tourguéniev, Pauline Viardot, Maria Malibran, No. 3 (October 1979): 44, 49–53. 8. Turgenev to Viardot, 26, 28, 30 October (7, 9, 11 November) 1850, I.S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 30 tt (henceforth PSSP) (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), Pis’ma 2:63. On his use of golosiénié ­here, see O’Bell, “The Pastoral,” 290–291. 9. M. P. Alekseev, Iu. D. Levin, Vil’iam Rol’ston—­propagandist russkoi kul’tury i fol’klora (St. Petersburg, Nauka, 1994), 39–40, cited in A. L. Nalepin, Dva veka russkogo fol’klora: Opyt i sravnitel’noe osveshchenie podkhodov v fol’kloristike Rossii, Velikobritanii i SShA v XIX-XX stoletiiakh (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2009), 30. 10. Ernest Charrière, “Introduction,” in Ivan Tourgueneff, Mémoires d’un seigneur russe, trans. Charrière (Paris: Hachette, 1854), 1:vii–­viii. Cf. Nicholas G. Zekulin, “Early Translations of Turgenev’s ‘Zapiski Okhotnika’ into German, French, and En­glish,” New Zealand Slavonic Review/Festschrift in Honor of Patrick Waddington (1994). 11. Turgenev, “Mumu,” PSSP 4:272. 12. Victoria Somoff, The Imperative of Reliability: Rus­sian Prose on the Eve of the Novel, 1820s–1850s (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 123; and “No Need for Dogs or W ­ omen: Muteness in Turgenev’s ‘Mumu,” Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture 68, No. 3–4 (2010), 508–509, reads “Mumu” as valorizing silence; disregarding his sign language, she claims Gerasim speaks only when he names his dog. 13. I. S. Turgenev to Viardot. 21 July (2 August) 1850, PSSP Pis’ma 2:351. 14. Kolontaeva, “Vospominaniia,” 42n. That factory prob­ably produced ­little paper: no watermark from Turgenevo appears in Z. V. Uchastkina, A History of Rus­sian Hand Paper-­Mills and Their Watermarks (Hilversum, Holland: Paper Publications Society, 1962), 49; Iu. V. Andriushaitite, “Materialy o sobranii kollektsii vodianykh znakov I. P. Laptevym i N. M. Mikhailovskim,” Arkheograficheskii Ezhegodnik 1990, 1991; Andriushaitite, “Paleograficheskoe izuchenie vodianykh znakov v Rossii pervoi treti XIX v,” Arkheografichiskii Ezhegodnik 1993, 1994, 1996; N.  P. Likhachev, Paleograficheskoe znachenie bumazhnyh vodianykh znakov (St.  Petersburg: V.  S. Balashev i ko., 1899). ­There is no such watermark on the paper in the Notes of a Hunter drafts at OR RNB, f. 795 (I. S. Turgenev). 15. N. P. and P. N. Mel’nikov, Istoriia, statistika, literatura pischebumazhnogo proizvodstva (St. Petersburg: P. P. Soikina, 1906), 41–49. 16. N. A. Reztsov, Bumaga v Rossii sto let nazad (St. Petersburg: R. Golike i A. Vil’borg, 1912), 7. 17. N. G. Okhotin, “A. P. Bashutskii i ego kniga,” in “Prilozhienie,” facsimile edition of Nashi, spisannye s natury russkimi (Moscow: Kniga, 1986), 22. Cf. Les français peints par eux-­mêmes (Paris: L. Carmer, 1840), 1. 18. In 1816, ­there ­were 70 hand paper mills, 1 mechanical; in 1850, 130 hand, 29 mechanical; in 1861, 111 hand, 67 mechanical; in 1873, 55 hand, 40 mechanical; in 1885– 1890, just 145 mechanical. Uchastkina, A History, 56. 19. K. I. Iurchuk, Pleshcheevskaia fabrika v 1740–1880 gg. (Iaroslavl’: Iaros. Gos. Un iv., 2001).

NOTES TO PA G E S 131– 134

257

20. V.  A. Novikov, I.  S. Turgenev v Tul’skom krae: Dokumental’nye ocherki (Tula: Priokskoe, 1990), 12–13. 21. None of the six paper factories in Orel had continuous paper machines. Uchastkina, A History, 132. The three Orel factories listed in Iu. I. Vishniakova, Russkie pischebumazhnye fabriki v pervoi treti XIX veka. Spravochnik (Moscow: Pashkov Dom, 2018), 34, 44, 84, also do not seem to have such machines. 22. V. P. Boiko, “Zarozhdenie i razvitie russkogo predprinimatel’stva v tvorchestve I. S. Turgeneva,” Vestnik Tomskogo gos. Univ. 2017, No. 417. 23. Lothar Müller, White Magic: The Age of Paper (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014), 61, 69, 81, 144, 164, 162–163, 167, 171, 179. On Turgenev’s scorn for Balzac, and anxiety at the proliferation of media, see Melissa Frazier, “Turgenev and a Proliferating French Press,” Slavic Review 69, No. 4 (Winter 2010): 934–935. 24. N. A. Nekrasov, Komu na Rusi zhit’ khorosho?, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem (Moscow: OGIZ, 1949) 3:184–186. 25. Ol’ga Mashkina, “The Pulp and Paper Industry Evolution in Rus­sia: A Road of Many Transitions,” in The Evolution of Global Paper Industry 1800–2050: A Comparative Analy­sis, ed. Juha-­Antti Lamberg, Jari Ojala, Mirva Peltoniemi, Timo Särkkä, World Forests 17 (2012): 287–288. 26. Svod zakonov rossiiskoi imperii. Poveleniem gosudaria imperatora Nikolaia pervogo sostavlennyi (St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1842) 6:2; “Prilozhen’e k stat’e 1210, B,” 463. Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg: tip. II otd. Sobstvennoi ego imperatorskogo velichestva kantseliarii, 1873), 43:3, “Vysochaishe utverzhdennyi, 5 iulia 1868 goda, obshchii tamozhennyi tarif po Evropeiskoi torgovle,” 700. 27. A. Belov, Pischebumazhnoe proizvodstvo (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1869), 10; Reztsov, Bumaga, 15, 18. 28. Turgenev, PSSP 3:15–16. 29. Turgenev, “Pevtsy,” PSSP 3:217; I. Shumskii, “O prototipe Iakova Turka v ‘Pevtsakh’ I. S. Turgeneva,” Russkaia literatura 1959, No. 3, 198–200. 30. Turgenev, PSSP 3:217, 221, 91, 92. 31. Herman Melville, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 9, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860 (Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1987), 327. 32. Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging through History (New York: Norton, 2016), 96, 142. 33. Müller, White Magic, 47–51, 168. 34. Turgenev, PSSP 3:93. 35. Turgenev to S. T. Aksakov, 16 (28) January 1853, PSSP Pis’ma 2:188. 36. M. K. Azadovskii, “ ‘Pevtsy’ I. S. Turgeneva,” Stat’i o lit­er­a­ture i fol’klore (Moscow: Khud. Lit, 1960), 423. Cf. Patricia Carden, “Finding the Way to Bezhin Meadow: Turgenev’s Intimations of Mortality,” Slavic Review 36, No. 3 (September 1977): 459. 37. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt, 217–252 (New York: Schocken, 1968). 38. On dating by watermarks, see Andriushaitite, “Materialy o sobranii kollektsii vodianykh znakov”; “Paleograficheskoe izuchenie vodianykh.” The first Rus­sian book on paper history appeared in 1824. Uchastkina, A History, xxi–­xxv.

25 8 NOTES

TO PAG ES 135–139

39. Boris Gasparov, “The Language Situation and the Linguistic Polemic in Mid-­ Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sia,” Aspects of the Slavic Language Question, ed. Ricardo Picchio and Harvey Goldblatt (New Haven, CT: Yale Concilium, 1984) 2:316. 40. This recycling resembles Dal’s use of words to create “nests,” but that term has a dif­fer­ent set of meanings for Turgenev: as places of refuge and familial continuity, not tied to language. V. V. Vysotskaia, “Dva tipa prostranstva v proizvedeniiakh I. S. Turgeneva: ‘gnezdo’ i ‘bezgnezdov’e’,” Spasskii vestnik 2006, 13; O. M. Barsukova-­ Sergeeva, “Simvolika gnezda i bezdny v romanakh I.  S. Turgeneva,” Russkaia rech’ 2004, No. 1; Thomas P. Hodge, Hunting Nature: Ivan Turgenev and the Organic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 138–142. 41. A. Kriukov, Turgenev i muzyka (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo, 1963); Iu. V. Mann, “Turgenev—­kritik i literaturoved,” Turgenev i drugie (Moscow: RGGU, 2008); L. P. Grossman, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Sovremennye problemy, 1928) 3:61. 42. Turgenev to M. A. Bakunin and A. P. Efremov, 3 (15) September 1840, PSSP Pis’ma 1:169. 43. Turgenev to S. T. Aksakov, January 22 (February 3) 1853, PSSP Pis’ma 2:189. 44. A. I. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tt (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1954–1955) (henceforth SS), 7:266; 3: 32, cited in Azadovskii, “Narodnaia pesnia v kontseptsiiakh russkikh revoliutsionnykh prosvetitelei 40-­x godov,” Stat’i o lit­er­a­ture i fol’klore, 326–328. 45. Turgenev to Pauline Viardot, 28 October, 1, 4 November (9, 13, 16 November) 1852, PSSP Pis’ma 2:397–398. 46. Herzen, Sochineniia 4:342, cited in Azadovskii, “ ’Pevtsy’,” 328. 47. Johnson, Listening in Paris, 232. 48. Ibid., 240. 49. Julie A. Buckler, The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Rus­sia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 39–41. 50. Johnson, Listening in Paris, 225, 244, 274. 51. Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 9, 11, 69. 52. Turgenev, PSSP 3:12, 13, 17. 53. On acousmatic listening as a narrative device giving access to the character, see Somoff, The Imperative of Reliability, 115–116; Victor Ripp, “Ideology in Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter: The First Three Sketches,” Slavic Review 38, No. 1 (March 1979): 79–80; Richard Freeborn, “The Hunter’s Eye in Notes of a Hunter,” New Zealand Slavonic Review 1976, No. 2, 3. 54. Turgenev, PSSP 3:24. 55. Kriukov, Turgenev i muzyka, 4–5; Silbajoris, “Images and Structures,” 185. 56. F. Ia. Priima, “I. S. Turgenev (‘Zapiski okhotnika’),” Russkaia literatura i fol’klor (pervaia polovina XIX v), ed. A. A. Gorelov and F. Ia Priima, 366–383 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1976), 366, 367, 371. 57. Turgenev, PSSP 3:213, 219. 58. Turgenev compared his gathering of Rus­sian folksongs to Viardot gathering French songs for Sand. Turgenev to Viardot, 26, 28, 30 October (7, 9, 11 November) 1850, PSSP Pis’ma 2:53. On “Pevtsy” and Rus­sian nationalism, see Oksana Bulgakova, Golos kak kul’turnyi fenomen (Moscow: NLO, 2015), 95; Joshua S. Walker, “Incomprehen-

NOTES TO PA G E S 139– 145

259

sible from Without: Folk Authenticity and the Foreign Perspective in Gogol’s, Turgenev’s, and Tolstoy’s Rus­sian Songs,” Ulbandus Review 16 (2014): 127; Dale Peterson, Up from Bondage: The Lit­er­a­tures of Rus­sian and African American Soul (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 91. Leslie O’Bell writes that Turgenev understood Viardot as the intended arbiter of the ­music contest. O’Bell, “The Pastoral,” 279, 290, 291. 59. Turgenev, PSSP 3:490–491. 60. Ibid., 221–222. 61. Ibid., 464. 62. Ibid., 100. 63. Ibid., 104. 64. Hermann von Helmholtz understood listening as both mechanical and spiritual. “Resonance is an objective fact of nature that can be demonstrated on the strings of a piano, among other t­hings. But it is also a subjective phenomenon that can be experienced with the help of the resonator.” Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 234. 65. John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5, 89, 268. 66. S. E. Shatalov notes Turgenev used rural speech ele­ments less in Notes of a Hunter but more in the 1860s, in response to shifting literary trends. Shatalov, Khudozhestvennyi mir I. S. Turgeneva (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), 97–102. 67. Turgenev, PSSP 3:99. 68. V. V. Vinogradov, Ocherki po istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka XVII–­XIX vv (Leiden: E. I. Brill, 1950), 423–424, 429. 69. Turgenev, PSSP 3:99. 70. I. S. Aksakov to Turgenev, 4 (16) October 1852, Russkoe obozrenie 1898, No. 8, 447. Cited from notes at http://­turgenev​-­lit​.­ru​/­turgenev​/­pisma​/­1850​-­1854​/­letter​-­114​ .­htm. Also see Sergei Aksakov to Turgenev, 9 March 1853, on “Postoialyi dvor,” cited in Andrew R. Durkin, Sergei Aksakov and Rus­sian Pastoral (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 51. 71. Turgenev to P. V. Annenkov, 28 October (9 November) 1852, PSSP Pis’ma 2:155. 72. I. S. Aksakov to Turgenev, no date, Turgenev, PSSP 3:490. 73. Turgenev to Ivan Aksakov, 16 (28) October 1852 and 16 (28) January 1853, PSSP 3:490. 74. Bertha Thomas, George Sand (London: Allen, 1883), 184; Elizabeth Harlan, George Sand (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 75. George Sand, “François le Champi,” Journal des Débats politiques et littéraires, 31 December 1847, 1–2. 76. Sand, François le champi, Romans (Paris: Gallimard, 2019) 1:1273. 77. Françoise Alexandre, “La femme et l’oiseau dans l’oeuvre de George Sand,” in La femme et l’oiseau au XVIII et XIX siècles dans la littérature, la peinture et la musique, ed. Simone Bernad-­Griffiths and Daniel Madelénat, 21–38 (Clermont-­Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2011), 27–29. 78. Sand, Histoire de ma vie, Oeuvres autobiographiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1970) 1:835. 79. Robert  C. Clarke and Mark  D. Merlin, Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 170–171. 80. Sand, La mare au diable, Romans 1:1237.

26 0 NOTES

TO PAG ES 145–150

81. Sand, François le Champi, Romans 1:1276–1277. 82. As Roland Barthes notes in Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 100, “texte veut dire tissu” (text means fabric). 83. Janet Beizer, “ ‘Écoute le chant du labourage’: chant et travail de l’écriture dans Les Veillées du chanvreur,” Littérature 2004, No. 134, 109. 84. M. G. Ladariia, Zhivye kliuchi druzhby (K voprosu o lichnykh i tvorcheskikh sviaziakh I. S. Turgeneva i Zh. Sand) (Sukhumi: Alashara, 1976). 85. Turgenev to Pauline Viardot, 5, 6 (17, 18) January 1848, PSSP Pis’ma 1:257. 6. Dreaming

1. M. Klevenskii, “Vertepniki,” Katorga i ssylka. Istoriko-­revoliutsionnyi vestnik 47 (1928), 19, 21, 22, 26. On Rybnikov’s life, see A. P. Razumova, Iz istorii russkoi fol’kloristiki (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1954); I. A. Razumova, “P. N. Rybnikov,” in Pesni, sobrannye P. N. Rybnikovym, 9–43 (Petrozavodsk: Kareliia, 1989) (henceforth Pesni 1989), ed. B. N. Putilov, vol. 1; A. E. Gruzinskii, “P. N. Rybnikov,” in Pesni, sobrannye P. N. Rybnikovym, ed. A. E. Gruzinskii, vii-lx (Moscow: Sotrudnik shkol, 1909) (henceforth Pesni 1909), 1:viilx. 2. Thomas Marsden, The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Rus­sia: Bibikov’s System for the Old Believers, 1841–1855 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 220. 3. Klevenskii, “Vertepniki,” 25; see Marsden, The Crisis, 236. 4. Report of Governor Zakrevskii, 21 January 1859, “O sborishchakh na kvartire studenta Rybnikova. Delo kantseliarii moskovskogo general-­gubernatora po sekretnoi chasti,” MOIA (Moskovskii oblastnoi istoricheskii arkhiv), cited in A. P. Razumova, Iz istorii, 33–34. Cf. V. G. Bazanov, Narodnaia slovesnost’ Karelii (Petrozavodsk: Gos. Izd. Karelofinskoi SSR, 1947). 5. Gruzinskii, “P. N. Rybnikov,” xxv. 6. Klevenskii, “Vertepniki,” 26. 7. S. N. Vinogradov, “Materialy dlia biografii P. N. Rybnikova,” Sovetskii fol’klor 1935, No. 2–3, 318. 8. A. P. Razumova, Iz istorii, 48. 9. P. Rybnikov, Byt russkogo naroda v ego poslovitsakh (Moscow: Katkova i ko., 1859), 12. 10. Letter from P. N. Rybnikov applying for work for the Olonets governor, 24 May 1859, http://­www​.­rkna​.­ru​/­projects​/­mosaic​/­viewimg​.­phtml​?­lng​=­&id​=1­ 196&pa​ geid​=2­ 459 11. Gruzinskii, Pesni 1909, 1: xxix. 12. A. I. Stan’ko, Russkie gazety pervoi poloviny XIX veka (Rostov: Rostovskii Gos. Univ., 1969), 31, cited in Paul Werth, 1837: Rus­sia’s Quiet Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), chap. 5. 13. “Ob uteriannom attestate,” Olonetskie gubernskie vedomosti (henceforth OGV), No. 5 (1 February 1864), 27; “Ob uteriannykh dokumentakh,” No. 10 (7 March 1864), 63; “O rozyskanii pasporta,” “Ob uteriannom bilete,” No. 14 (4 April 1864), 84; “Iz tsarstva Pol’skogo,” No. 18 (9 May 1864), 27–29; “Vopros o preobrazovanii pochtovogo vedomstva,” No. 21 (30 May 1864), 80; “Ob uteriannoi knige,” No. 24 (20 June 1864), 134; Lavrov, “Neskol’ko slov po povodu otkrytiia biblioteki,” No. 35 (5 September 1864), 321–322; “Sel’ksaia biblioteka,” No. 44 (7 November 1864), 475.

NOTES TO PA G E S 150– 154

261

14. M. K. Azadovskii, Istoriia russkoi fol’kloristiki (Moscow: Izd. Ministerstva prosviashcheniia RSFSR, 1958) 1:349. 15. “Starina o Vasilii,” OGV, No. 13 (31 March 1856), 47–48, is listed as “from the papers of A. I. B.” but S. M. Loiter, in “Iz istorii fol’kloristiki Karelii: uchitel’-­kraeved F. I. Doze,” attributes the work to Doze. Cited from https://­k izhi​.­karelia​.­ru​/­library​ /­vestnik​-­11​/­1048​.­html. F. D., “Starina o Solov’e Budimiroviche,” No. 30 (27 July 1857), 159–161; No. 31 (3 August 1857), 164–165; No. 32 (10 August 1857), 171–173. 16. Rybnikov, “Zametki s dorogi I. S. Aksakovu,” OGV, No. 43 (10 November 1862), 108–110; No. 44 (17 November 1862), 112–113; No. 45 (24 November 1862), 116–117. 17. Gruzinskii, xlvii–­xliv. They appear in OGV: No. 31 (12 August 1859), 144; No. 34 (2 September 1859), 156; No. 39 (7 October 1859), 182; No. 42 (31 October 1859), 203; No. 45 (21 November 1859), 109; No. 17 (23 April 1860), 63; No. 33 (13 August 1863), 129; No. 35 (27 August 1860), 141; No. 39 (24 September 1860), 157; No. 47 (19 November 1860), 198. 18. I. Blagoveshchenskii, “Aleksandr Ivanovich Ivanov,” OGV, No. 14 (21 February 1890), 144–145. 19. “Ot redaktsii,” OGV, No. 14 (2 April 1860), 53. 20. Rybnikov, “Zametki s dorogi,” 43:109. 21. Gruzinskii, Pesni 1909, 1: xl–­xliii. 22. Pesni, sobrannye P. N. Rybnikovym, ed. P. Rybnikov, P. Bessonov, D. Khomiakov (Moscow: A. Semena, 1861–1867) (henceforth Pesni 1861–1867). 23. Ibid., 1:363–380. 24. Thomas Prymak, “Mykola Kostomarov and East Slavic Ethnography in the Nineteenth ­Century,” Rus­sian History 18, No. 2 (Summer 1991): 176, 184. 25. Taras Koznarsky, “Izmail Sreznevsky’s Zaporozhian Antiquity as a Memory Proj­ ect,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 35, No. 1 (Fall 2001); M. Iu. Dostal’, “I. I. Sreznevsky i ego rol’ v istorii otechestvennogo slavianovedeniia,” Slavianskii Vestnik 2 (2004). 26. I. I. Sreznevskii, “Pesni, sobrannye P. N. Rybnikovym, Ch. I. Narodnye byliny, stariny i pobyval’shchiny. M. 1861,” Izvestiia Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk po Otedeleniie russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti, vyp. III (1862), 10:248–253; I. M. Kolesnitskaia, “Pis’ma P. N. Rybnikova k I. I. Sreznevskomu,” Russkii fol’klor 1959, No. 4, 281–302. 27. Kolesnitskaia, “Pis’ma,” 289. 28. Rybnikov to Sreznevskii, 5 October 1862, Pesni 1989, 3:253. 29. Rybnikov, “Zametka,” Pesni 1861–1867, 3:i–lii; T. A. Novichkova, “ ’Pesni, sobrannye P. N. Rybnikovym’. K istorii izdaniia i izucheniia (po pis’mam i neopublikovannym materialam),” Iz istorii russkoi fol’kloristiki 3 (1990), 13–14. 30. P. A. Rybnikov, “Zametka sobiratelia,” Pesni 1989, 1:51. 31. Pesni 1989, 1:53. 32. Rybnikov, letter to Sreznevskii, 2 April 1863, Pesni 1989, 3:262; Tridtsat’ chetvertoe, i poslednee prisuzhdenie uchrezhdenykh P. N. Demidovym nagrad 25 Iunia 1865 goda (St. Petersburg: Tip. Imp. Akad. nauk, 1866), 36. 33. Rybnikov to Sreznevskii, 21 April 1864, Pesni 1989, 3:264. 34. “Razbor knigi, pod zaglaviem: Pesni, sobrannye P. N. Rybnikovym, sostavlennyi Akademikom I. I. Sreznevskim,” Tridtsat’ tret’e prisuzhdenie uchrezhdennykh P. N. Demidovym nagrad 26 Iunia 1864 g. (St. Petersburg: Tip. Imperskoi Akademii nauk, 1865), 103–104.

26 2 NOTES

TO PAG ES 154–162

35. Pesni 1909, 1:lx–­cii; Pesni 1989, 1:47–86. 36. Rybnikov, Byt russkogo naroda v ego poslovitsakh, 5. 37. A.  P. Razumova, Iz istorii, 49, no source given. Cf. Nikolai Ssorin-­Chaikov, “Po­liti­cal Fieldwork, Ethnographic Exile and State Theory: Peasant Socialism and Anthropology in Late-­Nineteenth-­Century Rus­sia,” New History of Anthropology, ed. Henrika Kuklick, 191–206 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008). 38. Rybnikov to A. V. de Saint Laurent, cited in Pesni 1909, 1: xxxi–­xxxii. Although Gruzinskii says that letter appears in vol. 3, it does not. 39. Rybnikov to Bessonov, 25 June 1861, GIM, f. 56, op. 1, ed. khr. 519 L. 80 ob, cited in Novichkova, “ ’Pesni’,” 8–9. 40. Dahl to Pogodin, November 19 1840, “Perepiska V. I. Dalia i M. P. Pogodina,” ed. A. A. Il’in-­Tomich, Litsa: Biograficheskii al’manakh 2 (1993), 293. 41. Antonio Gramsci, Se­lections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 10, 19–20. 42. Jon Cruz, Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 41–42; Terry Ea­ gleton, Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth-­Century Ireland (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 35–39. 43. Gramsci, Se­lections, 60. 44. Cited in Pesni 1909, 1: xxxii–­xxxiii. (Gruzinskii dates this to 1864, but no article of this sort appears in the online collection of OGV for that year. The many articles in the newspaper about paper make it seem likely this one was published, but in a dif­ fer­ent year.) 45. Rybnikov to Dm. A. Khomiakov, 3 November 1861, Pesni 1989 3:244–245. 46. Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 15. 47. Dennis Tedlock, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 6. 48. Willow Roberts Powers, Transcription Techniques for the Spoken Word (New York: Altamira Press, 2005), offers a practical guide. 49. Arkhangelʹskie byliny i istoricheskie pesni: sobrannye A.D. Grigorʹevym v 1899–1901 gg.: s napevami, zapisannymi posredstvom fonografa (St. Petersburg: Tropa Troianova, 2003); T. G. Ivanova, “Klassicheskie sobraniia bylin v svete tekstologii,” Russkaia Literatura 1982, No. 1, 136–139, 143–144. 50. Michel Chion, “The I-­voice,” in The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 53. 51. Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia (Charlottesville: University Press of V ­ irginia, 1981), 99. 52. Helmut Pfotenhauer and Sabine Schneider, Nicht völlig Wachen und nicht ganz ein Traum: die Halbschlaf bilder in der Literatur (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006); Die Halbschlaf bilder in der Literatur, den Künsten und den Wissenschaften, ed. Roger Paulin and Helmut Pfotenhauer (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011). 53. M. Alfred Maury, “Des Hallucinations hypnagogiques, ou des erreurs des sens dans l’état intermediaire entre la vielle et le sommeil,” 3–4, first published in Annales médico-­psychologiques 1848, 11:26–40. 54. Pesni 1989, 1:346–347. 55. Rybnikov to K. S. Aksakov, Summer 1860, Pesni 1989, 3:232–233.

NOTES TO PA G E S 162– 167

263

56. A. Veselovskii, “Byliny o Sadke,” Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveshchenia 248, No. 12 (1886): 251–284; Pesni 1861–1867, 2:ccxxxiii. 57. Miller, “K bylinam o Sodke,” Ocherki russkoi narodnoi slovesnosti, vol. 1 (Moscow: Sytina, 1897). 58. Richard P. Martin, The Language of Heroes: Speech and Per­for­mance in the Iliad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 224. 59. Michael Herzfeld, The Poetics of Manhood (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1985), 10. 60. Martin, The Language, 238–239. 61. Rybnikov to Bessonov, undated, cited in Novichkova, “ ’Pesni’,” 12; she dates it to fall 1863. 62. The connection of the byliny to boasting and competition may have inspired Nikolai Rimsky-­Korsakov to begin his 1896 opera, Sadko, with a contest among skaziteli. I am grateful to Margaret Frainier for sharing her work on this opera. 63. Klevenskii, “Vertepniki”; Razumova, Iz istorii; P. D. Ukhov, “Ob izdanii ‘Pesen’ P. N. Rybnikova P. A. Bessonovym i A. E. Gruzinskim,” Russkii fol’klor 4 (1959); Novichkova, “ ’Pesni’ ”; Pesni 1989. 64. Dana Prescott Howell, The Development of Soviet Folkloristics (New York: Garland, 1992), 20–34, 157–160, 170–173, 266–268. 65. Prymak, “Mykola Kostomarov,” 176. 66. Howell, The Development, 22, cites N. P. Grinkova, “Vopros o skazochnike v russkoi fol’kloristike,” in S.  F. Ol’denburgu: K piatidesiatiletiiu nauchno-­obshchestvennoi deiatel’nosti, 1882–1932, 171–180 (Leningrad: Akademiia nauk, 1934), 172, that he shifted in response to disbelief about the byliny. 67. I.  A. Shliapkin, “P.  N. Rybnikov i novoe izdanie ego sbornika (s prilozheniem novykh materialov),” Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 39, No. 6 (1912), 314. 68. M. K. Azadovskii, Istoriia russkoi fol’kloristiki (Moscow: Izd. Ministerstva prosveshcheniia RSFSR, 1958) 2:224; Ukhov, “Ob izdanii ‘Pesen’,” 155; Novichkova, “ ’Pesni’,” 6. 7. Insulting

1. An official investigation at the time blamed natu­ral ­causes. The case for murder is made in the memoirs (completed 1895, first published 1930) of Fedor’s b­ rother, Andrei Dostoevskii, Vospominaniia (St. Petersburg: Andreev i synov’ia, 1992), 102–104. V. S. Nechaeva, in Rannii Dostoevskii, 1821–1849 (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), 86–94, and V sem’e i usad’be Dostoevskikh (Pis’ma M. A. i M. F. Dostoevskikh) (Moscow: Gos. Sots-ek. izd., 1939), confirms it, based on archival evidence and oral history from the 1920s. Joseph Frank, in Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 2003), 5, is skeptical; Linda Ivanits, Dostoevsky and the Rus­sian ­People (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 13–17, believes Nechaeva. 2. Charles Ruud and Sergei Stepanov, Fontanka 16: The Tsar’s Secret Police (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1999), 23–24. 3. Mary Pratt, “Art of the Contact Zone,” Profession 1991. 4. The notebook is published in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–1990) (henceforth PSS 1972) 4:235–248; Polnoe sobranie sochinenii.

26 4 NOTES

TO PAG ES 167–170

Kanonicheskie teksty (Petrozavodsk: Izd. Petrozavodskogo univ., 1995–) (henceforth PSS 1995) 3:7–38; Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 35 tomakh (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2013–) (henceforth PSS 2013) 4:267–289. See Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850– 1859 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1983), 83; an interview with Ivanov’s son in Georgii Viatkin, “Dostoevskii v omskoi katorge. Po povodu semidesiatiletiia ssylki F. M. Dostoevskogo v Sibir’,” Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (Omsk: Omskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 2005–), 4:347–348. 5. Rus­sian folklorists rarely collect this genre. B. Ia. Sharifullin, “Invektiva: Lingvistika vs. Iurisprudentsiia, ili Lingvistika atque Iurisprudentsiia,” Vestnik Krasnoiarskogo gumanitarnogo universiteta 2000, No. 2, n.2, discusses ritual insult contests among Western Slavs. On con­temporary insults see V.  I. Zhel’vis, Pole brani: skvernoslovie kak sotsial’naia problema (Moscow: Ladomir, 1997); “Zlaia laia maternaia”: Sbornik statei, ed. V. I. Zhel’vis (Moscow: Ladomir, 2005). 6. Dostoevskii to Liubomov, 10 May 1879, 16 September 1879, 16 November 1879, PSS 1972, 30:63–64, 125–126, 130–131; L. M. Lotman, Realizm russkoi literatury 60x godov XIX veka (Istoki i esteticheskoe svoeobrazie) (Leningrad: Nauka, 1974), 307; N. K. Piksanov, “Dostoevskii i fol’klor,” Sovetskaia etnografiia 1934, No. 1–2. For the theory that he had a notebook with recordings that was confiscated on his arrest, see V. P. Vladimirtsev, Katorzhnaia tetradka Dostoevskogo. Monografiia (Irkutsk: Izd. Irkutskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2009), 8–16; A. Misiurev, “Dostoevskii i narodnoe tvorchestvo,” Sibirskie ogni 1971, No. 11, 178. 7. OR RGB, f. 93 (the Dostoevskys) III. 8. 6, cited in Vladimirtsev, Katorzhnaia tetradka, 14. 8. F. M. to M. M. Dostoevskii, 20 October 1846, PSS 1972, 28:1, 131; “Stat’i o russkoi lit­er­a­ture,” part 2, 1861, PSS 1972, 18:51. 9. On the carbon dating that places the composition of the notebook from 1855 to 1860, ­after he left prison, see PSS 2013, 4:452; on the idea that he wrote it in prison and concealed it in his Bible, see V. Zakharov, “Voskreshenie iz mertvykh,” in PSS 1995, 3:736. 10. On the connection to Derevnia, see I. D. Iakubovich, “Literaturnyi genezis obrazov ‘krotkikh’ i ‘chistykh’ v ‘Zapiskakh iz mertvogo doma’ F. M. Dostoevskogo,” Russkaia literatura 2015, No. 1, 99–101. 11. For an analy­sis that engages with debates in sound studies about listening and empathy, see Anna Schur, “The Limits of Listening: Particularity, Compassion, and Dostoevsky’s ‘Bookish Humaneness’,” Rus­sian Review 72, No. 4 (October 2013). 12. For analy­sis foregrounding Dostoevsky’s Chris­tian­ity, see Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1986), 226–227; Gary Rosenshield, “Akul’ka: The Incarnation of the Ideal in Dostoevskij’s Notes from the House of the Dead,” SEEJ 31, No. 1 (1987); Rosenshield, “Religious Portraiture in Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes from the House of the Dead’: Representing the Abrahamic Faiths,” SEEJ 50, No. 4 (Winter 2006); Robert Jackson, Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1981), 96; Lewis Bagby, “Dostoyevsky’s Notes from a Dead House: The Poetics of the Introductory Paragraph,” The Modern Language Review 81, No. 1 ( January 1986); Robert Berry, “First Descents into the Inferno: Parallel Ideology and Experience in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes from the House of the Dead,’ ” New Zealand Sla-

NOTES TO PA G E S 170– 172

265

vonic Journal 1997; Julie de Sherbinin, ‘Transcendence through Art: The Convicts’ Theatricals in Dostoevskij’s Zapiski iz Mertvogo Doma,” SEEJ 35, No. 3 (Autumn 1991); Anne Dwyer, “Dostoevsky’s Prison House of Nation(s): Genre Vio­lence in ‘Notes from the House of the Dead,’ ” Rus­sian Review 71, No. 2 (2012); V. I. Gabdullina, “Motiv smerti-­voskreseniia v sibirskom tekste F. M. Dostoevskogo,” Siuzhetologiia i siuzhetografiia 2015, No. 2; Marina Kanevskaya, “The Icon in the Structure of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead,” Zapiski Russkoi Akademicheskoi Gruppy v S. Sh. A, 30 (1999); Tat’iana Kasatkina, “Letniaia shkola o ‘Zapiskakh iz mertvogo doma’ v Sestole, 19–24 iiuliia, 2017,” audio transcript, accessed September 21, 2019, https://­www​ .­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­d88O4QSwq1c; Zakharov, “Voskreshenie”; Vladimirtsev, Katorzhnaia tetradka. 13. For analy­sis foregrounding the vio­lence of the prison, see Nancy Ruttenburg, Dostoevsky’s Democracy (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2008); Karla Oeler, “The Dead Wives in the Dead House: Narrative Inconsistency and Genre Confusion in Dostoevskii’s Autobiographical Prison Novel,” Slavic Review 61, No. 3 (2002): 533; Susan McReynolds, Redemption and the Merchant God: Dostoevsky’s Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008); T. V. Buzina, “ ’Zapiski iz mertvogo doma’—­russkii narod ne-­bogonosets,” Vestnik RGGU. Seriia “Istoriia. Filologiia. Kul’turologiia. Vostokovedenie” 2010, No. 8; A. Iu. Kolpakov, “ ’Mertvyi dom’ Dostoevskogo: ekzistentsial’nyi opyt katorgi,” Vestnik Krasnoiarskogo Gos. Ped. universiteta im. V.P. Astaf ’eva 2007, No. 3; Harriet Murav, “Dostoevskii in Siberia: Remembering the Past,” Slavic Review 50, No. 4 (1991); V. A. Tunimanov, Tvorchestvo Dostoevskogo, 1854–1862 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1980). 14. F. M. Dostoevskii to M. M. Dostoevskii, 9 October 1859, PSS 1972, 28:349. 15. Dostoevskii, “Knizhnost’ i gramotnost’,” PSS 1972, 19:31. 16. Dnevnik pisatelia, July-­August 1876, PSS 1972, 23:70. 17. Misiurev (“Dostoevskii i narodnoe tvorchestvo,” 177) and Piksanov (“Dostoevskii i fol’klor”) report that Dostoevskii liked memorates, songs, urban legends, and jokes. Szymon Tokarzewski wrote that he directed the convict plays (cited in E. Iu. Safronova, “Individualizatsiia kriminal’nogo fakta v ‘Zapiski iz mertvogo doma’ F. M. Dostoevskogo: Avtopsikhologicheskii aspect,” Sibirskii filologicheskii zhurnal 2013, No. 2, 103). De Sherbinin, “Transcendence through Art.” 18. A. P. Miliukov, “Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii,” in F. M. Dostoevskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, ed. V. E. Vatsuro et al., 1:259–290 (Moscow: Khud. Lit, 1990), 1:275. 19. V. Vladimirtsev, “Detskaia draznilka (fol’klornyi zhanr),” Dostoevskii narodnyi. F.  M. Dostoevskii i russkaia etnograficheskaia kul’tura (Irkutsk: Irkutskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2007), 382–391. V. A. Mikhniukevich, Russkii fol’kor v khudozhestvennoi sisteme F. M. Dostoevskogo (Cheliabinsk: Cheliab. Gos. Univ., 1994), 36, citing PSS 1972, 29:408. G. Levinton, “Dostoevskii i ‘nizkie’ zhanry fol’klora,” in Anti-­mir russkoi kul’tury. Iazyk. Fol’klor. Literatura, ed. N. Bogomolov, 267–296 (Moscow: Ladomir, 1996); I. V. Ruzhitskii and E. V. Potemkina, “ ‘Elitarnaia iazykovaia lichnost” i brannaia leksika (na primere idiolekta F. M. Dostoevskogo),” Russkaia rech’ 2018, No. 6, esp. 37. See PSS 1995, 3:793. 20. F. M. Dostoevskii to M. M. Dostoevskii, 30 January to 22 February 1854, PSS 1972, 28 (part 2):169–170. 21. Narodnyi teatr, ed. A. F. Nekrylova and I. I. Savushkina (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1991), 24. This volume cites (on 500) I. K. Kopanevich, Rozhestvenskie sviatki i

26 6 NOTES

TO PAG ES 173–176

soprovozhdaiushchie ikh narodnye igry i razvlecheniia v Pskovskoi gubernii (Pskov: Gub. Pravl., 1896), 10–18. 22. F.  M. to M.  M. Dostoevskii, 30 January to 22 February  1854, PSS 1972, 28:172–173. 23. ­These statistics are based on the identification of notebook items in the annotations to the novel, PSS 1972, 4:301–310. He used items 215 and 295 twice and item 115 three times. He uses five or more notebook items over a few pages on pages 10– 13, 23–25, 29–31, 70–76, 110–115, 162–164, 167–171, 179–181, 200, 225–227. 24. PSS 1972, 4:23. I borrow “rollicky” from Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from a Dead House, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Knopf, 2015), 24–25. 25. The obscenities in notebook entry 90 are represented in PSS 1972 as , but the initial letters are given in PSS 1995, 3:12, which reveals ­there ­were obscenities in note 141 and the unnumbered note a­ fter 217. 26. They are described in James A. Matisoff, Blessings, Curses, Hopes and Fears: Psycho-­ Ostensive Expressions in Yiddish (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 27. See Roger D. Abrahams, “Joking: The Training of the Man of Words in Talking Broad,” Thomas Kochman, “­Toward an Ethnography of Black American Speech Be­hav­ior,” and William Labov, “Rules of Ritual Insults,” in Kochman, Rappin’ and Stylin’ Out: Communication in Urban Black Amer­i­ca, 215–240, 241–264, and 265–314 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1972); Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-­American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 28. Richard Wright, “Black Boy and Reading,” in Conversations with Richard Wright, ed. Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre, 81–82 ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 81. Cf. Joseph Frank, “Ralph Ellison and a Literary ‘Ancestor’: Dostoevski,” in Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, ed. Kimberly W. Benston, 231–244 (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1987); Maria R. Bloshteyn, “Rage and Revolt: Dostoevsky and Three African-­American Writers,” Comparative Lit­er­a­ture Studies 38, No. 4 (2001): 277–309. 29. Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz mertvogo doma, PSS 1972, 4:93–94. 30. Asif Agha, Language and Social Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 24–26. 31. Dostoevskii, PSS 2013, 4:474. Fartikul’tiapnost’, fel’tikul’tepnyi, fertikul’tepnyi, and fertikul’tiapnyi are all attested. I. V. Ruzhitskii, “Iazykovaia lichnost’ F. M. Dostoevskogo: leksikograficheskoe predstavlenie” (PhD diss., Lomonosov Moscow State University, 2015; printed in Ekaterinburg), 524. Leskov uses fintikul’tepnyi in “Zaiachii remiz” (1894) and Arkadii Avarchenko uses it in “Indeika s kashtamani” (1925). I am grateful to Yuliya Ilchuk and Gregory Freidin for puzzling through this word with me. 32. Tat’iana Kasatkina, “Letniaia shkola,” notes that the Kagan, which brings good fortune, might be associated with the phoenix, Christ, and the Resurrection. 33. Zagadki russkogo naroda: Sbornik zagadok, voprosov, prich i zadach, ed. D. Sadovnikov (St. Petersburg: N. A. Lebedeva, 1876), 174. I thank Elena Minenok, October 13, 2019, for this suggestion. 34. B. A. Uspensky, in “Mifologicheskii aspect russkoi ekspressivnoi frazeologii,” Izbrannye trudy (Moscow, 1994), 2:53–128, analyzes this expression in depth.

NOTES TO PA G E S 176– 182

267

35. Felix Dreizin and Tom Priestly, “A Systematic Approach to Rus­sian Obscene Language,” Rus­sian Linguistics 6, No. 2 (February 1982): 233–234. 36. Levinton, “Dostoevskii i ‘nizkie’ zhanry fol’klora,” 269. 37. PSS 1972, 4:10, 24, 57. 38. Ibid., 54. 39. Ibid., 59. 40. Ibid., 204, 216, 211. See Nina Perlina, “Dostoevsky and His Polish Fellow Prisoners from the House of the Dead,” in Polish Encounters, Rus­sian Identity, ed. David L. Ransell and Bozena Shallcross, 100–109 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). 41. Agha, Language and Social Relations, 214. 42. PSS 1972, 4:94. 43. Ibid., 103. 44. Ibid., 89. 45. Ibid., 94. 46. Ibid., 55. 47. Ibid., 100. 48. Ibid., 210. 49. On Dostoevsky’s anti-­Semitism, see Leonid Grossman, Ispoved’ odnogo evreia (Moscow: Dekont, 1999); Gary Rosenshield, The Ridicu­lous Jew: The Exploitation and Transformation of a Ste­reo­type in Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); McReynolds, Redemption and the Merchant God. 50. See Gary Rosenshield, “Isai Fomich Bumshtein: The Repre­sen­ta­tion of the Jew in Dostoevsky’s Major Fiction,” The Rus­sian Review 43, No. 3 ( July 1984). 51. Examples appear in Entertaining Tsarist Rus­sia, ed. James von Geldern and Louise McReynolds (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 129–135, 183–186; cf. the discussion of Stseny collections in chapter 8 of this study. 52. P. Ol’khin, Rukovodstvo k russkoi stenografii, po nachalam Gabel’sbergera (St. Petersburg (M. Khana, 1866), i-­v; see Stephen Lovell, “Stenography and the Public Sphere in Modern Rus­sia,” Cahiers du Monde Russe 56, No. 2; Lovell, How Rus­sia Learned to Talk: A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), chap. 1. 53. Oksana Aleksandrovna Sosnovskaia, “Professora stenografii P. M. Ol’khin i Iu.­V. Taibig, znakomye F. M. i A. G. Dostoevskikh” Neizvestnyi Dostoevskii 2018, No. 4. 54. M. Ivanin, O stenografii ili iskusstve skoropisi, v primenenii k russkomu iazyku (St. Petersburg: Tip. Imp. Akad.nauk, 1858), 20–21, cited in Stephen Lovell, “Stenography and the Public Sphere in Modern Rus­sia,” 291. 55. M. Ia. Grebennikov, Stenografiia, ee istoriia, pol’za i oblast’ primeneniia (Kiev: D. S. Poval’skogo, 1885), 16. 56. Ol’khin, Rukovodstvo, 8-9. 57. “Svedeniia o khode i rezul’tatakh prepodavaniia stenografii vo vtoroi i shestoi S.-­Petersburgskikh gimnaziiakh,” Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia 1867, part 133, 653, cited in I. S. Andrianova, “ ‘Isskustvo vysokoe’: F. M. Dostoevskii i stenografiia,” Neizvestnyi Dostoevskii 2017, No. 4, 170. 58. I. S. Andrianova and O. A. Sosnovskaia, “Stenograficheskaia sistema Anny Dostoevskoi: Problema deshifrovki,” Neizvestnyi Dostoevskii 2018, No. 1, 46, 54.

26 8 NOTES

TO PAG ES 182–189

59. See the articles on Ol’khin in S. V. Belov, Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’. F. M. Dostoev­ skii i ego okruzhenie (St.  Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2001), vol. 2. They cite I.  L. Miuller, “Roman-­stenogramma,” Almanakh bibliofila, vyp 15 (1982): 119–125. 60. RGALI, f. 212.1.147 L 3–4, cited in I. S. Andrianova, “ ‘Ia prishla rabotat’, a ne dlia znakomstva’: Fedor Dostoevskii i Anna Snitkina,” Neizvestnyi Dostoevskii 2016, No. 3, 132. 61. Dostoevskii to A. V. Korvin-­Kriukovskaia, 17 June 1866, PSS 1972, 28:159–160; Dostoevskii to N. A. Liubomov, 2 November 1866, PSS 1972, 28:168. 62. A. G. Dostoevskaia, Vospominaniia, ed. S. V. Belov and V. A. Tunimanov (Moscow: Khud. Lit., 1971), 54. 63. Dostoevskaia, Dnevnik, 308, cited in Andrianova, “Ia prishla rabotat’,” 136. 64. Dostoevskaia, Vospominaniia, 56. 65. Andrianova believes the diary version and suggests the confusion was tied to a Paris episode of Dostoevsky’s love affair with Apollinaria Suslova. Andrianova, “Ia prishla rabotat’,” 137. 66. Andrianova, “Iskusstvo vysokoe.” 67. Dostoevskii, PSS 1972, 24:5–6. I have borrowed translations from Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, trans. and ed. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 1:677–678. 68. Andrianova, “Obraz stenografa v ‘Fantasticheskom rasskaze’ ‘Krotkaia’ F. M. Dostoevskogo,” Problemy istoricheskoi poetiki 16, No. 1 (2018): 164–165. 69. “ ‘Dlia menia—­samaia interesnaia!’ (voskresnyi gost’ ‘Smeny’—­stenografistka Tsetsiliia Mironovna Poshemanskaia),” Smena 1970, No. 302 (27 December): 2, cited in Andrianova and Sosnovskaia, “Stenograficheskaia Sistema Anny Dostoevskoi,” 51. 70. Dostoevskii, PSS 1972, 21:88–89. 71. Ibid., 89. 72. Dostoevskii, “Rasskazy N. V. Uspenskogo,” PSS 1972, 19:180–181. Cf. Katherine M. H. Reischl, Photographic Literacy: Cameras in the Hands of Rus­sian Authors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 7. 73. D. I. Pisarev, “Pisemskii, Turgenev i Goncharov,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Nauka, 2000–), 3:229–240. 74. A. I. Faresov, Protiv techenii. N. S. Leskov: ego zhizn’, sochineniia, polemika i vospominaniia o nem (St. Petersburg: Tip. Merkusheva, 1904), 273–274. Leskov did not want to use a stenographer. Andrianova, “Isskustvo vysokoe,” 166, cites I. K. Markuze, “Vospominaniia o V. V. Krestovskom,” Istoricheskii vestnik 79 (1900): 989. 75. N. S. Leskov to S. N. Shubinskii, 19 September 1887, Sobranie sochinenii v 11 tomakh (Moscow: Khud. Lit., 1956–1958) (henceforth SS), 11:348. 76. Dostoevskii, PSS 1972, 21:88. 77. Ibid., 90. I have borrowed ­these clever translations from Lantz, 232. 78. Lantz translates it “impersonator,” 217. 79. PSS 1972, 21:88, 87. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid., 90. 82. See K. P. Bogaevskaia, “N. S. Leskov o Dostoevskom (1880-­e gody),” Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 86 (1973).

NOTES TO PA G E S 189– 196

269

83. On the continuation of Leskov’s rivalry with Dostoevsky over their access to folk culture, see Irina Reyfman, “Dishonor by Flogging and Restoration by Dancing: Leskov’s Response to Dostoevsky,” Ulbandus Review 13 (2010). 84. Potemkina and Ruzhitskii, “Homo Increpans,” 87. 85. Dostoevskii, PSS 1972, 21:89. 86. Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 58. 87. Ivan Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Steven Marcus, “Language into Structures: Pickwick Revisited,” Daedalus 101, No. 1 (Winter 1972); Hugo Bowles, “Stenography and Orality in Dickens: Rethinking the Phonographic Myth,” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 48 (2017). 88. Lovell, “Stenography,” 293, 316. 89. Miyako I­noue, “Stenography and Ventriloquism in Late Nineteenth C ­ entury Japan,” Language and Communication 31 (2011): 184. 90. Dnevnik pisatela (1873), PSS 1972, 21:108–109. 91. S. M. Vengerov, Dostoevskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow: Khud. Lit, 1964), 2:404, cited in Peter Brang, Zvuchashchee slovo: Zametki po teorii i istorii deklamatsionnogo iskusstva (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2010), 68. 8. Laughing

1. I. F. Gorbunov, “Na pochtovoi stantsii,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. A. F. Koni (St. Petersburg: A. F. Marksa, 1904) (henceforth PSS), 1:161. The final line, starting Kazhinnyi raz, does not appear in this edition but is in most ­others, including Gorbunov, Stseny iz narodnogo byta (St. Petersburg: Kolesov i Mikhin, 1874), 293. 2. Cathy A. Frierson, Peasant Icons: Repre­sen­ta­tions of Rural P­ eople in Late Nineteenth ­Century Rus­sia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 182. 3. Ibid., 38–47. 4. Cf. Helen Stuhr-­Rommereim, “Let Some Genius Write a Poem: The Radical Tendency in Reform-­Era Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2021), 13–14. On unwilling listening in that period, see Gabriella Safran, “The Troubled Frame Narrative: Bad Listening in Late Imperial Rus­sia,” Rus­sian Review 72, No.  4 (October 2013). 5. For some scenes of this sort, see Entertaining Tsarist Rus­sia, ed. James von Geldern and Louise McReynolds (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 6. On the use of such publications to understand the taste of late imperial mi­ grants to cities, see Daniel R. Brower, “The Penny Press and its Readers,” Cultures in Flux: Lower-­Class Values, Practices, and Re­sis­tance in Late Imperial Rus­sia, ed. Steven P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg, 147–167 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1994). 7. I.S. Turgenev, “Stuchit!,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 30 tt (Moscow: Nauka, 1978) (henceforth PSSP) 3:347, 350, 352. 8. G. Uspenskii, “Moi deti,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Izd. Akademii nauk, 1940–1954) 14:589.

27 0 NOTES

TO PAG ES 196–201

9. Turgenev to P. V. Annenkov, 12 (24) June 1874, PSS 3:516. 10. F. M. Dostoevskii, “O liubvi k narodu,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–1990) (henceforth PSS 1972), 22:42–43. 11. On folklorists’ per­sis­tent linkage, since Herder, of folk language to precious metals, see J. Alexander Ogden, “Peasant Listening, Listening to Peasants: Miscommunication and Ventriloquism in Nekrasov’s ‘Komu na Rusi zhit’ khorosho’,” Rus­sian Review 72, No. 4, 597-598. 12. Dostoevskii, “O liubvi k narodu,” PSS 1972, 22:45. 13. Dostoevskii, “Muzhik Marei,” PSS 1972, 22:46. 14. Ibid., 22:49. 15. Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz mertvogo doma, PSS 1972, 4:204. 16. See Robert Jackson, Art of Dostoevsky (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1981), 20–32; Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky. The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1983), 116–127. Harriet Murav, “Dostoevskii in Siberia: Remembering the Past,” Slavic Review 50, No. 4 (Winter 1991), is less sure of this. 17. “Vypis’ iz metricheskoi knigi,” Sochineniia I. F. Gorbunova (St. Petersburg: R. Golike i A. Vil’borg, 1904), 3:562. 18. N. P. Likhachev, Bumaga i drevneishie bumazhnye mel’nitsy v Moskovskom gosudarstve (St. Petersburg: Tip. Imp. Akad. Nauk, 1891), 84–85, 93. 19. “Ivanteevo,” in Sochineniia I. F. Gorbunova 3:560–561, written by the editors in consultation with Gorbunov’s friend the priest Grigorii Stanislavlev. 20. A. S. Melkova, I. F. Gorbunov v Podmoskov’e (Kaluga: Fridgel’m, 2012), 29. 21. I. F. Gorbunov, Stseny iz narodnogo byta (St. Petersburg: Tip. Komm. Imp. Akad. Khudozhestv. Gogenfel’dena i Ko., 1861). 22. O. F. Gorbunov, Stseny iz narodnogo byta (Moscow: V. Got’e, 1867). 23. The Rus­sian National Library contains the following editions of I. F. Gorbunov’s collection, in addition to the 1861 one: u ­ nder Stseny iz narodnogo byta, ones published by Kolesov and Mikhin in St. Petersburg from 1868, 1870, 1874; I. E. Shiuman in Moscow from 1871; Ioganson in Moscow from 1872 and 1873; A. D. Stupin in Moscow from 1883; and ­under Stseny iz narodnogo byta: dlia rasskazov na teatral’noi stsene i semeinykh vecherakh, by A. Transhelia in St. Petersburg from 1876 and 1880; tip. M-va put. soobsh. (I. N. Kushnereva i Ko.) in St. Petersburg from 1894; and G. U. Prostakova in St. Petersburg from 1900 and 1904. It contains the following editions of O. F. Gorbunov’s collection, in addition to the 1867: V. Golovina in St. Petersburg in 1870; F. Ioganson in Moscow in 1874; and K. Shamov in Moscow in 1900. 24. A. P. Chekhov, “Liberal’nyi dushka,” 1884, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1975), 3:135–138. 25. Dnevnik Alekseia Sergeevicha Suvorina (Moscow: Nezavisimaia gazeta, 1999), 207. 26. A. Koni, “Predislovie,” in Gorbunov, PSS 1:104. 27. A. R. Kugel’ (Homo Novus), Literaturnye vospominaniia (1882–1896 gg) (Petrograd: N. P., 1923). 28. Gr. Pavel Sheremetev, Otzvuki rasskazov I. F. Gorbunova, 1883–1895 (St. Petersburg: M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1901), 104. 29. For a Soviet perspective stressing theater history, see E. M. Kuznetsov, Ivan Fedorovich Gorbunov (Leningrad: Vseros. Teatral’noe ob-vo, 1974); for a post-­Soviet perspective stressing regional history, see Melkova, I. F. Gorbunov.

NOTES TO PA G E S 201– 203

271

30. Melkova, I. F. Gorbunov, 17–18. 31. Dostoevsky, PSS 1972, 15:80. I borrow this translation from Fyodor Dostoevsky, The B ­ rothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 645. 32. M. M. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, Sobranie sochinenii v 7 tomakh (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 2000) 6:200n; I borrow this translation from Mikhail Bakhtin, Prob­lems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 180 n.32. 33. K. A. Lantz, “Chekhov and the stsenka,” Slavic and East Eu­ro­pean Journal 19, No. 4 (Winter 1975): 378, 386 n.1 34. For instance, C. F. Hennigsen, Scenes from the Belgian Revolution (London: Longman, 1832); Lady Morgan, Dramatic Scenes from Real Life (London: Saunders and Otley, 1833); Working Man, Scenes from My Life (London: Seeleys, 1858); M. Fisher, Scenes from Scripture and Other Poems (Carlisle, UK: J. I. Lonsdale, 1859); NA, Scenes from Christian History (Boston: Walker, Wise, and Co., 1862). 35. A. Jal, Scènes de la vie maritime (Paris: C. Gosselin, 1832); Emile Souvestre, Scènes de la Chouannerie (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1854); Alfred Assollant, Scènes de la vie aux Etats-­Unis (Paris: Hachette, 1859). 36. Louis Viardot, Scènes de moeurs arabes (Paris: Paulin, 1834); J. Tourguéneff, Scènes de la vie russe (Paris: Hachette, 1858). 37. Henry Monnier, Scènes de la ville et de la campagne, avec vignettes sur bois (Paris: Dumont, 1841); Monnier, Scènes parisiennes (Paris: M. Lévy, 1858); Gorbunov, “Otryvki iz vospominanii,” PSS 2:400. 38. Edith Melcher, The Life and Times of Henry Monnier, 1799–1877 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950). 39. Examples of peasant collections are Stseny iz narodnogo byta v Podolii F. N. Levitskogo (Kiev: Univ. tip., 1870); B. H. Bibin, Stseny iz narodnogo byta (Perm: Tip. Gub. Zem., upravy, 1877); Stseny iz narodnogo byta aktera Apollona Maksimovicha Krasovskogo (Moscow: A. Stupin, 1872). Volumes focused on Jews include Illiustrirovannye iumoristicheskie stseny iz evreiskogo byta Moishe Geim i barona Shperlinga (Moscow: Shiuman, 1872); Stseny iz evreiskogo byta A. P. Morozovskogo (Kiev: E. A. Fedorova, 1876); Stseny iz evreiskogo byta Pavla Veinberga (St. Petersburg: A. Kaspari, 1870); Stseny i kuplety iz evreiskogo byta L. A. Leonidova (St. Petersburg: R. Golike, 1876); Stseny iz evreiskogo byta I. Kupchinskogo (Moscow: Morozov, 1879). One on Ukrainians is Stseny i rasskazy iz malorossiiskogo narodnogo byta Petra Raevskogo (Kiev: Univ. tip., 1871). Some books concern multiple ethnicities: Stseny iz evreiskogo i armianskogo byta Pavla Veinberga (St. Petersburg: P. A. Remezova, 1878); Stseny iz narodnogo i evreiskogo byta by A. N. Fon-­Galler (St. Petersburg: R. Golike, 1876); Stseny iz evreiskogo, malorossiiskogo, burlatskogo i tsyganskogo byta. Ios’ki i Gritsko, Liamki i Shchupa (Moscow: S. A. Manukhin, 1872); Stseny iz narodnogo byta raznykh stran i obshchestv / iz evreiskogo, tsyganskogo, nemetskogo, tatarskogo, malorossiiskogo, i russkogo masterovogo i kupecheskogo byta M. Evstigneev (Moscow: D. I. Presnov, 1872). 40. Sheremetev, Otzvuki, 104. 41. G. Vinokur conveys a Soviet disdain of urban vernacular, which he calls “ugly, distorted speech . . . ​the pure, vivid, speech of the ­people is replaced by ill-­digested, meaningless snatches of the sophisticated language of the intelligent­sia . . . ​the speech of the characters of a semi-­literate type . . . ​who have come into contact with urban

27 2 NOTES

TO PAG ES 203–209

civilization in a purely superficial way.” G. O. Vinokur, The Rus­sian Language, trans. Mary A. Forsyth (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1971), 128–129. On the Soviet disdain for the popu­lar urban culture of the late imperial period, see V. G. Lebedeva, Sud’by massovoi kul’tury v Rossii. Vtoraia polovina XIX-­pervaia tret’ XX veka (St. Petersurg: Izd. S-­ Peterburgskogo univ., 2007). On a similar reaction to urban language mixing in the 1830s, see V. V. Vinogradov, Ocherki po istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka XVII–­XIX vv (Leiden: E. I. Brill, 1950), 302. 42. Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-­Century Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 4–5. 43. A. M. Skabichevskii, A. F. Pisemskii. Ego zhizn’ i literaturnaia deiatel’nost’ (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1894), 11, 24, 35, 36, 50, 51. He cites P. V. Annenkov, “Khudozhnik i prostoi chelovek. Iz vospominanii o A. F. Pisemskom,” Literaturnye vospominaniia, ed. V. P. Dorofeeva (Moscow: GIKhL, 1960). 44. A. Gornfel’d, “Aleksei Feofilaktovich Pisemskii,” Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ Brokgauza i Efrona, accessed September 29, 2016, http://­www​.­vehi​.­net​/­brokgauz​/­. 45. M. Gor’kii, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1951), 13:469, cited in A.F. Pisemsky, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Pravda, 1959) 2:559. 46. I. F. Gorbunov, “Otryvki iz vospominanii,” PSS 2:403. 47. Ibid., 2:404. 48. Alexey Vdovin points out the similarity between the ethos of the literary expedition and the ideas of the “Rus­sian” school at the Rus­sian Geo­g raph­i­cal Society. Alexey Vdovin, “Nationalizing Science in Mid-­Nineteenth ­Century Rus­sia: Ideological Origins of the Naval Ministry’s ‘Literary Expedition’,” Scando-­Slavica 61, No. 1 (2015), 110. 49. S. V. Maksimov, “Literaturnaia ekspeditsiia,” in A. N. Ostrovskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, 65–126 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1966). First published in Russkaia Mysl’ 1890, No. 2. accessed October 4, 2016, http://­az​.­lib​.­r u​/­m​ /­maksimow​_­s​_­w​/­text​_­0040​.­shtml 50. Catherine Black Clay, “Ethos and Empire: The Ethnographic Expedition of the Imperial Rus­sian Naval Ministry 1855–1862” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 1989), 6ff, 62–65. 51. Vladimir Lapin, “Zapakhi i zvuki Sankt-­Peterburga,” Zvezda 2007, No. 3. He cites “O rasporiazheniiakh v sluchae neobyknovennogo vozvysheniia v Peterburge vody,” Polnyi svod zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii. Vtoroe sobranie, No. 6575 (16 November 1833). 52. Gorbunov, “U pushki,” PSS 1:251. 53. Gorbunov, “Vozdukhoplavatel,’ ” PSS 1:248. 54. Gorbunov, “Zatmenie solntsa,” PSS 1:245. On the crowd’s response to disk, see Sheremet’ev, Otzvuki, 26; Koni, “Predislovie,” 1:31, 1:56–8. 55. I borrow “ethnogging” from Dani Schrire, “Ballads of Strangers: Constructing ‘Ethnographic Moments’ in Jewish Folklore,” Writing Jewish Culture: Paradoxes in Ethnography, ed. Andreas Kilcher and Gabriella Safran, 322–346 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016). 56. Gorbunov, “Samodur,” PSS 1:211. 57. Ibid. 1:221. 58. Julie A. Buckler, The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Rus­sia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 125–155.

NOTES TO PA G E S 210– 216

273

59. Gorbunov, “Traviata,” PSS 1:298–299. 60. John Dizikes, Opera in Amer­ic­ a: A Cultural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 126. 61. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in Amer­i­ca (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 104; Roberta Montemorra Marvin, “Verdian Opera Burlesqued: A Glimpse into Mid-­Victorian Theatrical Culture,” Cambridge Opera Journal 15, No. 1 (March 2003), 37; Dizikes, Opera in Amer­i­ca, 172–173. 62. Gabriela Cruz, “Sr. José, the Worker mélomane, or Opera and Democracy in Lisbon ca. 1850,” 19th-­Century ­Music 40, No. 2 (Fall 2016): 85. 63. For a description of the formal dinners and speeches associated with this visit, see Edward Kasinec, with Robert H. David, Jr., “The Naval Mission to Rus­sia of Gustavus Vasa Fox,” in The Tsar and the President, ed. Marilyn Pfeifer Swezey, 39–48 (Washington, DC: American-­Russian Cultural Cooperation Foundation, 2008), 39–47. Cf. Ari Hoogenboom, Gustavus Vasa Fox of the Union Navy: A Biography (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 284–289. 64. Koni, “Predislovie,” 1:43. Cf. Stephen Lovell, How Russia Learned to Talk: A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 25–26. Conclusion

1. Thomas Newlin, “Peasant Dreams, Peasant Nightmares: On Tolstoy and Cross-­ Dressing,” The Rus­sian Review 78, No. 4 (October 2019): 596, 597. 2. B. Eikhenbaum, Tolstoy in the Seventies (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1982); E. E. Zaidenshnur, “Ispol’zovanie Tolstym fol’klora narodov Rossii v svoem tvorchestve,” accessed July  28, 2020, http://­tolstoy​-­lit​.­ru​/­tolstoy​/­kritika​-­o​-­tolstom​/­zajdenshnur​-­ispolzovanie​ -­tolstym​-­folklora​-­narodov​-­rossii​.­htm. Cf. Paul Friedrich, “Tolstoy and the Chechens: Prob­lems in Literary Anthropology,” Rus­sian History 30, No. ½ (Spring-­Summer 2003), 117-118; Faina Ibragimovna Dzhubaeva, Rechevoe samousovershenstvovanie L. N. Tolstogo: Rannie gody, kavkazskii period (Stavropol’: Severo-­Kavkazskii federal’nyi universitet, 2013). 3. Tolstoy to N. Strakhov, 22, 25 March 1872, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: GIKhL, 1937) (henceforth PSS), 61:277–278. 4. Irina Paperno, Who, What Am I? Tolstoy Strug­g les to Narrate the Self (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 103–127; Inessa Medzhibovskaya, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time: A Biography of a Long Conversion (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 264–266; Richard Wortman, “Tolstoy and the Perception of Poverty: Tolstoy’s ‘What Then Must We Do?,’ ” Visual Texts, Ceremonial Texts, Texts of Exploration: Collected Articles on the Repre­sen­ta­tion of Rus­sian Monarchy (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2013); Aylmer Maude, “Introduction,” in Leo Tolstoy, What Then Must We Do? trans. Maude, v–­xviii (New York: Oxford University Press, 1925); Michael A. Denner, “Tolstoi as Social Theorist,” in Tolstoy and His Prob­lems: Views from the Twenty-­ First ­Century, ed. Inessa Medzhibovskaia, 39–58 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018). 5. L. N. Tolstoi, “O perepisi v Moskve,” PSS 25:173, 174, 177, 178. 6. Tolstoi, Tak chto zhe nam delat’?, PSS 25:218.

27 4 NOTES

TO PAG ES 217–220

7. B. Eikhenbaum, “K 100-­letiiu rozhdeniia N. Leskova,” in N. S. Leskov, Izbrannye sochineniia (Moscow: Akademiia, 1931), discusses Leskov’s similarity to Gorbunov. 8. N. S. Leskov, “Levsha,” Sobranie sochinenii v 11 tomakh (Moscow: Khud. Lit., 1956– 1958) (henceforth SS) 7:499. 9. N. A., review of “N. S. Leskov, “Skaz o tul’skom levshe . . .,” Delo 1882, No. 6, 102; on this episode see Lev Anninskii, Leskovskoe ozherel’e (St. Petersburg: Bibliopolis, 2012), 436; B. Ia. Bukhshtab’s notes in Leskov, SS 7:498–508. 10. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison make similar observations about photography in Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). 11. Leskov, SS 7:501. 12. Olga Petri, “Song of the Ovsianka: Enhanced Nature of the Urban Canary in Imperial St. Petersburg (1880–1900),” Society and Animals 2019, 9, 12. 13. Jacob Smith, Eco-­Sonic Media (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). 14. Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-­Century Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 20.

Index

Italicized page numbers indicate illustrations. Aarne-­Thomson tale type index, 34 abolitionists and abolitionist movement: French arguments against slavery, 31; in Rus­sia, 5, 44–45, 82; in United States, 9, 19, 42, 44–45, 84, 129 acousmatic listening, 21, 40, 126, 136–137, 140–141, 170, 184, 199, 258n53. See also darkness; percussive listening Adamovsky, Ezequiel, 32 Afanas’ev, Alexander, 123; Poetic Views of the Slavs about Nature, 162 Agha, Asif, 14–15, 167, 175, 177, 179–180 Aksakov, Alexander, 83 Aksakov, Ivan, 53, 57, 99–100, 122, 142, 143, 158, 217, 250n113 Aksakov, Konstantin: background and ­career, 53; Belinsky and, 53–54, 57; choral listening and, 55–56, 58; Dostoevsky and, 197; Haxthausen and, 58–59, 65–66; insiders vs. outsiders in Rus­sia and, 68; Lomonosov and, 54–55; Rybnikov and, 150, 162; Schellingian listening of, 53–58, 62, 65, 66, 72, 211; Slavophile ideas and, 53, 250n113; telegraphy and, 56–57; on virtues of peasants, 197–198; on Western education, 68 Aksakov, Sergei, 53 Aksakov ­family, 106 Alcuin of York, 243n96 Alexander I (tsar), 131 Alexander II (tsar), 2, 39, 68, 205 Algeria, 45 Almazov, Boris, 124–125 Anderson, Benedict, 13–14 Andrianova, I. S., 268n65 animals and zoology, 61, 74, 92–93 Anna Ioannovna (empress), 24 Annenkov, Pavel, 118–122, 125, 236n77, 255n79

anthropology: community’s ways of signaling and, 12; condescension of listening in, 19; historians of, 10; masculinity of epic heroes and, 163; racial supremacy of nineteenth ­century and, 82; unintentional humor in rural interactions, 105. See also linguistic anthropology anticolonialism, 50 Antiphanes of Berge, 34–35 Arnim, Achim von, 10 Assembly of the Land (zemskii sobor), 55 attentive listening, 5, 12–20, 58, 72, 90, 127, 128, 141 Augustine, 31 authenticity, 10, 16, 98, 151–152, 188 Avarchenko, Arkady, 266n31 Azadovsky, Mark, 10–11, 71, 102, 164, 172, 220, 255n72 Badouin de Courtenay, Jan, 249n86 Bairamukova, A. I., 246n39 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 14, 18–19, 20, 158, 201 Balasoglo, Alexander, 150 Balzac, Honoré de, 9, 202; Illusions perdues, 132 Bartenev, Petr, 122, 254n61 Barthes, Roland, 260n82 Bashutsky, Alexander, 131 Bauman, Richard, 12 Belinsky, Vissarion: Aksakov and, 53–54, 57; on Grigorovich, 115, 117; on Karamzin, 16; on onomatopoetic language, 18; on regionalisms in writing, 3–4; on Turgenev, 2–4, 14, 16, 141, 157–158, 186, 212, 220 bells and metallic instruments, 23–25; cold and, 33; death and, 21, 24, 41–42; description of bell sounds, 40–41, 140; 275

27 6 I n d e x

bells and metallic instruments (continued) French church bells silenced by Revolution, 41; Kievan bells, 43; liberty and, 43–46; Liberty Bell (Philadelphia), 42–43, 46; patriotic nostalgia of silenced bells, 43–44; percussive listening and, 38–46, 140, 141; in Rus­sian soundscape, 21, 38–44, 214, 236n83; silence of, 24–25, 28, 45–46, 214; Tsar Bell, 24–25, 40, 42, 43, 45–46; Uglich Bell, whipping of, 38; urbanization’s effect on, 43–44; Vetche Bell (Novgorod), 28 belonging: choral listening and, 21, 47–48, 52, 66–72, 76; Haxthausen and, 66–68; Khomiakov and, 48–50, 120, 142 Bénard, Ludovic, 111–112, 252n33 Benckendorff, Alexander von, 58 Benjamin, Walter, 134, 146 Bessonov, Petr, 151, 155, 163 Bestuzhev, A. A., 229n52 Bibikov, Dmitry, 149 birds: clothing and, 249n93; nests and, 88, 91–93; in Notes from the Dead House (Dostoevsky), 173–174, 176, 266n24; “Rus­sian canary,” 219–220; words compared to, 14–15, 88–89, 219–220 Blavatsky, Helena, 62 boasting, 22, 81, 163, 263n62 Boborykin, Petr: “The Cult of the ­People in Con­temporary Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture,” 6–7, 214 Bogdanovich, Leontii, 147, 151, 154, 159–161, 163 Bolin, Göran, 8, 11 Bolshoi Theater, 136 Boshniak, Alexander, 17–19 Botkin, Vasily, 106 Bourbon Restoration (1815–1830), 30 Bourdieu, Pierre, 19–20, 48, 50, 117, 124, 153 Brang, Peter, 228n47 Brentano, Clemens, 10 Britain: colonial empire of, 45; ­Great Post Office Reform, 55–56; industrialization creating new type of slavery in, 44; Khiva and, 74; paper production and use in, 130–131; telegraphy in, 56 Buckler, Julie, 136 Bulgakowa, Oksana, 228n47 Burns, Robert, 10 Butenev, N. F., 150 byliny (medieval epic songs), 77, 147–148, 150–152, 160–164, 263n62

Cadot, Michel, 233n11 cannon fire, 21, 23–24, 40, 46, 195, 205–208, 214 card cata­logues, 94–97, 95, 97 Carlyle, Thomas, 9–10, 132; Past and Pre­sent, 49 Castiglione, Baldassare, 89; The Courtier, 35, 235n65 cathedralness or conciliarity, 55 Catholicism: Chaadaev and, 23, 31–32, 39; compared to Orthodoxy, 29, 32; Custine and, 24, 25, 29–30; French Catholics as sympathetic for fellow Polish Catholics, 30; Kozlovsky and, 26, 31; liberty and, 30–31; listening linked to, 30–32; Slavophile writers on, 55; traditional intellectuals of, 156 causal listening, 21 censorship: Chaadaev as forcibly silenced writer, 23; Dahl and, 86, 98–100; Nicholas I and, 26–28; self-­censorship in Rus­sia, 8, 26, 31–32, 49; suspicious listening and, 26, 97–102; Turgenev and, 140; unfreedom and, 2, 45; vernacular speech and, 87, 98; writers’ cooperation with, 8. See also silence census of January 1882, Tolstoy on work of, 215–217 Chaadaev, Petr: 1836 letter from, 39–40, 46; Akasov and, 55; Custine and, 26, 27, 29, 32; on French Catholic thinking, 23, 31–32, 39; frozen words and, 38; Haxthausen and, 58; Herzen on, 23–24, 32–33, 39–40, 42, 72, 206; Iazykov and, 69; as Polonophile, 234n50; on Rus­sian silence, 23, 31–33, 45; serfdom and, 31, 45; Westernization and, 69 Charrière, Ernest, 128–129 Chateaubriand, François-­René de, 45, 55, 140; Genius of Chris­tian­ity, 41, 42 Chekhov, Anton, 194–195, 201; “A Liberal Dear,” 200 Cheremis (or Mari, Uralic speakers), 64 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 100–101, 118–119, 203, 253n50 Chion, Michel, 20–21, 39, 159 choral listening: Konstantin Aksakov and, 55–56, 58; belonging privileged by, 21, 47–48, 52, 66–72, 76; communalism and, 47–49, 65–66; defined, 21; in Germany, 52; Haxthausen and, 58, 64–66 Chris­tian­ity: Dostoevsky and, 170, 264n12; humility and, 49; ideal of unity and, 1, 6,

I n d e x 24, 31, 226n13; mute sect of, 61; prophetic listening and, 24, 25; redemption and, 6, 226n13; Vertep group discussing, 148. See also Old Believers; Orthodox Church Christoff, Peter, 55 Chuvash (Turkic speakers), 64 Clare, John, 10 climate. See cold and sound clothing choices: Konstantin Aksakov and, 53; crossing through, 18; Dahl and, 75; of folklorists, 17, 217; Khomiakov and, 48; Kireevsky and, 77–78; Pushkin and, 17–18, 20, 101, 153; Rybnikov and, 149, 153; Tolstoy criticizing his rivals for, 217; Tolstoy’s appearance, 215 coachmen, 28–29, 34–35, 60–61, 75, 192–194 cold and sound, 24, 32–40, 76, 89, 97 Colombian national language and ­music, 10 colonialization, 45, 50 comic books, 35–36 comic philologists, 105, 107, 117–119, 121, 125 communication technologies, 5; ability to perfect capture and transcription of spoken language, 220; disembodiment and, 185; fantasies of connection created by, 141; mechanization anx­i­eties and, 218–219; media generations and, 8–9; mediated listening and, 122, 126, 141, 146; Slavophiles and, 71–72; solitude and, 141. See also paper; telegraphy community and communalism: African ste­reo­types of, 50; choral listening in, 47–49, 65–67; communication technologies and, 72; creation of shared language, 13, 220; Dahl and communal speech, 70; idealized, 59; per­for­mance of communal meeting, 62–63, 65; quiet communal communication in Rus­sia, 11, 61–62, 65, 72; silenced bells as objects of patriotic nostalgia in, 43–44; values of, 58. See also mir Confino, Michael, 7 Cossack language, 79–80, 141, 211 Crimean War, 35, 205 crossing: defined, 103; dialect usage and, 125, 171; Gorbunov and, 212–213; Grigorovich and, 103, 107, 114, 121, 126–127; mocking listening and, 179; per­for­mance and, 120; Pushkin and, 15–18; ritual insults and, 174–176; Tolstoy and, 215–216; of Turgenev vs. Grigorovich, 126–127; of words, 18. See also clothing choices; masquerading

277

cultural appropriation, 19, 67. See also crossing cultural tectonics, 11, 24, 43 Custine, Astolphe-­Louis-­Léonor, Marquis de: background and ­career, 5, 25–26; bells and, 24–25, 28, 38, 43; on censorship, 27; Chaadaev and, 26, 27, 29, 32; on cold’s equation with silence, 33, 38; critical reception of, 25, 35, 63–64; Doré and, 35–36; education as a listener, 29–30; empathy, loss of, 28–29; Haxthausen compared to, 59–60, 63–64; Herzen and, 39, 63; Iazykov and, 69; Khomiakov and, 48–50; listening to Rus­sians, 25, 27–30, 32, 33, 35, 51, 63, 192, 194, 211, 213, 233n11; prophetic listening and, 24–32; Rus­sia in 1839, 25, 29–30, 35; Rus­sian refutations of, 47, 51; on silence, 27–28, 32, 49; Turgenev and, 127 Dahl, Vladimir: background and ­career, 11, 20, 73–76; card cata­logue used for dictionary production, 94–97, 95, 97; categorization of proverbs, 86–88, 98; censorship and, 86, 98–100; on communal speech, 70; critical reception of, 97–102, 141, 158, 190, 203, 220; Custine and, 75; dictionaries of, 3, 15, 70, 73–76, 85–86, 88–97, 99, 101, 113, 169, 176, 211, 248nn80–81; folklore collection and, 77, 86–88, 92, 101–102; frozen northern sounds and, 76, 97; Gorbunov and, 201; Grigorovich and, 104, 108, 114–115; Haxthausen and, 67–68, 75; humor and, 102, 190; nests for words and, 76, 88–93, 219, 246n39, 258n40; notebook use by, 73, 75–76, 86; omnivorous listening and, 21–22, 73–74, 76, 79–86, 90, 99, 192, 194; paper use of, 73–74, 77, 93–97; Rybnikov compared to, 156; satirical writing by, 75; Slavophiles and, 76; Spiritualism and, 83–86; suspicious listening and, 76, 97–102, 154–156, 164; Turgenev and, 3, 127; vitalism of, 76, 81–83, 85–86, 88, 170, 246n39; Zhukovsky and, 79–81, 97, 120, 141, 217 Dahl, Vladimir, works by: “Community and Cohabitation of Animals,” 92; Experimental Investigations of the Spirit Manifestations (trans.), 83; Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great-­Russian Language, 73; “Nedovesok,” 97–98; On the Beliefs, Superstitions, and Ste­reo­types of the Rus­sian

27 8 I n d e x

Dahl (continued) Folk, 92; Pictures of Rus­sian Life, 101; Rus­sian Tales, from the Oral Folk Tradition, 76–77; Sayings of the Rus­sian P­ eople, 73, 98; “A Word and a Half about ­Today’s Rus­sian Language,” 81, 97; “Zoology,” 88 Daly, Jonathan, 237n101 darkness: acousmatic listening and, 136–137, 159; in Notes from the Dead House (Dostoevsky), 170; in Notes of a Hunter (Turgenev), 137–141, 146; unmediated listening and, 126 Dashkova, Ekaterina Vorontsova, ed.: Dictionary of the Rus­sian Acad­emy, 90, 248n83 Daston, Lorraine, 274n10 data collection, 9, 57, 82. See also folklore and folksongs death: acousmatic listening and, 140; bells and, 21, 24, 41–42; communication beyond, 83–86; paper industry and, 134 Decembrist revolt (1825), 5, 17, 26, 30 Delo (Business, newspaper), 218–219 Demidov Prize, 147, 154 Derrida, Jacques, 225n5 Derzhavin, Gavriil: “On the death of Prince Meshchersky,” 41, 140 despotism, 6, 33–34, 39, 49, 65–66 Dewey, Melvil, 96 dialect and vernacular, 3–4; Dahl and, 76, 79–80, 86–88, 97–99, 141, 142; Dickens and, 10, 111–113, 177; Dostoevsky and, 176–177, 185–186, 190–191; easier reading from use of Moscow phonetics, 141–142; experimentation in mid-1840s with, 103; Grigorovich and, 103–107, 110–111, 115, 117–118, 176, 253n50; legitimate use of, 124–125; Leskov and, 187, 218; overuse (oversalting) of, 3, 185–190, 220; Pushkin and, 16, 124; Sand and, 144–146; Soviet disdain for, 271n41; stenography and, 185; technical challenges of, 141–142, 157–158; Tolstoy and, 215; Turgenev and, 126–127, 141–143, 145–146, 259n66. See also folklore; speech and spoken words Dickens, Charles, 113, 132, 142, 190; Bleak House, 132, 133; David Copperfield, 177; Oliver Twist, 111–113, 252n33 dictionaries: card cata­logue used for production of, 94–97, 95, 97; of folklore, 10; nesting lexicography in, 89–91, 96–97; paper and, 94; spirit of language in, 79, 85; Vostokov and, 90. See also Dahl, Vladimir

disability studies, 225n5 Dobroliubov, Nikolai, 118, 124, 125, 253n50, 255n76 Dolgorukov, V. A., 148 Doré, Gustave: The Adventure of Baron Munchausen, 37; History of Holy Rus­sia, 35–38; The Picturesque, Dramatic, and Caricatural History of Holy Rus­sia, 35, 36 Dostoevsky, Andrei, 104, 166 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 5; Aksakov and, 197; arrest and imprisonment of, 166–167; background and ­career, 165–166, 263n1; critical reception of, 185; dialect and, 176–177, 185–186, 190–191, 220; Gorbunov and, 201; Grigorovich and, 104, 114, 119, 121, 170–171; insults and, 106, 171–173, 185–190; Leskov and, 185–190, 203, 217; mocking listening and, 22, 179–180; prison notebook, 166–170, 168–169, 173–174, 176; on Pushkin, 122; reading aloud at private gatherings and, 113; stenography and, 22, 180–185, 189–190, 218; Turgenev and, 106, 199 Dostoevsky, Fedor, works of: “Bookishness and Literacy,” 170–171; ­Brothers Karamazov, 201; Diary of a Writer, 179, 191; The Gambler, 180, 182; “The Meek One,” 184–185; “Mummer,” 185, 187–189; “On Love for the Folk. A Crucial Contract with the Folk,” 196–197; “Peasant Marey,” 195, 197–199; Poor Folk, 169; “What Language Should the ­Father of a Fatherland Speak?”, 121. See also Notes from the Dead House Dostoevsky, Mikhail, 166, 169, 171 double-­talk, 195, 211–213 Douglas, Mary, 105 Doze, Fedor, 150 Drashusova, Elizaveta Alekseevna, 67, 105 dreams and dreaming, 147. See also hypnogogic listening Druzhnikov, Iurii, 254n61 Duck, Stephen, 10 Dukhobor sect, 61, 64 eavesdropping, 3, 15, 98, 129, 137, 148, 159, 219 Elagina, Avdotia, 77, 105–106 electromagnetism, 56 Eliot, George: Middlemarch, 105; Scenes of Clerical Life, 202 emancipation of serfs, 1, 2, 14, 38, 65, 68, 205–206

I n d e x enregisterment, 175, 179–180 estate system of categorization, 7 ethical listening, 19, 203 ethnographic listening: Bourdieu’s ideal of, 19, 153, 159; Dahl and, 86; Haxthausen and, 64–65; language choice of German vs. Rus­sian, 81–83; Rus­sian writers as ethnographers, 5; Rybnikov and, 153, 159–160; transcription and, 157 Etkind, Alexander, 8, 250n109 Eu­ro­pean views of Rus­sia: silence and, 49–50; voting system and, 70. See also France and the French; Germans and German language; specific Eu­ro­pean authors exceptionalism, 11, 38, 47, 55, 66, 141, 201, 214 Faraday, Michael, 56 femininity, 127, 198 Fet, Afanasii, 104 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 148 folklore and folksongs, 7; Azadovsky on, 10–11, 220; bridal laments in, 109–110; censorship and, 98–100; clothing choices of folklorists, 17, 217; cold and, 32, 34–35; collections of songs and stories, 10; Custine and, 24, 27; Dahl and, 77, 92, 101–102; Dahl’s categorization scheme for proverbs, 86–88, 98; Dostoevsky and, 169, 171, 188–189, 191; “folk calques,” 218; Grigorovich and, 104; Haxthausen and, 64, 67–68; influence on gods and neighbors, 162–163; insults in, 171, 173, 191, 264n5; language identity in, 53–54, 71–72, 79–81, 219; Leskov and, 188–189; listening to, 15, 101–102, 123; Panchenko and, 71; paper production and, 134; peasant singing and dancing, 55; Performer School of folkloristics, 10, 164; performing of, 10, 18, 105–106; as po­liti­cal messages, 27; Pushkin and, 105, 122–123, 230n72; recording and transcription of, 10–11, 77–79, 86, 123–124, 219–220; Rybnikov and, 147–149, 162, 164; Sand and, 144, 258n58; Turgenev and, 105, 137, 139, 258n58. See also authenticity foreignness: of Custine, 5, 24–25, 48; Dahl’s identity and, 81; foreign visitors to Rus­sia, 2; of Grigorovich, 107–108, 115, 117–121, 124, 134; of Haxthausen, 57–58, 62–63, 66–67; Khomiakov on, 66–69; of words, 18 Fourdrinier machines, 131 Fourier, Charles, 166 Fox, Gustavus Vasa, 212

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Frainier, Margaret, 263n62 France and the French: attitudes t­ oward Rus­sia in, 6, 25, 28, 30, 32, 33, 36–37, 47, 65; colonial empire of, 45; Custine’s complaints about newspapers in, 27; Grigorovich’s Frenchness, 103–105, 119; ­middle class, listening by, 9; opera listening in, 136; paper production and use in, 130; Rus­sian aristocrats living in, 26; Rus­sian attitudes ­toward, 81; Rus­sian writers imitating French writers, 79; Sand on, 144; silenced church bells by Revolution in, 41; slavery and, 31, 45; telegraph development in, 56 freedom of the ­people, 55. See also emancipation of serfs ­free press, 27 ­free speech, 45, 48, 119, 146 Freidin, Gregory, 266n31 French Revolution, 57 Frierson, Cathy, 6, 194, 214 frozen sounds and words, 24, 32–40, 76, 89, 97 Fuchs, Alexandra Andreevna (née Apekhtina), 64 Fuchs, Karl, 64 Gabelsberger system of stenography, 181 Gal, Susan, 13, 251n12 Galison, Peter, 274n10 Gautier, Ana María Ochoa, 10, 11, 203, 220 Gawtress, William, 181, 190 Gemeinde (peasant commune), 58–59, 72 gender relations and differences, 20; divisions in traditional ­music, 60; female uncertainty, depiction of, 209; folklore collection, female contribution to, 57, 64, 77, 78, 105, 128; literary salons run or attended by w ­ omen, 106; male authors and female recorders, 5; travel memoirs commenting on, 60 Germans and German language: Dahl’s national identity and, 74, 75, 81; dialects of, 65; ethnography and, 81–83; German-­Russian relations, 67, 69; Haxthausen as outsider in Rus­sia, 64, 66–70; Latinisms, use of, 81; on listening to ­music, 52, 81–82 Gil’ferding, Alexander, 154, 164 Gitelman, Lisa, 9, 157–159, 189–190 globalism: cultural tectonics in, 11, 24; media mastery and, 2, 9–10, 214; sound mediation and, 45–46; technological changes and, 8–9

28 0 I n d e x

Gogol, Nikolai, 78, 106, 128; The Inspector General, 100; “The Overcoat,” 8; Taras Bul’ba, 179 Goncharov, Ivan, 204 Goncharova, Nataliia, 219 Gorbunov, Ivan: critical reception of, 201–202, 204–205; double-­talk and, 211–213; humor of, 22, 192–194, 196, 199–203, 210; percussive listening and, 203–211; voice of the ­people and, 202–203 Gorbunov, Ivan, works of, 270n23; “At the Posting Station,” 192–194, 208; Echoes of I. F. Gorbunov’s Stories (posthumous per­for­mance transcriptions), 201; “Hot-­Air Balloon,” 207; The Petty Tyrant, 208; Scenes from Folk Life, 200; “Traviata,” 209–210 Gorbunov, Orest, 200 Gorbunov, Tatiana, 200 Gorkovenko, A., 112–113 Gorky, Maxim, 204 Gornfel’d, Arkady, 204 Gramsci, Antonio, 148, 156 Granovsky, Timofei, 69, 171, 188 Grech, Nikolai, 89 Green, Daniel, 17 Grigor’ev, Apollon, 119 Grigorovich, Dmitry: as amusing raconteur, 104; background and ­career, 20, 104; critical reception of, 103–105, 107, 114–121, 125, 134, 158, 218; crossing in novellas of, 103, 107; Dahl and, 104, 108, 114–115; dialect and, 103–107, 110–111, 115, 117–118, 176, 253n50; Dickens and, 111, 113–115; Dostoevsky and, 104, 114, 119, 121, 169, 170–171, 188; excessive use of paper by, 103, 134; folk language collection by, 104, 108–109; foreignness of, 107–108, 115, 117–121, 124, 134; Frenchness of, 103–105, 119; mediated listening of, 21–22, 103, 118–119, 125; Natu­r al School and, 104–105, 110; Pisemsky and, 119–120, 204, 217; Pushkin compared to, 121–123; social milieu of, 105–107, 113; Turgenev and, 117, 126–129, 134 Grigorovich, Dmitry, works of: “Anton Goremyka,” 253n38; “Egg,” 115, 116; Fishermen, 118, 119, 121; “Petersburg Organ Grinders,” 108, 110; Wretched Anton, 113. See also The Village

Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm (­Brothers Grimm), 10, 19, 57, 237n1 Gruzinsky, Aleksei, 154, 163 Hahnemann, Samuel: Organon of the Healing Art, 83 Hahn (landowner in Yaroslavl province), 62, 64, 65 Hare, Robert: Experimental Investigations of the Spirit Manifestations, 83, 84 Haxthausen, August Freiherr von: Konstantin Aksakov and, 58–59, 65–66; background and ­career, 57–58, 68; Chaadaev and, 58; choral listening and, 58, 64–66; as comic philologist, 105, 211; critical reception of, 63–64, 67; Custine and, 59–60, 63–64; Dahl and, 67–68, 75; ethnographic listening and, 64–65; folklore collection by, 64, 67–68; Herzen and, 58, 63–64; insider’s vs. outsider’s listening by, 66–68, 192, 194, 211; Khomiakov and, 65–68; language ideology of, 142; Schelling and, 51; silence and, 51, 61–66; Slavophile writers and, 58, 65; as travel writer, 51, 128; on voice of the ­people, 70 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 51, 255n79 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 259n64 hemp, 132–133, 141, 144–145 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 6, 10, 82 Herzen, Alexander: background and c­ areer, 11, 38–39; bells and, 23, 33, 43, 46, 146, 159, 203; Chaadaev and, 23–24, 32–33, 39–40, 42, 72, 206; Custine and, 39, 63; on folksongs, 135–136; frozen words and, 36–38; Haxthausen and, 58, 63–64; Iazykov and, 69; Khomiakov and, 70; Kolokol (The Bell, journal), 38–42, 149; Past and Thoughts, 39–40; on silence of Rus­sia, 24, 32–33, 39–40, 44–46, 65–66; sonic meta­phors, use of, 38–40, 45–46, 206, 209; telegraphy and, 68; on Tsar Bell, 24, 45; Westernization and, 69, 70 Herzen, Alexander, works of: Past and Thoughts, 39–40; Who Is to Blame?, 135–136 Herzfeld, Michael, 163, 229n56 Hogan, Patrick, 50 homeopathy, 83, 86 Homer: Iliad, 163 Hommaire de Hell, Xavier and Adèle: The Steppes of the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus, the Crimea, and Southern Rus­sia, 160

I n d e x Hugo, Victor: “The Last Day of a Condemned Man,” 184 humility, 49, 110 humor. See jokes and humor hunting styles, 11 hypnogogic listening, 21, 147, 160–164, 170 Iakushkin, Pavel, 124 Iazykov, Nikolai, 10, 68–71, 77, 81, 105, 120, 190, 203; “K ne-­nashim” (To Not-­Ours), 69 identities: change of ­legal identities, 7; concealing or masquerading, 17, 172; Custine’s French identity, 30; folk identity, 53; language and, 12–14, 53, 79, 85–86, 166; media generations and, 8; national identity, 14, 53, 81; provincial identity, 75, 150 Ilchuk, Yuliya, 266n31 Imperial Acad­emy of Sciences (Rus­sia), 67 Imperial Geo­g raph­i­cal Society (Rus­sia), 74 Imperial Paper Factory (St. Petersburg), 131 industrialization, 11, 43; paper factories, 131, 133 ­Inoue, Miyako, 9, 190 insults: Dostoevsky and katorga p­ eople, 171–173; Dostoevsky and Leskov, 185–190, 217; as folkloric genre, 171, 173, 191, 264n5; in Notes from the Dead House (Dostoevsky), 173–176; ritual exchange of, 167, 172, 174–175, 191, 264n5 intellectual property laws, 19 intellectuals: anxiety in relationship to narod, 1–2, 6–12, 20, 55, 107, 199; ritual insult exchange and, 167; traditional vs. organic, 156–157; unity with the ­people and, 55, 194, 197–200, 214 Irvine, Judith, 13 isolation of Rus­sia from Eu­rope, 23, 26, 214 Ivan the Terrible, 28, 29, 35–36 Ivanin, Mikhail, 181 Ivanov, A. I., 167 Ivanov, Alexander, 150 Ivanova, Alexandra, 182 Jakobi, Moritz Hermann (Boris Semonovich), 56 Jakobson, Roman, 18 James, Richard, 105, 251n6 Jamieson, John, 10 Japan, 9, 190 Jefferson, Thomas, 42 Jews: anti-­Semitism, 48, 74; byliny and, 162; Chekhov and, 200; Dahl and, 74, 99, 156, 250n109; Dostoevsky and, 167, 172, 175,

281

177, 179–180, 198; in Gorbunov’s sketches, 202–203; as inadequate listeners to Rus­sian voices, 12; names and identity of, 7; Wagner and, 229n53 jokes and humor: comic philologists, 105, 107, 117–119, 125; crossing social bound­aries, 105, 107, 211–213; Dahl and, 102, 190; Dostoevsky and, 265n17; Gorbunov and, 201–203, 209; Grigorovich and, 117; insults and, 175–176; mocking listening and, 179–180, 192–194 July Monarchy, 30 Kaf ka, Ben, 9 Kalevala (Finnish epic), 10, 151, 162 Kapustin (leader of Dukhobor sect), 61 Karamzin, Nikolai, 13–16, 219 Kasatkina, Tat’iana, 266n32 Kheraskov, Mikhail: Rossiiada (The Rossiad), 33–34, 135 Khomiakov, Aleksei: Konstantin Aksakov and, 57; background and c­ areer, 48–49, 68; cultural belonging and, 48–50, 120, 142; Custine and, 48–50; “Foreigners’ Opinions about Rus­sia,” 48; Haxthausen and, 65–68; Herzen and, 70; religion in listening of, 49; Rybnikov and, 148, 151, 163; on travel book authors, 48–50, 66–67, 69 Kireevskaia, Avdotia. See Elagina, Avdotia Kireevsky, Ivan, 55, 105–106 Kireevsky, Petr, 10; attending salon of Avdotia Elagina, 105–106; folklore collection and, 77, 78, 123–124; “Proclamation,” 123; on voice of the ­people, 70 Knight, Nathaniel, 82 Kochetov, Ioakim, 86–87, 98 Kolokol (The Bell, journal), 45 Kol’tsov, Aleksei, 78–79 Koni, Anatoly, 200–201, 212 Korf, Modest, 87, 98–99 Kostomarov, Mykola, 152 Kozlovsky, Petr, 26, 27, 31 Kraevsky, Andrei, 204 Kucherskaia, Ma­ya, 17 Kugel’, Alexander, 201 Kviatkovskaia, Amalia, 200 Lamennais, H ­ ugues Felicité Robert de: Custine and, 30–32; “Hymn to Poland” (poem), 31; Iazykov and, 69; percussive listening and, 55; on Rus­sia’s suppression of Polish revolt, 45, 74

28 2 I n d e x

language and language ideology, 13–14, 251n12; Ivan Aksakov on, 142; Konstantin Aksakov on, 53–55, 57, 142; Dahl and, 75, 81–82, 85–86, 89, 98; Dostoevsky and, 166; Grigorovich and, 115; Haxthausen on, 65; national identity in, 79, 85–86, 120, 166; Pushkin on, 79; Schelling on, 52; Tolstoy on, 215; Turgenev and, 134–135; words compared to birds, 14–15, 88–89, 219–220 Lantz, Kenneth, 202 laughter. See jokes and humor Lazarevsky, Vasily, 94 Lednicki, Wacław, 234n50 Lermontov, Mikhail, 128 Leskov, Nikolai, 167, 185–190, 203, 217–218, 266n31, 268n74; “The Lefthander,” 217–220 liberty: associated with Catholicism, 30–31; prediction of Rus­sian demand for, 33 linguistic anthropology, 2, 14, 80, 215 Lippard, George: “The Fourth of July, 1776,” 42–46, 140, 146, 159, 203 listening: ethical techniques for, 19–20; hearing deferred, 35–36; identity from, 12; mishearing and, 209, 212, 218; modes of, 20–21; to organ grinders, 108; as per­for­mance, 5, 12–20, 58, 90, 128, 141; prob­lems in, 1, 6, 12, 48, 67, 108; rival listeners, 2, 20–22, 24, 76, 103, 121; stenography and, 181–182. See also attentive listening; sounds; specific modes of listening and specific authors/texts illustrating listening listening contests: across social lines, 5, 20–22, 217, 219; “The Lefthander” (Leskov) contest and, 220; local and visiting writers in, 214; between similarly situated contestants, 217; between two types of foreign travelers, 2, 24. See also specific writers and types of contests literacy, 10, 85, 93, 110, 150, 208, 225n5 Lomonosov, Mikhail, 13, 54–55 Lönnrot, Elias, 10, 151 Lotman, Lidiia, 253n50 Lovell, Stephen, 11, 14, 228n47 Lovers of Wisdom (Liubomudry), 51 Macpherson, James: Ossian, 151 Maikov, Valerian, 113–114 Makoni, Sinfree, 13, 14 Maksimov, Sergei, 206 Maksimovich, Mikhail, 78, 106

Malia, Martin, 32 Martin, Richard, 163 masculinity, 127, 163 Maslov, Boris, 235n59 masquerading, 17–20, 101, 153, 165, 172, 188, 217. See also mumming Matveeva, Arina Rodionovna, 17 Maury, Alfred, 160 McDowell, Paula, 93 media generations, 5–12; communications technologies and, 8, 68, 214–215; competition in, 20; metallic instruments in, 24; mid-­century Rus­sian writers as international members in, 214; narratives about media in, 11–12 mediated listening. See unmediated vs. mediated listening Melville, Herman, 9; “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” 132, 133 Messer, Ia., 181 metallic instruments. See bells and metallic instruments metapragmatics, 13, 15, 18 Metlinsky, Amvrosii, 123 Meyendorff, Peter von, 58 Mickiewicz, Adam: Aksakov and, 100; Books of the Polish ­People and the Polish Pilgrimage, 30–32; frozen sounds of, 38; Iazykov and, 69; on Rus­sia’s suppression of Polish revolt, 74; sonic meta­phors used by, 30 Midosi, Paulo Júnior: Sr. José of the Cloak Attending a Per­for­mance of the Roaster, 210 Mikhailovsky, Nikolai, 6–7, 214 Milchina, Véra, 25 Miliukov, A. P., 171 Miller, Vsevolod, 162, 164 mir (peasant communes), 59, 63–65, 68, 72, 141 Missouri Compromise (1820), 42 mocking listening, 21, 167, 175, 179, 192–194 modernization and modernity, 5, 12, 55, 88, 130, 190, 212 Modestov, V. I., 152 Monferrand, Auguste Ricard de, 24 Monnier, Henry: City and Country Scenes, 202 Montalembert, Charles-­Forbes-­Réné, 31 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de, 33 Morse, Samuel, 56

I n d e x Moscow Society of Lovers of Rus­sian Verbal Art, 151 Moskvitianin (Muscovite, journal), 80, 119, 120 Müller, Lothar, 132 mumming (masquerade entertainment), 172, 188–189, 203 Münchhausen, Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von, 34–35, 38, 40, 46, 88–89, 192 ­music. See byliny; folklore and folksongs; opera; singing and song mysticism: Konstantin Aksakov and, 57, 65; Dahl and, 73–74, 83–84; Haxthausen on, 62; Schelling and, 52 Nadezhdin, Nikolai, 23, 156 Napoleon, 26, 57 narod (the p­ eople): anxiety of intellectuals in relationship to, 1–2, 6–12, 20, 107, 199; Custine on, 29–30; Dostoevsky on, 172–173; ethnography of, 82–83, 101; folklore transcription and, 10–11, 15, 78–79; folklorists seeking to connect with, 17; freedom of, 55; Gorbunov and, 202–203, 213; hearing silence of, 46; language identity and, 55, 79–81, 124–125; listening competitions over, 10, 51, 107, 170; listening to common ­people, desirability of, 16–17, 20, 105; mocking listening of, 194; paper-­making and, 130, 132; redemption through, 6, 194; Rybnikov and, 157; “spirit of the ­people” in entirety of language, 54; Tolstoy and, 215–216. See also voice of the ­people narodnost’, 79, 80, 101, 124, 151 nationalism: Dahl’s lexicography and, 76, 90; distinctive Rus­sian form of, 68; Grigorovich and, 107; Khomiakov and, 48, 50, 68; language and, 13–14, 53–54, 67, 79–81, 86, 120–121; in “The Lefthander” (Leskov), 217; ­music and, 52–53; in Notes from the Dead House (Dostoevsky), 198; reactionary traditionalist, 50; rise of, 11; Rus­sian Geo­g raph­i­cal Society and, 82, 86; in “The Singers” (Turgenev), 139; Slavophiles and, 48, 50–51; Western education of Rus­sians and, 68. See also identities Natu­ral School and naturalism: as caricature, 115, 117; Gorbunov and, 201; Grigorovich and, 104–105, 110; Our ­People, Copied from Life by Rus­sians, 131; paper production and, 131; Petersburg Physiology and, 108; Turgenev and, 143

283

Nekrasov, Nikolai, 106–108, 113, 200–201, 253n38; Who Lives Well in Rus­sia?, 132 nests and nesting: cloth vocabulary linked to, 249n93; Dahl and, 76, 88–93, 96–97, 246n39, 248n82, 258n40; Grigorovich and, 115, 116; Turgenev and, 258n40 Newlin, Thomas, 215 Nicholas I (tsar): death of, 204; land reform of, 58; loyalty to, voiced by the ­people, 70; newspaper publication and, 150; Rus­sia in 1839 (Custine) and, 25; serfdom and, 5–6; suppression of revolutionary activities ­under, 26–27, 149; telegraphy and, 56, 68; Tsar Bell and, 24 Nickell, William, 228n46 Nikitenko, Alexander, 115 Nikolaevich, Konstantin, 86, 205, 206 noblemen: relationship with Rus­sian peasants, 59, 65–66, 190. See also penitent noblemen non-­native language speakers and readers, 54, 65, 90, 177 Norris, Isaac, II, 42 notebook use: comic philologists and, 121–122; Dahl and, 73, 75–76, 86; Dostoevsky and, 167, 168–­169, 169–170, 173–174, 176, 187, 263n4, 264n6, 266n23; Gogol and, 78; Grigorovich and, 22, 103–107, 114–115, 117–119, 122, 125, 217; Leskov and, 186; listening and, 141; Nekrasov on, 132; paper proliferation and, 132; Pushkin and, 17, 122–123; Rybnikov and, 147, 152; Tolstoy and, 215; Zhukovsky and, 79 Notes from the Dead House (Dostoevsky): dialect in, 169–170, 176–178; enregisterment and, 179–180; insults in, 173–176; language standardization and, 166–167; prison notebook and, 173–174; redemption in, 198–199 Notes of a Hunter (Turgenev): “Bezhin Meadow,” 129, 133–134, 139–140, 142, 196; composition of, 126–128, 186; darkness and listening in, 137; “Ermolai and the Miller’s Wife,” 137; Herzen on, 15; “Khor’ and Kalinych,” 126, 129, 137; “Knocking,” 195–196, 199; “The Office,” 2–5, 11, 16, 22, 94, 137, 138; paper production in, 2–5, 129, 131, 256n14; as po­liti­cal statement, 128–129; Rus­sian types in, 143; “The Singers,” 128, 133, 137, 139–143

28 4 I n d e x

O’Bell, Leslie, 259n58 obscenities, 111, 171, 176–177, 191 Odoevsky, Vladimir: The Year 4338, 56–57 Old Believers, 61, 65, 100, 148–149, 154–156, 219 Ol’khin, Konstantin, 182 Ol’khin, Pavel, 181, 182, 189, 190 Olonetskie Gubernskie Vedomosti (Olonets Provincial News), 149–150 omnivorous listening: of Dahl, 21–22, 73–74, 76, 79–86, 90, 99; defined, 21, 73; of Haxthausen, 64; of Konstantin Nikolaevich, 206; of Rybnikov, 151, 155, 159 Ong, Walter, 225n5 opera, 136, 139, 140, 195, 209–210 oral language. See speech and spoken words Orenburg, 74, 75, 79–80 Ørsted, Hans Christian, 56 Orthodox Church: Aksakov ­family and, 53, 100; Chaadaev on, 23, 29, 45; compared to Catholicism, 29, 32; Custine on, 32, 60; Gorbunov and, 201; Haxthausen on, 61; humility and, 49; Khomiakov and, 48–49; Kviatkovskaia and, 200; peasant communes and, 66; serfdom and, 31, 45; Slavophiles and, 6. See also Old Believers orthography, 90, 248n80 Ostrovsky, Alexander, 119, 200; It’s a F­ amily Affair—­We’ll ­Settle It Ourselves, 124 Otechestvennye Zapiski (Fatherland Notes, journal), 104, 113–114 owner­ship of culture, 51 Palmer, William, 48 Panaev, Ivan I., 106, 117, 119, 253n38 Panaev, Kronid, 253n38 Panaeva, Avdotia, 104, 106, 253n38 Panchenko, Alexander, 71, 102, 250n109 “Paper Age,” 132 paper and paper industry, 8; card cata­logues and, 93–97, 95, 97; communication technology and, 9, 11, 146, 214–215; Dahl and, 73–74, 77, 93–97; demonization and oppression of, 9; Dostoevsky and, 170; foreign mechanics to run imported machines for making, 131, 134; hand paper making, 129, 133–135, 140; in illustration of “The Office” (Turgenev), 4–5, 94; narratives about, 4–5, 11–12; newspaper publication and, 150; omnipresence of cheap paper, 214; production of, 9, 93, 130–135, 144–146,

257n21, 256n14, 256n18; Pushkin and, 122–123; rags used in Rus­sian paper making, 5, 93, 129, 132–133; Rybnikov and, 157; Turgenev and, 5, 126, 130–135, 141. See also communication technologies; notebook use Paul I (tsar), 27 Paul’son, I., 181 Pavlova, Karolina (née Jänisch), 58, 70–71, 190, 203 Pavlovna, Elena, 59 penitent noblemen, 6–7, 20, 24, 49, 213, 227n23 Pennycook, Alastair, 13, 14 the ­people. See narod and narodnost’; voice of the ­people percussive listening: bells and, 24, 38–46; choral listening compared to, 47–48, 55; defined, 21; fantasy of, 46; Gorbunov and, 203–204; Herzen and, 24, 40; one-­to-­ many aspect of, 55; parody of, 195; representing the ­people and, 46 per­for­mance: in anthropological writing, 229n56; attentive listening as, 5, 12–20, 58, 90, 128, 141; of communal meeting, 62–63, 65; crossing and, 120; double-­talk and, 213; folklore collection and, 78–79, 101–102; foreignness and, 120; laughter and, 191; paper production and, 133–134; reading as, 113–114; ritual insult and, 167, 172, 174, 191; of Rus­sianness in Dahl’s omnivorous listening, 90; by serfs, 63; Slavophiles and, 71–72; spoken word of “the ­people” as, 2, 20; virtuosic recording through, 158–159; writing as, 12–13, 18–20, 46, 229n56 Pernet, Louis, 29 Perovsky, Lev, 74, 100 Perovsky, Vasily, 74, 82 Peter the ­Great (Peter I), 17, 28, 206 Peters, John Durham, 9, 85, 141 Petersburg Physiology (story collection), 108 Petrashevsky Circle, 166 phonographs, 9 photography, 186–187, 274n10 Piksanov, N. K., 265n17 Pisakhov, Stepan: “Morozheny pesni,” 235n65, 251n6 Pisarev, Dmitry, 186 Pisemsky, Aleksei, 119–120, 204–206, 217; “The Carpenters’ Guild,” 119, 204–206; ­People of the 40s, 11–12, 120, 204 Plutarch, 12, 34–35, 38

I n d e x Poe, Edgar Allan, 159–160 Poe, Marshall, 45 Pogodin, Mikhail, 80–81 Polenov, D. V., 152 police, 26–27, 45. See also Third Section Polish Revolt (1830–1831), French view of, 30–32, 45 popu­lar sovereignty, 70 Populist writers, 194–195 Poshemanskaia, Tsetsiliia, 185 postal system, 8, 56, 72, 146 postcolonialism, 19, 50 post road system, 35 Potekhin, Aleksei: Krest’ianka, 125 prophetic listening: choral listening compared to, 47–48; Custine and, 24–32; defined, 21; fantasy of, 46; Herzen and, 40; representing the p­ eople and, 46; ringing in night equated with prophetic sound, 40; silence prompting, 31 Prou­dhon, Pierre-­Joseph, 166 Prus­sia, 57–58 Pushkin, Alexander: clothing and, 17–18, 20, 101, 153; crossing in writing of, 15–18; exile of, 17; folklore and, 77–78, 105–106, 230n72; Grigorovich compared to, 121–123; listening and, 19–20, 77, 79; performative be­hav­ior of, 17; register-­ mixing and, 54; translation into French, 128 Pypin, Alexander, 7, 155, 156, 190, 203; History of Rus­sian Ethnography, 101 quiet communication. See community and communalism; silence Rabelais, François, 35, 40 race, 19, 82–83 rags and rag dealers, 5, 93, 129, 130, 132–133, 141, 145, 175. See also paper Rampton, Ben, 17–18, 103, 107, 174 Raspe, Rudolf Erich: The Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, 34, 37 reading aloud, 3, 14, 99, 113, 117, 135, 170, 202, 204 reappropriation, 47, 50–51 recording and transcription: of byliny, 152, 157; by comic philologists, 117–119; communication technologies and, 9, 122–123, 146, 220; dialect dictionaries and, 93–97; of folklore, 10–11, 77–79, 86, 123–124, 219–220; frozen sound and, 38, 97; Gorbunov and, 208; omnivorous listening and, 151; parody of, 195; precise

285

transcription impeding creativity, 142; in “The Singers” (Turgenev), 143; subjectivity debates in, 117, 203; technological innovations of, 9; technological limitations of, 157–159. See also notebook use; stenography; verbatim recording redemption, 6, 198–199, 226n13 reduced listening, 21, 39, 47 register-­mixing: Bakhtin on, 18; Dickens and, 111; Dostoevsky and, 165, 187; enregisterment and, 175, 179–180; Iazykov and, 71; laughter and, 191; Leskov and, 187; Rus­sian language and, 3, 226n8; Sand on, 145–146; in spoken vs. written language, 14; synthetic language emerging from, 54–55 Reif, Filipp: Russian-­French Dictionary, in Which the Rus­sian Words Are Situated by Origin, 90 Renan, Ernest, 148 Reshetnikov, Fedor, 194 Reyfman, Irina, 8 Reznik, Semen, 250n109 Rimsky-­Korsakov, Nikolai, 263n62 ringing. See bells and metallic instruments; percussive listening Rodionovna, Arina, 121–122, 254n61 Romanov, Koz’ma, 152 Romanticism, 136–137, 238n12 Rossini operas, 127, 136, 140, 210 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 33 Rus­sian Formalists, 217 Rus­sian ­Free Press, 38 Rus­sian Geo­g raph­i­cal Society (RGS), 82–83, 86, 123, 157, 272n48 Rus­sian language: homogeneity of, 48, 65; standardization and ideology of, 13–15, 89–90, 96, 97, 166, 181, 190, 220, 248n76, 248n80; words for hearing and listening in, 15–16, 20, 229n52. See also Cossack language; Dahl, Vladimir, for dictionaries; dialect and vernacular; language and language ideology Rybnikov, Pavel: arrest of, 11, 149, 155; background and ­career, 5, 148–150; byliny collected by, 150–155, 158, 163–164; critical reception of, 151–154; Dostoevsky and, 170; Gorbunov and, 201; hypnogogic listening and, 22, 147–148, 159–164; Khomiakov and, 148, 151, 163; “Notice,” 153–155, 157, 158, 160, 163; omnivorous listening of, 151, 155, 159; as organic intellectual, 155–156, 159; as recorder and performer, 156–159

28 6 I n d e x

Sabran, Delphine de, 25 Sadko bylina, 147, 160–164, 263n62 Sainte-­Barbe, Edward, 25 St. Petersburg: Bolshoi Theater, 136; Custine on, 27–28, 33; Dahl in, 74–76; paper production in, 131; telegraphy in, 56; Westernization and, 130 Samarin, Iurii, 115–117 Sand, George, 127–128, 146; The Dev­il’s Pool, 128, 144, 145; François the Foundling, 144–146, 159; Jeanne, 128 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 51–57, 62, 65, 66–67, 72, 81–82, 197; Philosophy of Art, 52 Schiller, Friedrich: “The Song of the Bell,” 41, 140 Schilling von Canstatt, Pavel, 56 séances, 80, 83–85 Sechenov, Ivan, 16 selective listening, 10, 63, 176 semantic listening, 21, 39, 41, 47, 110 Semenovna, Olga (née Zaplatina), 53 serfdom: Annenkov on, 255n79; Chaadaev and, 31, 45; Dostoevsky and, 165–166, 199; effect on Rus­sian speech, 26; emancipation of serfs, 1, 2, 14, 38, 65, 68, 205–206; gentry’s anxiety over, 5–7, 26, 31; Grigorovich and, 107; Haxthausen and, 58, 59, 63, 68; Herzen on, 38–39; Kozlovsky of, 26; ­under Nicholas I, 5–6; Orthodox Church and, 31, 45; paper production and, 131; Rus­sian Geo­g raph­i­cal Society and, 82; silence and, 31, 44–46, 66; Turgenev and, 2, 128–129, 137 Shatalov, S. E., 259n66 Shchukin, I., 12, 199–200 Shedden-­Ralston, William Ralston, 105, 128 Shcherbina, N. F., 171 Sheremetev, Pavel, 201 Sheremetev, Sergei, 201, 203 Shevyrev, Stepan, 115 Shillovsky (censor), 98 Shliapkin, I. A., 163 Shvedova, Nataliia, 16 Siegert, Bernhard, 236n83 silence: Carlyle on, 49; cold of Rus­sia and, 32–38; Custine on politics of, 27–28, 32, 49; Haxthausen on, 51, 61–66; Herzen on, 33, 39–40, 44–46, 65–66; Khomiakov on, 49–50; of Liberty and Tsar Bells, 43, 45–46; Mickiewicz on, 30–31; reappropriation of, 50; Rus­sia as place of, 21, 215;

Rus­sian vocabulary for, 50; in serfdom and slavery, 31, 44–46, 66; slavery and, 44–45 singing and song: folklore collection and, 77, 78, 105–106, 123–124, 149–153; gender divisions in, 60; hypnogogic listening and, 147–148; language and, 53–56; nationalism and, 52–53; opera listening and, 136, 139, 140, 195, 209–210; Schelling on ­music’s powers, 52–53; “Song Proclamation,” 78; Turgenev on, 135–136; Viardot and, 127–128; of Volga boatmen, 27. See also byliny; choral listening; opera slavery, 11; broader definition of, 44–45; France and, 31, 45; in United States, 42, 45. See also abolitionists and abolitionist movement; serfdom Slavophiles: Konstantin Aksakov and, 53, 250n113; anti-­Catholicism of, 55; clothing and, 53; communalism and, 65–66; Dahl and, 76; defined, 48; dialect fetishization and, 124–125; Grigorovich and, 117–118; Haxthausen and, 58, 65; Khomiakov as, 48; nationalism and, 50–51; opposition to change, 6; as postcolonial thinkers, 50; Rybnikov and, 163–164; on uniformity of Rus­sian language, 65; Westernizers vs., 6, 68–72 Smith, Mark, 44 Snitkina, Anna, 182–185, 190 sobornost’ (unity or catholicity), 55, 240n38 sociologists, condescension of, 19 Sokolov, Petr: illustration to “The Office” (Turgenev), 4, 4–5, 94, 137, 221 Somoff, Victoria, 256n12 song. See singing and song sonic meta­phors: Aksakov and, 53–55, 58; bells and, 23, 39; Chaadaev and, 32; Gorbunov and, 206–207; Herzen and, 38–40, 45–46, 206, 209; Mickiewicz and, 30–31 Sorokin, Vladimir: Goluboe salo, 235n65 sounds: acousmatic power in, 159, 161–162; cold and, 24, 32–40, 76, 89; global similarities in, 43–44; graphic repre­sen­ta­ tions of, 35–37; meaning of, 32; physicality of, 16, 34, 40; as pure objects, 2; Schelling and, 51–57, 66–67; soundproofing construction, 9–10; visibility of, 35–36. See also bells and metallic instruments; percussive listening; singing and song; speech and spoken words Soviets: Dahl’s publication ­under, 101; disdain for dialect and vernacular, 271n41

I n d e x Sovremennik (The Con­temporary, journal), 106, 113, 115, 118, 120, 126 speech and spoken words: climate and, 33–34, 39; common vs. writerly, 13–18, 110–111; cultural powers of, 40, 44, 85, 111; Custine on, 26–28; folk identity and, 53; Schelling on, 52; singing and, 54; sound studies approach to, 228n47. See also dialect and vernacular; voice of the p­ eople spiritoscopes, 84, 84 Spiritualism, 26, 83–86 Spivak, Gayatri: “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 19 Sreznevsky, Izmail, 151–153, 164; “On the Ancient Slavs’ Worship of the Sun,” 162; Zaporozhian Antiquity, 152 stenography, 8–9, 167, 180–185, 189–190, 214–215, 218, 268n74 Sterne, Jonathan, 225n5 Stolze system of stenography, 181 Stowe, Harriet Beecher: ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 129 Strakhov, Nikolai, 215 Stuhr-­Rommereim, Helen, 194 Suslova, Apollinaria, 268n65 suspicious listening, 21, 26, 76, 97–102, 149, 155, 156 Suvorin, Aleksei, 200 Suvorov, Alexander, 87 Sverbeev, Dmitrii, 71 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 83 technologically marvelous listening, 21, 165, 167, 184–185 technology. See communication technologies; media generations; paper; telegraphy Tedlock, Dennis, 157 telegraphy, 8–9, 21, 51, 56–57, 68, 72, 84, 214–215, 240n41 Third Section of His Majesty’s Own Chancellery, 26–27, 45, 47, 58, 100 Tikhonov, A. N., 90, 248n81 Tiutchev, Fedor: “Insomnia (the monotonous striking of the clock),” 42; “Silentium,” 238n12 Tocqueville, Alexis de: Democracy in Amer­i­ca, 25, 26, 128 Tokarzewski, Szymon, 265n17 Tolstoy, Lev, 5, 101, 201, 215–218; Death of Ivan Ilich, 189; War and Peace, 210; What Is Art?, 210; What Then Must We Do?, 216–217

287

transcription. See recording and transcription travel narratives, 5; Custine as author of, 24–25, 29, 35, 48; Grigorovich dismissed as writing as tourist, 104; Haxthausen as author of, 51, 59–60; Khomiakov’s opinion of authors of, 48–49, 66–67; Viardot as author of, 127–128 tuberculosis, 133, 134 Turgenev, A. I., 71 Turgenev, Ivan: background and ­career, 2, 126–129; critical reception of, 2, 3–4, 14, 16, 142–143, 157–158, 191; Custine and, 127; Dahl and, 3, 127; darkness and listening in stories of, 137–141, 146; dialect and, 126–127, 141–143, 145–146, 176, 186, 219, 259n66; distinguishing listening from writing, 2–5, 225n5; Dostoevsky and, 106, 170, 199; folklore and, 105, 137, 139, 159, 258n58; Gorbunov and, 201, 209; Grigorovich and, 117, 126–129, 134; humor and, 195–199; on listening, 135–136, 225n5; onomatopoetic tendencies of, 3, 18, 212; paper production and, 130–135, 142; Sand and, 145–146; unmediated listening of, 22, 126–127, 130; vernacular and regionalisms in, 3, 14, 18, 142; Viardot and, 202; as virtuosic modern listener, 11, 15 Turgenev, Ivan, works of: “Mumu,” 129, 256n12; Virgin Soil, 131. See also Notes of a Hunter for its collection of stories Turkish language, 64, 75, 81 United States: abolitionism in, 9, 19, 42, 44–45, 84, 129; bells in soundscape of, 44, 46, 146; Liberty Bell, 42–43, 46; paper production in, 130, 132, 133; pre-­Civil War silence of the South, 9, 44, 66; slavery and, 42, 45; sound as social phenomenon in, as in Rus­sia, 44; technological change in, 9 unity with the ­people. See intellectuals unmediated vs. mediated listening: communication technologies and, 122, 126, 141, 146; defined, 21; Grigorovich and, 21–22, 103, 118–119, 125; Haxthausen and, 67; paper production and, 129–130, 134, 141; Pushkin and, 122–123; Turgenev and, 22, 126–127, 130 urbanization, 11, 43–44 urban poverty, 215–216 Uspensky, Gleb, 194, 196

28 8 I n d e x

Vdovin, Aleksey, 226n11, 272n48 Vengerov, Semyon, 191 verbatim listening, 16, 80 verbatim recording, 4, 9, 10, 157, 189, 195, 214, 227n32 Verdi, Giuseppe: La Traviata, 209–210 vernacular. See dialect and vernacular Véron, Louis, 136 Vertep (po­liti­cal group), 148, 163 Veselovsky, Alexander, 162–163 Viardot, Louis, 127–128, 196; Hunting Memories, 128; Scenes of Arab Customs, 202 Viardot-­Garcia, Pauline, 127–128, 136, 140, 143, 145, 210, 259n58 Viazemsky, Petr, 15–16 Vilinskaia, Mariia (Marko Vovchok), 226n11 The Village (Grigorovich), 104–114; composition of, 108–114, 125; critical responses to, 114–121, 142, 253n50; crossing in, 103, 107, 114, 213; Dostoevsky on, 170; standard phonetics and spelling of dialect in, 113 Vinitsky, Ilya, 238n12 Vinogradov, Viktor, 14, 18 Vinokur, G., 271n41 Vinokurova, Nataliia, 10–11, 71 Vitalich, Kristin, 101, 248n82 vitalism. See Dahl, Vladimir

voice of the ­people: bell sounds and, 140–141; hypnogogic listening and, 147; importance of theme of, 29–30, 45, 214; Petr Kireevsky on, 70; origins of phrase, 69, 243n96; Panchenko’s use of, 71; recording of, 203; Slavophiles on, 69–72 Vokrug Sveta (Around the World, journal), 181 Vostokov, Alexander, 86–87; Attempt at a Regional Great-­Russian Dictionary, 90; Dictionary of the Church Slavonic and Rus­sian Language, 90 Vovchok, Marko, 226n11 Wachtel, Michael, 230n72 Wagner, Richard, 229n53 Westernizers, 6, 68–72, 117, 130, 163, 171 Wright, Richard, 174 Yaroslavl (province), 62–63, 100, 131 Zagoskin, M. N.: Iurii Miloslavskii, 135 Zarudnyi, Sergei: “Letter from an Experienced Bureaucrat of the 40s to a Young Colleague Entering Ser­vice,” 8 Zhivov, Viktor, 14 Zhukovsky, Vasily, 77–81, 97, 105, 120, 141, 217 zoology and animals, 61, 74, 92–93