The Journey In Boundless Longing

Russian Spleen. The Journey In Boundless Longing

Mikhail Epstein

Boredom, khandra, longing... these depressive conditions can seize the spiritual life of whole epochs or nations, and then--how are they resolved? By wars? Revolutions? Self-annihilation? In any case, here lies a point of enormous interest not only for psychologists, but also for sociologists and historians of culture. And Russian literature, as perhaps no other world literature, offers diverse material for the intensive study of these conditions on whatever social and cultural levels they appear.

A malady, the cause of which

'tis high time were discovered,

similar to the English "spleen"--

in short, the Russian "khandra". . .[i]

Even these few lines from Pushkin's Eugene Onegin reveal a great deal: khandra is a specifically national ailment, a problem of ethnic pathopsychology.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, boredom was thought to be an aristocratic illness. A bored visage entered the code of social behavior as a sign of refinement and nobility. Only the plebeian, forever in need, would have a visage inflamed by greedy and unconcealed interest. The satiated man, master of everything and acquainted with all, could not help but be bored. Such was the origin of spleen, the illness of English aristocrats, introduced into poetic fashion by Byron in the image of Childe Harold.

But can one say that it was simply this burden of satiety that crashed down upon Onegin, that all his agitation was the result of a superabundance of leisurely days not filled up by need and labor, and that if he were to mingle with the people, working in his native fields, as Dostoevsky conjectured, the desired cure would have taken? But Onegin is not Childe Harold; his longing is of another kind, not subtly arrogant. He is afflicted with a different disease, incomparably broader than his class affiliation.

Khandra, in distinction to spleen [splin], is not an ailment of satiety. Spleen afflicts aristocrats, while depression penetrates deeply into the soul of the whole Russian people, acquiring there another, more potent name: longing [toska], or woe [kruchina]. "Something kindred can be heard in the coachman's drawn-out songs: now bold revelry, now heartfelt longing. . . "[ii] The feeling of longing ties the coachman to the nobleman, makes them kin. "From the coachman to the poet, we all sing drearily. . ."[iii]

The same motif of longing, born of the road, is later extended by Gogol onto the entire breadth of Russia whom he addresses in the kyrical ending of Dead Souls:

Everything about you is open, level and desert-like; your lowly towns are like dots, marks imperceptibly stuck upon your plains; there is nothing to captivate or charm the eye. But what then is that unattainable and mysterious force which draws us to you? Why does your mournful song, which is wafted over your whole plain and expanse, from sea to sea, echo and re-echo without cease in our ears?[iv]

The Russian song is mournful [tosklivaia], and this longing [toska] is born not of satiety, but of the opposite: of some cheerless emptiness of the whole world, whose cities and towns have been brushed away like specks of dust in the wind. Onegin's depression, related on one hand to aristocratic spleen, on the other reveals a proximity to an eternal national longing. What in the novel's first chapter is called "depression" is the anticipation of another, more all-encompassing feeling. Later, when Onegin leaves Petersburg, the European-style, languid and refined city of boredom, and sets off for the countryside, and then for his travels around Europe, from time to time this feeling is called by its real name: "Toska!" "I'm young, life is robust in me, / what have I to expect? Ennui [toska], ennui! . . ."[v]

And, as a lyrical commentary to the hero's experiences, the sympathetic voice of the author: the poem "My ruddy-cheeked critic, pot-bellied scoffer...",[vi] written in Boldino at that time, in the fall of 1830, when Pushkin was finishing Eugene Onegin. This mournful voice comes not from splendid high-society drawing rooms, but from a native rural backwater, as an expression of the nature of the flat plain and the national soul that has become accustomed to it: "Just see if you can cope with the accursed depression. Look what a view you have here: a squalid row of little huts, behind them black earth, the gentle slope of the plain. . . What's wrong, my friend? Now you're not kidding, your seized with longing--aha!" Longing is the infinite length of space, unfolding from itself and into itself, interrupted by nothing, devoid of qualities, flat and monotonous as the plain. "Squalid row . . . gentle slope." This is an emaciated space, filled by nothing; in fact, the word "longing" [toska] has the same root as "emaciated" [toshchii]. What is emaciated is physically empty, and longing is a spiritual emptiness. Longing: an emaciated landscape of the soul.

In the Soviet epoch, all ideological power and leadership was conferred upon to the ruddy-cheeked critic, who, pointing to the mines of inexhaustible optimism in the hearts of the people, demanded a "little ditty to amuse us for a bit," so that the cheerful melodies would flow from the native pastures and grain fields! He saw the dust of boredom in the eyes of an alien class, and did not notice the heavy sheets of longing in the eyes of his own. He repeatedly insisted: boredom comes from satiety; the simple people are cheerful. But no writer is more of the people and anti-aristocratic than Andrei Platonov, and his characters are perpetually in need, they have barely ripened from bodily vegetation into a consciousness of the world. They are not cheerful; longing is their primary and all-encompassing emotion. All surrounding nature is plunged into some kind of muteness, a curse of bottomless, indifferent boredom. “The air was empty, the motionlless trees were carefully hoarding the heat in their leaves, and the dust lay dully on the deserted road---such was the situation in nature".[vii]

In Platonov's world, nature exceeds in its capacity everything with which man could possibly fill it; it is eternally alienated from him by the foreignness of its retreating horizon on the never-ending plain. All life in these expanses senses itself to be an idle and unredeemed trifle, the birth of which is not justified by the greatness that surrounds it. "The dog's bored. It's like me—it lives onbly because it was born."[viii] Man, like any other creature, has nothing except his own body, born into the endless expanse, whence "the melancholy in every living breath."[ix] What purpose could this petty, mournful swarming serve, when the expanse desires only itself—-its perpetual expansion into ever newer lands?

In Dvanov, Kopenkin, Voshchev, Chiklin, in all these Platonovian characters, we see the origin of a longing more profound than that of Onegin or Pechorin--a longing not mediated culturally, not busying itself with books, dances, love affairs, amusements."In front of Zakhar Pavlovich stretched the unprotected lonely life of people wjo live naked, without the least possibility of deceiving themselves by believing in machines"[x] – or by yielding to any other sort of deceipt or cultural-technological temptation. They are emaciated both corporeally and mentally; they are closer to nature; they are not sheltered from the void by a layer of protective fat, of satiating prosperity. The emaciated [toshchie] long [toskuiut] more strongly--these very words, like "vainness" [tshcheta] are formed from the same old Slavic root meaning "emptiness".[xi] The more emaciated the people, and the more deserted the nation around them, the longer the longing--that feeling of vainness and abandonment with which they encompass non-being--that stretches between them. More deeply than in the traditional, noble "superfluous" men, features of a kind of metaphysical superfluity are glimpsed in Platonov's "emaciated" characters. The former are superfluous socially: they do nothing, they do not participate in common life. Dvanov, Voshchev and the others do act and participate in social life, but this does not arrest the emptiness; it continues to grow beneath their indefatigable hands, just as if it were issuing from a hollow core. And not only while they are cleansing the earth of enemies, but also when they are engaged in peacetime production. “A smell of dead grass and the dampness of recently dug earth hung over the area that had been cleared, making the general sorrow of life and the feeling of the hopelessness of it all [toska tshchetnosti] still more palpable.” (The Foundation Pit)[xii]

The foundation pit being dug in this novel is symbolic; as the earth is dug out, the emptiness of the beloved motherland is deepened further. This foundation pit, in which people seem to be planning to build a joyous house, common to all, gradually grows--through heroic, selfless efforts--to such a volume, that it can no longer be filled by any structure, and all becomes clear: this is a mass grave. It is not for nothing that the caskets for the dying village are stored in the foundation pit; once the village has been allotted its graves, those villagers still remaining will arrive, having been recruited to the city to dig the foundation pit further and die in it—a ready-made burial refuge.

Voshchev senses that the people are digging toward a kind of secret truth that awaits them behind every successive layer of earth, and that in order to reach it, they will need to dig straight through the entire earth, to supplement the horizontally sprawling motherland with the void of the vertically rent aperture, to spread that void throughout all dimensions, so that they might convince themselves: there is no boundary, up ahead the infinite black hole of the cosmos awaits, and this is also home [rodnaia]... "The collective farm had followed him [Chiklin], and they too were digging flat out; the poor and middle peasants were all working with a furious zeal for life, as though they were seeking eternal salvation in the abyss of the foundation pit."[xiii] And this prolonged disemboweling, as every unearthed layer becomes not the foundation, construction on which is now long overdue, but simply an emptiness that has sprung up, been drawn back, and conveniently stored away, arouses in Voshchev a longing that cannot be compared to Onegin's. For "superfluous" men this longing resided outside, in the social world: there was nowhere to put oneself, nothing with which to occupy oneself. In the busy, the laboring, the emaciated, it resides within, flowing out in unceasing, voiding exertion.

Fair enough; but there is more than longing in the national heart. What about wild abandon? Privol'e [free space], razdol'e, [expanse], razgul'e [merry-making, revelry]: unique Russian words that have no exact equivalent in other languages. However, do they not contain the same void, at times perceived as maniacal and emancipatory, seeking to be filled?

What does this boundless space presage? Is it here from you, that some illimitable thought will be born because you are boundless yourself? Will a doughty champion or bogatyr spring up here, where there is room for him to spread himself and stride about? Threateningly that mighty expanse enfolds me, reflecting itself with terrifying force in the depths of my soul. . . .[xiv]

Thus in Gogol, too, longing in several lines turns into heroism [bogatyrstvo], just as in Pushkin, revelry turns to longing. Thus they roll, it is frightening to say, from the empty to the vacant, from vast expanse to wasteland--across the entire range of that Russian thought full of longing and pride.

It is astonishing that such a subtle connoisseur of all things Russian as the academician Dmitrii Likhachev failed to detect this interrelationship of longing and the open expanse, instead posing them as a simple antithesis: "Volia-vol'naia means the freedom that is joined with the expanse, with the totally unobstructed expanse. The concept of longing, on the contrary, is joined with the concept of closeness, the deprivation of space to man."[xv] Of course, there is also a longing connected with closeness, bondage, and imprisonment, but this is more the torment of unfreedom and slavery common to all humanity. That peculiarly Russian longing which drifts along the roads and is familiar to all, from the coachman to the first poet, is the child not of closeness, but precisely of freedom, of totally unobstructed space. This is the longing not of the prisoner, but of the wanderer.

The very limitlessness of this world engenders an aching void in the heart and, along with it, a terrifying storehouse of sweeping energy. And when they are combined--daring and longing, the void seeking expansion and the void unsuccessful in its desire to be filled--heroic deeds result. The longing, however, is not only not calmed by these deeds--it expands in the heart. For such a bogatyr's every step is "a journey in boundless longing" (in the words of Aleksandr Blok) and pushes further and further back the banks of this longing. Nearly every exploit of this sweeping boldness consists in pushing back the "inhibiting" [stesniaiushchie] boundaries; the goal is not to fill them in, but to replenish their broadening emptiness, from which no one, least of all those same bogatyrs, can be saved. "Embraced by a powerful longing, I roam on a white horse. . ."[xvi] The freer the horse's flight, the more powerful the horseman's longing. In the excesses of his daring, in the destruction of all boundaries and borders, the enchanted wanderer himself prepares a place for his own future unappeasable longing. "for miles and miles the horizon stretched without a break: grass everywhere, white and tufted, waving like a silver sea and scenting the air on the breeze . . . there is no end to the steppe, just as there's no end to life's sorrows, and as there was no bottom to my heartache [toska] . . . ."[xvii]

Speed is the only thing that gives the soul consolation in the face of these retreating boundaries. Speed is offered to the soul as its last chance for incarnation, for catching up with its retreating border, for reaching the desired limit, where it would be able to stop and define itself, which is its purpose in this world. “What Russian does not love fast driving?,” “the versts and steep slopes flash by, turn—-stop!” Blok's "mare of the steppe" is galopping along with Gogol's "horses-whirlwinds." But the void always slips away more quickly than it can be overtaken, and, closing itself up behind you, it seems to laugh, with the sound of the pursuit subsiding and fading into obscurity.

This is also the source of the demonic nature of that femininity which is revealed in the body of Russia as an ever-impelling, soul-stinging expanse, unfillable by any bogatyr. You meet this woman by chance, but you can't stop her--just rush past. It is a long road: a momentarily fleeting glance from behind a kerchief; the muffled song of the coachman with its prison-yard longing. Thus these three motifs--the expanse, femininity and longing--are unified in Blok's poem, "Russia" (1908).[xviii][xix] For the wandering hero, the void is an insatiable temptation, the Babylonian whore herself, who spreads her legs at every Russian crossroads:

O, my Rus'! My wife!

Our long journey is painfully clear!. . .

Our journey in boundless longing,

In your longing, o Rus'!

1981

Trans. Jeffrey Karlsen