Khrushchev in love

Ivan Turgenev has a certain awesomeness about him. He starts you off with some realistish narrative, then throws you off with a bizarro description like:

Bazarov frowned. The small and unprepossessing figure of the emancipée was not in the least ugly, but the expression on her face had an unpleasant effect on someone looking at her. One felt like asking her: ‘What’s wrong with you? Are you hungry? Are you bored? Are you shy? What are you all tensed up about?

And then goes back to his usual mode of writing. He’ll also throw in all sorts of Gogolesque trivia like “It is a well known fact that our provincial towns burn down once every five years.” The more I look at him, the less certain I am of how to read him. Is he playing a joke on me? Is he just tangental? Is he hungry? This raises all sorts of suspicions about all sorts of authors. Take Gogol, supposed by Soviet literary critics to have written firmly in the realist tradition (had they not read “The Nose“?):

In this connection the author feels bound to confess that the appetite and the capacity of such men are greatly to be envied. Of those well-to-do folk of St. Petersburg and Moscow who spend their time in considering what they shall eat on the morrow, and in composing a dinner for the day following, and who never sit down to a meal without first of all injecting a pill and then swallowing oysters and crabs and a quantity of other monsters, while eternally departing for Karlsbad or the Caucasus, the author has but a small opinion. Yes, THEY are not the persons to inspire envy. Rather, it is the folk of the middle classes–folk who at one posthouse call for bacon, and at another for a sucking pig, and at a third for a steak of sturgeon or a baked pudding with onions, and who can sit down to table at any hour, as though they had never had a meal in their lives, and can devour fish of all sorts, and guzzle and chew it with a view to provoking further appetite–these, I say, are the folk who enjoy heaven’s most favoured gift. To attain such a celestial condition the great folk of whom I have spoken would sacrifice half their serfs and half their mortgaged and non-mortgaged property, with the foreign and domestic improvements thereon, if thereby they could compass such a stomach as is possessed by the folk of the middle class. But, unfortunately, neither money nor real estate, whether improved or non-improved, can purchase such a stomach.

Gogol definitely has a knack for this sort of thing – the weird, and weirdly compelling, details that drive his stories in ways that plot doesn’t seem capable of. More than just weirdness of details, the lists (and they are often enough just lists) of things he describes are weirdly long: pages of foods, names of serfs, objects in the distance. But, of course, the weird attention to weird details doesn’t stop with Gogol and Turgenev. Take Dostoyevsky:

Sonia’s room looked like a barn; it was a very irregular quadrangle and this gave it a grotesque appearance. A wall with three windows looking out on to the canal ran aslant so that one corner formed a very acute angle, and it was difficult to see in it without very strong light. The other corner was disproportionately obtuse. There was scarcely any furniture in the big room: in the corner on the right was a bedstead, beside it, nearest the door, a chair. A plain, deal table covered by a blue cloth stood against the same wall, close to the door into the other flat. Two rush-bottom chairs stood by the table. On the opposite wall near the acute angle stood a small plain wooden chest of drawers looking, as it were, lost in a desert. That was all there was in the room. The yellow, scratched and shabby wall-paper was black in the corners.

Since when does a room’s being a quadrangle, however irregular, make it grotesque? And yet, Dostoyevsky succeeds in making his quadrangular room seem just that. He focuses on the corners, almost nervously noting the one as very acute before he moves on and lists what must be all of the objects in the room, and somehow creates just that illusion of Petersburg as frighteningly off-kilter.

All of this is really, really weird in a way. It seems to me that authors, when they write – good authors, anyway – should be trying to do something, beyond just taking up space, and all three of the above are good, even great, authors. I can’t, though, get a good feel for what the hell they’re trying to do, and yet, it is in these minute, disproportionately described, and varied details that these authors are most compelling to me.