Storytelling, reflection and narration in Dmitry Grigorovich’s essay "Waiting for the Passage-Boat"

Abstract

The article analyses the essay “Waiting for the Passage-Boat” (1857) by the Russian writer and publicist Dmitry Vasilyevich Grigorovich. The essay was published in the magazine Sovremennik (“Contemporary”), and its publication seemed to draw a line under the discussion of the slaver and serfdom question in Russian magazines. Grigorovich’s prose played a role in this discussion. Grigorovich was one of the first writers of Russian realism (the so-called “natural school”) and tried to move away from the theatre vaudeville and sentimental images of Russian peasants in his novellas The Village and Anton-Goremyka. His subsequent texts on peasant themes, written during the “gloomy seven years”, varied the source material, sometimes showing a movement towards melodrama. The article offers a variant of a narratological and hermeneutic reading of the essay in the aspect of reflection and narration. In the author’s opinion, Grigorovich demonstrates the exhaustion of the peasant theme in literature, using the technique of multiple storytelling (from Hoffmann’s Serapion Brothers or Odoevsky’s Russian Nights). This becomes most obvious at that moment of the narrative, when the “right to voice” passes to casual interlocutors, while the narrator, correlated with the writer, loses this right. He is not recognized as the author of stories in his environment and takes the passive role of a listener. The use of allusions, remeniscences (from Karamzin, Radishchev, Mérimée, de Prevost), and autoquotation creates “noise” in the communication channel, making it difficult to perceive these stories as “bitter truth” (Stendhal), at the same time convincing the reader of the impossibility of finding an adequate description language for peasant everyday life. In this regard, Grigorovich’s position coincides with that of Honore de Balzac in the introduction to his Les Paysans or of Pavel Annenkov that was declared in his main article: you can expect a lot of pleasure from the expression in art of the course of common life, many pictures, original faces, excellent descriptions, but hardly real knowledge of this course as a subject for discussion and conclusion. Yet many of the writers and a very large number of readers have in mind this latter goal; but it is the same as judging about the height of the people who built the Egyptian pyramid by the pyramid’s height. This epistemological impossibility is illustrated in Grigorovich’s essay: the nobles and the peasant world exist in parallel. Thus, interlocutors do not feel empathy, and the purpose of conversation is not to change reality, but to spend time. Thus, the conversation of the nobles can be correlated with the Socratic dialogue, in which the possibility of the maieutic acquisition of truth is not realized due to the failure of communication. The arrival of the passage-boat demonstrates the inconsistency and exhaustion of conversations about people’s happiness, becomes a marker of such a failure. The article is illustrated with fragments of critical articles and epistolary works by Grigorovich. whose 200th anniversary inspires researchers to search for the latest interpretations and update the ways of reading the writer’s texts. Results and observations that are presented in the article can be used in teaching the history of 19th-century Russian literature.