Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 5 Number 3, December 2004

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Man in the ontological space of the newest time

 By

Tamara Gurtueva

Fatih University, Turkey

  

The tragic nature of an attitude is inherent of literature at all times, but the components of the newest tragic elements have drastically changed during the last few centuries. Neither of the three components of the newest tragic elements – lack of will, homelessness, loneliness – is a part of the tragic elements of the past. Only what forms the basis and space of any tragic element, that only generates an internal tension between the components of a tragedy: non-conciliation, disagreement with the injustice of the world order and of human destiny in it, - that only is general. It is the basis in which a person stays within his or her human given, but the historical situation of an epoch, its sense, its logic’s, its secret aspirations create such inseparable relationships with a human heart that there is no alternative but to admit the full insularity of historical ages and civilizations. However continuity exists. A person of the Newest time certainly continues the situation of the previous state of mind in the spiritual sphere.

 

The study of sources, monuments, rests of the last cultures takes out a great number of phenomena and events. Searches of causes and effects, studies of structures of human life find out the relationships connecting all in all. And in this vast sea of events, in this infinite duration of times, a separate event dwindles. Among a huge multitude of events neither of them can be more important than another. In fact, neither is of an unconditional importance. When a reality oversteps the limits, the moments, which were the fundament of the medieval order, disappear: the beginning and the end, the boundary and the middle. Simultaneously hierarchical partitions spreaded between them and conformities disappear as well, and then symbolic stresses also disappear. An infinite connection propagating in all sides appears: on the one hand, it gives open space and freedom, on the other hand  "it deprives human existence of an objective foothold which it had in the former world, and a feeling of a desolateness, even a threat appears"(1).

 

The essence of an artist defined as doing a history to death inside the tragedy of being a god-abandoned person, considerably changes his (her) understanding as a doer in the field of aesthetic reflection. A writer now acts as a singer of a spiritual situation, where the aesthetic will proceeds not from an art arbitrariness of a person as it was in former times but from within the newest tragedies. When passing through the space of the opposition "a little person" – "superman", the newest tragedy gradually finds out its own lie, for an idea of "a superman" is a lie and temptation but "a little person" is also a lie and temptation of the essence of a person. Accepted as the last truth about a person, it plunges him into space catalepsy of hopelessness, losing its "ontological safety".

 

The dual nature of the reality, dominating a person servility obedient to it and at the same time dreaming about a secret freedom, dissolves the latter in the power of things and objects, assimilating the human existence to them.

 

The Gogol's "Shinel" (greatcoat) (Gogol, 1984) as a hymn for "a little person" specifies the destiny of the Russian literature during all Newest time in many respects. Gogol is topical for us with that urgency which appears when the matter of life and dead arises. Let us recollect Vladimir Nabokov's words: "A Russian which thinks that Turgenev was a great writer basing his conception about Pushkin on the vile Chaikovsky's libretto, will start up carefree for a boat travel upon the most tender ripple of the mysterious Gogol's sea and feel pleasure of the things that will seem to him being a fanciful humor and colorful stinging remarks. But a diver, the seeker of black pearls, the one who prefers the society of deep-water monsters to beach awnings, will find in the "Shinel" the shadows cast on our existence by one or other states of being which we intangibly comprehend in the rare instants of our susceptibility to the irrational"(2).

The metaphysics of Gogol is rather simple: the thingish, real, finite, put into shape world is evil. It is bad, nasty and vile. The ideal world, the world of heavens is good merely because it is distinct from the visible world by its static’s, eternity and immovability. It is complete and beautiful. In the world of the finite everything that comes to us from the heaven world, perishes, collapses, deforms, for there is nothing in this world that would not fall under the laws of aging and death. The hereabout world is a world of an unreal, a partial existence. This world is imperiously ruled by a romantic "languish on infinity", on integrity, on being free of defective state of mind and perishability.

Being of a person in the perishable thingish world is a through topic of young Gogol. "Laying there, he for a long time looked round the yard, the sheds, the hens running about the yard, and thought inwardly: "O, my God, whether I am the master! Is there a thing that I don't have?  Poultry, buildings, barns, plums; poppy in the kitchen garden, cabbage, peas…What else I don't have here?" (1984,191). The question "What thing I don't have?" shows the dissatisfaction, which is programmed more likely for "no" than for "yes". The countability of the available objects, be their number never so great, makes all the property unimportant, insignificant. Ivan Ivanovich does not use anything of his property. Those things that are available, are unimportant, because those ones that are non-available, are intangibly felt as something much more important than the available things. In other words, becoming is more valuable than having become. The completeness of becoming, which disappears in those available things, metaphysically directs the thought of Ivan Ivanovich to searching what "is not available". The orientation of this sort is not satisfied with the having become, because the more completely passion is satisfied, the more big is the space of what is "non-available". The smallest "no" converts a sufficiency into nothing. When Ivan Ivanovich saw the gun of Ivan Nikiforovich, all the order of his thingish universe ruined, it was destroyed. The gun here is not the question: the world justice here is profaned and mocked. To receive a gun means to restore the universe justice and the completeness of space existence. A thing appears to be a bridge in the transcendental. A thing is more important than a person. The value of a person is equal to a thing value. The verge between the phenomena disappears: they are equal under the infinity of becoming, because both of them: the thing and the person are insignificant. A thing in "The Shinel" already acts as something that creates a person, instead of the one that ranges him. A person without any connection with the heaven is equal to a thing. This is the origin of the Bashmachkin's greatcoat, of his life, his sense, his dignity. This equality does not allow taking the greatcoat off him, for then most terrible will happen: he will be refused of the right to be named a person ("a superman"). A greatcoat – is everything, a person – is nothing. Having lost the greatcoat, Bashmachkin unavoidably becomes a dreadful superman.

Among the thingish abundance, Pulkheria Ivanovna's look opens a chasm ("The Dead Souls"). The kitty that vanishes, comes back and then again disappears leaving the landowner cosiness, opens for Pulkheria Ivanovna the world existing under spontaneous, uncontrollable laws. The abundance loses any meaning, for a terrible secret is opened to her ("That my death has come") which opening sent her to the grave. It became the event "changing for ever (selected by me – T.G.) the life of this peaceful nook"(1984,71).

Having glanced in an irrational chasm, Gogol's characters realize that they have not a power to change their destiny, for they are powered by something that rules over the world. They do not live, something is lived within. Every action is no more than vanity in the world, where a person is a thing. A person as a person, id est in the minutes of distraction of the thingish, is capable to implement his humanity in such a manner only, that a weak-willed contemplation of the elements only, of destruction, ruin and dilapidation allows him to be that he is. Works of Gogol are full with pictures of dilapidation of things, houses, products; and this process seems to be necessary. Moreover, if a person interferes with the course of nature at all, immediately all begins to fall, disappear, decay, break and really perish… A person shares the destiny of the thing world, the destiny of absurdity, for there is no "something" in the world. Anything that cannot be expressed with words, tires and depreciates all around: any conscious effort, any finite existence of a thing or a person.

Vasily Rozanov already wrote that Gogol's figures do not move, they are dead souls almost literally: any changes do not occur in them from the first page till the last one. Naming Gogol "a painter of genius of external forms", Rosanov justly believed that "practically nothing hides behind these forms, there is no soul in them". "The loss of the reality feeling in our society begins from Gogol, as well as the beginning and disgust toward it comes from him"(3). The romantic conviction (and it exactly is a source of the loss of the reality feeling and of the disgust for the reality) begins from Gogol, because it was he who first apprehended romanticism not as a new literary trend but as a personal destiny in the world, as the truth of earth. According to the same Rozanov, the writer "showed Russia the non-doughty, nonexistent. He showed it with such an incredible strength and fury that the spectators went blind and didn't see the reality for a minute, didn't know anything, didn't understand that anything similar to "The Dead Souls", certainly didn't exist in the alive life and in the completeness of life… Only a howl, plaintive, killed howl blew over the country: "There is nothing here!", "It is empty!", "God's earth is empty!"(4)

Characters of Gogol exist as phantoms. "To live in the land of the living, is boring sirs", says Gogol, and this boredom is identical to the "apathy" of Pascal and to the "boredom of the world" of Hegel. According to Gogol, this metaphysical boredom is the last truth of being of a person in the world.  Dehumanization of the world presumes the human melancholy which cause is impossibility of integrity in the fractional world. If the finite is evil initially, then death there as well, and accordingly all is inevitably dying.  The reality cannot give positive examples not therefore this positive has disappeared of it for some reason but because of the fact that in the real sphere the positive cannot exist as it is evil itself. Gogol was unable to invent the positive as well as he was unable to make up, to add as a makeweight something ideal to the real.

However if the sphere of the ideal is something positive versus evil of the real world, then why by each meeting with the beyond world of the Gogol's characters, terror steals upon us? Is this fear of the ontological nature?  On meeting something unexpected, all characters of Gogol behave approximately alike ("Horror embraced all people being in the hut", "… he became pale as a canvas", "all stopped dead", etc. And an apotheosis of the death-and-petrifaction is the mute scene from "The Revizor" (inspector). This petrifaction is always connected with something outstanding located outside of an understanding, id est on meeting something transcendental. The petrifaction accompanies fear and horror …In order to stiffen in fear as by Gogol on meeting the world of something unknown, unexpected, that is to think of it as if a chasm, an emptiness is behind it, as if the beyond world is unmerciful, indifferent to a person, punishing a right person and a guilty one indiscriminately. In fact in the mute stage of "The Revizor" as well, this sensation of requital is strong, and it is extended on all people without consideration of each guilt weight. The punishment is separated from the moment of an individual guilt. It ruins all of them.

Gogol is one of few writers who never lost sight of mortality of a person, finitude of any existence. But the infinite as well, understood romantically, did not promise anything consolatory. This is the source of his exaggerations and dumbfoundness of his characters. The world interpreted in such a way inevitably horrifies. Therefore we should listen to V. Belinsky's words afresh, with a more trust: "Not the truth of the Christian Science but a painful fear of death, devil and hell blows from your book" ("The Letter to Gogol") (5).

The symbolism of the petrifaction and death has also another aspect. A person dies and eternity is born within a statue, for eternity is motionless. The idea of Gogol is hopelessly romantic: to reach the infinite, a person must lose humanity. The petrifaction is a sign of lack of God being Love in the world, is an indication of "God's death". And simultaneously with it, an aspiration exists to realize a connection with eternity, to carry out a transition from the individual to the transcendental, from the fractional to a single whole. "The Death of God", "a little person", the romantic tragedy, the absurdity of the world, in which a person is equal to a thing, – all of this is intertwined by Gogol in a tight ball of a city image. Here, in the center of the all world evil, the destiny of a person in his dark and light appearances is made.

The writer, one of the first’s in the Russian literature, began reflecting on the city in an ambiguous meaning, in which we understand this problem today. The space of the subject allowed Gogol to investigate the theme of twinning just as it is, as well as the topic of the naked absurdity, an estranged being generating both ordinary madness and high insanity.

The world of the reality and a desirable world oppose each other. They are incompatible insomuch that compel a character to give up the reality and to plunge in a world of illusions. Romanticism understood this problem in such a way, and then Gogol too. This madness kindred to the poetic inspiration, generates the city. The process of person destruction caused by influence of the city leads Gogol's characters to madness. Within this madness, even in its low form, an idea is formed; the idea of deleting limits between the high and the low, the sacral and the earthly.

A synthesis long awaited by romanticists occurs, but having placed in the sphere of the reality, in the city atmosphere, it inevitably leads to disappearance of a person.

Not only parts of speech, days and months, spatial and time conceptions, but also the concepts of good and evil, good and bad are intermingled, changed places, joined. A person is contradictory. He is kind and evil simultaneously. In this city not only fractionality and separate pieces – all lost its sense together with a person kept from his humanity, taken to flight into madness after which an ideal was separated of the reality.

The world went crazy, and consequently all can be intermingled in it not caring especially about a sense. Here, in the world of Gogol, the partial attention to madness and to grotesque, absurdity and fantasy following it permanently, takes the part of a symbol leading the reality itself to the brink of the reality: the finite breaks away from the individual and stiffens in the typical. City lunatics being typical up to commonness, as well as the dead souls of the poem of the same name, are dead with just deadness that overcomes the chains of the finite. They are "supermen" hiding their supernality under the mask of the comical. The tragedy of "a little person" (Bashmachkin) stands out against a background of the absolutely indifferent reality remoted from a person.

If being distracted from Gogol's manner to present all in a reduced version and to sneer at everything and everybody, then the situation of Bashmachkin in its pure tragic sense obtains some other form: the person covering with the mask of "a little person", preserves beauty, guards its secret being, giving up temptations of the world. In fact, the only thing that he is able to do is to write a good fist. Bashmachkin copies papers thoughtlessly, not going deep into their content as for him their essence is not important but the process which he joins: creation of a beauty expressed in his handwriting. It gives his life a special sense. And though it is poor and senseless for a stranger, Bashmachkin is sure that copying papers, he protects a primevality of beauty. A stoical sage is before us storing a treasure, which he guards. Here the mask of "a little person", all his tongue-tie, as well as the old greatcoat and full inability to do another work, is a screen, a veil, once and for all adopted rules of a game with the world of which one should not expect any good. It is the case when a flight is not accomplished yet, but the person protests using his humility. The old greatcoat and the new one are two worlds, two methods of being. And if an attachment to the old greatcoat is the faithfulness to beauty and humanity in himself, the new one, with marten around the collar in addition (of which the character dreamed so much,) is a temptation of an escape to the sphere of life, where neither humanity, nor service to beauty are required.

No wonder that Bashmachkin was tempted. Having tailored not just a new cheap greatcoat but an excellent one (it would be logical, but not be a flight), Bashmachkin followed the crowd, he run away in a world of the unreal. This escape not only converted him into a real "little person", which insignificance acts as his only essence, but also made him betray beauty being the supreme of what he had. A temptation entails a punishment: the long-awaited greatcoat is taken away at the first evening. The further flight of the character is inevitable, but now it won't be the world of the unreal but delirium, madness, death, supernality.

Gogol emphasizes the superness of  Bashmachkin with an utter strength which is so peculiar to him: the character becomes a phantom tearing off greatcoats of everybody promiscuously and even of "persons of weight", spreading fear and horror. Having tempted, Bashmachkin becomes a part of the world, becomes the elements acting together with wind, snow and cold in the space of the Gogol's city. This is a real tragedy, a romantic rebellion as a defeat. Life is an empty dream, nothing. But the Gogol's character does not accept this life, and the "little person" rebels, tearing off greatcoats of passers-by. Having whispered a spiteful word of the rebellion, rejecting any submission of his ego to the supreme, he enters the field of nihilism staying in the sphere of romantic understanding of the world. The world being the formation generates nihilism. The degree and the strength of this nihilism are given by Bashmachkin in his agonal delirium. He  pronounces the most terrible words which directly follows the address "your excellency". Gogol's "your excellency" undoubtedly is a reduction of the "My God!" address.  What was masked by the phrase "I am your brother", have turned back as a blasphemy. It was the rebellion, which destroyed the dam of "a little person's" mask.

The heart of "a little person" lived a secret internal life not being agree with the main conviction of romanticism: "All that really exists, exists with unconditional necessity, and with unconditional necessity it exists exactly so, as it exists: it could not exist or be another than it is" (Fichte. "The Basic Features of the Modern Epoch".)

Bashmachkin did not even suspect about some Fichte's existence, but he was not agree with Fichte's readiness to adopt the existing until he started dreaming about a luxurious greatcoat. Acceptance of the existing in the form exactly in which it exists, "reconciles" a person with it, but inside of such a reconciliation a rebellion is hidden, for Fichte's idea passes by the main: the heart of a person cannot reconcile itself to the fact that the world is arranged so that there is suffering and injustice in it. It cannot call the evil existing in the world and living in it as an ontological attribute of universe, to be necessary. Romanticism does not take a person and his heart into consideration, because he (she) interferes with the integrity of philosophical comprehension of the world picture. Bashmachkin had chosen the existing and perished.

The force of Nothing reducing oneself to nonentity, rules not only in the book space but also in the reality sphere, and therefore one can catch it with the aesthetic reflection only. In other words, the city itself crosses, intermingles, drives mad, unsettles, combines: dissolves the reality, and the artist merely tracks this process.  The artist also disappears as a creator, and if he resists this logic’s of the reducing to nonentity, he perishes, drives mad. And here the Gogol's destiny can give us a lot of food for reflection, as Gogol was the one of those who resisted.

 

Gogol was the one of those who was not agreed. He had in his heart all this tragedy appeared to be the truth of the world to the detriment of Christian secrets of studying the human nature. The collision of Orthodoxy and romanticism was a cause of Gogol's depression. Here is the origin of the real, not art twinning of Gogol. Gogol's metaphysics had an earmark of discord between the truth and the truth, between a real state of affairs inevitably understood romantically, and the truth of Christianity.

Gogol who was granted a rare and painful gift to never forget about infinity or to constantly realize limitation, frailty, relativity of all things, feelings, words, incompatibility of a person and indifferent space, describes the horror of timeless eternal existence, which is not overcome by intensity of faith, and thereby utters a secret story of many hearts in our epoch of the end of the Newest time.

*   *   *

… In the painful emptiness of the world "a little person" of Osip  Mandelshtam experiencing the tragedy of the nothingness, has found his shelter as well: "I am as poor, as nature/ And as simple, as heavens/ And my freedom is illusory …". He has no choice but to accept this emptiness, to admit illusiveness of his own human being, for even if "the sky is more pallid than a canvas", it means that "God is dead". But if the world is merely a creation of a brain, maybe it means that him only being a character exists in it as an alive entity? Really, the world of a Mandelshtam's character is least of all similar to his alive, tactile conformity in the reality. Therefore it is perceived as "an illusive veil tossed on the real life". The attitude of the poet is expressed with the utmost clarity. Life is no more than a dream arisen by whim of imagination. And the sensation of the world illusiveness inevitably leads the poet to a pejorative self-description, when his character does not imagine himself separated from the earth chaos.

The name of Osip Mandelshtam in the Russian poetry can be presented to the world as an example of faithfulness to "a little person", as an example of a courageous standing in freedom. Both in life and in poetry Mandelshtam was a personification of this "little person". From the memoir pages of contemporaries a person arises with "unattractive appearance, and weak health. He was a cause of sneers, unadapted and set aside at the life feast" (S. Makovsky). He is echoed by I. Odoevtseva: "[Mandelshtam] often hid under a cheerfulness attacks of neurasthenia reaching despair"; "…timid by nature" and still "…never repined at his unhappy lot, did not cry about himself" (S. Makovsky). In the Sergey Makovsky's memoirs the idea is consistently advanced that verses of Mandelshtam written after the Revolution are anti-Soviet because of their confrontation pathos. As if "nobody of the writers was shocked by October more strong than Mandelshtam … maybe even up to losing intellectual balance", and "the Bolshevist pogrom of our spiritual culture shattered his keen sensitivity so that with the years he was burned-out at all". Naturally, an emigrant consciousness imagines that the Bolshevist revolution is able to deprive a poet of his eupathy, and that one can explain the Mandelshtam's "pilpul" of the post-revolutionary period by fear of disclosing his hidden anti-Soviet orientation. As to us, we believe that a poet constantly has a cause to resist and confront without any revolutions as well: this cause is a chasm of the heaven emptiness, the world after "the death of God". Therefore the statement that "in the lines written for this decade, there is almost everywhere one persistent idea about horror, loneliness, hopelessness and irreconcilability regarding the new religion-free Bolshevist heresy", is only half-correct. The chasm looked like the Bolshevism, not reverse; otherwise Mandelshtam would not write as follows: "We rustle not with our own scales / We sing the wrong way of the World". Not the Soviet power as such but the existing order of the world and of universe did not do for the poet. Not a specific time but the usual injustice of the order of things disturbed him, and consequently he wrote: "No, never I was anybody's  contemporary". It was not a mutiny of the poet against the power but against circumadjacent chaos. It was a rebellion of "a little person". It was a rebellion caused by despair.

A person loses himself in the world where heavens are empty. There only is one method to get rid of horror: flight. But conscience does not allow escaping, for if a poet escapes, nobody will confront the chaos, nobody will guard the essence of a person, guard his freedom of disagreement with the nothingness of the world. A poet has no right to escape, because the flight will be not only defeat of a person but also defeat of those world, which a human heart thirst for, not a senseless world, but a valuable one. Nothing will force a poet to refuse the freedom to be a human being.

The theme of "a little person", not Gogol's, enervately rebelling one, but keeping a clearness and courage of confrontation in the real life, has a continuation in Mandelshtam's prose as well. (6) His romantic attitude generates the heroism of "a little person" and inevitability of an atonement.

Timur Kibirov's poetry is in its depth a persistent dispute with the romantic tragedy based on the conception about being as a primitive, spontaneous and senseless process, demanding of a person courage of self-abnegation and readiness to be dissolved in the elements. Such a person only, who has already become a superman, is capable to overcome his narrow-mindedness and negligibility in the face of the universe absurdity. Timur Kibirov argues with this readiness exactly to be dissolved.

And what is in fact "the death of God"? What is the meaning of this "death"? The meaning is that the belief dominates as if the absolute realizes itself in a person, that a consciousness as a matter of fact is being of God, and if a person in his heart does not find Him and not have a need of Him, it means that God has died. From the sphere of theology the problem imperceptibly moves to the sphere of morals. Seeing that Schelling and Hegel did their best in order to declare God to be "a result of philosophy" (S. Trubetskoy), His life and death appeared to be completely in dependence of philosophy and metaphysics of a specific historical epoch, while the metaphysics of an epoch indicates of a person's destiny, not of God's one. Now, in the epoch of dominating the metaphysics of romanticism, a person exactly became a disappearing moment in evolution of the world spirit, when the individual is sacrificed to the universal. Kibirov does not agree with this victim exactly, as he knows and feels the mortifying lie of the romantic self-sacrifice. A human individual itself is too valuable to routinely immolate it to the superhuman. Thus Kibirov allots on the poetry writing an ontological task, not aesthetic one. Kibirov's fear is an overcome fear. Contemplation of the chasm gives strength to overcome restrictions which are overcome by the cordial right being a belief in the supreme moral of highest forces. The belief deduced not from the world, not from the logics of "wisdom of the earth" but from a miracle:

 

… I want to live! It proves,

that's obvious, from former sisters

even if the elder, hope, is not read over,

don't let me see a light (and it most likely is not available)

its warmth touched my lips…

 

Kibirov sets a clear gradation: this is the truth of absurdity, and that is the truth of heart, and the truth of a human heart is worth to follow it at any price. The tragedy of Timur Kibirov's poetry is a recent one in the line of development and evolution of the tragedy of "a little person" taking place in the Russian literature. "A little person" in his rootedness appears to be a sage living through the absurdity, not taking his eyes off the chasm and thereby holding the sense of a person and of the world. In such a way justification of this person is made. And in such a way his destination in the world is fulfilled.

References

1. Guardini,R. The end of New time, Voprosy filosofii, №4, 1990 p. 127-164.

2. Nabokov,V. The Lectures on Russian literature, Moscow, 1996.

3. Rozanov,V. Literary and aesthetic papers of different years (the chapter "About Gogol"), Moscow, 1990, p.225.

4. Rozanov,V. Among the artists, SPb., 1914, p.119.

5. Belinsky,V. The letter to Gogol // The selected aesthetic papers in 2 volumes. V.2, Moscow, 1986, p. 410-418.

6. P.Nerler writes about it: "The central character of the "Egyptian mark" undisputably is the "Gogol's" raznochinetz (an intellectual not belonging to the gentry in 19th century Russia) Parnok and captain Krzhizhanovsky being his antipode and offender, a yesterday's gendarme and a tomorrow's chekist who has grabbed Parnok's cutaway, shirt, woman, - apparently all held dear. But whichever pitiable Parnok seemed to be… it was he … who rushes into the midst of things trying with available means to rescue against a shrift a stranger sentenced by a crowd to illegal punishment! Didn't Mandelshtam himself who was so mach afraid of bed bugs and militiamen, act in a similar manner at one time, when he instantly snatched out from hands of a beginning poet more known as the Mirbah's murderer, a pack of arrest warrants which the man twirled under his nose, alcoholically bragging of the power above "a pack of fates"? And Mandelshtam torn them to peaces before the chekist 's eyes who had already forgot about such acts"– P. Nerler. Echoes of time noise, Problems of literature, №1, 1991, p.275.