bazarov and sečenov: the role of scientific metaphor in fathers and sons

Russian Literature XVI (1984) 359-374 North-Holland

359

BAZAROV AND SECENOV: THE ROLE OF SCIENTIFIC METAPHOR IN FATHERS AND SOUS

MICHAEL HOLQUIST

Valentin Kataev tells a marvelous story of how the great Mejerchol'd once developed a plan for putting Fathers and Sons on the screen: "The film was to have begun with a diagram of the human chest - white ribs and, behind them, as if behind dungeon bars, a human heart, beating at first steadily and rhythmically as the law of blood circulation demands, then fluttering and leaping until it stops in a last convulsion . . . Bazarov draws a charcoal circle on his chest around the place where his heart beats. With horror he notices that it is love, passion, desire that makes his heart contract . ..".l

Mejerchol'd's interpretation of the novel refuses to take Bazarov's Nihilism seriously: "Bazarov a Nihilist? Nonsense [ozdorl ! ‘I. 2 He sees Bazarov not as an ideologue but as a poet; and he even planned to have Bazarov's role in the film played by Majakovskij himself. The film was never made, which is unfortunate because it might have helped to clear up a certain ambivalence that has grown up around Turgenev's reputation. I believe Mejer- chol'd was absolutely right in perceiving that Bazarov is more poet than scientist, a position I wish to extend in this paper, in the hope that it not only will provide yet another interpretation of Fathers and Sons, but will in some small measure add to the growing body of work that seeks to offset the currently reigning cli- chGs about Turgenev's status as a writer in the dis- tinctively Russian li.terary tradition.

As Isaiah Berlin made clear in his 1970 Romanes lecture, Turgenev's "artistic reputation is not in question; it is as a social thinker that he is still today the subject of a continuing dispute".3 The most serious charge against Turgenev of this kindwould seem to have been made by D.S.Mirsky: "There had always been

0 304-3479/84/$3.00 0 1984 Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)

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in Turgenev a poetic or romantic vein . . . his attitude to nature had always been lyrical . . . even in his most realistic and civic novels the construction and atmo- sphere are mainly lyrical".4 What this vision of Tur- genev's achievement results in is the ineluctable con- clusion that " . . . In his day Turgenev was regarded as a leader of opinion on social problems. Now this seems strange and unintelligible. Long since the issues that he fought out have ceased to be of any actual interest". And then comes the inevitable and invidious comparison: "Unlike Tolstoy or Dostoevsky", or virtually any other important figure of nineteenth century Russian literary culture - "Turgenev‘is no longer a teacher . . . his work has become pure art ...".5

Not only is Turgenev not a novelist, he is more precisely not a Russian novelist. I take this to mean that he is unlike Tolstoj or Dostoevskij insofar as he is not a thinker: he is precisely what the most characteristic strand of Russian criticism would have most vigorously objected to, i.e., someone, who is only an artist, someone who provides merely aesthetic pleasure. And insofar as this is true of Turgenev, he will beper- ceived as not doing the work of Russian literature as defined by the great Belinskij, whose views continue to shape ideas about the extra aesthetic importance of the artist.

The irony of such a view will become apparent if we remember facts so familiar that their importance is often overlooked. Not only is Fathers and Sons dedicated to Turgenev's old friend Belinskij, the still-invoked conscience of the Russian intelligentsia, but it was as well a central document in the intellectual - not only the artistic or political - life of Russia during one of its most formative periods.

The conception of Turgenev as exclusively an artist of a particularly refined sort is usually combined with an indictment of him as a failed man of action. The im- plication of such a view is that the only area other than literature itself for such a lyricist to demon- strate his seriousness was politics, an area in which Turgenev clearly did not excel. Mirsky in a rather curious echo of Vulgar Sociologism, sums up this view by suggesting that in political importance, Turgenev was "representative of his class . . . and of his generation, which failed to gain real touch with Russian re- alities . . . and which, ineffective in the sphere of action, produced one of the most beautiful literary growths of the nineteenth century".6 Finding in Turgen- ev "merely" beauty, it is inevitable that Mirsky con- cludes by saying, "We do not seek wisdom [in Turgenev]".7

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Turgenev, in other words, is the literary equivalent of the proverbial dumb blonde.

To dispute the Mirskian view of Turgenev as an in- effectual aesthete would require a principled study of the kind only a thoroughly trained Turgenev scholar might carry out. I am not in the position to make such a study. Nevertheless, i would like at least to hint at a relation between Turgenev and one of the major intellectual currents of the modern period, the mind/body duality that has haunted us since at least Descartes. My purpose will be to suggest the further point that Turgenev may be perceived not only as an artist, but in his artistry, as a certain kind of thinker. A thinker not so much about politics as such, but about the politics competing discourses represent as they express competing social currents in the history of the Russian language. In what follows, then, I will try very quickly to sketch two arguments: Turgenev is similar to other novelists and in particular to those Russian novelists from whose company Mirsky would exclude him, in that he uses the medium of the novel to think through important extra-literary problems. One reason we so often fail to see the intellectual, analytical side of Turgenev is because it is assumed the only scope for such activity was the immediate political situation of nineteenth century IRussia. But there were other and arguably much more historically important trends of thought - and action - abroad in the same period, and it is in at least one of these, in at least one of his works (Fathers and Sons) that Turgenev's importance both as a thinker and as a figure whose work had conse- quences in real life should rather be sought.

The particular debate in which Turgenev played such a role is the one concerning the relation between the science of physiology, on the one hand, idealistic concepts of personhood and individuality, on the other. This is a problem that occupies some of the best minds - both scientific and literary - throughout the late eighteenth and all of the nineteenth century, indeed up to the present time. My argument may be stated in a number of theses, which I will first list, and then go on to specify.

1) Turgenev occupies a distinctive place in the history of nineteenth century European literature insofar as certain of his works (particularly Fathers and Sons) mark a crucial stage in the movement toward a new perception of nature (and therefore of the place of man in nature) that begins to manifest itself in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a movement charted in literary history between the poles

362 Michael HoLquist

conventionally called Romanticism, and, at the other extreme, Naturalism.

2) His place in that movement, in order to be appreciated, must be calibrated not only within the closed system of literary history, but rather as a border in- cident between literary and extra-literary discourses (particularly those of the body sciences).

3) The extra-aesthetic language which is most help- fully invoked if we are seeking Turgenev's unique place in the history of the novel is, then, scientific, not, as is so often assumed, political; and more specifically it is the language of a physiologically grounded p.sychoZogy that was in the process of formatior during the early and middle years of the nineteenth century.

4) The specific way Bazarov and his famous frogs are used in Fathers and Sons is as a means for testing what was this new scientific psychology's major claim, i.e. that thinking is an illusion based on an erroneous di- vision between mind and body. This view held that all aspects of human existence previously ascribed to the individual person's intentions, to his unique soul or psyche, were merely extra-individual manifestations of physiological processes in the human organism. As Ba- zarov tells the little peasant boys in Chapter V, when they ask him why he is catching frogs: "I shall cut the frog open and see what's going on in his inside, and then, as you and I are much as frogs (only we walk on two legs), I shall know what's going on inside us too".

5) Fathers and Sons, then, is a kind of literary laboratory for testing certain nineteenth century claims of science. But since Turgenev is a much sub- tler thinker than, let us say, Zola, Turgenev's version of the roman expdrimental is not a laboratory modelled on those in the Rue Gay-Lussac, with their electrical generators and Bunsen burners, but rather a language laboratory. What we get is not a naive application of methods in physiology, nor do we get an equal- ly naive attempt to "attack" such methods. No, Turgen- ev sees that at the heart of the new somatic definition of man lurks a theory of language - an attempt to get out of words and to the things themselves. What he does is to translate the latent content of scientism into a set of discursive practices which he then tests against other forms of discourse in his novel.

6) Finally, Turgenev may indeed have been ineffec- tual in the realm of politics. But in the realm of science he was to have at least one important actual consequence: By raising certain questions about Baza- rev's physiological theories in his novel, outside the

Baearov and SeCen2,' 363

novel he caused Bazarov's double, the great physiologist Ivan Secenov (1829-1905) to ask certain questions whose answers were to have a powerful and lasting effect on later concepts of the somatic structure of the brain and the way that structure relates to human psychology. Although Secenov is precisely Bazarov's contemporary, then, I shall be arguing that if we were to apply Turgenev's own symbolic genealogy, it could be said that Secenov is son to Bazarov's father.

But before we can see the relation between Turgenev and Secenov - and the implications of such a relationship for any attempt to assess Turgenev's role as novelist - we must deal with a few preliminary considerations.

At a merely anecdotal level, nothing could be sim- pler than to define relations between Secenov and Tur- genev: each respected the other; both at one time or another belonged to the circle around the journal So- vremennik; both spent great stretches of time in Ger- many and France absorbing the very latest ideas across a broad spectrum of interests, and both shared an al- most British liberalism that made their politics appear slightly unreal or wildly eccentric to their more millenarian fellow Slavs. The connection between the two appears even more ineluctable to anyone who has seen the famous photo of Secenov, taken in 1861, the year Turgenev completes Fathel?s aTid 8071s: we see a fierce-eyed, hirsute young man sitting at his work table in the Medico-Surgical Academy, complete with Bunsen burner, electrical charging mechanism and a laboratory clamp from which are suspended - of course - three frogs. It is less the portrait of an individual man than it is the icon of an era, one of those rare instances that let us actually see the otherwise invis- ible historical forces shaping whole eras."

But if we reach for the deeper meaning SeEenov and Turgenev had for each other, we shall have to go beyond their merely personal associations and look (very brief- ly) into the way each responded to the new challenges raised by Nineteenth Century science to traditional assumptions about man's place in nature. It is the cogni- tive revolution that took place between a time when nature was felt to reflect man, and a later time in which man was conceived as little more than a reflection of nature that makes the local relationship of Turgenev and Secenov of particular interest.

Of all the pejoratives Bazarov uses, none in his eyes is more damning than "romantic". He means by this not merely that Romantics are old-fashioned because they prize the past:: as a naturalist, he seeks as well

364 Michael HoLquist

to invoke by this term the particular romantic sense of nature that dominated Europe in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century.

Reacting against the rationalist conception of the world as machine, such pre-Romantics as Haller (Die Al- penr 1729), Thomson (Bhe Seasons, 1730) and Saint Lam- bert (Les Saisons, 1769) began to perceive a new force in nature, one that was organic, that had an everchang- ing life of its own, and that was as varied in mood as man himself. From this it was but a short step to that association of the moods of man and the moods of nature that is so common in Romantic poetry. This step is taken already during the pre-Romantic period when sen- sibility intervenes to turn the objective portrayal of nature into a subjective feeling for nature. The mood of nature is seen more and more in relation to human sentiments. Such an interpenetration of man and nature, sometimes called "the sympathetic fallacy", is of course frequent later in Romantic poetry, prose and painting - so frequent as to be characteristic. Also known as paysage &at d'a^me, it finds its most sustained ex- pression in the Re^veries d'un promeneur solitaire (1778) of Rousseau.

This identification with nature created a new interest in science among such leading literary figures as Goethe and the early Romantics of the Jena school (1797-1805) , which included not only the Schlegels,

Tieck, Wackenroder, and Novalis, but the natural phi- losophers Schelling and Baader, and the physicist Rit- ter. These men engaged in a number of communal activities, among which were dawn frog-catching expeditions to supply experimental animals.

But this organic view of nature was in the course of the next decades to be displaced by another view which diametrically opposed the privileged place of the individual psyche in nature. As Zola later would say, metaphysical man gave way to physiological man: instead of nature reflecting the workings of the mind (paysage &tat d'a^me), the mind now was felt to be a reflection of nature, a mere sub-function of the electrical and chemical make-up of the physical body. Taine somewhere calls man "une machine de rouages ordonnes" (a machine with an interacting mechanism). Scientific method would gain such extraordinary prestige in the early years of the nineteenth century that it would be applied to ever broader fields of speculation outside science proper.

The application of scientific method to subjects outside science is, of course, called Scientism, andis now generally considered to be a bad thing. But in the middle decades of the nineteenth century such men as

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Jakob Moleschott (1822-921, Karl Vogt (1817-1915) and above all, Ludwig Biichner (1834-991, the brother of the famous playwright, aroused enormous excitement with their claim that "Matter rules over men" (the title of one of Moleschott's chapters in his 1852 Der Kreislauf des Lebens). They are precisely the figures, of course, the Russian Nihilists, both real and fic- tive, cited as their great authorities (as when Baza- rov convinces Arkadij he should give his benighted father a copy of Biichner's Kraft und Staff). This movement is reflected in the transfer of methods from the discipline in which arguably the most dramatic discov- eries were being made, physiology, to methods in literary practice. Taine in 1849 published his L'Avenir de Science, in which the future of science was clearly to be immense: Stendhal and Balzac, whom he called anato- mists and physicians,, were to be part of it, for instance.

But it was the 1865 publication of the physiologist Claude Bernard's Introduction ci Z'e'tude de qYa Mgdecine expbrimentaze that was to have the most obvious influ- ence on literature as it became the doxological text for Zola and other naturalists. As Zola said in ex- plaining what he sought to do, "I intend on all points to intrench myself behind Claude Bernard. It will often be but necessary for me to replace the word 'doctor' by the word 'novelis't' to make my meaning clear and to give it the hardness of a scientific truth".g

We can see, then, that the change in the status of nature that occurs in science between the late eighteenth and middle nineteenth century, is paralleled in literature as well. Goethe's sympathetic nature becomes dominant nature in Claude Bernard: in literature, the artist who was a.t one with nature, becomes the scientist who treats characters the way biologists treated frogs.

But between Rousseau's reveries and Zola's experi- ments intervenes Turgenev, not only chronologically, but formally: he represents a kind of synthesis between the excesses of romantic organism at one extreme and the excesses of a mechanistic naturalism at the other.

Like Goethe and Zola, he is an artist interested in science and more specifically, the science of physiol- OgY I especially as it relates to the mystery of human motives. There is nothing surprising about this. As a youth, Turgenev had spent time in France and Germany among the High Roman.tics, and later he hobnobbed with many intellectuals influenced by the new eminence of biological sciences. He was of course for years a mem-

366 Michael Holquist

ber of the group around Sovremennik, which included the most unbridled followers of the new Scientism in Pisarev and Cernysevskij, who in his (1860) "Anthropo- logical Principle in Philosophy" drew a parallel between Newton's thought processes in discovering the law of gravity and the "process that takes place in a chicken that finds an oat grain in a dung heap"."

Cernysevskij is often accused by those who see him in an exclusively Russian context of being an insensitive ideologue - or (no less frequently) he is honored as an original thinker. Neither is true. He is merely taking to an extreme a position that was well established in European psychology of the time. In the middle of the nineteenth century two models of medical psychology were competing with each other: that represented by Griesinger's Die PathoZogie und Therapie der physischen Krankheiten and von Feuchtersleben's Lehrbuch der iirzt- lichen SeeZenkunde, both of which appeared in 1845. Von Feuchtersleben was Dean of the medical faculty at the University of Vienna, but he was also a poet, and a man well known for his literary predilections. His concept was quickly and easily defeated by his oppo- nents: Griesinger considered all non-physiological - "particularly all poetical" - conceptions of the mind to be utterly useless. It was the triumph of Griesin- ger's model, supported by the work of materialist thinkers such as Comte and Taine, that turned the guest for human motives away from traditional concern for the soul (psyche) into a concern for what Wilhelm Wundt would call in his lectures at Heidelberg in the 1860s "psychology as a Natural Science" (and in 1873 would call "physiological psychology").

These tendencies were abroad in Russia as well from very early on, not only in the watered down and slightly hysterical claims of such populists as Moleschott and Biichner, but in the work of a man who was not only a real scientist, a pioneering physiologist whose work was recognized all over Europe, but a native Russian. He was Ivan MichajloviE SeEenov (1829-1905), who was not only a student of Karl Ludwig, the great Helmholtz, of Dubois Reymond and of Claude Bernard, himself, but a man who was highly regarded as a colleague by all these key figures. More important for our purpose is the regard not simply of other scientists for SeEenov, but of the general Russian public in the late 1850s and early 1860s.

In March of 1860, at the very time Turgenev was at work on Fathers and Sons, SeEenov began a series of lectures at the St.Petersburg Medico-Surgical Academy., These lectures produced a sensation among not only the

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students, but all Petersburg. As the historian M.N.Sa- ternikov puts it: "Both the form and the contents of SeEenov's lectures produced an immense impression, not only on the academic world, but also on intellectual society in general. [His] manner of speaking was simple and convincing; his method of exposition was absolutely new. With youthful enthusiasm and deep faith in the all-conquering power of Science and Reason . ..he spoke not only of what had already been achieved, also of what was yet to be done . . . [he produced a large number of students and] we may confidently assert that SeEenov is the initiator of the Russian school of physiologists". I1 (I should add that Secenov's work continues to be ranked very high, even in the West: in Boring's definitive History of Experimental Psychology it is said that SeCenov was "far ahead of West European thought", and the eminent cyberneticist Walter Rosen- blith has called SeCenov "a too little appreciated forebear of Norbert Wiener".)"

But the aspect of Secenov's achievement I wish to stress has less to do with his specific work on the brain. What I wish to emphasize, rather, is what Sater- nikov has in mind when he says "The remarkable demonstration with which [Secenov] illustrated his lectures acquainted students with the most recent techniques of scientific experiment and taught them to use the Zan- guage of facts".13 It is not Secenov as a kind of Vr- figur for Bazarov, but rather Secenov's "language of facts" that is significant for understanding Turgenev's novelistic practice. It is Scientism as a Language, as a discursive practice claiming a unique relation to truth that Turgenev will test in his fiction.

In order to proceed with this argument, we shall want to keep two prior assumptions in mind. First,that an interplay between science and literature is possible because both are, in the end, exercises in language. Secondly, that the novel is preeminently the literary genre whose constitutive feature is an artistically organized diversity of social speech types, particularly Fathers and Sons in which the major thematic and structural emphasis is on the ideology of Scientism as it is expressed in the speech practice of the Nihilists.

Turning to the text of Fathers and Sons, we will no- tice first of all the most obvious level at which Tur- genev contrasts different languages. These would in- clude the large number of what might be called phatic scenes: those encounters in which characters explain to other characters the peculiar meanings of their different idiolects. In Chapter XV we are aware of the growing differences between Arkadij and Bazarov when


the latter reproaches the former for interpreting lit- erally his statement about Odincova's situation to the effect that "something is wrong here". Bazarov must explain to his young friend that "something wrong" (ne Zadno) means me...'.14

"something right in my dialect and for In the following chapter, Bazarov, impressed

by the haughty demeanor of Odincova's butler, says to Arkadij, "What grand genre! . . . That's what it's called in your set (u vas), isn't it - ".15 When Odincova in- vites Bazarov for a walk she says "I want you to teach me the Latin names of the wildflowers". And Bazarov seeks to mark off the difference between them by insisting on the fact they speak different languages: "What use are the Latin names to you?"16 he asks with his usual rudeness.

This is a typical pattern. A major device by which Bazarov's uniqueness is established throughout the course of the novel is through differences between his language and that of all the other characters he encounters. It is clear, for instance, from the very out- set that Bazarov represents the polar opposite of everything that Pave1 PetroviE stands for. But their relations are already a duel of idiolects long before they devolve into a duel with pistols. In their first spar- ring match Bazarov accuses Pave1 PetroviE of using foreign words - each of which is a clear ideological mark- er "aristocracy", "liberalism", "progress" and of course "principles", which, as Bachtin17 reminded us long ago - and as Turgenev points out in the text" - Pave1 Pe- troviE pronounces in the French manner. (principe) and Bazarov pronounces in the German fashion (Prinzip). One of Bazarov's charges against his antagonist is that Pave1 PetroviE cannot speak with the don't even know how to talk to them". JE";;g~: ,~~~~vi, is foreign not only because he speaks French and seeks to live like an Englishman, but because even his Rus- sian (when he does speak it) is markedly eccentric. Space, geography determine the foreignness of his other languages; time, history determine it in his "native" language: "he intentionally clipped his words . ..though of course he knew very well that such forms are not strictly grammatical. In this whim could be discerned a survival of the habits of the times of Aleksandr I. The exquisites of those days, on the rare occasions they spoke their own language, shod forms".20

made use of such slip-

Turgenev's sensitivity to the social dimension as it reflects history is even more pronounced in the case of Bazarov's parents. Of the mother it is said that she should have lived "two centuries before in the time of

Bazarov and SecYenov 369

old Muscovy”, 21 and then Turgenev lists several of the superstitions and habits which distance her from the nineteenth century. It is said of Bazarov's father that "he served with SUVOZOV"~~~ so he too in a kind of Turgenevian parody of Formalist literary history, belongs to a generation of grandfathers rather than fathers. The difference between Bazarov and his father is most pointedly marked in the older man's predilec- tion for the ornate classical references of the eighteenth century: ("in the arms of Morpheus" for sleep and "trees beloved of Horace" for acacias),23 he even uses Latin (his conversation is sprinkled with such tags as homo novas, ad patres - which, we might note in passing, is a heavily ironic way of referring to death in a book called Fathers and Sons - and uses ic- term for jaundice). He is not insensitive to speech differences as when quoting a peasant woman who com- plains of "looseness", adding "that's how they explain it, but in our language dysentery".24

We could go on with this demonstration that selfconscious speech patterns that mark off distinct ideological positions are important building blocks in Turgenev's novel, with the corollary that when differences in language are dramatized, it is to dramatize ideoZogica2 differences,

But these ideological differences are also dramatized as differences in generations of books that sym- bolize the opposition between old and new forms of knowledge: Bazarov sees Nikolaj Petroviz reading Pus- kin and suggests as an antidote to such "Romanticism" that Arkadij give his father a copy of what might be called the Bible of Scientism, Ludwig Biichner's Kraft und Staff? We can see Turgenev insisting on the relation between specific kinds of language and particular ideologies in his characterization of Koljazin, the new provincial governor: "Matvej Il'iE used to speak with great respect of Guizot . . . such phrases were very familiar to him . . . [But] in reality, Matvej Il'i? had not got much beyond those political men of the days of Aleksandr I, who used to prepare for an evening party . . . by reading a page of Condillac ...";26

Generations are less chronological than they are ideological in Fathers and Sons, one more way Turgenev makes clear the primacy of the world of signs as opposed to the world of brute nature. Bazarov's mistake is not so much that .he respects science, but that he fails to see that the world view he has articulated on a scientific base is a fullfledged ideology, and that as such it is no less prey to the vicissitudes of change and history than those other ideologies - such

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as romanticism or phrenology - of which he is so con- temptuous. His iconic gesture is not only dissecting frogs, but attacking belief systems characteristic of the past: "Why, do people still believe in Schonlein and Rademacher in this province?"27

He is convinced his own truth is timeless because it is extralinguistic, scientific. What scientific means in his value system can be gathered from its opposite, the set of conventions and beliefs Bazarov castigates as Romantic: Romantic means Puskin,it means literature, it means metaphors. It means, in other words, inaccurate or deceptive language. Poetry can become outmoded because it is in a language thatis false. Bazarov holds that science is a system that is true to the extent it is free from the confusions‘ of language. It is he, the polar opposite of the underground man, who holds up the extralinguistic proposition that 2 x 2 = 4 as the ultimate argument for the truth of science.

What he fails to perceive, of course - what the whole movement of scientism failed to perceive - was that the extension of purely intrinsic scientific laws to extrinsic considerations such as ethics or politics - was itself a metaphoric move. It was an attempt to organize social life by scientific principles, i.e. to translate one system of signs into another: same but different, the classical definition of metaphor. In translating the laws of science into ideological practice, Scientism gives up the extrahistorical claim to truth attaching to mathematical signs. Their extrascientific claims for science become subject to all the confusions and historicity of natural languages, the limitations of which for anyone seeking to express extrahistorical, ultimate truths are all too obvious.

Bazarov, like the underground man, is sick, and Turgenev is extremely acute in diagnosing Bazarov's disease: he is suffering from an illness that is the opposite of Dostoevskij's anti-hero, who suffered from an excess of "consciousness"; Bazarov, on the contrary, suffers from an unconsciousness of the metaphoric nature of language. Speaking of his blindness as a disease is a metaphor, but so is Bazarov's sickness in the novel: the great proponent of the concept that men are no more than the sum of the cells and chemicals of their physical bodies is himself brought down by anill- ness contracted from his dissection of a corpse, i.e. a body that is indeed no more than its physical makeup. But the truth - the non-scientific truth - which this metaphor points to, is that Bazarov's disease is blindness to the metaphoric heart of his scientific ideology.

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One way this is made apparent in the novel is in Bazarov's use of scientific metaphors. As the science he feels to be most scientific is physiology, it is not suprising that body imagery dominates his rhetoric. For instance, Arkadij - in defending his uncle - tells the story of Ravel PetroviE's hopeless romance for Princess R-: Bazarov answers with an uncharacteristi- cally long speech:

And what about all these mysterious relations between a man and a woman? We physiologists know what these relations are. Study the anatomy of the eye a bit, where does the enigmatical glance you talk about come in there. That's al.1 romanticism, nonsense, rot, and artsy nonsense [chudoiestvo]. Much better if we go and look at a beetle.'@

What he's saying, of course, is that physiological mechanisms are true, but they may become layered over with false metaphors, especially the kind to which lovers are notoriously drawn. There is a truth of the physical on the one hand, and the fiction of a self that is more than sum of its cellular activities, on the other.

The interesting thing, of course, is that Bazarov's example of a bodily organ is precisely the one that constitutes the novel's most obsessively recurring metaphor: everyone in the book is characterized by the quality of his eyes. The only place where there seems to be a one-to-one fit between appearance and reality is in eye metaphors. The bailiff at Plar'ino is a cheat so his eyes are of course "knavish" [plutovskie].2g When Katja is confused by Arkadij's blurted declara- tion of his love, her eyes accurately reflect that confusion: "her dark. eyes had a look of perplexity".30 The constantly flust.ered and anxious-to-please Sitni- kov's eyes are "small and seemed squeezed in a fixed and uneasy look".3i Eyes, as a Romantic would say, are the windows of the soul, external physical signs accurately reflecting internal psychological truths. What Turgenev is doing here (as he does in his treatment of other parts of the anatomy, such as Kuksina's nose, Katja's feet, or Odincova's shoulders) is using the human body as lyrical poets had earlier used Landscape. It is a selfconscious and highly sophisticated variant of the somatic sympathetic fallacy: instead of merely the landscape of nature reflecting inner psychological states (spring/young love), the whole body becomes such a metaphor (a lesson that will not be lost on Tolstoj) .

The greatest twist on this metaphoric use of meta-

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phor is Bazarov's own use of metaphor: as he lies dy- iw , he metamorphoses into a romantic of the kind his Scientism previously had caused him to scorn. He spouts nothing but metaphors: a naturalist might explain away his reference to himself as a worm "half crushed but writhing still" as a last attempt on Bazarov's part to deny the difference between animals and humans. But only a poet would exploit light imagery as Bazarov does in his final speech: He says to Odincova, "be good to my parents, you'll not find any like them in your world even if you look by daylight with a candle...". Turgenev as author quite wickedly conflates his own imagery in his authorial voice with Bazarov's imagery: Turgenev as author says Bazarov's eyes "gleamed with their last light", but has Bazarov say in his own voice, "Goodbye.... breathe on the dying let it go out...

1 y? and Enough... Now, Darkness". It is

a poet's death: Mejerchol'd was quite right to want Majakovskij to play the role in his projected film of the novel.

Bazarov reverses in his biography the direction taken by the movement from Romanticism to Naturalism: he is a naturalist who metamorphoses into a romantic poet.

Does Turgenev's treatment of Bazarov mean that Tur- genev is so completely "lyrical" that everything he touches turns into a kind of poetry (which seems to be what Mirsky is saying)? I have tried to argue that Ba- zarov's transformation is rather the result of an ana- ZyticaZ process: it is the gradual revelation of the inescapability of metaphor, even in science, a fated- ness the implications of which dominate current philosophy of science.

Finally, I wish to dispute the claim Turgenev had no extraliterary effects; not only did he force the fictional physiologist Bazarov to rethink language, but he forced the actual physiologist SeEenov, to do so as well. Fathers and Sons created in Bazarov not only a general iconic image of the Nihilist that imme- diately passed into use, he created as well an image of the extrascientific implications of physiology.

And it was this image of the physiologist as de- stroyer of human morality that was superimposed on Se- Eenov when, in the year following publication of Fa- thers and Sons, he sought to publish his "Reflexes of the Brain" in The Contemporary and was refused by the censor (who did clear it for an obscure professional journal called Medieinskij vestnik). Persecution from the government reached a climax in 1866 when the book version appeared. Its sale was forbidden by the censor, and the High Court of St-Petersburg began an action

Bazarov and Sec'enov 373

against SeEenov in which he was charged with attacking the "natural order of things". "Reflexes", it was said, "is directed to the corruption of morals: it is indict- able as dangerous reading for people without established convictions and as such must be confiscated and de- stroyed under Article 1001 of the Penal Code".33

The book finally was allowed to appear, but the hullabaloo created around it utterly confounded the author, who merely had sought to say something about a topic in physiology. In-his autobiography he writes "I was accused of proposing a Nihilist philosophy [he writes in obvious bewilderment]... Unfortunately the censorship rules of the time prevented me [from defending myself against such a charge]... such an explana- tion would have at once put an end to such misinter- pretations...".34

What had happened, of course, is that Secenov was perceived in the light of Bazarov. Far from actually being a Nihilist, he was nevertheless accused of being one under the impact of surface similarities he bore to Turgenev's fictional hero. What we get is a reverse of the process by which a living figure becomes the basis of a fictional character. Turgenev may have indeed modelled Bazarov on a young provincial doctor, as he maintained in 1868.35 Put the ultimate irony is that Secenov was in fact modelled on Bazarov.

Indiana University

NOTES

1. Valentin Kataev, Xsava zabven'ja (Moskva 1967), 170. 2. Loc.cit. 3. Cited by V.S.Pritchett, "Turgenev", The New Yorker (August 8,

1983) , 90. 4. D.S.Mirsky, "Turgenev", Critical Edition of Fathers and Sons,

ed. Ralph Matlaw (New York 1966), 249. 5. Op.cit. 250-251. 6. Loc.cit. 7. Loc.cit. 8. See: Classics in Psychology: Biographical Sketch and Other

Essays, no.tr. (New York 1973), XIX.


9. The Experimental Novel and Other Essays, tr. Belle M-Sherman (New York 19661, 1.

10. Cited by Charles Moser, Anti-Nihilism in the Russian Novel of the 1860's (The Hague 1964), 33.

11. M.N.Shaternikov, "The Life of I.M.Sechenov", in Classics in Psychology, xvii.

12. Cf. Loren Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (New York 1972), 356.

13. Shaternikov, op.cit. xvii. 14. Otcy i deti; Sobranie soc'inenij v 10-i tomach (Moskva 1961),

t.111, 178. 15. Op.cit. 182. 16. Op.cit. 186. 17. M.M.Bachtin, "Slovo v romane", voprosy literatury i estetiki

(Moskva 1975). 18. Otcy i deti, 158. 19. Loc.cit. 20. Loc.cit. 21. Op.cit. 212 22. Op.cit. 216. 23. Op.cit. 211. 24. Op.cit. 213. 25. Op.cit. 156. 26. Op.cit. 209. 27. Op.cit. 166-167. 28. Op.cit. 147. 29. Loc.cit. 30. Op.cit. 250. 31. Op.cit. 169. 32. Op.cit. 271. 33. Shaternikov, op.cit. XXIII 34. Op.cit. XXV. 35. "Apropos of Fathers and Sons", Critical Ed., op.cit. 169.

bazarov and sečenov: the role of scientific metaphor in fathers and sons

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