Inhalt | Table of Contents | Contenu 15 Nr.| Trans | Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften | 15. Nr. | Juli 2004 | |
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1.2. Signs, Texts, Cultures.
Conviviality from a Semiotic Point of View / Buch: Das Verbindende der Kulturen | Book: The Unifying Aspects of Cultures | Livre: Les points communs des cultures |
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Danuše
Kšicová (Brno)
[BIO]
Summary: The image of the mirror capturing a person's face as well as his or her psyche is one of the archetypes found in all artistic movements, from ancient art to modernism. It draws its inspiration from the systematic research into the human mind. The critical moment when the whole of one's life is often recapitulated is the process of dying. Thus, paradoxically, death becomes the way to the truth. This is the aspect from which novellas by L.N. Tolstoy, A.P. Chekhov and Ladislav Klíma are analyzed. While Tolstoy finds his starting point in Rousseauism, Chekhov, fundamentally close to modernism, looks for beauty in art and nature. The Czech philosopher and writer Ladislav Klíma, following Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but also the eastern teaching on karma, heads from neo-Romanticism towards absurd grotesque, and thus becomes a predecessor of postmodernism.
Modernism, which draws its inspiration from the systematic research into the human mind (Sigmund Freud's teaching, later developed by C.G. Jung), accentuates the mysterious and problematic character of the human soul, damned and tormented because of its own doings. The critical moment, when the whole of one's life is often recapitulated, is the process of dying.
Existential problems have accompanied human beings since the first moment they understood their mortality. This gave them an impulse to create some of the oldest myths, those connected with the cult of fertility and the cult of the sun, as they are portrayed in countless manifestations of prehistoric art. The immortality of the species or humankind can only be secured by means of reproduction. The principles of existence were analyzed by Aristotle (cf. 1946) a long time ago, but it was much later that the representatives of the philosophy of life, especially the 20th-century existentialists, began to become interested in the connection between existence and the life of an individual. Much of what became the object of psychological research had been analyzed empirically by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, including mental defects connected with crime and punishment, and, from a slightly different point of view, by L.N. Tolstoy (1828-1910), who found the same drawbacks in relations between people from all walks of life. He is probably the most systematic of all Russian prose writers in analyzing crisis situations in marriage, from seemingly harmonious relations up to open conflicts leading to divorce, suicide or murder (War and Peace, Anna Karenina 1863-1877, The Power of Darkness, 1886, The Kreuzer Sonata, 1889). As regards the final assessment of the sense of human life staring death in the face, the most interesting are his short novels The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and Master and Man (1895), discovering how little a successful career, a high position in society or accumulated property mean in comparison with the inner sense of human existence. Only disease brings Ivan Ilyich to the realization that his life, lived according to the accepted norms, has in fact been a mistake. He finds nothing but falsehoods in everything that surrounds him: his difficult marriage, the routine of his job, the apparent friendship of his colleagues and acquaintances, and even things that have always brought him pleasure. A difficult and protracted death therefore becomes the fatal punishment. In the art of the ancient world it is symbolized by the goddess of revenge, Nemesis, who, later on, also appears in Ladislav Klíma's work. The dying Ivan Ilyich's unbearable physical suffering is multiplied by his knowledge of all his neighbors' hypocrisies. In accordance with Tolstoy's Rousseauistic belief in an ordinary sort of person, both these novellas depict the characters of countrymen whose bonds with Nature and its rhythm give them strength to perceive death as the logical end of life. But each of the novellas shows quite a different relation between the master and his servant. Ivan Ilyich, undergoing the ordeal of the gradual mortification of his organs, appreciates his young servant Gerasim's simplicity and compassion, traits which he does not find in the closest members of his family. Thus the servant becomes, paradoxically, the only person who can, at least partly, make the torture of dying less severe for him. The other novella, Master and Man, does not capture this utterly intimate relation between people from different social groups until the final scene, where the cunning businessman Vasili Andreyich is stranded in a snowstorm and lies down on his servant Nikita's body, lying stiff with cold in the sleigh, in order to save both their lives. The process of dying is described differently in the two works, as the depicted reality itself is entirely different. Ivan Ilyich's disease is protracted, so that it gives him sufficient time to solve the existential problems of his own life. His disease, which changed his entire life, came just at the moment when he had managed to achieve an optimum promotion in his office. Chances were then given to his colleagues from the law court. Tolstoy's technique of various points of view, used according to the principle of Lessing's Laokoon,(2) discovers objectively and straightforwardly the polyphony in the relationships of the deceased man's friends and relatives, for whom Ivan Ilyich's illness and death are connected with a number of unpleasant duties. Even less satisfaction is brought to Ivan Ilyich himself when he recapitulates his own life and finds out that, except for his short childhood, no remembered period of his life can bring him peace of mind. His awareness of the vanity of his seemingly successful life intensifies his mental suffering and fear of death. Quite a different situation occurs in the novella Master and Man, which depicts the unnecessary death in a snowstorm of a greedy merchant, proud of his shrewdness. In pursuit of successful business negotiations, after two warnings, he sets out on a risky journey in a night snowstorm and freezes to death. Paradoxically, his servant Nikita, who does not fear death and accepts it, though taking all necessary measures against the death of people and horses, saves himself. The cunning Vasili Andreyich, who does not reach the intellectual level of Ivan Ilyich, only calculates his profit till the last moment of his life. In this respect he resembles the sad hero Yakov from Chekhov's short story Rotchild's Violin (1894), who is haunted by the knowledge of permanent loss all his life. In addition to the financial criterion, which presses all other things into the background, there is another feature in the two works that connects them: treating one's wife with contempt. While Tolstoy's heroes Ivan Ilyich and Vasili Andreyich are at least capable of sorrowful love for their little sons, Chekhov's Yakov, called Bronza, has long forgotten that he ever had a child. He is reminded of the fact by his dying wife. Yakov speaks of his wife before the town healer as his "object". Thus in Chekhov the process of dehumanization of family relationships reaches its culmination.
What is different is the description of the process of dying. Tolstoy "alloted" the greatest martyrdom to Ivan Ilyich, who is devoted to Epicureanism body and soul. The man, who tries all his life to avoid anything unpleasant, is punished at his most sensitive spot. In his last three days he finds relief from pain in animal roar and only then does he feel pre-death reconciliation, as he no longer feels fear: "Light comes instead of death" (Tolstoy 1980: 94). And he enjoys the termination of all the suffering. At the moment of death, a similar reconciliation comes to Vasili Andreyich. In vain he tries to save himself by riding a horse: in the end it brings him back to the starting place under an overhanging rock. He is so pleased by the fact that he unexpectedly weeps for joy, looking forward to saving Nikita with his own body. The whole of his life then unfolds before him like a film. In his pre-death delirium he dreams that he himself is Nikita, that the two of them form one body. He also sees his own person, formerly called Vasili Brechunov (Prattler), in an utterly different way, as a result of his sudden wisdom. He can hear somebody calling and answers that he is coming. The last sensation Tolstoy gives him to experience is the feeling of absolute freedom. Nikita, who is dug out of the snow by village people in the morning, thinks he has died, but he in fact lives for a further twenty years and dies reconciled with the world as well as his own wife.
Social inequality, which plays a role in L.N. Tolstoy's short stories, can be compared to ethnic inequality in Rotchild's Violin by A.P. Chekhov (1860-1904). It is certainly not by coincidence that he chose Jews as the victims, as their life in Russia was no bed of roses: crisis situations at the turn of the century brought a number of pogroms in Russia. One of the Russian authors with social and national feelings who responded to the pogroms was Vladimir Korolenko with his shocking documentary House No. 13 (1905). In Chekhov's short story the social and national antipathy manifests itself in an animal form. As a good violinist, Yakov is asked to play in a Jewish orchestra, where not far from him sits flautist Rotchild, who for some reason plays all melodies, however joyful they may be, in a very sad way. Yakov comes to dislike the smell of garlic with which Rotchild is saturated, is rude to him, and causes an open conflict. Nevertheless, when Yakov's wife dies, he is sorry for not having paid any attention to her all his life, and feels so regretful that he sets out for the place at the river that his wife spoke about before her death: this is the place where they, still young, used to sit with their fair-haired girl, singing songs. At this very moment, when he feels persistent sorrow, Yakov for the first time realizes the pointlessness of a life in which people hurt each other as well as the Nature that surrounds them. All at once he knows that he had no ground for offending the flautist Rotchild, that mutual hate prevents people from real life and brings them nothing but loss. At confession he asks the priest to give his violin to Rotchild. The latter then becomes famous all over the town with the song that Yakov played during his last visit.
Death as the last chance for reconciliation with one's unsuccessful life and with people to whom one has done wrong also brings absolution to Kovrin, who suffers from mental disease and tuberculosis, in Chekhov's short story The Black Monk (1893). The hero, after two years of unhappy marriage and with a feeling of guilt towards his father-in-law (who brought him up and loved him so much that he agreed to give him his own daughter) is dying, and before his death he reads a letter written by his wife, whom he left some years before. The wind returns to him pieces of the torn bitter letter and brings him the black monk - his double, with whom he had long discussions during his illness. Kovrin starts to believe again what the monk has persuaded him to believe: that he is a genius. When Kovrin tries to contact him now, he starts spitting blood. At the moment of his death, however, he does not call for his new girlfriend, who is sleeping in the next room, but his unhappy wife Tanya, whom he has known since his childhood. The final reconciliation described in this short story is connected with the mystic character of the black monk and his whisper about the weakness of the human body, which is no longer able to serve the genius of the spirit.
A much more difficult death comes to the sensitive doctor Andrei Yefimich, who has been prematuraly retired, is left destitute and finds himself in the same Ward No. 6 (1892) where among the mentally ill he previously found the only man he could talk with on an acceptable intellectual level. The unexcited and objective tone in which Chekhov depicts a young doctor's meanness when he entices the unsuspecting doctor Andrei Yefimich into the closed ward of mentally ill people, from which there is no escape but death, increases the effectiveness of the artistic account. The scene where the doctor begs his former subordinate, the coarse warden Nikita, to allow him out for a moment, immediately precedes the doctor's stroke. As a former stoic he used to prove in his philosophical studies that in fact it does not matter in what circumstances one lives, since the end is the same for everybody; now, with his own experience, he becomes familiar with the danger of such an idea. At this moment, though, he is indifferent to everything. As always in such cases, the physician Chekhov is very accurate in depicting the clinical symptoms of the disease. The main content of the doctor's life has been reading and constant learning, and so after his stroke he can see a herd of spectacularly beautiful rushing deer he read about the previous evening. He can also see a woman's hand passing him a registered letter and hears his only friend, the postmaster Mikhail Averyanich, speak to him. A momentary reflection on the immortality of life is replaced by his realization that he does not desire any continuation of his own existence.
The belief in the immortality of the human soul changing into the form of karma, sometimes even in combination with Romanian myths of vampires, has become the basis of a number of prose works by the well-known Czech philosopher and writer Ladislav Klíma (1878-1928), who, like the poet Otokar Brezina, with whom he corresponded, had studied the Russian thinker and poet Vladimir Solovyov's work. Klíma argues with him about a number of problems. First of all, he does not agree with his interpretation of the idea of the Good, which Solovyov believes is indigenous to human beings. Unfortunately, modern research proves Klíma right. Similarly persuasive are Klíma's reflections on shame, which the Czech philosopher does not connect, as Solovyov does, with the sphere of sex, but with egoism. His proof lies in the analysis of the causes of officers' suicides when they were dishonored (cf. Arcibashevov's novel Sanin, 1907). In analyzing libido he stresses the presence of masochism and sadism, which in his view are much more powerful than is suspected nowadays. He also draws attention to the importance of laughter, which differentiates people from animals. Critically referring to Solovyov as well as to Schopenhauer, Klíma analyzes compassion as one of the pillars of morality. On the other hand, he does not believe it to be the basis of altruism, unlike reason, which in Klíma's view is the only source of virtue. A sense of reality is present in his reflections on happiness: its inseparable element is suffering, since everlasting perfection is unthinkable (cf. Klíma 1993: 119).
These ethical views are interpreted artistically in a number of Klíma's prose works. The theme of eternal damnation and new encounters of partners whose mutual love in their previous lives resulted in the torture and murder of the femme fatale, appears in his best-known prose The Famous Nemesis (1906-09, revised 1917). Sider, the main hero of this novella with a secret, is attracted by two young women he got to know in the Italian Alps. The older, aged twenty-five, is called Errata and is always dressed in red, while the younger Orea, twenty years old, dresses blue. The colors of the Virgin Mary's dress thus undergo division into two parts, and such division is repeated more than once in the text. This is most obvious with a small house under an overhanging rock, which is visited by the searching hero at one place and at another - at the mountain spa of Cortona.(3) This very house under an overhang was the scene of a crime in the hero's previous life; he pays for the crime now in his new transformation. Errata appears in two forms: as an unattainable beauty and a prostitute. She obviously feels lesbian love for her demonic sister Orea. Errata is described as more real than the mystic Orea: the latter is a widow and as a result of her mental illness is placed in a sanatorium, which is one of the venues for her meetings with Sider. It is always possible to interpret Sider's acts in two different ways: as real or hallucinatory. All the crimes for which Sider sets out on several years' journey abroad are erased in the end, because all of them were committed by someone else. Nevertheless, the damnation of guilt leads Sider to a fatal jump over a rock cleft which inevitably results in a fall. It is not until he falls on his wife's bones on a rock shelf that he is given a moment of cognition. The goddess Nemesis is satisfied at last. This final solution is presaged by the scene where the woman in blue raises a cup of hot blood to drink a toast to all-reconciling Death, Eternal Redemption and Famous Nemesis (93). Sider is told about it by an ordinary woman who, as if by miracle, survived with her children when her small house located under an overhang collapsed. As can be seen, the whole text is built on the frequent recurrence of the same scene in new variations. Even the structure of the story leads to a characteristic end, when Sider can see all his own, as well as other people's, previous lives, which are his lives at the same time. He also sees "the hurricane of Eternal Light" (116). Everything Earthly and Snow-white has disappeared in its Glow. Suffering has transformed itself into "a supertonic [...] March of Eternal Victory" (117). The neoromantic character of the Famous Nemesis is relatively unique in Klíma's fictional work. Its greater part consists of self-ironizing persiflage with strongly emphasized naturalistic details in the sphere of imaginatiom and lexis. This can be seen, e.g., in the novella What Will it Be Like after Death (1906-09, revised 1917), whose fat, dignified hero experiences a fanciful adventure after a wild drinking bout in the pub. (He and his situation remind us of the Czech philistine Martin Brousek from Svatopluk Cech's satirical short stories.) After numerous transformations into a rat and back into a human being he returns home to discover that he is being mourned for as deceased. The satirical tone of the novella is emphasized by the epilogue, where a highly positioned man appears who has recognized himself in the text and who was excluded from a political career after the text was published. Like L.N. Tolstoy's comedy The Fruits of Enlightenment (1889-90) or Alexander Blok's The Fair Show Booth (1906), Ladislav Klíma's novella parodies occultism.(4) This is indicated by a conclusion suggesting that the text has been sent to the author as a record of a spiritualistic seance. Lord Byron long ago settled an old score with the official nomenclatura and so does Klíma in his novellas now. The severest punishment which is to be inflicted in his future life on a bandit in Klíma's extensive novel The Terrible End of Fabius (1928) is the career of a university professor of philosophy. Similarly to the genre of romantic long poem, Klíma's prose works are interwoven with a number of philosophical extemporizations which show that the author follows the teachings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Voltairean free thinking, also discussed by Pushkin, is developed in Klíma's Gabrieliade (1821), which is a persiflage of the main Christian symbols. This shows that his attitude towards Christianity is as sceptical as Nietzsche's. Thus he is all the more interested in the problems of death and the afterlife. His texts are full of reflections on this subject, since it pursued him even in his personal life; he always lived as if at the point of death. Thus, e.g., his parodied Virgin Mary speaks of a posthumous existence which will be very similar to a dream; it is possible to move from it
into a distinctive dream, tied by the law and called wakefulness; our ego slides into it unknowingly. The longer is the wakefulness, the longer becomes the following series of dreams between separated "wakefulnesses"; a newborn baby who dies immediately can 'be awake" again in no more than ten years, since the afterlife dream only serves as a rest.(5)
Klíma is persuaded that
[t]he ego chain is never broken, even though any remembrance of the nearest past often disappears, but later on remembrance, syntheses and summaries reappear and they can embrace even millenia - or perhaps even a million years.
The character of the Virgin Mary - this symbol of purity and chastity - is thus degraded to the figure of a lascivous sinner only because she should become a bearer of eastern wisdom. Paradoxically, Klíma thus becomes a predecessor of postmodernism with its absolute relativism regarding values accepted for centuries, but also with its strenuous search for possible ways out. In very extreme situations, like dying and death, the sign as the mirror of the human soul changes from a simple reflecting device into a distorting mirror in a funhouse maze. It becomes a magnifying glass which, as a part of the microscope, helps to diagnose the portrayed characters. Modernism, developing the impulses of its predecessors, such as F.M. Dostoyevsky, or of apparently antipodic contemporaries, such as the world's most popular author during the first decade of the 20th century, L.N. Tolstoy, or the doctor of human souls, A.P. Chekhov, finds its heroes in extreme characters who are often mentally disturbed, as can be seen, e.g., in Valeri Bryusov's short stories and novels. An extreme position between them is held by the provocative philosopher Ladislav Klíma, whose unconventional stance places him close to his spiritual teachers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. In his writings the sign as the mirror of the soul sometimes opens into a bitter grimace which wakes the perceiver from lethargic sleep. In this respect it is an obvious prelude to the present artistic cacophony, characteristic of postmodernism.
The sign as the mirror of the soul opens a new dimension of semiotics. It describes the way to the veiled secrets of the human mind, discovered in the genial works of the world writers sooner than psychological research could corraborate it.
© Danuše Kšicová (Brno)
NOTES
(1) This paper has been worked out by support of Grant No. A9164201 of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
(2) What I mean here is the scene from Aeneas, retold by Lessing, where Helen's beauty is perceived by old men in the assembly. This indirect seeing of an object through other persons' perception multiplies the effect; cf. Lessing (1912).
(3) This seems to be a slightly changed name of the mountain resort Cortina, situated in the Dolomite Alps. Each quotation and paraphrase from The Famous Nemesis is marked here with the page where it occurs in Klíma (1967).
(4) On the significant role played by spiritism in Russia in the period of modernism, cf. Bogomolov (1999).
(5) Klíma, Ladislav. Bílá svine neboli konecné rozresení problému o vzniku krest'anství (A white sow or The final solution of the problem of the rise of Christianity). In: idem 1967: 183 and next quote 182.
REFERENCES
Aristoteles (1946). Metafysika. Praha: Jan Laichter
Bogomolov, N.A. (1999). Russkaya literatura natchala XX veka i okkul'tizm. Issledovaniya i materiali. Moscow: Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye
Klíma, Ladislav (1967). Vteriny vecnosti, Prózy, Listy, eseje, sentence (Selected Works). Praha: Odeon
- (1993). O Solovjevove etice. Praha: Lege artis + Prazská imaginace
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1912). Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie. Wien-Leipzig: P. Tempsky, G. Freytag
Tolstoy, Lev N. (1980). Povesti. Moscow: Chudozhestvennaya literatura
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