Virginia Woolf “Russian Point Of View”. Critical analysis.

 

"A great literature is chiefly the product of 

inquiring minds in revolt against the 

immovable certainties of the nation."

H. L. Mencken

It’s common truth that every culture is unique.

It’s common truth that this uniqueness finds its expression in mentality, in point of view and without any doubts in literature.

And it’s common truth that people are never able to understand foreign literature to the full. But still we are persistently trying to explore another world through fiction.

Virginia Woolf in her essay ‘The Russian Point of View’ reasons upon why it is so difficult for the foreigners to understand Russian literature, what difference lies in literature of our countries and what makes them so different? She creates a profound meditation on issues of cultural relativity, the necessary opacities of translation, and the distinctive concerns of the Russian writers she found so influential for her own writing.

‘The Russian Point of View’ is a philosophical essay with elements of criticism. The author reasons about such philosophical notions as soul, truth, disparity in nature between peoples and at the same time dwells upon literary criticism of works by Russian writers. In this literary work we can distinguish certain characteristic features of the essay: the use of connectives to grasp the correlation of ideas (then, and, but, for, as, thus, moreover); emotive words (terrible catastrophe, desire, nauseating, depths of misfortune, raging fevers); similes (“Russian writers are like men deprived by an earthquake”, “like transparences with a light behind them”, “life dominates Tolstoi as the soul dominates Dostoevsky”) and metaphors (“the vessel of this perplexed liquid” , “seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts…” , “flies off at a tangent far from the truth”).  The personal pronoun “we” involves the reader into communication (“we ask” , “we have to cast about…”, we open the door ) and shows, that Woolf does not separate herself from foreigners (“Not only have we all this to separate us from Russian literature” , “We become awkward and self-conscious” ).

Woolf opens her essay by foregrounding the problem of intercultural relations, understanding. The inversion in the very first sentence serves a perfect attention grabber (“Doubtful as we frequently are…”). The greatest and the most obvious “barrier” for understanding is the difference in language.  The whole literature is “stripped of its style”  when we read it in translation. The words with negative connotations “crude”, “coarsened”, “mutilations”, “false” show the author’s disapproval of the distortions of the translation. We feel the author’s rejection through the simile “the great Russian writers are like men deprived by an earthquake or a railway accident” and the metaphor “they have lost their clothes <…> in some terrible catastrophe”. These stylistic devices emphasize that the translation involves loss in such important and subtle details, as manners or certain characteristic features of the protagonist. But the difficulty in understanding Russian literature, according to Woolf, also lies in cultural difference. There is something that the foreigner lacks: the “absence of self-consciousness, that ease and fellowship and sense of common values which make for intimacy, and sanity, and the quick give and take of familiar intercourse”. Polysyndenton (the repetition of the conjunction “and”) produces a certain rhythm and makes the reader concentrate on the qualities that separate foreigners and the Russians. But what creates Russian literature is the “deep sadness”, the “common suffering, <…> effort, <…> desire that produces the sense of brotherhood”.

As V. Woolf puts it the major subject, the chief character in Russian fiction is soul, and this is the theme of the essay. In her work she gives the evaluation of three Russian authors, the three titans of world literature: Tchekov, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Each of these writers resorts to different methods in describing a soul.

Woolf talks about Tchekov as “the most subtle and delicate analyst of human relations”  that’s why his soul is also “delicate and subtle” . And “we have to cast about in order to discover where the emphasis in these strange stories rightly comes” . The anaphoric repetition in syntactically identical structures and the lexical repetition of the word “soul” foreground the idea of the soul as the main subject of interest in Tchekov’s works (“the soul’s relation with other souls… the soul’s relation to health… the soul’s relation to goodness”, “the soul is ill; the soul is cured; the soul is not cured”).

In Dostoyevsky’s works the soul is “formless”, “confused, diffuse, tumultuous, incapable…” . This string of epithets and the sustained metaphor “seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in”  refer to the notion of contradictory and unrestrained turbulent soul that Dostoyevsky depicts. It “mingles with the souls of others”  and create the feeling of brotherhood of the Russians.

Tolstoy is “the greatest of all novelists” for Woolf. The idea of his all-embracing vision, the global perception of the world is emphasized by the convergence of stylistic devices – the hyperbole (“From his first words we can be sure…”), the parallel constructions reinforced by the anaphoric repetition (“here is a man who sees what we see, who proceeds, too, as we are accustomed to proceed, not from the inside outwards, but from the outside inwards. Here is a world <…> here is a man…”). This makes us feel that Tolstoy’s perception of life is similar to Woolf’s and even coincides with it.

To conclude, Russian soul is unique because of its versatility and contradictions, Russian authors depict it because the soul is the endless source for inspiration, the most gripping and the most mysterious subject for description. But for people with different mentality, language, for people of different culture and sensation of the world it is almost impossible to understand another culture, another world. But V. Woolf is one of those foreigners who approached to “the alien culture” and revealed its secrets. 

Mikhaylishina E.