Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Number 48: September 2004

Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Number 48: September 2004

On The Original Reception of Kierkegaard in Russia, 1880s-90s

Darya Loungina

Philosophy Faculty

Institute of History and Theory of World Culture

Moscow University

The name of Søren Kierkegaard first reached Russia in 1878, in a letter[i] received by Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov from his longtime correspondent Peter Emmanuel Hansen. Hansen was born in Copenhagen (1846), but in 1871 his fortunes brought him to Omsk, Siberia, to serve as head of a telegraph school. In his spare time, Hansen worked on translations. No matter how far away he was from Denmark, the figure of Søren Kierkegaard lingered in Hansen’s memory. Mind you, this was not Kierkegaard’s actual image, but was rather the mental picture passed on to Hansen by friends, actors at the Royal Theatre, who had known Kierkegaard personally.

Goncharov praised Kierkegaard effusively to his friend Leo Tolstoy, whose “The Death of Ivan Illyitch” a spellbound Hansen translated into Danish. It was for Tolstoy’s sake, ultimately, that Hansen first rendered Kierkegaard into Russian. By 1917, when Hansen had to leave Russia and return to Copenhagen, he had translated eleven separate works of Kierkegaard. Several of these were ready for publication by 1885:

1. Parts of In Vino Veritas (in a manuscript preserved in Tolstoy’s private library)

2. Parts of ”The Immediate Erotic Stages or The Musical-Erotic” (titled by Hansen Don Juan in Music and Literature;

3. Selected Journal entries from the period of The Corsair affair (1847), also translated for Tolstoy[ii];

4. For Self-Examination/Judge for Yourself!: though in 1885 Hansen informed Tolstoy that he had translated these texts, there is no evidence that Tolstoy ever received the translations.

Hansen published the following Kierkegaard selections:

5) “Equilibrium Between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Composition of Personality”—a complete translation, titled by Hansen The Harmonious Development of the Aesthetic and the Ethical in a Human Personality[iii];

6) “Diapsalmata” (titled An Aesthete’s Aphorisms[iv]);

7) The Seducer’s Diary.

The above three texts were collected by Hansen in an anthology entitled Pleasure and Debt[v].

In addition, four incomplete translations remain in the Hansen family archive in St. Petersburg:

8) Repetition, completed and published in my 1997 edition;

9) a highly abridged translation of Fear and Trembling in 60 pages, published in 1982, in New York, by Hansen’s direct descendant Sergey Kozhevnikov;

10) fragments from Guilty?/Not Guilty?;

11) fragments from “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage.”

This accounts for Kierkegaard’s initial, one might say unbiased, reception in Russia. By the time Jurgis Baltrushajtis’s translations of “Diapsalmata” and “The Unhappiest Man” appeared (1908), Kierkegaard had already been classified as “modernistic.” In general, 19^th-century Russian thought had an adoptive character, defining itself around the great names of the Western world, such as Schelling, Hegel and Marx. Later Leo Shestov would try to add the name of Kierkegaard to this cadre.

The responses to the first Russian translations of Kierkegaard were both few and superficial. Only five critiques appeared, and even by the rather low journalistic standards of the day, these were almost comically inept. The earliest critics did not trouble themselves with such details as Hansen’s warnings about Kierkegaard’s indirect method of communication; rather, they simply refused to take Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms seriously. There are a variety of reasons for this literary blindness. The first respondent, Professor Timophey Ivanovich Butkevich[vi] of the Kharkov Theological Seminary, made no secret of the fact that his sole preoccupation was saving souls. Fusing Judge William and SK, he informed his readers that as a judge, married man, and a respectable parishioner, Kierkegaard “preached that good intentions and deeds were the only road to salvation.”

A writer for the journal Russkoye Bogatstvo[vii] [“The Russian Welfare”] read and commented upon both “Equilibrium” and “The Seducer’s Diary.” In his review, this journalist groped for an understanding of Kierkegaard’s apparent duplicity. The respondent decided that Kierkegaard could be identified with Judge William, “a common German burgher… very neat, very tidy and moderate, self-satisfied, well-nourished and loyal,” but a hypocrite, since it must have taken a very two-faced preacher to set people right in such a conniving way. As in the case of Butkevich’s reading, this reviewer wrote as if indifferent to the fact that “Either/Or” is a literary work, not just a complicated attempt at moral edification for the public benefit.

The remaining responses were inspired not by Hansen’s translations but by a broader interest in the figure of Kierkegaard, who was quickly winning popularity in Europe. Although Hansen’s biographical article on SK for the famous Brockhaus-Efron Encyclopedia was available, the second group of Russian journalists chose to ignore it and drew instead upon the French Revue de Paris and Nouvelle Revue. Despite their use of common sources, these writers reached diametrically opposed conclusions about Kierkegaard.

In the conservative journal Russkiy Vestnik, Kierkegaard was described as the spiritual father of both Henrik Ibsen and modernism, the latter being marked by “artificiality, pretentiousness and mannerism.” The author dismissed modernism as dangerously decadent and described Kierkegaard as psychologically disturbed and good only for making his readers feel “like fish out of water.”

The Odesskiye Novosti correspondent Isaak Vladimirovich Shklovskiy was a former “Narodnaya Volya” terrorist group member and prisoner, who had been exiled to Odessa. Shklovskiy, wrote under the pseudonym Dioneo, and sympathized with Kierkegaard because of his scandalous reputation. He liked Kierkegaard’s eccentricity, which he classified under the rubric “the cult of passions and the romanticism of the soul.” Shklovskiy penned the only favorable review of Kierkegaard during this time.

The third review which was as comically superficial as the rest, came from the hand of Boris Osipovich Effrusi, editor of the entertainment section of Mir Bozhiy. Effrusi registered his views on Kierkegaard between articles on the status of women-workers in Great Britain and the spread of infectious diseases. The author regarded Kierkegaard as a mere phenomenon to be observed with a naturalist’s eye; he did not offer any evaluation of the Danish writer. Together, these two groups make up the first wave of Kierkegaard’s reception in Russia.

Almost simultaneous with these journalists, there appeared another cadre of thinkers better equipped to understand Kierkegaard. Included in this group were Konstantin Dmitrievich Kavelin, who immediately recognized in Kierkegaard “a writer of genius,” and who tried to help Hansen get his first translations published in the Vestnik Yevropy. There was also Nikolay Nikolaevich Strakhov. Last but not least, there was Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, whom one would reasonably expect to have fully grasped Kierkegaard’s value. Tolstoy, however, could only appreciate like-minded thinkers. By the time he encountered Kierkegaard, the famous author was consumed by his own quest and, because he could not assimilate Kierkegaard into his own project, he became rather dismissive of him. Tolstoy only took notice of Kierkegaard after Hansen promised to retranslate For Self-Examination “in conformity with the spiritual interests of the Russian people.” Tolstoy then recommended Hansen to his publisher, Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov; their negotiations reached a deadlock, however, when Hansen refused to follow Tolstoy’s recommendations about making Kierkegaard more accessible. Hansen never wrote a popular book on Kierkegaard, though Tolstoy believed such a propaedeutic was necessary because “Kierkegaard did not make his great and often brilliant and beautiful thoughts clear to the reader,” since “his speech was obscure.”[viii] Kavelin similarly advised Hansen to write a book on Kierkegaard, warning that “otherwise, for the Russian readers ignorant of German philosophy, to say nothing of the Danish, the subtle discourse of the Danish writer is very likely to disappear without a trace.”[ix] Using even stronger language, Strakhov complained in an 1890 letter to Tolstoy that “To read him [Kierkegaard in Hansen’s translation - D.L.] was beyond my powers. So I got the book in German - I thought it might help, but it did not! The translator, his great admirer, also confessed in the Preface that he would not guarantee that he had understood everything right. But how could it happen that such a dark writer could win such fame and find so many followers?” [x]

A more complete bibliography of the pre-revolutionary publications would contain a few more articles by authors whose names are now forgotten. Such a list would include Nikolay Alexandrovich Yegorov, an employee of the Russian Orthodox Church’s mission in Copenhagen, whose article was issued in 1909 in “The Orthodox Encyclopedia of Theology”[xi]. Karl Friedrich Tiander, Professor at the Helsingfors (Helsinki) University, also wrote articles on Kierkegaard for the Encyclopedia of Granat Bros. and The New Encyclopedia[xii]. And then there was Mikhail Vladimirovich Odintsov’s report on Kierkegaard in “The Philosophy of the Religious Act”[xiii]—a very well-researched essay bristling with references to Danish sources. Such secondary works belonged to a new, more scholarly epoch of the Russian reception, an epoch made possible by the sources and criticism first available at the start of the last century. Scholars of this period considered it their duty to read Kierkegaard correctly. Yet their predecessors—the first-rate Russian thinkers of the nineteenth century, including Tolstoy—had no one check their egregious misreadings. Nikolay Strakhov asks, “How could it happen that such a dark writer could win such fame and find so many followers?” The answer is plain-such darkness is not an obstacle to fascination. In truth, Strakhov simply could not imagine a serious authgor without a following. In the 1890s he became an unofficial chief of Russkoye Bogatstvo, a highly influential periodical which published the first serious review of Hansen’s translations.

I think that Tolstoy’s deafness to Kierkegaard is the most interesting fact to be faced in trying to fathom the Russian reception. Tolstoy was drawn towards moralizing, whereas Kierkegaard was primarily interested in theology and philosophy. Hence Tolstoy, in his edifying pieces, appears less amenable to philosophical examination than Kierkegaard. This is obvious, for example, when we think of Judge William’s “Equilibrium between the Aesthetic and the Ethical,” Johannes the Seducer’s shadow constantly looms before our eyes, making our choice easier—or rather, more difficult. In contrast, Tolstoy disturbs us both by his use of rationalization and clumsy preaching, but also, and even more, by the fact that his edifying writings prove so effective, as they were for Berdyaev, Florovsky, and for many other Russian thinkers. The latter tried to explain this away by making thin excuses for the “rationality” and “nihilism of Tolstoy” (Berdyaev[xiv]), “only a writer, who fell into the poor and scant experimentation of the new projects” (Rozanov[xv]), a writer “who is condemned to separate art from thinking” (Gilyarov-Platonov[xvi]). However, when reading Tolstoy, this sense of moral constraint vanishes, since for Tolstoy the Whole of the world (“Peace”) lies before him, in all its chaos, and is present everywhere, including in his moral preaching. Yet when reduced to direct slogans, Tolstoy’s preaching startled his intellectual followers as poor and abstract.

Tolstoy nonetheless declared that chaos is a necessary part of life: salvation, for him, cannot always be separated from it. This explains his suspicious attitude to art, and his almost knee jerk approval of anything that seemed guileless in a human being. For this reason, Tolstoy was sympathetic to Kierkegaard: “Both of them [Tolstoy here responds to Kierkegaard and Bjørnson - D.L.], being different in the genre, have the main quality of the writer - sincerity, ardor, seriousness. They both think seriously and express what they think.”[xvii]

Judging from his marginal notes , Tolstoy only read Kierkegaard’s 1847 journals. These journal entries were what might be termed “direct communications” and Tolstoy interpreted them as if they had been penned in his favorite Buddhist-Schopenhauerian didactic style. Oddly enough, Tolstoy went so far as to score these readings on a numerical scale calibrated to his level of agreement with the text.

Tolstoy’s evaluation of people and thinkers is a separate question entirely. At first glance, Tolstoy’s reaction to Kierkegaard was slightly condescending: he considered him “young and therefore too perky.”[xviii] Yet in order to understand Tolstoy as a possible reader of Kierkegaard—assuming that he had read all the material suggested to him by Hansen—we should take into account the form of his chary esteem: as edifying and clear as in all his writings, particularly his vivid depiction of characters in his famous novels.

Kierkegaard’s relation to people and thinkers, on the contrary, was indirect in form, ironic, and open to a variety of interpretations, ready to embrace all possible limits of existence and to share the drama of the ironic duplicity of reception with the reader. In some cases, Kierkegaard’s evaluations are philosophical judgments on existence communicated in a literary way. As Georg Brandes wrote of Kierkegaard, “No author in our literature has reached deeper into the human heart’s abyss, no one has felt more deeply, thought more sharply or has taken in higher flight in his enthusiasm for the ideals of purity and truth.”[xix] I suggest that Kierkegaard initiated the new, ethical turn of European philosophy. In so doing, he pointed to fresh “ideals of purity and truth,” to new horizons of human morality.

For Tolstoy, on the contrary, such an interweaving of the aesthetic and ethico-religious perspectives is not something to be elaborated in a philosophically subjective way. As Vasiliy Rozanov wrote of Tolstoy, “He guesses that life certainly is very far from the ideal and “the heaven”, but it is still precious by the fact that we all live with it, and it consists of such pillars as that Vronskyi - a stupid, principled, solid fellow who never reasons…What a wonder! A genius writer is creating stupidity as zealously as God was creating the man.”[xx] The ideological gap between Tolstoy and Kierkegaard is too wide to permit further speculation. If only they had both preached morality directly, one could perhaps find a similarities between them; but they did not. A potentially successful mode of comparison would look for the moral and religious messages inscribed in their “left-hand” authorship. In these writings, the preaching is communicated indirectly and always against the kind of rich background of feelings and reflections which force a person to argue with himself, and—sometimes—to find a way out.