A Critic's Epitaph

...What lifted him over the formidable hurdles of the Russian language was not just the glorious freedom of reading the actual writings of the 19th-century giants, of striking through the distorting masks of translation, but the professorial opportunity to set the garbled record straight...

...The passionate curiosity and nimble erudition that he brought to his elucidation of specific works of literature were always tempered and enriched by his undivided attention to the concrete facts of art, and to the concrete-ness of the world in which art is nurtured...

...Perhaps not merely for reasons of chronology, Wilson ends A Window on Russia with a short piece on Solzhenitsyn that links the Nobel Prize winner with the Russian masters of the last century...

...Suddenly his deeply American distaste for passivity takes over, and he can stand no more of Solzhenitsyn's-or the Russians'-masochism...

...Out of this mire rose the miracle of Pushkin's poetry...

...Instead, Wilson uncovers, with the scrupulous lucidity of his exposition, "the qualities that are really there"-Pushkin's formal elegance, Chekhov's "triumphant self-confidence," Turgenev's incredibly hard-won victory over the Evil Force, and Tolstoy's humor and vitality (the atmosphere of War and Peace, Wilson was surprised to find, "was anything but bleak...

...Characteristically, Wilson began to share the surprises yielded by his study of Russian with the world at large...

...Though Wilson readily admits that Turgenev's work cannot compare in scope to Tolstoy's or Dos-toevsky's, he also persuades us that "No fiction writer can be read through with a steadier admiration...

...V. S. Pritchett charmingly remarks in a memoir of Wilson: "When he came upon the complexity of the Hungarian first person singular, he had the genuine joy of the scholar before the incorrigible difficulties of life...

...For even more interesting than the delineation of a typically Wilsonian continuum of temperament and national character is the self-portrait he triumphantly imposes on his discussion of the novelist...

...The essays of A Window on Russia brilliantly demonstrate Wilson's missionary zeal to instruct-he was didactic in the purest sense of the word...

...As Wilson points out in one of his Pushkin essays, even so fastidious a critic as Virginia Woolf believed "(1) That the Russians are formless and unkempt...

...Demolishing the nekulturnyi chestnuts about Pushkin's self-dramatizing romanticism, Wilson shows how the poet, like Mozart, was "able to express through an art that is felicitous and formal a feeling that is passionate and exquisite...

...The words, alight with Abolitionist fervor in 1971, can serve as Edmund Wilson's epitaph...

...Turgenev could feel invulnerable to her only in exile, where the "life-giving drop" of his genius, carried at such vast expense of spirit away from his reptilian homeland, was given the chance to survive...

...Wilson's marvelously close, precise examination of Turgenev's fiction is placed in intricate counterpoint to the writer's nightmare memories of Mother Russia, and the essay becomes an act of homage to Turgenev's courage and nobility, as well as to his literary greatness...

...There have been other American critics intent on placing "man's ideas and imaginings in the setting of the conditions which have shaped them," and even more academic toilers who have probed the properties of a work of art with the New Critical divining rod...

...As Wilson prophesied in 1943, in one of the earliest essays reprinted in A Window on Russia: "The comolete neglect in the West, on the part of our education, of Russian language and history has left us badly prepared to communicate with or to understand the Russia of the Revolution, which will certainly emerge from the war as one of the dominant powers of the world...

...In contrast to so many other American critics of his time, he never depended for his livelihood or reputation on an academic job, yet he seems to have regarded himself as a teacher...

...Wilson could sometimes be maddeningly notional...

...A stunning virtuoso performance (with none of the glib dazzle that phrase sometimes implies), the essay begins with a hair-raising account of Turgenev's monstrous mother, who ruled her enormous holding and thousands of serfs with unspeakable brutality...

...3) That they are crudely realistic...

...4) That they are morbid and hysterical...

...But no one has come close to Wilson's uncanny genius for balancing and combining the different kinds of literary scrutiny, for using whatever facet of knowledge, insight and intelligence was singularly appropriate to the task at hand and making of it a personal act of revelation...

...His] texture is as distinguished as his temperament...

...In an Anglo-Saxon reader, there is something that ultimately rebels against this...

...Indefatigable translators like Constance Garnett were responsible for many of the mistaken assumptions about Russian literature and character that were-and still are, for that matter-unquestioningly accepted by Western readers, but they were not the only ones...

...That Solzhenitsyn was very precisely describing a world that stifled the energy to rebel with terrible efficiency is, for my immediate purpose, something else again...

...Only Wilson could make a summary of a novel read like a novelon-and not necessarily the one he was summarizing...

...In Axel's Castle and hundreds of reviews, he taught us, as few of our professors were halfway competent to do, how to read those pioneers of literary modernism-Yeats, Joyce, Proust, Eliot, Valery-whose achievement, when Wilson published his book in 1931, was by no means taken for granted or even fully understood...

...As always, he took singular pleasure in the staggering problems that a distant tongue could present...

...When Wilson senses in Pushkin "something behind and beyond, something we can only guess at," we assent to the incontrovertible lightness of his words, as we would not if they came from a lesser critic...

...Confronted with the unrelievedly bleak worlds of Cancer Ward and The First Circle, Wilson demurs from the oppressive consistency of these chronicles of injustice...

...15.00) with a new introduction written in 1971, he embarked on a lifelong study of the human dimension of history that was eventually to take him through the Civil War, the Iroquois, French Canada, and the controversial record of the beginnings of Christianity found in the Dead Sea Scrolls...

...With all due respect to Solzhenit-syn's suffering and his indisputable gifts, Wilson feels the gorge rising...

...Even the jacket copy, obviously written before he died, speaks of Wilson in the living present tense-a poignant syntactic reminder that this instructive voice is so recently gone...

...Even when her two sons were grown, she treated them with tyrannical cruelty and tried to cheat them out of inheriting their father's estate...

...Nowhere in A Window on Russia is the dramatic richness of his gift for attention more superbly realized than in the long essay "Turgenev and the Life-Giving Drop," first published in 1957...

...In To the Finland Station (1940), his history of the idea of socialism from Michelet to Lenin, now reissued (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 590 pp...

...In one form or another she haunts Turgenev's work as a recurring force of evil riding roughshod over its helpless victims, and in his imagination Russia itself took on the coloration of her despicable inhumanity...

...In place of the conventional Turgenev-urbane and Westernized-whom we meet through the Goncourts and Henry James, Wilson offers a more troubled and authentic portrait that gives equal weight to the Western and the Russian halves of the Janus head of exile...

...Refusing to take Pushkin's melodramatic death in a duel at 38 as the dominant event of his life, Wilson carefully informs us of Pushkin's hazardous place in the autocratic Russia of the early 19th century-his freedom to write menaced by the Tsarist police, his position at court an intolerably ambivalent responsibility he could not resign, his shallow wife indifferent to the vise of apprehension and malice that held him tightly in its evil embrace...

...He was, of course, especially for the generation of American literary intellectuals that came to adulthood in the early 1940s, a profoundly influential figure...

...Russia, however, remained a crucial touchstone throughout the widely journeying years...

...2) That they are gloomy...

...5) That they are mystical...

...Such a state of things, feels the Anglo-Saxon reader, should not be allowed to exist...

...Himself undaunted by the difficulties of a language whose alphabet, structure and logic were so frustratingly foreign to a classically educated American patrician (as he was similarly undaunted, in a later decade, by the obstacles of Old Testament Hebrew), Wilson systematically began to study Russian in his 40s, after returning from a trip to the Soviet Union...

...This collection, bringing together "for the use of foreign readers" what he judged to be the best of his essays on Russian literature and the Russian language, is still warm from his touch, the last of his 25 books to be guided through its publishing stages by the man himself...