Russia, Poland and the West by W. LednickiReview by: L. R. LewitterThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 33, No. 80 (Dec., 1954), pp. 270-273Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4204638 .

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270 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

The value of such 'precision' is doubtful. And, unfortunately, one can

quote many examples of this kind; so much so that it is not safe to use the textbook without constant reference to some authoritative modern

Russian dictionary. Frequently the examples do not sufficiently illustrate a particular state?

ment, either because they are not numerous enough or because they are taken from one source only. Thus, the syntactic bases of scientific writing are illustrated from the works of Pavlov alone, although it should first be

proved that his style is typical of the writings of Russian scientists (?? 250- 260).

The examples given by the author are not always admirable in style (viz. the awkwardly constructed sentence from Pavlov and a flowery passage from Leonov on pp. 180 and 186 respectively). The author's own

style is far from irreproachable. See such expressions as C03,a;ai0T Sojiee

KOMnaKTHyio rpynny npe^MeTa c ero onpeftejieHHeM (p. 255), or

HeojKHftaHHOCTB, BnenaTjieHHH, HaSeraBiirax Ha npoesraaiomero no MocKBe nyTemecTBeHHHKa (p. 238), and many others.

Some theses advanced by the author are debatable, e.g. that 'content is

determined by form' (p. 182), or that 'both lyric and publicistic writing' are 'an idealisation of reality' (p. 84). Blok's poem 'The Scythians' is

classified as 'publicism' (p. 118). This work is particularly weak in its classification of stylistic phenomena.

It is very difficult to see what principle is adopted in making such classi?

fications. The attributes by which groupings are made are sometimes inessential (? 39, ? 40, ? 45, and ? 46) or even contradictory to the basic divisions (?? 35 and 36).

No bibliography is provided, and the footnotes indicating borrowings are incomplete (e.g. pp. 251-8 are strongly influenced by the corres?

ponding section in the 'Russian Syntax' by A. M. Peshkovsky, to whom no

acknowledgement is made and whose clarity and precision of style are not

preserved). The book is not without some merit. There are linguistic observations

which are of interest. One should particularly note ?? 166-224 on the tenses of the verb, ??340-9 on impersonal constructions, and ??452-79 on predicative constructions. But the potentially valuable content is

obscured to such an extent by vagueness and inaccuracy that the work defeats its own purpose as it stands and will require substantial revision before it appears in a new edition.

Melbourne, Victoria Zinaida Uglitsky

Russia, Poland and the West. By W. Lednicki. Hutchinson & Co., London,

J954- 419 Pages-

Professor Lednigki's new book constitutes the sum of his researches into

Russo-Polish literary relations in the 19th century and after, carried out since the beginning of the late war. For bringing out this handsomely illustrated survey of a field that lies off the beaten track of literary history

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REVIEWS 271

and criticism, the publishers deserve the gratitude of all students of

European literature?a feeling which would be unqualified, had it been

possible to include in this book Professor Lednicki's important and now

practically inaccessible essay on 'The Bronze Horseman' and to check the

proofs with even greater care.

Russia, Poland and the West deals with the work of Pushkin, Chaadayev, Dostoyevsky, Blok and, on the Polish side, chiefly with that of Mickiewicz, but it also contains valuable digressions on such diverse topics as?to mention only a few?Lermontov's reaction to Chaadayev's Lettre philo- sophique expressed in the poem Duma, the sincerity of Tyutchev's 'To the

Decembrists', the descent of Dostoyevsky's Man from the Underground from Turgenev's 'Diary of a Superfluous Man', and Pushkin's 'The Shot' and Dostoyevsky's attitude to Belinsky. Professor Lednicki believes that the

'Legend of the Grand Inquisitor' was inspired wholly or in part by Belinsky's 'Letter to Gogol", the common factor between the two being the gulf that is alleged to yawn between Christ and the Church.

In his exploration Professor Lednicki is guided by the assumption that Poland is 'an outpost of the West' and its corollary that the local Russo- Polish conflict epitomises the global war of ideas between East and West. His main interest is therefore of an historical kind and the aesthetic ques? tion to which it gives rise, 'What is the "creative power" of such a con? flict?' is treated only incidentally. The answer to it will of course depend on the extent to which the reader feels convinced that Dostoyevsky owes to Mickiewicz his notion of the illusory aspect of St Petersburg, Lyamshin's musical narrative of the Franco-Prussian war (in Besy), the theme of self- deification in 'Pro and Contra' (cf. 'The Brothers Karamazov'), and that Mickiewicz and Chaadayev knew each other or were at least familiar with and influenced each other's thought.

But the comparative method of criticism, of which Professor Lednicki himself says that it proves little and seldom leads to any concrete results, is not the foundation on which the book rests; the monument which he has erected to his erudition does not stand or fall by our acceptance or rejection of the conclusions suggested by the various parallels, many of them aston?

ishingly close. As well as being stimulating, as any skilful display of deduction is bound to be, such juxtapositions widen the reader's appre? ciation of the authors and works concerned, but the intrinsic value of the

pages which they enliven is that of so many signposts pointing to Poland as a rewarding subject of study for anyone wishing to deepen his under?

standing of Russia. Professor Lednicki's literary suspicion is contagious. Having laid aside

his book we cannot help smelling the Russian rat in every line written by a Polish author (and vice versa). Thus the letter which Krasinski wrote to his father in a moment of despair on 26 January 1836 (J. Kallenbach, Z> Krasinski (1812-38), vol. II, pp. 290-7) might well be taken for an

adaptation of the views put forward in Chaadayev's Lettre philosophique to the specific circumstances of Poland, if it were not for the fact that the writer does not mention Chaadayev and lays the blame for his distress on German Romantic philosophy.

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272 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

A large part of Russia, Poland and the West is devoted to Dostoyevsky's antipathy for peoples other than his own?an emotional attitude ranging from mocking contempt for the French to a rabid hatred of the Poles, as

shown among other instances in 'The Brothers Karamazov' (Book VI,

Chap. 7). It is perhaps worth noting in this connection that Grushen'ka's Polish seducer, the short fat pan, derives a symbolic significance from not

being mentioned by name at all and from being modelled on one

Bern, the most objectionable of Dostoyevsky's Polish prison-mates in Siberia. It is his companion, the tall lean pan Wroblewski, to whom the author's notes refer as 'Musialowicz' (pp. 284-6). 'How are we to recon? cile his hatred of so many nations and confessions, his animosity for so

many peoples with his preaching of love and compassion?' asks Professor Lednicki. How indeed? Dostoyevsky speaks with two voices?the voice of God and the voice of Satan: judged by his fruits he must be regarded as a false prophet. All that can be said in his defence is that he was aware of his own ambivalence and made no secret of it; the title of great Christian thinker was conferred upon him posthumously by the critics. On one

point however the present reviewer begs to differ from Professor Lednicki. In view of the mutilation perpetrated by the censors on 'Letters from the

Underground' and pointed out by Mochul'sky: ?CBHHbH neH3opa, TaM, r#e h rjiyMHJicfl Haft BeeM h HHor#a 6oroxyjibCTBOBaji ,o;jih Bimy

? to

nponymeHO, a rvje H3 Bcero DToro h Bbreeji noTpeSHOCTb Bepbi b XpncTa ? to 3anpemeH0.? (Dostoyevsky, 1947, p. 212), a Christian interpreta? tion of the drama of Raskol'nikov in 'Crime and Punishment' does not, in fact, become impossible, even if it remains unconvincing (p. 227).

The last chapter of Russia, Poland and the West discusses a subject hitherto

completely neglected by the critics?the Polish motifs of Blok's unfinished

Vozmezdiye, a poem, as Professor Lednicki points out, rooted in Yevgeny Onegin and Pushkin's 'retort' to Mickiewicz, 'The Bronze Horseman' (the

image of Pan Moroz) and perhaps also connected with two Polish works which also treat the subject of retribution, viz. Mickiewicz's Konrad Wallenrod and Krasiiiski's Irydion. The living link between Blok and 'Polish Romanticism and Polish Catholic mysticism', Professor Lednicki

suggests, was a Polish friend of the poet's named Rozwadowski. It might be observed in passing that this debt, contracted by Russian poetry, was cancelled by Tuwim's appropriation not only of the metre of Onegin but also of the barely adumbrated plot of Vozmezdiye for his Kwiaty polskie.

Professor Lednicki calls Blok's 'Warsaw poem', 'in its highest symbolic significance, a singular retort not only to Pushkin's anti-Polish odes and "The Bronze Horseman" but also to Dostoyevsky'. Is such a view of Blok

wholly justified? If in Vozmezdiye he 'showed himself closer to the Polish notion of Christianity and to the national idea of its Polish style [i.e. "the Christianisation of politics and international relations"] than to the

Christianity and "universalism" of Dostoyevsky, "the obscurantist", to

quote Blok', he went to the other extreme in Skify and in the blasphemous Dvenadtsat'. His vacillations, which do not detract from his greatness as a

poet, would indeed appear to have much in common with the inconsis?

tency of Dostoyevsky, whose very ambivalence makes him the most pene-

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REVIEWS 273

trating of all literary psychologists. Both are manifestations of the same

phenomenon:

POCCHH?C(|)HHKC. JlHKyH H CK0p6fl, H oSjiHBaacB nepHoii npoBBio, OHa i\jih,o,ht, tjih^ht, tjih^ht b Te6n H C HeHaBHCTBK), h c jiioSobbk).

Cambridge L. R. Lewitter

La position de I'adjectif epithete en vieux russe. By Maria Widnas. Commenta- tiones Humanarum Litterarum, XVIII. 2. Societas Scientiarum

Fennica, Helsingfors, 1953. 197 pages.

Considered as a whole, Slavonic word-order has been rather a neglected domain of research. Since Erich Berneker's Die Wortfolge in den slavischen

Sprachen (Berlin, 1900), no special study has appeared on this subject. Miss Widnas's work also deals only with a detail of Russian word-order, the position of the adjective in relation to the substantive it qualifies.

Everyone who is interested in Slavonic has noticed that in modern

Russian, as in most other Slavonic languages and also in English, the place of the attributive adjective is usually before the substantive to which it

belongs, e.g. pyccKHH H3BIK, HepHoe Mope (cf. 'the Russian language, the Black Sea'). However, in Polish the word-order is just the opposite: the

foregoing examples would be in Polish jgzyk rosyjski, Morze Czarne. It is also

interesting that modern Russian is here the opposite of modern French, as

clearly appears from the following passage from Pushkin's IlHKOBaH ^aMa (Dame Pique, Chapter VI) and its French translation: ?fH1Be HenoftBHJKHBie Hften He MoryT BMecTe cymeeTBOBaTB b npaBCTBeHHon ITpupoae, TaK

me, Kan #Ba Tejia He MoryT bt> (|)H3HqecK0M MHpe 3aHHMaTB o,o;ho h to >Ke MeeTO.??'Deux idees fixes ne peuvent exister a la fois dans le monde moral de meme que dans le monde physique, deux corps ne peuvent occuper a la fois la meme place'.

In Old Russian, however, the postposition of the adjective was very frequent, and therefore Berneker was inclined to believe that it was normal in Old Russian, although he declared himself unable to explain why modern Russian usage was just the contrary of this. Recently S. P.

Obnorsky has expressed the opinion that some Old Russian texts (Russkaya Pravda, Poucheniye Vladimira Monomakha, Moleniye Daniila Zatochnika and Slovo 0 polku Igoreve) being of a purer Russian character than, for instance, the chronicles, put the attributive adjective more frequently before the substantive than the chronicles do, although both were written in the oldest period of Russian literature. Accumulating a very large number of

examples, our authoress has now succeeded in proving that the adjective was put after the substantive in the chronicles under the influence of the New Testament as translated from Greek into Old Church Slavonic. As the oldest Russian legal codex Russkaya Pravda was not subject to the influence of the New Testament, it shows a purely Russian syntax and

puts the adjective before the substantive as do the writs, which Miss

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