Our Fathers in Flesh and Spirit: Intertextuality in &Chachek;exov's
With the publication of
&Chachek;exov's works, of course, belong to a different tradition,
but they nonetheless reflect the habits of their Russian
precursors. In superfluous man,
he is not unconsciously or
subconsciously invoking literary models: he quite deliberately defines
himself as a product of a literary phenomenon. When he identifies
Onegin, Pe&chachek;orin, and Bazarov as his fathers in flesh
and spirit,
he lays the blame for his own shortcomings at the
feet of these literary heroes. In other words, Laevskij's weaknesses
and faults, his inability to lead a meaningful life, result from
literature: literary antecedents define him, and, as a result, they
cripple his life. And Laevskij's foil, the zoologist and Darwinist, Von
Koren, who so fiercely ridicules the hero's claims to literary
victimhood, himself resorts to literary models in order to carry out
his vendetta against Laevskij. The duel he proposes is both an
anachronistic Romantic ritual and a glaring, conscious, and inept
parody of the duels fought by Pe&chachek;orin and Bazarov.
Ultimately, &Chachek;exov, like Pu&shachek;kin, exposes the
inability of literary models to address the true complexity of
life. But whereas Pu&shachek;kin uses Western Romantic models for his
characters to emulate, &Chachek;exov relies primarily on the Russian
phenomenon of the superfluous man,
and thus brings the
formula full circle: Turgenev and his contemporaries, in depicting
this type, strove to reflect a real phenomenon of Russian social
reality. Laevskij, ironically, sees himself not as an example of that
social reality, but rather as the product of the
This paper will draw its theoretical framework in part from studies of intertextuality (e.g. Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and others), but it will also base its discussion upon the long-standing and inescapable intertwining of social reality and art that characterized Russian literature in the nineteenth century.