A Rhetoric of Presence and Absence: Tjut&chachek;ev's Ne to, &chachek;to mnite vy, priroda
Cynthia C.
Ramsey
The scholarship to date on Tjut&chachek;ev's 1836 Ne to,
&chachek;to mnite vy, priroda (Nature is not that which
you think it is) has concentrated primarily on demonstrating
that the poem is a clear example of Tjut&chachek;ev's High Romantic
views on nature. Virtually all readings agree that the poem is a
repudiation of Enlightenment beliefs regarding man and the natural
world. Man, according to the tenets of the Age of Reason, has been
created in the image of God, with God-like attributes, and has the
innate capacity to think, to feel, to love, and—perhaps most
importantly to a poet—to speak. Nature, on the other hand, is
part of a sphere which exists solely as an empty representation of
beauty, which can be studied and ultimately logically comprehended and
explained by man. Ne to, &chachek;to mnite vy, priroda,
so goes the explanation, is Tjut&chachek;ev's answer to this line of
thinking, in which he mocks, rages against, and ultimately pities
those who do not see the greater truth: that nature in fact is a force
which is alive and capable of emotion and
communication. Bux&shachek;tab (1970) and Pratt (1977 and 1984) in
particular have pointed out Schelling's strong influence on
Tjut&chachek;ev in these Romantic organicist views of his on
nature.
What has not been critically addressed in any detail is more
specifically Tjut&chachek;ev's choice of language in the poem itself,
and the even larger question of Tjut&chachek;ev's reasons for that
choice. Ne to, &chachek;to mnite vy, prioroda consists
mainly of a series of negative particles and prefixes, which build to
a climax in quantity and intensity by the end of the poem. This
overabundance of negative indicators point most towards the absence of
crucial qualities, most pointed of which are those of sound and
language, and of vision and light. In this paper, I argue that in
Ne to, &chachek;to mnite vy, priroda, Tjut&chachek;ev is
attempting to turn on its head the Enlightenment idea that humans by
definition have certain attributes and nature by definition does
not. He rejects this model of humans as filled and nature as empty,
and argues instead that it is nature which is inherently full and it
is we, the humans, who are empty if we can't appreciate that
fullness. Those things viewed by eighteenth-century philosophy as
inherently human domain, such as a soul, or freedom, Tjut&chachek;ev
argues, are in truth inherently part of the natural domain. Only by
recognizing this fullness of nature, ironically, can we therefore
become truly human.
I will show through my close reading of Ne to, &chachek;to
mnite vy, priroda how Tjut&chachek;ev presents this Romantic
paradox of humanness through a process of personification of nature on
the one hand, and de-personification of people on the other. He
continually identifies nature with those traits usually though to be
human, and de-humanizes those who are blind or deaf to this truth. I
will also demonstrate that Tjut&chachek;ev's choice of negating
modifiers when speaking on the non-initiates to his views on nature
mirror the emptiness of human characteristics in those people. This
mimetic relationship between linguistic device and foregrounding
philosophy is what I have named here as Tjut&chachek;ev's rhetoric of
presence and absence.