Reading ‘The Newcomes’ in different ways: literary and critical ‘duel’ of Chernyshevsky and Druzhinin

The essay deals with the issues of reception of English literature by Russian literary criticism; it analyzes polemically pointed evaluations of The Newcomes (1853-1855) by two leading Russian critics of the 1850s - 1860s - Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Alexander Druzhinin. To look at their reviews of the novel is worthwhile as it leads to a better understanding of both Russian literary process of the period and Russian reception of English literature in the middle of the 19th century. While examining these reviews, it is necessary to remember that this novel occupies quite an important place in the creative work of Thackeray and has many peculiarities at such levels of its structure as genre, plot, narrative, character-making, irony. The novel belongs to the after Vanity Fair period of Thackeray’s oeuvre with its own aesthetics which just in The Newcomes gets its final look. The novel pictures the life of the English upper classes with the help of chronicle and panoramic methods of plot-making; direct satire, keenest irony and invective do not work here as they work in Vanity Fair. It is precisely this ‘otherness’ of The Newcomes, in comparison with the most famous novel by Thackeray, that becomes the matter of the opposite estimates of this novel by two Russian critics: at one extreme, Chernyshevsky who, though noting some strong plot-making and narrative positions in the novel, criticizes the writer for poor conceptuality of the novel, the petty themes raised, the hero’s unimpressiveness, procrastination and slowness of the narrative; at the other extreme, the benevolent view of Druzhinin who reveals some important facets of the novel’s artistic originality. He does not assess the novel from the ideological positions which are, in many respects, the products of the first Russian ‘thaw’ after the period of political reaction of the regime of Nicholas I and which determine the position of Chernyshevsky. Since Druzhinin had been taken by Chernyshevsky as his ideological rival and the founder of ‘art for art’s sake’ conception, his review was a severe polemical answer to Druzhinin’s review published earlier. That is one of the main reasons why such a profound literary critic as Chernyshevsky did not notice or did not want to notice many merits of The Newcomes which are stressed in the essay. It is shown in the essay that, while writing his review of The Newcomes, Chernyshevsky was thinking more about Russian literary situation than Thackeray’s novel itself and the literary process in England in the middle of the 19th century.