V.P. Burenin and his literary-critical strategy at the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries: polemic with “new art” (notes on the problem)

The main objective of this article is to present a brief overview of the polemical strategy of Victor Petrovich Burenin (1841-1926), allowing us to clarify his not so unequivocal, as it may seem, role in the literary process of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (on the controversy of Burenin’s reputation as a literary critic, see, e.g.: [Фатеев 2021]). By the early 1890s, Burenin was a well-known professional critic with an already well-established certain reputation, and from the second half of the 1870s he was perceived as the mouthpiece of the newspaper “Novoe Vremya”. Since February 1876 “Novoe Vremya” was published by Alexei Sergeevich Suvorin (1834-1912), an interesting figure in his own way: journalist, writer, literary and theatrical critic, finally, the first and only Russian newspaper magnate, the creator of a genuine publishing empire, which also included the illustrated supplement to “Novoe Vremya”, the “Historical Bulletin” and the “Zemledelcheskaya Gazeta” [Agricultural Newspaper], a book publishing house with the series “Road Library” and “Cheap Library” and even its own theater, the previews of which were always given in the advertising pages of “Novoe Vremya”.

The evolution of the readership’s perception of this periodical fully mirrors the ambiguous reputation of Burenin himself as an editorial staffer and its “face”: from a print organ that disregards authority and is open to all new trends in literature and art [Баршт 2017, 174], to their total rejection and consistently derogatory assessments on the pages of the newspaper. By the turn of the century, “to be printed by Suvorin in the eyes of the ‘liberal’ public meant losing face” [Bogomolov 2018, 21]. Summarizing the evaluations given to “Novoe Vremya” in various ego-documents, criticism, journalism and also in scholarly tradition, especially in the history of Russian journalism, S.M. Sankova refers Suvorin’s newspaper to the tendency of conservative liberalism, which she understands as the ratio of two tendencies: “stability for reforms” and “reforms for stability” [Санькова 2011, 7].

In such a framework, Burenin, with his aesthetic guidelines formed as early as the 1870s under the impact of the radical criticism of the “sixties” (V.A. Zaitsev, D.I. Pisarev, N.G. Chernyshevsky and especially M.A. Antonovich), is ambivalently perceived: on the one hand, as a subversive of all the new trends in art for the sake of preserving ossified tradition, on the other - as the author of talented parodies, whose merits were recognized even by their “heroes”. Thus, on 26 April 1899, Suvorin cites in his diary an epigram reproducing the pseudonym of A.V. Amfiteatrov (“You took your surname / an Old Gentleman; / It would have been better / to call yourself a Russian boor”), and notes: “Burenin seems to have a whole volume of such inscriptions for portraits. Chekhov collected them long ago in a special notebook” [Суворин 2015, 233-234].

Art for Burenin should only serve as a complete and vivid reflection of life, and as long as modern society is saturated with cynicism, the most adequate artistic method for its depiction will, in the criticos opinion, be cynical realism. In this vein, Burenin defines the way forward for the development of art as follows: “...I feel that art in its present course must aspire to cynical realism, that this aspiration is a new move away from the aesthetic realism that has prevailed hitherto and has already completed its circle.” [Z. [Буренин В.П.] 1872, 1] The tasks of such art, according to Burenin, are a “sober and truthful” understanding of life, as well as the arousal of disgust in the reader to the “ugly facts” of reality through a premeditatedly realistic depiction of them.

This aesthetic program was in tune with the aspirations of the paper’s publisher, A.S. Suvorin, aptly dubbed by I. Solovyova and V. Shitova “the genius of everyday awareness” [Соловьева, Шитова 2017, 36]. S.M. Sankova also remarks a direct dependence of the commercial success of “Novoye Vremya” on its target audience [Санькова 2011, 25]. LB. Ignatova, examining in detail Burenin’s critical method in her dissertation, speaks directly about the innovative nature of the denoted strategy: “The foregrounding in Burenin’s aesthetics of the category of ‘average talent’ and the substantiation of the principles of literature addressed to the ‘average’, ‘mass’ reader is a phenomenon of innovation in the history of Russian literary criticism. It was in Burenin’s criticism that ‘mass literature’ was recognized not only as a fact of the literary process, but also as a necessary link in the communicative chain author - text - reader...” [Игнатова 2010, 116]. But, as K.A. Barsht notes, this innovation by Burenin sounded “a heavy dissonance” in the climate of the Silver Age, “infatuated with the philosophical searches of the Symbolists” [Баршт 2021, 116].

Hence the fundamental incapacity to accept symbolism as a “new art,” which is “more valuable than reality precisely because the aesthetic is more vividly expressed in it,” [Минц 1980, 103] with the artist carrying out a very special mission. The position which Burenin as a leading “modern” critic demonstrated in his “Critical Essays” and feuilletons (at times in a most crude and over-the-counter form) was fully reflected in the discussion of D.S. Merezhkovsky’s lecture “On the Reasons for the Decline and the New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature” which was published as a single book in 1893. Let us take a closer look at the “rejoinders” of the participants in this polemic, which reflect not only their positions and their fundamentally different views on the tasks of literature and criticism, but also their distinctive “rhetoric”. In addition, in the polemic surrounding the work of Merezhkovsky, who even in the 1900s remained, along with M. Gorky and L. Andreev, one of Burenin the critic’s favorite targets, the seemingly impossible points of convergence between the opponents are surprisingly exposed.

Concluding that criticism in relation to literature “has always been a force contra-scientific and contra-artistic” [Мережковский 1893, 25], Merezhkovsky mentions Burenin in the same row as the Narodnic critics M.A. Protopopov, A.M. Skabichevsky, and the “young dead man” A.L. Volynsky. It is noteworthy that even in this unfavorable context Burenin is by no means denied “some artistic talent” and “frank lyrical pathos”. But they go to waste, according to Merezhkovsky, because of “a striking lack of a sense of literary morality” [Мережковский 1893, 31], which does not allow the critic to judge a work of art impartially. The resulting reputation of Burenin, according to Merezhkovsky, fully captures the decline of his contemporary literature and criticism: “The literary immorality of Mr. Burenin. Burenin, who has safely celebrated his jubilee, feels on top of fame, with whom everyone, little by little, has been reconciled and whom many are even afraid, is a very significant phenomenon for our current newspaper and journal mores” [Мережковский 1893, 31-32]. A.L. Volynsky, in whom Merezhkovsky welcomed a spark of “fruitful mystical fire” [Мережковский 1893, 33], muted, however, by “senile, premature impotence” [Мережковский 1893, 32], noted with ironic regret that Merezhkovsky “killed” Burenin the critic with his speech: “I sincerely feel sorry for Burenin. I sincerely pity Burenin and the critic Burenin: “I sincerely pity Burenin. He was so passionately drumming on the heads of some mediocre writers, he covered his own critical scalpel with glory, and suddenly Merezhkovsky came, spat, blew - and there was nothing, an empty place. <...> But here came Merezhkovsky, swung and struck, and Burenin the critic died. What was left was an amusing feuilletonist, a cheerful versifier, a vaudeville buffoon with very funny, but always indecent gestures, an unbridled figurante, a dashing horseman, a shameless magician, but Burenin the critic was gone” [Волынский / Volynskiy 1896, 766]. On Volynsky’s complex relations and polemic with Merezhkovsky, see [Толстая 2013], ch. 5 “On Two Fronts: Against the Decadents and Naturalists”.

This was hardly true, however, since Burenin’s reply in the 22nd January 1893 issue of “Novoye Vremya” was an impetus for the critic to articulate his aesthetic views and his role in the literary-critical field more clearly. Thus, E.A. Andrushchenko notes that this feuilleton contains a quite serious, no longer masked parodist account of the author’s views on the role of satire [Андрущенко 2017, 77-78]. In general, Merezhkovsky anticipated the eventual reaction of Burenin to his work. In a letter to Suvorin in the autumn of 1892, he wrote bluntly: “...my article is quite sincere and bona fide, although Burenin will not like it, and even will not like it very much” [Эпистолярное наследие З.Н. Гиппиус 2018, 31]. In fact, Burenin’s response essay shows the consistent use of all the usual tools so common to him, in the words of A.A. Blok, as “the coryphaeus of newspaper profanity” [Блок 2003, 189]. Such critical techniques include typologization, the integration of the object of criticism in a series of names, for which in Burenin’s texts a certain semantic field is already fixed: “If we turn from the form of Mr. Merezhkovsky’s article to its content, we should say in general that this is the pretentious chatter of a literary adolescent who wants to say much and about much, but what and what exactly - he himself can not give himself a clear report. <...> He has entered the field of poetry as the successor to the “prematurely departed” Nadson. This prematurely departed Nadson condescendingly, “going to his grave,” blessed Mr. Merezhkovsky, and promptly declared in a Jewish newspaper that Mr. Merezhkovsky surpassed even him, Nadson, ‘in epic genre’” [Буренин 2001, 36-37] (first published: No-voe Vremya, 1893, no. 6070, 22 January (12 February), pp. 2-3). The reference here to the story, memorable to many readers, of Burenin “poisoning” a dying poet is not accidental: both Nadson and Merezhkovsky embody the type that the critic organically detests, of which he wrote in his feuilleton “A Poet’s Lesson” about Nadson: “...the little poets boldly imagine that they are big poets, and consider it their obligation to present themselves before the gaze of readers with all kinds of trifles that come out from under their prolific feathers.” [Граф Алексис Жасминов [Буренин В.П.] 1886, 2] However, even with Nadson it was far from that simple; the mechanism of mythologizing this debate, including its protagonists, is examined in detail in A.I. Reitblat’s work [Рейтблат 2005, 154-166].

Another favorite Bureninian trick is caustic mockery hidden beneath condescending praise: “...Mr. Merezhkovsky’s prose is positively better than his poetry. <...> In prose, Mr. Merezhkovsky lavishes images, comparisons, analogies, dresses up his rather wretched thoughts, like the Moscow young ladies of Griboyedov’s time, with “taffeta, velvet and haze”...” [Буренин 2001, 36] In a trusting dialogue with the reader it is convenient to tell about the artistic inferiority of the opponent: “...in this poem, however, there is something from cadet or grammar school, something that recalls the feelings and thoughts of an undergrad, or the cold and powerless tension of a literary impotent, obsessed with doggy old age” [Буренин 2001, 38], as well as presenting himself as a “benefactor” who “tried to wean him from idle verse-mongering” [Буренин 2001,40].

It is important to identify this toolkit, which by the time of the polemic we are considering has become something of a cliche recognizable to readers, because it is the most immediate, verbally expressed part of the strategy that Burenin has been developing and successfully applying in his critical writings for many years. Satire directed at the object of critical reception is one of the most crucial elements, as the author himself explicitly states in the finale of his response to Merezhkovsky’s work: “I have the courage to think that it is in these days of literary decline that critical and satirical laughter is needed even more pompous criticism, which pretends to be philosophical and serious, but in fact turns out to be only amusing and peperistic” [Буренин 2001, 41].

These are the techniques that allow us to influence the formation of a certain opinion in the reader with greater effectiveness. The “amusing feuilletonist” and “cheerful versifier,” about whom Volynsky writes, in the author’s own opinion is only a mask under which the fighter for cleansing literature from falsehood is hiding: “... I declare once and for all: not only in talent, but also in genius, no matter what field he belongs to, I respect and honor only what I find true, and all that I find false, I persecute as much as I can, have always persecuted and will persecute, even if whole choirs of angry fools would shout against me. In this persecution of falsehood, in whatever and in whomever it manifests itself, is the essence of my critical and satirical activity. And I dare to think that if I was sometimes wrong, at least not without energy and not without some feasible benefit worked in this direction...” [Буренин 1895, 2], sums up Burenin several years later.

But is this not a hidden pipeline back to Merezhkovsky, who wrote that “the highest moral significance of art is not at all in its touching moral tendencies, but in the unselfish, incorruptible truthfulness of the artist, in his fearless sincerity” [Мережковский 1893, 29]? What is common and key for both opponents, who seem to have joined in an irreconcilable polemic, is the truth as an aesthetic category. It is a different matter that Merezhkovsky and Burenin have very different understandings of this, and the “ardent mysticism” of the former does not correspond at all to the program of the latter. It is curious that in his 1913 review of Russian literature Ivanov-Razumnik noted the congruence of “two critical poles” - Burenin and Anton Krainy (i.e. Z.N. Gippius) in their views on present-day literature as “empty and worthless” [Иванов-Разумник 1913, 51]. Thus, the obvious, at first glance, polarity of judgments and mutual evaluations apparently requires a more subtle gradation in the study, and the material suggested for analysis allows us to see how competitors in one of the vivid literary polemics of the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries are presented in their own texts and in the reception of their opponents.

Translated by Alexander Markov.