Historic Engagements with Occidental Cultures, Religions, Powers

A. Richards, I. Omidvar, A. Richards, I. Omidvar, A. Richards, I. Omidvar

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137405029
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

This book explores centuries of power relations and imperial and civilizing rhetorics, overarching themes highlighted in these infrequently heard accounts by eastern travelers to the West. Considered in depth are evolutions in mental frameworks and practices that led to the emergence of anticolonial consciousness and strategies of protest.

Part I

WESTERN AND EASTERN EUROPE

1

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, EASTERN ORTHODOXY, AND THE CRYSTAL PALACE

Roger Chapman

One cannot truly begin to understand Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) while remaining unaware that many of his literary undertakings constitute hostile reactions to the West. These reactions no doubt were heightened by his negative perceptions of the industrial exhibitions housed in and around London in 1851 and 1862. Dostoyevsky’s harsh critique of nineteenth-century globalization was in fact generated during his first tour of Western Europe, which included an eight-day visit to London at the time of the Great London Exposition of 1862. As a tourist, Dostoyevsky evidently viewed the Crystal Palace, the astonishing glass-and-iron edifice (expanded and transported to a new location) that had housed the 1851 fair, and there the novelist read meanings and sensed implications that severely contradicted his Russian values. The next year, in Russia, he published Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, in which he presented the Crystal Palace as a symbol of the controlling mechanism of utilitarian rationalism, a creation of Baal that would offer material abundance while demanding the sacrifice of spirit, autonomy, and authenticity. Dostoyevsky’s obsession with the symbol of the Crystal Palace was “henceforth to enter into everything he wrote.”¹

Dostoyevsky’s complaint against the Crystal Palace was largely a dismissal of what he viewed as an artificial approach to world unity. In addition, his reactionary critique represented a fear of the cultural hegemony he sensed would emerge from global capitalism. He regarded western industrialization, especially technological development and mass consumption, as forcing a cultural homogenization that promised brotherhood while inevitably producing atomization and alienation. A distinctive society such as Russia’s, he suggested paradoxically, actually offered the universality the technologically sophisticated nations were seeking with their crude synthetic methods. As he explained, “All Europeans try to attain one and the same goal”—that is, “the universally human ideal”—but this is impossible because of rivalry and greed, especially since the “Christian connection . . . loses its force with every day that passes.” Attempts to link nations through science, he added, had only resulted in their drifting further apart. In contrast, the Russian national character, “sharply differentiated from the European,” was “a distinct peculiarity of its own” because of its spirituality and synthesizing ability, which created a “talent for universal reconciliation, universal humanity.”² In short, the novelist saw the ideology behind the Crystal Palace as corrupting and believed that if Russia succumbed to the secular forces that had converged to create the Palace, then the Russian national character, and its inherent universalizing qualities, would be lost.

A proponent of the native soil movement (pochvennichestvo), Dostoyevsky viewed culture and geography as inseparable.³ Ever since Peter the Great (1672–1725) had introduced westernization reforms in Russia and imposed serfdom on the peasant class, Russian elites had gravitated toward western culture and consequently, in Dostoyevsky’s opinion, lost touch with the roots of their native land, in the process suffering cultural alienation. In 1861, with the emancipation of the serfs, Dostoyevsky and other similarly minded members of the intelligentsia saw the chance for Russia to experience a new beginning and to return to the “soil” (i.e., traditional Russian culture), in the process leaving the ways of the West behind. This period, however, coincided with Russia’s invasion by a new wave of “isms”—liberalism, utilitarianism, and socialism—all of which Dostoyevsky viewed as catalysts of social disintegration.⁴ He was incensed that so many of his peers were attracted to the values he parsed in the Crystal Palace.

The year before his death and almost two decades after traveling to London, Dostoyevsky gave the famous address in which he paid tribute to the memory of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin.⁵ The address highlighted Pushkin’s “prophetic significance” by arguing that he was the first major Russian writer to focus on the innate goodness of Russians, a people naturally imbued with the qualities of universal humanity. According to Dostoyevsky, Pushkin inspired many Russians to believe that their culture was distinct because it offered the spirituality the rest of the world so desperately was seeking. And spirituality, from Dostoyevsky’s perspective, was certainly more valuable than the empty promises of industrial capitalism. Dostoyevsky valued what he understood as human authenticity far above rationality. The former, in his view, was fostered most completely by the tenets of the Russian Orthodox Church, which guided and elevated Russian spiritual life and made Russia a “God-bearing” nation.⁶

Emphasizing Dostoyevsky’s complaint against the Crystal Palace as a symbol of western modernism and hubris, this chapter focuses on the novelist’s commentary on his 1862 trip to Western Europe. The remainder of the chapter examines, for the purpose of providing an historical context, the evolution of the industrial exhibitions and of Dostoyevsky’s sentiments concerning the Crystal Palace. These sentiments are compared and contrasted with those of his Russian contemporaries and of selected westerners.

A Trip to Western Europe

In two and a half months, from June to September of 1862, Dostoyevsky traveled to Berlin, Dresden, Wiesbaden, Baden-Baden, Cologne, Paris, London, Lucerne, Geneva, Genoa, Florence, Milan, Venice, and Vienna. His travel tales are not the anthropologist’s thick description but rather the views of a nationalist who had decided before packing his bags not to be impressed by anything foreign. At this time in his life he was unappreciative of museums and exhibitions; he even grew bored of the Uffizi Gallery and left without viewing its foremost canvas, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.⁷ In the midst of launching a literary comeback, he may have been consciously imitating Nikolai Gogol, who two decades earlier had an extended stay in Germany, France, and Italy while writing his greatest novel, Dead Souls (1842). Dostoyevsky affirmed Gogol’s conception of the “Russian soul” in his own writings⁸ and so may have been hoping to present Western Europe as a negative contrast to Russia. Gogol himself had remarked, “After I left Russia a great change took place in me. The [Russian] soul occupied me completely.”⁹ Likewise, Dostoyevsky remarked in an 1862 letter from Paris that he had “lost contact” with his “native soil” and that an unimaginable “feeling of solitude” had “envelope[d his] soul.”¹⁰

In his foreword to Winter Notes, Dostoyevsky’s commentary on the Cologne Bridge humorously describes outrage over the pride he imagined Cologne residents had for this structure spanning the Rhine River. When the narrator imagined that the toll collector was mocking him, he became irate:

The bridge, of course, is magnificent, and the city has a right to be proud of it, but I felt that it was too proud. Needless to say, I immediately became angry about this. Besides, the penny collector at the entrance to this wondrous bridge had absolutely no right . . . [to look] at me as if he were collecting a fine for some unknown offense I had committed. I do not know, but it seemed to me that this German was throwing his weight around. “He probably guessed that I am a foreigner and a Russian at that,” I thought. His eyes, at least, were all but declaring, “You see our bridge, miserable Russian; well, you are a worm before our bridge and before every German because you do not have such a bridge.” You will agree that this is offensive. The German, of course, never said any such thing, and perhaps it never entered his mind, but that does not matter: at the time I was so certain that this was precisely what he meant to say that I finally flew into a rage. “The devil take you,” I thought. “We invented the samovar . . . we have journals . . . we do things officers do . . . we have . . . ” In a word, I was infuriated, and, after buying a bottle of eau de cologne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   Recovering Oriental Perspectives on the West
• Part I   Western and Eastern Europe
• Part II   Northern Africa and Western Asia
• Part III   Southern Asia
• Part IV   Eastern and South-Eastern Asia
• Notes on Contributors
• Index