literature liza

  

You have to read the uploaded images and answer the questions below

****1. at least five of his/her own substantial literary critical comments based on the discussed stories. Each comment should be min. one paragraph – max. two paragraphs long; and*****

How did their social status influence the relationships between Liza and Erast? 

How successful was Karamzin in presenting their story?

What does sentimentalism a a literary movement have to do with his manner of writing? Was this story too sentimental and, perhaps, oversimplified? Or not? 

Do you think, this story can be viewed as a realistic story which can happen today? If yes, will a positive outcome be possible at all or not?

Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin

Poor Liza

Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich (1766 – 1826), is a famous Russian writer, a journalist

and a historian, the head of a literary school known as Russian sentimentalism. His first literary

experiences occurred in the beginning

of 1780s and in 1791 he became a professional writer. He

was a publisher of the first Russian literary periodical, Moscow Journal, and his first novella,

Poor Lisa, was first published in this journal in 1792. Soon after, Karamzin’s other works,

including the collections, “Aglaya” and “Aonids,” appeared From 1801 Karamzin starts

publishing another literary periodical, The European Herald. He authored a number of

sentimental novellas, including Eugene and Julia, Natalia, the Boyar Daughter, Frol Silin,

followed by a large number of poems and his famous History of Russian State, whose eight

volumes appeared in 1816.

Karamzin was an innovator, a writer who was deeply concerned with the events of his

epoch. He strove to depict a real life by ridding of the cannons of classicism prevalent on the

literature of the 18th century. A son of an impoverished Siberian landowner, Karamzin was

educated in foreign private educational establishments, subsequently going through the military

service, starting his literary career only after he has retired from the military service. He got

acquainted with such literati as Nikolai Novikov, the head of the “Printing Company,” and with

the members of his literary circle. In 1789 Karamzin traveled all over the Western Europe; this

trip has served a material for his work The Letters of a Russian Traveler. Before this work, there

were not literary works in Russian literature which described so vividly and in detail the life and

customs of the Western European nations and western culture. Karamzin describes his meetings

with European writers and cultural activists, his visits to the museums and cultural and

educational institutions, opening Europe to a Russian reader. An important feature of The Letters

of a Russian Traveler is the description of the feelings of this “sentimental traveler;” the author

considers sentimentality an important quality which a true writer should have. However,

Karamzin’s sentimentality which was partially a result of his fears and non-acceptance of the

Great French Revolution, sometimes led him away from the reality and into the unrealistic,

imaginary world of sentimental feelings. At the end of this book, Karamzin outlines the program

of his future literary activity.

Karamzin’s literary heritage had a tremendous importance for the development of

Russian literary language, colloquial speech, and a bookish jargon. He liberated Russian

language from the archaisms and borrowings from the Old Church Slavonic and Latin which

were abundant in the Russian of those days, and introduced a large number of the neologisms,

including the new synonyms of the words which never previous existed in Russian, such as

“future”, “industry”, “community/society”, etc. But already in the beginning of the 19th century

when such young literati as Zhukovsky and Pushkin were “fighting” for the implementation of

Karamzin’s literary reforms in the language and literature, Karamzin himself started to deviate

from the active literary process by immerging himself in the studies of history. According to his

own words, in 1803 he “got consecrated” to a historian who devoted the last twenty years of his

life to a grandiose project – the creation of The History of Russian State. Karamzin’s death cut

short his work on the 12th volume of The History in which the history of Russia’s “Time of

Troubles” (16th century) was being described.

Karamzin and Russian Sentimentalism

Karamzin became the most prominent representative of a new trend in Russian literature

– sentimentalism, which was especially popular in the Western Europe at the end of the 18th

century. The genres of novella (a literary work which is shorter than a novel, povest’, in Russian)

and travel notes (puteshestvie) became the most typical forms of sentimental writing in the

Russian 18th-century prose. Thus, the novella Poor Liza contains the basic features of

sentimentalism as a genre. It deals with people’s personal lives and their feelings, and

particularly, with the lives of the representatives of different social layers.

At the end of the 18th century, Russian society was shaken by two major historical

events: the peasant apprising headed by the rebellious peasant leader, a Don Cossack, Emelian

Pugachev, and the French Revolution. These events have caused a strong political oppression

within the country resulting in the change of the former values of the “enlightened aristocracy.”

A new philosophy was being born inside the Russian society. Rationalists who regarded human’s

mind as the most important tool of progress and who tried to change the world only through the

implementation of the rationalistic dogmas and notions, left a concrete human being, his feelings

and his soul outside their philosophy. A new philosophical idea has thus appeared, namely that a

human soul needs to be enlightened, to become more sensitive to the feelings, suffering and

pains of other people. Karamzin and his allies tried to proof that the path of human happiness

lied through such “new enlightening,” through the education of human feelings. According to

him, love and tenderness flowing from one person to another are turning into kindness and

mercy. “Tears flowing form the reader’s eyes, – Karamzin writes, – are always flowing from love

to kindness, nourishing the latter.”

Karamzin’s ideas became a fruitful ground for the literature of sentimentalism to which

man’s internal world was of a primary importance. At the same time, alongside with

sentimentality and sensuality, this new literature propagated strong moral values since the

conflicts among sensitive protagonists of the sentimental novels could and would often turn into

acute fights leading to a destruction of the weaker heroes.

Poor Liza

The popularity of Poor Liza has been extremely strong since the day of its publication

and during several decades. Even today it is read with interest.

The novella presents a first-person narration, and the narration can easily be identified

with the author himself who presents his own memoirs. The narrator tells about himself, about

his favorite places in Moscow which attract him the most and which he visits with pleasure, and

about the sad story of Liza. The mood and the tone of the narration are very romantic and

pastoral. Remembering peasants’ everyday life and their deep patriarchal traditions, Karamzin

concludes that “even peasant women can love” – the phrase which later became a literary and

social cliché. This highlights the problem of social inequality from a different angle, proving that

the rudeness and the lack of education is not solely a characteristic feature of the poor.

Karamzin describes the changes in the mood and feeling of Liza in detail: from the first

appearance of love to a deep disappointment which lead her to suicide. Liza had never read

sentimental novels and she had never experienced this feeling before even in her own

imagination. Because of that love sparkles in her heart right after the first meeting with Erast.

The author describes their first meeting — when Liza treats Erast to a cup of milk — with an

unusually high feelings and emotions. She falls in love immediately but together with this feeling

comes the fear: she is afraid that a thunder will kill her as if she is a criminal because “fulfillment

of all desires is the most dangerous temptation.”

Karamzin makes Erast and Liza equal as human beings as they both are the creatures

capable of high spiritual feelings. At the same time, he does not deprive them of their own

individualities: Liza remains a product of a patriarchal upbringing; she is pure, sincere, and less

protected from the bad outside influences. Her soul is open to natural impulses and she is ready

to succumb to these impulses without a hesitation. For sentimentalists, Liza has become the ideal

of a “natural human being.” Not only she is beautiful spiritually and physically but also is

capable of true and sincere love even to a person who does not deserve such love. Erast, who is

higher in his social position, cannot even be compared with Liza in his spiritual qualities. He is

incapable of disregarding social prejudices and marrying Liza. Having lost a lot of money in

gambling, he needs to marry a rich widow in order to cover his debts, and Liza, deceived and

lonely, throws herself into the pond. Human feelings are not entirely dead in Erast’s soul and

after Liza’s suicide he remains unhappy for the rest of his life, considering himself a murderer.

There are no traditional villains in this novella; there is only a regular “guy” who belongs

to the upper class. Karamzin was the first one to decipher and to describe this type of the young

aristocrat who, is a certain sense, was a predecessor of Eugene Onegin (a famous protagonist of

Aleksander Pushkin’s novel in verse with the same title) as well as of a long row of “superfluous

men” – the protagonists of a number of famous 19th-century Russian novels. Karamzin describes

Erast as a spoiled, rich young man but the one with a kind heart and a strong mind, although

weak and inconsistent by nature. Erast leads a promiscuous lifestyle, thinking only about his own

pleasures which he tries to find in the endless social gatherings but often fails. His natural

kindness makes him close to Liza but unlike her, he received an unnatural upbringing, his

dreams are artificial and lifeless, and his character is spoiled and shaky. Without trying to justify

Erast, Karamzin at the same time feels sorry about him: Erast’s vices are rooted not in his soul

but in the laws of society he is a part of. Social and material injustice separates these two young

people and becomes the reason of their destruction.

The Importance

The publication of Poor Liza resulted in a number of literary imitations, including

Izmailov’s Poor Masha, Lvov’s Alexander and Julia, Svechinsky’s The Seduced Henrietta and

many others. Different in character, these novels nevertheless can be grouped according to their

most characteristic feature – sentimentality. But already in the beginning of the 19th century the

first features of the crisis of sentimentalism became apparent as a number of low-level imitators

of Karamzin’s novella had appeared on the literary scene. Their works falsified and humiliated

the very essence of Karamzin’s sentimentalism with their false, unnatural feelings, pretence, and

poor style and language. It should be pointed out, however, that the literary cliché and a florid

language were characteristic of many works of this genre since the Russian prose was only

making its first steps, searching for its own style. It seemed to be a very difficult task for the

writers to learn how to express human feelings in writing, partially due to the absence of a well-

developed literary language. Thus, the model for expression of emotions and feelings was the

language of poetry, and that was why the features of poetic language were often applied or

directly transferred to prosaic writings. Yet, a sentimental povest’ played an important role both

in literature and society through the revival of the best humanistic values, such as faith, love and

mutual support. The influence of sentimentalism was strongly felt not only in the 19th- but also

in the 20th-century Russian literature.

For Karamzin, the countryside is a cradle of high morality, and the city is as a source of

lewdness which destroys the natural purity of the village. In accordance with the standards of the

genre, the novella’s heroes suffer constantly, expressing their feelings with the endless tears.

Karamzin makes Liza hide her sufferings from her old mother but, at the same time, he is

convinced that it is very important to give a human being an opportunity to express his/her grief

openly in order to relief his/her soul. A social conflict is presented through the philosophical

prism. On his way to the idyllic love, Erast is willing to cross social barriers but Liza has to look

at these obstacles from a very rationalistic point of view, understanding that “it is prohibited for

Erast to become her husband.”

The narrator sincerely suffers together with his heroes as if he lives together with them.

This authorial attitude been transferred to thousands of his contemporaries who became the

readers of the novella. Many were able to recognize in Karamzin’s descriptions not only the

circumstances but also of the geographical place where the action of the novella took place.

Karamzin has depicted these places so precisely and vividly that after this novella, the pond near

the historic Simonov Monastery became called “Liza’s Pond.” Moreover, several unhappy young

maidens from the high society drowned themselves to death in it. In her turn, Liza, the peasant

and the literary heroine, became a role model for those seeking true love, but naturally those

seekers did not belong to the illiterate peasantry. The name “Erast” which was very rare suddenly

became extremely popular.

Overall, from the social perspectives, Karamzin has made a significant step towards the

democratization of literature by establishing and developing the spirit of sentimentalism in

Russian literature, and by refusing to follow the strict rules and norms of classicism. Form the

linguistic perspective, he has improved Russian literary language by purifying it of archaisms

and creating a number of neologisms which are still widely used. From the literary perspective,

the author of The Poor Liza has refused to divide his heroes into the good and the bad,

particularly by showing a complex nature of the character of Erast. Karamzin has made a

significant step towards the development of Russian literature in the direction of romanticism

and, ultimately, realism which became the main literary method in the mid-19th century.