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A Russian Tarzan, or “Aping” Jocko?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Extract

The ape—the Tarzan ape—has risen to its full height and has overwhelmed us. The ape has caressed the Russian reader. The reader is captive in the ape's paws.

Andrei SoboV, “Vplenu u obez'ian” (1924)

“If one were to write a Russian Tarzan and place him entirely within present-day Russian conditions,” Viktor Shklovskii asserted in the midst of the veritable Tarzan “craze” that swept across the Soviet Union during the early 1920s, “he would probably not prove to be successful.” Long before Edgar Rice Burroughs's popular series of Tarzan novels was ever published, however, a nineteenth century Russian tale had already treated this same theme of the child who, having been raised among apes in the jungle, returns to civilization to face the dilemma of choosing between two vastly different cultures: the comfortable but corrupt society of men or the company of primitive but noble and loving beasts.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1987

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References

1. Shklovskii, Viktor, “Tarzan,” Russkii sovremennik 3 (1924): 254 Google Scholar. The epigraph is from Sobol', “V plenu u obez'ian,” in Pisateli ob iskusstve i o sebe (Moscow-Leningrad: Krug, 1924).

2. It is highly unlikely, however, that Pogorel'skii's story could have influenced Burroughs.Rudolph Altrocchi suggests other possible models for Tarzan in the essay, “Ancestors of Tarzan.” Seehis book, Sleuthing in the Stacks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1944), pp. 74–124. Burroughs himself claimed that the initial stimulus for his series of Tarzan stories was provided by the legend of Romulus and Remus as well as the story of Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books (1894–1895).See Porges, Irwin, Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1975), p. 129 Google Scholar. Aleksandr Anikst argues that Tarzan is indeed an imitation of Kipling's Mowgli story, which is in turn an animal version of the Robinsonade. See “Robinzonada,” Literalurnaia \ entsiklopediia (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1935) 9: 722. “:

3. See, for example, Passage, Charles, “Pogorel'skij, the First Russian Hoffmannist,” American Slavic and East European Review 15 (April 1956): 247264 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I

4. Pushkin was particularly enchanted by the charm of “Lafertovskaia makovnitsa.” See his 1oft-quoted remark about this tale in his letter to his brother, Pushkin, L. S., dated 27 March 1825 in JPushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: Nauka, 1979) 10: 105Google Scholar. Pogorel'skii's popular fairytale, “The Black Hen,” is examined in A. P. Babushkina's “Chernaia kuritsa Antoniia Pogorel'skogo.” See her Istoriia russkoi detskoi literatury (Moscow: Uchpedgiz, 1948), pp. 196–203.

5. See, for example: Moskovskii telegraf 20, no. 7 (1828): 358–362; Moskovskii vestnik 10, no. 14 (1828): 160–164; and Severnye tsvety na 1829god (St. Petersburg, 1828), pp. 85–93.

6. Charles Passage claims that Pogorel'skii's “romanticism is rudimentary” and his “Hoffmannismis purely external.” See “Pogorel'skij, the First Russian Hoffmannist,” p. 252. Sergei Ignatovwrites that “Hoffmann remained for Pogorel'skii alien and incomprehensible.” See “A. Pogorel'skii iE. Goffman,” Russkii filologicheskii vestnik 72, no. 3 and 4 (1914): 277. Michel Gorlin likewise denigrates Pogorel'skii's understanding of Hoffmann in his essay, “Hoffmann en Russie,” Éudes littéraires ei historiques par Michel Gorlin et Raissa Bloch-Gorlin (Paris: Bibliothèque russe de l'Institut d'étudesslaves, 1957), p. 192.

7. This view, is seconded by A. B. Botnikova, who claims that Pogorel'skii's artistic purpose was, unlike Hoffmann's, purely moralistic. See E. T. A. Gofman i russkaia literatura (pervaia polovina XIX veka): K probleme russko-nemetskikh literaturnykh sviazei (Voronezh: Izdatel'stvo Voronezhskogouniversiteta, 1977), p. 64.

8. Moskovskii telegraf 2, no. 8 (1825): 336. Pougens's tale was serialized in the followingissues of Moskovskii telegraf: chast’ 2, no. 8 (1825): 336–351; chast’ 3, no. 9 (1825): 41–59; and chast’ 3, no. 10 (1825): 134–144. The play Polevoi mentions was Jocko, ou le singe du Bresil, written byGabriel and Rochefort in 1825. See Janson, H. W., Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute of the University of London, 1952), p. 353, n. 70 Google Scholar. AnatoleFrance discusses the stage adaptation of Jocko in his “Appendice” ( “Jocko au theatre “) to Pougens, Jocko (Paris, 1881). See pp. 133–140.

9. Advertisements for this play can be found in issues of Severniaia pchela during October, November, and December 1827 (see, for example, nos. 127, 129, 130, 131, 133, 140, 142, 148, 150). According to M. A. Tur'ian, this stage adaptation was also performed in Moscow theaters in 1828. See his introductory essay, “Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo Antoniia Pogorel'skogo,” in Pogorel'skii, Izbrannoe (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1985), p. 16.

10. Sergei Ignatov, “A. Pogorel'skii i E. Goffmann,” pp. 267–268, n. 2. Somewhat more positiveevaluations of Pogorel'skii's ceuvre are provided by Nikolai Stepanov, “Zabytyi pisatel’ (AntoniiPogorel'skii)” in his Poety i prozaiki (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1960), pp. 139–159, and “Antonii Pogorel'skii” in Pogorel'skii, Dvoinik, Ui Moi vechera v Malorossii. Monastyrka (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1960), pp. 3–22; Kirpichnikov, A., “Antonii Pogorel'skii (Epizod izistorii russkogo romantizma)” in his Ocherki po istorii novoi russkoi literatury (St. Petersburg, 1896), pp. 76120 Google Scholar; Gorlenko, V., “Aleksei Alekseevich Perovskii,” Russkaia starina 21, no. 4 (1888): 109124 Google Scholar; Smaga, Józef, Antoni Pogorielski: Życie i twórczość na tie epoki (Wroclaw: Polska Akademia Nauk, 1970 Google Scholar; and A. B. Botnikova, E. T. A. Gofman i russkaia literatura, pp. 56–64.

11. A good example of this critical myopia is provided by V. A. Grikhin in his “Predislovie” (trans. M. Moore) to Russkaia romanticheskaia povest’ (konets XVHI-nachalo XIX veka), comp. V. A.Grikhin (Moscow: Russkii iazyk, 1981), where he writes: “In content and narrative style, Pogorelsky's Journey in a Stagecoach reminds one in many ways of the sentimentalists. The touching story of amonkey's attachment to a man is told here with the sensitivity and psychological insight typical ofthat school” (p. 23). A similar gaffe is committed by N. L. Stepanov, who writes that “Puteshestvie vdilizhanse” is “a sentimental narrative about the tender affection of a man for an ape.” See “AntoniiPogorel'skii,” p. 14.

12. “Today's Russian writer,” Sobol’ wrote, “is disappearing from the field of vision of the Russianreader and is disappearing not only quantitatively—in terms of number of unsold copies, butqualitatively, having ceased to be needed, required, integral, having ceased to be his own person.” See “V plenu u obez'ian,” p. 97.

13. This and other references to Jocko come from the Russian translation in Moskovskii telegraf.

14. “Preface” to Pougens, Jocko (Paris, 1881), pp. xiii, xv.

15. The theme of incest appears, for instance, in Nikolai Karamzin's The Island of Bornholm [Ostrov Borngol'ni], the Gothic tale about the guilty love between a brother and sister written in 1793by the leading exponent of sentimentalism in Russia.

16. For biographical background on Pougens, see France, “Preface” to Jocko, pp. vii–xxi

17. Kipling's Mowgli suffers a similarly painful ambivalence when he must choose between two cultures—one human and the other animal—in the Jungle Books. See Moss, Robert F., Rudyard Kipling and the Fiction of Adolescence (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially chapter 4, “Between Two Worlds: The Divided Self in Kipling's Adolescents” (pp. 107–127).

18. Pogorel'skii, Dvoinik, Hi Moi vechera v Malorossii. Monastyrka, p. 143. All further referencesto Pogorel'skii's tale are from this edition.

19. “Obzor rossiiskoi slovesnosti,” Severnye tsvety na 1829god (St. Petersburg, 1828), p. 92.

20. H. W. Janson discusses how the ape was seen in European culture as the embodiment oferotic passion. See chapter 9 (“The Sexuality of Apes “) of his book Apes and Ape Lore, pp. 261–286.In his search for “ancestors” of Burroughs's Tarzan, Altrocchi has found two stories where sexual relations occur between an ape and a human: Francesco Guazzo's Compendium maleficarum (Milan, 1608) and Sieur de Clairville's L'Amelinte (Paris, 1635). “In the first,” writes Altrocchi, “a womanwho had committed a crime is relegated to an uninhabited island where she is seduced by an ape and has two babies from him before she is rescued; in the second, with a similar situation, the ape-husband follows her into the surf and throws the baby after her, when she is rescued.” See Altrocchi's letter to Burroughs as quoted in Porges, Edgar Rice Burroughs, p. 131. The “rape-ape” theme, as well as the baby motif at tale's end in these two stories, resembles an unidentified story that Burroughs himself claims to have read once: “the story of a sailor who was shipwrecked on the Coast of Africa and whowas adopted by and consorted with great ape to such an extent that when he was rescued a she-apefollowed him into the surf and threw a baby after him” (quoted in Porges, Edgar Rice Burroughs, p. 130). It also brings to mind the French stage adaptation of Pougens's story (Jocko, oule singe du Brésil), where the she-ape rescues the small son of her master in the final scene. See Janson, Ape Lore, p. 353, n. 70.

21. “Antoni and Double,” John Mersereau observes, “function not only as raconteurs but alsoas a‘chorus, ’ commenting upon the stories themselves “; see Russian Romantic Fiction (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1983), p. 94.

22. Philip Frantz, “A. A. Perovskij (Pogorel'skij): Gentleman and Littérateur” (Ph.d. diss., Universityof Michigan, 1981), p. 49.

23. Shklovskii, in explaining the attraction Tarzan held for Russian readers, argued that “thereader loves Tarzan for the reason that he is from outside the reader's everyday life (byt) …thisprobably reflects a weariness with one's own everyday life “; see “Tarzan,” p. 254.

24. Mersereau, Russian Romantic Fiction, pp. 97–98. Mersereau's image of the Chinese-box lanternis a highly appropriate one, since Pogorel'skii himself uses it in Dvoinik—see p. 55.

25. Philip Frantz mistakenly identifies five narrators in the text, claiming that the Double's Muscovite friend hears Van der K.'s story from young R; see “A. A. Perovskij,” p. 76.

26. For a useful discussion of textual irony, see chapter 4 (“Point of View in Narrative “) of Scholes, Robert and Kellogg, Robert, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966, pp. 240282 Google Scholar.

27. The stagecoach, as a motif in European literature, is discussed by Adams, Percy G. in “The Coach Motif in Eighteenth-Century Fiction,” Modern Language Studies 8, no. 2 (1978): 1726 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as well as in his book, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983); see especially chapter 8, “Motifs: The Coach, the Inn,” pp. 213–229. Travel literature in Russia is examined in two studies: Wilson, Reuel K., The Literary Travelogue: A Comparative Study with Special Relevance to Russian Literature from Fonvizin to Pushkin (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Roboli, T., “Literatura puteshestvii,” in Russkaia proza, ed. Eikhenbaum, Boris and IuriiTynianov, (1926; reprint, The Hague: Mouton, 1963) pp. 4273 Google Scholar.

28. I have particularly in mind here the introductory chapter to book 18 of Tom Jones (“A Farewell to the Reader “), where Fielding writes: “We are now, reader, arrived at the last stage of ourlong journey. As we have therefore travelled together through so many pages, let us behave to oneanother like fellow-travellers in a stage-coach who have passed several days in the company of eachother “; see The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (New York: New American Library, 1963), p. 789.

29. Two sentimentalist travelers by coach who were especially guilty of idealizing the life theyobserved in the world around them are Shalikov, P., in his Puteshestvie v Malorossiiu (Moscow, 1803)Google Scholar and V. Izmailov, in his Puteshestvie v poludennuiu Rossiiu (St. Petersburg, 1800). In his later Novoe puteshestvie v Malorossiiu (Moscow, 1803–1804), Shalikov himself openly admits: “I wanted to see only the positive things: there are plenty of negative things every where and who has any need ofthem? … I wanted Little Russia to be an Arcadia.” See Vasil’ Sypovs'kyi, Ukraïna v rosiis'komu pys'menstvi, Zbirnyk istorychno-filolohichnogo viddilu, no. 58 (Kiev: Ukrains'ka akademiia nauk, 1928), p. 7. Pogorel'skii himself would later describe the everyday life around him in the Ukraine in a highly realistic manner in Monastyrka (1830–1833), the novel that is generally seen as a direct aesthetic response to Faddei Bulgarin's highly unrealistic depiction of Russian life in his best-selling Ivan Vyzhigin (1829). Pushkin's narrator in Puteshestvie iz Moskvy v Peterburg, significantly enough, politely declines the offer to read Bulgarin's “moral-satirical” novel during his trip, choosing instead Radishchev's Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu. See Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7: 186.

30. The image of the bridle (uzda) evoked by this figure suggests, of course, a link with thestagecoach metaphor.

31. Mersereau, Russian Romantic Fiction, pp. 98–99. Philip Frantz concurs: “The story doesexhibit features characteristic of a sentimental tale, but the work as a whole seems to be moreof a parody of the genre, rather than a representative of it,” “A. A. Perovskij,” p. 75.

32. Passage, “Pogorel'skij, the First Russian Hoffmannist,” p. 257.

33. Frantz, “A. A. Perovskij,” p. 75.

34. “Everything in Holy Russia is infected by imitativeness,” we remember Gogol “s narrator lamenting at one point in “The Overcoat” ( “Shinel',” 1842). Indeed, Iurii Lotman points outthat the Russian nobleman of this time was “like a foreigner in his own country,” reduplicating the image of western life he culled from reading works of foreign literature in “a ritualizedplay-acting of European life “; see “The Poetics of Everyday Behavior in Eighteenth-Century Russian Culture,” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, ed. Alexander D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 69–70.

35. Altrocchi, Sleuthing in the Stacks, p. 94.

36. “Tarzan,” p. 253.

37. I am quoting here from Walter Duranty's dispatch, “Russians Prefer‘Tarzan’ to Marx,” which appeared in the New York Times on 17 April 1924. I am indebted for this reference toboth Fenton, Robert W., The Big Swingers (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 133 Google Scholar, and Porges, Edgar Rice Burroughs, p. 388. According to Duranty, six of the Tarzan novelswere printed in cheap paperback editions in Soviet Russia during the 1920s; the total printingof 250, 000, he notes, proved insufficient. For contemporary Soviet views on the reception ofTarzan in the Soviet Union, see the essays by Sobol’ and Shklovskii cited earlier. For these twosources, I am indebted to the anonymous reader for Slavic Review, who suggested them to me.