Towards Natural-Philosophical Ecocriticism

Towards Natural-Philosophical Ecocriticism Presentation at ASEEES 2016, 17 Nov 2016, Washington, D.C. Mika Perkiömäki, University of Tampere

Introduction In 1976, the journal Nash sovremennik published a series of interconnected stories by a famous Soviet village prose author Viktor Astafiev. These 12 stories were set on and around the Yenisei River, and soon they were published as one book with the title Car’-ryba (Queen Fish). Many literary scholars and critics immediately saw the work’s connection to the natural-philosophical tradition. Felix Kuznetsov (1976), wrote in Literaturnaia Rossiia that this book is: “…philosophical, or rather (to update and modernize the old terminology) – naturalphilosophical prose, whose univocal and explicit interpretation impoverishes and, in fact, destroys the book.” (translation and italics mine, MP) «…философской, вернее (если допустимо переосмысление и осовременивание старинных терминов) – натурфилософской прозы, однозначное, однолинейное истолкование которой обедняет и, по сути дела, убивает ее» Clearly, the critic was not happy about Astafiev’s depictions of nature. Nevertheless, he was the first to use the term natural-philosophical prose. According to Alfiia Smirnova (2009, 42), the natural-philosophical idea of Astafiev is that humankind’s relationship to nature should not be based on the consumerist approach so typical of modernity. Instead, the model should be taken from the times when people did not yet separate themselves from nature. The main message of Queen Fish is thus, from a natural-philosophical standpoint, that humankind is a part of nature, and this fact is defined by nature itself. Nature dictates the rules, not humankind. In my own ecocritical reading of the river in Queen Fish (Perkiömäki 2017), I see the Yenisei as the invaluable source of all life, but at the same time as a cruel, punishing power. These two opposing features paint a picture of the river as something that “is agentic—it acts, and those actions have consequences for both the human and the non-human world,” to quote Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s (2008: 7) description of nature as understood by material feminism.

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For an ecocritic, Astafiev’s river is not only a univocal, explicitly positive presence, but also an enigmatic, active Other. The natural-philosophical readings of Queen Fish often underline the strong sense of the unity of culture and nature in the work. This is true, but this picture is not complete, because the river’s agency makes it an independent actor. It is also significant that the actions of both humans and the river have implications for the life of both: “The human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world,” as Alaimo (2008: 238) puts it. My example shows how a natural-philosophical reading and an ecocritical reading enrich each other. The natural-philosophical readings of Queen Fish have shed light to the anthropocentric point of view. They conclude that because humankind is part of nature, there is a sense of unity of nature and culture. My ecocritical reading sees also the other side of the coin: despite the sense of unity, certain dualisms that separate nature from culture are also present. The river, which is an integral part of both nature and culture, connects these worlds.

Another ecocritical rhizome Ecocriticism has evolved into a widespread, differentiated, and transnationally dynamic (Zapf 2016, 1) field of research. Even so, it is still very much interested in representations of nature and the relationship of culture and nature. These are the same questions that literary research in Russia has been studying for a long time from the point of view of Naturphilosophie. My aim is to lay the basis for a synthesis of these two distinct lines of research. One of my goals is to spread ecocritical ideas in Russia, but an even more important objective is to enrich ecocritical research with the views and concepts used by Russian literary scholars. Ecocriticism and Naturphilosophie are not two parallel concepts. Ecocriticism was formed specifically as a research paradigm for literary and cultural studies, and it is more a perspective for scholars. Naturphilosophie, instead, is a philosophical tradition that has affected the oeuvre of certain writers, and therefore it is more a point of view for authors. When the so-called third wave of ecocriticism emerged in the late 2000s, its range of authors grew to include diverse academic voices from around the world. Since its Anglo-Saxon beginnings, ecocriticism has become considerably more multicultural and transnational (see e.g. Adamson & Slovic 2009).

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Speaking in the terms of Hubert Zapf in his recent introduction to the Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology (2016, 9–10), the Russian national aesthetic ecological culture of naturfilosofskaia proza – natural-philosophical prose – can provide another “‘rhizomic’ root and trajectory of ecocritical thought”, which today does not presume “any monocultural or monosystemic unity.” Zapf (2016, 10) suggests that these diverse rhizomic directions, which are “distinct yet interconnected”, constitute the “internal dynamics and scholarly productivity of the ecocritical field”. I believe Russian natural-philosophical research can contribute in enriching ecocritical thinking, and I see a need to forge a path towards natural-philosophical ecocriticism. The rhizome metaphor has appeared in the ecocritical research literature as part of the field’s turn to theory in the current century (Zapf 2016, 8). The rhizome is a concept that Deleuze & Guattari (1987) used in their A Thousand Plateaus to describe a non-hierarchical web of multiple, distinct, but interrelated agencies. Elizabeth DeLoughrey introduced the rhizome metaphor to ecocriticism in 2005 when writing about postcolonial ecocriticism, and a few years later Serpil Oppermann (2010, 19) suggested, that “the rhizomatic paradigm defines the multifaceted nature of ecocriticism”. As Zapf (2016, 8) notes, the rhizome metaphor indicates the diversity of national manifestations and the transnational connectivity of ecological thought. I suggest that natural-philosophical ecocriticism, inspired by Russian national ecological culture, fits perfectly as another rhizome in this “network of multiple threads” with “interconnected living fibers” (Oppermann 2010, 19) of contemporary ecocritical thought.

Naturphilosophie Liudmila Gurlenova gives an overview of the history of the natural-philosophical thought in Russian literature in her 1999 dissertation about the sense of nature in the Russian prose of the 1920s–1930s. The Russian concept of chuvstvo prirody (my English translation is sense of nature; the original German term is Naturgefühl) was formed in the last third of the 19th century. It links together philosophical, social, and aesthetic representations of nature. It was based on representations of nature that preceded it as well as on humanity’s place in nature and the reflections of these issues

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in art ever since the Old Russian texts. The evolution of the concept’s meaning was affected by Western scholars and writers and, since the 1860s, also Russian scholars. (Gurlenova 1999, 5–6) The most important thinkers behind the origins of the Russian understanding of Naturphilosophie were the romantic philosophers of German Idealism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, most notably Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), who connected philosophical understandings of nature to natural scientific ones and expressed the idea of the dialectics of nature. (Gurlenova 1999, 8) In his Naturphilosophie, Schelling gives an account of nature from the standpoint of objective idealism. It is part of his critique of Kant’s dualism of the knowing subject and the objective world that surrounds the subject. The basic principle is the unity of the subject and the object. Nature is an independent subject, which becomes an object in the consciousness. From this point of view, nature in its entirety is one infinitely developing organism. Nature is “absolute”; it is the root cause and the first principle of everything. Schelling understood nature as a subject and an object at the same time; for him nature is a complete organism, and therefore humankind is also an integral part of it.

Natural-philosophical thought in Russia Naturphilosophie spread to Russia already in the 19th century, at the time especially in the humanities. Nikolai Karamzin, Piotr Chaadayev, Alexander Herzen, Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolay Chernyshevsky are some of the philosophers and writers that wrote about it (Gurlenova 1999, 11– 16). In the 20th century, its ideas also spread to the natural sciences, and the concept of chuvstvo prirody was used by Vladimir Vernadsky, who popularized the term “biosphere” and defined ecology as the science of the biosphere. (Gurlenova 1999, 17–18) In the 1920s–1930s, the concept of chuvstvo prirody was considered old-fashioned and ideologically harmful, and it was seen as inappropriate for socialist modernity. In these days, man was seen as the creator of “another”, new kind of nature. Chuvstvo priordy was seen only as an artist’s hypothetical concept. (Gurlenova 1999, 19–20) However, the legacy of Naturphilosophie never faded even in post-revolutionary Russian literature. Some of the writers influenced by the natural-philosophical tradition of the period are Vladimir Arsenyev, Pavel Nizovoy, Mikhail Prishvin, Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov, Mikhail Sholohov, and 4

Leonid Leonov (Gurlenova 1999.) After World War II, literary research also started to use it actively (Gurlenova 1999, 21). Alfiia Smirnova has studied the connection of late Soviet village prose and natural-philosophical tendencies. According to her (2009: 10–11), the way the concept of Naturphilosophie is used in Russia is “as the etymological equivalent of the philosophy of nature, as a set of philosophical attempts to interpret and explain nature with the purpose of obtaining knowledge about the relations and patterns of natural phenomena” (translation mine, MP). Artistic reproduction of these “philosophical attempts to interpret and explain nature” is represented by the writing of natural-philosophical prose. Smirnova states that this prose “combines a deep comprehension of 'eternal' problems with neo-Christian ethical concepts”, and that in it “environmental issues meet unconventional solutions in the context of new scientific achievements”. According to Taisiia Grinfeld (2001: 70), Russian natural-philosophical prose is based on Sergei Aksakov’s 19th century idea of the innateness and simplicity of the sense of nature, which is highly valued in Russian prose. She sees the works of Mikhail Prishvin as an invaluable aesthetic experience and a deeply understood, conceptual general view of the world. For Grinfeld, the 20th century was the transition period in Russian literature from anthropocentrism to a pantheistic vision, where a certain kinship is felt with the living environment.

What is Chuvstvo prirody? Gurlenova (1999, 23) divides the concept chuvstvo prirody into two distinct aspects. The first is “understanding of nature”, which she calls the ideological (mirovozzrenchesky) aspect. The other is “sensual perception of the natural environment” in its artistic representations. For Gurlenova, the concept is useful both in the arts – because works of art reflect the ways that nature is understood – and in various branches of sciences that study the ontology and origins of the concept and its reflections in the arts (Gurlenova 1999, 24). Gurlenova (1999, 24) further divides writers using chuvstvo prirody into three groups. The first group are those writers whose philosophically, socially, or scientifically oriented prose or poetry foregrounds representations of nature. As a more interesting group, she mentions the more 5

artistically oriented writers and the sensual perception of the natural environment in their landscapes. Finally, in some writers’ oeuvre, both of these paradigms are equally important, and this group is represented mostly by writers for whom nature is the main theme, such as Vladimir Arsenyev and Mikhail Prishvin. Gurlenova (1999, 25) uses the terms naturfilosofiia and chuvstvo prirody virtually as synonyms, because the “understanding of nature is closely connected to philosophical questions” and sensual, emotional, and aesthetic perceptions of nature are connected to the human psyche. Citing Pavel Florensky and Alfred Bizet, she mentions that researchers call these perceptions of nature the “experience of nature” or the “psychology of the sense of nature”. Whether chuvstvo prirody should be mostly associated with aesthetic (Savodnik), moral (Ruskin), or religious (Florensky) feelings has been a matter of dispute. According to Gurlenova, the main questions to which interpretations of nature in Russian literature are connected are: 1. the philosophical base of the writer’s representations of nature (materialistic or idealistic), 2. the religious roots of these representations (pagan or Christian), 3. the ideological worldview (anthropocentric or pantheistic), and 4. scientific methods (mechanistic or organismic). Finally, Gurlenova (1999, 26) considers the ways that a person’s chuvstvo prirody is formed and presents two main types. The first she calls elemental, instinctive, or unconscious. It is something that is present from birth and it consists of a person’s sensual experience of the world as well as representations of nature. The other type is connected to the consciousness of a generally civilized, cultured (Bizet, Ruskin) person or to the consciousness of a person who has received a Christian upbringing (Solovyov, Florensky). According to Grinfeld (1995, 7) the connection of chuvstvo prirody in Russian research literature around the turn of the 20th century to a cultured person led to the estrangement of the concept from the vernacular. This, for its part, led to the chilly attitude to chuvstvo prirody in postrevolutionary Russia. However, even this interpretation of chuvstvo prirody remained in the Russian literature of the 1920s–30s. Some writers (Arsenyev, Prishvin, Nizovoy, Yakovlev) embraced the idea of chuvstvo prirody as something that a cultured person’s education shapes

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from the instinctive understanding of the concept to form something that is central to a person’s harmonious relationship with nature. (Gurlenova 1999, 27)

Towards conclusions After the Second World War, the attitude to chuvstvo prirody and Naturphilosophie again changed in Russia. It was acknowledged that in the future, a sense of nature should be of the utmost ideological importance. This meant the more pronounced relevance of the philosophical, aesthetic, and moral aspects of chuvstvo prirody. Thus, a more environmentalist attitude was attached to the concept during the second half of the 20th century. The emphasis was now placed on unity with nature, a so-called “positive” relationship to nature, coevolution, sustained balance, the ethosphere, environmental ethics or bioethics, and, finally, ecophilosophy or even ecosophy (a term coined by Arne Næss and Félix Guattari). In art, this means that nature can be understood as more than a mere setting; it can be an active agent that influences the protagonist’s personality. Thus, representations of nature become an instrument for expressions of philosophical, aesthetic, and political thoughts and understandings. (Gurlenova 1999, 28) Gurlenova (1999, 30) mentions, however, that the Russian literary scholars have mostly been just interested in depictions of nature. Here we come close to first wave ecocriticism, which seems to share similar ideological roots. This is also evident in the interest of early American ecocriticism in transcendentalism, whose theoretical system is very close to German philosophical romanticism. In the background of both ecocriticism and late Soviet natural philosophy, there is also the imminent ecological catastrophe, which became obvious during the 1960s both in Russia and the West. There are other connections between Russian natural philosophy and first wave ecocriticism. There is, for example, a common interest to non-fiction writing and to a pantheistic worldview where nature is seen as a process. However, in the ideological base there is a very significant difference: Russian natural philosophy tends to be very conservative, it resists rapid changes both in society and literature (Gurlenova 1999, 34). Ecocriticism, however, formed on a distinctly liberal ideology; it has actively promoted for a change in people’s attitudes. Even though Western environmental criticism and Russian research on natural-philosophical literature evolved completely separately, they have much in common. This may seem surprising at 7

first, considering the very different conditions on the two sides of the Iron Curtain, but the philosophical basis of Naturphilosophie and the ideologies that were the driving forces behind the evolution of the ecocritical school are very close to each other and share similar roots. And, even though the Western environmental awakening of the 1960s never spread to the Soviet Union, a nascent environmental movement was born in Russia at the same time. Its premises were different from the Western movement, but it shared the common anxiety over the environmental crises facing the future of the planet. Therefore, it is not so surprising that the Russian and the Western research traditions overlap, and a synthesis of the two fields should not be an impossible task. Both fields could benefit from such a synthesis. I am trying to accomplish this by taking these first steps towards natural-philosophical ecocriticism, which, I hope, will add another rhizome to the web of diverse contemporary ecocritical thought.

Works cited Adamson, Joni, and Scott Slovic. “The Shoulders We Stand On: An Introduction to Ethnicity and Ecocriticism.” Guest Editors‟ Introduction. MELUS. 34.2 (Spring 2009): 5–24. Alaimo, Stacy. “Trans-corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature.” Material Feminisms. Eds. Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008. 237-64. Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory.” Material Feminisms. Ed. Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008. 1-19. Astafiev, Victor. Queen Fish: A Story in Two Parts and Twelve Episodes. 1976. Trans. Katharine Judelson, Yuri Nemetski, Kathleen Cook, Keith Hammond, Angelia Graf. Moscow: Progress, 1982. Astafiev, Viktor. Tsar’-ryba. Povestvovanie v rasskazakh. 1976. Moscow: Eksmo, 2010. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley, eds. Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. 8

Grinfeld, T. Ia. ”’Chuvstvo prirody’” i peizazh.” “Chuvstvo prirody” v russkoi literature. Syktyvkar: izd-vo Syktyvkarskogo un-ta, 1995. 3–20. Grinfeld, T. Ia. “Naturfilosofiia M.M. Prishvina kak sistema idei.” Priroda i chelovek v khudozhestvennoi literature. Volgograd State UP, 2001. 70–6. Gurlenova, L. V. “Chuvstvo prirody v russkoi proze 1920–1930-kh gg.” Diss. Syktyvkar State University, 1999. Kuznetsov, F. ”Zhizn’ nahodit usta”. Literaturnaia Rossiia. 1976. № 35, 5. Oppermann, Serpil. ”The Rhizomatic Trajectory of Ecocriticism.” Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 1.1 (2010): 17–21. Perkiömäki, Mika. "’The Sovereign of the River and the Sovereign of All Nature – in the Same Trap’". The River in Viktor Astafiev's Queen Fish. In Jane Costlow, Yrjö Haila, Arja Rosenholm (eds.), Water in Social Imagination: from Technological Optimism to Contemporary Environmentalism. Forthcoming, 2017, Brill. Smirnova, A. I. Russkaia naturfilosofskaia proza vtoroi poloviny XX veka. Moscow: Flinta, 2009. Zapf, Hubert. ”Introduction”. Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. Ed. Hubert Zapf. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. 1–16.

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