The unenviable fate of entrepreneurs in Russian classics

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Russian writers of the 19th century did not like entrepreneurs, were not interested in them and did not want to write about them - and if they did, it turned out that it was the swindler Chichikov and the swindler Hermann. In the next issue of the “All-Seeing Eye of Russian Literature” column, Svetlana Voloshina talks about the unenviable fate of entrepreneurship in Russian classics.

Entrepreneurship as a value, character trait and mode of action is perhaps the last thing associated with the ideas and characters of Russian literature. Spirituality, dedication, high love, loyalty and betrayal, loneliness in a crowd, aggression and the deadening influence of society - all these topics were traditionally considered worthy of description and artistic analysis; much, with a smaller caliber, was recorded in small topics and could claim to be covered only in feuilleton literature.

In general, entrepreneurial spirit, businesslike activity, “resourcefulness combined with practicality and energy” (as the dictionary suggests) is a fundamentally non-noble quality, and therefore despised by noble writers and considered unworthy of description. Considering that most of the writers of the 19th century belonged precisely to the nobility, it is not surprising that enterprising and positively active heroes in Russian literature are a rare animal to the point of being exotic, predatory and unsympathetic. In addition (if we continue the clumsy metaphor) where this animal lives and how it lives is not entirely clear: the authors clearly did not observe it in their natural habitat.

There is no need to talk about the entrepreneurial spirit of the heroes of the literature of the 18th century: if we exclude the translated stories, then neither the tragedies of classicism with their strict normality of the conflict and the choice of heroes, and even more so sentimentalism with a certain focus on feelings and sensitivity, had nothing to do with the enterprising characters. Comedies, on the other hand (and the corpus of satirical journalism of the time of Catherine II, adjacent to literature), were understandably focused on the peculiarities and vices of the then Russian society, among which enterprise, if there was one, was somewhere in the far end, after bribery, drunkenness, ignorance and other notorious realities …

Romanticism has even less to do with entrepreneurship: it is impossible to imagine Pechorin building schemes for the rapid development of agriculture in the Caucasus or contemplating a cunning scam. One can speak of the entrepreneurial spirit of literary heroes starting from the (conditionally) realistic direction. In addition, given that literature does have something to do with "reality," it is worth mentioning the historical context. The sphere of application of a practical, lively mind was rather limited: success in military service presupposed a rigid set of qualities and conditions - nobility, the state of parents, courage, generosity, adherence to a certain code of conduct. The bureaucratic service interpreted entrepreneurial spirit very definitely - as careerism, the means to which was not least flattery and servility to the authorities (hence the textbook “I would be glad to serve, it would be sickening to serve”).

The third path - a court career - was even more closely associated with the concept of enterprise as flattery, obsequiousness even in trifles - a good word or gesture at the right moment. The ideal of such an entrepreneurial spirit is the famous Maxim Petrovich from Woe from Wit:

As for the quick way to make money, there were few paths for the poor nobles and commoners, and the first of them was playing cards. Such an enterprising acquirer was Hermann from Pushkin's The Queen of Spades, “the son of a Russified German who left him a little capital”, who lived “on a single salary” and did not allow himself “the slightest whim”. However, the anecdote about the three cards became a fatal temptation for Hermann, like the prediction of three witches for Macbeth. In order to find out the secret of the old countess, Hermann, as you know, seduced her pupil Lisa, deceived him into the house, threatened the old woman with a pistol (unloaded), and after her death, he nevertheless achieved the coveted three cards. This entrepreneurial spirit cost Hermann both his fortune and reason.

And if the semi-romantic Hermann can be attributed to the enterprising characters with certain reservations (was he just an adventurer obsessed with the idea of quick money?), Then Chichikov from “Dead souls. " The essence of Pavel Ivanovich's scam, who planned to buy up peasant "souls" before submitting another "revision tale" and pawn them, having received money from the state as if it were alive, is known to everyone since his school years. When negotiating purchases, Chichikov is an excellent psychologist: his tone, manners and arguments completely depend on the character of the landlord-seller. He possesses "charming qualities and techniques" and knows "a really great secret to please." He also shows a rare entrepreneurial spirit in dealing with the most predatory class, officials - and wins:

Gogol informs the reader that Chichikov possessed exceptional practicality from childhood: "he turned out to be a great mind … from the practical side."

“I did not spend a penny out of the half given by my father, on the contrary, in the same year I already made increments to it, showing almost extraordinary resourcefulness: he molded a bullfinch from wax, painted it and sold it very profitably. Then, for some time, he launched into other speculations, exactly the following: having bought food on the market, he sat in the classroom next to those who were richer, and as soon as he noticed that his comrade was beginning to vomit, - a sign of approaching hunger, he would stick it out to him. under the benches, as if by chance, a corner of a gingerbread or a roll and, having provoked him, took the money, thinking with appetite."

Pavlusha was trained by a mouse, which he "sold later … also very profitable"; later, in order to get a profitable place in the service, he looked for and discovered the weak point of his boss ("which was an image of some kind of stone insensitivity") - his "mature daughter, with a face … similar to what happened on him at night threshing peas ". Having become her fiancé, Chichikov soon got a tasty vacant position - and "the wedding was hushed up, as if nothing had happened at all." “Since then things have gone easier and more successful,” says Gogol about the hero, and at the end of Dead Souls we read about Chichikov’s successful entrepreneurial (in a broad sense) activity in the field of bribery, “a commission for building some kind of state-owned very capital structure "And customs.

As it should be in the great Russian literature, Chichikov's scams ended in failures - and in the second volume of Dead Souls, Pavel Ivanovich, released from custody, turned out to be “some kind of ruin of the former Chichikov”. In the same second volume, there is also a positively excellent entrepreneur - a hard-working and successful landowner Kostanzhoglo, who "in ten years raised his estate to that instead of 30 now he receives two hundred thousand", from whom "all rubbish will give income" and even the planted forest grows faster than others. Kostanzhoglo is so incredibly practical and enterprising that he does not think over specially new ways to optimize the estate: incomes are generated by themselves, he simply answers the "challenges" of circumstances:

“Why, you also have factories,” noted Platonov.

“Who turned them on? They started up themselves: wool had accumulated, there was nowhere to sell - I began to weave cloth, and the cloth is thick, simple; at a cheap price they are right there in the markets and they are dismantled - for a peasant, for my peasant. For six years in a row, industrialists threw fish husks on my shore - well, where to put it - I began to cook glue from it, and I took forty thousand. It’s like that with me”.

"What the devil," thought Chichikov, looking at him in both eyes: "what a ragged paw."

“And even then I got busy because I got a lot of workers who would starve to death. Hungry year, and all by the mercy of these manufacturers, who missed the crops. I have a lot of such factories, brother. Every year a different factory, depending on what has accumulated leftovers and emissions. [Look] just more closely at your farm, all rubbish will give you income … "".

However, we will never know what happened to Kostanzhoglo and his estate further, and in the surviving fragments of the burnt second part, he no longer resembles a person, but a function: the subtlety and psychological nature of the literary text replaced didacticism.

Another character that immediately comes to mind at the mention of practicality and enterprise is Stolz from Oblomov. Ivan Goncharov often assures the reader that Andrei Ivanovich is a very business-like, agile and enterprising person, but if we try to understand what exactly his success and business vigor are, we learn a little. “He served, retired, went about his business and really made a house and money. He participates in some kind of company that sends goods abroad, "the author says, and the very lack of interest in the details of how enterprising people live and act in Russia in the mid-19th century is characteristically manifested in the word" some."

In this "some" company, Stolz is "incessantly in motion"; in addition, he often "travels to the world" and makes visits to someone - this is where his business activity is manifested. In the same "light" he drags the obstinate Oblomov, and when the latter proves that these hectic trips are no less stupid pastime than lying on the sofa, you involuntarily agree with Ilya Ilyich. It is curious that business and enterprising heroes in Russian literature are often of foreign origin: Stolz (like Hermann) is half German, and Kostanzhoglo is the face of unknown (Greek?) Roots (Gogol says that he “was not entirely Russian”). Probably, compatriots did not fit in the public consciousness so much with the idea of practicality and enterprise that the presence of such qualities should have been explained by an admixture of foreign blood.

It is logical to assume that enterprising and practical people in literature should be looked for in their natural habitat, merchant, and therefore, turn to Alexander Ostrovsky. Unfortunately, he is more often interested in the mores of the merchant kingdom and the dramas that occur as a result of these mores, and much less in the entrepreneurial abilities of the heroes and their success stories (which is understandable in principle, otherwise Ostrovsky would have been known not as a playwright, but as a writer of industrial novels). The reader is simply informed that Vasily Danilych Vozhevatov from "Bride" is "one of the representatives of a rich trading company", a Europeanized merchant who buys the steamer "Lastochka" cheaply from the squandered Paratov. Mokiy Parmenych Knurov, "one of the big businessmen of recent times," acts in the play as a man "with a huge fortune."

However, Ostrovsky also offers an example of a positive entrepreneurial hero: such is Vasilkov from the comedy Mad Money. Vasilkov at the beginning of the play does not look like a successful person: he is awkward, provincial and, with his dialectisms, makes Muscovite characters laugh. He has a very modest fortune, but hopes to get rich by honest entrepreneurship, insisting that in the new age, honesty is the best calculation:

The feeling intervenes in the calculations: the "baggy" provincial falls in love with the spoiled beauty Lidia Cheboksarova and even unexpectedly marries her (the rest of the beauty's admirers are either bankrupt or do not want "legal and marital pleasures"). The pragmatic Lydia discovers that her husband “does not have gold mines, but lingonberry mines in the forests” and abandons him. Vasilkov, having changed his mind to put a bullet in his forehead, demonstrates rare enterprise and efficiency and makes capital in the shortest possible time. “Today, not the one who has a lot of money, but the one who knows how to get it,” one of the comedy heroes explains the new financial realities. From him we learn about the entrepreneurial spirit of the Volzhanin Vasilkov, who amazes lazy Muscovites:

The enterprising Vasilkov found use for his wife who remained at the trough: he made her a housekeeper and sent her “under the command” to his mother in the village. The beauty and secular manners of Lydia (we, however, do not observe her manner - the beauty cynically talks about the decent financial support of her charms for most of the play) Vasilkov also came up with the use (perhaps it was originally included in his matrimonial calculations):

“When you study the economy perfectly, I will take you to my provincial town, where you must dazzle the provincial ladies with your dress and manners. I will not regret the money for this, but I will not go out of the budget. I, too, for my extensive business, need such a wife … In St. Petersburg, according to my business, I have connections with very big people; I myself am baggy and clumsy; I need a wife so that I can have a salon in which even a minister is not ashamed to be received."

The comedy, as expected, has a happy ending, but the image of the enterprising Vasilkov leaves an unpleasant aftertaste

Ostrovsky also created the image of an enterprising woman - a matchmaker, which is rare in Russian literature. The area of application of entrepreneurship and business qualities for a woman throughout almost the entire 19th century was even more modest than that of a man, and was most often limited to finding a successful party and successful housekeeping. (The enterprising Vera Pavlovna from Chernyshevsky’s novel “What is to be done?”, Who founded a sewing workshop, is a single character and is completely schematic.) Most often in the literature there are women who made money by keeping fashion shops, boarding schools or educational institutions for girls, but they are mostly foreigners (German or French), episodic and almost caricatured faces.

Such, for example, is the heroine of Mamin-Sibiryak's novel "Privalov Millions" Khioniya Alekseevna Zaplatin (for relatives and friends - just Kina). Thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit of Khina, who kept a boarding house in the Uyezd Ural town and was always in the center of all county rumors and gossip, the Zaplatin family lived much more than the money officially received by her husband. The fruits of Khina's entrepreneurial spirit were “her own house, which was worth at least fifteen thousand, her own horse, carriages, four servants, a decent lordly setting, and a rather round capital who was lying in the loan office. In a word, the present position of the Zaplatins was completely ensured, and they lived about three thousand a year. And meanwhile Viktor Nikolaich continued to receive his three hundred rubles a year … Everyone, of course, knew the meager size of Viktor Nikolaich's salary, and when it came to talking about their wide life, they usually said: “Pardon me, but Khionia Alekseevna has a boarding house; she knows excellent French … "Others said simply:" Yes, Khioniya Alekseevna is a very smart woman."

The heroine named Hina could not be a pretty face: according to one of the heroes, she is "no less than a three-story parasite … A worm eats a beetle, and a worm eats a worm." Of all the few female professions, it was matchmakers who required the full range of business skills required for successful work. Ostrovsky's matchmakers are extremely comic heroines. A wedding is an organic part of comedy, and the very presence of a matchmaker is also comical because of the discrepancy: an outsider intervenes in the field of feelings, taking on the role of divine providence and at the same time earning money. It should be noted that even for those rare examples of entrepreneurial women that Russian classical literature offers, an unambiguous conclusion can be drawn: any forms of entrepreneurship and in general activity (except for active selflessness and suffering) were ridiculed by the authors at best, while in others they were condemned.

Enterprising women were usually portrayed as unprincipled predators, capable of cold-bloodedly breaking the life of a delicate gentle hero for their pleasure. One of the best such images is Marya Nikolaevna Polozova from Turgenev's story "Spring Waters" (1872), a young, beautiful and wealthy lady who successfully and with pleasure leads the family's financial affairs. Happily in love with the beautiful Italian Gemma (a typical Turgenev girl plus a southern temperament), the protagonist of the story, Sanin, decides to sell his estate in Russia and get married. It is difficult to sell the estate from abroad, and he turns to his wife on the advice of a classmate he accidentally met. Turgenev places accents right away: Polozova's first appearance in the story informs the reader that she is not just beautiful, but prudently uses her beauty (“… the whole force was to show her hair, which was definitely good”). “You know what,” Marya Nikolaevna says to Polozov in response to his offer to sell the estate, “I’m sure that the purchase of your estate is a very profitable scam for me and that we will agree; but you have to give me … two days - yes, two days to the deadline. " In the next two days, Polozova demonstrates a real master class on seducing a man in love with another woman. Here, the author also reports on her commercial talents:

Is it any wonder that the beautiful Marya Nikolaevna succeeded in everything: she made a profitable purchase for herself, and Sanin never returned to the bride. Polozova is a bright, but clearly negative character: the main comparison when describing her by the author is “snake” (and she has a corresponding surname): “gray predatory eyes … these serpentine braids”, “Snake! ah, she's a snake! - Sanin thought meanwhile, "but what a beautiful snake!"

Enterprising and business heroines are freed from negative connotations only towards the end of the 19th century. Pyotr Boborykin in the novel "Kitai-Gorod" (1882) programmatically implements the idea: merchants are no longer representatives and leaders of the "dark kingdom", they have become Europeanized, received an education, behind them, unlike those who descended from the steamer of our time and are little fit nobles, - economic prosperity and the future of Russia. Of course, the domestic bourgeoisie, like the bourgeoisie in general, is not without sin, but nevertheless it is a young and full of energy formation.

The young and almost beautiful merchant's wife Anna Serafimovna Stanitsyna is economical and active. She oversees the work of her factories, delves into the details of production and marketing, is attentive to the living conditions of the workers, arranges a school for their children, successfully invests in new branches of production and operates energetically in commercial enterprises. Her entrepreneurial activities and planning new trade and factory deals give her joy, she is an excellent, practical and enterprising hostess. It is interesting that the author at the same time draws her unlucky in her personal life: her husband is a mot and a lecher who threatens to ruin all her successful endeavors and is completely indifferent to her (apparently, Boborykin could not help informing that enterprise and commercial vein do not get along well with a happy family life). In addition, she perceives with hostility and awkwardness that she belongs to the merchant class: her dress made of expensive and solid fabric too clearly betrays her origin, upbringing and taste, and some of her turns of speech and manners do the same.

However, she is perhaps the only example of a completely rewarded enterprise: after divorcing her husband and putting her production and trade on solid rails, Stanitsyna in the final seizes the man of her dreams - the nobleman Paltusov, paying his debts, releasing him from custody and clearly outlining my husbands and partners. Paltusov himself is also a curious type of new entrepreneur: from the nobility, but aiming at competitors for merchants, new financial and commercial owners of old Moscow (for some reason, Boborykin also supplied these merchants and entrepreneurs with “fish” surnames: Osetrov, Leshchov). Intelligence, education, enterprise (and a special gift to act on the tender hearts of rich merchants) give Paltusov the opportunity to quickly move up in the world of trade and finance, amass capital and thereby move towards the embodiment of his idea: to press Tit Titich in the economic and financial spheres, that he "got his paws on everything." ““Can't you make money in such a country? - thinks Paltusov already at the very beginning of the novel. “Yes, you have to be an idiot!..” He felt cheerfulness in his heart. There is money, albeit small, … connections are growing, hunting and endurance are a lot … twenty-eight years, the imagination plays and will help him find a warm place in the shade of huge mountains of cotton and calico, between a million-strong tea warehouse and a nondescript, but money shop of a silversmith-money changer … "However, at some point, the successful Paltusov undertakes a too risky business: his former" patron "commits suicide due to debts, and the hero with a fish surname decides to buy his house inexpensively - with the money entrusted to him by another merchant's wife.

“In the soul of the entrepreneur’s former henchman of the suicide, the awakened feeling of a living bait was playing at that moment - a large, ready, promising implementation of his plans ahead … This house! It is well built, it gives thirty thousand income; to acquire it in some "special" way - nothing else is needed. In it you will find a solid ground … Paltusov closed his eyes. It seemed to him that he was the owner, he went out alone at night to the courtyard of his house. He will transform it into something unprecedented in Moscow, something like a Parisian Palais Royal. One half is huge shops such as the Louvre; the other is a hotel with an American device … On the lower floor, under the hotel, there is a cafe that Moscow has long needed, garcons running around in jackets and aprons, mirrors reflecting thousands of lights … Life is in full swing in a monster shop, in a hotel, in a cafe in this courtyard, turned into a walk. There are diamond shops, fashionable shops, two more cafes, smaller ones, music is played in them, as in Milan, in the Victor-Emmanuel arcade …

He does not want to own a brick, it is not greed that kindles him, but a feeling of strength, an emphasis on which he immediately rests. There is no move, no influence, you cannot show what you are aware of in yourself, what you express in a whole series of deeds, without capital or such a brick block."

Paltusov really managed to acquire this house, using the capital entrusted to him by the tradeswoman in love. She, however, died suddenly, and her heir urgently demanded money, but Paltusov did not manage to find a huge amount - his belief in his own entrepreneurship and luck let him down. Stanitsyn saved Paltusova from the final shame: apparently, it was in the union of the merchants and the nobility that Boborykin saw the alloy of culture and practicality that would save Russia. In the novel's finale, the author describes this union of European and Russian civilizations in a very straightforward manner: "This tinned cauldron will contain everything: Russian and French food, and eerofeich and chateau-ikem" - to the deafening chorus "Glory, glory, holy Russia!"

The idea of painting a new type of business person did not leave the writer Boborykin even further. In the later novel Vasily Terkin (1892), his hero-entrepreneur is already captured not just by the desire to enrichment or the victory of the nobles over the merchants, but by the altruistic idea of helping the fatherland and neighbors. However, the reader basically only guesses how exactly the hero is going to build his altruistic business: Terkin's projects and deeds are written out in the novel in the style of Soviet slogans of the Brezhnev era (“you will lead a campaign against theft and destruction of forests, against kulak defeat and landlord thoughtlessness … to the careful care of such a national treasure as a forest”). For the most part of the time of the novel, Terkin struggles with carnal passion and, as a result, shakes off the “male predatory attraction”. Infrequent passages about the protagonist's own entrepreneurial activities look something like this:

“If only he manages to start managing this summer, the order will be different for him. But his head did not stop at these considerations, which quickly took possession of the sober thought of a business-like and enterprising Volzhan. And he dreamed of more than one personal way up the hill, sitting under the canopy of the wheelhouse on a folding chair. His thought went further: now, from a shareholder of a modest partnership, he becomes one of the main tycoons of the Volga region, and then he will begin a struggle against shallowing, he will ensure that this business becomes a nationwide one, and millions will be thrust into the river in order to forever clean it from rifts. Isn't that impossible? And the shores, hundreds and thousands of dessiatines inward, will be covered again with forests!"

The image, conceived by Boborykin as positive, clearly failed in the novel (however, the novel itself is perhaps one of those works that can be read purely for work needs). On the whole, Russian literature of the 19th century offers, as businesslike, energetic and enterprising characters, or obvious rogues and swindlers, or comic faces. Even in those (rare) cases when the author directly characterizes illegal scams and dishonest actions of the heroes as manifestations of the “original Russian genius” (for example, in Leskov’s story “Selected Grain”), he does so with obvious slyness. Those few heroes who were conceived by the authors as "positively excellent" entrepreneurs either remained lifeless schemes, or their enterprising side is written out so vaguely, vaguely that it becomes obvious: their creators were completely uninterested in delving into the details of financial activities and economic transactions.