Ivan Goncharov’s 'The Precipice' As Conservative Utopia

• In Event: Literary Landscapes of Collision: Life and Afterlives of Russian Realism

Abstract

Set in the 1840s, Ivan Goncharov’s The Precipice (1869) is nevertheless concerned not
with the past, but with the future of the Russian polity. The novel imposes on that future an
ideological vision of the unity of higher classes, realized in an allegorical form. The young Vera,
representative of new nobility, can learn about freedom from Volokhov, a “nihilist” who openly
opposes existing class structure, and about passion from the dilettante Raiskii, who distances
himself from the prerogatives of his socio-economic standing and unsuccessfully pursues a
career of an artist, but ultimately she belongs with her Grandmother, a steward of Malinovka, a
traditional or, as Ilya Kliger puts it, “primordial” landed estate, and with Tushin, another
nobleman who proudly carries out his class duties as an industrious landowner.
Following Fredric Jameson, who in Political Unconscious proposes that “all class
consciousness” or, in other words, “all ideology in the strongest sense, including the most
exclusive forms of ruling-class consciousness . . . is in its very nature Utopian,” I argue in my
paper that The Precipice narrativizes what Ernst Bloch calls “the utopian impulse,” that is, it
projects onto the world presented within it a utopian vision of a harmonious future. The utopia
put forth in the novel is a conservative one, since the promise of Vera and Tushin’s imminent
marriage leads to the restoration of the social whole and resolution of all conflicts through the
reinforcement of the existing class structure under the imposing presence of the matriarchal
Grandmother and, as the very end of the narrative suggests, “another magnificent
‘Grandmother’ — Russia.”

Author

• Piotr Kawulok, U of Wisconsin-Madison