Ivan Turgenev, Rudin (1856, Russian)

Novels about the "superfluous Man", the intellectual who couldn't act effectively, were trendy in Russia in the 1850s. Rudin is admirable, ambitious, learned, talented, and noble-hearted, yet unoriginal in his thoughts and ineffectual in everything that he does. The novel seems intended to show how enticing a flashy, copycat intellectualism can be, and why it is useless.

It doesn't really do that, though. We see that Rudin is enchanting, yet not original or creative, and lacks conviction in his beliefs sufficient to act on them. But the novel fails to argue that these three qualities go together, or to clarify which of them is responsible for Rudin's failure. You could call that a flaw, but I call it realistic ambiguity.

Stylistically, it's very 19th-century: Third person omniscient, long paragraphs, lots of adjectives, a mixture of showing the simple things and telling the complicated internal thoughts. 19th century novels that are later translated into English are sometimes easier for me to read than novels written in English in the 19th century, because the translator unintentionally takes some of the stuffiness out of it. I don't know if it's thanks to the translation (done in 2012 by Dora O'Brien), but I found Rudin easy and pleasant to read.

Rudin is a man nearing middle age, still unmarried, regarded by all who meet him as brilliant, yet who never has any great success in anything he does, due to—something. He has a chance at love, and turns it down due to practical considerations. I quickly realized it was a cautionary tale about how not to be like me, and I read it quickly, hoping for some advice or inspiration to help me not be Rudin.

But this is a novel, not a self-help book, so there's no such simple advice. At various times we're told that Rudin's failure is due to his inability to persevere and follow through, his idealism, his cowardice, his shallowness, his social naivete, or his always overreaching his abilities. Perhaps Turgenev even meant that idealism is just the perfect storm of all those flaws. The novel is about Rudin and his tragic flaw and its consequences, but you can't pin down just what his flaw is.

That's a good thing. Turgenev may have had his own opinion about what Rudin's flaw was, but he didn't force that onto his character, and created something realistic enough that even the answers he never thought of are hinted at. That, after all, is the purpose of novels.

The Rudin archetype comes down to someone whose head is in the clouds so much that he cannot accomplish anything on earth. Does this bit of folk wisdom reflect reality?

Perhaps it did in Russia in the 1840s. Yet Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a head-in-the-clouds intellectual, and we don't consider him ineffectual. Worse than ineffectual, possibly; but not ineffectual. Turgenev may have thought that the contrast between Rousseau and the French Revolution, and highly-pragmatic Ben Franklin or George Washington and the American Revolution, confirmed rather than refuted his thesis. If so, his thesis must be complicated to include highly-effective and influential "superfluous men".

Today, examples of this archetype might include Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Craig Whatsisname of Craigslist, and Bill Gates. The "superfluous man" character type is less likely to succeed, but more likely to succeed spectacularly. We need these "superfluous men".

We can even see this in the last chapter, with a little imagination: Rudin dies on the barricades in the unsuccessful June 1848 Paris uprising. Perhaps Turgenev meant to show that Rudin finally acted on his convictions. Or perhaps he only meant to show his unselfish and idealistic nature, or his uselessness and inability to succeed. But we can hardly blame Rudin for the failure of the 1848 revolt. It's just the opposite: People like Rudin are the ones who cause such things to succeed, when they succeed.

The problem is that Turgenev had to show Rudin failing in life, and everyone else in the story succeeding. The novel's world, therefore, is one in which every person has complete control of their fate, and success or failure depends only on one's character. We see that Rudin must fail over and over again, and die alone; everyone else inevitably succeeds at finding themselves married (if they want) with comfortable livelihoods. This is odd for a novel set in Russia in the 1840s, when slavery was still legal, in which all of the characters have roles and lives that were set for them at birth.

When Turgenev simplified his world by making it deterministic, he abstracted away one of the crucial elements to be considered: Chance. Courage and conviction is needed, in love and business; but so is luck. Is it really better, as the novel suggests, to do a boring thing safely and well enough than to aim for the stars? When is it better to settle, and when to hold out for more? Answering that question requires weighing the payoff against the chances, and there is no chance in Turgenev's world.

But this is a general failing of novels. We always see a single outcome in a novel, not a distribution of outcomes. Novelists, and humans in general, have not yet come to terms with probabilistic truths. Rudin didn't answer my questions, but it gave me a lot to think about for 50,000 words.