CHAPTER SIX All about Eve: The Realist Balzac's Ukrainian Dreamland
La comedie humaine honore de Balzac (1799-1850) is famous for his massive, multi-volume series of realistic novels and stories, collected as La comedie humaine (The Human Comedy).
What is less known about him: he dreamed for many years of moving eastward to the Slavonic world and eventually spent almost two years on an estate in Ukraine about a hundred kilometres from Kyiv, on the west, or right bank of the Dnieper River, near the town of Berdychiv. The story of how this happened constitutes the real “novel of his life,” as more than one of his biographers have put it.1Balzac was of very modest origins. His grandfather had been a peasant from the south, his father a minor bureaucrat in revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and he himself added the “de” to his surname to make it sound more aristocratic. A spendthrift and poor businessman - he failed in mass-market publishing, Sardinian silver mines, and Ukrainian lumber - he ran up enormous debts and had to work day and night, literally in a monk's robe, and with endless cups of coffee, to pay off these debts. But he was an acute observer of the emerging bourgeois world around him and described its inhabitants in great detail in his penetrating stories and novels. He described the internal side of things, but also their causes, social and otherwise. He appeared to be driven by some unseen and unrelenting hand to describe in almost-encyclopaedic fashion the manners and morals of the entire, bustling society in which he lived. Many of his characters were consumed by passions and manias, be it greed, desire for honour, even love.
Balzac titled this great project in imitation of Dante's Divine Comedy, often considered the masterwork of medieval European literature. Like Dante, he divided his life's work into three parts: in his case, studies of manners, philosophical studies, and analytical studies, of which only the first part neared completion before he died.
Balzac pioneered the use of the all-knowing, neutral narrator to tell his stories and created over two thousand characters in them. He described many of them in great depth, bringing them up recurrently, and did the same for his settings. This too was a completely new technique and has been imitated many times since. The American writer Elbert Hubbard once said that it was Balzac who discovered that not merely the heroic and the romantic, but every human life, is interesting, that life itself is a struggle, and that most battles are bloodless, and romance a dream, although all are very real. Moreover, Hubbard continued, he broke all the established rules of writing: he preferred prose to poetry, walked over French grammar, invented phrases, coined words, and used the language of ordinary people to “defile the well of classic French.” The public loved it, but the critics did not, and it took him many years before he was eventually accepted as one of France's greatest writers.2Politically, Balzac was a Legitimist, who supported the restoration of the absolutist Bourbon dynasty of France. He saw such a change as the only cure for the pettiness, untrammelled ambition, and “curse of money” thriving under the uninspiring King Louis Philippe (d'Orleans) (reigned 1830-48). And so, his criticism of French bourgeois society was sweeping, doubtless pushed to extremes by his own pecuniary difficulties. Yet this ultra-reactionary rightist was also idolized by the political left. His friend Victor Hugo considered him a genius and a revolutionary, and both Marx and Engels devoured his novels, the latter observing:
Balzac gives us a most remarkable realist history of French society, describing it in the form of a chronicle, almost year by year from 1816 to 1848. He shows how bourgeois society, growing ever stronger, put ever more pressure on the society of the nobles, which after 1815 restructured itself, and in so far as it was possible, showed itself as a model of old French ideals.
He reveals how the last remains of this model society steadily perished under pressure from the vulgar money-grubber... Around this central picture, Balzac wound the whole history of French society in which I even recognize more in its economic detail... than in the books of all the specialists of that time taken together, including historians, economists, and statisticians.3This resounding praise would return after 1917 to haunt Soviet authorities, seeking to contort Marxist “dialectics” to explain how such a perceptive observer of society as Balzac could be so blindly “reactionary.”
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. By character, Balzac was anything but the refined and elegant aristocrat. His carriage was awkward, his manner coarse. He was short, with square shoulders and a deep chest. But he held his head high and had the poise of a man born to command. No scholar's stoop nor the genius's abiding melancholy for him, says Hubbard. His smile was broad and infectious, and he was always ready for fun: “He has never grown up; he is just a child,” his mother complained when he was already past forty. Other women would say the same.